Little Disasters

by Randall Klein

  “I think it’s that nothing is ever good enough,” Jenny accuses, taking the ornament back, hanging it carefully from a plastic branch.

  “That’s not true.”

  “I’ll bet that when you open a gift, there’s a hitch in your face between surprise and delight, a skittish horse unable to leap the steeple fluidly. And in that moment anyone looking can spot the real justification—that no gift is ever the right gift for Michael Gould. You open every box hoping that someone will give you the gift that shows how well someone knows the core of who you are as a person, and that’s why you’re always disappointed.”

  I lean back, taking her with me, kiss her on her floor. “You’ve cut to the very marrow of me, Jenny.”

  Jenny needed to take a shower, so we multitasked and had sex while she washed herself. She leaves me in her bathroom, and by the time I’m done drying myself with her towel (so as to not transfer my scent to Paul’s towel, or Paul’s to me), she’s sitting in her new office, at her computer, one knee crooked up, foot tucked underneath her, the author-as-flamingo pose, contemplative, with a pen tapping a rhythm on her lower lip. “What did you get Paul?” she asks.

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “I’m materialistic,” she whines. “I’m an awful person. I’m going to judge how you really feel about me based on where I deem my gift to rank.”

  “That would be funny if now I didn’t think it might be true.”

  Her eyes frost over. “Ouch, Mickey.”

  “I’m kidding.”

  “Kid your ass back to Red Hook if you’re going to be an asshole.”

  “A bottle of bourbon. I got Paul a bottle of Blanton’s.” I explain the night at the hospital, delicately, testing the waters of mentioning that day to her. Jenny’s expression doesn’t change with the reference, she hears it like she hears everything else. I recount how Paul and I shared a nip from my flask, celebrating impending fatherhood in front of a church. I cringe, realizing the sense memory I may trigger with Paul by giving him a bottle of that bourbon. He’ll be polite about it, Paul is too bloodlessly Midwestern to be anything but; still a sip of Blanton’s may be a smooth reminder of the worst day of his life. Maybe this is why I hate getting gifts.

  “What did you get Jackson?” She’s working her way back to me.

  “I am only moderately embarrassed to admit that I didn’t get a single thing for Jackson. I don’t think Rebecca has, either. Wouldn’t make sense for us to get him separate gifts, right?”

  “I don’t know how it’s supposed to work.”

  “Right. Well, I’ll probably take one of his stuffed animals, hide it from him for a day so he forgets he ever had it, then give it to him again and his love will spring anew.”

  “Just tell me what you got me,” she snaps. “I told you I don’t like surprises. I’d like to think you’d understand why. So if you’re giving me a gift because you think it would make me happy, you’re ruining that.”

  There she is, I think. I sit down to show that I’m taking this conversation seriously, that I’m present and in the moment and consider her feelings valid, even though everything going on behind that facade is wondering what is causing her to act like a complete fucking lunatic about this. She’s in the office that I built for her, ten minutes after we just went down on each other in her shower, and this has turned into a fight.

  “I got you a subscription to Harper’s,” I say slowly. “And I carved you curtain rods.”

  A stunned ellipsis of a stare.

  “What is confusing you? Curtain rods. Like for the curtains in here. I made you, physically made you fancy curtain rods.” Still nothing. “So that you can write in here. And see them. And think of me. And they’re long and hard and fancy, so you’ll think about my penis.”

  “Shut up. Just shut up.” She shakes her hands. “Fucking curtain rods? Really, Mickey?”

  Our first fight. Click. For posterity.

  “What’s the matter with curtain rods?”

  “Nothing, Michael. Nothing. Curtain rods are a perfectly appropriate gift to get the girl you’re fucking on the side. I’m touched by the gesture.” She shoots up out of the chair and stands over me. “You know what I got you? For our first Christmas?” The question sounds rhetorical, but it’s not.

  I try to speak calmly, to defuse, but that only makes it worse. “What did you get me?”

