Dear Money (3 page)

The Chapmans knew none of this: that I could not afford the babysitter (with us eight years), the private school, the out-of-network doctors (my older daughter suffered from asthma and we didn't have dental insurance), Theodor's studio, my office, the dinner parties I liked to have, the lessons for the girls—piano and skating and swimming and tennis and soccer and lacrosse. ("Mommy, can I take gymnastics too?") I couldn't afford the expensive notions of the other mothers who'd catch you up in their whims, assuming you had as much money as they—private yoga instruction for the kiddies in their private gyms. The girls needed none of it, I knew that, but how could I tell them we could not afford it? Because I had failed? Failed by introducing them to a life that actually did not belong to them, that was a lie?

The problem of the artist who collects millionaires is that after a while you forget you can't live like them. The Chapmans didn't know that catastrophe loomed before me. If a change in our financial circumstances didn't happen fast, our daughters would be yanked from their nurturing school and placed in the terrible school in our catchment (the word alone sounded like some sort of horrid Dickensian workhouse for children), the one that I passed every day on the way to my office and that reminded me of a prison, riddled with the horror stories of New York public schools—drugs, guns, sex in the stairwells, overcrowding. "Oh, but it's getting better," the private school mothers declared in the park, with a nod of affirmation to the idea of public school. They espoused other progressive, open-minded, liberal ideas. They voted for Democrats and against school vouchers, and in most other things embraced a charming, witty, ironic sense of their own exceptionalism—a condition, perhaps, of their residency on an island of exceptions, subclauses and sneaky provisos double-parked off the midatlantic coast.

What the Chapmans didn't know, above all else, was that if things didn't change, and soon, I would have to give up on myself, on the dream of believing that I had made it or could make it, the artistic life so lauded by those who do not live it. In Wall Street terms I had chosen risk for Theodor and me; we'd gone long on ourselves, invested all we had in ourselves, and the investment was not paying off. We had not hedged. We were driving fast, one hundred miles per hour in our seemingly fancy life, but we were heading toward a brick wall.

Even so, I hoped, pumping and puffing and stretching the borders of reality, a kind of insanity. I hoped.
Generation of Fire
was a big book for my small publisher, the new and rising Leader Inc. Books—five bestsellers in the past three years. A "breakout book," they called my novel. They bought it when it seemed no one else would have it. And Hollywood had expressed interest in the dramatic rights. Streamline Productions and Atomic Pictures and Boss Brothers, names cast about like so many diamonds spraying light. Foreign sales were lining up nicely, nibbles on the line. The publisher was hoping for an excerpt in
The Literary Review.

It was all but a slam dunk. I was high. The editor and the head of publicity called me regularly, checking my whereabouts, making certain I'd be around, telling me about tour date possibilities and magazines that might do profiles, off-the-book-page opportunities. They even considered hosting a book party, a huge deal these days, an extreme vote of confidence. This time it would happen. It had to.
It
equaled success, and success, of course, equaled money. "Don't think about all this," Theodor told me. "Write." Now if only the reviews would be excellent, if only they'd roll in on time, on their wings the book would lift to the stratosphere. The
if only's
really could align just so this time to unlock the sea of elusive readership. In every part of me I felt that desperate hope.

But then a bill would arrive: tuition, life insurance, American Express thick with its charges to out-of-network doctors (I refused to believe I couldn't accept the best medical care), gourmet food stores, lessons for my girls—their endless lessons. Late at night before the blue light of my computer I would check my dwindling Vanguard balances to see if a stock had taken off, if there was a bank error in my favor. Want, want, want. Need. The wish for a piece of America, our own home, was a noble desire, like a good education or the ability to pay a bill without it stabbing you in the heart. For what was the sacrifice? For art? I hid behind my confident smile, my hair pulled back in a neat ponytail, jeans and a shirt from Agnès B., strolling to school with the girls on either side of me, holding their hands, the stroll of a mother who has few cares, the stroll of ease and success. I am a tall woman and I do not slouch. "We're spending a part of the summer in Europe. My next novel is set there," I say to another mother whose days are defined by gutting and renovating her little $5 million piece of America, a Manhattan townhouse. She has asked about our plans for the summer. The words glide from me with ease, not a lie exactly, perhaps wishful thinking. Who is the authentic one? My grandmother used to say, "If I don't like it the way it happened, I just say it the way it should have happened."

