Dear Money (11 page)

But as Lily carried on, I realized just how seriously I had taken Win's proposition even if I hadn't given it much thought, wondered would I be capable of that, of becoming a trader. Yes: India Palmer: star trader of mortgages: one of the few women on the Street: heralded: me: Mistress of the Universe. Well, I'd have to work on my moniker, at least. Yes, I hadn't dismissed the idea as quickly as Lily had. It meant that I was second-guessing myself as a writer. Did Lily know this? Was this also part of the fun she was having with me? I realized how far apart we were. She sat atop a Gibraltar of belief in herself. Looking at her was like looking into a kaleidoscope, a colorful swirl of affection, jealousy, malice, admiration, untoward intent.

"It's actually fascinating, you know. Mortgages, anyway. They've figured out how to amass mortgage debt and turn it into bonds that are larger than the entire United States market overall." I had forgotten what it was larger than, but I knew she'd know no better. "Imagine how clever that is, taking all the puny mortgages, compiling them. It's a guaranteed fixed coupon of five or six or seven percent for the duration of the loan, thirty years in most cases, and now they've come up with endless variations that make making loans possible for just about anyone."

I carried on trying to render the story as interesting as it had been to me in Maine, feeling as I spoke a passion to know more, to understand better, not unlike the feeling I had felt long ago about getting to the bottom of a writer's masterly sentence. I thought about Win, of seeing him here. Of bumping into him, of having him invite us for a cup of tea, a glass of champagne. I could feel Lily's eyes on me.

"Fascinating," Lily said, yawning playfully, patting her lips. She pointed while still watching me—like a ringside doctor examining the eyes of a boxer—to a bathing suit in a shop window. It was a sharp black bikini. The bottom, a square-cut brief: $250. The top, a halter: $195. We loved it. She encouraged me to try it on, flattering me with compliments about my body. So I tried on the suit, thinking it was only a fraction of what I was to be paid for the article in
Woman
if it wasn't killed. The idea I'd chosen was on beauty and my relationship to it. "I'm a whore," I'd said to Theodor. "I'll write about anything."

"As long as you're my whore," he'd said.

The bright lights of the store were also somehow soft and flattering, the mirrors tilted so that they added length to the body, elongating the calves and thighs. I looked elegant. The store was spare, only a few lacy bras and panties hanging here and there, carefully selected for exquisiteness, no need for excessive choice. I felt expensive, worthy. My skin was softer, smoother.

"Indulge," Lily said with her sweet smile. "You deserve it." Like a Hamptons house.

"Indeed," I said, feeling, however, that it would be more fun if there were some big man at a big desk blindly writing checks to pay for my indulgences. Rather, I thought of Theodor in his studio. "How about you?" I asked Lily. I thought of Emma admiring the bikini as we went for a swim at her rooftop pool club in SoHo. She would know exactly which store it came from; she'd take note of it and believe that I actually must be doing well as a writer—either that or I was a fool, and I knew she would never believe me a fool.

"That's a month's worth of food for my children," Lily said. And I thought of mine, Gwen and Ruby, their beautiful little faces, their mouths pursed, opening like fledglings'. I bought the suit, impressing Lily Starr with the ease with which I pulled out my credit card. I worked hard; I worked as hard as the next person.

At Bergdorf's I bought a new dress, a rich brown macramé for fall. The price: $775. A tax deduction, I thought. I just had to have it to wear to my book party. I shared my strategy with Lily, and we both laughed about the deduction. "An absolute expense," she said. "I'll serve as witness if the IRS comes after you. Kind sirs, she only wore it that once. She had to look like a million bucks, otherwise who'd buy her book?"

I stood in front of the mirrors, cocking my head to the left, watching myself in the dress as Lily enacted my defense. Illusion: the dress hugged every curve of my body, my skin like pale silk seen through the macramé. Money certainly could help one become thoroughly ravishing. I bought the dress. "I'll put it in a novel," I said. "And then it will really be a valid tax deduction." Why did I want to show off for Lily by spending so much? Why did I care what she thought? Somehow it helped me feel that I had succeeded, I supposed, part of the fabric of a lie I'd been telling myself for some time, that as an artist I could live this life in which the value of my work was equal to the value of other people's work.

