Charlotte Armstrong was not perfect, or nice. Good but not nice; and good is more important than nice. Grumpy and sharp-edged, and as I said, solid in form. And sixteen fucking years older. Right now I was thirty-four, which meant she was, oh my God, fifty. Fifty years old! She might as well be eighty!
Okay, big deal. So what. Because she made me laugh. And what’s more, I made her laugh. And I wanted to make her laugh. This was becoming something I was trying for, I mean really trying for. I angled what I did to please Charlotte Armstrong, to make her laugh. I looked around for things to do or say that would get that response from her. These days it was my main priority, it seemed.
That being the case, on this afternoon I got the bug up to speed and we lifted off the water and flew like a bird, like that bird called the shearwater, which you sometimes see out on the Atlantic skimming the waves, and which I once heard never lands at all, just lives and sleeps and dies at sea, an idea that I find strangely appealing. Especially when flying in the bug. Which it occurred to me I should christen the Shearwater. We shot out the Narrows under the big bridge and in my mind I named it that very moment, in the shadow of the bridge, and we flew.
South along the Jersey shore. And yes, Charlotte laughed. She stood and shuffled to the bow, holding on to the deck lines in a sensible way, and stood up there with her arms outstretched and her hair flying. I smiled and focused on piloting a clean line over the low swells, which were coming in from the east. By paying attention to the swells and veering smoothly to stay on a beam reach along the back of one for as long as possible, then jogging to the left up and over the next one to the east and then staying on that one also for as long as possible, our course came very close to transcending the swell and being a perfectly smooth ride, feeling something like one of the harbor ferries but very much faster. I had no idea if Charlotte was sensitive to the swell or not, but the last thing I wanted now was for her to get seasick. And the truth is that I myself don’t have any great stomach for the ocean’s up-and-down, be it heavy or slight, so I like to minimize the effect when I can. And there’s nothing like the Shearwater for doing that, because speed helps, somehow. And today the swell was not that large. So we flew!
After a while she came back to the cockpit and sensibly got in the wind shelter under the glassine half shell. I was in the airflow pocket at the stern, seated and twiddling the wheel with one little finger.
“Champagne?” I suggested.
“You shouldn’t drink and drive,” she said.
“You drink for both of us.”
“When we land. Or throw anchor. Whatever.”
In the cockpit’s air pocket the sound of the motor and the shearing of the foils through the water were all as subdued as the wind. We could talk, and did. The Jersey shore was low and autumnal, not with bright New England colors but more a brown sludgy tone, never very high over the horizon. Possibly the hurricane had ripped all its leaves away too. The East Coast was very obviously a drowned coastline; it had been like that even before the floods, and now more than ever. From our angle it looked like land on this planet was an afterthought.
Charlotte got a call and took it. She glanced at me as she listened, mouthed Fed Ex with her hand over the speaker, then nodded as she listened.
“Yeah, I’m on my way down now. By boat. My boatman. Yeah, the captain of my yacht. All congresspeople get a yacht, didn’t you know that?
“No, I know.
“Listen, you said you would need help in Congress. So now I’m there.
“No, of course not. But it’s not just me. I’ve been talking around the new members, and there’s a lot of them like me. It makes sense, right? Because now’s the time.
“I hope you’re right. I’ll try, sure.
“Shit yes we’ll back you. Just keep the president in line and it’ll happen. You’re the crucial figure in what gets tried. It’s fiscal policy.”
Then she listened for a long time. After a while she began to roll her eyes at me. She put her finger on her wristpad’s microphone. “He’s giving me all the reasons he can’t do it,” she said under her breath. “He’s chickening out.”
“Tell him the Paulson story,” I suggested.
“What do you mean? What about Paulson?”
Quickly and urgently I outlined the story for her. She nodded as I spoke.
When I was done she took her finger off the mike. Suddenly her look was fierce, her tone of voice likewise. She snapped, “Listen, Larry, I understand all that, but it doesn’t matter. Do you understand? That doesn’t matter. Now’s the time for you to be bold and do the right thing. It’s your moment, and you don’t get to do it over again if you get it wrong. And people will remember. Do you remember Paulson, Larry? He’s remembered as a chicken and a sleaze, because when the whole system was going down he ran up to New York and told his friends he was going to nationalize Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, right after he told everyone else he wasn’t going to. So his friends sold their shares while they were still worth something, and everyone else lost big-time. What? Yes, it would have been insider trading if he had had any investments in that stuff himself, but as it was he was just helping his friends. And now that’s all he’s remembered for. All. Nothing else. Your biggest move is what you get remembered for, Larry. So if it’s a bad one, that’s it. So fucking do the right thing.”
She listened to her ex for a while and then laughed shortly. “Sure, you’re welcome. Anytime! Talk to you later. Hang in there and do the right thing.”
