The Financial Lives of the Poets (9 page)

And that was it for me: love.

There were early signs of trouble, of course. Lisa was one of those people you don’t ever feel like you’ve reached the center of; not that she withheld herself, there was just always another, deeper layer that I didn’t have access to, boxes inside boxes…. And there was the money thing, always the money thing. Like most guys, relationships progressed physically for me (I kissed her…we made out…we had sex). Like a lot of women, Lisa’s progressions were more financial, security-based steps (he bought dinner…he took me to Napa for the weekend…he wants me to move in). But at least Lisa was always up-front about it; her father had died when she was twelve and she and her mother were dirt-poor for a few years. “I have to warn you, I can sometimes mistake being spoiled for being loved,” she told me on our fourth date, and then she smiled perfectly as she took a bite of her $65 entrée, winked knowingly and said, through a mouthful of seared-scallops-in-truffle-butter: “But I’m working on that.”

No, even Lisa’s quirky nature was alluring to me, partly because she was so open and cool about it. Even when she was suffering in the unfriendly job market, she was cool. Even during her online shopping binge—cool. She felt awful, apologized until I couldn’t take it anymore, volunteered to see a counselor. Hell, even now, when she’s possibly thinking of straying, I can’t seem to
blame her
. I’m terrified that she’ll find out I might be losing her dream house and leave me, but I can’t seem to blame her for that. Maybe it’s because I feel so incapable of doing anything about it right now. Or because I knew the rules going in.

And—as long as I’m assessing my wife’s strengths, a painful thing to do right now—the woman’s not hard to look at. Hell, if I were being honest, I’d have to admit she’s still attractive and smart enough to be on cable news…I mean, she’d need some makeup for primetime, or CNBC during the heavy market hours, but she’s more than cute enough to take an overnight shift or as morning referee between blathering political pundits. In fact, maybe when she’s living with Chuck in the cabin he builds from tree bark and his own nut hair, when she is
agin
distant, a pair of fur boots against a wall…totally unattainable…I’ll choose her as my mulligan.

“I’m going upstairs,” Lisa says when we finish the dinner dishes. Then she looks back at me. “Everything okay?”

“Everything…is great.”

I help Teddy with his math homework. Listen to Lisa tap away up there on the computer. At bedtime, I read a story to Franklin about a snake that doesn’t want to grow old and shed his green skin. Christ, I despise children’s books. They used to be mysterious and disconcerting, filled with odd Seussian creatures and Wild Things meant to scare the kids to sleep; now they’re aimed at scaring the parents, or worse,
fixing us,
thinly veiled attempts to get us to shape up, subliminal messages from Oprah’s insidious army of self-help authors trying to get us to be more responsible and loving. I get it, okay? I’m the snake who won’t grow up. I kiss Franklin, pry my arm away from his worried grip and escape downstairs.

“Let’s not watch TV tonight,” I tell Dad.

So we play an insane game of Scrabble instead, but my father only seems to know dirty words or made-up words that sound dirty.

“Cumshok? What is it—some kind of late-life nocturnal emission?”

“It’s a fish.” He pats his pocket for a cigarette, like an amputee looking for a limb.

I slowly reach for the dictionary. His eyes follow my hand, and then rise to meet my eyes. “A fish?” I ask.

“Go ahead. Look it up. It’s a fishing lure.” He stares at my hand on the dictionary.

“A fishing
lure?
”

“Yes. It looks like a bell.”

He knows I don’t know shit about fishing lures. Oh what do I care? I’m glad he’s sharp enough to mess with me. Make-believe words are an improvement. Fine. Cumshok. I remove my hand from the dictionary. Write down the eighty-one points and lose to a senile old man by sixty.

We go back to watching TV. He looks over and sees the Scrabble game still on the table. “We should play that sometime,” he says.

Upstairs, the typing has stopped.

Dad sighs. “You know what I really miss?”

