Golden Age (31 page)

When she called Michael, he said, “Not you, too.” Her broker, who was someone that Michael knew, though he didn’t have any funds with that firm, was a man almost her own age. She and Frank had put the Uncle Jens fund (twenty-five hundred very impressive dollars) first with that real-estate criminal Rubino (he had been charming, in his way, but when she saw
The Godfather
she had wondered about his origins). After real-estate investments had rolled it over several times, Frank put it into the stock market with a fellow Jim Upjohn recommended, and then that firm was taken over by this man, who stayed on the job when it folded into a larger firm. What was it, 110 years since the death of Uncle Jens? Andy’s mom had remembered vaguely that he’d left maybe seventy-five hundred dollars altogether. It was a very Norwegian thing to do to hold a grudge for sixty years after you died.

The youngish man who had been overseeing the funds for the
last four years had come highly recommended, and she had paid not much attention to him at all, since she had a pretty good track record on her own. But now, according to Michael, and then according to the head of the firm, who called all of his bigger clients, the forty-five-year-old had transferred almost a hundred million dollars to a mysterious account somewhere, and had himself left the country. His whereabouts remained mysterious for another four days, until he turned up in Venezuela.

At first, as Andy sat quietly at her kitchen table, stirring her mint tea and looking out the window at a group of crows arguing in the tree beside her little garage, the most shocking thing was the amount of money he had taken. Andy had thought she was rich—ten million dollars! Maybe because of that old TV show
The Millionaire
, which she watched when Janet was little, when they’d bought their first television and were living in that tiny place in Floral Park, she’d continued to think that a million bucks defined great wealth. A hundred million dollars! How could you spend that in Venezuela these days? When Andy had visited there with Frank, they had remarked upon how cheap even the most luxurious houses or views or gardens seemed to be.

Only gradually did she realize that she now had about eighty-three thousand dollars to her name, which had to last for some number of years. She was healthy and active, so the number of years might be considerable. She stirred her tea again, drank some more, watched two of the crows, who looked young, square off against one another, then fly away.

No mortgage payment. Not a lot for food—maybe fifty dollars a week? Heat could pose a problem, but her biggest fuel bill had been about three hundred dollars last year. She went down the list. Maybe she could go for three years or four? No new clothes, probably. She sat there. The tree was leafless, still; fog was vaporizing upward in small plumes. Andy took a deep breath and realized that she was happy now, happy that the disaster had finally arrived and had turned out to be nothing but money.

2001

T
HE FIRST THING
Janet hated about Bush was not that he had stolen the election—that was bad, but he had had accomplices. He might even regard himself, she thought, as the ignorant beneficiary of the unknowable power of beings greater than himself (Cheney, Rumsfeld, brother Jeb, and Al Gore, who, not having won his home state, buckled). No, the first thing Janet really hated him for was his offhand comment that the Clinton boom had busted, and that we were now in a recession. He seemed to have no understanding that to a lot of people (namely, those who had invested in Jared’s company) that sort of edict was a death knell—money was running to safety now (gold and, for God’s sake, diamonds), and Jared was worried. It was Bush’s final campaign statement, the ultimate repudiation of the Democrats, and a self-fulfilling prophecy. She told all her friends that he had been nonpresidential and irresponsible to say such a thing, but most of them pooh-poohed her.

The second thing she hated him for was that she was stopped on El Camino Real at the Sand Hill Road light, and the traffic light went from red to black. Everyone at all three of the lights stayed still for a long couple of minutes; then, realizing that the system had gone out, they began creeping across the intersection. Janet was heading for the barn, where she was going to take Sunlight on a little trail ride, maybe ponying Pesky, who could no longer be ridden though he liked to get
out, but she turned into the mall and drove slowly around. The mall was dark, too, and people were coming from the stores in droves, yakking and exclaiming. Then a cop car showed up, and a policeman started directing traffic on El Camino Real. Thinking that some sort of war had begun (probably no one else thought this), she turned on the radio for news. But it was not a war, it was another chapter in the ongoing energy crisis, brought to you by Enron. The most enraging thing about the energy crisis, apart from the sneering on all Internet message boards about how California must deserve this for some unknown reason having merely to do with the fact that California thought it was so cool to have attempted to scale back energy usage, was that it was closely—and, Janet would have said, seminally—connected to Bush and his cronies, who were, with absolute impunity, rigging the system in order to overcharge for the electricity they were refusing to send when the lines were available, and then insisting upon sending when the lines were jammed.

Janet finally overcame her rage sufficiently to drive out Sand Hill Road, creeping with everyone else through the black traffic lights, and she controlled her rage long enough to groom both horses and give them a little outing, but on the way home, all she needed was a Bush-Cheney bumper sticker in order for her actually to see red (she had never seen red before; what happened was, a sort of blood cloud closed in from either side, and she began to tremble in her seat so that she had to pull over). It didn’t help that the sticker was on a ’98 white Chevy pickup that looked a lot like the one Chance drove, although she thought he was in Phoenix at a rodeo.

She looked at her watch; it was two-thirty-four. She pulled into Town and Country Village, sat quietly in the car as the rain began to drizzle down, and took 150 deep breaths, which nearly made her fall asleep, but did mean that, when she picked up Jonah half an hour later, she was fairly sane, and this lasted through dinner, through the evening, and all the way until Jared started snoring beside her in their lovely but now deeply indebted bedroom.

