Golden Age (5 page)

She said, “You think the computer trading is a problem?”

“Nah,” said Michael. “The computers functioned great. I mean, the real problem is people, not computers. It’s hard to keep up with them, and you get tired. I’m glad the fucking day is six hours, not eight. Should be four, you ask me, but they haven’t thought about that. I mean, we knew this was coming. We knew that volume would pop, and they’ve spent years preparing for it, so…” He shrugged. “Things might settle down on Monday, but if they do I’m fucked.”

Ivy cast Richie a glance. Richie raised his eyebrows, their signal for I-will-untangle-this-mess-for-you-later. Ivy set Michael’s eggs in front of him and handed him a fork, a napkin.

Michael said, “You pregnant yet?”

“Is that your business?”

“It’s not my business, but Loretta asked.”

They waited too long to answer. The latest missed period had presented itself only the day before. It had been five days late. Michael said, “Let me try. I have a perfect record.” Ivy smiled, thinking he was kidding. “I mean, as an experiment. If I can’t do you, then the problem is yours, not Richard’s. Down and dirty. Save a lot of medical expense, and if it works, the result is the same, basically.”

He lolled back in his chair again, then moved it with a loud scrape. His elbow banged the windowpane, and Richie thought: out the window, three stories, four if he fell into the stairwell leading to the basement co-op.

Ivy scowled, and Michael noticed. He said, “What?” as if truly perplexed. “Okay, I said something. I didn’t rape you or go behind Richie’s back. I didn’t even make an actual proposal. I just floated an
idea. I am not blinded by social norms. I can see solutions. So what? It’s called thinking outside the box.”

“Or joking around,” said Ivy.

“All right, joking around. I know you guys got up and left
Beverly Hills Cop 2
because you just couldn’t take it.”

Richie said, “I like Eddie Murphy.” But he sounded so stuffy, and he didn’t look Michael in the eye, and he knew that Michael had gotten him again.

1988

H
ENRY FOUND
the University of Chicago amusing as a monument to wealth. He didn’t go there often; however, he did enjoy the library, not in spite of the fake Gothic feel, but because of it—the lancet arched leaded windows soaring to the fan-vaulted ceiling, and warmer this time of year than any cathedral in the world. It was less than an hour’s drive from his apartment down Lake Shore if he went in the middle of the morning and came back after rush hour. The snow wasn’t bad this year, and he was used to the wind. The bonus was that he could get away from that letter on his desk from Turner Klein, which was surely about whether he was making progress on the panel he had agreed to produce about Philip for the AIDS quilt. He’d intended to stay away from the AIDS quilt all last summer, and even into October—he’d thought it would be a tasteless memorial, a type of headstone in piecrust. Much better, he was vocally convinced, to build a shining and searing black structure identical to and parallel to the Vietnam Memorial, but he’d ended up going to Washington after all, and had found the two thousand panels laid out on the Mall strangely affecting, in spite of, or because of, their bright colors and homey shapes. He hadn’t broken down, though, until he and Turner did get to the Vietnam Memorial, and he did touch the name of Timothy Brinks Manning carved into the gabbro (in his pedantic way, Henry had told Turner, who was streaming tears, all about gabbro,
magma, large grains…). But when he touched Tim’s name, he was thinking of Philip and of Lionel and of Warren, the three AIDS victims he knew best, though only Philip had been his lover. Turner, who was in his thirties, a little panicky and insistent, would not let him get by without somehow seeing to the construction of a panel for Philip, a panel full of words—something severe, he thought, rigorously tasteful, yellow embroidered upon black. How this might be done, Henry hadn’t yet figured out.

He had not nursed Philip in the last year—Turner, Philip’s ultimate lover, had done that—but he had visited them in New York every month or so and sent them money; he was still sending Turner five hundred dollars a month.

