by Matthew Klam
“You’re successful at what you do,” she said, “but it isn’t as steady.”
I saw us entering into a new type of contract, an arrangement based on lust that offered a dividend, a secret layer of protection. I imagined it then as some monthly number, conceived on the basis of my responsiveness to her needs, money I’d immediately get hooked on, which would open up new priorities and all sorts of sickening conflicts, and eight kinds of pressure to spit out gratitude to justify her investment. I’d learn to beg when I came up short, one more worldly necessity negating my search for solidarity, artistic purity, and spiritual insight. I’d just attach myself to that multiheaded hydra, that billion-dollar death machine, each suction cup lined with serrated teeth, swiveling, perforating my system, jamming its slimy probe inside me. Things would sour between us and I’d wait for the ax to fall, emailing her lackey functionary, some asshole I’d be on a first-name basis with, happy holidays, all that.
“Hey, why don’t you take your money and shove it?”
“Hey,” she said. “We use our inside voice.”
“Oh wow, here’s eight cents on the floor. Can I keep it?”
She looked bored, or harried, or a little alarmed. She looked as if she’d stumbled into one of those unnerving conversations with a stranger in a public place where it takes a moment to figure out that they’re crazy. Also, it was time to leave.
“How were you planning on funding me?”
She leaned back and touched the corner of one eye, rubbing it. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m pretty sure I can make a living on my own.”
“I’m sorry you have to work so hard.”
“Say that one more time.”
“Sorry.”
“You want me to know how it feels to get paid for it, because that’s how it is for you.” She pulled her arm off me and sat up and fixed her clothes. “I don’t mean you,” I said, my face burning. The need to clarify took hold. “This whole place is fucked.” I offered a poignant description of my earlier disorientation, how I’d lost my sense of direction as we wandered the downstairs, which I’d intended as an illustration of the excess of her house though unfortunately made it sound like I’d wanted to leave from the start but got lost. One last time I gave in to the idiotic impulse to explain. “But that’s the idea, isn’t it? To crush people so they can’t even think. What does it cost to heat that ballroom?” She leaned forward, avoiding eye contact, hunching to get her bra back on. She had long, fine, soft, beautiful hair, nice collarbones. “I feel like a total skank right now, and it’s not even my house.”
“Will you shut up.”
I think she just wanted someone normal, not some broke freelance artist, but not him, either. He didn’t put their kids to bed, didn’t say good night to her. Her sisters hated him. He enjoyed strip clubs, dining alone in expensive restaurants, borrowing money against companies with hard assets, numbers and video games, but not people. No doubt the burdens of his philanthropy weighed upon him, the politicians who came begging, senators and governors, who he referred to as “a buncha ding-a-lings.” His tutoring centers served ten thousand kids a year and needed more space. His hospital in Eastern Europe bled cash.
Hey, I had my own fucking problems. I’d been gone all week, I had a deadline and a long drive home, where I worked beside a washing machine in an unheated basement with a damp floor and a midcentury oil burner that reeked of diesel. In a rainstorm I stopped counting how many wet-vac buckets I carried into the yard.
From where I lay I could see a broken ceramic dish, makeup brushes, loose change on the floor.
“I didn’t mean to call you a skank.”
“You never called me a skank.”
“Well, you’re not one.”
“And you’re not a liar and a cheater.”
“If I were rich, you wouldn’t have anything to do with me.”
“Is that right?”
“I’m not real to you.”
“You can stop telling me what I think.”
“You think it’s cute that I make sixty thousand dollars a year.”
“That’s the stupidest thing you ever said.”
We were both so miserable, waiting for me to shut up. I wasn’t about to leave Robin for this woman, although I liked her, she was entertaining, but the financial imbalance made it a nonstarter. What was I supposed to do, follow her around, begging, for the rest of my life?
“When I met you, I didn’t know you were loaded. And when I found out, it made it harder to like you, not easier.”
She was glad to hear this. But then she was sad, because it was true.
