Golden Age

2007

THE PARKING GARAGE was not full at all. Claire found a roomy spot in a corner, got the kids out, and assembled them in two columns in front of her, Lauren with Dustin, Ned with Dash. She took Rhea’s hand and Petey’s hand, and said, “Think about what you want to buy. The slower you go, the more you get.” What she was really curious about was what, when given the choice, each of them might pick.

Yes, being a grandmother was a wonderful thing. With her own mother as a model, she hadn’t expected that. Frank had always said that Rosanna appraised her offspring with an eye to their market value. Though Claire hadn’t actually believed him, she’d seen no evidence of the adoration she felt for her grandchildren. No faults in them, and she didn’t take credit for it, either, since she found plenty of faults in Gray and Brad, and certain faults in Angie, Doug, Lisa, and Samantha. The children walked into the atrium and paused to stare at the fountain, then up at the ceiling. They kept going, though, and stepped carefully onto the escalator. They looked around, pushed their hoods back; their voices were low; they held the hands they were instructed to hold. In the eyes of her fellow customers, only admiration.

She had enjoyed working here before her party business took off, and agreed with irate customers that they could have retained “Marshall Field’s”—not every department store in the United States had to be called “Macy’s.”

The toy floor was bigger than Claire remembered, and she felt a little intimidated, but upon arrival the kids all stopped and looked up at her. What next? She walked down one aisle and halfway down another, stopping in front of the Legos. She said, “Petey and Rhea and I will stay here. Look at the display at the end of the aisle. Dustin, what’s that?”

“Elmo. They’re all Elmo,” said Dustin.

“Okay. We are right by Elmo. You guys stick together, and come back to me when you find something. Don’t go away from the toys, and don’t talk to anyone, okay?”

All at once, and involuntarily, she remembered an occasion at Younkers — when was this? The late eighties, anyway. A woman was trying on a coat, and she turned around to discover that her daughter was missing. She alerted Colleen — Colleen was the manager of Women’s Wear back then. Colleen wasted not a second, and had the store doors locked. The woman estimated that it had been at the most two minutes since she lost sight of the four-year-old. Then everyone who worked there combed every corner and room and aisle of that Younkers, and they did find the child, one floor up, in Children’s Clothing, curled in one of the dressing rooms. Claire remembered Colleen talking about it; the girl seemed okay, but she was not wearing the clothes she had worn into the store. It was creepy. Everyone knew that whoever had taken the child was still locked in the store, but there was no way to find him (or her). Claire stood on her tiptoes and watched the kids as best she could, but they were good. Petey rummaged among the Legos, and Rhea walked to both ends of the aisle, playing with the Elmos at one end and the Doodle Pros at the other. Lauren brought a leftover Holiday Barbie to Claire for safekeeping; she was dressed in elaborately embroidered, fur-edged black, with a thick braid falling over her shoulder. She looked as if she had come straight to Chicago from Salzburg, and was not quite what Claire would have picked. Samantha disapproved of Barbie, so Claire said, “Very lovely, sweetheart,” and set it on the floor beside her. As the toys accumulated, she would take them to the counter.

It was useless, she said to her friends and to Carl, to remark about their own childhoods that when they were ten or eight or six they were heading over hill and dale with only a cracker and an apple, six miles to school and back. Why should children do that? thought Claire. Did it toughen them up, as her friends asserted, or simply prove to them that the world was a cruel place, and so ensure that they would prolong that cruelty when they themselves were grown? Even a young child could tell the difference between circumstances and intentions. Claire could see, when she was growing up during the war, that their house was old and uninsulated, and therefore she was cold, that there was no extra gasoline, and therefore it was a long walk to school, that all scrap, all cloth, all extra provisions went to the war effort, and therefore her mother reknit sweaters and patched clothes and had meatless Wednesdays and Mondays (though never Friday). But if a child lived in the midst of plenty and got none of it, then he would quickly learn to blame his parents for neglecting him or teaching him a lesson — take your pick. Paul had gloried in his success, and so showered Gray and Brad with more belongings than their friends had. They seemed fine, modest in their display of wealth; they had learned a lesson from watching Paul, and not the lesson he had meant to teach them. Dustin brought a video game and set it next to the Barbie. After sitting cross-legged with the Doodle Pro for a while, Rhea put it back on the shelf, then brought Claire a board game based on a labyrinth. She went back and found another one, by the same company, called “Castles of Burgundy,” a game Claire thought quite seductive. Petey turned away from the Legos and chose a stuffed lion and an actual book, Millions of Cats, and Ned returned with a set of what looked like lethal weapons but turned out to be spinning tops. Claire did not like or approve of the case full of fake makeup that Lauren chose next, but maybe, she thought, it was better than a toy stove with toy pots and pans. Dustin found another video game, and Dash, who had more or less disappeared, suddenly turned up with a transparent gun that shot soap bubbles, a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle with a rock-and-roll theme, and a magic set. All the kids seemed happy. They did not look half drugged by greed, they looked intent and interested. Claire felt pleasantly vindicated.

