Little Disasters

by Randall Klein

  Jenny says to me, “I missed you every minute.”

  “You read my mind,” I reply. She nudges me off.

  She says, “Would seem there might be an easy solution for this.”

  “And what would that be?”

  Jennifer Sayles rolls her eyes at me. Oh you petulant girl. You need to make me say it? You need me to be the first to leap so you can see how badly I might dash my body on the rocks below? Fine. Fine then. Parachute off. Here I go.

  “If you will, I will,” I say. Her chest rises and falls, respirating this offer. “I can’t give up Jackson—”

  She cuts me off with a wave. “I’m not asking you to.”

  “I know. And I’m saying I can’t. But for all the other stuff, if you will, I will.”

  I just said that. I just said that and I meant it. While Jenny considers my life-altering offer, I look down into Turtle Pond, a dark puddle made charming by its location. If she says no, I’m going to leap over this stone wall and swan-dive into it.

  But she doesn’t. She says yes. She says yes and okay and I’d like that and I love you and everything else I want to hear. And we gather our hands once more to get ourselves back into bed in Greenpoint, in a wagon, careening down a steep hill with the brakes missing and the cliff’s edge rushing to meet us and it looks to me exactly like unhinged, glorious freedom.

  June 2

  Jenny and Paul’s Apartment (114 Franklin Street, Brooklyn, New York)

  The leap stalls. We both seek the seismic event that will make this exit strategy from our current relationships either impossible or inevitable. Some great calamity must befall us to sweep away all obstacles. I root for Paul to die. I don’t like myself for doing so. Meanwhile, we’ve exhausted ourselves on New York, on fighting the rising flotsam of tourists. We stay in.

  Jenny and I laze, indecisive about what to get for lunch. Any restaurant is fine by me—there’s nothing she’d suggest that I’d say no to. Certain cuisines may not be as appetizing on a humid, heat-wretched day like today, when New York is in day two of what promises to be a full week of early height-of-summer anguish, but if Jenny were to suggest our favorite Polish restaurant, I’d endure the cement in my stomach and sweat potato flour.

  Nothing, on the other hand, appeals to Jenny, who sprawls out on top of the sheets in jeans and a bra. She shoots down restaurant after restaurant, picking reasons as if plucking petals off flowers. Too far. Too expensive. Bathrooms are always gross. The servers are hipster assholes.

  “What about Greek?” I present it wearily, still in my boxers, halfway to a nap. The afternoon heat hangs in her room, weighs us down. If I closed my eyes I could doze for an hour, easily.

  “I don’t like phyllo dough,” she replies. “It makes me feel like I’m eating an animal’s shell.”

  “You racist.”

  She slaps my side, not entirely playfully. “Don’t call me a racist.”

  “Munf.” I grunt my assent.

  “How about Enid’s?” she suggests. I’ve walked by Enid’s innumerable times, on its cozy corner, and I’ve never been in. “What kind of food is that?”

  “It’s … food. American? Go look at the menu. I’m peckish.” She puts a hand on my hips and shoves, rolling me out of bed. I get my feet underneath me at the last minute and shuffle toward her office. “Grab Paul’s computer,” she calls out after me. “My battery is dead.”

  She boots up Paul’s laptop, her laptop’s twin, save for the distinguishing birthmark of a comedy and tragedy mask sticker taped to the top (“My contribution,” Jenny points, pleased with herself). While it loads up I kiss her side and she giggles, playing with my hair and tickling the small of my back. I buck and shudder, as ticklish as a toddler, amusing Jenny to no end. The menu looks pretty straightforward, things stuck between buns, every dish has one extra artisanal ingredient to placate the clientele. “Let’s do it,” I decide.

  “Lemme check the weather.” Jenny starts to type it into the browser.

  “It’s hot.”

  “I know, I want to know how hot.”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “None, I just like to know.” She screws up the Web address a few times in her haste. Wether.com, then weahter.com.

