Little Disasters

by Randall Klein

  As he gets closer I flinch to see his face. He’s the shade of red kids get when they hang upside down for five minutes. Flecks of skin like broken shards of potato chips have already started to flake from his ruined cheeks and nose. Whatever other feelings I have toward him right now are cut through with horror. Today will inevitably leave multiple people scarred. It will leave Michael Gould scarred and leathery.

  He tries to be insouciant with me, aims for gallows humor, but I’m too exhausted to laugh. He doesn’t know what’s happened today any more than I do, but he thinks he does. Michael Gould is that subspecies of New Yorker who knows everything, even when he doesn’t. I’m glad for his uncertainty, though. To hear terrible news from Michael Gould’s mouth would sit sour in my gut, to have to remember hearing about a bomb or a crash with Michael would render the moment all the more grotesque.

  I can’t stand up anymore. My legs are scaffolding, about to collapse. There’s a spot in the shade against the park’s fence so I sit there. Michael sits down next to me, and after I take a moment to collect and situate myself, it sinks in that something will need to be done. I may need to summon the strength to cave his skull in. The fence I’m leaning against is tipped in spikes and I consider from my seated, vacant-eyed position whether it’s been built sharp enough to impale. “Do you want a beer?” I say. It comes out polite; I’m pleased with my tone, but in truth I want him away long enough to either get Jenny to spot me across the street or to give me an alternative to beating this man to death.

  Death is a strong word. Probably an exaggeration.

  He scampers off while I stare at the windows in our front room, wonder if Jenny sits in her office typing away or lazing about our bedroom, the only air-conditioned room in the place, reading on our bed. I wonder if she’s worried. Who she’s worried about. In what proportions. Michael comes back a few minutes later; he’s spent almost every cent I gave him, but he brought me a beer so I raise the bottle to him. “What are we toasting to?” he asks. To me not shattering every one of your bones with my hands. I think I’ve kept that thought inside of my head so I wink in response.

  It’s still so hot. I can’t remember a day this hot in my entire life. Not in Cadott. Our summers were mild. Our winters were brutal, winds rattling the house, snowdrifts taller than I was until puberty hit. I close my eyes and bask in those memories, make future plans to take Jenny back to Cadott, demand that she go with me, to see a piece of my past. She won’t need to share hers to see mine, I’ll take her as she is, but I want her to see the pot of dirt from which I grew.

  Michael says something obscene. He’s goading me, aiming to poke the bear into doing something I’ll regret. Maybe he thinks this is the way to Jenny, for her to see me as a savage and him as the enlightened victim. I don’t care. My body relaxes, the sinews in my hands and wrists and arms unclench. I’m not going to give Michael Gould the satisfaction.

  We had a barn on our property in Cadott. Most families did, and most families used their barn for barnlike purposes. Housing livestock, storing farming implements. Not my father. He kept the bus parked in there. And my mother worried, because every winter the roof of the barn would sag under the weight of the snow, and the wind would whistle through the slats, and she worried that it would collapse on the bus, or on my father. But he reassured her that the barn was built true, and it would hold. Year in and year out, the barn withstood all storms.

  And so would I. There may have been people before Michael Gould, and there very well may be people after him. I’m not blind, nor oblivious, nor stupid. But I’m steadfast, and if I stand in one spot and don’t move, not an inch, Jenny will cleave to me as her barn, a safe spot even in the worst of storms.

  “I’m in love with her too,” he says in his mewling, pathetic voice. My role needs no understudy. You will not take her from me. Not today and not ever. I do not need to beat you senseless to crush you; I do not need to lower myself to vanquish you completely.

  “Now that I believe completely,” I reply, because I do believe him. Jenny is someone I can’t imagine anyone not loving, not being in love with. If the world truly saw her through my eyes, she’d be an earthly deity we were lucky to merely exist alongside.

  As if I called her with my thoughts, like the lady in the tower, Jenny appears at the window. There you are. I came home to you. I walked through the veins of New York to rest outside of your window, under a sycamore tree.

  I wave. She waves back. And I am home.

