Turn of the Century (44 page)

“I read, my dear. And I don’t
want
to go out when I read that there are now twenty-eight thousand missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in New York City now.
Yes
. Twenty-eight thousand. Almost as many Mormons as there are
cops
. According to the article, there were only four thousand of them twenty years ago. I think they’ve been drawn to the city by Chelsea Piers and the World Financial Center and Disney and MetroCards and no-smoking laws. Didn’t we all come to New York to
escape
Mormons?”

“Have some more to drink, Warren,” George says.

Pollyanna and Lizzie have been out running since before Emily and Michael arrived. Emily and Warren are sitting in the sun on the porch with George, along with Suzie, Warren’s weekend-custody au pair, who’s holding the Holcombe baby. George suddenly realizes there’s
no polite way to indicate to Emily and her boyfriend that Suzie is not Warren’s cute, young, blond wife, but rather his employee with a Texas BA in Caregiving. But since Emily met Michael when he was her employee (he played the DA on
Girlie
), George decides his impulse for caste clarity is priggish and beside the point. Let the ambiguities fly.

Out in the yard, between them and the lake, Max catches his baseball, looks at it, and shouts “Sixty-eight!” before throwing it back to Michael. Emily brought the children gifts—a play surgery kit for LuLu and a Rawlings Radar Ball for Max. Packed inside the thread and rubber at the ball’s core is a speedometer, wired to a tiny LCD window on the surface that gives a readout for the speed of each pitch.

“Fifty-nine,” Michael shouts to Max, then throws back. Sitting on the porch of his country house, holding a mug of coffee as his son plays catch with this pleasant, dumb, handsome, childless, two-handed actor, George feels like a well-satisfied burgher relieved of a child-rearing duty—Michael can be Max’s sports wet nurse for the weekend.

Then, as he watches the caretaker drive his muddy Dodge truck up the road, he feels even more like a recreating Knickerbocker. Charlie climbs out of his pickup with his fly-fishing gear and a package in a tight garbage-bag wrapping.

“How are you, Mr. Mactier?”

“Fine, Charlie, how are you?”
My good man
. “How’s the winter been up here?”

“Not too bad. I took care of the barn cats, like you asked. Except that one cute little calico.”

“Buzzy.” George suddenly realizes that his instruction to Charlie as they were driving away last November—“You’ll take care of the cats?”—must have been very badly misinterpreted.

“Not much browse all winter, so the deer chewed up your garden some. Nice season for us, though,” he says, holding out the neat garbage-bag package to George.

George takes it. It’s frozen solid and weighs ten pounds.

“Some venison,” Charlie says, nodding at the frosty black plastic.

George feels silly over his momentary horror that he was holding the frozen carcasses of six cats. “The season,” of course, is deer-hunting season.

“Thanks very much, Charlie.”
I shan’t demand the thirty pecks of barley this jubilee year, however, nor the night with your comely eldest daughter
.

“Mr. Mactier, will it be any bother to you if I’m fishing down at your stream today?”

“No, not at all, Charlie, go right ahead.”

“Excuse me,” Warren says from the porch, “may I ask you a question?”

Charlie, startled and apprehensive, has no choice but to turn. “Yes, sir?”

“You’re a fly fisherman, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Do you buy them,” Warren asks earnestly, “or do you farm these flies yourself?”

Charlie apparently thinks this turtlenecked snob from the city is teasing him. George intervenes.

“They aren’t
real flies
, Warren. They’re made out of feathers and Mylar line and glue.” He turns back to smile at Charlie, who looks thrilled by the instant passing of humiliation from himself to the stranger.

But Warren is a psychiatrist from the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He does not humiliate easily, if at all.

“Interesting,” he says. “I also have another question. Do you trap martens around here?”

“
What
are you talking about?” George says.

“Lake
Marten
. You know, martens—they’re a kind of weasel,” he says to Charlie, “aren’t they?”

“Sure,” the caretaker says. “I took my six last season.” He pauses. “You didn’t want any pelts, did you, Mr. Mactier?”

Dinner is done, the peach and rhubarb pies are heating, the wine is still being poured.

“You don’t bring your nanny to the country?” Emily asks. Max and LuLu are upstairs watching the new animated
Lusitania
with Michael, Suzie the au pair, and Warren’s baby.

Lizzie shakes her head and George says, “Between Charlie, and the housecleaner, and the contractor, and the pond man, I think—oh, and the kid who mows,
and
the snowplow guy—we’ve got enough servants up here without throwing Rafaela into the mix.” He is smiling and means to be self-mocking. “You must have a big staff, Em.”

“Gardener, pool boy, housekeeper. That’s it. At the house.”

“Plus Michael,” George teases. “Did you ever think we would employ so many people?”

“Shall I put on the
Big Chill
soundtrack now or later?” Pollyanna says.

Emily is counting on her fingers as Michael returns to join the grownups. “Lawyer, lawyer, agent, manager, Becky, kid at Paramount, business manager, doctor, doctor, shrink, and Tranh.”

“That’s about four FTEs,” Lizzie says. Everyone looks at her.

“Full-time equivalents,” she explains.

“Our liability insurance policy on this place,” George says, “actually has a clause saying it covers ‘the accidental dismemberment’ of ‘the occasional servant.’ I don’t
think
it means the occasional dismemberment.”