  “How come it doesn’t autofill?” I point this out, not because I genuinely care, but because I’m so heat-weary that I get punchy, asking questions just to provoke, licking the soft flesh of her belly until she bats my head like chastising a dog.

  “Paul’s computer has a glitch. It never autofills.”

  “Give it here.” I turn it my way, click on a few tabs. “Paul has it set to clear his page history when he logs off. Once he clicks out of his browser, it’s like wiping the blackboard.”

  “Oh,” Jenny says, because what else is one supposed to say at this revelation. She doesn’t seem disturbed by this, more confused, even a little annoyed. She clicks a few buttons and changes Paul’s settings. Now he’ll retain. She closes his laptop, a punctuation mark to the conversation. Full stop. “All fixed.” Then, sharp enough to be considered an order, “Get dressed, I’m starving.”

  Paul Fenniger

  Present Day: July 19, 2010

  2:33 PM

  I come to underneath the shade of a makeshift tent, lying on my back on a yoga mat. I turn my head left and right, on both sides of me are people in states of semiconsciousness. The person next to me appears near death save for the gentle flutter of her eyelids. She lies on top of a towel.

  When I shift my weight I realize I’m covered in wet paper towels, affixed to my body like leeches. Someone has stuck a couple on my chest and neck, wedged a few into my armpits. I’m a papier-mâché man.

  I roll first onto my side to see how that plays. When I don’t immediately black out again I prop myself up on an elbow, then onto my hand, finally sitting upright. There’s a thick wedge of watermelon and a bottle of water just off the mat. Small sips, a few bites, see if it stays down. I probe my head with my fingertips, gently, working my way front to back, first along the sides, then over the top. Slowly, carefully, like a scalp massage. There’s no dried blood, no sore patches. I’m okay. Had I hit my head, were I here for a concussion, some evidence would present itself. I’m in the tent for dehydration—I must have passed out. Last thing I remember was coming up the stairs from the subway.

  A while later, when my stomach keeps down the watermelon and bottle of water, my strength slowly returns. I try to stand on jellied legs, looking for my shirt. A man my father’s age, salt-and-pepper beard neatly trimmed, strides from across the tent to me. “Feeling better?” he asks.

  There was a man selling water at the park entrance. Or giving it out, not selling it. I spoke to him. The thought interrupts, uninvited. It comes back piecemeal. “What happened?”

  “You passed out.” He hands me another bottle of water, takes my empty. “We can’t transport to hospitals for another couple hours, but if you want to rest here, we’ll keep giving you fluids until we can.”

  “What happened?”

  “You were hot and thirsty and you passed out,” he says slower, louder.

  “Sorry. I mean what happened in New York today?”

  He looks toward the city and shrugs. “There’s smoke, so there’s fire. Beyond that, mayor is speaking in about three hours.” I guide my arm over his shoulders and he helps me walk out of the tent.

  By the time I reach its perimeter someone else has taken the yoga mat. “I live near here. Am I okay to walk?”

  “I guess,” he replies.

  “Are you a doctor?” He shakes his head. “An EMT?” No.

  “Community organizer.” He shakes my limp hand. “I’m trained in first aid, though. There’s a doctor around here somewhere. If you’re walking, do you want another bottle of water?”

  Grateful, I take two more from him, tucking them into my pockets. The cool wetness against my thighs provides relief for the trip. I look around at the makeshift medical area. There was a man in the tun
nel who could go no farther. He pressed himself into a wall and waited for help. There was Carl, waiting to hear if his boyfriend is okay. There were people who stayed on the trains, because they were too old or infirm to move in that heat. I look for them, in the hopes we’d recognize each other by scent, by common experience.

  My legs can barely stay vertical. It’s time to go. Paul Fenniger survived.

  It takes a few moments to situate myself in the park, to find my polestar and steer myself home. Thoughts still move soupy through my head. I look for familiarity, be it a landmark or a person. A guide. Jenny, at the park to help and, after finding me, taking me back home.

