She turned to eye him. He’d never seen her look at her father with quite that disdainful a cast. She’d been blindly affectionate as a girl, and Lowell recoiled from the alien coolness. Maybe you couldn’t know anyone profoundly until they stopped getting their way. “This is about funding, right? If I’m detecting the pattern here. I can apply for grant support, then. If you’re so broke, I might qualify on the basis of need.”
“Be my guest,” Lowell said. “But good luck. College endowments all over the country have been devastated. That includes Georgetown, which hasn’t even paid me this month. Probably just an oversight, but it makes life more difficult for now.”
“What’s an endowment?” Bing asked.
“A sort of savings account. When everything is normal, schools can run off the interest and dividends.”
“But you said the market would bounce back!” Goog charged. “You said faster than anybody expected! You said we were going to make a killing!”
“I could still be right in the long run—”
“‘In the long run we’re all dead,’” Goog quoted. “John Maynard Keynes. It’s not going to help any of us to get a decent education in the long run.”
“Most kids I wouldn’t bother to explain this stuff to, but you’re bright enough to get it,” Lowell said. “The interest on our mortgage has doubled. With her current office rent, Mom’s income is negative. Students can’t afford to attend the university where I teach. Be honest—don’t some of your friends have to transfer out of Gates, too?”
“Olivia Andrews was going to, but she got a scholarship. Because her dad killed himself.”
“You trying to give me ideas?”
Goog shrugged. “It was a pretty successful gambit. Whatever works, right?”
“Sweetie,” Avery intervened. “That’s not funny.”
“Neither one of you has ever believed in my talent,” Savannah said. “You never wanted me to get an arts degree. Now you think you can browbeat me into something practical, like a degree in Mandarin.”
“I don’t want you to get a degree at all,” Lowell said. “I want you to get a job.”
“Doing what?”
“I don’t care. Anything to contribute to the family coffers.”
“If I flip burgers, I’m not giving the money to you.”
How did this happen? Did they do something wrong? All this time, should they have withheld what these kids wanted and it was within their power to give, from an abstract dedication to building “character”? “If I have to flip burgers,” Lowell said, “I’ll give the money to you. Seem like a double standard?”
“Oh, sorry—back to the workhouse! This is Dickensian.”
“Tell you what,” Goog proposed. “You take out a loan on my behalf, send me to Gates. We’ll work out a formula, how much of my salary after grad school I’ll devote to paying you back. As my salary increases, we can boost the percentage.”
“Nobody’s going to give your dad a loan, sport,” Lowell said. “Even if they did, the only terms available are 11 percent and rising.”
“What’s the equity situation, then?” Goog said gamely.
“We’re paying interest-only. Nice try.”
Goog lost his cool. “I can’t believe this is happening!”
“You don’t have to believe it for it to keep happening,” Lowell said. “Reality’s funny that way.”
For all his purported fascination with his father’s field, the boy didn’t really credit the primacy of economics. Lowell attributed the discrepancy to Goog’s particular brand of precocity: the boy’s involvement in the many topics about which he held such fierce opinions was essentially rhetorical. He’d yet to make a visceral connection between a high school debate over some barmy balanced budget amendment and an interstate highway system so underfunded that hundreds of Americans per year were dying in pile-ups on I-85 from potholes alone—a connection that registered the very real possibility that one of those casualties could be you. Distinguished by the same precocity at Goog’s age, Lowell wondered whether this purely rhetorical relationship to the pressing issues of his profession dogged him to this day. Avery constantly rode him for caring too much about being right. But maybe he didn’t care about being right, actually and truly right, which would have mattered. Maybe he only cared about winning.
“When you have a bunch of kids,” Savannah said, “you’re not supposed to throw up your hands and say, ‘Sorry, we can’t make any money, you do it!’ My art teacher says I’m immense talented, and you’re not going to ruin my life!”
