by Matthew Klam
We lived in a Maryland suburb known for its aging hippies, free mulch, and hundred-year-old Victorians, just inside the Beltway, a five-minute walk to the subway, a twenty-minute ride to downtown D.C. We’d been here for six years. Before that, we lived in Baltimore.
You could see how other people’s marriages worked, and you could take a wild guess, just by looking at them, who still did it. The ones who didn’t do it didn’t like you, but they knew they’d get you soon enough. The ones who did, who still seemed to hunger for each other, with their arthritis and their floppy appendages, made you wince at the thought of them naked.
Next to Lisa and Brett lived Amanda and Robert. He was special assistant to the deputy something at the State Department; she wrote talking points for some evil intelligence agency. She had small boobs and lacy bras and it really worked. Some nights before dinner she’d come up the sidewalk with her two little kids and we’d joke around and stand in our yard and she’d keep checking her blouse to make sure the top button didn’t come open, and I couldn’t help feeling noticed for noticing her.
On the other side of us lived a guy named Steve who cleaned carpets for a living. His wife looked too young, like he’d married his daughter. His daughter looked exactly like the wife, and could sometimes be seen from my upstairs bathroom late at night taking breaks from the glare of her monitor to kneel and rummage through her clothes half-naked. Elements of aging and ugliness now played a role in the corners of our privacy and the marriages around me. More people fatter and in worse shape, but still on some sort of eternal honeymoon. Other people who couldn’t get along, and caved and got divorced, destroying everything. Their kids fell apart. People who stayed single were children themselves and their genes were weeded out by natural selection.
Everyone not getting fucked enough, men not fucking anyone, women no one was fucking. What was the point of having a body? Intellectual life was not so satisfying that we could afford to relinquish the physical. The simple act of, or, I should say, when two people who, for whatever reason…or maybe it was more about the ability to give pleasure, if that’s what married people are up to, or maybe it’s just the raw power of sex, to cleanse and heal the body and mind, to simplify, soften, maybe clarify a complicated, heavy relationship, to make strong what is often rough or broken, while putting a fine and graceful point on the coarse and bumbling flesh, while gently nourishing the other, while somehow loosening oneself from the hunger—hey, around here we didn’t get enough of that. But just to hold the other and be held in return until the boundaries melt and our bodies hover, float, become weightless in that zero time of unclocked moments—we didn’t do a lot of that, either.
So when Beanie finally woke up with a shriek, I figured it was from the waves of unhappiness pouring off me, wafting across the floor. And maybe he wasn’t hungry so much as receptive to my distress; maybe I fed his hunger not for some nutritional reason but in order to fill my own emptiness. Maybe Robin was right and I shouldn’t have been giving him bottles in the middle of the night at ten months, rewarding him, training him to wake up. I couldn’t stop this vicious cycle. She pleaded with me, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t sleep, didn’t want him to sleep either, didn’t want to be alone. It was one thing in our lives that I could control.
When he finished his bottle he made a good burp, and what more could you ask for? Then he made a different sort of burp, his eyes rolled up into his brain, I could hear it coming up the pipe, it hit me in the chin first, then in the chest, like a garden hose had been attached to the back of his head. It was warm and smelled, at least at first, like apples. I staggered to my feet and carried him to the tub, to rinse the puke off him, rinse it from my hair, the plumbing whistling right through the wall, to wake whoever slept on the other side, and after I put him back down Robin and I met in the upstairs hall.
Quietly at first, we exchanged strongly held parental philosophies. She sighed, softly breathing sly accusations. I handled her inauthentic parroting of facile ideas, barf on the lapels of my pajamas, hoping to enlighten her. She deftly batted away my objections, invading my space, so I held her back, so she kicked me and tried to scratch my face off. I begged her to stop, or maybe I urged her on, like, “That the best you got?” I used my hand to keep her away, but not a flat hand, more a sort of curved grip, noting the sensation of the thin, soft, frail neck of my wife in my hand, like, “How did that get there?” A voice in my head, a tiny stage director, said, “Careful, careful,” until I let go.
