Golden Age (45 page)

Felicity, now nineteen, was registered and planned to caucus on January 3 with the Denby–North Usherton Democrats, who numbered exactly eleven. Felicity grilled Richie: Had he ever met Hillary
Clinton? Yes, of course. Barack Obama? Yes, he had seen his keynote at the 2004 convention, and sometimes he saw him in the Capitol—they had a nodding acquaintance. John Edwards? Yes. Bill Richardson? Yes. Dennis Kucinich? Yes, Richie offered that he admired Kucinich (and he did, the way you admire someone who is the guy you dare not to be) but he might be a little too pure. Felicity stared at him. Richie shrugged. Jesse and Jen had never caucused. Richie had never caucused. It was a strange process.

He did not say what he truly thought of the candidates: apart from Kucinich, they all looked better than they were, according to Lucille’s inside dope. Only Kucinich, who was short and not physically appealing, looked worse than he was, and so would never get anywhere. Lucille’s view was that you could be an ugly Republican and wield enormous power, but that didn’t work for Democrats. She wasn’t sure why.

In the summer, after their minimal June wedding, Jessica had moved out of her place in Stanton Park and into his condo, bringing her bike, a newish couch, and a Therapedic mattress. She didn’t even bring the book she was reading—she finished it the night before the move and gave it to a homeless man they passed on Constitution Avenue. To the Brooklyn co-op, she brought nothing but a Waterpik and some spare underwear. She had never been to Brooklyn before. She liked wandering around, and could end up anywhere, calling him on her cell and asking how to get back to “your place.” When Loretta heard about the secret wedding, she insisted on giving a reception at the Langdon establishment on the Upper East Side. Jessica ignored the insistence for two weeks, then said, “Oh, shit! I forgot!,” called Loretta, and said that, before anything like that could happen, she and Michael would have to come to Brooklyn for supper. That was the end of the reception idea. She did whatever she wanted in a completely disarming way, and Richie planned to get through the election year by having her walk in front of him into every gathering, a female bodyguard, a female spirit guard. He had never been so happy.

After the caucuses, Felicity wrote to say that her caucus had met for two hours and twelve minutes, and voted seven times. One person voted for Kucinich, four went for Vilsack, four for Hillary, and two for Obama. Edwards was considered suspiciously good-looking—not
a single vote. Felicity had voted for Hillary six times. She had made a case that, as the youngest person in the caucus, she needed a good role model for being a strong, intelligent, and well-educated woman. However, since the women in the caucus outnumbered the men seven to four, and all of them were at least twice as old as Felicity and one had been caucusing since Truman, they seemed to feel that Felicity was putting them down. One of the Obama supporters said that she had caucused in the eighties in Ames—did Felicity go to Iowa State?—and their precinct had been the only one in the whole state to go for Jesse Jackson. The four who went for Vilsack never shifted their votes, but when Felicity finally switched from Hillary to Obama, he got a majority and won. Jen told Jessica that Felicity was electrified by the whole process, and now viewed the congressman as her personal seat warmer for when she would go to Washington as the first female veterinarian/politician. Richie told Jessica that it couldn’t come soon enough, and laughed when she kissed him and began unbuttoning his shirt—there was that relaxed and agreeable and passionate part, too.

—

RICHIE WANTED TO
believe that the House of Representatives was less corrupt than the Senate, but he knew that this was not true, that, for all of U.S. history, the public had assumed that the House was a swamp of dirty money, nefarious influence, and continuous armtwisting. Maybe only Jessica still had faith, but Richie could see that her faith was fading fast when they drove to the Hut for a weekend with his mom. She reached into the glove compartment, helped herself to a peppermint Altoid, and said, “Do you think seventy-five thousand dollars is a lot of money?”

Richie said, “No.”

“Would you take seventy-five thousand from Exxon to stop working on solar?”

“Only if I didn’t mind being shot by Riley. Well, not shot, since she doesn’t believe in firearms, but decapitated with her Wüsthof six-inch cleaver.”

“It just seems so small to me. Isn’t Dodd rich? He’s from Connecticut.”

“I don’t know if he’s rich. He’s been in Congress his entire adult life. His dad was a senator.” He thought for a minute, then said, “He dresses pretty well.”

She said, “My parents’ mortgage is from Countrywide. They just refinanced last year.”

