Turn of the Century (25 page)

“No, nice to meet you. George Mactier.”

As he puts his hand out toward Francesca, the furry E!
²
mike swings toward his face.

“It’s
great
to meet you,” she says. “I’m a serious fan.”

“Thanks.” How quickly praise palls.

“Of
Wars Next Door
,” she says.

The Wars Next Door
was his PBS series in the eighties about the insurgencies in Central America. Yes! More!

“
NARCS
is great too. But
Wars Next Door
is my
All the President’s Men
. Seriously. It’s why I’m in this business.”

“
George Mactier!
Hello! We meet at last!” says the Spic-and-Span Super-Casual, bringing his glistening, plumpish face and bloody-urine-colored lenses as close as he can to George. His smile is fierce. How do people manage to smile like that at someone they’ve never met? “It’s Sandy Flandy. How
are
you? The grapevine’s buzzing about the new show! And I can’t get Ms.
Kalman
,” he says loudly enough that Emily glances over and smiles, “to tell me a thing about it. You’re the talk of the town.” Flandy is the agent for Angela Janeway. Although Emily does almost all the negotiating with actors’ agents, thank God, George has had many phone conversations with Flandy. It was Flandy who called George, for instance, to express Angela’s discomfort with a line in which she was to call a tobacco executive a “scumbag.” (Angela’s daughter, George discovered weeks later, is a Brearley first-grade classmate of the daughter of a tobacco company CEO.) And it was Flandy who last month broached the Nelson Mandela guest-star notion on Angela’s behalf.

The camera and lights have everyone talking a little louder, smiling a little brighter. A panpipe-and-drum ensemble has started playing. The room is noisy. With the tip of the mike twitching above their heads like some giant Amazonian insect, and the cameraman circling their little group, now joined by Emily and a very sober-looking bearded man who wants to be mistaken for Steven Spielberg, the seven of them squeeze closer together, and their expressions grow bigger, as if they’re being directed telepathically:
Stay in the frame! Look like you’re chatting!
It’s intimate and impersonal, real and stylized, the smells of
their eaus and gels and unguents blending and simmering in the tanning-salon glare of the camera’s light. Emily, nodding and solemn-faced, looking as if she might be discussing Tuesday’s presidential primaries, is listening to the bearded man tell her about the well-known young talent agent who, having been treated for addiction to both cocaine and sex, went to live on a kibbutz, where he fell off the wagon sexually, because he found the women of the Israeli defense forces irresistible.

From the living room, the children are suddenly screaming, loud, shocked, hysterical. “Mom! Mom! Oh, my God! Mom!” And even before Max adds, “Come! Quick!” Lizzie is leaping up the stairs two at a time, adrenaline-powered. What is it? But no flames, no blood, no wounds, no crying, not even a fight. It’s the television that’s alarmed them, their father on television, live, talking and laughing with an MTV star.

The E!
²
camera moves in as Francesca brings her mouth close to George’s right ear. She’s trying to be heard over the din. “So you’re developing a prime-time news hybrid. ‘Extreme news,’ my friend at MBC called it.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“It sounds amazing.”

Ng rejoins them. “Timothy told me about the new show, George,” she says. “It does sound unbelievable.”

“I hope it’s not that,” George says.

Francesca laughs. Then, pressing hard against his left arm, she says breathily, “I cannot tell you how utterly available I am.” George locks his smile. At least a full second passes. Francesca says, “My Viacom contract’s up in June.” Then, retracting her mouth from his temple and her breasts from his arm, she says to him at normal volume, “You are the man, George Mactier. My hero. I’m serious.”

“We should talk,” he says, too softly for the E!
²
mike to pick up. “Back in New York.”

“I want this,” Francesca growls to George as Hank Saddler pulls her off to meet George Stephanopoulos, who’s in Los Angeles promoting the miniseries based on his White House memoir.

Sarah has galloped down from her room too, and now all four of them stand in the dark, staring at the TV. “Yes, LuLu, that’s really Daddy, and that party is really happening right this second in California, and it’s neither good nor bad. But it’s time for dinner.” A kind of religious hush has overcome Max. His jaw has dropped. “This is so awesome,” he says. Sarah, still holding her Princessy yellow cordless phone, glances at her mother. “Yeah, it’s awesome,” Lizzie says. “Come on, everybody, it’s late, chop-chop, it’s a school night,” she says as she whomps the power button on the set and marches out of the room.

Lizzie would never
dream of saying
I need some space
or
I’d love the chance to get back in touch with myself
. But she has to admit, the first twenty-four hours of Georgelessness are almost always pleasant. It isn’t about toilet seats or toothpaste caps, or the mélange of cream and whiskers coating the bathroom sink, or the damp towels on the bed, the tabloids tossed near the recycling bin, the little drifts of sugar and drops of half-and-half left on the counter around the coffee machine. It’s the respite, very briefly, from familial complexity. One day, alone in her office, she diagrammed it on a whiteboard—then, blushing, immediately erased the diagram. As a full family, all present, the house hums with emotional permutation. There’s the big, twin-star gravity of her relationship with George; her solar relationships with Sarah, Max, and LuLu; George’s relationships with each of the kids; and the subtle but distinct vector, a kind of redundant dotted-line relationship, that passes from George to Sarah, through Lizzie, and back again. As a nuclear family with a single nucleus, Mom alone with the kids, the diagram is much, much more than twice as simple. Life on Water Street isn’t literally quieter without him (if anything, Lizzie makes more noise than George does), but it feels more peaceful. She’ll have had her fill of
emotional austerity by tomorrow night, she knows, but this morning, the chill is still fresh and bracing.

