Exclusive: Read an Excerpt from Matthew Klam's New Novel About Plunging Into a Midlife Crisis
I drove south, toward Providence, and a little while later I was following Amy's directions, imagining her on those roads, thinking that this was wrong and delusional, and also sleazy and immoral, which made me dizzy, but who cares. As I got closer, I thought of how racy it was, that the kind of guy who did this kind of thing was usually more chiseled. Turning deeper into rolling hills, darker woods, I figured I could get caught and lose everything and end up alone in a studio apartment with rodent feces and crackers in my beard. People make you do things you don't want to do.
We met last summer at a conference, a kind of art camp for adults, on a college campus by the sea, a place I'd barely heard of before going there to teach. She took a class in the studio next to mine and pulled some late nights; we shared a bench in the courtyard, downwind of a cigarette. She was a nice woman with a few complaints, suggestible, not finished, wrapped up in her kids. She was unmoved by her own painting, and thought her classmates were hilarious if a little hard to take: the lady who painted in her bra, the hipster who flirted with her in his little fedora. We bumped into each other in the laundry room, and went for a walk on the jetty at sunset, and talked about marriage, and stayed out late, and spilled our guts.
Wasn't that the whole point of the place? To take a break and clear your head? Everybody knows a spot like it, a fishing village turned tourist trap, with pornographic sunsets and the Sea Breeze Motel. And who really gave a fuck what two people did at an arts conference in some swinging summer paradise? Real life was so lonely anyway, and I figured I'd never see her again, so on the last night we went back to her dorm room and goofed around.
When the conference ended, we started zipping notes back and forth, just a few, then more and more. For a while I thought she'd leave him, and if she left him, maybe I'd leave Robin. But then she didn't, and I didn't, either. I saw her once in the fall, for an hour of furious hand holding and making out in a candlelit booth in New York City. Now it was spring, and I couldn't wait any longer, and said I needed to be in the city for the day, and headed to her house in Connecticut.
Over the winter, our ten thousand texts and emails had covered a lot of ground—holiday-cookie recipes, the tale of the nanny who set the pizza box on fire and almost burned down her house—but also her hopes, regrets, embarrassments, and lots of stories about the man she'd married. She told me stuff she'd never told anybody, suicidal feelings in college, her father's last words, a pitch meeting when Henry Kissinger spoke directly to her tits. By the time the weather changed, the novelty had worn off and our communications had hardened into something else, dogged, rambling, what we had for lunch, but also her fittings for ball gowns and other name-dropping tidbits of the .003 percent, the neighbor who bought a 737, the fund manager who poisoned a local river to get rid of some mosquitoes.
Amy had married a banker who made $120 million a year. He funded Tea Party candidates and didn't believe in climate change. She'd left a good career to stay home and raise their kids in style. Sometimes, when he walked into a room, she felt goose bumps rising on her skin, a seething animal hatred, although it hadn't always been that way. A world-class salesman, he'd sold her a bill of goods. He had a charitable heart, and a hospital in Latvia named after him that always needed cash. He was a soft touch on early-childhood education, the Third World, the urban poor. It had a certain logic, billionaires to the rescue, that kind of thing.
The emailing of our minutiae had a way of leveling the disparity in our fortunes. I told her how much it hurt to step barefoot on a piece of Lego, so she told me how much it hurt to trip over her son's ExerSaucer. We liked to pretend we lived parallel lives. My daughter and Amy's younger girl, Emily, began worrying around the same time that if their baby teeth fell out, their tongues would fall out, too. How many times did we trade photos of adorable kids in pajamas or the bathtub, or end the night with a few pithy words, "dying for you" or something, that kept me buzzing for hours? How many nights did I lie in bed like a twelve-year-old boy from the pain of a thing so stubborn, imagining her over me, pressing myself flat, the cat draped across my dick, getting a contact high from the waves of desire coming off me—either that or its purring gave me a boner—but it was so real, I found myself whispering, almost touching her, knocking myself out in the dark.
