Who is Rich?
The thing to do here was relax and not worry about where I ranked among them. I pushed my plate away and started drawing on the tablecloth. I drew the bay, a single steady line, wispy clouds in the distance, and walking along the shore I drew Batman, the Caped Crusader, looking a little haggard and overweight. Last year’s tablecloths had been made of a thick, toothy paper, with a spongy plastic coating underneath, but this was thin one-ply, and the ink bled like I was drawing on toilet paper. It was a waste of time, but I didn’t care. Batman was the first superhero I’d ever drawn. I hadn’t drawn him in thirty years. Why now? Drawing him middle-aged with a big keister seemed to answer something. He stood in the surf at low tide with a touristy camera around his neck and his tights stained dark from wading.
One line led to another, the feeling of deadness went away, and this arrangement of markings became a scene with a little girl about Kaya’s age holding Batman’s hand. Was it a memory? Was it cathartic? Did it work? I didn’t care. I kept going, surprising my eyes with what my hand could do. In Batman’s other arm I drew a little boy in a swim diaper—my knees bouncing under the table—until, shading in the bay around their ankles, I pressed too hard and tore the tablecloth.
Then I thought of home and felt my throat close up. I wondered how I’d protect my kids from hundreds of miles away. I worried that Kaya would ride her tricycle into the renovation pit from the construction next door. I worried that Beanie would suck the propeller out of my old tin clown whistle. Joey, the high school kid down the block, sometimes cut through the alley in his Subaru with his foot on the gas, even though a dozen kids under the age of ten jumped rope and played games there. A spasm of electric jolts shocked my heart, from the heady mixing of blood and guilt that brought on flashes of horror and feelings of dread and excitement, the fear that I would do something sexy and rotten and get away with it.
Stewart Rinaldi pulled up a chair and said, “What did I miss?”
“We’re talking about my book,” Dennis began, “Ring-a-Ding Ding.”
No one could stop him from explaining that the movie killed the book. When he finished, no one spoke. Beside me, Charlene folded things into a sandwich.
“Pass the salt.”
We had nothing else to say, or didn’t want to try for fear of starting Dennis up again. We didn’t discuss the news of the day or the presidential campaign or politics in general, power, money, greed, or war. As members of the cultural elite, we didn’t believe in any of that. We’d been teaching together for years. We sat in circles, bragging about things that mattered only to us. We were artists. We believed in ourselves.
And yet, things were happening out there. Obama had drawn a red line but Assad refused to back down, while hundreds of thousands fled, in what was looking like a massive refugee crisis. “Call Me Maybe” held steady at No. 1. Ernest Borgnine died. Kim Jong-un had been named Supreme Being of North Korea. The Republican primary had been brutal, awash in dark money, the first since the Supreme Court decided that mountains of secret cash in exchange for favors was totally fine. Romney emerged as the nominee, a hollow, arrogant flip-flopper. He’d spent the summer refusing to release his most recent tax returns, while his legal representatives explained away the Swiss bank account stuffed with tens or hundreds of his own millions. He was in London this week, having FedExed his wife’s half-million-dollar dressage horse over to compete in the Olympics.
We didn’t care about that stuff. We cared about art. We cared about lunch. Finally Dennis stood, picked up his bag, and walked out of the tent, past the drinks cooler, toward the library.
“Ring-a-ding ding,” Roberta said. “Does that ring any bells?”
“Forget it,” Tom said.
People liked Dennis as a teacher. Around the faculty, though, he lost control. He engendered pity, which must’ve bothered him. The interns were clearing off the buffet table behind us, watery bowls of lentil salad no one wanted. Roberta said Dennis’s wife had moved out, and Charlene shook her head and said it was a long time coming. Frederick turned to stare at Ilana, who pretended not to notice. Vicky asked why we had to sit here, year after year, talking about Dennis Fleigel, and wondered if anyone wanted to go for a swim in the ocean, and gave me a deep, meaningful look, but I didn’t want to linger, to catch up, didn’t want to be her beach pal. I couldn’t listen to the grievances of childless grown-ups anymore, their boredom with their free time, wondering what they’d missed. Whatever had caught up with them was making them depressed.