But when she rose to flounce out, Lowell grabbed her arm, at which she stared in incredulity. “The family meeting isn’t adjourned. A few more announcements, children. This summer, there will be no Debate Camp, no Art Camp, and no String Quartet Camp, got it? No Science Camp, no Water Sports Camp, and no Survival in the Wild Camp—even if that last one might actually end up being worth the money.”
He let go; she’d started to cry. Avery accused him of being a bully. Sure enough, he’d delivered the pronouncements with a trace of vengefulness. Taking away all their toys gave him a sick thrill.
“You’re taking it out on them as a substitute for punishing yourself,” Avery said quietly once they’d retired for the night.
“No-o-o,” Lowell said. “I’m taking it out on them as a form of punishing myself.”
“That’s too convoluted for me, and I’m a therapist.” She sounded tired.
“Look—do I want to throw the boys to the animals in public school? Of course not. Bing will be eaten alive. Goog? His broad general knowledge, his lucidity, the crafty way he inveigles himself into the good graces of his teachers—everything that makes that kid popular at Gates will make him a pariah at Roosevelt. And Savannah … It’s one thing to take a year out from college to go to Europe and learn Italian. Quite another to loll around the house getting into mischief and losing your momentum. What a waste. Everything we’ve paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to have drummed into their heads will dribble right back out. And I feel as if we’ve failed them. But not the way you think. I mean they’ve never been told no. And now we expect them to learn about adversity, self-denial, and disappointment overnight.”
“You can’t fake adversity,” Avery said. “When we had the means, we provided. Now we can’t. Which, if you hadn’t bought all those stupid stocks—”
“In 1919, Coca-Cola was a stupid stock,” Lowell cut her off. “And you cannot invest, or run your fiscal life at all, in a manner that covers an infinite array of contingencies. The destruction of wealth in this country since October has been on a scale that’s, well, fundamentally impossible. If you’d gone to any financial adviser a year ago and instructed him—”
“Or her,” Avery said.
“Or her,” Lowell corrected sourly. “I would like you to protect my portfolio from the destruction of the world as we know it. Please choose mutual funds that invest with an eye to Judgment Day, the flooding of all the earth’s coastal cities due to sea-level rise, nuclear war, and incurable plague. He, or she, would have sent you packing, regardless of your net worth. To participate, at all, in any economy, down to getting paid and buying pork chops, means having faith that the rules of that economy won’t upend. There is no insurance against game change. So whatever happens, you keep playing the game. That means when Apple is going for jack, you buy Apple. Exactly the way you always have. If that doesn’t work out, because of reasons beyond your control the whole game is out the window, nothing else would have worked out, either.”
“It’s just, if we’d kept more in cash—”
“Cash is also an investment,” Lowell overrode her brutally. “Historically, a very poor investment. One of the worst. You can’t help making investments of some sort if you’re going to have capital at all.”
“But admitting to having made some mistakes can be a surprising relief—”
“I didn’t make any mistakes! All those pension funds with pie charts of 62 percent equit
ies and 27 percent bonds … All the investment accounts with their contrasting strategies of ‘growth’ or ‘income’ … The solicitous questionnaires from Morgan Stanley about the degree of ‘risk’ you’ll tolerate—questionnaires that tend to play down the fact there’s nowhere on the form to check ‘zero’ … The ‘large cap’ versus ‘small cap’ versus ‘emerging markets’ … The delicate tweaking, Maybe we should move a little more into the energy sector and de-emphasize pharma … Well, all those accounts have been flattened. The strategies didn’t matter.”
“What a waste of effort, then,” Avery mumbled.
“Kept a lot of people occupied. But there’s an upside: if no one was right, then no one was wrong, either. If everyone is screwed regardless of what they did or didn’t do, then everyone is blameless. Including me. Unfortunately, that logic never seems convincing when I’m wide-eyed in the middle of the night.”
