The Financial Lives Of the Poets

lay out the whole while-you-were-out-doing-God-knows-what-I-had-to-deal-with-keeping-this-family-together clacker incident, and maybe it goes on thick, maybe even embellished-the ferocity of Franklin’s attack, severity of the school’s reaction, passion of Franklin’s crying afterward-but I’m feeling desperate and I hope that ten logs of pure-grade guilt will shock Lisa out of this thing that she’s on her way to doing to our family. Indeed, she covers her mouth and shakes her head as I tell the story.

“My God, Matt. Why didn’t you call me?”

I shrug. “You said you had plans tonight.”

“And…you didn’t think I could take a phone call?”

I give another passive, wounded shrug. “I didn’t know what you were doing. I didn’t want to interrupt if it was something important to you.”

It is this to you that I hope will sting. I look down at the table.

“Interrupt…what…what do you…interrupt?” She stares at me in disbelief. “You knew what I was doing. I told you a week ago. I was at Karen’s candle party!”

Candle party? And now that she mentions it, I do remember something about candles…I quickly look for refuge from my own guilt, something to be mad about: those candle parties always start at seven, which doesn’t explain why she wasn’t home for dinner. “All night?” I ask desperately.

Lisa turns away. Hands shaking, she pours herself a cup of

coffee, but throws it in the sink, cup cracking in the basin. “It was a fucking candle party, Matt!” She turns to me, eyes red and teary. “You want me to feel shitty about going to a candle party?”

I open my mouth to say something, but nothing comes.

“Because I do! Okay? Happy? I feel awful. I felt awful sitting there with all those women ordering candles and drinking wine and talking about where they were going for the holidays. I could feel their pity, Matt! They were sitting there feeling sorry for me. And do you know why? Because they know I can’t even buy a fucking candle, because…because-” She covers her mouth and cries silently. I sit at the table, staring into my coffee.

We both know why she can’t buy a fucking candle.

My mom used to describe Lisa with the best praise she could ever heap on another person. Matty’s wife, she would say, now there’s a woman who is put together. To my mother, the best men were “real gentlemen” and the best women were “put together.” Oprah Winfrey? “Put together.” Hillary Clinton? “Really put together.” My oldest sister’s mother-in-law? “Likes to think she’s put together.” And while my dad would scoff (his stripper friend Charity, now there’s a woman put together, surgically so), Mom merely meant by the phrase that a certain woman was successful, sure-of-herself, composed. All those things Mom believed she wasn’t; all those things she wanted to be.

When Lisa went back to work and couldn’t find a job, I thought about Mom’s pet phrase. And I thought about it again almost a year ago, when-in the fog of poetfolio.com-I happened to get the mail and saw a bill from MasterCard. It wasn’t the URGENT stamp on the bill that got my attention; while I paid the mortgage, Lisa took care of the monthly bills, and I knew she sometimes mugged Peter to pay Paul. It was the fact that we didn’t have a MasterCard. We had Visa. As it turned out, we had both now, and Discover, too, and all

three were maxed out. I went out to the garage, where the boxes had been piling up-investments, Lisa called them-and I started opening them, porcelain dolls and commemorative plates and limited edition plush toys. After five or six, I stopped. None of this was secret. I’d seen the boxes. And she’d tried to tell me about the online “business” she’d read about-buying collectibles on eBay, holding them for a few years as their value increased, then reselling them on craigslist (or maybe it was vice versa). Deep in my own delusions, I’d only pretended to listen, so I missed the desperation and envy in the way she described people who made a living buying and selling such crap online, and I completely missed the fact that my wife-who, an hour later stood in front of me, weeping (it just got away from me, Matt)-was suffering deeply, unsure of her place in the world, of her value, pathologically afraid that the solid man she’d married was morphing into her irresponsible father-and that she felt she needed to do something immediately to take care of herself.

Here’s the thing: if you’re put together, you can also come apart.

