Little Disasters

by Randall Klein

  He huffs, aggrieved, as if paid on commission, as he yanks a slip of wax paper from a box and grabs a bagel from the bin, throws it into a paper bag. “Eighty-five cents,” he says. I hand over one of my last four dollars and hold up my empty bottle of water.

  “Listen, I’ve got a long walk ahead of me and I’m out of water. Can you please refill this?”

  He points at the darkened refrigerators behind me. “We have bottled water.”

  “I know, but I only have three dollars left and I have to walk to Brooklyn. All of the subways have stopped. Can you do me a solid and fill it from the tap?”

  “I can’t, my manager won’t let me. I’m sorry.” He shakes his head but a smirk finds its way to the corner of his mouth. He looks behind me, but there’s no one else in line, no one else in the store.

  I’m bigger than this man. I’m bigger than he is and I can take what I want. Might makes right in an emergency, and this qualifies. There’s a camera over his head; we both glance at it at the same time. If the power is out, then the camera is out. My veins pump adrenaline in coughing spurts, workstrong hands clench and unclench at my sides.

  “How long has the power been out?” I ask.

  “Comes and goes.”

  “Do you know what’s going on downtown?”

  “Nope. Wi-fi is down. I keep hearing shit, though. People coming in with theories and shit. Classes got canceled, so that’s all I know.”

  “Classes?”

  “At Columbia?”

  “Do you go there?”

  “Yeah.” He turns his jaw up to me at that. Slave to chasing the round doughy dragon today, a titan of industry tomorrow. Someday, I’ll work for this philosophy major, his sneer tells me, and meanwhile I can take my empty water bottle and unadorned bagel and fuck myself.

  I take three deep breaths, right in front of him. He looks past me again but it is still just me and him and an entire police force dealing with a level of fuck we cannot begin to fathom a hundred blocks south of here. Everything I do, I could get away with.

  Short of murder. I cannot murder this man. “Must be really bad.”

  “The entire subway system is shut down?” he asks.

  “And the buses. Probably a terrorist attack. That’s why everywhere that people can congregate is shut down. That’s why cell phones aren’t working. They turn off the towers to prevent people from detonating bombs with cell phones.” I’ve never met the man who spoke through my mouth just now, but he sounds like he’d be intense at a party. I add, more in my own voice, “Only way to get around is on foot.”

  “Shit.”

  “You live around here?”

  “Like, ten blocks away.”

  “How much longer is your shift?”

  He checks his watch with the same placid disdain he’s done everything else since I set foot. “Another hour. I’ve been here since six.”

  “Maybe it’ll be fixed by then,” I offer. He nods, seems to appreciate that glimmer of hope. One more deep breath. One more attempt at the standards and practices of civil society. Then, I decide, glaring at him, I am going to get into my first physical altercation since puberty. “Come on,” I implore. “Fill up my water for me. Everything is fucked everywhere today. Please, help me out.”

  He takes my bottle from me, looks at it dolefully. Then he hands it back, leans across the counter, and lowers his voice. “Can’t let you back here, but we have a bathroom, you can fill it up from the tap.” He’s slides a key attached to a block of wood across the counter to me.

  In the cramped bathroom, next to the cleaning supplies, in pitch-blackness, I feel my way around the sink and angle the bottle until I’ve filled it halfway, then cup my hands as a makeshift funnel until my bottle is full again. After that, I crack the door enough to give myself light to see the toilet. I manage to pee a little as well, glad that I’m not so dehydrated my body can’t spare a bit. There’s a terrified moment as I flush, questioning whether I will, at some point today, need to drink my own pee to survive. Is that what today will come to?

  I thank him by dropping a dime and nickel into the tip jar, getting the desired huff of dissatisfaction as gratitude. On the street outside, with the sun beating down on me, I chew half the bagel slowly, savoring as much as I can while the peppers scald my tongue and make me gulp water to work the lump of bread down my throat. Half does nothing for me; I don’t have the willpower to stop there. Cramming the remaining half into my mouth, I add as little water as I can spare. I am a wild animal uncaged. I am stronger than this city, and I will step over its ruins to take what is mine and ford the East River with the bodies of those who oppose me. Fortified by boiled dough and lukewarm water, my hunger temporarily sated and my thirst slaked for the time being, I continue my strange pilgrimage with a hulking ursine gait.

