Dear Money

by Martha McPhee

  "Is that how it works?" he said. "The writer is held accountable for bad sales?"

  "Yes," I said, but I did not want to be talking about this. "Should we offer our help in the kitchen?"

  "Our help is not wanted," he reminded me, but of course I didn't need reminding. "We've been asked to stay outside." I wished Theodor would come save me so that we could stop addressing a topic we seemed to be rapidly approaching, the roman a clef I was writing daily: The Shambles of My Life. I knew Win didn't mean any harm, but he persisted with his interrogation.

  "How many copies does a book, does Generation of Fire, need to sell to be a success?" He was studying me with those eyes, scrutinizing me, reading me. He'd spent so much time around people who made so much, he had no idea what struggle was, no idea what it might be like to have forces larger than oneself driving one's ability to become successful. He was in charge of a large Wall Street firm's mortgage department. There were outside forces, sure, but they were all part of an equation that he could manipulate to positive effect. For the most part, a writer could not do that. The only thing a writer had control over was the work, the writing. After that, it was up to forces so mysterious not even the publishers understood.

  "Thirty, forty thousand would be excellent." I had no idea how to take back control of the conversation. "I'll come to Wall Street if it fails," I blurted, in another attempt to change the subject. He didn't laugh. I tried moving on, to Scotland, the trip we might be making there, the castle my brother was renting with his wife and her sisters on the sea in Kintyre, the three sisters always fighting, then loving, then fighting again—dramatic crescendos from which return to cordiality seemed impossible, so very un-English, but every single time they got back to it with laughter. I rambled nervously. "The Weird Sisters, Theodor calls them," I said, but Win didn't seem to be listening. He had a ponderous gaze that seemed to look through me, something remote swirling through his head.

  'What fun," he said. He scratched his nose contemplatively. I had never known that brown eyes could be so light and jewel-like.

  "The Weird Sisters?" I said, picturing the pretty sisters all in a rage and then in fits of laughter. Oddly, I was fascinated by their passion; they made me want to be one of many sisters—more even than Will's group of five. It seemed that they, their concerns, mattered most to one another. I didn't have that sort of clan relationship, and the bond with my brother was a more formal one.

  "Would you do something like that?"

  "Have sisters?"

  "Wall Street," he said. Now his eyes were fully engaged, like stars. "Would you come to Wall Street?"

  "Is this an invitation?" I asked.

  "Perhaps."

  "Well then, perhaps."

  "I like the notion," he said. "It would be fun."

  "Absolutely," I teased. I didn't let go of his eyes.

  "You'll work for me, then," he said. He wasn't smiling. In fact, there was something serious in the way he said that. "You'll be my protégée. I hope your book fails."

  "Thanks," I said.

  "Did you take calculus in college?"

  "I didn't go to college."

  He looked puzzled. I felt relieved. The conversation was mine again. In that one instant of throwing him off I was able to retake control. I liked Win. I liked him very, very much.

  "You're a tease," he said.

  "And so are you," I said. "I was excellent at math. It was the only subject in which I received straight A's. But my book will not fail, and I would never go to Wall Street. I couldn't imagine having to ride a subway every day." Instead I imagined myself with my own car and driver, and a parallel life rose before me like an expensive helicopter, clear up and into the night sky. That life, filled with splendid luxuries and great abundance, so vivid, settled around me, gratifying my craving for the beauty of life's external finish.

  "Give me eighteen months and I'll turn you into a trader. And no ordinary trader."

  The door to the kitchen banged shut, and Will's smiling face appeared over a pot of steamers. "What?" he said, looking at both of us. "You're both a pair of possums."

  "Win's just propositioned me," I said.

  "Oh, here we go," Will said, snagging a clam and shouting upstairs, "The weekend is getting weird. Theodor! Win's seducing your wife!"

  "Tell him to stop doing that, please," Theodor's muffled voice shouted down from an upstairs bedroom.

