Little Disasters

by Randall Klein

  Over Central Park, you might argue? Absolutely, he states unequivocally, offended to even consider. Designed by the same man, Olmsted, you point out. Pshaw, he actually says out loud. Pshaw. Olmsted had to design Central Park, manicure it and carve it into a chunk of land so that rich Manhattanites could have their playground. Prospect Park simply exists, the way nature is intended to exist, with the grass and the water and the hills and the cement all living in harmony. Central Park is much bigger, you offer up, though by this point you’re also seeking an exit to the conversation. And there are cemeteries bigger than both, and landfills that would dwarf all of it, he counters. Still, give me a nice day and I’ll wander through Prospect Park, scaled to a more human size. And, he adds, there’s maybe two square feet of space in Central Park where you forget where you are, where you don’t have the shadows of office buildings or condos where Vanderbilts and Astors live. You take five steps into Prospect Park and the world disappears but for the green. All the glorious green, says my father, Marty Gould, the belligerent tour guide.

  *

  • • •

  I’ve finally hit Central Park, the very northern edge of it, having walked almost a hundred blocks thus far. I am Lewis and Clark seeing the Pacific for the first time. This park, this is recognizable to me. I’ve been here before. My internal map spreads out. If I turn right, there is the K2 of hills.

  A runner approaches on my left, and I stand and watch him go past, staring as if at a centaur. His nylon shorts show almost every inch of his sinewy legs, and he wheezes a chanted huff as he passes, sweat following his body like a trail. Assuming he hasn’t been running since this morning, this man saw that something major was happening downtown, something big and terrifying enough to shut down a massive chunk of the city, as well as all public transport and phone lines and God knows what else, and he still decided to go out on his run. On the hottest day of the year. I think of him as resilient, a gloriously crazy variety of resilient. My father would dig shallow for a Yiddish pejorative to mutter.

  I’m sure my parents are both worrying about me. The first thing they would do is try my cell phone, then Rebecca’s. When that didn’t work, they’d get in their car and come to Red Hook. My father has just enough Papa Bear in him to believe that his presence will protect us. If Rebecca has explained to them my whereabouts, either or both of them (likely my mother) would drive to Greenpoint and confront Jenny. If she explained the situation to them, eventually they’d realize that I’m on the island where the trouble is, and I rue the years I could be taking off their lives.

  Kites float back and forth in the sky, picking up wind that I cannot feel, launched from the Great Lawn some forty blocks south of where I stand. Kites, on a day like today, weather and mayhem be damned. Again I reach down, take off my shoes, and walk barefoot in the grass, my clothes sticking to my skin, my ankles and shins and knees and the arches of my feet and the meat of my calves all burning, my hamstrings tightening, starved for water. My bottle is running low, but if I’m in the park I’ll find a water fountain before long. I can’t think about that now. Now is for appreciating the grass that pokes the pads of my feet, that wends its way between my toes, tickles me like carpet. I sit. I sit down for a minute. I’m going to sweat no matter what I do, I’m going to pant and burn and my eyes are going to sting with the salt from my brow running down my face no matter what I do, so I sit and rest. Another runner goes by. Then another. Kites and runners in a boiling Central Park—emergency vehicles and mayhem far away. This, even more than Christmas, is when New York feels to me like a snow globe, a city that remains the same no matter how hard you shake it. All you can really do is shift the debris around.

  From the park I’ll walk down Fifth Avenue to get to Fifty-ninth, from Fifty-ninth I’ll cross the Queensboro Bridge, from Queens I’ll walk south across the Pulaski Bridge, over the fetid canal that separates it from Brooklyn. And from there I’ll walk to Franklin Street, right up to Jenny’s door, and she will look at my blistered face and my cracked lips and there will be an accounting for decisions we made together.

  There I’ll call my parents if the phones work. There I’ll call Rebecca.

  It’s difficult to stand up, but I do, rickety and quivering, my skeleton rebuilding the scaffolding of my body. Then I walk forward, across the scorching pavement and onto the edge of the Harlem Meer, and step into the brackish water, the ducks and geese swimming away from me. Standing for a soothing moment, I feel the moss beneath my feet now, a calm resolve steeling my nerves, and stepping out, I slide on my shoes and continue onward.

