Golden Age Read online

  The one he liked best was still Tina, who had come by the shop in April. She was quiet and easygoing; even while taking him and Riley to lunch, she’d been looking at things, and not just the mountains and the clouds, which everyone looked at, but cobwebs and moldings and stray cats half hidden. She was observant, and when she left Charlie her phone number and a sincere invitation to come to Sun Valley for a visit, she’d doodled his own face beside it, a likeness that Riley now kept in her wallet.

  It was sunny and getting hot; he drove into range of KSHE and turned the radio up. Some Guns N’ Roses carried him across the Missouri River, a beautiful and evocative waterway and, in Charlie’s opinion, the true main branch of the river. The bridge was a high one, taking him from the bluffs on the north side to the flatlands on the south side. The afternoon sunlight glinted in lengthening rays on the opaque water. He wondered if he would ever see his grandfather Arthur again. It was uncanny to meet your family as strangers, to look like them, to see yourself in them, but have feelings for them that were only random and new, not conditioned into you. And here he was—this was the oddest thought—alive, speeding through Chesterfield, knowing that in two weeks, when he turned twenty-two, he would have outlived his own father.

  —

  IVY WAS in the shower, and Richie was lingering over the front page of the Times, when he heard the telltale creak in the fifth step of the third flight of stairs—their flight of stairs—which meant that someone was on his way up, and certainly it was Michael, since Loretta and the kids were back in California; without them, Michael was an early riser. Why sleep when you could get on the motorcycle, zip across the Brooklyn Bridge, terrify everyone on Flatbush Avenue, then get something to eat? Richie hadn’t heard the bike, but the window of the co-op faced away from Eighth Avenue, onto the tiny yard behind their building. Always drawn to disaster stories, Richie had just finished reading the article about hundred-mile-an-hour winds, whirlwinds, and square miles of fallen trees southeast of London (didn’t they know what a tornado was?). The accompanying picture was of a beached ferry. A British radio announcer had named the storm “Hurricane Ethelred,” but so far only thirteen people had died. Michael shook the door handle as if he had a right to come in, and Richie got up from the table. On the way to the door, he picked up the coffee pot. Maybe a cup left.

  Richie knew about the stock-market dip—everyone did. He had nothing to say about it. He hoped he could remember that when Michael began babbling. He opened the door. “Fuck,” said Michael.

  Richie couldn’t tell if he was saying this in a positive way or a negative way. He stepped back and Michael strode in. Richie said, “Haven’t seen you in a while.”

  Michael said, “Fuck, I am rich. I am fucking rich.”

  “Sounds like you’re the only one,” said Richie.

  “I don’t mind that,” said Michael. “If you could’ve seen those guys yesterday, just standing around with their mouths open—what does Uncle Joe say? ‘Catching flies.’ You got some coffee?” He took a cup out of the cabinet and poured out the pot, then pulled out a chair and sat down. “What does the fucking Times say?”

  “Haven’t gotten to the business section yet.”

  Michael began rummaging through the paper, and found the article he was looking for. “Fuck!” he shouted. “Three hundred thirty-eight million shares! Ha!” He sucked down his coffee as if he didn’t even notice that it was hot, and leaned his chair back. His head grazed the window. If, Richie thought, he should lose his balance, he would certainly crack his head on the sill, maybe even break the window and cut open his scalp.

  “A hundred points! A hundred and eight, really. You know how many points the Dow fell in 1929? Thirty-eight. So many guys are just completely fucked.”

  “But not you,” said Richie.

  “Fuck, no.”

  He might as well be wearing a T-shirt—Fuck No, Fuck Yeah, Fucked Up, Fucked Over, Fuck Me, Fuck You. He did not talk like this when Loretta and the kids were around. “You have a plan,” said Richie, standing up to put some bread in the toaster.

  “I went for the delta.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Basically, you bet both ways, way up and way down. If the market pisses and moans and piddles around where it is, I’m—”

  “Fucked,” said Richie.

  “God, yeah,” said Michael. “But if it jumps or drops big, I win big.”

