The Financial Lives of the Poets (4 page)

“I wanted to diversify you, Matt. You insisted on media and financials.”

This is true. In my past life as a business reporter I’d decided
I
was the expert and I clung to a tip from a banking guy who, I can only hope now, is lying dead on a sidewalk somewhere. But I can’t entirely blame
him
either, because I rode those stocks up for years, and when the financials first cracked, I stubbornly refused to sell. Then I got distracted by my own job loss and by Dad’s senility meltdown. And every time Richard begged me to let him unload those bad stocks, I reminded him of his last advice,
And buy what? Mexican Shipping Bonds?

So…as I say, here we are—

“After penalties,” Richard’s mustache continues, “taxes, commissions…”

“Wait.” I look down at the check again as Richard stands. “You took a commission? Do travel agents take commissions on flights that go down?”

Richard ignores
my
choice metaphor. He apologizes, then walks me to the lobby and asks me how everything else is going—which is a bit like asking the Prime Minister of Poland how
everything else is going
in the fall of 1939—you know…other than the Nazi invasion. I tell Richard that, all in all, I’m not in a bad mood—probably because I got high at a 7/11 last night.

“You got high at a 7/11?”

“Well, we actually got high in my car, and at this apartment building. But I had an amazing burrito at the 7/11 afterward. You can’t believe the pot they have now, Richard.”

“Yeah, I know,” he says. And then, he leans in and sort of wistfully, adds: “It’s supposed to be a myth, the increased potency.”

“It’s no myth.”

“No.” He smiles. “No myth.”

And then something hits me. “Wait. You smoke pot, Richard?”

“Now and then,” he admits. “When I can get it. Doesn’t everyone?”

“I didn’t.” And I tell him how it had been at least fifteen years, how I assumed that, after Lisa and I had two impressionable kids, two hypocrisy-sensing laser beams of sweetness, my weed-smoking days were long behind me.

Richard hums laughter. “Hey…I’ve got a question about that.” Then he looks both ways and leans in close. “Can you get me some?”

Outside, after the meeting, it’s cold—air crackling with the sudden turn to late fall. Leaves are giving up, like newspapers, becoming insolvent all over the streets. I walk to the car. It was disconcerting at first, to be out in the world in the daytime, when everyone else was working. This is the first fall since I was fifteen I haven’t had a job of some kind. Sadly, I’m getting used to it. Right now the editors will be coming out of their budget meeting and the reporters will be trying to avoid their eyes, or pretending to be on the phone so they won’t get assigned a weather story (“Colder temps move in”) or a brief about last night’s trailer fire (“Suspected arson at mobile home park”) or a feature on the Eagle Scout who built a bike out of aluminum cans (“Recycled cycle leads to scholarship”).

I call Lisa from the car as I drive to Costco.

“Well,” she says, “How’d it go?”

“You know Richard,” I say, “always the optimist. Thinks we should invest in cyanide.”

Polite laugh.

“Would you have ever guessed Richard is a weed smoker?”

“How did that come up at a financial planning meeting?”

“I don’t remember.”

“So what’s his advice?”

“Well, first, we can’t panic…and second…if we were going to eat one of the children, which one would you pick?”

Lisa laughs a little more heartily; her voice always gets lower, throaty, when she thinks something is genuinely funny. It’s very hot. “I suppose the older one,” she says. “That little one looks gamy.” And suddenly I’m filled with warmth and sadness and I am rushed with nostalgia—
for the marriage I’m still in.
I can’t believe how much I want this woman and it kills me—
kills me
—knowing what I know.

This: Right before I went to 7/11 for milk last night, I considered telling her about the letter from the mortgage company. But when I went upstairs she was asleep. I signed onto her FaceBook page (it had taken me three days to figure out her password) and saw that she’d put up a better picture of herself with her cute new pixie haircut (a picture I took) and I also saw that she’d been carrying on a three-day “chat” with an online buddy named Chuck, which, not coincidentally, is the name of her old high school boyfriend, a guy I was never jealous of before, because, frankly, Chuck sounded like a bit of a chuck, and not like the sensitive, successful guy he turns out to be, at least in the online realm. The subject of this chat seemed to be the flat parallel trajectories of Chuck’s and Lisa’s mildly disappointing lives (“ever wake up and wonder what happened”)—lives that must’ve seemed boundlessly perfect when they were eighteen, sneaking off to his parents’ lake place to squirrel their boundlessly perfect young bodies into positions that I’d give anything to replicate. And it seems clear from their familiarity that this was not the first chat between Lisa and Chuck, not the first time the sad subject of their sad lives has come up. As the FaceBook conversation continued, Lisa and Chuck went back and forth about themselves (“trying to get back in shape” “Y? U look great”) and their jobs (“not the best time to be looking for something” “but U R so talented”) people from high school (“Dana looks like a manatee—ooh, that’s mean” “U could never be mean”) and while it was all vaguely above-board, it also felt…I don’t know, intimate…and then Chuck wrote, “Temted to get all hot and steamy agin” as if the very words made him too worked-up to type straight and she ignored his misspellings and suggested two simple letters, “TM?” and either she was trademarking his stupid sexy-talk or, more likely, suggesting that he should take his nastiness to the text messaging world—
agin
—so she could see it right away—
agin!
—huddled over her cell phone, breathless, in our bed…