Yet after a knock came on the master bedroom door, Lowell would feel sheepish about having embraced his new paternal role as the “big meanie” with such zeal. It was Bing—cradling a crumple of bills, the allowance he’d been saving for a new violin bow. “I want to help,” he said, offering his stash up to his father. It was shocking, that only their eleven-year-old seemed to grasp the gravity of the situation. More shocking still—that three hundred and some bucks? Lowell took it.
If he seemed touchy, Lowell was getting it in the neck from more than one direction.
When his parents retired—from being real scientists; his father was a microbiologist at Tufts, his mother the sort of ingratiating zoologist who discovered a family of great crested newts on a building site and brought a $10 billion development project to a halt—they turned to their elder son for investment advice. Wanting to be of service (wanting to show off?), he dished out plenty. Did he at least get credit now for having steered them away from gold? No, his parents were in hysterics, because their impeccably proportioned portfolio—tactically diversified, judiciously spread between growth and income—had fallen on the floor like a nutritiously balanced plate of whole grains, green vegetables, and high-omega-3 fish fillets landing face down. Their both bending over backwards on fleXface to explain that they didn’t blame him in the slightest didn’t require his wife’s professional psychological acuity to translate: they blamed him entirely.
To make matters worse, it was at Lowell’s urging that they’d cashed in the sprawling family home in Brookline two years ago. The released equity and its investment income were meant to finance pseudoscientific jaunts abroad, which wouldn’t amass meaningful data, but would encourage the harmless fiction that they kept a professional hand in. But the “cozy” apartment in Fort Lauderdale into which they downsized had only made sense as a sunny respite from the excursions to the Arctic or the Russian tundra that they could now no longer finance. They were left with that confining apartment as their only hard asset; stuck there, they hated Florida.
It wouldn’t have done, he supposed, to remind them that throughout his childhood both his parents had stressed how little they cared about wealth, and how crucial it was to focus not on money but on work that interested you (a homily Lowell threw rather on its head, since what interested him was money). Yet his parents had always been packrats, why they were able on moderate salaries to build healthy reserves in the first place. Thus their pose of fiscal obliviousness was a lie, for he knew no other couple who talked more incessantly about money. This or that was on sale, the price of something else was outrageous, despite no claims all year an insurance premium had soared … Their every decision, down to purchasing fine, tender green beans versus fat, tough ones, was still determined by the better deal. Which is how they ended up in a pretty drab apartment in Florida: it was a steal. Caught up in money-as-game, they mistook their raffle tickets for the prize. Because the only thing that bargain hunting “won” was more money—which was solely valuable as a route to buying the thin, tender beans instead of the fat, tough ones.
Previous to the Great Renunciation, Lowell had veritably to put a gun to his parents’ heads to get them to go out for a meal. Then assured that both sons were flourishing—Aaron was in IT security, and made a killing from the Stonage—Dave and Ruth claimed not to be scrimping in order to pass an inheritance to their boys. Because for mortals gratification infinitely deferred equaled no gratification, their inability to switch economic gears in old age, to go ahead and splurge since when else were they going to spend it, ultimately implied the illusion of eternal life. Had Dave and Ruth registered in the gut by their seventies that they were soon going to die, they’d have ordered the tiger prawns every night of the week.
As for his parents “not caring” about money, well—recent events should have put that myth to rest. They were beside themselves. But then, Lowell couldn’t think of a soul who did not have powerful feelings about his or her capital, regardless of its amount; why, try removing two bucks from a beggar’s hat and see what happens. To truly pull off proper apathy about the stuff would require so much energy, such contrived ideological zealotry, that the indifference would amount to a kind of caring. That was one of the fascinating qualities of money: it excited the passions.
So! Having relied on their elder son’s wise, benevolent investment counsel, Dave and Ruth had now to buy fat, tough green beans from not pathology but necessity. Did Lowell feel guilty? Yes, Avery. Of course. But this parental hardship—was it really his fault? Even a tiny bit? NO! Naturally Aaron had likewise solicited investment advice from his big brother—advice that didn’t depart substantially from the standard guidance of any large financial institution at the time, aside from the tip to steer clear of gold, which had turned out to be dead right (that the Emergency Economic Powers of 1977 were still on the books should have been known to any financial adviser worth his or her salt, yet when Alvarado availed himself of the legislation they’d all acted scandalized). Was the fact that a digital wheeler-dealer with a wife and two small children had gone from affluent to desperate in a heartbeat also Lowell’s fault? NO!
