Dear Money

by Martha McPhee

  "You're seeing Will and Emma tonight," Win said, more of a declaration, that way he had of wanting you to know he knew much, if not everything.

  "That's right," I said. We'd invited them along with Sullivan's wife for dinner, a celebration of the chalice. I hadn't seen the Chapmans since the fundraiser at the Met. Then a chill shivered through me. "Have you told Will?" I asked sharply. I imagined him making fun of me tonight in front of Theodor.

  Win gave me a quizzical look, studying me. "What are you worried about?"

  "Am I worried?"

  "You tell me." He paused, then said, "Ah-ha!"

  I didn't say anything.

  He persisted. "You haven't told the husband." This Win said with a devilish flourish. He loved every moment of this. He spoke as if referring to that other sort of scandal, referring to Theodor as "the husband," never by name. "I've committed to you," he whispered. "I need you," he said, letting that phrase develop its own heft, "to commit to me." He smiled. This was his way. I'd become familiar with it: rakish when he was disappointed. He didn't get upset. He simply told you what needed to be done, directing you so that he elicited the best from you. Knowing he'd made his point, he added, "Have you heard Will's good news?" I looked at him, again taken aback. For some reason Isabella's mirror popped into my mind. I hoped getting it through the door and illuminated had been a success.

  "I'm looking forward to hearing all about it tonight," I said, revealing nothing, for this was a test too. I could feel his eyes on me as I left, making my way to the elevator. I walked up Park to 57th, over to Fifth, into Bergdorf's, took the elevator to the seventh floor to buy napkins for the dinner party. Theodor had made napkin rings, gold wire entwined with elephants—their eyes jet beads. Will's news could be only one thing, and I was not yet immune to the writer's competitive, desperate nature—the sense that someone else's gain was necessarily your loss.

  In Bergdorf's I wavered for a moment, caught between the old and the new life. I was firm in the knowledge that everything here was priced preposterously, but knew that here I would find something special for Theodor's dinner. I knew too that I'd never hear the end of it from him. Indeed, he'd get years of mileage out of the extravagance that I was about to perpetrate, but he and I both also knew that that was part of the gift, an acknowledgment of his first and original snap assessment of me so many years ago at our first meeting. "You're a rich girl," he'd said. He wasn't right then, but he wasn't exactly wrong either, and I was about to help him make his own case. I'd not yet received my first paycheck, but I would soon enough. So the truth was, I was still broke. The first of many big checks, twice the size of my university check, had yet to arrive.

  Here among the preposterous things—they used to be called "notions"—lingering, pausing briefly to let fabrics fall between my fingers, I found myself in dinnerware. A woman approached me. I want to say she was middle-aged, but aren't we all? What I mean is, she managed to have assembled, "put together," out of the wreckage that life brings, a valiant sense of order, and one found it among the patterns of plates, whose names read like a catalogue of ships. She asked a few discreet questions, and I answered as if speaking in a confessional. She understood a few things about how the world works and guided me, gently but firmly, to a display table arrayed with napkins. She was a sensible woman. She would not let me wander off course into cookware or appliances or bedding and become dispirited. The napkin table was where I belonged, at least for now. She understood. She would hold my little secret. I felt moved by her discretion.

  I chose what I liked best, what might look most appropriate rolled as tight as a fat Cuban cigar inside a golden wire, beneath the elephants of Theodor's opulent and clever design. A cream linen with the thinnest border of silk organza—so pretty and delicate they should have been in a lingerie drawer among the sachets. They were $60 each. I'd like to say I thought nothing of buying six of them, but I can't. The old life was still fresh within me. I felt the desire for them and the rapid beat of my heart. "Aren't these sumptuous?" the saleslady whispered, taking the napkins from me and counting them gently, as though she were performing an arcane Japanese ceremony. "Is six all you need?"

  "Yes, thank you," I croaked, and reached into my purse to pull out the old wallet into which Theodor had long ago stitched, in fine silk thread, ANARCHY. From my anarchy wallet I extracted a credit card. "That will be it for today." I smiled and she took my card.

