Dear Money

by Martha McPhee

  "Good luck for me, then," he said. "I've always wanted sixty-dollar napkins."

  "Is there anything I can do that will make you stop loving me?"

  "Plenty. But taking someone up on a bet like this is not one of them. How many people get to try on something completely different in life? How many people would be as brave?"

  As we continued preparing dinner, I spilled out everything that had happened in the past two weeks, telling him all about the glass palace and the photography collection and Radalpieno and the silver bell the two men kept dinging and Win and his boys and their bet and his bet and my salary and the phones and the picture of Dick Cheney, and all of this coming forth made me light and relieved and eager to describe the details of this foreign country and to see what would become of this adventure of mine.

  The Texan came with his third wife on his arm and his bolo tie and his handmade cowboy boots and his loud enthusiasm for the beauty of the chalice. The wife, a lovely woman who had gotten the hell out of El Paso as fast as she could, was a good ten years older than Sullivan but seemed younger in the way she deferred to him, admired what he admired, agreeing easily with his comments. "Robot Girl," I whispered to Theodor in the kitchen as we finished making dinner. He put his mouth to my ear: "I'll bet she fucks like a robot too."

  The studio filled with their presence, his booming voice and the magnum of champagne he popped open, her fruity perfume with a touch of cinnamon. He was the sort of man who assumed that the world was designed for his pleasure. In that way, all Texans are unexpected throwbacks to the Renaissance, the world revolving around their own genius. In Sullivan's case it was his penchant for amassing huge wealth, originally in the oil and gas business. He'd been a "land man," a guy who buys oil and natural gas leases, before he turned to venture capital. Now it was art, and tonight it was us—actual artists of Williamsburg. We were his entertainment, and, I'll give him credit, he enjoyed us fully, as if he'd rolled us up and smoked us, without irony—me "the author," he said, delighting in the phrase, spellbound, and Theodor, having sculpted gold for him, no less—all of us together at last, a night that the wife, Dina, would tell her friends about for a solid week.

  And then Emma and Will arrived, looking beautiful as always and just the same, not changed by his new profession: she, lovely and petite in a little black dress with a ruffle at the knee, and he in a suit and shirt with French cuffs and loafers. More admiration for the chalice, a trip to the roof to see the skyline and the Texan taking Theodor aside to ask him privately if he didn't need a little tide-me-over before the big check arrived: "I don't know how you-all do it, but I'm sure this won't hurt." He pulled out his checkbook and wrote a check for $10,000, a small portion of what he owed Theodor, but that would help us enormously, would have solved many woes just a few months before. "This is how it works," Theodor had always said: "in waves. Waves of fortune. Waves of need. We just have to be steady in how we ride them."

  At dinner I made everyone laugh when Theodor announced that I'd gone to Wall Street to become a bond trader, had put writing aside for now. They laughed as other people would across the years when they heard my news, always the first response—a good jolly chuckle that would remind me of Theodor's first reaction.

  "The cad," Emma said, and the table quieted, attention turning to her. The room was lit only by the many candles. The light of the flames flickered on our faces, against the walls. "He got you after all my protestations."

  "Who?" asked the Texan.

  "Win Johns at B and B," Will explained, and then I told them the story of the bet, a prospect that sang to Sullivan's sense of the outlandish. But I could tell as I watched the faces around the table that Will, who liked to know everything but had been kept in the dark about my adventure, was straining mightily to maintain his signature poise, that air of least astonishment. "You didn't!" he said, his jaw dropping and straightening out and then dropping again as I told my story. Will, Perfect Boy, the Eagle Scout astronaut, so used to being unsurprised by any eventuality, was genuinely, comprehensively flummoxed.

  "I forbade him," Emma said.

  "He seduced me," I said.

  "The devil," she said and entreated Will to chastise Win, to save me.

  "Ex faucibus daemonis" Will said. The Texan's wife screwed up her eyes to indicate what the rest of us wondered too. "From the devil's jaws," Perfect Boy explained.

  "Don't fret," Theodor said. "She's a spy."