“Why does this all not embarrass us?” Lizzie asks.

“Why should it?” Emily says. “We’re good bosses. In L.A. there’s none of that guilt. About help.”

“The slave class,” George says, “that allows you and Barbra to spend your time raising money for Gore and stopping the war in Mexico.”

“There isn’t real servant guilt in New York either,” Warren says. “Trust me.”

“In Seattle there is,” Lizzie says. “About private schools, even. They’re democrats. Small d.”

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” Michael asks.

Instead of answering, Lizzie continues. “I think it’s because they’re not jaded enough yet to live with hypocrisy. You know? They’re too rational, in a kind of easy, adolescent way. I feel like Kirk with Spock or Picard with Data whenever I’m out there.”

“But that’s why you like it,” George says. “That’s why you want to move there.”

“I do not want to move there.”

“No, you do; it’d be like Cambridge all over again. Rainy and brainy. You’d like it too, Emily. Very lefty. They’ve got a municipal department of ecology.”

“In Los Angeles,” Michael says, “we have a Museum of Tolerance.”

“I think I would like Seattle,” Emily says, “except for the rain. That innocence, and the missionary spirit. Like writers, but not cynical.”

“Please,”
George says.

“No, Emily’s right,” Lizzie says, recanting for the moment her recent renunciation of Seattle. “The dream of the big score out there isn’t so much about getting rich or getting famous or getting laid or getting invited to fab parties.”

“Because they’re already rich,” George says.

“No, no,” his wife says. “They sincerely believe they’re bringing the New World into being. It’s sort of creepy. And admirable.”

“Mormons,” Warren says. “Creepy and admirable.”

“Do they do drugs?” Pollyanna asks Lizzie.

“I don’t think so, much,” Lizzie says. “But, you know, that constant tingle out there, even more down in the Valley—the money, IPO, next-big-thing mania—reminds me a lot of cocaine. The cocaine high, I mean. Not just their speediness, but their intoxication with their own brilliance and infallibility. Very coke-y.”

“Mormons on coke,” Warren says. “
Truly
frightening.”

“I thought you always said they were more egoless than people in L.A. and New York?” George says. “What, they’re egoless egomaniacs?”

“
No
, what I
said
was that in Seattle, nobody ever puts his own name in his company’s name.”

“No Warner Bros. or Goldwyn or Mayer in Seattle, huh?” Emily says. “Or Morgan Stanley or Lazard Frères or whatever?”

“That’s right. I can’t tell you how often people in New York think that my name is Elizabeth
Fine—Fine
Technologies.”

Michael, evidently operating on a several-minute time delay, asks, “It rains a lot in Seattle?”

There’s a pause as everyone registers that he’s not joking.

“One hundred and seventy-four days last year,” Lizzie finally says.

“I think people in Seattle take the gray weather as some kind of proof they’re not superficial,” George says. “Cloudiness equals intellectual depth. In some Scandinavian way. Just like New Yorkers secretly need all their man-made unpleasantnesses—noise and real estate prices and co-op boards and no place to park—so they can feel like soulful survivors. Like Berliners used to be.”

“That’s sad,” Michael says.

“You’re
such
a bullshitter, George,” Emily says.

“Who’s articulate who you
don’t
think is a bullshitter, Emily?”

George is sitting outside, finishing the Sunday paper. Lizzie steps out onto the porch with LuLu, about to join everyone else down at the lake.

“Is there some reason,” she says as they pass him, “you felt the need to be such an asshole last night?” She looks at the shadow of her hands on the side of the house, gesticulating as she searches for her words. “I’m not your enemy, George. And I don’t believe Emily is, either.”

“Isn’t ‘asshole’ bad?” LuLu asks.

George doesn’t reply.

“Are the deer and the squirrels homeless?”

“What do you mean, LuLu?” her father asks.

“They live outside all the time, and nobody feeds them. They act scared and crazy. They’re like bums.”

Lizzie remembers a book she read in college by a nineteenth-century writer named Cesare Lombroso, who believed that animals were, in fact, criminals by nature, violent and homicidal. She remembers learning in the same course that weasels kill more prey than they can eat. But after George’s Cambridge crack last night, she decides not to mention Lombroso or weasels.

“No,” Lizzie says, taking LuLu by the hand and walking toward Lake Marten. “Animals can’t be bums, honey.”

The phone in
the kitchen rings as it does every weekday morning around now. Ordinarily, Lizzie takes the call, but she left for the airport when it was still dark.
“Sarah?”
George yells, getting up from the fiberglass Eames chair to answer it. Your bus!” He picks up the receiver, but doesn’t say hello. He sometimes does, and then feels stupid. “Hello!” the machined female voice on the other end of the line announces brightly, almost lovingly. “Today is Tuesday. Your child’s transportation will be waiting at the designated location in. Four minutes. And thirty seconds!” Lizzie would hang up now, but George, not yet coffeed up and curious to hear today’s non sequitur, stays on the line. “Campbell’s soup is m’m-m’m-good!” the ReadyAim lady says. Then, after a pause, her voice suddenly quickens and empties of emotion. “This ReadyAim automated advisory was not reviewed by human staff, and by terminating this call you waive any and all liability claims against ReadyAim, its employees, and agents.” He smiles and snorts once as he hangs up.