The Financial Lives of the Poets Read online

“There he is.” Dave is wearing his tieless suit again. “How you doin’, Slippers?”

  “Good.” I stand and we shake hands.

  “Isn’t this a beautiful fall day?” Dave asks.

  It is, I have to admit, beautiful: crisp and sunny and the edges of the world seem sharpened by the depth of the sky. This fall is achingly clear.

  Dave looks over at Bea, who has lit another cigarette. “How’s school?”

  “Fucked up.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You make it to classes anyway.”

  She flips him off.

  “Lovely. Everyone’s so cynical these days.” Dave walks over, grabs her cigarette, takes a long, flaring drag and hands it back to her. She’s taller than he is. When did girls get so tall? Dave says, in smoke: “Whole world’s cynical.” Then he stares up at the white edge of the horizon. “I was just listening to this refreshing investment banker on NPR—”

  “Hey, I heard that guy.”

  “Wasn’t that great? Amazing to hear one of those guys be so honest and real, just say, ‘Man, we messed it all up.’ It made me feel…I don’t know…hopeful.”

  “Really?” I ask. “It made me mad.”

  “No, I thought it was cool. I sat there thinking, shit, what am I doing? All of this striving? Worrying? This shit with the bar? What does any of it mean if I die tomorrow?”

  Great. My drug dealer is getting religion. Hopefully not before I get my dope. “Here’s what I thought,” I say. “Here’s some guy who made millions off what he now admits was a corrupt financial system, probably spent twenty years living on champagne and strippers, and now, when the whole Ponzi pyramid falls on the rest of us, he gets religion? Why do people never get religion before the champagne and strippers?”

  Dave stares at me. “You’re even more cynical than she is. You guys are quite a pair.”

  I can’t tell if he’s teasing me, or if he knows about our kiss. I look over at Bea, who leans against the garbage can, her chin pointed down disapprovingly. Her mouth makes a little pink heart, the mouth that just kissed me…and again, I feel the teenage flush but when—

  My waist starts buzzing.

  “You ready, Slippers? We gotta go pick Jamie up first.”

  I glance down at the buzzing phone on my waist. It’s the boys’ school. Someone must be sick. Of all the stupid omens…“Uh…I might have to postpone.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Good Choices

  MY KID’S TEACHER IS such a hot lusty

  ball of blond, even the worst boys behave.

  But if I were in her class, I’d get me

  some of that time-out—that’s what I crave:

  Ms. Bishop sitting my spanked bottom down:

  young man, here we use our inside voices;

  you sit still ’til you’re ready to rejoin

  the rest of your class and make good choices.

  “Good choices”—this is the constant refrain in Franklin’s second-grade class: Marshall, was that a good choice? April, we make good choices in second grade. Parents, I’m just trying to teach the kids to make good choices, and I know exactly what goes through the minds of the other fathers (and not a few of the mothers) as they listen to nasty lovely sweet Ms. Bishop of the pouty mouth and black-lined eyes, because it’s exactly what goes through my mind: Oh, you hot minx of an elementary school vixen, there are some bad choices I could make with you right now. On conference night, you have never seen so many fathers haunting the halls: smartly dressed, cologned, they pace and pretend to contemplate child-art and Popsicle stick dioramas, eager for a glimpse of Ms. Bishop’s famous paint-on skirts tracing her perfectly symmetrical and round a—(Stop, bad choice!) For me, a true Bishop connoisseur, it’s not the tight skirts (so obvious, unrefined) but the blouses, and it’s not the eye-catching fronts—these are for Bishop neophytes, with their V-cut, cleavy, gravity-defying peakage. No…my Bishopiphany came on Open House Night a few years ago, when she turned to the chalk board during a school open house and I caught a glimpse of the symmetrical small of her lovely back. It was as if, weary from riding all night, my horse and I had come upon this gentle, narrowing valley, smooth, gracefully tapering down from her shoulders, and there I saw it, this small, quiet place…an easy place…a place where a man could rest his head after two hours of extremely questionable choices.

