Dear Money

by Martha McPhee

  In our Vanguard money market account, our savings, used for the big expenses, we had $1,927.58 left. Theodor had no idea. He also had no idea that the bills had gotten out of hand, that I was having a hard time juggling Peter to pay off Paul. He didn't know that the tuition was overdue, that American Express had not been paid this month, that the 0 percent promotion on the credit card that held our debt was coming to an end and the balance would need to be paid (or transferred again), that I hadn't paid the IRS estimated taxes for the entire year, not to mention New York State. I did not tell him that I had used just under $300 from my university paycheck (the income we drew on for our day-to-day expenses) to buy tickets to the new production of Madame Butterfly—heavily publicized as a sensation, not just of the season or the decade, but of opera history—even though Theodor had asked me not to. I loved opera. I could always find ways to justify theater tickets. For example, they could be a tax deduction, listed under the "professional viewings" category. And, I figured, if I canceled the cleaning lady twice, the tickets would be almost paid for.

  I didn't tell Theodor any of this; I had not wanted to bother him with more fights. I had not wanted him to lose his focus. The sooner he finished the commission, the better off we'd be. But now another hope began to dawn, creeping in around the edges, taking me over slowly but completely. And it smelled like coffee, of all those beans, the rich, delicious smell, the oily beetle-like shape, the sheer quantity, the amassing of so many beans. Did he say 37,500 pounds? I would have them. I would be buying them for a low price and would have them, and once I had them, others would want them, want them badly enough that they would pay me a good deal more for them than I had paid. I thought of how many people loved to drink, needed to drink, coffee. Though I understood nothing, it seemed to make such perfect sense.

  In this way I would make a handsome profit. In this way I would be able to work unburdened. In this way perhaps I would find my way back to storytelling. I wanted to find my way back. I understood that now. At all costs I wanted to find my way back to writing. I was a writer. I wanted to be writing. "Dreamers dream," my dear old professor Roger Salter once said, "and writers write." I wanted to make this work. I had fought for this. I will do this. And I realized just then how jealous I was of Will, terribly jealous—the ease with which he had let go.

  The coffee, it did make sense. Indeed, the fates were with me. Will Chapman chose that restaurant so that I would be here at this exact time to run into Darwin Deals. I linked my arm happily in his and for a bit we strolled. Later, when I got home, I sent him a check, leaving us with $927.58, just a stick of wood floating up from the wreck of the family franchise.

  Eight

  OCTOBER 16, A DAY CHOSEN by the marketing gurus at Leader Inc. Books. My publication day. On the proposed jacket, two sisters kissing. This, I am told by marketing, is alluring. Later, a man is added to the design. He sits in an armchair and appraises the sisters. "Sexy," I am told. "Sales are all about the jacket." On the back, blurbs from five best-selling female authors of women's fiction—commercial, less than literary but with that aspiration—sing the novel's praises. The pages of the book will have a rough-cut front edge.

  It's been unseasonably cold. I'm wrapped in wool and white corduroys. I spend the morning at the university, teaching. In my first class a student comes late. Her story is due for submission. She's a pretty girl with long black curly hair and sharp features. She's been crying. Her dark brown eyes are puffy. The class stares at her. I don't interrupt what we are doing. She does. "I can't read my story to the class today," she says quietly, but nonetheless sucking the attention of the class to her.

  The sense of privilege of these students always reminds me of my age. What they take for granted, my generation of students never would have—the display of personal drama, grubbing for grades, cell phones ringing during class, texting. "But you're due to read today," I say. "Please," she says, her mouth long and slack. "Why?" I ask. "It embarrasses me," she answers. I hold her with my eyes. She has already confessed to me in private that she's been having "psychological problems." All semester, my students have eyed me doubtfully as I have tried to find new ways to address certain irreducible laws of the writer's craft—that art is not random, that conflict and mayhem are not synonymous, for instance—but often they seem to stare blankly, as if to say, You're not John Grisham—what do you know?

