Little Disasters

by Randall Klein

  For an eternity, we stand like that, crushed against one another.

  “Jenny?”

  She crooks her head back and kisses me. Her lips brush mine, testing, before coming back full. At first I’m being polite, keeping my mouth where it was, not pulling away, moving my lips in a reasonable facsimile of how she is moving hers. Then I’m not being polite anymore. I respond, my hands gathering thin fabric and my mouth on hers, now pressing her against the island in her kitchen. The whole time, however long the kiss lasts, I’m piecing together the past ten minutes, trying to determine where this started, whether I did something wrong, how this ties back to the shower. But another woman’s tongue is in my mouth, reminding me that Rebecca doesn’t kiss this way unless it’s a precursor to sex, unless it’s a kiss with intention. It’s gravity and momentum and undertow and a river’s unceasing current, dragging moment by moment.

  I turn aggressor, slipping my tongue into her mouth, committing to this kiss without equivocation. Her lips feel so different from Rebecca’s, more nimble for starters. Jennifer’s lips move side to side while she kisses me, strafing my mouth, her tongue lingering whereas Rebecca’s tends to dart. And this, this moment of analysis walks in front of the motion sensor in a dormant part of my brain and triggers the floodlights. I know exactly how Rebecca will respond when I slide a hand to her breast, but I don’t yet know what this new person will do.

  And I want to know. While I’m already here, I have the half-formed thought, I should discover everything that I can.

  I move my hand to her breast and Jennifer bites down on my lower lip, hard enough to elicit a flinch. So there’s a discovery. I pull my head back and our eyes meet. It’s a dumbstruck moment, no longer than an intake of breath, when we stare into one another. If I’m supposed to see my wife and child, my comfortable life, my future all the way to death, I don’t. If I’m supposed to see a button marked either RESET or SELF-DESTRUCT, I don’t see that, either. I see two eyes looking back at me, and my brain doesn’t form any thought more complex than noticing that her eyes are blue, without producing an adjective to narrow the description from there. The thought of what she must see in my eyes at that moment never crosses my mind. After that moment passes, we move our heads toward each other once more, both complicit, in percentages to be determined later.

  We end up horizontal in her bed, still clinging and kissing, hands everywhere. She’s worked my shirt over my head and I’ve yanked her skirt down by its elastic waist. Clothing piles up on the floor, some articles we take off ourselves, some off each other. She demands the whole time that I look her in the eye as she tugs my pants and boxers off in one motion; as I unhook her bra, she grabs my jaw and forces me to look her in the eye, as if committing to the act, acknowledging that this is not an accident, that I am not pasting another face onto hers.

  “Look me in the eye,” she hisses, one hand gripping my face, the other hand lower, the first hand on my cock that hasn’t belonged to either my wife or myself in longer than I can calculate right now. Her eyes are closed, her head tilted back, exposing her neck. One of my hands is partially inside of her, and I realize that I did this without asking (was I supposed to ask?). “Look me in my eyes,” she says again, snapping me to attention. I grab her hand off my face and clutch it; the pressure on her fingers makes her wince.

  “You look me in my eyes,” I hiss back.

  The sin is ours, Jennifer Sayles. Neither one of us gets to say later that this happened while I had my eyes closed.

  The sex itself is furtive, passion not begetting coordination. I fall back on a few standard moves, she grips my hair and bites my nipple, which no one has ever done to me before, so that’s new. Her body is different from Rebecca’s, more light, more lissome; the feeling is less like being enmeshed than being swallowed. I’m falling back on dorm room etiquette, touching gently to see if I’m encouraged to touch more, entering her slowly and waiting for her to request a more furious effort. She’s drier than Rebecca, and that comparison, more than any other moral aspect of this, makes me go momentarily soft. But we rally, we have sex, actual sex, vanilla save for the rings on our fingers that we didn’t give to each other. Jenny arches her back and groans in huffed grunts, like she’s climbing stairs and enjoying it. I can’t tell if she came or not, and I’m too tense to go over the falls myself. Rebecca likes to talk a bit during, to check in with one another and ask tiny, almost silly questions. Do you like this? How does this feel? Where are you ticklish? Jenny is all business, silent save for the sex noises, and the slapping of her hands on my chest.

