Little Disasters

by Randall Klein

  I wave to Marc on my way out, but he’s hidden behind a veil of sparks and a steampunk nightmare mask. Back at home Rebecca has already started eating the chili without me. She sprinkles a few semicongealed strings of shredded cheese over each bite. “I was starving.” She covers her greeting and apology. I tug back her ponytail and kiss her swollen mouth. I kiss Jackson’s garbanzo bean and stare for a moment, take in the sight of his hostile expression, limbs twitching, fighting off sleep in his vibrating papoose chair. He is literally the most spectacular fucking thing I will ever lay eyes upon, and other than this one moment of grace, I have not had a single thought since I stepped back into this house that was not undercut with notes of getting the hell out as fast as possible.

  “I have to run to Greenpoint for a client meeting.”

  “Now? Which client?”

  “Potential client,” I correct, both myself and Rebecca. “Guy I met at the hospital.”

  “What does he want you to build?”

  “Don’t know yet. Going to go to Greenpoint and find out.”

  And her face says it all. It says that I shouldn’t leave, that my priorities are out of alignment with hers, and that the good father I’m supposed to be, as all boys are supposed to be when they’ve grown into men and put obsolete playthings behind them like so many discarded bikes left in backyards to rust, is the man who sits down on the carpet and watches his son fall asleep, tidies up a bit, converses with his wife about the banalities of their day, makes an effort to get her to laugh, kisses her until she relents and breaks away, goes to wash the scent of cookies from her skin; or doesn’t, instead continues to kiss, wants to be made love to (that hideous phrase makes me softer than Marshmallow Fluff), draws her gently into the bedroom, one ear alert for the waking, shrieking child, the rest of his attention on her mewing pleasure, the affectionate holding that replaced the ferocious clutching somewhere along the way, as if fathers aren’t supposed to have nail marks. That’s what her face says. It says that with a harmonizing look reminding me that I am also supposed to provide for this family, and so she understands that I need to go to Greenpoint for business, and that she trusts both the business element of that sentence and the needing to go. It says that too.

  But it’s just her face that says that, not her words, and so I kiss her again, make some vague promise to be back before she’s asleep, which I guarantee I will not be, and make my way to the bus stop. I get lucky and catch a passing B61. I’ll be there early, with enough time to enjoy a drink on my own.

  At twenty to eight, I’m sipping the house beer at the bar, passing time, paying close attention to a couple on a date without being too creepy. They are something new, it’s laced throughout every furtive pause and every perfunctory interview question. But each answer warrants a small noise of surprise, delighted squeaks to discover that this new person has also been to London or has an older sibling as well.

  I don’t know if there’s a single question I could ask Rebecca and be shocked by the answer. I’m guessing she’d say the same thing about me. She told me she doesn’t like the taste of capers a few weeks ago. That resonated enough for me to remember it now, weeks later. We’re the last four minutes of “Hey Jude,” the coda everyone sings along with because they know the words and the tune. No surprises, only the comfort of shared experience. When that song comes on, I let McCartney get through one go-round, then click forward to “Revolution.”

  Eight on the dot and Paul Fenniger walks in. We do our man shake and settle into a booth, Paul covering both my last and my next (a Manhattan this time), as well as something honey-colored and neat for himself. When he sits across from me, even in the low light of this hipster bar, I can tell he’s not how I remember him. His face projects spilt ice cream and skinned knees. We clink glasses.

  “Here’s to not having to breast-feed,” I quip. He smiles politely in reply. “How’s it going?”

  He bobs his head, his rounded shoulders hunched so tightly it’s making me tense. “It’s going. How’s your family?”

  “Everyone is great.” I beam. “Jackson keeps doing cute baby things. Mostly sleeping still. Rebecca is exhausted, so there’s that. I’m sorry, I don’t remember your wife’s name.”

  “Jenny.”

  “That’s right,” I confirm. “How’s fatherhood? You got a few too many two AM’s under your eyes, Paul.”

