So. Perhaps his calm, considered, rational, progressive forbearance had its limits. Belonging to the first generation of American men who pulled their domestic weight, Carter had already changed the X-thousand diapers he’d planned to, and at least his infant children hadn’t bitten him in the process. Yet God forbid his father would lend a hand. Douglas had embraced such a perfect passivity that you’d never know he had any causal link to the presence of this creature in their house.
Deploying the difficult situation to fortify the all-for-one-and-one-for-all of their marriage, Carter and Jayne convened in the kitchen, just the two of them, before bed, in the precious interval before Luella’s “night terrors” set in and she began to wail. Together they’d each sip a tiny glass of port. An emblem of better days, the measured extravagance helped to preserve their sanity. (A few luxuries had been facilitated by the sale of the BeEtle—a mere encumbrance now that they never went anywhere, and a liability given that the police may have abandoned investigating burglaries, muggings, and homicides, but were more rigorous than ever about issuing revenue-raising tickets for alternate-side parking violations.) The couple always lit a candle and turned off the overhead to create a semblance of romantic ambience. Ritually, exhaustedly, they would share the indignities of the day.
All the same, Jayne blamed him—their visitors-for-life were his family—and knowing she shouldn’t blame him merely buried the resentment into the deeper, more instinctual emotional stratum where the feeling was at its most virulent. Likewise, Carter couldn’t help but fume when Jayne threw up her hands, reminded him of how strenuously her doctors had advised against “stress,” withdrew to her Quiet Room, and locked the door—deaf to his proclamation that they had now entered a hard-assed era of American culture during which all that gutless guff about ADHD, gluten intolerance, and emotional support animals was out the window.
Yet the prime target of his enmity wasn’t his wife, but Luella herself. Carter had never much cared for the woman when in possession of her faculties. That floating, willowy deportment she’d cultivated, the hyper-civilized manners, the too-precise elocution—he’d never bought it. Luella’s whole shtick had been an artificial construct, and now, he believed, the surface refinement had been stripped off to reveal the real thing. Deep down, she’d always been a catty, cunning, covetous animal—ferociously determined to get her way; suspicious of others, since calculating, self-centered schemers always assume that everyone else is just like them; shrewd, but not very smart. It didn’t surprise him in the slightest that when you set her mind loose it produced rhyming drivel.
He found it telling, too, that the only food she’d eat without its being shoved forcibly down her gullet was anything chockful of sugar. In Luella’s heyday, she’d claimed to have no taste for sweets, a pretense that serviced her fashion-model figure. Add a few protein plaques and a smattering of miniature strokes to that mean scrabble of predatory opportunism in her head, and behold: a sweet tooth the size of a mastodon’s.
Luella had never liked Carter, either. She didn’t find him impressive. He’d overheard her once despairing to Douglas that his only son hadn’t inherited more of her husband’s esprit and joi de vivre. But the real reason she was uncomfortable around her stepson was that Carter had her number. She was a fake, she was a social climber, she had plotted from the start to marry Douglas only to outlive him and inherit his fortune, and when it eventually got out that Luella had left for la-la land in her latter fifties, Carter thought that was the best news he’d heard all day. Except now the revenge had boomeranged. She seemed to have deposited herself on his doorstep on purpose, like, There. You wanted the real Luella? Well, this is the real Luella. Happy now?
It didn’t help, either, that Luella was now a drooling kewpie-doll substitute for his real mother, whose disappearance into Manhattan’s anonymous mire of unremarked murders and missing persons had deprived him of any formal mourning of her passing. Only three years ago, the demise of the formidable powerhouse of charity fundraising would have occasioned one of the best-attended memorials of the year. If at last genuinely necessary, most charities had folded in the interim, and the sort of celebrity gala he imagined was unheard of. No one with a sou would flout it.
Carter saw no point in disguising it from himself: he wished Luella dead. While he might not have throttled her with his bare hands, in his personal Twilight Zone he’d gladly have thought-crimed the hellion cleanly to the cornfield. Because for all the hype about how dementia sufferers were “still capable of joy” and “still had value as human beings,” he detected no joy in their charge; the household hardly sponsored the buoyant sing-alongs and imaginative crafts projects of the apocryphally stimulating nursing home. And lifetime liberal or no, he was inexorably rounding on the view that to have “value” as a human being you needed to be of some earthly use to someone else.
At least Carter didn’t wish his father dead, too. Their relationship decontaminated of ulterior motives, Carter continued to feel a bedrock fondness for his father that he’d never trusted when it paid too handsomely. Late-life penury had likewise confirmed that his father’s character transcended the two-onion martini. Oh, he railed along with the best of his class, but at length Douglas had accommodated lifestyle demotion with surprising aplomb. So long as they kept him in liquid nicotine, he rarely complained. (In these ravenous times, the newer flavors of e-bacco stuck to the ribs: turkey-and-gravy-with-stuffing, or caramelized-ham-and-red-onion-chutney.) It was only the repetition that had grown unbearable; if Carter heard the three criteria of a functional currency one more time he would scream. Otherwise, Douglas had quietly adjusted to reading digital books and watched loads of TV.
Which was just how he was occupying himself in his room on the third floor the afternoon of March 7, 2032. Douglas was obsessed with the approaching presidential election, and that month would see primaries in Texas and Florida, among others—heavily Lat states that could help the incumbent. Naturally the Republicans were a write-off; the leading GOP contender had branded Dante Alvarado “Herberto Hoovero,” an epithet widely decried as racist. Yet the president was battling a serious challenge for the nomination from the leftwing grandee Jon Stewart, who was campaigning to wave the white flag on the bancor. Since the smallest little child could see that boycotting an increasingly entrenched international currency had proved a calamity for the US, the primaries—which, without a viable opposition party, were the election—pitted it’s-the-economy-stupid against the consolidation of ethnic equality. None of the Lats and white progressives who’d elected Alvarado wanted to see America’s first Mexican-born president serve only one term. Carter himself was torn, though he wasn’t telling Jayne that.