What We Talk About When We Talk About Money

My personal essay, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Money" is just out in Salmagundi's 50th anniversary issue, along with a group of essays on the subject for which I was a guest editor, by Rick Moody, Phillip Lopate and Howard Norman.  Each piece is a striking testament to the elemental, immutable, sometimes harrowing power of money, to its fertility as a storytelling device, and to all the ways it makes us feel and act and think about ourselves, our families, and our place in the world.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Money
by Elizabeth Benedict

In this corner is my kindly grandfather, who liked to say, when

the subject of our not having enough came up, “It’s just money.” In the

opposite corner, a different message from my mother, who longed for so

much: “All you need is money.” When I was eight years old, I showed my

father an ad in The New York Times  for a dog coat at Saks Fifth Avenue

that cost nineteen dollars. I wanted him to be astonished with me, and he

was, sort of. “I wouldn’t pay nineteen dollars for a dog,” he spat.

I too was a small creature who needed a coat now and then -

needed him to buy me these coats, and I could see that he had attached

a monetary value to small creatures and their needs. This is no doubt the

unconscious reason I applied for my first job, at a greeting card store on

 the Upper East Side of Manhattan, at the age of nine. It would take a

few dozen years of therapy to make that connection. At the time, I just

thought it would be fun to be there, with the cheerful women owners and

the colorful decorations changing every month or two with the holidays –

more fun than our apartment, where bitterness and money troubles rocked

around the clock. Early on, I learned that the word itself — m-o-n-e-y

— is loaded, charged with everything human: longing, ambition, power,

comfort, success, failure, disappointment, loss, fear, shame, blame, and

rage. So loaded it might as well be a gun.

In Light Years, James Salter writes: “Life is weather. Life is

meals.” But no, life is money. Money and stories of money. Who among

us does not have a hundred of them? A thousand? Anecdotes, dominant
 narratives, comedies, tragedies, aphorisms, moral tales, and of course

jokes. They come bunched in themes. Wanting money. Needing money.

Feeling foolish for wanting more. Feeling crappy for not having it.

Fighting over it. Having it, then losing it. Getting too much too fast – all

those sad lottery stories that I read and think, I  wouldn’t do that  if I won

$400 million! Anger at those who have too much. At leaders who answer

only to money, who choose money over justice, corporations over people,

profits über alles.

Consider this: It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a

needle than it is for a rich man to get into heaven. No one says that anymore.

No one even knows what it means, so many people are so fucking

rich – Forbes  counted 1645 billionaires in 2014 – even in places where

everyone used to have the same amount of money or none at all: China,

Russia, India. And there’s this: As a general rule of etiquette, for whatever

that’s worth nowadays, we are not supposed to talk about money, not supposed

to say, “How much do you have?” or “How much do you make?” or

“Want to know what I’ve got?” Not supposed to, but many of us do, living

deep in the age of confession, of Internet aliases, of an endless stream of

TMI. I can click my mouse and learn how much my neighbor gave to a

political candidate. In twenty-five seconds, I can find out how much just

 about anyone’s house is worth, what their real estate taxes are, sometimes

even the size of their mortgage. N+1  produced an anthology, MFA vs NYC,

 about how writers support themselves these days. The contributors skew

young, as editors and writers for N+1  tend to, and in these pieces many

discuss the details of their financial lives, including the amounts of their

 advances and their rents, with a monetary candor we never got from Saul

Bellow, John Updike, or even the king of TMI, Philip Roth.

I learned in high school and college that novels are about money

and status. Gatsby , obviously. Pride and Prejudice –  maintaining the

property, marrying appropriately. Narratives are driven by plots involving

money – because so much of life involves those plots: the wanting, the

needing, the calamities that all this desire brings. Certain dramas – The

Merchant of Venice, A Doll’s House –  reek of money and the darkness of

debt. And then there are movies, noir and otherwise, where the hunger

for money drives more narratives than the pursuit of sex: bank heists,

blackmail, gambling, money laundering, marrying for money. How to

Marry a Millionaire. It’s a Wonderful Life. Bonnie and Clyde. Oceans 11,

12,  and 13.  In the list of symptoms for certain mental illnesses - bipolar

disorder, borderline personality disorder - two of them are overspending

and racking up debt. Does this mean that money is an illness – or just that

it drives us crazy?

What is it, after all? A concept. A system. A symbol. A value.

