Who is Rich?. Matthew Klam

      

       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.

      Julie took a job in Atlanta. Nedd moved out. The housemate thing collapsed. Rishi and I found a place in Fells Point. Robin moved into an apartment alone, two rooms with a refrigerator under the counter and the smallest kitchen sink you ever saw. It was fall. One night I brought her flowers and beer and got a home-cooked meal. She was my friend, she took pity on me, I was a pitiful tortured person who could make her laugh. A wall of books greeted me when I walked into the apartment, film theory, life on the Serengeti, prehistoric pottery of the Colorado Plateau, whatever she was interested in.

      She didn’t want me, maybe didn’t trust me, saw something missing, wanted less, a lighter commitment, or was holding out for someone who could take care of things down the line. I couldn’t cope with her withholding, couldn’t talk to her about us. I played the part of the ironic, submissive romantic, and she played the partially compliant friend of the opposite sex, sexually complicated, rigid, obsessive, a tease. I was protective and patient but losing hope. She was emotionally damaged by the death of her brother and her parents’ divorce.

      On a weekday morning in December, some lady blew through an intersection and T-boned Robin’s Jetta. Thus began the period of her concussion. It lasted through the spring with a sort of merciless momentum. The nausea alone almost killed her. She wore sunglasses at work, had trouble looking at a screen, couldn’t tolerate light or music or ambient noise. Went to neurologists, did brain-rehabilitation exercises, memorized colored playing cards. I came and went, brought groceries, made phone calls to her auto-body place and health insurance. I still recall the soft shush of a beanbag she tossed from one hand to the other, crossing the midline.

      Indoors at night she wore shades under a floppy wide-brimmed hat, looking like a Russian double agent, one I called Farvela Du Harvelfarv. By cooking for her in the stuffy apartment, I earned the right to sit quietly while she talked to her mother, rubbing a certain spot on her temple while she cried, wondering whether she’d ever recover. She became softer, less guarded, quietly resting beside me, resigned to a constant migraine-type vertigo. But because it wouldn’t end, it seemed to get worse. She couldn’t exercise. Went to bed at eight. Was sad and strange to herself.

      Overcome by a wave of anguish, she slept with me. In that way, we began sleeping together. I think it was, even for her, a consolation. And yet, I couldn’t help feeling, as I learned to take on her bottomless fears of permanent damage, that the inordinate conditions under which she lived had forced her to surrender. I remember pulling her onto my lap, kissing her head in different places. She was so vulnerable and open. I wished we could always live that way.