Golden Age

2009

JARED WAS FIDDLING with the espresso maker, his third cup. He lost his temper and smacked the machine (new, De’Longhi) to the floor. He did not bend down to clean up the mess. Instead, he confessed that his company was bust, his employees were let go (had been for two weeks), and the reason was that he had borrowed money against the company to invest with Michael. That was the Friday before Thanksgiving. Janet’s first response had been to find herself an AA meeting. She closed the refrigerator door, picked up her car keys from the kitchen counter, and walked out. It was 9:00 a.m. (Thank heavens, Jonah was at school.) She drove around Palo Alto, detesting the eucalyptus trees and their breezy shade as she always did in a crisis, until she finally saw the sign outside of a church. She went in, sat down, waited for the meeting to commence, stayed quiet the whole time, returned home in a daze. Jared was lying on their bed. She said nothing about the fact that he could have at least done the breakfast dishes. She lay down beside him on top of the covers. They were both fully dressed, right down to shoes and socks. Jared had never failed before. He was the reliable one, the sane one, the one who got impatient with her irritability and grudge holding. How he had come to invest with Michael, Janet could not imagine, but she knew she would hear the story, though she didn’t want to hear it at that moment.

She had taken his hand, she had come up with the response she wanted to come up with — sympathy, solidarity. Remember when their monthly income was something like a thousand bucks before taxes, when they lived a block from the railroad crossing, when they didn’t have a car? Remember, said Jared, when we tried to make our own mozzarella that time the milk went sour and we were afraid to throw it out? They laughed. Now, two months later, that was a poignant memory.

More had to come out, and it did: There was a lien on the house. It was not a second mortgage; the mortgage had first priority, and the mortgage was small, only eighty thousand dollars — he had kept up with those payments.

A day went by. Janet understood that each item of the confession was like a circle on the floor that seemed secure, but could, or would, turn instantly into a hole, dropping her to a deeper, darker level. On Saturday, she asked who had made the loan.

Washington Mutual.

Why hadn’t she been told? Why hadn’t she had to sign any papers? Her name was on the deed to the house, on the mortgage.

It was a business loan. The loan officer was friendly. He overlooked some of the paperwork. He wanted to make the loan.

Janet said, “Washington Mutual went bust. They were sold to Chase.”

“They own the loan now. Or don’t. No one is quite sure. I’ve been talking to them, but everything is so chaotic.”

Bad luck — Janet and Jared agreed, he wasn’t to blame, just a piece of bad luck.

On Monday, after an amicable two days, Janet broached the topic of Michael. She hadn’t known that Jared had talked to Michael, had seen Michael. How in the world could he imagine that—

Then it came out: Michael had set him up. Jared realized that now, but had not realized it in August, when it happened. Did Janet remember when they went for a few days to the Ventana Inn with the Trycks, and Janet had decided not to go with them to the Post Ranch for lunch because the weather was so gloomy?

Janet did remember this — she had opted for a facial.

Michael and some client of his had been there, finishing breakfast in the Sierra Mar. They said they were on their way to Santa Barbara, taking the long route. Jared had been in a bad mood, complaining about business, wishing he could expand. He thought nothing more of it until a few days later, when Michael called him on his cell and told him that, if he wanted to expand, Michael had the investment for him. He was sure to hit it big before the end of the year. If he put in $750,000, he could get several million out, easy as falling off a log, no downside. The client he’d been with (driving a Bentley) was already in — why not Jared? Jared was driving their Toyota Highlander Hybrid, two years old, a car to be proud of, except at the Post Ranch Inn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What does that mean?” said Janet.

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

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

“Then you underestimated him, I guess.”

Finally, Janet said, “What about Richie?”

“Free at last,” said Andy.

And Janet knew this was true.

“And he has a pension.”

“How much?” said Janet.

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

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

—

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

He didn’t dare answer.

The fact was, Guthrie was in the neighborhood: he was spending time, and maybe living, with two friends from high school, Melinda Grand and Barry Heim. Melinda was a nurse’s aide at Usherton Hospital, and Barry was a long-haul trucker for the pork-confinement operation that Jesse’s father had hated so much. What did Guthrie do? Well, that was a good question. He told Jen that he was taking classes at Usherton Community College, in hotel management, and living on “savings.” The house that Melinda and Barry lived in was an old farmhouse north of town, overlooking the river, never good farm country, good for hiding something. Guthrie did not think he would be deployed again; he was glad to be home; he was twenty-five and looked fifty.

