Jane Smiley - Golden Age

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IT TURNED OUT that Charlie and Riley were good matchmakers, because Richie fell for Nadie Cantwell (born Nadya Chertsev in Leningrad, in 1967, moved to London at the age of two, when her parents defected, then to Boston at the age of seven). What Nadie wanted in a man was someone busy, thoughtful, good-looking, and willing to joke around. Whether anything would come of it, Richie didn’t know. Nothing could come of it until the election was over, because Nadie was just a little suspect to the Republicans; her liberation from the Soviet Union was balanced by her very outspoken skepticism of all Republican positions on Ayn Rand, abortion, religion, extramarital sex, homosexuality, and communism (which Nadie and her parents felt had its good points and its bad points, just like capitalism). Although he had been seeing Nadie for almost a year, Richie had not told Loretta about her, or introduced them. That had to wait until after the election, too.

It was known to his constituents that his wife had left him for a billionaire from New Rochelle. He was still seen, sometimes, playing with his adorable son in Prospect Park, taking that very active but charming boy to the little zoo or to concerts at the Bandshell. They were darling together. Vito Lopez agreed that they were darling together. Vito Lopez had met the billionaire more than once, here and there. The billionaire had recoiled from Vito, or so Vito said (though maybe what he meant was that the billionaire was not terribly enthusiastic about bear hugs from Vito). Anyway, Richie had Vito’s support. And Richie had $376,983 in his election coffers, compared with the seventy-six thousand or so that his self-employed electronics-store owner Republican opponent, who was fed up with Washington and hoped to throw out all the bums, had. Several of his New York colleagues in the House were running unopposed; Richie wasn’t so lucky, and Michael occasionally told him that he was the one who was financing Rex Carr (could that really have been the name bestowed by his rival’s parents?) just to keep Richie on his toes.

Once a week, since he was running a fairly lackadaisical campaign, Richie, Nadie, Charlie, and Riley had dinner somewhere, tonight at Bistro Italiano — Richie paying, of course, and Nadie, Charlie, and Riley telling him what to do and how to do it. The primi piatti had just been delivered. Nadie removed her hand from his under the table, reached her fork for a piece of grilled artichoke, and said, “Believe me, it would have never gotten as far as it did if she hadn’t been egging her on.”

“That is so true,” said Riley. Riley was having the grilled pepper bruschetta.

“She” was Linda Tripp. “Her” was Monica Lewinsky. Richie did not love talking about the scandal every single moment of every day, but the tapes had, indeed, been so fascinating that even Riley had stopped talking about global warming for a while to talk about them. What was clearest to the women was that Linda did not like Monica much, that she would listen to her, play with her, sympathize with her, prod her. It was Linda, said Riley and Lucille, who worked up the Christmas phone-sex tape that everyone found so shocking (well, no, thought Richie, not shocking). “She was using her,” said Nadie. “Just like junior high. Remember that? Some ninth-grader would come up to you and tell you how great your hair looked, and where did you get those loafers, and, by the way, didn’t you carpool with So-and-So? And so you would be drawn into this plot to humiliate So-and-So — had she really given Billy Johnson a blow job behind the science building? Ugh. Been there, done that.” Nadie shook her head hard, as if shaking spiderwebs out of her hair. Richie thought she was the most worldly female he’d ever met. She was fourteen years younger than he was, and for the first time he understood why men did this, fell for these much younger women — it was just another expression of that social ineptitude they were cursed with. In ninth grade, best go for an eleventh-grader; in college, a girl your own age knew what to do; but once you got her bundled away into a marriage, then both of you lost your touch. Witness Ivy putting her eggs in the billionaire basket.

Nadie was much more suspicious of the sources of the scandal than even Riley. Whereas Richie and Charlie assumed that Clinton was a horny guy whose brain was sometimes overwhelmed by his dick, and who was now paying the price for his obliviousness, Nadie had listened to her parents. She said, “You look at what they are doing to him. It is right out of the KGB — he can have no privacy. What if Hillary did know all about it, about everything over the years, and said, ‘That’s the way he is, I can live with it’? They would say: Not her business, our business. We are the police. You live like we do and do what we say, or we will ruin you.”

“What is the KGB?” said Charlie. Richie wondered if he meant this metaphorically, or if he really didn’t know what the KGB was.

Nadie said, “Kristol. Podhoretz. Wolfowitz. Once a commie, always a commie.”

“My dad’s aunt was a commie,” said Richie. “Aunt Eloise. Everyone loved her.”

“All of my relatives were commies,” said Nadie. “The thing they want most is to be sure that you are thinking the right thoughts. Even if they change their minds, or when they change their minds about what the right thoughts are, they still have to make sure that you think them. There may have been hippies in America who thought sex and communism went together, but in the U.S.S.R., this was not so.” She smiled merrily, and Richie laughed, but she went on: “They feel it is their right to know everything about you, to hide microphones and make tapes and invade your privacy, because not doing everything according to the party line contaminates and infects society.” She sniffed.

“That’s like people who are against solar initiatives,” said Riley. “They see funding for solar and go bananas. They have arguments, but the bananas comes first.” She sighed. Once the scandal blew up, Richie had pretty much stopped talking about solar and wind. Here was how it went: Gore liked solar and wind; Gore was contaminated by Clinton; Clinton was contaminated by Lewinsky; therefore, no talk about solar and wind. It appeared to Richie as though the KGB was winning.

However, they did finish the primi piatti and move on, with good appetites, to the pasta — in Richie’s case, paglia e fieno .

He said, “Here’s something. You know, my sister-in-law is a conservative bellwether. I don’t know if they are training her or she is training them, but now her thing is abortion. She talks about abortion all the time. Did she once have an abortion? Is she suddenly afraid that her teen-age daughters might get pregnant? Is this monsignor that she always has to dinner firing her up? If my brother didn’t father several abortions, I would be amazed, since, if he wanted it, last-minute birth control was up to the girl, but he doesn’t say a word. She starts going off about abortion and he sits there, eating his food.”

Riley said, “I think reproduction is a crime.”

Nadie set down her fork and sighed.

Richie looked at Charlie, who continued to eat his ravioli. He remembered Charlie the first time he met him — what was he then, twenty? Gaily accepting Michael’s arm-wrestling challenges, gaily thumping him. Charlie was certainly an example of exceptional breeding — strong, healthy, good-looking, resilient, canny if not smart — combined with intelligent nurture that Charlie was grateful for — he always spoke well of his parents and visited them even when he didn’t have to. Surely, if you were his spouse, you would want to breed him. Charlie seemed fine with Riley’s childless plans. Richie said to Riley, “So you guys are going to screw us on the Social Security thing?”