  Teddy was in Ms. Bishop’s class then, three years ago, and it was Lisa who noticed how, after we got home from school events, she and I couldn’t keep our hands off each other; it was as if Ms. Bishop were some sort of fertility goddess. After ice-cream socials and candy sales, pizza parties and school auctions, Lisa and I would fall off each other in bed, sweating and breathing deeply, and it was lovely Lisa who first said it: “Wow. Extremely good choice.” For a while, in the good old days, it became our code in front of the kids: “I’m thinking of making a good choice tonight.” “I hope you’re planning on making good choices later, young man.”

  This, however, promises to be a less-than-erotic meeting with Ms. Bishop.

  I’ve rescheduled my desperate wollie purchase (now I not only have to pay off the mortgage and private school tuition, I also have to cover eleven hundred in lumber I just bought from the guy Bishoping my wife) to come to school and talk about frail little Franklin, who is accused of making an unprovoked attack upon a defenseless playmate using as his weapon the little wooden blocks he was supposed to be clacking together primitively in his music class.

  Every father—whether he admits it or not—is gripped by two opposing thoughts immediately upon hearing that his child has been in a fight: first, the hope that no one was hurt, and second, the deep fear that your kid might not have won. (The art of losing isn’t hard to master.) Two days after punishing Teddy for slapping a classmate in the third grade, I found myself surreptitiously teaching the boy how to make a fist, how to keep his left up, jab, jab, cross with the right. (Speed, boy: stick and move, stick and move!)

  “It’s just not like Franklin,” Ms. Bishop says.

  “No,” I say helpfully, “he usually makes such good choices,” and the Pavlovian reaction to that phrase causes me to cross my legs. Franklin is cooling his heels in the office while I talk to his teacher, the rest of his class in Afternoon P.E. as Ms. Bishop and I sit alone in her classroom, surrounded by penguins and thick cursive letters and easy math problems, wedged into little chairs, and while this is serious stuff, our legs nearly brush and it’s all I can do not to look at Ms. Bishop, because then it will all be over, and I will not be able to affect the serious parent I need to be. My unemployment and Lisa’s recent flirtation with affairing has cut into my sex-frequency—it’s been nearly a month—so this is not a good time for me to be dropping in on women like Amber Philips and Bea and Ms. Bishop (whose jersey has long ago been retired from the delusional list of women who secretly long to sleep with me).

  “No, it’s not like Franklin at all,” says Ms. Bishop. Franklin is the frail one. I fully expect Teddy to get in fights, but Franklin? His teacher shakes her head; she’s in a plaid skirt and buff-colored blouse that clings to her as if she’s just come in out of the rain. “That’s what’s so disappointing,” Ms. Bishop says. “That Franklin would make such a bad choice.” She crosses her legs with a sweep of fabric and a glimpse of toned, muscled leg and I clear my throat to cover the sound of the whimper I feel in my chest. I stare at the ceiling, hoping it looks like I’m taking the details of Franklin’s assault especially seriously: apparently, in the middle of music, while they were learning the concept of keeping a beat, Franklin snapped and, without provocation, swung his clackers and hit his friend Elijah Fenton in the face. Elijah curled up. Franklin fell on him, crying, then hit him twice more before Ms. Bishop managed to pry the clackers from his cold dead fingers. (Clackers don’t kill people; people kill people.)

  “Do we know,” I ask, “what precipitated it?”

  “Some teasing, apparently, although Franklin wouldn’t tell me what it was about. I told him it doesn’t
matter. The children know that nothing excuses physical behavior like this.”

  (There’s some physical behavior I’d like to…)

  “Franklin knows that violence never solves anything,” Ms. Bishop continues. “I told him that if he’s being teased in the future, he needs to come talk to me or to you or to Mrs. Prior about it.” (Who? Oh, right. Mrs. Prior. My wife. Bad choice.)

  Ms. Bishop walks with me down to the office, where Cool Hand Frank is stewing in the hole, principal’s office. (My boy can eat fifty eggs!) I stare straight ahead, but the sound of Ms. Bishop walking nearly does me in. (What’s happening to me? Irrational, passive jealous reactions? Swooning over stoop kisses? Dizziness in the proximity of attractive women? I am officially fourteen again.)

