Little Disasters

by Randall Klein

  “So you have to kiss an actress,” I goad him on.

  “I’m attracted to her,” he says quietly. I wait for the next sentence, the gavel sentence, before realizing that’s my sentence. I’m the one with sins that turn less jaded heads. Paul has admitted his shameful confession. He’s attracted to another woman.

  “Are you sleeping with her?”

  “No!”

  I shake my head incredulously. “Are you kissing her outside of rehearsal?”

  “No.”

  “So you’re in a froth because the person you’re pretending to be has to kiss another person pretending to be someone else and you like it and you think that’s cheating on your wife.”

  “My partner,” he corrects automatically. Again, I roll my eyes, but he’s looking everywhere but at me, too embarrassed now that he has dragged me into the actress-kissing closet with him. “I don’t think that I’m cheating. Like you said, I’m pretending. It’s not Paul Fenniger up there in the holistic sense, right? And I’ve kissed other women onstage, but this feels different. I’m just not usually attracted to other women like that. It feels unfaithful. That’s the word, I feel unfaithful to my partner.”

  Ice cream. Ice cream. Ice cream. You know nothing of ice cream.

  “Paul, look around the room.” We take inventory. The yoga-thin blonde poking a fork into duck breast, the brunette two tables down from her who wears slimming black and is showing ample cleavage, the Asian maître d’ with the pert calves, the redhead at the bar who looks like she’s spent a lot of time at spoken word poetry nights, the waitress who has listened to every indie band of the past five years and has the RCA dog tattooed on the nape of her neck, even the woman sitting next to Paul, behind his sloped back, periodically glancing at the incredibly handsome, ferociously jittery man sitting next to her—I point all of these women out to Paul, making his eyes settle on them. Then I get to my point. “Paul, take consequence out of the equation and add consent, and I would fuck any one of these women.”

  “That’s not the same. We don’t know these women. These women are avatars to us. She’s a person. The actress. She’s an actual person.”

  I wave his nonsense off. Shut up, Paul. “And by consequence, I don’t even mean the whole wife-and-child thing. I mean that at this point in my life, it is too much fucking trouble to even try with any of these women. I know Rebecca’s brand of crazy, and I know her brand of difficult, and I’ve grown so used to both brands that if you changed them up on me, I’d be like ‘What the fuck is this? Mr. Pibb?’ I don’t have the energy for sneaking around and covering up and all the other bullshit. That’s what I mean by consequence. But, much as I love my wife, if any of these women came up to me and offered NSA sex in the bathroom here, and it was guaranteed that no one would find out ever, and the only issue I’d have to deal with is realigning my own moral compass … I’m going in that bathroom, Paul. The wanting isn’t cheating. It’s not even infidelity, unless you want to be all batshit Fundamentalist Christian about it. The wanting isn’t anything more than seeing something new on the shelves and thinking about how you always buy the same peanut butter and wouldn’t it be nice to try something else, before buying another jar of the same fucking peanut butter.”

  He contemplates this, looking at each of the women again. He’s thinking it’s about looks, because he’s simple, but it’s not a looks thing. I like the way Rebecca looks, I like her body, and my desire hasn’t waned since she popped out a kid. I am still turned on by my wife.

  But the unknown. It’s the reason we hate spoilers and read mysteries. Not knowing what comes next spares us the crushing monotony of our quotidian existence. That sounds a little too undergrad existentialist for me, so I bite my tongue rather than convey it to Paul. “I think we’re just different,” Paul concludes.

  “Yes, yes we are,” I agree. “Still, it’s not infidelity. It’s your character kissing her character, and however Paul Fenniger feels about that, it’s not de facto, de jure, or any other type of infidelity.”

  He finishes his beer. I didn’t even see him drink it, but it’s gone, as if he poured it out when I wasn’t looking. I’m still three-quarters full. He starts looking toward the exit, the lie of seeing my studio weighing on him. I take one last gulp and leave it half-full on the bar. On the way back Paul walks ahead of me, agitated steps. As we turn the corner to get back to our wives (or “partners”), he spins on me. “Can this stay between us?”

  “Of course,” I say, and add in my head save for Jenny, who I’ll tell at some point in the near future.

