Turn of the Century (35 page)

Ben has stepped out next to George. George doesn’t turn around.

“If that’s supposed to be Brando, you suck.”

“Lee Strasberg. Why’d you have such a hard-on for Bucky tonight? He’s an okay guy. I thought we were supposed to like mavericks and long shots.”

“It’s this ‘wealth creation’ bullshit, Benny,” George says, calling Ben by his old nickname. “It’s stupid and dangerous.”

“Dangerous?
Dangerous?
Are you going left-wing on me, George? You know, we’re all free marketeers now. It’s required.”

“Okay, irresponsible. Undiscriminating. Sloppy. It’s Tony Robbins infomercial talk. You know? ‘Wealth creation.’ Come on.”

“Can we talk about something else? Did I tell you about my plan to buy Aqueduct and turn it into the only NASCAR track in the civilized world?”

“No.”

“Oh, he’s
moping
. Okay, there’s a lot of sizzle with the steak out there. Too much. Point taken.”

“ ‘Wealth creation’ treats some bogus stock that’s, like,
quindoubled
in two weeks as the equivalent of real earnings at General Motors. It’s like Tinkerbell, the miracle happens because we clap our hands and”—George puts on a silly
Romper Room
grin—
“believe.”

“Yeah, but Tinkerbell can actually fly. She’s actually magic. We’re right to believe. By the way, can you tell me how to quindouble some of my positions?”

George stares off at a plane landing, gliding down, out of sight.

“You’ll be pleased to know,” Ben says, trying to change the subject again, “that we told Pat Buchanan’s people they couldn’t hold some family-values photo op at BarbieWorld tomorrow.”

“I sort of like Pat Buchanan.”

Ben looks at him. “You are just determined to be the orneriest asshole you possibly can be tonight, aren’t you? Maybe you
should’ve
fucked that girl. Something.”

George shuts his eyes. “Do you have any seltzer?”

“Seltzer?” says Ben, suddenly excited, ducking back in ahead of George through the terrace door, moving like an overwound mechanical doll. “I’ve got Pellegrino literally on
tap
in here.”

As Ben skitters into his kitchen to push the Pellegrino button—hotel room kitchens: the ultimate useless dacha luxury, DIY on an expense account—George flops down on a big, cartoonishly asymmetrical burgundy couch, so soft and oversize it’s more an homage to a settee than a settee. The glow of the laptop screen illuminates his face.

“Did you see your pal Buchanan on the news today?” Ben shouts.

“He
disagrees
. He
believes
things. What happened today? Some slur about the Arab League millennium boycott?” Since late last year, the Arab countries have made a great show of being aggrieved about the worldwide hoopla over the two thousandth anniversary of Christ’s birth. One of the mainline Moslem groups called the American TV networks’ live broadcasts of colorful “millennium celebrations” in Indonesia,
Pakistan, Egypt, and Morocco “grotesque and imperialistic anti-Islamic fabrications.” And they have a point, George figures, even though it’s been hard to argue the case since the suicide bombing of CNN’s Cairo bureau in January.

“No. Buchanan claims Panama is funding the Zapatistas. And he stands up in San Diego, right on the border, and says if even a single rebel platoon is spotted within a hundred miles of ‘the Canal Zone’—he still calls it that, I guess it’s this year’s ‘Nationalist China’—we should invade. He actually called a retaking of the canal ‘America’s right of return.’ The guy is just
unbelievable
.” Ben arrives with the Pellegrinos, which he sets down, and a bucket-size can of macadamias, which he opens with a bass
whoosh
. What a good sound. “Panama has only
had
the canal for two months, and already we’re trying to steal it back.”

George is stretched out on his back, arms behind his head, eyes closed. “What are we, Ben?”

“Uh-oh. Time for bed.”

George opens his eyes. “No, I mean, we’re not liberals, are we? But we’re not conservatives. Are we?”

His mouth full of macadamias, Ben asks George, “Invade Mexico: pro or con?”

“What, we’re playing the
McLaughlin Group
home game now? Against. But I guess I can imagine circumstances where we might have to do something.”

