Little Disasters

by Randall Klein

  As a crowd forms behind me, I start to get sucked into the mass. I bail before I become a part of the amoeba, dart off down Sixty-fourth, map the route that will jump my place in line, get me on the bridge faster. Etiquette cedes its place, the largest and most powerful cutting a swath through the crowd that enables the slower, the older, the weaker to follow. We all misquote the same tenets of Darwin in our heads, waiting for the alpha males to lead us to safety.

  Foot traffic moves even as it approaches the corkscrew entrance to the footpath of the Queensboro Bridge. Someone must be directing people at the other end, in Queens, getting the crowds to disperse, otherwise we’d be as stalled as the cars are on the bridge. We press on under the midday heat, last reported as 103 officially, “feels like” 109, inhaling the exhaust fumes of idling cars, the guttural growl of stalled trucks drowning out all other sounds. People around me keep checking their phones to see if there’s service once off the island. We are the Israelites in Exodus, heads bowed in prayer to our phones.

  A man stands fifty feet past the entrance of the bridge, pressed nearly flat against the guard fence. He’s dressed like I am, like any rational human being would dress on a day like today. He’s shaved his face and combed his hair and wouldn’t warrant a second glance on an ordinary day. But today he stands at the entrance of the Queensboro Bridge and he shrieks at the top of his lungs, “What are they not telling us?” Every word gets its own exclamation point. His eyes aren’t even wide. “What aren’t they telling us?” he shouts over and over again. After three or four times his voice recedes to an uneasy place, gravel rubbing in the backs of our minds.

  I’m surrounded by thousands of people, yet none of us seem to know what has happened in midtown today. New York is not a secretive place, not for most of us. We share information. Trains are running express instead of local and you’ll hear about it from a dozen people before you swipe your card through. That no one has any idea paints the day with an artificiality, all of us extras on a giant set.

  Of course, there’s a far scarier explanation: no one crossing the bridge knows what’s happened because no one who knows what’s happened made it out of midtown.

  We walk with urgency. Many of the women walk in pinched, pained steps, heels in hand, still striding forth as fast as their cut and blistered feet will take them. When a woman collapses about two hundred feet onto the bridge, she’s immediately lifted up by fellow New Yorkers, carried arm over shoulder, a wounded comrade being dragged to the nearest medical tent, should one even exist. On the other side of the fence, separating feet from tires, horns honk and people yell back.

  I catch glimpses through the steel girders. The footpath is on the north side of the bridge, but I see parts of Brooklyn to the south. The subway map makes the boroughs look more geometrically elegant than they actually are. In reality, the rivers wend through and Brooklyn hooks underneath Manhattan, spooning the island. The phallic spire of the Williamsburgh Savings Bank in downtown Brooklyn situates me like a beacon. Walk toward that and I can find my way home.

  Halfway across the bridge, people in front of me start turning around, walking backward for a few steps, snapping pictures on their phones. I spin with them and see Manhattan from a distance for the first time. I’m blocked by steel and cars, by the unending crowd of people, but I can make out some of the buildings of midtown. In the vicinity of Times Square, a thin plume of smoke rises, as if the island were casually smoking a cigarette. It bends and trails off south, carried along the invisible currents of a breeze too faint to detect. Something is on fire.

  As we approach Queensboro Plaza, we pass over hundreds of people tucked below the bridge, those who walked across before us but couldn’t stop on the bridge, so they retreated down toward the banks of the East River. They now look across, waiting for a sign of what to fear, what to run from, so I turn around one last time as well. No shower of ash this time, no buildings collapsing inward. It’s our shining city, unbroken if not unbreakable, the only change to the skyline that slender wisp of smoke, rising steadily until it dissipates into a grainy haze.

  Michael Gould

  Five Months Ago: February 19, 2010

  Adam Cavendish loves his table. Will definitely call me for all of his future custom furniture needs. “Did you tell him you paint?” Rebecca asks. “Not in the market for art right now,” I reply. Not in the practice, either. It’s been months since I’ve picked up a brush. Whatever time I would have been dedicating to it has been channeled elsewhere. Or I’ve outgrown the artistic ambitions I once held sacrosanct. I don’t have the mental bandwidth to contemplate why I’ve stopped painting. Rebecca, politely, hasn’t asked.