I know this loop; there are six main things that my father misses and they come up a lot now, as if, right before he says,
You know what I miss,
Dad spins a tiny wheel in his head. And I make a game of trying to guess which of the six things he will land on. The six things my father misses are: (1) chipped beef (2) Angie Dickinson (3) Dandy Don singing at the end of
Monday Night Football
(4) the old pull tabs on beer cans (5)
The Rockford Files
and (6) Joe Frazier. It is a good sign, the doctors say, anytime Dad references the past, and so I always ask what he misses, even though it’s mildly disappointing that he never seems to miss my mom, or even my three sisters—scattered across the country by the limited employment opportunities of themselves and their husbands—or his job at Sears, or I don’t know, his bowling ball. Instead, it’s always one of these six inane things, and usually it’s chipped beef. I even made chipped beef for him one night, but he ate it without saying a word, while the boys made faces and Lisa pretended to get a phone call. Two hours later, Dad said, “You know what I miss? Chipped beef.” But I suppose the doctors are right: it is a good sign that he’s remembering at all, connecting images or things to his past, building himself out of the things he no longer has. And so I don’t take it personally, I just lodge my mental guess…I go with the odds: “Chipped beef?”

“Rockford Files,”
Dad says.

It is garbage night in America, the night I glide room-to-room emptying plastic garbage cans and get the full measure of what’s really going on in my family’s life. No surprises in the kitchen can—except more banana peels than I remember us having. This is the problem with our cultural paranoia: something as harmless as extra banana peels can send the addled mind a-reeling
(…playing off the sweet memory of their pet name for his lumber, Chuck sends Lisa a bouquet of bananas to her office…).
The bathroom bucket has nail clippings, toilet paper tubes, disposable razors and the forensic clues to that still mysterious world of feminine-parts care; it’s depressing to think of these cycles of male and female hygiene, to imagine landfills full of the shit it takes every day just to keep us all fresh, un-rank, wiped and de-whiskered. In Teddy’s room, the basketball hoop garbage can reveals what I have suspected: dude’s hitting his Halloween candy a little harder than he’s supposed to. It’s a killing field of Reese’s, Sweetarts and Musketeers. Franklin’s garbage can is like the kid himself, heartbreaking—a half-eaten sneaked sucker thrown away in guilt, a pair of crapped underpants he hoped to hide, a scary picture of a monster he’s torn from a book.

It’s 9:30—thirty minutes until my meeting with Pablo Escobar. Both boys are asleep, sprawled across their beds like window jumpers splayed on a sidewalk. I pull the covers over them. Teddy’s hair is in full revolt on his pillow. I smooth it down.

In our bedroom the garbage can is empty, and while I’m not above assigning meaning to this fact, in my overheated season of allegorical discontent I can’t quite decide whether an empty can symbolizes a bankrupt marriage or the withheld nature of our relationship, i.e., that we’re not even sharing our garbage with one another.

Lisa is in bed already, her reading glasses low on her nose as she flips through a magazine. Apparently, there will be no phone texting tonight. Maybe Chuck has his kids. Or maybe there was a band-saw accident at work and he lost his fingers and can never type again.

“I was thinking…if it’s okay,” Lisa says, without looking up from her magazine, “I might go see a concert with Dani on Saturday.”

I stand there holding my bag of shit. “With Dani?” And I remember Dani last night:
So romantic
and
Are you going to do it?

“Yeah.” No eye contact. “She asked if I wanted to.”

“What concert?” I ask, as if she’d start down this road without a cover story.

She mentions the name of a band I don’t know: “Blue-Eyed Jesus? Supposed to be good. Kind of alt-country…Wilco-ish.”

“Oh sure,” I say, pinned. “Blue-Eyed Jesus. Yeah, they’re good. No, you should do that. It sounds fun.” And then, devilishly: “I know how much you love Wilco.”

Lisa hates Wilco.

“No, I just thought a concert sounded fun. And since Dani has an extra ticket, it wouldn’t cost us anything.”

“No, you should go. I’d go if I had the opportunity.”

“Oh. Did you…did you want to go?” She glances up at me. My God, we change. Arms go flabby, guts grow, hair gets gray; everything changed on those two people whose eyes met at that press conference; everything, that is, but their eyes. Hers look away.

And I pretend to consider it. “Maybe.”

“I would have asked you,” she says, “but I know how much you hate concerts.”

I do hate concerts. I have hated them ever since we went to an outdoor festival once and were nearly trampled to death. I hate paying three times the cost of a CD just to stand in an unruly crowd and think one of two things: (A) this song sounds just like it does on the CD or (B) this song sounds nothing like it does on the CD.