While I drove, I thought about Robin, what she was doing, what I'd be doing at that hour if I were home. Beanie had his first cold, and Robin was covered in hives from exhaustion.
It was just the usual struggle to stay in love, keep it hot, keep it real, the boredom and revulsion, the afterthought of copulation, the fight for her attention, treating me like a roommate, or maybe like a vision of some shuddering gelatinous organ she'd forgotten still worked inside her.
First a guy sticks something in you. Then a thing grows inside your body. Eventually it tears its way out, leaving a trail of destruction. Then it's outside your body, but still sucking on you. It makes you weird, these different people in you and on you. Robin had had two C-sections and felt that they'd put her back together wrong the second time. A cold electric twinge shot down her back, down her leg, while walking, sitting, standing, or lying down. It defied any cure, painkillers, epidurals. For a while she wore a small black box on her belt that electro-stimmed her buttocks.
In a previous life, she bit my neck and licked my ear when we did it. After Kaya, I worried about courting her in my pajamas, with our little angel breathing down the hall, and lost focus and cringed as Robin's patience ran out if I finished too fast or not fast enough and overstayed my welcome. Bad sex was better than nothing, but Beanie effectively ended the badness. Fuckless weeks, excused by parenting, turned weirdly okay. Like our anniversary, we weren't sure anymore when it was supposed to happen. And, with the exception of my tongue on her clitoris every who knows when, she didn't need to be touched. She had vibrators for that. I think she mostly thought of what I did as a way to save batteries.
Our sex life hadn't been mauled by depression, routine, or conflict as much as it had been mauled by distraction, diffusion, a surfeit of beauty. Was that it? Our children's vitality and strangeness, their softness, shocked me every day. Their lightness and willingness and spirit and stupidity surprised me, their readiness to bravely step into a world they couldn't understand, packed with swimming pools, speeding cars, blazing sun, fanged dogs, stinging bees, heat, silent anger, slammed doors, inexplicable demands, funny hats slammed on their heads, and constantly from every direction these giants with twelve-pound heads, ten times their weight, five times their height, grabbing, pushing, shoving past, talking loud, telling them how to think, what to want, how to treat their own impulses, which ones to kill, which to love. I was sad for the bleakness of a little kid's bumbling existence, envious of the simplicity of their cause. They faced the world because they had no choice. They were explorers in a new land. Robin and I stood by them, in parallel formation, to witness and guide them.
Parallel, as if on the same track, running at the same speed, but not touching and having no way to touch. Parallel like people who went to bed without remembering to say goodnight, or saying it without meaning it, or meaning it but not saying it. I appreciated how on those rare occasions when my wife would kiss me, she did so with flat lips, popping them the way she did when she smacked at her ice cream. In this way she turned my face into something more palatable.
Was this as close to love as I was ever going to get? The closer I got, the more I wanted to destroy the things I loved. Something rose up in me, threatening me. I had to deflect it somehow.
I'd spent the winter engaging in daydreams, fantasies, alternate realities, while flipping through emails in a secret folder and looking at selfies of this same beautiful woman, barely clad in a towel at a fancy resort in Zurich, or on the swings with her kids at the park, or modeling the necklace I'd sent her at Christmas.
As I followed the map, the road wound scenically along endless stone walls and dense hedges impossible to see through. The pavement turned to dirt and sometimes went beside a field with a lone horse in the middle, wrapped in a blanket or unclothed, with some big house in the distance that said to all who passed, "Get a load of this, you fucking dirtbags." I found the mailbox and pressed the button and drove through the gate, and was surprised at how loud the gravel was, and slamming my door I looked up at the house, holy fuck, fieldstone chimneys, big columns on a massive porch.
