Turn of the Century (42 page)

“What does your Russian limousine driver in New York want?”

“Nothing. We happened to call Yuri—his old lead had a question about telepresence he wanted to kick around with him. And Yuri asked him about ‘Booster Grime-spawn’ and Fine Technologies, and here we are.”

“This is a trustworthy guy?” the older man asks. “And he understands what he heard and saw?”

“Definitely. He got his master’s under Buster Grinspoon at U-Dub Comp Sci. He helped write some tools that shipped, Japanese Windows 98, and then we used him as a contractor in Research. On user interface and telepresence. His leads say he’s a very high-bandwidth guy. They wanted him to stay, but he has a wife and some kind of family business in New York.” He opens the door for his colleague. “The leads tell me he was an absolute straight shooter.”

“Absolute straight shooter—is that right, Gary?” Moorhead asks, looking at the younger man to see if he catches the irony of a conscientious snitch.

He does not. “Uh-huh. And as far as I’m concerned, what he happened to see were unencrypted objects distributed in an open environment. It was Yuri’s vehicle. And no NDAs were signed.”

Moorhead, wondering if his colleague may be attempting humor now, referring to papers left on the backseat of a car as “unencrypted objects distributed in an open environment,” looks at him again. But there is no trace of a smile, only that look of earnest, untroubled self-confidence that is the default demeanor of executives here.

“Just to get some more data on this, I contacted a friend over at U-Dub this morning, who—”

“You didn’t e-mail, Gary, did you? This is definitely one of those no—e-mail subjects.”

“Oh, no. I phoned. And he says Grinspoon has been talking about moving back east.”

Moorhead, considering this, seems both bewildered and amused, as if by an account of the shenanigans of a bright but willful child. The two men pass a Foosball machine whose playing field is filled by a five-foot-high pyramid of empty Mountain Dew cans, and a video arcade game, Gravitar, circa 1984, flashing its rudimentary, elegant white silhouettes of planets and gently thrusting spacecraft. Moorhead prepares to board a shuttle bus back to One Way, the main campus. (Fifty-two years old, a man of stature and means, taking a plebeian little van from office cluster to office cluster! Only his 243,000 shares and options mitigate the gall.)

“Well, Gary,” Moorhead says, “these are very useful data to have. Thank you.” And then, as the shuttle heads out for the main campus, he speaks into his wireless phone. “Adam, I’m just leaving Red West? As soon as I’m back I’ll need to speak with Elizabeth Zimbalist? At Fine Technologies in New York City?”

Saying no had
not been a negotiating posture. She adored saying no. Her no meant no. She wasn’t intending to push the number up.

“You play a very impressive game of hardball, Ms. Zimbalist,” Moorhead said. “We’ll need your answer tomorrow by noon Pacific time?”

She wasn’t meaning to play hardball. When she told Lance Haft the number, he thought she was pulling some kind of sophisticated Harvard joke on him. Then he literally couldn’t speak.

“My God, Lizzie,” he finally said. “My God. You called their bluff and they blinked. Stock? Vested stock? Not options? My God. What made them blink? My God.”

She wasn’t trying to call anyone’s bluff or make them blink. She wanted them to leave her alone, let her stay doofy and small and amateurish.

“You’re acting spooky, Mom,” Max said when she came home.

“Did Daddy die?” LuLu asked.

“Sarah,” Lizzie said. “Take the kids over to Uno’s for pizza. Please? I’m fine. I’m good.”

She doesn’t want to talk to anyone about it—not Ben, not even the children, not even in bowdlerized kiddie-speak—until she can tell
George. She didn’t tell her father when he called from the hospital to announce that he had agreed to let MBC make a TV movie about his operation, starring “the chubby bald superstar jerk from
Seinfeld
.” (“Why aren’t you pissed at me for this?” he said. “What’s wrong?”) It doesn’t feel like she’s hit the jackpot. It feels more like she’s been in an accident, but an accident in some other universe, where getting decapitated is not necessarily a bad thing. Being alone hasn’t restored her equilibrium, nor has the glass of wine. Doing yoga in the bedroom for twenty minutes, down dog
and
corpse pose, has not helped her realize her eternal nature as pure awareness, which transcends all duality and yearning (and which, as the poster in the dressing room at Yoga Place also says, is the ultimate goal of human existence for which all other labors are merely preparatory), or even diminished her desire for a Marlboro Light. Smoking a cigarette isn’t helping, either.

