Golden Age

2001

THE FIRST THING Janet hated about Bush was not that he had stolen the election — that was bad, but he had had accomplices. He might even regard himself, she thought, as the ignorant beneficiary of the unknowable power of beings greater than himself (Cheney, Rumsfeld, brother Jeb, and Al Gore, who, not having won his home state, buckled). No, the first thing Janet really hated him for was his offhand comment that the Clinton boom had busted, and that we were now in a recession. He seemed to have no understanding that to a lot of people (namely, those who had invested in Jared’s company) that sort of edict was a death knell — money was running to safety now (gold and, for God’s sake, diamonds), and Jared was worried. It was Bush’s final campaign statement, the ultimate repudiation of the Democrats, and a self-fulfilling prophecy. She told all her friends that he had been nonpresidential and irresponsible to say such a thing, but most of them pooh-poohed her.

The second thing she hated him for was that she was stopped on El Camino Real at the Sand Hill Road light, and the traffic light went from red to black. Everyone at all three of the lights stayed still for a long couple of minutes; then, realizing that the system had gone out, they began creeping across the intersection. Janet was heading for the barn, where she was going to take Sunlight on a little trail ride, maybe ponying Pesky, who could no longer be ridden though he liked to get out, but she turned into the mall and drove slowly around. The mall was dark, too, and people were coming from the stores in droves, yakking and exclaiming. Then a cop car showed up, and a policeman started directing traffic on El Camino Real. Thinking that some sort of war had begun (probably no one else thought this), she turned on the radio for news. But it was not a war, it was another chapter in the ongoing energy crisis, brought to you by Enron. The most enraging thing about the energy crisis, apart from the sneering on all Internet message boards about how California must deserve this for some unknown reason having merely to do with the fact that California thought it was so cool to have attempted to scale back energy usage, was that it was closely — and, Janet would have said, seminally — connected to Bush and his cronies, who were, with absolute impunity, rigging the system in order to overcharge for the electricity they were refusing to send when the lines were available, and then insisting upon sending when the lines were jammed.

Janet finally overcame her rage sufficiently to drive out Sand Hill Road, creeping with everyone else through the black traffic lights, and she controlled her rage long enough to groom both horses and give them a little outing, but on the way home, all she needed was a Bush-Cheney bumper sticker in order for her actually to see red (she had never seen red before; what happened was, a sort of blood cloud closed in from either side, and she began to tremble in her seat so that she had to pull over). It didn’t help that the sticker was on a ’98 white Chevy pickup that looked a lot like the one Chance drove, although she thought he was in Phoenix at a rodeo.

She looked at her watch; it was two-thirty-four. She pulled into Town and Country Village, sat quietly in the car as the rain began to drizzle down, and took 150 deep breaths, which nearly made her fall asleep, but did mean that, when she picked up Jonah half an hour later, she was fairly sane, and this lasted through dinner, through the evening, and all the way until Jared started snoring beside her in their lovely but now deeply indebted bedroom.

The next morning, she wrote a long complaining e-mail to her congressman — not Anna Eshoo, whom she had met and did like, and therefore could not badger, but her own personal congressman from Brooklyn, who always replied with a stock e-mail entitled “Congressman Langdon Responds to Your Concerns.” This time, though, the return e-mail included a note from Riley, who said, “I know exactly what you mean! It is like a coup around here, and not just because everyone knows that SCOTUS scuttled the recount on VERRYYY questionable grounds. Everyone is scared! My friend Nadie Cantwell says that her parents say it’s just like 1964 in the U.S.S.R., when Khrushchev was ousted and Brezhnev took over — the same sort of watch-your-step chill in the air.” Then, below that, “BTW, an hour later — I guess your mom got all her money back. The congressman says you can call him about it when you get the chance, but the brokerage firm managed to get it somehow, and the bonus is that she gets back what it was worth when it was stolen, not what it’s worth now, since the crash. Isn’t that funny?”

Janet wrote back, “My mom is always lucky. How is Charlie?”

