A Woman No One Wanted

For money has a power above
The stars and fate, to manage love.

Samuel Butler

Gelt ist Der Welt [Money is the world].

My Baba

Lately, I’ve noted I’m getting tight—well, tighter about money. At the gym, swimming laps for 30 narcotizing minutes or on the treadmill for an hour, my Walkman clamped on my head, opera tapes obliterating the world, in a myopic haze, I daydream about money. It used to be fame, before that love, before that I guess it was sex but those lubricious fantasies of men have gone.

Now it’s money. These fantasies are not more shallow than my dreams of pleasure or love or universal admiration, but they are less innocent. My musings on money are less the symptoms of hope than of doubt, less about the imagined future than about having no future.

Freud said money was filthy lucre, and Western writers from Shakespeare to Dickens have equated wealth and corruption. Unlike the meaning of filth, the filth of money is neither literal nor moral, but symbolic of waste, decay, death. Associations about avarice, unbridled love of money for its own sake, are about hoarding and accumulation, a constipation of the soul. Universally, money is a transparent defense against mortality, a modern version of pharonic anxiety about dying, but for some, it is also a defense against the anxiety of living.

My dreams of money are, I suspect, implicated with mortality. As if money itself could ward off thoughts of the grave that now come unbidden with dismaying frequency. Perhaps my unarticulated ploy is that with enough money, I’d be so busy spending, I’d be too preoccupied to think. Actually, I’m not thinking now, and the gratification about money is really about having rather than spending it.

Dreaming about money as I glide through the water, the tension leaves my muscles, dissolves into the chlorine, and by the time the swimmer’s high kicks in, I’m awash in a pale blue peace, my goggles protecting eyes that just manage to discern shapes, the splash of water blocking out the human sounds around me. After winning some lottery or being told I’m the heir of an unknown benefactor (my own rich relatives are not good candidates), the sum usually a few modest millions, I quickly go through the details of dispersing it: pay off debts and mortgage, reupholster the couch, get a new state-of-the-art stereo system, buy a bunch of CDs, some fancy schmatas, and then be generous to friends: this one who gets by without an extra dime, that one who’s burdened with debt. Then I “invest” what’s left, calculate my income (usually about twice what I have), decide my expenses—all the money has to be spent; there’s no point in saving anymore—and the fantasy is essentially finished; during its ebb, the euphoria begins.

I cannot reach the euphoria on Tuesday merely by picking up where Monday left off: nothing will happen, that’s too boring (it’s all boring, it has to be boring); it hasn’t the requisite obsessiveness. I must go through the whole story again exactly like a child of three who can hear the same recital endless times and will not tolerate any deviation from the text. And like that child, I too am in search of knowledge and control. The child cannot articulate his or her pleasure in repetition nor her need for it, cannot tell you why you can’t change a single detail no less omit one about Goldilocks or Red Riding Hood, but the need is clear and strong, as any confrontation will reveal (“You left out X.” . . . “No I didn’t” is a sure invitation to a tantrum). Like that child’s, my need is strong and clear; the question is what do I need to control and what do I want to know?

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I grew up in the Great Depression, poor but hardly hungry: we had grocery stores, little mom and pop places where my mother made potato salads, pickled her own herring; where barrels...