Little Disasters

by Randall Klein

  “Oh Jenny, you are a card.”

  “Shut up! They were funny at the time.”

  I kiss the top of her head. “Grow old with me, Jennifer Sayles.” Please.

  “I will, Fenn.” She sighs. “I envision us wrinkled and mute, sitting next to each other at a bar, cradling medicinal whiskey drinks, something to help us get to sleep that night. We’ll look like two derelicts, strangers who wandered in off the street and gravitated toward each other, as if to section off a tiny fragment of the bar for the aged. For the experienced.” She savors that last word. “Our postures stooped, our eyes fixed forward. And you’ll turn to me, lock your rheumy eyes with mine, and say, ‘I love the fucking Christ out of you.’ You’ll say it without preamble or prompting, just a declarative statement, heavy with the weight of shared time. I think about that when I think about us growing old together, Fenn, and it counts as romantic.”

  Jenny can joke, but when I first saw her across the room at a college party, time did stop and music did play. That orchestra still picks back up every time she crosses my mind.

  “I love the fucking Christ out of you,” I say, and kiss the top of her head again.

  Jenny ambushes Jackson when we get to their house. I love Jenny for her unbendable resilience. After dinner, Michael insists on taking us to the roof of his studio. I look to Rebecca to shoot this idea down on Jackson’s behalf, but she seems more excited than he is by the prospect. She still retains a shred of sobriety, though my head is wrapped in a warm blanket of the mulled wine Michael has been ladling into our glasses all night. We bundle into jackets and hats, Rebecca straps a sleeping Jackson into a BabyBjörn, and we set out. “When he’s out, he’s out,” she says, proudly.

  When Michael mentioned his studio I thought to myself that I had been there before, then realized that was a lie I had told Jenny. But I have the vague recollection that Michael was going to say that he forgot his key, so we went to a bar instead that night. It’s possible that in both the real and duplicitous worlds I still have not been inside his studio. Lies within lies—it’s exhausting. In this hazy, drunken state, I’m rigid with anxiety that someone will ask me a question, and when we start walking, I make sure Michael leads the way, bending to retie my shoe as he sets out.

  His studio looks how I pictured it, with sections of the floor taped off, tools strapped to the walls, and half-finished projects lying around. Michael gives us a grand tour. Tony’s section has metal shelving stacked with ceramic plates and bowls, a potter’s wheel and a kiln, a picture of a bearded man with a wife and children, and a basketball. Regina’s section is all jagged splinters of wood and rolls of canvas. “I think she’s building a boat,” Michael tosses off. Marc’s section has a funhouse-of-terror vibe to it, metal spikes pointing in every which way, like the rays of the sun. “He’s on a fence-building jag,” Michael explains. He finishes by showing us his section, the ornately carved table legs and pictures of projects finished. At the bottom right he’s taped a photograph of Jenny’s office. She’s immensely tickled by this, that he kept a picture, but I’m strangely possessive. It rubs me in a way I can’t define that he has this, that he displays Jenny’s room like a pinup.

  I’m very drunk. Some attentive secretary in my mind makes a note that everything I think, say, and especially do for the rest of the evening must now be monitored more closely, because I am very, very drunk.

  The roof offers the panoramic view of lower Manhattan I’d expect. Fireworks go off somewhere over New Jersey, small pinpricks on the distant horizon, oddly cute in their minuscule state. Michael says that we’re technically not supposed to be on the roof, but that the landlord has to keep it accessible as a fire escape and so instructed his tenants to use it only during an emergency. The small crowd up here makes clear that this rule is widely disregarded. Tony and his wife sip from a flask and greet us all with hugs, his red, bearded face stinking of some brown liquor, but his eyes kind. Michael introduces me as an actor and Tony reacts with starstruck wonder. Regina introduces herself and her girlfriend, whose name is German and flees my head as soon as she says it. “I like what you’re building,” I say cordially, and she gives me a small, patronizing smile in response. Her girlfriend immediately takes to Jackson, chatting away at him in German.

  Michael has brought bottles of wine and glasses to the roof, so we continue the party up there. Tony regales us with his first New Year’s in New York, which he spent in an emergency room because he’d been hit by a cab. At midnight, the doctors and nurses gathered at the desk and toasted with sparkling cider.