  It’s in this moment that I cross the threshold. I’ve just made a faux pas there’s no way I could have known I was making. It’s in the tightening of his mouth, the look askance at the bar, as if I can’t see that he’s got tears welling up if he’s not facing me straight on. “We didn’t …” he starts, bundles his hands into fists. “He never left the … he had … he had a hole,” and he taps his chest twice. “Right here.”

  Everything sinks at once. The floor of the bar falls away and I stare openmouthed at Paul Fenniger, this bottomless well of sadness, and I thank every deity imaginable that I am not this man, that I don’t know his pain. That I am better than he is. That I am better than he is. That I am better than he is. A broken record thought, repeated and repeated while he composes himself and I mask the bile and the … what is this … fucking schadenfreude? Am I actually comforted to know that his child leaped into the bad statistical pool in the false hope that Jackson, conversely, will now be safe? Am I glad? Paul looks directly at me, like he knows what I’m thinking, like he doesn’t blame me for being reassured it’s him and not me.

  “Jesus, Paul,” I sputter out. “That’s the worst thing. I’m so sorry. How are you holding up?”

  “I’m okay. Jenny’s okay,” he insists. “She’s been having some bad days, kind of what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “Okay …”

  “We turned her office into a nursery, and now we don’t need a nursery for a while. I want to turn it back into an office. I have money.”

  I wave him off, hate myself for doing so. “That comes later, Paul. Tell me how I can help.”

  “I was thinking shelves. Like built-in bookshelves. She has a lot of books.”

  “She’s a writer. I remember you telling me that. Shelves are easy enough.”

  “Maybe some other stuff. I was hoping you could come over one night. Not tonight. I haven’t spoken to Jenny about this yet. But you could come for dinner. See the room. Tell me what you think. You and your wife could both come. I mean—I’m sorry—she’d be busy, or you both would be busy.”

  “My parents can watch Jackson,” I reassure. It feels dirty to say the name of my son in front of a grieving father.

  “Thanks.” He wicks a tear away from his cheek. When he looks back at me his eyes are dry. He’s once again stoic and manly. “You want to go smoke?”

  “Sure. You need one?”

  “Nope.” He taps a private code on the table. “I’ve got.”

  For the next hour, Paul Fenniger and I talk about where we grew up and what sort of work we do. We talk about our wives. I get the feeling that whereas my drinking buddies simply don’t see me anymore, Paul never had any to begin with. He’s a little too enthusiastic to share trivial details about himself. Then there’s a pause, and his voice stays steady when he tells me, “I’m just worried about Jenny.” He repeats that twice, an incantation to the bottom of his glass, and he leaves it at that. He’s worried about Jenny. Fair enough.

  He pays the full bill and we separate at the train station. This time, when we man shake, he throws an arm around my back and I do the same. I start down the stairs but come back up a second later, watch him walk away, see his body transform once again into something heavier, rounded, walking in the fetal position, bracing himself for the next blow.

  Then I break into a dead sprint down the stairs and through the station. I run as fast as I can for the train. It’s not here yet, and it’ll be another fifteen minutes before it arrives, but I couldn’t take the chance of having just missed my way home.

  Michael Gould

  Present Day: July 19, 2010
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  9:49 AM

  For our honeymoon, my parents sent me and Rebecca to Paris. I’m an artist, she’s a baker, it made sense. When we got there, starving, we went to find something to tide us over until dinner. A man at a crepe cart asked us what we’d like, and I opened my mouth and said, “I’ll have banana caramel, please.”

  Every word in an English accent. Upper crust. More Laurence Olivier than Michael Caine.

  Rebecca looked at me askance but said nothing. We ate our crepes and strolled toward the Eiffel Tower. There, after getting deux tickets, I bumped into another set of tourists and apologized, “Sorry.”

  Soar-eee.

  Rebecca made fun of me for it, thinking that I put on a stupid fake accent for strangers to amuse her. For the rest of our trip, she’d sometimes lapse into a hideous cockney, only when speaking to me, of course, and demanded Cornish pasties for every meal.