After only half an hour, the kids started acting bored, and Dash said, “Can we get something to eat?”

They took the toys to the cash register, and Claire was especially friendly to the rather brusque sales associate while she bagged the toys in six separate bags. Claire asked her to staple them shut (there was a stapler on the counter). The kids were agreeable even to losing access to their toys until they got home. They ate in the Marketplace. Lauren ate only gelato, Ned only French fries, Petey only the toppings off his slice of pizza. All in all, when they got home, Claire decided that she had been an ideal grandmother, and that all six of the kids would remember this day, at least for a while.

—

AROUND EASTER, Henry sent out a mass e-mail. It read,

Dear All,

Happy Easter. I hope you are well, especially those I haven’t talked to in a while (this means you, Claire — I miss you. I will try to call sometime soon). I am enjoying my life and my house in Washington, D.C. The weather is so strangely different from the weather in Chicago. I’m not sure I deserve it! Anyway, my work is going well, and I’m off to Ireland this summer for about two months — six weeks working with some materials at the University of Dublin, and two weeks in the west, driving around (with a friend! I would not attempt to drive in Ireland on my own).

My real news is that I have asked to adopt (though it is more complicated legally, it amounts to the same thing) Alexis Wickett, Charlie’s little girl, who is soon to turn five (May 11, to be exact). From “in loco parentis” to “legalis parens.” Charlie’s folks have agreed to this — I get along with them quite well when they come for their twice-yearly visits, and they agree with Riley and me that she needs some sort of safety net (will she be taking me to court for child-support someday? We shall see). Anyway, Alexis is very dear to me. I never thought I would become a father at 74, but it’s a very medieval thing to do.

Love to you all,

Henry

Obviously, this was a good thing, but it prodded at a point of contention that Claire thought she’d put aside, her discomfort at the way everyone in the family seemed to go crazy when Charlie died. Claire had liked Charlie — he was a charming boy — and the circumstances of his death were horrifying, but, still, he was only peripherally their child, and he had become the family obsession. At least, that’s how Claire saw it. Carl didn’t agree, but when she pressed him, he did his Carl thing, smiled and shrugged, leaving her to understand that, however crazy she acted, he had learned to live with it.

Claire put on her coat and went for a walk around the block. The daffs were blooming and the tulips had thrust up beside them. It had been a strange winter — sinister warmth over Thanksgiving, then, two days later, ten inches of snow, an inch of freezing rain, plummeting temperatures. Carl, whose business had dropped off, was suddenly overwhelmed: he spent long days for two weeks at a house in Evanston where a huge tree limb had fallen through the roof of the solarium. Then, after the calm over Christmas and New Year’s, more snow, more work. Claire had felt the same flutter in her customers — doubt because of strange happenings in the markets, followed by a surge of what Carl called “Spend-it-while-you-have-it” parties, Friday, Saturday, Sunday afternoon, Thursday, caviar, sterling silver, Cristal champagne, best orchestra you can find, is Elton John available. In her pockets, Claire crossed her fingers.

