Jane Smiley - Golden Age

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ALTHOUGH PART OF Michael’s shtick (and as the representative of a district in Brooklyn, Richie could use that word with ease) had always been snickering at Richie’s “job,” he didn’t say a word about impeaching Clinton, didn’t say a word about NAFTA, didn’t say a word about Bosnia. But when Phil Gramm and Jim Leach came up with their bill to loosen the banking regulations, Michael had plenty to say, all of it erudite and pleased. He started calling Richie on his home phone and his office phone after the Senate passed their version in May.

Richie didn’t consider himself any sort of expert on banking, and so was going to vote along party lines — that’s how the Senate had voted. Dingell, his colleague on the Energy and Commerce Committee, to whom Riley gave a B because he was from Detroit (“Gas-guzzler central,” as Riley said), was completely opposed to changing the laws, and gave Richie an earful every time he saw him in the Capitol building. Dingell always said, “Take it from me, Langdon, those banks are going to expand until they don’t know what in the world they are doing, and then they are going to come to us, hat in hand. How many staff do you have?”

“Ten, these days,” said Richie.

“And you let them do mostly what they want, right?”

Richie didn’t say anything.

“Well, who doesn’t? There’s only so many hours in the day. But your staff aren’t gambling for a living, are they? Doubling down, then doubling down again. Statistically, I’m telling you, sixteen percent of these investment boys are going to be doubling down, and sixteen percent of those are going to go bust on their biggest bets. No CEO or CFO who’s got his own life to live, now that he’s made it, is going to know a thing about it.” Of course, he had a point — he had been in the Congress for as long as Richie had been alive.

Michael said that the financial system would be much more efficient, both for investors and for savers, and that the banks would be safer, because when the economy was up the investors would carry the vig, and when the economy was down the savers would. This sounded reasonable to Richie, if not to Lucille, who didn’t have a real argument apart from “disaster in the making” and “inherent greed,” but, considering that most of Lucille’s insights came to her on the can, Richie had reservations about that, too.

Even apart from the Michael factor, Richie had come to like Jim Leach (R-IA), who reminded him of his cousin Jesse a little, if only in the way he talked. Leach understood derivatives, and he had broken ranks and voted against Gingrich and for abortion rights. Gramm made him about as suspicious as Leach allayed his fears. And, said Michael, the president was for it.

“Who told you that?” said Richie. “His new best friend, Loretta?”

“I don’t consult Loretta about money, and she doesn’t consult me about morals.”

Appropriate division of labor, thought Richie.

“Listen, little bro,” said Michael — and, yes, Richie was a half-inch shorter and ten pounds lighter, though, as always, four minutes older—“it’s all a mess already. You’ve got Citicorp eating up Travelers even as we speak. The waitress has dropped the tray, everything has spilled and is running together in a mess. You can’t back it up, you have to go forward with it.”

“You are making the case that they broke the law against merging investments and savings, and now we change the law to avoid having to punish them?”

“No, I’m making the case that there’s a reason the law was broken — that the world is more complex now, and the law has to reflect that. Let’s say that in Montana there’s no one on the roads, so there’s no speed limit. Then let’s say that twenty years goes by, and now there are trucks and cars and school buses and motorcycles on the road, but there’s still no speed limit. Your job would be to recognize that times have changed, and to institute a speed limit.”

“Would you abide by it?”

“If I was driving my Toyota and didn’t know any better, yes.”

Richie smiled, and it was true that there was some irreverence, some self-conscious humor, in everything that Michael said. “I make no promises.”

“It’s a vote! Just vote! Who is going to hold it against you? Some fucking deli owner on Flatbush?”

“I’ll talk to you later,” said Richie. He hung up. Michael did not know when to stop. That was his perennial flaw.

Nadie and Michael, and, more important, Loretta, had now broken bread together. Michael was impressed by her youth, and Loretta thought she had a lot on the ball for someone her age. That was all they thought about her, as far as Richie understood. His mom liked her — she had driven up from what Michael called “the hut” in Far Hills and taken, first Richie and Nadie, then just Nadie, out to lunch. They talked about architecture, and Andy said that Nadie had “a worldly manner,” and had read Oblomov . Nadie was the only person Andy had ever met besides herself who had read Oblomov , one of her favorite novels. Sometime after Nadie and Loretta met, Loretta told Nadie that appearances were deceiving — in spite of the hut and the old clothes, Andy was worth over ten million dollars these days, and she did all her own investing. Nadie’s own parents believed that all investments should be portable and kept at home, but Nadie was making good money, and since she saw how houses were built, she didn’t want to buy one. So all of that was going well, and, in fact, Leo didn’t seem to mind Nadie, either; but one result was that Nadie told Richie more than once that he was obsessed with Michael, everyone thought so, it was his problem. As the vote on the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Bill approached, he could not ask Nadie’s opinion, because that would cause him to talk about Michael, and thereby reinforce her idea of his obsession, and she would extrapolate from that to general obsessiveness on his part, and she would be even less inclined to make up her mind to marry him, which he ardently desired and she may have been inching toward, but not very quickly.

In the end, it was because Michael went too far — called him from Biarritz twice in one day, when Richie was pissed that his air conditioner was on the fritz and Washington boiling. He stewed in his seat for an hour, trying to make up his mind, then decided that he needed psychiatric help of some sort, then voted in favor, then saw that 137 other Dems had voted in favor, apparently without the onset of any personal trauma at all. Representatives stood up, stretched, walked around, yawned. Business as usual, torment confined to Congressman Richard Langdon of New York’s 9th district.

—

HENRY’S BOOK of essays on Gerald of Wales, which had been published by the University of Wisconsin Press, had elicited one review in an obscure English journal. Books that Oxford and Cambridge published these days were larger and more ambitious consolidations of material that crossed disciplinary lines. And no one was much interested in historical linguistics; some authorities didn’t adhere at all to the idea that there had been a Proto-Indo-European culture of the sort that his mentor, Professor McGalliard, had taught him about. Probably there had been a culture and a language, but who was to say that it had spawned in a logical way? Maybe it had simply fragmented and re-formed randomly?

Henry’s new project, therefore, was to read everything that had been written since he’d more or less lost interest, and to add to that archeology, anthropology, paleobiology. It was a huge project, and he expected to die before he finished it. A very invigorating thought. Who was that scholar, in Germany somewhere, who had spent her life putting together a Gothic-Germanic-Nordic dictionary, and when she died her filing cabinets were discovered to be filled with empty brandy bottles? But scholarship was different now, with conferences and computers and cheap travel, no longer lonely and cold. Especially, no longer cold. He was not looking forward to going back to Chicago, back into his cave of books. Maybe Lois, who was living at his place while he lingered in D.C., would sell them — she was practical like that. Minnie and Claire burbled on about Lois “abandoning the farm, her whole life,” but Lois herself didn’t seem to feel it as a crisis. Henry admired her.