In my cursory investigations, Michael Rapazzo's name had turned up on a list of speakers at some economic summit, and on the board of a dozen companies, and as the founder of a free health clinic in Hoboken, and as the backer of a charter school, or a string of them, mostly for profit, in tax-free public spaces. Three quarters of the $20 billion he managed came from large pension plans of state employees. Cops, firemen, teachers. He was up 24 percent in the first quarter of this year. He'd also appeared on TV financial-news shows once or twice, fending off attacks on private equity, citing a study by some think tank or university that proved he'd created eight thousand jobs. But I was drawn to his posture of authority; he was conventionally handsome, and I could imagine him mistreating his family in all the ways Amy had mentioned, growling at breakfast, forgetting birthdays, spending Christmas alone in a hotel in Lisbon, falling asleep at dinner.
I knocked, and was relieved to see how ashamed she was. She looked tall and grim and expensive, and as I entered the house it smelled like citrus cleaner and new carpeting. Amy led the way, not saying much.
I hadn't texted her until the night before, since I hadn't been sure I could slip away. There had also been the distinct possibility that I would chicken out, which left me feeling less ashamed and disgusted. She'd written back that she had a lunch date, housepainters were there, and her younger daughter had to be picked up at one. We'd have an hour or less, but yes, she'd said, please come.
The kitchen was long and white, with a couch in a bay window and a dog on the floor sweeping its tail. The ceilings were eighteen feet high. In the space above our heads you could hang hammocks, rope swings. The doorknobs, drawer pulls, light fixtures, and color schemes were bright and coherent.
Somebody had baked a crust in a casserole dish that sat on the counter, although I didn't know if that someone was her; I wasn't sure what she did all day, between the philanthropic commitments and the mommy stuff she claimed to live for, rocking her son in the middle of the night, building a tree house, standing in a pool all afternoon teaching the girls how to dive. What she did in the way of housework and how it resembled what went on in my house I never figured out. On this very day she had a list of things that needed her immediate attention: a local art museum pre-gala speech had to be written to rally the host committee, the lunch in town she couldn't cancel with the sub-Saharan head of Oxfam, and then she was taking her kids to the park. On slow days, she tutored in math at the after-school program they funded in town. She'd been to the hospital they'd built in Macedonia and wanted to go back. She also managed some pile of money. She worried about the Fed's monetary policy watering down the dollar. At Christmas they'd gone somewhere in the Caribbean I'd never heard of. In February she'd skied Chamonix.
Who was this woman? I stood there in my coat, so nervous and guilty I almost choked, and asked for some water. She ran the tap and handed me a glass. A photo on the fridge showed a younger Amy with lighter hair, evenly cut on the bottom, before her son was born, holding Emily as a baby, standing behind the older girl, the beautiful blue-eyed Lily, and the husband, who looked decent, older, balding—beside an even older, smiling, bald-headed guy who I guessed was his father. They were standing at the folded-out staircase of some kind of aircraft. The husband was tall and thick, with a big head and bags under his eyes. The older man, upon further inspection, was international war criminal and goon for the state Dick Cheney.
"You know him?"
She glanced at the photo. "Mike did a deal. We were friends. He used to take us places."
On the drive here I'd imagined an awkward meeting, which might've led to fumbling intimacy, nymphomania, the hostess lighting candles in a hot tub. But now I felt stupid and drank my water.
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing. What do I owe you for the water?"
I saw her hands shaking. Over her shoulder, Cheney held his pose. "I do this thing where I can't stop checking my phone. Do you do that?" I said yes. "Are we supposed to keep this up forever? Is there something else?"
"Like what?"
"It's bad. We're bad." I couldn't understand the point of that kind of talk. "This whole thing. We're sick."
"They're sick. We're the good ones." The stupidity of my response exhausted us. She put her hand on my shoulder as some kind of steadying gesture. I knew I was sick. I figured I should leave. Unfortunately, I'd lost my sense of how to retrace my steps.
