Jane Smiley - Golden Age

Janet swallowed when he said the amount—$750,000. Their house could have eaten that up without gagging in ’06, but maybe not anymore. Hard to say. They dropped the subject. Janet had not even said the obvious, “How could you trust Michael for half a second, how could you?” She continued to opt for solidarity, support, getting poor Jared through this, being thankful that they had paid Jonah’s school tuition, thankful that Jonah was a senior, thankful that he had not, could not, would never apply to Harvard, Princeton, Yale, thankful that Jonah drove the old Prius and that at his school this was not an embarrassment. Thankful that Emily was enjoying her job at the same Pasadena art gallery where Tina had put up her show five years before, thankful she spent weekends helping Fiona teach the littlest kids, content to ride once in a while, not to aspire to equestrian glory, to talk about someday having a handicapped riding facility, as if this were the form that her rebellion against everything her parents represented would finally take. Janet was in the habit of supporting this aspiration by remarking from time to time that she could never make a living at that .

Thanksgiving had been modest, enjoyable. The kids followed Janet’s lead in being especially affectionate toward their father and deploring both Richie and Michael — Emily said that a single continent between herself and her uncles was hardly enough. Janet had continued going to AA meetings, listening, remaining silent, cultivating a larger view. Jared’s birthday, his sixtieth, had been December 10. Janet made dinner for him, his favorite dishes. He didn’t show up that evening, that night, the next morning. The very moment when she was about to pick up the phone to call the cops, it rang, and it was Jared. He was in Minnesota, at his mom’s house. He wasn’t coming back. He had decided to return to Minnesota as an alternative to killing himself.

If Janet were to look in the drawer on his side of the bed, she would see the loaded gun there. He asked her to dispose of it, very carefully. He did not think it would go off — the lock was on — but you could never be too cautious. He was not coming back to California, to their marriage, to anything. He could not bear it. He hung up. When she called back, no one answered, either then or in the subsequent three days, during which she tried the number seventeen times, and then gave up. It took her several hours to open the drawer. The gun was underneath some folded-up pages from the Financial Times . She picked it up the way they did in movies, between thumb and forefinger, and carried it down to the cellar (holding the railing with her other hand every step of the way), and put it into an unused little safe they had bought years before. She locked the door, and in the morning she went out into the backyard and buried the key.

She was surprised at which specifics enraged her, and also at the order in which they arose. First, of course, was that he would have a loaded gun in the house, in the bedroom, and not a shotgun, but a handgun, and many bullets. What if, what if, what if, became a series of steady pops in her brain, day and night, the image of herself and Jonah naïve and stupid, walking around a house inhabited by a loaded gun, making one wrong move and having an accident. That sort of thing happened all the time — some high-school kids in Santa Clara had found a pistol and started playing with it, and one of them ended up shot in the throat. After that, the first notice of late payment, addressed to Jared and to her, arrived. She opened it in a rage and then quailed: no payments had been made on the loan since October, they (she) owed almost twenty thousand dollars, including fees. Twenty thousand that they (she) didn’t have. She stopped what-iffing and simply froze — only following her first instinct, which was to go to Safeway and buy lots of beans and cans of stewed tomatoes. In the middle of the night, she prioritized her spending: Bluebird’s board and vet bills would come before any of this debt, because a sixteen-year-old former event horse with soundness issues had no hope in the now collapsed equestrian market. But when she went to the barn, she was too edgy to ride; she took Birdie for walks and gave her cookies, and she avoided everyone human.

None of her friends knew that Jared had left. She accepted no invitations of any kind. She told Jonah the barest bones of the story — his dad’s company had failed, his dad had gone back to Rochester to get himself together and help his mom move out of her house to an old folks’ home (totally made up), everything would be all right. Jonah gave her one of his looks, the one that always said to Janet, “I knew something like this was coming.” She told Emily a little more — that maybe she would have to sell the house, that sometimes a marriage was just a marriage, not a love match, and marriages could hit the wall. At least there wasn’t another woman, some thirty-five-year-old. Emily said, “Dad doesn’t have enough money for one of those”; clearly, Emily was in communication with Jared.

And with Far Hills. When her mother called, she knew all about it, which relieved Janet from having to tell her. Andy hemmed and hawed until it was clear that Janet wasn’t ready to confide, then went on to other events — Ray Perroni had died, and Gail Perroni was sure it was because the housing development Michael had funded on the southeast corner of the ranch was such an empty eyesore, rows of prefabs, two stories of rattling plywood bleaching in the sun, weeds everywhere, streets but no sewage lines or electricity. A hundred acres of quite good pasture wrecked. It wasn’t much in comparison with the rest of the ranch, but Ray Perroni couldn’t stay away from it, couldn’t get over it. He keeled over in his truck, heart attack, Gail found him dead and cold, eyes open, hours later. Loretta was not invited to the funeral. She had moved to the house in Savannah — did Janet know they had a house there? Binky was with her. Michael was still in New York, trying to sell the place on the Upper East Side.

Andy’s tone was normal for her, the recitation of facts and events, something like a steady hum, nothing like the ups and downs of gossip, absent both Schadenfreude and fear, expressing nothing more than curiosity. All of her money was lost, too, but when Janet said, “Mom, what about you,” daring to delve no deeper, Andy only said, “Oh, I have plenty of books I’ve bought over the years and never read. Chance has simply disappeared.”

“What does that mean?” said Janet.

“He might have gotten a job on a cattle ranch in Colorado. Emily heard that through several intermediaries. He doesn’t want anything to do with Michael. Terribly shamed.”

“I wouldn’t have given him that much credit.”

“Then you underestimated him, I guess.”

Finally, Janet said, “What about Richie?”

“Free at last,” said Andy.

And Janet knew this was true.

“And he has a pension.”

“How much?” said Janet.

“Oh, goodness, I’m not quite sure,” said Andy, “but maybe seventy-five or eighty thousand a year.”

After they hung up, this was the thing that enraged Janet for the next four days.

—

JESSE WAS SURPRISED at how well informed everyone at the Denby Café was — even Julianna, about nineteen, who carried the coffee around and ran the cash register now, had read about Michael Langdon, not quite a local boy but close enough, in the Chicago Tribune . He and Jen didn’t say much, beyond recalling various incidents they had heard about that served as predictors for some sort of bad behavior. Felicity followed the story in her online subscription to The New York Times —she occasionally sent Jesse links and disapproving e-mails, especially when it came out that Michael’s fund had been “worth” almost a billion dollars. She had looked for Chance online, but he had closed his MySpace account (who hadn’t?), and never responded to e-mails. And his cell-phone number did not work. Every time she tried and failed to contact him, she e-mailed Jesse—“Are you worried?”—and Jesse e-mailed back, “No.” He wanted to e-mail back, “Not about him,” but then, he knew, she would fire back, “WHO ARE YOU WORRIED ABOUT?”