Golden Age

2004

JANET WAS FEELING kind of empty and cold, the way you did in California when the air was damp, the sky was overcast, the holidays were over, and your beloved eleven-year-old had turned twelve and begun to disdain (well, maybe ignore) you, and even though you knew it was essential for his development into manhood that he do so, it still hurt. So, when the phone rang and it was Emily on the other end saying, “Mom! I’m in Pasadena! You have to come!” she called Jared and said she was going to meet Emily in L.A. that evening, spur of the moment, and would he pick up Jonah, and she would be back the next evening, or they could join them…

Jared was no fool. He knew that any invitation from Emily was a big deal, so he said, “Of course,” and she got in the Audi, leaving Jared and Jonah the van, and left, though not without swinging by the barn and taking pictures of both Pesky and Sunlight for Fiona — she was sure that Emily must be staying with Fiona.

California did what it always did in January, get greener and sunnier and more eerie as she drove through the Central Valley and over the Tejon Pass. The Audi was sprightly and quick, and in no way drawn to precipices. It felt safe to be without a horse trailer.

But Emily was not at Fiona’s. She was at a gallery a block over from Fair Oaks Avenue, where she, Tina, and the owner had just installed Tina’s show, which was running from January 18 until March 12, three rooms of works, including the main hall. When Janet came in the door, Emily ran up to her, hugged her, kissed her, and said, “I am so glad you came! You represent the victims!”

Tina was behind her. She was thin, like her dad, Uncle Arthur, and her thick gray hair hung in a kind of waterfall down her back, but she looked not five years younger than Debbie, more like fifteen. She kissed Janet on the cheek and said, “Thanks for coming.”

“You have to see,” said Emily.

The main gallery was full of Tina-ish objects — etched glass, sticks bound together in the shapes of animals, musical instruments that looked playable but were made of papier-mâché. Emily hurried her past them to the last room, long, narrow, brightly lit. The installation was called Autobiography. Emily said, “No, start here. Right beside the door.”

Right beside the door was Tina’s birth certificate, “Christina Eloise Manning, January 19, 1953.” To all of the letters, glitter had been carefully added, and tiny designs had been scattered all over the paper — stars, moon, sun. The art pieces ran away from it in a long row down one side of the room, across the far wall, and back up the other side. Janet began.

She had seen some of the childhood pictures — in fact, she was in one of them — but she remembered them as snapshots. These versions had been blown up and manipulated, painted on, pasted on, torn, layered. The sixth image, especially, did give her an uncanny feeling. It was a picture of Aunt Lillian and Uncle Arthur’s house in McLean, Virginia, from the front and slightly below, as it might have appeared in a real-estate ad. Tina must have reprinted it hundreds of times and then cut apart the images — house, front door, windows, tree, mailbox, bits of lawn, shingles on the roof — then piled them on top of one another. How she did it, Janet could not figure out, but it had a 3D/memory effect, a place appearing in your mind, not as it really was, but as you wished it to be, in this case far more mysterious and alluring than a real house could be. The colors made it look both heavenly and unattainable. No one could have gotten into that house, either, because the door was locked — Tina had padlocked it. Janet shivered and moved on.

