Dear Money (30 page)

"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 what 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 document, 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."

"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."