Turn of the Century (45 page)

“Daddy?” LuLu asks between mouthfuls of high-fiber
Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace
Home Video–themed Eggos, “Why do you laugh so much?”

“I didn’t laugh.”

“You did that
thing
. Like a laugh.”

“You did, Dad,” says Max, who is at the counter carefully filling out an order form. Max loves filling out forms, dry-run forms he rips out of magazines (subscription cards, subscriber surveys, NRA postcards to congressmen, credit card applications) and the forms his teachers give him (order forms for Scholastic books, for Disney Books, for Nickelodeon software, for
Time for Kids’
current events activities books, and Cool Candy of the Month Club order forms masquerading as consumer surveys). George glances at Max.
Buying stuff didn’t qualify as homework when I was a kid
, he refrains from saying for the tenth time this school year, probably because Lizzie is not around to hear it.

“Oh,” George says, “the bus recording was sort of funny.”

“You mean the part at the end where she says it’s not their fault if your child gets stolen or killed?” LuLu asks. “That makes Mommy sad to hear, so she doesn’t listen.”

“Uh-huh,” George says, turning the pages of the
Post
, scanning and skipping the midsection of disappearing-Queens-hubby and murdered-Bronx-tot articles.

“I don’t think it’s funny
or
sad,” LuLu says. “Daddy, why does Mommy think the men at Microsoft might kill her? Will they kill her?”

“No. It’s a figure of speech. She’s worried they’ll be mean to her. Finish your waffles.”

“They’re
Egg
os.”

Tag-team marriage
, he thinks. If he were still working for ABC, he would be ready to suggest a
GMA
second-hour piece with the title already invented. No,
no
—first commission the book,
Tag-Team Marriage: New Relationships for the New Century
(or
A Third Way to Love: Staying Married in the Third Millennium;
test both), get a pleasant Dr. Somebody to be the author, a clinical psychologist or psychiatric social worker, a high-energy female shrink who
then
gets her interview with the Society writer at
Newsweek
, and
off that
her two-minutes-thirty on morning TV, and
then
sell a show to Lifetime. Since he’s left journalism, his daydreams have become more vertically integrated.

Sarah appears, her short hair still wet from the shower. Zipping up the loose olive-green jacket, strapping on the overstuffed thirty-pound backpack, unsmiling as ever, she looks like a scared, brave young B-29 crewman suiting up to fly across the Channel.

“This afternoon?” she says to George, beginning her statement in the middle to avoid the intimacy of
Dad
or the snub of
George
. “I’m going with my friend Felipe to see his older brother’s web site office. In Chelsea? I’ll be home at roughly five. Thirty?”

“Who
is
Felipe?”
George asks. He knows he has Lizzie’s proxy here, although by overstressing the first and last words the question sounds more contemptuous (more Wall Street asshole, more Republican) than he intends.

“A guy in my class. Felipe Williamson.”

“It’s Philip Williamson, Dad,” Max says from the other side of the kitchen. Philip Williamson, Jr.! Philip Jr. is the pale, blond son of a Goldman Sachs partner and a Davis Polk partner. He has been Sarah’s classmate off and on since first grade.

George does not smile. “How did Philip become Felipe?” he asks Sarah.

“He was adopted, you know. From Arizona, he found out last year. So he changed his name.”

“His biological parents were … Mexican?” George asks.

“They could have been,” she says. “I have to go.”

“Right,” George says, straight-faced.

George and the little kids leave a half hour later for the drive to school. Gaping potholes are fine, uneven cobblestones are fine, even the collapsed sawhorse and shards of drywall in the middle of Beekman Street are fine. They all make George feel as if he has a good excuse for wheeling a giant sport-utility vehicle around Manhattan. They’d bought the Land Cruiser (George wanted a Land Rover, but Lizzie vetoed it—her Anglophilia phobia) when they moved to Sneden’s Landing. Their single longest off-road experience has been parking at Nancy McNabb and Roger Baird’s outdoor wedding in Litchfield County, but George figures that navigating New York City’s infrastructure qualifies as
utility
, maybe even
sport
.

“Can we listen to the blues?” LuLu asks, by which she means a Screamin’ Jay Hawkins CD they have somewhere in the car.

“I can’t find it and stick it in while I’m driving, sweetie. This,” he says, nodding toward the radio, “is related to the blues. Probably.”

