If a tornado ravaged Brooklyn I would gather my family in my arms, swallow them whole into my belly like stones, protect them from all wind and weather, my feet planted in the floorboards like roots, waiting for the storm to pass. Then I would regurgitate them, slick but unharmed.
If a plane flew low into our front window I’d grab it by the nose, push it with locomotive force back onto the street, and serve Rebecca dinner while the sirens blared and the police cordoned off the area.
If the plague swept through the streets they could breathe with my indestructible lungs. I’d purify water, boiling it in the heat of my rage toward any bacteria brazen enough to try to shatter our tranquillity. And we would thrive. Our son would grow iron-boned, like an earth-bound god, able to withstand the most biblical of calamities, power and courage passed through the blood of his father.
I’d destroy the world to keep this scene intact.
We named him Jackson Thomas Gould. Jackson after Pollock. Thomas after Rebecca’s father’s father. Gould after me.
Paul Fenniger
Present Day: July 19, 2010
9:38 AM
The announcements stopped fifteen minutes ago. We continue to stand, elbow to elbow, marinating in our own sweat. Headphones have come off, books have been dog-eared and tucked into bags or onto laps. We’re playing a favorite game, speculating about what’s wrong.
“Signal failure,” the New Yorker man speaks, in tones of information delivered from on high. “Some malfunction in red lights and green lights and we have to sit here until they figure it out.”
“How come we have to wait here then? Take us to the next station and figure it out there,” he’s asked. Some voice in the crowd. He considers this, his seated position giving him the air of kingly condescension.
“There are trains ahead of us. They can’t move if the signals don’t work in front of them. It’s a domino effect. Probably backed up all the way to Bushwick.”
“Definitely a jumper,” the suited man—the last man to squeeze in—counters. “I’ve seen this before. Some guy dives into an oncoming train and they have to clean it all up before the next train rolls in. Some asshole’s last act was to make me late for work.”
Cell phones can’t get a signal down here, but that doesn’t stop people from checking, from clicking through again and again, reaching to the ceiling in the hopes that an extra inch will help the signal penetrate through the East River, bore through the tunnel, and meet their device. I’ve taken my jacket off and folded it over my forearm. I’m taking all of this in, absorbing it to recount to Jenny. I have a lot of trouble starting conversations. Sometimes she jokes that she is my director; if she didn’t cue me to speak, I’d amble through life like a background extra. When I get home today I don’t want to dive into the serious talk. We should orbit it instead, wait for the right moment to approach. If she doesn’t have much to share with me about her day, though, I’ll tell her about the cast of characters who got stuck on the subway.
“How long are we going to be stopped here?” One voice speaks for many.
“If it’s a jumper, could be a while. They have to get as many pieces as they can.” He’s trying to sound insouciant, but he clearly relishes this. This man will laugh later in a bar about a subway jumper.
I’m exhausted, but that’s okay. I don’t need to be particularly energetic to fetch and file for the law firm. Jenny didn’t sleep well, which means I didn’t sleep well.
I want Jenny back. I want Jenny back, and that occupies every idle thought.
“If a guy jumps from the end of the platform when a train is coming in at full speed, he can get everywhere.”
“Why don’t you shut up,” a voice in the crowd responds.
Then the steady hiss of the air-conditioning goes out and the train car immediately feels thirty degrees hotter. There’s a horrible mix of sounds—gasps of horror, groans of anger, the clicking of tongues, as if the air-conditioning is being inexcusably rude.
Shortly after the air-conditioning goes out, the lights follow.
Paul Fenniger
Eleven Months Ago: August 13, 2009
I come home to find Jenny in pajama pants. This is an improvement. Yesterday she woke up in a T-shirt and underwear, and I came home six hours later to find her still barelegged. She doesn’t acknowledge me as I drop my briefcase (a ludicrous gift from her for my last birthday, solid and leather—it looks like it should be holding stacks of unmarked bills, not the paperback I brought on the train and the Tupperware with remnants of my half-eaten lunch), or even when I come up behind her, bundle her hair in my hands, and kiss the top of her head. The ashtray on her desk is empty. This tells me it was at saturation point before I arrived.