A commodity. A means of exchange. Sometimes an object: coins, bills,

cashier’s checks, plastic cards. It’s protean, it’s elastic, it’s fixed. It’s a

 lure, a comfort, a weapon, all of which gives it a lot in common with that

other cosmic trickster, sex. But it is not optional. You can choose where to

live, whom to marry, whether to be celibate, to shoot heroin or eat flowers,

 but you cannot opt out of submitting to the rule of money, whether it’s

US dollars or Kenyan shillings. It has been so essential for so much of

recorded history – arriving as soon as people produced more agriculture

than they could eat, and had a reason to sell the excess - it’s surprising

that the ancients did not include it in the list of essential elements: fire,

 water, earth, air, money. You are born and sooner or later – directly or

indirectly – it lands on you, a fishing net impossible to escape.

It took until 2000 for scientists to name the study of the effects

of money on the brain – “neuroeconomics” – and among the things they

learned is that the craving for it is located, along with most other cravings,

in the hypothalamus, or the ventral striatum, and the fear of not having

enough is located, along with most other fears, in the amygdala. While using

MRIs to study the brain, a Stanford scientist, Brian Knutson, saw that the

images that caused the most brain activity, more than sex and decapitated

bodies, were those involving money. An article in Forbes reports the MRIs

revealed that “offers of cash caused a surge of dopamine in a tiny piece of

neural machinery called the nucleus accumbens.” George Loewenstein,

a Carnegie Mellon economist quoted in the piece, tried to make sense of

the observations: “According to standard economic theory, money is a

means to an end. When you get money, you shouldn’t experience immediate

happiness. What all the scanning research is showing is that people

get immediate pleasure and pain from obtaining and losing money.” Add

to the MRI data whatever else we learn about money growing up – that

we’re entitled to it, that we don’t deserve it, that Dad ran off with what we

had – and it’s not surprising that it can easily send us over the edge, into

tailspins, fits of rage, revenge, despair, and/or greed that destroy families

for generations. Consider the divorce from hell or a will that ends up in

court.

 Like so many subjects that make us uncomfortable, it spawns

jokes. The best end up in combination with other subjects that make us

uncomfortable: marriage, divorce, religion. 1. Why is divorce so expensive?

Because it’s worth it. 2. Three Jews walking down a road see a sign on

a church: $100 to Convert. Harry decides to go in, and when he comes

out an hour later, his friends pepper him with questions. “Did you get the

money?” says one. Harry is indignant: “Money! That’s all you Jews think

about!”

All I think about is money. When I was in my twenties, there

was a joke going around - or maybe a real study — that went something

like, “Men think about sex forty times an hour. Women think about sex

twenty-two times an hour.” Whatever the numbers were. It was funny.

It was true. I probably think about money twenty-two to forty times an

hour. Sex, not so much anymore.

Until I was in my late thirties, I was an ordinary writer-artist-dunce

about money. I lived from book to book and scraped together small piles

from book reviewing, editing, and part-time teaching jobs. During the

time I wrote my second and third novels, I was married to someone who

had more money than I did. I wasn’t cunning about money, but I wasn’t

so dumb as to marry another near pauper, and during that time, I had good

health insurance and a nice place to live. After I got divorced, I made more

money teaching and writing books than I ever had. Later in the 1990s, I

had to take care of my ailing aunt, who had about $150,000 invested in

the stock market – and then my sick mother, who had $30,000 in CDs.

By that time, I owned a few shares of something or other, and

some retirement funds from teaching, and I grilled a wealthy cousin about

how to invest and manage this small fortune. I was serious about it, because

I had to be, and it took a lot of effort to figure out how to make my

 aunt’s and my mother’s money last, without just keeping it in a savings

bank. Then some good fortune came my way – a year-long contract to

write a monthly column for Japanese Playboy –  that turned into two years.

It was a phenomenal amount of money for cranking out a few pages of

silly, soft-core porn once a month. Earning and investing it added to my

sense of myself as a Person Who Knows About Money. I was in charge of three
accounts at Merrill Lynch and became a demon at reading the

monthly statements and calling my broker to discuss rates of return and

who knows what else. I need to call my broker,  I would say to whoever

was nearby. It was thrilling, like Halloween for kids. I could pretend I

was someone else entirely. Sorry, that’s my broker on the phone.

