Jane Smiley - Golden Age

“I went for the delta.”

“What’s that?”

“Basically, you bet both ways, way up and way down. If the market pisses and moans and piddles around where it is, I’m—”

“Fucked,” said Richie.

“God, yeah,” said Michael. “But if it jumps or drops big, I win big.”

As Michael said this, Richie could almost see the testosterone throbbing through his brother’s carotid arteries. He said, “What are you going to do to make sure one of these things happens?” He was joking, but Michael said, “I don’t know yet, but I’ve got till Monday to figure it out.” Everyone had a system now. Even his dad had a system, something some guy had explained to him in Aspen, a year ago. Frank didn’t use the system, but it seemed like his mom was using the system, in her way, which was to wake up in the morning and say, “I think IBM is about to have an uh-oh day,” and then Andy would buy, and then, apparently, IBM would rise, and his dad would say, “I think she’s going to turn out to be a genius after all.”

Richie, of course, would have to have something to say about the crash, too — Congressman Scheuer would be required to issue a statement about volatility and regulation and why should our nation be beholden to the fat cats — but it was possible that the market would bounce back, and those remarks could be shelved before they were needed. Richie heard the door to their bedroom open, and here came Ivy. When she saw Michael, she gaped, stuck out her tongue, and rolled her eyes, but then she laughed and kissed him on the cheek. She had told Richie over and over that she wanted to see Michael and Loretta as little as possible, but in the end she was always won over. The toast popped, and she buttered it. She said, “You want jam? I have some pear I just got.”

Michael said, “Any eggs?”

“There’s no such thing as a free breakfast.”

Michael said nothing. Ivy got out the frying pan, opened the refrigerator door. Later, Richie knew, she would say that Michael’s attitudes were a kind of performance, blond-guy rap. Sure, there was a part of him that was aggressive and inconsiderate, but he was nice to Loretta and better with his kids than, just as an example, their dad had been with them. Michael was a complex person, no two ways about that. She sprinkled in the chili powder and the cumin; she knew what he liked. Richie had told her about the girl at Cornell — Alicia. He’d told her what he remembered from their sophomore year, that Michael had attacked Alicia, he, Richie, had tried to stop things, and Alicia had stabbed Michael with the scissors in her bag and gotten away. He’d also told her what Michael told him after Richie left Cornell for Rutgers — that Alicia told everyone they both attacked him. Ivy didn’t believe either story. They were kids, Michael had a temper, things got out of hand; what was the girl doing, playing them off against one another, anyway? Richie allowed Ivy to give Michael the benefit of the doubt, because didn’t he want the same thing for himself?

She said, “You think the computer trading is a problem?”

“Nah,” said Michael. “The computers functioned great. I mean, the real problem is people, not computers. It’s hard to keep up with them, and you get tired. I’m glad the fucking day is six hours, not eight. Should be four, you ask me, but they haven’t thought about that. I mean, we knew this was coming. We knew that volume would pop, and they’ve spent years preparing for it, so…” He shrugged. “Things might settle down on Monday, but if they do I’m fucked.”

Ivy cast Richie a glance. Richie raised his eyebrows, their signal for I-will-untangle-this-mess-for-you-later. Ivy set Michael’s eggs in front of him and handed him a fork, a napkin.

Michael said, “You pregnant yet?”

“Is that your business?”

“It’s not my business, but Loretta asked.”

They waited too long to answer. The latest missed period had presented itself only the day before. It had been five days late. Michael said, “Let me try. I have a perfect record.” Ivy smiled, thinking he was kidding. “I mean, as an experiment. If I can’t do you, then the problem is yours, not Richard’s. Down and dirty. Save a lot of medical expense, and if it works, the result is the same, basically.”

He lolled back in his chair again, then moved it with a loud scrape. His elbow banged the windowpane, and Richie thought: out the window, three stories, four if he fell into the stairwell leading to the basement co-op.

