Turn of the Century (103 page)

“I guess the money said ‘Fuck you,’ ” George says. He turns over on his back and looks up at his wife’s face. “Hey, I canceled the lease on the Aston Martin. That’s twenty-three hundred dollars a month right there. Seriously, won’t the interest on your two million cover the nut for a while? The house, food, the car, tuition? There’s also my
Real Time
settlement and your consulting money from Bruce and Buster, plus we have the
NARCS
royalty. If it lasts.”

She looks down at him. “I gave the St. Andrew’s fund two thousand dollars this year, by the way.”

“Protection money,” George says. “Good thinking.”

“We’ll get by. I should clean up the lunch mess so we’re out of the caterers’ way when they get here. When’re your sister and Cubby coming over? Get off, my leg’s falling asleep.”

“Kiss me first. Not until three. He had a run-through at St. Patrick’s.”

Cubby and Ben’s religious light-and-magic business, the Guild, is having its American debut tonight at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. (“Spectacle of the Spirit” is being cosponsored by Lincoln-Mercury and Versace.) George and Lizzie will go to the early show, then come home for the traditional New Year’s Eve dinner party.

Lizzie leans down, yogilike, and smooches him quick and sloppy, then bobs up, slides his head to the floor, and stands. “You should put
out the thing, their gift,” Lizzie says. Alice and Cubby’s Christmas present to George and Lizzie is a Home Again reproduction of a red-white-and-yellow turn-of-the-century carnival ring-toss game that looks like a Jasper Johns painting. Unbeknownst to Alice and Cubby, Zip copied it from an antique carnival ring-toss game that George and Lizzie have hanging in the house on Lake Marten.

“Alice actually thanked me yesterday,” George tells her, sitting up, “for connecting Cubby to Ben. I almost cried. I think it’s the first time she’s ever thanked me for anything in her life.”

“What did she ever have to thank you for before?” Lizzie says on her way down to the kitchen.

“
I’m
the unsentimental prick?” he replies, trailing after her.

“George, what are those boxes in the closet under the stoop? Are those presents you forgot to give?”

“No.” He shouldn’t lie. Even the small lies can be trouble. “It’s some sporting goods I bought during, you know, in August. I’m returning them.”

She turns to look at him. She is stunned.
“Sporting goods?”

“And other stuff. You don’t want to know.”

In the boxes are: a Maptrek, a GPS device for skiers that records their paths and speed, but which George planned to hide somehow on Lizzie’s person in order to track her movements; a GPS “vehicle locator” that attaches to the car phone, which was to have been a redundant backup system to the Maptrek; and something called Walker’s Game Ear, which hunters use to amplify the sounds of deer flanks rustling bush boughs and hooves crackling dried leaves from a hundred yards away. George never developed a specific plan for using the Game Ear, but it only cost $179.99.

“George Mactier purchases sporting goods.
There’s
a clinical definition of insanity. You’re sure you didn’t also buy the pistol?”

He puts his arms around her and grinds himself into her. “Ready to fire.”

The phone rings.

“That’s probably the kids,” Lizzie says. “
Antichrist!
lets out at two-something and you’re supposed to pick them up.”

“Hello? … This is he.” He gives Lizzie a funny look, opening his mouth and popping his eyes. Then, “Hello! This must be the longest game of phone tag in history.”

Lizzie stares at him, trying to guess the identity of the caller by interpolation.

“Sure,” he says into the phone. “No, that’s okay.… I do remember.… No, Harold never did. Uh-huh … Uh-huh … No, I know you do.… Well, I’m afraid I’ve got bad news.… It’s real. I don’t wear a toupee.… Well, whatever you call them.… Nope.… Right.… I understand. No problem.… No … Really? … I hope we can.… You have a happy New Year too. Bye-bye.” He hangs up. He looks at her, grinning and dismayed. “Guess.”

“I have no fucking idea.”

“Michael Milken. He said he admired my hairpiece ‘tremendously’ when we met at that party a year ago, and hasn’t stopped thinking about how ‘authentic’ it looked. He said ever since, he’s wanted to know who my ‘vendor’ is.”

