Golden Age (44 page)

—

JEN WAS IN
a cleaning mood, so she had left six boxes of books on the front porch. Jesse could see them from his desk. The rule was that he had to go through them, and only those volumes he actually wanted could come back into the house; the rest would go to the Usherton Library. It was midsummer, and there wasn’t much else to do; Jesse had proposed that they take a trip somewhere, only a week or two, but Jen said they didn’t have the money. That was discussable—they could go to a lake somewhere not far away, like Bemidji, Minnesota, for almost nothing, but Jesse also knew that Jen wanted to be around if maybe, by some small chance, Guthrie or Perky might call. Jen and Jesse didn’t talk about either Perky or Guthrie. Perky they didn’t talk about because he was being trained in South Carolina to manage a bomb-sniffing dog, and there was nothing to be said about it. Guthrie they didn’t talk about because he was in Georgia and they never heard from him. And, anyway, they had argued between themselves so many times about every facet of Guthrie’s enlistment and Perky’s enlistment that all they had to do was look at one another in order to know where they stood. The argument was not about whether the boys should have enlisted or what might have prevented them, it was about whether the wars should be there to lure them, to offer them a
dangerous alternative to life on the farm. Yes, Jen had a cell phone, but Guthrie or Perky might only try one time, and the signal could be very bad in northern Minnesota.

Life on the farm this summer had been far from dangerous—only strange. The weather was cool, maybe too cool for a really good crop, but it was interesting. Their county and the one just to the west had had normal precipitation; the crops were growing nicely. But due north and due south it was very dry, while due east it was swampy. In Jesse’s whole life he had never seen it so varied. Usually, a system came through, southwest to northeast, and on the edges of the system, storms struck or didn’t. But this summer, it was too cool for really dangerous weather, perfect for really strange weather.

Jesse hoisted himself out of his desk chair (he had been paying bills), went out, and opened one of the boxes, then two more. He saw that most of the books were old ones that Uncle Henry had left behind.

Jesse had thought of going back into the commodities market: he’d had a little surplus in the winter, forty-seven thousand dollars. He hadn’t done badly trading in the old days, when he thought he was so smart playing both ends. He had even rather enjoyed visiting the pit one time and listening to the shouting, but while he was turning over the idea, before he mentioned it to Jen, the Board of Trade decided to consolidate with the Mercantile Exchange, so they would be trading beans in one spot and euros in another, and who knew what else—Ebola-death futures?—somewhere else. However, as soon as he heard the two exchanges were merging, he gave up his nascent plan, and that was the moment he knew he was old, the moment that the feeling he’d had for such a long time of being sharp, knowledgeable, organized, ready for anything, the anointed heir of Frank Langdon, evaporated into the humidity.

Underneath the books, folded up, was a gift from Uncle Henry, a print of a painting by John Constable, an English artist. For a while, Jesse had cherished that print as he cherished his uncle Frank’s letters—an object showing the affection Uncle Henry held for him (the inscription on the back said, “You will like this! To my favorite future farmer! Love, Henry”).

Jesse carried it inside and spread it open. It was large, so he sat with it at his desk, in the morning light. It was a painting of a man with
a scythe in his hand, standing at the edge of what looked like a field of wheat. A river, a green meadow, a cathedral, and some trees were in the background. He remembered that the picture had given him a sense of the Langdon and Cheek past—the past behind Great-Grandpa Wilmer, who had died in the early fifties, and Great-Grandma Elizabeth, whom he hardly remembered. The Cheeks were from Wessex, and the Langdons were from the north somewhere. This painting had been made in the southeast, of flatlands that would have been alien to the Cheeks and the Langdons. Now he looked at it rather sadly, as at an old girlfriend whom he had overestimated, who had grown careworn and dull. What struck him was the smallness of the field and the overwhelming weight of the heavy labor. If he had spent his life scything wheat and shocking oats and shoveling manure and hitching and unhitching draft horses, would he still be alive? He and Jen sometimes complained about the passing of youth. He was fifty and Jen was forty-nine, but they hadn’t thought yet to complain about the onset of old age—his joints didn’t ache, he had only just purchased his first pair of glasses, the fifteen pounds he had gained ten years before he had gotten rid of by walking around the farm more and driving less. Jen was the same age that her mother had been when she married Jesse, and looked ten years younger. Were they flattering themselves, or had they arrived at a golden age of agriculture without knowing it? The fields and rivers Constable depicted, Jesse now knew, were rife with cow pox and tuberculosis, rabies (he remembered his dad telling him that they didn’t dare have a dog when he was a boy, because of the danger of introducing rabies) and brucellosis. In the cottage and cathedral, there were no moms and dads reading novels or watching the news or discussing fishing trips that they weren’t going to take.