Ivy scowled, and Michael noticed. He said, “What?” as if truly perplexed. “Okay, I said something. I didn’t rape you or go behind Richie’s back. I didn’t even make an actual proposal. I just floated an idea. I am not blinded by social norms. I can see solutions. So what? It’s called thinking outside the box.”

“Or joking around,” said Ivy.

“All right, joking around. I know you guys got up and left Beverly Hills Cop 2 because you just couldn’t take it.”

Richie said, “I like Eddie Murphy.” But he sounded so stuffy, and he didn’t look Michael in the eye, and he knew that Michael had gotten him again.

HENRY FOUND the University of Chicago amusing as a monument to wealth. He didn’t go there often; however, he did enjoy the library, not in spite of the fake Gothic feel, but because of it — the lancet arched leaded windows soaring to the fan-vaulted ceiling, and warmer this time of year than any cathedral in the world. It was less than an hour’s drive from his apartment down Lake Shore if he went in the middle of the morning and came back after rush hour. The snow wasn’t bad this year, and he was used to the wind. The bonus was that he could get away from that letter on his desk from Turner Klein, which was surely about whether he was making progress on the panel he had agreed to produce about Philip for the AIDS quilt. He’d intended to stay away from the AIDS quilt all last summer, and even into October — he’d thought it would be a tasteless memorial, a type of headstone in piecrust. Much better, he was vocally convinced, to build a shining and searing black structure identical to and parallel to the Vietnam Memorial, but he’d ended up going to Washington after all, and had found the two thousand panels laid out on the Mall strangely affecting, in spite of, or because of, their bright colors and homey shapes. He hadn’t broken down, though, until he and Turner did get to the Vietnam Memorial, and he did touch the name of Timothy Brinks Manning carved into the gabbro (in his pedantic way, Henry had told Turner, who was streaming tears, all about gabbro, magma, large grains…). But when he touched Tim’s name, he was thinking of Philip and of Lionel and of Warren, the three AIDS victims he knew best, though only Philip had been his lover. Turner, who was in his thirties, a little panicky and insistent, would not let him get by without somehow seeing to the construction of a panel for Philip, a panel full of words — something severe, he thought, rigorously tasteful, yellow embroidered upon black. How this might be done, Henry hadn’t yet figured out.

He had not nursed Philip in the last year — Turner, Philip’s ultimate lover, had done that — but he had visited them in New York every month or so and sent them money; he was still sending Turner five hundred dollars a month.

What he was doing at the U. of Chicago was idle work, since he was not doing it in Europe, but it gave him an edgy sort of pleasure. There was that Pope, the evil Innocent III, who had sent Simon de Montfort to Béziers to slaughter the Cathars in the Cathedral. Henry’s sympathies were entirely with the Cathars, and he had driven around Carcassonne and Narbonne and the Hautes-Pyrénées several times now, pondering the Cathars at Foix, pondering them at Pamiers and Lavaur, where one of their female leaders was thrown down a well and stoned to death. But through Pope Innocent, he had been reminded of Gerald of Wales, who had met with Innocent several times in order to wrangle himself a position in the English Church, preferably to get Innocent to certify the independence and importance of St. David’s Cathedral in Wales, as opposed to Canterbury Cathedral. Gerald (really “Gerallt”) had failed, but, out of curiosity, Henry had looked into his many volumes of writings, thinking there might be a subject there for a book or a monograph. He had done the work intermittently and idly, a relief from everything else, but, perhaps because of Philip, the passage that stuck in his mind was not about the exhumation of the bodies of Arthur and Gwenhwyfar, the real Arthur and the real Gwenhwyfar, from the crypt at Glastonbury Abbey in the 1190s. What snagged him was the connection between Arthur’s defense of Britain in the sixth century against invading Germanic armies and the Plague of Justinian. He imagined Gerald, who was well traveled and lived into his late seventies, as someone not unlike himself, healthy, active, curious, a man of the Church who wrote about the people he met, the animals he saw, the places he visited. In all his years of fascination with language, wars, and cultural invasions, Henry had never actually identified with anyone until Gerald of Wales.