Dear Money

by Martha McPhee

  Fragile and delicate, a girl who looked like a man, like him, I grew into a woman he could not protect as he watched me in my mother's arms. Nestled and swaddled and tucked against her chest, emphatically driven by instinct and will. Through his thick horn-rimmed glasses it was easier for him to see bills—the doctors, the clothes, the food, the education: the roller coaster ride ahead of him. He knew how to pay bills. But me, impossibly small, rubbery, how would he manage me?

  Dread filled him: I was his responsibility. Panic seized his chest. Already he was dizzy, and he hadn't even left the platform. He was thirty-six years old, a successful urologist in D.C., an "intimate of the urinary tracts of senators and congressmen," affiliated with prestigious Washington General Hospital. In a city where proximity to power is the coin of the realm, he liked to say that he had his finger in the Senate. He owned his house, he invested well, he had his daughter, in a few years he would have his son (now a doctor too, living in London with a fancy wife); my mother never had to work. His will had driven him to create this, comfort for his family that his daughter would discard, sneer at and defy. She grew up before his eyes, from mysterious newborn rooting at her mother's breast to a blue-eyed beauty who would not listen. How could he save me if I would not listen?

  That I would not listen made him furious. Standing in our living room, my long hair falling in soft curls about my face, I told him I was going to graduate school, that I would become a writer, that I did not need his blessing. When I was a newborn he could hold me in one hand, but even then he'd felt helpless. He had wanted to be able to explain it to me, the helplessness, the fear, how fragile babies are, how punishing whimsical choices can be. Becoming a writer was whimsy, after all. But he did not know how to bring softness to the negotiating table. Fear did not create tenderness. "I would have written books if I'd had the chance, if someone had believed in me," my mother said in my defense as my father raged about my choice—as if it were a choice, as Theodor so frequently reminded me. "Nonsense," my father declared. "You're a smart girl, capable of choosing. Most writers aren't any good. Most of them don't make a dime, even the good ones. Especially the good ones."

  Mom defended me again when I announced that I had married (eloped with) the unpromising Theodor. "You really have no idea," my father said. "You don't get it. He will amount to nothing financially. You can't fathom how hard that will be." And my mother sweetly saying, "Theodor is a nice man. I'd have been an artist if I'd had the option." My mother sweetly saying, "Daddy loves you. That is the reason for all this. Daddy is afraid for you." Isn't it always all for love—the rage, the anger? If he didn't care ... My father's rage swelled beneath his skin, fear getting the better of him, wrapping around him like the snake around the tree because I was throwing my life away. "Don't come to me for money if that husband of yours can't support you." My father came from nothing, was terrified of going back to nothing, afraid that somehow I would lead him there. Art was for the impractical, for dreamers, for people who didn't know any better, who hadn't suffered the consequences.

  And that husband of mine.

  I met Theodor at a New Year's Eve party on the Lower East Side. He was sitting on the arm of a couch in a smoky room filled, somehow, only with men. His thick black curls, his red lips, the amused and cynical slant of his eyes drew me to his side of the room. He was engaged in a conversation about the messy state of the Union, which quickly led to the perpetual decline in funding for the arts. We were all so young, dressed in fancy thrift-store wear, a roomful of artists and writers on the threshold of something that we hoped would turn into success and the shape of our lives, smoking, sipping grown-up drinks, martinis. A plate of cheese bobbed above our heads, passed around the room on raised palms. A small ecumenical Christmas tree languished in the corner, draped in strands of flickering lights in a variety of disguises—red chili peppers, lobsters, cows.

  The lights illuminated the faces of Theodor and the men he spoke with, casting them in a colorful yet fleeting glow. Young men offered preposterous, ironical proclamations, trying on the preposterous, ironical art world of New York to see how well it fit. Wealth and poverty, at this intersection, were only abstract notions, fodder to support a line of argument—certainly not something one lived in or inhabited as a condition, something that might actually shape, or perhaps, in the case of poverty, warp and derail a person. If some of us lived like monks in abandoned buildings in Alphabet City, it was because we had chosen to do so. It was a choice that came with its own safety net. We were neither rich nor poor. We were simply young. The atmosphere in the room—the music, the laughter—fanned the egos of the young men, each vying to strike pay dirt with a bon mot or two, and thereby receive, like flowers that blossomed only at night, the further blandishments of laughter, the quick and telling smile, the promise of the night that lay ahead and that animated them in their cluster. They were boys, really, well read, equipped with knowledge of art and literature but otherwise largely untested, likely to put quotation marks around a sunset, a willow tree, the V-shaped flight of geese heading south—anything that smacked of an originating source or destination. Boisterous and enthusiastic, they laughed and leaned on walls, on each other, on the shelves of books written by an older generation that had gone on to fame or oblivion.

