Little Disasters

by Randall Klein

  “Rounding up?” Jenny cocks an eyebrow. She walks up to the side, looks at the brushwork to see how thick Braque or Picasso laid it on, peers as close as she can get to the canvas itself before the guard asks her to step back. We’ve seen all the greatest hits today, all the furious lines and big ideas.

  She turns to me and whispers, “What do you notice about this room?” I look around and see that everyone else has his or her phone out and is taking pictures of the paintings, seeing the masterworks of the modern era through iPhone screens. “Exactly,” Jenny remarks.

  She turns back from Ma Jolie to face me. “Is this what your painting looks like?”

  “Sort of. I’m a bigger fan of abstract expressionism. Think Jackson Pollock.”

  “Only less so?”

  “Only more so.”

  She turns back to the painting to sound casual. “I want to see what you paint.”

  “I want to read what you write,” I retort. Her spine straightens as she considers this. “Like a hostage swap?” she asks.

  “I’ll trust you if you trust me.”

  “I trust you.” She takes my hand again. It feels empty now without hers tucked into it. I walk on her right because my left arm and her right arm are the perfect hand-holding length. We tried the other way but it left either our shoulders or our wrists in an awkward crook. My left and her right fit together perfectly, as if our arms and wrists and hands and fingers were designed for this love. “Come on, professor. Show me this art only more so.”

  *

  • • •

  At home, Rebecca bakes cookies for Dawn de la Puente, who has trimmed her order but still keeps the ovens perpetually warm at Becky’s Bites. Rebecca added a few other restaurants in the past month, her reach spreading, her reputation growing. I catch her bent over accounting software as often as bent over a mixing bowl now.

  “Empire building?” I ask to be cute.

  “Empire building.” Serious as a librarian in her reply.

  She goes to sleep earlier, often before I get home. I soft-shoe into our room and she doesn’t stir for me. I had never gone a full day without speaking to my wife. I’ve done so three times in the past month. These statistics trouble me, ominous as an engine rattle, as a dark spot on an X-ray.

  April 2

  Staten Island Ferry (alight at 4 South Street)

  Cold snap snapped, warm weather abounds, spring has sprung. Saltwater scent envelops us, wind blows her hair into curtains. We lean against the railing and watch the Statue pass us. We tip our hats and wave.

  “I can’t believe I’ve never done this before,” Jenny yells over the noise of wake. “Do you think we’re going to hit that boat?”

  “Probably not.” I squint into the horizon. It’s a party boat, running a tour. “It’s been years since I’ve been on this. Rebecca and I took a trip the first week we lived here. She wanted to set foot on all five boroughs to feel like a real New Yorker. The terminal was as far as she wanted to go into Staten Island, and I think we got out of the subway in the Bronx, had a slice of pizza at the first place we saw, and got back on. Five boroughs, one week.” It’s a pleasant memory and I share it, casually, speaking of my wife with the same tone I speak about my mother and father.

  Jenny tilts on her hip, though, before she gets quiet. Her whole body reacts when she’s upset. It shuts down, locks up. Every joint sets itself with a click. “I don’t like it when you talk about Rebecca,” she says. She means to say it quietly but has to shout to be heard. “I know that’s unfair, but I don’t like it.”

  I don’t know what to say to that, how to respond to something so patently ludicrous, so I don’t respond at all. I lean against the railing next to her. Jenny usually keeps up a patter the entire time we’re together, but we chug along the rest of the way to Staten Island in silence. On a typical day, when she’s not angry with me, when the conversation lulls, she pulls a question out from her bag of dinner party games, asks me something that she herself wants to answer. To shut down the conversation is tantamount to arguing; I fight my loudest with Jenny in absolute silence. At the terminal in Staten Island, we stand there and regard each other with a challenge. What did you expect? How did you think this would go?

  We look into each other’s eyes and see the affair that we’ve dressed up in finery, and we’re each, in our own way, mortified that we convinced ourselves it rose above the hoi polloi, that we had an ounce of class.