“Did you write today?” I ask.
“I did write today,” she replies.
She’s not going to apologize for smoking in the house, not that I think she needs to. It’s okay, I guess, that she does. I’m just concerned. I don’t want the slammed doors or the tears that sharing my concern would provoke, so instead I rest my face on the crown of her head. I’d like to know if she’s been drinking. I’d like to know which Jenny I’m going to get tonight. I spin her chair and she doesn’t resist, doesn’t resist when I cup her chin in my hand and doesn’t resist when I kiss her mouth. She doesn’t touch me back, and her lips barely twitch in response, but this is also an improvement.
“In medieval times,” Jenny says, “husbands would come home and kiss their wives less to show affection and more to detect notes of alcohol, see if the missus has been in the liquor cabinet.”
“Have you been drinking my mead?”
“No.”
“Well then.” I kiss her again.
I kneel, because she’s not going to stand up, and we have our daily stare-off. I look into her eyes, the crevices deepening by the day, and she looks back into mine, challenging, daring me to acknowledge her grief. Jenny didn’t go outside today, or shower, or do more than throw on pants and come in here to type. Jenny may have taken a nap, if sleep came for her, or she may have blearily watched an hour of television, flipping absently through channels, settling on some show she’d seen before—the comfort of familiarity, of knowing the joke a second before it’s delivered, of having the resolution of the drama determined in her mind while the conflict still raged. She’s got a coffee mug on her desk, so the pot I left her this morning went to some use. I’ll check the fridge downstairs to see if she’s eaten. I’d look in the sink to see if she dirtied a dish, but Jenny has taken to washing and drying dishes immediately after using them, of making the bed the instant she leaves it, of erasing all signs of her presence outside of this desk, so if I weren’t to stand in the stale smoke air of our bedroom, next to the wooden desk she’s had since college and that has followed us, like a stray dog, from apartment to apartment, I wouldn’t know she ever existed.
“What should I make for dinner?”
“I’m not hungry.”
I lower my head, then curse myself. I shouldn’t show frustration with her. “Please, babe, can we eat something together?”
“Can you not call me babe?”
“Sorry.”
“Babe or baby or …”
“I won’t. I’m sorry.”
“It’s cruel.”
“I wasn’t thinking.”
“You’re being cruel.”
“I’m sorry.”
She runs out of steam. Jenny scratches her arm absently, leaving a jet trail that immediately glows red. I ask again, “Can I make chicken and rice?” She sticks out her tongue, shakes her head. “How about hamburgers? I could grill them.” Another violent shake. “Do you want to order a pizza?” Nope. “Umm … Chinese?” Ew. “Indian.” A moment’s hesitation, then another headshake. “Steak?”
She accepts this, bobs her head in tacit agreement. Steak. She gestures at me, waves her hand around like a sorceress. “With the …” She chokes up. Tears start.
“With the marinade?” I complete h
er thought. She knows that I know she loves it when I marinate skirt steak. But she’s gone now, crying into her hands, knees drawn up into her chest. Quiet, almost silent sobs. “It’s okay, Jenny,” I reassure. “It’s okay.” I try to rest my hands on her legs, unpry them so I can hold her, but she’s shut fast. She wants to be left alone. I know this mood; I’ve learned this language in a crash course. So I leave to get the ingredients for marinated skirt steak. On another night I may have tried something new with it, some citrus or adventurous spice. Not tonight. Not for a while.
On my way out I pass by the closed door. Jenny doesn’t want it opened. I can’t even open it when she’s down the hall in our bedroom; she’ll come and yell at me. She did the one time I tried, actually beat my chest with her hands. It was the closest she’d come to blaming me. I leave the door shut and walk out of the house. On our front stoop I withdraw a cigarette from one pocket and my cell from the other. I light up and scroll through my contacts, searching for the name of the man I met in the hospital, the one who knows how to improve a home.