  Outside the office, Ms. Bishop explains that the school has “a set of violence and aggression protocols that Franklin has now accessed” and she sounds like my old editor, the nonsensically evil M—and I find myself wondering when the business jargon people took over education, or maybe it was the other way around. According to the violence and aggression protocols Franklin has accessed, my little offender gets a one-day suspension for the first act, a week of suspension for the second and expulsion for the third. Because Franklin has never done anything like this before, Ms. Bishop says, she and the principal have agreed that if he writes a note of apology to Elijah, he will not be suspended, but this will count as his first act of violence. Any more acts, though, and he will be suspended for a week. I thank her. “Nothing is more important than providing a safe atmosphere for learning,” Ms. Bishop says.

  In the principal’s office, poor Franklin is sitting with his head in his hands. “Come on,” I say. He moans. Thirty minutes later school is over and the boys sit in the backseat while I drive home. Franklin sniffs as he stares out the window. Teddy works like an old reporter, trying to get information about the fight.

  “What kind of noise did it make when you hit him? Was it a slapping sound or a thumping sound?”

  “Enough, Teddy.”

  Another sniffle sniffle from Franklin.

  “Elijah Fenton is kind of a jerk, Dad,” Teddy says. “It’s not the worst thing in the world that Frankie hit him.”

  “I don’t think that’s true, but even if it were, you know it wouldn’t matter, Teddy,” I say. “It’s never right to hit people.”

  Teddy asks, “What if they’re gonna kill your family with a grenade?”

  “Elijah Fenton carry a lot of grenades, does he?”

  “He probably said something really bad,” Teddy says. “He swears a lot.”

  “It doesn’t matter. We don’t solve problems that way. No matter what someone says.”

  “What if they say they’re gonna kill your family with a grenade?”

  “Let’s stop talking about grenades and think about how Elijah feels.”

  Another moan from Franklin.

  “He was playing kickball after school,” Teddy says. “He’s fine. Can’t I just ask what Frankie hit him with? Please. Let me ask that one question and then I’ll be quiet.”

  “No.” I’m stuck behind someone turning left; I miss the light. Traffic is hateful.

  “Please.”

  “No!” I snap, then, realizing I’ve overreacted: “The wooden blocks from music.”

  “Clackers! You hit him with clackers. Wow!”

  Franklin moans.

  “Teddy, that’s enough.”

  I pull into the driveway. Inside, Teddy and Franklin retreat to their rooms. I try the Providential Equity prefixes again, leave voicemails all over their phone system. Since Lisa mysteriously claimed to have something to do this evening, I make dinner—chipped beef. Dad comes in from the TV room, sets his remote on the table, wrinkles his brow but doesn’t say a word about what I’ve made. It sits on bread on his plate, covered in white-gray septic gravy.

  “Chipped beef, Dad.”

  “Gravy looks funny,” he says, but he eats it, fork clacking the plate. The boys herd the food around. Dad gets seconds without a word. We’re a stoic breed—Prior men.

  When he’s done, Dad pats his chest for a missing cigarette, then grabs his remote, gives a sigh and marches into the TV room. Plops down in his easy chair. The boys pick at their chipped beef, give me plaintive looks. I give them an extra scoop of ice cream for dessert.

  Dark settles in. I help the boys with their homework, avoid doing dishes, and another night bleeds away (where the hell is she?). I drink a cup of coffee alone at the table (maybe it’s too late…they’ve run off together), check on Dad, who remarks that playing quarterback in a beard would be tough (“Itchy?” I ask), tuck the boys in (have I lost her?) and lean over Franklin in his twin bed, finally ready to have a talk with my little ultimate fighter.

  “What did Elijah say that made you so mad?”

  “I don’t want to say.”

  “Sorry, pal, you have to.”

  The covers are at Franklin’s chest; his too-small Shrek pajamas ring his neck. “He called Ms. Bishop a bad word.”

  “What word?”

  “I don’t want to say it. I’ll get in trouble.”

  “I’m giving you a mulligan, Frankie. Bedtime amnesty.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Means one time you won’t get in trouble for saying it.”

  “He said Ms. Bishop was a slut.”

  “How do you know that word, Franklin?”

  “Elijah always says it.” And then, possibly thinking I don’t know the word, Franklin adds, “It means a girl who kisses lots of people. Elijah says Ms. Bishop kissed his dad, and that his mom called Ms. Bishop a slut. I said she isn’t and he said she is and then…I got real mad. And I hit him.”