Why was the family not obsessed with Guthrie, who had returned from Iraq and was, Claire thought, just barely holding it together? Or with Perky, who had joined the marines over his mother’s loud objections, as if to say, You think the army and Iraq is something, try the marines and Afghanistan! And no one said a word about Chance, who was on the road nine months out of the year, as if he didn’t even have a wife and child. (And did he? Apparently, Delie had moved back to Texas.) Jonah, she had heard through the grapevine, had several “diagnoses,” but she hadn’t heard exactly what they were and was a little afraid to ask — Janet was Frank’s real failure, because she mistrusted not only him but anyone connected to him. Emily seemed to be emulating Tina and hiding out in Idaho. Tia and Binky were supposedly going to school, Tia at Georgetown, Binky on a year abroad in Paris (a likely story, thought Claire).

Richie had ceased being in the news. When Claire looked him up in The New York Times, there was nothing, not even a wedding notice when he married the girl, what was her name, Jessica Montana. Michael was quoted in the Times once, not with the frequency of two or three years ago. His quote was typically slippery: “These innovative instruments are revolutionizing the landscape and bringing about an era of steady prosperity that really isn’t like anything we’ve seen before. Risk should be spread around! It makes for a more stable world economy and a better balance between all parts of the market.” But whether that slipperiness was his own or was just jargon belonging to his Wall Street world, Claire didn’t know. A month ago, Carl had brought home a copy of the Financial Times he’d noticed in a trash can down by the Board of Trade; there was Michael’s photograph, looking spiffy and sinister and just like Frank, with the caption “Michael Langdon, CEO of Chemosh Securities, in London for a meeting with Barclays Bank.” She hadn’t heard from Debbie in ages — Claire didn’t know what Kevin and Carlie were doing. How your world was cast when you were young seemed not to matter at all as you aged. What was it like for the firstborn or the second? Claire could not imagine. But for the fifth and last, it was like walking onto a stage where the lights were up and the play was beginning the third act, gloriously permanent, soon to close, but always a lost world. No one would ever seem as handsome and dashing to her as Frank, as kind as Joe, as beautiful as Lillian, as smart as Henry, as reassuring as her father, as strict as her mother, and, maybe for entirely coincidental socioeconomic reasons, people these days didn’t have those Greek choruses of relatives, freely offering their opinions about everything that happened. Maybe she had tried to reproduce it all, imagining in Dr. Paul the very man for the job, an aspiring playwright with a grandiose sense of himself, but she had failed in her production — hadn’t she walked out just before the curtain went up?

Carl was a wonderful gardener; her mother would have told him what to do, loved him all the same, and given him all her best bulbs. Truly, she and Carl had made this harbor here, this Midwestern island of peace and prosperity, and Claire couldn’t take much credit for it. Carl didn’t live onstage, he lived in a workroom, putting the finish on this, sanding the edge off that. He was still the happiest man Claire had ever met, a saint of tremendous patience whose greatest pleasure, other than a good dinner and some friendly sex, was the neat fit between mortise and tenon.

—

PONIES HAD BEEN KNOWN to live to the age of forty, and though Janet didn’t think Pesky would get there, he was almost thirty, turned out in a grassy refuge for elderly equines down near Big Sur — she visited him every couple of months with some apples and carrots. Jared didn’t mind going along, because he liked to have dinner in Carmel. Sunlight had lasted a long time, too — the summer he was twenty-three, she had come to the barn to find him lying in his stall with his eyes open, quiet and stiff. No horses after that until now, two years later: in February, she had agreed to buy Jackie Milkens’s retired event horse, fourteen, very experienced, mostly sound, good at dressage. Her name was Bluebird. Since no one at home seemed to require her maternal services and the house seemed to clean itself, Janet’s enthusiasm for the equestrian life had resumed — she showed up at the barn every day, stayed for two or three hours, went on trail rides, and kept her tack clean and oiled. The barn was full of all sorts of people who engaged their horses in all sorts of disciplines, and everything was fine, until the man who had owned the place since the seventies decided he was done, and another group bought it. These were people from out of state — Arizona or somewhere, rich people who wanted an equestrian facility in a vineyard, or near a vineyard, or with its own vineyard. Janet tried to stay on their good side.

