Jane Smiley - Golden Age

The windows were all open, and the air was humid and thick, but fragrant, of course, with the scent of lavender. Moths kept landing on the screens and fluttering away. His mom said, “Michael was here. Have you seen him lately?”

Richie said, “I thought they were in Chile, trout fishing.”

“It’s winter in Chile,” said Jessica.

“Well, then, Scotland.”

His mom poked for bits of hard-boiled egg in the salad. “I think Loretta is in Scotland. She’s having some kind of spa retreat where they hike for a couple of hours, then get salt rubs and massages for the afternoon.”

“Have you ever had a salt rub?” said Jessica.

“Oh, yes,” said his mom. Richie tried not to imagine it. “It’s invigorating. Richie’s dad liked them, too.” Richie closed his eyes.

His mom said, “Michael looked a little hollow around the eye sockets. I thought maybe it was just age, because I remember your dad looked a little the same way when he was your age. But you look fine. Something is worrying him.”

“Something is worrying me.”

“But, you see, you’re used to it.”

In a nutshell, thought Richie.

“Oh, heavens,” she said to Jessica, “Frank nearly lost his mind when Janet joined that cult in California. We both did, really, but nothing surprised me in those days.”

“What cult?” said Jessica, pleasantly.

“The one where they all killed themselves.”

“Waco?” exclaimed Jessica.

“No. Before that.”

Richie said, “The Peoples Temple. It’s not clear that the Branch Davidians killed themselves.” It was amazing to Richie that he hadn’t thought of David Koresh or Janet Reno in years. When he was first elected to Congress, he had thought about them every hour of every day.

“There have been so many,” said his mom, shaking her head. “You can’t count them all, really.”

Jessica glanced at him. He knew she was thinking, as an Irish person was welcome to think, of the Catholic Church. And he wondered, but didn’t dare to ask, why nothing surprised his mom in those days. He had thought she was the paradigm of innocence.

He said, “Why do you bring this up, Mom? Has Binky or Tia or Chance joined a cult?”

“No, they’re fine, according to Michael. He said he was just feeling lonely, and it didn’t take him long to get here — once he crossed the GW, not much more than half an hour.”

That was something like fifty miles.

Jessica’s eyebrows lifted. Richie said, “Oh, that Ferrari, always getting out of hand.”

“He wasn’t driving the Ferrari,” said his mom. “He was driving the Lexus. He said he sold the Ferrari.”

“Then maybe he was feeling lonely,” said Richie. He smiled at his own joke, but neither his mom nor Jessica did. Jessica’s response when he said things about Michael did make him feel mean. He and Jessica had cleaned their plates, and Jessica was scraping the salad bowl with the serving spoon. His mom had selectively eaten her tomatoes, her hard-boiled egg, and her bacon, but only bits of her chicken and her avocado. He looked at her. She was five seven; she might weigh 120 pounds.

He said, “Why did you ask about CDOs?”

“I don’t know. I asked him what he was working on, and he gave me so many letters of the alphabet that my head started to spin.”

He said, “As long as I’ve known him, he’s managed to get through the slamming door without catching his tail. When I talk to him, he seems upbeat.” But he hadn’t really talked to him in months.

“Isn’t that the truth,” said his mom. She got up, took their plates, returned with pineapple sorbet from her favorite shop in Bernardsville. By common agreement, it seemed, they stopped discussing Michael. The evening progressed with pleasant conversation about weather, flowers, Montana, clothes. At nine, his mom went to bed, and Richie and Jessica went out for their snack. They walked for forty-five minutes, all around the fields, in the humid grassy warmth.

—

RICHIE WAS at the kitchen table, drinking the last of his coffee, half listening for Jessica and reading a review of The Dark Knight . He was perhaps the only person in the world who had enjoyed that wreck of a movie, Batman & Robin —George Clooney as Batman. Even Leo had disdained it when Richie took him — what was that, ten years ago now? The city in the picture with the review did look like Chicago, rather than New York — there was something Michigan Avenue — y about the shot of Heath Ledger in the middle of the empty street. And then his Mac mail seemed to beep with extra insistence. He clicked on Riley’s link (subject line—“!!!!!”), which was to Bloomberg.com. Merrill Lynch; Goldman Sachs; BlackRock. He scrolled down. Then there it was, toward the end, “Banks and brokers have taken more than $435 billion of writedowns and credit losses since the beginning of last year as mortgage-backed securities, CDOs, leveraged loans and other fixed-income assets lost value.” Richie stared at this for a moment, then went to his Dashboard and tried to type out the number into the calculator, 435,000,000,000. The calculator wouldn’t take it by three decimal points, but he remembered enough arithmetic to do the division anyway. That kind of debt was worth $145,000 for every man, woman, and child in America, though only $60 for every man, woman, and child in the entire world. He took a sip of his coffee, and comprehended that that was a lot of money in a way that he never had before. He understood instantly that there were only two things that that amount of money could do — it could go somewhere, into some sort of money Grand Canyon, say, or it could disappear. According to the Bloomberg article, this was the amount of money that had disappeared.

Since Richie wasn’t on the Banking Committee, he had done what most congressmen did, which was to study up on his own subject and hope that the others were studying up on theirs. He did wonder why Michael had stopped hanging around, why Loretta had gone to California for the summer rather than to their new house in Burgundy. His one specific financial thought about Michael in the last week had been to wonder whether he could borrow some of the twenty-two thousand he would need to finance Leo’s first year at Brown, since Ivy was complaining, too, about the book business. Part of the problem, he now realized, was “illions”—once you were counting in the “illions” your mind got hazy about the real amount. When was that article in the Post —Riley would have it filed in her forebrain — that declared that the Iraq War had cost three trillion? A perfect example of the “illion” problem. Richie had looked at the “three,” lost interest in the “trillion.” “Three” didn’t seem like much. They should have printed it out—$3,000,000,000,000. He might have taken it seriously. And here he thought he was doing okay, a co-op in Brooklyn that was worth about a million, a condo in D.C. that was worth about $750,000, $158,000 in salary, and $376,000 in investments (Edward D. Jones, thank you — a name you never saw in the paper). Was Michael worth ten times what he was? Probably more like fifty or a hundred. But, looking at the Bloomberg article, he realized that everyone, really, was worth nothing — the numbers were a story people told about themselves, were told about themselves. He was fifty-four years old! How had he not realized this before? He shook his head and closed his laptop. He felt a little dizzy.

Jessica came into the room. She was wearing a pair of shorts she had bought for him — silk with a leopard-skin pattern — and a shirt buttoned with a single button. Her hair was flipped here and there; clearly, she hadn’t looked in the mirror before going in search of her coffee. She was worthless, too, a momentary occasion in the history of the universe when matter happened to coalesce in a being as ephemeral as a smile or a turn of the head. Richie thought that there was nothing he could do to save her, and his eyes got wet. She said, “I woke myself up laughing. Isn’t that funny? I have no idea what I was dreaming about, but the first thing I heard was this giggle. I wish it would happen every morning. I am in such a good mood!”