  And we hated each other, in the Staten Island Terminal, for sharing in the costuming, and in the sham.

  Then we get on the same ferry, because we’re in Staten Island. Because there isn’t a separate subway for us to take. Had we had this fight in Brooklyn, or Queens, or Manhattan, or the Bronx, we could have broken up and gone our separate ways then and there. By the grace or the curse of the disfigured Kennedy child of boroughs were we forced to board the same boat back. On that boat, we simultaneously noticed how many people had done exactly what we had just done. It was like no one actually lived in Staten Island—we had just shared an experience with a few hundred other tourists too cheap to get tickets for a cruise tour. Jenny and I share this joke silently. Then I put my hand on her thigh. She turns to me and asks, “If you could own any exotic pet, what would it be?”

  And I reply, “What would you choose?”

  Right on cue, “I’m glad you asked …”

  Later in the evening I sit across from Paul, having dinner away from Rebecca and Jackson, because I’m in love with another woman and that beast needs to be fed. But I sit across from him and make pleasant conversation and then, after the bottle of wine is finished and I’ve helped clear the table and maybe even washed the dishes, I go home. I go home and leave her with Paul, who I hear plenty about. It wouldn’t be out of line to have brought that up on the ferry, to throw a little elbow back at Jenny, show that I can get angry as well, to call her out on hypocritical bullshit. It could double as a test, see how fast we throw the brakes, see if we can slow it down before it even devolves into a fight.

  On the boat ride back, after we’ve made up, after she gave a half apology and I gave a half apology in response, we stand on the bow of the ferry and gaze out over lower Manhattan. The sky runs blue in every direction, sailboats dot the distance. It’s short-sleeve weather. What would winning an argument accomplish?

  April 5

  Deno’s Wonder Wheel Amusement Park (3059 Denos Vourderis Place, Brooklyn)

  Around and around we go. Who are these other people in the other cars on the Ferris wheel? Don’t they have jobs? I do. I finished the third of four chairs this morning. Jenny indexed a book about the Louisiana Purchase. Hearing that she actually did tangible work surprises me a little. Something about Jenny smacks of the idle rich, like she has hobbies rather than employment. She’s always claiming to be writing a novel, or revising a novel, but I never hear about a publisher or an agent. Or any specifics about the novel itself. And there’s the editorial work she does, which is real enough that I see the checks “for editorial services” on her counter. Then we meet and come to Coney Island, where she gets a ridiculously large lollipop for the visual effect it provides.

  The man running the ride lets us spin as long as we want. He has no line, no one waits, so why not keep it going—let the cars that slide keep sliding back and forth, let the couples in the stationary cars keep staring out over the ocean at the toy boat tankers before going back to kissing. When it’s busier he’ll short a couple cars on their turn. The New York economy evens everything out.

  After this we’ll get funnel cake and walk the boardwalk. Maybe we’ll stop into the aquarium, or sit on the sand for the afternoon. Maybe the freak show. Or maybe we’ll head back to Greenpoint, with a quick stop in Midwood to show her a sliver of where I grew up and get a slice at Di Fara’s.

  In the meantime, around and around we go.

  April 15

  Brooklyn Bridge

  I make a mental list of all the torturous walks in history: the Trail of
Tears, the Bataan Death March. There were death marches at the end of the Holocaust, but those don’t have catchy names. I relate this to Jenny as we crest the Williamsburg Bridge and she tells me to grow some balls. Then she takes a Nalgene bottle from her bag that looks like it’s filled with red Gatorade.

  “I’m not thirsty.”

  “Drink it anyway,” she insists. I open it up and tilt my head back. It’s Campari and soda. She’s mixed us a giant batch of Campari and soda for our long walk. “First of the year,” she says proudly.

  We wend our way through the Lower East Side, through Chinatown. We eat donuts on Grand Street, steamed buns on Mott. We write caloric checks and hope our long walks can cash them.