Across the shorter wall was a series called Y Chromosome. The title and all of the frames had been chrome-plated, and glinted in sunlight that came through a skylight in the roof. The series had seven pictures, each of them three feet by four feet. The first picture was of a man in an old-fashioned army uniform, glancing at the camera, not quite smiling but good-natured. Tina had manipulated his features, too, superimposing pencil marks that emphasized the lines of his cheekbones, his jaw, his forehead — Uncle Arthur’s father. Uncle Arthur, Tim, and Charlie were interspersed with three other faces, which Tina somehow manipulated so that the real images seemed to mutate through the intermediate image into the next one. Janet remembered Tim’s picture quite clearly: it was his senior photo from high school, his hair ragged and plentiful, daring for 1964. When Janet left the East Coast for California, she had made a special trip into Aunt Lillian’s living room to kiss it goodbye, to kiss, as she thought, her entire past goodbye. Tina had done something to each of the images. Tim’s she had aged somehow, maybe with pencil, too, but over that, charcoal? It was hard to tell. But he did not look eighteen — he looked fifty. Janet turned and smiled at Tina, who was not far away, watching her, and she realized that she had made Tim look like herself, aged fifty — but also like himself, aged eighteen. She looked again. It was eerie. Under the picture was the title, Missed. Janet nodded. The image that morphed into Charlie’s was one of Tim’s childhood pictures, in which he was wielding toy six guns; Janet remembered that every kid had done that. But the face had not Tim’s characteristic intent look, but Charlie’s cheerful grin. In the last picture, Charlie’s face was superimposed on that of Uncle Arthur’s father, and crusted with some sort of paste that made it almost 3D. The title was Pentagon, and there was a five-cornered shape in the lower right corner.

Along the third wall were twenty-one pictures, also three feet by four feet, but Janet had never seen any of them before. The underlying images were photographs that appeared to have been taken over the last ten or fifteen years, always from a distance. A striking one was of Charlie around the time he first showed up, running in Central Park. A lake glinted in one corner, and there were buildings above the tree line. The third picture was of Richie and Leo, standing on the steps of their old place in Brooklyn, framed by the white banisters. Leo was screaming, his mouth wide open, and Richie was looking quizzically downward. It was entitled Nanny State. There was one of Michael getting into a limo, actually surveying the neighborhood with a masters-of-the-universe air. The sunlight reflected in the roof of the limo had been enhanced so that it appeared to block out the surrounding landscape. Another was of Debbie and Uncle Arthur in a supermarket. They were wearing heavy winter coats. Debbie was looking at lettuce, and Uncle Arthur was hunched, but looking over his shoulder at images Tina had painted and pasted of toys from their childhoods — Tiny Tears, a teddy bear, a game of Clue. The aisle they were standing in was a yellow brick road. And then there was a picture of herself, outside of Jonah’s school, with Mary Kircher and Eileen Chen. Their clothes had been painted in bright colors, and their faces, though recognizable, had extra lines — on Janet’s face were worry lines. Behind them, the double doors to the school had swung open, and the kids were emerging — glittered, the way Tina’s birth certificate had been.

Every third picture was of Uncle Arthur, and in each he looked uncomfortable and suspicious. One of the last pictures was of her mom, through a window of her house in Far Hills, the one everybody called “the Hut” now. The wall of the house was dark, and the window was yellow; through it, you could see the edge of the refrigerator and a magazine on the kitchen table. Of all the subjects, her mom, gaunt-cheeked, her eyebrows lifted, was the only one turned toward the camera. This made her look not as oblivious as the rest of them. The only thing Tina had done to enhance that image was to outline each of the boards of the exterior siding in gold. Janet looked at that one for a long minute, then went all the way down the line, feeling, she knew, what she was supposed to feel, that someone was watching her. The name of this group of images was I-Thou. When she came to the end, Emily jumped in front of her and grabbed her shoulders. She said, “Aren’t they great? I so love them.”

Janet kissed her, appreciating her appreciation, and said, “They are very powerful.” She wondered what people outside the family would think; the images impressed her, but they also made her anxious.

They ate dinner at Celestino, and Janet could not help thinking that it was appropriate that Tina was having the risotto with squid ink, as black as any food Janet had ever laid eyes on. But she made herself act friendly and affectionate, because Emily, as she had with Mrs. Herman when she was learning to ride, seemed to have adopted Tina as a goddess. Janet had always viewed her as you did younger relatives — interesting in their way, but not important. Okay, she admitted it: her entire childhood had revolved around Tim. Yes, Tina was good-looking; yes, she was successful (but her success had taken place so far away); yes, she was adept — she had always been adept. But she had never said much, or made much eye contact, and she didn’t talk about clothes or cooking or children, she talked about “media” and “blowtorches” and the thickness of glass. Finally, sipping her wine, Janet sat back and said, “Those are some amazing images. I mean, especially in the last row. Emily must have taken that one of me waiting for Jonah. What was he, about five?”