  Michael Gould

  Two Weeks Ago: July 5, 2010

  These floors are not my floors. But I can walk on them barefoot all the same. Some minutes go by where I stare dumbly at the walls, or I tiptoe my way to furniture, like a dog brought home from the shelter, testing his owner’s patience. Can I sit here? What about here? Here too?

  The only room I’m completely comfortable in is the office. I don’t own any of this, but it all seems to belong to me now.

  Jenny snaps me back to the present. “What are you looking for?”

  “A spatula.”

  “To your left. It’s in there.”

  I lift it triumphantly. Jenny applauds. “I couldn’t see it because it’s flat.”

  This morning I make us eggs. Yesterday morning she got bagels and tofu cream cheese that was better than I ever anticipated it being. Rebecca is all full-fat, lecturing on how there’s no healthy way to eat butter and cheese so you might as well enjoy it sparingly. Jenny likes her gin mixed with diet tonic water, her milk skim, her cream cheese tofu’d. I catch myself comparing the two of them again, column A and column B. I shouldn’t do that, and luckily haven’t done so out loud. This time it happens while I’m cracking shells, working the yolk back and forth for egg-white omelets. My mind wanders, and that dangerous little dwelling is where it wanders to, like an unforgivably stupid child who keeps falling down the same well. If Jenny notices, she hasn’t called me on it yet. Her mind may be on a similar walkabout, circling the same well.

  Rebecca’s name doesn’t come up most days. Neither does Paul’s. Most days, Jenny and I snuggle in our cocoon, phones turned silent, happily sequestered.

  On our first night, we discovered that the act of actually sleeping together involved choreography neither of us practiced for. Our sleep habits never came up, because they never needed to. Napping lacks the formal, Bauhaus structure of sleep for me. I have trouble powering down, so I swaddle myself until my body and mind finally give way and I pass out. Once that point has been reached, I can be molded into any position and comfortably used as one would a stuffed animal. Jenny, on the other hand, can’t sleep unless she is being spooned, enmeshed in arms. After that point, she’ll wake up at any shift in weight, any rustle of a blanket, even a stiff breeze. So far we’re compromising, but I see trouble on that horizon.

  Groggy though we may be, the rest of our relationship hasn’t appreciably changed, only grown more ordinary. She hates cleaning bathrooms. I’ve never been allowed to clean the kitchen. So, I scrub the toilet while she scrubs the stovetop. We didn’t used to clean at all when our time was centered around sex. We still do that as well, and Jenny still puts the chain on the door, though she tries to do so behind my back now, quietly, once I’m in the bedroom, leaving as if she had forgotten something in the heat of the moment, and then the telltale clink of metal on metal, of Jenny once again protecting the fortress of our deceit.

  I still see Jackson, usually every other day. Rebecca goes for a long walk while I spend time with our son. He ironically has chosen this time to develop his sense of humor. Daddy making fart noises with his mouth kills as a reliable closer. Rebecca’s face, the way she looks at me when I come back into the apartment—I recognize it from years ago. From when we first came to Red Hook, and she saw the less chic areas of our neighborhood. Equal parts curiosity and fear. She looks at me now and sees a stranger, and her mind accelerates to decide whether to approach or run away or simply freeze in place.

  She grants me an hour; I’m positive
she sets a timer on her phone before she starts walking. After an hour Rebecca comes back and says, “If you’re staying I’m cooking …” and then fill in the blank with whatever she’s making for herself. It’s her way of trying to initiate a conversation.

  “I should go,” I say, putting my son back in his crib, or his vibrating chair, or on his back on the Technicolor play mat that Rebecca and I once dubbed his “Baby Acid Trip Funland.”

  “We should talk, Michael,” she presses. “When do you think you’ll be ready to talk?”

  “Soon,” I promise, vaguely. Then I leave. And once I’m away from the apartment, and where she cannot see me, I smile to myself because she still cares. She still wants me in spite of everything I’m doing to her. She’s still an option—I’m monstrous for seeing it that way, fine, but it’s warming to be loved and, even more, to be needed.