Riley wrote back: “Charlie busy! Somehow, talked his way into nursing school at Georgetown! He just started, midyear. He finished his EMT course, and took two courses at another school in the summer, and then he was sharing a cab with someone, and you know Charlie, as soon as he found out that that person was in admin for the nursing school, he started asking questions and getting excited, and pretty soon, that person wanted him, even had him come over for an interview, and wrote him a recommendation! The reading isn’t easy, but it gives him more hope than his source of rage, which, now that he’s been on several hikes in the Appalachians, turns out to be hilltop removal mining! (Congratulations, me, since I have been talking about this for years, but he had to see it to believe me.) Anyway, we are hunkering down here. Not happy, but hoping for the best.”

On February 17, Bush bombed Iraq — Janet read all about it in The New York Times. This time, she wrote e-mails to Bush, Cheney, Richie, and Congressman Eshoo, as well as a letter to The New York Times, and various messages on various message boards under her alias, Sunshinelover. She spent all day doing this, and failed, it turned out, to cook supper. When Jared came in and the oven was as cold as the weather, she snapped, “Shit! I will just order a pizza, okay?” He hit the roof (finally, many of their friends might say). He set his laptop gently on the dining-room table, then dropped his briefcase, threw down his coat, and said, “I have had enough.”

“Enough of what?” But she did not phrase this as a question.

“Enough of this over-the-top reaction at whatever Bush does, whatever the Republicans do, whatever doesn’t go exactly your way in the world we live in.”

Jonah appeared in the doorway, and disappeared. Janet’s heart seemed to push toward him, but she said to Jared, “That’s right, put your head in a damned hole and wait till someone shoves his dick right up your ass. It’s the American way.”

They had not agreed on the election. Jared had wondered whether Janet wanted Gore to wreck the government over the vote count, when the outcome of that would have been iffy at best.

Now Jared said, “There is something wrong with you. I don’t know what it is.” His voice was mild, enragingly forgiving. He went on. “Your attitude toward your father is, honestly, insane, especially considering that he’s dead. And you extrapolate that attitude onto everything masculine.”

“I do not.” That was the only defense she could think of at the moment.

“I liked your dad. Frank was interesting and complex. I enjoyed talking to him and working with him. I thought he was generous in his way. He was a man. Your idea is that if a man makes any mistakes, no matter how old he is, he is never to be forgiven, his mistakes are never to be forgotten.”

“What are your mistakes, then? I suppose I need to know.” As soon as she said this, and in a frozen, spiteful voice, Janet realized that she should take it back, that she had confirmed her identity as a bitch, maybe permanently.

Jared said, “Fuck you. If I disagree with you, you argue with me until I can’t stand it anymore, and if I agree with you, I get depressed. I’m going out for dinner. And I am taking Jonah with me.”

Janet stared at her computer screen and sat still, all through the slamming of the front door, the turning on of Jared’s car, and the backing around. Jonah hadn’t made a noise or said a word, which meant, she thought, that he was either a very good child or that he was scared to death.

It was clear that she was supposed to ponder her sins while they were gone, so she did for a while, at least as long as it took her to eat the leftover tagliatelle and chicken sausage from the night before. Then she went back to the computer, did some more complaining (because she was right, after all), then felt exhaustion flood over her. She went to bed. At eight-thirty in the morning, she realized that Jared had slept in Emily’s room. The only words they exchanged when she got up to find him sitting at the breakfast table were that she asked him where they went, he said they went to see Little Nicky, she said, “Is that appropriate for a nine-year-old?” and he said, “Yes,” gritting his teeth. Then he said, “I’m going out. My sincere and honest suggestion is that you find an Al-Anon meeting somewhere.” He finished his cup of coffee, got up, left. When Jonah came into the kitchen half an hour later, it was Janet who said, “Where did your dad go?”

Jonah said, “He said he was going to go skiing up at Dodge Ridge for a couple of days, and he’d be back Wednesday.”

She should not have said, “I guess he doesn’t give a shit about his company, then.”

Jonah said, “I don’t know,” and went back to his room.

