The Financial Lives Of the Poets

CHAPTER 3

MY WIFE TYPES HER life, key-by-key

site-by-site, primarily at night,

on the home PC where I try to find

work while she’s drowsing, instead

find the history of her browsing,

surfing her lost past for evidence

that she wasn’t always this sad-

Still, I’d convinced myself, at least until last night, that Lisa’s new online hobby, social networking, was a healthier compulsion than the brief, eBay shopping spree she went on last year (our garage lined with unsold remnants, nine boxes of commemorative plates, plush toys and china figurines). At one time, Lisa managed this online life at work, but the optometrist’s office where she rots as a receptionist for thirty hours a week without benefits put an end to personal computer use, so every night now Lisa spends two hours on our home computer, managing her Facebook page and her Linked-In page and her MySpace page, responding to ass-sniffing inquiries from old friends on Classmates.com and Google-imaging people she used to know. I don’t say a word about any of it-this was our couples-counselor’s advice-but I worry that what she’s really looking for is not the people she once knew, but the her she once was, some happier version of herself living a better life than the one she has with me.

Of course, it’s unwise to diagnose the mental condition of one’s spouse. But if I had to trace Lisa’s current malaise (and if I didn’t trace it to the moment she accepted my marriage proposal) I would say that it began when her confidence was battered by leaving her career to birth those two boys eleven years ago. Before that, Lisa was a world-beating, self-assured businesswoman, in charge of marketing a doctors’ group that specialized in sports medicine, and she ventured out every day in curvy business suits that made me want to coax her into elevators for inappropriate workplace contact. But then I spermed her up and she left that good job, and since I was earning decent money and making indecent profits on some canny investments, we felt safe and maybe even wise-perhaps even morally good-having Lisa quit her job while she nursed, nested and nurtured those thankless little shit-heels. Then, a decade on, with the boys safely ensconced in papist school, we figured she’d just go get another job like her old one, but she ventured back into the job world two years ago with none of the hot confidence she’d had before we procreated. I try to put myself in her position-one day you come home from work a vital twenty-nine-year-old babe, whom the fellas at the office actively lust after (a real pro, too, trained in the latest technology, terminology and theory) and next day you go out looking for work a nearly forty-year-old Mom who colors the gray and doesn’t even know PowerPoint, a short-tempered lady who didn’t get any sleep last night because one of the kids pooped his bed (how do you poop a bed, anyway?). Six months

of résumés, referrals and rejections took their toll and Lisa accepted the first job she was offered-receptionist for a dull optometrist who calls the women in his office gals, and whose idea of a Christmas bonus is twenty-five bucks at a craft store.

I hated seeing the woman I loved lose her confidence that way. And yet, in the deepest reaches of my psyche, I wonder if there wasn’t a part of me that was glad she didn’t go back to the gym-toned guys at the sports medicine clinic. Our marriage was typical, I think; we deluded ourselves that it was made of rock-solid stuff, but there were trace elements of regret, seams of I-told-you-so, cracks of martyrdom. In the last few months-with things around here deteriorating-I’ve even asked myself if I didn’t take some pleasure keeping my wife at home, that maybe I subconsciously preferred a depleted Lisa because I was threatened by the sexy, confident one, the one I couldn’t control, the one I could lose. If so, then I am an even smaller man than the out-of-work, out-of-gas loser who greets me in the mirror every day, and maybe I deserve my unraveling fate, pushed away from this beautiful beaten wife, who goes out every night on the Internet in search of her better self-pre-child, pre-forty, pre-me.

