Turn of the Century (19 page)

“Extremely Daddy, isn’t it?” Lizzie says.

George, holding the note but looking away, doesn’t answer. Like his wife and eldest daughter, George is wearing dark glasses. Small children’s delusion that they become invisible by shutting their eyes tight is halfway to the truth—by wearing dark glasses adults can become semi-invisible, invisible enough to stare at strangers on the subway, or to privately cry in public.

“Baby?” Lizzie asks, touching his arm. “Are you okay?” George nods his head, holding his breath for a second, swallowing hard, and hands the envelope back to her.

David Spade, on the opposite side of the pool in tiny red trunks, laughs explosively and mulishly into a phone, sounding like Burt Reynolds circa 1975. Only in the Talk Show Age, George thinks, can we recognize and cross-reference the guffaws of the celebrated.

“By the way,” Lizzie says, “just for the record, I
never
enjoyed going to Palm Springs as a kid. It always felt like that Dalí painting he has. Surreal in a really tawdry, boring, obvious, sucky,
duh
way.”

“Can we go to Palm Springs?” Sarah says, grabbing her
Teen Nation
, open to an article called “PCBs: Why Leonardo DiCaprio Says N-O to NBC and GE,” off George’s chaise. “We could see the windgenerator fields they have there. Isn’t Palm Springs where Quentin Tarantino jumped that movie critic guy you know?”

“Mommy! Daddy!” Louisa yells from the pool, smiling. “Look! Sir is dead!” Max is floating face down, arms and legs limp.

“No, we’re not going to Palm Springs. Stop that, Max! LuLu, time to get out of the pool! You too, buster. It’s almost four. Now!”

In the west, the sky had turned faintly violet, the color of a sigh.

As they pack up their lotions, reading material, and children, Sarah urgently whispers, “Sinbad.”

Her parents look where she’s looking. Across the pool, just behind David Spade, the comedian Sinbad, holding a copy of
The Economist
with a giant flaming question mark on the cover, has come lumbering out of a cabana, accompanied by a perfect, tiny blonde.

“She’s practically your age, Sarah,” Lizzie teases.

“Right,”
replies Sarah, dubious, embarrassed, and flattered all at once.

“Could be an assistant,” George suggests halfheartedly as the five of them shuffle toward the looming pinkness of the hotel. “Remember when they formally forbade us from doing that piece at ABC?”

“What piece?”

“Black celebrities, white chicks.”

“Racist,” Lizzie says good-naturedly as George holds open the door for her and Sarah and the sopping children.

He has said nothing so far. Dr. Hardiyanti and a female colleague stand at the foot of the bed. Tammy is between them, squeezing both doctors’ hands. Mike Zimbalist opened his eyes ten seconds ago, but now he’s laboriously, twitchily shutting the left one tight. George, wondering if there’s some neurological problem, glances at the doctors, who are still beaming. Lizzie, holding her father’s left hand, idly rubbing the big gold pinky ring, realizes the eye shutting is a wink—a slow-motion,
postanesthesia wink. Her father is a big winker, and he always winks before he makes a wisecrack. Lizzie prepares to cringe. (A couple of days before his parent-teacher conference with Lizzie’s seventh-grade teacher, he had one of his comedian clients write him a half dozen jokes about the New Math, Jimmy Carter, and disco, “just in case things get slow.” Lizzie was aghast. The teacher, of course, was smitten.) Mike Zimbalist lets his winked left eye pop open, and purses his lips. He’s going to speak. “Oink!” he says. “Oink! Oink!
Oink
!” Everyone chuckles—even Lizzie.

Three days later, he’s still alive, still in critical condition, still beguiling the medical staff with pig jokes. “Hey, I guess now I’m
really
a male chauvinist pig.” Interspecies transplantation “isn’t just chopped liver.” He could do an endorsement for the hospital, touting “the other white meat.”

This morning, Tammy invited the whole family to move in to her and Mike’s house “for the duration.” And what is the duration? This morning, Lizzie dared to broach the topic for the first time with George. They were still in bed, and Lizzie was watching TV. On the KABC local news a man with a chirpy, nasal voice was delivering almost telegraphic reviews of forthcoming movies, ten in a minute. “Can a woman from the year 2000 save the world and get a boyfriend when she finds herself in the year 2125? Julia Roberts stars in
The Good Old Days
, B-plus! Opening Friday!”

“This asshole sounds like a recorded message,” Lizzie said. “You know? He sounds like the ‘Welcome to MovieFone, press one
now
for a theater near you’ guy.”

George, face down with his eyes still closed, said into his pillow, “It
is
the MovieFone guy.”

“No! It isn’t.”

“Uh-huh. He’s become a critic.”

“Amazing.”

“You’re suggesting he’s not qualified?”