The two main guerilla groups in southern Mexico jointly launched their “New Millennium offensive” a little over two months ago, on January first. It was the sixth anniversary of the Zapatistas’ first big action, when they seized six towns in Chiapas in 1994. The guerillas’ brilliant timing impressed George back then. The North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect that day, New Year’s is always a news vacuum, and the first of the year fell on a Saturday, guaranteeing maximum play on the Sunday morning news shows and in the Sunday
Times
and
The Washington Post
. Not that their media savvy generated any enduring interest—the half-life of the story in the States was about two weeks. This year, though, now that the insurrection was starting to get some traction, the guerillas’ New Year’s timing worked well. The first of January once again fell on Saturday. Coming directly off the interminable syrupy wallow of millennium coverage, the TV
news shows and papers and weekly magazines couldn’t have been happier: better than Y2K snafus, Mexico was providing unembarrassing, unequivocal, old-fashioned hard
news
, week after week, pitting have-nots against haves right here in our hemisphere. Mortar attacks on hydroelectric facilities, shaky videos inside secret guerilla bases, revolutionaries with American mothers and brothers to interview in East L.A. and Phoenix, army officers smashing video cameras on camera. And plenty of three-hour nonstop flights to Mexico City. Last year’s big rebel offensive started during George’s final week at ABC, and it made him the most excited he’d been about his job in years. He had to remind the on-air people not to sound
gleeful
when they used phrases like “large Zapatista deployment in the dense Lacandon rain forest” and “the U.S.-supplied Huey gunships based just across the border in Guatemala’s Petén jungle.”

“Waiting for that trumped-up Gulf of Veracruz incident, are you?” Ben asks George with a smile. “You sound like Al Gore.”

“Why do you still give money away to the Democrats, Ben?”

“I don’t give money only to candidates.”

“I know, I know. You’re sending everyone at P.S. 148 to Wharton. You got Def Ex investment-banked.” Def Ex is the new, black-owned overnight-delivery company that serves only the twenty largest cities in America.

“Excuse me for caring. Just because you won’t give a dime to anybody, don’t—”

“Ben, I can’t. I couldn’t. Journalists can’t. But really, Benny, why do you give money to the Democrats qua Democrats? Abortion is not going to be outlawed. Old people are not going to be impoverished.”

“It’s my religion. I’ll always be a Democrat. And I tell you, the more money I make, the stronger I feel that. I know there are Republicans who agree with us on every issue; most of the guys I do business with are like that. But those kinds of Republicans can’t be
elected
to anything in a zip code that begins with a number higher than two. I’d rather be in a party where the wingnuts are multiculti union crazies than one with racist anti-Semite antiabortion crazies.”

“So it’s really just a question of … taste, right? It’s just
unattractive
when people with money piss on poor people and tell themselves they’re acting out of principle.”

“I can’t stand disingenuous rich people whining about high taxes,” Ben says. “Or like when that right-wing ex-junkie on TV, the columnist, what’s her name, the heiress who led the demonstration to stop clean-needle exchanges.”

“Molly Cramer. I agree: it’s
ugly
.”

Ben lifts off his chair for an instant and bellows, “Noooo! No, you’ve got it backward, George: that is
wrong
. It’s
wrong
. It’s ugly
because
it’s
wrong
.”

George says nothing for a few seconds. He drinks his Pellegrino. “If there’s a depression I guess we’ll all care about politics again, won’t we? Depression or repression. Or real U.S. intervention in Mexico.”

“Which you’ll be happy to support ‘under certain circumstances.’ Just like liberals in 1964 with Vietnam. Hey! That’s what you are—not a paleoliberal, not a neoliberal. You and I are fucking
retro
liberals. Swank City liberals.”

Ben, knowing he’s won the round, settles down and leans toward George. “Just because nobody but me and people in the District and a few nuts give a shit about politics right now doesn’t mean your beliefs aren’t real beliefs. It isn’t all ‘taste.’ You’re still more offended by Molly Cramer than you are by, by … some ugly zoom shot or something, aren’t you? Or polyester?”

“Yes. I am. Absolutely.” For the first time all night George smiles and means it. “Although zoom shots are hip again. So’s polyester. Get it straight, man.”

Ben puts his feet up on the giant wooden coffee table and tips back in his chair, which is a kind of thickly upholstered burgundy throne. “That’s why Americans love the market. The rules are clear. And we believe in the rules. And it’s exciting, like sports! Everything else is fuzzy. Marriage, sex, religion, art, politics, all that.” He glances at the computer screen, where the time, 12:12, is flashing. “Seminar’s over. London opens in twenty minutes. A couple of the biotechs are still going crazy from that ‘mental modem’ horseshit last week.”