Jesse got up from his desk and went upstairs to go to the bathroom and find out what else Jen was throwing away, but also to go through Guthrie’s old room, out to the back-porch windows to the north, to look over the bean field. A bean field wasn’t as dramatic as a cornfield—just rows of leafy green, this year a little damp and yellow to the east of them, a little dry to the north and south, but perfect here. His field ran as far as he could see in both directions. It was clean, healthy, mostly weed-free; he wasn’t having the problems with monster velvetleaf that some farmers were. He had always been precise, and precision seemed to be paying off, but, to be honest, he
didn’t know how long that would be true. His field contrasted pleasantly with the Constable print—as a reflex, he congratulated himself. But the longer he looked, the more the field looked as though something was about to happen, as if it were a blanket about to be sucked into the sky. He shook his head. There was no peace on the farm—that man carrying the scythe could have told John Constable that.

—

IF RICHIE HADN
’
T NOTED
it already by himself, he would have been reminded by Loretta that when the money guys met to consider a crisis, they always met somewhere expensive and grandiose, like Aspen or Davos. Richie wondered if this made it easier for the losers among them (those worth less, say, than a hundred million) to throw themselves off a cliff? Loretta was sure to e-mail from wherever it was (this year, Jackson Hole), just to complain about how sleepy she was in the economic stratosphere, though enjoying herself anyway. And there was a crisis—everyone in the world except Michael seemed to acknowledge it. When Richie and Jessica went to their now intermittent Sunday supper two weeks later, there was no discussion of the housing bubble and its collapse, and Richie did not remark, glancing around the palatial ground floor, where they dined among the collection of California artists, that the place must be worth—what?—ten million now, rather than fifteen. He and Jessica did admire the painting of men panning for gold in 1849 that Loretta had picked up from a private collector in Los Angeles. She said, “I don’t think people realize there was a series of these. The most famous one is in a museum in Boston, but I like this one better. It’s more intimate.” She had added a lot of paintings to her “collection” recently. Richie hadn’t realized that it was a “collection”—here he had been thinking these dusty things were just reminders of the ranch.

Over their roast chicken (which Jessica seemed to be devouring, much to Loretta’s pleasure), Richie kept his eye on Michael, but he could see nothing. Michael’s cheeks weren’t flushed, his eyes weren’t rimmed in tears, he was not wringing his table napkin, his hair hadn’t turned gray. Given the economic news, Richie was a little surprised, and, maybe at last, a little gratified to feel that his lifelong desire for Michael to suffer had dwindled away. It was the Jessica effect, surely—she was so indifferent to so many painful things that he seemed to be
imbibing her indifference. Even in the spring, when Leo had been quoted in his school newspaper to the effect that his father could and should be replaced in Congress by someone with real convictions—his example was Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC), who in 2003 had come up with the name “Freedom Fries” but now opposed the Iraq War and wanted to publish redacted pages from the
9/11 Commission Report
pointing to the Saudis. Richie had laughed and asked Jones if he was looking for an intern, but only as a joke.

After dessert, Loretta got up from her place, carried the pie plate (maple-walnut, delicious in every way) into the kitchen, and invited Jessica to go with her into the front room. Jessica got up, dropped her napkin on the table, and glanced at him with a merry look. They walked out. After the door closed, Richie said, “Where are we? Windsor Castle?”