Even though it was time to get going on the farm work — at least to be fixing this and that, checking the soil moisture, thinking about seed (or listening to the salesmen give him their pitches) — all Jesse really wanted to do was drive past that dump Guthrie lived in and see what was going on. Except that the dump was located on a very un-Iowa sort of road, not the usual grid, but back up a long drive littered with junk — an old truck, old engine parts, a rusted cultivator, some tires, and that was only what he could see from the road. The roof peak of the house itself thrust up above the treetops, and it looked like it had shingles on it. He knew what people all over Iowa did in those types of houses: they cooked up drugs. Jesse stared up the lane for a few minutes and then drove on to Usherton to the feed store. When he got home in the late afternoon, and Jen told him that Guthrie had called and would be there for supper, Jesse felt anxious and guilty, as if his spying might be found out.

For a week, the weather had been suspiciously mild. Jesse was sitting on the front porch in the old rocker, nursing a beer, and watching the high wisps of cloud to the south turn gold and then pink. When he saw Guthrie’s car, a two-year-old Nissan, he couldn’t stop himself from wondering if old wreck or newish sedan was more suspect. When Guthrie got out of the driver’s side and looked in both directions before proceeding up the walk, he couldn’t not wonder what Guthrie was looking at or for. When Guthrie frowned, was that a bad sign? When he then smiled, was it a self-conscious or even a guilty smile? A foot on the bottom step; he looked thin. Was he fit, or was he eaten away? Jesse said, “Hey.”

Guthrie said, “Hey.”

Everyone said that when a boy went away to a war he came back a man. Guthrie had gone away twice, come back twice — did that double the maturity quotient? Everyone also knew that you could never see the boy in the man: every man looked more like his father and uncles than he did like his youthful self. Guthrie looked like a combination of Jesse’s dad and Jen’s brother David — which side did the premature worry lines come from? Jesse often missed Minnie, who would tell him. She had moved to the old folks’ home, and they hardly ever heard from her. He finished his beer and stood up, but he didn’t hug his son. Hadn’t seen him in two months, but to hug him could imply something that might offend.

They went in the house.

Jen might also worry about Guthrie, but, as an optimistic, active, fit, and healthy sort, she would almost certainly not have thought of methamphetamine, would only remember the best about Melinda and Barry — how cute they were in fourth grade or whenever — and so Jesse had said nothing to her concerning his anxiety. A scientific type of farmer, he told himself this was an experiment: If and when Jen expressed concern, then his own concerns would be justified, and they could, might, do something. What that would be, no one on the Internet agreed. Guthrie kissed his mom, went to the refrigerator, offered Jesse another beer, took one for himself. Jesse popped the cap. Guthrie said, “Corona? You guys are getting very snooty.”

Jesse said, “They just appeared one day.”

Jen said, “If you want to know the truth, Felicity left them the last time she was here.”

Guthrie said, “I have a hard time imagining Felicity tossing one back.”

Jen said, “She sips and savors, as if it were a nice Chardonnay.”

Guthrie said, “I believe that.” Then, “Listen to this. Grandma called me. She wants me to go with her to the Isle of Skye this summer.”

Jen said, “Near Scotland?”

“I guess. She is going for the salmon and the venison.”

Jen laughed. “Only Lois.”

Jesse said, “Are you going?”

“It is like forty degrees there.”

“Nice of her to ask, though.”

Guthrie’s cheekbones were a little sharp, his eyes a little wide. But he did not fidget. When they sat down at the table, Jesse thought, Please, don’t let me count his helpings. But he did — two of the mashed potatoes, one of the meatloaf, one of the green beans, one of the brand-new, spanking-fresh baby spinach from the garden. No dessert. Jen didn’t make cakes or pies. Jesse thought that his mom would be sad to know that she had had no lasting effect on their entremets and gâteau consumption; Jen had never opened the Julia Child cookbook his mom had left behind. She was coming here in a week for Easter — there could be leftover crème brûlée and they could maybe persuade Guthrie to get out of town. He leaned back, stretched, and groaned a little, in the great tradition of an aging, slightly overweight farmer, and said, “Anyway, how’s it going?”

“I got a job.”

“Oh, lovely,” said Jen.

