Dear Money

by Martha McPhee

  "Tulip mania," he said. He tilted back in his chair and raised his glass a bit and stared into it. "You know what I want from you? I want you to go home and wear this loss like a fantastic dress. I want you to feel it in every part of you. I want it to become you."

  I said nothing for a minute. Then, "And if I don't want to?"

  "You don't have a choice, do you?"

  "I don't?"

  "I bought you. You're mine."

  I flinched, but then, like a revelation, just as sudden and acute, I understood how true this was. I didn't have my job at the university anymore. I'd given that up in the summer without a second's hesitation. They'd never have me back now. I'd lost my credibility there. Without the old job, or the new one, I'd have no salary, no insurance for the family. How would I pay the tuition, April, doctors, the rent? I felt the walls and windows move in closer to me.

  "And when you're finished with me?"

  "You'll go back to writing, I suppose. I don't know. You're a grown woman. You'll get a job, here or somewhere else."

  It had all started out as a game. I'd known that—a game I'd been eager to play, just as I'd been eager to be absorbed by the culture, the bets, the hamburgers, the late nights, the numbers. But today all that stopped, the game had stopped, for him, for me.

  Sixteen

  I HAD PLAYED the game because I had wanted to see if it was possible to change the course of my life. In a way, I had wanted to conform, be erased, be reborn to live the American dream, to live a life untainted by constant worry and debt. But what was it really that I was valuing, as they say on the Street, in this vita nuova? What Elysian Fields bloomed there? "The land of joy ... where the blessed make their homes." Sixty-dollar napkins? Hundred-thousand-dollar mirrors? "Personal grooming experiences"? Yoga retreats and dietitians and personal trainers and life coaches and personal shoppers? Better cars? Better homes and, it almost goes without saying, gardens? Private lessons—the sacred ice time of the soul for kids, all just for them? Their favorite teachers magically transported into the living room for a little one-on-one face time with the kinder? Private tours of the museum's marquee shows after hours—a docent trying mightily to explain the art of Degas, Rembrandt, El Greco, Arbus and Murakami for four-year-olds? Nannies for life? Private schools, private colleges, private planes, VIP passes through gilded corridors, the world wonderfully cleansed? Plucking your pleasures and enticements as you pass them by?

  It starts like this: you get a job, you want a better job; you get a car, you want a better car; you get a house, you want a better house; you have a child, you want another, then another. Crested Butte becomes Aspen becomes Gstaad. The wife? I've found another, one who makes me laugh. In a fairy tale, a hard-pressed writer—who cares only for the good, the true and the beautiful—has grown destitute because of the world's general indifference to art. In a moment of desperation, the man agrees, temporarily, to trade places with his shadow. But his shadow, who understands how the world truly works, is confident and charming and opportunistic, and becomes successful and well liked by all, even though he's only a shadow. In time, the shadow slowly eclipses the man, eventually bedding the man's wife. By the time the man comes to his senses, threatening to expose the state of things, the wife and the shadow conspire to have him killed. It's a dark parable whose significance seemed at once immediate and yet always, somehow, skittering off at the periphery of one's vision.

  In Central Park, for instance, at the Conservatory Water, filled with model boats, I was with Theodor and the girls the Saturday after my first big bona fide failure as a capitalist fly-girl, thinking about Win. "Don't forget this," he'd said. "Like those bad reviews you say you always remember, the ones that pinch you awake in the middle of the night. What was it you called it? The boulder someone planted in your stomach? That's nice. If you want to survive here, don't forget the boulder."

  I could feel the flush of humiliation still. After my first bond debacle, I was both the failed writer who stupidly trades places with his shadow and the shadow himself, only in this version of the story the shadow receives his comeuppance, gets knocked down by a bond market, which runs over him like a bus, to remind him, in the way that only New York City can, that he's just a freaking shadow after all.

