Golden Age (49 page)

Did he feel regret or shame? Richie had no idea. He himself alternated, understanding that regret was a desire to have lived your life differently, whereas shame was a much more basic, and honorable, emotion. In order of importance, he had five shames: supporting the Iraq Resolution, voting for repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, not blocking Halliburton in some way, letting the anti–climate-change
forces of big oil roll over him, and not sticking his foot out and tripping Dick Cheney when he had the chance.

He said, “Jessica wants to move to the Catskills and build a hay-bale house.”

“I visited a cob house in California once.”

“Built with corncobs?”

“No, it’s a kind of mud, including sand and clay, and some straw. You build it like a sandcastle. It was eerie.”

When she found out that Richie was not only still speaking to Michael, but also had taken him in, Janet had stopped speaking to him, and, yes, according to his mother, Janet was about done for. She had gotten enough out of her house to send Jonah down to Santa Barbara, to the community college, then moved herself and the horse to Half Moon Bay. No one was invited to visit. She had asked Andy three times if she remembered that time in Paris, when their father had called Janet a royal bitch in the middle of the night in the hotel room. Andy did not remember that incident—she had enjoyed the trip.

Nor did she know, Richie thought, about the prostitute Michael had paid to give him a blow job, in a little alcove around the corner from the hotel, at about two in the morning. First they had dared each other to escape the suite and hotel, then they had wandered around until they spotted her, high heels and some kind of fur coat with very little underneath. Messy hair, druggy look. She knelt down on the icy pavement while Michael leaned back against the wall. It took about two minutes and cost a hundred francs. Richie watched the whole thing.

Richie said, “Riley always said you could grow your own hemp house in a single season.”

“I’ve read about that. I would do that,” said Michael, proving to Richie that a lifetime together was nevertheless full of surprises.

2010

H
ENRY HAD TRIED
to avoid but in the end had not been able to resist interpreting the crisis in literary terms. Right when it all came out, he had been reading about the hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold that some average Joe had unearthed in Mercia (well, Staffordshire), bigger than Sutton Hoo, and that had shaped his response. For Riley and Alexis, it was the long-awaited comic plot-twist: the faithful lieutenant promoted to colonel, given charge of her own little regiment of climate-change soldiers, consorting with Bill McKibben on a friendly basis, frequently quoted in
The New York Times
, an occasional column in
The Guardian
, and periodically vilified on Fox News, where, when she appeared, she did not allow herself to be interrupted even once. They had not moved out of his house—Riley said that if Henry constituted the sole member of Alexis’s village, then that was fine. So Henry spent a lot of time with Alexis, who was almost eight, went to the local public school, but was enrolled in piano lessons and an after-school Spanish class. Henry sometimes read aloud to her (right now,
Black Beauty
), and she sometimes read aloud to him (right now,
Como nasceram as estrelas
) and liked to go on Saturdays to a climbing gym and shimmy her way up rock walls (but she was not yet Charlie: she always scuttled downward when she got about twelve feet off the ground).

Richie was Sisyphus released from his endless task of pushing that
stone up the mountain, and every time Henry saw Richie, he saw the relief—no more fund-raisers, no more fake smiles, no more pretending to know what he didn’t know, no more listening to the cacophonous demands roaring around him. But Sisyphus had rolled that stone up that mountain for such a long time that he was conditioned to do nothing else. Month by month, Henry had seen Richie slip into pure idleness—go to the gym (well, that tapered off), read a book (never had before), learn to cook (cut himself chopping vegetables, burned himself braising a pot roast), do housework (disorder was not visible to him). Richie’s skills were social ones: he was articulate, charming, graceful, witty, self-effacing. He had actually done something for the Congress while he was there in not being obstinate, loud, and ugly, in appearing to be the last remaining representative willing to listen. Sisyphus was going to have to reassemble himself, take on another thankless task, but he didn’t know how.

