Dear Money Read Online Free

within me and I now felt, when I watched him busily in his studio, like one of his strange visitors having a look, an outsider peering in.
    "I married an artist," he'd say to me. "You don't have a choice."
    Is that true, I'd wonder. Is that true? If I was not an artist, then it was not true. And so here I was in this mess, a quandary of my own inelegant design. To make matters worse, I had not shared much of our money woes with Theodor. Rather, I kept assuming the tides would turn for him, for me. But I had published enough books by now to know what to expect, to know better than to trust in all that. Thus the systems that made our life possible and easier all lined up in front of me like those overused domino tiles waiting to topple even if only one should fall.
    The Chapmans knew none of this: that I could not afford the babysitter (with us eight years), the private school, the out-of-network doctors (my older daughter suffered from asthma and we didn't have dental insurance), Theodor's studio, my office, the dinner parties I liked to have, the lessons for the girls—piano and skating and swimming and tennis and soccer and lacrosse. ("Mommy, can I take gymnastics too?") I couldn't afford the expensive notions of the other mothers who'd catch you up in their whims, assuming you had as much money as they—private yoga instruction for the kiddies in their private gyms. The girls needed none of it, I knew that, but how could I tell them we could not afford it? Because I had failed? Failed by introducing them to a life that actually did not belong to them, that was a lie?
    The problem of the artist who collects millionaires is that after a while you forget you can't live like them. The Chapmans didn't know that catastrophe loomed before me. If a change in our financial circumstances didn't happen fast, our daughters would be yanked from their nurturing school and placed in the terrible school in our catchment (the word alone sounded like some sort of horrid Dickensian workhouse for children), the one that I passed every day on the way to my office and that reminded me of a prison, riddled with the horror stories of New York public schools—drugs, guns, sex in the stairwells, overcrowding. "Oh, but it's getting better," the private school mothers declared in the park, with a nod of affirmation to the idea of public school. They espoused other progressive, open-minded, liberal ideas. They voted for Democrats and against school vouchers, and in most other things embraced a charming, witty, ironic sense of their own exceptionalism—a condition, perhaps, of their residency on an island of exceptions, subclauses and sneaky provisos double-parked off the midatlantic coast.
    What the Chapmans didn't know, above all else, was that if things didn't change, and soon, I would have to give up on myself, on the dream of believing that I had made it or could make it, the artistic life so lauded by those who do not live it. In Wall Street terms I had chosen risk for Theodor and me; we'd gone long on ourselves, invested all we had in ourselves, and the investment was not paying off. We had not hedged. We were driving fast, one hundred miles per hour in our seemingly fancy life, but we were heading toward a brick wall.
    Even so, I hoped, pumping and puffing and stretching the borders of reality, a kind of insanity. I hoped.
Generation of Fire
was a big book for my small publisher, the new and rising Leader Inc. Books—five bestsellers in the past three years. A "breakout book," they called my novel. They bought it when it seemed no one else would have it. And Hollywood had expressed interest in the dramatic rights. Streamline Productions and Atomic Pictures and Boss Brothers, names cast about like so many diamonds spraying light. Foreign sales were lining up nicely, nibbles on the line. The publisher was hoping for an excerpt in
The Literary Review.
    It was all but a slam dunk. I was high. The editor and the head of publicity