Dear Money

by Martha McPhee

  Was I being terribly unfair? Writers could be like this, were like this—a combination of that ego and deference, wanting to both hide and trumpet. Her face brightened. No, I was not being unfair. We were riding the escalator down, our faces reflected into infinity in the mirrors, my bags draping off my arms, as if I were a lady who could afford the $1,500 I'd just dropped in an hour. The day before, I had spent $3,000 on our last-minute tickets to London.

  "What?" I asked. "Good news?" I knew it would be good news, and I also knew I didn't want to hear it. I saw the future suddenly. Her book would become fabulously successful. She'd become the anointed It Lit Girl. She had a story after all: fifteen years to write her first, smashing novel. Worth the Wait: I could see the headline. Lily Starr, the truth transparent in her name.

  "Leonardo Cavelli called me. Piccadilly is hosting a party. This is a big book for them," she said, glee oozing out of every part of her. And why shouldn't it? She should be flooded with glee, drowning in glee. And I should, should be happy for her. The brilliant smile of hers shining with success.

  I could not share in the glee. Why hadn't I understood the glee before? Before spending all this money? Her voice nearly a squeak, she knew full well the news had to come quietly. This, for Piccadilly, was unprecedented. A call from Cavelli for a book party was like a call from God, reserved thus for the biggest names.

  "I got a star on the Advance review and a star on the Cramer. I'm still waiting on the others. But Advance and Cramer—that's like hitting a double-header, or whatever you do in baseball. Bull's eyes?" she said. "Advance is going to run a profile!"

  Who, anywhere else in the world, anywhere but in New York City, would care about a Cramer star? Who? No one. Nowhere. But I was here and I cared, and I hated myself just then for every sensation that rushed over me. Most of all, for imagining she knew just how I felt.

  "A what?" I asked, referring to the double-header—a football term? Baseball?

  "It's great, isn't it?" she asked with false modesty, asked as if it could be possible that the stars were a bad thing, as if a book party hosted by Cavelli were an irrelevant occurrence. An Advance profile, to be avoided at all costs? In the machine that knits a selling book, these were the founding threads. Worse was that she was pretending to defer to my experience when she knew that with this first book of hers she was on the verge, with one giant leap, of surpassing me in sales, and we all know that sales are all that matter.

  "Well, of course," I said, those bags pulling me to the ground. I was a fake. That's what it was. If she was pretending, so was I. I was living inside the inauthentic, trying to prove that the writer could live like everyone else, all those honest, hard-working souls. That we could keep up. I was pretending for Lily Starr so that she'd think I was doing well. I had been her role model. I was pretending with the parents of my children's friends that I had the money to pay for the vacations they invited me to join them on, for the birthday presents I bought for their children, for the dinners out at fancy restaurants. I was pretending to the children's school that I could afford the tuition we had no business affording.

  Lily, bagless, was as light as a feather. I could feel her stars and her Cavelli in every part of my body, sick, nauseated, as though I'd just eaten grease. I wanted to return the swimsuit, the dress. Outside, the sun was blistering. Writers, I'd learned, don't stab you in the back. They insert the blade gently right between your ribs while staring you in the eye.

  "They're planning a first printing of fifty thousand," she said. "I'm in shock, really. That's a lot, right?" Then, "Have you gotten your prepubs?" she asked.

  I hated her using publishing jargon. I hated her.

  No was the answer. No, I had not.

  Speaking of the Joneses, Win was the first to teach me their secret, to let me in on the fact that the Joneses, as a category of consumer, were in fact more volatile than the neighbors who tried so hard to keep up—in the olden days, that is, of the mortgage universe, before the flourishing of subprime. The nature of the neighbors' relatively predictable (and small, also relatively speaking) incomes made betting on them—or against them, as the case may be—easier to get right. They tried hard not to fall, but when they did the loss was minimal, easily absorbed. Not the case with the Joneses. First, they believed so invincibly in themselves that they didn't protect with wide margins; second, when they fell the enormous sums were not so easily absorbed, making them a riskier bet but also potentially far more profitable.