“We saw you on television,” she said to him on the phone last night.

“What do you mean?”

“You and
Francesca
.” She pronounced the name in an exaggerated Chef Boyardee accent, even though Francesca is thoroughly American, native born. She was trying to sound blithe.

“So they aired that live? Jesus, what a zoo.”

“ ‘You’re the
man
, George Mactier.’ ‘I
want
you.’ Talk about fucking California caricatures. I’m surprised she didn’t start singing ‘Happy Birthday, Mr. President.’ ”

“Actually, she did, later. I guess the E! channel cut away before the humjob out on the terrace. By the way, it was ‘I want
this.’
She wants a job.”

Lizzie smiled, alone in their bedroom, but she doesn’t like it when George makes his jokes about having sex with other women. “I thought you were going to read scripts in the room all afternoon.”

“I did.” He paused, a half second of mental rewind, which Lizzie mistook as some kind of guilt over attending Saddler’s party and flirting with the MTV girl, when in fact it was guilt over snooping around her computer files. “But Emily called and insisted I go with her to this Hank Saddler party, so I went. By the way, I think I’ll go to Las Vegas tomorrow night and surprise Ben at the Barbieland grand opening. I’ve got nothing to do here until Tuesday. Except visit your dad.”

“Whatever,” she said. “It’s Barbie
World
. I’m going to sleep.”

But now, awake and alone in daylight, she checks her George feelings: no peevish residue, no grievance. The Francesca spectacle was funny. She’s relieved to be back in New York, refreshed, recharged, and rebooted, happy to be on her way to work, happy even to be on the number 3 train. She’s late enough this morning (after loading Max and LuLu into the neighborhood gypsy-cab service’s ’88 Eldorado, watering the orchids, paying bills) that she gets a seat right away. Several seats. She sprawls, in her jeans and black lace-up boots, across a plastic banquette unit for three, both feet up off the floor, reading the
Times
. The paper isn’t folded into tidy little rectangles in space-saving subway origami style, but spread out on her lap and legs, the whole broadsheet.

Since the move to Water Street from Sneden’s Landing last year, George admitted recently, he has taken the subway exactly four times. Lizzie maintains her subway ritual, especially in the mornings. She has her public reasons (it’s usually faster and always safer than a taxi, the number 3 stops close to her office, and, last and least, it saves thousands of dollars a year), but her attachment to the subway is less about utility than private personal symbolism. With money in New York City, it is tempting to ease into a platinum-card arm’s-length soft-focus version of urban life, Manhattan observed from behind tinted Town Car windows. (“What are ‘tainted limo windows’?” Max, misunderstanding, once asked.) As it is, the family has a city house, a country house, a sixty-thousand-dollar Land Cruiser, three children in private school. Since
NARCS
began, George has complained more than once about union featherbedding rules, and even she has discovered that EEOC and OSHA regulations can be stupid and intrusive and infuriating. Lizzie would feel too Republican if she abandoned the subway, just like she felt too Republican living on their acre in Sneden’s Landing.

Her train ride is a little pageant of race and class, each day the same and on many mornings so vivid it seems staged, a site-specific ten-minute avant-pop performance piece. Usually, before she can step into a car, she must stand aside for the hasty, eager exits of the very white lawyers and stock traders and investment bankers coming from their cheap, million- or two-million-dollar Brooklyn brownstones. At the next stop, the criminal lawyers and civil servants from the more Brooklynesque precincts of the borough get off, half of them white and half black, and are replaced by a shuffle of Chinese, each one carrying a cheap plastic shopping bag. At Fourteenth Street, Lizzie disembarks, slipping off the train and onto the platform between a pair of beggars, ready with their props and spiels, and a pack of actors and models, dreaming of theirs. One of the Fourteenth Street bums this morning—a white man about her age in a filthy T-shirt that has
HIV!
printed in huge letters across the chest—stands directly under a
NO SPITTING ON PLATFORM
sign and spits as she passes. Maybe antiexpectoration can be the last great crusade of the Giuliani age. Her loathing of Giuliani is visceral. She voted for him in both mayoral elections, first against a nice black man and then against a nice Jewish woman, and both times she spent Election Day giving out a five-dollar bill to everyone who asked for money, as penance.

The MTA seems to have taken down all the
AVOID ARREST
signs. When she first moved to the city, Lizzie remembers, in 1987, those signs, as ubiquitous underground as graffiti, struck her as strange and funny. An advertising campaign unabashedly targeting a particular New York City demographic—punks, fare beaters,
criminals
. With a message abdicating any assertion of moral authority in favor of simple, direct, cost-benefit advice that sympathetically presumes a desire to break the law—
PLEASE DO NOT FORCE US TO APPREHEND YOU
. (Lizzie had wondered why the authorities neglected bilingualism here, of all places. She never saw an
EVITE SER ARRESTADO
sign.) Maybe she is a Republican already. Maybe, it occurs to her, she could buy an
AVOID ARREST
sign at one of the antique stores on Lafayette Street.