Little Disasters

by Randall Klein

  I can try to walk by Manuel with a smile and wave, scan my keycard, and take the elevator up to the inevitably empty office.

  Or I can walk up to Manuel, tell him I’ve forgotten my keycard, get him to let me in as unspoken approval that I’m bringing a suitcase into the office at one in the morning, which is rarely a work-related act.

  Or I can ask Manuel for his permission to camp out in the office, making him a full accomplice.

  Of course, he could refuse, tell me that people cannot sleep in the office, or report me in an e-mail to Gregg. I tread an eggshell path across the office lobby. He’s watching me the whole way, his mouth smiling under curious eyes. “Hello, Mr. Fenniger,” he says.

  I hybridize my three options. “Hello, Manuel,” I bellow cheerfully. That my eyes are still puffy from crying on the subway is probably a giveaway that not everything is all right. “Is it okay if I go up to the office?”

  “Of course! Do you need a keycard?”

  “No, I’ve got it.” I look at my suitcase until he does too. “So, when do the first people usually arrive on my floor?”

  He holds up a single finger and I think he’s telling me one, as in they should already be arriving, or he’s being cute, and he means that it’s now one, and I’m here, so there’s my answer. But he’s checking his computer. “Most days, Ms. Blaine is the first one in, around six forty-five.” Emily Blaine. One of the partners.

  “Does that sort of thing get checked? When people come and go?”

  Manuel steeples his fingers pensively. “I don’t really know.” He comes around from behind the desk. “I think I heard a noise on your floor about a half hour ago,” he says. “Why don’t you follow me up and we’ll check on it.” With that, he sweeps me through the main gate and into my office, his keycard logged in the system, leaving me alone with only the motion sensors on the lights keeping me company.

  She watched me pack a suitcase, arms crossed the entire time. Cigarette in one hand, drink in the other, she seethed while I chose my clothing as slowly as possible. The only thing she said to me, when I started to zip up, was, “You’ll need more than that.”

  Jacob Weinstock comes into the office once a week, if that. Other partners joke that he’s senile, but I’ve seen the man quote case law from decades ago verbatim from memory. Mostly when he comes in he reads the newspaper behind his desk and throws in his two cents on matters too complex for the associates. Given his tenure with the firm, however, he gets his own large office, furnished with two couches. He doesn’t bother to lock the door, so I roll my suitcase in and plug my phone into his wall. Then I take off my shoes, set my phone’s alarm to wake me at five forty-five, and lay still as I can until the motion sensor forgets about me and clicks off the lights.

  Michael Gould

  Present Day: July 19, 2010

  3:15 PM

  I wend my way through back streets of Queens. Whoever landed here got monopoly and built warehouses, tucked shipping containers in alleyways, as if a giant child spilled his toys and didn’t bother to pick them up. This is an empty place, and I walk quickly through it.

  I cross Pulaski Bridge, venturing over the stinking canal, acres of toxic sludge buried belowground, the mistakes of generations poisoning the water table and raising a sulfurous stench. The bridge rumbles beneath me with every passing truck. And when I step off, I am in Brooklyn. I am back in my borough.

  I hold my breath past the onion tanks of the sewage treatment plant, alien and silver reflecting the glare of the afternoon sun. My bottle is empty but doesn’t worry me. It doesn’t bother me at all. My thirst will be slaked soon.

  I don’t slow, just turn my head to the right, check the plume of smoke across the river. It still rises, now twinned, constant and steady, neither expanding nor sputtering away. Somewhere in Manhattan, something burns, whether a building or an entire block. But I’m on this side of the river. I gaze across, safely buffered by the barrier of slow, deep water.

  I march, one step in front of the other, ignoring the anguish in my heels each time I step down.

  I drip sweat from every pore. Still. This goddamn day.

  I am on my way home, along the river, all the way to Red Hook.

  I have a stop to make first.

