The Mandibles

by Lionel Shriver

  • CHAPTER 5 •

  THE CHATTERING CLASSES

  I told you I didn’t want to do this.”

  Avery eyed her husband warily at the kitchen counter as he poured himself a girding glass of French Viognier. After he’d put up such a stink about this dinner party, she wasn’t about to let him know how much that bottle had set them back. The exchange rate with the nouveau franc must have been ghastly. To cover her tracks, she had buried the wine shop receipt in the outdoor trashcan.

  “We haven’t had anyone over in two months,” she objected, “and it’s coming up on Christmas.”

  “Notice we haven’t been invited to one holiday bash this year? It’s understood: if you’re raising a glass, you’re getting plastered by yourself, with the door locked.”

  “But you’re the one who keeps saying this is temporary.”

  “I do think this is temporary. But for the time being, we’re surrounded by people who think they’ve been ruined.”

  “According to you, if only everyone would stop freaking out and act normal, the economy would settle in no time. Since I never go this long without having people to dinner, that’s what I’m doing: I’m ‘acting normal.’”

  “It sends the wrong signal,” Lowell grumbled. “This town is roiling with suspicion that certain-someones got their cash out of the country in advance. Or worse, have made a fortune at everyone else’s expense. It’s not a good time to live conspicuously high on the hog.”

  “Fine, we’re not having pork,” Avery said brusquely. “And there’s nothing highfalutin about the menu.”

  This was not entirely true. Avery had her standards. People thought you couldn’t get bluefin tuna anymore, but you could—for a price. After all that ruckus about the bees and patchy pollination on the West Coast, tossing shaved almonds in a salad was like scattering gold leaf. Since the jet stream’s burro-belly sag over North America had frozen Florida’s crops again, the lemons and the avocadoes were from Spain; the guy stacking them reverently in the produce aisle said shipments from Europe were so extortionate that Wholemart might stop stocking citrus altogether.

  Worst of all, like most cooks of her generation, Avery listed the primitive necessities of life as fresh water, shelter, clothing, and extra-virgin olive oil—preferably oil pressed in Cyprus; all the Italian stuff was fake. But when the liter went through the scanner at checkout, she objected that there must have been a mistake. Perhaps weary of this interchange multiple times a day, the surly clerk assured her that the bottle had scanned correctly, and asked if she wanted to have the olive oil put back. Embarrassment won the day, and Avery shook her head no, she’d take it. That receipt went into the outdoor can, too.

  “It’s not only the risk of ostentation,” Lowell said. “I’m not in the mood. I ran into a guy from Administration today, and he said to be prepared for a big drop in enrollment next semester. Parents are pulling their kids out of school. They can’t cover the tuition—if they ever could. Lucky I got tenure. When it came through, I took it as a compliment. Now it’s a lifeline.”

  “Therapists, I’m afraid, don’t get tenure,” she warned him, grating ginger. “Four more cancellations today. Those patients may never be back.”

  “They’ll be back.” He smoothed a hand over her rump, wrapped in a tight little black number for the evening. “If only to get counseling over, ‘Oh, why on earth did I sell my GM stock after it took such a dive? Had I simply held my nerve, I’d be sitting pretty!’ Like my wife”—he gave her buttock a squeeze—“who can’t help but sit pretty.”

  “Thanks. Listen, I do want credit: when you were so tepid about tonight—”

  “Not tepid. Violently opposed.”

  “When you were so ‘violently opposed,’” Avery revised, “I cut the guest list to the bone. It’s only going to be Ryan and Lin Yu, Tom and Belle.”

  “My, two out of the four I can actually stand. Good odds, as dinner parties go.”

  “It’s in your interest to stay on Ryan’s good side. Mark Vandermire’s a passing clown who got lucky, and given your positions you were always going to hate each other. But Ryan is your boss.”

  “He’s only head of the department, in defiance of my seniority, because he threatened to take his marbles to Princeton. They should never have capitulated to blackmail.”

  “That’s because Ryan Biersdorfer is a rock star. Economics doesn’t have many rock stars, so you have to make nice.”

  “Your husband’s not a rock star?” He’d have tried to say this lightly, but it came out wounded.

  She looped her wrists around his neck, keeping her ginger-hairy hands from soiling his shirt collar. “My husband’s more like a jazz musician. Much more careless.”

  Lowell left to check on the kids upstairs. Hopefully with that butt-patting banter and grousing about the guest list, he’d pulled off a reasonable facsimile of the grumpy yet affectionate husband on an ordinary Saturday evening when he wasn’t up for company. Everything he did and said lately felt fake—like cover, or distraction. Yet he did believe fiercely: this too shall pass, and more rapidly than anyone expected. Look at the Stonage: the country sprang right back. GDP took a hit in ’24, but the market recovered lickety-split. So: all that hair-tear for basically nothing. Same cycle, all over again.

