2

A tall room with good windows. The only piece of art is Ed’s forest landscape painting, which he brought into our marriage from some unascertainable previous moment in his life, and which he does not claim is great art, he just likes it. Giant funereal sideboard inherited from Ed’s family—not a treasured heirloom, his mom bought it at a flea market—that in any other room would look like a set prop for The Addams Family but in this room really works, somehow. Next, the table with its diagonal legs. I suppose they look stylish, but they make it very awkward to seat more than four people. A Persian rug. When did we get that? Threadbare, needs replacing, but I like it anyway. I like the rocks and the trinkets arranged on the windowsill. I like the hardwood floor. I like the stained-glass window identical to the two in the living room. The fake-wood ceiling fan left over from the previous homeowner I do not particularly like, but then, how often do I look up? This whole room, I like. The living room, too, back when we were standing over there. My house.

I wish I were really in those rooms right now, one of those rooms instead of this one. This whole hotel smells like laundry. No, like a smell sprayed from a can. That time Ali and I were in line at the pharmacy and saw, on a storage shelf over the cashier’s shoulder, a cardboard box labeled “Farts in a Can” and “Made in China”—because they sell a lot of gag gifts in that place. Me of course thinking instantly about all the waste, the environmental cost of shipping consumerist crap from China, the Texas-sized trash heap in the middle of the Pacific, and how my daughter’s generation will never know the sense of well-being my own took for granted, the limitless security we felt but never realized we were feeling. Silently thinking all that but actually saying to her, to be funny, to keep it upbeat: Those farts came all the way from China.

But Ali, serious-faced: Who made them?

Some factory.

No, who made them?

Oh, who made them. Beats me!

Then a fidgety sort of silence, until out in the car she started rattling them off, old people and young, rich and poor, tall and short, one by one, all the different people she’d imagined in China who had taken time out of their busy days to fart into those cans in our pharmacy. That was only a couple of years ago. She’s still little. Still mine. Actually, this room doesn’t smell so bad. It doesn’t smell like much of anything.

Nor is it noisy, exactly—you are a blessing, my quiet sleepers—but noises, yes. There’s no such thing as true silence. John Cage once climbed into a sensory deprivation tank and came out later announcing that there’s no such thing as true silence as long as you’re alive, because you can always hear your own heartbeat. To experience absolute silence, you’d need to be dead. Tonight, I appear to be more alive than is strictly necessary, my heartbeat is very loud, not just in my chest but in my head, my ears. I can feel it beating. But I am also calm. I feel wired and calm at the same time, the mind busy but the body stuck. Is it nerves or anxiety? Nerves would just be about the talk tomorrow. Anxiety would be about everything else. Maybe it’s different feelings causing separate effects, like getting poison ivy on top of chicken pox. My heartbeat is the loudest sound in my head, when I stop talking to myself. It isn’t the loudest sound in the room, though. Outside my head, you can’t hear it.

In the room, three distinct sounds are layered one atop the other, occurring simultaneously but with no real connection. The high one is electronic. It’s coming from the television or the phone. The middle one, the loudest and most complicated, is the air-conditioning. It’s more of a tinny rattle. The low one is unplaceable, a sort of ubiquitous whimper that is not even inside this room but more like a sound the building makes, as if the building itself is moaning. Or maybe it’s the sound of all the other rooms, the accumulated white noise of all those sleeping strangers, their specific snores and grunts and coughs and rolling-overs and pillow-flips and blanket-yanking not singularly audible in here, thank goodness, but taken together forming a pervasive human rumble, a collective ambient grumble, the nocturnal soundtrack of this cheapish hotel.

It’s a little surprising, frankly. The honorarium’s not bad, which means they have money to spend, and also suggests they want to make their speakers happy, because who knows, they might want to invite us back, or else one speaker might talk to another—surely there’s some sort of speaker circuit and they all talk to one another—and they wouldn’t want one saying, The fee’s good but they’re surprisingly stingy with the accommodations. Not that I’m some kind of superstar, probably to them I’m a B-lister, a brown dwarf, but still, it makes a difference, the sort of room you’re in. It shapes your whole mood.

