Who Is Rich?

by Matthew Klam

  Following Ruth, we ducked through the doorway of the oddly shaped building, like something a hobbit might live in, and entered a room lined with a heavy stone foundation. I read the plaque. The guts of the windmill—the mill, et cetera—had been removed. Built in 1811, the structure had been dragged to the campus in 1860 on horse-drawn skids, when the campus had been the estate of a gunpowder merchant. I recognized several trustees coming down the steep staircase, and other funders of the conference leaning back on the banister, stepping slowly, carefully, smiling and red-faced, as though they’d been locked inside a sauna. When our cohort mounted the stairs to go up, I went out to the vodka tent.

  I’d worked hard these past days, done foolish things, run around with my blood pumping. It had been a kind of terrific nightmare, a product of a feverish delirium. It had been useful, but there was no point in pretending. I’d become what I would’ve been anyway. I’d tried to disrupt the smooth conveyance of myself into middle age, obedience, whatever, to destroy my own likely future by posing as a bumbling incompetent, forcing myself through outlandish behavior, while cagily implying some authorial control.

  Nancy walked slowly around the outside of the windmill. She gazed upward, angling her body in the spotlight so that I could look at her, backlit in her dress, while she studied the building. Then she took a seat and told me how it had been made, using pegs, braces, and trusses. We sat on teak chaises that had been arranged beneath the tent. The town she lived in, near Boston, was full of old mills and tanneries. She worked as a designer at her husband’s architecture firm. Historic preservation was about consistency. There were rigid guidelines. I could feel then that she had nowhere to go. The band played “Tangerine.”

  We lay there, in a breeze as soft as butterfly wings, as the wind lifted the hem above her knees and the fabric fluttered over her body. I felt the light from her body enter my brain. She wore leather sandals on tanned feet, her toenails painted pink. Their firm was busy, doing well, had just finished a retail build-out of the train station so that it reeked with economic vitality. The thing to do here was probe more deeply, with a light touch and genuine concern, to file away details and assemble them later, to reflect them back to her in a flattering way. She talked about some old coffered ceiling and her daughter’s ballet schedule and son’s hoop camp. I pretended something interesting was happening out on the bay, and in fact there was, the tide flowing out, the beach wide and flat with bonfires all the way to the cliffs.

  “My husband does very well,” she explained. “He’s a wonderful father.” She had a small face framed by thick brown hair. “But he doesn’t talk about his feelings—not to me, anyway. It’s a problem.”

  “Oh.”

  “He loves to ride his bicycle.” Her eyes went to my face, around my face, for whatever she was looking for, and I felt the pressure building. I had no more space inside me, no more room in my face or in my heart. I already loved as many people as I could.

  “You have no right to complain, you have a good life, but he freezes you out, and it’s a sham, and you’re stuck.”

  “You know what it is?”

  “What?”

  “Lack of privacy.”

  “Sure.”

  “Everything is communal. Nothing is yours.”

  “Exactly.”

  “We’re together all day, and with our kids at night. Nothing goes unseen. Nothing goes unmeasured, unmentioned. Nothing is secret. Nothing is hidden.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Quantity versus quality.”

  “But we like it,” I said, “because it takes out the guesswork.”

  “That’s marriage, measuring everything, like a speed trap. Your speed is communal property. Your kids belong to the community. Your tendencies will be noted.” She had one hand tucked under her armpit and the fingers of her other hand pressed to her lips, as though she’d forgotten and then remembered some terrible news. I felt her body’s energy, felt it flashing and beaming. She said, “I shouldn’t take it for granted.”

  “I’m trying to stay positive and think of the nice parts.”

  “I find I’m often faking it.”

  “Sure.”

  “Is that sure like ‘whatever,’ or sure like ‘me too’?”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “I pretend to care about whether to save leftover chicken. I pretend to like hip-hop with disgusting lyrics when we’re alone in the car.”

  “I pretend to snore so my kid will fall asleep, but then I really do fall asleep.”

  “Maybe you don’t know what I mean.”

  “I probably do.”

  “You have it easy. Some people do.”

  I just kept looking. Something stood up in me. It had a mean grin, and a chip on its shoulder from a cynical, isolated, cutthroat victimhood. Looking at her body, at her face, was like pulling up to the curb with my U-Haul. Then I’d say, “Do you want to see the eighteenth-century barn I’m staying in?”