“It was fun,” George says, and gets up to leave.

“Whoa!”

George turns. Ben is scrolling through the Reuters wire. “What?”

“You see what your network did after the close tonight? Announced a new issue. Twenty-five million ME shares! What does Mose
need a billion dollars for?” Ben turns from his computer to face George. This seems not to be a rhetorical question.

“Let me go call Harold right now and ask.” He puts his hand to his forehead in a salute. “Good night, Benny.”

“I smell roll-up!”

“Okay,” George says, opening the door, his desire for bed overriding the impulse to ask Ben what he’s talking about. “I’ll see you.”

Getting from the rooms to the elevators in big-deal Las Vegas and Disney World hotels is inevitably depressing, since in the hallways all expense is spared on the theming. The fantasy bubble is burst. It’s like seeing a nightclub in the daytime, without even the redeeming stench of ashtrays and perfume and day-old booze.

“
Hey!
Where’d
you
go?”

It’s Shawna. He sees she really is sexy, in the thin-lipped, do-a-little-crank fashion of the prettiest checkout girl at the Safeway. Maybe she
is
a stalker. Maybe she’s about to pull out a razor blade from between her breasts, and with an unearthly animal cry bare her dripping vampiric fangs. He pushes the down button. She is too close.

“I went to get some air,” George says. “With a friend.”

“So, like, I’ve got rubbers.” Of course you do, because you have AIDS; the prospective details—
rubbers!
—haven’t even occurred to him. “And like I said before, you can do, you know, totally whatever you want to do to me.” She smiles her quick, guileless, automatic American smile. “Come
on
, we’ll have a blast.”

No, not a razor blade, not fangs. She’s more android than beast.

“I’ll pass,” he says.

“Okay. Cool. Hey, one piece of advice?”

Don’t stick your arm down a woman’s shirt if you don’t intend to have sex with her? That’s very astute advice, Shawna
.

“What?” he says.

“You’ve
got
to go see the Mandalay Bay. The Sea of Predators has
real
crocodiles and sharks. It’s just exactly like a fairy tale my daddy used to tell me.”

The elevator door opens and he lets her on first.

“A gentleman!”

George finds himself chuckling uncontrollably.

“What?”
Shawna says, wanting in on the joke.

“Nothing. It’s—I’ve had a long day.”

She reaches between her breasts and pulls out a necklace strung with tiny plastic luggage tags. She snaps one off.

“This is my card.”

SHAWNA
CINDY SWITZER, ACTRESS
is ink-jetted in cursive letters.

“Now,” she says as they reach the lobby, “if you ever have any parts you think would be right for me, call. Okay? Or if you just want to, you know, talk.” George is now almost entirely sober, but it’s impossible for him to tell if by “talk” she means
have the dirtiest sex imaginable
, or
talk
.

“Okay,” he says.

“Nighty-night.”

As she walks out into the lobby, cheerful as a coed in a Mentos commercial, George, destupefied, presses the button for his floor.
So, like, I’ve got rubbers!
He has never in his life worn a condom, never even touched one. In this, as he once argued during a
Newsweek
story meeting, he’s part of a singular baby-boom subcategory of the condom-innocent—heterosexuals whose promiscuous years occurred during the decade and a half after the Pill, before herpes and AIDS. Non-marital intercourse without condoms, George thinks as he switches off the light and the TV and falls into the crisp and frigid hotel sheets: another dying twentieth-century art, like operating a television manually, and reading (and sniffing!) those damp paper copies with the purplish type they had in grade school. The sixth grade, maybe seventh, was the last time he had been in a conversation about rubbers, using that word.
So, like, I’ve got rubbers. And you can do, you know, whatever you want to me. Totally whatever
. The
to
in “to me” was, of course, the most acutely pornographic bit of a remarkable pornographic performance—the carte blanche invitation to enter some dark free-fire zone, achieving maximum erotic power in its unconsummated ambiguity.

The phone rings. Christ, maybe she got his room number.

“
Hal
lo. May I help you?” he answers slowly, in a badly faked English accent.

It’s Lizzie, speaking softly. “I’m calling George Mactier. Is this room 4063?”