  I will be your reckoning, Jennifer Sayles. I will be your choice. You cannot have ended us in a text message, Jenny—that’s not how rational adults act. If you need us to be tragic, we can be tragic. We can be the lamentable pair at the mercy of brooding gods. I’ll rend my garments and wail next to you. But it has to mean something. I didn’t just cheat on my wife. I didn’t build everything I’ve built for thirty-three years and then tear it down like some sweaty salesman at the hotel bar, falling into a honey trap to stave off the boredom of living on a plateau. It’s more important than that. It has to be. I’m not acting entitled, but it simply has to be.

  Michael Gould

  One Month Ago: June 18, 2010

  More than six months have passed since Jolie’s death and Rebecca still mourns in waves. Most days she goes about her routine, walks Jackson to the end of the pier and back, trying to teach him to wave to the Statue of Liberty, in preparation for what is beyond my ken. Some days she wanders around the apartment as if she’d been cruelly blindfolded, spun around, and she now has to reacclimate using an entirely different sense. She’ll bump into the counter, forget how to open the oven, let her buzzer beep shrill while she takes her cookies out, then go to turn it off. These are cataclysms in the world of Rebecca Gould.

  I’ve grown skilled in reading the spillage of rocks to detect the avalanche. When Dawn had to stop carrying Rebecca’s cookies, because Dawn’s restaurants were folding one by one in spite of a tidal wave of gentrification, it cut Rebecca deeply. Financially, we were fine, but her empire sputtered in fits and starts. I made myself present at these strange, fragile times, even helping in the kitchen as much as Rebecca would allow, taking every chore she’d let me take off of her shoulders.

  The steepest drop came after Detective Lewis’s last call. Jolie’s case stays open. I like Detective Lewis. She doesn’t bullshit. Jolie ran in dangerous circles, and those circles tended to be closed off from the rest of the world. Detective Lewis will continue to investigate, but she braced Rebecca for the possibility that Jolie’s murder will go unsolved. That led to the Jolie-yard stare, the Jolie tremens, and Jolie alcohol syndrome. I pulled a sobbing Rebecca off the toilet and put half an Ambien under her tongue, stroked her head until she passed out. In sickness and in health. We never spoke of that afternoon again.

  I felt the tremors early yesterday, Rebecca coming down again with a case of the Jolies. She forgot the word chip. As in, “Could you check to see if I have enough chocolate?” Then pointing at the bin. At the bin, jabbing her finger. “Chocolate …” She formed the word and spat it out of her mouth like it was lukewarm. “Chocolate …”

  “Chips?” I helped.

  She looked crestfallen, sprayed a sterile counter with vinegar solution, and said, “Yes, chocolate chips.”

  So tonight I’m home, having bathed my son and tucked him in, giving Rebecca a chance to catch up on anything she could possibly want to catch up on. Read a book, watch television, drink herself into a stupor—all on the menu. I grabbed us dinner from the only Chinese food storefront within walking distance.

  “This is the absolute middle of the road for Chinese food,” I comment after a few bites of the house fried rice. “It’s not bad, but it’s not good. I can’t even think of adjectives I’d use to describe it.”

  “Not too greasy,” Rebecca remarks. She’s ordered orange beef, her go-to dish.

  “Also not too dry,” I counter.

  “It’s passable.” She smiles a little. This is how she comes back, in tentative steps to the land of the living, where her life goes on.

  “It’s tolerable.”

  “I would eat it again if we really wanted Chinese food and were too lazy to walk to somewhere we like.” And with that assessmen
t final, we eat in amiable silence until the doorbell rings.

  Rebecca bolts down the steps. I hone my ears to the monitor, hear nothing out of Jackson’s room but contented baby breath whooshing loud-soft-loud. Two sets of footsteps come back up and, suddenly, wholly unexpectedly, there’s Jenny in my apartment. Jenny walking in front of Rebecca, whose face has changed completely. Rebecca’s face, that is. She’s gone from mousy to steel magnolia in a flight of stairs, because she once again has someone to take care of. This is the truest shortcut out of grand mal Jolie, replacing one wounded animal with another.

  Oh, Jenny is crying. That’s why Rebecca has her arms on Jenny’s shoulders. That’s why Rebecca has gone into octopus-caregiver mode, with arms reaching for glasses of water and a box of tissues and turning the volume down on the monitor and putting cookies on a plate while offering words of encouragement. Jenny turns to me while Rebecca’s head is in the fridge and mouths Sorry. I shrug, because I have no idea what she is sorry for.

