My father's father drank himself to death soon thereafter. My father had to rise from this, a slum somewhere in Baltimore, a little sister now in his care. Or does the story begin with the birth of my grandfather on a small Scottish island, very cold, where even potatoes were hard to come by and the idea of writing a word, one's own name, was reserved for people of more fortunate means and the only hope was that ship to America?
This was the story my room told. I gave the essay to Miss Fine. The next day she read it aloud to the class. Adjusting her bifocals on the bridge of her nose, she stood before the class with my typed pages in her hand and read the words slowly, patiently, emphatically. It was magic, a swirl in my chest. She asked me to write other stories, and I did. I received an A in the class and the confidence to know that my stories, my words, the effort that went into them, were admirable. I understood something specific, elemental, looking into the canopy cover—the painstaking quality with which those circles were made, a thousand of them, eighty thousand balls, so precise it seemed a machine had to have made them, each one looking like the others, woven together with a needle to turn an ordinary bed into a fantasy for a girl, the cotton reinforced with silk, a smooth and creamy cream, draping the mahogany posts of the four-poster bed—I understood something about patience, and that I would pursue it at the expense of all else. Miss Fine read my essay to the class, and the class was impressed, and the class and Miss Fine thought they learned something more about me and where I came from. They were heartbroken for my father, the stern man they saw only on occasion—if Mother was sick—dropping me off at school. They were heartbroken for me too.
What I did not tell them was that the story was a lie. The Palmers were English, not Scottish; the canopy cover was a bedspread bought by my mother at a flea market. My paternal grandmother lived to be 104. Shall I go on?
That facts were malleable—not irreducible finished goods, but a kind of originating ore, to be shaped and spun and even discarded wholesale for the sake of the story—was a new and powerful discovery. It made me feel powerful, because I understood that people wanted to believe that what they were reading had actually happened, and I believed I could make them feel that even if I was "lying."
I went to a college famous for its undergraduate creative writing program and then went to New York City to graduate school. I read all the young American writers I could find who I believed had talent. I studied them to see what they were doing, if they had the ability to get inside me and move me, and if they did, I studied every word, every comma, to see how they managed the feat. I wanted to do what they did. I studied their careers too, used them as models for my own. I applied for grants and prizes they'd won. I went to writers' colonies they'd gone to. I was calculating. I saw where they were ten, fifteen years down the line from me, imagined myself there, became competitive, imagined I could and should do better. I locked myself in the bedroom of my first small apartment and stayed there until a chapter was finished. I worked until all hours of the night. I rose early, tore my hair out. I wanted this. I did not notice the days slip by. I did not notice the seasons. I went inside myself and in two and a half years pulled out my first novel—the story of a young doctor whose father is an immigrant from Scotland, an illiterate drunk who wanted to be a poet, the story of a young doctor whose mother dies before his eyes during a simple operation, the story of how this young doctor raises his younger sister after the death of both parents— The Way We Do Things Here. I met Theodor and together we began to dream.
The novel was sold to Deutsch for a ridiculous amount of money, the publisher and editor in chief promising me the moon. A few months after publication it was nominated for the Washington Award, and I believed myself firmly on the right and inevitable path even if the book sold fewer than five thousand copies. I was twenty-six years old. Theodor got his first big commission. We had money in the bank, more than most of our friends. We were in our twenties and succeeding as artists. By thirty we had a baby, and by thirty-two, two babies, three novels, a fourth on the way. We were rising, rising while at the same time I was being pushed quietly, with a little, subtle force, away from the solitude of the desk toward the playground and beyond. Beyond its perimeter lay the rest of the park and the world. But in this tug of war the desk won in the end.
I needed the money. We needed the money. Only a fool wrote a book for anything else, said Samuel Johnson. It did not faze me when I had to move from one publisher to another. I did not believe in that sort of loyalty. I'd followed the careers of too many writers. If you didn't have the money, you wouldn't be able to afford to write. So I moved, easily. And each time, with the publisher's enthusiastic support, I believed this could be the book! But belief and "having a marketing plan" don't mean you have control over the fickle beast that is the reading public. I believed irrefutably in myself and my talent and my own ability to succeed. I knew someday I would make enough money to keep doing what I loved. I believed that as one believes some things sometimes. I just didn't know when. I waited, like a passenger in an airport waiting for a delayed flight to somewhere fabulous—Tahiti, Bora Bora—waiting for things to get easier, waiting for our lives to begin. We were surrounded by artists in the same position, all eager, all hopeful, all waiting, all of us removed from those we had known in college who had taken responsible jobs and were living their lives responsibly in the world in real time. In the meantime, while we waited, I continued to sell novels, and Theodor got his commissions. Like this we could keep going. We could. If we scaled back, we could.
