Turn of the Century (54 page)

“Sucks, doesn’t it?”

“Your MTV contract is up soon?”

The bar is crowded now, and noisy, so instead of shouting she leans closer to answer. “June one. Their sixty-day renegotiation period is under way.” She pulls back, grins, and rolls her eyes. “Aren’t I pushy!”

“No, no. Informative.”

She writes down her agent’s name on the back of her business card and hands it to George.

“William Morris,” he says.

She understands his implication. “I was a starlet my first year in New York, before I went back to J school.”

“You must have been a successful starlet if William Morris took you on.”

“I lucked into a Wrigley’s Spearmint commercial that ran about five million times. Which was my great thespian moment, and all because I could do the ‘Wrigley load’ so well.”

George shakes his head.

“You don’t know about the Wrigley load? They have this very specific, market-tested way that actors in their ads have to stick the gum in their mouths. It’s like a theological principle.” She grabs a bocconcino and strips a mozzarella strand off it. Then, flashing an extreme ad-girl smile, she turns her profile to George, puts her face close to his, tips her chin up, opens her mouth narrowly, and still grinning like a madwoman, quickly tips in the simulated stick of gum. They both laugh. “That,” she says, “is the Wrigley load.”

“Thanks for the demonstration.” It’s late; Rafaela leaves at seven-thirty; George gathers his briefcase and coat. “I’m really glad we had a chance to talk. You should definitely meet with my partner, Emily, in L.A.”

“I will. And I should leave too.” George gives a nice-meeting-you glance to Zip’s new pals and consents to a goodbye smooch from Zip.

“I’ll see you at your big soiree,” Zip says, “if not before.”

“Zip? What about chicken? People don’t have a problem ordering roast chicken and eating fried chicken, even though it’s the name of the animal.”

“Not a mammal,” Zip says briskly. He has obviously been through this many times. “It’s cute-mammal meat people need to call something else. Although I have a theory that ‘free-range’ was partly an attempt to assuage chicken-eating guilt. Goodbye—
Francesca
,” he says. “Night-night, George. Very chocolaty.”

“Entertaining guy,” Francesca says to George on the sidewalk.

Little asshole
is what she probably means. “He is that,” George says. He knows that Zip, like Ben Gould, takes up a lot of the air in any
room he occupies. He doesn’t spend a lot of time making apologies or defenses on their behalf (although with Zip,
He saved my life in Nicaragua
works well). People either get Ben and Zip, or they don’t, find them entertaining and full of life, or loud and off-putting. George’s loyalty is all the fiercer
because
they are so easy to dislike, as he realized only when Lizzie explained it to him as soon as she met Zip.

Her father sounded
a little tired on the phone, but maybe that was really only in comparison to her, because she’s been so wired, full of post-Microsoft fizz. She probably should fly down to L.A. tomorrow night and then go home a day late. George would be cranky, in that passive-aggressive “Fine, Lizzie” way of his. If she ever manages to actually talk to George about it. The increasingly brief and brittle telephone recordings swapped back and forth, back and forth, have been tempered only a little by the faxes from Max and LuLu waiting under her hotel room door. The notes and drawings are so sweet they’re sad, the sadness welling up more when she calls and finds nobody home. Where is George? Where are the kids? He must have taken them all out to dinner.

“Zimbalist, for two,” she says. Alexi, who at every moment professes to know the hottest restaurant in every North American city that recognizes the concept of hot restaurants, has booked her and Buster Grin-spoon for dinner at a place called Captain Bridger’s Pacific Markethouse Lounge and Grill. The maître d’ is wearing a tight-fitting blue-and-black-striped jacket, which at first she reads as velvet. She now sees it’s synthetic fleece. “The reservation is for seven-thirty. I know I’m early.”

“Oh! That’s
fine
, Ms. Zimbalist!” The fellow seems to crouch in an effort to make himself shorter than Lizzie, and looks at her with a tiny hopeful smile, as if a big welcoming grin might strike her as presumptuous. “Would you like to settle into your table now? Or would you prefer to relax at the bar du vin with a complimentary glass? We have some very surprising Idaho Rieslings.” He is the human incarnation of modern customer service, scorched-earth pleasantness made flesh. Ms. Zimbalist elects to sit at the table. She doesn’t hate this.

