Golden Age

  Felicity had not read about any occasions where social action made a real difference—it was, she thought, too hard to organize, and too quick to devolve into self-conflicting actions and arguments. Exactly that thing had happened to feminism, which by rights should have worked beautifully. Felicity believed that viral movements worked better, but Jason was good-looking, Jason was excited, so she was here, skeptical already, but she did have her phone out. She lifted it up and took a picture as soon as she could get all of the occupiers in without their being dwarfed by the building. As she got closer, she read various signs— “Tuition Shooting Up! Jobs Plummeting!” and “Who’s the Boss? We Are!” and “What’s Your Salary, PreZ!” Felicity knew that President Geoffroy made about $450,000 a year, up every year. It took 112 students to pay the president’s salary. Houses in Ames were cheap, but there were developments out in the countryside, even to the north, right beside the high-voltage transmission towers, that were a lot more expensive. That was where the administration lived. She wandered among the protesters, smiling, taking pictures, nodding when someone called out, “Post them!”

  Everyone looked excited and cheerful, and she and Jason were in the Union by one, eating pulled-pork sandwiches for lunch. She didn’t think much about it (though she did conscientiously make up her missed classes) until a month later, when she saw the pepper-spray incident at UC Davis. She had in fact applied to the microbiology department at UC Davis, and gotten in, but she hadn’t gotten a fellowship, and the tuition was much higher than at ISU, so she had stayed in Ames. She watched the footage several times, how casually the cop pointed the pepper spray at the kid sitting at his feet, and sprayed him in the face. That might have been her, except—not; would never have happened at ISU. Felicity was a realist above all. She did look up the cop’s salary—$110,000. That surprised her. Her best teacher, the Foodborne Hazards professor, wasn’t making two-thirds of that; as for Jason, he didn’t have a chance, really.

  2012

  IT WAS the pepper-spray incident that propelled Richie, at long last, into his new job at a think tank—the ReNewVa think tank. Riley found him the spot, but he wouldn’t have ended up there without Jerry Nadler, who was conducting an inquiry into law-enforcement malfeasance throughout the Occupy movement, and Michael, who knew Boris Kohn, the ReNewVa funder, from some Caribbean trip and talked Richie up for the job. Officially, he was a “consultant,” and he did have an office, but his real job was to be told what to do and say. He still had that TV presence he’d always had, that way of seeming enthusiastic and genuine. As Jerry pursued his inquiry, Richie rephrased what he said and smiled more than Jerry did. Riley insisted that Michael never appear at ReNewVa. Richie didn’t have to enforce this—Michael knew where he was welcome and where he wasn’t. He spent his time at youth-empowerment programs around D.C., shooting hoops with kids and giving little talks on Focus and Intention.

  Michael had opened up to Richie in the last six months. He blamed Loretta for almost everything. Did Richie remember that girl, the artist, Lynne? He’d adored her, bought her that place in SoHo, but she scared him, she was so ambitious and, he thought at the time, knowledgeable. He was wrong. Loretta was the one who should have scared him; she had seemed to agree with him, but she took his every thought or statement a step further. Chance was born, and he said, “This is fun, we should have a flock”—she stopped using birth control, and here came Tia. He said he rather liked Reagan or Thatcher, or whoever, and there they were, contributing as much as possible to Reagan’s campaign, offering to go to rallies. He decided to cut back on his drinking, and she had him not only in AA but with a counselor three days a week. He had to agree to whatever she “suggested” just to gain a little bit of freedom. The only thing she left to him was making the money, and so he spent more and more time at work, just to have something for himself. And he wasn’t allowed to spend it—she chose the place on the Upper East Side, she chose the schools…

  When Richie and Jessica went to Michael’s place for dinner (and to meet Binky’s boyfriend) after the New Hampshire debate, Michael said, idly, “At least Huntsman isn’t an idiot.”

  Richie kept cutting his steak into smaller and smaller pieces. Jessica said, “That depends on your definition of an idiot.”

  Binky laughed and the boyfriend looked carefully around the table. According to Michael, the boy’s family was deeply divided, politically, and dishware had been thrown at Thanksgiving. He was from State College, Pennsylvania, and sold houses on the Internet to investors in China.

  Michael said, “What is your definition of an idiot, Jessica?”

