Golden Age (52 page)

When he got home, the breakfast dishes were stacked beside the sink, and he could hear the TV from the living room, an odd sound. He called out, then called out again, noticing that his voice shook, though, he hoped, only to his own ears. Her voice came down the stairs—“Here I am!”—and he jumped.

She looked upset, still in her robe.

Jesse said, “What is it?”

She said, “Earthquake. Tsunami.”

“Where?” He thought of Janet first, then Emily and Jonah. After that, the New Madrid fault.

Jen said, “Off the coast of Japan. There isn’t much on TV—you can turn that off. There’s plenty on the Web. I guess three nuclear-power plants are right there. Can I have a hug?” He went up the stairs. Jen was not supposed to react like this. She was supposed to accept fate in good spirits. He said, “Do we know anyone there?”

“Didn’t Aaron Cartwright’s nephew go teach English there?”

“That was years ago. He’s in Davenport now, training to be a chiropractor.”

“I guess we don’t, then.”

She still looked devastated. Jesse put his arms around her and held her for a long, long moment. But he wasn’t devastated. He had gotten so small-minded, he thought, that he was mostly grateful that this one disaster, at least, was far away.

—

AFTER HE PAID
his fine, Michael must have had some money, because he bought himself a house in Georgetown that looked like a shoebox on end. It had a yard the size of a deck, square, plain rooms, and almost no kitchen. Jessica loved the sunporch, a tiny room with eight rattling mullioned windows that looked over the alley. The previous owners were in the State Department, leaving to take a position in the embassy in Peru. Michael bought their furniture, and had never, he told Richie, felt so clean and comfortable in his life. And it was true that the whole house, upstairs and downstairs, was painted brilliant white. Jessica presented him with a 36-pack of Zwipes, “to clean as you go.” Michael laughed and kissed her on the cheek. A week after he moved in, Andy drove down from Far Hills, and Michael served a meal, admittedly ordered in, but ordered with thought: a Caesar salad for their mom, and a roast chicken with sides of sweet-potato fries and sautéed spinach for the three of them. Binky and Tia came, looked around, and left a few personal items, which also made Michael laugh.

Two weeks later, he showed up in the old way, at seven in the morning, before Jessica had left for her run, before Richie was out of bed. Richie could hear them in the kitchen, talking about the massacre in Norway, how bizarre, how horrifying—how American, really. Then their voices dipped, and he knew they were talking about him. He had been going to get up, but he lay there, staring at the ceiling of the bedroom, until Jessica came in to say goodbye. She put one hand on either side of his face, kissed him, and said, “He’s got a plan.” Richie took a deep breath. That anger he had felt earlier in the year had seeped away again. Perhaps he was growing up. He said, “Good plan?”

“You decide.” She kissed him again, tenderly and with concern. He understood that she hoped he would go along with the plan, whatever it was. He heaved himself out of bed and put a shirt on
over his shorts. His breakfast was on the table—a bowl of Special K, a carton of strawberry yogurt, and a cup of black coffee. Michael was reading the paper. He said, “This is what Jessica says you like.”

“I like that.”

“You’re welcome.”

Richie took this to mean that it was Michael who had set out the meal. He sat down. Michael pushed the sports section of the paper across the table, and without saying anything, Richie read the article about the north/south rivalry between the Cubs and the White Sox in Chicago. He wondered if their uncle Henry had ever been to a baseball game. He ate his cereal and his yogurt and drank his coffee. Michael said, “First, the haircut.”

“Excuse me?”

“You have a ten a.m. appointment at Bang Salon with Umberto. He’s level four, very hip. If he doesn’t have any ideas, no one will. After that, we’ll have a look at Universal Gear, but I’m sure we’ll end up at J. Press.”

Richie said, “I have clothes.”

“Congressmen’s wear. No. Time for a change. We don’t know what you will actually look like after your haircut, so I’m reserving judgment about the style statement you will end up making. Are you finished?”

He actually stood up and cleared the dishes, not forgetting to fold the paper neatly and set it in the middle of the table.