That was followed by the abandoning of her post, the dragging of blankets past me, the knocking of stuff off low tables, the destruction of personal property as Robin went downstairs to sleep. I followed her to the living room, where she made up the couch, draping windows with towels for curtains as I stood, arms folded, sadder than I’d ever been, admitting everything, asking forgiveness, wishing her a good night’s sleep. After our fights I felt tender and protective.
“Go on, keep talking,” she said. “I’m calling the police.”
—
When I met Robin, she was a cute kid who could do impressions of the wackos who worked in televised puppetry: Lois, head puppet wrangler, who built each of the characters by hand; Brenda, who talked to them as though they were alive; and Kyle, who played Anselma. Sometimes her impressions overtook her: grabbing an oven mitt, pretending to be Skunk, saying, “I love you, Chippy, DIS MUCH,” her cheeks flushed as she got tongue-tied and disoriented, wiping away tears.
But a year after we met, the world changed. Our nation came under attack, and Robin started calling everyone she knew in TV news, friends of Digger’s in Istanbul and Karachi. She wanted to go somewhere with a “-stan” at the end, where troops and air support assembled for the war.
And while she never did manage to get to the Middle East, over the next six years she worked for a couple different newswires and later Japanese, Kuwaiti, and British agencies, sometimes shooting a story for a few days, other times gone for a week or two, on the road 180 or 200 days a year. This was back when no one gave a shit about Latin America, when coverage down there was still a rinky-dink operation, and even a phone call was sometimes difficult, and satellite hookups were sketchy and slow. Her assignments took on a familiar pattern: gang murder, prison riot, kidnapping, coup. She covered dire poverty, guerrillas, narco-trafficking and cartels in Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, and Honduras. The ups and downs of Haiti, Aristide, Duvalier, mudslides, fires, FARC, Chávez, some horrible plane crash in Paraguay, body parts hanging in a tree. After a childhood marred by divorce, illness, sibling tragedy and death, she’d gained some resistance to human suffering, or maybe had a greater appetite for it.
And then she went corporate and learned to handle the blow-dried West Coast bosses of a vast public media company, while fending off the flattering advances of one Danny Katavolos, grandson of television pioneer Johnny Katavolos, and for a while she ran the Nature Channel’s moneymaker on sharks—she came up with the idea to stick a guy in the ocean off the coast of Somalia wearing underpants made of chum. She faced the irregular participation of her dad, and her mother’s steep decline, and didn’t ask for my advice on how to raise our kids. I wasn’t prepared for her to blossom into womanhood.
It was easier to be around her during the hours of the day when our kids were awake; it was safer and more fun, as we cleaned the kitchen while Kaya dragged her little brother around, saying, “Hey, look! Baby Beanie can walk!” Then I’d go to the basement while Robin did her yoga tape in the living room, her lady yogi’s Southern drawl burbling through the ceiling above me, her feet pounding the rug as if to flatten, to pulverize me. I’d come to bed hours after her, turning the doorknob like a safecracker, crawling past the crib on my hands and knees so the floorboards didn’t creak.
I liked to hear Beanie snore, and the quieter sounds of Robin sighing in her sleep, soft high sweet sounds like a secret baby was hiding inside her. Tiptoeing beside the bed to find my pajamas, I’d study the mess of our blankets, tracing be
neath them the contours of her body, staring down into the husk of her discarded jeans at my feet, the soft-looking, brightly colored underpants still inside them, so that I stood naked where she’d been naked, as though an echo of our once-naked selves intermingled on some alternate plane. Then I’d climb in beside her, calling up the ghosts still resonating in the air between us, and remember something better.
What was better was this: a receptive, neglected accomplice in the well-groomed horse country of Connecticut, suffering a similar fate, transporting herself over e-waves of desire through the magic of her cellphone, down the East Coast, to find me hiding under the blankets, texting with one hand. Someone who needed bodily updates, and remained curious and enmeshed, and kept the bloom on our flirtation, and cut it off for reasons I hadn’t yet understood—matters of life, death, and the supernatural.