  Michael Gould

  Ten Months Ago: September 4, 2009

  I plan to be married to Rebecca for the next fifty to sixty years. Barring unfathomable tragedy, we will grow old together. In that time, we will cook and eat tens of thousands of meals together. We will tell each other innumerable jokes, comfort each other as our parents die off, tend to each other as our bodies fail. It’s mapped out in front of us, this future, like a well-tended path, void of cracks. At the end of those sixty years—because let’s be optimistic and anticipate sixty—only one of us will have been faithful for the entirety of the marriage. I can’t see that blemish tainting the entire portrait.

  As of right now, I’ve slept with a woman who is not my wife. Once. That’s the semantic argument I make to myself over a donut and coffee, sitting legs tucked under in a booth at a Polish bakery five minutes from Jenny’s place. The bars aren’t open this early, or the two I passed were not. But I couldn’t go straight to the apartment, so instead I’ve bought a donut that is the best fucking donut I think I’ve ever eaten, from a grim woman with broad Slavic features and an air of contempt for me, as if she could hear my internal monologue and judged me for it.

  Admittedly, I should have called. Or texted. But I haven’t. I’m going to walk to Jenny’s (and Paul’s—I keep leaving him out of the equation, as if he’s the variable, not me) apartment, and I’m going to knock, and Jenny and I are going to address what we did. Because we did it. I did not seduce her. I definitely did not force myself on her. I slept with another woman, and she slept with another man, and that merits further discussion. I finish the donut, but I have half a cup of coffee left, so I get up and buy another.

  “Was so good I’d like a second,” I tell the woman, who still doesn’t smile at me. When I pay I smile at her, broad and bright, locking it in place as she hands me my change, and I don’t move from the counter until she finally gives me a perfunctory grimace back, but it feels like a victory. I take the first bite of my second donut and contemplate a third.

  It’s intensely stupid to think that a couple will remain monogamous for the duration of the relationship. Every argument for that involves comparing humans to swans, or exalting boilerplate vows. The only reason people stop fucking outside of the marriage, I believe, is that the hassle is greater than the payoff. If I had to flirt with Jenny, and go on dates, and charm my way into her bed, like I had to do with Rebecca, there’s no way I would ever have slept with her. Pressing a new body against mine triggered all the usual responses, the responses I’m supposed to have, or at least the ones I’d otherwise have to go to great lengths to suppress, and I did a human thing. I get that, presented with the same scenario, Rebecca wouldn’t have gone to bed with Paul. She’d have brushed him off, politely at first and forcefully a moment later. Her math has a stronger moral element than mine.

  I break the donut into three remaining pieces and contemplate the next step.

  Scenario A: Jenny, irate that I didn’t get in touch with her after mashing my boy parts into her girl parts, kicks me out and fires me, but as she too committed adultery (what a stupid, biblical term—if we committed adultery then it’s because we had intercourse), she keeps her
mouth shut. I claim to Rebecca that they decided not to change the room or realized they couldn’t afford me even at a steeply discounted rate; Jenny tells Paul that she fired me because she wants the room to stay the same and to save their money, and what happened five days ago evaporates over time. I never see her again, Rebecca never knows, and I don’t need to worry about it until I’m old and demented and making deathbed confessions. On the plus side: My marriage stays intact and my crime goes unreported, victimless. On the minus side: Well … put a pushpin in there.

  I set the first piece of donut aside.

  Scenario B: Jenny, again irate, decides that she doesn’t mind assured destruction so long as it’s mutual, tells Paul, tells Rebecca, and now it’s a known known. Rebecca is crushed. But it happened once, and I own up to it. Rebecca makes me get tested for the suite of STDs, then I absorb the scorn of a marriage counselor, and we move on, though with past indiscretions hanging over my head during every future fight. On the plus side: Rebecca is in too much debt to my parents to leave me, she’s not going to raise Jackson on her own, and given her history with Jolie, a one-time mistake is far preferable to a pathology of atrocious decision making. On the minus side: I might get the shit kicked out of me by a larger man, my wife will hate me for a while, and I’ll get to hear chestnuts like “once a cheater, always a cheater” in my head, in Rebecca’s voice, long after I stop hearing it in my ears.