  On the Brooklyn Bridge, we hang to the right, avoiding the bikes that zip down the wooden slats at compound-fracture speed. Hordes of German tourists stand still and point and take photographs with digital cameras, lenses telescopic, getting in our way and occasionally drifting into the bike lane. Jenny and I admittedly take up more space than we should, walking side by side with our hands interwoven rather than in single file. We’ve put a dent in our thirty-two ounces of aperitif and both of us ride a nice buzz.

  “Would you ever live anywhere other than New York?” I ask.

  “I have lived elsewhere already.”

  “Where did you grow up?” This question has been asked in the past. It’s in the first dozen questions of any bar pickup. But Jenny dodges it like she’s in witness protection.

  She starts to answer, then catches herself. “Is that Governor’s Island?”

  “Yep.” We walk in silence until the bridge levels out. “Can I ask you a personal question?”

  She squeezes my hand. “You are entitled.”

  “Has it really been five other guys?” It’s taken me weeks to work up the nerve to ask her this, and I don’t think I would if I weren’t mildly drunk right now, but I want to know. I want to know how many others she’s been with since Paul and how she can do it. I want to know her secrets, how she made that work.

  I’ve built this up in my mind as being the most offensive thing I could ask her, an accusation dressed up as an interrogative. If she turned the other way and walked away from me, if she yelled at me or slapped me across my face, if she pushed me off the footpath into fucking traffic it would make sense to me. But Jenny lets out a light laugh, as if she had been waiting to be asked as long as I’ve waited to ask her. “Paul was number eight in my roster,” she says. “You’re lucky number thirteen. So it’s actually four others.”

  “How are you counting them?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What earns someone a number?”

  She gives me a look that I deserve for a dumb question. “His penis has been inside my vagina, Mickey. I don’t count blow jobs as half. I’m not a guy.”

  “How many of those?” In for a penny …

  The look easily transforms into a glare, weary of this grief. “Focus on your own penis. Nothing else belongs to you.”

  “Fair enough.” In for a pound … “Follow-up question.”

  “I expected as much.” She sighs. “Go ahead.”

  “How did you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “… can I use the C word?”

  Now she bristles. “Are you going to call me a cunt?”

  “No! Cheat. How did you cheat?”

  “Oh.” She takes another swig from the Nalgene bottle, turns her face to the sun. “It’s a pretty standard procedure, Mickey. I have sex with men other than Paul. That’s how I cheat.”

  I monotone a droll, “Ha.”

  “Oh, you mean morally? How do I make peace with my God over breaking His commandment?”

  “It’s not an unreasonable question.”

  “The first one happened because Paul was out of town doing a show for a month. Met someone at a bar, took him home, and we had a thing for a month. Paul came back and it ended. He went away quietly. I liked that about him. Numbers two through four just sort of happened. One-night stands that stayed on their feet. Paul suspected all of them, whether during or in retrospect. I’m sure he suspects us, but I keep doing it because he keeps letting me get away with it.” She nods her head. “I made him a victim only once. After that, he gets what he deserves.”

  “Why did the others end?”

  This she mulls over as we walk downhill back into Brooklyn. Our plan is to get a pie at Grimaldi’s, because Jenny has never been. We’ll wait in line with the tourists. “They ended because all of them wanted to push things forward. Or two of them did. The other one ended because these things end. But two of them wanted me to leave Paul, or threatened to out us. I told them they were welcome to and broke it off. Neither of them did. They were both much smaller than Paul and I think they worried he’d beat them to death.”

  And then the crux. All my chips to the center. “How am I different?”

  This she laughs at. Loudly. “You’re Mickey. You just are.” The deep furrow of my brow tells her this answer does not satisfy. “I love you, for starters. I didn’t love the others. And you haven’t pressured me, and while I know some of that is about your own situation, I still appreciate it. You treat me like a grown-up, which I am, so that’s a point in your favor. I mean, why do we love anyone, Mickey Gould?” She gives up when she sees the line for Grimaldi’s, skipping ahead, waving me on.

  It’s a good question. Why do we love anyone? Because we choose to. And then we do because we no longer have the choice.

  And then what happens?

