Dear Money (10 page)

At the moment Theodor was working on a piece for a museum in Fort Worth that had been commissioned and funded by a venture capitalist who applied his knack for finance to his love of art. He, a large, boisterous and intelligent Texan who wore the boots, hat and bolo tie, was Theodor's patron. He was betting on Theodor as he would bet on an idea for a start-up. Initially he funneled plenty of money to the commission to pay for supplies and time and anything else, but now he needed to see results. He asked for them in a kindly way, and in a kindly way Theodor told him he needed more time; he'd rather get it right. The work was to be the centerpiece of an exhibition that the museum planned, a retrospective of Theodor's oeuvre. The museum intended to track down his work and take it on loan from the present owners. The show would include about thirty pieces and be a career maker—all of it instigated by the patron, Warren William Sullivan.

But the commission was not coming along well at all. Gold leaf on silver, extraordinarily expensive; and working with the gold leaf was like working with butterfly wings. Beyond that, I knew very little about the subject because Theodor never discussed what he was working on, only the struggles in the abstract. I did know we were out of pocket a lot of money now, and unless he could finish and be paid for the commission our bad financial situation would become even worse. "Don't worry," he would say. Once, long ago, he had said to me, when we were first starting out in New York, his black curls bouncing around his sculpted cheeks, "I'm going to keep wanting. That's what it's all about. Stay poor, my girl. Poor with me, to make this work."

"What do you want?" I asked him now.

"I want, and I have, you," he said, and he pulled me deeper against him.

In the morning I received more good news. Streamline Productions wanted to option
Generation of Fire
for film. The option was for $2,000, not much, but money all the same. The
Woman
magazine article would be about $4,500; the
Lit Review
excerpt could be as much as $8,000; several thousand for the three pending foreign sales. Yes, things were coming along quite smartly. In a small notebook I kept hidden in my desk, I wrote down the figures, adding up our potential extra income. All the zeroes smiled like round and jolly faces. And I didn't even include Theodor's commission or the possibility of the film's coming to fruition. On the first day of shooting we'd receive a check for $250,000. That sum sat in the back of my mind like a lozenge. Of course, I didn't calculate all of our expenses, all that we owed, the tuition bill that was coming due in September, Theodor's gold and jewels. Instead I met Lily Starr for lunch in midtown.

Lily and I had been to graduate school together, and since then she'd published no novels and I'd published my four, with the fifth imminent. In general, I did not like to surround myself with writers. I preferred the bankers and the ad executives and the lawyers for whom I was a curiosity and with whom I had no overt professional competition. But Lily and I had hung on to each other. We liked each other, but for her there was also a bit of envy and masochism—each of my successes a reminder to her of her inability to finish a book. And I'll confess: that inability of hers, and her envy, made me feel better about my own career and its degrading lack of sales. Things were about to change, with Lily's first novel publishing one month to the day before mine.

"They say publishing in the fall is the new spring. Everyone, all the big names, now pub in spring, so the fall's opened up again for fresh voices," Lily said.

We were walking up Park Avenue in the Fifties. We'd been together for an hour and I was beginning to feel that unease of writerly competitiveness. Ungenerously, I decided she had the irritating characteristic of pretending to be a novice even though she knew all about the business. She'd had years to study it, and believe me, she had been. What she knew made me jealous and fearful. She knew that a debut novel was a potent aphrodisiac to those in the industry. A first novel was a blank slate that an enormous career could be written upon. A first novel was the wildcard in the deck; it had the potential to become anything, everything. I was a known thing, harder and harder to launch. She was the new thing: a few smart words, a brilliant book jacket, and entry through the gates of Parnassus was hers.

Truth be told, Lily had been a good friend to me long ago, had read my first novel and encouraged me with every sentence, giving the first chapter to her boss when she worked as an intern at
The Barcelona Review,
and the boss had loved it and they'd published it, launching me into the New York literary scene. It was based on that chapter that my agent first contacted me.
Barcelona
had published three chapters from that novel, all while Lily slaved as a lowly intern, receiving high praise too, by the by, for having "discovered" me.