  Emma emerged, declaring that we had to eat the steamers immediately or they'd be no good. Then Theodor arrived, sitting down next to me, cleaned up with a nice shirt, his shock of thick black curls so very handsome. "Now, then," he said, lifting my hand and kissing it, staking his claim, "what in God's name are you wild swingers up to, anyway?"

  Then we were all digging into the clams, slipping off the skins covering their long black necks, dipping them in butter. They tasted like butter, just as silky, just as soft. The Atlantic air wafted over us, carrying a mist.

  "How are things with Europe?" Will asked Win.

  "Not happening," he said. "All the different laws get in the way. Too many countries."

  "The European securities market," Will offered to Theodor and me as an explanation. I had no idea what a security was. "Win's company wants to export our securities structure, but the Europeans have stringent, antiquated laws protecting inhabitants and that are different in each country."

  "People don't take out mortgages in Europe in the same volume as in the U.S.," Emma said. This was all over my head.

  "Better to let them buy ours," Will said. "We're rich with them anyway."

  "Actually, I have a new sort of business plan," Win said and looked at me conspiratorially. Emma and Will were all ears. "I'm going to hire India."

  "Oh, that kind of proposition. Whew!" Theodor said with an exaggerated swipe of his forehead.

  "He's going to turn me into a trader," I said with a coy smile. I liked knowing something they didn't know.

  "A Pygmalion story," Will said.

  "That's right," I said. Make me new, make me rich like you, I thought. Leave it to Perfect Boy to give a literary flourish to a ridiculous business proposition.

  "I'm having problems negotiating with her, though," Win said.

  "Do tell," Will said.

  "She doesn't want to take the subway," Win said.

  "She wants a car," Will said knowingly.

  "And a jet," Theodor added helpfully.

  "Don't forget to backdate the stock option package, India," Will said.

  "That'll be touchy," Win said.

  "A jet would be nice," I mused.

  "We'd never let it happen," Emma said protectively. "Wayne Johns, you are not going to corrupt our artist."

  "Oh, yes, he most certainly is," Theodor said and looked at me as though I were crazy, seeing into that side of me that he knew was corruptible, and wondering, I imagined, if I was taking this at all seriously, wondering if I'd gotten myself into a mess. I raised my eyebrows suggestively, popped a clam into my mouth and lifted my glass to Maine and the house and to its someday belonging to Emma, though I was beginning to fall in love with the house myself—or, I should say, the spot. The moon, now a bit higher, cut a path across the water from it to us, so bright it seemed you could walk upon it.

  In the morning, a thick fog had settled in. I could hardly see the dunes just in front of the house. The change in the weather sent an unexpected rush of hope through me. A beautiful white fog that drifted like a veil over the beach and the morning. I wished, as I sat up in bed in the turret with my husband asleep at my side and the house very quiet, that the fog would prevent Win from leaving. There was no way he could fly in weather like this. I wrapped my robe around me and slithered downstairs. I hadn't felt this excited about getting up in years. I wanted to see Win again. I wanted to see his smile, his eyes, and hear his presumptuous declarations. I was giddy. I wanted to find him in the kitchen sipping his morning cappuccino (Emma had also brought along a cappuccino machine), go for a dawn stroll on the be
ach.

  But he was gone. (People with all the money in the world, it seemed, weren't held up by such a nuisance as weather. I imagined a limousine whisked him to a fogless airport and his idling G-IV.) In his place were four kites, colorful and neatly wrapped in cellophane, and beneath them lay a note of thanks with a promise of clear skies and stiff winds in the afternoon. I stood on the deck, the fog washing over me, so thick that at times it was impossible to see even my own extended hand.

  Five

  I WOULD NOT SEE Win again until a bitter cold night at the end of November. He would invite Theodor and me along with the Chapmans to a fundraiser at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, beside the Temple of Dendur, snow falling heavily into the glass wall overlooking the park, the temple illuminated, seeming to float on the dark pool that lay before it as people in holiday spirit drifted from one conversation to the next, canapés and champagne bobbing above them on silver trays held by servers wearing long white gloves.