A week after that awkward scene in Connecticut, Amy’s seven-year-old daughter had a brain hemorrhage while walking off a soccer field. Somehow in Amy’s mind there was this linkage of events, which on one level I understood. Overwhelmed with guilt, she took it as a sign. I gave her whatever space she needed.
I spent the spring and summer forgetting her. Although at times when I couldn’t forget her, I pictured her at Lily’s bedside, or in the woods behind her house, walking the dog, missing me, maybe weeping in the pickup line in her beautiful-smelling German car or on an airport runway on Anguilla, killing whatever thoughts came up.
But cutting off daily contact with her had another effect. Like the quiet that rushes in after a car alarm, it let me breathe, gave me peace, made me strong. In the intervening silence I began to notice you-know-who. I’d been living in my head for so long, Robin had become strange to me again. You recognize the strangeness as the person you first met.
She put mustard on her hamburgers. She licked her yogurt bowl at breakfast. She stuck her sweaters in the freezer to kill the moths. As winter edged into spring, she had her moles burned off, and over time I saw those burn marks slowly heal. I watched from my side of the bed as she drugged herself into a coma every night, spying on her from under the blankets, noting the fine white hairs on her neck, and little moons that hung outside her undies. In the warming days of spring, her easy-browning, pollen-dusted skin faintly shimmered. I listened to her voice, wafting across the hall as she woke Kaya for preschool, heard it in my sleep, reminding me of my mother. I watched the fingertip she traced along Beanie’s ear while he lolled on her nipple.
Her own mother, once the means of her survival, was all but gone. Her sister out west never called. Her brother was long gone, but sometimes haunted her dreams.
Her father was a tall, broad, large-lipped man who, in a lab at a chemical company in the seventies, had accidentally invented a nylon fiber five times stronger than steel. He’d won every important award in chemistry but the Nobel and was loved the world over by people whose lives he’d saved, his invention having protected them from bullets or bombs, lauded by builders of sports equipment, suspension bridges, musical instruments, and medical devices. And yet he was the one who’d left the family all those years ago, for his sexy lab assistant, and could not be forgiven. After the tragic death of his son, he still didn’t return, and he eventually married that Turkish hussy half his age. It was complicated stuff. He was sporadically, effusively generous. I wished he’d give us more. He claimed he didn’t have a lot of money—his discoveries belonged to DuPont—but he had a lot more money than we did.
We visited them in May, shocked by the cloudless Midwestern beauty of Chicago in late spring. We wandered through the unused rooms of their big brick townhouse, hunted for a wooden spoon in the kitchen they never cooked in, and tried to work the remote of their home theater while they went to the lab or wined and dined their favorite molecular engineers and polymer scientists. They’d always just returned from meetings all over the world and told fun stories of parties in restaurants, famous acquaintances, and the latest in composite materials. After a couple of days of that, I found Robin alone in some unused room, behind a cloud of agitated motion, knees shaking, breasts pumping, starry-eyed, hunched, vengeful, cursing the wife, eating meat off a chicken leg. The wife insisted that our kids call her Jenny, rather th
an Grandma or her real name, Mujgan. Mujgan sent us home with toys, and Dopp kits she’d collected from Lufthansa’s first-class cabin, and beautifully wrapped clothing she’d already worn with no tags and no receipt, which Robin draped against herself and thanked her for, then brought home and tried on, full of sarcasm, then gave to Goodwill.
They also owned a vacation house we’d been to once or twice, off the coast of Florida, on an island made of garbage.
It was hard to believe they had ever been a family. But there they were, in framed photos in her dad’s study, with Mom too, squinting under sun hats when the kids were small. And there they were a few years later, during a trip to France, on a research fellowship, after her brother was killed, in an image mostly devoid of grief, with Mom out of the picture, showing instead the snazzy purse her dad wore in Europe, and Mujgan in a macramé bikini, and Robin’s familiar scowl, and her sister’s nearly fatal eating disorder.
In old photos, her brother, Eddie, had been the smiling one. If people tried talking to her about him, even now, it made her angry. Picture something so terrible that for the rest of your life it never changes and you never figure out how to deal with it. I was sad for her at Christmas and at times when without warning his absence became vivid, sad for the past she’d put on ice, for their family’s truncated future, sad for who I’d hoped to be to make up for it, the brotherly husband I should’ve become, for how I’d fallen short. The person she’d married was part of a future I couldn’t live up to.