  He rapped on Savannah’s door, then poked his head in. “You consider joining the grown-ups tonight?”

  “Nah.” His seventeen-year-old was sprawled on the bed, hunt-and-pecking on her fleX. Savannah was one of those girls who managed to make brown hair seem exotic. He trained his eyes away from her long bare legs; she was a knockout, she had powers, but he was her father. Which made him fortunate. He’d hate to be one of the teenage boys she turned to jelly. “I want to finish this application. I can ask Mojo for an omelet.”

  “Better make it yourself. Mom’s turned Mojo off for the night. She didn’t want it to bury the guests in the backyard or something.”

  “There’s a new Netflix series about that, you know. About a murderous Mojo run amok.”

  “Oldest sci-fi plot in the book. Goes back to 2001: A Space Odyssey.”

  Savannah frowned. “Why would science fiction be set in the past?”

  “Because when the novel was written, 2001 was in the future. Like 1984—which seemed far away when Orwell wrote it, but then the real 1984 came and went, and it wasn’t nearly as horrible or alien or sad as he predicted. Plots set in the future are about what people fear in the present. They’re not about the future at all. The future is just the ultimate monster in the closet, the great unknown. The truth is, throughout history things keep getting better. On average, the world’s population has a higher and higher standard of living. Our species gets steadily less violent. But writers and filmmakers keep predicting that everything’s going to fall apart. It’s almost funny. So don’t you worry. Your future’s looking sunny, and it’ll only get sunnier.”

  She looked at him with curiosity. “I wasn’t worried.”

  Well, that makes you a colossal idiot popped into his head before he could stop the thought. “What’s the school?”

  “Risdee. I can draw. But they want you more than anything to be able to talk about drawing. I’m not sure I’m so good at that.”

  “Visual art stopped being about making anything a long time ago. It’s all about talking. The talking is what you make.”

  “Doesn’t ‘visual’ art have to be something you see?”

  “I guess text is something you see.”

  “Not anymore,” she said. “Nobody at my school reads anything. They use ear buds, and get read to.”

  “Sounds slow,” Lowell said glumly.

  “It’s easy. It’s relaxing.”

  “They do know how to read.”

  She shrugged with a smile. “Not all of them.”

  “You have to be able to read even to work for the post office.”

  “Not really,” she said with an air of dreamy mischief. “Hand scanners can read aloud addresses, to
o. Careless, huh?”

  Lowell rolled his eyes. “Good luck with the application.”

  He shut the door. Not long ago, he’d been pleased that Savannah had fostered the marginally practical ambition to become a fabric designer, and of course she was pretty enough—no father was supposed to think this way anymore—that some guy was bound to scoop her up and take care of her come what may. But at this exact point in time, Lowell was leery of quite so airy-fairy a profession as crafting new prints when the world was already chockful of paisley. More pressingly still, last he checked a degree from the likes of the Rhode Island School of Design cost about $400,000—before room and board. The 529 Plan that Avery’s grandfather established when Savannah was born, meant to cover Goog’s and Bing’s higher education as well, was currently worth about ten cents.

  When Lowell stopped by Goog’s room, Bing was on the bed, too. Indoorsy and pale, Goog managed to thrust his chest out when seated on a pillow with his back to the bedstead. Didn’t a normal fifteen-year-old slump? As ever, his 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 searches, too; they slide their palms into your pockets, right next to the groin—unsavory, to say the least. You don’t only take off your shoes but your socks. They examine the heels for signs of tampering, and pull out the insoles. You could haul a rocket launcher through Reagan, and nobody would blink. But don’t try slipping out with an extra ten bucks!”

  “It’s amazing how many cheats they’re catching,” Lin Yu said gleefully. “You wouldn’t believe how brazenly corporate fat cats are trying to walk onto planes with briefcases bulging with cash. It was so gross. Stacks of thousand-dollar bills everywhere. All these supposedly upstanding citizens, and it looked like a drug bust.”

  “Except the bills scattered around the X-ray machine aren’t necessarily illicit,” Tom said. “I mean, we can at least presume that it is their money.”

  “We can presume nothing of the kind,” Lin Yu said. “That’s wealth that this entire country helped to create.”

  Tom took an it’s-going-to-be-a-long-night breath. “According to that reasoning, no one owns their money. The funds in your bank account actually belong to everybody.”

  The pleasantness of Tom’s tone sounded forced. Wearing an outdated suit jacket with a collar, he was a rumpled, easy-going, good-humored man, more inclined to defuse tension with a joke than to ratchet it up by getting personal. Ordinarily, his gentle Maryland accent—that would be Murrelun accent—further beveled his tactful opinions, but events this fall had put even the laid-back on edge.

  “Morally, your money does belong to everybody,” Ryan said. “The creation of capital requires the whole apparatus of the state to protect property rights, including intellectual property. Private enterprise is dependent on the nation as a whole for an educated workforce, transportation networks, and social order. No country, no fortune.”