…while I cluelessly watched sports highlights with my buggy old father—
agin
—who responded to every Colts highlight by reminding me how good Unitas was, every Eagles highlight by remarking what a slow stiff Jurgensen turned out to be—as if quarterbacks were declared extinct in 1968…

…and I saw that I couldn’t tell her about the house, at least not yet, not after coming across the trail of this crushing deception, because God knows I’ve flirted and daydreamed and committed a thousand tiny betrayals—but…this tore me up…my broken little black heart bleeding out through my mouth and my eye sockets and my asshole and…

…I’m dying here. Of emotional Ebola. And I just wish the little bugs would get it over with and gobble me all up, so that I could stop suffering, because I know the world goes on without us; my mother taught me that; it goes on and on, turning us over like broken sod. And hell, maybe it’s nothing, a little late-night nasty smack-smack talk between old lovers—harmless! But
agin? Agin?
And when I imagined my wife’s narrow tapering back in our bed last night, cute face bathed in the blue light of a nasty cell phone message from the boy who used to sleep with her—Jesus, it hurt more than I could bear…and that…

Of course, this is just the kind of melodramatic, twisted logic I will refuse to accept from my boys when they are teenagers. (You went out and got high with delinquents because you were jealous of your girlfriend? Do you know how stupid that sounds?) But last night I did just that, went to the 7/11 and, sulking over my wife’s flirtation with her old boyfriend and the knowledge that I was losing her house, I fried my nut with the delinquency dream team.

On the phone now with Lisa, I don’t tell her that Richard says the house is almost certain to go to the bank. And I certainly don’t mention her “chat” with Chuck. And I definitely don’t confess my emotionally retarded response. Instead, as I pull into the Costco parking lot, into this temple of buy-bulk-big-box consumerism at the opening bell of a planetary recession, I take a moment to simply pass along to Lisa our pothead financial guy’s more mundane recommendations, the long list of luxuries we can do without in the upcoming belt-tightening: “Richard says we should cancel cable and get rid of the Internet,” I say, with no small amount of conniving joy. “We sure as hell can’t afford these cell phones anymore.”

“I don’t know if I can live without a cell phone,” Lisa says after a moment.

“Well,” I say, and I laugh giddily, “I guess we’re just gonna have to find out.”

I
WAS DRIVING AROUND THE
packed Costco parking lot

looking for a space and listening to some guy

on NPR talk about America’s growing suburban poor

when I saw this woman with four kids—

little stepladders, two-four-six-eight—

waiting to climb in the car while Mom

loaded a cask of peanut butter and

pallets of swimsuits into the back

of this all-wheel drive vehicle

and the kids were so cute I waved

and that’s when I saw the most amazing thing

as the woman bent over

to pick up a barrel

of grape juice:

her low-rise pants rose low and right there

in the small of her large back

stretched a single strained string,

a thin strap of fabric, yes,

the Devil’s floss, I shit you not

a thong, I swear to God, a thong,

now me, I’m okay with the thong

politically and aesthetically, I’m fine

with it being up there or out there,

or wherever it happens to be.

B
ANDED STACKS OF BLOND
boards

sit out back of the lumber store

and if you squint they look

a little like leftover cakes.

God, the end of a party

is always so sad

“This economy must be killing you guys,” I say at the lumber warehouse store where I’m pretending to shop for materials to make a tree fort for my boys. I hope I don’t sound
too
hopeful about the economy killing this particular business.

“Things have certainly slowed,” says Chuck as he flips through a catalogue for the kind of metal brace he is certain would be perfect for the imaginary tree fort I’m supposed to be building. “Luckily, the last few years were busy enough that a slowdown won’t be the worst thing in the world.”

It is cold inside this big warehouse store; the ceilings must be thirty feet high. Each narrow aisle is stacked nearly to the rafters with boards and posts and dowels and bags of concrete and plywood and doors and window sashes. The effect of all this scale is to shrink the people in here and I feel like a leprechaun, a tiny sprite come to this mystical woodland to shop among giants for a place to store my magic beans for the winter.

I have lived in this city most of my life and yet I’d never ventured into this lumber store until I found out—from Lisa’s chat last night—that her ex-boyfriend Chuck worked here. Setting aside what my never-going-to-a-lumber-store says about my manly bona fides, the important thing is that I’m here now, confronting my enemy, or at least seeing the infamous Chuck for myself. I am totally undercover. Chuck has no idea who I am. He hasn’t asked my name, and I don’t know why he would, but if he does, I’ve decided to go with the nom de guerre Jamie Skeet.

