Little Disasters

by Randall Klein

  “Okay.” I pant a little. “What?”

  “We’ll go to the Cloisters.” She pauses, pushes me back down on the bed and shifts me up until my head is on a pillow. Then Jenny laughs, laughs with me inside of her. “We’ve never been to the Cloisters, so that’s where we’ll go. And we can go there once a year or something and it’ll be our spot and that’s where you and I will start because I love you and you are mine.”

  I come a few seconds after she does. The Cloisters. New territory for both of us, a place to plant our flag.

  Michael Gould

  One Day Ago: July 18, 2010

  Dear Jackson,

  Happy birthday, birthday boy! Before you were born, your mother and I sat down over ramen and spitballed ideas for traditions. We wanted our own, separate from the ones we grew up with. We had, in you, a tabula rasa of ritual. Your mom wanted to take a picture of you every day with her camera, one for each day of your life, from birth to when you turned eighteen. I don’t remember why we nixed that. In fact, none of the traditions we brainstormed that night have come to fruition, but I’ve decided to start one of my own. I’m going to write you a letter each year on your birthday, and when you turn thirty I’m going to give them to you. If I’m not around, someone else will, I promise you that.

  Why thirty? Well, that’s the main point of this first letter. You’re going to be told that you’re an adult multiple times throughout your life. If we raise you Jewish, you’ll be told that you’re an adult at thirteen. This is bullshit. You won’t know which hand to jerk off with when you’re thirteen. Most everywhere else you’ll become an adult when you hit eighteen, as if one day you are a young lad and then, poof, you’ve crossed over and have metamorphosed into a grown man. Again, this is bullshit. At eighteen your best-case scenario is to go off to college. There, you’ll realize how young you are, a realization that renews itself every time you move on to the next point in your life. You’ll graduate from college at twenty-two and then it’s off to the real world, right? I mean, at twenty-two, you’re an adult, right? Maybe. Twenty-two is a maybe.

  I hope you are one of those extraordinary kids who goes straight from undergrad to the working world with a high-paying job in some fledgling industry that will pay you obscene amounts of money. If you aren’t, and given your pedigree I don’t hold this in high hopes, here’s where you walk in on the ground floor. The lobby. Where the receptionist and the security guard work. It sucks to be starting out. But still, you’re starting out, so opportunity is around every turn, and you can afford to dick around in jobs that intrigue you, even if you don’t think they’ll make for good careers. You can flirt and date and fuck and fall in love and get your heart broken and rebound and repeat the whole process over and over again, even blog about it. At some point, you’ll probably notice that you’ve started a career because you’re finally working a job that doesn’t involve a time card. I hope you love that career. I hope you love the day in, day out of it, because that is so fucking important I will say it loudly into your one-year-old face today and hope your mind absorbs it, stores it away for when you need it.

  Then you’re thirty. It’s not funny anymore. That’s the theme of your thirties. It’s not funny anymore. That endless string of ill-conceived relationships? Some of your friends are getting married, some even starting to have kids. It’s not funny anymore. That job you don’t take seriously, so much so that you can come in hungover every so often and no one notices? Some of your peers are on a course that will carry them through the rest of their working life. It’s not funny anymore. Strangers as roommates isn’t funny anymore. Not knowing how to manage credit card debt isn’t funny anymore. Being uninsured isn’t funny anymore.

  When you read this, you’ll be thirty, and I hope that you are in a place where you feel settled and secure, where you look around yourself with satisfaction at the work you do, and especially the people you share your life with. Still struggling to define yourself, still grasping and hoping and waiting for your life to begin at thirty is a terrible feeling. When you’ve made those choices, and you think you’ve made the right ones, you’ll know it in your gut, and that’s when your life is truly ready to be lived. That’s when you’re an adult.

  I’m not there yet. I’m passing you this advice because I am your cautionary tale.