  “Thank you. You’re a friend. A new friend. That’s a good thing to have.” He laughs weakly. Then his head drops, his chin bangs into his chest. “I can be a bad person sometimes.”

  “This doesn’t make you a bad person.”

  “Not just this. With Jenny, I …” He chokes back the rest of the sentence, like a deathbed confession cut short. It devolves into hiccupped babble. Whatever admission is weighing him down, he can’t unburden himself of it here and now. Instead, defeated, he repeats glumly, “I am a bad person.”

  “No you’re not,” I reassure. “You only want to be to justify how bad you feel about this thing you don’t need to feel bad about.” I add in my head and also because it might finally give you something that makes you interesting, you brittle gelding. He claps my shoulder and walks on. Behind him, I scan him head to toe, really look at this kindhearted, decent man, and I think that I’m going to take Jenny from him. I’m not a competitive man, and I don’t love his wife. But I’m going to amputate this feeble limb from her body. My only challenge is finding a way to keep Rebecca as well, but it’s on this night, in this moment, that I decide. She’s going to be mine. Mine and not his. Just mine.

  Michael Gould

  Present Day: July 19, 2010

  12:16 PM

  I cut across 112th Street, walking in between car lanes. They aren’t going anywhere, sitting and honking, trying to get to Riverside Drive, where they’ll sit and honk some more. The parking attendants of Manhattan must have had the busiest morning of all, pulling cars out from the bowels of garages for every long-term resident seeking shelter off the island. I pick up snippets of radio as I walk between stalled drivers. The mayor encourages calm, has announced a press conference for six tonight. He asks that New Yorkers avoid going south of the park and above Fourteenth, which means that the police halo is forty blocks large and encompasses literally millions of people living and working in midtown. There’s still no information on what is causing the issue—I can’t see that far south from where I’m standing—but talk radio has speculated a bank heist, which sounds to me like wishful thinking, the old nobility of cracking the safe and making your getaway through the warrens underneath Manhattan. The screenplay practically writes itself.

  It’s the semantics of having no additional information to report that leaves me more wry than annoyed. Of course the mayor knows more than he’s saying. If a sinkhole swallowed two blocks, he could say that. But instead he has nothing to report, because truth has consequences.

  My father told me this moment would come, when the liberal in me would compete with the realist and the realist would put the liberal on the canvas. The mayor isn’t reporting anything because the security cameras show a guy in a long linen robe climbing aboard the train. The mayor is letting all the good Muslims of New York get behind any fortifications they can find before making the announcement and putting every single one of them at risk. Today is why my father votes for repugnant men and smugly insists that I will too someday.

  A few enterprising boys walk shirtless through traffic, coolers strapped to their shoulders, bottled water dripping from each hand. Only five dollars. It’s funny to see drivers beckon them over and then watch their expressions change when they hear the price. It’s capitalism at its most Darwinian. My bottle is still half-full of bathroom water. All I accomplish by drinking from it is manufacturing more sweat, feeding coal into an overburdened train eng
ine. I stopped checking my phone for the temperature as soon as I saw the pop-up alert that I’m down to 10 percent battery, with the ominous red button underneath asking me to dismiss. I know it’s over a hundred degrees. I can feel it’s over a hundred, and even hotter with the blistering humidity and the lack of a breeze.

  On the corner of 112th and Malcom X some virgin-worthy hero has taken a wrench to the fire hydrant, sending gallons of water pouring out onto the pavement, providing a makeshift shower and wading pool. Dozens of kids in bathing suits splash each other, shin deep, bent over and flinging their arms to the heavens to rinse off their fellow bathers and the idling cars. I strip my shoes off and tuck one apiece into my back pockets, then dive into the middle of it, seeking some short but exalted relief, the baptism of bacteria-laden water from the sewers soothing my skin as it soaks my clothing through.

  Once more quenched, I slip my shoes back on and start the few blocks down to the park. The radio on a stalled Hyundai tells me the mayor isn’t taking questions at this time. The reporter speculates that it’s a dirty bomb and advises we all get inside immediately.

  Michael Gould

  Eight Months Ago: November 18, 2009

  Jenny dips her toes in conversational waters. She likes to ask me questions after sex, interviewing me while I’m languid and midday sleepy, curled in blankets keeping out the chill of her apartment, her leg draped over my thigh. She always starts out with softballs. She asks me New York questions.

