Can't Buy Me Love

by Chris Kenry

  “Well?” I asked, taking a drink.

  “Well,” he said. “She can and she has.”

  I picked up my large glass by its elegant stem and took an inelegant chug, realizing that this meeting was probably not going to be any more pleasurable than my meeting with Wendy that morning.

  “Maybe I will have that cigarette,” I slurred. He tossed one over to me.

  “Well, damn it, Jack, what do you want me to say? I hate to say I told you so, but I did try to get you two to draw up wills ages ago, but you didn’t, so it all goes to the next of kin.”

  “Which is me!” I cried, blowing out a big cloud of smoke. “Isn’t there any way we can contest it?” I asked, rising and pacing the room, cocktail in one hand, cigarette in the other, realizing how much I sounded like a character from Melrose Place, and how this severe black-and-white room fit that role perfectly.

  “I mean the will is old....” I continued.

  “It’s less than ten years old,” he said, laughing, “which to your puppy-dog eyes seems like a long time, but in the legal scheme of things it’s not unreasonable.” He downed his own drink.

  “Now, son, I know you’re thinking, and rightly so, that you are the next of kin, but this here’s the Hate State, remember? Some people here aren’t real fond of homos. If they had their way we’d all be living in Sin Francisco or locked away in some mental hospital.” He poured us both the last of the Manhattan from the shaker.

  “It’s not pretty, but what it comes down to is this: she has very strong legal legs to stand on and you have puny little toothpicks.”

  “Sshiit,” I slurred.

  “Son, you know if there was any way I could help you I would, but you have to believe me when I tell you that you’re just bangin’ your head against a wall. I wouldn’t take this case if someone paid me in full up front, because it would be a big ol’ waste of time.”

  As he spoke I thought of all the credit-card debt I’d amassed in the past year, largely in secret from Paul. It was well over thirty thousand by now, and thinking of it, I dragged deeply on the cigarette.

  “Another drink?”

  “No,” I said, my tongue feeling heavy. “Any more and I won’t be able to walk, let alone drive.”

  “Well, then by all means have one.”

  “No, I really need to go,” I said, but made no move to get up.

  Even now it’s not clear what happened later that night, but I know I stayed and that we drank at least one more shaker of Manhattans. I vaguely remember dancing on the sofa with Burl while we both sang along to Cher’s “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves,” but not much after that. I awoke the next morning, my twenty-sixth birthday, alone in Burl’s four-poster bed, feeling like I had a mouth full of sand. I was naked save for my underwear, which was keeping my ankles quite warm.

  The fact of my sleeping with someone when my lover was barely a month in the grave was bad. The fact that the someone was his drunken, overweight, hillbilly friend was worse. But the real sting came when, struggling to get dressed and out of there, I reached into my pants pocket for the car keys and pulled out three crisp hundred-dollar bills. My head throbbed, and it took me a moment to realize what it implied, but as I looked more closely at the bills I noticed that it was all spelled out for me quite literally. Burl had taken a blue ballpoint pen and drawn little conversation balloons coming out of Ben Franklin’s mouth. Thanks again for last night, read the first caption. The next said, For services rendered, and the last, Cum again soon! with one of Franklin’s eyes penned into a crude wink. I was furious, and my head pounded as I struggled to remember what had happened.

  Later Burl said it was probably nothing, but that he couldn’t remember either, and he gave me the money “just in case.” He said that toward the end of the evening I started crying, and it was then that he put me to bed. He has never answered to my satisfaction how my underwear came to be around my ankles.

  “Hell, I probably dumped you at the bottom of the bed and then pulled you up to the headboard by your arms. Your underwear must have slid down then.”

  Yeah, right.

  I rubbed my eyes, set the money on his desk, and grabbed some paper and a pencil from one of the desk drawers, intending to sit down to write him a caustic note saying that I was sorry he had misinterpreted a drunken roll in the hay as sex for hire. I say I intended to write it because I no sooner sat down than nausea raised me up again and I ran to the bathroom.