  "A spy? Of course, India the observer," Emma said. "My allegiances are shifting. I feel sorry for Win."

  "Don't be," Will said. "They're well matched."

  To the Texan (I liked referring to him as the Texan) I said, "Ask Will what's become of him."

  "And you?" the Texan said to Will, obeying me. I was ready to hear Will's news. By now all of us had had a pleasing amount of wine. Nothing mattered. Life was a funny, topsy-turvy game.

  "And me what?" Will said.

  "Tell him what you've become," I said.

  "Oh, this is crazy," said Emma, delighted.

  "He's become a writer," I blurted. "We've traded places."

  "I was never a trader, India. I was much lower on the totem pole, a lowly investment banker bringing phone service to impoverished countries."

  "You're all mixed up," said the wife, Robot Girl, with her deep accent and fluttering smile. For the first time of the evening declaring her own opinion. "And none of you look a day close to forty."

  "He sold his novel to Piccadilly," Emma said to the table. "His agent is billing him as a new Thomas Wolfe, though he doesn't write on the top of his refrigerator. Not yet, anyway."

  "I'm not tall enough," Will added.

  Even though I'd been waiting for the news, it pricked a bit, and I wondered: What am I doing? Why had I done it? We had $10,000, with more on the way. I didn't need to do this. Why did Will get to become a writer? I had the urge to jot something down in that small notebook I carried around in my purse, which I'd been filling with notes over the past two weeks. Sort something out, as Theodor had said. I deflated a little, the way you can after too many glasses of drink, when it dawns on you that the sensation won't last much longer, that the party's almost over. I was glad tomorrow was Saturday, that there was still time and a chance to turn my mind around.

  "Why, yes," Emma said. "Piccadilly was your publisher once, right?"

  "That's right."

  "Will sold not just one book," Emma persisted, "but two. Cavelli," she added. The name would mean nothing to the Texan and his wife, but to me it meant a lot. The Dashing Cavelli. Not only did Will land the best agent in town, but also the most prestigious publisher.

  "You were fond of him, weren't you, India?" Will asked.

  "Yes," I said simply. He was charming, dapper in his white suits, elegant and extremely smart. A Long Islander who spoke with transatlantic inflections. His offices were stacked to the ceiling with papers and books, with only the narrowest paths cleared in the corridors, which made moving from room to room nearly impossible. That old world rose before me, appealing all over again.

  "My fellow bohemians," said the Texan. "How do you do it? How do you make your way in a banker's world on a writer's budget?" He made a flourish with his hands that was intended to take in the New York City skyline, which languished on the other side of the studio's exposed-brick walls.

  "We hope," Will said, now squarely one of us. Everyone burst out laughing but me. I knew that response, had lived it, a quality of nonchalance about one's fate, as if one were Lermontov in a cliff-top duel, a mere character in a novel. Magical thinking, they call it. It surprised me to hear this from Will, but I suppose he was only trying on his own vita nuova as well. One practiced one's lines to feel how they fit. Hope? The old world disintegrated as fast as it had been resurrected. I was done with all that. I was after a different sort of animal.

  The dinner ended with Armagnac, brought from the Texan's limousine, which would usher him and Dina back to their Manhattan hotel and the Chapmans to thei
r Tribeca apartment. Goodbyes and kisses all around, and Emma, wrapped in a fur, insisted we visit them again in Maine this summer.

  "A bond trader," the Texan said, shaking his head and smiling, slipping into his coat. "I think, Theodor, that your chalice has caught things at just the right moment, the tipping point. Or not. It's not made me—I'm not that smart; there are plenty smarter than me—but I always have a knack for finding the right moment. I know what it is. So I smell it here. No doubt. I think you're brilliant, old boy."

  Fourteen

  EMMA MOVED TO MAINE in April of that year, as soon as the temperature became bearable and snow unlikely. She flew home on the occasional weekend, or Will and the girls came to her. Now that he spent his days writing, he could pick the children up from school if he wished, had more time for them. To be prudent, they had let their babysitter of eight years go, had hired a student part-time—a painful decision, as Lolly had been part of the family, but one that made sense given the new shape of their lives. The money saved could be used to help with the new expenses of Maine. In June, Will and the girls would pack up the apartment and join Emma for the summer, their first spent entirely at Pond Point. Of course it was difficult leaving her family behind, but she was determined to make the house perfect for them.