It’s hard to approximate the sweep and fullness of a twelve-year relationship while diminishing and giving evidence against my wife and children in order to validate my adulterous behavior, but on that trip to visit her dad in Chicago this past spring, I felt especially tired of my marital shortcomings and stints of poverty and artistic despair, the failure to meet my own low expectations. I was suddenly aware of the time I’d wasted all winter, trying to lie and sext myself past manic domestic entanglement.
It was just the usual stuff, sooty socks, closet shelves falling apart, the increasing awkwardness of disrobing in front of my wife, the sounds of rodents carrying stray cornflakes behind the stove and up into our walls, along with any lingering nerve damage she’d suffered from pregnancy that radiated from her hip, up into her lower back, down the meridian of her leg, rode her wiring and made her sour and frail. I gave up on screwing, didn’t wonder what my chances were, didn’t look for an opening, didn’t engineer it, didn’t beat myself up over an opportunity I might’ve missed. Lying there as another chilly night passed between us, I was relieved to feel trapped and defeated, to feed it and point it inward and hoard it for myself.
But in the spring, her pain began to fade. She went back to the gym, snapped back into shape, and bought yoga pants that hid nothing. Our lovemaking began again, sporadic and incidental, modest in its meaning, ambition, and duration.
The weather had been warm and beautiful, and then it really was summer. Sun dappled the leaves of our walnut tree. Lawnmowers hummed in the evening. Somehow, the bill for Kaya’s summer camp had finally been paid, three thousand bucks, and the bill for fall pre-K was already late. One night after dinner we walked through the woods at the end of our neighborhood and into the park, Kaya ran ahead, I carried Beanie, Robin and I held hands, and I remember it well because later that night I almost killed her.
There were abandoned tricycles and a basketball left lying on the playground, and I threw an errant skyhook that went over the backboard and into a hedge. At some point, after the kids had been bathed and put to bed, we sat on the rug folding laundry, discussing them, how Beanie liked to sip his bathwater while I read him a story, how Kaya had fallen in love with the ugliest white patent leather shoes in the world, two sizes too big, and pleaded for them, and tripped on the sidewalk and skinned her nose, but still refused to take them off. How, at four, she was less unified, more complicated and skeptical, already bored with having her picture taken, offering a fake smile, and how Beanie would get angry if he couldn’t spit cottage cheese into the holes in my harmonica. We wanted them with the madness of a teenage crush, we belonged to them now, we were nothing on our own anymore, and we placed their clothes in neat piles, amazed at what we’d done. To have a conversation lasting longer than thirty seconds about something other than that day’s logistics or strategies she’d learned from parenting books on how to destroy our kids’ will left me thrilled and grateful and brimming with hope.
Then I cleaned the kitchen while Robin sat at the table, watching rough edits, making notes for the Nature Channel on a show not about nature, but about a hoarder who lived with fifty-two chickens clucking inside his house. Then she dragged the Internet for the perfect pair of boots and recipes for people who eat flax, while getting whacked on pinot grigio, explaining to me that manganese is good for my prostate. Then she lay on the carpet, raising and lowering her pelvis in a kind of yoga-pants mating ritual, making soft breathy sounds, her nursing boobs rising, moving up her body’s absolute geography as her hips lifted, then falling as her butt met the floor. Afterward she did our house bills, pausing for a moment to insult my income and future prospects, to recall my back taxes and lingering debts, until Beanie started screaming. He woke up Kaya, who made one too many demands, and then Robin started yelling too, telling her to stop crying, threatening her with consequences, referring to the chart. The Chart of Good Behavior rewarded Kaya with gifts and gum or punished her with the loss of dessert and weekend television. It went on like that. It hurt to hear. I tried not to. She took it out on Kaya as a way to yell at me, because I didn’t like the chart, or because parenting is hard, and she actually didn’t know what the fuck she was doing, and neither did I, and that made her mad. My agony at hearing my daughter suffer had to be contained. Because she was a child in this marriage, Kaya’s suffering could not be avoided.