  But it’s the earlier news that I can’t process. Elijah Fenton’s dad kissed Ms. Bishop? Bullshit. Carl Fenton? No way would that tool have a chance with Ms. Bishop. Not possible. Although…if a tool like Carl Fenton can get in there….

  “So you just…hit him?”

  “I kept saying she wasn’t a—” he looks at me to see if his amnesty is still in effect…“—slut, that she was nice. Elijah said that I must love her too, and I probably want to kiss her. So I hit him.” His eyes tear up again. “When he said I liked her, it made me so mad.”

  “Maybe…because…you do like her?”

  “Da-a-d.” He looks at me like I’m crazy. “Come on. Have you seen her?”

  And as much as I empathize with him, this is a lecture I must deliver. The highpoints: (1) Violence is always wrong, except in rare instances of self-defense, or to protect those who can’t protect themselves. (“Like grenades?” Franklin asks, echoing his older brother. “Sure.”) (2) While it was certainly wrong of Elijah to say those things, stacking a wrong on top of his wrong just makes a higher pile of wrong. (3) Next time, Franklin should tell me or tell his teacher, even if it’s embarrassing. (4) It is, however, perfectly natural to have a crush on a teacher. (Especially your teacher, my God, that taut little guitar string…)

  Franklin sighs and promises he won’t hit anyone with clackers ever again. (I imagine his next defense: you never told me not to use shakers.) I kiss his forehead and he grips my arm one more time. “Do people have to sleep even when they’re old?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “They do.” More hypocrisy from me: king of the sleepless.

  Franklin falls back in bed. The world is so incomprehensible to him, so difficult; he must imagine there is some other world after dark that he can fit into. This is the kid I have to worry about, I suddenly see, the one most likely to land outside a convenience store.

  Downstairs I check on my own father, who is staring warily out the dark window, ignoring the television in front of him. He turns to see me in the room, and it takes a second for him to remember who I am. Pats his chest. “Know what I miss?” he asks.

  I pray for Rockford Files.

  “Chipped beef.”

  Back to the kitchen, I scrape shit and shingles, wash, stack and stare at a second cup of co
ffee. Clock ticks. Mail sits on the counter, waiting for Lisa, a stack of red-lined bills and rustic catalogues that I consider throwing away. I get nervous whenever Lisa picks up a catalogue; since her binge, she’s seen them as cruel taunts, news from the outside. Even before her recent trouble, of course, Lisa had a complicated relationship with shopping and with money. She grew up an only child, spoiled for the first decade of her life by her oft-traveling car-dealer father—although, as it turned out, she wasn’t spoiled as much as the kids in his other family. Lisa was twelve when Walter McDermott died of a heart attack and this odd bit of truth came out: not only did Walter have two McDermott Dodge dealerships in two states…he also had two wives in those states. In court, it was established that Lisa and her mother were actually Walter’s second family—he’d never divorced Wife #1 (nor had he told Lisa’s mother about her), so the entire estate went to the first wife, and to Walter’s three older children. Lisa and her mother ended up with nothing. To hear Lisa and her mother talk about this period, you’d think it was the siege of Leningrad, them boiling shoes and eating tree bark. Finally, when Lisa was fifteen, her mother found a responsible, older man to support them and pay for Lisa’s college (this was her advice to Lisa, obviously ignored: go for a wealthy man at least a decade older than you). The surprising thing for me was how Lisa continued to idolize Walter. The unsurprising thing is that she grew up so conflicted about money, security and men—and that her deepest anxieties remain where those three things intersect. I remember being a little scared when we’d just started dating, and Lisa dragged me into a shop that had a belt she’d been scouting. I flipped the price tag: $280. I said that all of my clothes together didn’t cost that much. She was mad for two days, angry at me for humiliating her (and for letting her down), but irrationally angry also at the store for the affront of stocking clothes she couldn’t afford, and at the world, for excluding her from its best things. This was before I realized that Lisa would always take issues of wealth and poverty personally, before I understood that, while she loved me, Matthew D. Prior didn’t exactly allay her deepest fear about being stuck with a breadwinning failure…(or, perhaps she fell in love with me because of that, because I remind her of dangerous old Walter).