  My fake accent wasn’t entirely intentional. It never came out to the customs agent at the airport or the concierge at the hotel, and I couldn’t understand why until I realized that they had my passport. They knew where I was from. But to a stranger, I was determined to be as much a stranger as possible. And I couldn’t control it.

  The accent came out again, unwelcome as spittle, when I paid for my bottle of water on West 181st. A dozen blocks north of there, four buses had passed without stopping, without passengers. The drivers hadn’t even looked in our direction, we few standing at the ass end of Broadway, trying to go south. I checked my phone again for incoming texts, had none, saw the temperature had crested ninety-three, and my battery power was down to 20 percent. I also grew fairly certain I was dying, since my body had jettisoned every drop of water.

  “Fuck it, I’ll walk,” I announced to the small crowd. And so I pointed my feet south and got started.

  Three people stand at the counter at a bodega on 181st, two leaning over a candy display to watch a small rabbit-eared television with the clerk. They don’t pay any attention as I grab the biggest bottle of water I can find from the fridge and chug a third of it walking back up to the front of the store. “What’s going on?” I ask, hearing my voice overenunciate its consonants, my upper lip stiffening. Far enough away from home, speaking to strangers, I myself become strange.

  “Something happened in midtown,” the clerk grumbles. He notices the bottle in my hands and says in the same dejected monotone, “Four dollars.”

  “Four bucks? Is this a movie theater?”

  He immediately escalates. “You opened it!” he shouts. The other two customers turn and glare at me, a united front.

  I haul out the ten in my wallet and hand it over. “What happened in midtown?”

  “They don’t know.”

  “Trains aren’t running,” I offer. Provide a little information, hope to get a little in return.

  “Nothing is running,” he huffs. The other customers nod stoically. “Everything is completely shut down. TV says they are trying to evacuate the area.”

  “Jesus, is it …” I let my tea-and-crumpets voice trail off. I don’t want to say terrorism out loud, not in front of the dark-skinned clerk and his other customers. The youngest customer, a guy who probably isn’t older than twenty, starts fiddling with his phone.

  “Reporter said possible train crash,” the clerk provides.

  “Train into another train,” the older of the two customers clarifies.

  “It’s terrorism,” the younger interjects. He holds up his phone, waves it around. “I have no bars. My cousin works for Verizon. He told me they can turn off the towers by flipping a switch if they want to shut down cell service to an area.”

  The other two men shake their heads. “No, really. There must have been a bomb underground. You can trigger that shit with any piece of shit phone. Even those.” He points behind the counter at the small collection of burners hanging on a pegboard.

  “Not those.” The clerk chuckles uneasily. He’s simultaneously shooting daggers at the kid and offering up a what can you do chuckle to me.

  “Yes! Those exact phones! My cousin told me any phone. It’s real Al-Qaeda shit. But they shut down the towers so there’s no signal. No signal, no detonation. I’ll bet a bomb went off and they don’t want to report it because people would panic. Those assholes wait for the first responders to come in and then they set off a second bomb, so the phone companies shut down the tower. I’ll bet anything that’s what happened.”

  I check my phone, and sure enough, I don’t have any service.

  “Definitely terrorism,” the kid insists. “And if they’re not even reporting it, it must be massive.”

  Michael Gould

  Twenty-one Months Ago: October 16, 2008

  She calls it the Interior. Geographically, it’s a misshapen triangle of land bordered on one end by the hip commerce of Van Brunt Street, on another by the slowly reclaimed industrial wasteland of Beard Street, and severed from the rest of Brooklyn by its third border, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. I point out to Rebecca that at the point it reaches our neighborhood, the BQE is actually more aptly termed the Gowanus Expressway, or even Hamilton Avenue, but to her it’s fast cars zipping by on two levels, plunging headfirst into the gaping anus of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel.

  The Interior is everything within. The Interior is the projects, though that’s the term she learned in Connecticut, when projects were settings for movies. The projects were fictions to Rebecca, settings for drive-by shootings and ghetto poetry until she moved to Red Hook. She learned that term over there, and I had to be the one to break it to her that they’ve come up with a less-loaded term by now. No one calls them the projects anymore, and if she’d noticed the well-manicured courtyards and the families around picnic tables, the aesthetics have changed a bit since she rented a VHS of New Jack City.