Lisa closes her magazine. “You want me to look for a sitter, then?”

Here we are. Our poker hands on the table. Antes in. Time to either bet my bluff or get out of the way. Or…wait…“Can I think about it?” I lug my bag of trash downstairs, happy with myself for my open-ended play. This is what we call a check in poker—the third way.

I stack the recyclables on top of our wheeled garbage container and push the whole thing through our leafy backyard toward the alley. The truly undesirable part of our undesirable neighborhood begins at the alley behind our big house; our alley is the DMZ of gentrification. Everything in front of the alley, like our house, has come around, owners tidying up lawns, painting, planting and putting on new roofs, parking new cars in driveways. Behind the alley is an unsettling world of chipped-paint, junk-cars and sofas-on-porches, and it’s not uncommon to see police lights strobe the clapboard rentals or to hear loud reports of drunk love—
Get your fat ass inside for dinner, Damien!
—that make Lisa and me feel pathetically superior about our more-sober parenting style. (And yet, I’ll bet most of those screamers have jobs.)

I push the garbage into the alley and turn back toward my home—

My home…

God, this view is breathtaking. This is the view that sold us on the place. The homes on the front of our block sit on wide lots and I still lose my breath at this angle of my house, from deep in the backyard: a long, gently sloped hill leading to big majestic maple trees on either side of our angular, two-story, 1917 Tudor, a streetlight on the corner, and the mist of late October rain bands the street with fog so that our big brick house glows in soft light like a movie set of Old London. From back here, the money and stress, the lifetime of work it will take to pay for this place (I remember calculating the total we’d pay over thirty years and feeling sick) almost seems worth it. Up close, the clinker brick and uneven roof make our house look like it was drawn by the unsteady hand of a child, but from back here, if you squint, there is the faint line of a country manor. This is the house we fell in love with, Lisa and I—the house that has become, in every way, the third party in our marriage, the very sort of big drafty place we always saw each other in when we imagined our married adult lives.

I wonder if a house has ever represented as much as it does now, for people like Lisa and me. It has been the full measure and symbol of our wealth and security over the last few years; every cent we threw into it and every cent we took out, seemed so smart, like such a good bet. Every time we got ahead, we borrowed against the thing to remodel, and every time we remodeled the thing we congratulated ourselves on our wisdom, and every time we saw a house go up for sale on our block
(They’re asking three-eighty-five and it’s half the size!)
we became like derivative-crazed brokers; we stopped thinking of the value of our home as a place of shelter and occupancy and family—or even as the aesthetic triumph witnessed from our alley—but as a kind of faith equation, theoretical construct, mechanism of wealth-generation, salvation function on a calculator, its value no longer
what it’s worth
but some compounded value that might exist given the continued upward tick of the market, because this was the only direction housing markets could ever go: up. All the geniuses said so. If housing had survived the dump of the technology bubble and the brief realization after 7/11 that we weren’t alone in the scary, scary world, then what could possibly stop its march? In eighty years, the geniuses told us, actual housing values had only fallen once.
One time in eighty years?
I can still close my over-leveraged eyes and hear two decades of such party talk: real estate is the only safe bet; real estate can only go up; they aren’t making any more real estate.

Yesterday, Dad and I watched a news story about half-empty subdivisions in Nevada and California, dead sprig saplings slumped in the rolled seams of sun-fried sod, backyard pools green with neglect, swarming with clouds of malarial mosquitoes visible over cedar fences.
Idiots,
my father said, and while I wasn’t sure whether he meant the buyers or builders or the bugs, borrowers or banks, Congress or me, or people in general, how could I disagree? Idiots.

I’d love to go back to a 2004 cocktail party and beat those sure-sounding real estate idiot optimists to death with a For Sale sign. I’d take a good whack at myself, too, because while I suspect that housing prices will eventually bounce back (five years? ten?) I’m also sure of this: I’ll never fall in love again. I’ve lost my innocence. And my disappointment is not that my own home has lost half its value. What disappoints me is me—that I fell for their propaganda when
I knew better,
that I actually allowed myself to believe that a person could own a piece of the world when the truth is that anything you try to own ends up owning you.