—

EMILY HELPED with the horse show — it was at Mount Holyoke — but she didn’t ride, because Pattycake had come up with an abscess in his left front hoof. No one minded an abscess — as soon as you got your horse out of his stall and panicked because he was hopping lame and then felt the hoof wall, and realized that it was burning and the horse had a bounding digital pulse, the vet came, pulled the shoe, excavated the abscess, and packed it, and a day later the horse was soundish, and the hoof wall was cool. But even though it was not serious, it was a couple of weeks off, and that wasn’t bad if spring break was coming, and your roommate and another friend were planning to drive to Florida just to escape the everlasting cold and snow. It was possible that if Emily had known what she was getting into, she might have gone to Sweet Briar for the weather, even though her mom had gone there. Mount Holyoke was more prestigious, and she liked Boston, but she was learning about trade-offs.

The three of them agreed, no Miami Beach and no Key West, but no other restrictions — none of them had been to Disney World, for example. Two days down and back, five days driving around in Miriam’s mom’s Civic, staying in cheap hotels. It was a daring vacation for three girls from South Hadley.

It was Miriam who suggested Ocala; her mom thought the horse farms were beautiful. You could make a St. Augustine — Daytona Beach — Orlando — Ocala — Jacksonville loop and it was almost an American history lesson, and so they did, driving past the rodeo on the way into town. Miriam said, “Horses!” and Tory said, “I like horses!” and when they both looked at Emily, Emily said, “I know zip about rodeo.”

It was before noon; the class was not an important one. The speaker system had a hum, but it was interesting to see how many guys there were, compared with a horse show. At a horse show, there were male trainers, but most of the riders were girls. Here, it was hard to recognize what few girls there were. The three of them bought Cokes and headed into the empty stands. Miriam and Tory put their elbows on the wooden railing and stared. At the far end, a gate opened, and a calf came running. A guy on a buckskin came right after him. Four fast strides, and his rope was twirling above his head, sailing toward the calf, but the calf spun and the loop missed.

Emily picked up a program that had fallen under the seat. In the class they were watching, the sixth horse was Bogey, #345, ridden by Chance Markham. Moments later, the gate opened (somehow the previous calf had been scuttled out of the arena), and here came a bright chestnut with a lean kid in an orange shirt. The calf moaned; the rope went out and settled itself over the calf’s head. A split second later, the calf put his right foot into the loop, and the rope tightened around both the leg and the neck. The calf continued to baa in short bursts. The horse slid to a halt and stood, while the guy in the orange shirt, who was, indeed, her cousin Chance, eased his hand down the shivering rope until he got to the calf, at which point he tilted the animal onto its side, tied three of its legs together, then sprang up, raising his arms in the air. The timer read 7.3 seconds. Emily said, “You’re not going to believe this, but that guy is my cousin.”

Both Miriam and Tory looked at her, jaws dropped.

“I thought he was in California.”

“How old is he?” said Miriam.

“Nineteen.”

“He’s cute,” said Tory.

Time to go, thought Emily. Chance left the arena, and three other guys in boots and hats ran to the calf and untied it; it stood up mooing and headed out the other end of the arena to its buddies. They watched a few more, then some of the bronc riders, including one kid who was tossed on his face. Disney World seemed bland by comparison.

When she called her mom a day or so later about seeing Chance, Janet said, “I told you he was in Florida for a month. Then it’s Texas. Loretta bought herself a nineteen-foot camper van to stalk him with. I’m surprised you didn’t see it.”

“He calls himself Chance Markham.”

“That was some relative on her side who rode with the Texas Rangers.”

“Did not,” said Emily.

“Pony Express, then,” said Janet.

The natural next question was “Dad there?” but Emily was afraid of the answer, so she said, “I’m sure Pattycake’s abscess will be fine when I get back.”

“Keep him sound.”

“I do, Mom!”

“I wish he had more turnout.”

“So does everyone!”

And their voices rose.