“Maybe,” said Guthrie. “It’s part-time — manning the front desk at the Motel 6 on 330.”

“Are you in charge of bedbug patrol?” said Jen, good-naturedly.

“Bedbugs come after exposed wires and clogged drains. I guess new management has a plan, and part of the plan is easing out the eighty-year-old who’s checking people in now.”

Jesse said, “Then they’ll hire themselves some guests.”

“It could work,” said Guthrie. “At least it’s a start.”

“A start is always good,” said Jen.

Jesse said, “I could use some help in May,” but Guthrie didn’t appear to have heard him. His absolute resistance to farming remained in place.

Jen began clearing the table. They talked a bit about Felicity, but not about Perky. Jen cast no speculative glances toward Guthrie, made no observations about what he had and hadn’t eaten, seemed not to notice his foot tapping the floor. After supper, they watched an episode of something or other in the living room — Jesse felt his distraction and concern beginning to overwhelm him. Guthrie got up to leave; Jen went with him out onto the porch. They talked for a while, and though Jesse did attempt to enlarge his ears in order to hear them, he didn’t move from his spot on the sofa. He heard Guthrie’s steps, a moment later heard the car turn on and depart, looked at Jen when she came in. She looked back at him. She said, “It’s okay if his reintegration is slow. Slow is steady. Slow is stable. He’s had a few dates with a girl from the college. She wants to be a chef.” Jesse wished he could see Guthrie as Jen did, a system basically sound and stable, just needing a few repairs. He vowed not to drive by that house, that junk, ever again.

—

FELICITY WAS getting fond of the horse she had to muck out for, who was quarantined at the back of the barn because he had a very contagious ailment called, of all things, “strangles.” She gave him hay three times a day, changed his water, mucked his stall out twice, and did everything in a pair of overalls that she had to leave by the door, along with a hat, a hairnet, rubber boots, and a pair of gloves. As long as she was taking care of this horse, she also was not to go into any other part of the equine facility. For four weeks, until the horse tested negative for strangles, that was her job, because there had been an outbreak at the vet school two years earlier, and it had been a nightmare.

The horse’s name was Go For It, or Goofy. He was a bay showjumper, nice-looking, and obviously used to lots of attention. When she came into his little barn, he whinnied to her as if he had been pining for her, and even after she threw down the hay and he started eating, he would keep his eye on her, lifting his head and whinnying if she headed for the exit. She had never thought of horses as convivial, but clearly this guy was as lonely as could be. She began giving him carrots and petting him — she bought herself a whole box of disposable latex gloves in order to pet him.

Now that she was actually at ISU, working at the vet school had succeeded in convincing Felicity that veterinary practice was not her future. When she assisted in the clinic for a semester, she found herself extremely abrupt with the owners of the patients. The turning point was when a woman and her daughter brought in a cat, not very old, with a lung infection from soil-borne bacteria. The woman asked what the vet might do, and Dr. Latham described opening the chest, laving it thoroughly, closing it up — certainly a major operation. Was the doctor sure that would cure the infection? No, could not be sure. Might have to do it more than once. Even looking at the limp, weak black cat and thinking about it made the woman and the little girl burst into tears. They couldn’t imagine putting the cat through that. Dr. Latham nodded in sympathy. They decided to put the cat down. Felicity was disappointed, because she didn’t much care about the cat, but she was thrilled by the idea of seeing what might happen. She must have harrumphed or something, because, after the woman and her daughter left, her supervisor took her aside and said that she needed to be “more empathetic” if she expected to have a clientele.

It was hard for Felicity to believe that she would turn twenty-one in the fall. By rights, she should be turning twenty-five, or thirty, if only so that people other than her parents would take her seriously. Her parents took her very seriously; she had trained them, with a combination of treats and punishments, to allow her to do as she pleased and express herself, and to pay attention to her opinions. Thanks to Aunt Minnie, she was a researcher first and foremost, exhaustive, organized, and curious. She owed a lot to Aunt Minnie, who had died lying in her bed at the old folks’ home, all her possessions boxed and labeled, the day before her ninetieth birthday. Felicity never forgot to leave some locally sourced flowers and herbs on her grave, which was right beside Uncle Frank’s. No one had planned it that way — that was where the space was. Aunt Minnie had once told Felicity (after being probed) that, yes, she had loved Uncle Frank, but then he had gone off. Aunt Minnie made sure Felicity understood that Uncle Frank had never loved her back, and Felicity did understand that, so when she laid the flowers on Aunt Minnie’s grave, she left nothing on Uncle Frank’s grave.