Why
is
she acting so spooky? Why is she sitting cross-legged on the filthy black roof, in the cold and the dark, staring over at the big time-and-temperature sign on the Brooklyn waterfront? So that she can witness the 10° C flash off and—at just the instant she happens to be watching, change to 9° C—so she can entertain the notion that some momentous countdown is under way.

You’re acting like a fucking girl, Lizzie Zimbalist
, she thinks,
like some L.A. dope
. She stands and stubs out the cigarette on the chimney, making a tiny ash graffito, and then, for no reason she knows, takes cautious tiny steps toward the front of the house, mincing up the incline of the cornice toward the edge, and peeking out and over, four floors down. As her vertigo swells and passes, she sees a black Town Car turn down Water Street and come to a stop in front of the house. George is home. She watches him step out in that get-it-over-with fast motion he has, with a suit bag already draped over his bad arm, then reach back inside for the carry-on bag, then slam the car door with his hip. She has seen him make this series of moves dozens of times, maybe hundreds. But she has never really
watched
him do it. The bird’s-eye view is clinical. She is a Georgeographer, a spouseologist. She has never before studied her one-handed husband and thought,
So plucky! Pluck
. Pluck is precisely what she admires in George, she realizes, and in herself when she can muster it.

Honey, guess what?
she does not scream down.
Microsoft wants to buy
half the company now!
And then she does not leap out over the rotting wooden cornice and, as she descends magically to the cobblestones right in front of George, add,
For thirty-one-point-five million!
Fuck.

Five hours later, the bass-laden snatches of a white rap song no longer radiate down to Lizzie and George’s bedroom from Sarah’s (“Scissors cut paper / Paper wraps rock / Rock smashes scissors”), but George is so tired he can’t fall asleep. “It’s the jet lag, I guess,” he says when he turns the lights back on. And, of course, the electricity of greed, his anticipation of Lizzie’s seven million dollars worth of Microsoft stock. She hasn’t even tried to sleep. They have talked and talked and talked. Their brains are sore. Both of them are sitting up in bed, naked, both with Grandma Mactier’s ripped and faded patchwork quilt pulled up almost to chest level. Both are staring through raised knees at
Badlands
, on the Miramax Channel, which is muted.

“So what in God’s name,” she says, holding the hand-rolled cigarette off to the side of the bed, toward the cracked-open window and its concealing breezes, “do you suppose that means?”

“It’s not a sex thing. I know what it means.”

“Yeah?” she says in a choked voice, holding her breath, looking over at him.

“Featherstone uses it. It’s like ‘do me a favor.’ ‘Can you do me a prop, George, and lose the greeting-card crack from your first act?’ ”

She exhales. “Are you making this up?”

“No.
Jesus
, Martin Sheen is
so young
. He is so much cooler-looking than his sons. Was. Don’t worry about Sarah. Some boy at school must have done her some kindness. Carried her books to class, given her a ride home.” George gingerly takes the burning cigarette from Lizzie’s fingers. “Paid for her abortion.”

Lizzie grimaces and nods in acknowledgment of the joke. “I’ve never heard of Felipe.
‘Felipe
did me a
prop,’
she said. I felt kind of sick when I heard her say it.”

For a couple of seconds, holding his breath, smiling, he says nothing, then exhales smoke between his knees toward Sissy Spacek.

“Is she still married to Sam Shepard?” Lizzie asks, pushing her hair, her entirely natural hair, behind her ears with both hands. She has always worried she looks like Sissy Spacek with a perm and henna.

“It’s not her, it’s Jessica Lange who’s married to Sam Shepard. But they’re not
married
.”