SIX
In college I couldn’t figure out what to major in. Over in English they were complaining that language itself had become brittle and useless, and over in art, so-called postmodern painting was being taught in a way I didn’t understand, as the subject as object ran into ontological difficulties that couldn’t be solved with a paintbrush. I started making comics for some relief—leaning heavily on my own journals, since I’d never learned how to make up anything—an episodic, thinly veiled series of stories about a girl and boy who fall in love, stay up late, eat pizza in their undies, make charcoal drawings, create installations of dirt and lightbulbs, hate their fathers, move into an apartment together, build futon frames, flush their contact lenses down the drain, throw parties with grain alcohol punch, get knocked up, have an abortion, read Krishnamurti, graduate, break up, fuck other people, and move together to Baltimore, to an abandoned industrial space where sunlight comes through holes in the roof, dappling the walls.
After college I published it myself, on sheets of eight and a half by eleven, folded in half and pressed flat with the back of a spoon, stapled in the middle, and handed it out personally at conventions for a dollar. Making comics kept me from going apeshit. Later, at the ad agency where I worked, I upped the production value, made the leap to offset printing, sending it through on the invoice of a client in St. Louis, who, without knowing, paid for my two-color card-stock cover. I didn’t dedicate myself to it, didn’t plan on toiling for years. I figured I’d do a few more, get a job as a creative director, drill holes in my head and use it as a bowling ball.
One day I got a call. “We like your comic. We’d like to publish it. Would you be interested in that?” I remember walking around the office, heat boiling my face, wondering who to tell. Soon my work began appearing in a free alternative weekly. A year after that, I cut a deal with a beloved independent publisher for a comic book of my very own. When I finally held it in my hands, twenty-four pages, color cover, I lifted it to my face and inhaled. I caught the attention of agents and editors, and a couple of big-name cartoonists, who championed my work, and the thing took on a life of its own.
All of a sudden I’m cool, phone’s ringing, there are lines at my tables at conventions. My cross-hatching improved; my brushwork became fearless. I put out two issues a year. The comic grew to thirty-two pages, then forty-eight.
TV and film people started calling. I quit my job and helped write a pilot. I flew to Brussels to be on a panel of cartoonists. I designed a book cover for a reissue of On the Road, did a CD jacket for a legendary L.A. punk band. I lived on food stamps, even as my ego ballooned. I broke into magazines, and caved to the occasional job for hire, and torched my savings, and somehow got by.
But in my own comics, I handled the hot material of my life. My characters were shacking up, doing PR for the Mafia, suffering premarital anxieties and fertility issues. My publisher suggested collecting these comics into a book. The book held together like a novel. It came out six years ago.
They couldn’t sell the TV pilot. The book went out of print. I couldn’t tell stories about myself anymore. I’d flip through my sketchbook, dating back to before Kaya was born, life drawings, junked panels, false starts, art ideas, rambling journal entries, then babies in diapers and crawling and wobbling, and all this tearstained agonized writing about how tired I was. Then I’d start to think about What I’m Capable Of, but then I’d think, Who cares. Fuck comics. I couldn’t write about these scenes of domestic bliss, maybe because they lacked the reckless, boozy, unzipped struggle of my youth, or maybe because my wife and kids were some creepy experiment I couldn’t relate to, or maybe because they were the most precious thing on earth and needed my protection from the diminishing power of my “art,” and writing about them was evil.
In my stories I’d been some kind of wild man, some bumbling lothario wielding his incompetence, mistaking his sister-in-law for a prostitute, knocking over the casket at the funeral of his boss, battling suburban angst and sexual constraint in a fictionalized autobio psychodrama. My success at selling that renegade message opened up a sustainable commercial existence, the very existence I’d been trying to avoid. Instead, I embraced conformity, routine, homeownership, marriage, and parenthood, in exchange for neighborly niceties and a sleepy, toothless rebellion in the pages of a crusty political magazine trying to be hip. I worked as an illustrator now, or what might be referred to as an “editorial cartoonist.” I’d also done other types of unclassifiable commercial whore work, promotional posters for a Swedish reggae festival, fabric patterns for a hip-hop clothing company. I had a handful of regular clients from over the years, a hotel soap manufacturer, a Canadian HMO, a fried chicken chain in the Philippines whose in-house art department called when they got totally overwhelmed, although it had been a while, actually, since I’d done any of that crap.