The dumbest thing they did was kick the stable workers off the property and tear down the little houses they had been living in since the property was built. This meant that Marco and his wife, Lucia; Chico and his wife, Anna; and Pablo (who was too young to have a wife, and went back and forth to Guadalajara, where he played piano in a band) had to find places to live in the most expensive rental market in America. Marco, who had been at the barn as long as Janet had kept a horse there, was now about forty-five, Janet thought. He had gotten a little set in his ways, and he was not happy when his hours were shifted so that, instead of working seven hours a day, six days a week, he had to work ten hours a day, four days a week; but he got used to that, and the grumbling subsided. Things were fine for about two months, and Janet could speak to the new owners politely when she saw them.

In May, on a beautiful day that had Janet singing under her breath, she was in Birdie’s stall, putting the saddle on, and she heard Marco say, “Sí, se acabó cerca de Los Banos.” When she led Birdie into the aisle, Marco was in the next stall over, cleaning it out. “Los Banos” had caught her ear, since that wasn’t terribly far from the Angelina Ranch, so she said, “Marco! Do you have friends over in Los Banos?”

“Sí, señora, but, really, I have bought a house near there.” He grinned.

She said, “You have! How wonderful!” She’d almost said “amazing,” since she knew for a fact that Marco made minimum wage or no more than a dollar above that. She said, “It’s so far away, though! Isn’t it like a two-hour drive? Are you leaving here?”

Marco stood up, leaned on his fork, and said, “No, señora. My wife stays there. I go for three days, come back. I am staying with my cousin in Los Altos four days.”

“What’s your wife doing now?” When they lived on the stable grounds, Lucia had run a cleaning business: she went around to people’s houses once or twice a week with an assistant. She called it “Mini-Maids.”

“She is cleaning, like before. But over there now, so she can live in the house.”

Janet had been through Los Banos, to the Perroni ranch, and a little bit around that neighborhood. She could not imagine that Lucia could prosper the way she could in Palo Alto, but she didn’t say anything except “Well, congratulations. Drive safely.”

“Sí, señora. Gracias,” said Marco. He went back to sifting shavings and tossing lumps of manure into his wheelbarrow. On the way over to the arena, leading Birdie, who walked along politely, she passed Marco’s truck, a huge Ford pickup. That was pretty new, too — newer than Janet’s 1998 Chevy. Nothing made sense anymore, but it was too beautiful a day to care.

—

FELICITY WAS LOOKING FORWARD to ISU, but she didn’t think about it much. She could have started the year before, but she had decided to focus on her job at the vet clinic. Her mom said she was obsessed with that job, but Felicity would not have used the word “obsessed”—she was busy and happy, that was all. She cleaned cages, mopped floors, helped around the office, watered plants. Sometimes she pulled on latex gloves and helped Dr. Carlson by holding a cat or a dog. Most vets were women now, and she knew she could be one, but she hadn’t decided. What her dad considered a bad thing had happened: Lou Carlson, Dr. Carlson’s brother, had taken Felicity down to Des Moines, on a visit to the Great Ape place there. Her parents might have heard of the Great Ape place if they read The Des Moines Register, but they didn’t. Though she had told them all about it, she saw that they were not convinced that primate research was her destiny. She felt some despair about whether they would ever learn a thing. In an effort to sway her father (or maybe teach him), she had given him his own copy of Our Inner Ape, a book that Pastor Diehl would have found sinful and ungodly.

To tell the truth, Felicity had indeed been surprised to discover that there was a sort of ape she had never heard of, called a “bonobo,” a much more playful and less vicious ape species, in which the females were dominant and the males had sex all the time in preference to fighting. Felicity had read the book three times, though she still went to church with her parents. She passed the time there by imagining Pastor Diehl as an ape with a mask on — he was definitely from the chimp side, since he was prickly, aggressive, and loud. Felicity could easily imagine him patrolling the grounds of the Worship Center, Bible in hand, eager to wrestle nonbelievers to the pavement. He was already talking about the Iowa presidential straw-poll, which wasn’t until September.

