The Financial Lives of the Poets Read Online Free PDF Page A

burning bright…
    Damn. What was I thinking about?
    Sprinklers? Internet? Forbearance? Unraveling? Slurpees?
    No, it is very good pot.

Social Networking
     
     
    M Y 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