Golden Age (40 page)

—

THE NEXT PERSON
Richie took Jessica to meet was his mother. He didn’t know which one made him more nervous. He was well aware that Jessica cared nothing for her appearance. When she was naked, she was wonderful to look at, at least to him; she was muscular and strong, but her muscles were smooth, did not ripple and bulge. When he embraced her, he could feel the warmth and spring of her body. And she was indulgent. In the eight months that they had been dating, she had never once criticized him or told him what to do—she didn’t believe in it. Nor did she tell Leo what to do; when he challenged her, she said, “Suit yourself.” When he found out she was a boxer, he’d insisted upon donning boxing gloves and going a couple of rounds. She had rope-a-doped him for maybe six minutes, then given him one in the jaw that knocked him down, though not out. He hadn’t asked for a rematch, though she offered to take him along to the gym and get him a few lessons.

Richie knew his mother could fall short in many ways, from a vacant look on her face, to wearing something truly antique and strange, to offering them six pieces of romaine as their entire meal. However, he had not imagined that she would fail him by inviting Michael and Loretta and Chance and Delie and the baby—what was his name?—oh, Raymond, after Loretta’s dad. Raymond Chandler Perroni Langdon, because there was also some old Hollywood connection between Raymond Chandler and Gail Perroni’s father. He was now three months old. They called him “R.C.”

The weather was pleasant, not so hot as it had been; everyone was in the tiny backyard. Richie had explained to Jessica that both Michael and his mom were veterans of AA, so Jessica received her virgin tonic water and lime wedge with her customary cordial good nature. One good thing was that Loretta had taken over food detail; she whispered to Richie that she’d brought along ribs, potato salad, carrot cake. (“There is exactly nothing in the refrigerator! I asked her what she lives on; she said there’s a bakery somewhere that makes wonderful chocolate croissants!”) Jessica observed where R.C. had been placed, and sat far away from him. That put her near to Chance, and Richie saw them start talking. Michael sat down beside him and said, “Hot.”

“I’d like to think you are referring to the weather.”

“No, you wouldn’t.”

“She’s a lovely, harmless girl who could beat you to a pulp in about five minutes, so keep your opinions to yourself, okay?”

“Is she gainfully employed?”

“She’s a bouncer at a gay bar.” Out of the corner of his eye, Richie saw that Michael was impressed. He said, “I’m joking. She manages a fitness gym.”

“Low on fertility, is my guess.”

“I think she’s opted out of the asshole-reproduction role. She has six brothers and a sister. She is the second oldest.”

“You’re sure she’s a girl, right? I mean, you’ve had plenty of time to look by now. You can’t judge by the exterior add-ons or even the fake vagina. It’s really in the hips.”

Richie knew that part of his problem for his entire life was that he couldn’t come up with ripostes. Michael’s barbs surprised him every time, and he was missing whatever part of your brain it was that batted back.

Michael went on, “I have this
Playboy
in my permanent collection from five years ago, the December issue. You could tell the one who started out as a guy—great hair, beautiful face, but hips like Chance’s.”

And why not say something mean about Chance the dope or his floozy wife, whose hair seemed to have been put on like a football helmet? But Jessica was chatting with Delie in a pleasant, animated way. Chance had gone around to the other side of the house. Richie felt his teeth grinding. He said, “Mom seems immortal.”

“Gail Perroni is ten years younger than she is, and looks ten years older. Loretta says there’s some group that does calorie restriction and they live to be a hundred. Maybe that’s it.”

“It isn’t genetic. Uncle Sven died in his seventies.”

“I think she’s using an artificial preservative. Formaldehyde.”

Richie said, “You have a sick imagination.”

“I call it creative. If you refuse to think outside the box, then you get stuck in Brooklyn.”