  As Michael said this, Richie could almost see the testosterone throbbing through his brother’s carotid arteries. He said, “What are you going to do to make sure one of these things happens?” He was joking, but Michael said, “I don’t know yet, but I’ve got till Monday to figure it out.” Everyone had a system now. Even his dad had a system, something some guy had explained to him in Aspen, a year ago. Frank didn’t use the system, but it seemed like his mom was using the system, in her way, which was to wake up in the morning and say, “I think IBM is about to have an uh-oh day,” and then Andy would buy, and then, apparently, IBM would rise, and his dad would say, “I think she’s going to turn out to be a genius after all.”

  Richie, of course, would have to have something to say about the crash, too—Congressman Scheuer would be required to issue a statement about volatility and regulation and why should our nation be beholden to the fat cats—but it was possible that the market would bounce back, and those remarks could be shelved before they were needed. Richie heard the door to their bedroom open, and here came Ivy. When she saw Michael, she gaped, stuck out her tongue, and rolled her eyes, but then she laughed and kissed him on the cheek. She had told Richie over and over that she wanted to see Michael and Loretta as little as possible, but in the end she was always won over. The toast popped, and she buttered it. She said, “You want jam? I have some pear I just got.”

  Michael said, “Any eggs?”

  “There’s no such thing as a free breakfast.”

  Michael said nothing. Ivy got out the frying pan, opened the refrigerator door. Later, Richie knew, she would say that Michael’s attitudes were a kind of performance, blond-guy rap. Sure, there was a part of him that was aggressive and inconsiderate, but he was nice to Loretta and better with his kids than, just as an example, their dad had been with them. Michael was a complex person, no two ways about that. She sprinkled in the chili powder and the cumin; she knew what he liked. Richie had told her about the girl at Cornell—Alicia. He’d told her what he remembered from their sophomore year, that Michael had attacked Alicia, he, Richie, had tried to stop things, and Alicia had stabbed Michael with the scissors in her bag and gotten away. He’d also told her what Michael told him after Richie left Cornell for Rutgers—that Alicia told everyone they both attacked him. Ivy didn’t believe either story. They were kids, Michael had a temper, things got out of hand; what was the girl doing, playing them off against one another, anyway? Richie allowed Ivy to give Michael the benefit of the doubt, because didn’t he want the same thing for himself?

  She said, “You think the computer trading is a problem?”

  “Nah,” said Michael. “The computers functioned great. I mean, the real problem is people, not computers. It’s hard to keep up with them, and you get tired. I’m glad the fucking day is six hours, not eight. Should be four, you ask me, but they haven’t thought about that. I mean, we knew this was coming. We knew that volume would pop, and they’ve spent years preparing for it, so…” He shrugged. “Things might settle down on Monday, but if they do I’m fucked.”

  Ivy cast Richie a glance. Richie raised his eyebrows, their signal for I-will-untangle-this-mess-for-you-later. Ivy set Michael’s eggs in front of him and handed him a fork, a napkin.

  Michael said, “You pregnant yet?”

  “Is that your business?”

  “It’s not my business, but Loretta asked.”

  They waited too long to answer. The latest missed period had presented itself only the day before. It had been five days late. Michael said, “Let me try. I have a perfect record.” Ivy smile
d, thinking he was kidding. “I mean, as an experiment. If I can’t do you, then the problem is yours, not Richard’s. Down and dirty. Save a lot of medical expense, and if it works, the result is the same, basically.”

  He lolled back in his chair again, then moved it with a loud scrape. His elbow banged the windowpane, and Richie thought: out the window, three stories, four if he fell into the stairwell leading to the basement co-op.

  Ivy scowled, and Michael noticed. He said, “What?” as if truly perplexed. “Okay, I said something. I didn’t rape you or go behind Richie’s back. I didn’t even make an actual proposal. I just floated an idea. I am not blinded by social norms. I can see solutions. So what? It’s called thinking outside the box.”

  “Or joking around,” said Ivy.

  “All right, joking around. I know you guys got up and left Beverly Hills Cop 2 because you just couldn’t take it.”

