Who is Rich?. Matthew Klam
life in a dance studio. She pranced around on long, strong legs, like she was still onstage, mimicking my exaggerated throwing motion, elbow back, above her ear, and threw it over my head, then threw it into the bushes, then under the stands, waiting each time for me to go get it, like my daughter, who didn’t know how to do anything and needed me to show her, as though she were doing me a favor, turning whatever should’ve been fun into a pain in the ass.
I asked polite questions about her acting career, and mentioned a few out-of-the-way spots where people go to sunbathe, smiling at her, wondering whether she liked the beach, whether she liked swimming in big waves, feeling invisible and ignored, wondering what it would be like if for some reason she put down the mitt and lay on the grass and pulled down her shorts and begged me to fuck her.
Art historian Marilyn Michnick sat behind the fence, smiling and serene, and nearly blind, needing a cane, beside Alicia Hernandez Roulet, whose ugly little walleyed dog yapped around the field. Mohammad Khan, a theater critic, cleaned his eyeglasses with long, delicate-looking fingers, complaining about having to play. “I don’t like to get sweaty. I don’t like to be wet.” Vicky Capodanno came toward us from right field, in the baggy black T-shirt and shorts and combat boots she wore every year for softball, and a few steps behind her, Tabitha wore a baseball cap and a long thing you toss over a bathing suit that looked like a tablecloth. I recognized a couple stragglers, among them a taller lady moving stiffly, hunched and broad-shouldered in her gray sleeveless T-shirt and blue-and-green plaid shorts, who I’d spoken to a few minutes earlier: Amy O’Donnell, who I’d once held as we caressed in the dark, trembling and naked, and later while sleeping in the quiet dawn. I wanted another moment with her, something I could look back on later, to get me through another year, a scene, a place to park my soul through winter months of diapers and screaming.
I looked across the road, beyond the trees, to houses and a cornfield in the distance. Whatever hadn’t been watered was dead. A guy in a jungle hat took batting practice, drilling balls into left field, where eight or nine people stood chatting in two clumps, some of them not even facing the batter, and I wondered if one of them would be hit by a ball and killed.
Amy went behind the dugout and started stretching, some kind of hurried knee-bend squat. She was so tall. Her people could be traced back to the northern coast of Ireland, where shipwrecked Vikings raped the villagers, which made them tall and fair. She bent, she hunched, she made horrible faces. Now she squatted side to side.
The guy with the water came through the trees from the parking lot, and one of the girls in a bikini tried to make a run for it, shrieking, and he tackled her and spilled water on her and she screamed. They were young, although not so young, but like a different species.
“What’s his problem?” I asked Eva. “Why isn’t he playing?”
She watched him, lips parted, not smiling. She said his name was Ryan.
“Is he in the theater company?”
“He’s in something in New York, so he’s going back and forth, taking the train, so he can’t be in anything here.”
He rolled around on the grass—he had fine golden skin and a Chinese tattoo on his neck—as she watched him, her poor little blouse straining at every button, her ass floating in the air like a helium balloon. I threw the ball, but she wasn’t looking and it flew past her and pegged Stan in the back. He wheeled around, scowling, and kicked it away.
One of these nights, maybe after a rehearsal, under glittering starlight, Ryan might meet Eva walking from the theater to the dorms. And may it not turn into a long-term monogamous relationship, and may it end in a mutual hatefuck. Amen. Behind us, a group of interns stood blocking the dugout, looking sweaty, stealing our water, complaining to Mohammad Khan about having to clean up the tent after lunch.
“The kitchen is a total slime pit!”
“We’re totally covered in slime!”
They went on complaining as they tipped up bottles of water: a young woman in a torn miniskirt with torn black stockings and heavy mascara, and her sleepy-looking friend, filling out a T-shirt with the school’s name across her chest, and a third one with bouncy, eggy, shiny hair. It was as if the water they poured down their throats went right into their sumptuous breasts to keep them full.
Four more days of this. Then I could go home and choke my wife.
There were enough of us now to split into two teams. People wandered out to take positions so we could start.
I pictured myself heaving over some sullen nineteen-year-old, my baggy old face hanging down, and went along the dugout thinking filthy thoughts, grabbing helmets and lining them up beneath the bench, and asked nicely if anyone had the order, and saw that I was batting seventh. On this broiling Saturday afternoon, where were the cuties of my youth? Women in their forties had replaced them, hunching toward the grave. For so long I’d been young, but that was over, and the thing to do now was teach a little comics and go home, where I could drop my eyeglasses in the toilet, and fall down the stairs in my pajamas, somebody wailing in the background while I stood in my kitchen, in a state of shock, loading the dishwasher.
Vicky came over and put her mitt on her head and said, “Let’s get on with it already.”
I needed to find someone at this conference, someone who wouldn’t harm a married man, or hated being married, or couldn’t bear to be alone for three or four days. I didn’t have any big strategy here. I liked to flirt. I needed to stay alert every second for a potential alliance in this war against morbidity and death. Were there rules or prohibitions? Some of my colleagues preyed upon the young, their own students, the low-hanging fruit, which struck me as a real character flaw. I wanted a grown-up, maybe with children of her own, someone who was needed somewhere else and wouldn’t get hooked. I’d driven the many miles here with purpose and concentration. I had to make the most of my time away from home. Over the last ten years, the stuff I’d done could be counted on one hand: a couple of late-night goodbyes that never got past the talking stage; a wriggling blond woman at a convention in Brooklyn who edited textbooks for a living; Ruth Gogelberg, Gunkelman, whatever, at this very conference three or four years ago. It started when I was sixteen. It started when I was five, the need for a girl to save me, the need to escape, in a panic to get away from my mother and father, out of this empty shell. I always had a girlfriend, always fell in love, and even at my most saintly and sexless, I always liked someone out there, was working at something, moving toward it with intention and forethought, nibbling around the edges until I hated the whole thing, until everything I did became about not cheating, not doing something, until it was pretty much a foregone conclusion, and all I had to do was pull the trigger and get it over with, so I could slink back to my safe and stable perch and pretend it had never happened and hate myself and think of someone new.
Amy finished stretching and pulled her hair back into a rubber band. Our thing went beyond lusty one-liners and therapeutic confessions. I’d been in love with her for a year. Not love. Whatever it was. And it just so happened that her personal misery, hidden behind a windfall of prosperity, was ironically charged, luridly beguiling, and possibly useful in a practical sense, as fact-based material for the once and future semiautobiographical storyteller. She walked into the dugout. I stood and walked out, pretending not to know her. She found a bat and went behind the backstop and took practice cuts, swinging so hard her helmet fell off.
The game started. A big sandy-haired kid stepped into the batter’s box and golfed the first pitch high and gone; it landed in the parking lot, where it bounced as people cheered, as he ran around the bases with his arms hanging down, like a pigeon-toed ape. Mohammad Khan could barely lift the bat, and tapped a base hit. Tabitha got up and somehow outran a dribbler down the first-base line. Then Amy went to the plate, grimacing into the sun, and took a wild cut.
She hit it pretty well. The second baseman knocked it down but couldn’t hold on. He picked it up and tagged Tabitha softly on the shoulder, then threw the ball over the first baseman’s head, over the dugout, where it beaned the golf cart that had driven Marilyn Michnick here. Mohammad limped home. When the ball is thrown out of play, the runner is awarded the next base. Amy waited at first. I couldn’t