More frustratingly still, now that Lowell’s advice was important—now that it did indeed run contrary to the orthodoxy of the moment (sell, sell, sell—tantamount to, “Find tall building, jump”)—neither his parents nor his brother would take it. The investors who would come out ahead were the ones who’d held their nerve. The only rational response to derisory valuations was to hold, hold, hold. That instead his relatives were lemming off the cliff and consolidating their losses made stoical Lowell Stackhouse want to cry.
Fuck it. He and Avery had their own troubles.
Now, Lowell hadn’t always been well off. In graduate school at MIT, he’d lived on a meager stipend abetted with stints as a TA. Before his first proper academic appointment at Amherst, he’d done some down-and-dirty adjunct teaching—including at the odd community college—a wallowing in the trenches that had helped further to convince him that he knew what it was like at the bottom. But he had never been at the bottom. He’d been at the bottom of the top.
Accordingly, Lowell had never received a bill that he couldn’t pay. He had long unthinkingly relegated folks who kept no cushion in their accounts, who spent merely because there was cash in their pockets, who reached out for payday loans to cover their electric bills, who were chronically in arrears and lived in fear of knocks on the door, to a remote category of the hopeless, the irresponsible, the feckless. As for debt, an economic wheels-greaser that ideologically he was quite big on, Lowell promoted getting into hock as a splendid idea for companies and whole countries, but paid off his Visa bills in full. His avoidance of credit was emotional. He didn’t like the sensation of being beholden, of being in someone else’s pocket.
Which made him a sucker for the sad-ass Protestant values that most of the country had gleefully abandoned. The international economy had punished the frugal and rewarded the profligate for most of his professional life. It was an odd lesson for a man in his position to have failed to learn. Look at southern Europe,
in the end. The euro zone’s Club Med took trillions, spent them, and didn’t pay them back. It wasn’t nice. It was smart. Economics doesn’t reward nice. It rewards smart.
So Lowell felt pig-thick. With his spotless credit report, he should have borrowed up a storm, and then once the Renunciation hit he could have walked away. Whether through formal bankruptcy or by slipping quietly off-grid, that’s what everyone else was doing. Which is why the First USA Visa he’d carried since 2001, and all the other plastic in his wallet, had just been canceled. Unless they ceased lending to insolvent citizens of Deadbeat Nation, the card companies would go under: one more lifeline, snipped.
Meanwhile, the “delay” of his salary from Georgetown in June segued into July. He simply could not get his head around the idea that an institution legally contracted to deliver a certain sum on a particular day of the month would ever simply: not do it. He appeared to believe that because the university owed him his salary, it would ipso facto pay his salary, in a confusion of should and will that bordered on dyslexic. He had made his living analyzing systems, assessing in what circumstances they worked well or less well. He had no expertise whatever in what happened when they didn’t work at all.
Thus as the summer advanced, Lowell watched in horror as their liquid resources evaporated. They were fast approaching the point at which Avery would refrain from buying a cantaloupe not because they didn’t feel like cantaloupe, or because the fruit had been suddenly found to concentrate toxins even more virulently than strawberries. Not because she wasn’t up for making the bags too heavy when she hadn’t brought the car. And that’s right, Mother, not even because the melon wasn’t a very good deal. No, pretty soon Avery would not buy a cantaloupe because they did not have the money.
Taking his cue from Georgetown, then, Lowell made a discovery that the “hopeless” had beaten him to long ago. What do you do when a mortgage payment comes due, and the requisite funds are not in your account? You don’t pay it. You don’t pay it in June. You don’t pay it in July. By August, you’ll have got with the program.
The Mandibles Page 16