  So Emma, in Maine, passed the spring doing what she loved best, making their world beautiful. Emma's arrival, and the coincident arrival of spring, with all its associations of awakening, of renewal and, more specifically, of cleaning, fueled her for the task, which was, upon closer inspection of the house, a formidable one, but one she approached with determination and ambition, sleeves rolled, her eyes alive to the possibilities of the interior space. This was not about decoration but design, and she approached her task as if to a calling—though one perhaps not as serious as the drive of an artist. But first there was wholesale throwing out and stripping down to be done, a rendering to the bare bones, as the cottage had been bought as is. So Emma spent a long first few weeks tossing things into dumpsters—the beds, the couch, the chairs, all the pots and pans and old tins, spices and food, the kitchen appliances, the kitchen floor, the mattresses, the lamps, the switch plates, the books and the puzzles and the games and the linens, the blankets and the television and the tools in the basement and the contents of the three bathrooms, the rugs, the piano, the wreaths.

  A few minutes' pause on a given midmorning gave her a chance to contemplate the new space that was emerging from under all the clutter. She could feel her mood rising with her progress, and of course this was no accident but only the most obvious of ancient principles engaged and aligned. Arranging space was nothing to be sniffed at, though most people did. But Emma wasn't most people. The Hovs, bless them, were more like most people in that they hadn't thought to change the interior of the house so there was more of a dynamic interplay between interior and exterior landscapes. To them a house was something that shut out the world, offered protection and isolation from it, so somehow filling it up added to the armor. There would be no more of that. Emma took to redefining space where she could, to let the outside in, to create new interior vistas that would, every day they were there, offer up to her family the landscape's positive, soul-expanding physiological effects.

  The closing had been in late March, and by Easter five dumpsters were filled and the house emptied. The framed drawings by the children and the Bachrach photographs had been carefully wrapped in newspaper and shipped to the Hovs—a task Emma offered to do in order to speed the process along. It was gratifying to clear out the house, the accumulation not of one lifetime but of several—from the days when Pond Point had been populated by wealthy Bostonians who came by steamboat to summer here.

  For a few days Emma basked in the big emptiness and in being utterly alone. She slept on a blow-up mattress in the turret, covered in down quilts (shipped up from New York), listening in the dark to the moaning of foghorns, the tolling of bell buoys, the constant, reliable tumble of waves against the shore, the cry of gulls. She ate her meals, drank her coffee, at the lobster shack in town, which was more of a hamlet: the lobster shack, a lifesaving station that had been converted into a bed-and-breakfast, a church and a general store that also happened to serve the best lobster rolls around.

  The sea air and pungent pine had seasoned her blood. The horizon, the vastness of the ocean, seemed to cause her to grow, become a part of it. The surf retained its winter violence; the sea, the color of a deep sapphire, foamed beneath a lowering sky. None of the other homes were occupied, boards across the windows. She liked it this way, Pond Point unpopulated. For a few days she didn't bother calling Will or the girls. She'd walk to the lobster shack along the beach, bending with it as it reached the river. The view of the river wending its way north seemed to arrest centuries.

  At the restaurant the owner and his wife were skeptical of Emma at first, this newcomer from New York City—they silently checked her out, suspicious, chins raised. New summer-home buyers were likely to import other fancy people. She drank their coffee, read the local paper, asked how the winter had been, praised the pancakes, flipped through the Auto Trader with curiosity, bought the Maine syrup, asked for nothing special. She understood their heavy accents, didn't need for them to repeat themselves, asked questions about the lobsters, about their clear blood, how they can regrow a leg or claw, when they molt, the variety of their colors—yellow, blue, red, and the joker, striped orange and black.

