The Financial Lives of the Poets Read online

  But this isn’t our only reason for watching. Because even if the world financial crisis is somehow solved, we will still tune in to ogle the twenty-four-hour news babes. When one comes on in her smart suit, we say to each other, “Wow,” (me) or “I wouldn’t mind ten minutes alone with that” (Dad) or “I think she’s changed her hair,” (me) or “Love to get on that” (Dad again).

  There is even one of these women—Tamara—for whom I routinely declare that I would violate my marriage vows. I first got lumberland for Tamara’s lovely talking head long before I found out that Lisa was on the verge of carrying on a virtual affair—or a real one, jury’s still out, there—with her old squeeze, Chuck.

  My thing for Tamara is in no way a betrayal, like Lisa’s Chuck-obsession is. For one, Lisa knows all about my Tamara-lust and knows I couldn’t act on it. Tamara is, in the particular parlance of our marriage, my mulligan (what others might call a freebie), that one guilt-free unattainable, purely theoretical woman with whom I could cheat without penalty. Sometimes Lisa and I go with the obvious: say, a little swing with Angelina and Brad; other times, more obscure: say, Lisa Bonet and Jason Patric; or erudite: Jhumpa Lahiri and Paul Krugman; for a while, when things were best between Lisa and me, we had time-travel thought-experiment cheats: 1967 Ann-Margret and 1972 Robert Plant. This is how solid we were, our marital bonds so strong we joked about infidelity! Only recently did my mulligan become this whip-sharp MSNBC anchor, whose lovely eyes and soft mouth make the ongoing crisis in the world credit markets and the loss of trillions of dollars sound, to my ears, like spank-me dirty talk.

  “One time,” my father growls to the TV screen. “One time in my life, I’d like to flop on something that tight.”

  Should anyone doubt that our miserable time here on Earth is just a sad existential joke, here is the cruelest thing I can imagine describing: my father (who is obsessed with sex, like a lot of dementia sufferers)—at seventy-one years of age, frail, balding, with a paunch that looks like it should wear its own pair of jockey shorts—recently had ten days of crazy sex with a twenty-two-year-old stripper with long smooth legs and two big round silicone funbags, and the poor son-of-a-bitch doesn’t remember a thing about it.

  This is the first metaphysical question I have planned for the church hierarchy once my Catholic training is complete: Okay, your holiness. Seriously…what the hell?

  My dad pats the pocket where he used to hold his cigarettes, back when he was allowed to smoke. Then he looks over and I think maybe I see some of the old sharpness in those eyes, maybe one of those brief flashes of clarity he gets, like the one yesterday when he remembered buying a donkey shit cigar in a Mexican brothel (sadly, I can’t predict which lights will come on in there). “Hey, kiddo, I ever tell you about the woman who worked at Lannigans?”

  Usually when my father says Did I ever tell you about, he tells me something he just told me, but I don’t recall hearing about a woman who worked at Lannigans. I do recall Lannigans, because it was the bar I occasionally had to stick my head inside to see if Dad would be joining us for dinner, or for the weekend, or for Thanksgiving, or for my high school graduation.

  The doctor has prescribed a handful of activities to help with Dad’s dementia, alongside his medication: I. that he do crossword puzzles, play games, and do little jobs around the house (given certain tasks and chores, Dad can concentrate and this sharpens his overall acuity); II. that he look through photo albums; and III. that I indulge him whenever he wants to tell this kind of story, so that he might better reconnect with his past.

  But as quickly as it arrived, the old clarity is gone. “Tell you what?”

  “You were going to tell me about the woman from Lannigans.”

  “Lannigans? We should go there.” He pats his shirt again.

  “It closed years ago, Dad.”