  Richie said, “I like Eddie Murphy.” But he sounded so stuffy, and he didn’t look Michael in the eye, and he knew that Michael had gotten him again.

  1988

  HENRY FOUND the University of Chicago amusing as a monument to wealth. He didn’t go there often; however, he did enjoy the library, not in spite of the fake Gothic feel, but because of it—the lancet arched leaded windows soaring to the fan-vaulted ceiling, and warmer this time of year than any cathedral in the world. It was less than an hour’s drive from his apartment down Lake Shore if he went in the middle of the morning and came back after rush hour. The snow wasn’t bad this year, and he was used to the wind. The bonus was that he could get away from that letter on his desk from Turner Klein, which was surely about whether he was making progress on the panel he had agreed to produce about Philip for the AIDS quilt. He’d intended to stay away from the AIDS quilt all last summer, and even into October—he’d thought it would be a tasteless memorial, a type of headstone in piecrust. Much better, he was vocally convinced, to build a shining and searing black structure identical to and parallel to the Vietnam Memorial, but he’d ended up going to Washington after all, and had found the two thousand panels laid out on the Mall strangely affecting, in spite of, or because of, their bright colors and homey shapes. He hadn’t broken down, though, until he and Turner did get to the Vietnam Memorial, and he did touch the name of Timothy Brinks Manning carved into the gabbro (in his pedantic way, Henry had told Turner, who was streaming tears, all about gabbro, magma, large grains…). But when he touched Tim’s name, he was thinking of Philip and of Lionel and of Warren, the three AIDS victims he knew best, though only Philip had been his lover. Turner, who was in his thirties, a little panicky and insistent, would not let him get by without somehow seeing to the construction of a panel for Philip, a panel full of words—something severe, he thought, rigorously tasteful, yellow embroidered upon black. How this might be done, Henry hadn’t yet figured out.

  He had not nursed Philip in the last year—Turner, Philip’s ultimate lover, had done that—but he had visited them in New York every month or so and sent them money; he was still sending Turner five hundred dollars a month.

  What he was doing at the U. of Chicago was idle work, since he was not doing it in Europe, but it gave him an edgy sort of pleasure. There was that Pope, the evil Innocent III, who had sent Simon de Montfort to Béziers to slaughter the Cathars in the Cathedral. Henry’s sympathies were entirely with the Cathars, and he had driven around Carcassonne and Narbonne and the Hautes-Pyrénées several times now, pondering the Cathars at Foix, pondering them at Pamiers and Lavaur, where one of their female leaders was thrown down a well and stoned to death. But through Pope Innocent, he had been reminded of Gerald of Wales, who had met with Innocent several times in order to wrangle himself a position in the English Church, preferably to get Innocent to certify the independence and importance of St. David’s Cathedral in Wales, as opposed to Canterbury Cathedral. Gerald (really “Gerallt”) had failed, but, out of curiosity, Henry had looked into his many volumes of writings, thinking there might be a subject there for a book or a monograph. He had done the work intermittently and idly, a relief from everything else, but, perhaps because of Philip, the passage that stuck in his mind was not about the exhumation of the bodies of Arthur and Gwenhwyfar, the real Arthur and the real Gwenhwyfar, from the crypt at Glastonbury Abbey in the 1190s. What snagged him was the connection between Arthur’s defense of Britain in the sixth century against invading Germanic armies and the Plague of Justinian. He imagined Gerald, who was well traveled and lived into his late seventies, as someone not unlike himself, healthy, active, curious, a man of the Church who wrote about the people he met, the animals he saw, the places he visited. In all his years of fascination with language, wars, and cultural invasions, Henry had never actually identified with anyone until Gerald of Wales.