  Today's my publication day, I think. I want the kids to know it, to know they have a real writer teaching them. I get a jolt of joy, a high, because I've done it again. I've sent another book out into the world—the book, glossy and smooth and mine. Just looking at it, holding it, ignites the butterflies in my stomach. Yippee for me. Tonight Theodor is cooking me dinner at his Williamsburg studio to celebrate, the book party having transformed into a wine-and-cheese event at the Chapmans' after a reading in Tribeca on a later date. I have not yet seen Theodor's commission, the progress of it. "Dinner on the roof," he'd said to me, kissing me on the lips, holding me tightly in his arms. "No matter the temperature. Congratulations, my girl." The way he said "my girl" always made me feel sixteen.

  The troubled student's eyes are laser-like, trained on me, awaiting my response. "We can talk after class," I say to her, and the class carries on. Another student reads a story. This one is about a dentist who suddenly realizes that the patient in his chair is a former girlfriend who dumped him back in high school. She is unaware of the connection, doesn't recognize the doctor behind his surgical mask. With his drill he takes his revenge on her face. I only half listen, like a shrink, I imagine, sitting across from her patients as they rattle off their endless tales of abuse. I don't need to listen; I know my comments—gratuitous violence and the implications, violence as pornography, not interesting, no complexity, who cares? Your job is to make us care.

  My mind flits to a doorman in our building. A week ago, at forty-nine, he dropped dead of a heart attack. He loved to draw cartoons, cartoons worthy of The Literary Review, and I always thought how wonderful it would be if the magazine ran one of them: Doorman Becomes Famous Cartoonist. I had wanted to be his savior.

  Today is my publication day! Fall light slants beautifully into the classroom while the drill does its business on the patient's face. I'm thinking, I'll send the doorman's family $1,000 if my book does well. I'm thinking, I'll ask the family for his cartoons, and I'll submit them myself to The Literary Review. I'm thinking, I'll get him an agent. I'm thinking of all the good I'll do with my money. I'll give April, the babysitter, permanent employment, guarantee her job for life. Such pondering was a favorite pastime. Ah, I would be good and generous at the task. The cleaning lady too, I would save her: employment for life. She's been with us since before the children were born. I'm loyal, I think to myself, brightening. I love being loyal. It's a fine quality. Karma, the world should be good to me.

  Today is my publication day! The drill tears from the nostril to the lip, then up the cheek toward bone. She had beautiful bone structure and he loved defiling it. He loved how easy it was to wreck beauty. Blood spurted everywhere, coagulating as it met the air. The student reads with vivacity, a real sense of himself and the power of his work. He's a solid boy, like a football player, with fat eyes and a buzz cut. The woman is anesthetized but conscious, aware of what is happening to her but unable to do a thing about it. The coffee option is looking good. Darwin Deals has been phoning almost daily. "Up, up, up," he says. "A blight in Brazil. We're reaching the strike mark and we're going to keep surfing until ... India Palmer, you're going to be glad you know me." Blood spurts like a fountain, oozy, from the once pretty chick's face. She's flailing her arms as if she could reverse the horror The horror! If the book fails, there is always the coffee. It's a pretty day outside, if cold, the clouds booming across the sky. In this fashion, the class proceeds.

  My students are serious, sweet, young, impossibly young. The strange boy reading with those fat eyes of his, I'm not sure he qualifies as sweet. To them, I am an old lady. They are pie
rced everywhere. One is stoned, eyes rimmed red. They wear clothes that look like pajamas. "The violence is well rendered," a student begins the critique. "You grossed me out," he offers as evidence of the writer's success. His name is Bob. On the first day of class he declared that Bob was his new name when he introduced himself: "My name is Bob. It used to be Malcolm Bennett Johnston VIII, but I think that's one too many Malcolm Bennett Johnstons. And I'm taking this class not because I want to write novels or fiction or stories—there's no future in that—but to learn how to write a good plot so I can make video games. That's where the money is." He looked me in the eye as if challenging me. "How long have you gone by 'Bob,' Bob?" I asked finally. He checked his watch and said, "Three minutes." Now he adds, "I love being grossed out." Hands shoot up, waving eagerly, stems in a breeze, and then all the students are a-chatter about what's wrong and right with the story: point of view and conflict and characterization, and is "the horror" referencing Conrad? They take the story and their responsibility to point out strengths and weaknesses quite seriously. The girl with psychological problems sinks in her chair.