  “A voice crying out in the wilderness.”

  Richie laughed and patted her knee under the table, but said nothing.

  Michael said, “Well, Romney is an idiot—I know from firsthand experience. You tell him something, anything, and he gives you a sort of blank smile and then looks over your shoulder, I guess for the cue cards. I never met anyone else like him. I always thought he had a condition of some sort.”

  Richie said, “They can’t stop him.”

  “The voters will,” said Michael, decisively, and the boyfriend—oh, yeah, Linc—breathed a sigh of relief.

  Michael didn’t dislike Obama, never called him by any remotely racist epithet. Michael thought Obama was reasonable in all things, and said that he felt relief just being able to express that opinion out loud. He liked Geithner, he liked Holder, he liked Sonia Sotomayor. Most of the others he hadn’t met. It could be said that the only person in the world who made him angry these days was Loretta, who, on the advice of the monsignor (now in North Dakota, where his ministry was profoundly needed), had resolved to be patient. She had even called Richie late one night to probe into whether there was any hope of a reconciliation. Richie, sitting up in bed, with Jessica’s hand in his, had told her the truth—no. Loretta had said, “He will regret that.”

  Richie had said, “I don’t think so, not in this lifetime.”

  Loretta had said, “The next one is a lot longer,” and slammed down the phone. Then Richie had rolled up against Jessica, kissed her about twenty times, and said, “What do you think happens after we die?” And Jessica said, “Nothing.” That thought seemed like a tremendous relief.

  As far as Richie knew, Michael was not dating anyone. He never mentioned women, and he told Richie to drop by whenever he was in the neighborhood. Richie did, twice. Not a woman in the place, not a stray item of underwear, no fragrant handkerchief under the sofa. Maybe this was the hardest thing to believe, so Richie did not believe it, but he respected Michael’s secrecy skills.

  —

  UNLIKE THE HOUSE to the left, their building did still have its roof and shingles, and unlike the building across the street, their front entrance was not blocked by a huge tree that had flipped out of the ground onto two cars, a blue Toyota and a silver Mercedes. Facing east turned out to be a good thing—the only damage was to rooms overlooking the alley, like their bedroom, not to rooms overlooking the street, like their living room. Some junk had blown onto their deck, and the lounge chairs and table were turned over, but, as Michael said when he showed up about five minutes after Richie and Jessica came up from the cellar, where they had spent the night, it could be worse. He had already driven out to Uncle Henry’s—trees down, but no real damage; Henry, Riley, and Alexis sent their best. Since he had shoes on, Michael braved the glass-strewn bedroom and brought out some clothes. Power was out everywhere, but his house had a generator—did they know that?—so he would give them breakfast.

  The Shoebox was in good shape—the virtue of small windows. Even the tiny little sunporch was okay, since it looked away from the storm. Michael scrambled eggs, made toast and coffee, told Richie and Jessica he had worried about them, been up all night, in fact, though he didn’t mind that.

  Jessica went to the bathroom to take a shower. Michael talked about the “derecho”—started as a storm cell in Iowa, grew and expanded, eighty-to-ninety-mile-per-hour winds, straigh
t, not swirling, always blew from the northwest. Lots of storms that people thought were tornadoes were really derechos. While he was taking his own shower, Richie managed to come to, and not only from this hard night. He hadn’t meant to be so dumbstruck, he hadn’t meant to feel so old and sunk in some sort of mental goop, he hadn’t meant to be taken care of by Michael, he hadn’t meant to let almost four years elapse after his time in the Congress before he got himself together. He hadn’t meant to take Jessica for granted, to buy her only a potted hydrangea from the grocery store for their last anniversary. It was a sign of how lost he was that he did love her all the time, turned toward her like a sunflower toward the sun, and yet he let conversations die, occasions where they might do something together pass, opportunities to help her make dinner or do the dishes fall by the wayside. Did she think he was indifferent to her, when, really, he was indifferent to himself? When he got out of the shower, toweled off, and opened the bathroom door, he heard her laugh in the kitchen. She hadn’t given him one of those laughs in weeks. Michael laughed, too, exactly in sync. Richie shook his head back and forth, back and forth, loosening the dead particles of brain matter that seemed to be clogging his thoughts. They had done their best to grab his hands and drag him out of the sinkhole. Now it was time for him to exert himself.