  “I got you a watch,” she spits at me. “I engraved a fucking watch for you.”

  We both glance at my bare wrists. I haven’t worn a watch since I was a little kid. My upper lip starts to sweat and tuck in, my mouth goes dry. This is the bile of knowing that I’m getting a gift, of enduring the hassle of obligation that comes with someone giving you something. This is why people trade coins for knives. Jenny stands over me, ready to kill, as every reason against a watch jostles in my mind.

  First, my phone is a perfectly adequate watch. Second, there’s no point in my day when I’m desperate to know the time and unable to find it out thanks to my phone, or the millions of other people around me also with phones (some with watches) or any number of other sources. Third, if I were the type to wear a watch, I could get a watch. They aren’t difficult to locate. Obviously, I don’t wear a watch by choice. Maybe I’m just such a free spirit that I can’t be shackled to time. Or maybe I work with machines that have giant, spinning discs of metal teeth and you’re not supposed to wear any jewelry around them, in the interest of keeping limbs attached.

  But I don’t give any of those reasons. Because I’m too stupid for my own good. Instead, I say to Jenny, the incredulity sliding into my voice like blood into the well, “I can’t wear a watch from you.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because I’d think Rebecca would be curious as to where the watch I’m now wearing came from, and even if I lied and said I bought it for myself, or said you and Paul bought it for me, or just that you bought it for me, I think she’d be a little confused that our friends got me an engraved watch. It’s a little personal, Jenny, isn’t it?”

  She folds her arms across her chest and glares at me. Then she explodes, “Fuck you!” She yells. “You don’t even know what it says, but I’m glad you’ve let me know where I rank. I’m just good enough to fuck but God forbid you make me feel like I’m a human being.”

  “That’s not fair, Jenny.”

  “Fuck you!” She flicks her head forward when she says this, flinging it at me, shaking her hair out. “Fuck you!”

  “What does it say?” I raise my voice. “What did you have engraved?” Then I stand up, and suddenly the room changes perspective, and I’m bigger than Jennifer Sayles. My arms twitch at their sides. I’m done being yelled at.

  “It just says with love. I left it vague, you asshole. So it could mean anything, and you can tell your precious wife that it’s from me and Paul,” she sneers.

  “How does that make sense? Why would Paul write with love?”

  “Because you were a good person when our child died, you ignorant, selfish fucking asshole.”

  The room deflates. “I’m sorry,” I say. Quick math tells me the balance of this fight is my fault, but I can’t apologize in full. I can’t absorb all the blame. Too much ground to cede. “I overreacted. That’s a beautiful thing to write. I was going to carve something like that into the curtain rods, just for you to see.” I hadn’t, but the idea seems good now.

  I take a step toward Jenny and she doesn’t retreat, so I take another one until I’m right up next to her and have gathered her into my arms, kissing the top of her head and waiting for her arms to uncross. They finally do, and she tucks her head into my chest and hugs me back. This is how we put ourselves back together again. Here is the point where we could have ended, in our first fight, realizing that going halfway on an affair leaves too much hanging over us, that watches and curtain rods will end up being the most romantic, personal things we’ll exchange other than words and the well-hidden note. She’s given me a few of those, and the
y felt like loaded guns, so I hid them in a locked cabinet in my studio, in a drawer where I keep my awls. “I love you,” I tell her. In a muffled, withdrawn voice, she says it back.

  “I’ve never cheated on my wife before,” I say. “And I know that I love you, I do, and I want us to work out, but I don’t know what that looks like, and I don’t know that I can trust myself to make the right decisions or say the right thing all the time. Does that make sense? These are uncharted waters for me, Jenny. You’re my first.”

  She eyes me curiously, like I’ve just revealed a hitherto hidden talent. Then she says, “Well, Mickey Gould, you’re my fifth. So if you can’t trust yourself, you can try trusting me.”

