Golden Age (4 page)

FRANK HAD DONE
his best. He hadn’t said anything impatient, cutting, sharp. He had prevented his foot from tapping irritably under the table. He had spoken when spoken to, smiled when he had to, bounced his grandson Chance on his knee. When he finally fled, he did it smoothly, with a congenial nod, not saying, or even implying, that the clamor of voices was driving him crazy. He strolled as if idly, as if only admiring the straightness of Jesse’s rows, out toward the bean field. He put his hands in his pockets and looked west and north, pretending to care about the weather. Twelve more hours and he could leave, whether the others went with him or not. Yes, he was too old to find his origins maddening. Yes, he was too mature to be hurt that Jesse hardly spoke to him. (How many letters had
he written to Jesse? More than to anyone else he had ever known, for sure.) Walking along the lilac bushes, remembering his mother, Rosanna, clipping the flowers (they had grown so much that she wouldn’t be able to reach them now), he took some long, intentional deep breaths, clenched and unclenched his fists, turned around at last, stared at everyone. Everything was easier to take if he couldn’t hear them. It mattered less that Andy was gazing into the trees, that Emily was jumping up and down, that Janet kept wringing her hands without even knowing it, that Richie was practically entrapping Ivy in his bearlike embrace, that Michael was flexing his muscles. Charlie was the prize, but he was Arthur’s prize. Charlie was a restless one—huddling with Arthur and Debbie, nodding and laughing, then bouncing from his chair. The person Frank saw in him was not himself anymore, not Tim, not any Langdon, but Arthur, the only truly charismatic human being Frank had ever known, the one who could get you to do whatever crazy thing he wanted you to, not because he had a good argument, or made you an offer you couldn’t refuse, but because he wrapped you in a story, filled you with pleasure, dared you to do it. Frank saw Charlie ask Jesse a question, and saw Jesse lean forward, intent upon answering thoughtfully. His mother would have said, “Well, pick of the litter. No two ways about that.”

CHARLIE KNEW
that the Highway 61 he was on wasn’t the one Dylan meant in the song, but he was glad to be on it—it was much more lost in time than 70, or 80, or 90. He’d already passed Keokuk, gone over a tiny bridge across the Des Moines River, toll ten cents. Iowa made Missouri look very strange. North of the border, towns were flat, with wide streets, grain elevators, and unpretentious storefronts. Houses and barns were close to the road, and fields were neatly planted in corn and beans. South of the border, the landscape was hillier and the houses, with their verandas and even a few columns, were set far up long driveways. He remembered from college that Missouri had once been a great producer of hemp. Charlie was in favor of hemp, but Riley, his girlfriend back in Aspen, was ready to wear hemp, live inside hemp walls, sauté her onions in hemp oil, eat hemp seed for
breakfast, write on hemp paper, shampoo with hemp, rappel with hemp (Charlie preferred nylon), and then compost her waste products and grow more hemp.

When he got to Hannibal, he turned off the highway and drove through town; and why would you not leave this run-down but self-satisfied burg when you were eighteen, as Mark Twain had done, and head south, west, east, anywhere you possibly could? He stopped on 3rd Street and went into a café for a Coke, but the cigarette smoke nearly drove him out. At the Langdon farm, only Michael had smoked, and he did it on the back stoop, right beside a bowl of sand for stubbing out and burying his butt. Thinking of Michael made Charlie laugh. He’d acted like the arm wrestling was a joke, at least at first—“Oh, your face is turning red! Oh, your eyeballs are rolling! Okay, I’m going to actually try now!,” laughing, sticking out his tongue. But Charlie could feel in his own arm and shoulder and in Michael’s grip that Michael was trying harder than he pretended; in the third round, he could feel the jolt of anger that held Michael’s arm steady just when Charlie thought he had him. It had crossed Charlie’s mind then that he could get a punch in the jaw, but suddenly Michael had smiled, backed off. Later, the other woman, the wife of Michael’s twin, came up to him and apologized. Of course, his mom would have called Michael a bully, but Charlie had a lot of experience with bullies—you outgrew them, you walked away from them, or you took them down in an unexpected way, like the time in seventh grade, before he’d outgrown anyone, when he noticed that his customary tormentor, Bobby Rombauer, had just gotten braces; when Bobby grabbed his shoulder that day, Charlie whipped around and smacked him on the mouth, flat-handed. Ouch. Bobby never touched him again.

South of Hannibal, the highway veered inland, through some areas that made Charlie want to stop and get out and run a mile or two, but he knew Mom was expecting him by dinnertime, and dinnertime was six—he could get a couple of miles in before the sun went down at eight, and maybe the humidity wouldn’t be so bad by then, anyway. She had been her usual agreeable self about this whole reunion thing. His parents had always been open about his adoption. He was blond, they were dark; he was tall, they were short; he misbehaved, they liked rules and catechisms and confessions and routine.
She didn’t say what he knew she was thinking—“You’ll do what you want to do no matter what”—she just said, “That ought to be very interesting. Have fun!”

The one he liked best was still Tina, who had come by the shop in April. She was quiet and easygoing; even while taking him and Riley to lunch, she’d been looking at things, and not just the mountains and the clouds, which everyone looked at, but cobwebs and moldings and stray cats half hidden. She was observant, and when she left Charlie her phone number and a sincere invitation to come to Sun Valley for a visit, she’d doodled his own face beside it, a likeness that Riley now kept in her wallet.

