Oregon Humanities

Trophy

Does money make the man?

Alexis Nelson

I was at a writing conference in upstate New York the night my boyfriend, Daniel, called to tell me about his Emmy nomination. Before I got the call, I’d been considering having an affair with one of my fellow conference-goers, a thirty-five-year-old waiter with plans to publish a memoir that would, he suggested, revolutionize the art of food writing. By the time Daniel and I hung up the phone, though, I felt rededicated to our wobbly, long-distance relationship—not to mention excited about picking out a fancy dress to wear to the awards ceremony. It didn’t occur to me that the sudden surge in my commitment level might have something to do with the equally sudden upswing in Daniel’s professional situation.

Daniel had what most people would probably consider a good job, working for a television studio as a 3-D animator. One night, he showed me a sample of his work: a made-for-TV movie with no dialogue, about toy soldiers that come to life and kill a guy. We watched all forty-five painstaking minutes, curled against each other on Daniel’s futon. At one point, a three-inch helicopter crashed into a chair leg, exploding into dozens of little flaming pieces, and he whispered, “I did that,” into my hair. Looking up at his handsome, angular face, a shy smile playing on his lips, I thought, We’re doomed. Not only was Daniel tied to Los Angeles because of his job, and I to a graduate program in creative writing in Portland, but, more significant, I was a self-proclaimed “Artist”—a writer, no less—and he made stuff blow up in movies without words.

Yet every few weeks for about a year, we tried to keep the relationship afloat, as Daniel flew to Portland or I scraped up the funds to visit him in L.A. Because of the geographical distance between us, the relationship felt low-pressure, which suited me well, since I didn’t want major distractions taking me away from my writing. And in spite of his “good job,” I believed I saw shades of a true Artist in Daniel, hints that deep inside him beat the heart of a man for whom beauty and truth outweighed all other concerns. In his spare time, he liked to draw and paint. He even had a particular character—an ugly flower who suffered from unrequited love for a butterfly that landed on him solely to steal his nectar—which he drew over and over again, and which clearly expressed some essential part of who Daniel was and how he felt about life.

Sometimes I tried to get Daniel to admit that what he really wanted to do was become a serious visual artist, but he remained firm about not wishing to make his living as a painter. I claimed to understand, but in truth I considered Daniel a bit of a sellout. At the studio, he was always subject to his superiors’ whims and judgments, so his work didn’t really belong to him. Yet I did envy Daniel for making what seemed like heaps of money at a stable job that he enjoyed while I struggled to pay my bills each month. Occasionally, I even despised my own dreams for the financial burden they seemed to place on me.

The fact is that in some dim corner of my soul, I had begun to wonder what made an aspiring artist, finally, an Artist. If money—which seemed to be society’s usual way of determining worth—had anything to do with it, then I was probably less of an Artist than that elephant who learned how to paint with his trunk—his trainers, at least, must have made some money. Talent ought to be the truest measuring stick, but how does one ever assess one’s own artistic ability accurately? And what about someone with a deeply poetic sensibility who hasn’t had the proper guidance or time necessary to hone her craft—is she an Artist? In my bitterest moments, I told myself that even the most dedicated and gifted among us only become Artists once they achieve some measure of success, which usually means whenever wealthy people start buying or promoting their work. And while I had to keep believing my time would come—I was young, after all, the best years might yet be ahead of me—I had begun to wonder how I’d cope if it never did.

***

On the day of the Emmys, Daniel offered me his hand and I stepped out of our rented limousine and onto the red carpet. Above us, the dazzling Los Angeles sun burned bright, making the bare backs and shoulders of the women around us shine, their sequins sparkle. To one side, hordes of photographers scrambled over each other, clamoring for the perfect shot.

“Over here!” they called. “Turn this way!”

Still blinking from the abrupt change of light, I felt something bloom and soar inside my chest. I thought, for a moment, that the photographers were calling to me.

“What are you wearing?” they cried, and I looked down at my gray satin dress with the tiny cap sleeves made of lace; I’d hoped it would transform me into a vintage starlet. But the photographers couldn’t care less about me or my dress, or even Daniel in his ill-fitting tux; they cared only about the stars who stood between us and them, up against the red velvet ropes.

Even if the paparazzi didn’t think Daniel and I were of any importance, I felt important. I didn’t ask myself what my date’s achievement had to do with me. There, in the bustling lobby of the Shrine Auditorium, with its pseudo-Egyptian motif and classy Art Deco furnishings, I was grateful to Daniel for leading me, on his well-muscled arm, into a privileged realm that had always been—I was sure of it now—my rightful milieu.