  That Saturday was a crisp fall day, and the tiny white sails of the model sloops tacked gently, hopefully into the breeze. The Lebanon cedars with their craggy limbs dappled sun like trees on Japanese screens. Uniformed attendants pushed old ladies in wheelchairs. Nannies cooed to babies in prams. Girls and boys stood mesmerized by the boats as clouds lumbered slowly across the sky like dirigibles. This sad and beautiful world—an artist with her easel stood painting it with watercolors. Some foreigners strolled by speaking gaily their own language.

  "You don't have to stay, you know," Theodor said. I had asked him why we couldn't run away, live on a boat for a year, home-school the girls. I had allowed myself to become a plaything of big-time gamblers. I could see Lily's face with its pursed and puzzled expression. She had made the same point, and I hadn't listened. I'd lost myself, even if I'd won for Win. When all was said and done, it was I who lost—and was lost. Checkmate.

  Our girls had rented their own radio-powered boat and were negotiating it across the water with a fine precision, ignited by the one desire of commanding their craft. They ran up to us where we sat on a park bench (endowed by the Silversteins, in memory of Marni Rae 1909–1999) for snacks, and we popped little Goldfish crackers into their bird-like mouths and off they ran again. Ruby, with her guileless brown eyes, had announced on our way here (on bikes) that her friend Ada didn't think much of the boating here, that it was more challenging in the Luxembourg Gardens. "I want to go there instead," Ruby had declared. "That's spoiled," Gwyneth snapped, never missing a chance to chastise her sister. "The Luxembourg Gardens are in Paris." "So?" Ruby replied. "You're impossible," Gwyneth said, rolling her eyes. Then, "Mommm. Gwyneth's being mean."

  Is this what I wanted them to inherit? To walk serenely untroubled through life with friends who could rate model boating on different continents? At B&B, men from everywhere—Indians and African Americans, Chinese and Koreans, WASPS and Jews and you name it—arrived each year, but there was no diversity. The desire for money had leveled them all, honed the edges, flattened the contours into one high plateau.

  In front of us a mother appeased her upset two-year-old, crying for sunglasses forgotten at home, by taking off her own Chanel glasses and putting them on her daughter. "Is that better? Now don't drop them because they are very expensive." They wore matching tan dresses and cashmere shawls. The glasses, on the two-year-old, with their bold logo on the arm, looked as though they belonged, resting on the dull bridge of her tiny nose.

  "You do this if you like it. If you don't, you say arrivederci" Theodor said.

  "And a job? I wouldn't have a job."

  "We'd work it out. This is a lark. You must remember that." The sun caught the silver in his hair, making him look older than his thirty-nine years. His sideburns were completely gray. When had that happened?

  "If I were to leave now, it would look as if I couldn't hack it," I said. That was how the talons went in: fear of perception.

  "You're kidding," he said.

  Theodor's show was opening in Fort Worth in a few weeks. He'd spent the past several months on the business of his career, promoting the show with interviews, arranging for the loan of works owned by various patrons and museums. How I'd have loved to be simply an artist's wife. I could have taken care of all the business while he produced more work. Perhaps I could have been a muse. I thought of Emma. The Chapmans were back in New York now, Maine closed for the winter, Will rattled with prepublication concerns, calling to ask me if a six-city tour was good enough, to read me the advance praise, the blurbs, to tell me of Emma's plans for a surprise party given with Win and Cavelli, warning me not to let on. It was both endearing and annoying that Will valued my ear for all the news about his book. And his desire for my
ear made me feel I still had a foot in a world that he was making his own, still had advice worthy of articulation, still had stock there.

  "I wanted you to save me," I said. Theodor was not a sentimental man. He did not waste time on banalities. He was not the sort who would woo his woman with public candlelit dinners and roses, statements writ large for others to see and admire: look at how he loves his wife; he's having an airplane write I LOVE YOU across the sky; he's dropping five hundred grand on a fireworks display over the Hudson River. No, Theodor's sentiments were private like his kisses, and he was not the saving kind. So he laughed at me now. I thought back to our first evening together, following the Salvage Stream, as he had called it, how I'd imagined myself a castoff he'd found in those waters and picked up and resurrected, made whole again.

  "You wouldn't let me save you if I tried."