Like that Christmas when the basement flooded. Not a flake of snow, but rain for days and days, and Ali and I were playing Connect Four at the dining room table when we heard a giant crash, then an enormous rushing gush, like the whole house had just gone over the edge of Niagara Falls. Ali jumped, I shouted, and Ed came bounding down from upstairs straight to the basement. The storm drain in the alley had gotten clogged with leaves, which caused water from all the way up the block to pour into our backyard and blow the basement door right off its hinges. You could hear it rushing in. Ed was shouting that he couldn’t stop it, Ali was freaking out, so after calling 911 I ran her over to the neighbors, then went back to find Ed in the backyard, in freezing water a foot deep, using a rake and a broom to prop the patio table sideways at the top of the outside stairwell, to divert the incoming water around the side of the house. Then the firemen showed up. They stood out there in the rain, five or six big men in their rubber uniforms, staring at Ed’s patio-table contraption, until one of them shrugs and says, That’s about as good as anything we could do. I was flabbergasted. Ed was clearly proud of himself. Finally, the friendly house inspector arrived and very apologetically condemned our house, because the firemen had turned off the gas and apparently there’s an ordinance. Just a temporary condemning but he had to put that bright orange shaming sticker on a street-facing window, he tried to pick a spot that was hidden by a bush, but still, how humiliating. Plus then you have to vacate until all the water’s out.

So we booked a room at the nice hotel down the street, the one that always looked so charming: not overly fancy, but cozy and clean. Ed took Ali swimming in the indoor pool. I treadmilled in the little gym. I was sweating out my frustration, starting to feel better, when that horrible face came on the giant TV screen, and the voice. It was just after the election, he wasn’t even in office yet, but already his voice was all over the place, it was everywhere. I’d been staying away from TVs all month trying to hide from it. Just the thought that I’d have to hear it now, over and over, that we’d all be forced to listen to it, what an awful thought, don’t think about this, why did I want to think about this? Oh, because later, after we’d showered and put on pj’s, and crawled into bed and talked about our crazy day, and ordered room service that came on a cart, on plates with plastic covers, and Ali got to choose which one of us to sleep with and she chose me, at that point I did feel better. A lot better. That night in that nice hotel room, in the midst of that terrible day when all those awful things had happened, I felt better than I’d felt in a very long time.

“With all due respect,” says Keynes, who’s been standing all this while in the space between the window and Ed’s landscape painting, a spot that in real life is home to a leafy tall floor plant that I for some reason forgot to picture a moment ago when I was taking myself around the dining room—well, I guess Keynes is there now—“With all due respect,” he says, “the point of Cicero’s loci method seems a little lost on you.”

I am wandering. At least I’m calm. I’m frankly impressed by how calm I’m keeping. I don’t always, Keynes. It must be your influence. Anyway, what’s the hurry? I think we’ll be awake for a while.

“But if your intention is to mentally rehearse tomorrow’s talk, which does seem like a very good use of your insomnia, then shouldn’t you proceed as closely as possible to how you’d like this talk to actually go?”

Where was I.

“You’ve looked all around the dining room. You’ve set me down in a spot usually reserved for a houseplant, but everything else is per usual. You are feeling very happy to be here, content, as the next portion of your speech—in which you discuss the ways my essay was wrong, and why it was wrong, and why it was perhaps never intended to be right—as all of that comes flowing back to you . . .”

But before we start talking about what “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” might teach us about living in this current day and age—not about whether Keynes was right but whether he’s useful, and how being useful might be a way of being right—before we head in that direction, we should first take a closer look at the various ways he was certainly wrong. These we can divide, to make them easier for me to remember and to create the illusion that this talk has been carefully organized, into two types. Two categories of wrongness. He was wrong because of his own shortcomings, and he was wrong because of ours.

To understand his shortcomings, you need to know something about his life, the Victorian and Edwardian worlds in which he lived, in which his morals and his desires and his cares and beliefs were formed, though that could easily be a lecture all its own, or series of lectures, none of which would be the pithy upbeat presentation I am supposed to be giving you people, a talk about optimism at a time when I am personally feeling anything but. When I have been stripped of my own optimism by recent life events that I am not going to think about now. No, I am not. No, I am not. Except perhaps just to acknowledge the irony, that here I am serving myself up as some sort of expert on how to proceed through the world with intention and purpose when in fact I am utterly lost. When everything I have ever worked for is STOP. Just stop.