A little disoriented, Richie put on plain old khakis and a green polo shirt. Better start with a blank slate, he thought. Minutes later, they were in Michael’s Acura, heading up 9th Street. That was Monday. It went on like that for the rest of the week; Michael even took him for a foot massage at the Thai Institute of Healing Arts, where they seemed to know him. The masseur was kind, but kept shaking his head when Richie flinched in pain. He was told to come back “at least once a week” and to buy himself a foot roller, nine bucks, something that looked like a miniature of what he had always imagined a medieval rack to look like. They drove around. They went to a matinee of
Mr. Popper’s Penguins
, after which Michael told him that he was now making a practice of seeing just about anything, as a way of being more open. Richie would not have said that they talked much
during the week, but, then, neither did they avoid talking. It was peculiar and lulling.

It wasn’t until Wednesday the following week that either of them mentioned Loretta. It was a short conversation that took place as they were walking down 13th Street, eating butter chicken wrapped in chapati bread, purchased from a food truck.

Michael: “Loretta found out where Chance has been.”

Richie: “Where is that?”

Michael: “The ranch. I told her, but she didn’t believe me. She never believes me.”

Richie: “What is he doing there?”

Michael: “Minding his own business and staying out of the way. Also roping cattle. But Gail was diagnosed with bacterial endocarditis, and Chance got nervous and called Loretta. She hasn’t been invited to the patient’s bedside, though.”

They continued to walk. Richie finished his lunch and wiped his fingers on the three paper napkins he had taken from the food truck, then tossed them into a trash can. This took about four minutes. By that time, he had worked himself up to asking a question: “How long since you’ve talked to her?”

Michael looked at his cell phone, then said, “Two years, five months, and about four days.”

“How do you decide things?”

“She decides, the lawyer tells me.”

“No divorce?”

“Not permitted.”

They came to the corner of Farragut, and turned toward the park. It was too hot already to run, but Richie was rather looking forward to the walk. Michael said, “Every time I walk in Rock Creek Park, I think of murder.”

Richie said, “I can’t avoid thinking of massacres, I guess, but I never think of murder,” and to himself, he added, “anymore.”

—

HENRY WAS STARING
out the window at the two linden trees in his front yard. They were both bright yellow, but the one on the left had red-orange leaves scattered through the yellow, and when the
wind picked up, they fluttered in a pattern that looked like the profile of a face. He took a sip of coffee, and there was a knock that he recognized—Alexis—on his door. On Wednesdays, her school got out early. He called out for her to come in.

The Charlie in her was like the red leaves among the yellow ones—almost but not quite an illusion. Her hair was dark and straight, her eyes were brown, but she had Charlie’s nose and his personality—inquisitive and friendly rather than doctrinaire, like Riley. She said, “Today is your birthday.”

Henry was genuinely surprised. Yes, October, yes, changing leaves. But he hadn’t celebrated a birthday in so long that it had slipped his mind. He looked at his watch, but of course she was right—that she shared with Riley. He said, “Good Lord, I am seventy-nine! What in the world happened?”

Alexis came over and sat in the chair across from him. She said, “Tell me about when you were nine.” She had turned nine in May.

“I’m sure my mama made me an angel-food cake, which was a very dry, tall cake with a hole in the middle, and she would have frosted it with whipped cream, which I would have scraped off and left in a pile on my plate.”

“You were a poor eater.”

“That’s not a bad thing. Say ‘fastidious.’ ”

She said, “Fastidious. But Mom says it is a waste of good food.”

“The thing is to be choosy before you even start cooking or buying. You tell her that you will do the shopping.”

“She hates shopping,” said Alexis.

“We can do that today. For my seventy-ninth birthday, we can go buy only what you and I like, and she will have to eat it.”

Alexis giggled.

“For the rest of the day, we can do what you want to do. We didn’t do that on your birthday, so we can do it on mine.”

“I want to do my homework thing for one half hour.”

“Go get it, then. Arithmetic.”

Alexis ran out the door. Henry got out the pot and the wooden spoon.

A boy in Alexis’s fourth-grade class had been diagnosed ADD. His parents, instead of putting him on Ritalin, had decided to train
him like a police horse: while he worked, one parent or the other would march around him, beating a pot with a spoon, and he would have to concentrate to do his work. He gave a report on it. Alexis had come home demanding to try it, but she had her own wrinkle. Since she was taking piano lessons, the pot beater had to use different rhythms—4/4, 2/4, 3/4, 7/8. Quite often the session devolved into chaos since Henry’s sense of rhythm wasn’t great, but she loved doing her homework now, and usually went from homework straight to piano practice.