  The railroad apartment belonged to a poet, a woman in her late thirties with long black hair, long face, long body, referred to as Morticia (though her name was Jane), and she played the part like a Dada throwback from that other distant era, reciting poetry at the strike of her cuckoo clock, which was wedged into a corner against one of her overstuffed bookcases. Musil alongside Zbigniew atop Gibbon, the spines reclining this way and that, no logic to the order. "Look out," someone warned as she quieted the room, "the poetry is about to begin." Jane's furnishings had been proudly hauled off the street and restored with care.

  "Stunts like the black Jesus do us in," said an earnest-looking man as I insinuated myself into the cluster that held Theodor. The speaker was a tall guy with freckles and flaming red hair. He gesticulated dramatically, knocking the drink of the blond boy standing next to him. It spilled on the front of his pink oxford shirt and he dabbed at it abstractedly with a cocktail napkin. "No concern," he said. "It's fine." I noticed he wore cuff links.

  "The what?" I asked as I said hello. I knew some of the cluster from Jane's other parties and from the artistic youth circuit: a gay poet, a painter, two heterosexual novelists—one tall, one short. Jane collected people with interesting faces and thrust them together as some sort of performance art in combustible human energy, but she was well loved for the effort because everyone enjoyed the parties and, we liked to think, since we ourselves were included, she chose people well. Always she engaged in postparty gossip, keen to know the details of who went home with whom. She kept track of these relationships as some people keep track of their stocks, taking a certain pride in the successful match.

  I could feel Theodor's doubtful eyes land on me, a tactile pressure as he tried to make sense of who I was, checking me out with sidelong glances and looks of detached appraisal. Unlike the other women at the party, who now made their way into the room, plopping into the chairs, finding cool spots by the open window, a pretty dye cast into clear water, I was wearing an expensive black dress of silk chiffon that my mother had given me for Christmas with the hope, I believe, that it would attract the right sort of man. The thrift-store aesthetic had never been mine. I imagined Theodor saw me as I saw the blond with the cuff links—out of place. I wanted him to know that I belonged, for it was like a club, this world. I had just sold my first story to The Literary Review and I was still a bit smitten with the success, but I knew better than to share the news. News like this you let people discover on their own, while leafing through the magazine's pages. Theodor was big and tall with a ruddy broad charm, and the vodka made me feel a little reckless.

  "Stuff like that enrages the Christians, the Catholics, the Republicans. It's all over the news," the blond sho
uted above the din.

  "The chocolate Jesus," someone explained to me.

  "Oh, that," I said. The artist had sculpted the figure entirely from chocolate and had left him, also entirely, unclothed. A black, naked, edible Jesus, the Christmas Sensation. Outrage poured through the television screen as the Christian holy season fell upon us. Comparisons with chocolate Allahs and Buddhas and the like were summoned up. How WOULD YOU FEEL? was one headline of the gossip pages. A photo of the sculpture captured front and center the genitalia blocked out with a black rectangle. Another headline read: EAT ME?

  "This kind of stunt—and it is a stunt—is self-serving, but so what?" said the gay poet. "I mean, look at us. We're talking about it. The Post is talking about it. It's a success."

  "Art becomes advertising—and we're all okay with that?" said one of the novelists, the tall one with enormous hands. He'd received a big advance for his first novel and spoke with authority, though no one I knew thought much of his talent. Everyone liked him all the same.