  4

  FAMILY VALUES

  As exiles go, my parents’ house is not a bad one. It is a large structure, vaguely Tudor, made of gray stone, with three large gables and a turret in front. As a child I had always wanted my bedroom to be in the turret, envisioning the many nights I would secretly climb down the ivy-covered stones into the arms of my waiting lover. Instead my father used it as his study, and it was the place my siblings and I came to associate with punishment or “talking-tos,” as my father called them. It is where we sat as my father silently perused our report cards and asked, “Do you really think you did your best?” the place we went to get our allowances, or ask for a permission slip to jump on the neighbor’s trampoline, or to sign birthday and Mother’s Day cards. I always thought of it as the brains of the house—an image now reinforced by the presence of a giant telephone antennae shooting out of the top.

  Returning to the nest at the age of twenty-five is not usually heralded, but my father was easier on me than he might have been because Paul was so freshly dead. Nevertheless I did not want to seem presumptuous, and had thus been reluctant to unpack much of anything, out of fear that to do so would imply in my father’s mind (and my own, for that matter) that my stay was somewhat permanent.

  My mother would have loved that. In the three weeks I’d been home, she and I had shopped extensively, filled all the pots and planters around the house with annuals, made mango sorbet, selected new upholstery for the dining room chairs, taken a class on ikebana, and had gone to three baseball games. Day after day we went along, as blissfully happy as Oedipus and Jocasta, until my father returned home in the evenings and spoiled everything by making us both feel guilty: me for not working, and my mother for indulging me.

  My father has always been rather stoic and severe, but he used to be a much better sport. He used to see my mother and me, and my twin sister, Carey, more as his court jesters than his relations, always there to entertain him and make him laugh with our stories of the interesting things we did and people we came in contact with. But those were the days before he, like so many people in the country, came under the moral spell of an aged black nun called Sister Melanie, and lost his sense of humor.

  Sister Melanie is a retired inner-city school principal from Atlanta who has somehow morphed herself into a ridiculously popular talk-radio personality. This she has done largely by emphasizing personal responsibility above all else and by taking all the problems of her callers and placing them squarely back in their own lap. She is so effective, in part, because she is a very small, blind woman and appears, on the surface, to be all Southern gentility. Then she bares her teeth, and this dichotomy is somehow appealing to certain masochistic segments of our society. Lately she has become the darling of the Republican party because she routinely bashes the welfare system and because of her tough moral code: no sex before marriage, no abortion, and no using addiction as an excuse for anything. She is ruthless when people make mistakes and argues against giving second chances “ . . . because that makes it seem like actions have no consequences.”

  What she is most famous for, however, are her slogans: little phrases and sayings that she incorporates from time to time into her broadcast. Sometimes they rhyme, other times they don’t, but they all serve as a simple reminder of her philosophy. She reads through them in the voice and diction of a beat poet or a Baptist minister, and many times she can throw them out at callers as one-sentence answers to their problems:

  AGONIZED MOTHER: “Sister Melanie, my son got kicked out of school for having
marijuana in his locker. He has a bad drug problem and we really want to help him. What can we do?”

  SISTER MELANIE: “Listen, honey, it’s nice that you want to help him, but you know what I say: Abuse is no excuse! You need to stand back and let him face the music. The school administrators were right to kick him out. I’m surprised they didn’t turn him in to the police. I can tell you that’s what I would have done if he was at my school. He needs to make the decision to fix himself. Remember, addiction is a fiction!”

  My father became acquainted with her quite by accident when he discovered one of her books in the seat pocket of the plane in which he was traveling. He read it, liked it, and that was it. He was a convert, and from then on he never stopped trying to convert the rest of us. Worse than that, he sought out any and every opportunity to use her philosophy to point out the shortcomings of his family, most often mine.