She returned and put her arithmetic sheets on the table with two pencils, and Henry set the stove timer for thirty minutes. Then he picked up his pan and spoon. Alexis said, “Ready, set, go!” The song in Henry’s head was “Stormy Weather,” the Lena Horne version, which had a steady backbeat, one of Philip’s all-time favorites: “Can’t go on, everything I had is gone.” But he had gone on, hadn’t he?

Alexis shouted “Beep!” and he switched to “All Out of Love,” another of Philip’s favorites, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, a faster beat, a song he had listened to over and over after Philip left him, and then again, over and over, after Philip died. “What are you thinking of? What are you thinking of? What are you thinking of?” His eyes started to sparkle, so when Alexis shouted “Beep!” he went as far back as he could go—“Smoke, Smoke, Smoke That Cigarette,” a song that had made him fall over laughing when he was fourteen—every word about something his mother deplored. “Tell St. Peter at the Golden Gate / That you hate to make him wait….” After that, “The Tennessee Waltz,” and then Alexis said, “I’m done!” and waved her paper. Henry took a deep breath, set down his instruments, and flopped into his chair. The timer had not gone off. He said, “Seven minutes to spare! You’re getting good!”

“Check it!”

He did. Every answer was correct (and when she got to fifth grade, he would have to use a calculator). He said, “Hundred percent! I think you need a birthday present!”

Very seriously, Alexis said, “Can it be not educational?”

Henry leaned toward her and whispered in her ear, “Yes.”

—

FELICITY WAS NOT
sorry that Max the math guy had faded out of her life, only to be replaced by the much more muscular Jason, who was an education major specializing in kinesiology, and, yes, his coursework included pocket billiards and racquetball, and weren’t schools all over the country cutting phys ed? But since she was in her first year of her M.S. in microbiology, she had no fears for her economic future, and he had taught her enough about billiards for her to realize that she had exceptional talents in that direction (he agreed). However, it was one thing to skip your racquetball class in order to Occupy ISU, and quite another to skip both your Insect-Virus Interactions: A Molecular Perspective class and your Foodborne Hazards class in order to join Occupy ISU in a drizzle. But Felicity considered herself even more of an observer now that observing was her vocation, and so she skipped class and went. She even carried a sign she had made out of the bottom of an Amazon shipping box, “We Are the 99.99%” It did not make an iota of difference that the family farm was worth almost six million dollars if you dared not buy a new car and add to the debt because, however much the farm was worth, it was not cash. Felicity knew that, because of corn and bean prices, the value of the farm was bubbling again, the way it had in the eighties. She thought her father should be paid not to farm. Her father didn’t want to know what the farm was worth, and her mother didn’t care, since it would never be sold. The Occupy movement was not about farming, but if anyone had any sense, Felicity thought, it would be.

They got off the bus at the Union, walked up past Carver. There were about seven people standing by the Campanile, but then Felicity saw the group, maybe a hundred or more, standing on the steps of Beardshear. The wind was blowing from the south, so maybe the protesters were chanting something, but Felicity couldn’t hear it. Jason grabbed her hand and pulled her. He seemed excited.

Felicity had not read about any occasions where social action made a real difference—it was, she thought, too hard to organize, and too quick to devolve into self-conflicting actions and arguments. Exactly that thing had happened to feminism, which by rights should have worked beautifully. Felicity believed that viral movements worked better, but Jason was good-looking, Jason was excited, so she was here, skeptical already, but she did have her phone out. She lifted it up and took a picture as soon as she could get all of the occupiers in
without their being dwarfed by the building. As she got closer, she read various signs— “Tuition Shooting Up! Jobs Plummeting!” and “Who’s the Boss? We Are!” and “What’s Your Salary, PreZ!” Felicity knew that President Geoffroy made about $450,000 a year, up every year. It took 112 students to pay the president’s salary. Houses
in
Ames were cheap, but there were developments out in the countryside, even to the north, right beside the high-voltage transmission towers, that were a lot more expensive. That was where the administration lived. She wandered among the protesters, smiling, taking pictures, nodding when someone called out, “Post them!”