Dear Money

by Martha McPhee

  But the commission was not coming along well at all. Gold leaf on silver, extraordinarily expensive; and working with the gold leaf was like working with butterfly wings. Beyond that, I knew very little about the subject because Theodor never discussed what he was working on, only the struggles in the abstract. I did know we were out of pocket a lot of money now, and unless he could finish and be paid for the commission our bad financial situation would become even worse. "Don't worry," he would say. Once, long ago, he had said to me, when we were first starting out in New York, his black curls bouncing around his sculpted cheeks, "I'm going to keep wanting. That's what it's all about. Stay poor, my girl. Poor with me, to make this work."

  "What do you want?" I asked him now.

  "I want, and I have, you," he said, and he pulled me deeper against him.

  In the morning I received more good news. Streamline Productions wanted to option Generation of Fire for film. The option was for $2,000, not much, but money all the same. The Woman magazine article would be about $4,500; the Lit Review excerpt could be as much as $8,000; several thousand for the three pending foreign sales. Yes, things were coming along quite smartly. In a small notebook I kept hidden in my desk, I wrote down the figures, adding up our potential extra income. All the zeroes smiled like round and jolly faces. And I didn't even include Theodor's commission or the possibility of the film's coming to fruition. On the first day of shooting we'd receive a check for $250,000. That sum sat in the back of my mind like a lozenge. Of course, I didn't calculate all of our expenses, all that we owed, the tuition bill that was coming due in September, Theodor's gold and jewels. Instead I met Lily Starr for lunch in midtown.

  Lily and I had been to graduate school together, and since then she'd published no novels and I'd published my four, with the fifth imminent. In general, I did not like to surround myself with writers. I preferred the bankers and the ad executives and the lawyers for whom I was a curiosity and with whom I had no overt professional competition. But Lily and I had hung on to each other. We liked each other, but for her there was also a bit of envy and masochism—each of my successes a reminder to her of her inability to finish a book. And I'll confess: that inability of hers, and her envy, made me feel better about my own career and its degrading lack of sales. Things were about to change, with Lily's first novel publishing one month to the day before mine.

  "They say publishing in the fall is the new spring. Everyone, all the big names, now pub in spring, so the fall's opened up again for fresh voices," Lily said.

  We were walking up Park Avenue in the Fifties. We'd been together for an hour and I was beginning to feel that unease of writerly competitiveness. Ungenerously, I decided she had the irritating characteristic of pretending to be a novice even though she knew all about the business. She'd had years to study it, and believe me, she had been. What she knew made me jealous and fearful. She knew that a debut novel was a potent aphrodisiac to those in the industry. A first novel was a blank slate that an enormous career could be written upon. A first novel was the wildcard in the deck; it had the potential to become anything, everything. I was a known thing, harder and harder to launch. She was the new thing: a few smart words, a brilliant book jacket, and entry through the gates of Parnassus was hers.

  Truth be told, Lily had been a good friend to me long ago, had read my first novel and encouraged me with every sentence, giving the first chapter to her boss when she worked as an intern at The Barcelona Review, and the boss had loved it and they'd published it, launching me into the New York literary scene. It was based on that chapter that my agent first contacted me. Barcelona had published three chapters from that novel, all while Lily slaved as a lowly intern, receiving high praise too, by the by, for having "discovered" me.

  "Is that so?" I said about spring pub dates. I'd read her book, You Didn't Want to Know, and thought it good, in fact very good. But I also knew how hard it was to publish. Her book would languish out there with the rest of them, and she'd come to understand what it felt like to be an author—revered, hailed. Piccadilly was publishing it, and though they were the best for literary fiction (they'd published my second novel, Scion), I knew they gave little attention to unknown writers, let them sink or swim on their own. ("The book will abide," or some such, the publisher, the Dashing Cavelli, had famously said.)

  Piccadilly had a reputation for doing nothing for the books. Indeed, their logo, a pair of trumpets, did everything for the books. I played up the air of indifference, as if publishing were rote, run of the mill, as if everything didn't depend upon it. It was a sweltering day and I wore an old sundress that I'd bought at Marshall's for $5. One of the shoulder straps was slightly torn. But it was a pretty dress, had once been stunning, and I'd prided myself on how good it looked for so little. In fact, with some other graduate school friends we had a running competition: who could buy the cheapest dress and look the most expensive. This particular dress made me look like an artist, I fancied, and a woman who looked fabulous in anything.

  Then I saw it, the sign, big roman letters—two B's and an ampersand intertwined, the unmistakable logo of Bond & Bond Brothers. I had no idea it was here. I had thought all finance was centered around Wall Street, most of it anyway. Park Avenue, I now noticed, was thick with businessmen, and a few -women, dressed in their suits, marching between office and restaurant for the midday meal. The buildings loomed above us, terraced with gardens, trees spiking above steel and glass. There seemed to be a rhythm to the stride of the avenue, a steady beat, a pulse—the not so subtle pulse at our temples. The pulse of a flower emitting its fragrance, the fragrance of America. Flags fluttered like kites. A klatch of limos idled at the curbs. St. Bartholomew's Church seemed an oasis of reason in the midst of all the banks. Big bank after big bank, and then here we were beneath B&B, caught in its shadow.

  A stream of taxis flowed by. One stopped in front of us. Lily said something that I did not hear, her voice small in the street. A woman stepped from the cab. She wore a nicely pressed, white linen suit, her dark hair swirled in an up-do, her eyes shaded by big black glasses, her lips a startling red. Under her arm was a folded Wall Street Journal. In her right hand she clutched a leather computer case. She slammed the cab door and disappeared into the revolving doors of the Winchester building.