—

ONCE SHE STARTED looking into it, Janet found out that there were Anonymous organizations for just about everything. The easy thing was to go to all sorts of meetings as — she told herself — an observer, or a contemplator of George W. Bush, who she quickly decided was a dry drunk. A person with her history was not going to accept the existence of any power higher than the power of the group itself to induce conformity. That was fine. What was not fine was that she was exceptionally sensitive to bullshit. Having known Pastor Jones at the Peoples Temple, she now found herself gripping her hands together or writhing in her seat when the Al-Anon people used certain words—“wayward,” “backslider,” “healing,” “God,” “we,” and, sometimes, “love.” Certain tones of voice — kind, generous on the surface, but hostile underneath — also drove her from the room.

The meetings were held at a modern building that was also a yoga studio just past the light-rail station in San Carlos, not an area where she normally went. The yoga mats were rolled up and the shades drawn; overhead lights made the room dim and yellowish. The six tables pushed together for the group looked like old schoolroom tables, and the chairs didn’t match, either, but Janet knew it was her task to cultivate gratitude, and so she did, for about ten minutes of each session, until the revelations began to get edgy. It did not help that most of the participants were younger than she was — sometimes half her age. One who was her age — nearly fifty-one now — had only just emerged from his room in the last two years. He had been hiding out since his father beat his mother to death before being put in Soledad Prison. The father had died in 1987. Another of the terrified ones said nothing except “That’s not true” under his breath. He never said what was true. The majority of the participants were risk takers, though, not risk avoiders. One had started hang gliding in high school. He was now twenty-eight, and the sole survivor of his hang-gliding group of friends. He had broken both ankles in a ski accident on a closed slope in the winter of ’99 and decided that maybe he was out of control in the most literal sense. Several had had three or more car accidents, one regularly drove his BMW 1000 motorcycle at over a hundred miles per hour. One woman had, like Janet, married someone she hardly knew. Janet admitted that she had once joined a cult, but didn’t say which one, and implied that it was located on the East Coast. The problem was that the risk takers and the risk avoiders found each other deeply irritating, and each of the four meetings she dared to attend eventually devolved into arguments — after the fourth, she saw one of the risk avoiders pause outside the door of the building after the meeting and elbow one of the risk takers hard in the ribs. Janet ran for her car, avoiding risk, leaving the fracas to the more experienced members.

However, she rather liked Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, because the participants’ stories were adventurous and sometimes funny, and she didn’t mind AA itself, though she could not speak honestly about her drinking habits, since she didn’t drink. By comparison with the offspring of alcoholics, the alcoholics were good-natured, often helpful, and eventually it got somewhat easier to say that she was powerless over the Bush administration, that she had come to believe that some power greater than herself would have to restore the nation to sanity, that she had been a pain in the ass to most of her friends and relatives for a long time, that she could give up her shortcomings rather than give up her marriage, that she was willing to make amends not only to Jared and Jonah and Emily, but also to her mother and Richie, if not to Michael and Loretta, that she could get in the habit of admitting she was wrong when she actually was, and that a few minutes per hour of silent meditation were better than none at all.

Every time she picked up a newspaper, though, she saw Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld through the lens of AA, barreling out of control toward something she could not name, which they called redemption. The main thing she learned from AA was to shut up, even when Rove and Cheney admitted that they had stock in Enron, even when a government official confessed to being “a wholly owned subsidiary of the Department of Defense,” even when Tommy Thompson decided to extend health care to “the unborn.” She got through the summer, though they had to sell Pattycake for sixty thousand dollars (they would have gotten $150,000 the year before). She and Jared got through the summer, though he had to fire a quarter of his staff. She and Jonah got through the summer — although he didn’t love his day camp, he made a friend there from two blocks away that he hadn’t known before, because the friend went to public school. She and Emily got through the summer, because Emily admitted that she preferred Sunlight to Pattycake after all — Pattycake was good in the show ring, but acted as if he didn’t know you from Adam when you arrived at the barn, and he could not go on the trail, which was what she wanted to do until she headed off to Idaho in August, to help Aunt Tina run her gallery.