Michael Gould
Eleven Months Ago: August 13, 2009
The Brooklyn I grew up in was splintered by race and ethnicity, then by class. Cooking a big meal would find you venturing from neighborhood to neighborhood, grabbing one thing from the Italians, another from the Chinese, a third thing from the Blacks. That’s what my mother called them, collectively—The Blacks. Like a family. She’ll deny to this day that the term is racist in the slightest.
The Brooklyn of my childhood kept its nice things across the river, in a cabinet of curios called Manhattan. We kept our money in their banks, our hopes in their skyscrapers. We bought our daily clothes down the street (from the Jews) but our funeral and bar mitzvah suits from the shops of Fifth Avenue. Their Fifth Avenue. We have one too, but we shopped on theirs.
And then came the new wave of gentrification, this mysterious houseguest who claimed squatters rights before both feet were across the threshold, a salesman Santa with all sorts of goodies in his sack. Lower crime rates, an influx of business, new development. The homeowners loved it because trust-fund kids flooding Brooklyn from Long Island, from New Jersey, from parts unknown with only their bank accounts on their backs raised property values every time they signed a lease. The renters, people who may have lived in a neighborhood for decades but could never quite get over that down-payment hump, weren’t as fond of these nattily dressed kids flipping the demographics of their block like a game of Othello.
And then came the bar owners—mustachioed, pomade-slick vinyl hair, with nautically themed tattoos crisscrossing pipe cleaner forearms, lending heft to the underlying skinniness. They too came to our neighborhoods, joined by the artisanal shopkeepers and bookbinders, terrifically strange men and women who dressed as if dragging the Jazz Age and the Weimar Republic into this century, willfully ignoring that hell followed those pale horses.
And then we came. To Red Hook, where I marvel that the man who writes calliope music is afforded the same respect as the stock trader. I rented a work space in a warehouse to store canvases and build furniture. That’s another great thing about gentrified Brooklyn—no matter how esoteric your living (or hobby), you can always find three other people who will go in on loft space with you.
The wood swallows my chisel. It’s a hot knife into butter, and I pull up to avoid cutting too close. I don’t hear my phone chirp when the text message comes in. I’ve tuned it out, listening to my iPod, metal scraping wood at high speeds underslung by whatever angst rock I have playing. Rebecca complains that if I can’t hear my phone when I’m in the shop, I should put it where I can see it. But I’m steps from home. In an emergency, she can step outside our apartment and hurl a rock through the window of the shop floor. My phone stays in my pocket, where I won’t lose it. I don’t hear my phone because I’m focused on this cherrywood table leg, on shaping it in the style of a modified Latchee twist. I’m focused on the money this chiseling will bring in.
Rebecca wiped down our kitchen table the other night while I cradled Jackson, shushing him to sleep. Feeling a baby fall asleep in your arms provides immeasurable peace, better than watching fish. The rest of it has been pretty boring thus far. It’s marvelous, he’s astonishing to gaze upon, but every emotion, sustained too long, becomes rote. It’s exhausting to be this appreciative all the fucking time.
“We should get a new table,” Rebecca observed.
“What’s wrong with that one?”
“Nothing is wrong with it. We should just think about a new one. We can afford it.”
“But why would we need a new table?”
“Why not? You could build one, manly man.”
“Why would we replace a table that still works fine? It’s still a table, isn’t it?”
She shrugged, hummed to herself while she finished cleaning up. Rebecca has planted her seeds; she wants a new table. And since then, every time I look at the table, I see its flaws, how it does look like the sort of thing two people significantly less far along in life should have. It’s not that there’s a problem with it—the problem lies within Rebecca and myself. We’re not poor enough, not young enough (God help me … not hip enough?) to have a table that is one step removed from particleboard set on two sawhorses, aka the much-loved table I had through college. And I miss the person who was suited to my kitchen table. He traded something unawares to earn the right to be too good for a piece of functional furniture.