  Jenny slips away from the rest of us to smoke, and Michael looks beseechingly to Rebecca. “It’s a holiday,” he whines. She shoots him a half-convincing look of disappointment, but then waves her hand dismissively.

  “Go ahead.” And Michael scampers over to Jenny to join her. “He thinks he hides it better than he does,” she tells me. Jackson, as if to confirm, let’s out a tiny squeak of protest. He’s woken up, not quite out once he was out, but he doesn’t seem to mind the cold, the noise, the disorientation, the people. He is not aware that my head swims upstream.

  I wonder if my son would have been so chill on New Year’s. Nope. Can’t cry. Can’t cry here.

  “Wow, he really doesn’t cry much, does he?” I ask Rebecca. Jackson lies against her breast, his stumpy legs kicking air.

  “Certain things bother him,” Rebecca explains. “He doesn’t like baths, and he makes a lot of noise when he wakes up hungry from a nap.” She stares at him dreamily.

  I look over at Michael and Jenny, who sit huddled next to each other, passing a cigarette back and forth. Thin plumes of smoke rise off them, these two bundled close together. He tilts his head toward her, saying something too low for us to hear, like two kids scheming.

  Jenny’s behavior now strikes me as less erratic, more familiar. I know this song, verse and chorus.

  I’ve been blind—this intimacy they share goes beyond offices and casual friendship. I love Jenny, and I trust Jenny, but I also know Jenny, and I’ve seen what it means when she shuffles herself closer to another man, presses her shoulder to his, as if willing their two bodies together.

  It’s happening again, in front of my face.

  I’m not sober, but I’m clear as still water. They exhale at the same time, turned away from one another, and on this windless night the smoke rises to the side, like two horns from the same beast.

  I turn to Rebecca, to see if she’s watching the show I’m watching, and discover her face coming toward mine. With a hand guarding her son from being crushed between us, Rebecca’s mouth veers off at the last second and pecks me on the cheek. “Happy New Year,” she coos. I spin around the roof, looking at everyone kissing everyone else. Michael comes up to me and shakes my hand, transforms it into a hug. “Happy New Year, brother,” he says to me.

  I was facing Rebecca when the ball dropped. When it hit midnight. I completely missed how Michael and Jenny rang in the new year. It happened ten feet from where I’m standing, but I was looking the other way.

  Paul Fenniger

  Five Months Ago: February 2, 2010

  Vain Fopps, but court, and dress, and keep a puther,

  To pass for Womens men, with one another.

  But he who aimes by women to be priz’d,

  First by the men you see must be despis’d.

  Those are my last lines onstage. I walk off to some piped-in harpsichord, because Ted connects harpsichord to anything before 1900, and the monitor onstage plays a final speech we recorded two weeks ago—me as Mr. Hart, recapping everything in iambs.

  Marie hands me a bottle of High Life once I’m offstage, our nightly tradition for the past week. Elspeth sits on an overturned black wooden box, already halfway through hers. We have another thirty seconds before the curtain call to roll our eyes and thank good Christ another night of this is over. Ted called us back four weeks ago, right after the new year, to tell us that he’d secured a space for us to perform in. Show goe
s up in twenty-four days. Rehearsals start back up tomorrow.

  The first time he told us about the performance space, he spoke rhapsodically about its technical capabilities and location, and slipped in that it would cost $3,000 for the week. Each subsequent time he spoke about the space he downplayed its West Village location and emphasized the cost. The three members of the cast discussed this over drinks after rehearsal one night, after we separated from Ted.

  “You know we’re not getting paid,” Elspeth said before the drinks arrived. My attraction for her has waned almost as powerfully as it arose, like getting over a nagging cold. Now what I feel for her is mostly revulsion, on a personal level at least. As a scene partner, I like her more now than when Ted cast her. She’s on time, doesn’t step on my lines, and engages with the material. But I’ve projected enough of a cold front to her offstage that she’s confused, wondering if she offended me somehow.