Dodd had proposed a housing bailout, then admitted that he was best friends with Angelo Mozilo, the CEO of Countrywide. Richie didn’t know if the surprise was in the scandal or in the fact that it was being seen as a scandal. Angelo Mozilo had never approached Richie, and Richie had been too lazy to refinance his mortgage on his own. Riley had asked him about it two weeks before—some other senator had gotten a good loan from Countrywide. Both Dodd and the other senator were Democrats, which was why Riley had gotten nervous: she was always worried that Richie might slip the leash and get in trouble.

Richie preferred to take Route 202, though it was somewhat slower than 95. Jessica was looking out the window. Sometimes, while they drove, she made fists, flexing her forearm muscles and her biceps meditatively, and she breathed in an even, deep, oxygen-enriched rhythm. She worked out three days a week these days—she had stopped doing even practice bouts, but she still trained. Other days, she watched movies on TCM while running the treadmill.

When they got to the Hut, his mom was on the porch, digging her forefinger into one of her pots of lavender. She was so enamored of it, and had so much of it, that its fragrance seemed to envelop the Hut. When he pulled up, she trotted down the steps like a fifteen-year-old and embraced Jessica as soon as she was out of the car. Richie kissed her on the cheek. It was nearly time for supper, but Richie and Jessica had made sure they were prepared for anything by eating ribs and fries for lunch and stashing the leftovers in a cooler in the back seat of the Subaru.

It was easy to imagine his mom lost in space as well as time—Spring Street was so quiet and so green and so architecturally archaic that he expected
The New York Times
sitting on the kitchen counter to be dated 1985, if not 1955. When his mother handed him his tonic water and lime, he sipped away the rumblings of Washington, D.C., in 2008, the anxieties of trying to get a black man with a Muslim name into the White House, the price of oil inching toward $140
per barrel (how much had Michael invested in oil?). He was in fact dozing off, listening to Jessica and his mom discuss underwire brassieres, when suddenly she said, “Say, do either of you know what a CDO is?”

And Jessica said, in her customary even tone, “Oh, that’s a type of financial instrument. A bank bundles together a big pile of mortgages and sells them as a bond to investors. The investors get a larger or smaller rate of return, depending on the amount of risk in a particular bundle.”

His mom said, “What if I am getting ten percent?”

“That’s high-risk,” said Richie.

“Oh,” said his mom.

After that, they had dinner. She had made something of an effort—a large Cobb salad, neatly constructed. Richie didn’t even have to exchange a glance with Jessica to know that they would take a nice walk down to the fairgrounds or over to Moorland Farm around nine, and stop at the cooler, where they would devour the rest of the ribs.

The windows were all open, and the air was humid and thick, but fragrant, of course, with the scent of lavender. Moths kept landing on the screens and fluttering away. His mom said, “Michael was here. Have you seen him lately?”

Richie said, “I thought they were in Chile, trout fishing.”

“It’s winter in Chile,” said Jessica.

“Well, then, Scotland.”

His mom poked for bits of hard-boiled egg in the salad. “I think Loretta is in Scotland. She’s having some kind of spa retreat where they hike for a couple of hours, then get salt rubs and massages for the afternoon.”

“Have you ever had a salt rub?” said Jessica.

“Oh, yes,” said his mom. Richie tried not to imagine it. “It’s invigorating. Richie’s dad liked them, too.” Richie closed his eyes.

His mom said, “Michael looked a little hollow around the eye sockets. I thought maybe it was just age, because I remember your dad looked a little the same way when he was your age. But you look fine. Something is worrying him.”

“Something is worrying me.”

“But, you see, you’re used to it.”

In a nutshell, thought Richie.

“Oh, heavens,” she said to Jessica, “Frank nearly lost his mind when Janet joined that cult in California. We both did, really, but nothing surprised me in those days.”

“What cult?” said Jessica, pleasantly.

“The one where they all killed themselves.”

“Waco?” exclaimed Jessica.

“No. Before that.”

Richie said, “The Peoples Temple. It’s not clear that the Branch Davidians killed themselves.” It was amazing to Richie that he hadn’t thought of David Koresh or Janet Reno in years. When he was first elected to Congress, he had thought about them every hour of every day.

“There have been so many,” said his mom, shaking her head. “You can’t count them all, really.”

Jessica glanced at him. He knew she was thinking, as an Irish person was welcome to think, of the Catholic Church. And he wondered, but didn’t dare to ask, why nothing surprised his mom in those days. He had thought she was the paradigm of innocence.

He said, “Why do you bring this up, Mom? Has Binky or Tia or Chance joined a cult?”

