Little Disasters

by Randall Klein

  Michael Gould

  Eight Months Ago: November 24, 2009

  Coming back from Greenpoint, I kiss Rebecca and Jackson and immediately step into the shower. Jenny doesn’t wear perfume, I don’t worry that her scent has somehow imprinted onto my body, but there’s a rinsing and scrubbing that needs to occur before I can be comfortable again in front of my wife and son. That moment I kiss Rebecca hello tightens every sinew, my body rebelling against the infidelity as surely as it will succumb to it again. Kissing Jackson is easier, he’s a beautiful and ignorant lump, happily dwelling in his own world, fat and solipsistic.

  To make this shower routine seem more routine I’ve been, for the past month, leaping into the shower after coming home from the studio as well. I didn’t used to, the fine grains of sawdust would appear on my pillow the next morning, to Rebecca’s chagrin. That memory exists somewhere in the bottom of my bag of excuses in case she brings this up, to say that I’m showering for her and—here’s the perpetual trump card—so as to not shake sawdust off onto Jackson. So helpless is he that his father could do irreparable damage dandruffing tree dust onto his vulnerable face.

  Within the tiles of the shower I separate out my emotions, divide them into Venn diagrams and determine which need to be sequestered. That a bewildered fuck with Jenny turned into an affair and has now developed into some scratched-and-dented relationship requires cupboard space in my mind. Guilt has to go somewhere where the drawers won’t rattle. So does pride. Me ’n’ Jenny, since the I-love-you’s, have escalated what we once could get out of clean. We’ve taken each other as willing hostages.

  Jenny’s boyfriend is the part of me that sluices down the drain. By the time I dry off, all that’s left of me is Rebecca’s husband. I go through the process in reverse on the trip to Greenpoint.

  I’m not two people. That’s an asinine thought. I’m one person sleeping with two women, there’s nothing more cinematic about that. Common as muck the world over, the cheating husband. I’m a cliché. It’s still difficult to negotiate. I’m doing it to myself, and were it not so very worth it, it wouldn’t be worth it at all.

  Today has been a normal day. I spent a few hours at the shop, handling the rent-paying business—a chest of drawers and another coffee table. Then I trained to Greenpoint, put in an hour of work while Jenny copyedited a dissertation. After I came to a logical stopping point, I knocked gently on her bedroom door and veered off to rinse my face in the bathroom while she pranced through the house and slipped on the chain. Then we had sex on her bed because she needed to wash the sheets anyway. Otherwise we would have had sex in her shower. I’m making it sound quotidian, but it’s still lovely. There’s still passion and need. But we’ve hit a comfortable place where there isn’t as much tentative groping, where we can talk before and during, even laugh at positions tried and failed.

  We’ve reached a point where either one of us can say I love you first, and the other person can parrot it back—not breathlessly, like in a Brontë novel, but effortlessly, like it’s a given, a question already asked and answered. We hit that today. Before today, I said “I love you” with a quarter note of a question mark. Today I just said it, tossed it off and she caught it, threw it right back to me. Mickey Gould and his moll, Jenny.

  In the shower at home I process and compartmentalize while I duck my head under the nozzle and let warm water run down my spine, loosening the tension in my lower back. The door opens and there’s the sound of clothing hitting the floor. “Hello?”

  Rebecca steps into the shower with me. “Thought I’d join you.” She gives me a wet hug complete with a grin. “That okay?”

  “Oh, are you a … dirty girl?” I say in my creepy, deep, pedophile voice. She hates this voice, so for my troubles I’m slapped on the chest. “Where’s the wee one?”

  “Sleeping.”

  “Chair or crib?”

  “Crib. He’s been taking longer naps lately.” She throws it out there, a statement like a question, see what I think of this ongoing development.

  “Do you think he’s entering middle age?”