  After class, the girl and I sit on a bench outside in the sun, wrapped in our coats. She explains that her piece is about her boyfriend doing something very unpleasant to her. She apologizes, says she had to write the story. "It had to come out," she says. "But I just couldn't bear to read it in front of the class."

  It's very short. I skim it. Today's my publication day. Yippee. The story is not clear, skates by on allusive images. Apparently the couple is having sex. He's entering from behind, his front to her back. The story is not very good. The woman is hostile afterward, not sure how to talk to the man. I don't understand the predicament or why this would trouble her so, and I explain myself. She says this approach to intercourse was new for her. I think, How naive, how young. She seems, with all her curly hair and her lovely face with sharp planes, to have a bit more experience than she is revealing. She lights a cigarette. I hate the fact that part of my job entails reading about the sex lives of my students—worse, having to critique them. A helicopter flies low overhead. Today is my publication day and I'm talking to a student about sex.

  "I just couldn't read this out loud," she says, her hands trembling as they hold on to the story and the cigarette. "Do you understand?"

  Do I understand what? Having a man come in from behind? Doggy style, as they say? And this is so troubling to her that she finds it worthy of fiction? I study her for a minute, the intensity of her face, filled with concern. None of this matters, I want to say to her. Just breathe. A colleague passes and congratulates me because he's seen my book in a bookstore. Yippee. I'm glad the student now knows I have a book out. Her face remains fractured with her own concerns. "It's not that unusual," I say to her, regarding the position—that is, wanting to snap her into a more perceptive self-awareness. Then I get down to other points of artistry and characterization, and she, hanging on to my last comment, stares at me dumbly, blankly, holding me with her eyes for a moment as if in disbelief. She turns away. I quickly finish commenting and am off to the next class.

  In the afternoon, I take the subway downtown to the West Village to meet a college friend, Kathy Park, who is taking me to Queen's Spa Sauna for a jjimjilbang treatment. This is Kathy's surprise, and surprise it is—a way to celebrate the publication of Generation of Fire.

  Kathy, tall, with a dark bob and large, arching, humorous eyes, kisses me at the golden dragon front gates. Inside, the décor is bright red with more gold. Sculptures of lions stand guard, and a flurry of women in black bras and panties speak among themselves as naked women saunter by on their way to the sauna or steam room or the heated mugwort room. Kathy says something to the receptionist in Korean. She came to America when she was fifteen and retains a slight accent. She's tough and strong-willed and always the boss. It's one of the many things I love about her: she takes charge and gets her way with a firm and commanding pursing of the lips. She's an attorney, a litigation partner specializing in white-collar-criminal matters (like Sally), an avid reader, a fabulous dresser, a divine cook, a mother of three. Her husband is a thoracic surgeon. As a friend, she never had sympathy for any stories of my financial woes. And she certainly had no answers, or not the kind I wanted to hear. She yearned to be a pianist but gave that up when she had children, because that is the way things are done. "When you have children you have got to be responsible, and that means doing things you don't want to do."

  Now Kathy's carrying on with the Korean ladies, fluently in her mother tongue. When she came from Korea, her father had been here six years, working nights so that he could bring his wife, Kathy, and her two older sisters to New York. He'd lived in Central Harlem and started a well-respected business creating wigs in all styles and shapes for African-American women. Kathy spent her high school years forking wig hair into afros, combing it, teasing it, until it was wiry and firm and perfectly oiled. The time I shared my money concerns with her—the only friend with whom I would ever do so—she said impatiently, "You have to sit down with someone who can show you the numbers." She gave the phrase the special emphasis it has in the business world, a cult-like Pythagorean regard for the numbers, and for the doing of them, the way that the numbers, once done, can crack through fortresses of rhetoric and blarney to reveal the truth of a given situation, like a scrawny, wet dog. "The numbers," she continued, "will show you what you need to put away each year. You'll be frightened. It's scary. But if you don't, then I don't want to hear any complaints about your lives. Look at how you live. We are all working and you are running off to Europe for extended vacations." "We" included the entire rest of the world.