  Hands steady, voice plangent, Jenny sits on our couch and tells the tale about that low-down, no-good man of hers. She calls him that, grins ruefully to say it, like this is a performance and we’re her audience, or this is a sales pitch and we’re her customers. I catch this moment, this feeling of being hoodwinked, and it nags at me, makes me want to roll my eyes and ask Jenny for more matter and less art, but Rebecca’s hand is on Jenny’s knee and her eyes are limpid, bottomless pools of empathy. That strange rictus grin Jenny musters fishhooks my wife completely. And so I sit back and silence my phone, because the show is about to begin.

  She starts with the premise: she’s found some things on Paul’s computer. A bit of elaboration and red flags go flying for me, because I am currently in a sexual relationship with two women and I still find time every week to take care of myself. Explaining why would involve a long treatise on the nature of male sexuality that I’m flaccid even considering. My point is that if Jenny has shown up on our doorstep because Paul ogled some models, I’ll need to start prepping damage control for when she finds out where I’ve been when I’m “checking my e-mail.”

  Nope. It goes much deeper than that. Red flags retracted. Interest piqued.

  Paul’s porn habit takes all sorts of forms, from role-playing to gathering cock shots, as if he has been trying to collect the whole set. Jenny has spent the day going through his computer after demanding the passwords from a spectacularly booted and banished Paul. She makes it clear to us that she has no problem with Paul looking at porn, gives the pat speech about how it’s natural. We nod along, Rebecca more sympathetically, though, when Jenny explains the betrayal she feels here is in how personal he got with strangers. She found long exchanges in chat rooms about Jenny, about their marriage, about their baby. “He should have been talking with me,” Jenny strains. “He’s got, like, a dozen different online personalities, and they hold no resemblance to my husband. One minute he’s telling people about what I’m going through, and the next minute he’s on a different board pretending to be a sophomore at Columbia trolling for dick. Literally the next minute. Everything is time stamped.”

  My eyebrows are arched in a frozen expression of solidarity, but my thoughts are twofold.

  First, that motherfucker. That phony motherfucker whining passive-aggressive commentary and staring at us with self-righteous, heavy-lidded looks, wielding his weapons from the moral high ground, as if to say that he knows what we’re doing; he knows and he disapproves. Fuck him.

  Second, I relish in his weakness. I bask in how even in his cheating Paul maintained a fidelity, that he couldn’t even allow himself the thrill of human contact. Maybe this is just what’s been discovered, the smoke and mirrors on stage right while he bangs away at that actress on stage left. I contemplate bringing that up here, but it’s information best kept in reserve. Paul doesn’t need a stronger push. I suspect, from everything Jenny is saying, that this is as far as Paul has gone, this is all this fucking actor can muster.

  “How can we help?” Rebecca asks, her voice tight.

  Jenny takes the question in, gives her answer serious thought. It’s right here, at this very moment, that I understand why she has come here and told us all of this. The sympathetic ear, the cookies, the looks of deep and terrible understanding, all of those are gravy. She’s here to let me know that Paul is, for the time being, out of the picture, which means the picture now has a Michael-size gap in it. Whether she’s asking me to fill it or expecting me to fill it is another matter. “I want someone to say this out loud to, make sure I’m not being crazy, or unreasonable for kicking him out,” she says, finally.

  When Rebecca has reassured her that she’s not, and a few placating cookies have been consumed, Jenny asks me to walk her back to the subway. Not the bus, that would be one block outside my apartment, but the subway, fifteen minutes away. Right before I leave I take one last look at Rebecca, see her tidying up, turning the monitor back to jet engine volume, once again troubled, deep in the throes of the Jolies.

  We’re not even to the end of the block when Jenny confirms all of my suspicions. She turns to me and says, “I need you to step up your game, Mickey Gould.”

  And I ask, like an interviewer bewitched by a starlet’s meteoric rise, “What do you think the future holds for you and Paul?”

