Little Disasters

by Randall Klein

  A conversation later recounted, my father doing his best Topol impersonation of our neighbor:

  “Marty,” his neighbor beckoned one day. “I cannot thank your wife enough for what she does for me.”

  “It’s her pleasure. It’s what good neighbors do,” Marty replied.

  “True.” His neighbor nodded. “Still, I want to thank you. My son—he is a stockbroker. He works on Wall Street.”

  “That’s so impressive. You must be very proud.”

  “I wish he spent a little more time in synagogue, but when they hit a certain age, what can you do?” His neighbor shrugged. That his son was so far from the flock was a major topic of gossip, another benefit my mother had picked up in her weekly rounds. But Marty kept his face a mask of deep understanding. “He passed along a tip to me, and I’d like to pass it along to you. You know kids with the cursing music?”

  “Yech,” Marty replied.

  “Well there’s this thing coming out, and it’s called … hang on … I wrote it down …” His neighbor fumbled through layer after layer. Marty sweated just to look at this man. “… em pee three player.”

  My father listened. My father talked it over that night with my mother. My father made a call to his neighbor’s son.

  He retired a year later. He no longer needed to make the trains run on time. My mother, flush with cash, wanted to keep her hands busy, so she continued to perform her rounds and stock the fridge with cabbage soup.

  *

  • • •

  My parents drive from Midwood, which they hate to do, to babysit for Jackson, a name they aren’t fond of, at our place in Red Hook, a neighborhood that alarms them. Miriam rushes over to Jackson, happily vibrating in his papoose chair, and scoops him up, shrieking into his neck, rubbing her perfume all over his face, pressing kisses into his tiny nose. Marty breathes deeply the air of cookies, but squints disdainfully at our lighting. Last time it was the flooring.

  “It’s very dark in here,” he comments.

  “Who said that?” I reply.

  “I’m serious. It can’t be good for his eyes.”

  “It’s fine, Dad.”

  “Let me buy you some lamps.”

  I take a deep breath. It’s a move I’ve practiced, that Rebecca has rehearsed with me more than once, to look like I’m giving the matter some thought, to not come off as petulant, but in reality taking the beat to keep my cool. “If we want any additional lighting I’ll come ask you, okay?”

  “Just dark in here,” my father says again, before diving in with my mom, tickling Jackson with twenty arthritic fingers.

  I don’t like taking money from my parents. Most of the time. I didn’t mind asking them for the seed money for my business, or Rebecca’s, or this apartment. They didn’t mind giving it, and to their credit, they haven’t lorded it over us in any way. Haven’t even mentioned it. That largesse provides me with limitless stores of patience when my mother is smearing my son against her, making him smell like a department store, and when my father shit-talks my home.

  Rebecca has narrowed her choice of earrings down to either gold hoops or gold studs, and she comes in leading with them. I point at the hoops. She gets a second opinion from my parents. “Go with the little ones,” my father counters. My mother stands at attention, enough tact to pretend to listen as Rebecca goes through her instructions for when to feed Jackson, what schedule he’s more or less keeping, and where emergency numbers are located. She inserts the studs into her ears as she runs through this.

  “It’s so sad,” my mom says to Rebecca, apropos of nothing, shushing Jackson back and forth. He’s got his cheek pressed up against her breast, and he’s confused. He knows Rebecca by her boobs, and these ain’t them. “Losing a baby. Outliving your child. No greater tragedy,” she elaborates.

  We all nod, stare at Jackson and nod sincerely. Not my father. Pose a tragedy to my father and he spins to the nearest window, stares out as if looking for the answer on the horizon.

  “Before Michael, I miscarried twice. Very early on. You’re having a baby and then you’re not.”

  “It is very sad,” Rebecca agrees, hoping that will end the conversation.

  But it doesn’t. “We’ve become conditioned as a culture to assume that everything that is supposed to happen will happen. A generation ago we were lucky just to live a little better than our parents did, for our children to live a little better than we did. Now everything is a done deal before it even starts, and that leads to very sad moments.” She cradles Jackson, who looks around vacantly through half-lidded eyes. Rebecca thought it would be more difficult for her to leave him for the first time, but it’s not. With cheek kisses all around, I take her hand and we’re off. Just like that.

