Who Is Rich?

by Matthew Klam

  What if I could ask for it in exchange for loving her, and for dragging her hair out of the shower drain, and carrying the fucking AC units up and down the basement steps, hauling the five-gallon water jugs, garbage and groceries, making sure to pay her parking tickets, dandling our babies every night, cooking light and tasty meals, scraping old rice off the floor under Beanie’s chair, folding and neatly placing her lacy undergarments back in her drawer of frilly things?

  “Are you flying out to New Mexico alone?”

  She didn’t answer. I was jealous. Although I was no more jealous than I would’ve been imagining Amy bending over to take it from Mike. Because I’d been away and had touched someone new, Robin had become strange to me all over again; her situation felt new and precarious, and tinged with excitement.

  I recalled a night seven or eight years earlier, before we moved to D.C., seated in the corner of our kitchen in Lauraville, with our view of the cemetery. Danny and his wife, Elaine, had come to dinner. They had a new baby in the Snap-N-Go and Elaine was already pregnant again, which tormented us because we were in the middle of disgusting fertility stuff and our being able to have a kid was not looking good.

  They’d brought us ice cream and candles. There was a competitive energy between Robin and him, and all these shared experiences. I sat across from Elaine, shoveling food into my face, feeling pitiful. Danny sat across from Robin, staring at her as they talked about wherever they were heading next, or Alejandro the Chilean fixer, or the night they spent on the side of the road in the Darién Gap, one of the times he’d acted like Johnny War Zone and almost got them killed. She looked like Audrey Hepburn in the candlelight. Then they started speaking in Spanish, and I hated to interrupt them to ask for the grated cheese.

  She looked at him, with her hollow cheeks and smooth, olive skin and hazel eyes. It all sat at the end of her nose. I must’ve felt proud watching Danny court my wife. It must’ve felt good all her life to get that kind of braying attention from guys.

  But instead of answering me about her flight to Albuquerque, she got nervous and started babbling: “The average amount of television the typical viewer watches of crime-reenactment shows is a hundred and twenty minutes a sitting, four times a week, eight hours of this one stupid show. The average amount of television a person watches who watches that much crime reenactment is four to six hours a day. That’s six to midnight, with no break for dinner. Can you believe it? It’s disgusting.”

  Maybe they never touched each other. Maybe she liked being flirted with or just needed to go back to work. She used to complain that he spoke Spanish like an old lady, and after two days on the road he smelled like a moldy sneaker, and almost got them macheted to death in a market in Port-au-Prince, wandering around like an idiot.

  Or maybe she’d loved him for ten years. Maybe they cooked up reasons to go to places so they could live their other life. Maybe she was frustrated from having been denied his bodily pleasures and took it out on me, or him, or herself. Maybe it wasn’t just survivor guilt that had pushed her into war zones all over Latin America. Maybe it was because of guilt from two-timing me that she needed drugs to sleep. Maybe the years without him had made her heartsick. Maybe we were both better off when she was more in love. This was probably all in my head.

  Robin ran through some of the pitches they’d come up with for her crime-reenactment show. The episodes were all the same: someone is in danger and doesn’t know it, and someone evil is coming to destroy them. “Artistically speaking, my attitude is ‘Here you go, dumb pigs, eat some slop.’ ” She laughed.

  Were we safe? Was someone coming to destroy us? She had loads of work to do. The sooner I got home, the better. “Anyway, I’ll do the best I can, and embrace the fact that it’s about ratings, and hope that people will want to watch. And that’s a good feeling.”

  “Sure.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Yes. It’s good enough.”

  The rain had stopped. As I crossed the quad, I tried to imagine them at that moment. After dinner, Beanie liked to sit on the rug in the living room with a piece of cheese in each hand, making coyote sounds. Kaya liked to scatter dollhouse furniture across the rug, little grandfather clocks, tiny cakes and clothing, and naked Barbies in a pile. She liked to place the Barbie with a flower sticker on her face beside the Ken doll, on a too-small canopy bed with their feet hanging off the end. At their feet she’d arrange some dollhouse people, a mismatched girl and boy, into a family of four, pretending to sleep. She liked to stage these family scenes, and didn’t want to take them apart at the end of the night.