Richie made up his mind to ignore this. Michael was clearly bursting with pleasure at some market innovation he had recently
come up with. It was true that he never told Richie any of his networth particulars, but Loretta didn’t mind tossing around large numbers as if they were the price of pasta—“I think it was fifty million. Was it fifty million, Michael, or forty-five? Binky, have you put in your paperwork for the Year Abroad program, or haven’t you? Please give me a straight answer.” Or, “That place on East Seventieth I told you about—it went for twenty-four million! I nearly fell over. I can’t imagine what our place is worth now.”

Chance had returned, and what did he have with him but a lariat! Now he and Jessica walked toward the back of the yard, him swinging the rope in a leisurely way above his head. He and Jessica were still chatting away. He lassoed a lawn chair and pulled it toward him, took the rope off, set the chair upright. Then he performed some rope tricks that Richie had seen on TV from time to time—bringing the rope down around himself, then raising it up, enlarging the loop so that he could step through it, spinning the rope on one side of his body, then switching arms and spinning it on the other side. Michael said, “That’s the hard one, but he’s ambidextrous.”

“Did he bring a calf along, too?”

“Only R.C.”

Richie glanced over toward the rest of the group. R.C. was snuggled against his mom, a baby blanket over his head. Ivy had never been so modest. Once, when she was nursing on an airplane and the flight attendant said they had run out of food, Ivy snapped, “This is making me hungry, so I’ll take what the captain is having.”

The flight attendant brought the food. Richie had been the one who wanted to hide his head.

Now Chance coiled up the rope and handed it to Jessica. She was tentative at first, so that the rope caught and fell, but within a few minutes she was leaning over it, her arm up, getting it to go around. “Told you,” said Michael. Very slowly and smoothly, but with evident strength, Jessica now began making the lariat twirl unevenly above her head, and then, quite smoothly, she tossed it toward the lawn chair. It hit the top of the curved back, slid downward. Chance and Jessica both laughed.

It was Loretta, with, perhaps, some input from Delie, who decided Chance was having too much fun. She got up, went in the house, and
came out with plates, napkins, silverware, the food. When she called out, Jessica looked up, startled, as if she’d been enjoying herself quite a bit.

On the way home, Richie was in a bad mood for the first time since he’d met her, but Jessica seemed not to notice. She said, “Chance is a cute kid. He’s practicing being able to do rope tricks and talk at the same time.”

“That’s been done before.”

“Oh, really! Who did that?”

“Will Rogers.”

“Who was that?”

Richie didn’t answer, just said, “What does he want to talk about?”

“Well, the goal is, someone in the audience yells out a word, and he talks about it for a minute; then someone else yells out another word. We tried it.”

“What word did you give him?”

“ ‘Campaign.’ ”

“What did he say?”

“He said that that was a region in France where they grow a Pinot Noir and a Chardonnay grape, and then he described the two kinds of fermentation.”

“Did you correct him?”

“Yes.”

“Then what did he say?”

“He sang a verse of that U2 song, ‘Beautiful Day.’ But then he lost control of the rope. He needs practice.”

Richie was willing to admit that if Chance had been his son he would have liked him better.