  She charges on, “I mean he might be down for an hour. Ninety minutes. We have plenty of time before he’s awake.” Rebecca doesn’t initiate sex. We’ve discussed this ad infinitum that if she’s forever making me initiate then it makes me feel coercive, if not downright rapey. So she’s started dropping hints, innocuous statements said with what she thinks is a sultry voice but sound vaguely like a cartoon character attempting seduction. Still, hearing that intonation triggers me, even more than her nudity, even more than her stepping into the shower with me, that I’m now free to touch her, to commence foreplay. It makes me feel less like a guy rubbing up against her on a subway and hoping that, because I’ve watched too much porn, she’ll just fucking love it.

  I place her under the water and run my hands along the swell of her breasts. They’ve been turned into a restaurant for four months now, so I feel like I’m doing a good deed reminding her that they are still sexualized body parts to me. She arches her back and hums. Her hands travel southward. My body doesn’t respond the way I want it to, and I kiss her hard, pin her hands up against the tile wall as if this is how we’re going to do this, this is how she’ll be taken today, but in reality I’m struggling to buy myself some time. I’m past a refractory period, there’s no reason for me not to get hard for Rebecca, but it’s not coming alive. I delay with fingers. There’s still no response in my downbelows. Oh good gravychrist, I do not want to fail to get it up for her: just the thought of a conversation about impotence has me silently hollering at my cock to do its damn job. We make out for a while, I try dry humping my wife against a shower wall, which she enjoys in tiny vocalizations. Finally, the conductor in my brain finishes his coffee break and I start to get erect.

  Rebecca pulls back from me with a jolt, her face confused. “Oh baby,” she pities, “how did you cut yourself?” Her hand goes to the back of my shoulder. When she takes it away, I angle myself in the shaving mirror, contort myself to see behind, and there I find the bite mark Jenny left there earlier, one she assured me hadn’t broken skin. It’s two near-perfect parabolas, bright red in color. “It looks like a bite mark,” Rebecca remarks, but not in accusation. I’m almost offended that she’s not asking me with an accusatory tone, that she’s giving me the leeway to lie my way out of this.

  The doorbell rings. Rebecca hops out of the shower without another thought, a mother’s protective instinct immediately kicking in that her child is sleeping and doorbells are loud. I rub the bite mark with soap and water, start running through a catalog of tools that could have fallen on me that would have made such a mark. I settle on a board, just a large board from a high shelf that I should have been more careful taking down. More embarrassed than anything else. Didn’t think it hit me hard enough to leave a mark. Goddamit, Michael. And goddamit, Jenny.

  Rebecca shrieks. This inhuman sound flies like upward lightning from downstairs and I leap out of the shower, wrap a towel around my waist. When I open the door she’s still howling, and Jackson, now awake, wails angry cries. The house is a cacophony, and all I can make out through the sound of screaming in both ears is the crackle of walkie-talkies and the name, over again and again, coming from my wife’s body like it was being ripped from her in strips.

  Jolie. Jolie. Jolie.

  Paul Fenniger

  Present Day: July 19, 2010

  1:26 PM

  The crowd blobs together in front of me, already slow and now ossifying, standing still in the tunnel. People ask each other whether this bottleneck is because we’ve reached the platform at Bedford, whether we’ve made it through to the end. There’s hope in their voices, strained and quivering, exhausted and overheated. We can’t see that far ahead from the back of the pack, and the mass shuffles forward as if we’re being pulled down a giant drain. Gradually, the word works its way back to us.

  Train. Said over a shoulder, then over a shoulder, then over a shoulder. Grumbl
ed from person to person to person, all the way back to me. Train.

  We left at rush hour. It would make sense for another train to pull in right behind ours, collect the next sea of people. Would make sense for that train to go through the same procedures as ours: the evacuation, the mass exodus from the tunnel, the fear, the drenching sweat. I’m oddly relieved that others endured what I’ve endured today, the thought that straphangers throughout the city may have had to leave trains in the middle of tunnels, even on raised platforms, and walk where we aren’t meant to walk. It’ll give us all some common ground in bars, looking back on that nineteenth of July when we were the tunnel people. The moles—that’s how we’ll come to be known.

  I’m hot, bordering on delirious. I stopped sweating ten minutes ago. My body expels dry heat.