It was a game that made everything else go away. It was as corny as that piña colada song, and as irrational as a noxious fear in the night, a fear of maiming and death by some rich guy's hired thugs while my children watched in horror. The sneaking around demanded exhausting and myopic concentration, and made me schizo and paranoid. There was nothing I could do about the guilt.
Anyway, I couldn't stop myself. My own ethical dilemmas seemed small in comparison. She believed in prayer and public service, a certain godliness, and, even so, couldn't stop herself from texting me photos of her naked butt. She wanted to create a stimulating after-school environment for poor kids in Detroit, and worked at it day and night, using all that moolah she'd ripped from the bones of humanity. She went down the hall. Half in a fog, I followed.
At the end of the hall we climbed a dark, narrow staircase, and as we climbed I looked out a small window onto her covered swimming pool, with walkways of elaborate stonework. I recognized the barn in the distance, a clean, beautiful post-and-beam structure she'd sent me photos of, no animals inside it, nothing at all but her sunlit painting studio, where she made her goofy artwork.
Upstairs we passed a four-year-old's bedroom the size of a bowling alley, with its own veranda. We passed additional seating zones, a paneled library, a gym with chromed machinery and a padded floor, an office—and finally entered a sunny room with high windows. A bed hid behind a rice-paper folding screen. She closed the door and bolted it and put her face in my face and breathed. I felt sick and wanted to leave. I had a sandwich and some cookies waiting for me in the car. The bed sat low on a wooden platform with a pea-green silk comforter and gold tassels. It didn't look all that virginal. They had a crib by the bed, like us, and books on the nightstands. It was creepy, although maybe I didn't give a shit.
Beyond this room was a smaller room with a ficus tree and a couch and a wall of glass facing the woods. There was a makeup mirror on a desk scattered with jewelry and a walk-in closet heaving with her clothes. On the couch were sneakers and a laptop, where, I imagined, she'd written all those emails. The adjoining bathroom had a floor made of smooth stones and an egg-shaped tub. Moisture lingered in the air, her smell. I believed all of it then: that she had nobody else to talk to, her husband was gay or autistic, a bill of goods she'd sold to me that I was the man and could do what I wanted.
"I have twenty-one minutes," she said, blushing, with sad eyes, all business. "Then I have a lunch that'll probably cost me a million bucks."
Something fell off the makeup table and crashed. I felt myself soaring, brightly, falling over. The couch was too short. I had one hand up her sweater and one down her pants. Her head tipped back as she grabbed my wrist and said, "I feel ugly."
I felt ugly, too. The night before, we'd texted to arrange this rendezvous. After it was arranged, I didn't sleep a wink. I drove three hours with reckless abandon to get here in time.
"I'm not taking off my clothes."
"We don't have to do anything," I said.
"Yes we do." She tightened her grip. "Every day, all day, you're the only thing I think about, the only person I want to talk to."
It was true that I'd never had that with Robin.
She said, "I married someone who ignores me."
"But you got sick of it."
"But it creeps me out to use some rationalization."
"Like we've been mistreated, so we deserve this."
We hovered in that vulnerable state. I felt her wanting my help getting past it.
"Why did you wait until last night to tell me you were coming?" Her breathing changed and became more labored, her eyes on me but not seeing, her anger distracting her guilt. She exhaled, trying to reel it back in.
"I wish this whole thing would blow up in my face so he'd find out and I could stop pretending." She grabbed my hand and shoved it down farther, directing the operation. She made a lovely noise. Her other hand went to my elbow. I found some spot on her that made her go out for a minute and leaned down and sucked her nipple. She came like sneezing, then rested, yawned, ran her hand through my hair and said, "How many other houses are you planning to visit on your way home?"
"I don't even have time to brush my teeth, I'm so busy answering your emails."