  “You know they’re going to go through our apartment,” Rebecca says to me.

  “Just your things,” I reply.

  I lay my raggedy backpack over my lap on the train. I’ve brought my tools and a digital camera and a batch of Rebecca’s cookies, caramel cashew, along with a bottle of red and a bottle of white. “I plan on drinking tonight,” Rebecca says.

  “Then drink you shall.”

  “God, I haven’t had a glass of wine in I don’t know how long. I want one more than my next breath.” Whether she makes it through an entire glass is dubious. She’s so exhausted she lays her head on my shoulder, dozes for the trip. I plug my headphones in and flip to a podcast. We sit in comfortable silence as the poor, much-maligned G train slithers its way through the less affluent areas of Brooklyn.

  We alight in Greenpoint, heads on a swivel, staring at the stores. The signs in Polish, letters with tails and hats, us with our fingers intertwined, reading out loud, phonetically, under our breath. This strange hamlet of New York, of Brooklyn, no less. Here, I can’t tell how we don’t fit in, only that we don’t. There are the requisite hipsters, but here they stick out, as if they wandered up from Williamsburg in search of something new to gawk at or co-opt or disdain. The locals pay them, and us, no mind. Old men smoke cigarettes on the steps of a majestic church, a restaurant has a full suit of armor, actual metal armor, on either side of its doors, the legs chained to the facade. The dress code appears to be track suits for men, ample cleavage for women. I stare at strained tops, at rounded bums in stretch pants, as subtly as I think polite, until I glance over at Rebecca and realize I’ve been ogling with the subtlety of a self-immolation.

  Paul and Jennifer live one long block over, on Franklin, close enough to the water that we see it peeking through buildings, see the neighborhood cede its houses to industry, to fences and smokestacks and truck exhaust. I squeeze Rebecca’s hand on the front steps. “Ready for this?”

  And she says yes, because what else is there to say?

  —

  Dinner, in four courses

  FIRST COURSE

  Seasonal vegetables, served with homemade hummus

  “I’m Paul.” He says this to me while shaking hands with my wife. He’s all facial tics and quick movements. He waves his arms in front of himself like dealing three-card monte when he apologizes, amping up the wattage on his head shot smile. “Jenny is still getting ready.”

  First word that comes to mind to describe the apartment is cute, though that rings dismissive. It’s maybe a little larger than ours, when you add up the square footage, but its ceilings are lower, its kitchen is smaller, and the paint on the walls is the chalky whitewash that corner-cutting landlords the city over slap on in two coats, leaving ridged blotches that make a wall look like it has eczema. They’ve got posters and playbills up in plastic frames, but very few pictures of themselves. Paul instructs us to make ourselves at home, because that’s something people say to one another, so I take a mini tour of the living room, walking in a loose box step, peering at their shelves, scrutinizing their tchotchkes, marking off the comparisons to our apartment as they come up. The entire room is ringed with stacks of books, shin-high, a ridge of literary baseboard. Rebecca shuffles behind me the whole ti
me, like a kid on her first day of school. Paul slips away down a hallway and Rebecca and I share a look. I kiss her forehead and she squeezes my hand to say Thanks, buddy.

  She finally breaks off and sniffs around, explores the same shelves, makes idle sounds of approval. I respond in kind. The first time I see Jennifer it’s in a frame next to a wooden bowl filled to the brim with pennies. The two of them beam at the unseen photographer, the Washington Monument stretching phallic behind them. They look younger, though it’s difficult to tell with Paul of the lineless face and the boyish energy. Jenny’s face hides halfway behind his in the picture, seemingly kissing him on the back of the ear, too distant to reveal what she looks like. Paul sweeps back into the room, clapping his hands and grinning to the cheap seats. “Let me take drink orders,” he declares.

  He pours wine for Rebecca, puts a glass of red in her hand, and I can hear the tension crackling off my wife’s shoulders as she raises it to her lips, polishing off half before Paul has time to rummage through his drawers and find a bottle opener for my beer. He keeps shooting cautious looks down the hall and then reassembling his too-wide smile for the both of us, and I get the sneaking suspicion that either Jennifer isn’t quite up for tonight or this is a trap and Rebecca and I are about to be murdered.

