The Financial Lives Of the Poets

started to read over her shoulder-I couldn’t help it; it was a sex scene-but she moved the book. It felt as if everyone on the bus saw through me.

At the next stop a woman, maybe nineteen, got on, followed by a little boy no more than four, and a rail-thin man with the gapped smile of a meth-user. The boy had one glove on his right hand and was holding up his left hand-red, bare and cold-while his mother finished a lecture that must have started long before they got on.

“Because I told you not to lose it, that’s why! Gloves ain’t free, TJ. That’s your last pair for the whole winter. You just gonna have to wear that one.”

“I don’t know what happened to it,” the boy said with great wonder. “It was on my hand.”

“Well it ain’t now,” his mother said. They moved down the aisle toward the back of the bus, mother in front, boy in the middle, father behind, and as they passed me, the little boy turned back to his father. They were in this together. “It’s okay, Dad,” said TJ. “Look.” He smiled at his own cleverness. “I got pockets.” And he shoved his bare hand in his pants pocket.

The father put his hand on his son’s head and made eye contact

with me, smiled proudly, and I swear to God I have never felt such shame-such deep, cleansing shame. I put my judgmental face in my spoiled hands and I wept quietly. The woman with the sexy book got up and moved to another seat.

Christ. It is the only unforgivable thing, really…to feel sorry for yourself.

The next day I took a pair of Franklin’s old gloves and put them in my messenger bag. I carry those gloves in my bag every day now, but of course I’ve yet to see TJ or his dad. In the meantime, whenever I feel like a failure- not an uncommon feeling-I take those gloves out of my bag, imagine that father touching his boy’s head and hope I’m half as good a man.

After being assessed by the nursing home, my own good father has been moved to the memory unit. It’s paid for by Medicare and his VA benefits. I’m not going to pretend that he’s happy-but he has his remote and one of the cable networks has begun showing The Rockford Files every day at 11 a.m. Dad has built his day around that. His clear memories come in fainter now…I wonder if he might be better off when they don’t come in at all. One day Lisa offers to pick Dad up and bring him over for dinner. I gladly accept. On Dad’s second visit, she even cooks, makes him chipped beef; but he asks her not to make it anymore. Says he doesn’t like it.

What he does like is the treeless tree fort. He and I sit on the balcony and watch the cursing neighbor boys climb around on it, Dad laughing every time they swear: Fuck you, Travis! Fuck you, Alvin. Dad loves this show; he doubles over like Travis and Alvin are Martin and Lewis, funniest thing he’s ever heard.

Teddy and Franklin go to a little public school four blocks away but I made sure the new apartment was in a better district than the little Sing-Sing school in our old neighborhood. The boys seem okay with their new school. They miss their friends but they

love not wearing uniforms. There’s even a Math-Quest team at the public school.

Biz-Daily exists only online for the first month, but when we finally finish our first print issue, the thing is gorgeous. We sell out of it. I can even imagine the thing making money someday-if companies can ever afford to advertise again. In the back of our first printed edition are two features that I pushed hard for, both of which turn out to be popular, the Stoned Stock Analyst, in which I make random picks under the pseudonym Jay Wollie (he’s already up four percent by pushing fast food stocks), and The Poetfolio, which I write under my own name:

Recovery

We’re like bored ghosts-over our horror

as we wait for dispensation

on the hard wooden pews

of bankruptcy court

and next to me

this old ruddy trader

who’s been reading the paper

whistles at something in the stock pages.

“If only,” he says, “I had about twenty G’s”

and I complete: “you wouldn’t be here?”

but he slaps at the paper, “No, look

don’t you see, it’s already

here-the next thing…” and I’ll be

damned if I can help myself:

“What do you mean?”

Then one by one he lists them

the drugs I already know

“We had tech and pharms

war, biotech and of course housing.”

And now? I say, leading, but he won’t

give it away, he just shrugs

and says it again: “The next thing.”

An hour later we are broke but free

and as we part in the hallway

it’s all I can do to not beg the man

for that last tip, that final stake

like some idiot junkie who

kicks smack by going on crack

kicks crack by going on meth

kicks meth by going on smack-

jonesing for the next thing, because

relapse is what we mean

when we say recovery.

And maybe there’s a sort of bankruptcy for marriages, too. At least, that’s what I tell Lisa one night after we’ve had dinner with the boys, and they’ve gone on to bed, and we’re sitting on that balcony having a glass of wine. “Marital bankruptcy,” she says, and almost smiles.

Sure-I say, unable to look her in the eyes-a new start. No debts, no blame, no punishment: marital bankruptcy. Like we’re new people. (She: hot woman awaiting her divorce papers; me: middle-aged drug dealer on probation.)

Marital bankruptcy isn’t quite the carefree little joke that our old mulligan was; and when I glance up, Lisa looks away sadly. “I’m here,” I say. “Take your time. I’m not going anywhere.”

She says, quietly, “Don’t, Matthew.” But we have another glass of wine, and that night, she nestles in behind me in our king-sized

bed; the beds are the only big pieces of furniture I saved, and ours takes up most of the tiny bedroom in this apartment. I know better than to ask what this means-having her next to me like this. I know better than to say anything. I just sleep…my wife’s knees pressed into the backs of mine.

In the morning she’s gone, and for days, she doesn’t say anything about it. But a week later, she stays again, and a week after that, we make love. It’s awkward at first, bumping, apologizing; we turn out to be exactly like new people, tentative, trying to find our way back. But afterward, we sleep.

I usually have some time to think on the bus, and in the drizzling morning after I make love to my wife, I bounce on the curb and light-step my way through sighing split doors, my mood untouchable, even by an especially potent burst of bus-funk (let’s see, I’m getting sweat, diesel fuel and off-brand tobacco, perfectly balanced, with a slight finish of unwashed ass) and I drop into a plastic seat like some grinning fool, and that’s when I happen to catch, out the bus window, a for-sale sign, a little wooden post planted on a weedy strip of sidewalk in front of a shocked bungalow (Price Reduced!), the plywood door of a forced repo where some other poor shit was run over, and my mind starts to race again (how long must you spend in exile)