  Finally, by letting my mind go vacant, I come, shuddering, so hard I take myself aback. I will never love any feeling more than that. We catch our breaths, Jenny underneath me, sweat from my forehead dripping onto her neck. “Did you just come inside of me?”

  Jesus Christ, I did. Not a condom ever considered. Rebecca and I stopped using them years ago and it simply never occurred to me, and now my mind floods with all the ramifications, as if I’m back in college, the reality of repercussions cutting through an alcohol haze. “I’m sorry.”

  She pauses, then bursts out laughing. “You look so terrified!” She throws her head back and laughs until tears are streaming from the corners of her eyes. I spill out of her, limp, and assess the stain on the sheets. “I have to wash these anyways.” She sits up. Again, she grips my jaw and makes me look her in the eye. “I’m not going to get pregnant. I’m just not. You can trust me on that.”

  Seems poor manners to bring up diseases. Instead, I lay next to her on the bed, expect some further discussion, but Jenny springs up and pats my stomach; she goes off and the pipes mimic our noises a second later so I wait while Jenny does whatever mysterious things women do in the bathroom after sex. When she comes out she stands unself-consciously before me and I see her body in full for the first time. Her breasts are smaller than Rebecca’s, the left slightly fuller than the right, but her stomach is a flat plane, still taut. She’s assessing me back as I sit up on her bed. Her eyes dwell around my fleshy parts, my bony parts, my doughy parts, the rim of fat around my middle, the dead snail exhaustion of my postcoital cock.

  She throws on shorts and a T-shirt and instructs me to get dressed, then meet her outside. I’m left alone in her room, on wobbly legs, and I buttress myself against the dresser while I gather up what the fuck I just did, what these discoveries bought me. I’m fairly certain any favors I was doing for Paul have been nullified by the past twenty minutes. There aren’t any pictures of him, of him or of them, in their bedroom. It’s reassuring to know that he wasn’t watching us on the bed he will later sleep on.

  I sit back down on the bed, next to the telltale puddle. Has Rebecca ever fucked another guy on our bed? I don’t think she has. I don’t think she’s ever made a stain like this with anyone but me since we started dating. And now I have. There isn’t the electricity of anxiety in my body, in my mind. Not yet. If it comes later, it comes later. Right now my body slowly reassembles itself while my mind assesses from a respectful distance, surprised at the turn the married-and-aparent-in-my-early-thirties experiment has taken.

  She’s laid two fresh Campari and sodas out on the front steps next to the empty bottle. “The last of the summer.” She smiles, handing me my glass. “I think I’ll go with the birch natural oiled and the top color on that lighter blue one. Do you know which one I’m talking about?”

  “Fog. I think it’s called fog. If that’s the one you picked.”

  “Maybe. Go with bright colors. If you think something else would work better, go with it.”

  “But it’s your choice,” I point out.

  “And I’ve made it, but I respect your opinion.”

  We look at each other knowingly, though what it is we now know I’m not sure. Jenny offers me a cigarette and I accept it. I haven’t smoked in a while. It’s foreign and familiar, inhaling and choking. Jenny and I sit and stare at the park across from her house while sipping the last Campari and soda of the y
ear. “What’s your drink for fall?” I ask.

  My phone rings before she can answer. I take it out of my pocket and see Rebecca’s and Jackson’s faces pop up, and every movie and TV show I’ve ever seen says that seeing their faces should fill me with immeasurable self-loathing, because I am that guy. I’m that guy, only less handsome. Still, I don’t feel any differently about it than I would have two hours ago. This is my wife and son; my wife is calling me. I don’t separate out a before from an after, at least not yet, though I grant that I may change how I feel, without any self-inflicted penalties. I’m giving myself grace, the methadone to the heroin of forgiveness.

  “Hey, pretty lady,” I answer. Her voice responds tight, tearful, as if she already knows what I’ve done. I can hear shrieking in the background.

  “I need you to come home right now.”

  “I’m on my way,” I reassure her; always reassure her first. Jenny picks up both glasses from the step. I ask into my phone, “What’s the matter?”