  Your first birthday was a wild success. It’s been a hot day, even hotter as the day progressed, but we still cooked outside and fed you a Popsicle. Orange. You devoured it. Your grandmother hiked up your shirt and blew on your belly and you loved every minute of that. Your grandfather cradled you in his withered arms with a look of such deep and profound contentment on his face, as if to confirm his life’s work had paid off. “What a beautiful specimen of a grandson,” he said today.

  I haven’t told my parents, your grandparents, about my plans to leave your mother yet. I’d love to pretend that I’m sparing them pain or embarrassment, but the reality is closer to a sense of shame about how they will look at me. If you get past thirty and you still think it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission, you’ve made some wrong turns in life. Instead, everyone got to eat cake and sing to you and laugh at your giggles, as if you were telling the best jokes they’d ever heard. My mother finished it up by helping to give you your bath, wading into the tub with you, the water up to her shins, splashing around and beaming the whole time. Today was a terrific day for them; I helped to give my parents a terrific day.

  After they’d left, your mother and I put you to bed. You were dangling limp in my arms before you even hit the crib. The attention wore you out.

  Then your mother slept in her room, and I slept on the couch. And early in the morning, I snuck into your room and kissed you on your forehead and apologized for everything I was about to do. “I’m so sorry,” I said into your sleeping ears. I hope I didn’t change a dream into a nightmare at that point.

  Then I walked out the door.

  I never thought I was capable of loving someone as much as I love you, Jackson, and I never thought that love would get any bigger, or even could be bigger than the all-encompassing love I felt for you on the day you were born. But it has; it’s accumulated. Today I love the one-year-old Jackson Gould, who is smart and inquisitive and good-natured. He’s not a finicky eater, loves to cuddle, smells good for a child who craps himself twice a day, and makes a surprisingly small mess eating pureed foods. You’re a tidy child, Jackson, and it’s just one of the countless qualities that make you extraordinary.

  I need to go now. I told a fib before, four paragraphs ago, describing what happened after you went to sleep. I projected into the future. I’m going to put this letter down now, then I’m going to kiss you and apologize. If someday you don’t understand, I hope you forgive.

  All my love. Always.

  Your father,

  Michael Gould

  I press the letter into a book, one of mine that I know Rebecca likes as well. She’s not likely to put this out on the stoop, so I can come back and get it later. There’s plenty I left out because it doesn’t concern him; it’s background detail to his story and personal to his parents’ marriage. I left out that after we put him to bed, Rebecca and I sat down with a bottle of wine and dissolved our marriage. I left out that she cried like the dams had burst, like I hadn’t seen her cry since Jolie died, not out of anger toward me, or a sense of betrayal. That will come later. Today she cried for the sheer tonnage of sadness that accompanies a wound you know will only open wider with each step. She did everything right, and still I’m leaving her for someone else.

  “What does she do that I don’t?” she asks me, so woefully. In so much pain.

  “It’s nothing like that. It’s not one thing. It’s something indescribable.”

  “You don’t think you owe it to me to at least try to describe it?”

  “It’s that …” I seek out a possible answer.

  “Do you love her more?”

  “Not more. Not less. Just in a different way.
”

  Rebecca pours herself another glass of wine. “The right answer was that you love her less than the woman you married and who gave you a child.”

  Gradually we wind ourselves down. Surprisingly little acrimony has passed between us. Rebecca makes no threats, instead asks me procedural questions. Would I be moving out? Yes. When would I come back for my stuff? When I can get the truck. A week or two. Does this mean we’re getting a divorce? Yes. Should I get an attorney? If you’d like. I’m getting an attorney.

  That takes her aback. “Why are you getting an attorney?”

  “Jackson,” I reply, and hope that answer suffices. She tucks that into the folds of her mind.

  “I’d take you back, Michael,” she says, her voice thick.

  “Why? Why on earth would you do that?” I ask her.

  “This is what I know, and I’m frightened by what I don’t.” She buries her head in her arms and cries more.

  When she’s decently drunk, when we’re both exhausted and we’ve shed our tears and mourned our loss and even reminisced about the highs we hit, Rebecca kisses me like she did on our wedding day, her mouth pressed against mine with conviction. I watch her go into her bedroom—the one that used to be our bedroom—and leave the door ajar. A last invitation. A proper send-off.