  He turns back to the TV. I know it’s frustrating for him, too, feeling like he can’t keep it all straight. This is not a man who likes thinking of himself as incapacitated. After the Army, he married my mom, and eventually got a good job at Sears, working his way up to manager of the automotive department. Every day, he put on a tie and went to work, and once there, he put on coveralls and grabbed a clipboard. It was important that his necktie peer out of his shop clothes like that but I don’t think it was something he consciously thought about; it was more like an innate Darwinian drive, a man in a tie and coveralls being the missing link in the evolution of my family’s male drive from lower-middle-class, rural blue collar (Dad’s dad worked on cattle ranches and in lumber mills) to upper-middle-class urban white collar. (I’ve never worn a pair of coveralls; my private-school kids have never seen them.) But while every father hopes his sons will use their brains to make more money and have a better life than he did, something was lost when Dad crawled out of the primordial labor swamp and put on that tie. Dad’s dad, my Grandpa Stan, could fix anything—tractors, cars, washing machines. (Give the man a socket set and a Phillips head screwdriver and he’d get this economy going again.) My dad is half-as-handy as his father was and I…well…I can change light bulbs. Sometimes. I always planned to have Dad show me some…stuff. I imagined his later years as a master class on plumbing and sheet-rocking and auto repair, Dad and I retreating to the front porch for a beer after…I don’t know…patching the holes in my driveway. Instead, we watch TV and Dad talks about quarterbacks from the 1970s, pats himself for the cigarettes he no longer smokes and tells me which female news anchors he’d like to nail.

  He can still be his old self for a minute, commenting on politics or sports and then, bang: he skids on the ice and his mind spins sideways. And I think he knows he’s spinning because he makes a little groaning sound and nods at the TV, and says, of the woman on-screen: “God, I wouldn’t mind planting my carrot in that garden.”

  Eventually, he falls asleep and I edge out of the room. The rest of the afternoon and evening, I’m more nervous than I’ve been since the layoffs. This is probably understandable since I have in my coat pocket an envelope with $9,000 in it—a two-inch stack of hundreds—for the drug deal that I am planning to make later. When I cashed the check earlier today, I inexplicably put $400 in our checking account. I’m not sure what you’d call that—taking your last $9,400 and putting $400 of it in the bank while you buy pot with the rest. A $400 hedge? Yes, your honor, I did go into the drug business in a last-ditch effort to save my house, but I managed to sock away four hundred bucks in case something went wrong. (And honestly, what could go wrong with this brilliant plan?)

  Since I’ve got some time, I spend an hour on my little side project: “contacting my lender” about the $31,000 payment we owe next week. This is not easy. The new company, Providential Equity—which bought the old company that purchased the bad mortgages in which mine was bundled—insists that “all inquiries come via email.” I’ve sent four emails, but all I get back are “automatically generated” responses that begin: “Do not reply to this message.” These auto-responses insist that my “correspondence is greatly appreciated,” and that my “file is being reviewed” and that “a loan specialist will contact you soon.” I did track down a 1–800 phone number on the website for the company that ate the company that bought the bundle of mortgages of which mine is one—but it led to a Cretan labyrinth of telephonic dead ends: “Welcome to the Providential Equity Help Line. For English, please press one…if you know the extension, please press…for customer service questions not regarding current mortgages please press…if this is about an adjustable-rate mortgage, please press…if this is about a fixed-rate mortgage, please visit our website at…the number you’ve reached is currently unassigned….”

  Last week, I tracked down the Providential Equity home office, in Benicia, California, but the main number simply returns you to this chase-your-own-tail voicemail system. Today I’m trying an old reporter trick, starting with the prefix, 392, and then tapping in random digits, praying that a phone will ring in a cubicle where an actual human being works, but
this particular company seems entirely computerized now, perhaps taken over by the mainframe that wiped out humanity in the Terminator movies. I’m just about to give up, after forty minutes on the phone, when a carbon-based being suddenly answers, “Client services, this is Gilbert.”

  “G—…” For just a second I can’t speak. “Gilbert?” I feel like weeping. “Gilbert! Thank God. I need to talk to you. Don’t hang up!”

  “Certainly, sir. What can I do for you?”

  I patiently explain: (1) I had a mortgage. (2) Lost my job. (3) Fell behind. (4) The mortgage got sold along with a bundle of others. (5) The company that bought these mortgages was bought by Gilbert’s company. (6) Before the sale, I foolishly got a forbearance agreement. (7) And now I have a “Dear Homeowner” letter in front of me that says I’m going to lose my house in less than a week unless I make the necessary reinstatement payment. (8) But I’ve got some things brewing and if I could just have another month or two, I could catch up….

