About Alice by Calvin Trillin

Author:Calvin Trillin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781588365781
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2006-12-26T05:00:00+00:00

VI

Alice’s Law of Compensatory Cash Flow holds that any money not spent on a luxury you can’t afford is the equivalent of windfall income.

—Words, No Music

It’s true that she tended to be the instigator of our family’s money-spending schemes, but most luxuries didn’t interest her. She didn’t want expensive jewelry. She never wore perfume, expensive or otherwise. She couldn’t imagine anything dumber than spending a lot of money on a flashy car or boat. Although she sometimes talked about how it might be fun to go to a chic spa and she always said she didn’t see anything wrong with cosmetic plastic surgery, she never got around to either one. When she finally decided to buy a fur coat—she insisted on buying that and all of those other fancy clothes with money she had earned—she said that she wanted it only because of how cold she got during a New York winter, although the girls and I teased her by suggesting other ways of staying warm. She liked to travel, and she loved beautiful clothes. She liked living in nice surroundings. Her phrase for the opposite was “living like a graduate student.”

Before we were married, she accepted the notion that she would have to make do with something like graduate-student possessions. “I had always assumed that writers were poor,” she wrote in the article about her parents, “which at the time was fine with me.” She was surprised that, through what she characterized in that article as “a complete lack of concern for possessions and a devotion to the clothes he had bought during his freshman year at college,” her future husband had accumulated enough money for a down payment on a brownstone in Greenwich Village. At least Alice saw it as a down payment on a brownstone. To me it was just accumulated money. In the late sixties, nearly everybody in Manhattan lived in rental units. Co-ops were associated with a small number of wealthy people on the Upper East Side. The real-estate dreams of people who did the sort of things we did for a living were filled with roomy rent-controlled apartments. But I hated the idea of leaving the Village, which didn’t have many roomy apartments, and Alice had a strong desire to own a house—not necessarily a house with an elaborate swimming pool and a basement bowling alley, but a house.

The brownstone we finally bought was not a turn-key operation. We had to deal with two rent-controlled tenants, which took months. For a while, we had what amounted to squatters. (When I saw Wally Popolizio to the door after he’d gotten rid of the squatters, he said, “Bud, you can sleep with Alice without asking me. But anything else, give me a call.”) We had to do the sort of renovation that people in New York tend to describe as “the usual nightmare.” During the renovation, I wrote furiously to keep up with the contractor’s bills—above my typewriter I kept a quote I attributed to Voltaire, “Words Is Money”—and Alice acted as what we called the project manager.

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