Over supper, she told everyone about the personalities of the dogs she was caring for. Did a dog hang back, waiting for her to take her hand away from the food dish before he approached it, or did he eat as soon as the food was given out? When presented with a rope toy, did a dog immediately pounce and want to play, or did the dog have to be encouraged? Did a dog show sexual behaviors even after being neutered? These would include mounting, humping, masturbating (her parents exchanged a glance but didn’t say anything; Aunt Minnie smiled to herself). Felicity pushed her glasses up her nose and pressed on. Canute, her “boyfriend,” wasn’t much better, but he did ask her a question every so often. Canute had his own passions that Felicity respected — as he said, Canute Rose was his name, and brass instruments were his game. He was a year younger than Felicity, and played the trombone in the school orchestra. In the all-state orchestra, which had given a concert in the winter, he’d played the trumpet, because there were six chairs as opposed to four. Sometimes Canute and Felicity had conversations that she knew were weird, him making remarks about mouthpieces and her making remarks about bonobo grooming behaviors. He was a wonderful musician, and he was good-looking, too. His folks had a farm—754 acres west of town — but Canute had no interest in it. None of their friends gave a shit about farming; they cared less than Felicity did, and she was only distantly interested now. What she imagined was that she would have a small-animal vet clinic somewhere very fancy, like New York City, not far from the alleged palace where the cousins lived, and she would specialize in shih tzus and Cavalier King Charles spaniels while Canute would play in brass quartets and, maybe, the New York Philharmonic. They would not have a shih tzu — they would have several rescue dogs, and parade proudly around Central Park. Iowa State could prepare you for all of that.

—

JEN WAS IN a cleaning mood, so she had left six boxes of books on the front porch. Jesse could see them from his desk. The rule was that he had to go through them, and only those volumes he actually wanted could come back into the house; the rest would go to the Usherton Library. It was midsummer, and there wasn’t much else to do; Jesse had proposed that they take a trip somewhere, only a week or two, but Jen said they didn’t have the money. That was discussable — they could go to a lake somewhere not far away, like Bemidji, Minnesota, for almost nothing, but Jesse also knew that Jen wanted to be around if maybe, by some small chance, Guthrie or Perky might call. Jen and Jesse didn’t talk about either Perky or Guthrie. Perky they didn’t talk about because he was being trained in South Carolina to manage a bomb-sniffing dog, and there was nothing to be said about it. Guthrie they didn’t talk about because he was in Georgia and they never heard from him. And, anyway, they had argued between themselves so many times about every facet of Guthrie’s enlistment and Perky’s enlistment that all they had to do was look at one another in order to know where they stood. The argument was not about whether the boys should have enlisted or what might have prevented them, it was about whether the wars should be there to lure them, to offer them a dangerous alternative to life on the farm. Yes, Jen had a cell phone, but Guthrie or Perky might only try one time, and the signal could be very bad in northern Minnesota.

Life on the farm this summer had been far from dangerous — only strange. The weather was cool, maybe too cool for a really good crop, but it was interesting. Their county and the one just to the west had had normal precipitation; the crops were growing nicely. But due north and due south it was very dry, while due east it was swampy. In Jesse’s whole life he had never seen it so varied. Usually, a system came through, southwest to northeast, and on the edges of the system, storms struck or didn’t. But this summer, it was too cool for really dangerous weather, perfect for really strange weather.

Jesse hoisted himself out of his desk chair (he had been paying bills), went out, and opened one of the boxes, then two more. He saw that most of the books were old ones that Uncle Henry had left behind.

Jesse had thought of going back into the commodities market: he’d had a little surplus in the winter, forty-seven thousand dollars. He hadn’t done badly trading in the old days, when he thought he was so smart playing both ends. He had even rather enjoyed visiting the pit one time and listening to the shouting, but while he was turning over the idea, before he mentioned it to Jen, the Board of Trade decided to consolidate with the Mercantile Exchange, so they would be trading beans in one spot and euros in another, and who knew what else — Ebola-death futures? — somewhere else. However, as soon as he heard the two exchanges were merging, he gave up his nascent plan, and that was the moment he knew he was old, the moment that the feeling he’d had for such a long time of being sharp, knowledgeable, organized, ready for anything, the anointed heir of Frank Langdon, evaporated into the humidity.