  I shrugged my shoulders. "I suppose not." But that was not really true. I wanted the impossible, to become something I wasn't, to be saved by a man whom I'd concocted to be something I had always known him not to be. And so I continued to sink, watching my girls in the fall light. They were free. I could see that because I'd changed my career, they'd made an adjustment in the way they faced the world, a subtle tipping, but a tipping of chance for them all the same, which they intuited more than understood. I was around less but also worried less, and in that open space they came to feel they belonged, staked their unequivocal claim and felt justified in their desires, that perhaps now their impetuous wants could be met. I recalled another mother saying once, after her husband lost his job, "But the children, they're used to a certain lifestyle. I need to be able to maintain that."

  Indeed! My girls spoke of renovating the apartment so that each could have her own room—or better yet, moving into something bigger, a plan we spoke of often but which now had the weight of the inevitable. "And we'd own it," Gwen declared. Even at their age, they understood the value placed on homeownership. The government's tax policy that rewarded homeowners had trickled down to them—through me, certainly. What was I bequeathing to my daughters? What had I become? I felt possessed by an alien force—the capital markets of the world? Again I wondered how I had allowed this to happen.

  As I wallowed in my newfound despair with the vita nuova, Tiger and his girlfriend sauntered by—because that's what they were doing. They engaged in what could only be described as a bona fide saunter, she a bottle of uncorked bubbles in a summer shirt, all aflutter and smiling, and he gripping her hand as if to both hold her back and be carried away by her. Tiger, Snake's protégé, the second-best trader on the desk, late twenties, the girl at his side, the one in the bikini framed on his desk, there to make him race. They came to life in the dappled sunlight, as if stepping from a painting. On this Indian summer day he wore flip-flops and longish shorts that revealed well-defined calves. He had the composure of one in charge. Out in the real world, away from the legion who were just like him, he seemed more of a replica, one groomed from a young age, like so many others, to be the man that he had already become. She too had been groomed from a young age to ride on the arm of such a man, by parents who taught their girls to expect a lot, to settle for nothing less than precisely what they wanted. This was revealed in her shirt (the neckline flirting with her bust), her gait, the easy smile cast by her full lips, her confident stride. (Hadn't I been taught the same thing? But a mutant gene had early on made me desire the artistic life, and I had pursued it at all costs, and found a mate who would help realize that want.)

  The pair was a particular creation of this moment in history. They'd soon appear in the Sunday paper's wedding section, their faces smiling, saying that, indeed, life was good. I wanted to poke ahead, imagine what life would do to them. I wanted to see the full arc of the story. (And they paused just then to watch the boats, he taking her hand more firmly in his.) I wanted escalation and the denouement—bitter divorce, lots of money splayed, unseemly events involving other women and a quest for the elusive Something More. I suppose I still thought like a writer, an observation that didn't make me unhappy.

  It occurred to me then that I had been drawn to Win so long ago (it felt long ago, anyway) because he declared himself a seer, all-seeing, capable of reading the future. And, in kind, he had been drawn to me because I saw myself as a seer. Now, the seduction over, we were left with the reality of who we were, our failings, and the fact that the game we were playing was over. He'd asked me to wear the dress of failure and humiliation, embody it completely and come back ready to fight again. Could I do that? Did I want to do that? Did I want to continue buying into a world that created the oblivious pair in front of me, whom, I realized, I did not want to spot me, on the bench or anywhere else? If they'd stepped out of a picture and into the real world, so had I, and I wanted to stay hidden.

  Theodor had gotten up and was with the girls and their boat. I kept my eyes on them, hoping Tiger and his girlfriend would saunter on by. "Play young," Win had said, and here I was surrounded by snacks and a family, playing middle age. Theodor walked back toward me and then I heard his name, called in the familiar, marbleized accent of Will Chapman's and Lily Starr's publisher—the Dashing Cavelli, Leonardo of Piccadilly.

