Matthew Klam - Who is Rich?

“When a big kid bounces a little kid,” she said, “we call it popcorn.”

In photos the girls danced around in towels or naked; no one cared. “I just let ’em do whatever.” She’d grown up in a big family with no money and liked to pretend she still lived on the fly. She wanted me to know that she was the real thing, that all the fancy ladies in the neighborhood had been born rich and ignored their kids. One took the infant and the night nurse with her on business trips. The point was, only Amy with her fun yard could protect the children of utmost privilege from abandonment and cushy neglect. “The nannies like hanging with my nanny, they’re all friends, so guess who ends up making lunch for everyone and keeping an eye on the pool?”

“The pool boy?”

“You’re getting warmer.”

“Looks like fun.”

“Honey, I’m always having fun.” Her eyes narrowed. Seagulls wheeled over us, screeching like monkeys. A single airplane, high up, left a puffy trail.

“Your pool looks even bigger with the cover off.”

Her eyes were pale and slitted. “It’s the same.”

“And your house looks bigger. Have you been feeding it vitamins?”

“Same pool. Same house.”

There were voices coming this way, people walking to the flagpole to make phone calls. She’d spent time thinking about this very thing and wanted it settled.

“It’s not my house. It’s his. He wanted it. He wanted an even bigger place, but I said no.”

“That’s a beautiful story.”

I knew all about her lonely life in the big empty house in the woods. I knew what kind of soap she used on her son’s eczema, and the name of her husband’s investment fund, and the humiliating details of their sex life, and how many billions in assets, and his unpublished annual haul. I had a hard time imagining that there was anything left to tell me. I knew she’d played trumpet in the marching band in high school, and spit had run down her chin. She’d told me about the ex-boyfriend who stalked her, the summer after high school ended, finally cornered her, tore her clothes, beat her badly, and probably worse—and how she refused to seek justice or retaliate. She missed her father, he’d died a few months after the attack, and in her mind somehow those awful events were connected. One night, when her second kid was an infant and Amy had a bad stretch, her father appeared to her as a ghost at the foot of her bed. She had a high, hard, shining forehead. Some of her hair had fallen out after each of her kids was born.

I noticed her cracked lower lip and remembered my mouth on her salty neck, holding her smooth, bony hip. We locked eyes. I felt it zooming through me again. I heard pretty violin music in my head, the back of my throat went soft, I tried to swallow, and wanted to bury my face in her hair.

A man paced back and forth, talking with one finger in his ear. A white-haired lady stood on the other side of the flagpole in a long denim skirt. “Hello? Hello? Are you there? I’m only hearing parts of what you’re saying.”

“But you’re doing okay?” Amy asked. “And things are good at home?”

“Is that a joke?”

“But how is it for you?”

“I already told you,” I said. “I gave her everything I had.”

Amy said, “You’re a good person.”

“No I’m not.”

“I’m glad I met you, whoever you are.”

“You look beautiful. I’m glad your daughter’s healthy.”

She nodded. “She’s at sleepaway camp, hating every minute of it.”

“You got through it. I knew you were scared.”

“Yeah, well.” She glanced around. “I started to wonder.”

“What?”

“You know.”

“Huh?”

“If there was a connection.”

“To what?”

“To us. All the emails and everything.”

“You mean, like, punishment ?”

She looked up, chin raised. “I’m not blaming you.”

“I understand.” She didn’t want to be mocked.

In March, a week after I saw her at her house in Connecticut, her oldest kid walked off a soccer field and puked and passed out and almost died. Texts and lengthy emails flowed night and day with no punctuation, starting in mid-sentence, referencing jargon and arguments about emergency surgical techniques to relieve swelling in her daughter’s brain. Then notes from the hospital at all hours, waiting to speak to the doctors. Her husband was in Milan, working on a deal. Then I heard nothing from her for four months, not a word.

We’d put a lot into our emails. It was a gigantic pain in the ass. If either of us slacked off, the other one got offended. You had to be timely and consistently thoughtful. Although it was nice to know that on nights when I couldn’t sleep, at least someone out there was listening. When I started spiraling into my own black hole, or when Beanie went loco at two A.M., or when Kaya cried because her pillow was too hot, or when the magazine sent back my drawing thirty-seven times for revisions and then killed it, or when I received actual death threats for a cartoon I drew mocking military methods of interrogation, or when the dental surgeon sent me a bill for two thousand nine hundred fucking dollars, or the neighbors hated me because my car blew clouds of whitish-blackish smoke, or when Robin said I tasted like something she had for dinner that she didn’t feel like tasting again, when I thought that nobody would ever want me again, that I’d never crawl into bed with someone and fall into her arms, grateful, protected, in love—I could say it, through that doohickey in my pocket, and by the power of instantaneous electronic transmission it would find her, rising out of a dead sleep in the middle of the night, and she’d zap back a little something to cheer me up, and that would be enough. Giving voice to every thought in my head, having a place for that, meant a lot to me.

Her kid recovered quickly, and in May Amy took to Facebook to celebrate. In June I wrote to her, wondering whether I’d see her here again, and waited patiently for that iffy response.

“I want to hear more about His holy vengeance, but I have to go play softball. It’s in the contract. Part of the fun.”

“Oh.” She looked miserable.

“You should play. It’s the Naked versus the Dead.”

“Some people from my class signed up.”

“Come on.”

“I’d probably hurt myself.”

“I hurt myself every year.”

“Look,” she said brightly. “I took your advice and went to a chiropractor.” She turned her head from side to side. She seemed to grow even taller.

“Praise the Lord.”

“Although that’s as far as it goes.”

“Any farther and it means you’re possessed by the devil.”

Almost sincerely she said, “You are not the devil.”

“No, I’m not,” I said. “Although it’s interesting how you turned that against me, slightly demonic.”

“Sorry. It’s the possessed part.”

“Either way, you’re safe from me.”

She looked pained. Not too pained, not like she might keel over with blood pouring out her eye sockets, but maybe more like the electric toothbrush she’d been hoping for was permanently out of stock.

“You know what?” Her eyes narrowed again. “I was doing fine until now.”

She had been mine. There was that. So it was nice to be close to her, and it was nice to see it causing her pain.

I went into the dugout and looked through the mitts for one with no cracks in the leather. Tom McLaughlin sat on the bench, reading his phone. Frank Gaspari walked by with his socks pulled up. “Are we ready for this, or what?”