  Marie can’t turn her androgyny off, and Elspeth and I suspect she doesn’t want to, that reading as either male or female is a role she carries offstage with her hair cropped and buttoned shirts billowy enough to hide the breasts I wouldn’t be surprised if she taped down. And it works for her, she draws the eye. She’s the only one of us with her next gig already lined up. There’s something intimate about her conscious ungendering that forces an audience to engage with her to glean basic information. She shook her hands in front of her and said, “Whoa. Since when are we not getting paid?”

  “Ted’s in the hole at least three grand,” I agreed with Elspeth. “He’s done this before.”

  “Not pay you?”

  “It’s not that we don’t get paid,” I hemmed and hawed. “It’s that we don’t get paid first. Ted will recoup what he’s put out first, then pay us from the box office. No more than what we were originally going to get. We’ll get paid something,” I reassured Marie. Elspeth blew the bangs from her face. “It’s not as guaranteed as before.”

  The audience starts clapping, they’re so small an audience we can hear individual sets of hands, so we put our bottles down and walk out to bow. At quick count, about two dozen people came to see our final performance. Jenny sits house left; I found her immediately upon my first entrance. She doesn’t sit in the front row because she worries she’ll distract me, and in a theater this small, she would—I’d be able to see her beneath the lights. I can’t see anything but silhouettes past the third row, but it would be difficult to kiss another woman in front of her, even in character. She applauds, beaming at me. There’s a warmth in that, this public display of support. Michael claps and hoots next to her. Rebecca sits politely next to him on the other side, clapping as if she doesn’t want to hurt her hands.

  I bow and bow again, hold hands with my costars and we gesture toward the back to show our gratitude, to demand the audience’s gratitude for our tech crew, which comprises Ted and another friend he roped in to run the lighting board. The audience can only respond so far before the clapping becomes more sporadic, thins out like a fire slowly dying. After some more harpsichord, we exit.

  Our single dressing room is crowded even when only one of us is in it. Elspeth has already signed the wall, next to hundreds of other illegible signatures of actors, interspersed with photographs of past productions taped, captioned, defaced.

  As I sip my beer backstage and slowly get out of costume, I wipe my makeup off and stare at the lines on my face. They weren’t there the last time I checked, or they were and I simply hadn’t noticed them. Hadn’t thought to look.

  Dressing room mirrors speak in declarative sentences. I’m thirty-two years old. I’m acting, potentially for free, in obscure productions for audiences that consist mainly of friends and family. The production basically extorts the money we are too proud to ask our loved ones for directly, not that my parents would travel from Cadott to see a show I’m in. I don’t begrudge them that—dropping my parents into New York would be akin to dropping them into the Serengeti. They’d go wide-eyed and slack-jawed for ten minutes, like being teleported into the movies, before some small pinprick—getting jostled on the sidewalk, seeing the price of breakfast, confronting homelessness—would start the polite, passive-aggressive Midwestern questions like “Are you sure this street is safe?” or “You wouldn’t come here when it’s dark out, right?”

  This is how it goes when I think about my acting career. My mind, in desperate self-preservation, darts wildly down some other path. I went to school for acting. I trained. I’m no dilettante. And I live and work in the most theater-conscious city in the world. Every week there are hundreds of auditions for student films and off-off-Broadway shows and corporate gigs and productions in the parks. Every week opportunities are laid before me, have been for a decade, and yet here I am, no further along than when I was young and unlined, when I could play the male ingénue, the beautiful object any director could find the flimsiest excuse to put onstage without a shirt.

  Oh my God those days are done. Oh my God I’m thirty-two and one set of doors has closed without another set opening. Physically I’m still the same body type—the salt can be dyed out of my hair, makeup will cover these few shallow ridges—but those days are done. A new generation of chorus boys has stepped off the bus to answer the callbacks I used to get.

  I own a career that never belonged to me.

  Jenny kisses me on the cheek when I step outside, kisses me on the cheek the way she kisses Michael on the cheek when he leaves our house. She’s drawn the equivalency between us. Now that I have my evenings back, Jenny and I should spend more time together. We should reconnect as a couple. Being in this play, pursuing this farcical dream, wearing failure as some noble badge, has hurt my marriage. When we decide on an East Village bar for my celebratory drink, Michael and Jenny fall into step next to one another. They separate from Rebecca and me as naturally as oil from water, forging on ahead, talking and laughing and ignoring the silent partners who walk like spies behind them.