  Once they put on their clothes, Richie suggested to Jessica that they drive out to Uncle Henry’s, partly to see what they could see on the way. And also, of course, to enjoy the car’s air conditioning. What they saw was interesting. Their neighborhood was more damaged than most of the neighborhoods in the city, but the suburbs were a mess—lots of detours because of trees and power lines. When they finally got to Henry’s, Henry and Riley were out in the yard, raking up debris. Richie pulled in. Were they glad to see him? They seemed glad to see Jessica. Richie started his new life by pitching in, sweeping, raking, picking up debris, dragging the waste containers to the curb, wiping the sweat off his brow with the hem of his shirt, but not therefore tapering off. In spite of the heat, they laughed a lot. Riley kept pausing, looking at Alexis, and smiling. Richie overheard her say to Jessica, “Eight to twelve is the best age! The last time I was really, really happy was when I was in fifth grade.” And Jessica laughed and nodded. I’m happy now, thought Richie. I am happy now.

  Only two interns and one consultant at ReNewVa were working on climate change, according to Riley. No funds for more. “I could help them,” said Richie at supper. “I’m not doing anything else.”

  Riley said, “Talk to Ezra. He’s good.”

  “He’s twenty-three,” said Richie. “He weighs six pounds.”

  “More like a hundred, but he is a vegan. Nevertheless, he’s up-to-date. He graduated from Caltech. He has no interpersonal skills. He knows nothing about the Arab Spring, but he can put you to work. Just don’t take offense at his air of superiority.”

  The ReNewVa offices did have power on Monday. He knocked on Ezra’s door and said, “So—Ezra! Get me up to speed about climate change.”

  Ezra looked up from his Diet Coke and burped, then said, “No one ever says that to me.”

  Richie said, “Good. Then I have you to myself.”

  “Do you want to work on the Keystone XL pipeline or weather extremes?”

  “Anything is fine,” said Richie.

  Ezra’s last name was Newmark, and he was from Roxbury, New York. There was a picture of John Burroughs above his desk. Richie knew this because the words JOHN BURROUGHS were printed on a piece of paper to the left, shaped like an arrow and pointing at the bearded elderly man. Underneath the picture was another piece of paper, cut into a jagged shape, with the words “Marcellus Shale” printed on it. To the right were four pictures of flooding in Roxbury caused by Hurricane Irene, now almost a year in the past. Richie didn’t ask if the pictures were of Ezra’s parents’ house, but he looked at them thoughtfully. He remembered Irene as something of a bust, but, then, a year ago, he hadn’t been thinking of the Catskills, or much of anything else. Ezra spoke quickly but with exceptional clarity, as if he had been explaining things to people his whole life. He suggested that Richie write down what he was being told. Richie took his suggestion.

  That was his life at work. At home, he avoided looking at the sofa, at the television, at his computer, all lures to sitting down and fading out, including the London Olympics—yes, you could watch javelin and discus and sprints until you fell into a coma. He suggested what might be good for supper, stopped at the market on the way home, bought things like eggplant and leeks. He moved on, in the Julia Child cookbook, from Potage Parmentier to Potage Crème de Cresson, and then he jumped ahead to Carbonnades à la Flamande. Jessica loved it. He bought another cookbook at the supermarket, called All-Time Best Recipes. A drain got clogged. He found a wire hanger and unclogged it. The summer, though hot, began to progress with verve and energy.

  All the same, he did not take personally the drought in Iowa until Michael brought it up in late August. There was a graphic on the New York Times Web site about crops—corn, soybeans, wheat, sorghum. Tiny black dots like a swarm of locusts hovered over the map of Iowa (and Minnesota, and Missouri, and Nebraska), indicating crops that had been declared “poor or worse” and would be left in the ground or turned into silage. Fifty percent of corn, a sixth of the soybean crop. There was also a report that he found somewhere, about river temperatures being almost a hundred, and thousands of fish dying in the water and decaying along the banks. Somehow Michael knew some things that Ezra had mentioned, things that Richie considered rather esoteric—the flow of water down the Mississippi was so lacking that salt water from the Gulf was flowing upriver toward New Orleans; huge soybean plantations were the root cause of the destruction of the Amazonian rain forest. None of these factoids surprised Richie: Ezra had a four-by-six map of the United States with drought conditions penciled in on the wall of his office, across from John Burroughs. What surprised him was that Michael seemed interested, that he knew conditions were worse than they had been in the eighties (“Not the year we were there, but the year after that—’88 was a terrible drought year”), as bad as they had been in the fifties. He was Facebook friends with Felicity. (Did Richie remember her? What was she, early twenties—Jesse’s youngest.) She posted about crop reports, even took a picture or two of Jesse’s corn (dry, pale) and beans (spare, but not a disaster). She took pictures of the soil between the rows—dusty—and the dust on the west side of the house. Her comments were usually “Could be worse” and “At least a little rain.”