Henry knew that everyone in the family was inclined to see Loretta as the evil queen, staring into the mirror and reciting incantations against her enemies, exercising and expanding her powers so relentlessly that her very own son had to disappear in order to escape the curse, not of being her enemy, but of being her friend. Claire maintained that, though Michael had always been difficult, his problem was impetuosity more than anything else—“Frank without brakes.” Whatever intelligence Michael had was a sort of cunning—not introspective, but calculating. Loretta had put his energy, looks, and impetuosity to work for her own purposes. There had been so many girls; why had he picked her? Well, she had picked him—that much was obvious—and then enlisted that priest, what was his name, to keep Michael in line. That was the Catholic way of doing things; Catholicism was about power; there were scandals going back to the beginning of the Church. Claire clucked and clucked. In Chicago, it was all coming out—that choirmaster stabbed in the eighties, the arson at the All Saints church. Andy was not quite so ready to put all of the blame on Loretta. She said, “If she was a witch, then she never cast a spell that worked, did she? No, I haven’t talked to her, but how much advice did she ask from me over the years, how to win him, how to persuade him, how to rein him in, how to get his attention? She was always arranging her weapons, making her preparations. I think she was glad he didn’t kill and eat the children.” Ah, thought
Henry, Saturn. Or, if you preferred the Greek version, Kronos, the most interesting of the gods, who hadn’t required that his sons be sacrificed by humans, but simply ate them himself.

His own views were not so mythological, though. In fact, Michael was the one he almost never thought about. He was the accident of nature or the irresistible force that simply had to be endured or avoided. Sometimes, watching Alexis choose a pair of socks or stand on a chair beside the stove making popcorn the old way (she was also allowed to scramble eggs and knead bread), he marveled at how like herself she remained every minute of the day, remembered that his mother had always said he was born already formed and she had had nothing to do with it. So it would be with Michael, testosterone incarnate. And, yes, Henry did remember Michael playing nicely with Tia, singing a song with Chance, tickling Loretta on the top of the head and kissing her cheek, and now he was separated from those loved ones. But why was this not a tragedy, the Story of Michael? Had all of the inner life really gone to Richard, none of it to Michael? There was something about Michael that made that question not worth asking, Henry thought.

As for Janet, well, everyone thought the split was a terrible shame, but there must be some way that she had brought this upon herself. Why had Jared left her? Well, everyone knew she was difficult to live with. Why had she lost the house? She’s not the only one; at least she has something to live on. Janet’s troubles were an exercise in realism, belonging to her alone. Why did she always flee when something went wrong? Pride, that’s what it was, always had been. Head shake, less said about that. Maybe something would turn up. Some deus ex machina, thought Henry, ironically. He did try to call Janet every few weeks. She said that she was fine.

—

AND MAYBE JANET
was fine, since she and Birdie and her new puppy, Antaeus (Jack Russell–poodle mix) were as far west as they could go without falling off the edge of the continent. Thanks to a discussion she had while getting her hair cut the day after the Haitian earthquake, she knew that the chances of the San Gregorio Fault’s producing a 6.7 or greater earthquake were considerably less than for
the San Andreas. Birdie was living on pasture (and it was pretty green, not like anything Janet had seen in Silicon Valley); Janet was paying the ranch $350 a month and supplying some extra feed. Janet herself was living in a one-bedroom condo in a complex that would probably go into foreclosure, but the laws were so complex that she gave herself six months’ breathing room, and at her age, that was enough. The nicest person in her life was Emily. It was Emily who had given her Antaeus, who had taken over supervising Jonah and was doing a pretty good job of it; she drove up to see him in Santa Barbara every month or so, anyway. She had met the roommate, walked around the campus, made sure he changed the oil in the old Prius, and bought him a membership to Costco. She hosted him for a weekend in L.A., where he went to a Lakers game and a show by a band called Steel Panther. He asked after Janet, Emily said.