  I couldn’t do it. She talked about her husband a little more. I pretended not to listen. She got up.

  I saw that ugly little walleyed dog, Piccolo, coming up the paved path to the windmill. He scampered around the tent, licked my shoe, and pissed under a side table before following Alicia through the door of the windmill. He gave me a last goggle-eyed look. I couldn’t bring myself to flirt with him, either.

  The theater performance let out, and the crowd came across the lawn. Winston walked slowly, heavily, with Ingrid behind him, and Charlene, Roberta, and Nada Klein. A clot of faculty assembled. I went over there. Carl came out of the building, his long gray hair plastered to his neck, with Barney Angerman leaning on his arm, and said it was too crowded in the windmill, the stairs were too steep, and asked if I would walk Barney home. I introduced myself, and bent down as Barney’s other arm hooked around mine. I wasn’t sure if he’d been given any say in the matter. He was entirely deaf and looked up at me and smiled. We prepared to descend, and carefully took the first step down the paved path to the lawn.

  He stared ahead, his hair glowing white, in a kind of pompadour, his stride short and uneven, his eyes steady. His shirt had stains all over it. His ears looked like something that had grown in the black dirt at the base of a hobbit’s tree, his nose resting against his upper lip. As we descended, I didn’t say a word for fear of distracting him. We navigated a dark wooden staircase, and he paused to catch his breath, pulling hard on my elbow, and when we started up again I tripped, almost yanking us both down the stairs, and he let out a creepy, warbled laugh.

  We exited the campus gate and crossed Main Street. He was staying in a salt-stained cottage on the bay. We went around back, where some men and women were sitting in the dark, drinking and talking.

  Barney pushed past me on his own power and lowered himself into a patio chair. A candle burned in a jar. Someone handed him a cup of wine and he took a sip, letting out a sigh, and someone else politely asked me to sit except there weren’t any chairs. The average age here seemed to be nearing the triple digits. They talked about places they’d rented or owned around town over the years, and who owned them now, a house that caught fire one Fourth of July, and recalled their first trip out here decades earlier in a white ’73 Eldorado convertible. It felt good to be young among them. There was a raft lying on the patio and I lay down on it. I could pretend I was nothing, or anything, depending.

  Barney explained how, one summer forty years ago, on an empty floor of some factory in Manhattan, two men whose names he couldn’t remember invented disco. “We thought it was paradise.” He took a long drink. “Dancing until dawn, barely able to stand, stoned on ethyl chloride.” It ended when he fell in love with a guy named James and moved out here, to a one-story shack on Route 7 while he wrote The Dancer, his best-known play.

  I lay there on the raft, looking at the stars. I thought about outer space and how we’re in it, wondering what it is and where it ends, because it has to end, and what’s over the roof of space, who made it
, and what if I stood on my roof back home, would I be able to see stars? I missed the night sky, a heaven above me in which things occurred. This was my world, my universe, it had been given to me, and I lay there, amazed, and tears streamed out, quietly, like rain down a window.

  Air flew weightlessly across the sea, against the crisp blackness, in the beauty of this night. The stars were so big. Beneath them bits of fog puffed by, and the bigger stars winked behind the veil, and then it was clear again, and the heavens were so huge, and the Milky Way so bright, a path of spilled breadcrumbs, an explosion of particles frozen in the sky. We’re particles of the same particles, we eat each other, we are stardust. I was so small, and raw from the blowing wind, and I started to feel good, and wondered how I could ever feel bad again.

  The bay was wide and dark. I could see TV sets glowing inside motel rooms and an airliner overhead. I heard the shushing of the bay, the sea slapping pebbles, rattling stones, and saw, bathed in the ugly orange glow from a streetlight, a condo where a student had hosted a cocktail party years earlier. Shoosh. Woosh.

  I woke up on the raft on the tiny brick patio at sunrise, six A.M. The steel cable of a catamaran whanged against the metal mast in a steady breeze as it sat in the yard next door. A loud horn, the final boarding call, blared across the harbor from the ferry terminal.

