Golden Age (22 page)

“Dung,” said Henry.

“And then they bring in the turkeys, and after that the chicken coop on wheels, and they open the door, and the chickens pick up any bits that are left; the eggs are completely organic and fertile; and all the animals together have pounded the nutrients into the soil by walking around—”

“Where do you stay?” said Claire.

“Well, they have a bed-and-breakfast, where they serve only products they’ve grown and produced; the place is entirely self-supporting. If you want a bath, you throw wood into the boiler that heats the water, and there’s some kind of filter in the chimney….”

He went on. Henry glanced despairingly at Claire.

“After we got married, Riley said she needed a break, so I drove to St. Louis for a visit, and I thought I’d loop north to pass the time. Here’s the great thing: when we moved to New York, I sold my Tercel, and then, when we moved to Washington, I found the exact same car, even the same color, but with fewer miles on it, at a dealer in Baltimore.” He looked at his watch. “Two guys are going back with me. I pick ’em up at six. We should be back to D.C. by tomorrow morning. I’ve been averaging forty-two miles per gallon, and the price of
gas has been around a dollar twenty-five, so each of us will pay about eight bucks for the trip.” He grinned. He was a nice young man, but Claire could see how his wife might need a break.

From deep within himself, Henry summoned a mote of curiosity (Claire knew she was being catty to think this). He said, “How is Richie doing?”

Charlie crossed his ankle over his knee and got comfortable. He said, “You know, Riley and I talk about this all the time. He can say anything. He can say that Hillary is sexy, and no one goes bananas, not even Hillary. There’s something about the way that he gazes at you, as if he’s really listening, and you have this feeling that he cares about you, and you also have this feeling that he might punch you in the nose. In D.C., that works. It works with Vito Lopez—you know who he is? He sort of runs the Brooklyn machine. He gives the congressman no shit at all.”

Then Charlie said, “You look like you could use some lunch. I could use some lunch.” He glanced at Claire. Claire shook her head. “I have to take all the table linen from the weekend parties back to the rental place and talk to some people.”

But Claire was curious to see how Charlie would pull this off. He said, “What’s around here? Did I tell you about my marathon? It was in October. I got into that state you get into, you know, where you are a mindless machine of pain and transcendence, and then I crossed the finish line and fell down and passed out, and that was that. Never again. But I still run about five miles a day. A meatball sub? What is Chicago famous for?”

“Hot dogs,” said Henry, inertly.

Claire sat up. She said, “You could go to the Superdawg drive-in on North Milwaukee. You can drop me at the ‘L’ station near there.”

“I eat hot dogs,” said Charlie.

After that, she saw how good he was. He did everything as if it were automatic, not pausing for a moment to gauge, or possibly even sense, whether Henry wanted to do it. He had Henry in his coat, with his scarf and gloves, out onto the sidewalk, into the passenger seat of the Tercel, burbling the whole time about hot dogs he had known, split, grilled, with onion rings, with French fries, mustard from Boulogne, not Dijon—he was a great lover of mustard. Henry looked stricken, but he did look—out the window, down the street,
at passersby. Pretty soon, he was sitting up straighter and responding: No, he hadn’t eaten sausage in Milwaukee; perhaps he should have; actually, he’d never been to Milwaukee. Claire and Carl had invited him to Lake Geneva, but in fact he’d only been to Wisconsin once. No, he wasn’t much of a local traveler. Preferred France and Italy; maybe that was a mistake. Just before they pulled up to where she was going to get the train, he said, “I am getting hungry. Oh, Claire. I’ll call you later,” and then off they drove. She could see Henry’s head turned toward Charlie, his mouth moving. She thought of the hot dog they would have, juicy, thick, poppyseed bun. Carl liked those; Claire preferred the deep-fried battered vegetables, rather tempura-like in a Chicago way.

When she called the next day, Henry was almost talkative. It was a shame about that boy. Thirty years old and utterly without direction; one failed athletic attempt after another—swimming and diving in high school, then skiing and mountain climbing, now running, but that was over. He had very much admired the sweater Henry was wearing, a cable-knit cashmere; Henry had simply handed it over. Undiagnosed dyslexic, maybe. Did Claire remember the Cheek cousins? Had 160 acres up by Gladbrook? None of them could read; there was a dunce cap at the school there with “Cheek” written on the inside of the brim.