Daniel won the Emmy that night for the work he’d done on the TV movie he’d shown me about murderous toy soldiers. As I watched him collect his statue, I beamed with pride and sat up straight in the plush, crimson seat. If the cameras had turned toward me, they’d have captured an adoring girlfriend with a bright smile and excellent posture.

That night, I understood for the first time how closely success and money are bound with attraction and sex. This was a truth I experienced intuitively, on a physical level I couldn’t deny. For as the evening progressed—from the awards ceremony, to the celebratory dinner and ball, to an all-night after-party thrown at a studio executive’s mansion—my pride turned, very quickly, to desire. I hadn’t felt such strong desire before, for Daniel or for anyone else I’d been with. His smile flashed; his blue eyes twinkled. His broad shoulders and chest, which in the past I’d thought of as too overtly masculine—attractive, sure, but in an annoyingly showy way—now begged for my touch. More than anything, though, I wanted his hands on me—low on my hip or at the small of my back, clutching an elbow, grazing an arm. I wanted badly to please him and to be beautiful for him. I wanted to be his prize: the sexy girl on the arm of the powerful man.

The house where the after-party was held resembled a pink stucco wedding cake with terra-cotta frosting. Sliding glass doors, polished until they gleamed, opened onto a deck the size of a basketball court, with spectacular views of the valley below and the surrounding Pasadena hills. A floating thatch-roofed bar drifted across the pool, ethereal beneath the pale light of the moon. I found Daniel sitting by himself at the pool’s edge, his pant legs rolled up and his bare feet dangling in the water.

I stepped out of my heels, hiked up my dress, and sat down beside him. The pool was the perfect temperature, not too warm and not too cold, as was the night air, which hung about my shoulders like a delicate shawl. I set my champagne glass down and wrapped my arms around Daniel’s neck. Punctuating each word with a kiss, I told him how proud I was of him. My head swam—from all the champagne I’d drunk, from the startling force of my own desire, and from the sudden notion that I could be falling in love. I envisioned our happy future together: once Daniel’s career really took off, he’d ask me to move to L.A. and live with him while I finished my first book. Or maybe I’d try my hand at screenwriting; perhaps Daniel had the right idea after all, and Hollywood was the best place to make a living with one’s artistic talent.

Daniel and I finally dragged ourselves away from the after-party shortly before dawn. In the dim car on our way back to his place, I couldn’t stop myself from leaning across the gearshift, kissing his neck, and asking him, rather awkwardly, if he wanted me to fall in love with him.

Daniel shifted in his seat, his silence filling the car. Outside, Los Angeles flashed by, and knotted freeways and flimsy-looking houses turned bone-pale in the thin light of early morning.

“Sure,” he finally said. “That would be nice.”

“Oh,” I said and sank back into the soft leather of the passenger seat. Staring at my lap, I attempted to smooth the wrinkles from the skirt of my dress. For the rest of the way home, neither of us spoke.

***

By the time Daniel dropped me off at the airport the following afternoon, it was pretty clear that our relationship was over. Although we continued to talk on the phone for another couple of weeks, neither of us visited the other, and Daniel soon confirmed that he no longer wished to. Maybe he had sensed that my newfound passion for him did not come from an entirely pure place. Or maybe something had shifted in our dynamic the moment he won his Emmy. Now, he not only had a higher salary than I did, but he also had this golden statue, proof positive that he was going places. My own scribbling suddenly felt small and desperate by comparison. Perhaps this discrepancy explains why rich, successful people tend to marry other rich, successful people. Wealth doesn’t necessarily make love flourish, but need—especially an imbalance of need—surely helps to stifle it.

Or maybe it’s not as complicated as all that. Maybe Daniel had simply discovered that he did not, could not, love me—for reasons that had nothing to do with money or fame. As I stood at the curb, watching the shiny black tail of his car grow smaller and smaller, I didn’t know why things with Daniel were over; only later would I come to acknowledge how much my own longing for status and security had colored our relationship, how wrong I’d been to imagine my own artistic ambitions as purer than Daniel’s, or anyone else’s. Standing in line at the Bob Hope Airport, waiting with the other passengers to board a plane back to Portland, I knew simply that a small change had taken place that weekend, not only between Daniel and me, but also in my own way of thinking about the world. And I knew, too, that in a short time, I would squeeze into my economy-class seat, open my journal to a fresh page, and begin sorting everything out.

From the Summer 2008 “Class” issue