If you’ve got to be homeless, try to do it at a four-star hotel. At least you’ve got a roof over your head and a swell complimentary breakfast. If you wake up early, you can hit it twice without too many people noticing and save the extra for lunch. For dinner, you learn to live with the stares you get carrying groceries past the doormen with your kids in tow. After a couple of weeks, I could tramp through a dozen power breakfasts in my bathrobe on my way to walk the dog without giving it a second thought.

The Union Square W Hotel in Manhattan had become my family’s own personal Hotel California–we could check out any time we liked, but we could never leave. We had no place to go.

We checked in when our developer promised that our new apartment would be ready “in a week or two.” That turned into a month or two. Nothing to do but sit tight–a family of four plus our dog, Spike, wedged into a cramped hotel room–and keep racking up the hotel bills, waiting to move into a new dream home that we could no longer afford to actually live in.

I was okay with that. I no longer viewed it as losing a home. I saw it as winning an argument–and, quite possibly, saving my family from a lifetime of financial ruin.

***

My marriage to Rose is an ongoing disagreement over finances. She’s a big believer in “paying it forward”–that is, buy things today that you hope to afford tomorrow. According to her revolutionary economic theory, a.k.a., “Rose Math,” the need for money somehow creates the supply, as if the capital she’s tied up in her shoe collection is what she leveraged to attain her enviable success as a business executive. Sure, it’s fuzzy logic, but much of the time, Rose Math has worked.

Thanks to her theory, we enjoyed a very good ride on the ever-expanding Manhattan real estate bubble, flipping our way through three different residences in five years, each nicer than the last. And okay, fine, I’m no victim. Flipping was addictive. You start to think that if you’re not over-extended, you’re under-invested, that the only way to stay ahead of the game is to get behind the 8-ball. It’s a rush. When the flip is on, you feel like Tarzan, swinging from one place to the other, buying low and selling high, your feet never touching the ground.

Problem is, eventually you hit a tree. Ours came in the form of a sudden $3,200 per month assessment on the loft we were selling. The building needed a new elevator, and the condo board had to take out a big loan.

No one wants to buy into a troubled building, of course, unless the price is right. We slashed our asking price until it hurt, then until we bled, and finally, to the bone. By the time we had pillaged it enough to attract a buyer, we were a few hundred thousand dollars south of where we thought we’d be when we made our commitment to buy the new place. And we had no idea how we’d bridge that gap.

***

Staying at the W had been Rose’s idea. We knew it was a splurge, but unloading the loft was so stressful that we figured we deserved a mini-vacation. Besides, Rose’s perspective was: What financial worries? People who stay at four-star hotels don’t have financial worries!

From our 17th floor hotel room, I could look down upon a handsome red-brick office building across the street where our accountant, Abe, had his offices. Having him so near would be terrifically convenient when it came time to file for bankruptcy.

A month into our stay, with our developer coming up with increasingly creative reasons why the new place wasn’t ready, I noticed the stress getting to Rose–as did a room service guy who forgot mayo one night. This flip had officially flopped. We had flown too high on mortgaged wings. Even she had to acknowledge it now.

I set up a meeting with Abe to discuss our only realistic option–put the new place on the market immediately, find a cheap rental, and crawl under a rock until the storm blew over. I said my piece and then offered Rose my big, strong shoulder to cry on.

She pushed me away. “If you’re not man enough to fight for this apartment, you can pack your bags right now!”

Huh?

“I will die before I give up that apartment!” she continued, grandly. Think Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind: “I will never be hungry again!” Then, as if to underscore her willingness to die for the apartment, she succumbed to a massive coughing fit. She’d recently caught a bug.

Abe and I looked at each other and shook our heads. “What’s our bottom line?” I asked.

“Well, since Rose’s income looks fairly fixed for this next year, basically it’s up to you. To afford that apartment, you will need to double what you made last year.”

Gulp.

***

“What you need to do is sell a book,” Rose said, once we got back to the W.

The idea wasn’t as half-baked as it sounds. I actually did have an idea for a book, and I did have connections in the book industry. But: “Honey, for me to sell the book, I would have to write the book. Or at least a lengthy proposal. And trying to write under this much pressure would be like trying to build a house of cards with a sledgehammer.”

