Straight Man

have been much margin in pointing out to my daughter Julie that they could not afford this house she and Russell were building.
    This simple fact is so manifest that it cannot have escaped even Julie, who has never understood money—how it comes to you, how long it’s likely to last, where it goes, how long it will be before there’s more, what you’ll do until then. More painful than her naivete is the fact that she doesn’t believe herself to
be
naive. Should you make the mistake of asking her why she’s doing something so stupid, she’ll explain it to you. The house, she informed me, would be not just a home but also a tax shelter. “You’re kidding, right?” I asked her, looking for signs that she might be kidding, finding instead evidence of anger. “Tax shelters are for people who make too
much
money,” I explained, “not too little. The fact that you resent paying taxes on your earnings doesn’t necessarily mean you need a shelter.” The effect of such fiscal wisdom on my daughter was so predictable that even I might have predicted it. All along it has been her intention not just to build this house but to build it
anyway
—that is, come hell or high water, in defiance of reality and sense, both of which represent for Julie the odds that will just have to be overcome. Julie likes movies, and I suspect she’s seen one too many of the sort where long odds are defied and faith rewarded. By trying to reason with her, I became part of the already long odds she’d vowed to beat. My daughter likes television, too, and I suspect that her thought process has been corrupted by advertising. Like many Americans, she no longer understands the meaning of simple words. She sees nothing absurd about the assertion “you
deserve
a break today” when it’s applied across the entire spectrum of society. She believes she’s
worth
the extra money she spends on her hair. Several of her friends have big houses. Doesn’t she
deserve
one too? Is she
worth
less than her friends?
    Still, what Lily means when she says that we should butt out of our children’s lives is that it’s our duty to put the best possible face upon their behavior, even in the privacy of our own home. If my wife had her way, we would never allude to the sometimes insane behavior of our children, as if merely acknowledging their errors in judgment might further jinx their doomed schemes. Be fair, Lily is fond of counseling. Give them a chance to fail.
    Fine by me. It’s the attendant pretense that mangles me. We have to pretend they’re being smart when they’re being dumb. Such pretenses, I have tried to explain to Lily, fly in the face of Occam’s Razor, which demands that entities must not be multiplied beyond what is necessary. Lies and pretenses, I explain, always require more lies and pretenses. “Promise you’ll act surprised,” is one of Lily’s favorite, supposedly harmless pretenses, one I’m required to act out every time somebody does an entirely predictable thing that is supposed to take me unawares. Feigned stupidity never strikes Lily as undignified, but it does me. For one thing, it’s always used against you later on. (We thought you might be suspicious when you saw all the cars parked outside on your fortieth birthday. Aren’t writers supposed to be observant?) Lily’s got her reasons too. Often they have to do with not hurting people’s feelings. And so I’m required to act surprised at the announcement of a mutual friend’s pregnancy a few short weeks after a hastily arranged wedding. “It hurts
my
feelings to pretend to be this dumb,” I tell my wife. “Don’t you care what people think of
me
?” But she just smiles. “They won’t notice,” she always explains. “It’ll blend in with all the times you’re genuinely slow.”
    With regard to Julie and Russell’s new house, I’ve been required to pretend that the result will not be disaster. To further the illusion of our confidence in their judgment, we’ve loaned them money. That I’ve kept my own counsel on the matter has annoyed Lily and at times made me mildly repentant. If the house bankrupts them now, it will be my fault for having failed them at the level of psychic support.
    There’s about a fifty-fifty chance it will. Russell has recently quit a good job for what he thought would be a better one, only to discover that several large government loans needed to start up the project he was to direct have not been approved as expected. It