“Tell me, again,” Keynes—my conscience, maybe—changes the subject, “why they need to know my shortcomings?”

Because I don’t want to pretend you were some kind of saint.

“Yes, but why bother saying much about me at all?”

Why? Why.

Because my whole talk hangs on the idea that your essay was fundamentally a rhetorical and imaginative gesture. Because the point I’ll be coming to is that you were more interested in proposing a utopian space for thinking through how the world could be different than in fastidiously predicting what would actually come to pass. And if that’s my point, if what I’m arguing is your intent, then it would help if my audience had a sense of who you were. Because the person you were says a lot about how you saw the world, the ethics behind your economics, the importance you placed on public discourse, the importance you placed on all kinds of things. But if I just list off your accomplishments, I risk making you out to be some sort of romanticized unproblematic magical guru-person, effectively undermining the very pragmatism, the pragmatic optimism, that by the end I’ll be arguing is the true lesson of your essay, if not your life. Because it’s not really about you, Keynes. It’s about the ways you managed to be better than yourself. They need to know your shortcomings because that’s what makes you human, and your humanity is a large part of why you’re worth talking about at all. Okay?

“It’s off subject,” says Keynes plainly. “You’ll run out of time.”

Well, let’s see how much I can even remember.

He was in some ways the very model of the liberal English gentleman, raised in the Victorian era, not from a wealthy family but certainly not from a poor one. Hardworking. Self-driven. Tall, gawky. Sickly? It seems like every famous intellectual in history spent their childhood sickly. But Keynes eventually died of being sickly. Died younger than usual, I mean. Obviously, lots of people die of being sickly.

A healthy ego, anyway, alpha child, best boy, a winner in all the ways that might make a parent proud. He was the sort of young man who cares about pleasing his parents. This brisk “winning” youth blossoming, then, into an intellectual and artistic young adulthood: model student, debate club, a predilection for theater, performed on stage at Eton, bit of a ham. Perhaps most importantly for our purposes today, this tall gawky young man, who would someday invent macroeconomics, adamantly refused to specialize in math, despite the considerable pressure, from various directions, that came with being incredibly good at it. Because he was also good at, and interested in, so many other things.

Bearing in mind that economics, back then, was not as math-frenzied as it is today. When Keynes came to it, economics was still a branch of moral philosophy. The author of The Wealth of Nations had also written The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Moral sentiments! Would that more of my own colleagues took up the study of those. Keynes did study math, of course. He liked math. But he also liked medieval poetry. And classical opera. And contemporary art. All of which seems relevant to the person he was, and why he thought in the ways he thought, but you’re right this is probably already too much detail for tomorrow.

“Very probably,” says imaginary Keynes, now seated at my dining room table, having grabbed a deck of cards from the sideboard drawer, and shuffling. “I think, Abigail, as a general rule, in every instance and in all places, you should talk only an eighth as long as you feel like you want to. An eighth at the very most. No one will notice what you’ve left out, because it will never have been there in the first place, and your listeners will attend to your words better if the words themselves are fewer. You were born into an era of overload. Leaving things out is the great unmastered art form of your age.”

His bohemian arty side, on the other hand, is extremely relevant and just too interesting to bypass entirely, and if nothing else tomorrow’s audience of—retirees? homemakers?—will depart having learned something about the Bloomsbury group, some bits and bobs of history, something tangible, take-away-able, the satisfaction of a knowable thing. For example, the bizarre and wonderful factoid that Keynes was housemates with Virginia Woolf. They were friends and she at some point claimed to be jealous that he could do what she did—write beautifully—but she couldn’t do what he did—economics, politics. His influential position at the center of both intellectual and artistic culture in early twentieth-century England. The story of how he bought a newspaper, The Nation and Athenaeum, that became a megaphone for Liberal politics and economics but also a platform for Modernist artists and writers. He even tried to hire T. S. Eliot—whose famous poem The Waste Land was inspired by one of Keynes’s economics tracts, no I am not kidding—as The Nation’s literary editor, but Eliot turned out to be a real handful, so Keynes offered the job instead to Virginia’s husband, Leonard.