  "Theodor Larson." It was more elegant than simply eating the rs. Rather, it was as if the rs were somehow exempt. Then his body caught up with his voice and he stood in front of me, in a Harris tweed jacket and knitted tie and all that goes with being a well-groomed gent: a car and driver, a box at the opera, a table at Dino's. His aura spelled his flair for spotting success. He, like Win, was a cunning gambler, though of another sort, could tell which writers it would pay to boost—that singular combination of talent and superficial daring. In some ways he alone had changed the tenor of the market, back in his day, by giving placement to the cult of the personality.

  Even if you had no idea who he was, he struck the image of a bold speculator of some kind or another, one who knew how the world worked and used that knowledge to extraordinary advantage. Trailing behind him was his Indian wife (a novelist and much younger and, yes, published by him) and their two young sons. Then he said my name, asking Theodor where he hid the charming India Palmer. He said my name loudly and with a flourish that legitimized his moniker. He was Dashing, extremely so. Strong broad face, suitable height, defined pose. I popped up to greet him, feeling the familiar unease I had always felt around him that spelled his power over me—that he could change my life if he wished, that he could save me with the fine publication of a book. It was as though I stood trembling before an old lover. The emotion startled me.

  And then, at the sound of my name, Tiger turned from the boats toward me, and the four of us—Tiger, Theodor, Cavelli and I—formed a quartet of surprised greetings: Tiger and I a little stunned to see each other out of context, as though the sun made us palpable and real. And then Cavelli between us, trying to sort out Tiger, giving him a sweeping once-over with his eyes, sizing him up, deciding that he was from a different orbit. Tiger introduced his girlfriend, pulling her into the mix. Her name was Veronica. The name suited her simply in the way she tossed back her hair. She extended her hand to Cavelli and Theodor. Tiger introduced himself, using his given name, Robert Lippincott, which he never used. It seemed funny to hear it, as if I were speaking about a stranger—which, after all, he was to me in the clear light of day. He explained that he was my colleague. I'm sure that at first Cavelli assumed Tiger to be a university colleague. Then Cavelli and Theodor explained their connections to me: former publisher; husband. It was all very awkward—there are those moments in life in which chance en counters collide to form an avalanche. "But he's called Tiger," Veronica offered helpfully, as though that piece of information would sort it all out. "Indeed," Cavelli answered with a smile, extending his hand.

  Tiger grasped it and a satisfied look spread over his impatient lips. His impatience could help him at times, but often it got in his way. Then he looked at me, and it seemed I grew—the girls raced over and hugged me and, as
if on cue, I popped Goldfish into their mouths—and in this gesture grew even more, from thirty to, say, forty-five. Tiger was seeing Win's creation naked before him in all humility, and it gave him a sudden edge. All traders relish an edge, though he wasn't certain what to do with this one.

  Cavelli absorbed Tiger absorbing me. In Cavelli's curious fashion he wanted to get to the bottom of Tiger, who announced to the quintet that I was a "rising star." "She'll be trading her own book by year end," he said.

  Cavelli, his chin raised, asked Tiger what in the world he was speaking about. His eyes twinkled. He'd never before been so curious about me. Tiger looked at me, and Cavelli looked at Theodor with raised eyebrows, the king of my old universe, waiting for an answer. My new universe had a different king. And though Cavelli hadn't thought about me in years, he smiled and exhibited a well-timed, mildly proprietary concern that was ever so charming. I had left him, not he me. He had made a reasonable offer for the third novel and I had rejected it as paltry. But he knew how the world worked. He did not take offense. So I told him.

  "I've become a bond trader," I said. It was not dissimilar to when, in the beginning of my writing career, I would tell people (when asked what I did) that I was a novelist. "I am a novelist," I would say, and I could feel myself stand a bit taller. I am a novelist. I am a bond trader. Except that most people didn't burst out laughing, as Cavelli did then. So much for elevation.

  Even so, something wonderful happened, wonderful and unexpected: I had a strong desire to return to B&B, for Monday morning to be here so that I could walk back to my desk and start trading and learn from the mistake and then learn some more and take on this world again, not as a game but with a passion. I did not want to be laughed at, simple as that. I did not want to be afraid of Cavelli (and all he represented) ever again, simple as that. I held him with my eyes, watching how beautiful laughter can also be.