  "That's the oldest trap in the book," the other novelist blurted, sloppily draping an arm around me with a smile, and then removing it with a sincere and disarming apology—he'd mistaken me for somebody else and suddenly became drunkenly bashful and solicitous, offering to fetch me another drink. "Don't mind me, I'm incoherent as a general rule, alas." He was like the rest of us, living on tips from two restaurant jobs and sending out short stories to literary magazines in Nebraska and Seattle.

  "Free expression suicide," said the blond with the cuff links, as if trying to convince himself, a bit out of his league, it seemed. I wondered if he was a banker scouting the young art market, looking for long-term investments. Shrewd boy. The discussion turned to funding for artists. The gay poet rolled his eyes. "Writers," he said, "everyone pecking fiercely at a carcass, fighting for scraps of flesh, so little to go around." He turned on his heels, decamping for the kitchen.

  Theodor caught my eyes and held them for a moment, and a generous sweetness, mixed with a dash of bravado, poured from him to me. He wore checked pants that would have looked preppy on the blond but on Theodor had a stylish flair, black loafers with no socks and a black T-shirt. He seemed to understand something. I didn't know what. But it sat there on his beautiful lips, making me curious to learn whatever it was. He had a girl's long eyelashes.

  "That's what the government wants," said the blond guy. "What do you want to bet at some point this fraud received funding from a government grant? It gives them license. 'See how taxpayer money is being spent?'"

  "Don't be paranoid."

  "Paranoid? The government wants to control everything—art, philosophy, law, the air even, the air we breathe, you breathe."

  "It shows that they really care."

  "Art reduced to a state of servility, having to depend on the likes and dislikes of government lackeys," said one of the novelists, allowing himself to be carried far away from the chocolate Jesus.

  "Lackeys? Really? You sound like a drunk Socialist Party newspaper." The redheaded man tossed back the rest of his martini. He jutted the empty glass out in front of him. Theodor took an imaginary bottle from his pocket, filled the glass, then raised his own and said, "Here, here. We struggle for the sake of art, and art"—he paused for emphasis, like a car going over a cliff— " art is a very important thing." The group laughed. "Interrogate the chocolate," he continued. "What kind of chocolate did the artist use?"

  "The artist's aesthetic concern, of course," said the tall, untalented novelist.

  "What kind of chocolate?" I repeated. The silliness made me giddy.

  "If you can't eat it, the rest is nonsense, right?" Theodor both asked and stated, ceding a little of that something that he understood, like a fisherman who lets out his line only to be more certain of hooking the fish. He raised his glass to mine, eyes sparkling as he estimated the impression he had made on me.

  "You mean if he uses cheap chocolate, what's the point?" I asked.

  "I mean if it is supposed to be edible—and it's Jesus we're talking about—then it better be good."

  "For example, Godiva?" I asked.

  "That would do."

  "Teuscher?"

  "Belgian Callebaut would prove he's serious."

  The blond boy said, "The great one speaks." He did not seem to be joking.

  "The great one," I said. "So who anointed you?"

  "He's just won the Austria Prize from the Kunsthistorisches," said the blond with what seemed to be a perfect accent.

  "The what?" I asked.

  "Come on," said Theodor—whose name I did not yet know. "No résumé-building. Tonight I think we are all drunken socialists, no?" I didn't believe that. If he was anything like a male writer, résumé-building was exactly what he wanted.

  "Do you know each other?" I asked. Someone had knocked into me, pushing me closer to the blond and to Theodor so that we became our own constellation, the others fading away one by one.

  "I'm his dealer," said the blond boy.

  "Dealer." I laughed. "Ecstasy? Pot? You look like you're still in high school."

  "I work for his dealer," he confessed bashfully, vodka flushing his cheeks. He had an adorable mouth, fine straight white teeth. His cuff links were blue Wedgwood. An aspiring assistant. His determination was ferocious. He'd be somewhere in a few years.

  "What do you do?" I asked Theodor.

  "Is this a test?" he said, tilting his gaze up to meet mine.

  "Yes," I replied.

  "I'm a collector," he answered. "A trash collector."

  "Oh, please," I said. He too was bubbling with the alcohol. "You won the Austria Prize for trash?"

  "It's true," he said and looked to the blond.

  "Scout's honor," the boy said.