And philosophers! He was friends with Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and was instrumental in getting the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus published while Wittgenstein was in a POW camp in Italy. The Tractatus being the book that effectively founded analytic philosophy, and in doing so put Keynes’s own budding philosophy career out of business. His close but complicated relationship with Lytton Strachey. His long romantic relationship with the painter Duncan Grant, left out of the pages of Keynes’s first biography for presumably political reasons, probably also left out of my talk tomorrow, because I’d have no idea how to bring it up without sounding like I’m making some big deal of it. Eventually he surprised his friends by marrying Lydia Lopokova, a Russian superstar ballerina he fell in love with while she was performing in Diaghilev’s Sleeping Beauty. She traveled with him to international economics conferences and met all the leading math nerds of their age. They were devoted to each other. In their later years, they lived in the country with dogs and housekeepers and kept mostly to themselves.

And after he got rich, which he did by writing internationally bestselling books but also through successful market speculation, he became a great art collector and patron, particularly of his Bloomsbury friends. He founded the Cambridge Arts Theatre, and was instrumental in establishing government arts funding in England. He did more for the arts on a volunteer basis than most artists manage in their lifetimes, all while working in government, and shaping British economic policy, and meeting with world leaders to plan the economic resolutions of World Wars I and II, and founding both the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and holding various academic positions, and reconfiguring the theory and practice of economics in the twentieth century, and walking his dogs, and—how am I doing?

“Other than it being twenty times too long?”

Other than that.

“Fine. Though I can’t say I’ve noticed anything yet that would obviously qualify as a ‘shortcoming.’”

Getting there!

Now, I have no idea if any of those names will mean anything to you, ladies and gentlemen. The larger point I’m making is simply that Keynes was both an intellectual and artistic soul, and his idea of the “good life,” the one he imagined us all happily attaining, was based on the life he personally knew. A champion of the economic underdog, of prosperity for everyone, he was, like the rest of Bloomsbury, culturally a bit of a snob. More Liberal than Labour, where culture was concerned. Which becomes a shortcoming when it leads him to presume, in “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren”—you see? back to the subject—that we all desire the lifestyles of cultured British white people; that the whole world aspires to the same sort of society and economy and holds similar values and beliefs. For example, the belief that not working is something everyone should want. Not all of us share that particular view. Some of us can imagine nothing better than keeping our jobs—in fact at the moment, “leisure” sounds to me rather like another word for doom, for failure, though obviously I will not get into any of that tomorrow, nothing about myself or my problems. None of you know me, and even if you did, you couldn’t possibly understand. I would sound like a crazy person!

I am not a crazy person, ladies and gentlemen, at least I don’t think of myself as a crazy person, but I am also not sure that I am any better of a person, any taller in my shortcomings, than the dead British man I’ve chosen to keep me company, not just tonight but over the course of my—I almost said “my career.” Keynes was a privileged member of a colonizing capitalist nation who loved his way of life, was generally proud of his country’s place in history, and presumed to impose his own ideas of happiness on others, but is Abigail any better? I’ve struggled with the same questions—how the world should change, how changes should be made, what a better world would look like—and I suspect my answers are just as limited by my own values, my assumptions, the biases I don’t even see, the personal deficiencies I try not to think about.

The other day in the kitchen, for example, I was listening to the radio, a conversation about race and whiteness, and whoever was speaking suddenly asked the audience to ask themselves, “How many Black friends do you have?” At first the question bugged me, a knee-jerk irritation, not because I don’t have African American friends, I thought—it’s just condescending to tally it up like that. But then I thought, There’s a point being made, an important point, okay. A few colleagues from other departments; four or five parents from Ali’s school; friends in college, summer jobs; and plenty of students, if students can count as friends. That was the question, really: what counts as a “friend”? At which point the radio guest added, as if they’d heard my question, or maybe the interviewer had actually asked it, “I mean someone you’ve eaten at least two meals with.” I tried to remember the last time I’d gone out with anyone other than Ed, then made two terrible realizations: that I have no Black friends, and that I don’t seem to have any friends at all.

