Jess Walter - The Financial Lives Of the Poets

I drive through a forest of leftover political signs, red and blue and black and white and good and evil; the experts say we are polarized again, but I think we’ve become bi-polarized, and I leave the parking lot, pull out into the world, merging into something larger than myself, perhaps bleeding into the flow of history as we’re on the verge of…

What? What was that? I lost it. Shit. A merge on the verge of the surge of…Tyger! Tyger! burning bright…

Damn. What was I thinking about?

Sprinklers? Internet? Forbearance? Unraveling? Slurpees?

No, it is very good pot.

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…”).