  McCarren Pool to my right. Tennis courts off a hundred yards to the left. Internal compass aligned. Has it really been this hot up here this entire day? Where is Jenny? One foot in front of the other, Paul. Come on. You got out of the tunnel. Come on. You’re okay. It’s okay. There. There you go.

  At the north end of the park, I walk past a group of hipsters, tossing a Frisbee. I walk past people tending to an illegal homemade grill, essentially a cinder block fire pit dug into the dirt of McCarren Park. Drum and bass thump through speakers, though no one is dancing. Everyone, however, is drinking, raising bottles of IPA to their lips, toasting to being on the other side of the river from the end of the world.

  Paul Fenniger

  One Month Ago: June 17, 2010

  I close the lid of my laptop and leave it on the nightstand, then go to brush my teeth. Jenny slinks in behind me and motions for the toothpaste. We brush our teeth together in quiet, happy domesticity. These are the small moments that make up the brunt of a successful lifetime, brushing your teeth next to someone you love.

  Jenny challenges me, as she always does, to see who can brush the longest. It’s the look in her eye that throws down the gauntlet, and the slowing of her concentric circles, working her molars like she’s trying to gradually sandblast concrete. But I’m game. We brush and brush, spitting and continuing, until I have a goatee of foam and my mouth burns from menthol and I have to quit. She wins again. Jenny raises her toothbrush in triumph and her spit follows mine down the drain.

  We get into bed and I spoon her. She digs herself back into me. Before I turn the lights out, she startles. “Can I check your computer? I forgot to send an e-mail.” I roll over and grab it, hand it over. She boots it back up.

  I passed up an audition today. A slightly bigger company working on a marginally bigger stage. An Arthur Miller play I had never heard of. Measuring the benefits of gaining exposure against being present in my marriage made this no choice whatsoever. Jenny must sniff this secret on me; she’s been side-eyeing me all night, bobbing and weaving. I’ll have to tell her eventually.

  She pokes me in between my shoulder blades. “Fenn? What’s this?”

  I prop up on an elbow. She turns the screen to show me a site for an escort agency in Ottawa. Above it I can see tabs for other pages, for parenting chat rooms and Craigslist ads. But right now she’s focused on the prostitutes in Ottawa.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know? You don’t know how a Web site for an escort service got into your browser history?”

  “Oh.” My stomach lurches and I fear throwing up in our bed. “It’s for work,” I mumble, as casually as I can manage. Heat rushes to my face—I flush and my throat closes up. She clicks through the site in front of me, muttering about reasonable rates and zodiac sign, how thorough. “Jeff is going to Canada and he wants to get a prostitute,” I say with a thin laugh.

  “Jeff … from work?”

  “Jeff from work.”

  “Really Fenn? Let’s help him, then. This one is nice.” Jenny clicks through thumbnail photographs. “Her head is cut off, but her body is very well airbrushed. Do you think Jeff would like her?”

  “I don’t know what kind Jeff would like.”

  “Should I click over to the chat rooms or—”

  “I’m a terrible person,” I blurt out. My cable snaps. I’m freefalling, watching the ground rise up, bracing myself for the last impact of my life. “I’m a terrible person.” Jenny clicks over to the chat rooms anyway, starts perusing my shame. “I’m a terrible person.”

  “Yeah, looks like you kind of are. What the fuck is all this?”

  “It’s stupid,” I explain. “It’s nothing. I’m just looking at stuff. It doesn’t even turn me on.” One more lie on top of all of the others is rancid icing on a bitter cake, but I tell it. “It’s stupid. It’s so stupid. I’m so stupid. No one could think less of me than I do of myself.”

  Jenny keeps clicking, keeps uncovering. “I have a puncher’s chance, Fenn.”

  She stands up, can’t even be next to me in our bed anymore, taking the laptop with her. Jenny parades around in the room, holding our annihilation in her hands. I want to explain to her that she’s the only one I’m attracted to, that all the online stuff is tourism, like going to a bookstore and checking out guidebooks for places you know you’ll never go. It’s harmless voyeurism. My mouth opens to say these words but they die in my chest. She paces, reading, scrolling through whichever page she’s on. “Password,” she says, now icy. I already know what she means. Oh God this gets worse.