She clicked the phone off and grinned at me, and I grinned back.
“You’re tough,” I said.
“I am,” she said. “And he deserves it. Thanks for the story.”
“Seemed like it was time for the stick.”
“It was.”
“So now you’re an advisor to the chair of the Fed!”
“My Fed Ex,” she said. “Well, he likes to be able to ignore me. I tell him what to do, he ignores me. It’ll be like old times.”
“But he’s doing what you told him to do this time, right?”
“We’ll see. I think he’ll do what the situation forces him to do. I’m just clarifying what that is. Actually you are.”
“It sounds way better coming from you.”
“I don’t see why.”
“Because you’re a realistic person, and he knows that.”
“Maybe. He thinks I’ve gone nuts, grinding in the city as long as I have.”
“Which is true, right?”
She laughed. “Yes, it is. Maybe I do want that champagne.”
“Good for you.”
I checked the ocean ahead and clicked on the autopilot, then went to the hatchway to the cabin, tousling her wild hair very briefly as I passed her. “Someone has to have the ideas,” I said down in the cabin.
“I thought that was you,” she called down the hatch.
“I did too,” I said as I came back up. “But these other ideas you’ve been talking about lately don’t sound familiar to me. So I’m thinking it’s not me. More like Karl Marx.”
She snorted. “If only. I think at best it’s Keynes. But that’s okay. It’s a Keynesian world, always has been.”
I shrugged. “He was a trader, right?”
She laughed. “I guess everybody’s a trader.”
“I’m not so sure about that.” I unwrapped the foil and wire from the champagne bottle, very old-fashioned, very French, and then aimed the cork to the side and sent it flying to leeward. Poured her a mason jar glass and sipped from it myself before giving it to her.
“Cheers,” she said, and clinked her jar to the bottle I was holding.
Then after she had drunk about half her glass, and I was back to steering, or at least supervising the autopilot, she got another call.
“Who’s this? Oh! Well, thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to hear from you. Yes, I’m really looking forward to it. It’s a very exciting time, yes it is.
“Yes, that’s right. We were married whe
n we were young, and we’re still friends. Yes. He is very good. Yes.” She laughed, seeming a bit giddy; I thought the champagne had gone to her head, but then realized who it must be. “Well, he was so brilliant we had to get divorced. Yes, one of those. It was like nuclear fission, or is it fusion. Anyway that was a long time ago. But now we talk, yes. He has the right ideas, I think. Yes, there’s a big group of us in the House, and I think in the Senate too. What? The court? Haven’t you packed the court already?”
I could hear the laugh coming from her phone, a familiar-sounding soprano cackle.
“Okay, I look forward to meeting you. Thanks again for calling.”
She let the phone fall to the bench, stared at the Jersey shore, then out to sea.
“The president?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“I thought so. What did she want?”
“Support.”
“Of course, but … wow.”
She looked at me and smiled. “It may actually get interesting.”
Late in the day it got colder and the swell a bit higher, and I let the Shearwater down and brought it in to shore, looking to spend the night at a marina in Ocean City Bay, where I could recharge the batteries and take off at dawn. The harbormaster radioed to say there was a space in the visitors’ slips, so as the sun was going down behind the Maryland shore I puttered in behind the floating seawall and followed the harbormaster’s gestures into a slip. She tied off at one cleat, I tied the other, and there we were. Once the battery’s charger was plugged in, Charlotte and I walked up to a restaurant with its windows overlooking the marina. The Highway Fifty Terminus. Nice view. I could have barbecued on the boat but didn’t want to. This was nicer, and we needed a break, needed the space for a while.
We talked over dinner, not just money and politics, but music and the city. She had been born and brought up in the Lincoln Towers, right on the Hudson. She listened to my stories of Oak Park, Illinois, and we ate seafood on pasta and drank a bottle of white wine. She watched me closely and yet I didn’t feel observed or judged. I tried to make it clear that trading had interested me as a puzzle to be solved, a story to be pulled together out of the data. I explained my theory of the screen and its multiple simultaneous genres, giving when taken altogether a glimpse into the global mind. A hive mind.
“Like history,” she said as I tried to describe it.
“Yes, but visible on a screen. History as it’s happening.”
“And quantified, so you can bet on it.”
“Yes, that’s right. History made into a betting game.”
“I guess it always is. But is that good?”
I shrugged. “I used to think so. I enjoyed it as such. But now I’m thinking it has to be more than just something to bet on. With this building project, it’s more, I don’t know …”
“Making history.”
“Maybe so. Making something, anyway.”
“Did you get what you wanted when you went up to see Ramirez?”
“Well, I bought him out. And he let me do it. I suppose that was because his security contractors had been breaking the law. I may have burned a bridge there, I don’t know. He said we’d be seeing each other again. I don’t know what to think of that.”