“No, they’re fine, according to Michael. He said he was just feeling lonely, and it didn’t take him long to get here—once he crossed the GW, not much more than half an hour.”

That was something like fifty miles.

Jessica’s eyebrows lifted. Richie said, “Oh, that Ferrari, always getting out of hand.”

“He wasn’t driving the Ferrari,” said his mom. “He was driving the Lexus. He said he sold the Ferrari.”

“Then maybe he was feeling lonely,” said Richie. He smiled at his own joke, but neither his mom nor Jessica did. Jessica’s response when he said things about Michael did make him feel mean. He and Jessica had cleaned their plates, and Jessica was scraping the salad bowl with the serving spoon. His mom had selectively eaten her tomatoes, her hard-boiled egg, and her bacon, but only bits of her chicken and her avocado. He looked at her. She was five seven; she might weigh 120 pounds.

He said, “Why did you ask about CDOs?”

“I don’t know. I asked him what he was working on, and he gave me so many letters of the alphabet that my head started to spin.”

He said, “As long as I’ve known him, he’s managed to get through the slamming door without catching his tail. When I talk to him, he seems upbeat.” But he hadn’t really talked to him in months.

“Isn’t that the truth,” said his mom. She got up, took their plates, returned with pineapple sorbet from her favorite shop in Bernardsville. By common agreement, it seemed, they stopped discussing Michael. The evening progressed with pleasant conversation about weather, flowers, Montana, clothes. At nine, his mom went to bed, and Richie and Jessica went out for their snack. They walked for forty-five minutes, all around the fields, in the humid grassy warmth.

—

RICHIE WAS
at the kitchen table, drinking the last of his coffee, half listening for Jessica and reading a review of
The Dark Knight
. He was perhaps the only person in the world who had enjoyed that wreck of a movie,
Batman & Robin
—George Clooney as Batman. Even Leo had disdained it when Richie took him—what was that, ten years ago now? The city in the picture with the review did look like Chicago, rather than New York—there was something Michigan Avenue–y about the shot of Heath Ledger in the middle of the empty street. And then his Mac mail seemed to beep with extra insistence. He clicked on Riley’s link (subject line—“!!!!!”), which was to Bloomberg.com. Merrill Lynch; Goldman Sachs; BlackRock. He scrolled down. Then there it was, toward the end, “Banks and brokers have taken more than $435 billion of writedowns and credit losses since the beginning of last year as mortgage-backed securities, CDOs, leveraged loans and other fixed-income assets lost value.” Richie stared at this for a moment, then went to his Dashboard and tried to type out the number into the calculator, 435,000,000,000. The calculator wouldn’t take it by three decimal points, but he remembered enough arithmetic to do the division anyway. That kind of debt was worth $145,000 for every man, woman, and child in America, though only $60 for every man, woman, and child in the entire world. He took a sip of his coffee, and comprehended that that was a lot of money in a way that he never had before. He understood instantly that there were only two things that that amount of money could do—it could go somewhere,
into some sort of money Grand Canyon, say, or it could disappear. According to the Bloomberg article, this was the amount of money that had disappeared.

Since Richie wasn’t on the Banking Committee, he had done what most congressmen did, which was to study up on his own subject and hope that the others were studying up on theirs. He did wonder why Michael had stopped hanging around, why Loretta had gone to California for the summer rather than to their new house in Burgundy. His one specific financial thought about Michael in the last week had been to wonder whether he could borrow some of the twenty-two thousand he would need to finance Leo’s first year at Brown, since Ivy was complaining, too, about the book business. Part of the problem, he now realized, was “illions”—once you were counting in the “illions” your mind got hazy about the real amount. When was that article in the
Post
—Riley would have it filed in her forebrain—that declared that the Iraq War had cost three trillion? A perfect example of the “illion” problem. Richie had looked at the “three,” lost interest in the “trillion.” “Three” didn’t seem like much. They should have printed it out—$3,000,000,000,000. He might have taken it seriously. And here he thought he was doing okay, a co-op in Brooklyn that was worth about a million, a condo in D.C. that was worth about $750,000, $158,000 in salary, and $376,000 in investments (Edward D. Jones, thank you—a name you never saw in the paper). Was Michael worth ten times what he was? Probably more like fifty or a hundred. But, looking at the Bloomberg article, he realized that everyone, really, was worth nothing—the numbers were a story people told about themselves, were told about themselves. He was fifty-four years old! How had he not realized this before? He shook his head and closed his laptop. He felt a little dizzy.