Magazine work asked less of me, and paid more, and at times could almost be fun. I’d done drawings of Anthony Weiner, the Arab Spring, bedbugs, the uprising in Syria, Walmart slaves, Obama as a jug-eared mullah, Obama in his Bermuda shorts in the Rose Garden burying tiny flag-draped coffins, the whole clown car of Republican kooks who’d been rolling across the country all year—Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt, Rick Perry, and several of Mitt. In one he’s waving from his yacht, and in another he’s wiping his ass with an American worker, and in yet another he’s burying his loot in the Caymans. I’d also done full-page drawings for longer features, assigned by Adam, my art director: Somali pirates, Gitmo prisoners force-fed on a hunger strike, and a dozen covers—“The CIA in Damascus,” “Stop Eating So Much Meat,” “The Breast Issue,” “Our Complicated Relationship with Drones.” I could make a living if I worked fast, on three things at once, and didn’t mind the art department yanking my chain.
SEVEN
At midnight Beanie got hungry, and at three A.M. he made a sound like a cat being run over by a car, for an hour without stopping. At six he got up for good.
“I hope you have a better night tonight.”
“Please don’t talk about it.”
I regretted having called. They were at the park now, in unrelenting heat and humidity. I sat on a low brick wall by the flagpole, the Place of Good Reception, overlooking the sweep of the harbor, the bridge in the distance, seagulls curling in arcs under high pressure and plenty of sunshine, the temperature a breezy seventy-eight degrees, a skosh below the seasonal average.
First thing this morning they went off to gymnastics camp, where we’d enrolled Kaya for the next four Saturdays, and met a nice blond lady who knelt beside Kaya when Robin tried to leave, and a dark-haired unsympathetic woman collecting the pizza money, and a teenage gymnast, holding a sobbing girl, about Kaya’s age, in a pink tutu with a blue lump on her forehead and an ice pack on her wrist.
Kaya had enjoyed the trampoline but not the rope thing. Then some boy shoved her, waiting in line for a cookie. She’d let another boy lie on top of her during circle time, they bumped heads, and now she had a swollen lip. She quit after lunch and said she’d never go back.
Robin’s parents had made it to dinner last night after all, but it seemed that Dave hadn’t changed Iris’s clothes, and her hair was dirty. The last time I’d seen my mother-in-law, she’d used mascara to draw on eyebrows, and wore eye shadow that looked like fireplace ash, and had a bruise from a fall discoloring one side of her face. Every time she walked into a room Robin would walk out, as if an alarm had gone off, explaining loudly that one of the kids needed a cracker, and her mom would sit and tell me how fat people were in Florida, or call Robin’s stepfather Dan, or tell me she had a baby in her belly that was painful sometimes.
Robin mentioned the urinary tract infection her mom had, a result of Dave’s neglect. He’d done his best to nurse her along, while also resisting and denying the obvious. By the time he’d finally given in and had Iris tested, she’d been tying her blouses in front for a year because she couldn’t figure out how to button them. I’d gotten used to the pantomime at dinner, nodding and smiling when she abandoned her fork and pawed through her plate.
Dave and Iris had worked hard all their lives, and this caretaking and dementia were their only retirement. He didn’t have religion or children or close family of his own, but he’d confided in me that after Iris died, he planned to take a bicycle tour through the wine regions of Tuscany. He enjoyed the light-tasting Chianti of Florence, as well as the more full-bodied pinot chiefly associated with Pisa. He’d already done the research.
“I need to talk to her nurses,” Robin said. “I have to call the house when Dave’s not there.” I could hear Kaya singing in the background. I could picture the bench where Robin sat at the park by a sweltering playground. “If he’s home, they won’t say anything.”
It was the song Kaya had been singing in the kitchen before I’d left. “Shakira, Shakira!”
“They’re not nurses,” she said. “They’re probably corn farmers. Or soldiers. When did the war end in Sierra Leone?” I said I didn’t know. Kaya yelled for Robin to watch her climb.“He’s so incapable of dealing with his grief.”