What he was doing at the U. of Chicago was idle work, since he was not doing it in Europe, but it gave him an edgy sort of pleasure. There was that Pope, the evil Innocent III, who had sent Simon de Montfort to Béziers to slaughter the Cathars in the Cathedral. Henry’s sympathies were entirely with the Cathars, and he had driven around Carcassonne and Narbonne and the Hautes-Pyrénées several times now, pondering the Cathars at Foix, pondering them at Pamiers and Lavaur, where one of their female leaders was thrown down a well and stoned to death. But through Pope Innocent, he had been reminded of Gerald of Wales, who had met with Innocent several times in order to wrangle himself a position in the English Church, preferably to get Innocent to certify the independence and importance of St. David’s Cathedral in Wales, as opposed to Canterbury Cathedral. Gerald (really “Gerallt”) had failed, but, out of curiosity, Henry had looked into his many volumes of writings, thinking there might be a subject there for a book or a monograph. He had done the work intermittently and idly, a relief from everything else, but, perhaps because of Philip, the passage that stuck in his mind was not about the exhumation of the bodies of Arthur and Gwenhwyfar, the real Arthur and the real Gwenhwyfar, from the crypt at Glastonbury Abbey in the 1190s. What snagged him was the connection between Arthur’s defense of Britain in the sixth century against invading Germanic armies and the Plague of Justinian. He imagined Gerald, who was well traveled and lived into his late seventies, as someone not unlike himself, healthy, active, curious, a man of the Church who wrote about the people he met, the animals he saw, the places he visited. In
all his years of fascination with language, wars, and cultural invasions, Henry had never actually identified with anyone until Gerald of Wales.

No one talked much about the Plague of Justinian. It had occurred in the darkest of the Dark Ages, but it was at least as interesting as the Black Death. It was easy for Henry to imagine Gerald, 650 years later, standing there as they lifted the mortal remains of the famous Arthur and his famous second wife. Gerald would have been in his mid-sixties, simultaneously repulsed and fascinated by the ragged-clothed skeletons, noticing bits of jewelry and perhaps finery clinging to the bones, thinking: So this is him, what really did happen so long ago, here they are, exposed to the sunlight of the modern era, how did they die, what were their lives like? Was he the tyrant that Henry Plantagenet was? In 1191, Henry had been dead for two years, and the murder of Thomas Becket was twenty years in the past. Did Gerald of Wales think of that at once, or not at all? Did he think of it the way Henry thought of the assassination of JFK, an emblem of his youth? And it was also true that, if you drove three or four miles past the University of Chicago, you came to Avalon Park. Supposedly, Arthur won the Battle of Badon—was that Bath? And he called his Britain “Avalon”—the Isle of Apples (from the Indo-European root,
*ab
(
e
)
l
). Henry imagined Gerald of Wales turning these ideas over in his mind, going into libraries, asking questions.

He found a parking spot.

There were two editions of the works of Procopius, the major historian of Emperor Justinian’s reign—an old edition from before the First World War of the
De bellis
(
Of Wars
) and an edition of the
Historia Arcana
(
Secret History
) that was about fifty years old. Henry supposed it was possible that the U. of Chicago Library would loan these to the Northwestern University Library—they weren’t terribly valuable—or Henry could buy them on the used-book market, but, really, he enjoyed this sense of the fan vaulting drawing his gaze as he walked into the library. The door closed behind him, shutting out the wind and the cold. Philip had gotten his doctorate from this very university, and had surely spent hours and hours in this library, but Henry had never visited him here.