  “Greenpoint is beautiful.” Rebecca throws this statement into the air, waits to see where it lands. Paul grabs a tray of vegetables from the fridge and puts them on the table along with hummus, coarse and khaki. Then he looks up with surprise, anxiety rippling the pond, his mind rewinding to the last thing said. I want to tell him to sit down, that Rebecca and I are low maintenance; we’re not expecting to be entertained as if we own the factory. I want to tell him that we’ve spent the past few months eating while a child intermittently shrieks at us, or that Rebecca has to work the fork around his body on the way up to her mouth while he lampreys to her nipple. Seems a cruel gesture more than a comforting one, though, so I say nothing and sip my beer.

  “Thank you. We really love it here. And it keeps changing, even this street. We have the bookstore, and clothing stores, and a tattoo parlor, and bars, and a bodega …” He runs out of steam. Then he leans forward to both of us and says, quiet, almost conspiratorial, “How is your son?”

  Rebecca bobs her head, and for a moment it gives me pause, the question’s phrasing and her response making me wonder if something is wrong with Jackson, if Paul’s asking because the last he heard, Jackson wasn’t doing so well but was still fighting. “He’s good?” I whisper back. Rebecca confirms with a sharp nod.

  Footsteps emerge from down the hall and Jennifer Sayles steps into our lives. Her arrival charges every ion in the room, displaces the air into the corners. She catches me tilting a bottle of beer between my lips, lingering there, staring. My first impression of her is so outright bitchy that I have to brace myself on their table to keep from doubling over in self-hatred. My eyes dart from face to face, checking to see if everyone notices the same thing I do. Paul may be used to it by now, but Rebecca must see what I see.

  Paul’s face has such symmetry, he’s such a boilerplate beautiful man, and Jennifer looks so drained, so emptied out and haggard, with none of Paul’s humor or vitality. My first thought is how vastly more attractive Paul is than Jennifer. I pull on my beer, draining half of it in one go, because I can’t fathom what is inside of me for that to be the first thing that comes to mind.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she says, voice hoarse with false cheer. “Fenn, do we have wine?”

  “Red or white?”

  “Whatever’s open.”

  “Red is open.”

  “Then a bottle of that.” She laughs, brash and hacking. “Glass! I meant a glass. I’m sorry. I’m out of sorts.”

  Rebecca steps forward and approaches Jennifer. She says, “I remember you.” My wife lays her glass on the table so that she can stretch out her arms, reach forward like a zombie narrowing its scope on the kill. Jennifer starts to recoil, but her body freezes, goes rigid. “We both were in T-shirts and yoga pants, and you had a wraparound sweater, and I remember thinking how smart that was in case it was cold, even in the summer, because of the air-conditioning. You told me how horrible you looked, but you didn’t. You looked beautiful. We both were too self-conscious to look anything but perfect in front of Dr. Mulitz.”

  Then she wraps her arms around Jennifer and holds her tightly. Rebecca is an inch shorter, so her cheek cradles Jennifer’s jaw. Jennifer, for her part, accepts the hug uncomfortably, like she’s being sniffed by a strange dog. Then she settles into it, though she doesn’t hug my wife back. Her arms remain at her sides, hands slack. Stiff but unbowed, Jennifer raises her head and stares at Paul, gaze fixed, looking every inch a painting of one of those martyred women flayed alive for their faith.

  When the hug breaks, Jennifer pats Rebecca on both shoulders. “I remember you too,” she assures, before lunging for a glass of wine.

  —

  SECOND COURSE

  Gazpacho with Parmesan croutons

  “Paul tells me you’re a writer,” I say. Jennifer, who has been raising spoonfuls of soup halfway to her mouth, then tilting them back into the bowl for the past five minutes, gives me a wry smirk, to make clear that I will regret engaging her on any level throughout this meal.

  She opens her mouth and leaves it like that for a few beats before sound emerges. “Did he now?”

  “What kind of writer are you?”

  “The unaccomplished kind. Paul says I’m a writer because it’s kinder.”

  “That’s not what I do,” Paul corrects gently. “You’re an as-yet-unpublished author.” He has stared at his soup since sitting down, intermittently glancing at Jennifer across the table (a much nicer table than ours, but ours has character). Rebecca and I sit across as well, foot pressed to foot, united in our effort to overcome this meal. It helps that my wife is alternating sips of soup with gulps of wine.