  That piece of donut joins the first.

  Scenario C: Jenny, not irate, nevertheless realizes that while what we did wasn’t a mistake—we didn’t stumble, we weren’t drunk—it cannot happen again. I finish the room, awkwardly tiptoeing around Jenny and Paul, and then, because we’re already united by this fucking writing office, we continue to hang out as couples, so I see every few months the woman I cheated on my wife with, and she sees the man she cheated on her husband with. Or her partner, whatever bullshit term they co-opted. On the plus side: Again, I get away with it, more or less. On the minus side: An itch was scratched. Something happened five days ago, something I stayed awake struggling to process after we got back from the pharmacy, after Jackson finished his bottle and Rebecca collapsed into a motionless sleep. Fucking Jenny didn’t make me feel young—that line of thinking is too stupid to dignify. But she did make me feel unformed again, and I hadn’t realized how much I missed that feeling. Standing still means that for the rest of my life I’m a husband and a father and a guy who makes furniture while painting on the side, and that all I’ll have to navigate from here on out are the small catastrophes like the deaths of my parents, or the inevitable fights about where to send Jackson to school, when to finally move out of New York, or how to finance a car while saving for retirement. Jenny threw a twist into my story, and now I’m reinvested in the plot. That’s a … minus. Another bite of donut. Another sip of coffee. That’s a minus.

  I’m all out of donut. I set the cup of coffee in front of me, swirl around the dregs.

  Scenario D: I take my phone out and scroll to her number. I tap my finger on the little word bubble icon, a conversation icon, though I may end up “talking” to myself.

  I should have called. I’m sorry. I should have called.

  I put the phone down and drink the coffee-soaked crumbs from the bottom of the cup. This somehow makes perfection even better. My phone beeps.

  Yes, you should have. Or texted.

  I’m in the neighborhood. I was going to come by and show you sketches.

  OK?

  Is it?

  Is it what?

  OK?

  Is what OK?

  That I’m going to come by.

  Yes, come by. I’ll be here.

  I stop by the counter one last time before strolling purposefully to Jenny’s apartment door. That’s where I stand for a few minutes, staring at it, wondering if she’s waiting on the other side. I take my phone out again, reread the conversation, try to pick up inflection. Is she casual, like what happened didn’t matter? Or is she rancorous, that I fucked up and she wants to yell at me in person?

  Or is she flirting? What am I walking into? I type another message.

  I brought donuts.

  From Peter Pan?

  Is that the bakery on Manhattan Avenue?

  With the vaguely hostile waitresses.

  Yes, from there.

  Good move.

  And a deep breath. On the plus side. On the minus side.

  Hey, you mind if I try something bold?

  … ?

  It may just be cheesy, or stupid, and it might be entirely unwelcome, but it’s bold.

  You have good text etiquette. The editrix in me appreciates it.

  Is that a yes?

  It’s a go ahead and be bold. The worst you can do is embarrass yourself and you’ve already done that.

  Are you any good at math?

  Oh I can already tell what comes next is going to be bananapants ridiculous.

  Then play along. Are you good at math?

  Yes, I’m good at writing and editing and I know how to use a semicolon; I’m also quite skilled at math.

  I have an equation for you.

  You + Me = Happiness?

  Not that one.

  Go ahead. Let’s hear it, as it were.

  Clothing < what you are wearing when I ring the doorbell.

  Oh. My.

  And now there’s proof. And if it comes out, if the nuclear scenario happens and Jenny spills, then I can show this to Rebecca, after she knows, well after she knows, and show her that this was about sex. I didn’t love Jenny, or want her more than I want Rebecca. This was me as a horny adolescent, doing something unconscionable that I will never do again, and that I’m so, so sorry. With bag in hand, I ring the bell and wait.

  The buzzer lingers, lets me in. I push open the door and walk upstairs to the second floor, past her unseen neighbors. When I get to her door it opens slowly, but she’s not standing in front of me. She’s standing behind the door, because she’s wearing less than clothing. The first thing she does is take the bag of donuts from my hand and place it on the table behind her. The second thing she does is lock the door and put the chain on.