  "India." I heard my name. "Is that you, India?"

  Behind me, with her fingers wrapped around a sterling silver fork with carved grapes tumbling down the shaft, was a newer, improved Lily Starr. I hadn't seen her since the fundraiser, and she looked even more becoming now in well-fitting jeans tucked into brown suede boots and a cashmere turtleneck, her hair short. From her wrist dangled a cerulean-blue alligator purse. I wasn't yet learned enough to know the designer. It was beautiful, though. Little silver feet glimmered from the corners of the bag's base. Money had been good to Lily, and she was not hesitating to flaunt the effect. A leather bomber jacket draped her other arm.

  "You're in a suit," she gasped, chic girl giving my corporate get-up the once-over. "Why in the world?"

  "Fancy running into you here," I said.

  "A wedding present," she said, almost apologetically. "My niece has registered for this pattern." She held up the fork with the intricate grapes. "Can you believe this place? Nine-eighty a setting. She's marrying a banker," she added for explanation.

  "Smart niece," I said.

  "Right! What were we thinking?" she said, taking me in with her big infectious smile, knitting us together in camaraderie. I remembered her once saying, after her husband got his first teaching job following a prolonged stint of unemployment, that a salary made her want to have sex with him again. "Note to self," Lily Starr said with a wink into an imaginary tape recorder, "next time around, let him be a banker."

  Lordy, she was trying to realign herself with me, with what she thought I still was, perhaps here with what she thought she still was, with what she had been before the best-selling publication of her book and the $5,000 invitations to give readings at colleges all over the country. ("I've no time left to write," she confessed.) The past: when there was nothing to lose, when all was driven by the white heat of the page, "the sexy theater of 8% x 11," as one writer had called it, "the only game in town that ever matters," another had said, the place where one lived and died to make one's audacious mark on the world. Now she was the proud owner of a million-dollar bungalow in the Hamptons, I remembered. Then Lily noticed the suit again, and I could see it jar the nostalgic tableau.

  "The suit?" she asked, screwing up her eyes.

  "A disguise," I said.

  "Who are you hiding from?" She raised her eyebrows and looked around the store, teasing me.

  A mother and daughter sauntered by, the daughter apparently a bride-to-be, looking a little bored and tagging along with her mother to register for wedding gifts. They were trailed by a saleslady who held a pad and pen, taking notes as the mother listed the items they'd like: "We'll take two Buccellatis, one small, one large." She held up a wine glass for her daughter to peruse, cocked her head and pursed her lips as if to ask the daughter if she approved, a kind of "huh" look, a "would these do at $215 a stem" look. Before the daughter could respond, the mother announced they'd take a set each of sixteen—white wine, red wine, champagne and water.

  "You know I've always wanted to conform, blend in," I said. I was caught, the second time in one day. She started giggling like a little girl who knows her friend's secret.

  "Oh, India," she said. I knew what she was talking about. The revelation spread over her face, an understanding of who and what I'd become, a mixture of curiosity and triumph. I could have said a lot of things, but I didn't want to seem defensive, beaten. I knew I had to hang on a few more minutes.

  "You went to the hedge fund guy?"

  "Bonds," I reminded her.

  "Oh yes, James Bond. I still don't know wha
t a bond is. You tried explaining but it went in one ear, out the other."

  The saleslady arrived with my package and the receipt for me to sign. Lily studied me. Lily the Shameless, we'd called her in grad school, the only short story writer we knew who had never actually read a short story. The girl with the perfect writer's name had spotted a target, a curiosity, an interesting subject, and now trained on her (that would be me) her professional gaze like a neon sign that said "The Writer Is In." I could almost feel her misreading me, drawing the wrong conclusions, emoting on my behalf, as she always had. There was nothing to Lily Starr. Nothing except that the Mighty Big Finger of God had descended upon her. I could feel it in the intensity of her gaze. She was eager to understand psychology while being a psychological blank slate, a turnip, a potato. My new life caused an auspicious perturbation in her that must have felt, for her, like a poem coming on, or maybe a short story, about failure, about being forced from Parnassus.