  Gilbert says, “Sure, sure,” and “Oh my,” when I mention forbearance, and “I’m sorry,” that I lost my job, and, “Of course,” I need a little more time, and “We want you to stay in your home as much as you do, Mr. Prior.” Gilbert is brilliant, loveable. He takes down my name, email, phone number, looks up my account, says it’s going to be okay. I can hear his organic, nonautomated fingers typing. I tell him I’m going to write a letter about what a star he’s been. Gilbert laughs gently and tells me that’s not necessary. Gilbert isn’t surprised that I’ve had trouble getting anyone on the phone; he confesses that “things are a little crazy right now” at Providential Equity. But he knows exactly who can help me. There is a program for homeowners like me and I should be eligible for “extended mortgage modification”—and I’m near tears when Gilbert mentions another person’s name and title and extension and says that I should use Gilbert’s name, and while I look for a pen to write down this new human being’s name—Joyce or Joe or Joan, I didn’t quite catch it, Anderson, Addison or Amberton, I’m not sure, either the senior client service manager or the special claims administrator, at some number like 478–2344 or 874–2433 or 487–3342—Gilbert transfers me to—

  “Welcome to the Providential Equity Help Line. For English, please press one—”

  The phone flies. Cracks against the wall. Not only don’t I recall Joyce Joe Joan Anderson Addison Amberton’s extension, I can’t remember the number I dialed to reach Gilbert. I try a few combinations but they ring into the void and I imagine Gilbert alone in his little cubicle, pants at his ankles, surrounded by ringing phones as he goes back to surfing for fetish porn, or managing his fantasy football team.

  I’m beaten for the day. I’ll try again tomorrow. I stuff the Dear Homeowner letter back in my messenger bag. Slump back next to Dad. He pats his smoke pocket. Time bleeds. Wife comes home with kids. We eat pork chops. Dad picks at his. Lisa and I look away from each other.

  At dinner, Franklin and Teddy are full of heartwarming stories about school, as if they’ve somehow intuited that their parents may not be able to afford tuition anymore, each story a testimony to what a beacon of academic achievement their little parochial school is, what a warm nest of intelligence and security, what a refuge against the cold, hard world, what a failsafe ticket into a blissful Ivy League future.

  “The Math-Quest team is raising money to go to nationals again this spring,” Teddy informs me. Of course, when Teddy’s Math-Quest team goes to nationals, he will be over at Alcatraz Elementary, learning to make a plastic spork into a shiv.

  Lisa finally meets my eye, her fork in mid-air. She doesn’t grimace or shake her head, she does something far worse: she smiles sympathetically, her eyes drooping at the corners, as if to say, Don’t worry, Matt. We’ll figure this out. It’s okay.

  And her reaction pisses me off because it would be so much easier to lose my wife if she were an asshole, but she has consistently refused to cooperate in this way. Even when I was single and my buddies were required by law to hate my girlfriend, she was unfailingly easy to be around and they grudgingly paid her the highest buddy-compliment: “Nah, man, Lisa’s cool….” I was twenty-four when we met, my first year at the newspaper. And she was cool, twenty-one, a marketing intern at a hospital I covered. I first saw her at a press conference for the hospital’s new outreach program for addicted teens. I only went because I was working on an enterprise story about the hospital’s pending labor trouble and when the spokesman whined that “you never do anything positive about us,” I wanted to point to the two paragraphs about that outreach program buried deep in the business section. I walked into the conference room and immediately saw this girl—bemused eyes, broad lips, toned legs in a just-above-the-knee skirt, and, like a beacon: a pair of expensive-looking, out-of-place, fur-lined boots. It was one of those inane “press conferences” where there’s only one actual member of the press—me. I sat in one of the fifteen chairs they’d put out “for the media” as the hospital spokesman stood at a podium and read me—word for word—the same stupid press release I held in my hand. Then he asked “Anyone have questions,” and being the only anyone, I asked, “How many teens will this serve?” and the stumped spokesman directed me to fur boots—“Lisa McDermott is facilitating this program, she has those specifics”—and I know it sounds corny, but in my mind I thought, Lisa Prior, as she strode over with a brochure for the program, which had some ridiculous, concocted acronym—N.O.D.O.P.E. or G.O.C.L.E.A.N., and I said, “Nice name,” and fur boots said, “Yeah I know, right?” and—her back to the spokesman—she made a little fist and gave the universal sign for jacking off.

  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 h
elp 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.