WNYC is playing African music that sounds like a concerto for oboe, very flat string quartet, and the-men-of-the-village-making-cricketlike-sounds.
George likes international music because he can’t understand it, neither the words nor the music. It’s the same reason American graphic designers love Japanese magazines. It’s why strangers speaking foreign languages look more attractive and interesting than they would if they were speaking English—we hear their voices without judgment, snobberies deactivated, oblivious to nuances of class and education and geography. Conversely, it’s why fashion models become less beautiful the moment they speak. It’s why the temptations of a Shawna Cindy Switzer become easier to resist as the night goes on. He has to remember to tell Lizzie about Shawna Cindy Switzer.

“Related to the blues,” Max asks, “like apes are related to us?”

“Well. Yeah. Sort of like that,” George says.
But my dad told me that African-Americans are like monkeys, Mrs. Bosgang
. George begins constructing his explanation of why an analogy involving apes and the music of black people is inherently tricky and probably unwise. But they are only a block from St. Andrew’s. He decides to let it pass.

Max and LuLu are already scrabbling across the seat toward the curbside door by the time he brakes to a stop.

“Have a great day,” says their father. The moment the children are out of the car, as he always does when he drives them to school, he switches from NPR to Howard Stern.

“So,” Stern is saying as George drives sixty through the empty Brooklyn Battery Tunnel on his way to the
NARCS
location shoot in Staten Island, “if I could say something intelligent to you about, like, the presidential election campaign or the Mexican rebels or something, then you
might
make love to me? You’d consider making love to me? Like, even though you’re on MTV and every rock star on the planet wants to get in your pants, the fact that I’ve got a tiny penis isn’t a problem for you, right? Because even though you’re very hot and even though you live in L.A., you’re an intellectual chick.”

“Something like that.”

George slows to let the E-ZPass ray gun read the bar code stuck to the inside of his windshield, and then speeds through the open gate. Magic! E-ZPass is one of the great blessings of dehumanized modern life. Online book buying, ATM machines, MovieFone, and E-ZPass.

“Now what’s the deal with the name? Did your manager make that up for you to sound sexier?”

“My parents named me Francesca. I’m afraid that’s my name.”

“Were they like Italians or something?”

“Just pretentious.”

The car phone rings. It is, of course, Iris.

“So those are what, C cups?” Howard asks Francesca. George turns off the radio.

“George,”
Iris says in her
Def-Con 4
whisper, “a producer from MBC News says she needs to talk to you about Mr. Zimbalist
right away
! Shall I patch her through?”

Of course she
doesn’t like the name
business class
. But she likes it, the class. Since the airlines have defined discomfort down, flying business class isn’t profligacy (she reassures herself), it’s playing along with a protection racket—you pay extra, or you just might get roughed up in coach. If it were up to George, they’d be flying first class all the time. His line lately is, “I’m tall, we’re rich.” She knows he’s being deliberately coarse with the “we’re rich” part, but it still makes her nervous, reminding her of how her father brought home brand-new his-and-her 1975 Mercedes coupes the week before MGM fired him. “That upper-middle mama-bear thing is very … sweet, Lizzie,” George said once, making her feel like a frump. “I guess in your family Great Depression anxiety skipped a generation.” Last summer, after she drove two hours round-trip to spend $950 on shoes at the secret Manolo Blahnik factory outlet in New Jersey, he said, “Neoluxury. You’re the poster girl.” Jokes about neoluxury and neolimos she doesn’t mind.

The armrest Airfone is ringing. She turns to dig the telephone out of its compartment, and gives an apologetic little smile to the pudgy man in the suit and tie working next to her. He looks like a congressman. Almost everyone in business class looks like a congressman.

“Alexi?”

“How’s the flight? Harold Mose called. That boy you interviewed for the Seattle job, Chas Prieve? The dip from Boston? The
I’m-your-guy
guy? He called to follow up, and I told him you were on your way to Seattle, and he was like, ‘Well, I just happen to be overnighting in Seattle tomorrow night on my way back from Vietnam to talk to some major VC people.’ And he’d love to get together with you.”

“Kismet.”

“I told him you were fully booked. On the other hand, he did call all the way from Asia. It’s gumption.”

“I guess I should see him. Tell Chad to meet me for coffee at the Sorrento.”