Surrounded suddenly by so much copper and so much pretty old brick, Lizzie feels as if she’s stepped back into 1986. The restaurant is like Reagan-era Cambridge, or high-yuppie Columbus Avenue, full of diners in their thirties and forties with gray beards and no ties. Except here, now, they’re probably all multimillionaires—digital multimillionaires, at least on paper—who happen to look like $64,000-a-year Smollett scholars or $43,000 senior architects. It’s not so bad, Lizzie thinks, feeling twenty-one again, with the husband and children stashed a continent away for forty-eight hours. Looking out from her table at Elliott Bay (to which “
excellent
marine vista” the maître d’ commands she pay attention), she remembers being wowed by the view at dusk across New York Harbor from the River Café on her first serious date with George. No, that wasn’t George, that was her date with Ben Gould; she hadn’t met George yet.

“…  using heirloom grains, and we truck in our own batch every week,
fresh
, from the brewstillery over in Spokane.”

She looks up at the greeter, and realizes that for at least half a minute he’s been reciting the names and provenances of obscure alcoholic beverages.

“May I tell you about our specialty martinis and premium tequilas?” he asks.

“I’ll just have a club soda, thanks.” She turns away to look at the bay. But she doesn’t hate this.

“I’ll bring you the Captain Bridger’s private-label brand. It’s really not half bad. Our special ragouts today—”

“Someone’s joining me.”

“
Thank
you, but that’s all right, I’ll be happy to repeat them. We have our ragout of baby Vietnamese eggplant, our ragout of hacked rabbit saddle (and that’s encircled by braised strips of the rabbit’s
flank—
excellent);
our Olympic Peninsula Sierra Club—certified wild mushroom ragout; and I
think
we may have one more of the Pacific Markethouse ragouts of free-range north Oregon weasel, which is prepared tartare style, with white and cayenne peppers moistened by Burmese mustard; and the ragout of Dungeness crab.”

She’s starting to hate this. Doesn’t he need to get back to his post? The eighties time-warp experience is now total. Lizzie recalls her own intense and stupid excitement about trying exciting new dishes at exciting new restaurants, when going for the first time to Hubert’s or Arcadia or Chanterelle was like a combination of Broadway in the thirties (
Let’s go see the new Kaufman and Hart …
) and sex in the seventies (
 … at Plato’s Retreat
).

“Our Northwest shellfish species of the day are ceviche of Alaska weathervane scallops, and Dungeness crabs. The special vegetarian platter this evening is a salad of sesame-dewed daikon, sprouts of rapini and Walla Walla sweet onions garnished with cilantro aioli and flecks of rock salt accompanied by
either
a blend of squash, sweet potatoes, bean curd, tapioca, and cloud-ear mushrooms;
or
our parsnip and Granny Smith hash with peanuts, basil, lime, and tamarind served in lettuce wraps.”

He is not out of breath, probably because he runs and hikes long, kilometer-denominated distances every day. Or maybe because he spent a Seattle boyhood in training, reciting PC specs to his parents until they put him in foster care. He’s looking at her, eyes open wide, head tucked down a little, looking as if he wants a pat. “That’s quite a choice,” Lizzie says. “Thanks.”

“Oh! And today’s seafood
entrée
special, marinated in a local ale and grilled over applewood, is Dungeness crab. Served with a semi-vinaigrettized double-baked potato-prune gratin. And,” he says, evidently saving the best news for last, “I’m afraid we are
out
of the chicken sashimi.”

He goes, but thirty seconds later he’s back, leading a bearded man in a jumpsuit wearing a fanny pack. He is not fat but his belly is huge, like he’s got a Snugli with a two-year-old strapped on and zippered up in there.

“Hi,” Buster Grinspoon says.

“Hello,” Lizzie says, offering her hand, which he shakes limply.

“You got Corona?” he asks the hovering maître d’.

“No,” the man says, almost as if Grinspoon were joking. “The Terminator is very nice.”

“You got Budweiser?”

“Hmmm … maybe I can get you an icy cold Hammerhead?”

“Water’s fine,” Grinspoon says, sitting.

“You like all this Pike—Pine Corridor shit?” he asks Lizzie. “I guess you’re staying around here.”

“Not far. Where do you live?” A single-occupancy room filled with junked Kaypros and
Oui
magazines? On a rusty cot in the lab, arms wrapped around a sawed-off shotgun?