  Michael Gould

  Seven Months Ago: December 12, 2009

  We six walk slowly through Central Park, coming in from the Seventy-second Street side, past the tourists standing over Strawberry Fields. John Lennon was shot on a December 8, so the memorial overflows with decaying flowers and eight-by-tens of him in his New York City shirt.

  Seven. There are seven of us. Counting Jackson, wrapped and padded in layer upon layer upon layer, sleeping in his stroller. My parents walk behind us, pushing him slowly through the park, my mother pointing out birdies and trees and squirrels in a quiet singsong voice. My father walks solemnly alongside, a designated mourner.

  Eight. Eight of us, if I’m entering the spiritual realm. Rebecca leads the vanguard, holding a wine bag with an urn inside of it. Inside of the urn is Jolie.

  Paul hangs back, like he’s tailing Rebecca. I speak sidemouthed to Jenny, “Is there a reason he’s walking by himself?”

  “He doesn’t like funerals.”

  “Does anyone?”

  Her head tilts away from me. “I don’t mind them.”

  When we got the news, my parents came to stay with Jackson while Rebecca and I were driven in an unmarked police car to the morgue on the other side of Prospect Park. I soothed Jackson while Rebecca got dressed, then I fixed the police officers a pot of coffee, the entire time still clad in only a towel. I even gave each officer a cookie. We both resented waiting. My parents have a key. We could leave Jackson in his vibrating chair or his crib and he wouldn’t go anywhere. He wasn’t even hungry at the moment. We could have left, but suggesting that to the cops would only have opened up a whole new set of issues.

  We pass the Falconer statue. My mother points it out to Jackson, who has awoken but remains immobilized in his Gore-Tex cocoon. His cow-mittened fists clutch and release, clutch and release.

  Jenny says quietly, “Who has the worse loss, me or Rebecca?”

  “Jesus, Jenny.”

  “On one hand, losing a child is worse than losing a sibling. And Jolie probably cheated death plenty of times, so on some level, Rebecca had to have been preparing for this day for years. On the other hand, I can always have another child, whereas Rebecca is all out of sisters.”

  “The gallows math of tragedy,” I remark.

  Rebecca called her parents from our house later that night, after seeing the body. After nodding her head and declaring, “That’s Jolie.” After signing papers and receiving gruff condolences from the police. After my parents left. She waited until they were gone, checked with me that they had gotten back into their car and driven off. She knew how the phone call would go and didn’t want good parents to see how bad parents acted, in case they thought less of her, thought neglect and apathy could be passed down through the genes. My mother cried when she heard the news about Jolie. She wept softly in the bathroom, against all of her louder instincts. I know my mother. My mother handles bad news, truly bad news, by wailing. But a sleeping baby alters every response. My father sat on the couch and steeled his soft, aged jaw—a blame-the-world posture. Ten years ago he would have blamed the blacks, tried to justify his accusation with some statistic or flimsy bit of anecdotal evidence. Call him on his bullshit and he would have insisted that he’s not a racist, that he worked for the MTA with hundreds of black guys during his career. That he keeps his mouth shut and holds back the tidewaters of blame counts for Marty as late-in-life growth.
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  Rebecca called her parents and apologized for the late hour, told them Jolie was dead, then apologized again for calling them so late at night. The whole call took two minutes from start to finish. They paid the cremation fees because they didn’t want Rebecca to, but they insisted that they buried their daughter years ago and that they wouldn’t be attending a second funeral for Jolene McMahon.

  “I want you to promise me,” Rebecca seethed, “promise me that if I die, you will do everything in your power to make sure Jackson sees as little of those two people as possible, and never without you present.”

  “I promise.”

  “Not for a minute. You have to pee, you take him with you.”

  We cross the Bow Bridge and start our way into the Ramble, searching for a quiet, secluded spot to scatter Jolie. This is illegal, I’m sure. Unhygienic at the very least. But Rebecca insisted, tears and tight mouth, that Jackson come as well, that he got to hear about his aunt even if he’d never remember today. “You can’t scatter Jolie while holding Jackson,” I pleaded, and finally she relented. So as long as he was there, my parents could come as well to take care of him.