We had eleven minutes. I lay there, considering ways to get her pants off. I could ask politely. I could say, We're old and sad and this is our only consolation, or, from the other angle, Let's celebrate our youth, we're not done yet, let's romp. There was the legalistic approach, citing spousal shortcomings and violations, and redundancies among the various approaches. I tried to think, but as I did she started to fight with my belt, then got onto her knees. "Here," I said. "Let me." She looked at me with pity and clawed at my pants and yanked them open. I guess I just exploded. It might've been the best blow job in my life, except maybe it didn't go on long enough to count, like in professional bull riding, where the judges need at least eight seconds for a qualified ride.
We gave up on the couch and rolled onto the carpet. Her bra hung loose, unhooked, under her chin, and her sweater was bunched up around it. Five minutes.
"If anyone downstairs asks, I'll say you're my cousin." Amy was bigger and taller, but laid out against me she fit perfectly into my arms.
"Do you have a lot of cousins?"
"Tons."
"Do you have sex with them on the floor in your closet?"
"This is known as my dressing room."
"I drove all this fucking way to see you."
"I'll be sad when you go."
"I'm sad now."
"I hate this," she said. "Although it's nice to be with someone who doesn't act like he wants to kill me every time I open my mouth."
What could I say to that? "We'll have fun this summer."
"I guess."
"What does that mean?"
"I hate cheating," she said. "I hate lying and planning and scheming."
We lay there, trying not to do that.
"Hey," I said. "What if we meet somewhere else?"
"How is that better?"
"Somewhere less public."
She gave it some thought. "I have a meeting in Anguilla next month."
I'd had in mind somewhere near the Amtrak station in Wilmington. The longer we lay there, the worse I felt. Even if I could afford the plane ride, I'd have to get someone to cover. Our babysitter worked part-time. Who would do drop-off in the morning and pickup at Molly's at night? I'd need an excuse. And I'd have to tip the Caribbean bellhop for incidentals.
"I know it's harder for you," she said. "Mike doesn't give a shit. I've exchanged six words with him in the last thirteen days." I didn't want to hear about that bald-headed fuck. "He's in Holland."
"Good for him."
"I wish I could help you."
"Help me what?" I asked.
"I'd like to make it easier for you."
"So I can meet you in Anguilla?" We were still having fun.
"I don't mean that. I didn't think you even cared about money." I didn't want her pity, or her dough, if that's what we were talking about, but as I lay there I thought about hers, and mine, and had the sense that we'd begun blindly feeling our way into a conversation that was not entirely contradictory to my interests. I said, "I live on sunshine and candy." She told me to shush.
I saw us entering into a new type of contract, an arrangement based on lust that offered a dividend, a secret layer of protection. I imagined it then as some monthly number, conceived on the basis of my responsiveness to her needs, money I'd immediately get hooked on, which would open up new priorities and all sorts of sickening conflicts, and eight kinds of pressure to spit out gratitude to justify her investment. I'd learn to beg when I came up short, one more worldly necessity negating my search for solidarity, artistic purity, and spiritual insight. I'd just attach myself to that multiheaded hydra, that billion-dollar death machine, each suction cup lined with serrated teeth, swiveling, perforating my system, jamming its slimy probe inside me. Things would sour between us and I'd wait for the ax to fall, emailing her lackey functionary, some asshole I'd be on a first-name basis with, happy holidays, all that.
"Hey, why don't you take your money and shove it?"
"Hey," she said. "We use our inside voice."
"Oh wow, here's eight cents on the floor. Can I keep it?"
She looked bored, or harried, or a little alarmed, as if she'd stumbled into one of those unnerving conversations with a stranger in a public place where it takes a moment to figure out that they're crazy. Also, it was time to leave.
I think she just wanted someone normal, not some broke freelance artist, but not him, either. He didn't put their kids to bed, didn't say goodnight to her. Her sisters hated him. He enjoyed strip clubs, dining alone in expensive restaurants, borrowing money against companies with hard assets, numbers, and video games, but not people.
"If I were rich, you wouldn't have anything to do with me."
"Is that right?"
"I'm not real to you."
"You can stop telling me what I think."