After putting them back to bed, we tidied up the first floor, gathering, sweeping, shoving, folding. Robin followed me around, blaming me for sabotaging Beanie’s nap schedule, blowing wine breath in my face, punctuating descriptions of a four-year-old with words like “obstinate,” “transitional,” and “oppositional,” educating me along the way, insulting me with her sarcasm.
Perhaps I made it sound worse than it actually was. What I know is, we were mostly kind to each other. It was good at least half the time. All she had to do was walk into a room in her bathrobe, smelling like a baby herself, asking me to check a mole on her back, suddenly small and vulnerable, and I’d give in, my heart blown open like a parachute, a kiss on her neck when I was done.
After the insults, she sat at the table, blouse raised and tucked into her armpits, breast-pump suction cups strapped across her chest, squinting at the milk collecting in the bottle, talking about Beanie’s burps.
“Why do you think he has colic?” I asked.
“He’s too old for colic.”
“That’s probably true.”
“You’re not listening. I said it was something I’m eating. I said my breast milk is pink. I said it seems like colic.” She’d pushed aside our place mats from dinner and laid out her knitting project.
“I’m not listening.”
“From your tomato sauce last night.”
“I know what the problem is.”
She didn’t look up but cocked her head to the side, suction cups against her chest.
“You think our family’s going to fall apart because your family fell apart,” I said. “And if you keep it up, it will.”
“Keep what up?”
“Your militaristic expectations.”
She squinted at the bottle of tomato-colored milk, slowly filling. “You had your perfect mom. She never yelled, never said no. She protected you from your father because you needed that. But now you’re the parent. You don’t get to be the baby anymore.”
“And you don’t get to be my father.”
“Why don’t you go fuck your mother.”
“I don’t need to be educated by you.”
/> “If you do to your kids what your mother did to you, they’ll end up like you, an emotional cripple, unable to work with others, waiting around for some paradise that never existed, that will never exist because life isn’t perfect.”
“I know it isn’t perfect because you get into a screaming fight with a four-year-old every night so she cries until you bribe her with a cookie and packs of gum.”
“You’re the one who treats people badly, you cut me off at dinner,” she said, “and if you do it again I’m going to take my fork and stab you. Do you want me to stab you?”
“Every night you talk about how broke we are, while I’m trying to eat.”
“This from a guy who sleeps till noon while the babysitter my father pays for takes care of his kid.”
“That’s bullshit, but how would I even know? I never see a dime of that money.”
“And you never will, because you’d blow it.”
Kaya stood at the other end of the kitchen, holding the cat, listening.
“She plopped on my head.” She said to the cat, “I want you to apologize for biting my chin. I give you an apologize, and you give me an apologize and send it to my brain.”
Robin unhooked herself and pulled down her shirt and knelt and hugged Kaya. Kaya spoke to the cat: “You’re a cutie wootie. You’re a furball. Dat’s not responsible, sweetie.” Robin put the cat on the floor and carried Kaya upstairs and lay down next to her and fell asleep.
Later I emerged from the basement, having wrecked myself with the illusion of work, and got into our bed, sad and alone, and listened to Beanie snore. I was hoping for a cry, maybe praying for a way to give myself over to anything, anyone who would need me, who I could soothe and hold, as a way to put our family back together.
On our block, you could see which families got along, which ones couldn’t be apart, clutching, clinging, which ones couldn’t be in the same room together. Across the street lived a heavily pregnant litigator named Shao, married to a jittery math professor named Phil, expecting their second child. Next to them were an old, bent, scowling, poodle-walking hermit—a retired electrician—and his wife, in the final stages and bedridden. Next to them was a house with three boys, hockey sticks, soccer balls, skateboards all over the lawn. They were lawyers in the telecom industry who wrote regulations and then crammed them down the government’s throat. Lisa served disgusting slabs of bloody meat for dinner that everybody over there loved. We had a block party every Labor Day with a bouncy castle and an egg toss.