  “It’s Jackson,” she says. “Something is wrong.”

  Michael Gould

  Eleven Months Ago: August 30, 2009

  I sprint to the train, leaving my backpack holding all the samples back with Jenny. She didn’t require an explanation, waved me off from her front step like dismissing a jester who no longer amused her, or as if I had planted the phone call to extricate myself, that while I was putting on my clothes I quickly texted my wife, “Hey, I just fucked Jennifer Sayles. Super awkward convo coming up. Can you bail me out in five? Say it has to do with our son.”

  The first cab I have ever seen in Greenpoint rolls down Manhattan Avenue and stops at the intersection in front of the subway entrance. I take it as a sign from God that if this is an emergency, I should not take the hour-long trip from the train to the bus.

  Sitting in the backseat, my address shouted twice, I have another moment to process what I just did. I’m not weighing it yet on a spiritual level, whether I just broke a solemn vow or compromised my morals—I did and I have, there’s no going back on that. I had sex with a woman who is, to put it mildly, unstable, and I don’t know if this is a revenge ploy she’s using against her husband, whether she’s going to lord this over me, whether she intends to let Rebecca know. I sniff my arms, my shirt, inhale deep in the back of the cab to see if I can scent her on my body. If this is truly an emergency, even my creepily perceptive wife isn’t going to notice, but that doesn’t relax me as we wend our way through midday traffic on the BQE.

  I burst in to find Rebecca cradling Jackson on the couch, and they’re both sobbing. It’s incongruous and yet oddly comforting that the apartment still smells of cookies. “He won’t stop crying,” she explains. “He woke up from his nap and he won’t eat and now he won’t stop crying.”

  I take him from her arms and he continues to howl, his little fists balled over his head, quaking. Rebecca has handed him to me because I’m the guy who fixes things, things like pipes and burned-out lightbulbs. I crave the day when Jackson will be able to calmly point to his leg and say, “See how the bone juts out of the skin? It’s clearly broken.” For now, all he can do is make noise and give me and his mother a collective heart attack.

  His open mouth also reveals white patches, like leftover milk. He opens wide to unleash another unholy scream and I see the blotches all over the inside of his cheeks and lips. “It’s thrush,” I say. Rebecca stands next to me and double-checks my work, disbelieving that I’ve come up with an answer so quickly.

  “But he won’t eat.”

  “Yeah, he’s got, like, a yeast infection in his mouth.”

  Her eyes go wide. “Did I get him sick?”

  “No! Jesus, how do I know more about this than you do?”

  “Don’t talk down to me, Michael,” she chides. “What do we do?”

  I conjure up a plan, suddenly Dr. Spock. “Go pump. We’ll need to bottle-feed him until we get him to a doctor. If it’s really bad, she might give us something to rub on those white patches and your nipples. Maybe some Tylenol. It’s not bad, Becks. This is one of those things babies get all the time.”

  “So we need to go to the hospital?”

  “It’s thrush,” I repeat, but it doesn’t permeate.

  “How serious is that?”

  “He doesn’t like it. His mouth hurts. It’s not fatal. It’s not even that harmful. He’ll still make Law Review.”

  Rebecca stops crying. Now she’s whimpering, her arms across her chest, holding herself. Jackson is slowly winding himself down, cried out. “Go pump.”

  “He’s crying.”

  “Put him in the shaken baby chair.” It’s the chair that vibrates. I regret giving it that joke name now.

  “But it’s not time for his nap. He’ll go off schedule.”

  “Fuck his schedule. I’m going to reserve a Zipcar and then we’ll take him to the doctor, see what she says.”

  “He’s going to be all right?” It’s heartwrenching how plaintively she asks. I hand him back to her and he lolls his heavy head onto her shoulder. Poor boy is exhausted, overwhelmed by the past hour. It’s such a huge portion of his life, even an hour. He doesn’t remember a time his mouth didn’t hurt. My son is, hopefully only for the time being, like a goldfish.