Felicity had four girlfriends, five colleagues/friends who were guys, and a semi-boyfriend, Max, whom she slept with enough so that they were satisfied and not distracted by sexual yearnings. Max was in the math department, and he was not unlike Canute in personality type — INTJ (Felicity herself was ESTJ). She liked to be in charge, and Max liked someone to be in charge of him. She fit beautifully into the world of Iowa State. She liked her job, she thought the campus was exceptionally well organized, and she enjoyed being surrounded by engineers. Her father had taken her once to the spot where Uncle Frank was struck by lightning, and then they looked for the spot where he was said to have lived in a tent by the river for a month, a year, the whole time (Felicity was inclined to think this was family folklore). He had put himself through school with rabbit skins? They had tried to make gunpowder out of cornstalks? And also there was nuclear waste out past the university graveyard? Yes, but. Felicity was not saying that she did not believe these stories, only that she had not researched them, and so could not verify them to her own satisfaction.

What Felicity thought about her family’s worries and upsets, she kept to herself. What she felt about them, she also kept to herself. Her feelings did not seem to be as strong as everyone else’s, and the conclusion she drew from this was that her attachment to her family, though sufficient, was not in the upper percentiles. Perhaps, someday, she would regret this, but perhaps, someday, she would not. Her coolness had benefits: Her girlfriends complained more or less incessantly about their parents and their brothers and sisters. Everything any sibling or parent did caused a crisis full of discussions and tears. Max was not like this — he confessed that he often forgot about his parents entirely, and had gotten to be sixteen without ever learning his paternal grandmother’s maiden name (he could barely remember her first name). Felicity gave good advice, but she viewed all these upsets as through a window — slightly muffled. Spending so much time tending Goofy had caused her to think; she didn’t want to be like Goofy, and she didn’t mind hours in the isolation wing at all. If there had been a use for it, she would have listed and analyzed Goofy’s idiosyncratic behaviors to pass the time. Instead, she organized her future and reconfirmed her freedom.

—

IN AUGUST, and not in the Hamptons or Savannah or Nice or Bora-Bora, but lolling on the deck at his and Jessica’s condo in D.C., Richie told Michael that he had never been this happy in all his life, and Michael looked right at him, nodded, and said, “Me, too.” It was as hot as could be, but apparently only here — Richie was glad not to have to argue with Riley about weather predictions versus climate change and extrapolating from the daily forecast to civilization collapse. Riley had sashayed quite easily from congressional aide (“aide deluxe,” as she called herself) into a very well-paid and visible job at a prestigious think tank, and Richie now saw her on television more often than in person. Richie had not sashayed anywhere. He was still too disgraced to enter the private sector visibly. He didn’t mind, he didn’t worry, he covered the condo payment and let Jessica cover the food and the gym membership.

Jessica let Michael be underfoot; made him do the dishes, did not ask about the state of his marriage, and told Richie not to ask, either. In the meantime, Richie found it irresistible to compare their progress through the aging process. On this very day, they happened to be fifty-six and a half years old, though Richie hadn’t mentioned this. Michael still had the scar on his knee from the accident with that girl before Loretta, where the car key had gone into the flesh, and, Richie thought, he also still had a faint red line in his biceps from Alicia’s scissors. What had they been, twenty, when that happened? His chest hair was thick, a little gray in the upper area, not unlike Richie’s own chest hair. They were old. He had felt so young for so long that this rather surprised him. Even Leo now seemed older to Richie than he himself was, and Ivy, who took pity on him from time to time and called him, seemed to have outpaced him by a generation. Perhaps this was a side effect of the congressional lifestyle — not perennial youth, but perennial immaturity. However, in accordance with Jessica’s advice, once he thought about the House, he redirected his attention — to bellies. His was moderately large, but, he guessed, Michael’s was 10 percent larger. They didn’t look quite as sleekly predatory as his father had looked at the same age.

Michael said, “Sold the place.”

Richie said, “How much?”

“Five.”

“What do you think about that?”

“Good riddance.” Possibly, Richie thought, including the money, which would have to go to some litigation-settlement account.

“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.