Lizzie shakes her head.

“He also said, ‘I hope you can come to my little party for Nancy McNabb and Harold.’ Apparently
Nancy’s
left
Roger
for
Mose
.”

“When the two angels flew in at the end and landed on the altar,” Daisy Moore Granger is saying to Cubby Koplowitz and Lizzie, “I thought, ‘Clever. Very nice.’ But then when they started
glowing
, and then sort of became that blue light that filled the whole nave, and then the thunder and whirling noise—I tell you, I actually felt like kneeling. And I’m not Catholic.”

Lizzie wonders for a second, almost unconsciously, like a fragrance on a stray breeze:
Did my husband sleep with you?

“And that’s not even state-of-the-art, holography-wise,” Cubby tells Daisy. “At the mosque in Chicago next month, as a surprise to everyone at the conclusion of the service, we’re going to have the prophet mingle among the congregation.”

“So,” Lizzie asks her brother-in-law, “you and Ben really have a shot at getting Bill Clinton to be your cemetery anchorman?”

At the other end of the table, Bruce Helms’s girlfriend, a university-press book editor named Agnes who has annoyed everyone all night long, is talking past Warren Holcombe (whose book,
The Modernist Madnesses
, she once declined to publish) to Ben Gould’s date, a young Englishwoman named Caroline Osborne—the prettiest person in the room by far and, as it happens, Gloria Mose’s daughter.

“What is the official term for the kinds of articles your magazine prints,” Agnes says to Caroline, “is it gossip, or celebrity confession, what?”

“Journalism is the official term,” Caroline says. “But I suppose you could call it ‘cultural studies primary texts,’ couldn’t you?”

Bruce’s girlfriend aside, the dinner is going well. The standard gaiety is bound up tonight with a complicated sense of gravity. Almost everyone at the table feels it, as they eat and drink and flirt and chatter, this sense of some new hybrid sentiment seeping over them. It’s not fear, or giddiness. Is it cheerful rue? Is it wonder? Imminence or immanence or both? What they’re feeling, one of them thinks (or maybe several of them), is a mood of respite rather than of completion, pausing here in the middle of the expedition to trade stories and collect thoughts. They’ve learned the queer new truth that the best way to move between two points isn’t always a short, straight line (FedEx and satellites carry urgent messages thousands of miles to move them ten), that any of the zigs or zags may be important. Most of the men and women here have been out on the trail long enough now to understand that the wild beasts do bite and the quicksand kills—that every special effect in life is real—but also that their good luck so far impels them to go back out for more, together and apart, after tonight. Where to? Nobody knows. The road ahead isn’t necessarily a road, as everyone in this room should realize by now.

“ ‘All clichés turn out to be true,’ that’s what Lizzie’s always said.” George is reassuring Jess Burnham about her plans to adopt a Korean infant. Jess joked that she would be committing two clichés in one—adoptive lesbian mother and transracial adoptee. “Anyhow, you’re now a gay CBS News anchor—that’s a total non-cliché, I think.”

“If you keep repeating ‘All clichés are true’ at every
whipstitch
, Mactier,” Zip Ingram leans over to say, “
that’s
going to turn into a cliché as well.”

“Which would be perfect, right?” says Pollyanna Chang from Zip’s other side. “Then it can become the final cliché, the ultimate cliché.”

“We don’t have an English word for
cliché
, do we?” George says. “I mean, with
cliché
, shouldn’t Americans be like the Eskimos, with their twenty words for snow and ice?”

“Actually,” says Bruce’s date, Agnes, who specializes in books with
titles that contain colons, “that’s a kind of racist myth—this idea that there are so many different words among the Arctic indigenous peoples for ice and snow. And so, right there you have an example of a cliché that is
not
true.” She smiles just enough to indicate how pleased she is with her cavil.

Lizzie, three people away, cannot resist coming to George’s defense.

