Jess Walter - The Financial Lives Of the Poets

My knees lock. “Oh.”

“She’s pretty sure she can’t.”

“Ah.”

“You could probably still go. You just might not be able to sit with us.” And Lisa shrugs, pretends to go back to her magazine, phony nonchalance. She’s steady, unmoving, but beneath the covers I can see that she’s wiggling her toes nervously. God. She really wants this. That’s what hurts. What’s the last thing I remember her wanting this badly? Oh yeah. The house.

How do you know when you’ve gone too far? When you can’t go back? I think of my home from the alley again. Sometimes you can’t get back in. You just have to live outside for a while. “You know what? You guys go ahead. I’ll stay home, save us the cost of a babysitter.”

“Are…Are you sure?”

“Go. Have fun.”

I grab my jacket and wallet, trying to keep my hands from shaking.

“Where are you going?” she asks.

I don’t even turn back. “We need milk.”

IDON’T KNOW WHAT I expected-no

maybe I do, Al Pacino from Scarface -

but this drug dealer is more like Al Pacino

at the beginning of The Godfather

reasonably bemused, untouched by his

criminal world, sitting with Diane Keaton

whispering about Luca Brazzi, not yet asleep

with the fishes, or like Al Pacino

from Glengarry Glen Ross, although actually,

now that I think about it, he’s not

like Al Pacino at all but more like

Kevin Spacey from that film, and who’s

ever been afraid of Kevin Spacey?

“Okay, then,” says the drug dealer, whose name is Dave. He’s probably thirty, with short hair and deep acne scars. He wears a sports coat over a button shirt, and I think, Hell, since I took a buyout and stopped showering, I look more like a drug dealer than you. Then Dave stands and I get queasy, thinking: why is Dave the Drug Dealer standing? And it’s clear I should stand, too, when Dave gives a little roll with his hand and says, “Should we get to it?”

Preceding getting to it, I have so far on this night: (1) left home pretending to get milk again, leaving Lisa alone again so she could presumably scurry to the computer and email the Prince of Lumberland- He fell for the concert story. See you Saturday night and we will have sex (2) hurried to the 7/11 near my house, arriving promptly at 10 p.m. to find Jamie already there, bouncing in the cold drizzle, blowing on his hands, wearing not his silky sweat suit but a pair of dark jeans, a sweatshirt and a watchman’s cap that make him seem just a bit dangerous (3) driven in my car with Jamie to an even older, sadder neighborhood, where the blocks of huge 1890s Victorians have been split into unfortunate apartments-this particular house an old four-story beauty whose original grand floor plan is long gone, replaced by cubby apartments with mismatched numbers and letters hung on the doors, so that we somehow walk past Apartment 5 to get to Apartment G (4) met the owner of this cozy book-and-candle Apt. G, a tall, leggy, striking girl named Bea or maybe just the letter B or maybe the insect Bee, not sure, her long blond hair pulled in a ponytail, her no-doubt banging body effortlessly buried beneath a pile of tights and sweaters and scarves-she is a walking coat rack-and as we shook hands, Bea fixed me with the most alarming blue-eyed stare of my life, the kind of stare in which you think some potent subliminal message is being passed along (Run away with me or maybe just Run away), before Bea said she’d get out of our hair so we could “get to it” (5) waited about five minutes until Dave the nonthreatening Drug Dealer swept into Bea’s place, shook the rain off his overcoat, and I thought, what kind of drug dealer wears an overcoat, as I also noted that Dave has a key to Bea’s apartment, a fact that broke my pathetic little heart, since I had

decided to fall in love with Bea, and as Dave set his briefcase next to the couch, we engaged in a little political small-talk (like everyone I know, we seem to agree on everything) before Dave stood and said, as reported earlier: “Okay then. Should we get to it?”

And here we are, about to get to it.

The best part of Apartment G is Bea’s wall-length hot-English-major bookcase, filled with the comfortable spines of all of the books we were supposed to read in college but which we only got a few chapters into, and enough contemporary fiction to make it clear that reading is not just an assignment for lovely Bea. Alarmingly, though, on top of the bookcase there is also a family portrait of Bea with two just-as-striking blond-and-blue-eyed sisters and a pair of handsome proud Nordic parents, whose stares make me aware of the vast age difference between Bea and me, and I am profoundly ashamed to be here buying drugs in this girl’s apartment. What I’d really like to do, I think, is lie down on this couch and take a nap.

Jamie elbows me. I stand.

“Okay,” Dave says. “Take off your clothes.”

“My…”

“I need to make sure you’re not wearing a wire or anything.” And then he pulls out a small flashlight. “And I need to look up your ass.”

I turn to Jamie on the couch. He is surprisingly unsurprised, impressively unimpressed.

“What…would possibly be up my ass?”

Dave says, “It’s just a precaution I take.”

“I’m no expert,” I look over at Jamie, “but if I was wearing a wire up my ass, how would the police even be able to hear it? Wouldn’t it be muffled?”

Dave stares at me. I look over at Jamie again but he has picked up a copy of The Sun magazine and is flipping through it.

“I don’t understand,” I say.

“This is what I do,” Dave explains. “It’s the same search you’d get in prison. I do it to make sure people aren’t stealing from me. I might do it any time. You never know.”

“But…I haven’t even bought anything from you yet.”

Dave is starting to get a little more threatening. “And you aren’t going to buy anything until you take off your clothes and I get a look up that ass.”

I look over at Jamie again but he won’t meet my eyes. There’s a twitch in his neck tattoo.

So I take off my shirt and, for some reason, fold it before setting it on the arm of the couch. I try to remember the last time anyone has looked up my ass, which would be, oh, let’s see: never. I begin to unbutton my pants.

And that’s when Dave spits laughter. “I’m just fuckin’ with you,” he says.

My hands are still on the buttons of my pants.

“Man,” a disappointed Jamie says, “I can’t believe you were actually gonna let him look up your ass. What’s the matter with you? You some kind of ass exhibitionist?”

My shirt is off and my pants are two buttons down and I am dumbfounded. “You mean you don’t need…I don’t have to get undressed?”

“It just proves my point,” Dave says. “You can get people to do anything.”

I put my shirt back on, button my pants and we all sit again.

Then Dave picks up his briefcase and opens it on his lap. “Jamie says you need some pain relief.”

“Um, yeah.” I reach for my coat, which has the money in it. “Nine thousand dol-”

“Bup, bup!” Dave interrupts me. “I didn’t ask how much.” He

holds up his hand to stop me. “Wait… You brought the money with you?”

“Well…yeah.”

“First-I don’t handle money. And second-” He looks over at Jamie, shakes his head, and then back at me. “You brought nine grand to a meeting with someone you don’t know?”

“What if we were planning to rob you, Slippers?” Jamie asks.