  We call it the Interior and we don’t go there as much as travel through it. The bus makes its way slowly through Red Hook from the body of Brooklyn, like a blood cell voyaging to an oxygen-starved extremity, and it picks up and drops off people along the way until it reaches Van Brunt and we get out.

  I call my wife a racist. I don’t say it like I mean it but make a joke of it, to be kind, if vaguely barbed in that kindness. Michael Gould, born and raised in Brooklyn, has no qualms about walking through the Interior. But I hang back, stay on Van Brunt, patrolling like a dog on an invisible leash, because I know how uncomfortable it would make Rebecca for me to venture inward.

  Instead I call her a racist. I used to say it only in response to her issues with the Interior, especially anytime she would invoke our term for it, but now I say it about anything, widening the scope of the humor. Whenever I sense discomfort in her, I contort my face and say, “You racist!” to her in as horrifically broad a stereotype as possible.

  The first time I brought Rebecca to Red Hook, an act as mysterious and portentous as introducing horses to the Indians, we stepped off the subway one neighborhood over, at Smith and Ninth streets, descending from up on high, the novelty of the aboveground subway and the spectacular view of downtown Manhattan from the platform transfixing us both. This could be our view, whenever we wished. “See,” I said, “you like it already.” And she did. She positively glowed, making her careful calculations in her head, running fingers along a mental abacus, budgeting the cost of smiling at my comment.

  She wanted to take a bus, but I insisted that we walk, to approach this new neighborhood on foot, see it appear before us from its fringes to its core. I wanted us to map out our future in the storefronts we passed, to find the future anniversary restaurant, the wine store that carries Gewürztraminer, the boutique where I could buy her birthday gifts.

  The walk became a horrific miscalculation on my part, and lazy scouting to boot. I hadn’t done the advance work to see how much the neighborhood had gentrified over the years from when I last saw it, when it was an uninhabitable shipping yard, subway-null and crime saturated. We crossed over the expressway, scurrying to make the light, and turned r
ight, past gas stations and garages. Past cracked sidewalks, barely able to hear each other over the truck noise. Rebecca’s look clouded over.

  Rebecca hasn’t breathed a stupid breath in her lifetime. She saw through the facade, this choreographed first trip, designed to dip her toes into the waters of Red Hook. She knew, sure as sugar, that I had already decided that we’re getting the hell out of my parents’ place and that this is where we’d settle, possibly even seen where we’d live, and that I was practically humoring her to believe she had more agency in the process. On that first trip I took her to the gigantic Fairway market, where we bought ingredients and assembled our lunches on the picnic benches outside. Our very own picnic. I pointed out the small shops up and down the waterfront, artisans hawking their wares in buildings like forts. That’s where she’d buy her earrings. That’s where she’d buy her ornamental scarves.

  “What is this place like in winter?” she asked.

  “It becomes Santa’s workshop. Elves and reindeer everywhere.”

  “I’m serious.” A long pause to show me how serious she was. She layered shaved turkey and slices of cheese, building a sandwich of unimpeachable structural integrity rather than look me in my face. She added, half to herself, “This isn’t where I saw us moving.”

  “Where did you see us moving?” I asked the question I already knew the answer to.

  “Park Slope. Or Carroll Gardens. Or Brooklyn Heights.”

  “We can’t afford any of those places.”

  “We can if you ask your parents.”

  “Then we can’t afford any of those places. I’ve asked as much as I’m going to ask.” We’ve had this discussion so many times it reads as two actors testing each other to see if they have their lines memorized. “You won’t be the only white lady in Red Hook,” I promised.

  She looked around quickly to see who’d heard. I’d aired a dirty secret and put my thumb in a very deep wound. “That isn’t what I meant and that’s not fair,” she spat. “Red Hook has bad parts; I know what happens in bad parts; I’ve been to bad parts. Are you going to be okay with me calling the police the first time I see kids loitering on our block? Or sitting on our front steps?”