The big difference, then, the saving difference, though it is not a very saving difference, it is more like a sad pathetic difference, but the defining difference between my shortcomings and Keynes’s is that mine have hardly ever imposed themselves on anyone. My ideas have not remade economic theory, or settled geopolitical disputes, or helped establish international cooperative monetary oversight institutions. My prejudices and presumptions have had pitifully little effect on anything at all. So I guess there’s that to feel good about.

Another fun fact that is not actually fun: he was anti-Semitic, in the insidiously casual way that “everyone was back then.” Leonard Woolf must have put up with a lot from his Bloomsbury friends. At least Keynes hated Hitler. Hated fascism.

What was my other category? Our shortcomings.

Oh boy.

Freed of the burden of work, we would all learn to love the finer things, the gifts of education and art. Scarcity would be eradicated, rich countries would share with poorer countries, and before you knew it, everyone would be fed, housed, clothed, and off to the English countryside, messing about in boats. For those who like work, well, leisure can be a kind of work. They would pursue the work that brought pleasure, rather than the work that was just a job. The whole world would be finished with “just a job.” We could all find our true callings, and would come to judge the quality of our lives, not in dollars and possessions, but in how our time is spent. When you put it that way, it does sound pretty good.

But he failed to foresee our shortcomings. Presumably he did not actually believe the next hundred years would be free of wars and population growth, but he had no way of knowing, for example, that TV would arrive, filling our days with its nonsense. Then the internet. How mass psychological manipulation by the advertising industry would amp up the consumerist side of our natures, causing us to care so much more and so vapidly about what other people have. The rampant increase in per capita consumption. The endless distractions of modern life. The rise of the military-industrial complex and how it would soak up our surpluses in the accumulation of weapons of mass destruction. Of weapons of any size of destruction. He did not foresee the “Great Acceleration,” which only really got going after he died. The explosive expansion not just of technology but of all kinds of Earth-altering activities, how capitalism would reshape the planet, the environmental and social and economic costs that climate catastrophe would impose unequally but without exception around the world. The down-the-road consequences of endless growth. How the income inequality caused by globalization would render traditional political structures increasingly susceptible to the very sort of authoritarian takeover bids that keep popping up these days. Attacks on democracy! Two whole years, now, of that hideous man and his ghoulish cronies. Two years of terrifying obviousness, of conspiracy theories and white nationalists, climate denial, double down, hashtag, “Lock her up!,” sad. That voice. That voice. That vacuum of leadership. I wouldn’t have imagined it two and a half years ago, let alone in 1930. It was one of those impossible possibilities, the kind that movies have convinced us can’t happen. America asleep at the wheel, no one to witness and adjust, now I’m letting poetry into this. No one to witness and adjust, no one to drive the car. Which is the last line, actually. The poem starts: The pure products of America go crazy. In between, the poet talks about his maid. William Carlos Williams, high school English. The first adult poem I ever understood. The car is America and there’s nobody to drive it.

They should get Ed to drive it. He drove us up here, and maybe that’s the real reason I wanted him and Ali along, since I didn’t want to fly and I’ve stopped driving. I hope they don’t think that’s the reason? Ed understands why I had to stop driving. He saw how I was that time I called from the Target parking lot, when he had to borrow the neighbor’s car to come pick me up. You drive fine for years, for all your adult life, then one day, in a split second, it’s too much. Not just the lights and sounds and fast motion, it’s also all the bad things that could happen. You see the full picture and it’s suffocating, or paralyzing. The full picture is always paralyzing.