—

CHARLIE CONSIDERED HIMSELF a brash, or bold, or even brave person. Certainly Riley often said that he was ready for anything, but it wasn’t until his mom sat him down over the Fourth of July, when she and his dad came to Washington (for the first time!) to visit various buildings that they had heard about all their lives (and maybe also to see for themselves that no grandchildren existed or were forthcoming), and said that he needed to try to see his birth mother before it was “too late,” that he seriously considered contacting Fiona McCorkle. And so he got up from the table where his mom was sipping her iced tea, went to the Rolodex, found the number, and dialed it. Riley, who was at the stove, stirring half-and-half into the broccoli bisque, glanced at him and gave him a little nod. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw his mom’s eyebrows lift and then lower, and he heard his dad say, “What is he doing?”

“You dared him,” said Riley, reaching for the salt shaker, and Charlie was willing to believe that this was true.

Charlie looked at his watch. It would be 10:00 a.m. in L.A. A voice said, “Over the Top Stables. This is Fiona.” It was a self-possessed voice, a bit distracted, the voice of someone in the middle of something. Charlie said, “Hi, this is Charlie Wickett,” in the exact same tone that people used when they called to ask you whom you were going to vote for. Fiona said, “Yes?” Then there was a pause, and she said, “Well, what do you know.”

Charlie said, “Not much, to tell the truth,” and Fiona laughed.

Charlie laughed, too. He glanced at his mom and then looked at the floor. With the Langdons and Arthur Manning, he had felt no competing loyalties, but now, unexpectedly, he did. He said, “I’m thirty-six. Oh, I guess you know that. Anyway, my mom says I should meet you.”

Well, he had bungled that. He felt his face grow hot.

“I hear about you from time to time,” said Fiona. “It sounds as though I would like you.”

Charlie said, “Now you have your chance.”

“Where are you?” said Fiona.

“We live in Washington, D.C. My wife works for Congressman Richard Langdon, of New York.”

“What do you do?”

“Right now, I go to nursing school, but since I’ve gotten into a lot of trouble over the years, I decided that I’m going to specialize in rescues.” Fiona laughed again.

His dad was patting his mom on the shoulder, and his mom was looking away, toward the windows. Riley stirred the soup again, turned off the burner. Charlie said, “I just wanted to make contact. I need to get off now.” Awkward again.

Fiona said, “We come to Washington from time to time. There’s a big horse show. We have a horse that might qualify.”

“I’ll give you my number.”

“I have it. It’s right here on the phone.” Then, “Oh, here’s my student. Sarah! Wait a second.”

And then she said goodbye and hung up.

After his folks left, Charlie grilled Riley about whether she thought he had hurt his mom’s feelings, and even brought the subject up one night when Uncle Henry took them to his favorite restaurant, Galileo. Uncle Henry said, “She’s always encouraged you.”

Riley said, “She pushes him. She was glad.”

“She didn’t look glad.”

Uncle Henry said, “Sometimes when you first open the door to the attic, you aren’t sure. But then you’re happy to clean it out.”

“Spoken like a hoarder,” said Riley.

And Uncle Henry said, “You got me.”

They all laughed and went on to a discussion of the casserole — celery root, onion, potatoes, wild rice, food originally from the Mediterranean Basin, Iran, Minnesota, and South America, according to Henry, and delicious according to all three of them. Riley said that the name “Menominee” meant “eaters of wild rice.” It was not what the Menominee called themselves, but what the Ojibwe called them. Uncle Henry looked impressed.

At the beginning of August, Fiona called him when Riley was at work, taking advantage of what she called the Idiot Vacation. The apartment was quiet, and Fiona, as before, had a strangely pleasant voice. She said, “Is it Charlie? Charles?”

“Always been Charlie.”

“Good. Anyway, as soon as the vet diagnosed the injury, I thought, well, he’s out for the season, so I won’t get to see Charlie.”

“What is his injury?”

“Oh hell, he kicked the wall of his stall and fractured his coffin bone. What a dope. He’ll be fine next year, though. He’s only seven. You should come out here.”