More self-pity. It’s ugly. Counterproductive. I constantly warn my sons about the dangers of self-pity when they’re moping about being the only kids in the world without a Nintendo Wii. And honestly, with Lisa and me, it hasn’t been that bad. Beneath our current troubles, I think we still like each other, and as flatly unromantic as that might sound, it’s amazing how many of our couple friends genuinely don’t. Lisa and I still root for each other, still make each other laugh, still have fairly successful sex at least once a week, sometimes more-at least we did until about a month ago, when this dry spell started. We have similar goals and interests. Share the same politics. And (I realize I’m making the case to myself) we don’t even argue much. Certainly we did argue some

last winter and spring, when our finances fell apart, but even then Lisa and I didn’t argue so much as not talk-our little ballet of sighs, pursed lips and hushed voices as I worried over mortgage statements and retirement bulletins and over the increasingly terse letters from various lenders and financial institutions-grim reams of paper that have led me today to the office of Richard Blackmore, our financial coroner…I mean, planner.

When the hole started opening two years ago, Lisa and I congratulated ourselves because at least we weren’t in one of those La Brea Tar Pit adjustable-rate home loans. We had a normal thirty-year, with a normal fixed rate, and even though we’d unwisely cashed in equity for a couple of costly remodels, we were still okay. We had some normal debt: normal credit cards, normal furniture layaways, normal car payments, some uncovered medical bills, Teddy’s normal braces and Franklin’s normal speech therapy (Oh, for God’s sake, just say your ‘R’s). But then my perfectly normal dream of starting my own business, the afore-derided poetfolio.com, turned out to take longer and be more costly than we thought, and we found ourselves taking another line of credit on the house, going deeper in debt. Then came Lisa’s abnormal online shopping binge, and our credit cards rolled over on us a couple of times and the car payments lapsed and the ground began slipping away and the only thing that seemed rock steady was the house, so we took another chunk out of it, just to catch up, we said, to temporarily cover living expenses, and we refinanced at the peak value; like a snake eating its tail we borrowed against our house to pay the house payment of a house leveraged at forty percent more than the house was worth. When the dip came I scrambled back to the newspaper, but with the hole growing deeper and monthly interest charges eating us alive, we fell further behind, missed a few house payments and our helpful mortgage lender offered us an “agreement of forbearance,” six months leeway (with interest!) to get on

top of our payments, and we jumped at that lifeline, but then I lost my job and maybe we were distracted by that and by my father’s collapse (we dragged him into the hole with us) because while we fretted and waffled and stalled, the stock market went out for milk, got stoned and lost forty percent of its value, depleting my 401(k), which, due to my stubborn love for financial and media stocks, had already begun to look more like a 4(k). That’s about the time I stopped showing Lisa the grim letters about the house, with their phony warm salutations (“Dear Homeowner…”).

This is how a person wakes up one morning to find that he’s six days from losing his house.

The advice you get when your mortgage is in danger is to “contact the lender.” The last time I contacted my lender, some twenty-five-year-old kid answered the phone and talked me into forbearance, this six-month amnesty of procrastination. I should have known it was a bad move when I contacted my lender the next time and found out the kid had been laid off, that our mortgage had been bundled and sold with a stack of similarly red paper to a second company, and that the second company had been absorbed by a third company. Now I have no idea how to “contact my lender.” I seem to spend hours in automated phone dungeons (“For English, press one”) desperately looking for a single human voice to gently tell me I’m dead.

Clock ticks. Planet turns. Six revolutions from now whatever bank owns my mortgage will start foreclosure proceedings unless I can either beg more time or come up with the balloon forbearance payment of $31,200. Meanwhile, I try to figure out how to tell Lisa about this looming deadline-keeping in mind that (a) she adores this house, (b) she was raised to connect financial security to love and (c) I’m quite possibly losing her anyway. So I go it alone.

In the office of Richard Blackmore, Idiot Financial Planner, on the third floor of a squat downtown building, the reception

area’s littered with Forbes and BusinessWeek and Investors Daily: crisis porn, full of emphatic dirty-talk about “Hidden Opportunities in the Wreckage,” climaxing charts, “How to Make Money in a Crash,” photos of wet-browed, bug-eyed investment experts looking for full relief in this overheated climate.