A writer is above all this. A writer has the urge, the irrepressible, antiquated instinct to put one word down after another, to create real houses, real cities, real worlds of real people in imaginary gardens. A writer writes because it is necessary—is, dare I say, spiritually sustained by that necessity and not a need for profit. A writer does not care about profit. A writer writes, and because a writer writes, it seems, a writer goes without, and the list is long of the things forgone, all of it on display as Theodor and I happened from one grand summer vacation home to another, refuseniks camping out in the beds of our children's friends' homes. "Socioanthropology," Theodor called it, spinning gamely. This is all that one gives up for art. But the artist does not care.

Will and Emma Chapman knew none of the weight, the slow, steady pressure, crushing with humiliating might. No, no. They did not, would not ever know all of this. They would not see me on the high wire. My life was beautiful! I was a great literary success! Renowned, as Mr. Hov had said. I was at the top of my career or my game or both, and Will Chapman, the endearing fool, wanted to be me. And so I said to Emma, standing there in that crumbling house that would complete their dreams, on that first afternoon in Maine, the light pouring through the fractured windowpanes, casting rainbows of color on our faces, "We will help you kill them too."

"The plot thickens," Will said, raising his eyebrows.

"India is good at that sort of thing," Theodor added. He shot a knowing look at Emma and Will, one that said he knew his wife inside and out, everything that she was capable of, and with that look he knit them into his intimate knowledge of me. I wasn't sure what he meant, nor do I believe did they, but we all smiled anyway. I caught myself up in their dream, pretending to understand it, wanting it too, I'm afraid, because it seemed to my mind, with its desperate questions, that the Chapmans, with this house, their desire for and appreciation of it, were gently pointing me to a kind of answer.

O
N A CLEAR MAY DAY
my life began, lilacs blooming, their scent flooding the hospital room, a bouquet on the bedside table. In my mother's tired and happy arms I wailed, her gorgeous girl, everything long about me. She admired each toe, each finger, my rosebud mouth, my long dark eyelashes and my bright blue eyes that held an intelligence, she could tell, that almost scared her with its ferocity. She loved to tell me that, the haunting power of my newborn eyes. They became mythic even for me. It was the responsibility that terrified her and fascinated her and which culminated in my eyes.

I am seduced by beginnings. I yearn for beginnings. I love to start fresh. A new book. A new day. A new dress, slipping into it to become a new person. Before things become messy, before the predicate traps you.

I was the predicate for my father. He sat in an armchair in the corner of my mother's hospital room, a bit stunned by the wreckage of birth—his wife's dark eyes, drawn and tired cheeks. Looking at me there, a newborn baby girl, he did not think I was beautiful. Rather, he thought I looked like him, with my thin hair and round face, the intensity of my big eyes which held a defiance that declared that I would do as I pleased. He knew this defiance. It was his own, had served him well.

Fragile and delicate, a girl who looked like a man, like him, I grew into a woman he could not protect as he watched me in my mother's arms. Nestled and swaddled and tucked against her chest, emphatically driven by instinct and will. Through his thick horn-rimmed glasses it was easier for him to see bills—the doctors, the clothes, the food, the education: the roller coaster ride ahead of him. He knew how to pay bills. But me, impossibly small, rubbery, how would he manage me?

Dread filled him: I was his responsibility. Panic seized his chest. Already he was dizzy, and he hadn't even left the platform. He was thirty-six years old, a successful urologist in D.C., an "intimate of the urinary tracts of senators and congressmen," affiliated with prestigious Washington General Hospital. In a city where proximity to power is the coin of the realm, he liked to say that he had his finger in the Senate. He owned his house, he invested well, he had his daughter, in a few years he would have his son (now a doctor too, living in London with a fancy wife); my mother never had to work. His will had driven him to create this, comfort for his family that his daughter would discard, sneer at and defy. She grew up before his eyes, from mysterious newborn rooting at her mother's breast to a blue-eyed beauty who would not listen. How could he save me if I would not listen?