It was sunny and getting hot; he drove into range of KSHE and turned the radio up. Some Guns N’ Roses carried him across the Missouri River, a beautiful and evocative waterway and, in Charlie’s opinion, the true main branch of the river. The bridge was a high one, taking him from the bluffs on the north side to the flatlands on the south side. The afternoon sunlight glinted in lengthening rays on the opaque water. He wondered if he would ever see his grandfather Arthur again. It was uncanny to meet your family as strangers, to look like them, to see yourself in them, but have feelings for them that were only random and new, not conditioned into you. And here he was—this was the oddest thought—alive, speeding through Chesterfield, knowing that in two weeks, when he turned twenty-two, he would have outlived his own father.

—

IVY WAS
in the shower, and Richie was lingering over the front page of the
Times
, when he heard the telltale creak in the fifth step of the third flight of stairs—their flight of stairs—which meant that someone was on his way up, and certainly it was Michael, since Loretta and the kids were back in California; without them, Michael was an early riser. Why sleep when you could get on the motorcycle, zip across the Brooklyn Bridge, terrify everyone on Flatbush Avenue, then get something to eat? Richie hadn’t heard the bike, but the window of the co-op faced away from Eighth Avenue, onto the tiny yard behind their building. Always drawn to disaster stories, Richie had just finished reading the article about hundred-mile-an-hour winds, whirlwinds, and square miles of fallen trees southeast of London (didn’t
they know what a tornado was?). The accompanying picture was of a beached ferry. A British radio announcer had named the storm “Hurricane Ethelred,” but so far only thirteen people had died. Michael shook the door handle as if he had a right to come in, and Richie got up from the table. On the way to the door, he picked up the coffee pot. Maybe a cup left.

Richie knew about the stock-market dip—everyone did. He had nothing to say about it. He hoped he could remember that when Michael began babbling. He opened the door. “Fuck,” said Michael.

Richie couldn’t tell if he was saying this in a positive way or a negative way. He stepped back and Michael strode in. Richie said, “Haven’t seen you in a while.”

Michael said, “Fuck, I am rich. I am fucking rich.”

“Sounds like you’re the only one,” said Richie.

“I don’t mind that,” said Michael. “If you could’ve seen those guys yesterday, just standing around with their mouths open—what does Uncle Joe say? ‘Catching flies.’ You got some coffee?” He took a cup out of the cabinet and poured out the pot, then pulled out a chair and sat down. “What does the fucking
Times
say?”

“Haven’t gotten to the business section yet.”

Michael began rummaging through the paper, and found the article he was looking for. “Fuck!” he shouted. “Three hundred thirty-eight million shares! Ha!” He sucked down his coffee as if he didn’t even notice that it was hot, and leaned his chair back. His head grazed the window. If, Richie thought, he should lose his balance, he would certainly crack his head on the sill, maybe even break the window and cut open his scalp.

“A hundred points! A hundred and eight, really. You know how many points the Dow fell in 1929? Thirty-eight. So many guys are just completely fucked.”

“But not you,” said Richie.

“Fuck, no.”

He might as well be wearing a T-shirt—Fuck No, Fuck Yeah, Fucked Up, Fucked Over, Fuck Me, Fuck You. He did not talk like this when Loretta and the kids were around. “You have a plan,” said Richie, standing up to put some bread in the toaster.

“I went for the delta.”

“What’s that?”

“Basically, you bet both ways, way up and way down. If the market pisses and moans and piddles around where it is, I’m—”

“Fucked,” said Richie.

“God, yeah,” said Michael. “But if it jumps or drops big, I win big.”

As Michael said this, Richie could almost see the testosterone throbbing through his brother’s carotid arteries. He said, “What are you going to do to make sure one of these things happens?” He was joking, but Michael said, “I don’t know yet, but I’ve got till Monday to figure it out.” Everyone had a system now. Even his dad had a system, something some guy had explained to him in Aspen, a year ago. Frank didn’t use the system, but it seemed like his mom was using the system, in her way, which was to wake up in the morning and say, “I think IBM is about to have an uh-oh day,” and then Andy would buy, and then, apparently, IBM would rise, and his dad would say, “I think she’s going to turn out to be a genius after all.”

Richie, of course, would have to have something to say about the crash, too—Congressman Scheuer would be required to issue a statement about volatility and regulation and why should our nation be beholden to the fat cats—but it was possible that the market would bounce back, and those remarks could be shelved before they were needed. Richie heard the door to their bedroom open, and here came Ivy. When she saw Michael, she gaped, stuck out her tongue, and rolled her eyes, but then she laughed and kissed him on the cheek. She had told Richie over and over that she wanted to see Michael and Loretta as little as possible, but in the end she was always won over. The toast popped, and she buttered it. She said, “You want jam? I have some pear I just got.”

Michael said, “Any eggs?”

“There’s no such thing as a free breakfast.”

Michael said nothing. Ivy got out the frying pan, opened the refrigerator door. Later, Richie knew, she would say that Michael’s attitudes were a kind of performance, blond-guy rap. Sure, there was a part of him that was aggressive and inconsiderate, but he was nice to Loretta and better with his kids than, just as an example, their dad had been with them. Michael was a complex person, no two ways about that. She sprinkled in the chili powder and the cumin; she knew what he liked. Richie had told her about the girl at Cornell—Alicia.
He’d told her what he remembered from their sophomore year, that Michael had attacked Alicia, he, Richie, had tried to stop things, and Alicia had stabbed Michael with the scissors in her bag and gotten away. He’d also told her what Michael told him after Richie left Cornell for Rutgers—that Alicia told everyone they both attacked him. Ivy didn’t believe either story. They were kids, Michael had a temper, things got out of hand; what was the girl doing, playing them off against one another, anyway? Richie allowed Ivy to give Michael the benefit of the doubt, because didn’t he want the same thing for himself?