Instead, the girls began private nursery school, which led to private grade school with fancy East Side friends and expensive camps (not to mention birthday parties—rowboats in the Boat Basin, circuses in the park) and country houses on the moon! One goes broke in a thousand small ways: birthday presents, the ticket of admission to those fancy birthday parties; house presents; ballet classes, lessons in general; theater subscriptions, for us and for the children; dinners out with the mothers, with the parents who want to get to know you better; fundraisers (God forbid you don't have your name on the donor list); contributions; dinner parties; out-of-network doctors for my asthmatic daughter, the pulmonologist, the allergist, well-child care not covered, the dentist; bills (electricity, cable, telephone); clothes for the kids, uniforms; taxis, when too tired to take the bus; haircuts even for Theodor, the girls, myself (Do you really need one? I'd find myself thinking); movie theater tickets and the requisite popcorn and soda—all of it adding up constantly in my mind, a spinning calculator, accumulating numbers with astonishing and frightening speed. A taste for small luxuries swells: hair coloring four times a year, eyebrow sculpting by the Eyebrow Man at Barney's, a massage. Who buys those $1,800 bags and $1,000 pairs of shoes?
An excursion to the reflexologist with another mother—an outing I had no business being on: "Sarah Jessica Parker comes here," the mother exclaims. Afterward we stop in a cosmetics shop and the mother buys herself a small jar of face cream for $250 (the size of my grandmother's tiny silver smelling-salts box) that contains an ancient serum, a mixture of mummy dust and some other such nonsense, and that claims to return you to your former self. Indeed. "You must get yourself a jar," she insists, plopping down her credit card, and I understand that she just does not get it, she just does not know who I am, she has no clue, no idea, and the fault is mine. The white glass vial, its sage-green label holding the vivid description of the rectifying powers of the mummy serum, resting so invitingly in the saleslady's creamy palm as she promises that yes, the jar is small, but you need only a speck for the magic to work, that the jar will last a year, that luxury can buy youth. At this point, you will know what I did.
Along this way one is forgiven, perhaps, if one takes a wrong turn, if one gets distracted from the pursuit of art. What did truth matter when money was the only truth capable of speaking its mind, when the amount of money one made was the only measure of success? Perhaps I can pinpoint our fall to the beginning of preschool. Not becau
se of the school or the friends, but because I was not good at being the poor one, and in this new stratosphere, even by the standards of a good year for us, we would be the poor ones. Perhaps it begins earlier than that, with the sale of my first novel, with believing on the flimsiest evidence that a first enormous advance would lead to others, and that with them I'd be able to prove to my father that I could afford the life he intended for me, that the artist didn't always need to starve. Or perhaps earlier still, perhaps our fall boils down to my mother's impeccable taste, she who always wanted the finest quality for her children; she cared not so much about brands but that the clothes we wore were exceptionally made, that the lessons we took would teach us the most, that the school we attended would expand our minds. She was a simple woman in many ways, but her eye for detail was acute and demanding. Or perhaps my desire and its ever-expanding circumference were fueled by the very air of New York.
Here now, home from our visit to England and my brother and his wife and expensive life, it was not a good year, and I was very much the poor one, with debt like a stone slab, with the publication of Generation of Fire not having such a promising outlook anymore—none of the glossies were covering it, no reviews had been assigned yet. ("It's still early," my editor would say, though the long silence that I was so familiar with, the post-publication oceanic silence from all involved in the happy occasion was already well under way, the calls to agent and editor returned with more and more delay—after all, what was the urgency? The urgency was mine alone. Their job was done.) The article for Woman magazine was on the verge of being killed. Theodor's commission was far from complete, his patron and the museum threatening to withdraw support if he didn't show them something soon. Tuition for the children was due and I had no idea how we'd pay it. Credit card payments were due and I had no idea how we'd pay them, next to nothing left in the once big savings account, notice needing to be given to the cleaning lady and the babysitter. The fights starting with Theodor:
I— We need to make more money.
T— You need to stop spending so much.
I— It's my fault? What about the commission? When's it going to be finished? I've never seen a person work so slowly.
T— Come on now, darling, have faith.
I— Faith? Faith? How about reality? Tuition? How about you get a real job?
T— It always works out. Don't let me lose you just because it's a little tight now. It's going to work out.
This was where we were now, floating on our own little barque of ruin, surrounded by the gorgeous sea of wealth so flamboyantly on display in the early morning hours as the city's parents awoke to take their lovely children to school in their Ferragamo shoes and their shiny black SUVs, juggling $5 cappuccinos and buttery croissants that would both, unfinished, end up in the garbage. That was the only truth I was capable of absorbing. Indeed, I did not like to be the poor one. I, simply, was sick of waiting. I wanted to be among the grown-ups, the responsible, the living. So yes, you could say I was giving up on art. That is what happens when you grow up. Art finds its rightful place as a child's plaything, the preoccupation of damaged souls, hapless academics, tenured nincompoops and exhibitionists, whom we strangely entrust with the education of our children, the way the wealthy aristocrats of an earlier age hired governesses. Art: child's play, nothing more.