  She’d leave these things around the house: a stuffed Dalmatian wearing one of Beanie’s swim diapers, resting on the couch; a brown-skinned plastic baby, in sunglasses, flat on a kitchen chair on a dish towel, stripped to its panties. A feeling streamed toward me from a monkey in a tutu, with a teacup and saucer, cowering under Robin’s desk or crammed into a toy high chair beside a green knitted frog in dolls’ pajamas, propped against the bookcase like Tiny Tim. I thought she staged these props for a reason, to remind us of what we were really here for: to protect smaller, helpless bug-eyed creatures.

  While she played, one of us cleared the table and the other gave Beanie a bath. Then came pajamas and a reading from Curious George. The tinted darkness, cream-colored walls of our bedroom, humidifier’s huff, noise-canceling machine’s whoosh, Thomas the Tank Engine’s face smiling sweetly from the night-light. I’d take in Beanie’s smell of crackers and fruit, the lingering fragrance of his bath, place him in the crib and lean my head against the rails, singing softly. With terrific strength he’d stand and grab my shirt and cling. I’d lay him back down and cover him with his gacky as he closed his eyes. I’d lie on the floor for a brief eternity, out of his line of sight, serenading from the rug beside the crib with “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” then crawl on my hands and knees, turning the knob like a safecracker, tiptoeing into the hall.

  Some nights it was like splitting an atom. Panicking, bargaining, surrender, or the telltale burping that signaled vomiting at will. Other nights loneliness overtook me and I hauled him into bed. Some nights it went okay.

  Burt stood in front of me in the supper line, twisting his beard, reading the chalkboard. Fresh seasonal fruit cocktail, Jell-O for dessert, and chicken française, with the “française” crossed out. A light yellow stain oozed through the bandage on his head. There were announcements too: Lions Club bingo, poetry reading at seven, “Bump and Grind” beach party on the cove at nine, and a drum circle at midnight, clothing optional.

  I looked around but didn’t see anyone I knew, so I sat with Linda, who wore a visor from a casino in Atlantic City, and Shari, who was bipolar and on lithium and unable to utter a sentence without diagramming her mother’s destructive narcissism, and Ginny, a nature poet from the Pacific Northwest. The conversation turned to Solito. Because I’d introduced him the night before, they gave me the chance to weigh in. When I didn’t, they took turns. A great artist gave everyone in his proximity a sense of what’s possible, he lit the path, gave you hope, and so on.

  I was still full of hate, but I had the sense that a fever had passed. I’d gone through it. My wife and kids were getting ready for bed. Amy was somewhere north of here. Our final moment hadn’t exactly crackled with resolution. I ate another barbecued chicken leg. They discussed the polishing of memories, the skeleton of facts a writer illuminates through feeling. I would do what he did, make something out of nothing. This experience of turmoil and ecstasy deserved my attention and respect.

  I had one last night to get through, and one more day with my students. I wanted to eat and head back to the Barn to look over my lecture notes so I’d have something to offer in the morning, although I was in no particular hurry. I was afraid to be alone and knew that when I went back to the Barn it would be worse: it would be quiet, it would be all Amy, everywhere. The kitchen cutting board, the curtains—each object would trigger some thought, image, words. The ste
el bar of the bed frame that she’d wrapped her hand around. We fit, locked together like puzzle pieces. She pulled me in and gave me life from the deep spring inside her. My own genetic material had lived inside her. And what if it still did? A creamy burst, a microscopic explosion would bind us. Then I remembered the party at the Azamanians’, the big, slimy oysters I’d eaten while they were still alive. Did they swim inside me? And the lobsters, boiled alive but served cold, and the bay, warm and solid, strange plankton glowing in the sand at night, and the ocean everywhere around us; cold and roiling and teeming, it flung living and half-dead things upon the shores. I wondered when I would stop thinking about her. I could rub my own face with my own two hands, and those hands would be her hands, and she would hold me in her arms and I would go crazy. I started to go crazy anyway, wondering what was real.