  We’re interrupted by the sound of a door opening, or trying to open, but hitting the chain instead. Jenny’s eyes goes wide, but for just a second. Just a second of inattention, half a breath of regrouping. Then it’s back to a placid normalcy. “The cabinet broke,” she says under her breath, a meaningful look, then tapping her desk on the way out, as if getting it in on the grift as well.

  “Hello?” Paul’s voice calls. I hear the door close and then the chain slide off.

  “You’re home early,” Jenny says.

  “They let me go home. Did you write today?”

  “I did write today.”

  “Good. Why was the chain on?”

  She laughs, loud and breezily. “It’s silly girl at work. Ever since Jolie, I’m just paranoid.”

  “Oh,” Paul says. “Okay.” He starts down the hall to his bedroom, but stops to see me standing in the office. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say he knew immediately why I was there, and it’s all I can do to not check my head to see if my hair is still wet.

  “The cabinet broke because our builder turned out to be crap,” Jenny drawls. “But he came by to fix it.”

  “Good as new,” I remark. “But now I’ve got to run. Everything I build seems to be falling apart. Can’t get anything right on the first try.”

  Jenny walks me to the door, mouths the words I love you as she shuts me out, even slides the chain back on to sell the lie. I can get out of this clean, I think as I walk back to the subway, to go home and pretend Adam Cavendish exists. I can end things with Jenny even with this new information, even knowing that she’s done this before.

  There’s a clean exit. The door will open, and then I just have to slide through it before it closes again. Right?

  Paul Fenniger

  Twenty-one Months Ago: October 5, 2008

  In every relationship, one person loves more. In my own relationship, that person is Jenny. She loves me more than I love her. It gives me something to strive for every day, to balance the scales.

  I started college knowing one inalienable truth: everyone would be able to tell that I was a virgin. On a fundamental level, I could reconcile being an eighteen-year-old who had never had sex. My high school had 128 girls total. That was the pool from which the sex I would be having would spring, and when you take the freshmen out of the equation, and then take out the girls who were already dating one of the 133 boys, I was left with a smaller pond of, by my count, 49 girls. Forty-nine devout Lutherans. I starred in the school plays, and won the senior superlative of best-looking, but I never profited from it. With the few girls I dated, out of what puddles were left from the pool, we never progressed beyond kissing or groping through sweaters.

  I knew in my bones that I could not hide my virginity when I got to college. The way I thought it would happen is that a group of guys would be talking one day about sex, just sitting around on a couch and discoursing, and one of them would turn to me and ask, “Paul, what can you tell us about pussy?” And there would be nothing that I didn’t get from Mrs. Mitchell’s quick and flustered reproductive unit in biology. “There are two holes, and I’m terrified that I am going to try to put my dick in the wrong one,” would be my most honest answer.

  The opportunity didn’t present itself my freshman or sophomore year. That makes it sound like it was everyone else’s fault. It was mine. The opportunity presented itself dozens of times, I’ll bet, but I was too stupid to notice it or too shy to act on it.

  The first thing I loved about Jenny was how she took control. She brought me to a bed and sat me down. She took her clothes off. Then she took my clothes off. And everything that followed was gentle instruction and encouragement. Do that. Keep doing that. Move a little more like that. Every that punctuated by a small gasp, a reassuring clutch. I lasted through tracks five to seven of Pleased to Meet Me before I shuddered and came into a condom that she had rolled onto me.

  Afterward, we lay next to each other for the rest of the album. She had been so kind, so supportive through the whole process that I felt it only right to trust her with my secret.

  “You were my first,” I said quietly. If she didn’t hear me, I wouldn’t repeat it. But she did, and she rolled over onto her side and ran her finger over my jaw.

  “Then we should celebrate with whiskey drinks. Now that you’re a real manly man.”

  The question that meant to come out of my mouth was how did I do. I meant to ask for a critique, but it spewed out instead as, “Was I your first too?”