  The third thing she does is start an affair with a married man.

  Michael Gould

  Nine Months Ago: October 31, 2009

  There exists, because I have seen it with my own eyes, a photograph of Rebecca and Jolie, both plump as rabbits, in matching white lace dresses, sitting in a red, rusty-handled wagon, crammed in next to a well-packed bale of hay, holding hands and grinning with every Chiclet tooth on display. Their parents bought them a session of child glamour shots, and so the two girls were primped and buffed and later airbrushed into what resembles a glossy shampoo ad for WASP children. Rebecca doesn’t like to acknowledge that she loves this shit. The changing of diapers, the successful tuck-in, the tutoring, the sex talk, the advice giving, the college move, walking him down the aisle—all of that gets to be more or less public pride. She’ll win Mother of the Year from whatever committee decides it, but only if they don’t discover her abiding love for the uncomfortably staged shot. She buries this part of herself in a drawer next to all affections she deems shameful, like corn chips and Southern Comfort and carnival games and swallowing. I know her dark secret though, that a teaspoon of her glee in motherhood centers around dressing up a living doll and taking pictures of it. Jackson’s first Halloween finds him glowering, uncomfortably stuffed into a costume Rebecca stitched together from patterns she downloaded, sewing yellow window after yellow window onto gray fabric deep into the night so that her son could spend his first Halloween as the Empire State Building, a landmark we have never visited and have no intention of ever visiting.

  “He looks like a penis,” Jolie comments. Rebecca slaps her arm.

  She insists, “He doesn’t. The hat part is pointy.”

  “He looks like an uncircumcised penis. Trust me, I’ve seen a lot of dick. The resemblance is uncanny.” Jolie looks to me for confirmation. Of w
hat? That I too have seen a lot of dick? Or that my wife has dressed our son up like one? Now Rebecca is looking at me as well, so this is no longer rhetorical.

  “The windows make it look more like a building,” I offer.

  “A diseased dick,” Jolie counters. Rebecca clicks her tongue at both of us, snaps away as Jackson struggles mightily to get the spire hat off his head. My phone vibrates in my pocket.

  We just got trick or treaters dressed as sexy Klansmen. Seriously.

  Pointy hats and …

  … Garters.

  “Who are you texting?” Rebecca asks.

  “Jenny Sayles,” I reply, nonchalant, nothing to hide.

  Rebecca absorbs the world’s pain into her eyes. I should admire her empathy more than I do. “I’ll bet Halloween is hard for them.”

  “Yeah.”

  *

  • • •

  I saw Jenny yesterday. I’ll see her again in two days. We’ve managed to stretch out the design process three sessions longer than the one it required, claiming Jenny’s discerning and fickle eye. Once the drawings were settled, the painting began. I’ve been painting the same walls for the past two weeks, double-primed and two coats of fog.

  She makes me wait after I come, wants to feel me going soft inside of her, retreating slowly. Rebecca doesn’t expect me to flee as if her vagina is on fire but makes no similar requests, so after a few times of finishing and exiting, Jenny forced the issue by grabbing my hips and yanking me back into her. “Stay for a minute,” she purred. “I just had an orgasm.”

  I’m learning her demands. Her etiquette. Does she expect me to speak?

  “Good,” I venture.

  “Could you tell?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “Not for certain. I never can,” I admit. “I just assume if you have sex with me again then I must do something right, so I kind of do my thing and see how you respond and go from there. But it worked?”

  She laughs. “It worked.” She strokes the side of my head, running a fingernail through my hair, down my ears, tweaking my earlobes. She says, “I knew girls in college who bragged about how well they could fake an orgasm. Like it was an acquired skill, akin to making a pie crust or mastering the double stitch. My roommate brought it up once and a bunch of girls nodded their heads like she spoke truth to power, like a passcode for this sisterhood of forced moans. Some claimed they didn’t fake the orgasm, per se, but their enthusiasm, that they turned la petite mort into le grand mal, thrashing and shrieking. Others confessed to faking orgasms whole cloth.”