  "Wall Street, that's a full-time job, right? And your writing? And after all those good reviews?" The mother paused nearby and told the daughter she looked tired. And she did, her fine blond hair catching behind her ears, her youthful cheeks paling. "Tell me you really haven't done this. I'm just not quite believing you. Did you get my message about the reviews?" Lily spoke fast, shooting questions out as rapidly as they came to mind.

  "Sorry I didn't call you back."

  She did look pained. My defection had become a bad omen for the trade, a betrayal of the guild—one didn't just up and leave for a world where literature was irrelevant.

  "For how long?" she persisted.

  "For now," I said.

  "It's not right," she said genuinely. That was the thing about Lily: she was mercurial. She had no sense of embarrassment. She just laid it all out there for the world to see and think what it would. Now she almost created in me the desire for her to pull me back. But then I caught myself, stood a little taller.

  "Oh please, Lily."

  But she continued, taking both of my arms, looking at me closely, and it was as if we were in a tree house together making our vows to be best friends forever. We had once been good friends. We'd shared the same bed when she and her old boyfriend had had a bitter fight. We'd read each other's work in the earliest days, helped each other to believe in ourselves, to keep going. Time had driven us apart, and I'd been carried to a completely different shore. But it was the sincere eyes of my old friend who wanted desperately to yank me back, not for me so much as for herself—one can always count on self-interest—as if the slow water torture of my own career—writing and failing—somehow preserved her notion of how the world should work, that there was a system, a design. My defection wrecked her vision.

  I thought of Theodor. I would need to tell him now. Immediately. Lily would be on her cell phone telling our writer friends what I'd gone and done. The news circulating with the speed of good gossip. I could hear her voice, filled at once with concern and glee and astonishment.

  "Don't fret, Lily. I'm enjoying myself. It's fascinating, you know. How often does one have the chance to become something else?" And I did feel that now, Daphne in the midst of becoming the tree, the familiar parts of me vanishing—not the limbs, of course, but my own petty, writerly preoccupations.

  "Oh please," she said.

  "It's not what we imagine. They're actually smart and nice, and they do read." I winked, then kissed her and told her I had to run, that Theodor was unveiling his chalice for the patron.

  "Theodor. What does Theodor say?" she asked. I smiled, was all, and dashed away.

  I had a dress in my bag, folded neatly and wrapped in tissue paper, an old dress, familiar to Theodor. I had planned to change out of the suit, but didn't bother now. When I arrived at the studio I took off my coat, put my bag down, gave him the package with the beautiful napkins, put lilies I had brought into a vase on the foyer table, and then I told him. He was wearing his welder's apron over a white shirt, jeans, flip-flops. His hair was wet and brushed back, the curls flattened. I knew well how those curls came to life as the hair dried, as though a part of him were waking up. I had been dishonest with every part of this man, the first time in our relationship. The flattened hair made him appear like someone else. His features were more pronounced without all the distracting curls, the lines about his eyes and lips a touch more severe. Somehow this made it easier.

  "I've been lying to you," I said. He was unwrapping the napkins. They were in his hand along with the receipt.

  "About what?" he asked, admiring the linen. I could see his eye catch on the receipt. He studied it for a moment and looked at me, eyes rising to pose a question.

  "I've defected," I said.

  "Mrs. Mysterious," he said, giving me a once-over. "In a suit, no less. You've been wearing suits, I've noticed. Part of the research?" he asked sarcastically. I sensed a reticence in him, a bracing, could tell he struggled to mask it, didn't want me to know.

  "I'm a bond trader," I said, just like that and as if we were meeting for the first time. Years ago, at the New Year's party, I am certain he would not have bothered chatting with me had I announced that I was a bond trader. Now I liked the way the words sounded, powerful. What is it? Master of the Universe, Mistress of the Universe? "I'm not writing a short story. I'm not a writer anymore. I've gone to Wall Street, took Win Johns up on that bet of his."

