The Economist
I am sitting across from Nils. Axel is on his left.* It’s another hot day. The fluorescent lights inside are trembling against the sun banging on the window. “Fern” brings our coffee. She looks at us one by one, more than usually confused, hesitating as to which cup to give to which though we’ve all ordered the same thing and the cups are identical.
Then, Axel is wondering aloud how much to tip her. He’s paying for everyone.
Then, Nils starts in on an article he read in The New York Times Magazine or somewhere like it about the woes of a Harvard professor or an op-ed writer for The Washington Post or a “senior fellow” at the Brookings Institution, who has been caught up through no fault of his own, “meaning because he’s clueless,” Nils barks like a large dog. Something odd, terrible, and more than slightly icky has gotten hold of the poor naïf while his more practical wife and children are spending their usual July and August in France. (Twice a month he flies to spend the weekends with them).
It’s at this point I seem to have lost track of the story, watching Nils’ mouth. My senses seldom act in concert, to reinforce one another. Especially I can’t see and hear the same thing at the same time. So, I’ll close my eyes when I want to really listen to a song or to follow a piece of hectoring on the radio or at Corner Coffee. I’ll turn off the radio in the car when I’m looking for a turn.
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| “that jackass Paul Klugman” as a fair-haired child by m ball |
I look down into my coffee cup, and I hear: “That jackass Paul Krugman,” Nils is saying.
It wasn’t Klugman this icky thing had happened to, and I realize the story is over; we’ve advanced to the moral. There’s a dull clatter of porcelain: someone’s dropped something in the kitchen but hasn’t broken. I’m thinking how hot the days are: “The sun pounding at the window is all fire, nothing else,” I’m thinking, “and we’re falling into it as fast as it’s rising to meet us.” I know it’s not true, and I hear again: “That jackass Paul Krugman,” Nils repeats, “wants to say that it isn’t that ‘the rich are different from you and me’ but that the superrich are different from all of us. How can someone so damn smart miss that the ‘merely rich,’ his buddies in high-level academics, the press, the think tanks, etc., are different from you and me? Widely. Wildly. The op-ed writers, Yale profs, and the opinion-makers that have more than more than more than enough so they’re flying back and forth to France to visit their all-summer-holidaying families on the weekend, while at home with the couple staying for the weekend their dogs are eating better and sleeping in more comfortable beds - they’re getting better health care than our friend Fern. Those that want to tell ‘you and me’ how to think have no earthly fucking idea about how we live.
“‘We’re not the superrich,’ they protest because they want us to think they know us. How she lives,” Nils barks again, looking around the room to find Fern, so he could get a better look at her himself.
“What does she know about them?” Axel asked. He didn’t mean to be snide, I’m pretty sure, but to insert a bit of whimsy into the conversation. But tirade doesn’t understand whimsy; it is offended.
“Axel,” Nils comes back. He is addressing me, not his brother. “Not even Axel goes in for that kind of gold-dusted bullshit, running off to Turin for three weeks’ vacation, off to Uppsala for study leave.
“And he’s richer than any of us. Not only doesn’t he do it, he doesn’t even dream about it.”
I look up again. Axel shakes his head. But I’m not sure I believe him. It’s not the first time I’ve heard he has hidden “resources.”
I’d even asked a mutual friend about it once, how much Axel “had,” I think was the word I used. “Not all that much,” the friend said. “But he’s richer than he wants to be.”
“I don’t know what that means,” I’d said.
“It means he’s got more than he needs - quite a bit more - at least, he thinks so, and he feels guilty about it. He’d give it away if he could, all of it. He gives away a lot as it is. But at some point, he thinks, ‘Something might happen, and I’ll need at least this much.’ Then, he realizes almost immediately that ‘this much’ is more than he really needs. But he’s settled on it. So, he keeps that much, and he feels guilty.
“He shouldn’t, but he does,” the friend had said. “He’s a Lutheran pastor,” he said in a there’s-the-explanation tone.
I can’t remember where we were when we’d had that conversation. It wasn’t in a coffee shop. No, we’d been walking somewhere, I do remember that, so I could listen to what he was saying because I was watching my feet on the sidewalk.
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