  Emma had brought up the Joneses. "The Joneses of Pond Point," she had said, speaking of the family in the neighboring house, the Bostonians with the Red Sox paraphernalia everywhere. We were gorging on lobsters after the clams, that night with Win in Maine. The Joneses had just arrived for their weekend stay. It was dark already but their house was lit up, a lamp in each window, above the front porch and the back. The house shimmered and one broad floodlight blanched the sea grass for fifty yards, then darkness.

  As the lights went on we admired it again as we had done during the day, walking on the beach. It was well cared for in contrast to the Chapmans'. The place was freshly painted. Window boxes thrived with red geraniums, along with a garden of hardy flowers in front of the house. An American flag snapped smartly in the breeze. On weekends they worked tirelessly on the property, Emma told us—mother, father, aunts, uncles, even the children. They weeded and scraped and banged and fixed and swept and cooked and mowed the small lawn. They hung out their clothes to dry with tidy precision. Never would they dream of renting the house. "Even the dog struts around with a sense of having done a helpful chore, carrying his bones here and there, digging clean holes," Emma had said.

  Now the family was inside having their dinner.

  "Emma rubs shoulders with the Joneses," Will said. "Wherever we go, she gets their number."

  "I hadn't known she'd found them on Pond Point," Win said. "You've got a knack. Middle-class neighborhoods are the new posh."

  "Funny you should mention the Joneses," Theodor said. "We're related to a pair over in England."

  "Oh, not that story," I said as Theodor launched into it. This was a little dig at my family, my brother and his values, but I liked that Theodor was telling it; I liked appearing to be above the Joneses in that I was all right with admitting that I was beneath them. After all, that was what Emma liked about them. We weren't so very different in many ways. Theodor set the scene: Heath and Clarissa, the American doctor in London and his expensive English wife, with her Oxbridge accent. "Darling," my brother would say, drawing out the word until it was as long as a dachshund, "don't forget the schedule"—pronounced shed-jewel —"and tea this afternoon with the Harringbones." Their four daughters: Ginger, Chance, Olympia and Happy—yes, Happy, as in Rockefeller, as in Felicity—all blond and blue-eyed and entitled. My brother earned bundles servicing the American expatriate banking community, charged American prices to those suspicious of the National Health Service. The family lived in a gorgeous townhouse in Cadogan Gardens—recently purchased for many millions of pounds—red brick with white wood trim and paned windows two stories high. Each house on the square was prettier than the next. But my brother's house was the prettiest, the largest and the most lavishly redone, but only upon close inspection, only if you are one to notice the finest details. Clarissa passed her time with interior decorators, examining swatches and paint chips and doorknobs and finials, making decisions about windows and equipment and appliances.

  Visiting them just after they bought the house, taking in the whole picture, endless minutes on the couch with fabrics and window treatments, Theodor had said to my brother with an inside nudge, "What's it like keeping up with the Joneses?" I had laughed both nervously and sincerely, for he was teasing my brother, who was difficult to tease as he took life very seriously. We were swimming in too much delicious chocolate, up to our necks in it, drowning in it, and no one seemed to be aware except Theodor.

  "The who?" Clarissa, looking up from the couch and out the window a
t all the other, inferior homes on the square, asked innocently with her sweet small voice.

  She had always had and would never need. She knew exactly who the Joneses were. They had reached all four corners of the developed world. Everyone knew the Joneses. "The who?" Theodor nearly burst out laughing. Then so did she. She hadn't heard, but now she had, and so she laughed at herself, at the misperception, feigned ignorance because the Joneses were an American construct and she was too English to allow them admission. "The who," she repeated, mocking herself, and I knew again why Heath loved her.

  Heath was a big man filled with a doctor's bravado and a small, adorable boy's desire not only to please his father but to outperform him. He looked at Theodor and said without a trace of irony, "We are the Joneses."

  "He didn't say that," Emma said to Theodor, bubbling with laughter; and then everyone laughed. You could pretend all you wanted to be beneath the Joneses, but God forbid if you place yourself up there with them. What kind of a person would do that?

  "Power to your brother," Will said, stroking his strong chin, pushing back in his chair, admiring my brother for the boldness of his character, finding the complexity in something seemingly silly. "At least he calls a spade a spade."