  Insecurity gets the better of me sometimes. I don’t know what Jenny does when I’m with Jackson, or when I’m in my shop, where I go almost every day. Strange to make the reverse trip, and to be so close to Rebecca and Jackson without seeing them. I ask Tony to photograph me at my lathe, ostensibly for a Web site. In reality, I’m texting the pictures to Jenny, to prove that I am where I say I am. She doesn’t ask me to, but once a cheater … So with one eye on the lathe or the saw or any other sharp object, and one eye on my phone for Jenny’s texts, I wonder what she’s doing, whether she’s in touch with Paul, whether he’s at her apartment now having the conversation that I can’t seem to bring myself to have with Rebecca.

  I ask, in as nonconfrontational a tone as possible, “Do you still love Paul?” She drapes herself over me on the couch, filling in the New York Times crossword puzzle in ink. I’m listening to the Replacements over the speakers with my eyes closed. Jenny considers my question for a moment, completing a clue before answering.

  “No, not anymore.”

  “You can turn it off, just like that?”

  She snaps her fingers. “Just like that.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “You asked me and I answered. If you wanted to give an opinion instead of asking me a question, you should have just said so.”

  I craft a response in my head. “If you love someone once, then a part of you always loves them. It never goes away completely.”

  “Don’t speak for me. That’s like saying ‘people who believe in a Jewish God believe in the one true God.’ If that’s how you feel about Rebecca, fine. But declaring your beliefs with conviction doesn’t make them any less idiotic.”

  Fair enough. “I think, and this is just my own opinion, that if a person, for example, like myself, loves a person, also for example, like you, then regardless of whether you are in my life or not, this person would, in part, continue to love you. And furthermore, again solely the opinion held by me and me alone, I believe that love, once felt, never truly vanishes.”

  Jenny turns her attention back to the vertical clues. “Better. You sound much less crazy. Thank you.”

  Later, in bed, when I’m cuddling her and not getting to sleep, and she can feel me squirming behind her and she’s not getting to sleep, I say to her, “I love your hair. I love the rest of you, all of you, really, but I love love your hair.”

  “I’m going to lose it,” she replies simply. “Not soon, I hope. But the women in my family go bald. My mother is in her mid-sixties and she’s had a wig for a decade.”

  Was that an opening? Let’s find out. “You never talk about your mother.”

  Jenny exhales, languid in my arms. “She once told me, ‘Some people don’t care what they got so long as you got less.’ I guess that applies to our situation if we want it to, but I bring it up because it’s one of the few expressions of hers that I remember. She and I don’t talk very much.” And we’re done with this topic. We lie in silence for a bit until Jenny wiggles her ass into me to snuggle closer. “I just gave you more than I’ve given Fenn in the entirety of knowing him. Do with that what you will.”

  I run my palm over her breast and feel her heartbeat in between my fingertips. “When you start to lose your hair, I’ll shave my head, and we’ll be bald together. We’ll move somewhere nobody knows us, and people will think we survived chemo together, but the reality will be that I’m just hopelessly, helplessly, completely, and unconditionally in love with you.”

  I hold her close until she drifts off. A few hours later, I finally roll over, slow as dismantling a bomb, and join her in sleep.

  The next day, Rebecca comes back early from her walk. I’m feeding Jackson his first blueberries. Rebecca bought them this morning at the farmer’s market, fat and purple and puckered at the top. Jackson can’t decide whether he likes them or not, but he keeps shaking his hands for more. “If you’d like to stay for dinner, I’m making a stir-fry,” she says. I stand up and hand her the cup of blueberries. Behind me, Jackson squeals in protest. “Are we going to have a birthday party for him?”

  “Sure.”

  “Just family, I thought,” she adds. “You, and me, and your parents. We don’t need to tell them about all of this. I don’t want to tell them.”

  “That’s kind of you.”

  “I’m very kind.”

  “You genuinely are, Rebecca.”

  She rubs her eyes. “Michael, I need you to make a decision on how you think this goes forward. Not sometime soon, but immediately.”