“
Chas
. Also, the invites to your soiree
are
going out today, Karen worked all night and finished them. A hundred thirty-eight! She’s a good slave. Go look—it’s open.”

“What?”

“Bruce. He needs some article he says he left in your office. Speaking of slaves, the girl from St. Paul, Fanny Taft? She gets here May the tenth. I forged your name on some Justice Department affidavit about her.”

The man seated next to her, only a little older than she, is now snoring, and his necktie has flopped over the armrest onto Lizzie. As she hangs up, she uses the opportunity to toss the tie back onto his belly and glance at the spreadsheets and yellow legal pad on his lap. On the top sheet he has written only “PURPOSES?” and underlined it twice. The instant she’s finished shoving the phone down into its home, it rings again, startling her.

“What is it, Alexi?”

“Ah-ha,”
the man’s voice says, “
Alexi!
The lover with whom you’re rendezvousing in Novopolotsk.”

“Who is this?”

“It’s Harold Mose,” he says from his office on the Fifty-ninth Floor in New York, standing alone with the door closed in a room as big and quiet and lush as a pond, looking out over the northern half of Manhattan, the view that makes rich New Yorkers feel richer, wiser, untouchable. As he turns and moves behind the desk and sits, the tiny video lens built into the rim of his computer monitor pivots and rotates,
finding him, zooming back as he wheels in closer, focusing. “Don’t worry, Lizzie, I won’t breathe a word to George.”

She smiles. “Hello, Harold.”
He makes his own calls
, she thinks, a little impressed, and also a little impressed with herself for getting the call. “Alexi’s my assistant. The guy who gave out this number without authorization?”

“Correct.”

“What can I do for you?”

“You’ve done it.” Mose’s computer is on, and as he speaks he clicks around the screen from window to window, the contemporary equivalent of doodling. His mouse is heavy and black, carved out of Indonesian onyx; the little rubber trackball lodged inside, like a ship in a bottle, is a globe. “I’ve been meaning to call you for weeks to tell you your memo is absolute genius.” Open in one window on Mose’s screen is Lizzie’s memo.

“Thanks,” she says. “It’s good to know my six years in this stupid business weren’t for naught.” (“Looks like our spin control was all for naught,” Lizzie said to her father on the phone yesterday after she told him
Newsweek
was threatening to go ahead with a story about his transplant because MBC had announced its plans for the TV movie they’re calling
Mr. Piggy
. “ ‘For
naught,’
” Mike Zimbalist said back. “I can’t believe you’re my kid, Lizzie, and not some goddamn
Redgrave
.”)

“One does tend to forget that the average Joe does not have a T1 line or a cable modem installed in his rumpus room yet. Streaming video isn’t exactly mass-market, is it?” Another of the open windows on Mose’s computer contains a video image, live television as small as a pack of matches, streaming in crisply across his T1.

“Not quite.”

“So I suppose you’re not going to tell me about your sudden secret mission to Seattle, are you?”

Did Alexi
tell
Mose where she’s headed? Now she can’t lie, but she can’t tell the truth either. So she creates the illusion of candor. “It’s been in the trade press—we’ve talked to Microsoft about selling a small equity piece. You know that, don’t you?”

“Correct. By the way, we didn’t even come close to a deal that made sense for the MBC. We’re not talking any longer.”

“No?”

“Not even close. Elizabeth, I need to take this company to the next level. Quickly. As you say in your memo, convergence really is coming. As you also say, we can’t afford to get locked out of the game. Whatever the goddamn game turns out to be.” Mose is now looking at another window on his screen, the one he keeps permanently open, under a large red
ME
, Mose Media Holdings’ New York Stock Exchange ticker symbol. The box displays not just the current stock price
, down 1⅞ since this morning’s open) and trading volume (a little higher than usual), but the number of Mose shares sold short (much higher than usual); the relevant Wall Street analysts’ public guesses about the company’s earnings for the quarter that just ended; the company’s internal reckonings of its earnings; and the ratings of last night’s MBC prime-time programs—an empire of messy facts and squirrelly hunches collected and conflated and then distilled down to the salient digits, and that salience reduced still further and squeezed neatly into a few square inches of pixels. “I found them to be arrogant shits, Gates and his boys,” Mose says to Lizzie. “For once somebody’s lousy press is correct, eh?”