“Not yet,” said Michael. He leaned back until his chair was teetering, and reached his long arm for the Cognac. No butler. He poured Richie an inch, himself nothing. One thing to be said for him—he made up his mind to do something or to stop something, and his mind was made up. The Cognac was in a spherical bottle set in a sort of blue crystal bed with a blue crystal stopper. Richie had never seen anything like it. He took the tiniest sip. Michael said, “What does it taste like?”

Richie considered, then said, “A little smoky. I wouldn’t dare say sweet, but it’s not a hundred percent removed from a chocolate latte. Are you tempted?”

“Only to take a whiff.”

Richie handed him the glass. Michael took a whiff. He said, “That’s the best part, really.” He took another whiff and handed it back. Richie enjoyed his second sip more than his first; then he said, “Are we supposed to discuss Mom here, or national policy? Loretta must have a plan.”

“Always,” said Michael.

Then he dared. He said, “You okay?”

Michael knew exactly what he was talking about. He said, “The office could be better. I saw the writing on the wall in March, though, and stashed my own portfolio in concrete goods.”

“Like concrete?”

“Not quite, but close. Zinc, cadmium, neodymium, sulfuric acid.”

“What is neodymium?”

“It’s a rare-earth. They use it in batteries. Priuses, that sort of thing.”

Richie nodded, took another sip, consulted his inner sensor to see if Michael really did seem calm. He did. So Richie hazarded, “Everyone else is fucked, right?”

Michael said, “Maybe not. I’m not as bearish as some people are. But here’s the real problem.”

He stopped, stared at the Cognac bottle for a moment. Then he said, “As many are fucked as are not fucked. That means, as far as I can tell, that you guys can’t really do anything, and you had better not do anything. Some have to live and some have to die, because almost as many are short as are long. There’s too much fucking money.”

“I never thought I’d hear those words out of your mouth.”

“Well, let me say them again: there’s too much fucking money. It’s like a hurricane of money, or, no, better, a quantum field of money. It pops here and it pops there, and settles somewhere else, but the wrong signal will explode the whole thing, and all the money will disappear.”

“But not the neodymium, right?”

“Maybe not. Maybe not.”

“You don’t seem as, I don’t know, as worried as you could be.”

“That’s only because I don’t quite know what to be worried about, so I’m taking a worry vacation. Do I worry about the Fed? Do I worry about Greenspan? Do I worry about the rising tide of stupidity?”

“You never have worried about that,” said Richie.

“Something to fucking float onto the surface of,” said Michael.

“Did Dad ever give you any advice?”

Now Michael looked right at him and grinned. He said, “He did, actually.”

Richie felt a weird and unexpected stab of pain. His father had never given him any advice. “Do tell.”

“He said to never forget that money is boring.”

“So—the equation would be, too much money equals too much boredom, and that’s the root of the problem?”

“I think he would say so, but he never told me which came first, the chicken or the egg.”

“I would like to be bored,” said Richie.

2008

F
ELICITY AND JESSICA
, Richie discovered, were two of a kind. Jessica, like Felicity, had been a pudgy, earnest girl in glasses that were always slipping down her nose, and then boxing had given her purpose, strength, and contact lenses. Felicity had grown into a willowy young woman (though strict). Over Christmas, when Richie, Jessica, and Leo made their postmarital promenade to Chicago, Denby, and Montana to demonstrate their familyhood, Jessica did with Felicity what she did with everyone in Richie’s family: she showed a sincere interest in Felicity’s yakkety yak about the personalities of animals, and she went with her one day to the local animal shelter to look at cats. They also compared their biceps and their quadriceps, and Jessica gave Felicity tips about stretching before and after stall cleaning. Richie thought that Felicity didn’t look like any of the Guthrie women or Aunt Claire, or the sainted Aunt Lillian—more like he himself might have looked as a girl. In the meantime, he and Leo went jogging with Guthrie. Richie huffed and puffed in the back while Guthrie and Leo pressed ahead, talking about Iraq and Afghanistan, too far away to ask him any questions about Robert Gates or Merrill Lynch—a good thing.