  Theodor burst out laughing, a good hilarious chuckle, the napkins in his hand. He waved the receipt. "My sweetheart," he said and wrapped his arms around me.

  "Don't be condescending," I snapped.

  "What would you like me to say?"

  "What do you want to say?"

  "I want to laugh. This is funny news."

  "You're not going to take this seriously?" The laughter made me angry. I wanted him to be angry. I wanted him to be furious, to feel cheated and betrayed.

  "So I married a rich girl," he said, trying mightily to keep a straight face. Of course he would say that; our first evening had become the mythic base of our story, hadn't it, told to our girls over the years: the humor implicit in the notion of Theodor and a rich girl. His curls were beginning to lighten, to lift as though echoing his humor.

  "You don't care?" I asked. "I've been consumed with fear, betraying you, and you don't care? I've sold out. I'm not who you married. I don't like that woman anymore. And all you can do is laugh?"

  He let go of me and put the napkins down. He picked up my coat and hung it in the closet. He went to the kitchen and checked the oven, opened the fridge for a bottle of wine, which he then uncorked, took two glasses from the cabinet and poured us each one. This was the maddening side of Theodor: he avoided big discussions. He was thinking, of course. And later, when I reflected upon this moment, it would also occur to me that he was relieved, that the laughter was the expulsion of a tremendous buildup of concern. Hadn't he asked me a few nights before if I was having an affair—a concern I'd not heeded as real? My betrayal was petty compared to what he may have feared. But I didn't have so much sympathy now. I wanted to be chastised. I wanted him to feel he didn't know me, that I'd become something other, Isabella Power, her husband, of that caste. I suppose you could say that I wanted his wrath to save me, that somewhere that was the only chance I had.

  Then, very seriously and very quietly, he said, "You're an artist. No matter what you do, you'll always be an artist. You can't turn your back on who you are by nature."

  "I'm not following," I said. The downstairs rooms of his studio seemed smaller, closer. "I care about mortgages, what happens to them, how they're packaged into bonds, how those bonds are valued. Where's the art in that?"

  "I don't know. Maybe you don't know yet. But I'd put a lot of money on your figuring it out at some point." He always had the ability to remove us from the immediate and its sticky details and bring up the larger picture. Duchamp and Warhol, the arc of one's career, how Duchamp moved away from "the retinal" to the theoretical, from the production of art, the need to create a do
cument, to embrace the process itself. "He stopped painting and started playing chess, exhibition chess games with nude models. He sold widgets at art expos. The act of living became art for him. Warhol made a career out of pushing together art and commerce. He loved to put weird things together and sit back and watch the fireworks. You can construe this as a sellout, India, or you can see it as a phase in the arc of your career and sit back and watch the fireworks. Do what you do so well: observe."

  We were standing in the tiny galley kitchen. He turned to the cabinets and started unloading plates and water glasses for the table and then he turned back to me. "Have I taken you seriously enough?" he asked with a smile. "We need to get ready," he said and placed the plates and silverware in my hands. I ran upstairs to set the table. His worktable had been cleared off to become one long dining table. The chalice stood in the center, completed, the world hanging on or about to topple, the beautiful eyes of all the beasts glimmering, the intricate painstaking work made by Theodor's hand, two years of time and labor. Fruit filled the orb, champagne grapes reclining on top of it all. Of course I knew what he meant. I was a performance piece. In some ways that was what I was for Win and Radalpieno: a stunt in a world consumed by money. I kept running up and down the stairs, setting everything up. I changed into a more appropriate outfit, the old black dress that Theodor loved, the way it scooped in the back to reveal the wings of my shoulders.

  "Now I recognize you," he said.

  "I felt like a spy in that suit," I said.

  The kitchen smelled of roasted chicken. Cheese stood on a platter surrounded by crackers.

  "Of course, a spy! That's it. You didn't think you were doing this for the money?"

  "Oh, yes I did. Just because you've turned my low pursuit into high art doesn't mean I'm not doing this for the money."