Jess Walter - The Financial Lives Of the Poets

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 doctors are right: it is a good sign that he’s remembering at all, connecting images or things to his past, building himself out of the things he no longer has. And so I don’t take it personally, I just lodge my mental guess…I go with the odds: “Chipped beef?”

“Rockford Files,” Dad says.

It is garbage night in America, the night I glide room-to-room emptying plastic garbage cans and get the full measure of what’s really going on in my family’s life. No surprises in the kitchen can-except more banana peels than I remember us having. This is the problem with our cultural paranoia: something as harmless as extra banana peels can send the addled mind a-reeling (…playing off the sweet memory of their pet name for his lumber, Chuck sends Lisa a bouquet of bananas to her office…). The bathroom bucket has nail clippings, toilet paper tubes, disposable razors and the forensic clues to that still mysterious world of feminine-parts care; it’s depressing to think of these cycles of male and female hygiene, to imagine landfills full of the shit it takes every day just to keep us all fresh, un-rank, wiped and de-whiskered. In Teddy’s room, the basketball hoop garbage can reveals what I have suspected: dude’s hitting his Halloween candy a little harder than he’s supposed to. It’s a killing field of Reese’s, Sweetarts and Musketeers. Franklin’s garbage can is like the kid himself, heartbreaking-a half-eaten sneaked sucker thrown away in guilt, a pair of crapped underpants he hoped to hide, a scary picture of a monster he’s torn from a book.

It’s 9:30-thirty minutes until my meeting with Pablo Escobar. Both boys are asleep, sprawled across their beds like window jumpers splayed on a sidewalk. I pull the covers over them. Teddy’s hair is in full revolt on his pillow. I smooth it down.

In our bedroom the garbage can is empty, and while I’m not above assigning meaning to this fact, in my overheated season of allegorical discontent I can’t quite decide whether an empty can symbolizes a bankrupt marriage or the withheld nature of our relationship, i.e., that we’re not even sharing our garbage with one another.

Lisa is in bed already, her reading glasses low on her nose as she flips through a magazine. Apparently, there will be no phone texting tonight. Maybe Chuck has his kids. Or maybe there was a band-saw accident at work and he lost his fingers and can never type again.

“I was thinking…if it’s okay,” Lisa says, without looking up from her magazine, “I might go see a concert with Dani on Saturday.”

I stand there holding my bag of shit. “With Dani?” And I remember Dani last night: So romantic and Are you going to do it?

“Yeah.” No eye contact. “She asked if I wanted to.”

“What concert?” I ask, as if she’d start down this road without a cover story.

She mentions the name of a band I don’t know: “Blue-Eyed Jesus? Supposed to be good. Kind of alt-country…Wilco-ish.”

“Oh sure,” I say, pinned. “Blue-Eyed Jesus. Yeah, they’re good. No, you should do that. It sounds fun.” And then, devilishly: “I know how much you love Wilco.”

Lisa hates Wilco.

“No, I just thought a concert sounded fun. And since Dani has an extra ticket, it wouldn’t cost us anything.”

“No, you should go. I’d go if I had the opportunity.”

“Oh. Did you…did you want to go?” She glances up at me. My God, we change. Arms go flabby, guts grow, hair gets gray; everything changed on those two people whose eyes met at that press conference; everything, that is, but their eyes. Hers look

away.

And I pretend to consider it. “Maybe.”

“I would have asked you,” she says, “but I know how much you hate concerts.”

I do hate concerts. I have hated them ever since we went to an outdoor festival once and were nearly trampled to death. I hate paying three times the cost of a CD just to stand in an unruly crowd and think one of two things: (A) this song sounds just like it does on the CD or (B) this song sounds nothing like it does on the CD.