He holds the joint out toward her, but she shakes her head, and he turns and drops it, barely lit, into a turquoise-encrusted sterling silver cuff-link box that Mike Zimbalist gave him a few birthdays ago. It springs shut with a loud snap.

“Bruce is all bummed out we’re not going into business with his friend Grinspoon.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“God, we
have
been apart. Bruce’s friend, Buster Grinspoon, the user-interface biomimetics genius—the mental-modem guy. Bruce wanted me to buy Grinspoon out and move him to New York and spend half a million bucks a year on his cat-brain experiments. I decided I couldn’t afford it. And it’s not what we
do
. I guess now I could afford it, with the Microsoft money.” She pauses. “That is, Microsoft could afford it.” She pauses again. “How weird. How completely fucking weird.” And then: “Shall we have a party? A big spring party. With everybody we know? I feel like we need to get back in touch. We never had the housewarming we said we were going to.”

“Is this a party to not celebrate Fine Technologies’ liquidity event?”

George is curious but also joshing, and he knows Lizzie understands this, and Lizzie knows he knows she understands, so they both stare straight ahead, watching Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek make out.

“Maybe so,” she answers. “I ran into Cynthia on the street yesterday. She quit the agency! Just
quit
. ‘To garden for the summer,’ she said. I was jealous.”

“Like you are of Buddy?”

“I’m jealous of Cynthia and Rich because they’re the kind of people who you could imagine just giving up the rat race and moving to, you know—to Portland.”

“Which Portland?”

“Either Portland. Any Portland.”

“My phone finally died.” My
phone
. In his present state of mind this seems freighted with meaning. “I just realized that nobody says ‘cell phone’ anymore, or ‘mobile phone,’ or even ‘wireless phone.’ It’s just ‘phone.’ ”

She nods. “You still call e-mail ‘e-mail,’ though, right? In Seattle I’ve heard people call e-mail ‘mail’ since, I don’t know, 1997.”

“I remember as a little kid,” he says, “noticing one day that everybody had stopped saying
‘transistor
radio.’ Sometime after ‘Purple People Eater’ and before ‘Satisfaction.’ ”

“ ‘Purple People Eater’? Was a song?”

He smiles. “Yes. From a few years before the presidential assassination that happened before you were born. You know, this is sort of the same thing that happened with plastics.”

“Oh, wow, like
 … plastic
?” she says, in a mock-stoned idiot’s voice, imitating the hippie girl she never pretended to be.

“When I was little, plastic objects were cheap and crummy. Nobody wanted a plastic anything—even plastic toys were kind of suspect and low-rent. Nothing any grownup cared about was made from plastic. (Except telephones.) I may be a member of the last generation to remember when a plastic object was by definition an inferior object.”

“You are. I have no plastic stigma whatsoever.” She turns to face him. “You know, George, you have a high signal-to-noise ratio, but I even find your noise pretty interesting.”

He smiles, at the compliment as well as at the nerdy engineering trope. “And your signal-to-noise ratio is … what?”

“Too high, probably.”

Their mutual debriefing spirals further into randomness. They have already been through every major ramification of the Microsoft offer (fiduciary duty requires that she do the deal at this price, she needs to go to Seattle soon, he thinks
Real Time
is on track) and of her father’s situation (he seems good, and despite his movie-of-the-week deal, no interviews, none) and the children (when Max’s nosebleed wouldn’t stop this afternoon, Sarah said, LuLu proposed letting Rafaela “come and live in his room after he dies”). They are down to third- and fourth-level agenda items—to automatic file sharing, to filler.

Mentioning Harold Mose’s mysterious remark now, George thinks, wouldn’t seem paranoid or disproportionate or weak. He turns to look at Lizzie.

“What did Mose mean when he told me you told him to go to hell?”

“What?” she asks, surprised.

“Harold Mose said you’re a liberal who told him to get fucked.”

“Told him to
get fucked
?” She is smiling in a way that doesn’t please George. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What did Harold say?”