The Financial Lives of the Poets Read Free Page A

boots) flaring into an evolutionary fire that represents a near miracle of abstract comprehension, an Einsteinian leap of cognition: It is four-thirty in the morning. That means I can still make it home to watch my boys’ last hour of sleep.
    And in my mind, the Nissan Maxima of my responsibilities follows the Ford Festiva of my unraveling into this convenience store of realization:
    Hey!
    This is where they sell more milk!
    But that shit’s like nine dollars a gallon.
    Outside the store, Skeet and Jamie go off with the dude in the Festiva and I wave goodbye with my new white jug and I am in love with the predawn cool black, in love with my boys, in love with two percent.
    The drive home is glorious—streetlight rollers like tide at dawn.
    I blow laughter through my nose. Key in quietly. Like I’m sixteen again. My old senile father is asleep on the hide-a-bed in the living room, TV still on ESPN. This is what we were watching together when I left to get milk…almost four hours ago. Dad doesn’t stir. I try to take the remote control from him but he’s holding it against his cheek like a security blanket, so I turn off the set manually, old school. Every day now they show the top ten sports plays of the day—and I think: what if life was like this, and at bedtime we got to see our own daily highlights (No. 4: Skeet freaks over the microwave).
    Lug my jug to the kitchen, milk in the door of the fridge—the food inside is also glorious: cheese stick, martini olives— chomp, chomp —I eat shark-like, without conscience, hover upstairs to find Lisa in bed, tousled short hair clinging to the pillow. My wife, she is cute—everyone says so, but lately that word has carried a kind of accusing overtone, as if there might be something unsettling about a grown woman who retains her cuteness well into her forties; and maybe that’s our problem, maybe Lisa is too cute, curled up in her cute little ball, cute back to the profoundly un-cute space where I’m not sleeping. Her cute cell phone on her nightstand, where she no doubt set it after TM-ing her old flame…and I toy with waking her, begging for a little marital goodness— smack, smack —maybe we can fix this thing the way we fixed problems when we were twenty-seven, but we’re in a smack-smack dry spell, and according to an online chat of hers that I reconned earlier, she’s not a big Matt fan these days. Anyway, this might not be the best time to win my cute wife back, given my B.C. bud-and-burrito breath, and the fact that I haven’t told her that we could lose the house as early as next week. (I imagine breaking it to her as we fire a couple off— Yes, yes, yes! Uh-uh! That-feels-so-good-we’re-about-to-be-evicted!)
    So I step back into the hall; the boys’ rooms are across from one another, and I stand between them, fists on my hips. Sentry. Superhero. All I want is to keep them safe, healthy, fed. But with no job? No prospects? No money? No house? What did the man say— There is always hope, but not for us. Mouth dry. Head weighs eighty pounds.
    I look around at my house —for a while anyway—before it begins its journey back to Providential Equity, or whatever company buys the company that bought the company that bought the bundle of red bills in which ours is bundled. Or is that more melodrama, mere self-pity? (They don’t just take your house. They want you to pay. You’re just the sort of homeowner they want. They’ll do whatever they can to keep you here.) No, all I have to do is liquidate, get some money together, show good faith, get someone from the mortgage lender on the phone and convince them we need a little more time…that’s all…a month…what’s one month…a single month for a journalist in his mid-forties…to find a job…during a recession…with newspapers failing faster than investment banks.
    I slump against the wall, played out. Who am I kidding? I can’t save anyone. Maybe Skeet’s right. Maybe they are irradiating us;