“I should.”

“September would be good. I don’t have to put you on a horse. We can go to the beach, or take a drive into one of the wilderness areas. We can go up to Desert Hot Springs. There are a lot of weird little places around L.A. Death Valley.”

Charlie said, “I would like to come.” And it was true.

Riley said she could not go with him. The new congressional term would have started, and she had to prove to the congressman that she was more essential to him even than Lucille. Sometimes she got the sense that he was getting tired of her, which wasn’t surprising — she and Lucille were the only ones left of the original eight staffers. But now they would be moving into Rayburn. She didn’t want to miss that, and she didn’t think he would fire her as long as she was married to Charlie. But of course that wasn’t the only reason she remained married to Charlie. She kissed him smack on the lips. He knew it wasn’t the only reason, but they were an odd couple, he admitted that. He got himself a map of California, and imagined driving around — Pasadena, Indio, Twentynine Palms, Escondido (“Secret”) — the place-names were evocative of darkness and sunshine all at once. He began to get a little excited.

—

RICHIE WASN’T SURPRISED that Riley was crying in the bathroom — she was crying everywhere, and she wasn’t alone. His mom, of course, said, “I felt he shouldn’t take that flight. I even picked up the phone to call you, but I couldn’t do it. It is killing Arthur. Arthur will be dead by Christmas.” And then he could hear her voice shake, and then she said, “Oh Lord,” and hung up. Richie had done his share of crying, too, as had Uncle Henry, as had Charlie’s parents in St. Louis, who called Riley every few days. Richie put his head in his hands. Ivy had seen the towers fall from her new place in Brooklyn Heights — or so she said — it was all jumbled in her mind. He knew scads of people who had looked up, or looked over their shoulders, or seen something, or heard something, or sensed the ground shake upon impact, or saw the plume of fire when the plane, Charlie’s plane, hit, then plowed through the Pentagon. Michael and Loretta knew two men who had been in the second tower. Maybe one of them had jumped. Michael said that he would have jumped. Every thought about it was terrifying. Why would you jump? thought Richie, and then he stopped thinking.

However, Lucille said that Riley wasn’t crying in the bathroom — or not only crying. She was also throwing up. Richie did not understand what this meant until Lucille said, “Well, Congressman, open your eyes. She’s pregnant.”

Richie said, “I don’t think that’s our business.”

“If you say so,” said Lucille.

“I say so,” said Richie. What was their business? That was the question. Just after they heard about the Trade Center attack, it had been decided that everyone should evacuate — Richie was arriving at the Capitol building with his new press secretary, Alia, when they saw Hastert being whisked away, and knew that they should leave, too. Richie sent Alia home — she lived in College Park. Then he found Lucille in the office and told her that the Secret Service said everyone had to leave, walk south. Right then, it would have been, at that very moment (Richie pictured his feet, brown loafers, green socks, stepping across the pavement), Charlie’s plane was arrowing into the Pentagon. That evening, Richie joined the others on the Capitol lawn, when everyone agreed to stand behind the president. Since then, though, their job had not been as clear. The perpetrators were dead, and there were all sorts of theories about who was behind them. Most of the Congress was eager to fund some sort of reprisal, or at least investigation. Although his district did not include Ground Zero, as they called it, it did include parts of Lower Manhattan, so he helped Jerry Nadler author a bill that would give grants to businesses around there, to keep them running.

But it was a nightmare, trying to figure out how to get to the neighborhood, who should go there (a day-care business?), what to do with the site. He was the only congressman he knew of who was related to a victim. He hadn’t mentioned it to the papers, and so no one knew it—how he was related could be a problem. Only Cheney and Rumsfeld seemed not overwhelmed. They came, they talked, they promoted strict policies and aggressive laws, and though Richie didn’t like them, he was foggy about why — he needed Riley, he discovered, and Nadie and even Ivy, to get him organized. But the only person he had was Michael, and Michael wanted to kill them, whoever they were, no matter what, no matter where, no matter how.