  How Jenny and Paul came along makes less sense to me. Jenny called Rebecca to offer condolences, then Paul did the same, and both asked if there would be a service. Rebecca invited them along. It occurs to me that this couple constitutes our best friends. I haven’t been back to Greenpoint since we found out; Jenny and I steal lemur-eyed glances, confused and upset at our interruption, tethered to lives that feel less and less like the central plot, more like the place where we visit with the supporting cast.

  So let’s say we tried something absolutely fucking crazy and formed some unholy polyamorous relationship wherein we all sort of lived together and raised Jackson. I mean, with a number of variables falling the right way—that wouldn’t be the worst idea, right? Like a hippie commune. Or a cult. This doesn’t strike me as the right line of thinking at a funeral. I should place my hand somewhere on Rebecca now. But if it made us all happy …

  “Do you think about trying again?” I ask Jenny.

  “All the time,” she replies. “There are complications to that, though.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  She looks at me, the conversation suddenly more serious, more sad, more funereal. “Yeah, Mickey.”

  The paved path starts to get bumpy, and my mother struggles to push the stroller. I stop the convoy and pick Jackson up, hold him against me, and tell my parents to wait here, that we’ll be back soon. Jackson fidgets in my arms, but I quiet him with a binky. Every book I’ve read tells me that a binky will be the root of tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of orthodontic work later, but I’ll pay it to keep him quiet for now. A pacifier is to babies what cigarettes are to adults—a necessary salve, damn the consequences.

  Rebecca leads us off the path, into the woods, where a few hardier tourists smile at us as they pass, especially at Jackson. When I started taking the subway alone, and coming into Manhattan on the weekend with my friends, my father told me never to go into the Ramble. He described it as a place where “men make love to men for money.” I think about that now and stifle a giggle.

  Finally Rebecca stops. We gather around her, encased in bare trees, stiff dirt beneath our shoes. She starts to unscrew the urn and it’s Paul who stops her. “Do you want to say anything?” he asks.

  She kneels down, sprinkles a bit of Jolie on the ground to see how it plays, to see where it will go. We wait for the wind to blow while a pile of human cremains sits in a small pyramid on a dead leaf. Rebecca sighs to analyze it. “When Jolie first came to the city she told me that her favorite place was Central Park. She wasn’t a nature girl when we were growing up, so I assumed this was where she scored, but when I came to see her the park was the first place she took me. She acted like my sister when she was in the park. My sister from when we were growing up. I have no idea why this park, and I didn’t ask her and now I can’t, but this is where she was her most Jolie. And I loved that person, so here’s where she’ll stay.”

  A small breeze blows the ashes already poured across the ground, mixing like seed. Rebecca gets low and tips the urn over in the direction the wind is going, blowing Jolie away from us. Jenny and Paul huddle together. I cradle Jackson tight to my chest.

  Jolie was found with her throat cut in a vacant apartment in Flushing. Ligature marks on her wrists led the police to believe she had been tied down with an electrical cord.

  Rebecca holds her head high, tears streaming down her face, watching her sister’s ashes mix with the leaves and dirt of the Ramble.

  The coroner found no traces of either drugs or alcohol in Jolie’s body. Jolie died clean, Rebecca asserted, heartsick and defiant in the face of overwhelming grief. She says it again, the last of the ashes spilling from the urn, the last of Jolie scattered in the park. Jolie died clean.

  Michael Gould

  Seven Months Ago: December 22, 2009

  Adam Cavendish can ogle the span of the Williamsburg Bridge from his living room. He’s earned such a view, his tech start-up performing better than anyone could have anticipated. He saw a piece of my furniture—I don’t know which—at a dinner party, and he likes my work. Wants to start out commissioning a coffee table, something he can put his feet on. The first few sessions have been mostly philosophical, Cavendish sitting me down on a couch that costs more than a car and talking me through his maxims of life, all twenty-eight years of it, while I take notes and shape them into coffee table details. What does his upbringing tell me about how to stain the wood?

  Rebecca oooohs and ahhhhhs as I describe the opulence. The best thing she does is not press the issue. She asks no questions that I cannot answer or plausibly plead ignorance to. And thank God for that.