Like the first time we dropped Ali off at kindergarten, oh god don’t remember that. The other parents all lined up talking like they already knew each other, like maybe there’d been an orientation or a parent party I’d missed. Even the kids all seemed to know each other. The hallway so full of people it was hard to move around and I couldn’t stand it, I couldn’t breathe. I mean, I could breathe, but it felt like I was stuffed inside of something. I said to myself, All your childhood up through high school you’re packed in with these people who have nothing to do with you or how you think. Who seem so much surer of themselves and their place in the world than you ever feel . . . At last you go to college and into adulthood and you’re free of those people, you find people more like you . . . But then you have a kid and she has to go to school, and suddenly you’re surrounded by them again, the high school people, not the same people but close enough, with their own confident kids who your kid is packed in with—snarky thoughts that were unfair to those people, since how do I know what they’re like or what they’re thinking? But there was a bigger picture there that no one was acknowledging. That’s what was upsetting me. My snarky thoughts were meant to distract me from the bigger picture, because the full picture is always paralyzing. Ed must have noticed since he pulled me aside. What was I going to do, homeschool? I don’t know, is that an option? He tried reminding me that we were kids once too, we’d handled that same mess, he and I had both survived kindergarten, and Ali’s so much better than us. She might be better, I said, but the world’s so much worse! Domestic insecurity, social insecurity, digital insecurity, climate insecurity, or rather crisis, climate crisis, racial crisis, moral crisis, midlife crisis—I didn’t say these things to Ed but I was thinking them. Financial crisis, energy crisis, housing crisis, healthcare crisis—it was one of my toughest days, having to let her go like that. Arms race, tech race, wage gap, food desert, class action—this was back around the time I stopped driving, back when I wrote the essay, but I remember the scene like it was yesterday: the names were called and the kids lined up, Ali was smiling and everybody was happy and I’m there thinking factory farming strip mining clear cutting reef bleaching. Of course I have tough days all the time, and tough nights, I never remember them, I just move on, but you can’t move on from everything, sometimes you have to arrive, and that day was different, a memory. One of those moments in life when the consequences of your choices are set out in front of you, and so are everyone else’s. Everyone is watching with total attention as the consequences of their choices line up to go inside the classroom and everyone’s happy, even I was happy, I was maybe the happiest I have ever been, and proud, so proud, but I was also Armageddon, I was overpopulation species-extinction breathe—

Breathe.

Okay.

Ed had no idea how dark things got that day. He doesn’t know what’s going on with me half the time. If half the time he knew half the things I was thinking, he’d decide I was crazy or else give me a medal for holding it together at all.

I’m sorry that Ed has to do all the driving now, I do feel bad about that, but guilt aside, thinking only about driving and the fact that I no longer do it, I couldn’t be happier. Everybody should stop driving. Everybody should get Ed to drive them wherever they need to go. He’s a pretty good driver, though he does lose his temper. He yells at stoplights. It’s funny, since he’s such a calm person otherwise. Set him at a really long red, though, or in front of anybody riding his tail, or behind anybody driving slower than the speed limit, and suddenly he’s throwing up his arms and cursing, his pathetic displays of rage, damn shit fuck damn, even with Ali right there in the back seat. On second thought, maybe Ed is not the right person to drive America.

“Probably not.”

Keynes! You’re supposed to be keeping me on track.

“Yes, well.” He’s looking at his card game. He picks up a column from the right and places it at the bottom of a column in the middle. “The problem, I think,” he says, “is that it is very difficult for you to focus, here in the dining room of your mind. What I mean is, you are having a hard time remaining here, with me and with your speech, when you know very well that you are actually out there, in the world of problems. How to stay on track when the only thing standing between the two of us and that tinny air conditioner are the four walls of your skull and the thin scrim of your imagination.”

I actually do need to practice, though. And I do not want to think about anything related to politics, or income inequality, climate catastrophe, nothing to do with my house, my family, my utterly devastated career prospects, or anything at all like that. How the future keeps promising horrific possibilities. How the horrors have already started arriving. How the horrors are like a dinner guest who shows up twenty minutes earlier than you were expecting them, when you’re not done cooking, so they sit there hovering as you go on trying to pretend it’s all normal and fine. Your life. Your failure. Your daughter’s future. Those are the last thoughts I need right now. But they’re so abundant, Keynes! They’re everywhere, those thoughts. The very air this brain breathes. I could try all night to avoid them, but they’d still come around knocking like a thousand times.

Knock

knock

knock

knock

knock

knock