Marc welds over in his corner. Neither Tony nor Regina is here today, but if they were, Tony would be spinning a potter’s wheel and Regina would be competing with me for table saw time. The three of them have been here longer—I started renting the space six months ago, after my predecessor (I’ve been told) stole “three or four cars.” His incarceration is to my benefit—a workshop space a few blocks away from my house, use of a truck, shared supplies.
My shopmates are a cordial bunch, but they’ve been slow to warm. Tony molded a clay giraffe for Jackson, something to sit on a high shelf for the foreseeable future, and I appreciate the gesture. I offered to take them all out for a beer to celebrate Jackson’s birth, but Regina and Marc demurred. Tony was initially up for it but followed their lead. I bring in Rebecca’s cookies and they’re devoured gratefully within a few minutes. Still, there’s a thin plane of ice between shopmates and friends that needs a bit more thawing.
Would be nice to have a beer with someone—I didn’t realize that would stop once my wife pushed out a baby. I didn’t realize that having a child would lead to the immediate death of my social life. I’m not an adolescent and I don’t exist in a sitcom; I knew sacrifices would be made. I knew I wasn’t going to be stumbling home while Rebecca provided the 2:00 AM feeding, but I didn’t anticipate the full stop at the end of the sentence. Plug up that release valve and it has to go somewhere, doesn’t it? So I spend more time in this shop, or I volunteer for all sorts of errands so that Rebecca can stay at home with Jackson. She’s not going stir-crazy, doesn’t matter to her. I keep running back and forth to Fairway, so often the produce manager recognizes me now as the guy who always forgets one or two ingredients and has to keep coming back. “You sure you got everything you need?” He laughs. I smile and nod, because fuck him in the teeth. He doesn’t know my needs.
My foot finally catches up to the rest of me and stops pressing the pedal. The lathe gradually slows, the table leg transforms from a blurred cylinder to the twisted, bulbous shape I’ve been hoping for. Wood like pulled taffy, ready to be sanded. Polish this one, then do it all three more times.
When I take out my phone it’s to check the time, make sure I’m home for dinner. There’s nothing elaborate waiting for me, just leftover chili, possibly reheated. Our new habit is to cook a giant one-pot meal to last us for three or four days, based primarily on what’s on special.
Hi Michael. This is Paul Fenniger. We met at the hospital. Was hoping I could buy you a drink and we could talk projects.
This guy. T
he actor slash something else that doesn’t pay. I’ve sat across from dozens like Paul, guys who read too much GQ and crave bespoke suits but don’t want to pay the tailor. In my case, it’s custom furniture, and depending on the wood and the hardware, it’s expensive. Tell that to a guy like Paul and his mind starts downgrading from dining room table (like the one I just spent hours lathing a leg for, that I myself could never afford) to coffee table, still not considering my time and labor in the cost. Or, you know, my expertise, the fact that I make beautiful furniture and others don’t, and there’s value in that. My father used to have an expression: Everybody wants to pay only for the burger, no one wants to pay for the grass. He probably still says that, shakes his hands like he’s reciting Talmudic wisdom instead of a quaint shtetl idiom.
Paul Fenniger didn’t give off the musky cologne of trust fund, but I’ve been wrong on that count before, and if mine eyes don’t deceive me, he’s offering to buy me a drink. Sitting across from another guy, especially one going through the same shit I am, could be therapeutic.
Hi P, I remember you. Sure lets drink. when and where
A minute later …
Do you want to meet in the Slope? Or I can come to Carroll Gardens or Boerum Hill. You’re in Red Hook, right? And how about tonight? Does that work for you?
Your buying, Ill come to you. Gpoint?
Thanks. That would be great. How about Black Rabbit, Greenpoint Avenue?
I know it give me ninety to get there. See you 8sh.
That’s great. Thank you.
Little Disasters Page 4