  I created Adam Cavendish from whole cloth. I planed him down into shape and sanded away his edges. I am building a coffee table, though it’s for a man in Chelsea who is buying it for his son, who lives in Providence. If Rebecca visits my studio, she will indeed see sketches and pieces of a coffee table strewn about. In creating Adam Cavendish, I chose tech work because anyone over thirty who understands Web start-ups is also a billionaire and not likely to associate with my wife and me. And Williamsburg because Williamsburg is a stop away from Greenpoint, and that’s where I spend my days, figuring out how to extricate myself from portions of one life without salting the earth.

  *

  • • •

  Jenny kneels over a plastic Christmas tree, pulling tiny decorations from a box. “I think that’s the cutest slash saddest thing I’ve ever seen,” I declare. She locks the door behind me and slips on the chain. “You and Paul don’t get a real tree? You strike me as the real-tree type of gal.”

  “Not this year.”

  “Ah.”

  “Big days are harder this year.” I spread my legs and pull her to me while she rotates the tree to decorate it evenly. “I’ve had this tree since college. My roommate got it for us because she wanted a tree but was going home for Christmas, and I wasn’t willing to water it and pick up all the needles. So she bought this, and we got drunk and decorated it, and when I moved in with Fenn I just took it.”

  We’re a treeless family this year, plastic or otherwise. Rebecca had a tree growing up but connects it to emotionally absent parents and now to her sister, so she didn’t want one. I offered three times to go out and get one. Fairway had them stacked like dead soldiers in the parking lot. First she demurred, then refused, then cried. I’m Jewish, too Jewish for a tree at least, and Jackson was born five months ago and hasn’t made his wishes known yet. When she at last emerged from our bedroom, dry-eyed and composed, Rebecca asked to table the tree discussion for another year (or two), and I agreed without hesitation.

  “What did you get me for Christmas?” Jenny asks. Her hands free of ornaments, she tugs my cuffs up to my knees and rubs my shins. I love this, how she can fixate on parts of my body I never thought could be charged.

  “It’s not
Christmas yet.”

  “I know, that’s why I’m asking. I hate surprises. Come on.” She turns and crinkles her nose. The cute pout can turn into the real pout on a dime.

  “What did I get you publicly, or privately?”

  “Oooooh, you got me two gifts?”

  “I did.”

  “Tell me both.”

  “Nopeeeees.”

  “Harrrumph.” Then, “What did you get Rebecca?”

  “Lingerie.”

  She repays my joke with a look that reminds me I’m too dumb for buttons. I amend, “A gift card to the King Arthur Flour Company and a catalog.” Now she seems offended on behalf of my wife. I protest, “What?”

  “That’s not romantic at all.”

  “Rebecca and I both hate getting gifts.”

  “No! Everybody likes getting presents! What sort of monsters are you?”

  I laugh. “We used to buy ourselves gifts, that’s how opposed we were. For my birthday, I would buy myself art supplies or something and show it off to Rebecca that I had spent money on myself and some whim I had. She’d do the same. Now we buy each other gifts, but we don’t like it. There’s way more stress than joy.”

  I pluck an ornament off the tree over Jenny’s halfhearted protests. It feels delicate in my hand, like a robin’s egg, trailing glitter across my fingertips. I hate getting gifts. Can’t explain it. Have ever since I was a kid. Seeing a wrapped box and knowing it’s for me prompts a physical revulsion that settles in my throat and sits there until I’ve opened the fucking thing and faked enthusiasm. Doesn’t matter what it’s for. That’s been a huge fear of fatherhood, to be reckoned with at some later date. I think I’ll be okay with Jackson making me things in school, with him sticking his hand in some clay and calling it a paperweight. But God help the boy if he spends a cent of his allowance on a gift for Dad.

  Every year I tell Rebecca that there’s nothing I need, nothing I want. Birthday, anniversary, whatever. She’s just ambivalent, as happy with a bottle of wine as a gift card. She hasn’t appreciated a gift enthusiastically since her engagement ring, which counted more as a contract than a gift. Call it a martyr complex and I’ll agree. In my head there’s a point far into the future when I’m destitute, when Rebecca and Jackson and I warm ourselves by the heat of a barrel fire, and at that point I will resent the digital camera they bought me that I barely used. We have perfectly good phones on our cameras. And yes, I know my parents are rich, and that once they die I in turn will be rich.