  I reserve us the next available Zipcar and then clean up the past two hours of my own life. While Rebecca pumps I strip off my clothes and throw them into the bottom of the hamper, slip into the bathroom to give myself a quick scrubbing in the shower. I rub soap on my cock hard enough to strip paint.

  She’s packed his bags and is ready to go when I come out ten minutes later, freshly washed. She’s giving me a puzzled look, bordering on disappointed, probably because I just showered instead of kicking down doors until I found the one our doctor is behind. I head off her ire at the pass. “I swear, Rebecca, I’m an only child. You have a sister.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Shouldn’t you know about shit like this?”

  “Jolie is older,” she says coldly, vulnerable to my unwise pressing of the matter. “If Jackson ever needs to get off Oxy, I’ll know what to do.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I thought I hurt our son.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “I was worried I had really hurt him.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  She’s crying again, “I kept hearing Jenny Sayles in my head talking about how she feels like she hurt her baby. I thought she was being dramatic, but now I get it. I thought I hurt our baby.”

  “Jenny is being dramatic,” I reassure. It clicks to me, and maybe I’m just repeating after Rebecca, but somewhere along this day she metamorphosed from Jennifer to Jenny. “Let’s go get him to a doctor.” Jackson stirs when I take him from the shaken baby chair and put him in his car seat, so I rock it back and forth, surprisingly heavy, and gather Rebecca in with my free arm. Freshly washed, I collect my family and keep them close, corral them in and grip them tight, the day crashing over me like waves breaking, finally over the falls, plummeting toward the rocks below.

  Paul Fenniger

  Eleven Months Ago: August 30, 2009

  First I poke my head into Jeff’s office. Jeff is the office manager whose job consists primarily of ordering a variety of folders. He also handles time sheets, including mine, which I fill out every Friday.

  “Jeff.” He looks up from a supply catalog. “Just a reminder that I have to go early today for an audition.”

  This does not please him. He makes an exaggerated frown. Disappointed. “I thought you did that the other day.”

  “I did. This is a callback.”

  “Oh.” Now his face contorts into a grin. Joyful. Jeff has a face a social psychologist would love. Other lawyers joke that if you can’t tell exactly what emotion he is projecting, you’re probably a sociopath. “Congratulations.”

  “Don’t have the role yet.”

  “What’s the show?”

  “It’s ca
lled The Country Wife.”

  He furrows his brow. Confused. “Never heard of it.”

  “By a guy named William Wycherly.”

  “Is it a musical?”

  “No, it’s really old.”

  Mouth into an excited O. Enthusiastic. “Like a Greek tragedy?”

  “Later than that. I just have to leave an hour early.”

  Mouth back into a flat line. Eyes dead. Professionally solemn. “Clear it with Gregg and it’s fine with me.”

  Gregg is an associate. Like Jeff, he’s four years younger than I am, working seventy-hour weeks until he makes partner, which he hopes to do in the next two years. He’s decorated his office with as much USC memorabilia as will fit. As the senior associate, he’s also in charge of the paralegals, myself included. He is, though he disdains the term, my direct supervisor. Gregg’s face doesn’t move, at least not in the office. Whether listening to a client or giving me instructions or discussing his weekend, Gregg’s face neither twitches nor betrays any emotion whatsoever. Other lawyers joke that he’d be a great poker player. Or a serial killer.

  “Gregg, Jeff told me to come see you. I have an audition today so I need to leave an hour early. That okay with you?”

  “Second time this week.”

  “Yeah, it’s a callback.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “It’s a second audition. I’m closer to getting the role.”

  “Is that good?”

  “Yes.”

  He thinks on this, gives it due consideration. The other paralegals are terrified of him, but Gregg and I have a good relationship. He knows I’m not here for the long haul, sees my intrinsic value. In Gregg’s mind, at some near point in the future, he’ll need to woo a client by taking him to a Broadway show, and I’ll be the call he makes to get backstage. “Let Toni know and tell her I cleared it.”

  Toni sits at the desk in the front of the office, directs phone calls and fetches beverages for clients. “I’m leaving an hour early, Gregg and Jeff both cleared it,” I say hastily on my way out the door. She doesn’t look up from Vogue, but she does wave to indicate she heard me.