Little Disasters

by Randall Klein

  She punctuates the story by finally spooning gazpacho between her lips. I give Jennifer an appreciative smirk. Shine on, you crazy diamond. You roped me back in. “What happened to Danny Perlis?” I ask.

  “He gave me a lecture that he clearly thought was eviscerating and I thought was directed entirely to my tits. Probably a good thing that we didn’t elope like he wanted. I loved him, but the thing I loved most about him was how much he loved me. I mailed his ring back after graduation.”

  Jennifer pushes her virtually untouched bowl of soup forward. She drains another glass of wine and reaches halfway across the table for the bottle, but Paul’s arm shoots out and grabs it first. He holds it just out of Jennifer’s reach and the two of them glare at each other. Rebecca has on her no-lipped mortified face, but I cannot imagine a better standoff. Either they will go the full George-and-Martha and my wife and I will get to go home (or to a bar, so long as we have our babysitters …), or she’ll wrestle the bottle from his hands and deliver another meandering monologue of her checkered sexual history. Either way, I’m getting dinner and a show. There’s a vitality in the room, an electricity I discover that I’ve missed. Rebecca fusses with her lap, but I’ve engaged all five senses.

  Paul stands up from the table and carries the bottle over to his wife. Then he turns to Rebecca and pours her a half measure, a bold act of defiance. But he knows exactly how much is left, because he next takes Jennifer’s glass and fills it up just a shade more. “Shall I clear bowls?” he asks no one before taking mine to the sink.

  “And that’s how I met Paul Fenniger. How did you two meet?”

  Under other circumstances Rebecca and I would laugh at this question. This subject is a longstanding inside joke between us. “Neither of us remember,” I say. “We just sort of happened. There we were.”

  “That’s sweet,” Jennifer murmurs, sipping her fresh glass of wine. “I like your story better.”

  —

  MAIN COURSE

  Pork chops with homemade applesauce and minted peas

  Whatever hostility Jennifer needed to expel has burned off. No sooner had Paul set the plate in front of her than she’d tucked her fingers into the pockets of his jeans and tugged back and forth, like a child demanding attention. Paul’s face relaxed, and he leaned over and kissed the tip of her nose.

  “You did have atrocious grammar when we met,” Jennifer says sweetly.

  He raises a glass to her. “And you fixed it. Now I’m ready to meet the queen.”

  The mood lightens, and it’s once again okay to joke without malice or sneer the answer to simple questions. His mood elevated, Paul talks about how his father was the single, solitary bus driver in Cadott, Wisconsin, where his dad did one sweep for the school kids, and then doubled back to take the elderly and anyone else who fit on the twelve-seater around to run errands.

  “This may be a silly question,” Rebecca slurs. I stopped counting glasses by the time I started counting bottles. “But why did you decide to keep your name? I mean, I thought about keeping mine, but I ended up taking Michael’s. I have this strange attachment to feminism, like I think of myself as a feminist, even though I make cookies all day, but that’s neither here nor there. It’s just something I notice, when women take their husband’s name.”

  “Paul is my partner,” Jennifer notes lightly. “And there was no way in hell I was taking his ridiculous name.”

  Rebecca scrunches her face. She turns to Paul. “What is your name again?”

  “Paul Fenniger.”

  “Oh,” Rebecca replies. She doesn’t press further. Jennifer Fenniger. She of the self-satisfied smirk. I got it. Clever girl, avoiding that one. Say it out loud.

  But no one explains it to Rebecca, and the rest of the main course passes by swapping safe New York stories, lamenting the trust-fundification of Brooklyn, as if we weren’t the canaries in that coal mine. My father would want to slap me for even listening to a conversation so lacking in self-awareness.

  Nevertheless, Paul clears the plates once only bones are left, curved like the body of a harp, picked clean and white. I notice this when I find myself staring at Jennifer’s plate, relieved that she’s finally eaten something. She catches my dumb gawk and raises an eyebrow—first one, then both, like asking a question and a follow-up in one go.

