The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047. Lionel Shriver
chestnut hair was neat, his clothing tidy. The boy seemed always to be putting himself forward for inspection, and Lowell worried that the kid conceived of himself too much in relation to adults.
They both clammed up when their father made his appearance. But if they were up to something, Lowell would hear about it. Goog had the same garrulous, eager-to-please, desperate-to-impress quality that he had evidenced from the moment he learned to talk. He couldn’t keep a secret for five minutes. Bing could—but for all the wrong reasons. Soft and a touch overweight, their ten-year-old was chronically frightened. He’d make ideal prey for pedophiles: warned that if he blabbed he’d get into terrible trouble, Bing would hush-hush the story with him to the grave.
“You boys planning to stay upstairs tonight? Because you can come down and join us if you want. Though I’m not sure Mom has quite enough fish.”
“Oh, yuck!” they said in unison. They didn’t realize it, but given the outlandish prices and poor availability of anything but the farmed varieties, which tasted like pond scum, these boys had been trained to hate fish.
“Mom said we could have grilled cheese,” Bing said.
“Who’s coming?” Goog asked.
“Mom’s friend Belle Duval—you remember, the cancer doctor—”
“Oncologist,” Goog corrected scornfully.
“The oncologist.” God forbid you should insult Goog’s vocabulary. “Her husband, Tom Fortnum, is a lawyer with the Justice Department. Also, my colleague Ryan Biersdorfer and the woman he lives with, Lin Yu.”
Goog squinted. “The guy who did that ten-part documentary on inequality.”
Lowell’s middle child was keenly alert to the proximity of fame and influence. It required an unearthly maturity to keep from getting irked that the kid’s celebrity radar didn’t blip around his own father. Hadn’t Dad been on TV, too?
“What made Ryan’s name was a book, believe it or not. One of the last big bestsellers. It predicted that American low-skilled wages will soon be so abysmal that the Chinese will outsource their jobs to us.” Lowell tried to discipline the derision from his voice. “One of the things that makes an economist popular with regular people is a proclivity for hyperbole. Which means …?”
“A tendency to exaggerate,” Goog said promptly. “But how could you get more hyperbolic than what’s really happened? Olivia Andrews has taken a leave of absence from school because her father shot himself in their kitchen. I don’t think you guys have been exaggerating enough.”
“Sounds like you two should come downstairs, then. Join the conversation.”
“I don’t wanna listen to a bunch of economy stuff,” Bing said.
“Then maybe you were born into the wrong family.”
“Yeah. Prolly was.”
“Tonight, Bing?” Lowell said. “I’m with you. You guys stay up here, I might sneak away and join you. Ryan is a bigmouth showoff. I bet you know the type at school. When you grow up, nothing changes.”
He turned toward the door, but Goog piped up, “Dad, can I ask you a question?”
That boy could never get enough attention. Alas, bigmouth showoff was a label that might apply to his elder son. “Sure,” Lowell said coolly.
“A friend of mine at school. He said his mother had a bar of gold she bought a while ago in Dubai. Where I guess you could buy it like, you know, shampoo, without a paper trail. His mom had to explain to him about Dubai because he walked outside when she was digging a hole for the bar in the backyard. Isn’t that against the law?”
“Right now, yes. But your friend is a knucklehead. He shouldn’t have told you that. He needs to keep his piehole shut.”
“Well, he made me swear not to tell anybody.”
“So why are you telling me?”
Goog looked hurt. He’d be the only teenager in DC upbraided for sharing secrets with a parent. “’Cause I wonder what to do. Whether I should report it to somebody.”
“Like the police?”
“Yeah, that’s what they told us to do in assembly.”
“That,” Lowell said, “is sinister. And the answer is no, you do not want to report that gold to the police, or even to a teacher. Keep a lid on it. Your friend’s mother could be fined and even thrown in jail.”
“But what about the law?”
“I don’t care. There have been places and times where everyone rats on everyone else, and nobody trusts anybody. They were bad places, and bad times. This is the United States, and we don’t operate that way, got it? If I had some gold I wasn’t handing over to the feds, would you turn me in?”
“Are you hiding any?”
“Given this discussion, I wouldn’t tell you if I were.” The levity fell flat.
“But if people who surrender their gold get a roachbar price from the Treasury, like you said … And then the recalcitrant”—Goog gave the recent addition to his vocabulary an emphatic flourish—“not only get away with hiding their gold but can get a better price for it on the black market, or overseas …” Lowell was bursting with pride that his son had mastered the basics here without any help. “Doesn’t that mean that the people who follow the rules get punished?”
“As your father, I shouldn’t be letting you in on this rather ugly fact of life, but people who follow the rules are almost always punished.”
On that mournful note, Lowell headed downstairs, where the guests had arrived.
Word of warning,” Ryan advised. “It slows down security something fantastic.”
Avery was a bit exasperated that their company didn’t sink into the plenitude of seats in the soft chocolate living room. Everyone remained standing with their wine, instinctively encircling the dark, striking man in a trendy bronze-weave tie. He employed the flamboyant hand gestures of a VIP accustomed to holding court. Receding hairline, true, but Ryan Biersdorfer exemplified that good looks were 50 percent conviction. He was neither as smart nor as entertaining as he thought he was either, but since he did think he was, other people did, too.
“We flew out of Reagan last week, since I had to give a lecture in Zurich,” he continued. “The lines were staggering. I’d say add two hours. Even in ‘Fast’ Track.”
“Naturally,” Lin Yu said. “Business travelers are the worst offenders.”
Half Chinese, Lin Yu Houseman had reaped the best of both worlds—with the smooth, purified lines of a classic Asian face, but a Westerner’s slender nose and wide eyes, which women in China were once eager to endure plastic surgery to mirror. (Avery had read that the younger mainland set now considered eyelid augmentation pandering and undignified.) Barely thirty, she combined that hint of the orient that fifty-ish men like Ryan found sexy with a relaxingly straight-up American accent. Intellectually as well, she’d melded the diligence of an Asian upbringing—she’d been one of Ryan’s star grad students—with the earnest political passion of the East Coast liberal. Avery would have admired the young woman more had she parted ideological ways with her partner-cum-mentor even occasionally.
“But you should see the scene,” Ryan said. “It’s almost worth the aggravation for the theater. They’re searching every bag, not only the belongings of an unlucky few.”
“Thank God that, ever since the Shaving Cream Bomber, you can’t check luggage anymore,” Avery noted. “Or security could take a week.”
“Right now, the TSA couldn’t care less about bombs!” Ryan said. “But they are checking the inside sleeves of suitcases, and sometimes ripping the linings out. They’re prying into the folds of every wallet. They’re authorized to do hand