  April 20

  Economy Candy (108 Rivington Street)

  She picks out gummy lobsters and gummy butterflies and gummy strawberries and gummy root beer bottles and gummy worms and gummy dinosaurs and gummy letters. Everything but gummy bears. “I don’t like the taste,” she claims.

  I get a quarter pound of licorice jelly beans. “The fuck is wrong with you, Mickey.”

  “I like licorice.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Well then I won’t have to share with you.”

  “Or I won’t kiss you because you’ll taste of licorice.”

  “… you’ll still kiss me.”

  “Harrumph. I will, but I won’t like it. And I’ll probably pinch you as well.”

  I grab a box of Junior Mints on my way to the register.

  May 4

  Belvedere Castle (Central Park above the Seventy-ninth Street Transverse)

  On the ramparts of the castle we have a treetop view of Manhattan. Such an unusual perspective, to see the roof of the Met and feel like you are eye level with some of the lower buildings surrounding the park. We both appreciate the fairy-tale kitsch of it, the silliness of a faux castle in the middle of Central Park, overlooking a murky pond. Hardly worth invading unless you’re a tourist. Wander south a few hundred yards and we’d hike through Jolie’s final resting place, or her initial final resting place. But Jenny people-watches from her perch, eyes the even more absurd turret to determine how high we are able to go before it’s trespassing.

  I hadn’t seen her in over two weeks. Circumstance gets the blame for the absence, though Jenny thinks that I could stand to shoulder some of it as well. I’ve missed her terribly, a cavernous ache swelled inside of me that my thoughts kept getting sucked into. But I and my father took Jackson to his first baseball game, minor league at Coney Island. It underwhelmed him, but I lived out a long dormant paternal dream, spreading the gospel to the next generation. While he chewed on a cold rubber ring to sooth his broken gums, I taught him about the infield shift.

  Rebecca and I celebrated our anniversary a week ago. After seven consecutive days at home, fully present, fully attentive, she’s warmed to me again. Jackson spent his first night away from home so that Rebecca and I could have the place to ourselves. That was the euphemism we all used, my parents and my wife and I, each one of us speaking in code to avoid saying that my wife and I wanted to have sex without keening our ears to a baby monitor, and that Rebe
cca wanted to make the guinea pig squeak she makes when she gets close to coming. We did and she did, and afterward we lay facing each other, and she ran her hands over my body as if in disbelief that it was there, that I’m still solid, flesh and bone, and not the aching pain of the phantom husband she lost.

  I got her further on my good side with the work I did. In my workshop I felt comfortable taking my phone out and texting Jenny, though she responded brusquely, because my obligations are personal failings whereas her obligations are somehow noble. I built two goddamn tables over the past three weeks. One I sold to a family in Midwood, another gig my father threw me. The other one I carried the few blocks home, even hoisted it up the stairs, and dropped it where the old table used to be. All the while Rebecca had been in the sad little park by our house, letting Jackson play on a patch of grass lest he become weird. She came home and made the same guinea pig squeak. That’s Rebecca’s sound of full approval.

  She spread her arms out and, with utter bliss, hugged our new table. I had made her happy, and this in turn made me happy. It was at this point I realized I had entered the friend zone with my own wife. Making a table for Rebecca was neither an audition nor something to barter for sex. I planed and sanded and screwed it all together because she wanted one and there was no good reason not to make her one. What a passionless experience.

  I want the mountains of a relationship; I’m too young to move to the plains.

  Back at the castle I lay my forehead between Jenny’s shoulder blades. We haven’t put ourselves back together again. She didn’t even want to meet me in Greenpoint to travel together. We took separate trains to the park, texting horrible directions back and forth until we found each other. She told me that she was near a big tree at one point. It’s really big. I replied that I’m next to a squirrel, then not anymore. We haven’t yet had the sex that’s supposed to bond this relationship together. That’s one of the advantages of starting from that animalistic, physical place. We have a safe space to which we can return. My head on her back, her breath even, standing in a castle, we simply haven’t found our way back there yet.