As she was realizing that this was impossible — Emily had been away at college when Jonah was five — Tina said, “Oh Lord! I hired a private detective. I employed her off and on for twelve years.”

Janet felt her eyebrows lift.

“Those are just the most interesting images. I have boxes full of film.”

“You had us tailed?”

“My dad would have been proud. He, for one, never had the first notion he was being spied on. I have a whole video of him in his apartment in Hamilton.”

“Is that legal?”

“I have no idea. But the world is full of private detectives.”

Emily laughed, then said, “There are pictures of me and Lila smoking weed in our dorm room.”

“She climbed a tree for those.”

Emily and Tina laughed together.

“Why in the world?” Janet lowered her voice.

Tina said, “Well, it didn’t start out as art. It started out because, after Mom died, everyone just fell apart, and I didn’t hear from anyone. I got lonely, but every time I called anyone, they said, ‘Oh, we’re fine. Don’t worry. How’s business?’ That was all. I would call my dad, and he would pick up the phone and cough — remember how he did that? — and then not answer a single question. He made it seem like he was being interrogated. So, one night, I just thought of this, you know, a sort of payback. But then it got more and more interesting, and I was making plenty of money, so it mushroomed.” She looked up. “Are you going to sue me?”

Emily said, “No! Of course she’s not! It’s such a great show. So great.”

Janet said, “Jared and Jonah should come down and see this.” The dinner proceeded smoothly for another twenty minutes (crème brûlée for Emily, who had come a long way from the picky eater she’d once been); then Emily and Tina called a cab for the ride to LAX, back to Idaho. Janet might have offered to take them, but they seemed so well organized, and she was suddenly so exhausted that she kissed them goodbye and let them go. Once upon a time, she would have stayed at the Ritz-Carlton, but she didn’t do that sort of thing anymore. She checked into the Santa Anita Inn, where she stayed at the horseman’s rate — nice gardens, lots of noise. The horses were running, and although she probably would not hang around until post time, it was nice to have the opportunity. And it was easy to go from there past Fiona’s. When she called Jared, she said she would be coming home the next day, but he should see the show before it was taken down and maybe buy something. They had a pleasant conversation.

The sheets and blankets were thin, and the room was cold. She lay quietly, thinking of the pictures — especially of how young Charlie looked running — hardly more than a teen-ager. It took her a while to realize that there were no images of her father, the famous Frank Langdon. Even Aunt Claire was present — through the window of a passing bus. Even Uncle Henry — also through a window, his finger in the air, expounding before a class. Even Joe, Jen, and Minnie, outside the front of their house, picking up nuts of some kind under a very big tree. But no Frank. If Tina was having Charlie stalked when he was first in New York, then her father had had at least five years still to live. But Tina hadn’t been interested in Frank Langdon. It was a revelation. Cars drove noisily into the parking lot, drunks got out and stumbled up the stairs. Janet burst into tears.

—

IN HIS WHOLE LIFE, Jesse had never experienced the perfect year, at least on the farm, in terms of plowing, planting, and harvesting, but everyone at the Denby Café, and even their wives, agreed that 2004 was the one. The sign in front of the Worship Center flashed over and over “REJOICE!” It was not only that Jesse expected to harvest at least 160 bushels an acre of corn and forty-two of beans, it was that the only astonishing thing about the weather had been no astonishing things — early planting, then sunshine, rain, some heat, some cold (no frost). Not everything else was great. They were constantly worried about Guthrie, who was about to be deployed to Iraq and pretty excited about it; his head was not only shaved, but tattooed in the back with an eagle. (“Mom,” he wheedled when he came home, “when I get out, I’ll just grow my hair over it.” For a while, thought Jesse, but he didn’t say anything. Tattoos were common, these days.) Better to think about the harvest than about Iraq.

