"Huh, " I said, drawing a little smiley face on the glass pane. "That sounds grandiose."
I don't know about money. I don't care about money. I'm not trying to be cool; this is not some posture. The acquisition of wealth is genuinely disinteresting to me, perhaps because I have never been (or been related to) someone who managed to pull it off. The acquisition of wealth is so genuinely disinteresting to me that I owe the U.S. government a cool $30,000 in back taxes. (Yes, I'm on a payment plan, and no, I will not pay it off before 2017.) I have four credit cards, nearly every one of them maxed out at a colossal twenty-seven percent interest rate. All of this — the debt, the disinterest, the smug entitlement to a life I could not afford — came crashing down on me last April (Tax Day!), coincidentally the same month the man I planned to marry left me, the same month I was forced to move to a new apartment, the same month my job became unexpectedly tough, even panic-inducing. It was a shitty month. Actually, it was a shitty five months. And perhaps that helps explain my impulsive behavior that night. Having lived inside a suffocating fog of anxiety and sadness for so long, I felt like I suddenly had nothing but oxygen to breathe.
Anyway, months before my friends and fellow Americans started "tightening their belts" — or, at least, months before The Today Show started running regular segments about Americans tightening their belts — I started living more frugally. I brought frozen dinners to work while the rest of the staff ordered delivery; I took subways while friends piled into cabs; I brewed coffee at home, washed my own laundry instead of dropping it off like I always had. Wah-wah-wah, I know, what a bunch of privileged first-world bullshit. Starving children are picking grains of rice off the ground in Haiti; so sorry you've had to skimp on sushi. And, by the way, this attitude is a good one — even though the shift felt like deprivation at the time, I have come to believe that this life of minor sacrifice and conservative spending is the one I should have always been lucky enough to live. Which is why, when Wall Street imploded, I could not find even a dusty corner in my capacious heart for the playboys who lost millions. Sorry you'll have to sell your yacht, dude. Sucks to fly business class. In other words: Boo-fucking-hoo.
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A friend joked to me the other day that she was going to start hiding her money underneath her mattress. And come to think of it, I'm not even sure it was a joke.
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So when Billy told me he was responsible for the market crash, it just sounded so typically Wall Street. It's the kind of narcissistic hyperbole that I have come to expect from the (mostly white, mostly male) self-appointed masters of the universe. It takes a staggering chutzpah, a seriously inflated sense of self-worth to believe that you — little you, insignificant you — could have even a tiny hand in bringing down the global economy. But I figured there was something to it, something I didn't particularly care about, and I left it at that.
Besides, I didn't want to talk about the stock market. Not just because it was confusing to me, and boring to me, but because the subject had become bleak and desperate and frightening, even. Do I even need to explain that? A friend joked to me the other day that she was going to start hiding her money underneath her mattress. And come to think of it, I'm not even sure it was a joke.
We got back to my place, and I smoked a few more of his cigarettes while we drained the beers left in my fridge. I propped my heels up in his lap and he stroked my bare legs. And at some point, we had sex. We had a sex a few times, actually. Took a bath together. Drank some Gatorade. Had sex again. And I remember thinking, around dawn, I'm either going to marry this guy, or I'm never going to see him again. It really could only go one of two ways.
And as far as marrying him goes — well, he was a sweet guy. I could do much worse. He was adorable in a buttoned-down, slightly nerdy way, and he seemed to have a good heart. He talked warmly about his mother. He kissed my nose tenderly when I said something that struck him as cute. When we ran out of condoms, he insisted on walking to the store in the middle of the night to buy more. (Perhaps this will not win any "Boyfriend of the Year" awards from Oprah Winfrey, but all I can say is that I was certainly not schlepping down to the bodega for some rubbers at four A.M.) The sex wasn't fantastic, exactly — in my experience, sex with a man I am not in love with is never "fantastic, exactly" — but it was nice, and it felt good and natural, none of that annoying jackhammer business that men too often think I enjoy.
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, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