All of this coincided with the crazy rise in the stock market, when

millions of other dunces like me behaved like little John D. Rockefellers,

reading the financial pages, and becoming part of the “investor class,”

along with bus drivers, janitors, and high-flying high school students.

On a dinner date with an economist in 1999, trying to sound wise in the

ways of money, I said that I had “made some money in the stock market.”

Maybe he’d have some stock tips for me. Maybe we could swap. “That’s

not hard in this market,” he said drily.

I took the insult without flinching and did not regale this serious

 man with stories of my stock market hijinks. They had taken place in

the preceding months, on occasional visits to the apartment of my dear

friend – let’s call her P. She came from a working class family who knew

just enough to save well, and P. had recently inherited her share of the

savings. In the spirit of the times – which, if you recall, were frenzied

with the promise of a market that had no upper limit – she had gotten

into the habit of day-trading large quantities of stocks. I was trading

much smaller amounts, in less risky ways, but I got into the spirit of it

myself. P. is a serious person, but has a zany side too, and when we got

together for dinner, we talked about our investments – and all the money

we were making – with a feverish excitement and much out-of-control

laughter. We would often end up at her computer, where we did copious

amounts of research about the stocks we were planning to buy the minute

the market opened, so that we could sell them at huge profits later that

 day, or perhaps the following week. “I think I’ll buy two thousand shares

of this one,” she might say. “At what?” “Now it’s $4.50. It opened this

morning at $3.90. If I can buy it at $4.50 and it goes up two dollars, I can

make $4000 in a few days. Maybe I should buy four thousand shares. If

I sell the BQE – how much have I made on that?” “What’s BQE?” “It
 went up twenty dollars in the last two weeks.” “Why didn’t you tell me?

I would have bought some! What kind of company is it? Tech? Biotech?

Something else?” “Who knows what it is. If it goes up, we like it. If it

goes down—”

We laughed at our antics until we cried, laughed at what we

knew to be our hysteria, at the absolute insanity of what we were doing.

We played it like a comic routine, as though there were an audience. We

were Lucy and Ethel in the chocolate factory. We were – as it turned

out – Thelma and Louise about to nosedive into the Grand Canyon. Had

I explained all of this to the economist, I’m certain he would not have

laughed. He wouldn’t have cracked a smile, the prig. And he would have

told me this was a bad idea. Come to think of it, based on what little I

mentioned, he did say something along those lines.

My friend made a fortune and lost it. She got out with her shirt

intact but somewhat tattered. I lost a few buttons on my own. Whatever

I did – not that I can remember, because I’ve tried pretty hard to repress

the details – didn’t hurt my aunt’s and my mother’s fortunes, only my

own, but not permanently. There was a stock I should have sold when it

was worth $20,000, and then suddenly it was worth $6000. There was

another – and another and another – but my only huge regret was selling

200 shares of Apple that I’d bought for about $60 each in the mid-1990s.

If I had never sold it, and it had just split and split again over the years, it

would be worth a great deal today – I try not to calculate how much – and

I would not be scrounging around doing what I do, which is both working

very hard and worrying about money. It’s just money, after all. Right?

At the same time, I’ve had a peculiarly privileged life in the way

of some artists and writers who have had an occasional hit, followed by

years or even decades of what might be called “belt-tightening,” what a

writer friend calls “the period when I had to buy the small eggs.” For a

short while in the 1990s, I owned a house on Martha’s Vineyard with my

first husband, and even though year-rounders on the island are some of

 the poorest people in Massachusetts, the image of those who live there as

loaded dies hard. It was difficult to say where I lived when I lived there

without people looking askance at me, as though I had just flown in on

my private jet.

During many periods since then, I have rented houses on the island

through friends for far below market rates, and occasionally in winter.
Fifteen years ago, I became friends with another writer in a winter rental.

She soon left the island and moved to a semi-feudal estate in the English

countryside, where she rented the gardener’s cottage – which happened to

have no heat – on this vast property. A good number of our phone calls and

emails in the years since then have been about how broke we are, which

could often send us into peels of self-mocking laughter and regret, faux

and otherwise, that we had spent our lives as writers. Some of the laughter

was that we lived as the idle rich do, having met on the Vineyard and now

chatting away in the middle of the day, she on her estate and I in a tony

Manhattan apartment (never mind that I was renting a room), when not

living with my boyfriend-who-became-my-husband near Boston. In one

such desperate conversation, she said, “Our bohemian lifestyles would

be much more endearing if we were thirty years younger.”