  Next up is a set of kitchen chairs for a family that lives in Hell’s Kitchen in reality and in Prospect Heights in the narrative I’ve spun. It’s a neighborhood down from Williamsburg, but in sort of the same direction from here. Rebecca congratulates me on the new gig, claims a whole set of anything sounds expensive, but her voice has a strain to it, her joy for me doesn’t reach her eyes. When we’re in bed later that night, when I’m the ladle and she’s the teaspoon and my arms are draped around her middle and I warn her that if she falls asleep before I do, then I’m going to swallow her up whole and she’ll live inside my tummy, she laughs only to be genial. I ask her what’s wrong.

  “You’re never here,” she says.

  Pause. Breath. Pause. Brace. “It only feels that way because you’re always here.”

  “Maybe.” She elongates the word; I feel her shift and fluster, casting doubt. “It seems like you’re always either in your shop or working with a client and when you’re not you’re hanging out with Jenny.”

  “And Paul,” I amend.

  “And Paul. I’m glad you have friends—”

  “We have friends—”

  “—yes, we’re friends. I mean, our friends.” She exhales, shrinks in my arms. “I’m being clingy. Sorry. Can we blame mommy hormones?”

  “Nothing to be sorry for,” I reassure her. “But if you fall asleep, I’m first going to bite your face off, chew it up. Then I’m going to bite off each of your fingers, one at a time, suck the meat out. Then I’ll move on to your sweetmeats …”

  Devour you whole, Rebecca Gould. Keep you inside of me forever.

  *

  • • •

  Two days later, unseasonably warm in late February, Jenny and I decide to venture out into our city. There’s been a sexual segue in our relationship, one in which we don’t feel the need to make sex either the thing we get out of the way the instant I arrive, or the culmination of our day together, a figurative and physical climax to shared time. Lately, I come over and we go out from there. Less wear and tear on the sheets. Like today. When it’s time to leave Jenny scrunches her face and retraces her steps through the apartment. “Where are my keys?”

  I spin around, looking at countertops. “Thank you, Mickey. Very helpful.” Then she reaches into her purse and plucks them out by a ring. “You goose.” I laugh at her until she joins in and then I can laugh with her.

  “I used to hide Paul’s keys from him. He’d leave them on the counter and I’d slip them into his jacket pocket, and he’d go nuts trying to remember where he’d left them. I’d act exasperated and then reach into his pocket, or wherever else I’d hidden them, and hand them over.”

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “So that he’d remember how much he needs me,” she says as she locks the door behind us.

  Jenny’s head goes on a swivel when we’re in her neighborhood. I’ve never seen her with a friend, she and Paul seem like a supremely insular couple, so I’m not sure who she’s worried might see us together. Today it’s particularly bad—she’s checking behind her so often that I begin to get paranoid that she’s in deep to the mob. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing. What do you mean?”

  “You keep checking your six.”

  “My six?”

  “Behind you.”

  “Why are
you using hipster lingo?”

  “Because you’re behaving like we’re in a seventies cop movie. What’s going on?”

  She stops us from walking. We’re two blocks away from her house, on our way to the subway. It’s the middle of the day. We’re alone save for the not unpleasant stench of smoked fish wafting off of the Acme warehouse. Alone but for the sound of trucks rumbling in the deep background. Alone but for eyes at windows, the street bare before us in both directions. “I want to try something new.” She composes herself, then reaches out and grasps my hand in hers. We commence walking, in her neighborhood, hand in hand. Thus begins our Young Lovers Tour of New York.

