Jane Smiley - Golden Age

Every week, he saw Charlie and Riley, and sometimes, he saw Richie and the new girlfriend. He had them all convinced that he was very, very busy. He made it a practice to refer to people that he met in the library, what they said, what they were like, when, really, he was only overhearing something or other from time to time. The person in the library that he talked to was one of the security guards, an African American man who lived in Alexandria, whose hobby was the Civil War, or, as he called it, the War Between the States. Twice he took Henry to visit battlefields, Spotsylvania and Manassas. Henry could tell that the man — Forrest La France was his name — felt sorry for him. But Henry didn’t feel sorry for himself. Every single day when he put on a pair of lightweight khakis and a pima-cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled twice, every day when he put on his straw hat, every day when he took a clean handkerchief out of his drawer and knew that he would be using it to pat the sweat off his brow, he was happy, because he was not in Chicago, it was not winter, the wind off the lake was not laden with snow.

He had accepted that if you were a bookish person the events in your life took place in your head. Once upon a time for Henry, those events had been dramatic; as the years went by, his skin prickling when Heathcliff ran out of the house calling “Cathy!” had given way to a gasp when Mr. Carker the Manager was hit by a train, and then to a quiet thrill when Beowulf found himself in Grendel’s mother’s cave. He had learned early on not to look up from the book and say, “Listen to this.” In graduate school, his pleasure in the dramatic gave way to something more abstract — yes, there had been the pleasures of words and their roots. Not only was “foot” connected to “fetlock” and “pedal,” but it was also connected to “impeccable” and “appoggiatura.” Not only was Artemis the sister of Apollo and the virgin goddess of the hunt, she was also Britomartis on Crete, an archaic mother goddess, no relation to Apollo at all. There were books that Henry remembered so clearly that he could still picture the pages he had read and the places where he had read them. One of these was The Hero with a Thousand Faces . Henry was in Berkeley and he dared to say to his cousin Rosa, “Who is Joseph Campbell?” She handed him the book, and he read it in a day, sitting on her mother, Eloise’s, porch in the sunshine. Gods and goddesses had eventually paled in comparison with wheat, rice, and corn, thanks to Les Structures du quotidien —that would have been on the beach beside Lake Michigan, sitting under an umbrella with Philip (he kept looking at Philip, the way you did when someone fascinated you), grinding his heels into the sand nearby. All of these books were carefully sorted and shelved in his apartment, and though he had loved them, perhaps they had held him back — they had been so lordly in their tone, so sure of themselves, so hardbacked and dense. Lost in the library, Henry had forgotten that the very men who wrote these books were out and about — some of Eloise’s friends of friends remembered Campbell himself on the beach, yakking it up about crabs and sea urchins with Ed Ricketts. The two men would have been half the age that Henry was now.

His problem was Chicago, not books, but he was retired, wasn’t he? Didn’t have to go back to Chicago at all. If your life remained in your mind, complex and busy, full of what you had read as well as what you had done and whom you had met, you could carry it into the future, and it would all, somehow, flow together. That was his hope, and his superstition, and he planned to stay in D.C. as long as he could.

—

RILEY SAID THAT deciding to hike the Appalachian Trail was not something that you did by waking up in the middle of the night the day before Halloween, and, as always, Charlie had nodded and agreed with her. Nevertheless, when he got to work at the outdoor outfitters Monday morning, he went straight to the book-and-guide department and pulled out a guide. By lunch, he saw that he could start down in Georgia, where the weather was still pleasant, and just keep walking until it got too cold to go on. He had the equipment, even the orange vest (obviously, there would be plenty of people hunting, since it would be November), and he could get the trail provisions at a discount. His manager would give him the time off — their busy time was the spring and summer, and Charlie hadn’t taken any vacation in two years.

By his afternoon break, he was walking around the shoes-and-boots department, wondering if he needed a new pair: you never wanted to break in your boots on the trail, but his were getting pretty worn. Supposedly, you would start out hiking eight miles a day, but Charlie thought he could do twelve or more. After work, he ran to Dupont Circle double-quick, got an earlier train than usual, and could not keep his mind on his book, which was The Hound of the Baskervilles . Henry made him alternate, man’s book, woman’s book; the last one he’d read was Northanger Abbey . Riley had him reading books, too — next to his bed was A Sand County Almanac . Riley was powering through Guns, Germs, and Steel , marveling from time to time that those Menominee ancestors (but really “Mamaceqtaw”) had managed to survive at all, and Charlie glanced at her surreptitiously while suppressing the yawns that came from his own reading material. More than once, he lost his place and started over, only dimly recognizing passages he’d read minutes before. He had two books on his side of the bed. Her side was close to the window, and her “currently reading” set ran in a line along the sill, blocking out the morning light almost as well as the shades they hadn’t bothered to buy yet.

He got home. He helped make dinner very pleasantly, broccoli soup, veggie omelet. He chopped the vegetables and warmed the day-old whole-wheat baguette. She set the table.

Charlie said, “I talked to Fred. He doesn’t need me after Thursday, so I think I will—”

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

Charlie looked at the wall above Riley’s head and assembled his arguments.

“Hey, babe. I need a break, and it’s not that expensive. Say I’m out there for a month, which is not likely; at the most that’s three hundred dollars — well, three fifty. I’ve got all the equipment I need. That old sleeping bag from Aspen that’s good down to ten below, we haven’t used that in years. Perfectly good tent, too.” He tried to sound conversational. “I looked at the boots, but I couldn’t justify getting a new pair at this point. Maybe in the spring or summer—”

“You will be gone for a month?”

“Three weeks, then? I thought a month would be the absolute outside.”

“What if I have to go away for a few days? How will you know?”

Charlie knew she was talking about Thanksgiving, which, as a semi-official Menominee, she would not celebrate, but she didn’t mind spending the day with friends. He said, “The house will be empty and the oven will be off.”

“Oh God.”

But she didn’t raise her voice. She sounded more or less resigned. Charlie pressed on.

“You know that too long in the city makes me jittery, you know that. When we lived in New York, I went upstate every couple of weeks.” He smoothed his voice. “You went, too.”

“I cannot take a month off to walk the Appalachian Trail.”

“Eventually, you will have to take time off.”

“The congressman takes enough time off for both of us.”

This could be a sticking point: Charlie knew that Riley knew that Charlie knew that he liked Richard Langdon better than Riley did. “Hard-hitting” was not the word for Congressman Langdon, but every Congress needed some congeniality, that was Charlie’s view of politics.