  Where’s the best Indian food?

  Jackson Diner, in Queens.

  Where’s the best Thai food?

  SriPraPhai, also in Queens.

  Where’s the best Mexican?

  Mexican Mexican? Like Oaxacan? Or Tex-Mex?

  … Both.

  And I answer, let my raised eyebrows remind her that I know what she’s doing. Rebecca also beats dough into compliance before she carves it up. But Jenny charges ahead, setting her Rube Goldberg machine up for the next volley, one answer a coin that buys the next question. The questions get more personal from there. She dances around the topic of Rebecca and Jackson, shuffling her feet to leave no identifying footprints. I answer whatever she asks because it’s easier that way. It’s easier to be honest, less effort than to come up with some equivocation or to pretend I’m someone else.

  Rebecca takes a half answer as full, doesn’t press issues, picking up on discomfort with emotional antennae, and she retreats. “What’s Jenny like when you’re over there?” she asked me. Jenny is affectionate, she touches me all the time while I’m working, as we smoke out the bedroom window. “She’s quiet, sort of does her own thing,” I reply tersely, and Rebecca lets it drop. Jenny, conversely, pokes and prods, an evaded answer her cue to pick at the scab until she’s exposed the wound underneath.

  She bites and scratches me when we have sex. I’ve asked her not to, and she apologizes, but I question the sincerity, since she does it again. She claims that she’s in the moment. “I get a little lost during, you know? Don’t you?” she says, mock casual. I speak tone, Jenny. I’m fluent in intonation. And no, the answer is I don’t. I don’t get so lost that I’m not in control of where I put my teeth. Call me a chilly lover. But I can’t answer with that, I can’t tell her how in control I am. So I clam up. “Don’t you?” she repeats. “Don’t you?” she pokes my ribs with her fingers, teases my neck with her lips. “Don’t you?”

  “Fair enough,” I reply. Conceding her point, that’s my best victory.

  When Paul comes home, he looks in on the room, but it’s only to be polite. He’s not measuring my progress, and I’m not charging him virtually anything for my time, so he harbors no concerns about how long it’s taking me to build shelves. The glory of a generation raised with little to no knowledge of home repair. I could spin the knob behind his toilet and Paul would assume he’d have to move, that once it’s busted it can never be repaired. Paul looks in on the room so he can give me empty praise with his happy, sheepdog look. He kisses Jenny and she kisses him back and acid corrodes my throat, but he cooks us dinner, and we sit and eat and discuss our days, a three-person family, cast less traditionally than the one I will rejoin hours later in Red Hook.

  Paul’s play has been put on hiatus while the director trolls for funds, taking him out of the immediate vicinity of the actress who set him all aflutter. I didn’t tell this to Jenny. I kept Paul’s secret, not out of loyalty to Paul, but because there’s no gain yet in causing strife where there doesn’t need to be. Nothing gets better for me by tearing a rift between Jenny and Paul. Let her ruffle his hair and call him Fenn and peck his lips on her way to and from a room. She told me that they have sex about once a month. Once a month. I sit across from him at the dinner table, eating the meal he prepared for me, drinking the wine he bought, and I know this about him. This beautiful, sexless man, like a prized eunuch. He makes jokes to me across the table, speaks to me in bro-tones, because we’re buddies. In my head I refer to him as Cuck Finn. Cuckold, what an antiquated word, so perfect for right now. He’s a cuckold, and I feel equal parts pity and disgust for him that he doesn’t realize his seemingly only friend has given him his horns. I gave him his horns. What a silly, olde-timey thing to believe. I mentally dress myself in a doublet and codpiece when I think it, but I did it. I did it to you, Paul. You boy. I gave you your horns.

  His blank, lineless face recounts a day at a law firm and I sit across, cutting into a delicious piece of chicken almondine. Spooning up a bouillabaisse. Actually enjoying tofu for the first time. Dinners start to blend together. The boy can cook. The three of us sitting around a table, chattering away like pigeons, me sinking my teeth into the food he’s made while Jenny strokes my leg under the table with her bare foot. Paul ambles on, oblivious to it all.

