The Financial Lives Of the Poets

“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 entree, 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 help 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.

Upstairs, the typing has stopped.

Dad sighs. “You know what I really miss?”

I know this loop; there are six main things that my father misses and they come up a lot now, as if, right before he says, You know what I miss, Dad spins a tiny wheel in his head. And I make a game of trying to guess which of the six things he will land on. The six things my father misses are: (1) chipped beef (2) Angie Dickinson (3) Dandy Don singing at the end of Monday Night Football (4) the old pull tabs on beer cans (5) The Rockford Files and (6) Joe Frazier. It is a good sign, the doctors say, anytime Dad references the past, and so I always ask what he misses, even though it’s mildly disappointing that he never seems to miss my mom, or even my three sisters-scattered across the country by the limited employment opportunities of themselves and their husbands-or his job at Sears, or I don’t know, his bowling ball. Instead, it’s always one of these six inane things, and usually it’s chipped beef. I even made

chipped beef for him one night, but he ate it without saying a word, while the boys made faces and Lisa pretended to get a phone call. Two hours later, Dad said, “You know what I miss? Chipped beef.” But I suppose the