  Rebecca wants to fuck. That’s what that open door means. It’s not that I’m a rock god in bed, it’s that I’m here. She didn’t know the last time we fused ourselves together was the last time. Looking at that open door, I think that she is pathetic. Desperate. But those aren’t the right words. I’m a horrendous person for letting them come to mind.

  But I can’t go in. I don’t know why this absurd feeling hit me, especially at this time, but I can’t go into the bedroom and be with her. Doing so would be unfaithful. So I place my phone on the floor in front of the couch, setting my alarm for before Rebecca will be up. Then I sleep, jittery about tomorrow, like I’ve just finished taking the biggest test of my life, and now all I can do is wait for the results of the exam.

  Paul Fenniger

  One Day Ago: July 18, 2010

  The key still turns in the lock. That’s a good sign. I push the front door open to find Jenny sitting on the counter, eating a sandwich. She regards me coming in. “You should have knocked.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t live here anymore, Fenn.”

  “I’m sorry. Should I go?”

  “You’re here already,” she says, so I close the door behind me.

  It’s been a rough few weeks on my back. I spent two nights sleeping on the couch in Jacob Weinstock’s office, showering in flip-flops in the building’s locker room, keeping my suitcase stowed away under my desk, obscured by two heavy file boxes. It became difficult to go past the front desk, to look Manuel in the eye, or, worse yet, to avert. So on my third day away I came to Amir, another paralegal, and I knocked on his cubicle wall. “My wife threw me out,” I admitted, point-blank. “I need a place to crash.”

  He analyzed me, ran the equations of what kind of life I must have if I’m coming to him for refuge.

  “You can take my floor for a few nights,” he offered. And so I have, ever since, sharing the same stale fart air of his tiny, rent-controlled Alphabet City apartment heated by the processors of three large computers. The floor isn’t Amir’s stab at domestic alpha-maledom; he doesn’t own a couch, only a mismatched set of computer chairs scavenged from assorted offices of Manhattan.

  Jenny puts her plate in the sink and stares at me. “The air mattress is in the office closet.” I nod. That’s her concession to kindness, letting me take the air mattress. She washes her dish, done with me, so I get out of her space and go down the hall.

  This room. This extra room. This office turned nursery turned office. This good intention turned mistake turned catastrophe. I want to rip down these beautiful shelves. I want to paper these walls. I don’t want to leave here. I don’t want to leave her. “Jenny!” I shout, my voice catching in my throat. She appears in the doorway. “Please.” I whisper.

  “You should get what you need and go, Fenn.”

  “Stop being cruel.”

  “I’m not trying to be cruel, Fenn. Going online and telling strangers about our dead baby is cruel. Cheating on me and pretending you’re not because it’s just chat rooms is cruel, Fenn. It humiliates me.”

  “I never cheated on you,” I plead.

  She rolls her eyes. “Fidelity shouldn’t be a question of semantics.”

  I open the closet, carefully setting aside the garbage bags of baby clothes and toys we never threw out, anticipating that it would only be a matter of time before we tried again. As I lay them gently on the floor next to me, Jenny doesn’t leave, standing in the room as if to make sure I don’t steal anything. On the floor, in the back, is the small box with our air mattress, like a raft covered in coarse felt. It’s patched with duct tape. I smile sadly to see it, this running into an old friend who has fallen on hard times. “Do you remember when we bought this?” I ask. Jenny doesn’t respond. Doesn’t even begrudge me the memory. “We didn’t have a bed yet. We were in that awful apartment that you liked.”

  “I didn’t!” she protests. “I hated it.”

  “I hated it too,” I concede. “I only liked it because you were there. I remember we got our bed piecemeal. We got the frame first and then we scoured Craigslist for a mattress. And people kept writing to us so we kept taking trips to see mattresses that had weird stains. That’s how we got familiar with a lot of neighborhoods, walking around trying to find people trying to sell us a mattress. Where did we end up getting one?”

  “Murray Hill.”