  I go to her and hold her close, and she doesn’t resist. She doesn’t push me away. She doesn’t even cry, standing like playing dead, a soft mannequin in my grasp. “Let’s talk after the party. We’ll get drunk and figure everything out. Okay?”

  She shrugs because, really, what else is there to say?

  Michael Gould

  Two Days Ago: July 17, 2010

  Jenny and I finally have our talk. It occurs in between discussions of which bread to buy and whether her sniffles are from allergies or if she’s coming down with a cold. The most important decisions of our lives slipped into the liner notes of lesser conversations.

  I say, “I could start over with you.” I’m holding a loaf of white bread at the time, a generic store brand. Jenny thinks we should go to a bakery and get fancier bread, but if we’re just using it to make bread crumbs, it doesn’t matter. Now that I’ve released that bomb, though, she’s looking at me wide-eyed; perhaps I’ve embarrassed her by starting this conversation in the middle of a grocery store. That doesn’t mean we won’t have it, though, standing before a neat bounty of loaves. “It wouldn’t really be starting over. And it would be messy—I can’t imagine it not being messy, especially for me, because of Jackson. But if you would be patient with me, and understand that I don’t mean for it to get messy, then I think I’d like to knock my current world off its axis and give us a more legitimate try.”

  I hadn’t unpacked my suitcase yet. Jenny hadn’t cleared a drawer for me. We kept waiting for the large-scale event, like buying bread to make crumbs. Jenny takes that bread from my hand and puts our basket on the floor. Then she walks me out to the street.

  “Do you mean that?” The issue has been forced, not that it hasn’t in similar terms before. We’ve spoken at length about all the things that we could do, that we want to do, that we could make possible. It occurs to me that this is how couplehood works. It’s not about making the leap, it’s about acknowledging that you’ve already made it. Rebecca and I had been living together, sharing finances, sharing responsibilities, planning our family by the time we signed a piece of paper that said we were married. Jenny and I sleep together, wake up together, plan our days around one another. We are in a relationship, full-fledged, seemingly on the monogamous end of the scale. Now that we’re standing up to our waist in that quicksand, it’s merely a matter of agreeing that we’re half-sunk.

  “Absolutely. If you leave Paul, I’ll leave Rebecca. Officially. Legally.”

  We walk the rest of the way to her place without speaking, Jenny deep in her own mind. She starts to say something a few times,
turning to me and opening her mouth, as if she had a promise to make or a warning to give but stifled it. Once we get back upstairs she puts the chain on the door, right in front of me, then flusters. Pauses. Collects herself. Then she slowly slides it back off.

  “I love you,” she says.

  “I love you.”

  “We can start from that.” Her hand goes to my chest; she undoes my shirt buttons, one at a time, businesslike, with speed but not passion. I grip her wrist.

  “Don’t ever cheat on me.”

  For an instant she looks angry. Then it dissolves so quickly I think she may have misheard me.

  “I won’t.” My belt follows, then my pants, like she’s undressing a doll. When she’s done with me, and I’m in her kitchen with my boxers around my ankles and not a stitch on me otherwise, she removes her own clothes, just as mechanically. When we’re both finally naked, her look is so intense I wonder if she did all of this to check me for a wire, and to show me she wasn’t wearing one either, that we could trust each other.

  She drags me back into her bedroom and straddles me on the edge of her mattress. “Stay with Rebecca tomorrow night.” She grips my face in her hands. “After the party, stay with Rebecca.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m going to tell Fenn to come over.” She reaches down and guides me inside of her. “Tonight you talk to Rebecca and I’ll talk to Fenn. I’m going to ask for a divorce. You’re going to do the same.”

  “All right.” I move my hands from her hips to her face, but she grabs them, pins them back against her thighs.

  “I’m not ready to marry you,” she hisses.

  “You’re not divorced yet. Neither am I.”

  “Even after that. I’m not sure I’ll ever want to get married again.” She arches her back, leans into my shoulders. I grunt to accede. So we won’t be married. I don’t know why I thought we would be in the first place. “But I want to do something. Something for us. For this.”