Her relationship with the downy older bills in her wallet was surprisingly emotional. They were primitively associated with her earliest experiences of agency, reward, and sacrifice. In grade school, exchanging a cherished sheaf of ones for a Walkman was a seminal assertion of will. When she was sixteen, these rectangles were the prize after six weeks of repainting the entire interior of the family’s house in Carroll Gardens every afternoon after school, while her friends cavorted off to Canal Jeans. Dropping a twenty on the sidewalk in haste drove home the cost of inattention; finding a five buried in a handbag emblemized serendipity; parting with a taller stack of these tokens than she’d planned for her mother’s birthday taught the return on generosity. The soft green tender was inextricably bound up with her experience of loss and gain, achievement and inadequacy, caution and imprudence, calculation and abandon, benevolence and malice, taking advantage and being taken advantage of. So the shoddy, coarse pretenders palmed off on her during the last visit to Green Acre Farm made Florence feel robbed, personally insulted, and anxious for the United States, as if in compromising the integrity of its mere emblems of value the nation had devalued itself.
This was the most riveting period for his profession that Lowell had ever lived through. Yet Avery regarded his growing treatise as a child’s puttering in a sandbox. Indeed, one of the very regressions he was documenting was the way all cerebral endeavor had been demoted to irrelevance—thereby sending civilization hurtling backwards at warp speed. Had Avery expressed such contempt for her husband’s papers in the Georgetown days? No! She would knock timorously on his study door, ask if he wanted a bowl of soup, and apologize, apologize profusely, for interrupting. Nowadays, when he was poised over his fleX mid-inspiration, she’d bark that he could at least join the kids in combing curbsides for cast-off furniture they could use for firewood. Rather than cruelly break the flow of his intellection and thus imperil the very future of American scholarship, she could as well have come across him with his dick in his hand.
Lowell had to admit that his wife astonished him. Previous to this reversal of fortune, he’d have described her as spoiled. Now, it wasn’t such an egregious thing, being spoiled, so long as you had the wherewithal to cover life’s niceties. It was in the nature of niceties, too, that they would slide to needs. Seen from the perspective of plenty, her extravagance had appeared a form of refinement. He had always brought in the larger measure of their income, and had privately considered her “practice” barely a step up from the all-female book club: it was cute.
In the initial stage of this Jobian trial in East Flatbush, Avery had assumed a demeanor he was tempted to call whiny. But something happened shortly after he and Avery mournfully downed the last bottle of chenin blanc. In a tribute to the homonym, once their evenings ceased to be winey, her daytime disposition could no longer be characterized by the adjective’s crabby twin. She seemed to have made a conscious decision: to be stoic, heroic, and selfless. Incredibly, after having quite reasonably drawn the line at living without toilet paper, a few months later his fanatically hygienic wife hadn’t given her sister the slightest grief when Florence announced that they couldn’t keep snipping up old clothes and linens to wipe their privates, because they were running short of fabric. And get this: Avery volunteered to collect the bags of used cloth squares from both bathrooms every weekend, to run a laundry load of these noxious “ass napkins,” and to restore stacks of fluffy clean ones to beside the toilets! This was a woman who, the first time she had to walk out in public without eyeliner, burst into tears!
Lowell’s difficulty was not so much that he was living with a woman he no longer recognized, which might have spiced things up. Rather, they had a yin and yang problem. It was as if Avery had co-opted the sole chair labeled “Valiant Survivor Type Rising to Challenge in Face of Adversity and Discovering Brave Sides to Self Hitherto Unsuspected,” and the only other chair left for her husband to assume was labeled brutally “Big Baby.” With Avery marching about seeing to everyone’s needs, mending and chopping and fetching and washing up; soliciting Kurt whom she didn’t even like to please have some more polenta because the so-called tenant was looking peaked while going without seconds herself; urging Kurt and Bing to play evening concerts in the living room when duets of sax and violin were preposterous, not to mention the fact that Kurt’s saxophone drove her crazy—all with nary a peep of petulance or confession of fatigue, never the hint of an admission that she reviled living in this cramped, ugly house with people whose company had grown more than trying… Well. Someone had to insert a note of peevishness into this hellishly halcyon Keep Calm and Carry On. Generating some reputable resentment, giving voice to the free-floating outrage that imbued their environs like smoke from a burnt dinner—it was a job to do, as Avery’s tireless goodwill was a job. With corresponding self-sacrifice, he’d taken on the less glamorous task of reminding the rest that this sucked, it all sucked, it wasn’t fair! Savannah should be a sophomore at RISD, Goog should be applying to MIT, Lowell should be giving speeches in Geneva. Lowell was officially the grump, the grouse, the grouch, the Grinch, the grumbler, and he gave himself up to the part heart and soul, thus allowing the others their virtue, their high-mindedness, their this-too-shall-pass-ness. His diligent dyspepsia made all their infernal goodness possible.
Not that he got any thanks. Rather, his housemates seemed to blame him for this whole mess. But writing about inflation doesn’t mean you control it. In fact, no one including the Fed really listened to economists about anything. Governments did what suited them, and in the high-turnover administrations of elective democracies, that meant whatever suited them in the myopic short term. Though that sententious pipsqueak Willing Darkly sought always to cast his uncle as naive, Lowell was savvy enough about the artificial divide between central banks and national treasuries. So obviously in printing money like it was going out of style—which it sort of was—the Fed chief was doing the president’s bidding. Across the board, Alvarado was taking advantage of what most electorates tend to shy from: a sovereign state can do anything, really. The reserve-currency coup, the Renunciation, Alvarado’s refusing to play ball with the bancor bullyboys—it was all politics, and precious little to do with economics. The next boomerpoop who tossed off the popular trope that economists were “modern-day witch doctors” he would deck.
Moreover, no one could posit cogent academic theories that covered the flukish arrival of every deus ex machina, a.k.a. people from outside the system doing dumb shit. This bancor nonsense was like being hit by a comet. The towering eminence of the field having failed to allow for cosmic annihilation didn’t invalidate Keynes. (The fact that John Maynard Keynes himself had whimsically coined the inane word bancor Lowell experienced as a slap in the face.) Besides, whoever heard of loaning in one currency and then demanding to be paid back in another—particularly in a currency you just made up?