“What did you tell him?”

“I said you were fine, lying low, he can call you anytime.”

He asked after Jared.

“What did you tell him?”

“You don’t want to know, Ma.”

No, she didn’t. It was easier to imagine that Jared was the mess, the one to be pitied, the one who had lost everything, the one who was stuck in Minnesota, where the snowpack was heading for a record. She knew from two letters she’d gotten from him that their marriage had done that thing she had seen with her friends’ marriages over the years—flipped from white to black in a heartbeat. As soon as one spouse was ready to get out, then there had never been anything right about it, he had never seen anything in her, she had gotten pregnant and suckered him. This breakup had been coming for a long time. Her flaws turned into impossibilities. Remember the Josephs? Same thing happened, but neither would move out of the house; every day for Laurie Joseph was a lacerating catalogue of not only her character flaws and failures, but her physical defects, too.

The few people she saw around Half Moon Bay and out at the ranch were much more forgiving. At the ranch, they traded funny horse stories or bits of advice. New Leaf, Orlando’s, the fish market—she came in with her dollar bills and went away pleased with her sole or her basil or her can of fagiolini beans and bag of spinach. She
learned to knit, and the ladies sitting around the yarn shop advised her but asked her no questions—she was becoming one of those silent types, and everyone accepted it so far. What she didn’t expect was a call from Loretta. The first thing she said was “How did you get my number?”

Loretta ignored this. She said, “I need you to go to the ranch.”

“No. My car is a wreck. It won’t get me that far and back.”

“I’ll rent you a car.”

“So—you still have plenty of money. Many of us don’t.”

“I have enough to pay you to find out whether my mother is still alive.”

“You can fly there.”

“If it’s me that shows up and she’s still alive, she will slam the door in my face.”

“You deserve it. I know someone who bought one of those houses at the ranch. He made eight dollars an hour, and his wife had a cleaning service. Now they have nothing.” Janet did not in fact know what had happened to Marco, but she could guess. And his house was only
near
the ranch, but what was the difference, really?

“I did not give Michael investment advice. I did not know he was shorting the market, or, rather, I did not know what shorting the market was. I did not know he was so desperate for funds. I knew about the development on the ranch, but I didn’t approve of it, I thought it was too far from town, I said it was a shitty idea. But no one believed me. I need an emissary. I need someone to find the body. She really would hole up and not lift the phone if she felt ill. She’s eighty. She’s not like your mom, just immortal. She’s got all sorts of conditions.”

“No.”

“I really will pay you. I know you’re broke. I will pay you ten thousand dollars.”

“How about seven hundred fifty thousand? Then I can get my house back.”

“I can’t afford that. I really can’t. I mean, he ruined us, too. Don’t you know that?”

“I’ve heard it, but I don’t believe it. I’m sure you’ve given the money you owe me to some Super PAC dedicated to buying Congress.” Janet felt herself getting a hot flash—sweat along the back of
her neck, panting, waves of heat rising to the top of her head. She put her hand on her forehead.

Loretta said, “Congress isn’t that expensive,” then, instead of laughing, burst into tears.

Janet tried to imagine this. After Loretta’s sobs had subsided a little, she said, “You send me a money order for fifteen thousand dollars, and when it is safely stashed in my bank account, I will go to the ranch. Not before. Your choice.” She hung up.

The day she did go was a glorious one—the perfect day to draw her out of her new shadowy landscape and into the sun. There had been plenty of rain, so the hills rose everywhere toward the brilliant sky, wave after wave of thrilling green, as if no water shortage would ever be possible again. Across the hillsides, swaths of lupine had draped themselves, and they shivered in the very breeze that brought their fragrance through Janet’s partially open window. Of the fifteen thousand, she had spent fifteen hundred on the Highlander, very practical, and a hundred on eight skeins of bamboo yarn, “Persimmon.” She had sent a thousand to Jonah and a thousand to Emily.