  "The Joneses," Win said, turning them over in his mind. On his plate lay the lobster carcass, picked clean, even the head. Will had instructed all of us to dig into the small crevices of the head to find the lobster's best meat. "They always fall. The trick in trading is to assess when, understand how and when the illusion will get the better of them, you know, in terms of the general feel of the market. There's a whole subcategory of bonds designed for the collapse of high-end mortgages, bonds that thrive on the failure of the Joneses."

  Win sat there with his pink shirt and his glistening cuff links, perched high above the rest of us.

  "True enough. But for now he's a Jones, and for now he knows it," Will said. And my brother was deflated and inflated in what I could see was a dialogue about their perspectives on the market. Will worked in the present. Win worked in the future. And character, as it always seems to be, was at the center of the argument.

  ***

  Again, in my bed, I awoke to a thunderstorm violently ripping the night sky, lightning darting about, streaking light here and there. I heard water dripping onto the plastic above my head. I lay watching the storm out the window. Theodor had moved to the girls' room to comfort them. The water would become too heavy for the plastic and the tape. Eventually it would all fall into the bed. I would drape more plastic over the bed in order to protect it and then move to the couch.

  But for now I lay here listening to the sound of the leaking water that made our lives possible, allowed us to live well. Was there a category of bond for us? Of course not, for we were renters. Even Lily Starr made it into Win's fabulous subcategories of mortgage bonds. She'd be good and reliable and stalwart. The crash of thunder was so violent and loud it seemed New York was being carpet-bombed. The thunder obliterated the drip. For so long I had been outside the forces of the market. I, my family, a stealth force, operating beneath the surface, unable to be tracked. If Win was above it, we were beneath it. In either case, we were both outsiders, able to sit back and watch the play unfold at a distance, with perspective. For all my longing and indulgences, I was fascinated by the mechanics of the system, all our minor yet essential parts in creating desire's narrative.

  Seven

  IN HIGH SCHOOL, a teacher of mine, Miss Fine, gave me an extra-credit assignment to help me improve my grade in language arts. She asked me to describe my bedroom, to go home and look at it carefully, to observe the details. I lay on my four-poster bed, my back pushing into the thick, full down comforter, looked into the crocheted canopy above me and studied the design therein. For a long time I looked only at the canopy cover—four-inch circles, each like the eye of a cobweb, spun by hand and repeated a thousand times. The canopy cover was enormous. It spanned the four posts and draped down each side to meet at the mattress. My great-grandmother had made it for my grandmother's bed when she was a toddler, some eighty years before. I never knew my great-grandmother, but I could see her hands as they worked the crochet hook and the needle, sewing the canopy cover together. She was an elegant woman named Margaret, and she lived with her husband and two daughters in Philadelphia. Her husband, Heath (like my brother, his namesake), was a financier heavily invested in railroads and in the city's infrastructure—trolley cars and garbage disposal and the like.

  Margaret was a young woman when she worked on the can opy cover, her hands less marked by age than my own, at thirty-eight. Smooth, white, unblemished. She did not wash her own dishes. The eye of the web was detailed with balls (popcorn, the stitch is called), the fine cotton yarn teased to form a cluster of eight. If there were a thousand circles, and each circle had eighty tiny balls, that would make at least eighty thousand balls stitched by her hands. It took her less than one year to make the canopy cover. She worked on it in her parlor by the fire while her husband read the evening paper, while my grandmother India was still in a crib and while Margaret's baby, Nora, was in a bassinet.

  Looking into the canopy, it was as if I were sharpening my eye. There was nothing extraordinary about the room. It was a girl's room, the walls a pale shade of pink, a bookcase filled with classics, another with small Madame Alexander dolls, a closet filled with dresses, some of them having belonged to my mother as a girl. On my dresser I had a doll's bureau for hair ties and ribbons and clips. A few pictures hung on the walls: Mother as a small girl in Europe with her parents, my brother and I as babies, an antique mirror in a gilt frame, a painting of Mother Goose. The mirror had belonged to my mother's mother. In the closet as well was a doll's pram that had been my mother's. There were riding boots and hat, a tennis racket, ice skates, a soccer ball, a couple of lacrosse sticks. I did not know true discomfort. I did not know true longing. At that point in my life I longed for little, and I understood, lying on my bed, that this stuff passed down to me by a few generations was a form of wealth. I understood that I, in a centrally air-conditioned ranch house in suburban Maryland, not far from horse farms where I had ridden as a younger girl, had so very much.

