When it was my turn it was well after 9 p.m. He looked at my papers and all of my account of trying to make a life of words. “Hmm,” he said, “hmm.” He told me I owed a tax bill in the low of thousands. I almost went black. “But,” he said gently, “that only means that you are successful. You made so much of writing. “
My accountant taught me that even in a life of art where uncertainty is built in, some care can be taken in making plans, planning success, not just succeeding, and offering me ballast for nothing in planning go according to plan. It’s a difficult lesson to learn – the lives of great artists are full of instability. But he also reminds me not to block my blessing every April 15th, not to decide that I already know how my artistic career will end, that life can surprise you with both good and bad things.
At the end of our first meeting, he said to me seriously, “You are good at it. You will make money as an artist. You have to be prepared, ”and he told me what kind of money to put and what kind of retirement plans to invest in for the following year. I went back to him a year later when I got married and he then gave me advice on my taxes. He told me urgently, “Don’t get married on Christmas or New Years. It will ruin these days for you. “
By then I had spoken to him long enough to know that he was married and divorced, and that he had seven adult daughters of his own, all of whom were trained accountants – they helped him through the tax season. Sometimes after negotiating a contract or looking for a grant, I would call his office and just get the machine. That was because, as he had explained to me, he had left six months a year to travel around West Africa and collect the art I had seen in his office.
The last time I saw him in person was the 2019 tax season. I was five months pregnant, my then-husband had just lost his job, and we were both suddenly living on a research fellowship I had. He sat with us and assured us it would be fine. I was stressed about money, stressed about my baby’s future, stressed about how I was going to pay my impending hospital bills. Speaking to him was one of the few times during this tumultuous pregnancy when I felt like I was being looked after by someone else instead of caring for everyone else – a gift I will always be grateful for.
The tax season of the last pandemic was pushed back again and again by the disaster. I paid my taxes in June on the back porch of the house I lived in during quarantine and paid a masked sitter $ 20 an hour for the privilege of speaking to my accountant on the phone without a baby in the background . I realized that my relationship with him is the most positive I have ever had with a man about money. When I kept him informed about my pandemic year – marriage over, vacancies gone, quarantine in another state – he just mumbled wisely into the phone. He had seen it all. “But I did what you told me last year and paid my estimated tax,” I said.
“Did you listen to me?” he replied with fatherly warmth. “Of course,” I said. “None of my customers ever do that,” he laughed. And then he said he set me up for 2021 because I followed his instructions. It was one of my proudest moments in that hazy, heady year.
Kaitlyn Greenidge is the author of the upcoming novel “Libertie” and the director of Harper’s Bazaar.