  No one talked much about the Plague of Justinian. It had occurred in the darkest of the Dark Ages, but it was at least as interesting as the Black Death. It was easy for Henry to imagine Gerald, 650 years later, standing there as they lifted the mortal remains of the famous Arthur and his famous second wife. Gerald would have been in his mid-sixties, simultaneously repulsed and fascinated by the ragged-clothed skeletons, noticing bits of jewelry and perhaps finery clinging to the bones, thinking: So this is him, what really did happen so long ago, here they are, exposed to the sunlight of the modern era, how did they die, what were their lives like? Was he the tyrant that Henry Plantagenet was? In 1191, Henry had been dead for two years, and the murder of Thomas Becket was twenty years in the past. Did Gerald of Wales think of that at once, or not at all? Did he think of it the way Henry thought of the assassination of JFK, an emblem of his youth? And it was also true that, if you drove three or four miles past the University of Chicago, you came to Avalon Park. Supposedly, Arthur won the Battle of Badon—was that Bath? And he called his Britain “Avalon”—the Isle of Apples (from the Indo-European root, *ab(e)l). Henry imagined Gerald of Wales turning these ideas over in his mind, going into libraries, asking questions.

  He found a parking spot.

  There were two editions of the works of Procopius, the major historian of Emperor Justinian’s reign—an old edition from before the First World War of the De bellis (Of Wars) and an edition of the Historia Arcana (Secret History) that was about fifty years old. Henry supposed it was possible that the U. of Chicago Library would loan these to the Northwestern University Library—they weren’t terribly valuable—or Henry could buy them on the used-book market, but, really, he enjoyed this sense of the fan vaulting drawing his gaze as he walked into the library. The door closed behind him, shutting out the wind and the cold. Philip had gotten his doctorate from this very university, and had surely spent hours and hours in this library, but Henry had never visited him here.

  A plague was a plague, no matter what the infection. That was all Henry was interested in anymore, not friendship or love or student careers or his own advancement, only the nature of infection and its passage around the world by means of things that seemed like good ideas at the time, such as grain storage, such as ships passing from one city to another, such as trade routes opening from China to Ireland, such as conquest, such as vast armies needing food and something to do. The Plague of Justinian (40 percent of the population dying in Constantinople, a quarter of everyone else) made AIDS seem very small, a flutter of mortality, not nearly as large as Philip, thin as wires in his bed, taking sips of water and listening avidly as Henry read an article to him from People magazine, oh, back in the early fall sometime, about a family in northern Florida who got a court order so that they could send their three hemophiliac-AIDS-infected sons to public school and promptly had their house burned down. By that time, Philip was past feeling sorry for those boys: however long they lived, it would be longer than Philip himself. What amazed and delighted him were the ideas of the hate-group that threatened the family before setting fire to their house—they thought you could buy a skin cream, like sunscreen, that would protect your child in case an AIDS-infected fellow st
udent touched him, their headquarters was the back room of a beauty parlor, they asserted that head lice were only surpassed in their ability as carriers by body lice (Philip had laughed so hard at this idea that he and Turner had to sit him up and give him water to stop the coughing), and that horses were the original carriers. Henry had stopped reading twice, but Philip gripped his forearm with his own mottled claw until he went on. Then Philip drifted off to sleep, and Turner and Henry sat in chairs on either side of the bed, watching him. Probably that very day, the final pneumonia was setting in, but Philip seemed alert, and Turner could feel no fever. Another thing Henry remembered was that Philip persisted in speaking the Queen’s English all the way to the end—maybe one of the last things Henry heard him say to Turner was a grammatical correction, “may not” rather than “might not.”

  Henry got his pass from the librarian and walked to the elevator. Did the Plague of Justinian look like the Black Death? There were plenty of descriptions of suppurating buboes and black gangrene in the literature. Or did all infections loom, horrifying and gigantic, on the inner eyelids of those who witnessed them, rashes the color of tomatoes, swellings the size of oranges, faces like skulls, never to be forgotten?

  —

  JOE WAS OUT EARLY, before the dogs were awake and before the thermometer hit eighty. When he opened the back door, they rolled over and stretched in their pen, and Rocky made his good-natured yawning noise: Glad to see ya, where’s my breakfast? They stood up with their tails wagging, and Joe let them out. They loped over to the edge of the east field and started sniffing and lifting their legs. Joe expected he would have to clip them in the next couple of days.