“If you love me, you’ll find a way.”

Pow! Jewish guilt, the way my wife rolls, is a bare-knuckle blood sport played for keeps. Rose followed this uppercut with her sucker punch, another coughing fit. Whammo!

I staggered to my corner, slumping down at my laptop. This was a no-win situation. If I didn’t pull this rabbit out of my hat, it’d be a blow to our marriage. We’d rung up some emotional big-ticket items at the old place: I’d lost my mom. Our youngest son, Charlie, was born prematurely and almost didn’t survive. Our oldest son, Sam, had to have plastic surgery after being bitten by a dog. Rose, in particular, was banking on us getting a fresh start at the new place. The beautiful thing about my wife is that she spends of herself as freely as her money. She’s all in, all the time.

But if I did, well, I shuddered at the thought of “Rose Math” becoming our new normal. It’s like having Nietzche as your financial advisor: That which does not bankrupt you makes you richer.

That night, as I stared at the ceiling, I wondered how we got here. How could Rose and I, after ten years together, disagree on something as fundamental as home? For Rose, home is where the doorman is. I could only theorize that, as a relatively new second-generation American, coming home to a fancy address provided vital reassurance that she had truly “arrived” in America.

But my first American ancestor came over on the second crossing of the Mayflower. What I know about my Scotch ancestors suggests that he probably was originally booked on the first crossing, but volunteered to go standby on the second for a free ticket. My forefathers pioneered the Midwest, withstanding flood, famine, drought, pestilence–all for the privilege of being pig farmers in Iowa. Perhaps because of my humble origins, I believe that a place has to be humble to be no place like home.

I spent the next week at my laptop, doing great work–never before had I come up with such creative scenarios to avoid working. One night I even had myself convinced that our hotel room was under attack from mutant mold spores. The next morning, with my trusty ex–police dog Spike at my side, I laid the evidence before Boris (not his real name), a hotel’s building engineer:

Exhibit A: A dank smell permeating the room.

Exhibit B: A wet spot on the carpet directly underneath an air-conditioning vent, suggesting a point of entry.

Exhibit C: Rose’s ever-worsening cough. Note: Rose has a mold allergy.

“Together it spells mold, Boris. Quite possibly a super-aggressive strain.”

Boris smiled and nodded politely, the way you do with crazy people, and then said, “Or maybe it’s just zee little dog.” He pointed at Spike, peeing on the rug in the corner.

Somehow, Boris got to my witness.

* * *

“How’s the writing going, honey?”

“Great,” I said, typing furiously: All work and no play make Mark a dull boy. This was my inside joke, riffing on the scene in The Shining when Shelley Duvall realizes that Jack Nicholson has gone stark raving shack-whacky. But even I wasn’t laughing. I hadn’t really slept in days, ate only apples that I swiped from the ornamental centerpiece in the hotel lobby, and stopped bathing regularly so as to not “waste” the free bottles of Bliss bath products the W provided.

Living at the hotel was even taking a toll on my boys, who built their own bedrooms out of sofa cushions, luggage, and blankets, and ordered Rose and I to keep out!

Instead, Rose moved out–to the hospital. She was there for two weeks. Her cough was not, as I had previously deduced, the work of mutant mold spores. It was pneumonia. We celebrated Sam’s sixth birthday at her bedside. She missed his first little league game.

One night, when visiting hours were ending, Sam turned to me, excited. “Daddy, let’s all stay in Mommy’s room tonight! The beds are so cool the way they move up and down.”

“There’s nothing wrong with our bed at the hotel.”

He drew quieter. “But if we all stay here, we could be home.”

“Sam, this is a hospital.”

“But if we stay here with Mommy then we’ll all be home, because we’ll all be together.”

Rose and I looked at each other. Somehow, as our fighting for a better life turned into fighting with each other, we’d lost our way home. At moments like this, it’s terrifically handy to have a six-year-old around to remind you that the most important things in life aren’t really that complicated.

* * *

Man, I hate when Rose is right.

Not only did I get the book deal, but it brought in what our accountant said we needed–almost to the penny. Then, the builder felt so bad for everything we went through that he picked up our $20,000 hotel bill. And, of course, we all really love the new apartment.

Now, I’m not saying Rose Math works. Just that it worked for us. Again.