Let me get one thing straight before we begin: I am not a criminal. I am a creative taxpayer. There is a difference, and the difference is worth approximately four hundred million dollars, give or take a yacht.
My name doesn't matter. What matters is the paper. I have spent the better part of two decades routing money through companies whose only job is to own other companies whose only job is to own a painting no one has seen, while the people who write the rules still want a wet signature on a form designed in 1970. I have paid less in taxes than my housekeeper, and my housekeeper is a wonderful woman named Rosa who deserves every penny and then some.
I am writing this book for three reasons. They are not a list I keep in a drawer for other lives. They are this life.
The Sideboard, the Letters, and a Woman Who Dusts Around Them
It is a Tuesday. It is almost always a Tuesday when I remember that I live in a house and not in a filing cabinet.
Rosa comes on Tuesdays. She has a key I did not give her in a ceremony. She has a rag that used to be a pillowcase. She has a bottle of something lemon that I do not buy and that the grocery delivers because she put it on a list in a handwriting that is better than mine. The label has a cartoon sun wearing sunglasses. I have never asked her why. The sun looks like it knows about the letters and has decided not to care, which is a better attitude than mine and a cheaper one. She starts at the sideboard because the sideboard is where I leave the things I am pretending are not important.
The sideboard is mahogany and slightly too large for the room, which is how you know it was purchased by a person who thought furniture was a kind of argument. On it: a wooden bowl from a country I can still visit, a lamp that makes everyone look richer, and two envelopes that are not in a safe. The first one asked the Internal Revenue Service if I would like to schedule a meeting. The second one said no further action is required. They sit under the bowl, slightly fanned, the way a person leaves cards when he was in a hurry and then was not.
Rosa lifts the bowl. She dusts the wood. She sets the bowl back. She does not stack the letters. She does not square them. She leaves them the way she found them. Once, in the first month, she asked if I wanted them in a drawer. I said no. A drawer is where you put things you have decided about. The sideboard is where you put things the government already forgot and you have not.