  —

  DESSERT COURSE

  Becky’s Bites

  “I’m not much of a hostess tonight,” Jennifer admits, half-apologetic, half-defiant.

  Rebecca, glassy-eyed, takes her hand. She’s reached for it all night and now finally Jennifer has left it languid on the table long enough for my wife to clutch. I’ve never seen her this drunk. “It’s okay, it really is.”

  “No, it’s not. I’m being rude, and you and your husband are doing us a huge favor just by being here. How is your son?”

  “We don’t need to talk about him,” Rebecca says quickly.

  “No.” Jennifer punctuates with her free hand, delivering a hard slap on the table. “I live in a world where people have children. I have to get used to being around them. Parents and kids. Can’t avoid walking past playgrounds, right?”

  “That’s strong of you. I don’t know if I’d be that strong.”

  She takes Rebecca in, searching her foundation for structural weakness. “What an awful thing to think about yourself.”

  “Jackson is fine,” I step in. “Thank you for asking.”

  “Good.” She takes a bite of cookie. “That wasn’t so hard.”

  “How have you been holding up?” I cringe at how stupid that question sounds. It’s possible that, four or five beers in, I’m a bit drunk myself. But Jennifer absorbs it, considers it as she lights a cigarette at the table. Paul opens a window.

  “Not great,” she admits. “I keep thinking about all the little things I might have done that killed my kid.”

  “You can’t think like that,” Rebecca interrupts.

  “You wouldn’t know.” Jennifer’s voice sharpens. She blows a thin stream of smoke over the table. It sinks into the plate of cookies. “I don’t mean like smoking or drinking. I’m not a fucking idiot. I didn’t do any of that. I mean like yoga poses or sitting a certain way. Things like getting out of bed too fast. I was doing something or not doing something when my child’s heart got ruined. There’s no way to separate out my behavior from what happened. I know as a rational human being—I’m a rational human being—I know that I didn’t kill my child. That’s not how it works, or that’s what our doctor told me.”

  “Dr. Mulitz?” Rebecca says, smiling sadly. “I’d kill for that woman. Anyone she asked me to. Even Michael. Especially Michael.” She snorts a laugh. “If she says you couldn’t hurt your baby, then you didn’t.”

  Jennifer stares out the window. “Something I ate. Walking up too many steps.”

  “Are you and Paul going to try again?” Rebecca interjects. She does this whenever anyone displays what she deems negative emotions. Sadness or anger, especially. Rebecca goes into Saturday morning cartoon mode and won’t stop until everyone joins hands and sings. “I hear you can try within a few months.”

  “Beck,” I caution.

  “Probably. Maybe not within the next few months, but eventually. I mean, this wasn’t the most deliberately planned of pregnancies. I can’t take hormonal shit because it makes me act like a fucking lunatic and I have a latex allergy, so Paul and I have pretty much always been like Christian teens, but this is the first time our methods failed. Or succeeded. Or succeeded and then failed. Not sure how to phrase it.”

  Rebecca parts her lips to sally forth with another platitude, but I cut her off and lie. “I’ll bet someday you’ll be a terrific mother.”

  She tilts her head toward me, smiles without teeth. “Thank you, Michael.”

  —

  AFTER DINNER

  Cordials and work

  As soon as Paul clears the last of the plates, Jennifer stands up and exits the apartment, sweeping out at celebrity for
ce. Paul watches the front door close but lets it go without comment. “Let’s go take a look at the room?” He puts it out there as if that might be a fun idea. Rebecca teeters on unsteady legs. “Go,” she says to me, rich with meaning. “I’ll be outside.”

  Paul and I take a moment at the table to decompress. This is the point where one of us should say something, apologize for our respective significant other so that the other person can say it’s no big deal. That muscle goes unflexed, Paul instead leading me back down the hall, opening the only closed door.

  The room itself is small, big enough for the crib still sitting in the middle, and a nursing chair over by the window. I’m about to say that Rebecca has one of those as well, and comment on how comfortable a chair it is even for nonnursing mothers, but I catch myself in time to realize how that might come across, that while Rebecca has a nursing chair, Jennifer has an expensive rocking chair decked out in cow-jumping-over-the-moon upholstery.