  "Do you know her?" Lily asked, gawking at me as I gawked at the woman.

  "No."

  "She's a different species. Can you imagine?"

  "They're all a different species," I said, sweeping my arm around to include everyone walking down the street. I felt protective of the woman, but also smaller in my smart $5 dress. Why weren't we at our desks? Why were we out in the middle of a New York working day? I felt like a little girl, a truant.

  "What a life," she said. "Every day I thank my lucky stars. Time is mine and I do what I dream."

  I didn't say anything, but I thought, How naive. I looked up to the top of the building, then to the doors. When the doors opened, cool air gusted over us. Here the engines of commerce hummed. Mortgages were packaged, lumped into a vast money flow.

  "Gorgeous," I said.

  "Bond and Bond Brothers?" Lily asked with an incredulous huff.

  "I met a trader who works there," I said.

  "And—"

  "And he propositioned me."

  "You've got to be kidding." Then, "Attractive?"

  "Not at all."

  "And Theodor?"

  We were walking again, but then Lily stopped me and looked me in the eye, all genuine concern, it seemed. I left the notion suspended for a moment so I too could live in the bubble of misperception. Imagine: India Palmer on the verge of an affair with a billionaire banker Even the best of us loves gossip. I certainly did. Gossip was storytelling, after all. And what about adorable Theodor? I knew they'd married far too young. Two artists? It just is not possible. I looked at Lily, letting her eyes try to read mine. She was a pretty girl with high cheeks and a sweet oval face with all its features neatly arranged, as if
someone had placed each one there carefully, by hand. She was short and a little chubby, but her body was incredibly strong and agile, able to contort into difficult yoga positions.

  "Not that kind of proposition," I said finally.

  Why weren't we talking about Duchamp and Mina Loy and Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams? Why weren't we discussing the history of the novel or Thackeray's cynicism or Eliot's objective correlative or Dreiser's patience? Why weren't we competitive with our knowledge and our artistic desires? Why weren't we sharing ideas and thoughts of work? Deciphering the struggle, making it urgent and necessary? Why weren't we creating our own ism, an aesthetic revolution like those other aesthetic revolutionaries who came before us and paved the way for what we try to write now?

  Before kids, before now, before life got in the way, we'd spent long evenings with our grad school friends parsing the structure, the very sentences of the works of little-read novelists like Heinrich von Kleist. Sure, we'd been interested in his biography, his double suicide with his terminally ill lover on the shores of Lake Wannsee. Sitting in one of our gloomy apartments, drinking cheap wine, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, so very very late, we had all agreed that we'd be successful if we didn't kill ourselves by thirty-five. But we'd also cared about how Kleist had made the work happen, how he'd managed the famous first sentence of "The Marquise of O—." An Italian woman of unblemished reputation finds herself mysteriously pregnant and places an ad in a local paper with the hope of learning the identity of the father. Now that's a brilliant plot, and it was held in one burst of a sentence, an opening sentence. An explosion of curiosity, every part of the sentence made you want to know more. If your character must want something, the reader must too. Why, at the very least, weren't we talking about the wars? There were two wars going on, and no one seemed to be aware. Who and what had we become? But it wasn't any of that that came from my mouth. I thought of a talented and acclaimed writer I knew who, at a book party for her new novel, wore a black dress with straps that cut across the wings of her shoulder blades, accentuating her fine muscle tone. I admired the dress. She said, "I love publishing a book most of all because it's an excuse to shop."

  We slipped over to Madison as I described Win and his proposition. The street smelled of perfumes blasting from the doors of the expensive stores. People walked fast, eager, anxious, a ferocity propelling them down the street, passing newsstands and newspaper vending machines, the headlines announcing military and civilian death tolls, troops searching for the missing, car bombs, suicide bombers, training camps in Afghanistan. The smell of lemons and honey-roasted peanuts, the sighing of buses coming to a stop. A woman rushed past me, knocking her Chanel shopping bag against my hip. She turned, sneered, continued on. Horns and sirens and all those beautiful stores, like pretty flowers so carefully arranged.

  I loved giving Lily the details, resurrecting the evening in Maine—the crystal flutes imported from Manhattan for the champagne—a world far removed from the one we lived in that was glamorous and somehow easy in that it was rid of so many concerns. Lily Starr had two kids and a husband who taught in a public high school. They crammed into a one-bedroom apartment that she referred to as a mini-loft. Great location on Riverside Drive and they owned it. But their ticket out, like ours, had always been and still was her novel. She'd been writing it for fifteen years. For fifteen years she'd done what all of us writers so pathetically do with our humongous egos. She'd believed that a novel, her novel, could defy the novelists' track record for dying unknown and impoverished. She'd believed. We all believed. And why not?

  "India Palmer: bond trader, mortgages. Bond, James Bond," Lily said. "What is a bond, anyway?" she asked. Her eyes were a bright blue, sparkling as she had fun with this notion in a way that reminded me of why I always adored her. She was fun. She could look down the road and fully imagine it, decorate it with all the details and then decide, all in an instant, if it added up. "Whatever a bond is, your trading them is an exquisitely stupid idea. Was he serious? Has he read your work? Generation is your best novel yet. I couldn't put it down."

  She has read it, I thought, and a lovely sensation wafted over me. She still believed in me. My first review. I'd given it to her months ago in manuscript, but she'd said nothing. Best novel and couldn't put it down translated to: she loved it. Writers were like this; they always believed everything positive they were told—praise from their readers, their friends. When they say they love it, the writer never doubts. She believes she's a genius. She's brilliant. A shining star. She believes even though she knows how many times she has lied in the same circumstance.

  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 wh
ich 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.