Of course, there was that downside — he expected to get about $1.90 a bushel for the corn, if he was lucky, even though his inputs had been up — he’d had to use maybe 10 percent more herbicide because of the foxtail, which took a bite. And where would it be stored? As soon as you had a giant harvest, then you started wondering about moisture content, grain bins, who was going to buy. Fortunately, stocks were down from 2003—as low as they had been in years. As a result, Jesse was driving around, doing something he hadn’t done for a long time, which was looking at cattle.

What was it that his dad had told his granddad he was going to raise when he was grown up? Not Herefords, not Angus — Red Poll, or Belted Galloways, something like that. As far as Jesse knew, the only people in Iowa who raised anything out of the way were kids getting their 4-H projects ready for the state fair. Jen’s nephew David, who was now working as an insurance man in Kansas City, had raised a Blue Brahma once, beautiful but wild, perfect for a Guthrie. Jesse wasn’t looking at anything exotic anywhere but on the Internet. In fact, he wasn’t looking at anything long enough to pull out his checkbook — only long enough to pay some compliments and ponder using some of his own surplus feed corn instead of selling it off for less than two dollars a bushel. On the Internet, he did like to look at the cattle — White Park (beautiful pale hides, black noses, graceful horns), Highland (shaggy hair, deep-red color). But he also looked at houses in Malibu — there were lots of real-estate sites on the Internet.

Or hogs, but for hogs you had to build a confinement building. No one just let the hogs run around in a pen anymore. In fact, now that no one had hogs, everyone remembered that hogs were dangerous — big, fast, and opinionated — they would run you down and trample you. Stories about someone who got in trouble with the hogs back in the old days came up rather often in the Denby Café. Or hogs that had been allowed to run loose, go feral — not in Iowa — oh, yes, in Iowa, grew tusks and bristles, ate acorns, three hundred pounds, five hundred pounds, chased some farmer out of his barn and all the way to his house. When was that? Oh, back in the forties.

It was Felicity who e-mailed him (from her bedroom to his, a distance of about seventeen feet) a pdf of an article from The New York Times. According to the article, there was someone in charge of climate research, and he was forecasting bad weather to come, which Jesse did not intend to report to the farmers at the Denby Café, because if what they were having was the bad weather to come, they would say, “Bring it on!” And most of them were Republicans, so they could say that with pride. Jesse read it idly until the end. Many of his attitudes toward global warming had been shaped by a movie he’d seen with Perky and Felicity early in the summer, The Day After Tomorrow. They had been eating popcorn and gaping, just like everyone else in the audience, and thinking what if what if, and then, apparently, New York City froze solid in the space of about five minutes, and Jesse wasn’t the only person in the audience who laughed out loud.

The end of the article referenced a study someone had done in Colorado, on the short-grass prairie, good cattle country (for those Belted Galloways, in fact, who liked to forage). Whoever had done the study mimicked the effect of doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and then tested the grasses; the carbon dioxide elbowed out the nitrogen, and the resulting grasses (Russ Pinckard often said of carbon dioxide that more would be better for the plants, if not for the people) were less digestible and more fibrous. In the last paragraph, even worse — carbon dioxide was like fertilizer for invasive weeds. The article didn’t say which, and Jesse hadn’t yet found the study on the Internet, but he could imagine: foxtail, thistles, bindweed, velvetleaf, all the weeds that were his nemeses.

He e-mailed Felicity back: “What should we do?”

Then he sat looking out the window, into the foliage of the butternut tree. His mom, who was living in Minneapolis, where she had access not only to Whole Foods but also to Lunds, would be showing up one of these days to look at her crop. He would be glad to see her, and also to see that apple pie of hers. He had mail. He clicked on it. Felicity had written, “Wind Farm!” Well, he hadn’t thought of that before.