"You think it's cute that I make sixty thousand dollars a year."
"That's the stupidest thing you ever said."
We were both so miserable, waiting for me to shut up. I wasn't about to leave Robin for this woman, although I liked her, she was entertaining, but the financial imbalance made it a nonstarter.
"When I met you, I didn't know you were loaded. And when I found out, it made it harder to like you, not easier."
She was glad to hear this. But then she was sad, because it was true.
A week after that awkward scene in Connecticut, Amy's seven-year-old daughter had a brain hemorrhage while walking off a soccer field. Somehow in Amy's mind there was this linkage of events, which on one level I understood. Overwhelmed with guilt, she took it as a sign. I gave her whatever space she needed. I spent the spring and summer forgetting her. Although at times when I couldn't forget her, I pictured her at Lily's bedside, or in the woods behind her house, walking the dog, missing me, maybe weeping in the pickup line in her beautiful-smelling German car or on an airport runway on Anguilla, killing whatever thoughts came up.
It's hard to approximate the sweep and fullness of a twelve-year relationship while diminishing and giving evidence against my wife and children in order to validate my adulterous behavior, but as spring faded into summer, I felt especially tired of my marital shortcomings and stints of poverty and artistic despair, the failure to meet my own low expectations. As the silence continued, I was suddenly aware of the time I'd wasted all winter, trying to lie and sext myself past manic domestic entanglement.
It was just the usual stuff, sooty socks, closet shelves falling apart, the increasing awkwardness of disrobing in front of my wife, the sounds of rodents carrying stray cornflakes behind the stove and up into our walls, along with any lingering nerve damage she'd suffered from pregnancy. I gave up on screwing, didn't wonder what my chances were, didn't look for an opening, didn't engineer it, didn't beat myself up over an opportunity I might've missed. Lying there as another chilly night passed between us, I was relieved to feel trapped and defeated, to feed it and point it inward and hoard it for myself.
It was easier to be around her during the hours of the day when our kids were awake; it was safer and more fun, as we cleaned the kitchen while Kaya dragged her little brother around, saying, "Hey, look! Baby Beanie can walk!" Then I'd go to the basement while Robin did her yoga tape in the living room, her lady yogi's southern drawl burbling through the ceiling above me, her feet pounding the rug as if to flatten, to pulverize me. I'd come to bed hours after her, turning the doorknob like a safecracker, crawling past the crib on my hands and knees so the floorboards didn't creak.
Tiptoeing beside the bed to find my pajamas, I'd study the mess of our blankets, tracing beneath them the contours of her body, staring down into the husk of her discarded jeans at my feet, the soft-looking, brightly colored underpants still inside them, so that I stood naked where she'd been naked, as though an echo of our once-naked selves intermingled on some alternate plane. Then I'd climb in beside her, calling up the ghosts still resonating in the air between us, and remember something better.
What was better was this: a receptive, neglected accomplice in the well-groomed horse country of Connecticut, suffering a similar fate, transporting herself over e-waves of desire through the magic of her cell phone, down the East Coast, to find me hiding under the blankets, texting with one hand. Someone who needed bodily updates, and remained curious and enmeshed, and kept the bloom on our flirtation, and cut it off for reasons I hadn't yet understood—matters of life, death, and the supernatural.
It was too late, I was too far gone, I'd spent too much time thinking up filthy stuff I planned to do when I finally got the chance, knowing I'd be sprung for a week in July, at my annual summer arts conference. There had to be someone else out there. I couldn't let it go. Despite the lack of communication since mid-March, despite the long silence, my feelings for Amy had grown even more intense, because I didn't need to filter or censor them, didn't need to shove them in an email and wait for the response to know they were real. In my loneliness I had to resist going back to study every word she'd ever sent, although I did, about four times a day, but it was more the knowledge that someone out there waited, trapped in her life, thinking of me.
Who Is Rich?: A Novel, by Matthew Klam, will be published by Random House on July 4.
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