  Where was she? Had she made it to New Hampshire in one piece, only to find her daughter writhing on the grass, bleeding from her brain? Or were she and Lily already safe at home? Had Mike returned early, in an expansive mood? Had the sight of his injured wife inspired his compassion? Or had he sensed in her some troubling, independent spirit that would incite his need to dominate and destroy?

  Would I be haunted by her ghost, be woken in the night, would I check my phone, lie there in cool sheets and think of her until it all came rushing back? We’d agreed to leave each other alone, to write only if necessary. This was a natural stopping point. Would I cave first? Would she write something beautiful? “I know what I’d do if you were here in my bed.” Would she tell a rambling story about the photo lab she worked at after high school, during that strange year after the attack, when the keepsake images of strangers gave her something to look forward to?

  Would it ever end? Would I spend years sadistically refashioning events, squeezing life’s nervous contradictions into scene and action, would I write to her from time to time, asking for help with the details of her life, answering her questions about my children or my own attempts at happiness? Would this go on until the secret history and madness lost its power, the familiar click in my heart replaced by a cooling, a nostalgia, and a sense of camaraderie?

  Cigarette smoke blew by. The clouds broke and sunlight poured through. The sudden beauty reassured us. We agreed that if it weren’t bad for us, we’d smoke five packs a day, take Ambien every night, ride motorcycles, and stop eating kale. It was one of those kooky, freewheeling conversations grown-ups have in an idyllic place when they’re trying to shake off the sorrow that it’s ending and they know they’re running out of time. Then Shari stood and went back for seconds, and Ginny went off to find a homework assignment for her final class.

  On the second floor of the main building, I made copies of work to show my students: a few pages of Crumb, from an underground comic he did in the sixties—acid-tinged, id crazy—where this feminist chick beats up some cops, who tear off her dress, so she runs naked through the supermarket, knocking down all these repressed old hags. And Art Spiegelman, who used adorable mice to bring genocide to life, and proved to the world that comics could be literature. The main office was empty and dark. Fish swam on Mary’s glowing screensaver. And newer work, Phoebe Gloeckner’s obsessive rage tour of her abusive childhood and years of promiscuity. And Alison Bechdel’s lovingly wrought family drama, her dad in the closet, her own coming out, in fine black lines and gray-green ink wash. These were pages I’d burned into my brain and tried to steal, went crazy over and knocked my head against but just couldn’t beat, cartoonists who made me want to be one, until I came up with my own thing, before I quit.

  For a while, in my twenties and thirties, I told stories that hit close to home, that were crucial to my existence, of love and sarcasm and maddening envy, daily mortification, sexual pity and raging insecurity, stylized fictionalization of stuff taken from my life. I stole the moral and ethical problems of friends and relations and gave them to imaginary beings, then worked like hell to turn line drawings into walking, talking flesh and blood.

  I checked the page numbers, skimming to make sure I’d copied the right ones. I found myself rereading scenes I’d read a hundred times before. It seemed to me then that I’d missed the point of everything, and had ended up on the wrong side of the divide. It wasn’t up to me to judge cartoonists. The only thing that mattered was finding stuff I loved. I didn’t hate comics. I hated the need to make them. I loved comics. I hated the lifetime of pain and struggle it took to create a thing that anyone could read in an hour.

  Downstairs, a kind of cocktail party spilled off the porch. The after-dinner crowd clustered at the drinks table and slumped on wicker couches. Along the front of the main building, conference-goers headed off on bikes to watch the sunset. The sky had cleared. The bay glowed a strange, prehistoric silver.

  On the porch, a girl with freckles and a ponytail pushed by me, followed by a man with a flat nose like a boxer’s, holding a pen in one hand and a book in the other, for Tom McLaughlin to sign. Tom smiled back brightly but didn’t budge, holding his wine. He was worn out. The guy blanched. Dennis stood beside Tom, ignored by him, with a red nose.