  "Just so you know," Theodor said, "and by way of offering a blanket apology, nobody here, including myself, will ever be remembered—for anything." The blond smiled, a telling knowledge of his friend, and retreated quietly to another conversation.

  "That's optimistic," I said. "A real upper."

  "I'm a realist," he said.

  "Trash?" I repeated.

  "I collect junk and reshape it and then sell it. It's a value-added service." Then he looked me over again with an awful, awful appeal, and added, "And you're a rich girl."

  "I'm a novelist," I said defensively. But I liked the notion, myself as a rich girl.

  "But you're also," he said, raising his glass and pointing his forefinger, "a rich girl."

  "Will you speak to me if I'm poor?"

  "The dress gives you away, my darling." I felt suddenly darling and cocked a cute little smile.

  "Perhaps I stole it." I liked that notion too, the idea of stealing a beautiful dress. The idea seemed to give him pleasure. It was hot in the room, everyone pressing together, waves of human movement.

  "A thief," he said, raising his left eyebrow. "Interesting." We were shouting above the din. He stood up from the arm of the couch to move closer to me. We were pushed against a bookcase—Waugh and Yeats and Freud and Borges.

  "A thief," I confirmed. His eyes brightened.

  "It just so happens I'm in need of a thief," he said.

  "You're in luck, then," I said. I felt dangerous. A bottle of cheap champagne appeared in his hand and he filled our glasses and we drank them down and he filled them again. The vodka and the champagne mixed in me in a daring combination.

  "What are we going to steal?" I asked. "More trash?"

  "Trash," he confirmed.

  "I don't like that."

  "Rich girl!" he said. His curls were wild and unruly, ferocious.

  "India," I corrected and reached out my hand to him. "I'm India Palmer."

  "And I'm sub-Saharan Africa. Nice to meet you," he said and took my hand in his. He had long slender fingers, a cool palm. A small mole vanished into his dimple as he smiled.

  "It was the dress," he said later. "I wanted to take it off of you."

  And he had (if my mother only knew), in
his studio in Green-point, in the brightness of New Year's morning, the sun streaming through the big paned window, the streets below a foreign land with signs in unfamiliar Polish, advertising unfamiliar Polish foods. In the silent hours of the new day, the New Year, I pretended to be a dangerous woman, a thief. I'd followed him home, out of Jane's party and across the Brooklyn Bridge, shivering in the New Year, lips blue, teeth clattering—not a very alluring thief. On the bridge he tilted my head upward, showing me the weave of cables, filigree against the midnight sky, both of us in a drunken rapture over the intricacy of the design. The American flag fluttered boldly from one of the towers. "Hypothermia and romance," he'd declared, enveloping me in his coat and arms. "Beautiful together."

  We walked all night across Brooklyn, from the bridge to his studio. I'd followed him along the banks of the Salvage Stream, as he called it, the big swath of garbage that cut through the city like a big river snaking across the continent, or perhaps the Gulf Stream spanning the world's sky, as he plucked from it the garbage of others, metals and ceramics that he intended to reinvent in his sculptures. Beauty from ugliness, he wanted to prove a point, but he was too drunk (and so was I) to be any good at the task. "I'm showing off for you," he said, pulling a cracked vase lined with green slime from rotted flower stems, holding it proudly before me, a trophy of his cleverness. The thing was hideous, almost laughable.

  "You need to work harder, then," I said. "The vase smells." It did, of the dank rot of foliage. He looked at me with those curls, trying to come up with an intelligent response, and examining the vase once again, sniffing it, he said, "By George, you're right," and set it gently on the sidewalk so the glass did not shatter. I remembered that detail, how carefully he set it down. As filled with vodka and champagne as we were, he would not let the glass break. As it turned out, I was right about a lot of the junk he wanted to claim. But even so, we had fun. He was trying his mightiest to succeed before me, to pull off a layer of the city like a real estate agent lifting up a shag carpet to show a potential buyer the parquet floor beneath. I'd followed him because what he understood was simply what he wanted. I'd followed him because he was leading me through the gates of Parnassus, showing me that entry there did not depend on credentials. That's what I found in the trash. Alchemy. Something from nothing. You either had it or you didn't. That's why the artist has never had to doff his hat to the king. I followed him. It did not feel like a choice.