  “I don’t ever want to see Paul again,” she replies. “I get that what I’m doing is worse than what he’s doing. I’m not going to pretend it’s just different; it’s fundamentally worse. So I can’t explain why I feel so betrayed, but I can’t even look at him.”

  This is the lesson my father never taught me. This is the lesson my mother left unlearned. If I knew how it all worked, the sheer logistics of extricating myself from one relationship to become fully involved in another, doing so without Rebecca thinking I’m a villain, without making it hard for me to see Jackson, I could commit to that course of action. I could amend the parts where Rebecca blames me for her unhappiness, or where Jackson grows up thinking I abandoned him. My parents never sat me down and instructed me on the finer points of how to not destroy lives. They never gave me the guidance to know what choices were the right choices, how to know if I had a good thing going.

  If I knew for certain that my life would be happier with Jenny than it’s been with Rebecca I could get on the train with her now and come back later to pick up my razor.

  “Mickey, I want to be yours. If you let me, I will be your choice. If this is something you’re not sure about, and you want me to fight for us, I’ll do it. I’ll fight you for us. I’ll prove how right I am for you. But if you’ve made up your mind, and you just don’t want to be the person who ends the relationship, then I can’t fight. I can’t fight nothing, Mickey. But I will fight.”

  I stand with her at the entrance to the subway. “I need time,” I say.

  “I know. I know you do.” She strokes my face. “Don’t take too long.”

  *

  • • •

  Walking back, it eludes me why this is important, but I need to remember how I met Rebecca. I need to have that first moment in my head. It doesn’t come to me, though. All I remember is the moment we cemented, when in my heart and in my gut, turning back was no longer an option.

  I introduced her as Rebecca. Just Rebecca, like a celebrity famous enough to forgo a last name. She wore white to further darken her complexion, bury deep the Irish flush. Marty and Miriam, ever polite and passive-aggressive, didn’t address the matter directly. Instead, my mother served kreplach for dinner.

  “Have you ever had these before, dear?” Miriam asked, her voice lined with honey.

  And Rebecca, poor little shiksa lamb, said, “Of course I have. My mom made ravioli all the time.” I let out a noise like a death rattle while my mother stood, triumphant, and ladled applesauce onto my plate. I’d brought a gentile girl home. A McMahon at that. My parents would be nice to her, they would be welcoming and even charming, but they would never accept her. I could slap a ring on her finger and
a baby in her belly and my parents would still refer to her as “Michael’s girl,” a tentative label for a temporary distraction.

  After dinner, my parents employed the divide-and-conquer strategy, my mother grabbing me to help her clean up while my father took Rebecca around the living room, showing her photos in cheap gilt frames of me as a boy, pictures worn as the carpet. He closed the tour at the mantelpiece, where a giant curved objet d’art dominated the space. It had the gloss of plastic. I dried dishes and watched Rebecca motion to touch it, seeking permission from my father. “Are you helping or are you watching?” my mother asked.

  My father smiled warmly and put it in her hands. “That”—he tightened her grip—“is a shofar from Krasnystaw. Do you know where that is?”

  “I don’t,” Rebecca admitted. She admits when she doesn’t know something. I love that about her.

  “It’s in a part of Poland that used to be called Galicia. It’s where my family is from, both the parts of it that survived and the parts that didn’t. The whole town was a welcome mat for the rest of Poland. Russians wiped their feet on us, Germans stamped their boots. You’ve heard of the Warsaw Ghetto, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Lodz?” he tested.

  “Yes.” Atta girl.

  “Krasnystaw was another place where the Jewish people were rounded up before being sent to the camps. Not so famous as the others.” He leaned forward and confided, “I don’t think Michael’s mother could tell you where Krasnystaw is, and she’s been dusting this shofar for over thirty years.”

  “I most certainly could.” My mother didn’t break her scrubbing rhythm to shout. She can shout through anything.

  Rebecca held it in her hands firmly, but gently, like she would a baby. My father laughed to see how unnatural it looked. He lifted it from her grasp, held it in one hand, and raised it to his mouth, heralding a piercing, flatulent sound that resonated through the house. Soft laughter emanated from my mother.