Kendall kissed his wife’s neck once more as he exited the kitchen. He headed upstairs, first to use the bathroom and, second, to get a sweater, but as soon he entered the master bedroom he stopped in his tracks.
It wasn’t the only master bedroom of its kind in Chicago. Across the country, the master bedrooms of more and more two-salaried, stressed-out couples were looking like this. With the twisted sheets and blankets on the bed, the pillows either mashed or denuded of their pillowcases to show saliva stains or spew feathers, and the socks and underpants littered like animal skins across the floor, the bedroom was like a den where two bears had recently hibernated. Or were hibernating still. In the far corner a hillock of dirty laundry rose three feet in the air. A few months ago, Kendall had gone to Bed Bath & Beyond to buy a wicker clothes hamper. After that, the family had conscientiously tossed their dirty wash into it. But soon the hamper filled up and they’d begun tossing their wash in its general direction. For all Kendall knew, the hamper might still be there, buried beneath the pyramid of laundry.
How had it happened in one generation? His parents’ bedroom had never looked like this. Kendall’s father had a dresser full of neatly folded laundry, a closet full of pressed suits and ironed shirts. Every night he had a perfectly made bed to climb into. Nowadays, if Kendall wanted to live as his own father had, he was going to have to hire a laundress and cleaning lady and a social secretary and a cook. He was going to have to hire a wife. Wouldn’t that be great? Stephanie could use one, too. Everybody needed a wife, and no one had one anymore.
But to hire a wife Kendall needed to make more money. The alternative was to live as he did, in middle-class squalor, in married bachelorhood.
*
Like most honest people, Kendall sometimes fantasized about committing a crime. In the following days, however, he found himself indulging in criminal fantasies to a criminal degree. How did one embezzle if one wanted to embezzle well? What kind of mistakes did the rank amateurs make? How could you get caught and what were the penalties?
Quite amazing, to an embezzler-fantasist, was how instructive the daily newspapers were. Not only the lurid Chicago Sun-Times, with its stories of gambling-addicted accountants and Irish “minority” trucking companies. Much more instructive were the business pages of the Tribune or the Times. Here you found the pension-fund manager who’d siphoned off five million, or the Korean-American hedge-fund genius who vanished with a quarter billion of Palm Beach retiree money and who turned out to be a Mexican guy named Lopez. Turn the page and you read about the Boeing executive sentenced to four months in jail for rigging contracts with the Air Force. The malfeasance of Bernie Ebbers and Dennis Kozlowski claimed the front page, but it was the short articles on A21 or C15 detailing the quieter frauds, the scam artists working in subtler pigments, in found objects, that showed Kendall the extent of the general deceit.
At the Coq d’Or the next Friday, Piasecki said, “You know the mistake most people make?”
“What?”
“They buy a beach house. Or a Porsche. They red-flag themselves. They can’t resist.”
“They lack discipline,” Kendall said.
“Right.”
“No moral fiber.”
“Exactly.”
Wasn’t scheming the way America worked? The real America that Kendall, with his nose stuck in Rhyme’s Reason, had failed to notice? How far apart were the doings of these minor corporate embezzlers and the accounting fraud at Enron? And what about all the businesspeople who were clever enough not to get caught, who wriggled free from blame? The example set on high wasn’t one of probity and full disclosure. It was anything but.
When Kendall was growing up, American politicians denied that the United States was an empire. But they weren’t doing that anymore. They’d given up. Everyone knew about the empire now. Everyone was pleased.
And in the streets of Chicago, as in the streets of L.A., New York, Houston, and Oakland, the message was making itself known. A few weeks back, Kendall had seen the movie Patton on TV. He’d been reminded that the general had been severely punished for slapping a soldier. Whereas now Rumsfeld ran free from responsibility for Abu Ghraib. Even the president, who’d lied about WMD, had been reelected. In the streets, people got the point. Victory was what counted, power, muscularity, doublespeak if necessary. You saw it in the way people drove, in the way they cut you off, gave you the finger, cursed. Women and men alike, showing rage and toughness. Everyone knew what he wanted and how to get it. Everybody you met was nobody’s fool.
One’s country was like one’s self. The more you learned about it, the more there was to be ashamed of.
*
Then again, it wasn’t pure torture, living in the plutocracy. Jimmy was still out in Montecito, and every weekday Kendall had the run of his place. There were toadying doormen, invisible porters who hauled out the trash, a squad of Polish maids who came on Wednesday and Friday mornings to pick up after Kendall and scrub the toilet in the Moorish bathroom and tidy up the sunny kitchen where he ate his lunch. The co-op was a duplex. Kendall worked on the upper floor. Downstairs was Jimmy’s “Jade Room,” where he kept his collection of Chinese jade in museum-quality display cases. (If you had criminality in mind, a good place to start would be the Jade Room.)
In his office, whenever Kendall looked up from his Tocqueville, he could see the opalescent lake spreading out in all directions. The curious emptiness Chicago confronted, the way it just dropped off into nothing, especially at sunset or in the fog, was likely responsible for all the city’s activity. The land had been waiting to be exploited. These shores so suited to industry and commerce had raised a thousand factories. The factories had sent vehicles of steel throughout the world, and now these vehicles, in armored form, were clashing for control of the petroleum that powered the whole operation.
Two days after his conversation with Piasecki, Kendall called his boss’s landline in Montecito. Jimmy’s wife, Pauline, answered. Pauline was his latest wife, and the one with whom he had found marital contentment. Jimmy had been married twice before, once to his college sweetheart, once to a Miss Universe thirty years his junior; Pauline was age-appropriate, a sensible woman with a kind manner, who ran the Boyko Foundation and spent her time giving away Jimmy’s money.
After talking with Pauline a minute, Kendall asked if Jimmy was available and, a few moments later, Jimmy’s loud voice came on. “What up, kiddo?”
“Hello, Jimmy, how are you?”
“Just got off my Harley. Rode all the way down to Ventura and back. Now my ass hurts but I’m happy. What’s up?”
“Right,” Kendall said. “So, I wanted to talk to you about something. I’ve been running the house for six years now. I think you’ve been happy with my work.”
“I have been,” Jimmy said. “No complaints.”