It was too late, I was too far gone, I’d spent too much time thinking up filthy stuff I planned to do when I finally got the chance, knowing I’d be sprung for a week in July, at my annual summer arts conference. There had to be someone else out there. I couldn’t let it go. Despite the lack of communication since mid-March, despite the long silence, my feelings for Amy had grown even more intense, because I didn’t need to filter or censor them, didn’t need to shove them in an email and wait for the response to know they were real. In my loneliness I had to resist going back to study every word she’d ever sent, although I did, about four times a day, but it was more the knowledge that someone out there waited, trapped in her life, thinking of me.
I went into town and rented a bicycle. Pedaling through the village, I fell in with other cyclists as we dodged tourists bumbling off sidewalks in floppy hats, crowding Main Street, trampling the town green, which overlooked the harbor. A sinewy man, shiny with oil, stood beside an old cannon, eating a caramel apple, in nothing but a shimmering green Speedo. A lady with a gray mullet played guitar on a bench, singing “Your Body Is a Wonderland.” The town had a history as a noisy, unconventional haven. A window displayed T-shirts with slogans: I MASTURBATE AND I VOTE; MY PARENTS ARE GAY. Art galleries, a side street paved in cobblestones, rainbow pinwheels strapped to lampposts. Not a cloud in the sky, bright blue hydrangeas, white boats sailing by.
Even though my phone didn’t get a signal, I kept checking. I had a feeling she might call. And in the bay a single motorboat, a line of white foam behind it, an airplane above it in a mirrored dome of continuous blue. Old stone church, bait and tackle, a kids’ playground in the sand. Riding out of town there was nothing, no coverage at all. The weight of the phone in my pocket was a nameless erotic impulse. It had always been the only way in.
I passed tiny clapboard houses, sharp green lawns, blooming rosebushes. Across the bay to the south I saw the tall bridge you took to reach the interstate, to leave this place forever, a bridge I’d be crossing soon enough. I thought of Amy, bleary-eyed and trembling, facing backward in that chair they used to roll her off the field, staring ahead at nothing. I figured her conference was over.
Past the massive stone breakwater that crossed the bay to the lighthouse, I joined other cyclists heading to the beach, and left them at the entrance to the state park, and rode by the Coast Guard station, its bell softly clanging, seagulls swirling out over the dunes. I followed the shoreline for a while, along a golf course and a grassy, lonely unnamed bay, and saw houses up in the hills. I found a quiet road with no markings that eventually turned to dirt, with smooth humps and soft potholes; I rode on to a parking lot with a boat ramp where the road dead-ended in a berm of sand. Two kids stood ankle-deep in tea-colored water, collecting something with a net, as a guy in surf trunks baited hooks beside his truck. A woman on the tailgate with long black hair stared at me as I leaned my bike against a guardrail and sat, my back against the sand, sipping water. I pulled off my backpack, took out my sketchbook, and attended to feelings of worthlessness.
The general shape of the truck emerged. Squinting, I delineated sand dunes to the east. Then I struggled to grasp the human figure. Do you think of the skull first or the contours of the head? When we move, all manner of compensatory things happen. The woman opened a cooler and fed the kids. I couldn’t get the trees right, then began addressing areas of light, shade, and texture. The windshield didn’t look like glass. The bay didn’t look like water. With a white-out pen I plastered over my mistakes, waiting for them to dry, blowing on them, staring out at the flat-bottomed clouds on the horizon. Before I could finish, the family packed up. The tailgate slammed. The guy walked over. He stood behind me for a minute.
“That’s why I take pictures,” he said. “It’s faster.”
“Thanks. I never thought of that.”
They drove off. I sat alone in the silence.
On Friday, during the long drive up, sitting in traffic, I’d phoned Adam, my boss, the magazine’s art director. I’d already sent him a dozen sketches, and he’d sent back two thousand emails, tweezering over every detail, nitpicking me to death until he finally approved one. I had those rough illustrations in my sketchbook, and sifted through them for the one he liked best. I had to finish that drawing, maybe later today, and get started on a full watercolor painting of Chinese factory workers.