  The crowd stumbles forward. No one has the energy to push, all fears about leaving the first train now supplanted by weary resignation, degradation even. The tunnel still isn’t wide enough to walk around this other stalled train. The conductor with the flashlight and our officer stand at the doorway to the front, helping people up. We’ll pass through the train as through the belly of a snake.

  “Step forward. Wait. Wait. Step forward. Wait. Wait. Wait.” The commands repeat for another half hour before I reach the train. “Are you the last?” Perry waves his flashlight beam over us. Grumbles of assent. “This is the damn hero,” he says to the cop. “Everyone behind him needs evac.” The cop nods. Both hoist people up. “Walk through the train, some people will be at the back to help you down.” Perry then loudly adds, “The platform isn’t much farther.” Whether or not it’s true, I’m grateful to him for cutting through all of the confusion with a dose of hope.

  In the train itself the lights are out, and Perry and the cop walk behind me, helping people up from the benches where they sit or lie down. This must be the makeshift trauma unit, the place where people who can go no farther can wait for medical care. I think back to the man in the tunnel, measure out how much longer he would have had to walk and wait before he could be among the others. Only a few people come up from behind me, raising themselves off the seats with hoarse groans, stumbling onward with Perry’s help.

  When I get to the last car, still in single file, I’m helped down by a man and a woman. I turn to help the next person down but instead I’m roughly shoved forward. “Keep moving. We’ve got this,” a voice says. I’ve been digested by another L train. Hanging back from the rear of the crowd, I hear the rumble of a generator and soon I can make out lights up ahead, glowing like Vegas in the desert night.

  Paul Fenniger

  Seven Months Ago: December 14, 2009

  Every day closer to Christmas brings less oversight to my corner of the office. A last gasp for the year’s billable hours has everyone coming in early and staying late, sequestered behind closed-off doors.

  I keep three windows open on my computer. The first window is a template for a thank-you note. Gregg asked me to start plugging in the addresses for a boilerplate thank-you-for-your-Christmas-gift letter that we’ll mail to clients who sent boxes of Godiva and dried fruit platters. Transferring the addresses from one database to the letters takes, and I’m being charitably slow here, fifteen minutes. That’s what the other two windows are for.

  Signed in as NYPeach (12:04pm)

  Hardguy8in joined the chat (12:06pm)

  HARDGUY8IN: Hey

  NYPEACH: Hi there! How are you?

  HARDGUY8IN: Horny.

  NYPEACH: Oh yeah, me too. What should we do about that?

  HARDGUY8IN: Tell me abut yrslf.

  NYPEACH: Pardon?

  HARDGUY8IN: ?

  NYPEACH: I didn’t understand that.

  HARDGUY8IN: R U a fuckin computer?

  NYPEACH: No, I’m definitely a real girl. What should I do?

  HARDGUY8IN: Tell me about yourself.

  NYPEACH: Oh! Absolutely. I’m nineteen, and I just came to New York to be a model.

  HARDGUY8IN: U should suck my dick. R U hot?

  NYPEACH: I’ve been told I’m hot. I have 36C breasts and long blond hair that hangs all the way down to my ass.

  HARDGUY8IN: S#n pix.

  NYPEACH: I’ll bet you have a monster cock, and I want to do all sorts of things to it, but do you think you could type so I can understand you better? You know, spell words out?

  HARDGUY8IN: WTF?????

  NYPEACH: Smart guys get me so wet!

  HARDGUY8IN: Fuk u bitch.

  NYPeach left chat (12:13pm)

  I have been men and women, gay and straight. For the first year of this, every encounter tied to sex. I was a wife looking to cheat on her husband. I was a husband seeking someone to film him and his wife. I discovered that if it can be conceived, it can be a fetish. But at some point the sex talk grew rote. So I mixed it up. I’m an accountant looking for a gently used car. I’m a parent seeking information about the schools in Ames, Iowa.

  At first it was silly, then funny, then kinky, then intriguing, then absorbing, then necessary. At first I thought I would share it with Jenny, because I want to share everything with Jenny, and at some point between kinky and intriguing, at some point when I found the boards for child loss, I realized that this had to stay inside of me.