Actually, I thought Dave was holding up pretty well, considering. The steroid he took to suppress whatever was choking his lungs had terrible side effects. His face was bloated and his skin had turned red, thin, and fragile. His beard had gone white. He looked like Santa, if Santa started drinking every day at lunch, which Dave did.
“How come this morning at an air-conditioned gymnastics place for seventy-five bucks an hour she wouldn’t get off my lap, but we come here in a million degrees and she can’t stay off the monkey bars?” I figured it was because she knew the layout, but kept it to myself. “I got so mad at her for quitting. I started screaming, ‘You never try. Why is that?’ I’m sitting outside gymnastics, sweating my ass off, holding Beanie, she can literally see my head from the window, and twice she came out crying, saying she missed me. I just wanted to close my eyes for five seconds. You know how you say I never admit I’m wrong? Well, I was wrong, and I’m not just telling you I abused her to make you feel guilty. I went too far.”
“I’m sure you didn’t.”
“I had to shove him into his stroller so I could deal with her, but he wouldn’t let go, and I pressed down so hard I thought I broke his rib cage.”
“Jesus.”
“At lunch, the nice counselor let her sit on her lap, but the mean one told her she was a big girl and should stop crying. I’m going to find that one and explain to her that it doesn’t do any good to tell that to a four-year-old.”
“You tell Kaya that all the time.”
“That’s different.”
“Why is it different?”
“Because she woke me up five hundred times last night. Oh, here she is. You woke me up five hundred times last night.”
“I’m sorry, Mommy.”
“You don’t sound sorry.” It was true: Kaya didn’t sound sorry. I looked out at the bay, the sky, the seagulls, thankful for the distance between us.
“I’m locking her in her room tonight.”
“With what?”
“I’ll buy a hook.”
“Why didn’t I think of that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because I wouldn’t do that to a dog.” Two sailboats tacked at the same angle as they cornered around the jetty.
“She’s not used to being ignored in the middle of the night. One peep and you’re there, hovering over her. Maybe now she’ll finally get sleep-trained. Now she’ll learn to spend the night in her bedroom alone.”
“You’re going to sleep-train her in one night?”
It went on like this for a while.
“It’s you, you feed and flirt and sing and have conversations at three A.M.—”
The bay, the water, the seagulls.
“When you’re here, it’s always ‘Daddy Daddy,’ keeping them out of the basement so you can work, brokering that. When you’re not here, it’s quiet and I feed them early and put them to bed early, not at nine o’clock—”
“Hey, why don’t you take the night shift for the next four years?”
“Because I need drugs to sleep.” Beanie let out that piercing cat scream. I heard her whacking him on the back. “And when I take medication, I need more sleep. I’m not doing this for you next summer, so have fun.”
“I’m having a blast.”
“I don’t care what you do up there, but if you give me a disease I will cut it off. Got it?”
“Fine.”
“Or shoot you. Or chop off your balls.”
“Understood.”
Beanie remained quiet, and then we were all quiet.
“I wouldn’t mind going to some makeout festival if my body wasn’t broken.”
“Go ahead.”
“As long as you take care of them while I take care of me.”
“I should probably get back to it.”
“You didn’t say how your first class went.”
“My class?”
“Yes.”
“Fine.”
“You say that every year. You worry about that class for weeks, slaving over your notes, ‘What do they want from me? I forgot how to teach!’ It hardly pays anything, and you’re up there having a blast and I’m here killing myself and for what?”
“At least it gets me thinking about comics again. I used to love making comics. I don’t know what happened. I have to get a break from the magazine. I have to start something I care about. I have to find a way back in.”
“Maybe you’re not supposed to write stories about your life anymore. Maybe you outgrew it. Maybe it bubbles up because you’re there and you should force it back down where it came from.”
“Thanks.”
“Or maybe being around those people, you’ll have an epiphany.”
“Sure.”
“Go on, shove it down. Next to your childhood. Next to your parents. Keep shoving.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know all about you. That’s what you’re trying to get away from. You think you’re worthless, so you make me feel worthless, and when you’re gone I don’t have that, nobody second-guessing me or giving me nasty looks or turning off my music or criticizing my soul. It’s more work, but there’s no time to be depressed or think, although I actually can think. Four producers are coming from L.A. on Monday, I’m meeting with the network, it’s the busiest time and budgets are insanely tight and Realscreen is right around the corner. I can keep fairly complicated ideas in my head without having any obligation from you to talk and listen. I’m myself. I get love from people at work, and Karen Crickstein wants to meet me for lunch, and Elizabeth comes over and we do the knitting tutorial, and have conversations that matter, and she doesn’t wish I would shut up and go away.”
