Jane Smiley - Golden Age

Richie had ceased being in the news. When Claire looked him up in The New York Times , there was nothing, not even a wedding notice when he married the girl, what was her name, Jessica Montana. Michael was quoted in the Times once, not with the frequency of two or three years ago. His quote was typically slippery: “These innovative instruments are revolutionizing the landscape and bringing about an era of steady prosperity that really isn’t like anything we’ve seen before. Risk should be spread around! It makes for a more stable world economy and a better balance between all parts of the market.” But whether that slipperiness was his own or was just jargon belonging to his Wall Street world, Claire didn’t know. A month ago, Carl had brought home a copy of the Financial Times he’d noticed in a trash can down by the Board of Trade; there was Michael’s photograph, looking spiffy and sinister and just like Frank, with the caption “Michael Langdon, CEO of Chemosh Securities, in London for a meeting with Barclays Bank.” She hadn’t heard from Debbie in ages — Claire didn’t know what Kevin and Carlie were doing. How your world was cast when you were young seemed not to matter at all as you aged. What was it like for the firstborn or the second? Claire could not imagine. But for the fifth and last, it was like walking onto a stage where the lights were up and the play was beginning the third act, gloriously permanent, soon to close, but always a lost world. No one would ever seem as handsome and dashing to her as Frank, as kind as Joe, as beautiful as Lillian, as smart as Henry, as reassuring as her father, as strict as her mother, and, maybe for entirely coincidental socioeconomic reasons, people these days didn’t have those Greek choruses of relatives, freely offering their opinions about everything that happened. Maybe she had tried to reproduce it all, imagining in Dr. Paul the very man for the job, an aspiring playwright with a grandiose sense of himself, but she had failed in her production — hadn’t she walked out just before the curtain went up?

Carl was a wonderful gardener; her mother would have told him what to do, loved him all the same, and given him all her best bulbs. Truly, she and Carl had made this harbor here, this Midwestern island of peace and prosperity, and Claire couldn’t take much credit for it. Carl didn’t live onstage, he lived in a workroom, putting the finish on this, sanding the edge off that. He was still the happiest man Claire had ever met, a saint of tremendous patience whose greatest pleasure, other than a good dinner and some friendly sex, was the neat fit between mortise and tenon.

—

PONIES HAD BEEN KNOWN to live to the age of forty, and though Janet didn’t think Pesky would get there, he was almost thirty, turned out in a grassy refuge for elderly equines down near Big Sur — she visited him every couple of months with some apples and carrots. Jared didn’t mind going along, because he liked to have dinner in Carmel. Sunlight had lasted a long time, too — the summer he was twenty-three, she had come to the barn to find him lying in his stall with his eyes open, quiet and stiff. No horses after that until now, two years later: in February, she had agreed to buy Jackie Milkens’s retired event horse, fourteen, very experienced, mostly sound, good at dressage. Her name was Bluebird. Since no one at home seemed to require her maternal services and the house seemed to clean itself, Janet’s enthusiasm for the equestrian life had resumed — she showed up at the barn every day, stayed for two or three hours, went on trail rides, and kept her tack clean and oiled. The barn was full of all sorts of people who engaged their horses in all sorts of disciplines, and everything was fine, until the man who had owned the place since the seventies decided he was done, and another group bought it. These were people from out of state — Arizona or somewhere, rich people who wanted an equestrian facility in a vineyard, or near a vineyard, or with its own vineyard. Janet tried to stay on their good side.

The dumbest thing they did was kick the stable workers off the property and tear down the little houses they had been living in since the property was built. This meant that Marco and his wife, Lucia; Chico and his wife, Anna; and Pablo (who was too young to have a wife, and went back and forth to Guadalajara, where he played piano in a band) had to find places to live in the most expensive rental market in America. Marco, who had been at the barn as long as Janet had kept a horse there, was now about forty-five, Janet thought. He had gotten a little set in his ways, and he was not happy when his hours were shifted so that, instead of working seven hours a day, six days a week, he had to work ten hours a day, four days a week; but he got used to that, and the grumbling subsided. Things were fine for about two months, and Janet could speak to the new owners politely when she saw them.

In May, on a beautiful day that had Janet singing under her breath, she was in Birdie’s stall, putting the saddle on, and she heard Marco say, “Sí, se acabó cerca de Los Banos.” When she led Birdie into the aisle, Marco was in the next stall over, cleaning it out. “Los Banos” had caught her ear, since that wasn’t terribly far from the Angelina Ranch, so she said, “Marco! Do you have friends over in Los Banos?”

“ Sí, señora , but, really, I have bought a house near there.” He grinned.

She said, “You have! How wonderful!” She’d almost said “amazing,” since she knew for a fact that Marco made minimum wage or no more than a dollar above that. She said, “It’s so far away, though! Isn’t it like a two-hour drive? Are you leaving here?”

Marco stood up, leaned on his fork, and said, “No, señora . My wife stays there. I go for three days, come back. I am staying with my cousin in Los Altos four days.”

“What’s your wife doing now?” When they lived on the stable grounds, Lucia had run a cleaning business: she went around to people’s houses once or twice a week with an assistant. She called it “Mini-Maids.”

“She is cleaning, like before. But over there now, so she can live in the house.”

Janet had been through Los Banos, to the Perroni ranch, and a little bit around that neighborhood. She could not imagine that Lucia could prosper the way she could in Palo Alto, but she didn’t say anything except “Well, congratulations. Drive safely.”

“Sí, señora. Gracias,” said Marco. He went back to sifting shavings and tossing lumps of manure into his wheelbarrow. On the way over to the arena, leading Birdie, who walked along politely, she passed Marco’s truck, a huge Ford pickup. That was pretty new, too — newer than Janet’s 1998 Chevy. Nothing made sense anymore, but it was too beautiful a day to care.

—

FELICITY WAS LOOKING FORWARD to ISU, but she didn’t think about it much. She could have started the year before, but she had decided to focus on her job at the vet clinic. Her mom said she was obsessed with that job, but Felicity would not have used the word “obsessed”—she was busy and happy, that was all. She cleaned cages, mopped floors, helped around the office, watered plants. Sometimes she pulled on latex gloves and helped Dr. Carlson by holding a cat or a dog. Most vets were women now, and she knew she could be one, but she hadn’t decided. What her dad considered a bad thing had happened: Lou Carlson, Dr. Carlson’s brother, had taken Felicity down to Des Moines, on a visit to the Great Ape place there. Her parents might have heard of the Great Ape place if they read The Des Moines Register , but they didn’t. Though she had told them all about it, she saw that they were not convinced that primate research was her destiny. She felt some despair about whether they would ever learn a thing. In an effort to sway her father (or maybe teach him), she had given him his own copy of Our Inner Ape , a book that Pastor Diehl would have found sinful and ungodly.