Jane Smiley - Golden Age

“What about all the stuff?”

“The art is being evaluated.” In his last four visits, Michael had avoided any mention of Loretta’s name, but sometimes Loretta called Jessica, not to complain, or even to confide, Richie thought, but to ask advice about exercise regimens, cleanses, muscle strains, over-the-counter pain medications.

Michael yawned. “If I can ever afford to buy furniture again, it will be IKEA. Jessica can put it together.”

“Where are you going to live?”

“I guess we’ll find out.”

Richie hadn’t heard of any financier going to prison, but he hadn’t been paying attention, either. He said, “I mean, for now.”

“With you.”

Richie laughed. Michael’s delivery was good — thoughtful, regretful, honest — but there was no comparing notes on this: Michael confided only in him. All of his other relationships that Richie was witness to were polite and superficial. Really, Richie thought, it was like living for years with a huge, aggressive German shepherd, and then having the dog come into your bedroom one night, climb onto the bed, and open up in perfectly good English about his long life of pain and sorrow. The dog still growled at the UPS guy, and no one else in the world knew he could talk.

When he told his mother that Michael had changed, that he was more easygoing, Andy had said, “Your father became very loving in his last few years.”

Richie had nearly fallen to the floor.

She went on: “It was like his manner was a shell that was going to be the last thing to change, but inside he was softening. Had softened. We were close. I don’t know. There was something about your father. It was as if he had been born old and hard and his task was to regress to vulnerability. I don’t know why that was. His parents were like everyone’s parents. I was fond of them. You couldn’t really know your father and his parents and continue to believe in Freud.” Nor did his mother seem to hold her current straitened circumstances against Michael. The two times Richie had broached the subject, she had acted as if she didn’t have any idea what money was. Richie wondered if she had ounces of gold stashed somewhere.

Jessica was the boss, or, rather, she did what she wanted, as always, and they went along with it. Sometimes she would need to go to the Smithsonian for a look around, sometimes she would need to go to the 5th Street Market and buy kale, sometimes she would need to hike five miles in Virginia somewhere or take in a movie. But it wasn’t like it had been with Alicia — there was no rivalry. Richie and Jessica walked along, holding hands, and Michael ranged here and there around them. When they went to bed, he stayed up watching a movie or reading a book (right now, Bleak House ). They made love and noise, but he seemed not to notice, except to say, “Glad that part is over for me.”

Did he feel regret or shame? Richie had no idea. He himself alternated, understanding that regret was a desire to have lived your life differently, whereas shame was a much more basic, and honorable, emotion. In order of importance, he had five shames: supporting the Iraq Resolution, voting for repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, not blocking Halliburton in some way, letting the anti — climate-change forces of big oil roll over him, and not sticking his foot out and tripping Dick Cheney when he had the chance.

He said, “Jessica wants to move to the Catskills and build a hay-bale house.”

“I visited a cob house in California once.”

“Built with corncobs?”

“No, it’s a kind of mud, including sand and clay, and some straw. You build it like a sandcastle. It was eerie.”

When she found out that Richie was not only still speaking to Michael, but also had taken him in, Janet had stopped speaking to him, and, yes, according to his mother, Janet was about done for. She had gotten enough out of her house to send Jonah down to Santa Barbara, to the community college, then moved herself and the horse to Half Moon Bay. No one was invited to visit. She had asked Andy three times if she remembered that time in Paris, when their father had called Janet a royal bitch in the middle of the night in the hotel room. Andy did not remember that incident — she had enjoyed the trip.

Nor did she know, Richie thought, about the prostitute Michael had paid to give him a blow job, in a little alcove around the corner from the hotel, at about two in the morning. First they had dared each other to escape the suite and hotel, then they had wandered around until they spotted her, high heels and some kind of fur coat with very little underneath. Messy hair, druggy look. She knelt down on the icy pavement while Michael leaned back against the wall. It took about two minutes and cost a hundred francs. Richie watched the whole thing.

Richie said, “Riley always said you could grow your own hemp house in a single season.”

“I’ve read about that. I would do that,” said Michael, proving to Richie that a lifetime together was nevertheless full of surprises.

HENRY HAD TRIED to avoid but in the end had not been able to resist interpreting the crisis in literary terms. Right when it all came out, he had been reading about the hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold that some average Joe had unearthed in Mercia (well, Staffordshire), bigger than Sutton Hoo, and that had shaped his response. For Riley and Alexis, it was the long-awaited comic plot-twist: the faithful lieutenant promoted to colonel, given charge of her own little regiment of climate-change soldiers, consorting with Bill McKibben on a friendly basis, frequently quoted in The New York Times , an occasional column in The Guardian , and periodically vilified on Fox News, where, when she appeared, she did not allow herself to be interrupted even once. They had not moved out of his house — Riley said that if Henry constituted the sole member of Alexis’s village, then that was fine. So Henry spent a lot of time with Alexis, who was almost eight, went to the local public school, but was enrolled in piano lessons and an after-school Spanish class. Henry sometimes read aloud to her (right now, Black Beauty ), and she sometimes read aloud to him (right now, Como nasceram as estrelas ) and liked to go on Saturdays to a climbing gym and shimmy her way up rock walls (but she was not yet Charlie: she always scuttled downward when she got about twelve feet off the ground).

Richie was Sisyphus released from his endless task of pushing that stone up the mountain, and every time Henry saw Richie, he saw the relief — no more fund-raisers, no more fake smiles, no more pretending to know what he didn’t know, no more listening to the cacophonous demands roaring around him. But Sisyphus had rolled that stone up that mountain for such a long time that he was conditioned to do nothing else. Month by month, Henry had seen Richie slip into pure idleness — go to the gym (well, that tapered off), read a book (never had before), learn to cook (cut himself chopping vegetables, burned himself braising a pot roast), do housework (disorder was not visible to him). Richie’s skills were social ones: he was articulate, charming, graceful, witty, self-effacing. He had actually done something for the Congress while he was there in not being obstinate, loud, and ugly, in appearing to be the last remaining representative willing to listen. Sisyphus was going to have to reassemble himself, take on another thankless task, but he didn’t know how.

Henry knew that everyone in the family was inclined to see Loretta as the evil queen, staring into the mirror and reciting incantations against her enemies, exercising and expanding her powers so relentlessly that her very own son had to disappear in order to escape the curse, not of being her enemy, but of being her friend. Claire maintained that, though Michael had always been difficult, his problem was impetuosity more than anything else—“Frank without brakes.” Whatever intelligence Michael had was a sort of cunning — not introspective, but calculating. Loretta had put his energy, looks, and impetuosity to work for her own purposes. There had been so many girls; why had he picked her? Well, she had picked him — that much was obvious — and then enlisted that priest, what was his name, to keep Michael in line. That was the Catholic way of doing things; Catholicism was about power; there were scandals going back to the beginning of the Church. Claire clucked and clucked. In Chicago, it was all coming out — that choirmaster stabbed in the eighties, the arson at the All Saints church. Andy was not quite so ready to put all of the blame on Loretta. She said, “If she was a witch, then she never cast a spell that worked, did she? No, I haven’t talked to her, but how much advice did she ask from me over the years, how to win him, how to persuade him, how to rein him in, how to get his attention? She was always arranging her weapons, making her preparations. I think she was glad he didn’t kill and eat the children.” Ah, thought Henry, Saturn. Or, if you preferred the Greek version, Kronos, the most interesting of the gods, who hadn’t required that his sons be sacrificed by humans, but simply ate them himself.