EIGHT
The first time I saw her, standing in my foyer, she was holding a giant stick bug in a wooden frame. Robin Lister had moved to Baltimore for a job at the public television station, and knew somebody who knew the sister of this lunatic, Julie, who lived in our group house on Chestnut Ave. Robin took the room of the guy we called Lumpy, who was headed to law school in Denver, which meant we’d be sharing a bathroom.
I helped carry in boxes from her U-Haul. That night I heard her spitting into the bathroom sink, and the next morning I found her in the kitchen, in a thin yellow robe with tiny blue fishes, staring into the garbage, trying to figure out how many cups of coffee she’d already had by the look of the used filter. When I think back to whatever it was that brought us together, it probably happened in the kitchen. She’d been hired to write and edit bilingual scripts for a local children’s television program and had tape drives of old episodes to study, but she already had a few things to say about the show’s three main characters, a hyperactive skunk, a Hispanic beaver named Anselma, and a wise old chipmunk who protects the young explorers.
I found myself sitting across from her, lingering over breakfast, offering piercing analysis of our roommates’ psyches: Nedd, the ladies’ man; Rishi, an account exec at the ad agency where I worked; and Julie, the emotionally stunted MBA who talked like a baby. Robin had questions, and I projected a confiding warmth and a loud, Jewish, overcompensating wit.
She was seeing a guy named Jim, who deejayed on the weekends. He was followed by Digger, a cameraman from the Czech Republic who worked in war zones and had always just stepped off an airplane held together with duct tape. He’d been to the Congo, had ridden a horse across Afghanistan. Somehow, a year passed. I’d been dating Eileen Pribble, an elementary school art teacher who stuck refrigerator magnets to the outside of her car.
Robin and I were friends, although she was too good-looking for that. She needed company. I thought I might earn something, through my loyalty, that someday I would collect. At first I didn’t know what to make of her, but after a while I noticed how much I looked forward to her coming home at night. After dinner, the two of us would sometimes walk down the street for ice cream. She had hazel eyes, thin, wavy brown hair, and olive skin. The hair resting thinly on a delicate skull held an introspective, self-doubting, reasonable, forceful, somewhat dignified mind. She wanted to get out of kids’ programming and work in hard news, wanted to see the world. Digger had friends who could help. In the fall of that year, two Sudanese guys had blown a hole in the USS Cole as it refueled in Yemen. The new trend in terrorism, Robin said, was asymmetrical, like a bottle of botulism in a New York City reservoir. She wanted intensity and danger. She was so pretty that guys would stare at us as we walked down the block. Sometimes I worried that one of them would try to kill me.
Eileen and I split, and I thought for sure it would change things. I remember standing in the bathroom when no one else was home, examining Robin’s tongue scraper, and found myself pondering the wall that separated our bedrooms, wondering if I could tunnel through it to find her there asleep. There were moments where I’d given up, moments where I got obsessed, moments where I was repelled, moments where I’d grown too emotionally attached. I felt feverish and sick whenever Digger spent the night, trying not to listen while brushing my teeth, long sick sleepless nights until he left for some war zone in East Timor, until he moved back to Prague for good. In the mornings Robin and I had those nattering exchanges old couples have, bickering in front of our housemates or alone, about the missing butter or how long to boil an egg. If her insomnia plagued her, she’d shoot me a look—and I can remember now, the rush of blood in my face. I felt somewhat powerless, and assumed it would pass.
She’d ask my opinion on her clothing before work in the morning, she’d notice my haircut or suggest I stop chewing ice before I cracked a tooth. I wanted her to love me. There was this basis forming beneath us. Sometimes we walked together to the nearby community center for our morning laps. I’d spy on her from underwater, her thin arms balletic and almost lazy in their strokes, a weird, improper technique, her legs kicking furiously, frothing the water around her.