  The second thing I loved about Jenny was how she takes everything in stride. Her eyebrows raised, but she laughed and told me, “A lady never tells.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “No, I’m really sorry.”

  “I’ll tell you this much: if you were my first, then I have been missing out on this whole sex thing.” She sized me up with a look, then ran her hand down to my balls. I was twenty-one, so everything was more or less ready to go again. Jenny paused. “What does your family call you?” she asked.

  “My name. I don’t have a nickname.”

  “Okay … but what do they call you?”

  “Paul.”

  “Paul,” she repeats. “Paul Paul Paul. Virginal no more. Paul. You’re not going to imprint on me, little duckling, are you?”

  I didn’t know what she meant, but she shook her head as she asked, so I shook my head in response. That earned me more sex.

  One part of determining who loves more is to decide who knows the other person better. Jenny knows me so well that she knows I will be waiting up for her, waiting for her to return home. She knows that I’ll have cleaned the apartment to give my hands an activity to do. She knows that I’ll be on the couch, rather than in the chair by the window, and I’ll be reading a magazine, rather than a book. She knows all of this about me, whereas I don’t even know where she is.

  We moved to Lefferts Gardens because it was still cheap, by Brooklyn standards. And it’s next to a corner of Prospect Park, even though it’s the corner where the homeless camp out, not the one where indie bands play concerts. But we can afford it without dipping into our savings, on the money we take in while we pursue what Jenny calls our “Love Careers.” For now. Our lease is up in two months and both of us tremble at the rent hike. Jenny finds it not-ha-ha-hilarious that gentrification is going to push two white kids out of a predominantly Caribbean neighborhood.

  She started working with a writing group four weeks ago. She’s been a writer for as long as I’ve known her. I asked to read something by her once and she politely declined. “But I let you see me in plays,” I protested.

  “But I don’t come see the rehearsals,” she countered. “You can see results, not process.” Over the years, though, process has never begat results. I blend patience with encouragement, certain that a stack of pages will greet me one day, and that the brilliant brain I love will have produced her masterpiece, maybe even dedicated it to me.

  The writing group meets in the basement of a bookstore in Carroll Gardens and reads each other’s work. I don’t take offense that they get let in to rooms I’m locked out of; feedback from peers is part of the process. Still, Jenny says that most of her group mates are kind of clueless and think idle praise counts as helpful, but then there is Jonah. />
  I heard about Jonah for days after the first meeting. He’s a great writer (“He already has an agent, Fenn”), and he really engages with her work. After the second meeting, she again couldn’t stop speaking about him, circling back to Jonah no matter where the conversation meandered, but his name didn’t linger as long afterward. After her last meeting, she barely mentioned him at all, instead complaining about a cabal of men who dispense opinions liberally and all write pieces “they hope Philip Roth will have his last orgasm across.”

  There’s a way that Jenny says Jonah’s name, a Morse code signal she gives with her eyes. When she tells me that she’s going to meet for coffee to talk through a chapter, I offer to go with her and hang out. “I won’t be able to work if you’re there,” she counters, then floats out the door with a sheaf of papers rolled up, jutting out of her purse. She comes home four hours later, no coffee on her breath, veers immediately toward the shower. “Wash this day off of me,” she mutters as she brushes past. They meet for coffee a couple of times that week, each time for around four hours.

  Tonight is the latest Jenny’s ever stayed out. The sky has started to reform itself. I’ve positioned my body so that I can’t see any clocks. Watching time pass would drive me insane, make me say something I would regret when Jenny gets home. Jonah only has one name so far; I wouldn’t even know where to look for her.

  I did the very thing she told me not to. I imprinted on Jennifer Sayles. If she doesn’t come home, I will float away until my legs grow too weary, and then I will drown. This is why Jenny loves more in our relationship, because she doesn’t conflate love and need. All of my verbs are under the same umbrella when it comes to her: need, want, hope, trust, live.