“Oh,” gasps Rebecca sympathetically.
“I know,” I say. “Imagine living in Miami and earning a fifth of what you earn. The stress must be unbelievable.”
“It’s another world,” says Rebecca.
The Pallwitzes’ fifth anniversary is approaching. “We’d like to go to the east of the state where we had our honeymoon,” Dennis says. “But”—he glances at Rebecca—“that would cost gas and food and a bed-and-breakfast stay, so maybe we’ll stick around here, save the gas money, and get a hotel room for a couple of days.”
“You can’t afford to drive across the state?” I say in a startled screech. I sound like the Dowager Countess from Downton Abbey. In fact, last night in New York City, I got to see something Frantz has never seen: the inside of a Capital Grille restaurant. (I’m guessing Dennis and Rebecca have never been to one, either.) It was delicious and I didn’t even think about what it cost. There were stag heads and sculptures of horses and fine oil paintings of generic earls and lords and foxhunts. The milieu was very English country gentleman, although an English country gentleman would never put an “e” at the end of the word “grill.” Almost every waiter was light-skinned, but I did see one dark-skinned black man serving. So that was nice.
“But there’s lots of stuff to do here in the Des Moines area that we still haven’t done,” Dennis says, brightening. “So . . .”
“I know what I want to do,” says Rebecca.
“What’s that?” says Dennis.
“The drive-in movie theater and then the Incredible Pizza,” she says. “The Incredible Pizza’s got games and a buffet. You can pay thirty dollars, eat as much as you want, then play games until the money runs out. They have this tunnel thing going on. That doesn’t cost anything. Our son can take his shoes off and run in there for a while. . . .”
Dennis smiles, but I can tell he thinks Rebecca has evoked a crappy way to spend a fifth anniversary.
Dennis installs, maintains, and repairs “a wide variety of home medical equipment, oxygen equipment, wheelchairs, a smattering of everything.” Rebecca stays home with the children. She says their problems are twofold: taxes and health insurance.
“He gets paid every two weeks,” says Rebecca. “For state and federal taxes they take about a hundred eighty dollars. Then for health insurance they take about three hundred seventy-five.”
“The health costs go up every year,” says Dennis. “And not just the regular four percent for inflation. It could be ten percent, seventeen percent . . .”
I ask them if they feel worse off than they did a few years ago. Rebecca says, “Yes, a little. The cost of everything, like health insurance, gas, and groceries, has been going up by leaps and bounds. Some things have even seemed to double. Versus our income not changing that much.”
I tell them about the health system in my native UK—free health care for everyone. I say I remember Glenn Beck trying to scare America by saying that if Obamacare went through, things would end up like Britain, with a savage, failing, socialist health-care system.
“But it’s not failing,” I say. “It’s great. And nobody has to pay anything.” (Actually, it’s funded by national taxation, and some parts of it work more efficiently than others, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a Brit who doesn’t feel essentially proud and defensive of the system.)
Dennis and Rebecca look at me warily, as if I might be pretending for some nefarious European socialist reason that the UK National Health Service is a functional thing. But it really is.
So they’re going nowhere for their anniversary. Instead they’ve started seeking help at the local Food Pantry, a charity offering food to the needy. Rebecca says she was amazed that somewhere like Urbandale even needed a Food Pantry. But it does. And when she queues up, she doesn’t see only derelicts. She sees middle-class families just like them.
Dennis says he wishes they were better off, but there are positives about being poor. It makes people community-spirited, he says. Plus, money can turn a man wayward. Dennis runs a church support group for sex and drug and alcohol addicts. Why did some of those men fall into a hedonistic abyss? “Because they could afford to,” he says.
This is a little heartbreaking to hear. It reminds me of Frantz. He rationalizes his place in the ecosystem by saying it’s manageable as long as people talk to him respectfully. Dennis rationalizes his position by saying that, if he had more, who knows what pleasure-seeking scrapes he might succumb to?
And there’s something else Dennis and Rebecca have in common with Frantz. They, too, say they leave the house only for work and church and to go to the park. They haven’t been to the movies in a year.
“I hope you’re not offended,” I say, “but your lives seem unexpectedly similar to Frantz’s.”
“I don’t find it surprising that we have the same struggles,” says Rebecca.
“How do you feel when you hear stories of the super-rich getting away with paying hardly any tax?” I ask them.
There’s a short silence.
“I’d probably do it, too, if I could,” Dennis shrugs. “But I can’t.” He pauses and shrugs again. “So.”
• • •
FIVE TIMES Dennis and Rebecca, there is me. I make $250,000, double that in a good year—if, say, George Clooney is turning one of my books into a movie. Which doesn’t happen often. Just the once, in fact. Being a panicker, I live my life convinced poverty and disaster lie just around the corner unless I constantly and frantically work. Which I do.
But I have none of Dennis and Rebecca’s struggles. I can vacation anywhere. I haven’t noticed rising gas and grocery prices other than hearing myself murmur a vague “Oh. That seems a bit more” and then forgetting about it. I have never felt so rich and so fortunate as I do as I drive away from Urbandale that morning.
• • •
THE WOMAN who makes roughly five times more than me—$1.25 million in a bad year, up to $3 million in a great one—wants to remain anonymous. I’ll call her Ellen. She’s a New York producer: movies, TV, Broadway. I meet her in London. She’s over on business. She’s brassy and loud and restless and alarmingly energetic and tough-looking and she talks incredibly fast. She says it would be “too weird and stressful” to reveal her name to the world in the context of what she makes. If you’re super-rich or super-poor, everyone can see that. But in the top-middle, one stays covert. Plus she doesn’t want letters begging for money. She once had one from her father, who is a “pathetic gambler.”
“How does it feel to make what you make?” I ask her.
I notice a strange tone in my voice. The usual chirpy sense of inquiry isn’t there. Instead I sound weirdly tense, as if the true reason for our meeting is for me to discover what I’m missing out on.
“Good,” she says, nodding. “Happiness is having twenty percent more than what you need. The trick is not to be too rich.”
“Why not?” I ask her.
“People want to go on your private plane,” she says. “You fall asleep in the middle of conference calls. There’s a certain discombobulation when you have too much.”
Maybe Ellen’s right. Maybe it would be bad to have your own plane. But for a second Dennis flashes into my mind, with his own imagined perils of having more money. I remember that Karl Marx line about religion being the opium of the people—his idea that the elites keep the masses subdued with illusory happiness. But Dennis and Ellen have both suggested to me, surely fallaciously, that greater fortune might lead to unexpected sadness. So we’re actually very good at inventing our own opium.