  Emma, in a red velvet gown, her hair in a French knot, blue shadow about her eyes, would lean toward me to let me know that a benefactors' table, at which we were to be seated, cost $50,000, her whisper thrilling with the absurdity of such a sum spent for a few hours' entertainment. Then Win would be before me in a smoking jacket with a pale pink cravat, his thin hair combed smoothly to one side, a wicked smile lighting his face, his chocolate eyes, as I approached him, forcing my lips into a smile, and I would fill once again with potential and hope. "Ah, my protégée," he would say, and kiss me on the forehead like a good brother, his lips warm, his embrace solid and reassuring. "I've been waiting for this." Then he would hold me out from him with both hands to admire. I dressed specially in a full-length gown (charcoal silk chiffon over silk satin, Empire waist), knowing that I would see him again. He would turn me around slowly, in a proprietary way, as if he owned a part of me and could do with me as he wished. I would let him believe that he could, because feeling possessed made me somehow stronger, more alive. "Smashing," he would say. "I have missed you."

  But that was later. Now I was leaving Maine. We left the day after Win did. It was the end of July and I found myself downcast, though I tried to hide any appearance of it. We were headed back to New York, to five weeks of writing before teaching began. It was my plan to start a new novel so that I wouldn't have time to fret over the publication of the current novel. I had learned long ago that it is better to be involved with a new project so that you care less about the publication. That was the myth, anyway. Once, it had worked. I had soared through publication on the high of writing, with no concerns, and everything had gone fabulously—glowing reviews and the like—except for those elusive sales. My problem this time was simple: aside from the imaginary Emma Chapman Story, I had no idea for another book. So in front of me now, if I could not work, lay instead the stretch of time before the publication of Generation of Fire. "The calm before the calm," as a friend and fellow novelist once put it.

  Leaving the Chapmans always made me a little blue. I was familiar with this sensation. It would happen after a simple dinner party at their Tribeca loft. Driving home along the West Side Highway, past the heliport and the Intrepid, I always longed for something ineffable, some part of them, perhaps, that I could take with me, a souvenir that would be infused with all those answers they seemed to know so well. We were approaching forty, Theodor and I, we had our two girls, but we lived like a couple just starting out—with the expectation that circumstances would change, that with the growth of our careers we would trade up from our apartment to something a little more grown-up, replace the hand-me-down furniture, stuff hauled in off the street. All the pretension, all the hiding and the juggling, couldn't keep that reality from me as we faced all that was—or wasn't—ours. With each novel, with each impending publication, I longed for our circumstances to change. However much I'd built my life around my art, I'd also come to hope that my next book would be the winning ticket in the literary lottery where art met commerce and bought you a fancy new coat for your trouble.

  This was the writer's paradox—ego fueled the belief that one was about to become the exception. This is what kept me writing, the humongous ego, a necessity of the trade. How else to go forward? I longed. I longed to prove to my father that I could afford my life, that I, with my talent, had earned the ability to do so against his proclamations of failure. For him and for so many others, success was defined by one thing only. And we all know what that is. So I hoped. I hoped mightily, and the trouble with hope, yapping at your ankle like a hyperactive poodle, incessantly clamoring to be believed and heard, is that it turns into expectation, and given enough time, expectation skips over a fine line into something else again, into conviction—that you deserve.

  Who except for a scant few among us doesn't deserve more? Riding on the subway, home from an early evening out, Theodor and I were discussing what a real artist would do. A real artist would not want as much as I do, I was saying. A real artist would be happy in the act of creation. Sitting beside us in the subway car was a tall, bald, young, familiar-looking man. He had one of those faces that could have been familiar because he was famous or because I'd known him in college. He wore a pale green, clean, pressed shirt, tucked neatly into his jeans, shiny loafers on his sockless feet—a preppy look, but on him there was style, as though the clothes were speaking against the persona. He had his nose in The Literary Review, absorbed.