Now Lisa stands in our kitchen, leaning on the sink. She sets her face, shakes her head without looking at me and leaves the room. In the TV room, she offers a flat “Hi Jerry” to Dad, whose voice cracks raspy and urgent, like a man dying of thirst: “I miss chipped beef!”

“I know that, Jerry,” she snaps, and then, softer, “I’m sorry.” And then Lisa goes upstairs, and after a minute, I hear her gentle, sweet voice in Franklin’s room-just a low hum, I can’t make out any words; this goes on for several minutes, punctuated a few times by Franklin’s voice, first frantic and then high, then low, easier-muffled jazz horn of comfort. Lisa won’t make more of this than she should. She’s good that way, good with them, a genius of per

spective and calm. I know Franklin must feel better, and I feel another rush of jealousy. I want that comfort, that voice. Then I hear her feet pad across the floor upstairs and the toilet flushes and there’s more padding and the door opens on the office-my eyes tracing her movements in the lines in the ceiling, as if I could see through the floorboards to the world where Lisa lives now, and then I hear the first, faint clacks of computer keys. (U will never guess what he did now…)

I know I should go up there and talk to her. And what? Apologize? Confront her about Chuck? Wait for her to confront me? What do I say? We’re in a perpetual blind stalemate here; lost. I can see how we got here-after each bad decision, after each failure we quietly logged our blame, our petty resentments; we constructed a case against the other that we never prosecuted. As long as both cases remained unstated, the charges sealed, we had a tacit peace: you don’t mention this and I won’t mention that, this and that growing and changing and becoming everything, until the only connection between us was this bridge of quiet guilt and recrimination. I don’t bring up her insistence on remodeling and her online shopping binge and she doesn’t stare across the dinner table and say, with all due respect, Matt: financial fucking poetry? And on and on we go, not talking-all the way to the incriminating cheating and weed-dealing mess we’re in now.

We’re not husband and wife right now; we are unindicted coconspirators.

It’s almost as if Lisa and I deserve this. Or believe we do. And I don’t think we’re alone. It’s as if the whole country believes we’ve done something to deserve this collapse, this global warming and endless war, this pile of shit we’re in. We’ve lived beyond our means, spent the future, sapped resources, lived on the bubble. Economists pretend they’re studying a social science, and while the

economy is a machine of hugely complex systems, it’s also organic, the whole a reflection of the cells that make it up, a god made in our image, prone to flights of euphoric greed and pride, choking envy, irrational fear, pettiness, stinginess, manic euphoria and senseless depression. And…guilt. Embarrassment. Somewhere a genius economist is factoring the shame index into this recession because we want to suffer, need to suffer. Like the irritating talk radio host who’s been giddily predicting economic collapse for five years, and now is more than I- told-you-so self-satisfied. He actually seems aroused by the specter of soup kitchens and twenty percent unemployment; I’m telling you, the man has a recession boner. Politicians and TV analysts put on leather stockings and whip their own backs like self-flagellating end-times Christians, slathering for payback for profligate spending, for reliance on debt, for unwise loans and the morons we elected, for the CEOs we overpaid, the unfunded wars we waged. We are kids caught lying and stealing: guilty, beaten children of drunks; give us our punishment so we can feel loved, so we can feel something.

And Lisa and me? We constructed our trouble, for better or worse, richer poorer, built it out of mistakes and arrogance and yes, at some level, we deserve this…bottoming out. No other explanation. She deserves an unemployed pothead husband. I deserve a distant, cheating wife.

I stare at the ceiling separating us. She’s up there.

I hear the low buzz of the TV in the room next door. Dad sighs.

I could still go upstairs. And what will I see? Lisa on the computer? Or lying in bed, texting him? Is there the slightest chance she’ll lift the covers and say, Matt, don’t go out tonight? Or the awkward silence, avoiding eyes, me shifting my weight, making my lame excuse and Lisa simply shrugging when I say I’m going out