  I went over to a side table and poured half a bottle of wine into a cup, eavesdropping on a man with a bulging forehead and a woman in espadrilles offering her chicken recipe with leeks and mustard. A witty former student of mine, Ruth Gutenberg, Googlebaum, took my chin in her hand and, with a cocktail napkin, wiped some barbecue sauce off my face.

  “My dearest darling,” she said. “My sneezy, dirty, grumpy little elf.” I had to grab her wrist. I hadn’t seen Ruth yet this summer. “Did you miss me terribly?” she asked. She looked different, thinner and older, with shorter hair. She called everyone “darling” and “crumpet.” “Nothing will ever come between us again.” She was still joking around but I remembered how, a few years earlier, nothing had: lying under an open window, in a moment of pure stillness, all our nerves on edge. We did everything in that dormitory bunk bed except sing “I Got You Babe,” and slept like babies, and had breakfast in town the next morning. I gave her a hug, banging her on the back like a long-lost brother.

  She introduced me to Nancy, mute, agreeable, soft, and sensitive, and Russell, sturdy and angry, hadn’t gotten as much done as he’d hoped, planned to write a hundred pages in August. Somehow, we turned to the subject of Solito. Russell wondered how the cartoonist was able to recall scenes and conversations verbatim from infancy on up. “He used real names,” Russell said. “Does that mean everything actually happened?” We talked about screen memory, emotional honesty, and other stuff.

  We were joined by a tall woman wearing lipstick and a guy in gold-rimmed glasses. As Solito’s star had risen, several articles had appeared, exploring the story behind the story, with photos of Angel and other family members pulled from social media, along with evidence of blurry paperwork from his detention in Oaxaca at age six. He’d changed some details about key characters, had altered the chronology of major events, and he had admitted that freely. He’d used real people as a means, boiled them down, strained and stripped out whole through lines and tossed them away, kept other parts, shifted blame, moved ugly things up into the foreground or back, depending on what he needed.

  I didn’t want to hear what they thought. I already had my own response. Solito had been given the opportunity to actualize his dreams, and then he’d handed those dreams over to literary critics, professional cranks whose only means of support was to shred the work of others, and beyond that to the wider world of opinion generated by every asshole with a keyboard. I didn’t want them to tear him apart.

  “There’s a difficulty in any sort of autobiographical writing,” the guy with glasses said. “It’s a stew of self-analysis, reporting, biography, imagination, and also some heat, a core of wanting, of strong emotions, who knows.”

  “That’s why my book is labeled a novel,” Russell said.

  “Dearest, it doesn’t matter what you call it,” Ruth said. “Telling stories about other people is immoral. A ten
-year-old knows that.”

  The poetry reading ended, and bodies flooded through the doors of the main building. By the traumatized looks on their faces, you could tell how it had gone. They dragged themselves into the fresh air, gasping foggily, not looking back, drawn and pale, shoulders fallen, bellies out, stepping toward a table with a melted wheel of Brie, moving gingerly to protect the psychic wound.

  “Are you part of the conference?” I asked Nancy. She nodded. “Are you enjoying everything so far?”

  She wore a pale orange dress that left her half-naked in back, stitched with little green flowers whose leaves were embroidered with tiny holes through which you could see her bra and tanned pulsing skin. Around one wrist was a plastic bracelet from the Pretty Pretty Princess game. I asked her who made it and she showed me a picture of a girl in a shiny pink leotard with her face pressed against her mother’s larger head. I took out my phone, and we showed each other photos and gave their names and ages.

  But then the poet emerged, in a wool suit coat and tie, looking flustered, with a conference handler dutifully stationed at his side, loudly offering him some wine, as members of his audience falsely congratulated him. It became impossible to ignore the metallic vibration of his foul effects, we wanted to get as far away from this scene as possible, and followed Ruth off the porch, along a dirt path, up the hill, to a party in the windmill. Above us in the dark sky, its massive fan blades had been trimmed in white lights. Powerful spotlights lit up its exterior. A small tent had been set up outside with a jazz trio, sponsored by a vodka brand.