Jess Walter - The Financial Lives Of the Poets

Lisa closes her magazine. “You want me to look for a sitter, then?”

Here we are. Our poker hands on the table. Antes in. Time to either bet my bluff or get out of the way. Or…wait…“Can I think about it?” I lug my bag of trash downstairs, happy with myself for my open-ended play. This is what we call a check in poker-the third way.

I stack the recyclables on top of our wheeled garbage container and push the whole thing through our leafy backyard toward the alley. The truly undesirable part of our undesirable neighborhood begins at the alley behind our big house; our alley is the DMZ of gentrification. Everything in front of the alley, like our house, has come around, owners tidying up lawns, painting, planting and putting on new roofs, parking new cars in driveways. Behind the alley is an unsettling world of chipped-paint, junk-cars and sofas-on-porches, and it’s not uncommon to see police lights strobe the clapboard rentals or to hear loud reports of drunk love- Get your fat ass inside for dinner, Damien! -that make Lisa and me feel pathetically superior about our more-sober parenting style. (And yet, I’ll bet most of those screamers have jobs.)

I push the garbage into the alley and turn back toward my home-

My home…

God, this view is breathtaking. This is the view that sold us on the place. The homes on the front of our block sit on wide lots and I still lose my breath at this angle of my house, from deep in the backyard: a long, gently sloped hill leading to big majestic maple trees on either side of our angular, two-story, 1917 Tudor, a streetlight on the corner, and the mist of late October rain bands the street with fog so that our big brick house glows in soft light like a movie set of Old London. From back here, the money and stress, the lifetime of work it will take to pay for this place (I remember calculating the total we’d pay over thirty years and feeling sick) almost seems worth it. Up close, the clinker brick and uneven roof make our house look like it was drawn by the unsteady hand of a child, but from back here, if you squint, there is the faint line of a country manor. This is the house we fell in love with, Lisa and I-the house that has become, in every way, the third party in our marriage, the very sort of big drafty place we always saw each other in when we imagined our married adult lives.

I wonder if a house has ever represented as much as it does now, for people like Lisa and me. It has been the full measure and symbol of our wealth and security over the last few years; every cent we threw into it and every cent we took out, seemed so smart, like such a good bet. Every time we got ahead, we borrowed against the thing to remodel, and every time we remodeled the thing we congratulated ourselves on our wisdom, and every time we saw a house go up for sale on our block (They’re asking three-eighty-five and it’s half the size!) we became like derivative-crazed brokers; we stopped thinking of the value of our home as a place of shelter and occupancy and family-or even as the aesthetic triumph witnessed from our alley-but as a kind of faith equation, theoretical construct, mechanism of wealth-generation, salvation function on a calculator, its value no longer what it’s worth but some

compounded value that might exist given the continued upward tick of the market, because this was the only direction housing markets could ever go: up. All the geniuses said so. If housing had survived the dump of the technology bubble and the brief realization after 7/11 that we weren’t alone in the scary, scary world, then what could possibly stop its march? In eighty years, the geniuses told us, actual housing values had only fallen once. One time in eighty years? I can still close my over-leveraged eyes and hear two decades of such party talk: real estate is the only safe bet; real estate can only go up; they aren’t making any more real estate.

Yesterday, Dad and I watched a news story about half-empty subdivisions in Nevada and California, dead sprig saplings slumped in the rolled seams of sun-fried sod, backyard pools green with neglect, swarming with clouds of malarial mosquitoes visible over cedar fences. Idiots, my father said, and while I wasn’t sure whether he meant the buyers or builders or the bugs, borrowers or banks, Congress or me, or people in general, how could I disagree? Idiots.

I’d love to go back to a 2004 cocktail party and beat those sure-sounding real estate idiot optimists to death with a For Sale sign. I’d take a good whack at myself, too, because while I suspect that housing prices will eventually bounce back (five years? ten?) I’m also sure of this: I’ll never fall in love again. I’ve lost my innocence. And my disappointment is not that my own home has lost half its value. What disappoints me is me-that I fell for their propaganda when I knew better, that I actually allowed myself to believe that a person could own a piece of the world when the truth is that anything you try to own ends up owning you.

We’re all just renting.

And this is how the poets failed us.

The poets were supposed to remind us of this, to regulate the existential and temporal markets (Let be be finale of seem./The only

emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.) and to balance real estate with ethereal states (One need not be a chamber to be haunted,/One need not be a house). Hell, we don’t need bailouts, rescue packages and public works. We need more poets.

Yes. Standing behind my own home like this, I imagine letting go of this dream of solvency…let it go…float away into the sky…let someone else live in the big house; I’ll live above the garage, finally get some sleep, spend the rest of my life as a simple servant (Matt? He’s our poet-driver), let the boys forget that I was once their father, now just the kindly old poet-driver who brings the car ’round front. Rest of the time I’ll disappear in my little writer’s garret, grow a goatee, write bad verse and smoke good weed until I can’t recall those people who loved me, or how much I owe on their big house ($485,592). Write during the day, and at night hang out with Skeet and Jamie, read them my poems while we fry our skulls and haunt Rahjiv’s convenience store aisles for Fritos. And this is such a pleasing thought-Fritos!-that of course my mind can’t hold it and it goes the last place I’d like it to go: Lumber-Chuck moving in, taking over the parenting, the payments, the pampering and pleasing of Lisa.

And that’s what finally snaps me out of my self-pitying funk. Not the thought of Chuck inside my house, but the thought of Chuck rooting around inside my wife snaps me out of this delusional hole, and I run across the backyard, ready to reclaim my house, my wife, my life. I’m suddenly aware again that the air is sharp and cold; winter’s here. A gun has gone off in my head and I know what to say: this is insanity, Lisa, this place we are going! We have to stop: dope dealer? Mistress of the Prince of Lumberland? No, no, no! Is this really who we are?

Who cares if we lose the fucking house next week? This house isn’t us. We are us. One need not be a house …So what…we default? Declare bankruptcy? Big deal. It doesn’t matter where we go,

what we do. Hell, I’ll wash dishes, tend bar. You can clean houses. We can take the kids out of school, walk away from this big house, drift. Go from town to town, see the world, work menial jobs. Live. Let be be finale of seem!

Through the kitchen, I take the stairs two at a time, fired up to reclaim my life: Damn it, Lisa. Why are we doing this? Come back-

But she looks up at me from bed and there’s something in her eyes that stops me cold. She closes her phone. She’s seen my earlier check and…she raises the value of the pot: “I called Dani. She doesn’t know if she can get another ticket for the concert.”