Claire had never heard this.

Anyway, school started after the weekend. Henry had given Charlie a couple of books—not hard ones, fellow named Hinton, for kids, really, but he made Charlie promise to write him a short letter every fifty pages. Charlie swore he hadn’t read a book in ten years, since he barely graduated from college.

Claire saw that Henry was out to change that.

—

EVERY YEAR
, Jesse pondered the glyphosate conundrum, usually while lying in bed after Jen fell asleep. It was fortunate that the windows of their room looked south, away from the farm. Otherwise, he would be standing there, staring at the fields. This way, he just lay quietly beside her, trying to push thoughts about glyphosate out of his mind while coordinating his breathing with hers. The thing was, you could have the well water tested for calcium and magnesium
salts. Supposedly, the hardness of the water did not change much year to year; supposedly, it had to do with the rock layers that the water seeped through. He had had the water tested, and discovered that the water from his dad’s well was harder than the water from either the well by the old farm or his own well. The evidence was there—his folks went through a hot-water heater in seven years because of calcium and magnesium buildup in the tank. His had lasted ten years already. If the water was hard, you added ammonium sulfate to the glyphosate—Jesse usually added eight pounds, or maybe nine, though if your water was hard enough you could add up to seventeen pounds. When the mix was right, the emerging weeds drank it up and died. Sometimes the velvetleaf was harder to get rid of, but it did a great job on the foxtail. He turned over, opened his eyes. The moonlight made the pattern of the wallpaper look like a fence, though Jesse knew it was really flowers. He closed his eyes.

His dad was skeptical about all these chemicals (and they were pretty expensive, too), but what was the alternative? Repeated cultivating, sending the soil in clouds east to Illinois? Hoeing? His dad had plenty of stories about the kids hoeing the fields in the thirties, or maybe it was their own parents doing that in the 1890s. When Jesse imagined Uncle Frank with a hoe, Uncle Frank was wearing his army uniform from the war and aiming the hoe at deer in the distance. Perky hoeing? Guthrie hoeing? Felicity, maybe—even at seven, she was determined to outdo her eleven- and twelve-year-old brothers. And then he couldn’t help stilling his body and listening for any sound that might indicate that a certain seven-year-old was up in the night; sometimes she woke up and read, though she was forbidden to go downstairs. No sounds.

Jesse was as precise as any farmer he knew. He sprayed between nine and ten in the morning, when all the leaves of all the weeds were stretching out, taking in the day’s sunlight. Before he sprayed, he kept a record of morning temperatures for a week, and he noted the dew (enough dew and the glyphosate just slid off the leaves, nothing taken in). He thought that if he sprayed as precisely as possible, he would use less glyphosate and still get the same results. All of this was a constant topic of discussion at the Denby Café. A few farmers thought a light dew made the glyphosate more effective—“opened the pores,” they said. “Hell, no, sun does that,” said the others. Jesse didn’t say
much, but every year he wondered if he should be more precise, or less. More than one farmer at the Denby Café scoffed at all the complicated stuff and “just added some, don’t know how much. What seems to work.” One of his letters from Uncle Frank had a line about his friend the cranberry farmer dipping rags in glyphosate and then dragging them in the water behind a boat. His mom said her mother had been as casual with her baking: “Oh, some butter. A nice piece about the size of your thumb.” Jesse didn’t understand how anyone could farm this way, as if you could look at the ground and figure out whether it was time to plant, as if you could look off to the west and figure out what the weather was going to be. Once, his dad had said that all those years at college must have driven out his instincts, and his mom had said, “Hush!,” so his dad had never said that again (and Jesse never complained about his dad; all those years at college had proved to him that he had the kindest and most easygoing dad of all). But you couldn’t farm with instincts if you were aiming at 150 bushels of corn to the acre and 45 bushels of beans.

Or you could. There was something attractive about taking it day by day, following your instincts, hoping for the best, maybe worrying, but not parsing out every little detail night after night. Yes, the crop might fail, but God would provide, as his mom said, giving him a little kiss on the cheek, or Uncle Frank would provide (not anymore), or the bank would provide (for a price), or Monsanto would provide (as the local rep kept telling him).