The meeting is as predictable as coffin shopping. Richard keeps his diplomas on the wall, and I wonder why journalists and poets don’t do that. He tells me that losing the house might be inevitable, but that it’s only the beginning of my trouble. “Look,” he says, and he plays his adding machine like Jerry Lee Lewis, shows me various groupings of red numbers, offers painfully obvious advice. I could go into deeper detail, but frankly, I’m not that interested in the further specifics. Except these two points: (1) my money guy Richard is going without a tie now, like a politician who wants to appeal to the suffering common man (or perhaps every morning his firm takes the ties and shoelaces away from the brokers and financial planners to keep them from offing themselves); (2) Richard’s basic advice is to liquidate, sell, sell, sell, dump, sell, scale down, sell some more, live “like a fry-cook in the ’70s,” try to get a job, any job “very fucking fast,” beg my lender for more time, and with a great deal of luck we might avoid losing the house and going bankrupt.

This is something like taking your car to a mechanic, only to hear this: I hope you have good walking shoes.

“And by ‘scale down,’ you mean…”

“Scale. Down.”

“Right. And by ‘down’ you mean…”

“Down,” Richard says. His mouth is car-ported by a black mustache, an effective tool for delivering bad news: “Down down down. I’m talking public school down, used-car, canned-food down, lower-middle class down, Matt. Not 2004 upper-middle class down-not eight-person Jacuzzi and lawn guy down-but

1977 generic-food buy-your-clothes-at-K-Mart down. I’m talking dump your car payment, have a garage sale, clip coupons, Christmas shop at Goodwill. I mean-look at these numbers.” He spins a red page. “You see anything I don’t?”

I see London. I see France. Flood tide below me! I see you face to face! Heat check: still high. “Richard, if we cash out everything, is there any tax benefit to-”

“Tax benefit?” Richard’s mustache spits laughter. “Jesus, Matt. I don’t think you understand.” And he leans forward, his bleary eyes darting around my face. “Once this starts, you can’t stop it. I’ve seen this before. You’re parked on a hill without a parking brake and your car is rolling toward you and the only move is to get out of the way…and you want to talk about tax benefits?”

I should point out that my money guy Richard is not the best money guy in the world. (My first clue in this direction came in the late 1990s, when I was doing pretty well on my own, blindly investing at the height of the tech boom and I let Richard talk me into what he called “a safer bet”-Mexican shipping bonds. So while I had doubled my own easy bets on Microsoft and Cisco, I lost thirty cents on the dollar on Richard’s great tip-that anchor of the business world: Transmaritime-Pacifico.) But if Richard is not the best number guy, he’s a brilliant word guy-probably the reason I stay with him-and should anyone doubt it, the man shifts metaphors while I’m still marveling at the idea of our finances as a rolling car.

“Look,” Richard says. “I’m gonna give you the straight diagnosis, Matt. You are severely hemorrhaging here-not just on the house, in every area possible. Credit-card debt, health care debt, the equity you took on your house, unpaid creditors from your little business venture, your stubborn insistence on riding those bank and media stocks into the ground. And I don’t know who talked you into forbearance, but that’s the worst thing you could have

done. It’s just a way for lenders to squeeze the lemon once more. Did anyone tell you that ninety percent of the people who make the big forbearance payment still end up losing their houses?”

I seem to have missed that part of the sales pitch.

“Listen,” Richard says, “unless you’re about to inherit some money, what we’re talking about here is irreversible, fatal. You have fiscal Ebola, Matt. You are bleeding out through your nose and your mouth and your eye sockets, from your financial asshole.”

See! Fiscal Ebola? My financial asshole is bleeding? This was exactly why I started poetfolio.com; there are money poets everywhere.

Richard slides a small check across the table to me. “Here’s another way to look at this. The last thing you can afford right now…” And he pushes the folders from my file over to me. “…is a financial planner.”