"Is that so?" I said about spring pub dates. I'd read her book,
You Didn't Want to Know,
and thought it good, in fact very good. But I also knew how hard it was to publish. Her book would languish out there with the rest of them, and she'd come to understand what it felt like to be an author—revered, hailed. Piccadilly was publishing it, and though they were the best for literary fiction (they'd published my second novel,
Scion),
I knew they gave little attention to unknown writers, let them sink or swim on their own. ("The book will abide," or some such, the publisher, the Dashing Cavelli, had famously said.)

Piccadilly had a reputation for doing nothing for the books. Indeed, their logo, a pair of trumpets, did everything for the books. I played up the air of indifference, as if publishing were rote, run of the mill, as if everything didn't depend upon it. It was a sweltering day and I wore an old sundress that I'd bought at Marshall's for $5. One of the shoulder straps was slightly torn. But it was a pretty dress, had once been stunning, and I'd prided myself on how good it looked for so little. In fact, with some other graduate school friends we had a running competition: who could buy the cheapest dress and look the most expensive. This particular dress made me look like an artist, I fancied, and a woman who looked fabulous in anything.

Then I saw it, the sign, big roman letters—two B's and an ampersand intertwined, the unmistakable logo of Bond & Bond Brothers. I had no idea it was here. I had thought all finance was centered around Wall Street, most of it anyway. Park Avenue, I now noticed, was thick with businessmen, and a few -women, dressed in their suits, marching between office and restaurant for the midday meal. The buildings loomed above us, terraced with gardens, trees spiking above steel and glass. There seemed to be a rhythm to the stride of the avenue, a steady beat, a pulse—the not so subtle pulse at our temples. The pulse of a flower emitting its fragrance, the fragrance of America. Flags fluttered like kites. A klatch of limos idled at the curbs. St. Bartholomew's Church seemed an oasis of reason in the midst of all the banks. Big bank after big bank, and then here we were beneath B&B, caught in its shadow.

A stream of taxis flowed by. One stopped in front of us. Lily said something that I did not hear, her voice small in the street. A woman stepped from the cab. She wore a nicely pressed, white linen suit, her dark hair swirled in an up-do, her eyes shaded by big black glasses, her lips a startling red. Under her arm was a folded
Wall Street Journal.
In her right hand she clutched a leather computer case. She slammed the cab door and disappeared into the revolving doors of the Winchester building.

"Do you know her?" Lily asked, gawking at me as I gawked at the woman.

"No."

"She's a different species. Can you imagine?"

"They're all a different species," I said, sweeping my arm around to include everyone walking down the street. I felt protective of the woman, but also smaller in my smart $5 dress. Why weren't we at our desks? Why were we out in the middle of a New York working day? I felt like a little girl, a truant.

"What a life," she said. "Every day I thank my lucky stars. Time is mine and I do what I dream."

I didn't say anything, but I thought, How naive. I looked up to the top of the building, then to the doors. When the doors opened, cool air gusted over us. Here the engines of commerce hummed. Mortgages were packaged, lumped into a vast money flow.

"Gorgeous," I said.

"Bond and Bond Brothers?" Lily asked with an incredulous huff.

"I met a trader who works there," I said.

"And—"

"And he propositioned me."

"You've got to be kidding." Then, "Attractive?"

"Not at all."

"And Theodor?"

We were walking again, but then Lily stopped me and looked me in the eye, all genuine concern, it seemed. I left the notion suspended for a moment so I too could live in the bubble of misperception. Imagine:
India Palmer on the verge of an affair with
a billionaire banker
Even the best of us loves gossip. I certainly did. Gossip was storytelling, after all.
And what about adorable Theodor? I knew they'd married far too young. Two artists? It just is not possible.
I looked at Lily, letting her eyes try to read mine. She was a pretty girl with high cheeks and a sweet oval face with all its features neatly arranged, as if someone had placed each one there carefully, by hand. She was short and a little chubby, but her body was incredibly strong and agile, able to contort into difficult yoga positions.