  As the subway bounced us uptown I tried to place him. The logo on the side of his glasses said Prada, the logo on the side of his watch said Prada. He continued to read. I continued to wonder how I knew him. He got off at our stop and we followed him for a few blocks. At home, I Googled Carlyle P. Smedes, the hip and famous It Boy, best-selling Scottish novelist, literary superstar, imaginative, dynamic, inventive, nothing like him has come along thus far to stir up contemporary literature, his style is acrobatic, he's the voice of the turn of the century. The praise for him was universal, and there was a picture of him—the It Boy himself—the same man I'd seen on the subway. "He was probably reading his own story," said my friend Lily Starr, also a novelist, on the verge of her first publication, when I told her of sitting next to him, carrying on about the real artist versus the fake. "Prada glasses, Prada watch, you got your answer," she said. "Didn't Twain go bankrupt? Didn't Melville bet his farm on his work and lose?" she asked.

  "Don't forget Shelley, who made precisely forty pounds from his writing, and most of that was for a novel he wrote while still in school." We enjoyed this game.

  "Joyce, Pound, Milton, they all died in miserable, impoverished circumstances."

  Fools, I thought heretically. Win came again to mind.

  Being grown up would mean this: buying an apartment like the Chapmans', having the walls skim-coated and detailed, choosing the smallest things for it: the switchplates, the doorknobs, the faucets and all the rest of it would allow us, finally, to take part in the real estate conversation that was the very air of our New York life. Carlyle Smedes famously paid $2 million for a doublewide brownstone in Sugar Hill that he bought for himself and his dog, spent $4 million renovating—garage, the whole nine yards—turning the neighborhood into the new trendy dwelling spot for hip artists, causing prices there to shoot toward the moon. "He calls himself an artist, for Christ's sake," declared a blogger on a website devoted to Smedes's domestic purchase.

  Being the grown-up would mean inviting my father and mother for an elegant dinner, putting them up in the guest bedroom, having them see what I had made of myself, proving them wrong. This would mean more than any book I could offer up, but that this was paid for by the success of a book would mean triumph. My father had nearly disowned me when he learned that I had paid for the lease to a rent-stabilized apartment. (A deal I had been proud of, which involved risk and the reading of chance on the face of a tenant with slender fingers and long, manicured fingernails, a man, and his realtor, a woman with one leg; $15,000 dollars in a paper bag and we'd receive a lease that would allow us
to live in New York City on a shoestring. I used my graduate school fellowship and student loans, figuring I'd pay it all back by getting roommates so we could live rent free. "You should have gone to Wall Street," Theodor said when we'd paid off the fifteen grand, gotten rid of the roommates and had the sprawling apartment to ourselves—it had seemed big before kids. To pay off the fifteen grand took exactly one year.) But for my father, rent stabilization was a disgrace, a system designed to screw respectable business owners. It was a socialist relic from a time when Democrats had too much power. It was welfare, nothing else. I would regret it someday, he had said, because later in life I would own nothing, no equity, a shame. He was a Republican and I was an artist, but I did not want to live like one. I never had. Without my stabilized lease we would not have been able to live in New York City.

  When we drove away from the Chapmans, their glittering orbit filled with champagne and fine cheese and characters like Win, a hole would start to widen in the center of me into which you could drop a house. Now, leaving Maine, the truth was the impending publication of Generation of Fire and what its failure would signify. This is what stared me in the face as we left the sea air and the pines. Somehow I knew, though I hoped so very differently, that the publication would not go well. The odds favored that outcome. I imagined that Emma understood this. I could see the understanding fluttering in her eyes—a mix of sympathy for me and relief at her own good fortune.

  Indeed, it felt as if Theodor and I were being banished from the Chapmans' world, renters cast out from the comforting blandishments of home equity. (For example, Maine wouldn't be theirs unless they owned it. They strived to own it.) "When I see you next, you'll be on the verge of giving birth," she said with those eyes of hers on me. A stupid expression when related to the publication of a book. Could I see in those eyes the flit of desire that we all have, the glee one feels while standing witness to another's fall? It was I who was creating this, my reflection in her image. She loved me, and had she known the layers of fear and self-doubt, and yes, ego, she would have tried to prop me up.