This is why I’m here, of course. To cash out. I am pretending to need advice, but what I really need is whatever cushion I have left. So…I hold my breath and pick up the check. It’s in the high…four figures. Nine thousand four hundred and twelve dollars. I laugh. “That’s it?”

“I wanted to diversify you, Matt. You insisted on media and financials.”

This is true. In my past life as a business reporter I’d decided I was the expert and I clung to a tip from a banking guy who, I can only hope now, is lying dead on a sidewalk somewhere. But I can’t entirely blame him either, because I rode those stocks up for years, and when the financials first cracked, I stubbornly refused to sell. Then I got distracted by my own job loss and by Dad’s senility meltdown. And every time Richard begged me to let him unload those bad stocks, I reminded him of his last advice, And buy what? Mexican Shipping Bonds?

So…as I say, here we are-

“After penalties,” Richard’s mustache continues, “taxes, commissions…”

“Wait.” I look down at the check again as Richard stands. “You took a commission? Do travel agents take commissions on flights that go down?”

Richard ignores my choice metaphor. He apologizes, then walks me to the lobby and asks me how everything else is going-which is a bit like asking the Prime Minister of Poland how everything else is going in the fall of 1939-you know…other than the Nazi invasion. I tell Richard that, all in all, I’m not in a bad mood-probably because I got high at a 7/11 last night.

“You got high at a 7/11?”

“Well, we actually got high in my car, and at this apartment building. But I had an amazing burrito at the 7/11 afterward. You can’t believe the pot they have now, Richard.”

“Yeah, I know,” he says. And then, he leans in and sort of wistfully, adds: “It’s supposed to be a myth, the increased potency.”

“It’s no myth.”

“No.” He smiles. “No myth.”

And then something hits me. “Wait. You smoke pot, Richard?”

“Now and then,” he admits. “When I can get it. Doesn’t everyone?”

“I didn’t.” And I tell him how it had been at least fifteen years, how I assumed that, after Lisa and I had two impressionable kids, two hypocrisy-sensing laser beams of sweetness, my weed-smoking days were long behind me.

Richard hums laughter. “Hey…I’ve got a question about that.” Then he looks both ways and leans in close. “Can you get me some?”

Outside, after the meeting, it’s cold-air crackling with the

sudden turn to late fall. Leaves are giving up, like newspapers, becoming insolvent all over the streets. I walk to the car. It was disconcerting at first, to be out in the world in the daytime, when everyone else was working. This is the first fall since I was fifteen I haven’t had a job of some kind. Sadly, I’m getting used to it. Right now the editors will be coming out of their budget meeting and the reporters will be trying to avoid their eyes, or pretending to be on the phone so they won’t get assigned a weather story (“Colder temps move in”) or a brief about last night’s trailer fire (“Suspected arson at mobile home park”) or a feature on the Eagle Scout who built a bike out of aluminum cans (“Recycled cycle leads to scholarship”).

I call Lisa from the car as I drive to Costco.

“Well,” she says, “How’d it go?”

“You know Richard,” I say, “always the optimist. Thinks we should invest in cyanide.”

Polite laugh.

“Would you have ever guessed Richard is a weed smoker?”

“How did that come up at a financial planning meeting?”

“I don’t remember.”

“So what’s his advice?”

“Well, first, we can’t panic…and second…if we were going to eat one of the children, which one would you pick?”

Lisa laughs a little more heartily; her voice always gets lower, throaty, when she thinks something is genuinely funny. It’s very hot. “I suppose the older one,” she says. “That little one looks gamy.” And suddenly I’m filled with warmth and sadness and I am rushed with nostalgia-for the marriage I’m still in. I can’t believe how much I want this woman and it kills me-kills me-knowing what I know.