“
Just
amazing.” She punches
MUTE
on the remote. “The kids have missed four days of school already.” She poked at George’s nearest buttock with an index finger. “George? Are you going to fly home with the kids tomorrow?”

George turned over and sat up. He had an extremely sincere expression that took Lizzie aback.

“They could go without us,” he said. “Sarah would be in charge. With Rafaela. And both of us stay here for a while, playing it by ear with your dad.”

As she had feared: empathy one-upsmanship. “Until when? Tammy says they’re not going to let him go home for at least four weeks, best case. If and when we need to come back, well, you know, we will.” If and when her father’s immune system finally wakes up and realizes that the liver isn’t just new,
it’s from a pig
, and does what it is designed to do—attack the pig liver, kill the pig liver, fight to keep Mike Zimbalist pure and (his native cells believe) healthy … the dumb, tragic loyalty of antibodies. If and when they need to attend the Neil Sedaka funeral gala at Merv Griffin’s Beverly Hilton.

The family has just arrived for Saturday dinner at a big, dark, sleek Chinese restaurant called Powerful on Sunset, at the Beverly Hills end of West Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard. On one wall hangs a life-size, photorealistic black-and-white portrait of the Gang of Four, overprinted in pink with the Courier typeface line
INT. SECRET LAB, SAN BERNARDINO, NIGHT
. On the matches and menus is the restaurant’s subtitle:
CHINESE CUISINE FOR THE THIRD MILLENNIUM
. The giveaway that they are in a West Los Angeles restaurant is the background music: in a restaurant this smart in Manhattan, there would be no Lite FM instrumental medley.

The male half of the restaurant’s clientele can be divided just about evenly into thirds, the standard West L.A. cut. There are those wearing mint-condition blue jeans or chinos, perfectly white sneakers, and freshly laundered casual shirts—the Spic-and-Span Super-Casuals, tanned and aggressively cheerful Maliboomers (Emily Kalman’s phrase) who would prefer that you envy their happiness and serenity more than their money and power. The Sullen Seven-Figure Scruffs, about a decade younger and dressed in well-worn jeans and dirty sneakers and shirts that do not look lemony fresh, are happening nerds and young dudes—wan, chubby sitcom creators, and actors with 1870s-by-way-of-the-1970s first names like Ethan, Billy, Christian, Vince, Ben, Skeet, and Stash. The nameless third group of men, lawyers
and lawyerlike executives and older agents, are in jackets and dress shirts—they’d be more comfortable wearing suits and ties, but can’t because it’s the weekend; it would make them seem uptight to the Spic-and-Span Casuals, the Seven-Figure Scruffs, and their own wives. The female half does not divide so neatly. Most (but not all) of the classic southern Californians, the genetically and surgically awesome Nicole Simpsons, are at tables with group-three men.

George hasn’t shaved today. But with his short new haircut he thinks the stubble might pass for rugged instead of slovenly. (“A grayer Mel Gibson?” he asked Lizzie the night he walked in with it. “A taller Rowan Atkinson?” she replied.) In his khaki pants, the peach-colored polo shirt he bought yesterday at the Gap, and an old blue Armani blazer, and with his fresh tan, George might pass for a Spic-and-Span Super-Casual. Which is fine with him. It seems the lesser evil, or anyway the less unattractive evil. Spic-and-Span Super-Casuals are, in effect, a youngish subset of Merry Hardasses and Merry Chatterers; David Geffen, a Merry Hardass, is paradigmatic, the Cary Grant of Hollywood’s underdressed generation.

Lizzie, wearing her Helmut Lang pants and black silk Cynthia Rowley shirt, looks like the friend of a Spic-and-Span Casual visiting from New York, or an agent. In New York, Lizzie sometimes wonders if wearing her hair loose makes her look too girlish and foofy. In L.A., as long as she’s not wearing very short shorts or Lycra, or exposing belly flesh, she won’t be considered frivolous, which is a relief. On the other hand, nothing she can wear or do will ever get her or any other woman taken entirely seriously in Los Angeles. The category, woman-taken-entirely-seriously, does not quite exist here, does it, still? As always when she returns to L.A., she thinks of Barbra Streisand: for all the crappy movies, the sunstroke spiritualism, the pussycat feminism, the angry insecure art-collecting autodidacticism, the diehard paleoliberalism, despite attaching herself to Bill Clinton and James Brolin, as ridiculous and annoying as Barbra Streisand is, in the southern California context, you start feeling sympathetic. Lizzie does, at least.

“Your dad was certainly chipper,” George says.

“Of course. He feels important. Some reporter from
USA Today
who heard something called the hospital. Daddy told Dr. Hardiyanti to
hold out for
The New York Times
, and offered to get him a TV agent for ‘the MOW deal.’ Remind me what MOW is?”

“Movie of the week,” Max says, standing up along with his little sister. “LuLu needs to go to the WC,” he announces over his shoulder as he walks away, using one of their former nanny’s phrases.