Underneath the books, folded up, was a gift from Uncle Henry, a print of a painting by John Constable, an English artist. For a while, Jesse had cherished that print as he cherished his uncle Frank’s letters — an object showing the affection Uncle Henry held for him (the inscription on the back said, “You will like this! To my favorite future farmer! Love, Henry”).

Jesse carried it inside and spread it open. It was large, so he sat with it at his desk, in the morning light. It was a painting of a man with a scythe in his hand, standing at the edge of what looked like a field of wheat. A river, a green meadow, a cathedral, and some trees were in the background. He remembered that the picture had given him a sense of the Langdon and Cheek past — the past behind Great-Grandpa Wilmer, who had died in the early fifties, and Great-Grandma Elizabeth, whom he hardly remembered. The Cheeks were from Wessex, and the Langdons were from the north somewhere. This painting had been made in the southeast, of flatlands that would have been alien to the Cheeks and the Langdons. Now he looked at it rather sadly, as at an old girlfriend whom he had overestimated, who had grown careworn and dull. What struck him was the smallness of the field and the overwhelming weight of the heavy labor. If he had spent his life scything wheat and shocking oats and shoveling manure and hitching and unhitching draft horses, would he still be alive? He and Jen sometimes complained about the passing of youth. He was fifty and Jen was forty-nine, but they hadn’t thought yet to complain about the onset of old age — his joints didn’t ache, he had only just purchased his first pair of glasses, the fifteen pounds he had gained ten years before he had gotten rid of by walking around the farm more and driving less. Jen was the same age that her mother had been when she married Jesse, and looked ten years younger. Were they flattering themselves, or had they arrived at a golden age of agriculture without knowing it? The fields and rivers Constable depicted, Jesse now knew, were rife with cow pox and tuberculosis, rabies (he remembered his dad telling him that they didn’t dare have a dog when he was a boy, because of the danger of introducing rabies) and brucellosis. In the cottage and cathedral, there were no moms and dads reading novels or watching the news or discussing fishing trips that they weren’t going to take.

Jesse got up from his desk and went upstairs to go to the bathroom and find out what else Jen was throwing away, but also to go through Guthrie’s old room, out to the back-porch windows to the north, to look over the bean field. A bean field wasn’t as dramatic as a cornfield — just rows of leafy green, this year a little damp and yellow to the east of them, a little dry to the north and south, but perfect here. His field ran as far as he could see in both directions. It was clean, healthy, mostly weed-free; he wasn’t having the problems with monster velvetleaf that some farmers were. He had always been precise, and precision seemed to be paying off, but, to be honest, he didn’t know how long that would be true. His field contrasted pleasantly with the Constable print — as a reflex, he congratulated himself. But the longer he looked, the more the field looked as though something was about to happen, as if it were a blanket about to be sucked into the sky. He shook his head. There was no peace on the farm — that man carrying the scythe could have told John Constable that.

—

IF RICHIE HADN’T NOTED it already by himself, he would have been reminded by Loretta that when the money guys met to consider a crisis, they always met somewhere expensive and grandiose, like Aspen or Davos. Richie wondered if this made it easier for the losers among them (those worth less, say, than a hundred million) to throw themselves off a cliff? Loretta was sure to e-mail from wherever it was (this year, Jackson Hole), just to complain about how sleepy she was in the economic stratosphere, though enjoying herself anyway. And there was a crisis — everyone in the world except Michael seemed to acknowledge it. When Richie and Jessica went to their now intermittent Sunday supper two weeks later, there was no discussion of the housing bubble and its collapse, and Richie did not remark, glancing around the palatial ground floor, where they dined among the collection of California artists, that the place must be worth — what? — ten million now, rather than fifteen. He and Jessica did admire the painting of men panning for gold in 1849 that Loretta had picked up from a private collector in Los Angeles. She said, “I don’t think people realize there was a series of these. The most famous one is in a museum in Boston, but I like this one better. It’s more intimate.” She had added a lot of paintings to her “collection” recently. Richie hadn’t realized that it was a “collection”—here he had been thinking these dusty things were just reminders of the ranch.