That I would not listen made him furious. Standing in our living room, my long hair falling in soft curls about my face, I told him I was going to graduate school, that I would become a writer, that I did not need his blessing. When I was a newborn he could hold me in one hand, but even then he'd felt helpless. He had wanted to be able to explain it to me, the helplessness, the fear, how fragile babies are, how punishing whimsical choices can be. Becoming a writer was whimsy, after all. But he did not know how to bring softness to the negotiating table. Fear did not create tenderness. "I would have written books if I'd had the chance, if someone had believed in me," my mother said in my defense as my father raged about my choice—as if it were a choice, as Theodor so frequently reminded me. "Nonsense," my father declared. "You're a smart girl, capable of choosing. Most writers aren't any good. Most of them don't make a dime, even the good ones. Especially the good ones."

Mom defended me again when I announced that I had married (eloped with) the unpromising Theodor. "You really have no idea," my father said. "You don't get it. He will amount to nothing financially. You can't fathom how hard that will be." And my mother sweetly saying, "Theodor is a nice man. I'd have been an artist if I'd had the option." My mother sweetly saying, "Daddy loves you. That is the reason for all this. Daddy is afraid for you." Isn't it always all for love—the rage, the anger? If he didn't care ... My father's rage swelled beneath his skin, fear getting the better of him, wrapping around him like the snake around the tree because I was throwing my life away. "Don't come to me for money if that husband of yours can't support you." My father came from nothing, was terrified of going back to nothing, afraid that somehow I would lead him there. Art was for the impractical, for dreamers, for people who didn't know any better, who hadn't suffered the consequences.

And that husband of mine.

I met Theodor at a New Year's Eve party on the Lower East Side. He was sitting on the arm of a couch in a smoky room filled, somehow, only with men. His thick black curls, his red lips, the amused and cynical slant of his eyes drew me to his side of the room. He was engaged in a conversation about the messy state of the Union, which quickly led to the perpetual decline in funding for the arts. We were all so young, dressed in fancy thrift-store wear, a roomful of artists and writers on the threshold of something that we hoped would turn into success and the shape of our lives, smoking, sipping grown-up drinks, martinis. A plate of cheese bobbed above our heads, passed around the room on raised palms. A small ecumenical Christmas tree languished in the corner, draped in strands of flickering lights in a variety of disguises—red chili peppers, lobsters, cows.

The lights illuminated the faces of Theodor and the men he spoke with, casting them in a colorful yet fleeting glow. Young men offered preposterous, ironical proclamations, trying on the preposterous, ironical art world of New York to see how well it fit. Wealth and poverty, at this intersection, were only abstract notions, fodder to support a line of argument—certainly not something one lived in or inhabited as a condition, something that might actually shape, or perhaps, in the case of poverty, warp and derail a person. If some of us lived like monks in abandoned buildings in Alphabet City, it was because we had chosen to do so. It was a choice that came with its own safety net. We were neither rich nor poor. We were simply young. The atmosphere in the room—the music, the laughter—fanned the egos of the young men, each vying to strike pay dirt with a bon mot or two, and thereby receive, like flowers that blossomed only at night, the further blandishments of laughter, the quick and telling smile, the promise of the night that lay ahead and that animated them in their cluster. They were boys, really, well read, equipped with knowledge of art and literature but otherwise largely untested, likely to put quotation marks around a sunset, a willow tree, the V-shaped flight of geese heading south—anything that smacked of an originating source or destination. Boisterous and enthusiastic, they laughed and leaned on walls, on each other, on the shelves of books written by an older generation that had gone on to fame or oblivion.

The railroad apartment belonged to a poet, a woman in her late thirties with long black hair, long face, long body, referred to as Morticia (though her name was Jane), and she played the part like a Dada throwback from that other distant era, reciting poetry at the strike of her cuckoo clock, which was wedged into a corner against one of her overstuffed bookcases. Musil alongside Zbigniew atop Gibbon, the spines reclining this way and that, no logic to the order. "Look out," someone warned as she quieted the room, "the poetry is about to begin." Jane's furnishings had been proudly hauled off the street and restored with care.