“Actually,”
says George Mactier’s anthropology-major wife, leaning in front of both Warren Holcombe and Emily Kalman, “in the language spoken by Greenland’s Eskimos (who are the only Eskimos I know anything about) there really
are
a huge number of different words for ice and snow.” When Agnes reacts with a doubtful little smile, Lizzie adds, “At least according to Fortescue, in
West Green-landic
,” and then returns to her conversation with Francesca Mahoney.

“So,” Lizzie says, “you really think MTV might want to help out with Sarah’s new project?”

“I do,” Francesca says. “I’m going to talk to them about it on Tuesday.” Sarah and her friend Felipe are organizing a thematically driven, site-specific multimedia performance piece (their phrase) to be performed simultaneously by a hundred cyberpornographic “actors” around the world. Sarah and Felipe would write dozens of simple commands in advance—“Stroke your left breast,” “Suck your thumb,” “Shake your hair,” “Bend forward,” “Frown,” and so on—which would be delivered electronically in a random sequence for ten minutes to all hundred performers at once. The idea is for the hundred naked men and women, sitting in front of a hundred video cameras in a hundred different grotty cubicles all over the world, to obey each instruction in unison. All hundred images would be shown together on a giant patchwork of monitors—ideally, Sarah and Felipe think, on the video-wall skin of the Viacom building in Times Square.

“I think it’s so cool that you support her on this,” Francesca says, “since she’s only, like, what … ?”

“Fifteen next month,” says Lizzie, rolling her eyes, “and believe me, I really wish she had something else she was this passionate about. I’m prepared to be completely embarrassed if this happens. Probably even disgusted. But it is an interesting project, isn’t it?”

Zip stands and dings his glass. “Since everyone else here is too bloody cool to properly salute the beginning of the new millennium—”

“Hey!” Ben Gould shouts, “enough with the two-thousandth-birthday crap, you anti-Semite. You’re making Zimbalist and me feel bad.”

George looks at Lizzie smiling at Ben and wonders, in some theoretical microscopic sense:
Did she ever sleep with him?

Rehoisting his glass, Zip resumes, “A toast, then, Mr.
Gould
, to the conclusion of the fin de siècle—”

“Rerun! Rerun!” Ben says.

“Zip,” George agrees, “that
is
exactly the same thing you said, standing right there, a year ago tonight.”

“All right, then,” Zip says, suddenly more pleased with himself than ever, “a toast: to this fin de
sequel
.” People groan. “May we all continue to have the strength to live in these interesting times.”

Glasses are raised, cheers mumbled. George stands.

“I have two toasts,” he says. “No, three.”

“No need, George,” Emily Kalman says.

“Don’t worry, Emily,” he replies, getting a laugh. “First, to Elizabeth Zimbalist, who allowed me this year to discover all by myself the differences between fact and fiction.” No one but Lizzie (and Warren) is quite sure what he means, but there is a sentimental hum of
awwwwwws
around the table, as there is for any modern husband’s sincere public display of uxoriousness. “And also to my brother-in-law, Cubby Koplowitz,” he says, “who showed me one afternoon last winter that it’s possible to construct a world in a room no bigger than this, a strange and perfect little world that doesn’t need to be test-marketed or sold. In a garage, in St. Paul, Minnesota. Thank you, Cubby.” No one but Lizzie and Cubby and Alice (who is choking up) has any idea at all what this means, but it sounds eloquent, so they smile and say cheers. “And to Ben Gould, for finally giving my brother-in-law the wherewithal to test-market and sell all of his other nutty, appalling ideas.”

The teasing relaxes the room. Ben stands.

“And to Zip Ingram,” George continues, “for providing me with a lovely padded cell on wheels, for a month this fall.”

“Hey!” Ben says, “that’s
four
, toast hog. Sit down. Tonight, I want to salute all the weasels in the world”—as Lizzie’s eyes lock onto George’s, he shrugs—“to forgive them their trespasses against us. Because there but for the grace of God go I. And sometimes there
go
I.”

Before the laughter subsides, Ben’s heartbreakingly gorgeous date stands. Turning to stare at her in her astonishing Versace dress, the men at the table lock their smiles from a second ago in order to disguise their plain pig yearning, every one of them, for Caroline Osborne.