Matthew Klam - Who is Rich?

Then she had morning sickness, puking her guts out for eight or ten or fifteen straight weeks, it’s hard to remember now, wishing she could give me a nonlethal form of salmonella so I could know her pain. After Beanie was born she took time off again, and for the last six months had been edging back in, happy to work part-time at Connie’s small production company, whose only client was the Nature Channel, making a sweet little PSA she loved, destined for the wee hours of the night, about girls in poor countries who were victims of early marriage. A former executive producer for the channel, she was now a so-called independent producer, with no benefits, no contract, no real job, at the mercy of bland, plodding, overpaid executives on staff.

Between us we’d had terrifying gaps in employment, clients who’d gone bankrupt, work stoppages, lean times, hospital bills, economic downturns, crises of confidence, bosses who’d lied or disappeared, and projects mercy-killed.

There were moments when I too somehow failed to understand my place in the world or see what lay ahead, when I thought my own good luck would never end, when I mistook the work I did for a skill that builds on itself. I had years where money dropped from the sky, but also disappointments, broken dreams, ill-advised spending on copper saucepans and breathable raingear, troubles with the IRS, and a house we owned whose value had dropped below what we owed the bank. Six years ago, we’d borrowed from Robin’s mom to buy it. After the mortgage crisis we were underwater, and nobody would refinance the loan. A year or two later, we went back to Robin’s mom. She took out a second mortgage to bail us out. We got money from her dad to buy Robin’s car. We got a title loan against the car to pay bills. We set up a payment plan with the IRS guy, asked the worst credit card companies to cut our spending limit, begged them later to maybe raise it back up so we could eat, which, thank God, they refused to do. The magazine paid me on the twenty-eighth, like a monthly salary, although I wasn’t an employee, so a third of it needed to be set aside to pay taxes, which was completely out of the question, and would have to be dealt with down the road.

While I sat there by the flagpole, a pair of gladiator-sandaled feet appeared on the grass in front of me, and two legs, and above that, Amy. She held up a finger for me to wait. She was being polite. She pulled the phone away from her ear and said, “Somebody wants my money.” I feigned outrage. She shook her head. “I’m on a conference call.”

She was tall, with a long neck and good collarbones. She wore a gray sleeveless T-shirt and close-fitting blue-and-green plaid shorts. She had the bent posture and crimped mouth of a forty-one-year-old mom with three small kids. She didn’t look like her photos—ones she’d sent me, from a skating rink, or her bedroom, or with her oldest kid and a dog—which now seemed like one more problem to deal with.

She’d tied up her hair for painting class. It looked smooth and glossy. Her cheekbones were high and soft, her arms tanned and freckled. She went back to the phone call, nodding her head as hair spilled from the knot, her wrist bent against her waist, and turned on her toes on the grass, twirling cutely. It bugged me. Her movement said, “I’m busy. I’m needed. I have a life.”

In high school she was scouted at the local mall, and got hired to do some modeling, boat shows, department store flyers. Her parents didn’t approve. Her father stocked shelves in a grocery store and died young. Her mom was still living, and also tall. Amy had swum competitively, and set a national record in the short-course two-hundred-meter something. Then came a job in finance, to erase the deprivations of her childhood, and marriage to that jackass who made her a fortune. Then she set her sights on becoming some kind of activist, straddling the classes with money and love.

Lately she’d been infusing her artwork with one of her charity concerns. The toxic-sludge painting she’d started here last summer showed aquatic life along the Connecticut shore, deformed by PCBs—which, I guess … ​if you like that sort of thing. Over the winter she’d sent me pictures of another one, more sludge infecting life-giving waters, with these intestinal shapes framing her screwy self-portrait, head too long, one eyebrow raised, a kind of eco-friendly Frida Kahlo thing.

She turned to me and rolled her eyes. I shrugged like, “Oh well.” She grabbed her throat and stuck out her tongue. I pretended to gag. She motioned to throw the phone in the direction of the bay. Then she hit Mute and said, “It’s beyond partisan politics, but working together to protect our environment I want to thank you all for blah blah—”

She pressed a button on the phone again.

“Ugh. Yes honey, sorry, I’m here.”

When the call ended, she groaned. “We’re trying to get muckety-mucks to buy a table, and if you really want to know, we can’t decide whether to put a seashell in the middle of each table and decorate the seashell with the table number or put the fucking number on a stick.”

“Oh.”

“Board service.”

“You sound bored.”

“I like to serve on small boards, with a clear give-get, for a year or less.”

“Whatever that means.”

“I think it means I have to give them something. Let me tell my assistant the password to my bank account.”

For a long time, I didn’t think about her money. Then I thought it was ridiculous and disgusting. Although later, I just wanted to get paid. Maybe somewhere in the middle there, for a while anyway, I thought anything was possible, that we were bigger than money, that if we got together, whatever she had would somehow melt away in the heat of our passion. She didn’t wear an engagement ring or fancy clothes, and she carried up from birth a grinding Catholic guilt that equated frugality with goodness. She wore diamond earrings, although her generous earlobes made them look smaller.

She ended the call and asked how I’d slept, and I asked how her class had gone, her narrative painting workshop. “You look tired,” she said.

She looked thin. She survived for stretches on Twizzlers and Diet Coke. I studied her chipped fingernails, the part in her hair, until I recognized her, the long thin nose with a knob on the end that I’d kissed, and big gray eyes on either side of her head like an extraterrestrial.

I should’ve asked more questions, wondered how her kids were, the baby who looked like a monkey and ate bananas, the girl Kaya’s age who never remembered to wear underwear, or the oldest, who’d had a health scare but was fine now. Or maybe it was better to keep things light, so I did my impression of Beanie eating his first solid food, a Cheerio, chewing it for a minute or two before it flipped right onto his chin, entirely whole. And I told her how Kaya made a schedule of the hairdos of her favorite doll, every day there was a different hairdo, but I didn’t go into what they were.

“That’s cute.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re a good father.”

I hated this fake chitchat. Before she put the phone away, she showed me a photo of her brand-new bald-headed niece in a pink onesie, with a little pushed-up nose, surrounded by her own children and many other neighbors and nephews and other suntanned people, beside their swimming pool. It was nice to see her older daughter looking healthy, bright-eyed, and beaming.

“And who’s this?” I asked, but I didn’t care. I let her talk. There were more photos of kids on horseback in the neighbor’s paddock, and girls with juice-stained faces in fancy dresses on the beach at sunset. This one in pigtails was underweight and got gummy vitamins and a chicken leg whenever she came over to play. She lived next door. The mom ignored her but had just bought a $90,000 horse. This boy came to practice piano. He cried if you touched his towel. His dad had moved in with the CrossFit instructor. The lady two doors down had had so much plastic surgery she looked like a marionette. I recognized Amy’s garden, now in bloom, her walkways and meandering stonework. She wanted to move the trampoline so the kids could bounce into the pool, but she worried that if somebody missed the water they’d hit the patio or impale themselves on an umbrella.