Independently of each other, we had followed Grace Paley’s

advice for writers: Keep your overhead low. We do not redecorate. We

do not build additions onto what property we own. We shop in thrift

stores and drive ancient cars. We are both happily married to extremely

nice men whose financial contributions are necessary but not sufficient

 to maintaining our lives of genteel poverty. We do what writers do who

don’t have secure teaching jobs or wealthy spouses or trust funds: we get

by, more or less, on our wits. For ten years, my friend was on a handsome

retainer with a management consulting firm, and though she had never

 been either an employer or an employee, her job was to write management

training programs. One day she complained to me about how inconvenient

it was for her to have to show up in the company’s office – once a year. I

 tried to explain to another friend how funny this line was to me, but this

friend, who endured a more ordinary struggle to make ends meet, looked

at me with something near contempt. Living with this much uncertainty

and insouciance – but also a weird confidence that someone would appear

before long and pay us a lot of money to ghostwrite a book or edit a paper

on desalination plants in Saudi Arabia – is hard to explain to those who

don’t have the constitution to live this way.

At one point, my friend in England and I had an editing company

that we promoted on-line. Over a period of several years, we got a total of

three inquiries from men with names that sounded made up and who had

ideas for projects that were as colorful and off the wall as their names. Biff
Ziff (not his real name, but somewhat like his real name) wanted my help

writing a book about the psychopathic Mob killers who used to eat at his

restaurant – and which he claimed that Steven Spielberg wanted to read

when it was finished. After I told him that I didn’t think I was the right

 person to help him – because I could tell he didn’t have the money to pay

me up front and had no idea what it meant to write a book – I called my

friend in England. “My fear is that if I see Steven Spielberg’s next movie

is about this guy and his restaurant,” I told her, “I will shoot myself.” She

assured me that I had nothing to worry about. And now – four or five years

 later – my friend and I are not nearly so desperate. In recent years, things

have picked up: one of us inherited some money and the other has a new

business that’s more lucrative than Biff Ziff-like projects. Yet now and

then, I’m slightly sad that we don’t laugh as much as we used to about

being destitute.

Thinking about money as much as I do, several years ago I decided

to pull together an anthology of personal essays by writers on the

subject. The publisher I approached felt that because I’m not a “money

expert” – a Suze Orman, I suppose, or an “Adam Smith” – they couldn’t

promote such a book the way they wanted to, and I shelved the idea. But

of course I am a money expert, having applied for my first job at the age

 of nine at the greeting card store, and having known exactly how much

money my father made that year - $4000.00 – and how much our rent was

– $375.00 a month. When I didn’t get the job, I got another, walking the

dog of a woman in our building every day before school for twenty-five

cents a walk. I used the money to buy pajamas for the summer camp my

parents sent my sister and me to, for which they borrowed the money

from my grandparents, and the purpose of which was to send the children

away so they could “save the marriage.” What more does anyone need

to know about money than that – along with all I’ve learned in the years

since, including the art of investing and losing money while laughing

hysterically?

It can often feel like money is the only thing that matters in our

lives, and of course it matters immensely – because money equals food,

clothing and shelter. And so much else. Even though I’m not as financially

 fragile as I have been for much of my adult life, I still think about money

going to sleep and waking up, getting dressed and cooking dinner. That’s
me, I thought, when I came across this line in Penelope Lively’s novel

How It All Began:  “She walked to the bus stop, thinking about money.”

When I was in my twenties, I took a shower one morning and

wondered how I’d pay my rent two months later, and when I got out,

the phone rang. It was an editor I didn’t know saying that he’d pay me

three thousand dollars to interview a country singer for a magazine that

promoted a tobacco company – Philip Morris. I said yes in a flash. How

 could I have said no? This was a story I told myself and others about how

I managed to live the way I do: I took a shower and the phone rang – and

there was money.  Years later, in my stock-buying days, another friend

convinced me to buy some shares of a tobacco company. I did, but sold

them a day or two later when I realized I didn’t want to make money – or

god forbid lose money – on Big Tobacco. It would have been harder than

explaining that I lived on Martha’s Vineyard. I don’t think the magazine is

still around, but if it were – I have thought this through, believe me – and

if an editor called me again with a juicy offer, this time I’d say no.

All you need is money.