When the tuna melt was served, Tooly excused herself, claiming to have eaten earlier. In truth, she just needed a break — wasn’t accustomed to so many people at once. And she had resolved to intrude as little as possible during her stay, planning to skip their meals (only partly because eating with a YouTube soundtrack made her want to scream into her sleeve). But, as soon as dinner ended upstairs, Mac came down to the music room and watched her tune the ukulele. “Want to try?” she asked.
“I’m supposed to be doing piano,” he said, pointing at the Yamaha keyboard in the corner.
“Oh, sorry — I’m in your way.”
“You want to play with me?”
“I can’t really sight-read music,” she explained. “I just battle at this piece by Rossini. It’s all I know.”
“I mean play Xbox.”
“What does that involve?” She found herself being pulled upstairs.
Still puzzling over game-controller buttons, Tooly was already riddled with bullets. Duncan appeared in the doorway, eating a microwaved burrito and checking his BlackBerry, still in suit and tie. “How’s it hanging?” he asked, mouth full, flopping on the couch and turning the plasma screen to a news channel.
“We were playing!” Mac complained. Finding no recourse, the boy departed.
Duncan switched among CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and CNBC, appearing to scrutinize Tooly with faint irritation. “Do you work out?”
“I walk. Does that count?”
“I sit on the train. Does that count?” It seemed to: he had spread, especially in the sitting regions. “You notice many changes in your body from walking?”
“To be honest, Duncan, I make it a policy not to look below my neck. I try to keep all this area”—she indicated from collarbones down—“free of major injury, but I don’t see any reason to actually look at it. Hey, it might be terrible to ask this, but you don’t have a small drink I could steal, do you?”
“Wait here.” He rose from the couch. He thumbed in a text. He looked at her. “Why did I just get up?”
“Drinks.”
“What? Oh, right. Some old wine in the fridge, possibly? I could open something.”
“Not just for me,” she protested, her voice fading from lack of conviction. She did want a drink; this day had constricted her.
He returned from the kitchen with a bottle of Beck’s for her, then lay on the floor, raised the volume on CNN, and checked both cellphones at once, each intermittently bleeping, as if the two devices were communicating with each other. “The girls just texted me that you play the ukulele. What’s up with that?”
“That’s thanks to you — you’re the one who got me into music.”
He pointed the remote at a couple of debating pundits. “The Bush crew were right on one count: people in this country don’t live in the reality-based community.”
Bridget appeared in the doorway. “I sense a state-of-the-Union rant,” she warned Tooly. “Listening not advised.” She asked her husband, “Are we going to have your decline-of-Western-civilization thing now, where you end up railing against call centers?”
“I’ll try not to drag the call centers into it. But, parenthetically, call centers do mark the decline of Western civilization.”
Tooly laughed.
“I’m not actually kidding.”
Bridget looked at Tooly. “He’s actually not.”
“Explain,” Tooly said.
“ ‘Explain’ is the single most dangerous word to utter in front of my husband.”
“Okay, here’s my theory. So, like, in the past,” he began, “when the American people acted like dumb-asses, it actually didn’t matter. Because we were being led by smart-asses, right? But now we’re basically run by lobbyists and pollsters, while Congress is a bunch of squabbling brats. So when the people act like dumb-asses today it matters. We had the war on terrorism, the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan. We’re going broke buying these billion-dollar drones to chase a bunch of clowns through the Pakistani tribal areas. Meantime, every serious country is burning past us.”
“You make it sound like a race,” Tooly said.
“That’s what it is. There’s, like, one point two billion Chinese, and they want what we got. They become as rich as we are? Well, they just can’t. We’re at war already. You hear this stuff about hacking? I guarantee you, China has a zillion geniuses stapled to their desktops figuring out how to ram us. Look how they’re hoarding our debt. We basically mortgaged this country to Beijing.”
“I remember people saying doomsday stuff like this in the 1980s,” Tooly noted. “How America was falling apart and Japan was going to run the world.”
“Japan was a boutique. China is the whole shopping mall,” he replied. “Our country was in charge of the world for a few seconds. So what did we do? Bitch-slapped Milosevic and Saddam, let global warming go out of control, and convinced the world that we’re a bunch of whack-job crusaders. And went broke doing it. That’s the story of our generation — the peak and the collapse, all in twenty years.”
“I don’t actually mind the U.S. not being in charge anymore,” Bridget commented. “Not like we did such a great job with that whole superpower thing.”
“You think that we suck at it?” Duncan responded. “Check out the competition. You want Russia and China running stuff? Russia is, like, the scariest place in the sort-of-free world. And the Chinese will sabotage every climate-change proposal till they’ve had their fair turn at fucking the planet.”
“Language.”
“But, Duncan, I don’t get where you stand,” Tooly said.
“He’s an against-everyone guy,” Bridget said.
“All politicians in this country are forms of Blagojevich,” he said.
“Obama isn’t,” Bridget said, trying to wrestle the remote from him as he switched to Fox News.
“Obama’s from Illinois,” he said. “A politician cannot come from Illinois and be clean.”
“Isn’t that where Lincoln was from?”
“Yeah, and you saw what they did to him.”
“Well, I think Obama is clean,” Bridget said.
“His feet are clean from all that water you think he walks on,” Duncan said. “Today’s leaders aren’t at the standards of the past. Nowhere near.”
“Hmm,” Tooly began hesitantly, wondering whether to speak her mind. “I don’t know,” she said. “Just, I always wonder if all this stuff about decline is false nostalgia — as if the old days were full of people opening doors for each other and memorizing poetry and playing the piano.”
“That’s exactly how I imagine the old days!” Duncan said, laughing.
“People in the old days were as rotten as people now, don’t you think?” she continued. “They were probably more ignorant and violent. There were great people back then — I’m sure your grandparents were very nice, especially to you, their grandson. But people from the Greatest Generation also spent a fair bit of time abusing and enslaving each other. No?”
“You think this current period is so fantastic?” he retorted. “Everything is progress everywhere?”