  This is my fault, I think. This division. Through my negligence, I’ve let this in. This presence in my marriage, this widening rift.

  I had nothing to do with it, and it’s all my fault.

  Michael Gould

  Present Day: July 19, 2010

  1:17 PM

  The ambulance bay outside of Mount Sinai curves eerily empty away from an equally empty lobby. Only a few security guards stand by the door, craning their necks to see in both directions down the street, like restaurateurs eager to goad passersby into dining tonight. The ambulances must be out on calls, concentrated in midtown, in makeshift field hospitals. I was told once by an EMT friend (now downgraded to an EMT acquaintance) that the back of an ambulance is equipped to handle most procedures, just under significantly worse conditions than an operating theater.

  I’ve bounced to the perimeter of the park, the straight line of Fifth Avenue, only intermittently broken by cross streets that connect the Upper East Side to the Upper West Side. This has to be faster than the meandering running path. In quick succession I pass the Guggenheim and the Met, both closed. Crowds mill outside, confused tourists standing one foot in the street with a hand raised to hail one of the cabs their guidebooks promised them are as common as ants. Entire families huddle over maps spread out on the sidewalk, penciling a route back to the hotel. Phones are consulted and shaken. People scream into them to no avail. But mostly, people loiter, waiting for instructions, waiting for the voice from on high to tell them to run for their lives. At the Met, about a dozen people stand in the fountains, cooling off, and the guards don’t even bother to chase them away. They’re busier trying to clear the steps, so crowded it looks like a protest.

  I grow increasingly certain of a subway bombing. The question then becomes who, and from where did he come, so we know where to start demanding retribution, though we never get that comfort of the past, of having a sanctioned attack from a country. Saudi Arabia’s official military is never going to attack us. Iraq according to Rand McNally is never going to attack us. W
hat country both hates New York enough and has the resources to launch a ground attack? All I can come up with off the top of my head is Texas.

  After 9/11, my father worried about looting, about opportunistic rioters coming into the neighborhood at night on the assumption that the police were too busy manning the bucket brigades in lower Manhattan or drowning their sorrows over fallen colleagues. He worried that reports of a breakin down in the Jewish section of Brooklyn would be met with a shrug and a “they police their own” mentality. “Chaos begets chaos,” he warned. He barricaded the doors of the house each night, continued to do so even when I came home two weeks later, demanded I help him shift a wardrobe against the front door and the oven against the back. He was willing to trade the obstacles that would likely kill us in the event of a fire for the inconvenient delay it would cause a robber before he simply smashed glass and came in through a window.

  Nothing happened, of course. Just as nothing is going to happen to these apartments along Fifth Avenue, which have locked their doors. New York operates (for the paler hued, at least) on the skullcracker theory of policing during times of citywide calamity. Getting caught stealing on a regular day will earn you a beating from the shop owner and a smack from the cops if you aren’t unfailingly contrite and cooperative. Get caught using mass hysteria as a distraction and the cops will look the other way if you happened to run full speed into a baseball bat a half-dozen times before they arrived. The doormen stand guard, legs spread shoulder width, hands clasped in front of them, receptionists turned mercenaries, eyeing the passersby from posts on the opposite side of glass-doored entryways, sentries unlocking the ramparts only to let in residents. With the power still coming and going, and the air-conditioning out with it, they glisten like glazed donuts in their uniforms.

  Crowds pick up at about Seventieth. There’s a noticeable shortening of steps, a slow congealing of the crowd. These aren’t just the tourists. A Central Park vendor loudly protests getting kicked out of the park today without being given a reason. At Sixty-fifth forward movement stops altogether. At first I assume that I’m standing at the back of a crowd of rubberneckers, that something is happening in front of us as people watch enrapt. Heads tilt up, mesmerized by the fleet of helicopters droning over midtown like black mosquitoes. As we trudge forward, I realize that this is foot traffic headed off the island, backed up to the park, five blocks north and roughly six long blocks west of the Queensboro Bridge.