  I wonder if I hate Paul Fenniger, if though I laugh with him genuinely, though I like talking with him, hanging out with him, though he and I have started going to postdinner drinks without Jenny, whether the whole time I look at him with a false, solicitous smile.

  There are points when I watch him watching Jenny, or striving to connect with me, and I’m swallowed whole into the gaping maw of self-loathing. He’d make this easier if he were malevolent.

  When I work, installing the shelves, Jenny chooses the music we listen to: the Replacements, Pavement, other bands that make me wonder if she regrets not being cooler in the 1980s. I don’t mind it, watching Jenny bop around the apartment, bounce to the Pixies and Morphine, periodically grab me for a spin around the room. When Paul comes home, Jenny cedes the music selection to him, the cook choosing the soundtrack, and Paul likes classical. I’m using that as a general, catchall term because I couldn’t give a flying fuck about any of it. Yes, it’s beautiful. But Jenny and I share aggrieved looks, silent groans, as another piano sonata starts, turning the apartment into a cat food commercial.

  A week of dinners and now Erik Satie plays for us. Not Erik Satie himself, per se, but whomever is actually banging away on the piano to his composition. I had to check the iPod to even know that it’s Erik Satie, a man I can safely say never made it into the Gould household in Midwood—Woodstock was ground zero for my parents’ record collection. Satie wrote pleasant music to watch a rainstorm to. Paul runs his fingers over the counter, inelegantly playing along. Jenny and I are sex tired, jelly-legged, lazing around on the couch. She reads, I close my eyes and rub her foot. We’ve grown more brazen, through apathy or adolescent petulance I can’t tell—the peck on the cheek when I say good night, a hand running along my shoulders when she passes me, her feet in my lap. It goes unnoticed, or unremarked.

  “Let’s dance,” Jenny says. I open my eyes to see her inches from my face.

  “To this?”

  “Dance with me,” she orders. Paul and I share a look across the room. He stirs a pot.

  “I’ll dance with you,” he offers.

  “You’re cooking. Michael will be an excellent understudy.” She yanks me up off the couch, manipulates my hands like I’m her
automaton, one on her hip, one gripped in hers, fingers interlaced, and we sway. We twirl. We shuffle back and forth in rough rhythm, her head on my chest, her arms encircling me, fingers pressing into my shoulder blade. This song is beautiful. I’ve never noticed how beautiful before, how elegiac, how bittersweet and tender. When it ends, barely three minutes and a lifetime later, I look up, and Paul has a scrim over his face, his own sinking sense of comprehension finally permeating.

  And I don’t care. Let him know. What does it matter? I bow gallantly to Jenny. She curtsys back. We all laugh, because it’s funny. Get in on the joke, Paul. It’s funny.

  Paul is uncharacteristically quiet over dinner, brusque though still amiable. He doesn’t have the muscle to be less friendly, only less enthusiastic, like a dog who can keep his tail from wagging. After dinner Jenny says she’ll walk me to the train, that she wants the air, even though it’s starting to actually get cold at night and today a slick mist hangs in the air, just short of a drizzle. As we turn the corner on Greenpoint Avenue she reaches over and clutches my hand, squeezes it for an instant before letting it go. We reach the subway and she stops me.

  She says plainly, “If you could, I think you would tell me you love me.”

  I see her attempt to shock, and I raise her. “You don’t need to dare me to say that I love you. I do. I love you. I’m in love with you. So what do we do about that?”

  I don’t even know if I mean it. It certainly didn’t emerge as a lie, and it got a stammer out of her. It robbed her of her words. For only a moment, though. Jenny Sayles is never far from her next sentence. “To be discussed.” She breathes out. To be discussed.

  Back at home an hour later, I rock Jackson while Rebecca prepares cookie dough. Jackson babbles, so I babble back, mimicking and riffing, his bababababa morphing into my bababadada. When Rebecca comes up from behind and hugs me, it’s her arms I feel. When she whispers that she loves me, it’s her voice I hear. And when we lay together that night, it’s her body pressed against mine. But a part of me remains in Greenpoint—a part I have yet to define, but I can feel its absence. I can’t yet tell if it’s the hole of a donut, whether it’s supposed to be there, or a cake without eggs, destined to break apart and crumble, no matter how enticing it may appear.