"Not that kind of proposition," I said finally.

Why weren't we talking about Duchamp and Mina Loy and Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams? Why weren't we discussing the history of the novel or Thackeray's cynicism or Eliot's objective correlative or Dreiser's patience? Why weren't we competitive with our knowledge and our artistic desires? Why weren't we sharing ideas and thoughts of work? Deciphering the struggle, making it urgent and necessary? Why weren't we creating our own
ism,
an aesthetic revolution like those other aesthetic revolutionaries who came before us and paved the way for what we try to write now?

Before kids, before now, before life got in the way, we'd spent long evenings with our grad school friends parsing the structure, the very sentences of the works of little-read novelists like Heinrich von Kleist. Sure, we'd been interested in his biography, his double suicide with his terminally ill lover on the shores of Lake Wannsee. Sitting in one of our gloomy apartments, drinking cheap wine, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, so very very late, we had all agreed that we'd be successful if we didn't kill ourselves by thirty-five. But we'd also cared about how Kleist had made the work happen, how he'd managed the famous first sentence of "The Marquise of O—." An Italian woman of unblemished reputation finds herself mysteriously pregnant and places an ad in a local paper with the hope of learning the identity of the father. Now that's a brilliant plot, and it was held in one burst of a sentence, an opening sentence. An explosion of curiosity, every part of the sentence made you want to know more. If your character must want something, the reader must too. Why, at the very least, weren't we talking about the wars? There were two wars going on, and no one seemed to be aware. Who and what had we become? But it wasn't any of that that came from my mouth. I thought of a talented and acclaimed writer I knew who, at a book party for her new novel, wore a black dress with straps that cut across the wings of her shoulder blades, accentuating her fine muscle tone. I admired the dress. She said, "I love publishing a book most of all because it's an excuse to shop."

We slipped over to Madison as I described Win and his proposition. The street smelled of perfumes blasting from the doors of the expensive stores. People walked fast, eager, anxious, a ferocity propelling them down the street, passing newsstands and newspaper vending machines, the headlines announcing military and civilian death tolls, troops searching for the missing, car bombs, suicide bombers, training camps in Afghanistan. The smell of lemons and honey-roasted peanuts, the sighing of buses coming to a stop. A woman rushed past me, knocking her Chanel shopping bag against my hip. She turned, sneered, continued on. Horns and sirens and all those beautiful stores, like pretty flowers so carefully arranged.

I loved giving Lily the details, resurrecting the evening in Maine—the crystal flutes imported from Manhattan for the champagne—a world far removed from the one we lived in that was glamorous and somehow easy in that it was rid of so many concerns. Lily Starr had two kids and a husband who taught in a public high school. They crammed into a one-bedroom apartment that she referred to as a mini-loft. Great location on Riverside Drive and they owned it. But their ticket out, like ours, had always been and still was her novel. She'd been writing it for fifteen years. For fifteen years she'd done what all of us writers so pathetically do with our humongous egos. She'd believed that a novel, her novel, could defy the novelists' track record for dying unknown and impoverished. She'd believed. We all believed. And why not?

"India Palmer: bond trader, mortgages. Bond, James Bond," Lily said. "What is a bond, anyway?" she asked. Her eyes were a bright blue, sparkling as she had fun with this notion in a way that reminded me of why I always adored her. She was fun. She could look down the road and fully imagine it, decorate it with all the details and then decide, all in an instant, if it added up. "Whatever a bond is, your trading them is an exquisitely stupid idea. Was he serious? Has he read your work?
Generation
is your best novel yet. I couldn't put it down."

She
has
read it, I thought, and a lovely sensation wafted over me. She still believed in me. My first review. I'd given it to her months ago in manuscript, but she'd said nothing.
Best novel
and
couldn't put it down
translated to: she loved it. Writers were like this; they always believed everything positive they were told—praise from their readers, their friends. When they say they love it, the writer never doubts. She believes she's a genius. She's brilliant. A shining star. She believes even though she knows how many times she has lied in the same circumstance.