—

RICHIE COULD TELL how completely the Republicans now trusted him by who they put up as his opponent for re-election, a kid just the same age he had been twelve years before, but shorter, and with a degree from Albany State. He spoke in a piping voice. Every sentence ended as a question. Richie wondered if his wealthy Republican parents were sponsoring his campaign as a way to get him to stop whining about going into government service and enter the family business. It was an old parental trick that Richie often used with Leo: You want to walk all the way over to Flatbush and back just to buy a candy bar you can get at the bodega around the corner? Fine, go ahead. You really want to go to the Putney School? Well, you put in the application, and when you get in, we’ll talk about it. If your child was not so much daring as challenging, you had to call his bluff.

He had voted for the Iraq Resolution, the Patriot Act, the Homeland Security Act, and further appropriations for Homeland Security. He had voted for the Healthy Forests Restoration Act without consulting Riley, who was home with Alexis, who had the flu, and he had received a tongue-lashing, but he did think the act was not entirely bad. He had agreed with Al Gore about deploring Abu Ghraib, but had stopped short of calling for resignations. He had voted for Sarbanes-Oxley, but, then, so had everyone except Collins, Flake (notorious or legendary skinflint, take your pick), and Ron Paul, who, as someone said, wouldn’t have regulated a sewer pipe running through his child’s playroom. He had gotten himself quoted a few times when Maloney gave his report about global warming, but that report had been made during recess, during August — possibly, Richie thought, because Cheney was in the Rockies and Bush was at his ranch and everyone else in the world was water-skiing. The report, along with his remarks, had disappeared without a trace. After all of these votes, he had gotten a nice call from Loretta, who seemed to be acting as Michael’s capo. Would he like to come with them to Cannes? They were going for just a couple of days of the film festival, then off to Dolceacqua and Apricale for some sightseeing? Fraser National Park? They were looking for a place. Michael loved trout fishing now — he was working much less, and learning to tie flies — he had a wonderful talent! When he saw Michael in New York or Washington, Michael was as nice as he had ever been, offering him actually good advice about Leo and about Ivy, who was dating a bestselling thriller author some ten years younger than she was (Michael’s advice: read the books to see whether she was gossiping about him, but stay on her good side). Michael had given him Loretta’s car, a perfectly good and not at all flashy Subaru wagon, green, leather upholstery, twenty-six thousand miles on the odometer, and twenty-three miles to the gallon. Not even Riley could disapprove, and she often borrowed it.

But now there was Bunny. Bunny Greenhouse. Riley was moderately intimidated by Bunny Greenhouse, as anyone would be. She reminded Richie of that old Johnny Cash song about the boy named Sue. Bunny was a predator, and she was after Halliburton. Riley expected Richie to join in the hunt. Richie had tried to use the Maloney report to explain to Riley about priorities — if he was going to hammer away at climate change, then he could not waste his ammunition on $2.63 gas. Anyway, according to Riley’s logic, gas in Iraq should be five dollars a gallon, in order to incorporate the external costs of the invasion and the costs to the environment; it was the one-dollar-a-gallon gas that ought to be investigated. But Riley wasn’t standing for that: this was so cut-and-dried, such a perfect example of corruption, that to bring down Halliburton and Cheney would be a step in every conceivable right direction. He did not say that if he talked about Ms. Greenhouse on the floor of the House and pressed the importance of her charges against KBR, Halliburton, and Cheney, Cheney himself might cross over from the Senate and tell him, “Go fuck yourself,” as he had told Senator Leahy in June. Or that he might not be re-elected. Richie didn’t know if he cared whether he would be re-elected. Let his opponent take over — why not? Judging by the nebbish’s talking points, he truly believed that the market was free, he truly believed that Bush had had no warning about 9/11, he truly believed that there were terrorists named Mohammed in every alley in Brooklyn, he truly believed that his trust fund was God’s gift, he truly believed that his co-op about six blocks farther toward Grand Army Plaza was worth five million dollars. He had a weaselly little wife with buck teeth and two minuscule daughters who were schooled at home.