That was what brought the subject of the beans into his brain every night.

His mom subscribed to a cooking magazine, and she was the one who showed him the tomato article a few years back: why tomatoes from Florida were so tasteless. Here it was—her fingernail tapped on the spot where the author went into the tomato field in Florida and ate a tomato. It was delicious! But as soon as you picked those tomatoes and put them into a chilled truck and sent them north, the flavor rose off of them like a vapor. Just the way she’d always said: You don’t put a tomato in the refrigerator! Everyone knows that! And so they added a gene to tomatoes that slowed ripening—they could ripen on the truck or at the grocery store. Still tasted terrible, and, for that matter, against God’s will, said his mom.

Jesse sat up very quietly, looked at the clock, moved softly toward
the bathroom, turned out Felicity’s bedside light on the way (Felicity was sound asleep, some Care Bear or other tight against her), lifted the toilet lid, took a pee, lowered the toilet lid, went back to bed. Jen was now on her stomach, her head turned toward the door. He bent down. Her eyes were closed; her breathing was steady.

Sometimes your glyphosate went ahead and killed your beans. You had to measure your poison accurately, and sometimes you didn’t, or the margin of danger overlapped the margin of safety. Now you could buy beans from Monsanto that resisted Monsanto’s own herbicide, and the margin of safety was expanded—the beans wouldn’t die, but maybe the bank account would, since every improvement costs money. The rep said he would give him a deal. His dad said that there were no deals. His mom said that all deals were with the devil. Jen said that Felicity needed braces: one of her canines was coming in through the gum and had to be extracted, the other as well, and then two years of braces, uppers and lowers. Jesse closed his eyes.

—

ANDY KNEW
that her new house looked like a servants’ quarters to Loretta and to Janet, a piece of Iowa that had lost its way, somehow transported to Far Hills, New Jersey, but she liked it. It was, maybe, the first house she’d ever lived in that truly suited her. Why it was in Far Hills was a funny story. All during the Republican primaries, she’d paid little attention to Bob Dole, no attention to Pat Buchanan, but intermittent attention to Steve Forbes. It had taken her two months to realize that he was Malcolm Forbes’s son; she kept looking at him and thinking he reminded her of someone. That day, which was a Sunday, she got into the car and drove to Far Hills—not far, though she had never bothered to drive there in her whole life before. The house, on Spring Street, was the third one she saw with a “For Sale” sign, modest in every way. For the first few years, she could have her bedroom in the attic, then on the ground floor, in the back. It was in a pleasant neighborhood and made for an old lady. She did not want to move into Manhattan (Loretta thought the right thing would be for Andy to live with them, but she didn’t actually want her, Andy felt). She bought the house, called the movers the next day, paid with a check when it closed a week later, moved in six days after she saw it. The house in Englewood Cliffs sold for six times the price
of the house in Far Hills, and Uncle Jens received a nice sum, which he put into Jared’s computer-animation business. He also contributed the maximum allowed amount to Richie’s campaign, the third one, and for this reason, perhaps, she opened the door one afternoon in October to find her son, the congressman himself, standing on the porch, his hands in his pockets, gazing around.

He said, “What are you doing?”

“I’m making a grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich for an early supper, then I’m going to read the latest issue of
The New Yorker
, then I’m going to bed.”

“Your front door is unlocked.”

“You tried it?”

“Of course I did.”

“Were you going to just walk in?”

“Only after I looked in the window and made sure it was yours.”

“What if I was out?”

“Then I would see what was in the refrigerator.”

She gave him a grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich, too—Emmentaler cheese, Black Forest ham—and a crunchy bowl of romaine lettuce with some olive oil from Spain and some balsamic vinegar from Italy. They sat across from each other at her very modest kitchen table in her very modest chairs; none of the Englewood Cliffs furniture had fit in here, so she’d sold it (some for very good prices), and bought all new.

She did not ask him about the campaign.

She did not ask him about Leo.

She did not ask him whether he was seeing anyone.

She did not ask him about Michael.