Then a little later: "Book party?" Lily asked, slanting her eyes toward me.

"Emma Chapman is having one," I said. "Save the date, my pub date, October sixteenth. The publisher's helping." That was a lie. In the end, they had wanted to keep the private party separate from publicity so they had declined to help, promising their own wine-and-cheese event at a bookstore. "We must do something for you," I said.

"I didn't tell you?" she asked, as if just remembering now, as if this hadn't been on her mind for our entire afternoon together, as if this hadn't been the reason she'd called wanting to see me.

Was I being terribly unfair? Writers could be like this, were like this—a combination of that ego and deference, wanting to both hide and trumpet. Her face brightened. No, I was not being unfair. We were riding the escalator down, our faces reflected into infinity in the mirrors, my bags draping off my arms, as if I were a lady who could afford the $1,500 I'd just dropped in an hour. The day before, I had spent $3,000 on our last-minute tickets to London.

"What?" I asked. "Good news?" I knew it would be good news, and I also knew I didn't want to hear it. I saw the future suddenly. Her book would become fabulously successful. She'd become the anointed It Lit Girl. She had a story after all: fifteen years to write her first, smashing novel.
Worth the Wait:
I could see the headline. Lily Starr, the truth transparent in her name.

"Leonardo Cavelli called me. Piccadilly is hosting a party. This is a big book for them," she said, glee oozing out of every part of her. And why shouldn't it? She should be flooded with glee, drowning in glee. And I should,
should
be happy for her. The brilliant smile of hers shining with success.

I could not share in the glee. Why hadn't I understood the glee before? Before spending all this money? Her voice nearly a squeak, she knew full well the news had to come quietly. This, for Piccadilly, was unprecedented. A call from Cavelli for a book party was like a call from God, reserved thus for the biggest names.

"I got a star on the
Advance
review and a star on the
Cramer.
I'm still waiting on the others. But
Advance
and
Cramer
—that's like hitting a double-header, or whatever you do in baseball. Bull's eyes?" she said. "
Advance
is going to run a profile!"

Who, anywhere else in the world, anywhere but in New York City, would care about a
Cramer
star? Who? No one. Nowhere. But I was here and I cared, and I hated myself just then for every sensation that rushed over me. Most of all, for imagining she knew just how I felt.

"A what?" I asked, referring to the double-header—a football term? Baseball?

"It's great, isn't it?" she asked with false modesty, asked as if it could be possible that the stars were a bad thing, as if a book party hosted by Cavelli were an irrelevant occurrence. An
Advance
profile, to be avoided at all costs? In the machine that knits a selling book, these were the founding threads. Worse was that she was pretending to defer to my experience when she knew that with this first book of hers she was on the verge, with one giant leap, of surpassing me in sales, and we all know that sales are all that matter.

"Well, of course," I said, those bags pulling me to the ground. I was a fake. That's what it was. If she was pretending, so was I. I was living inside the inauthentic, trying to prove that the writer could live like everyone else, all those honest, hard-working souls. That we could keep up. I was pretending for Lily Starr so that she'd think I was doing well. I had been her role model. I was pretending with the parents of my children's friends that I had the money to pay for the vacations they invited me to join them on, for the birthday presents I bought for their children, for the dinners out at fancy restaurants. I was pretending to the children's school that I could afford the tuition we had no business affording.

Lily, bagless, was as light as a feather. I could feel her stars and her Cavelli in every part of my body, sick, nauseated, as though I'd just eaten grease. I wanted to return the swimsuit, the dress. Outside, the sun was blistering. Writers, I'd learned, don't stab you in the back. They insert the blade gently right between your ribs while staring you in the eye.

"They're planning a first printing of fifty thousand," she said. "I'm in shock, really. That's a lot, right?" Then, "Have you gotten your prepubs?" she asked.

I hated her using publishing jargon. I hated her.

No was the answer. No, I had not.