Over their roast chicken (which Jessica seemed to be devouring, much to Loretta’s pleasure), Richie kept his eye on Michael, but he could see nothing. Michael’s cheeks weren’t flushed, his eyes weren’t rimmed in tears, he was not wringing his table napkin, his hair hadn’t turned gray. Given the economic news, Richie was a little surprised, and, maybe at last, a little gratified to feel that his lifelong desire for Michael to suffer had dwindled away. It was the Jessica effect, surely — she was so indifferent to so many painful things that he seemed to be imbibing her indifference. Even in the spring, when Leo had been quoted in his school newspaper to the effect that his father could and should be replaced in Congress by someone with real convictions — his example was Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC), who in 2003 had come up with the name “Freedom Fries” but now opposed the Iraq War and wanted to publish redacted pages from the 9/11 Commission Report pointing to the Saudis. Richie had laughed and asked Jones if he was looking for an intern, but only as a joke.

After dessert, Loretta got up from her place, carried the pie plate (maple-walnut, delicious in every way) into the kitchen, and invited Jessica to go with her into the front room. Jessica got up, dropped her napkin on the table, and glanced at him with a merry look. They walked out. After the door closed, Richie said, “Where are we? Windsor Castle?”

“Not yet,” said Michael. He leaned back until his chair was teetering, and reached his long arm for the Cognac. No butler. He poured Richie an inch, himself nothing. One thing to be said for him — he made up his mind to do something or to stop something, and his mind was made up. The Cognac was in a spherical bottle set in a sort of blue crystal bed with a blue crystal stopper. Richie had never seen anything like it. He took the tiniest sip. Michael said, “What does it taste like?”

Richie considered, then said, “A little smoky. I wouldn’t dare say sweet, but it’s not a hundred percent removed from a chocolate latte. Are you tempted?”

“Only to take a whiff.”

Richie handed him the glass. Michael took a whiff. He said, “That’s the best part, really.” He took another whiff and handed it back. Richie enjoyed his second sip more than his first; then he said, “Are we supposed to discuss Mom here, or national policy? Loretta must have a plan.”

“Always,” said Michael.

Then he dared. He said, “You okay?”

Michael knew exactly what he was talking about. He said, “The office could be better. I saw the writing on the wall in March, though, and stashed my own portfolio in concrete goods.”

“Like concrete?”

“Not quite, but close. Zinc, cadmium, neodymium, sulfuric acid.”

“What is neodymium?”

“It’s a rare-earth. They use it in batteries. Priuses, that sort of thing.”

Richie nodded, took another sip, consulted his inner sensor to see if Michael really did seem calm. He did. So Richie hazarded, “Everyone else is fucked, right?”

Michael said, “Maybe not. I’m not as bearish as some people are. But here’s the real problem.”

He stopped, stared at the Cognac bottle for a moment. Then he said, “As many are fucked as are not fucked. That means, as far as I can tell, that you guys can’t really do anything, and you had better not do anything. Some have to live and some have to die, because almost as many are short as are long. There’s too much fucking money.”

“I never thought I’d hear those words out of your mouth.”

“Well, let me say them again: there’s too much fucking money. It’s like a hurricane of money, or, no, better, a quantum field of money. It pops here and it pops there, and settles somewhere else, but the wrong signal will explode the whole thing, and all the money will disappear.”

“But not the neodymium, right?”

“Maybe not. Maybe not.”

“You don’t seem as, I don’t know, as worried as you could be.”

“That’s only because I don’t quite know what to be worried about, so I’m taking a worry vacation. Do I worry about the Fed? Do I worry about Greenspan? Do I worry about the rising tide of stupidity?”

“You never have worried about that,” said Richie.

“Something to fucking float onto the surface of,” said Michael.

“Did Dad ever give you any advice?”

Now Michael looked right at him and grinned. He said, “He did, actually.”

Richie felt a weird and unexpected stab of pain. His father had never given him any advice. “Do tell.”

“He said to never forget that money is boring.”

“So — the equation would be, too much money equals too much boredom, and that’s the root of the problem?”

“I think he would say so, but he never told me which came first, the chicken or the egg.”

“I would like to be bored,” said Richie.