This: Right before I went to 7/11 for milk last night, I considered telling her about the letter from the mortgage company. But

when I went upstairs she was asleep. I signed onto her FaceBook page (it had taken me three days to figure out her password) and saw that she’d put up a better picture of herself with her cute new pixie haircut (a picture I took) and I also saw that she’d been carrying on a three-day “chat” with an online buddy named Chuck, which, not coincidentally, is the name of her old high school boyfriend, a guy I was never jealous of before, because, frankly, Chuck sounded like a bit of a chuck, and not like the sensitive, successful guy he turns out to be, at least in the online realm. The subject of this chat seemed to be the flat parallel trajectories of Chuck’s and Lisa’s mildly disappointing lives (“ever wake up and wonder what happened”)-lives that must’ve seemed boundlessly perfect when they were eighteen, sneaking off to his parents’ lake place to squirrel their boundlessly perfect young bodies into positions that I’d give anything to replicate. And it seems clear from their familiarity that this was not the first chat between Lisa and Chuck, not the first time the sad subject of their sad lives has come up. As the FaceBook conversation continued, Lisa and Chuck went back and forth about themselves (“trying to get back in shape” “Y? U look great”) and their jobs (“not the best time to be looking for something” “but U R so talented”) people from high school (“Dana looks like a manatee-ooh, that’s mean” “U could never be mean”) and while it was all vaguely above-board, it also felt…I don’t know, intimate…and then Chuck wrote, “Temted to get all hot and steamy agin” as if the very words made him too worked-up to type straight and she ignored his misspellings and suggested two simple letters, “TM?” and either she was trademarking his stupid sexy-talk or, more likely, suggesting that he should take his nastiness to the text messaging world-agin-so she could see it right away-agin!-huddled over her cell phone, breathless, in our bed…

…while I cluelessly watched sports highlights with my buggy old father-agin-who responded to every Colts highlight by re

minding me how good Unitas was, every Eagles highlight by remarking what a slow stiff Jurgensen turned out to be-as if quarterbacks were declared extinct in 1968…

…and I saw that I couldn’t tell her about the house, at least not yet, not after coming across the trail of this crushing deception, because God knows I’ve flirted and daydreamed and committed a thousand tiny betrayals-but…this tore me up…my broken little black heart bleeding out through my mouth and my eye sockets and my asshole and…

…I’m dying here. Of emotional Ebola. And I just wish the little bugs would get it over with and gobble me all up, so that I could stop suffering, because I know the world goes on without us; my mother taught me that; it goes on and on, turning us over like broken sod. And hell, maybe it’s nothing, a little late-night nasty smack-smack talk between old lovers-harmless! But agin? Agin? And when I imagined my wife’s narrow tapering back in our bed last night, cute face bathed in the blue light of a nasty cell phone message from the boy who used to sleep with her-Jesus, it hurt more than I could bear…and that…

that…

that

…was when I went out for milk and ended up baking my wounded skull.

Of course, this is just the kind of melodramatic, twisted logic I will refuse to accept from my boys when they are teenagers. (You went out and got high with delinquents because you were jealous of your girlfriend? Do you know how stupid that sounds?) But last night I did just that, went to the 7/11 and, sulking over my wife’s flirtation with her old boyfriend and the knowledge that I was losing her house, I fried my nut with the delinquency dream team.

On the phone now with Lisa, I don’t tell her that Richard says the house is almost certain to go to the bank. And I certainly don’t mention her “chat” with Chuck. And I definitely don’t confess my emotionally retarded response. Instead, as I pull into the Costco parking lot, into this temple of buy-bulk-big-box consumerism at the opening bell of a planetary recession, I take a moment to simply pass along to Lisa our pothead financial guy’s more mundane recommendations, the long list of luxuries we can do without in the upcoming belt-tightening: “Richard says we should cancel cable and get rid of the Internet,” I say, with no small amount of conniving joy. “We sure as hell can’t afford these cell phones anymore.”

“I don’t know if I can live without a cell phone,” Lisa says after a moment.

“Well,” I say, and I laugh giddily, “I guess we’re just gonna have to find out.”