And here is my lightning quick assessment of my enemy’s strengths, relative to mine: (1) Chuck is taller. (2) Chuck is a few years younger and clearly in better shape. (3) Chuck really does have dreamy eyes. (I heard Lisa make this claim to a friend of ours once, when we were out with another couple, talking about why we fell for our first loves and Lisa said, “His eyes. Chuck had dreamy eyes.” Sadly, it’s true—a couple of dreamy blue orbs jut from that Cro-Magnon skull.) (4) Chuck looks good in his Carhartt work pants and does not seem to have the middle-aged disappearing-ass issue I’ve been battling the last few years (just being coldly objective about this). (5) Chuck is—I have to admit it—heartily handsome, those eyes astride carved cheeks over a square jaw. (6) Chuck is employed.

Another list—this one offered in my defense—of the reasons I may have underestimated my opponent for so many years, this strapping and friendly man’s man who, I was well aware, had slept with my wife back in her nubile, flexible, childless years: (I) Whenever she mentioned this old boyfriend Chuck she would smile slightly, which I misinterpreted as an expression of disbelief that she’d ever dated such a monumental tool before finding true love with the man of her dreams. (II) Complacency led me to believe that Lisa and I had such a strong relationship that it didn’t matter who she’d dated before; her ex-boyfriends could’ve been George Clooney, Kobe Bryant and Abraham Lincoln and I wouldn’t have been smart enough to be intimidated. (III) I made the classic arrogant white-collar mistake of thinking that because I used my
brain
to support my family (back when I supported my family) I was superior to some dude who stacks lumber for a living. (IV)
Dude who stacks lumber for a living
is not the same as
dude who works for hugely profitable family business, which he stands to inherit.
(V) Whenever Lisa mentioned her ex-boyfriend Chuck Stehne I always spelled it in my mind Chuck
Stain
and, honestly, who could ever worry about a guy named Stain?

“Top ten rejected attractions at Disneyworld,” I say. “Number ten: Lumberland.”

Prince Chuck of Lumberland smiles politely and spins a photo of the steel double-reinforced brace, or whatever it is, so I can see it for myself. “This one.”

“Nope, all wrong,” I say. “That’s not what I’m looking for. Not even close.”

Chuck spins the catalogue so that he can see it again. “No, I really think this is what you’re looking for. I built a fort for my kids and this worked great. See, it stabilizes the posts here and here and—”

“You have kids?”

“Three.”

I glance at his ring-less left hand. “Married?”

“Divorced.” But he looks a little confused by this line of questioning, as if he can’t imagine what it has to do with fake tree fort construction.

I pretend to look back at the brace. “I don’t know. That looks pretty dangerous. I have two boys that I love more than anything. Love my boys
and
my wife. Their
mother.”

“Sure,” Chuck says, looking at the catalogue. “Well, maybe a different style. We have some books.” He walks toward an aisle, and after a moment, I follow. We walk past all sorts of weapons that could be used on Chuck’s back, hammers and nail guns and pry bars—

Divorced. Shit. How do I fight divorced? Means he probably has his own house somewhere (probably not about to go into foreclosure); I was hoping the logistics of sneaking around might at least be difficult for them, but if he’s got his own place…shit, shit, shit.

Lisa is not someone who would stray from a marriage lightly but I see why now, because I know exactly what she’s attracted to—confidence, security, strength, stability—all of which Chuck has, none of which is exactly seeping from my pores these days.

He stops in the aisle of how-to books and clicks his tongue as he runs his hand across the spines of books that show how to do simple electrical work and how to repair a carburetor and how to fix a clogged sink and how to build a porch and how to stain your fence and, finally, how to build a tree fort. This long bookshelf seems taken directly from my insecurities—an entire library of things I cannot do. In the next aisle of this hell-library would be books about how to manage your billions and what to do with your foot-long penis.

“Here we go,” he says, and pulls out the book and hands it to me. “You can look through this and see if there’s a style you like better.”

I take the book and pretend to leaf through it. Each tree-house picture makes me feel more incompetent than the last.

“You might just buy the book, take it home and look through it to make sure you get the right one,” he says. “There’s no rush, I’m guessing.”

I look up at him.

“I mean, you’re not going to build a tree fort in the winter.”

“In the winter? No.” I laugh. Scoff. “Of course not.” I purse my lips and look back down at the book, make my own clicking noises with my tongue. I wish I’d said I was building something else,
anything else
—a catapult or gallows or balustrades—anything but a stupid tree fort. Four years ago, when we moved into the house we’re about to lose, I promised the boys that I’d build them a tree fort. Four years later, there’s no tree fort and that sad fact is probably not even in the top ten ways I’ve let the poor boys down.

“So, you built one of these for your kids?”

Chuck is looking through his own copy of
Building the Perfect Tree Fort.
He shows me a picture. “Kind of like this one.” Then he closes the book and puts it back. He looks off a little wistfully. “It’s at their mother’s house.”

“Ooh. Sorry,” I say. “It’s tough when a marriage breaks up. Let’s hope there’s a special place in hell for anyone who would break up a—”

But by putting the book back, Chuck has opened the door for a man’s man in coveralls who was waiting for his help, and before I can finish my pointed little comment about cuckolders deserving Dante’s seventh circle, this guy slides his lumber wish list in front of Chuck, like he’s the goddamn Lumber Fairy, and I wonder why the jerk can’t go get this stuff himself. He looks capable. He’s in coveralls. Still, Chuck excuses himself to go help the real customer.