“They won’t go away,” she said, regarding me with a little smile.
Was I naïve? Did I still have things to learn? Was she regarding me fondly? Yes to all. I felt confused in so many ways. But that look: it made me smile. It shouldn’t have but it did. It was a fond look.
When we got up to return to the boat, I felt good. Full; a little tipsy. Listened to. And I too had listened. We walked back down the slipways arm in arm. I turned on the boat’s lights and showed her down into the cabin, showed her the two beds tucked into either side of the narrow space down the cabin’s middle. Her bags were on the guest bed, and she put them onto the shelf over the bed, dug around and pulled out a bathroom bag and some kind of clothing, I guessed it was her pajamas. She left them on her bed and we went back up to the cockpit and sat under a few stars, fuzzy in the salt air. I had scotch but left it down below; we didn’t need it. Heads back on the rail, shoulder to shoulder.
Okay, I liked her. And more than that, I wanted her. Did that mean I was falling for power? Was it really true, then, that power is sexy? I couldn’t really buy it, not even then and there, looking at her and feeling that she looked good. Power comes out of the end of a gun, Mao said very cogently, and the end of a gun is not sexy, not if you are a normal person who values your life and thinks of sex as fun and guns as sick and disgusting. No; power is not sexy. But Charlotte Armstrong was sexy.
So but what did that mean? Sixteen years older, holy shit. When I myself was sixty, and hopefully still thoroughly hale and hearty even at that admittedly elderly age, she would be seventy-six years old, ack. An inhuman number. If I got to a lucky seventy, she would be eighty-six and deeply, deeply ancient. Up and down the years, the discrepancy was like a Grand Canyon between us.
But now was now. And by the time we got to that future point, I figured either she would have seen through me and broken up with me, or I would have caught a cancer and died, or more likely she would die and leave me bereft and seeking consolation with some thirty-year-old. I would be like one of those horrible Margaret Mead–Robert Heinlein line marriages and first marry someone way too old for me, then someone way too young. It sounded awful, but what was I going to do? Some people get lucky and partner up with someone the same age, they know the same songs, have the same references and all that, good for them! But for the rest of us it’s catch-as-catch-can. And just thinking of her kicking ass in the nation’s dismal swamp was making me laugh. It was going to be funny.
“Come on,” I said after a long silence. “Let’s go below.”
“Why?”
“Why what? You know why. To have sex.”
“Sex,” she scoffed, as if she didn’t believe in it, or had forgotten what it was. But there was a sly little smile tugging up the corners of her mouth, and when I kissed her I learned very quickly that she knew perfectly well what sex was.
The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
f) Amelia
Over New York harbor, a calm spring day, year 2143. Cloudless, visibility forty miles.
Amelia took Stefan and Roberto and Mr. Hexter up in the Assisted Migration and ordered Frans to ascend to two thousand feet to have a good look at the bay. Mr. Hexter was excited to be getting to see the city from this marvelous vantage point and planned to take photos for some kind of mapping project he was contemplating. The boys were happy to come along and catch the view, see if any muskrats could be seen from the air.
“I see them all the time,” Amelia said. “You’ll love the telescopes Frans has on board.”
As they made their ascent the boys and Mr. Hexter toured the gondola, with Amelia explaining everything, including the claw marks made by her polar bears, which she could now point at with only a brief plunge into sadness. It was just one of the bad parts of the past. In her campaigns on behalf of animals and habitat corridors she had experienced many reversals, and witnessed a lot of suffering, and often death. Now, as she drew her hands down the scratch marks and showed how the bears must have fallen down the suddenly vertical hallways, she could put that foolish moment in context. Category: Amelia’s Dumb Moves, Extrication From. It was a big category. It was not that particular moment that had been the bad one.
“Let’s have lunch,” she said after the boys and Mr. Hexter had marveled.
They gathered in the glass-bottomed bow of the gondola and looked down at the city as they ate tofu burgers that Amelia had prepared on her kitchen stove.
“How many miles have you traveled in this thing?” Mr. Hexter asked.
“I think it’s a million now,” Amelia said.
She asked Frans, and the ai
rship’s calm Germanic voice said, “We have traversed one million, two hundred thousand and eighteen miles together.”
Hexter whistled briefly. “That’s like fifty times around the world, if you were going around the equator. So it must have been more times than that.”
“I think so. I’ve lived up here for a long time. It’s kind of like my little skyvillage. A sky cottage, I guess you’d call it. There were some years when I didn’t come down at all.”
“Like the baron in the trees,” Hexter said.
“Who was that?”
“A young baron who climbed into the forest in Italy, and never came back to the ground again for his whole life. Supposedly.”
“Well, I did that too. For a few years.”
“Years?”
“That’s right. Something like, I don’t know, seven years.”
Hexter and the boys stared at her.