—

JANET HAD ASKED AROUND
, and so far, she hadn’t found anyone else her age who was getting regular e-mails from his or her eighty-six-year-old mother. And concerning things that Janet knew next to nothing about. The one she opened (her mom’s e-mail address was [email protected]) read, “Janet, dear. How are you? Trees are very bright this year. You should come for a visit. It is a little frosty, though, so I brought in the pots of herbs, including the lavender. Mary Watkins (next door? Don’t know if you met her) made me a
batch of lavender ice cream. It is profoundly purple. Am almost afraid to eat it. Did you know that if you eat too many carrots, the whites of your eyes turn orange? BTW, what is a CDS? Your brother seems to be after my money. He wants to infest in something—oh, I mean invest, isn’t that funny. I tried to get him, OVER the PHONE, to explain what he is talking about, but I couldn’t tell if he had no idea or if he wasn’t willing to tell me. I looked it up. The only thing I could find out was that sometime last month a lot of bankers had to meet and apologize to the head of the Federal Reserve about not keeping their records up-to-date. This seemed like a bad sign. So I said no. Oh, do you remember that woman Richie knew who was after Cheney? Here is an article about her (link). You should read it. She lives in Reston. I remember when Arthur and Lillian were looking for a place there. So they fired the woman. The man who fired her was careful to say that it was ‘not in retaliation for any disclosures of alleged improprieties she may have made.’ So that’s how you know it was. Do you have a recipe for Aunt Lillian’s angel food cake? I always thought that was delicious. Love.” Janet looked up the recipe, which she hadn’t made herself in twenty years. It called for ten egg whites. She found it in an online cookbook and sent it. She read the article her mother had linked to, about Bunny Greenhouse. She wondered why Michael wanted her mother’s money, and then she wondered how much money her mother had; then she went over to the family-room wall and looked for the hundredth or thousandth time at the picture she’d bought from Tina’s exhibition, of her mother sitting in the light, looking out the window, innocent, harmless, still beautiful. Or not.

2006

B
EFORE GUTHRIE
’
S UNIT
was redeployed to Iraq, his dad asked him if he wanted to read some of Uncle Frank’s letters about the Second World War. How many times did his dad mention those letters, as if they were the Bible or something? Guthrie didn’t want to read them, but in the end, he couldn’t resist. The paper was yellowed and thin, and most of them made the war sound like an adventure, not something Uncle Frank looked back on with fear or regret. He had been in the North African and Italian campaigns, which might have been a little like Iraq, and Guthrie thought the letter about watching the German tanks roll over the Allied trenches and sort of grind the men in those trenches into the ground was pretty interesting, mostly because Uncle Frank said his commanding officers were such idiots. Guthrie didn’t think that way, at least about his own commanding officers. The main thing he wondered about while reading the letters was where the local population was. There didn’t seem to be the sort of insurgency in North Africa or even in Italy that there was in Iraq—maybe the Allies had bombed them to kingdom come, but, whatever had happened, Uncle Frank’s letters were about armies going against armies, not about subduing the population.

When Guthrie got back to Baghdad, he saw at once that things were much worse than they’d been in ’04. There had been talk about this—it shouldn’t have been a surprise—but the feeling itself was a
surprise. It was as if Fallujah was everywhere now. And the guys who had lived through the change were on edge, pissed off, and ready for a fight.

There were folks back in Denby who didn’t know the difference between Shia Muslims and Sunni Muslims—there were maybe some guys in his unit who didn’t know, or at least didn’t care—but Guthrie did know the difference. The Sunnis thought that Muhammad’s father-in-law should have taken over when Muhammad died, and the Shia thought that his son-in-law, who was also his cousin, should have taken over. He kept to himself the thought that farm families in Iowa would understand the bitterness of this antagonism over issues of inheritance perfectly well; you said it was about principles, but really it was about loyalties and property. Guthrie also knew that most of the Iraqis were Shia, and that they resented the Sunnis in the same way that Evangelicals—who were always talking about how God was their personal savior, who spoke to them on a regular basis—disdained old-style churches for being all about rules and not about being saved. His grandmother and his mom had had “discussions” about this, and rather warm ones, more than once. And there were the Kurds. As far as Guthrie could tell, they were like American Indians on reservations, trying not to offend either group. It was as if the Episcopalians had all the money and the power, and the Evangelicals were bound and determined to take that power for themselves, because they were the saved ones. So, when some Sunnis blew the dome off the big Shia mosque in Samarra a week or so after his return, he knew that there was going to be trouble. He remembered the mosque and the dome from when his unit had gone through there after the operation against the insurgents, before the Fallujah attack.

He wasn’t a prophet—everyone in his unit knew there would be trouble. The only question, they decided when they were talking about it late that night, was: Bombs? Rockets? IEDs? And aimed at whom?