  Paul stands in the doorway, watching me evaluate the room. If he’s expecting alchemy, that I’ll wave my arms and gut renovate the nursery that wasn’t, he’s going to be sorely disappointed. The magic starts with my taking a tape measure from my belt loop and a pad and golf pencil from my back pocket.

  “Is there anything I can do?” Paul asks.

  “Give me ten minutes. I’ll take some measurements.”

  Paul nods. “Okay,” he says. “It’s okay.” And another nod. I prod him gently along; it doesn’t benefit either of us to have him here. “Just ten minutes should do it. I’ll come out when I’m done. You can shut the door if you like.”

  “Okay. Okay. I’ll start cleaning up.” He closes the door. I hear him pause in the hallway before his footsteps go off, leaving me to my tape measure. It takes eight minutes to get all the info I need.

  When Rebecca and I leave, there aren’t hugs or hollow promises to do this again. Jennifer slipped back into the apartment and into her bedroom while I was working, and Rebecca helped Paul clean up until I was finished. At the door, he leans forward to kiss Rebecca on the cheek but catches himself a foot from her face, as if he stumbled with his lips pursed. Instead he shakes both of our hands, thanks us for the cookies, and gives us one last perfunctory smile. No mention of when I’ll be coming back. Jennifer’s name goes unspoken in our farewells, as if she were a ghost we all hallucinated.

  On our way home Rebecca asks me about the job I’m going to do for them, working at a severely cut rate. It’s a kindness we can afford, more or less, so long as it doesn’t prevent me from taking on better-paying work. Becky’s Bites can cover our bills this month.

  Most of the work will be building shelves, to turn the nursery into more of an office. There’s only so much I can do in a room that size, but giving Jennifer space for books and a place to write seems the absolute least of it. Next time I’m over I’ll dig deep for more inspiration, assuming my work goes beyond tonight. I can very easily see a long discussion between Paul and Jennifer tomorrow in which the whole idea is scrapped and I never see either of them again.

  I hold Rebecca’s hand, our fingers intertwined. I grip it in my own like she’s going to get sucked from the moving train. “What did you think of them?” I ask.

  “I liked them,” she replies. “Did you like them?”

  My answer comes out unfiltered. Poisonous. “I think they’re damaged goods.”

  She considers this. Doesn’t disagree. “Did you look across the street?”

  “From their place?”

  “It’s a playground, Michael. They live across the street from a playground.”

  And I say, “Jesus”—because what else is there to say?—and we clutch our hands together all the tighter.

  When we get home Rebecca plows past my parents and into the bathroom. My mom shuffles over, holding Jackson in her arms like a porcelain football, and sniffs my breath. I must pass whatever test she’s administering because she hands off my sleeping son, and he barely stirs. When Rebecca comes back out, the overwhelming stench of mint doesn’t mask the mist of wine wafting from her pores, but she has put herself together enough to seem dignified, hugging my parents, gracious in thanking them for our night out. I give Jackson over to her, to put him in his crib, and I walk my parents to their car while Rebecca lays our son’s sleeping head down on his mat, with his blanket and stuffed animals and chirping mobile and everything else designed to placate not only his overstimulated mind, but ours as well.

  Paul Fenniger

  Present Day: July 19, 2010

  10:32 AM

  The full weight of the situation hits once we hear the car behind us start its shuffle out. As much as we all ride the subway—descending the stairs, swiping our cards, passing through the turnstiles, waiting on the platforms, and then getting on the train, sitting down or holding on to a pole, and emerging at our stops, having endured a noisy, hassled journey—we never go into the tunnels. We never see the path itself the way we do at street level, where the asphalt is something tangible, something we actively navigate. The tunnel exists to us as a blur seen through windows, the tracks only squeals below. But listening to the collective movement of hundreds of people shuffling out, the low moans and quiet sobs of fellow passengers, we realize that this is really happening, that we are entering a dark, ignored, terrifying place.