  At its best, it hurts no one and becomes a rehearsal for life. When nimble, I can sidestep conflict with Jenny because I gamed out a resolution as someone else hours or days earlier. Or if she is already burdened, I can take my problems elsewhere, like a virtual bar I can sidle up to and bend an ear.

  No one can tell from your font whether you are crying, or raging. Being a grieving father gets significantly easier when it’s a skin you can shed every time you log off. You work it out as someone else, then get to be your best self for the person who needs you.

  I close out of the second window and open the third. This is the Gmail account where pgvj7-3843277948@pers.craigslist.org goes to. I posted on Craigslist three days ago, an ad that advertised my bodily dimensions (38C-24-38, taken from Sophia Loren’s Wikipedia page) and invited the right man to come meet me for a drink, maybe more. Send a pic, and if I like it, you get a pic back.

  Fifty-three different men have responded, some of them more than once. Fifty-three, craving the possibility that I’ll send the picture I’ve promised. Do they solely want sex? I want to write each one of them back and ask them that: Do you solely want sex from me, or do you believe that sex is the map from which we’ll discover love, that you will meet a stranger on Craigslist for a hookup and it’ll become the story you tell your grandkids?

  Click the six new ones, new from the last time I checked. I don’t even bother to read whatever they’ve written, it’s either bold predictions for what they’ll do to me or offers of cash. Six new ones, four dick pics. Two are close-ups, one guy self-shot from the neck down. One open, honest gentleman took a whole body shot, face and all, in the mirror of his bathroom. Two toothbrushes on the sink.

  We live with the assumption that everyone is on the level, because if we didn’t, we would be too paranoid to exist.

  Every time I sign on as someone else, every time I continue a conversation, drawing myself in deeper, I feel what I have been told I’m supposed to feel every time I go “method” as an actor—my brain becomes convinced that I am who I claim to be. No one ever believes us with the fervor we believe in ourselves.

  Jeff whistles Cat Stevens as he walks down the hall, giving me ample time to shift back to the thank-you notes. He pokes his head into my cube. “Paul.” His mouth forms a straight line. Concerned. “I’m sure you have Christmas shopping to do. Finish whatever Gregg has you working on and get out of here early today.” Broad smile. Beatific. “Put in for the full time when you do your time sheet.” I thank him and he chuckles, ever magnanimous. I think I just received my Christmas bonus.

  I go back and click through the fifty-three replies, including the thirty-eight men who have sent me a picture of themselves, thirty-six of them electing to share their penise
s, as if I’m doing a study. I suppose I am. I clear my browser history and close out. I stroll down the hall into the men’s room, where I check under the dividers in the stalls, looking for feet. Seeing none, I lock the door behind me and furiously rub one out into a wad of toilet paper.

  It also turns me on. Not the grieving-by-proxy, but the rest of it, even being someone as banal as a man seeking a hypoallergenic rescue dog. Even that. I wish it didn’t, I really do. I wish I were just a troll, someone who hates the world and wants to lob bombs at it from the safety of anonymity, but no matter who I pretend to be, before I have that method moment, I get hard. It’s never happened for me this way while acting. Only online. It’s not me, I tell myself. It’s me playing the role of not-me. I cast myself. Some aspects of the characters just hew closer to Paul Fenniger than others.

  The instant I come waves of disgust crash over me. I flush, and wash my hands in the sink, staring into the mirror, slowly reclaiming the man I recognize.

  Michael Gould

  Present Day: July 19, 2010

  12:43 PM

  My father holds all subjective things Brooklyn over all subjective things Manhattan. The tallest buildings are in Manhattan and he cannot argue this, because they dominate the skyline and we don’t need a ruler to measure. But the most beautiful buildings are in Brooklyn, as are the best slices, the prettier streets, the nicer people, even the better weather. (All those buildings create wind tunnels.) Queens doesn’t get a horse in this race, though my father concedes most non-European ethnic food to it. The subways run better in Brooklyn, he proclaims. The air is cleaner in Brooklyn, he sniffs deep. And Brooklyn has the most beautiful park—Prospect Park.