The drawing would accompany an article about our failed wars with the Muslim world, our trillion-dollar experiment in nation building, the nightmarish lessons of history, and some other stuff. It was written by a famous crank who’d been at the magazine for decades.
The magazine had been around for 160 years, and as with other august, oldfangled publications, it required the protection of a benefactor. It had recently been bought in a fire sale by Jerry, a twenty-six-year-old who’d made a billion dollars starting a social-networking site. Jerry wanted a fresh look, a fresh feel, and had worked closely with Laura, the editor in chief, shuffling the staff, designing a new logo. They still ran pieces of straight investigative journalism, still published essays and criticism on society and the arts, but they also made room for lighter fare, satire, photo spreads of naked dudes and women in lingerie, kooky stuff, snackable content, diagrams and charts taking potshots at businessmen, movie stars, and politicians. I guess my work was part of that zany new look.
The article more generally assailed our disastrous record of regime change and our role in unleashing extremism. Adam wanted my illustration to connect a possible GOP White House with the neocon wackos hoping to get back into power to pave the Middle East. Big oil, American exceptionalism, party of war. In the sketch Adam picked to go to final, Romney rode a bomb toward Iran, Dr. Strangelove–style, dressed like a Mormon door knocker.
I could be happy working as a magazine illustrator. Cartooning, on the other hand, was lonely and difficult, and it savaged my personal life. Mainstream critics loved to talk about a new golden age of comics, and there was more money around and plenty of good work jumping the barriers, but a semiautobiographical story told in arty-farty black-and-white panels of a heterosexual white guy, contemporary daddy under stress, needed a reason for being, a plot, a hook. Whereas a magazine illustration already had a reason for being, and it failed if the number of viable interpretations rose above one. I liked that precision. I liked nailing the assignment. As an illustrator, I got paid to worry about what Adam worried about, his canned lefty politics, his prepackaged cultural commentary, his conventional ideas of what looked good. And while my salary wasn’t enough to undo the lie we were living in a house we couldn’t afford, it definitely helped. The anticipation of that monthly paycheck arriving in my bank account had become a more complacent and regulated panic, the money a modest return on a sane and expected amount of work. Anyway, making your own comics is the road to hell.
A magazine illustration is a rational, defensible complaint. Prescribed, safe, part of the conversation. It served some function in society. Exploring my failings in a comic book was something entirely different, a selfish, sadistic experiment, a cry for help. It was also an awkward and imperfect method to attach thought to actio
n, to think through my worst impulses and hopefully cleanse my soul. I guess that was what interested me. That was what I’d given up.
I finished the drawing of the truck, overdoing it, fixing it until it was ruined. I drew my hand, with veins and tendons flexing. I drew middle-aged Batman, at low tide, with a clam rake, staring like an idiot at some women undressing, stripping down to their bikinis. I drew fat Batman on the beach as he cavorted on a blanket with those chicks. I drew a little girl and her brother, waving to Daddy and blowing kisses. And I drew Robin, in her sports bra and yoga pants, saying, “I’m gonna buy a gun and shoochoo, muthafucka!”
I looked at my phone. It had one bar. Then it had none. It said, SEARCHING FOR NETWORK, then said, NO SERVICE. You had better luck on the other side of campus, by the flagpole, toward the highway.
I met Amy one night outside Fine Arts, downwind of a cigarette, sitting in the courtyard. We talked in a soft, sideways lukewarm rain. She leaned in close and bumped my knee. Then it spread across hundreds of miles and emails and photos that blotted out reality and ruined my life.
I drew a woman, easily and quickly, arms flung to either side, on the grass, unconscious, in the middle of the infield. Beside her I drew a shorter, bearded man with glasses and checkered shorts, and who is this man but my cartoon self, my hapless and poorly imagined alter ego. I drew the baseball field, bordered on one side by the campus, the clot of buildings in the old shipyard, and on the other side by a golf course and railroad tracks and a two-lane highway.