  Richie said, “What do you post on your Facebook page?”

  “Cartoons. Links to YouTube videos of punk bands.”

  Jessica, who had a Facebook account, said that this was true. She showed Richie: Michael had 932 friends. Jessica had 267 friends. One of Michael’s friends was Loretta, but, according to Jessica, she never commented on or liked anything Michael posted.

  Richie almost signed up for an account—even Ezra had an account—but in the end, he was too embarrassed.

  One day, Michael said, “You know, that place is worth six million bucks now.”

  “Up from a thousand or something like that,” said Richie.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t you remember Dad telling us once that when he was a kid the land was worth eleven dollars an acre, if they were lucky? I don’t remember how many acres they had then, but it was probably something like three.”

  Michael would not even smile. “I can’t believe he bought out everyone and gave it to Jesse. That still pisses me off.”

  “Like we were going to farm.”

  “I know lots of guys, especially in Chicago, who are in farmland. They say it’s a good investment. And if the crops burn up where they are standing, they get insurance payouts. Dad sent him money every year. He never gave me money.”

  “You were always telling him you were worth more than he was.”

  Michael scowled and went out on the deck. When he came back in, he talked about sh
oes—he had found a pair of Edward Greens in a used-clothing store, fit perfectly, perfectly broken in, seventy-five bucks.

  It was so disorienting to think of Michael attending to weather conditions in Iowa that Richie was more than thrilled when, in September, he saw an article in the Times saying “Drought conditions appear to be easing, says National Weather Service.”

  —

  FOR EZRA, who had been active in the Keystone XL protests the year before (how had Richie missed that? Well, he had made sure to avoid 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue while it was going on), the election posed a terrible dilemma. Next to the picture of John Burroughs, he now had a printout, in 24-point type, of a quote from The New York Times: “Mr. Romney envisions a nation in which coal-burning power plants are given new life, oil derricks sprout on public lands and waters, industry is given a greater say in the writing and enforcement of environmental rules and the Code of Federal Regulations shrinks rather than grows.” On his computer, Ezra had a file of everything Obama had ever said about climate change, including a speech he had made in the spring in Oklahoma, congratulating his administration on circling the world with oil and gas pipelines. Nothing Obama had said subsequently about stopping climate change redeemed his candidacy for Ezra. He thought voting for Romney might usher in the revolution, but, Ezra told Richie (realistically, Richie thought), he, Ezra, was the sort of person who might not survive the revolution. He could vote for Jill Stein, but to do so would not sufficiently express his anger at Obama. He was thinking about voting for Jill Stein and writing a letter to the White House explaining his vote.

  Jessica was voting for Obama as an anti-racist gesture. The cascade of racist remarks about him and the made-up brouhaha about Benghazi offended her almost to the point of anger—a rare point for Jessica. When those soldiers were discovered in Georgia who plotted to assassinate him and had eighty thousand dollars’ worth of guns and explosives, she sent in a campaign contribution, resurrected her campaign buttons from 2008, wore them to work. Michael was voting for Obama because Loretta would never vote for Obama, and he was also telling Tia and Binky that they should vote for Obama, as a protest against the Republican Party for offering a roster of candidates that went from bad to worse to worst ever. He didn’t believe a word of the Republican yakkety yak about Benghazi, either. For about a week in October, even after Romney won the first debate, he could not stop laughing at an article he read about Romney’s body language. The “expert” found his “tilt and nod” gesture (“with eyes wide open”) positive and welcoming. Romney’s “tilt and nod” was a permanent tic, according to Michael, and had always reminded him of those dolls from the 1950s with dumbstruck round blue eyes, pursed lips, and bobbing heads.