  February 28

  The American Museum of Natural History (Central Park West, at Seventy-ninth Street)

  We museum shuffle from skeleton to skeleton. At first I worried that Jenny would be skittish here. When we pass babies in carriages it often sends her into reboot mode. She goes silent for a few seconds, then slowly works herself back into whatever conversation we were having. I worried that this museum, where every hour of every day there is a different school group, would be a hornet’s nest of triggers for her. But it’s not. She smiles plainly at the kids pressing their faces against glass and the stupid things they say about the whale (“That thing is bigger than a car!”) but otherwise ignores them. It’s possible she never visualized her baby as a child. Or maybe, in the throes of grief, she walled a psychological cutoff somewhere around toddler lest she stroke out every time she sees any boy younger than herself and thinks of her son.

  Jenny falls in love with a South American sloth because it’s called the Robber Tooth. “That’s my new favorite thing in this museum,” she chirps proudly. Two rooms after that Jenny turns away from the medieval weaponry. I’m not particularly interested in it, either. She says, “You know where I’ve never been?”

  “The Cloisters,” I reply.

  “How did you know?”

  “Is that seriously it?”

  “Yes, I’ve always wanted to go and I’ve never been.”

  “No one has. It’s forever away. I’ve never been either.”

  She tugs my arms, gives me doe eyes, not because she needs to, but because she knows how I love it so. “Can we go, please?”

  “Anytime.”

  Today is the first time our talk hasn’t been about the us-ness of us, the first time we haven’t had a meta-relationship conversation. It’s not that we’ve avoided it, just that it hasn’t come up. Hand in hand, today felt blissfully normal, right up to the point when I took a different subway home.

  March 5

  Jackson Diner (37-47 Seventy-fourth Street, Queens)

  We’re a milky island in a sea of darker faces. We are the gentrification of this restaurant. It’s built like it was made for weddings: high ceilings, wide-open spaces, a seating plan that can accommodate at least two hundred Indian men. And us. I joke, “I’ll bet we could get a ride home pretty easily.” Jenny groans, because my ironic racism still counts in her world. Whatever. She’s just upset she didn’t think up the line first.

  “This is fucking delicious,” Jenny says. She has an obscene amount of red sauce on her chin—I think it’s from bhindi masala, but I wasn’t looking at what she loaded up on her plate.

  “I want to stick my cock in this.” I’m on my third trip to the buffet. Go easy on the rice, that’s the secret. Go easy on the rice, go easy on the naan. That’s how I’ve worked three helpings of chicken kadai down my gullet.

  She finally draws a napkin across her face, no longer looks like she went down on a jelly donut. She asks, “Where do you want to go?”

  “Back to your place?”

  “Then where?”

  “What are my options?”

  She smiles. “Anywhere in the world. For two weeks.”

  I swallow. “A nice place.” I cringe. I’m usually better at hypotheticals. My honest first thought was convenience. Where can we take Jackson? I don’t think that’s what Jenny asks me.

  “What makes a place nice?”

  “It isn’t likely to explode.”

  “That’s smart thinking. Where would you go? Name three places.”

  First one is easy. “Paris.”

  “Cliché.”

  Okay, there are correct answers. “Morocco.”

  “I like.”

  “Montreal.”

  “Canada? That’s like America’s sideline.”

  “A weekend trip then. On the way to Prague.”

  “Oooooh, Prague. Yes, please.”

  I put down my fork. “Where would you go?”

  Jenny closes her eyes to think. “Paris, Morocco, and Montreal. And Prague.”

  “All good places.”

  “I have a longer list, but I’d start there.”

  “Are you a good flier?”

  “Never flown.”

  “Never?”

  “Neverdy ever.”

  “You’ll get the hang of it in no time.”

  She scratches the back of my hand with a fingernail. “Do you want to travel the world with me?”

  We’d pack light, wouldn’t need to check a stroller. “I do, Jenny.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I am too, Jenny.”

  A beat. “I love you.”

  “I love you.”

  “… you want to get back in line at the buffet?”

  “Lead the way.”

  March 12

  Paris Theater (4 West Fifty-eighth Street)

  We bought our tickets from the usher in the glassed-in vestibule on Fifty-eighth. We climbed the crooked staircase. We took our seats and waited for the lights to dim, for the curtain to part, for the tommy gun percussion of the projector to perforate the hushed murmuring of the sparse midday crowd.