Bunnatine Greenhouse was not fixated on $2.63-per-gallon gas in Iraq. She had also noticed that the Corps of Engineers had all sorts of rules on the books that they did not follow. She had been hired by her boss, since retired (forced out?), to see that the rules were followed, and she had all sorts of degrees and was an outspoken presence at meetings. Her conviction was that “emergencies” don’t last as long as companies seeking “emergency contracts” want them to. Probably she was going to be fired. Her bosses were already drumming up grounds for firing her, though Cheney had not told her personally to go fuck herself. The most Richie could do was make a speech defending her on the floor of the House and then have it go into the record. So much of being in Congress was putting stuff on the record.

He did it for Riley. He did it for Alexis. He could see that reporter from the Times in the gallery, but could also see him get up and walk out ten minutes into Richie’s speech. So he wasn’t going to get into the paper, either. At best, he was background. And this wasn’t a local issue in Brooklyn, so no local rag would mention it. Just some thoughts tossed into the void. Even so, when he was finished, Dingell gave him a smile. Riley gave him a hug; then she hurried off to day care to grab Alexis, and Richie was alone.

It was late afternoon. He decided to go for a walk before finding the Subaru and driving home. His first thought was to head over to the Hay-Adams and sit at the bar, but then he couldn’t take that anymore, either, so he wandered around to the south of the Capitol building. In spite of the various security installations, the evening was pleasant; the grass had that late-fall brilliance that contrasted with the fading of the trees. He passed the botanic garden and then walked west past the various buildings of the Smithsonian. This was a walk he sometimes made, and he also sometimes went into one museum or another. Now he saw a group of kids standing in a row in front of the Ad Astra spear at the entrance of the Air and Space Museum, being photographed by their teacher. Was his old military school the only school in America that didn’t dare take the kids to Washington for a field trip? He paused to look at the kids. The Air and Space Museum was one of Leo’s favorite outings.

The woman wasn’t like anyone around D.C. or anyone in Brooklyn. She was wearing loose black pants and a black sweater. Her hair was long, and looked like she cut it herself, grabbing it in her fist and clipping the ends with shears. In spite of the dark colors, she was big — five ten for sure, and large in the bust and the derriere — okay, Richie thought, watching her pass him, the ass. She had a real ass, and shoulders. She turned to look at the Hirshhorn, and he simultaneously thought that she was pretty and that she had no makeup on, which was why she didn’t strike you. He looked again, then dropped his gaze. But he sped up. How did you pick up someone not in a bar? Riley and Nadie were not there to advise him.

She kept walking — past the main building of the Smithsonian, toward the Washington Monument, which got taller and taller. Richie glanced surreptitiously down at his chest and swept what might have been a few crumbs off the gray cashmere blend of his overcoat. It was too warm for gloves and a hat, but he looked respectable, congressional. She was a good walker, long-strided and self-confident. He caught up to her at 14th Street and stood beside her as they waited to cross. Their shadows stretched before them. He glanced at her sideways, and smiled. She said, “Are you following me?”

Richie nodded.

She said, “Why?” But she didn’t seem nervous in any way.

He said, “I want your vote,” then held out his hand. “Richard Langdon, congressman, New York ninth district.”

Without missing a beat, she held out her hand. She said, “Jessica Montana.”

Richie said, “You’re kidding, right?”

And now she did smile — the smile made her. She said, “No, I’m not. But it’s been an inspiring name.”

“Because?”

“My great love is women’s semi-pro boxing. Do you know anything about that?”

“Nothing,” said Richie. “I am in politics. Do you know anything about that?”

“Nothing,” said Jessica.

“Then,” said Richie, “let me take you to dinner. We are made for each other.”

“I’m always hungry,” said Jessica.