Читать книгу Who is Rich? - Matthew Klam - Страница 15

What I knew about Robin at twenty-six has since been overwritten by our twelve years together, by the fuzzing of boundaries that separate us, by events we faced beyond our abilities, by the sound of a four-note wooden xylophone our son liked to beat the shit out of at five A.M., and by the immutable cycles of birth and sleep. It’s not an excuse, for anything really, but there were nights Beanie woke up screaming every fifteen minutes. I could count on one hand the times in his life he slept more than two hours straight. It became a secret among us, like domestic beatings, what went on in our house after dark.

Sometimes I blamed our daughter, who fell between the mattress and the wall, or had bears in her dreams, or the rain upset her and drove her out of bed. Sometimes I blamed my wife, who never did figure out how to sleep, who needed protection from the chaos, and wore earplugs and a satin eye mask, and had a bag of prescription drugs she kept hidden in her underwear drawer, and in an emergency had to be shaken awake, and couldn’t go back to bed or take naps during the day, and in sleep debt quickly spiraled into anxiety and short-term mania.

But I woke up smoothly and easily when he screamed, and took him from the crib at the foot of our bed and carried him away and fed him or sang him a song, and he went back down for a while. Then I wandered from the bedroom to the couch to the futon in the basement, helpless and itinerant, waiting for his cry, so that the silence became loud, and the quiet throbbed and roared through the stillness like a marching band. If I lay there long enough, I split the worry into so many pieces it started to glitter, and I got dizzy and hopeful and felt grateful for the sounds of cars, birds, dawn.

I did the nights. In the morning I rested on the couch half-dead while Robin got them dressed. Sometimes as I lay there, my daughter came close and made a little ponytail on the top of my head. There were mornings when I wished I could escape or be put out of my misery, but the accumulation of good behavior, the years placed end to end, had also made me strong, although sometimes it occurred to me that it was all too fucking weird, as I struggled to stay the course, all this goodness and responsibility; it seeded an impulse toward endless badness and rebellion.

Sometimes as I lay there Robin bent down to see how I was, touching my hand with a look of eagerness or tenderness in her eyes, almost like hunger or lust, a look I didn’t see much in any other context, asking gently for a recap of how bad it had been. Sometimes she brought me toast. I think my pain meant something to her. I think she enjoyed my suffering almost as much as I did. Like lovers using clamps and whips, it somehow brought us closer.

She gave them life, gave them milk from her breasts, nursed them through sickness and colds, made a throaty sound when she hadn’t seen them all day, moaning, kissing them all over. She did the days. I handed over my paychecks, any option money or royalties that hadn’t dried up; she pooled it with her money, paying the bills, taking them to kid parties, doctors, setting up playdates, hanging with other mothers, deciding on Kaya’s preschool, wondering if I could take a more active role in decisions. Sitting in a little chair by the door of Kaya’s classroom last fall for three straight weeks, her back breaking, trying to get Kaya to calm down and hang in there. She was strong, strong-willed, and shouldn’t have been surprised that her daughter was, too. She got field producers and actors to do what she wanted, took hours of incoherent B-roll and turned it into tight twelve-minute arcs, understood how the wildlife conservation movement had failed African lions.

For several years, following her time in children’s television, Robin worked for an international news agency, and went all over Latin America, and held a camera and got dengue fever and hired soldiers to take her into the mountains. She had friends who were stabbed, kidnapped, or disappeared. Later she worked at the bureau, going out on assignment once a month, and until Kaya was born she ran the desk, Central and South America and the Caribbean, sending out other people to risk their necks the way she once did. Eventually she burned out and quit.

She wound up at the Nature Channel, which was perfect for a mom with a small kid. Her co-workers sometimes arrived still wearing their morning tennis outfits. The newsroom had been exciting and desperate and prone to burnout, but the Nature Channel was ergonomic and well lit and had the congenial atmosphere of a shoe store. She didn’t make films anymore; the channel didn’t make anything. It bought the finished product, shows about water buffalo, flora and fauna, and also, increasingly, the stuff that filled prime time: a “science” show about people too fat to wear clothes, a “history” show about bombs that fit up someone’s body cavity. A show about a man with huge testicles was not yet considered a celebrity vehicle. She still got to travel, but not to the Galápagos. Twice a year her department went to Wheaton, Maryland, for an afternoon of paintball.

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.