  We make out in the balcony like teenagers. We make out until our lips are swollen. We don’t even pay attention to the movie, can’t kiss and read the subtitles at the same time. Neither of us speaks a syllable beyond emergency French.

  Jenny texts Paul afterward, when we’re walking past the Plaza and into the park. She tells him that she’s in the mood for cassoulet. “He says he’s chomping at the bit to cook it.”

  “It’s ‘champing at the bit.’ The expression.”

  “I know.”

  “He’s only chomping because he doesn’t know I’m joining.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Does he know about us?”

  Jenny gives a half smile. “Knows about us or know he knows about us?”

  “Either.”

  “He hasn’t said anything to me,” she relays, and her smile curdles bittersweet. I may have grimaced at this point; it’s difficult to control every facial tic. Paul and I have a friendship built on sand and broken glass, unified at the very least by our love for Jenny—his open, mine less so. But it is a friendship, which makes it an even stranger relationship than the one I’m in with Jenny. Would that he openly and nakedly wanted to crush my skull—I’d know better what to do with that.

  Later, when Paul opens the door, his face falls to see me standing behind Jenny, grinning and holding a bottle of wine. I’m everybody’s friend, Paul. I’m coming for dinner, and you and I are going to get along and have a nice conversation. When I ask you about your day, as I do while you confit a duck leg, I care about the answer. Jenny smokes out the window, we sip wine, and you get to recount your life to someone who wants to hear about it. Accept this new stasis, bury your suspicions deep—not because they aren’t valid, but because no good can come of them.

  Jenny checks the recipe and whines to Paul, “Where’s the bacon?” He glances over the printout. “There’s no bacon,” he protests, more confused than assertive.

  “No! You’re making a Castelnaudary cassoulet instead of a Toulouse cassoulet. The Toulouse one has meaty happy bacon joy.” Paul and I share a look over Jenny’s head. “I’m serious.” She jostles him, grabs his arms, and shakes him back and forth. “This should have bacon. It makes s
uch a difference.”

  Paul shrugs and throws on his jacket. “I’ll be right back.”

  She watches Paul from the window, then leaps onto my lap. “You’ll have to explain what just happened.”

  “I knew what recipe he was going to use. If we had bacon, I would have sent him out for carrots, or leeks, or celery.”

  “You looked up varieties of cassoulet?”

  She bites her lip. “Yes, goose, I wanted to give us more time alone.”

  “He’ll be back in ten minutes.” I actually feel annoyed on Paul’s behalf.

  Then she kisses me on my swollen mouth and I don’t feel anything toward Paul. “I want more time.” Another kiss. “I want as much time as I can get.” Another kiss. Her mouth on mine before I can come up for air. “I want all of the time.”

  March 19

  Museum of Modern Art (11 West Fifty-third Street)

  “The painting on the left is called Man with a Guitar and it’s by a French artist named Georges Braque. He was one of the founders of the school of cubism. What do you see?”

  “You know that I know all of this already.”

  “Humor me. Pretend someday I’ll teach art.”

  “Okay, but only if you pretend I’m really young and ignorant. That gets me wet. Now tell my lady brain about the mishy-mashy paint wall.”

  I’m practicing for when I give this lesson to Jackson, Jenny. That’s what I’m hoping you don’t hear in my tone. She goes wide-eyed, cupping her chin in two fists. It’s a cuteness designed to let me know I’m not really offending her. “In cubism, the subject is simultaneously broken down into parts but also analyzed from multiple angles, so as to see it in its actual entirety, even on a two-dimensional plane. Braque takes a man with a guitar and shows him from every conceivable viewpoint, rendering the subject abstract but more truthfully represented. Now the painting on the right”—I take her hand and drag her two feet over—“Is called Ma Jolie, or My Pretty. It’s by Pablo Picasso. This painting combines both a depiction of a woman Picasso was in love with, or at least sleeping with, and a song that was popular at the time. So it shows both the musical notation that would indicate the song but also an abstract portrait of … let’s call her his love.”