Jane Smiley - Golden Age

Richie clenched his fists. He could feel the back of his neck heating up. He said, “That isn’t Jesse. Jesse isn’t a rube, never was. He knows more about farming than you.”

“Well, so what? However smart he is, he isn’t equipped to do economies of scale. It’s no big deal. I, we, bought two bundles of mortgages from that bank. They weren’t the only ones, that wasn’t the only bank, and I am not the only investor. I was scrolling through the list, and there he was.” He shrugged again. Then he put his hand on his shoulder and cracked his neck and moved his jaw left, then right. There was something about this set of movements that told Richie that Michael was sure he would get away with it.

He said, “You foreclosed even though he had made all the payments.”

Michael said, “It’s been done before.”

“Remember that time at the farm? You were screaming about subsidies and how you, as a taxpayer, shouldn’t have to subsidize incompetence or stupidity, or whatever you—” Richie felt his back teeth grind together.

Michael smiled his old smile, the sly one. He didn’t need his own lobbyist in Congress, or his own bought-and-paid-for flack on the SEC; all he needed was chaos, and there was plenty of that to go around. The smile was still there, the smile that said, “You don’t care, really. Your loyalty is to me, really. I know it and you know it.”

Richie stared at Michael, then faked a yawn. After a few beats of silence, he said, “Who are you marrying?”

“Do you remember Lynne? She came to your wedding.” Michael smiled again.

“The decorator? Your mistress who was just daring Loretta to ask her why she was there?”

“Repurposer. Those days, it was lofts, but she’s done all sorts of things. She likes to find architectural gems from certain periods, mostly modernist, and put them back together. She’s done three Frank Lloyd Wrights. With the flat roofs and all the windows, they tend to deteriorate.” He palmed his iPhone and handed it to Richie. Plain woman, glasses, gray hair, practical look. No resemblance to any model or movie star ever. Richie stood up and said, “Get the fuck out.” He handed back the phone; then, softening, he made it sound like a bit of a joke: “It’s three o’clock in the morning, for Christ’s sake.”

“Fuck, yeah!” said Michael. But he hoisted himself out of the sofa, grabbed his jacket, and left, not forgetting to yank the door open so hard that it hit the wall and knocked into a framed photograph of Jessica and her brother and sister on the day Jessica graduated from high school, gowned in white that reflected in her face, her hair in a shiny bowl cut. Michael thumped down the stairs.

AFTERWARD, Richie didn’t know what to think. He hadn’t seen Michael for months, nor did he hear from him, call him, e-mail him, or drive past the Shoebox. If Jessica was aware of that visit in November, she said nothing about it; she was such a sound sleeper that she could easily not have heard a thing. There was a part of him that had forgotten about it, the part of him that reveled in Leo’s Thanksgiving visit with Britt and Jack and their baby, Mona. Jack was ten now, and it looked as though he modeled his every word and gesture on Leo. Even Britt laughed that she could ask Jack if he wanted cereal for breakfast or eggs, and the first thing he did was look at Leo. Leo appeared to feel comfortable with being adored; he was affectionate with Mona, who at nine months was grabbing table edges, pulling herself up, and crowing ecstatically. Jessica would sit on the sofa and set Mona astride her knees, and within moments, they would both be laughing. When Richie described how Leo was as a toddler, everyone laughed at that, too. Maybe all that resistance had been funny, and Richie hadn’t had the sense to see it.

But there was a part of him that didn’t forget Michael, or, at least, that was how he reconstructed it after the fact. He looked up that girl whom they once left floundering in the freezing water down the road from their house in Englewood Cliffs — older than they were, bulky and contemptuous, Donna Fitzgerald then. On Facebook there were four, one of whom had once worked as a steamfitter. No way, with a girl who might have married, to find her and ask what she remembered about that incident. There were fourteen William Westons — which one had supplied the hammer that Richie had slugged Michael with when Michael sneered at his tent-erecting failures? Alicia Tomassi — there were eight of those on Facebook and seven on LinkedIn. None appeared to be an artist, though one looked rather like the old Alicia, who, he remembered, put it about that he and Michael both attacked her. “And lucky for her” was what Michael said. And so, if he could line up the witnesses, how would they testify? Would his congressional colleagues remember Richie’s bike leaning against Michael’s Ferrari? Would Jerry Nadler remember giving him the oh-yeah-I-get-it-now look a week or so after Richie voted for the Iraq Resolution, and Nadler saw them walking side by side out of a restaurant? Nothing had rankled quite so much in that article in the Times as the line about Richie being the younger twin. He had crushed the paper and thrown it against the wall — they called themselves reporters! How often had he thought about these things in the intervening months? How often did he tell himself the past was past and he was over it, and for that year, Michael did take him in hand, did make him get his act together. Did not tease him about how he might sleep with Jessica (his thoughts lingered over this one, and Leo entered the picture, only to be consciously banished). Did these thoughts form a pattern, or just appear to form a pattern in retrospect?

And why was he out after midnight, why did he wake up with a raging headache and lie there beside the person he cared most about, and, after finding no ibuprofen in the bathroom, decide that right now he had to go to Safeway and get some, that his head would burst if he didn’t? He got dressed and went to his car. The evening was warmish and foggy, so that the air was full of light and the streets were shining, and he didn’t have his watch, he’d forgotten it, and he drove rather aimlessly because of the headache — he had to make himself think how to get to Safeway, although the hardest thing in the world was thinking. The streets were empty, so empty, and there was a man in a smooth leather jacket that caught the light, jaywalking, holding up his hand imperiously, looking at him, and he realized that it was Michael, though why he was there at that moment, Richie could not understand. Michael recognized him, grinned, and gave him the finger; and Richie felt himself press down on the accelerator, press down hard, and then Michael grew to enormous size, and there was an impact, and a bump-bump as the car went over the body, and he drove home without looking back and without any headache, and he went to bed and slept like a rock until Jessica came into the room (it was bright daylight) and said, “Honey, someone is here from the police.” She looked upset, and all the cop said was “Congressman, I have some bad news for you. Your brother was the victim of a hit-and-run sometime between three-thirty and four-fifteen this morning, and, I am sorry to tell you, he passed away, and his body is at the morgue.”

Richie said, “Oh Jesus, you are kidding me,” and the cop frowned regretfully, and Richie said, “Any clues about the perpetrator?” and one cop said, “Not many, I’m sorry to say. The surveillance cameras in the area seem to have been down for maintenance.”