Turn of the Century (30 page)

“No!”

“Yes. I was so pissed,” Pollyanna says, taking a drag and elaborately exhaling, “I turned right around and went home.”

“Did you call?” Lizzie is an eager audience for her unmarried friends’ relationship stories, even and maybe especially the nightmares. She enjoys the hits of vicarious unhappiness.

“No. And when I called the next day, I was like, ‘Why the
fuck
didn’t you call my apartment? I could’ve been dead!’ And he said, ‘Because I fell asleep, and in the morning I figured out what had probably happened.’ ”

“Yikes. That’s not good, Polly. That’s bad.” A habit of extreme directness is one virtue of spending a lot of time with small children.

Pollyanna says nothing, then, “Yeah, well, it’s badder than that.… There’s a cute new boy at work.”

“Uh-oh,” Lizzie says, smiling. “The return of
Danger Girl!
” Danger Girl is the third-person alter ego nickname Lizzie and Pollyanna traded back and forth in the eighties, when both of them were single. She is kind of an imaginary super-antiheroine who smoked and drank too much, sometimes used cocaine, had imprudent sex with incorrect men, but always got every bit of work done perfectly. At thirty-five, Pollyanna, with her deceptively lost-little-Chinatown-girl smile and cascade of straight black hair down her back, still communes with Danger Girl occasionally. Another flavor of vicarious emotion Lizzie counts on her friends to provide.

“He’s pretty seriously cute. I mean, he’s still a
lawyer
. I’ve hardly talked to him. But he listens to Philip Glass on his Walkman.”

“Possible asshole. Liking Philip Glass is one of those things that can really go either way.”

“He also Rollerblades. Which, I know, can also go either way. But Philip Glass
plus
Rollerblading … Each, like, sort of counteracts the other?”

“Don’t you think he’s probably more a symptom of things being shitty with Warren than he is, you know, da-dum, a
boy?
” Lizzie and most of her friends have never stopped referring to men, especially single men, as boys. It’s simultaneously girlish and mock girlish, and Lizzie has found it to be a generational litmus test—most smart women over fifty don’t call men boys, and they disapprove of smart young women who call each other girls. During the only real fight about feminism she’s ever had in her life, with her stepmother Rachel, who dined out for decades on the fact that she once played tennis with Betty Friedan in Sagaponack, Lizzie argued that calling men boys was a way of putting men and sex in their proper places.

“Badder how?” Lizzie asks, taking another cigarette.

“Did I tell you how, a couple of weeks ago, he called me an emasculating
bitch? No, I’m sorry, it was
‘castrating,’
not emasculating. I was like,
What?
And he said, ‘Sometimes the literal prefigures the symbolic.’ I wanted to kill him for a second. I mean
actually
. I can’t stand it when he gets all psychiatric like that. The last time I got that mad was when he tried to make something out of the fact that I played alto sax as opposed to tenor.”

“So you did tell him. About the … thing in medical school.”

“He’s a shrink.”

Pollyanna started at Harvard Medical School the same September Lizzie started at the Business School. But she dropped out after the third time she accidentally mutilated her male cadaver’s genitals, and started over at Harvard Law the next fall. “But it was just so
dumb
. You know? ‘Castrating bitch.’ It’s like an eighteen-year-old’s idea of an insult. I mean, I’m a lot of bad things—an addict, prejudiced against Koreans, a lung-cancer profiteer—but I do
not
hate men. That’s a stupid cliché.”

“George and I were saying last week, about his mother and my father? It turns out the clichés about parents dying are true.”

“That’s why they become clichés.”

“And there’s practically nothing to say
except
clichés! Also about having children. About all the important stuff.” Lizzie regrets the swerve into childbearing smugness, but Pollyanna is lighting a cigarette, which helps them squeak past the moment. “All these deep, authentic emotions have been turned into fucking greeting cards and little gift books on the checkout counter at Barnes and Noble. Which makes you feel corny and inferior for having the emotions. Which is wrong.”

“Ladies,” says a blond man in an expensively baggy four-button brown suit, his grand but quiet and sincere manner more that of a clergyman than of a waiter. “Welcome to Zero. What shall we prepare for you this evening?”

Spending $186 for dinner at Zero, just for her own dinner, does not offend her tonight, partly because the meal (“wild baby North Atlantic salmon from the Hebrides” in a “sauce of “
hwaysah
berries hand-picked in the Tanzanian highlands”) was as excellent as it was pretentious, and partly because George is out of town and, fuck it, she can spoil herself once in a while.

Confessing her professional anxieties to Pollyanna, however, did not
diminish them. Rolling down Fifth Avenue (the Russian driver is now playing Charles Ives, a major improvement), she stares at the folder of papers next to her, now straight and neat (nice guy! she’ll tip big). “Are you scared of leaving New York?” Pollyanna asked during the second bottle of fifty-five-dollar Chardonnay. “If I were in your business, I think I might be scared of
not
leaving, of becoming like Dixieland after bebop, you know? Cute and eclectic and surviving but way too proud of itself and, like, just … out of it.” Polly had hit a sore spot. It’s easy to feel successful in New York in the software business because nobody expects you to become Amazon.com or Yahoo!: you can’t
really
succeed here, so you can’t really
fail
. Silicon Alley? Pathetic. New York lets her have it both ways: major-league city, minor-league digital culture. Bruce says they’re fish out of water, but she’s also a big fish in a small pond—a big mutant fish trying to do too many disparate things. And she’s not even so big. She’s just a lucky mutant fish without any go-go gene, a complacent, conservative Dixieland jazz fish. She’s so proud of being profitable. Three quarters of earnings. So? So?
Are earnings good or bad, Mommy?
The go-go companies don’t have earnings at all. Ben Gould wasn’t joking when he said he
prefers
some companies not to have earnings. “Don’t be a victim of the mom-and-pop fallacy, Zimbalist,” he said as the last Fine Technologies board meeting was breaking up. “Manage for growth, not earnings. Maybe it’s a girl thing.” That was a joke, the “girl thing” remark. Bennett Gould is Mike Zimbalist version 2.0. Her father always managed for growth. Her father was never a victim of any mom-and-pop fallacy, Lord knows. What
is
it with these guys? Everything’s on the come, always on the come. The jackpot is there up ahead, right there, we’re sure, just up ahead, honest, just ahead. This economy is geared to the Ben Goulds and Mike Zimbalists, and she just doesn’t have the balls for it. Maybe it is a girl thing. She hasn’t had this much to drink in a long time, since Christmas. Since 1999. Since the previous century.

