Jane Smiley - Golden Age

Another pause. Outside, the confused lady had walked on, and Jackie was talking to someone else, who was bundled in a full-length black down coat.

Michael shrugged, took his briefcase off the counter, gave Lisa one last winning smile, and turned for the door. Lisa let him get there, let him put his black gloves on, let him touch the handle, then said, “Twelve is okay. I can do twelve for you.” She put on a regretfully redeemed expression, and Michael strode back to the counter. A win-win situation. Everyone was happy, including Charlie, who knew that they sold the Valextra, full-price, for eleven hundred. Mark came out of the back, looking genial but uninterested, and Michael and Lisa completed the transaction. When Lisa put on her coat and they went out together (Lisa told Mark she was taking an early lunch), Michael still didn’t recognize Charlie, but he did smile at him this time.

It was Charlie’s job to make the jokes and tell the funny stories, and it was Riley’s job to laugh, but she didn’t laugh when he told her about Lisa and Michael — she was offended. Charlie had learned to make no assumptions about how Riley might be offended. It could be anything: Ripping off Michael? Lisa going off with him? But of course it was the waste that offended her, getting rid of a perfectly good leather item because of a small stain. And calfskin, at that; did Charlie know how much grain went into feeding cattle? This brought her around to hemp again, as so many things did. Or bamboo! Bamboo was verrry interesting, and Charlie heard all about it over the roasted vegetables and grilled goat-cheese sandwiches they had for dinner. The cheese was from the shores of Cayuga Lake, and that was where Riley wanted to go on their first trip out of the city.

—

HERE WAS HOW Michael told the story: Everyone in their group thought going on the Jolly Roger would be fun — just a two-hour cruise around Dickenson Bay, then back to Magnus King’s condo on Runaway Bay (Magnus King had started out life as Bruce King, but changed his name when he made his second million; he was up to ten now). The boat had several levels, and everyone wanted to see the view from the top level — it was sunset, the bay was flat. Michael was sitting on the railing with his feet on a cushion. Admittedly, you were not supposed to sit on the railing — you were supposed to sit on the cushions. The boat shifted, he lost his balance, and the next thing he knew was that he was reaching out to grab a lanyard that was hanging there, but it was attached to nothing, and he toppled over onto a white awning that collapsed underneath him, and then he was caught in the huge arms of the black chef who’d been grilling steaks on the poop deck for the partyers. The chef stood him on his feet. He went back to the bar, got himself another rum punch, and ran up the stairs. When he got there, everyone was gone.

Here was how Loretta told the story: Michael was smashed to smithereens. When he originally staggered up the steps to the upper deck, he’d been swaying, and Magnus King had made a joke about him. Loretta was embarrassed, and told Michael he needed to taper off; he told her to shut up, jerked backward, and disappeared. The seven of them looked over the railing and didn’t see anything, so they ran down the stairs, but it was a big boat with two sets of stairs, and as they were running down one set, Michael was running up the other set. They searched the lower deck, and then Loretta looked up and saw Michael waving his arm and laughing. She was really happy to see him. But, she said, at that point he had learned nothing.

The next thing, Michael said, was that when the cruise was over, and they had eaten their steaks and sobered up just a hair, they got so impatient with how slow the barge was that ferried passengers back and forth to the beach that Michael handed Loretta his wallet (as always!) and dove into the water, then Magnus went, then Tyler Coudray, leaving all the wives and Zeke Weiner, poor Zeke.

Zeke was happy to stay with us, said Loretta — why would he want to ruin his clothes and get wet and cold for nothing? By the time the five of them got to that crappy beach bar, Magnus, Tyler, and Michael were sitting in Buccaneer Cove with their drinks, out of their minds. Tyler threw up right when his wife got there, and the throw-up sort of spread around them and got on Magnus and Michael, and they didn’t even notice. All the wives were pretty fed up, but there was no going home while the Red Stripe beers were being extracted from the ice chest. And it was cold. It was something like California, how cold Antigua got in the middle of the night, and all they had was sweaters.

The miracle, Michael said, was the bwi dog. Not a big dog, not a little dog; brown with a black face.

The miracle, said Loretta, was that they got home at all. There was no public transportation by that time, they had to find their way across that isthmus—

And the dog led them every step of the way, said Michael, down a winding path, through the plants that were growing behind the beach — kassy, it was, prickly and tangled — and the dog just took them. It must have been three miles.

It seemed like a mile, but probably it was only a hundred yards, at least as the crow flies, said Loretta; if they’d been sober enough to look up rather than at their feet (Michael did fall down — not once, but twice), they would have seen that Dalla left the light on in the second-story window, they could have made it; and thank God they got there before the children woke up, it would have been such an embarrassment, their clothes all torn and covered with dirt and bits of plants; Michael had lost his shoes completely, though Loretta managed to carry hers — they were ruined, though.

No, said Michael, the miracle was the dog, a dog that gave himself to them, to lead them home, and then lay on the stoop for the rest of the night, even though, when Dalla got up with Chance, Tia, and Binky, she shooed him away.

And well she should, said Loretta, since there is rabies everywhere; we just don’t think about it. But the dog wouldn’t leave no matter what she did, so she couldn’t even take the children out for a swim in the pool. Dalla didn’t like the dog at all, and Loretta didn’t blame her. None of the adults got up until after lunch, and Michael, when he did get up, kept saying, “What happened, what happened, what happened,” and complaining like a broken record that his lower back and his shoulder hurt, until Loretta and Zeke sat him down and told him about the fall and the walk and the dog.

Then, Michael said, he went outside and found the dog and petted him and thanked him, and gave him a steak from the refrigerator, and the dog wandered away with the steak in his mouth, maybe to bury it. Everyone laughed, but Michael was changed; even he said so. He got sober, he let his mom talk to him about AA, he kicked out his latest girlfriend and put the place he’d bought for her in SoHo on the market so that he could buy a bigger place uptown where Loretta could live comfortably, and not like camping out. He would have remodeled the place in SoHo, but they had to be near the schools, and those were all uptown.

Loretta said, Well, finally, he scared himself enough to wake up, but I always knew he would.

What Michael said was, You get to the point where everyone has their hooks in you, not that they always want something, even if mostly they do, but they want to prove you’re wrong or you’re an asshole, or you’ve always been an asshole, and even if you have always been an asshole, you can’t let them prove it.

What Frank said was, If you don’t realize you’re an asshole around the time you’re thirty-seven, you never will.

What Andy said was, Well, we’ll see.

What Ivy said was, Everyone has always taken Michael too seriously; most of his rants and misadventures are jokes and stunts, and everyone like that goes too far once in a while. She could perfectly imagine the thing on the boat, Michael just making hay out of it all, waiting for the laugh and never getting one. Loretta’s sense of humor was about as big as the head of a pin, and, maybe because she was raised Catholic, she was really afraid of irreverence; no one blamed her for that, because she meant well, but she and Michael were a mismatch. But Ivy only said this to Richie, as they were pushing Leo in the stroller in Prospect Park.