Jane Smiley - Golden Age

Felicity, now nineteen, was registered and planned to caucus on January 3 with the Denby — North Usherton Democrats, who numbered exactly eleven. Felicity grilled Richie: Had he ever met Hillary Clinton? Yes, of course. Barack Obama? Yes, he had seen his keynote at the 2004 convention, and sometimes he saw him in the Capitol — they had a nodding acquaintance. John Edwards? Yes. Bill Richardson? Yes. Dennis Kucinich? Yes, Richie offered that he admired Kucinich (and he did, the way you admire someone who is the guy you dare not to be) but he might be a little too pure. Felicity stared at him. Richie shrugged. Jesse and Jen had never caucused. Richie had never caucused. It was a strange process.

He did not say what he truly thought of the candidates: apart from Kucinich, they all looked better than they were, according to Lucille’s inside dope. Only Kucinich, who was short and not physically appealing, looked worse than he was, and so would never get anywhere. Lucille’s view was that you could be an ugly Republican and wield enormous power, but that didn’t work for Democrats. She wasn’t sure why.

In the summer, after their minimal June wedding, Jessica had moved out of her place in Stanton Park and into his condo, bringing her bike, a newish couch, and a Therapedic mattress. She didn’t even bring the book she was reading — she finished it the night before the move and gave it to a homeless man they passed on Constitution Avenue. To the Brooklyn co-op, she brought nothing but a Waterpik and some spare underwear. She had never been to Brooklyn before. She liked wandering around, and could end up anywhere, calling him on her cell and asking how to get back to “your place.” When Loretta heard about the secret wedding, she insisted on giving a reception at the Langdon establishment on the Upper East Side. Jessica ignored the insistence for two weeks, then said, “Oh, shit! I forgot!” called Loretta, and said that, before anything like that could happen, she and Michael would have to come to Brooklyn for supper. That was the end of the reception idea. She did whatever she wanted in a completely disarming way, and Richie planned to get through the election year by having her walk in front of him into every gathering, a female bodyguard, a female spirit guard. He had never been so happy.

After the caucuses, Felicity wrote to say that her caucus had met for two hours and twelve minutes, and voted seven times. One person voted for Kucinich, four went for Vilsack, four for Hillary, and two for Obama. Edwards was considered suspiciously good-looking — not a single vote. Felicity had voted for Hillary six times. She had made a case that, as the youngest person in the caucus, she needed a good role model for being a strong, intelligent, and well-educated woman. However, since the women in the caucus outnumbered the men seven to four, and all of them were at least twice as old as Felicity and one had been caucusing since Truman, they seemed to feel that Felicity was putting them down. One of the Obama supporters said that she had caucused in the eighties in Ames — did Felicity go to Iowa State? — and their precinct had been the only one in the whole state to go for Jesse Jackson. The four who went for Vilsack never shifted their votes, but when Felicity finally switched from Hillary to Obama, he got a majority and won. Jen told Jessica that Felicity was electrified by the whole process, and now viewed the congressman as her personal seat warmer for when she would go to Washington as the first female veterinarian/politician. Richie told Jessica that it couldn’t come soon enough, and laughed when she kissed him and began unbuttoning his shirt — there was that relaxed and agreeable and passionate part, too.

—

RICHIE WANTED TO believe that the House of Representatives was less corrupt than the Senate, but he knew that this was not true, that, for all of U.S. history, the public had assumed that the House was a swamp of dirty money, nefarious influence, and continuous armtwisting. Maybe only Jessica still had faith, but Richie could see that her faith was fading fast when they drove to the Hut for a weekend with his mom. She reached into the glove compartment, helped herself to a peppermint Altoid, and said, “Do you think seventy-five thousand dollars is a lot of money?”

Richie said, “No.”

“Would you take seventy-five thousand from Exxon to stop working on solar?”

“Only if I didn’t mind being shot by Riley. Well, not shot, since she doesn’t believe in firearms, but decapitated with her Wüsthof six-inch cleaver.”

“It just seems so small to me. Isn’t Dodd rich? He’s from Connecticut.”

“I don’t know if he’s rich. He’s been in Congress his entire adult life. His dad was a senator.” He thought for a minute, then said, “He dresses pretty well.”

She said, “My parents’ mortgage is from Countrywide. They just refinanced last year.”

Dodd had proposed a housing bailout, then admitted that he was best friends with Angelo Mozilo, the CEO of Countrywide. Richie didn’t know if the surprise was in the scandal or in the fact that it was being seen as a scandal. Angelo Mozilo had never approached Richie, and Richie had been too lazy to refinance his mortgage on his own. Riley had asked him about it two weeks before — some other senator had gotten a good loan from Countrywide. Both Dodd and the other senator were Democrats, which was why Riley had gotten nervous: she was always worried that Richie might slip the leash and get in trouble.

Richie preferred to take Route 202, though it was somewhat slower than 95. Jessica was looking out the window. Sometimes, while they drove, she made fists, flexing her forearm muscles and her biceps meditatively, and she breathed in an even, deep, oxygen-enriched rhythm. She worked out three days a week these days — she had stopped doing even practice bouts, but she still trained. Other days, she watched movies on TCM while running the treadmill.

When they got to the Hut, his mom was on the porch, digging her forefinger into one of her pots of lavender. She was so enamored of it, and had so much of it, that its fragrance seemed to envelop the Hut. When he pulled up, she trotted down the steps like a fifteen-year-old and embraced Jessica as soon as she was out of the car. Richie kissed her on the cheek. It was nearly time for supper, but Richie and Jessica had made sure they were prepared for anything by eating ribs and fries for lunch and stashing the leftovers in a cooler in the back seat of the Subaru.

It was easy to imagine his mom lost in space as well as time — Spring Street was so quiet and so green and so architecturally archaic that he expected The New York Times sitting on the kitchen counter to be dated 1985, if not 1955. When his mother handed him his tonic water and lime, he sipped away the rumblings of Washington, D.C., in 2008, the anxieties of trying to get a black man with a Muslim name into the White House, the price of oil inching toward $140 per barrel (how much had Michael invested in oil?). He was in fact dozing off, listening to Jessica and his mom discuss underwire brassieres, when suddenly she said, “Say, do either of you know what a CDO is?”

And Jessica said, in her customary even tone, “Oh, that’s a type of financial instrument. A bank bundles together a big pile of mortgages and sells them as a bond to investors. The investors get a larger or smaller rate of return, depending on the amount of risk in a particular bundle.”

His mom said, “What if I am getting ten percent?”

“That’s high-risk,” said Richie.

“Oh,” said his mom.

After that, they had dinner. She had made something of an effort — a large Cobb salad, neatly constructed. Richie didn’t even have to exchange a glance with Jessica to know that they would take a nice walk down to the fairgrounds or over to Moorland Farm around nine, and stop at the cooler, where they would devour the rest of the ribs.