  On the flip side, my mother is fun and light and airy. She is a favorite of all of my friends because she has a thick Southern drawl, and a sort of ditzy naivete characteristic of women who grew up sheltered in the 1950s. She is one of the last living remnants of the white-gloved Dallas society that has now all but vanished. She met my father, who was much less dogmatic then, at a sorority tea dance her sophomore year at SMU. They dated all through college and married a week after their graduation, much to the dismay of her parents, because my father, while good-looking and highly ambitious, didn’t have a penny, and his family was borderline white trash. Her family, on the other hand, was rolling in it, and had been for generations.

  Aware of his in-laws’ reservations about him, my father, always a proud man, refused to accept, and refused to allow my mother to accept, any money whatsoever from her parents. So for the first few years of their married life, until my father got established, they endured what my mother likes to call “the hard time.” This meant they lived in an apartment instead of a house and had a dishwasher that was a machine as opposed to a woman who washed dishes. I’ve seen pictures and home movies from this period and I can assure you it was hardly as bad as she led us to believe. My father used to laugh at her descriptions and stories of “the hard time” because for him it was a huge step up from his lean bachelor days.

  Reluctantly, my grandparents respected his wish that he and my mother accept no money from them. But they managed to sidestep this rule by taking my mother on shopping trips every time they blew into town, which was about once every three months. Whole wardrobes were updated on these trips, and the young couple’s small apartment was, piece by piece, lavishly furnished. In addition, my mother made two trips to Europe in these years of poverty, ostensibly as her younger sister’s chaperone—trips bankrolled by her parents that left my father grumbling over his TV dinners while she was gone.

  As for my father’s side of the family, its history is clouded by myth and hyperbole. Dad never grew tired of telling my brother and sister and me how lucky we were to be living in a plush house in a beautiful neighborhood, because he had not been so lucky growing up in rural Minnesota. His father had been a farm laborer, and his mother had manned the counter at the local Woolworth’s cafeteria. They both worked hard but still never had enough money, so my father had to take a part-time job cleaning cattle stalls just to keep the family’s collective head above water. To hear him tell it, he had to work from sunup to sundown and had grown up with nothing but old corncobs to play with, which is probably true, but I’ll never know because he is an only child and both of his parents died long before I was born. Conveniently, this allows him to embellish his stories in any way he wants without fear of contradiction. I should be so lucky.

  My father is an admirable man, despite his gruff exterior and current lack of humor, and I know he has worked very hard to attain everything he has. But more important than grit and ambition, Dad has been blessed with tremendous foresight, which has enabled him to see upcoming trends before they are up-and-coming. He jumps in, makes lots of money, and pulls out before the market dries up, or becomes saturated, or whatever dry or soggy business analogy you want to use. He started out in the oil industry, made heaps of money in the sixties and seventies, and then quit just before the Arabs flooded the market. He then took the money he’d saved and opened a store selling computer products, which he quickly expanded into a chain of stores. He fortified that business, sold it for a staggering profit, and moved on to cellular phones in the late eighties. Back then, the phones seemed like nothing more than an elitist novelty, and therein lies my father’s wisdom: somehow he foresaw the trend, and knew that soon everyone would be carrying little phones.

  Oil executive, software pioneer, CEO of a communications company. All of his titles. I wonder what he’ll do next.

  I never gave much thought to the idea of titles (until recently, when I was branded with one), but when you think about it, we live in a society where people are largely defined by the work they do. Don’t believe me? Take a look at the obituary section of the newspaper. At the end of life everyone is defined by their work: Wanda the systems analyst, Theodore the hairdresser. Bob the doctor. Simone the bus driver. I should have realized this early on, since my father was constantly asking my brother and sister and me what we wanted to be when we grew up. My sister and brother always had quick answers. “I want to be a fireman!” or “I want to be a doctor!” But I’d just shrug my shoulders or say something disturbing, like “I want to be Mommy!” The truth is, I never gave it much thought at all. Not even in college, which is the time most people formulate at least a rough outline for their life’s work. I had selected art history as my major before I’d even started my freshman year, and was met with an avalanche of condescending smiles and comments: “What are you going to do with that? Open a museum?” or “You’ll be flipping burgers with that degree.” All implying that I was being terribly frivolous and decadent and was wasting my parents’ hard-earned money. I heard these comments so many times that eventually I began to believe them, and became embarrassed by what I was studying, like I’d been caught taking nothing but gym classes.