A plague was a plague, no matter what the infection. That was all
Henry was interested in anymore, not friendship or love or student careers or his own advancement, only the nature of infection and its passage around the world by means of things that seemed like good ideas at the time, such as grain storage, such as ships passing from one city to another, such as trade routes opening from China to Ireland, such as conquest, such as vast armies needing food and something to do. The Plague of Justinian (40 percent of the population dying in Constantinople, a quarter of everyone else) made AIDS seem very small, a flutter of mortality, not nearly as large as Philip, thin as wires in his bed, taking sips of water and listening avidly as Henry read an article to him from
People
magazine, oh, back in the early fall sometime, about a family in northern Florida who got a court order so that they could send their three hemophiliac-AIDS-infected sons to public school and promptly had their house burned down. By that time, Philip was past feeling sorry for those boys: however long they lived, it would be longer than Philip himself. What amazed and delighted him were the ideas of the hate-group that threatened the family before setting fire to their house—they thought you could buy a skin cream, like sunscreen, that would protect your child in case an AIDS-infected fellow student touched him, their headquarters was the back room of a beauty parlor, they asserted that head lice were only surpassed in their ability as carriers by body lice (Philip had laughed so hard at this idea that he and Turner had to sit him up and give him water to stop the coughing), and that horses were the original carriers. Henry had stopped reading twice, but Philip gripped his forearm with his own mottled claw until he went on. Then Philip drifted off to sleep, and Turner and Henry sat in chairs on either side of the bed, watching him. Probably that very day, the final pneumonia was setting in, but Philip seemed alert, and Turner could feel no fever. Another thing Henry remembered was that Philip persisted in speaking the Queen’s English all the way to the end—maybe one of the last things Henry heard him say to Turner was a grammatical correction, “may not” rather than “might not.”

Henry got his pass from the librarian and walked to the elevator. Did the Plague of Justinian look like the Black Death? There were plenty of descriptions of suppurating buboes and black gangrene in the literature. Or did all infections loom, horrifying and gigantic,
on the inner eyelids of those who witnessed them, rashes the color of tomatoes, swellings the size of oranges, faces like skulls, never to be forgotten?

—

JOE WAS OUT EARLY
, before the dogs were awake and before the thermometer hit eighty. When he opened the back door, they rolled over and stretched in their pen, and Rocky made his good-natured yawning noise: Glad to see ya, where’s my breakfast? They stood up with their tails wagging, and Joe let them out. They loped over to the edge of the east field and started sniffing and lifting their legs. Joe expected he would have to clip them in the next couple of days.

According to Russ Pinckard, the government had three billion, or even four billion stored bushels, so a bad corn crop wasn’t going to help anyone, but the farmers sitting around the café taking in the air conditioning, such as it was, agreed that no one knew what was really stockpiled. Jeff Green, who ran the NPPC hog facility between Denby and Usherton, had relied on government figures to decide when to buy feed, and his estimated cost had turned out to be too low by fifty thousand dollars. Jesse said you could gauge the stockpile by the fluctuations at the Board of Trade in Chicago, but in Joe’s private opinion, if the quantities themselves were rising and falling the way the prices did, then thieves or ghosts were hard at work supplying and removing tons and tons of corn every hour of every day. At any rate, Jesse had admitted the night before at supper that prices were falling because traders were hedging their positions. “Are you doing that?” said Lois, and Jesse nodded one of those Mom-don’t-tell-me-what-to-do nods. So, at least for now, Jesse was betting that a smaller crop would lead to lower prices. Walter the patriarch, Joe’s dad, Jesse’s granddad, would have been vindicated. But upset.

Lois asserted that either God would provide or the punishment, whatever it was, would be just. However, she was doing some stockpiling herself—two fifty-pound bags of flour, a case of dried beans, and two cases of evaporated milk had appeared in the cellar just this week. She had joined a group based up in Wisconsin that saved the seeds of old-fashioned varieties of vegetables and fruits, and was carefully labeling and saving her best garden seeds—not only tomatoes, peppers, seed potatoes, and squash, which you could justify in
the name of flavor, but onions, beets, turnips, carrots, and parsnips, which all tasted the same to Joe. Stashed-away turnips made him think about wartime. Lois wouldn’t plant a hybrid in her garden; she still gathered butternuts; she still pretended that her apple and pear trees were all about flavor and pies. She tended them not only with care but with prayer.