  “How did you two meet?” Rebecca takes her turn at bat. She’s on her third glass. Jennifer keeps pace. Paul and I eye each other over our second beers.

  Jennifer clangs the spoon against the bowl and leans back in her chair. She glares across the table at Paul, who shrinks before her gaze. Then she looks at my wife with a sweet, vacant expression, and says, “We met at a party. I was already there, and Paul walked in. Our eyes met and … I know this sounds cheesy, but is music supposed to play when you see the person you’ll end up loving? Because at the time it didn’t. The room didn’t even lower its volume to an ambient hum. But when I picture this scene in retrospect it’s Paul’s song in my ears. Do you know Erik Satie?”

  Rebecca shakes her head. Jennifer doesn’t even bother checking with me. “You should seek him out. Gymnopédies. The most beautiful thing you’ll ever hear. That’s the composer who scored the moment I met Paul. I hadn’t heard it before Paul and now I can’t hear it and not think solely of him, as if Paul himself wrote it. I first fell in love with Paul Fenniger through my ears.”

  “That’s beautiful.” Rebecca reaches across the table to squeeze Jennifer’s hand, but Jennifer, with no small measure of irritation, tucks them both in her lap.

  “But it’s not entirely true. I’m not being honest, just artful. He’s a beautiful man. That’s actually the first thing I noticed. Loved him first with my eyes. Taken apart, piece by piece, I grew to appreciate the high forehead and the flat planes of his spotless face. I came to lust for the perfect knob of his Adam’s apple, the notch below it sized as if designed for my jaw to rest in. His guileless eyes. The slight pursing of his lips. A nose sculpted with one of God’s finer chisels. When I cut him up into small parts I can hold him up to the light and scrutinize each lovely piece, but in that first moment, I noticed, simple as breathing, that the man who just walked in was unspeakably beautiful.”

  A stillness sets over the table. Who the fuck is she speaking to? Who is this performance for? I can see Rebecca’s gears spinning, striving to name the movie Jennifer is quoting. �
�Jenny … ,” Paul says, low and pleading.

  Jennifer throws her head back and laughs, the sound of a plucked guitar string, steady and tinny. “I can make it prettier than it is, Paul,” she chides. “I’m a writer after all. Fine, you want to know how I met Paul Fenniger?”

  Rebecca looks to me for support. I bury my eyes in my soup. There’s no way I’m diving headfirst into this hornet’s nest of crazy. My plan is to wait Jennifer out until she goes from giddy, chatty, sociopathically drunk to maudlin, exhausted, unconscious drunk. Once her head hits the table, I’ll feel comfortable rejoining the conversation. With no one to overtly disapprove, she commences.

  “I met Paul my senior year of college. I’d pretty much only had weekend boyfriends up to that point. My freshman year, I started hooking up during orientation with a sweet boy named Chris, who called his mother twice a week and thought buying me a single rose on my birthday was the height of romance. I liked him, but it ended before sophomore year, when I seriously dated a less sweet boy named Kyle, who didn’t believe in romance but had an opinion on every other subject. That also went an entire year, though a flowerless one. But I did learn a lot about Thomas Pynchon. In my junior year I became a gal about town, arm in arm with athletes and poets, a junior professor, and a townie named Curtis, who didn’t go to the University of Wisconsin and resented everyone who did except for me.”

  “They don’t need to hear all this.” Paul rubs his eyes.

  “She asked, Paul. Our guest that you invited asked, and I want to be a good hostess. I’ll skip a few chapters. It’s mostly blow jobs anyway. One night my roommate Molly whined me into going to a party. It was close enough to walk in heels so I said fuck it. It ended up being a theater party and no one was more entertaining than the bottom of a plastic cup. But I did meet a guy there that I fell deeply in love with. His name was Danny Perlis and he designed sets and he had these pellucid blue eyes that made me learn the word pellucid. That night we got high and had sex on everyone’s coats and two months later we were living together. And a year after that he asked me to marry him and I said yes and two weeks after that I met Paul, who was one year younger and a virgin from Cadott, Wisconsin, who had terrible grammar and who thought that rainbows flew out of my snatch and twelve years later we live in Greenpoint. Just the two of us.”