  A yoga class floated out in the glassy bay on paddleboards in downward-facing dog. The deck of a restaurant two doors down was swarmed by seagulls, pinned to updrafts, shrieking and squawking and landing on the rail, waddling and pecking and pooping on the planks. The bay was tea-colored, and beyond the jetty the white sea foam stood out crisply. I took off everything and swam. Still air, so quiet, birds, high soft clouds, a bright hard sun, cold, clear bay water. I floated over a hard sandy bottom in what felt as buoyant as Jell-O with glowing green blobs of algae that moved softly against my hand. I made my way by breaststroke down the curved harbor, past morning kayakers, rowboaters, anchored sailboats and sculls.

  Walking through town in the clear morning light, wet and partly clothed, I saw a woman wearing a dog in a backpack. A shirtless boy set down his boom box, unfolded his sheet of cardboard, and danced. People threw money at his feet. A French-speaking family stopped to eye some kitchen gadgets in a storefront window. A huge, brownish, immature eagle with patchy white flecks perched on a telephone pole on the bay side above a wine store, scaring seagulls. I sat and had coffee and some toast. We were twenty miles out in the ocean, on a skinny piece of sand, bathed in light. Along the upper stories of a brightly painted bed-and-breakfast, blossoming vines mounted columns, spilling off the roof deck, drinking in the light.

  We came for the light, the nearness to nature, the solitude, the convergence of elements. It hummed. It grabbed you and pulled you in every direction. It drove you back to something in your memory, made you want to try to repeat it. It made you crazy. It gave you hope or sex or courage. I passed the Crabby Sailor and two barefoot boys with sand on their calves. In front of the hardware store, a woman removed a long chain that wove through gas grills, patio furniture, and surfboards. There was a farmers’ market on the town green, with bright white stalls. A sign advertised a spaghetti dinner at the firehouse. A brand-new coffee shop had opened, with tables shaded by umbrellas out front. Every summer new places tried where old ones had failed, and the traffic got worse and drunks got arrested, and swimmers drowned on the rough side of the point. Broadway stars and summer rep took over the old theater until the end of August. A drag queen named Tasty Burlington sold out her two-week run. Then came Carnival, then Bear Week, then Labor Day, and then it was over.

  There’s no such thing as a reliable narrator. There’s more reliable and less reliable, but any light that passes through that lens is shaped, bent, divided. You willingly create distortions and those distortions are misleading, designed to stir up, revise, reverse, undo, shift, shape, sing. A story is an interrogation, an act of aggression, a flirtation. It’s slippery, squirrelly, and rascally. The conference had helped me return to meaningful work, but I’d lost faith that the project would gird me. Instead, a darker feeling filled me with longing. I imagined myself years into the future, and felt the inevitable letdown of having produced anything at all, of putting myself into it and giving it away.

  People lined up to get on the ferry, dressed for someplace else. Men, women, and children shuffled off the boat, carrying luggage, blinded by the sun. I walked home with my shirt in a ball. I still had an hour before class. The siren blared across the bay. In the Barn I stood under hot water in the shower stall, then fell onto the soft, worn flowered bedspread with its rusty stains, all clean, wrapped myself in it, and slept.

  FOR DANIEL MENAKER

  I’m grateful to the organizations whose encouragement and support made this project possible: the Whiting and Guggenheim foundations, Johns Hopkins University, and Stony Brook Southampton.

  The work done by individuals on my behalf, offering inspiration, edits, and new ways of seeing, touched every page of this work. Thanks to Jessica Blau, Rebecca Curtis, Nicholas Dawidoff, Dana Flor, Eric Puchner, Paul Tough, and Andy Ward.

  Thanks also to Chelsea Cardinale, Sarah Chalfant, Tom Chalkley, Max Culhane, Alix Clyburn, Todd Dimston, Michael Kessler, Brian Klam, Dave Kornhaber, Alice McDermott, Liz Mozden, Robert Reeves, Nathan Schreiber, Jillian Tamaki, Stephen Von Oehsen, and Conor Willumsen.

  BY MATTHEW KLAM

  Sam the Cat

  Who Is Rich?

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  MATTHEW KLAM is the author of the acclaimed short story collection Sam the Cat. He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, a Whiting Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. His writing has been featured in publications including The New Yorker, Harper’s, GQ, The New York Times Magazine, The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction.

  matthewklam.com

  @MatthewKlam

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