The next morning, she wrote a long complaining e-mail to her congressman—not Anna Eshoo, whom she had met and did like, and therefore could not badger, but her own personal congressman from Brooklyn, who always replied with a stock e-mail entitled “Congressman Langdon Responds to Your Concerns.” This time, though, the
return e-mail included a note from Riley, who said, “I know exactly what you mean! It is like a coup around here, and not just because everyone knows that SCOTUS scuttled the recount on VERRYYY questionable grounds. Everyone is scared! My friend Nadie Cantwell says that her parents say it’s just like 1964 in the U.S.S.R., when Khrushchev was ousted and Brezhnev took over—the same sort of watch-your-step chill in the air.” Then, below that, “BTW, an hour later—I guess your mom got all her money back. The congressman says you can call him about it when you get the chance, but the brokerage firm managed to get it somehow, and the bonus is that she gets back what it was worth when it was stolen, not what it’s worth now, since the crash. Isn’t that funny?”

Janet wrote back, “My mom is always lucky. How is Charlie?”

Riley wrote back: “Charlie busy! Somehow, talked his way into nursing school at Georgetown! He just started, midyear. He finished his EMT course, and took two courses at another school in the summer, and then he was sharing a cab with someone, and you know Charlie, as soon as he found out that that person was in admin for the nursing school, he started asking questions and getting excited, and pretty soon, that person wanted him, even had him come over for an interview, and wrote him a recommendation! The reading isn’t easy, but it gives him more hope than his source of rage, which, now that he’s been on several hikes in the Appalachians, turns out to be hilltop removal mining! (Congratulations, me, since I have been talking about this for years, but he had to see it to believe me.) Anyway, we are hunkering down here. Not happy, but hoping for the best.”

On February 17, Bush bombed Iraq—Janet read all about it in
The New York Times
. This time, she wrote e-mails to Bush, Cheney, Richie, and Congressman Eshoo, as well as a letter to
The New York Times
, and various messages on various message boards under her alias, Sunshinelover. She spent all day doing this, and failed, it turned out, to cook supper. When Jared came in and the oven was as cold as the weather, she snapped, “Shit! I will just order a pizza, okay?” He hit the roof (finally, many of their friends might say). He set his laptop gently on the dining-room table, then dropped his briefcase, threw down his coat, and said, “I have had enough.”

“Enough of what?” But she did not phrase this as a question.

“Enough of this over-the-top reaction at whatever Bush does,
whatever the Republicans do, whatever doesn’t go exactly your way in the world we live in.”

Jonah appeared in the doorway, and disappeared. Janet’s heart seemed to push toward him, but she said to Jared, “That’s right, put your head in a damned hole and wait till someone shoves his dick right up your ass. It’s the American way.”

They had not agreed on the election. Jared had wondered whether Janet wanted Gore to wreck the government over the vote count, when the outcome of that would have been iffy at best.

Now Jared said, “There is something wrong with you. I don’t know what it is.” His voice was mild, enragingly forgiving. He went on. “Your attitude toward your father is, honestly, insane, especially considering that he’s dead. And you extrapolate that attitude onto everything masculine.”

“I do not.” That was the only defense she could think of at the moment.

“I
liked
your dad. Frank was interesting and complex. I enjoyed talking to him and working with him. I thought he was generous in his way. He was a
man
. Your idea is that if a man makes any mistakes, no matter how old he is, he is never to be forgiven, his mistakes are never to be forgotten.”

“What are your mistakes, then? I suppose I need to know.” As soon as she said this, and in a frozen, spiteful voice, Janet realized that she should take it back, that she had confirmed her identity as a bitch, maybe permanently.

Jared said, “Fuck you. If I disagree with you, you argue with me until I can’t stand it anymore, and if I agree with you, I get depressed. I’m going out for dinner. And I am taking Jonah with me.”

Janet stared at her computer screen and sat still, all through the slamming of the front door, the turning on of Jared’s car, and the backing around. Jonah hadn’t made a noise or said a word, which meant, she thought, that he was either a very good child or that he was scared to death.

It was clear that she was supposed to ponder her sins while they were gone, so she did for a while, at least as long as it took her to eat the leftover tagliatelle and chicken sausage from the night before. Then she went back to the computer, did some more complaining (because she was right, after all), then felt exhaustion flood over her. She went
to bed. At eight-thirty in the morning, she realized that Jared had slept in Emily’s room. The only words they exchanged when she got up to find him sitting at the breakfast table were that she asked him where they went, he said they went to see
Little Nicky
, she said, “Is that appropriate for a nine-year-old?” and he said, “Yes,” gritting his teeth. Then he said, “I’m going out. My sincere and honest suggestion is that you find an Al-Anon meeting somewhere.” He finished his cup of coffee, got up, left. When Jonah came into the kitchen half an hour later, it was Janet who said, “Where did your dad go?”

Jonah said, “He said he was going to go skiing up at Dodge Ridge for a couple of days, and he’d be back Wednesday.”

She should not have said, “I guess he doesn’t give a shit about his company, then.”

Jonah said, “I don’t know,” and went back to his room.

—

EMILY HELPED
with the horse show—it was at Mount Holyoke—but she didn’t ride, because Pattycake had come up with an abscess in his left front hoof. No one minded an abscess—as soon as you got your horse out of his stall and panicked because he was hopping lame and then felt the hoof wall, and realized that it was burning and the horse had a bounding digital pulse, the vet came, pulled the shoe, excavated the abscess, and packed it, and a day later the horse was soundish, and the hoof wall was cool. But even though it was not serious, it was a couple of weeks off, and that wasn’t bad if spring break was coming, and your roommate and another friend were planning to drive to Florida just to escape the everlasting cold and snow. It was possible that if Emily had known what she was getting into, she might have gone to Sweet Briar for the weather, even though her mom had gone there. Mount Holyoke was more prestigious, and she liked Boston, but she was learning about trade-offs.