She phones her office number to leave a message, reminding herself to tell Lance to run the new Microsoft numbers and to ask Katherine about the legal implications of co-owning Buster Grinspoon’s software patents.

“You are in softvare business?” the driver suddenly says. “I also. I also vork vith Microsoft before. I am Yuri.”

Lizzie smiles. She’s dialing again.

“You know grime-spawn?” the driver seems to ask. “I know grime-spawn.”

“Hmmm,” Lizzie says. But in the middle of waiting the three seconds for her new phone to lock onto a TRW satellite 6,473 miles overhead in geostationary orbit, bounce 6,473 miles back down to an antenna bolted onto the concrete wall of a 1906 warehouse on Peck Slip, then course underground through copper wire the 242 yards to their old brick house, she isn’t really inclined to engage Yuri in a discussion of Microsoft and grime-spawn, whatever grime-spawn are. “Hello, Rafaela,” she says, speaking as slowly and clearly as a kindergarten teacher. “It’s Lizzie. Uh-huh. Bennett Gould called back when? Okay, I’m on my way home. Are the kids in bed? I’ll be home in about fifteen minutes. Okeydokey, Rafaela? Bye-bye.”
Okeydokey?
She upbraids herself for saying “okeydokey” to a Mayan peasant who knew no English two years ago.

It was weird how the check-in guy had snapped to attention and repeated George’s name,
yes
Mr. Mactier,
absolutely
Mr. Mactier, as soon as he’d heard it. Is it possible he knows that George is a TV producer with a hit series? (“Dad, how famous are you, exactly?”) No. He
might
recognize the name Steven Bochco or David Kelley or Marcy Carsey, this kid, given that
Entertainment Weekly
and
Entertainment Tonight
have replaced
Time
and
The CBS Evening News
in the hearts and minds of the twenty-two-year-olds who get jobs behind reception desks at expensive hotels. But still: they have not heard of George Mactier. Maybe Ben put him on a VIP list.

Vanity
, he thinks, looking closely at his crow’s feet. Vanity, vanity, vanity. George seldom uses cologne or mouthwash, but he uses both when he’s traveling. Away from home, his fragrance consciousness runs much higher. Hotels encourage a kind of toiletry hyperawareness, with these round magnifying mirrors and wee soap bars and bottles of cleansers and conditioners, the sunlamps, the bathrobe antitheft warnings masquerading as price lists, the wall phones next to the toilets and TVs by the sink, the symbolic paper virginity strip encircling the toilet seat. And when he uses cologne and mouthwash George invariably thinks of early adolescence, and his excited death row primping for church
dances. (It was in the darkened basements of Protestant churches, Methodist and Congregational as well as Unitarian, that George experienced all his early foretastes of sex, slow-dancing cheek to cheek, chest to breasts, tightly denimed erection to panty-hosed leg.) Turning to leave the room, tapping off the light, taking one final look in the mirror, pulling down his left shirt cuff, he feels the recurring jolt of gratitude that he didn’t lose the hand until he was twenty-eight. He imagines adolescence as an amputee, the Special Olympics kindnesses, the sympathy slow-dances. The thought actually makes him shudder.

When the elevator opens, George recognizes a pair of the Wall Street assholes from Ben’s suite earlier today. They’re ten, maybe fifteen years younger than George, about his height but harder and tanner than he is, tall and tan and young and lovely. The one speaking nods to George, the other only glances.

“…  because Q1, I hear, will kind of suck is why.”

“Suck how bad? Preannounce suck?”

“No. A penny, a couple of cents. No. But if he doesn’t have serious Q2 growth, I mean
serious
, he’s fucked. He’s working on some big net play Q2, I hear.”

George has always tended not to like men like this on sight, the big white smirking prosperous know-it-alls. He disliked them in Little League when they were ten and talked about bunts and balks and the strike zone, and when they were thirteen in Protestant church basements playing air guitar along with “Sunshine of Your Love,” and on airplanes leaning over seats fondling each other’s new laptops. These two probably earn a million apiece, maybe more. George understands that
over
pay is not the form of economic injustice on which he should be squandering outrage, but he can’t help it. The Saturday morning last winter that George watched himself, carrying LuLu on his back, ribbing his Sneden’s Landing neighbor, a childless professor of medieval art his own age, about how long it was taking him to shovel his driveway was the morning he agreed with Lizzie that they had to move back into the city. There are plenty of jerks living in the city, but not as many of the kind George worries about becoming.

“Big how? Big what? There’s no big left to do.”

“E-commerce. A sticky video portal. I’m not sure. But my M and A buddy has a boner.”

“Acquisition by? Or of?”