A cool, crisp September morning. The sky so blue, ethereal in its majesty. "Severe clear" is the aeronautical term. The summer behind us, the children in school again. I rode the subway downtown to Tribeca to have breakfast with Will Chapman, Perfect Boy, the Renaissance man of the investment house Paul, Smart & Smith: PSS, he called it, or Piss, depending on his mood. His invitation. As I came out of the subway, the buildings of Wall Street, to the south, rose in front of me, awake in the morning sun. Men and women, dressed in their suits, made their way to work, tanned, relaxed, ready to start again, take on the world—a whole army of people. It was 8:30. I was early. Cabs zoomed by, town cars. I walked south.
It was an odd invitation. I'd never met with Will before on my own, but it was just like him, if he wanted to meet with me, to do it in a completely safe way—breakfast. Nothing untoward or to be misinterpreted about breakfast. I figured he wanted to plan a surprise party for Emma or arrange some fabulous adventure (that we could not afford and that I'd have to lie my way out of) for us as couples or for our girls. In any case, I was intrigued. I strolled slowly, killing the half hour before our breakfast at nine. I paused at a newsstand to flip through the glossies to see if Lily Starr had made it that far.
A plane flew by overhead. My cell phone beeped, indicating a message. The screen announced that the caller had been private, offering no revealing number or name. I lifted a copy of Woman and flipped to the book page, phone pressed to ear. Lily Starr once told me of a friend of hers who bought a pair of roller skates when her novel was published so that she could skate from bookstore to bookstore to sign copies of her book. Oddly, she thought that a signed copy of a book could not be returned by the store to the publisher. How pathetic, I thought, as if those roller skates would make the difference, and I thought of my ridiculous self, standing here ready to open every magazine to see how much press Lily Starr had received so I could scratch at what seemed to be the writer's perpetual wound. "Hello, my darling novelist." And there was his determined voice. "You're having breakfast with Will to hear his silly news." There was an inflection on the word "breakfast," indicating that he too thought breakfast an absurd time of day to meet a lovely woman, no matter the circumstances. "I'd like to make my own invitation—champagne sometime soon?" He did not leave a date, a time, a place. He did not even mention his name.
Yes, I'd have a drink with Win. I dropped Woman magazine back in its stack. I liked this man. He went after what he wanted without a care for convention. I liked his bold determination, the fact that he seemed to know inherently that it does not matter a whit what others think. The art of his confidence lay in making people think what he wanted them to think, in knowing that the opinion of others did not make a person's life. My heart beat a bit faster. I did not need to know what Lily Starr had achieved. Who cared what small successes happened for her? Those successes: here for a nanosecond, then gone. I knew this better than most. I had a message from Win and I wanted to know what it was he wanted from me.
Later, though, at another newsstand on another pee-stained and -scented New York street, I would scan the magazines to find Lily Starr right where I expected her to be, her light scintillating from every glossy out there, heralding the greatest voice infiction written by a woman since Carson McCullers. "Old-school brilliance." "Irresistible." "Sensational." "A tour de force." "A modern master." Shall I go on? Her smile captured in a $5,000 publicity shot brightening all of those pages, the PR machine scooping her up like arms from heaven to lift her high above the rest of us mortal souls. After I set the last magazine back in its place, I'd look to the sky, expecting to see a billboard with her picture, right up there with the clouds, smiling down upon me. Perhaps she would even speak: "Gee, this is great. Isn't this great, India? Isn't it?"
But that was later. For now I did not care. I'd have champagne with Win. A married woman, mother of two, with no intention of ever being unfaithful, I'd buy a new dress to have champagne with Win, trying to cultivate for my own the indomitable self-interest that guided him to think first of himself and of all that he wanted. I craved to live fully, richly, to care not a bit for the opinion of others, to do exactly as I pleased, to be far removed from the distasteful pastime of worry and debt. I was a bit lighter on my feet, my cheeks a bit rosier. I loved thinking about the fact that Will Chapman and Win Johns had discussed me. And then I wondered: What could possibly be Will's news, and why did he want to share it with me?
The restaurant was where the titans of industry and finance breakfasted. Expensive flower arrangements. White tablecloths. Silver cutlery. Stemware. Cloth napkins. Butter pressed into the shapes of shells and starfish and sand dollars and se
a horses. Male waiters in black suits and white shirts. Businessmen in pairs leaned into each other, making morning-time deals. They'd all been up before dawn, running in the park.
Will sat, tall and elegant, reading the paper. He looked up as I approached and then stood, placed a soft kiss on either cheek. Will is a handsome man with his dark, full hair and green eyes, his strong jaw. He is slender and likes to run, and you can see from his body that his health and what he eats are important to him. As a pair, he and Emma do make an attractive couple. But there was something else about Will Chapman that I always admired: his ability, in spite of being one who liked to know so much about everything, to be shy, to bow his head and avert his eye, somewhat like a woman being flirted with by a dangerous man. She likes it, wants it, but at the same time wants to pretend that she does not. About Will, some might just call it bashful, but for me, his look and general demeanor, when his eyes sort of quivered a little, were more complex, hinted at vulnerability. And I liked that. I thought I had the ability to throw him off balance, and I liked that too.
Dear Money Page 10