  She made small talk about the weather, listened to the gossip, gleaning stories of the lives of others. A lobsterman pulling up his pot found a human thumb tangled in the rope, a mishap from an apparent attempt to steal his pot. The night before, a local scoundrel had come into the clinic one town over, missing his thumb. One thing led to another and a trial ensued. The jury failed to convict the thief. The reason: lack of evidence. Emma heard the story over pancakes. The man who told it, a skinny fireman who also delivered the mail, had emphasized those last three words, giving them enough space to make the point hit home, like some off-duty member of a Greek chorus, pouring syrup on a stack of flapjacks. "Lack of evidence," he said, underscoring for the new resident the justness of the decision—the thumbless man had lost enough.

  Emma's neighbors gave her plenty to contemplate regarding the human condition. Not yet here for summer, their presence dominated nonetheless. The Coffins were forbidding the Smalls from using their driveway to gain access to their house though they'd been allowed to for years, had a variance of some sort that had been proved in court to be illegal, and the Coffins didn't like the way the Smalls rutted up the road with their enormous SUV (that gas guzzler should be illegal too). The real estate developer who lost his wife in a boating accident wanted to build a retirement community in the marshland; it was said he'd fallen in love again but that his boy didn't like the new woman. The grandson of a Prohibition rumrunner had bought the Tuttle widow's cottage, and some believed he'd taken advantage of her, and though no one could remember the rumrunner, the fact of him served well enough as an indictment of the grandson's character. The gossip described a contentious lot who were highly attuned to the tiers of their society: the oceanfront owners, the riverfront owners, the townspeople and those who lived in cottages in the pines, a small expanse of woods infested with mosquitoes and ticks which you had to drive through to get to Emma's; quite a few people living in there but you never saw them on the beach. They seemed to like to stand next to their houses in the deep shade and listen to portable radios and barbecue steaks. They liked it right where they were. Before, Emma would not have cared about all this, but now things were different. On Sundays in the summer, when the church opened again, she would like being around these people, singing their hymns, chatting with them over coffee at the parson's house after the service, knitting herself, her family, into them.

  The owner of the restaurant, who was also a lobsterman, had a slender physique and boyish face, and despite being a genuine Mainer (that is, someone born here of parents who had been born
here), he had the blond hair and blue eyes of a Connecticut prep school boy. His supple wife wore braces and was always busy with a chore, cleaning, cooking. She didn't smile much, but when she did, you knew you'd said something worth saying. The wife's sister, a young widow with a smoker's cough, often sat with Emma at her table even when all the other tables were empty, saying little but happy for the proximity to someone new. Here talk wasn't always necessary. Emma could shed New York—the pace, the social engine, the fears of whether Will would succeed or not—and return to her most pure self, unencumbered by concerns about her future, which vanished in the wave wash and the crisp sea air.

  Everything would be fine. Will had given her fifteen years. For fifteen years he had worked a job that had compromised him so that she could have Tribeca, fancy trips, two children, private schools, lessons, comfort, security. She had not had to work. She had not wanted to work, had wanted to stay at home with the girls—compensating, as so many of us do, for the failings of our parents. As an academic her mother had never been around when needed, even if physically present. Emma had admired her mother for her devotion to scholarship, but had always been envious of the children whose mothers had the time to make them lunches, slicing the crusts off the bread, concerned with the whims and particularities of their small ones, mothers who stood on the sidelines watching the games, who did their level best to ensure their childhoods would last as long as possible.

  Emma had easily shed her career in the prints and drawings department of the Metropolitan Museum, cataloguing the endless inventory—the first step on the track to becoming a curator. She stopped writing her dissertation, gave up on her Ph.D. and never looked back once the babies were born. Well, perhaps a little when surrounded by the career-driven mothers who were so beautifully defined by what they did, dressed effortlessly as district attorney, white-collar-criminal lawyer, oil analyst, editor in chief of a women's magazine, global marketing director—their days filled to the brim, trips to far-flung spots around the globe. Women who couldn't seem to comprehend what it meant to stay home, who seemed to find in that choice a defeat and a refutation of what so many women spent the past thirty years fighting for. Emma knew the worst judgments of herself were cast not by others but by herself alone. Maine was Will's last promise to her, and she knew that it was her turn to promise him.