  “You liked that one because a girl sold it to us and she was really skinny, so you thought it would still be like new. The guy with the van ended up charging more to transport it to us than we’d paid for the mattress itself. But we finally had a bed, and we were sooooo proud of ourselves because we were sooooo grown up to have a bed.”

  We replaced it a few years later. That’s another story. We replaced it with the bed that we conceived our son upon and then our son died and then our marriage died.

  “We earned that bed piece by piece,” Jenny acknowledges, ruefully. I’m looking at her. Midafternoon summer light spilling over her. The sum of my lifetime.

  “I’m not leaving,” I say out loud.

  “We’re done, Fenn.”

  “I’m going to stay here tonight, and I’ll cook you dinner if you want, and I’ll go to work tomorrow. That’s when you can change the locks and cut me out of your life, but right now I’m not leaving.”

  Jenny glares at me, incredulous. “I’ll call the police.”

  Okay. I dig into my pocket and take out my phone, slide it across the floor to her. It’s not meant to be a petulant gesture, I’m not triple dog daring Jenny to have me arrested. I’ll accept her decision—whatever she decides—but if she’s going to actually sever ties, it’s going to be an active choice on her part, not me acquiescing and shuffling out of her life, slump shouldered and devastated, trucking a busted air mattress back to the subway.

  Jenny picks my phone up off the floor, holds it out to me so I can see that she’s clicked the button for an emergency call, hovering her finger over send. She’s magnificent and fierce, her eyes wide and challenging, her jaw set. I married the most astonishing woman, and I’ve never loved her more than in this moment when she’s threatening to call the cops and have me forcibly ejected from her life.

  Phone still in the air, she asks, “What would you cook?”

  “Is there still lamb in the freezer?”

  “I think so.”

  “I could make a lamb tagine.”

  Moroccan food. Jenny has always wanted to go to Morocco, for the dinners alone. She winces at hearing the magic password. That’s right, your partner knows your joys from dawn to dusk. Right now you’re hoping there’s still a dusty bottle of sambuca in the liquor cabinet.

  “I’d like that
,” she says quietly.

  I knew you would.

  Assembly. Quick defrost. Toe the line between obvious slowness and toughening the meat by cooking it too fast from the freezer. Placate her with some olives she has in the fridge. I keep her talking as I cook. Happy topics. “Did you write today?” I ask.

  “I did write today,” she replies sheepishly. Jenny hasn’t ever shown me anything she’s written. I hear her typing away at night sometimes, struck by some midnight inspiration. Someday, I have total faith, she is going to show something extraordinary to the world. Jennifer Sayles will enter the canon and be taught in classrooms and people will bookmark the moment in their lives they first read her. I can’t share how much faith I have in her. I have to dilute it with watery indifference. Otherwise it’s too much pressure, to disappoint me. But she knows how true a believer she has in me.

  The lamb comes out perfect, one of my best efforts in the kitchen. We eat it that night sitting across from one another at the table, sharing a glass of wine, literally passing it back and forth. When we were grindingly poor, we did that with beer, then mixed drinks, then fancier cocktails, our price point on the menu going up as we gained traction, still nevertheless sitting next to one another at the bar, sliding a glass from her lips to mine.

  “You can sleep on the couch.” Jenny stares into the darkness outside and relents, gets me pillows and a blanket off of the bed. It’s too hot for either, the bedroom is the only air-conditioned room in the apartment, but asking to sleep back there with her crosses a line she’s drawn. Tonight I’m going to sleep on the couch, and tomorrow I’m going to go to work, and somewhere in the thinking hours, Jenny will make her decision on whether or not to end us. I have faith. I have unshakable faith that it will be okay.

  She closes the bedroom door, and I lie awake for an hour, sweating in place, eyes on the ceiling, listening to the street sounds. I wonder what she would do if I didn’t go to work tomorrow, if I planted my feet on the floor and refused to budge. Would she call the cops then? What if I chained myself to the radiator in protest, safe until the landlord turns it on in winter, lived off her mercy to feed me scraps and let me simply exist in the same space as her.