  I lay on the bed for a long time, staring into the concentric pattern as my great-grandmother's hands grew old, a bit knotty, riddled with arthritis. The canopy cover had been made to outlast her, made of the finest Italian cotton thread reinforced with Como silk. The canopy cover had been folded neatly and stored in plastic, protected by mothballs, and had moved with my grandmother to Baltimore when she married—a financier too, invested heavily in telephones and automobiles. The window of my room looked out on a garden cared for by my mother and that bloomed from May through September. It was February now and snow covered the garden bed, a fine, thin white layer.

  Studying the room it occurred to me that something fundamental about who I am was missing: my father. He was not present in the room at all, and thus, like an equation, there was a missing factor that, once known, would complete the story of who I am: x + ? = y. There was nothing of him as a child, no picture, no toy. He was absent entirely, as if he did not exist, or as if he were irrelevant. My mother and her fancy past were all that mattered here, as if they wanted to wipe his struggle clean from the slate. He was always who he is now: the hard-working, well-paid doctor.

  My mother and father met at university when he was in medical school and she an undergraduate studying the history of art. He was a strong man, and she liked that he told her what to do. She had always been told just what to do. She wanted a man to complete what her father had begun, and so when my father saw her for the first time, sitting on a bench reading about Michelangelo, studying for an exam, her hair pulled back with a black velvet bandeau, her blue eyes round and hopeful and ready for adventure, he sat down beside her and said, "I'm taking you for lunch. You need a break and I'm taking you for lunch." She smiled ever so slightly, stood up and followed him. She did not bother to ask his name until they
were halfway through their meal.

  My father's past had nothing to do with hers. He was the son of an alcoholic from Scotland who came to this country at the turn of the last century because there was nothing left for him there. My grandfather was poor and close to illiterate. He used an X to sign his name. Even so, he was a dreamer, and dreamed of becoming a poet. In the evenings when his children were little, they sat around the kitchen table and my father listened to his father spin tales about the Hebrides and the Mull of Kintyre and the Irish Sea, sing achingly beautiful ballads. My father's mother dutifully cleaned as her husband sang, wiped down the counters, her hair pushed back with a kerchief, her housedress and thin frame wrapped in an apron.

  As my father grew up, watching the alcoholic nose of his father become redder and more bulbous, watching his mother weighed down by his father's life, he formed a decided opinion about art and its creators. He studied to become a medical doctor, something practical and sound. And here is where tragedy intersected his life, as it will, it seems, all lives. As an intern in a local hospital, he was invited to observe as a more seasoned doctor operated on his mother, a procedure my own mother was too embarrassed to name: "a female concern." It was my grandmother's uterus that was in question, I later came to understand. A hysterectomy. My father sat in the operating theater with a group of other young doctors in training, dressed in their sterile suits, hands covered, mouths covered. Observe he did, as the surgeon made a small mistake.

  The procedure went terribly wrong, simple as that, because of the incompetence of the surgeon, who cut an artery that did not need to be cut, and my father's mother bled to death before his eyes. The nurse and the anesthesiologist and the others in attendance tried valiantly to right what could not be righted. Blood poured from the wound, absorbed by the cotton covers, towels stuffed against her side to try to stanch the flow. He could feel her kisses on the crown of his head, her king, a shower of kisses. There was nothing he could do; helplessly he watched. The other students filed out, urging my father to come with them, but he became a stone. Once, for a moment, his eyes met those of the surgeon. My father would never forget the look they held. Not a look of culpability, of sorrow, of desperation, or of guilt. Rather, the eyes held blame. The eyes said to my father, big brown eyes edged with red rims, tired, overworked, defiant eyes, they said to him: Had you not been seated there, this would not have happened. The surgeon took off his gloves and tossed them on the table and with the same defiance walked from the operating room.