  If I had dared to explain myself, dared to say "But I don't have a choice in the matter," or "I'm not trained to do anything else," or simply "But I'm an artist," Kathy, with love, would have scoffed: "Artist? Don't hide behind that excuse. If you're an artist, live like an artist. Don't live like a rich woman. Move to a town you can afford. Put your daughters in public school." She'd worked sixteen-hour days since she came to this country. She'd left behind a dozen servants, a maid who followed her everywhere, a baby-grand piano. If the sinew of her life in Korea had been whimsical musical dreams, in America, land of dreams, she'd evolved into a person of solid, practical ambition—defending, for instance, major pharmaceutical companies in criminal investigations into fraudulent marketing and pricing practices. I stopped sharing my financial predicament with her a while back and always pretended that everything was wonderful. And today we were celebrating. Yippee!

  "I'm proud of you," she says. "Congratulations. And I adored the book." I don't realize until she says it how much her opinion means to me.

  She smiles at the ladies and then at me and says, "The works." We take off our clothes and enter a big room with cushioned tables and are asked to lie down. In all our years of friendship, I believe this is the first time I've seen Kathy naked. Slender and tall, even naked she walks with that determination. I can imagine her in the buff, running into a client and holding forth without a second thought.

  The works: a Korean woman in her black bra and panties rubs me down for a good forty-five minutes with a Brillo-like scrub pad. This is supposed to rejuvenate the skin, remove the dead so the new can shine. At some point I wonder what the gritty substance is that she is using with the Brillo, then realize it is my own dead skin. I am covered in fine balls, like sweater pills, of my own sloughed gray skin. After a while she heaves a bucket of water on me and the dead skin floats off to the floor and drains away. When I've been thoroughly sanded, the massage begins. The woman gets on top of me, knees pressed into and along my spine, thumbs up under my ribs as if she could penetrate all the way to my lungs and heart. She does not speak a word of English, flips me over as if I'm a fish, all five feet nine inches of me, all 145 pounds of me. She pummels my calves, stretches my arms, bends the joints in awkward ways. I've been sanded and kneaded and washed down, flushed and flexed, reborn. Today is my publication day!
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br />   Kisses goodbye on either cheek. Thanks and love and good luck and congratulations and "When will I see it reviewed in the paper?" I say, "Soon, soon," though I have no idea. Nothing is scheduled. I'm not sure if the book has been assigned. But I don't share my woe with Kathy. "Soon." I hail a cab. Jump in. Blow more kisses and zip off uptown. Hop out at the next traffic light because I realize I have no cash. Check to make sure Kathy's vanished. Descend into the subway. Zip up to Citarella to food-shop. Steak and ravioli and baby bok choy and mâche and bread and macaroons and olive oil and Humboldt Fog. Flowers (because they look so pretty). Total: $113.87. Today's my publication day. Cash from an ATM, am overdrawn (thank God for Checking Plus), a taxi the rest of the way home. Lug the bags into the building, up to the apartment.

  Where it's bright and sunny and sparkling. The cleaning lady, Janine, is there. Janine never says a word. But she is loyal to us and we to her. She insists on wearing a white apron. I give her cash, $120 (note, as I have of late, that she's paid more for her time than I am for mine; note, as I have of late, that I really must tell her I can't afford her anymore). She has long hair that she wears in braids. Her white apron is pulled taut over blue jeans and a T-shirt as she irons the children's shirts and our sheets and napkins from a dinner party we had last week. She smiles when I hand her the cash, as she always does. Her two front teeth, encircled with gold, shine. I must give her notice, I think, one more month. I hear the children in their room. "See you next week, Janine," I say and disappear into the children's room.