Speaking of the Joneses, Win was the first to teach me their secret, to let me in on the fact that the Joneses, as a category of consumer, were in fact more volatile than the neighbors who tried so hard to keep up—in the olden days, that is, of the mortgage universe, before the flourishing of subprime. The nature of the neighbors' relatively predictable (and small, also relatively speaking) incomes made betting on them—or against them, as the case may be—easier to get right. They tried hard not to fall, but when they did the loss was minimal, easily absorbed. Not the case with the Joneses. First, they believed so invincibly in themselves that they didn't protect with wide margins; second, when they fell the enormous sums were not so easily absorbed, making them a riskier bet but also potentially far more profitable.

Emma had brought up the Joneses. "The Joneses of Pond Point," she had said, speaking of the family in the neighboring house, the Bostonians with the Red Sox paraphernalia everywhere. We were gorging on lobsters after the clams, that night with Win in Maine. The Joneses had just arrived for their weekend stay. It was dark already but their house was lit up, a lamp in each window, above the front porch and the back. The house shimmered and one broad floodlight blanched the sea grass for fifty yards, then darkness.

As the lights went on we admired it again as we had done during the day, walking on the beach. It was well cared for in contrast to the Chapmans'. The place was freshly painted. Window boxes thrived with red geraniums, along with a garden of hardy flowers in front of the house. An American flag snapped smartly in the breeze. On weekends they worked tirelessly on the property, Emma told us—mother, father, aunts, uncles, even the children. They weeded and scraped and banged and fixed and swept and cooked and mowed the small lawn. They hung out their clothes to dry with tidy precision. Never would they dream of renting the house. "Even the dog struts around with a sense of having done a helpful chore, carrying his bones here and there, digging clean holes," Emma had said.

Now the family was inside having their dinner.

"Emma rubs shoulders with the Joneses," Will said. "Wherever we go, she gets their number."

"I hadn't known she'd found them on Pond Point," Win said. "You've got a knack. Middle-class neighborhoods are the new posh."

"Funny you should mention the Joneses," Theodor said. "We're related to a pair over in England."

"Oh, not
that
story," I said as Theodor launched into it. This was a little dig at my family, my brother and his values, but I liked that Theodor was telling it; I liked appearing to be above the Joneses in that I was all right with admitting that I was beneath them. After all, that was what Emma liked about them. We weren't so very different in many ways. Theodor set the scene: Heath and Clarissa, the American doctor in London and his expensive English wife, with her Oxbridge accent. "Darling," my brother would say, drawing out the word until it was as long as a dachshund, "don't forget the schedule"—pronounced
shed-jewel
—"and tea this afternoon with the Harringbones." Their four daughters: Ginger, Chance, Olympia and Happy—yes, Happy, as in Rockefeller, as in Felicity—all blond and blue-eyed and entitled. My brother earned bundles servicing the American expatriate banking community, charged American prices to those suspicious of the National Health Service. The family lived in a gorgeous townhouse in Cadogan Gardens—recently purchased for many millions of pounds—red brick with white wood trim and paned windows two stories high. Each house on the square was prettier than the next. But my brother's house was the prettiest, the largest and the most lavishly redone, but only upon close inspection, only if you are one to notice the finest details. Clarissa passed her time with interior decorators, examining swatches and paint chips and doorknobs and finials, making decisions about windows and equipment and appliances.

Visiting them just after they bought the house, taking in the whole picture, endless minutes on the couch with fabrics and window treatments, Theodor had said to my brother with an inside nudge, "What's it like keeping up with the Joneses?" I had laughed both nervously and sincerely, for he was teasing my brother, who was difficult to tease as he took life very seriously. We were swimming in too much delicious chocolate, up to our necks in it, drowning in it, and no one seemed to be aware except Theodor.

"The who?" Clarissa, looking up from the couch and out the window at all the other, inferior homes on the square, asked innocently with her sweet small voice.

She had always had and would never need. She knew exactly who the Joneses were. They had reached all four corners of the developed world. Everyone knew the Joneses. "The who?" Theodor nearly burst out laughing. Then so did she. She hadn't heard, but now she had, and so she laughed at herself, at the misperception, feigned ignorance because the Joneses were an American construct and she was too English to allow them admission. "The who," she repeated, mocking herself, and I knew again why Heath loved her.