  A voice says, “I can’t do this.” I look down at a woman. Her head comes up to my stomach. No, she’s bent over, trying to tilt her head between her knees from a standing position, breathing in fits and starts. When she straightens up, still whistling in shallow huffs, I see tear streaks on her face through the sheen of sweat. “I can’t do this,” she repeats. She’s talking to me.

  I have maybe a minute before it’s my turn. I’m one of the standing. I’m supposed to exit first. She dives her head back down, so I kneel down to her level. “It’s okay. We’re all going to go,” I reassure.

  “I can’t,” she cries. “I can’t go on the tracks. I’ll wait here until it’s safe.”

  “It’s safe now.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “The power’s off. There’s no current going through.”

  “I’m not worried about being electrocuted,” she snaps. And then she whispers aloud the fears of many. “There are rats.”

  There are rats. There’s no denying that there are rats. They scamper through every station, gawked at by tourists. Even hardened New Yorkers take a moment from their days to watch the show before the rumble of the train sends rats back into drainpipes, into the storm grates built into the track beds, into the lip under the platform where I can only assume there is enough space to fit a rat. Or a couple thousand rats. The small ones are no bigger than golf balls. The big ones are … noticeable.

  “Too many people.” I try to calm her, speaking loud enough in case others are listening. “We’ll scare them off. Rats aren’t going to bother us.”

  “I can’t,” she says again. I take another deep breath, the humidity forced into my lungs, and think of something else to say, some offer to make, that I’ll hold her hand, that I’ll carry her through the tunnel the entire way, until I can lay her gently on the platform, but before I do there’s a shift in the car. I’m jostled and pushed forward, then to the side, and she joins the amorphous dark blob of people on the other side of the car. Officer Gutierrez has come back in with his flashlight and is waving us along.

  “People standing first. No pushing, let’s keep this as orderly as possible. The conductor is on the tracks to help you down.”

  No one moves at first, except a few enterprising souls who nudge their way past him, as quickly as possible. “Come on,” he scolds. “We’ve got a lot of people to get out.”

  And like that, I’m swept up, shuffling along with the rest of the straphangers, those who weren’t lucky enough to get a seat, now somehow luckier to get off the train first, not that any of us ever wanted to leave the train this way.

  It’s okay, I tell myself, again and again. When I reach
the door to the car behind ours there’s a logjam, and I let a few women drag their feet in front of me, searching for the woman from before. We’re all taking geisha steps, and once we reach the next car it’s easier—there’s no one seated except for a few elderly riders who are waiting their turn, who can’t make it out without more help than can currently be provided. All the brash chatter has ceased; it’s a solemn, unholy ceremony. At the next door we constrict, and again, I let a few more women pass in front of me until I hear an audible and irritated huff from a man behind me. Then I feel a hand on my back, pushing me forward, not aggressive but assertive—definitely not an accident.

  I spin to see who it is: he’s small, my age, and he starts apologizing before our eyes meet. “Please, just keep moving,” he says, his voice hushed, as if giving words to his worst secrets. “I can’t stop or I won’t start again. Please.” He steps in place.

  In the last car I see the flashlight at the exit, and we stand in line until, one at a time, we step to the end and drop three feet, like getting off a carnival ride. Some take longer than others. The passengers from the car behind have started to creep up on us, their voices growing louder, gaining strength from anger and fear. “Fucking move!” someone yells, and the man in front of me, in his suspenders, shudders.

  My turn comes after what feels like an eternity. A single hand emerges from the darkness, the flashlight illuminating where I’m supposed to land. I wave him off and hop down. The conductor, portly and wheezing, continues to wave people along. “Just start walking. Help is waiting at Bedford,” he repeats.

  I step to the side. “Who’s helping you?” I ask.

  “Sir, please just walk down the tunnel,” he bellows. Speak loudly and hope I’ll fall in line. Otherwise he fears the same chaos everyone fears, the sense that any actual danger will be met with people screaming, then running, then falling.