  “IloveJen. Capital I, capital J. All one word. No spaces.”

  If looks could maim before they killed.

  I sit up on the edge of the bed, feet on the floor. My hope is that she’s going to read over the last couple, but Jenny isn’t stupid like I am. And she’s not careless. Her eyes scan the page and I know she’s working her way back in time, back ten months, back to July of last year.

  I know what she’s going to find.

  When she does, she winces like a wounded animal. “You told strangers?” I did. I couldn’t talk with her about the hospital, she needed to be the one to talk and get through it. I had to be strong to deal with grief in my own way. So I created a person who resembled me solely in that I am a man who just lost a child. No other connecting details. Then I picked a someone. An anyone out of a support group for child loss. “You told strangers about our dead baby.” She speaks so small, her voice so crushed. “And then … two hours later … you asked Cobrajaws18 what he’d do after he tied you up.”

  “I’m a terrible person.” I shake my head back and forth. Tears well up. I don’t want to cry in front of Jenny. Strength is what she needs. I am her rock. “I’m not even human.”

  “Shut up, Fenn. Is this what you want?”

  “I want you!” I shout.

  “Evidently I’m not enough.”

  “You’re more than enough. But you’re not …” I can explain this. It’s okay. We can get through this. “We have sex maybe twice a month since …”

  “Since …” Her eyes flash wide and dangerous. “Since our child died? Is that when you started cheating on me, you fucking asshole?”

  “It’s not sex,” I plead. “I’m not actually meeting these people. It’s …”

  She fills in the blank, “It’s you jerking off to other women. And men. Jesus, Fenn, who the fuck are you? Men too?”

  “It’s not a sex thing. It is but it’s not. There’s a lot of innocuous stuff there as well. I’m just pretending. It’s like method acting,” I blurt. She stops pacing and then, merciful God in heaven, she closes my laptop and sets it down behind her. Maybe I just found the right key, that this is masturbation. I get myself hard from strangers and kinks and all this other nonsense goes in one eye and out the other and doesn’t matter to me. And then I masturbate. I masturbated before I met Jenny, she knows that because she met me after I was twelve. It’s natural. Should I try to explain this to her, or would that respark the fire?

  Jenny stands stock-still, her legs planted, challenging me to justify. And I could, but for where it would take us. I tread up to my line in the sand, the one I drew there years before. On the other side are straight accusations, conversations we can never come back from. On the line itself are hints and cowardice. And on
my side is the unknowing, of simply not knowing what she hasn’t told me, and that’s where I live. I don’t want to go where I don’t live. In the end I say to her, gently as I can, “I miss sex, Jenny. I miss sex with you. Don’t you miss sex?”

  And while the fight in her doesn’t flare up again, while her face is no longer a mask of rage, I’ve nevertheless said the wrong thing. Jenny looks me in the eye and says, “Get out.”

  I stay seated, because my first thought is baffling stupidity: my name is on the lease here and she can’t really kick me out of my own home. She says again, louder, “Get out. Now.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you sicken me. You sanctimonious, hypocritical pervert.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Shut up and get out, Fenn.”

  I look around. “Where can I go, Jenny?”

  “I don’t care. Maybe one of your online friends has a spare room. Pack a bag and go.”

  “Why don’t I sleep on the couch?” I try to reason.

  And then she plays her trump card. “Paul, one of us is leaving this apartment tonight. If it’s me, you will never see me again. Do you understand?”

  I do. I do understand. Repairing the damage I’ve done begins here, with me on my knees, tears running down my face, throwing a few outfits into a suitcase on the floor of our closet.

  Paul Fenniger

  One Month Ago: June 17, 2010

  I roll my suitcase through the revolving door as smoothly as I can. Manuel sits behind the desk in the lobby, his radio tuned to NPR. He and I have spoken about soccer when I work late—or rather, he’s tried to engage me in a conversation about soccer, especially soccer in Honduras, and I’ve smiled and nodded along.