  Then I met Paul. And there, finally, was someone who thought I’d been wise in my choice of study. He showed me just a few of the countless avenues I could travel down with my education, and actually encouraged me to explore them, but by that time it was almost too late. I had been indoctrinated well and believed that while those avenues might have been open to someone as wise and brilliant as he, they would not be open to me with my useless B.A. Then Paul and I moved in together, and that effortless living situation did nothing to spur me on to look for a job. For me, work was always a vague cloud just over the horizon. I knew it would blow in and block the sun someday, but to my mind there was no reason to hurry it along.

  I thought about all that as I drove away from Burl’s that morning. I had almost reached my parents’ subdivision when I made a U-turn and decided to avoid going home for a while. I was afraid my father might be there, and I didn’t want to walk in wearing the same clothes I’d had on last night, making it more obvious than it probably already was that I hadn’t slept there. Instead I went to the gym. I wasn’t scheduled to work, and it wasn’t the time for my usual workout, but I felt I should punish myself for my drunken, slutty behavior the night before. What better way to do that than with a grueling workout? I changed my clothes, said a few casual “hellos” to some of the lunch crowd, and got on the StairMaster. I set the resistance fairly high, hoping to burn away the Manhattan cloud from my brain. It was tough going at first, but once I got the rhythm down and started sweating, I felt better.

  While climbing the staircase to nowhere, I thought again about the night before and the money that was tucked away in the pocket of my jeans in the locker room. The meaning was clear enough: it was a payment, but what did my taking it mean? What did that make me? I told myself it was a joke and that I’d have the last laugh by keeping it. I told myself it was his way of helping me out, and that I should be thankful. I told myself I’d take it, use it to silence my
most annoying creditors, and then pay it back to him when I could. I was a pro at rationalizing. My brain, just like my body, initially protested what I was doing to it, but eventually it quieted down and I adopted one of those scenarios, I don’t remember which, as the party line.

  And yet, somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that the money was just what it had said—money paid “for services rendered.” In a subliminal way that’s probably why I had gone to Burl’s. I hadn’t gone for legal advice; I knew Wendy was legally justified. I hadn’t gone for commiseration or remembrance. I had gone for monetary help. I desperately needed money and didn’t want to hit up my parents—again—and I knew that Burl had more money than he could count. I also probably knew, again in the back of my mind, what I’d have to do to get it, and I did it. I had to have a few drinks under my belt first, but it really wasn’t a laborious task. I like sex, and even bad sex can be kind of good. As unattractive as Burl is, I did find it kind of thrilling to be doing something so ... taboo.

  I finished the StairMaster, did a back-and-biceps weight circuit, and then stuffed all of my clothes from the night before into my gym bag. I figured I wouldn’t bother showering, as I would just have to put the dirty clothes back on. On my way out I stopped at the desk to look at my schedule for the coming week. I was working only two evenings. That will have to change, I thought as I walked out to my car. I made a mental note to ask my boss, Fred, if I could pick up more shifts and start getting paid in money instead of trade.

  I pulled into the driveway and was relieved to see that my father’s car was not there. I sat for a while, not wanting to go in and have to dig through my sloppy pyramid of boxes to find something to change into, but I did need to get showered and changed, as the rest of the clan was coming to dinner to celebrate our birthday. I say “our” because my sister and I are twins, and have always celebrated our birthdays together.