Jess Walter - The Financial Lives Of the Poets

clothes she couldn’t afford, and at the world, for excluding her from its best things. This was before I realized that Lisa would always take issues of wealth and poverty personally, before I understood that, while she loved me, Matthew D. Prior didn’t exactly allay her deepest fear about being stuck with a breadwinning failure…(or, perhaps she fell in love with me because of that, because I remind her of dangerous old Walter).

Maybe we are drawn to our own destruction, pulled into our own 7/11s.

Where is she? The clock on the kitchen wall says five minutes to ten. I look out the window, past my tiny reflection, into the black backyard. I knew two years ago that this would be a difficult time for Lisa, watching me quit my job to venture into something as unlikely as a financial poetry website. But how could I know the economy would go this far south, that I’d get laid off from the job I scurried back to, or that our house would lose nearly half its value. Or maybe I didn’t care (…we are drawn to our destruction). I recall once watching Teddy, when he thought no one was looking, staring at a cup of milk on the edge of the counter. Inexplicably, he gave the cup a little nudge. Or it wasn’t inexplicable…these cups sit on the edges of counters and sometimes you just can’t help yourself.

Finally, a few minutes after ten, headlights come down the alley. I watch the garage light come on. And three minutes later, my cheating wife comes in the back door.

She’s wearing a plaid skirt, too…must be in style. And even if her legs lack some of the tone of Ms. Bishop’s, they are great legs, and they are the legs I’m married to, legs I’d wrap around my waist if they’d have me. She’s also wearing a red, wool beret. The cap is not something I’ve ever seen Lisa wear and the sight of it breaks me a little, as if she’s on her way to becoming someone else, top-down. A gift from Chuck, maybe? As if reading my thoughts, she sets the

cap on the counter.

“Thanks for putting the boys to bed.” Lisa looks through the mail: But she seems too nonchalant, even as she flips through the catalogues, as if even they have no power any more (in love maybe?) her good mood pissing me off. “Any news from school?” she asks.

And I realize this is exactly what I’ve been lying in wait for, and I try not to sound too pleased with myself as I lay out the whole while-you-were-out-doing-God-knows-what-I-had-to-deal-with-keeping-this-family-together clacker incident, and maybe it goes on thick, maybe even embellished-the ferocity of Franklin’s attack, severity of the school’s reaction, passion of Franklin’s crying afterward-but I’m feeling desperate and I hope that ten logs of pure-grade guilt will shock Lisa out of this thing that she’s on her way to doing to our family. Indeed, she covers her mouth and shakes her head as I tell the story.

“My God, Matt. Why didn’t you call me?”

I shrug. “You said you had plans tonight.”

“And…you didn’t think I could take a phone call?”

I give another passive, wounded shrug. “I didn’t know what you were doing. I didn’t want to interrupt if it was something important to you.”

It is this to you that I hope will sting. I look down at the table.

“Interrupt…what…what do you… interrupt?” She stares at me in disbelief. “You knew what I was doing. I told you a week ago. I was at Karen’s candle party!”

Candle party? And now that she mentions it, I do remember something about candles…I quickly look for refuge from my own guilt, something to be mad about: those candle parties always start at seven, which doesn’t explain why she wasn’t home for dinner. “All night?” I ask desperately.

Lisa turns away. Hands shaking, she pours herself a cup of

coffee, but throws it in the sink, cup cracking in the basin. “It was a fucking candle party, Matt!” She turns to me, eyes red and teary. “You want me to feel shitty about going to a candle party?”

I open my mouth to say something, but nothing comes.

“Because I do! Okay? Happy? I feel awful. I felt awful sitting there with all those women ordering candles and drinking wine and talking about where they were going for the holidays. I could feel their pity, Matt! They were sitting there feeling sorry for me. And do you know why? Because they know I can’t even buy a fucking candle, because…because-” She covers her mouth and cries silently. I sit at the table, staring into my coffee.

We both know why she can’t buy a fucking candle.

My mom used to describe Lisa with the best praise she could ever heap on another person. Matty’s wife, she would say, now there’s a woman who is put together. To my mother, the best men were “real gentlemen” and the best women were “put together.” Oprah Winfrey? “Put together.” Hillary Clinton? “Really put together.” My oldest sister’s mother-in-law? “Likes to think she’s put together.” And while my dad would scoff (his stripper friend Charity, now there’s a woman put together, surgically so), Mom merely meant by the phrase that a certain woman was successful, sure-of-herself, composed. All those things Mom believed she wasn’t; all those things she wanted to be.

When Lisa went back to work and couldn’t find a job, I thought about Mom’s pet phrase. And I thought about it again almost a year ago, when-in the fog of poetfolio.com -I happened to get the mail and saw a bill from MasterCard. It wasn’t the URGENT stamp on the bill that got my attention; while I paid the mortgage, Lisa took care of the monthly bills, and I knew she sometimes mugged Peter to pay Paul. It was the fact that we didn’t have a MasterCard. We had Visa. As it turned out, we had both now, and Discover, too, and all

three were maxed out. I went out to the garage, where the boxes had been piling up-investments, Lisa called them-and I started opening them, porcelain dolls and commemorative plates and limited edition plush toys. After five or six, I stopped. None of this was secret. I’d seen the boxes. And she’d tried to tell me about the online “business” she’d read about-buying collectibles on eBay, holding them for a few years as their value increased, then reselling them on craigslist (or maybe it was vice versa). Deep in my own delusions, I’d only pretended to listen, so I missed the desperation and envy in the way she described people who made a living buying and selling such crap online, and I completely missed the fact that my wife-who, an hour later stood in front of me, weeping (it just got away from me, Matt) -was suffering deeply, unsure of her place in the world, of her value, pathologically afraid that the solid man she’d married was morphing into her irresponsible father-and that she felt she needed to do something immediately to take care of herself.

Here’s the thing: if you’re put together, you can also come apart.

Now Lisa stands in our kitchen, leaning on the sink. She sets her face, shakes her head without looking at me and leaves the room. In the TV room, she offers a flat “Hi Jerry” to Dad, whose voice cracks raspy and urgent, like a man dying of thirst: “I miss chipped beef!”

“I know that, Jerry,” she snaps, and then, softer, “I’m sorry.” And then Lisa goes upstairs, and after a minute, I hear her gentle, sweet voice in Franklin’s room-just a low hum, I can’t make out any words; this goes on for several minutes, punctuated a few times by Franklin’s voice, first frantic and then high, then low, easier-muffled jazz horn of comfort. Lisa won’t make more of this than she should. She’s good that way, good with them, a genius of per

spective and calm. I know Franklin must feel better, and I feel another rush of jealousy. I want that comfort, that voice. Then I hear her feet pad across the floor upstairs and the toilet flushes and there’s more padding and the door opens on the office-my eyes tracing her movements in the lines in the ceiling, as if I could see through the floorboards to the world where Lisa lives now, and then I hear the first, faint clacks of computer keys. (U will never guess what he did now…)