“Over in Issaquah. It’s only twenty-eight minutes, door to door.”

“From Issaquah to U-Dub?”

“Sieg heil.”

“Excuse me?”

“Sieg Hall? The Comp Sci building at U-Dub. My former employers. Issaquah’s real nice. My place is too big for me, four thousand square feet, but it’s quiet. It’s right at the base of the mountains, which trap the weather moving in from over here, so it doesn’t get sunny much, which keeps too many assholes from moving in. Used to, anyway.”

Lizzie’s only friends in Seattle, two women she knew in college, are no doubt exactly the kinds of assholes Grinspoon means: one is a lawyer living in Kirkland, a suburb she understands to be Pelham crossed with Santa Monica, the other a graphic designer in Redmond, which is White Plains crossed with Encino. Unlike New York or Los Angeles, however, little stigma attaches to living in the suburbs. The contempt of the sophisticated takes other forms.

“I used to live in Kirkland,” Grinspoon continues, “but they were killing me.”

“Who?”

“First I got ticketed by the town for not weatherproofing my house enough. Not energy-saving. Okay. Then it was
so
tight, they made me pay to install fans that totally vented the place six times a day. Okay. Then when I fixed up my lawn and they nailed me for violating the indigenous-shrub protection ordinance, I couldn’t take it anymore. That’s actually what made my last relationship crash and burn.”

“Why don’t you live over here somewhere? Downtown? Closer to the university?”

He screws up his face and shakes his head. “Too much clutter. Too random.”

A waitress arrives. “Hello! I don’t know if you’re in a ragout mood, but the hacked saddle of rabbit ragout with rolled strips of rabbit flank really
is
wonderful, and of all our Dungeness crab preparations, my personal favorite—”

“I’ll have steak, medium rare,” Lizzie says.

“And which of our beef preparations do you prefer?”

“The fillet, with the ‘sesame-skilleted cross sections of baby Spokane sweet potatoes,’ ” Lizzie says, handing her menu over. “Assuming that means fried yams. Nothing to start.”

“Vegetarian platter,” Grinspoon says.

“Excellent!”
the waitress says. “I’ll send Mimi, our new vice sommelier, right over.”

“None for me,” Grinspoon says to Lizzie. “Allergic to nitrites.”

Lizzie shakes her head at the waitress, who turns to leave, then pauses and looks back thoughtfully.

“You know,” she says, “if you’re a yam buff, you should definitely make it to YamFest 2000 over in the Beaux Arts Village this fall.”

“Thanks. I’ll check my schedule. So,” Lizzie says to Grinspoon, “Bruce tells me you despise Microsoft and won’t work for them.”

“I
did
work for them. As a contractor, years ago. But we’d get to a good alpha stage on some out-there software, and then they’d make us move on. We were just keeping the shit in the bag. And then—well, then the place became a
hive
. And I really don’t operate well in hives.” He lifts his water and glugs the whole glass without stopping. “So, are we going to joint-venture on bioelectronics and biomimetics?”

“Bruce would certainly love us to. What do you think the business
is
, though? What’s our product?”

Grinspoon shrugs. “I thought that’s what you were supposed to tell me. I mean, I got these two patents that the telco morons and the networkers want. And the genetic programming, that’s a patent too, Microsoft likes that, but it isn’t, you know, Quicken or Tomb Raider VI or something. But you mean the new work?” He leans forward. “AI.
Real
AI. Deep AI. Big-bandwidth AI R and D.”

Artificial intelligence is not a product
, Lizzie thinks.
Artificial intelligence is a theory, a theology, a tenure track, sci-fi semantics, marketing bullshit
. They said
Speak Memory contains AI because it (sort of) understands ungrammatical slang—such as the difference between
doughnut
and
Don’t it
. They call it AI when Amazon.com predicts what book you’re going to want next. She sold Y2KRx as “AI-enhanced.” Her game designers call it AI when, in Warps, they program a Pilgrim to react differently to a player speaking twenty-first-century English than he does to seventeenth- or nineteenth-century English. AI has been defined down to a rudimentary level.
Real AI, deep AI
, she thinks.
What am I supposed to sell?

“Interesting,” she says with a small smile and a cock of her head. “How so? R and D leading to what, exactly?”

“We’ll find out. That’s the journey. And AI is so much more doable with animals. Especially cats. We have a hundred billion neurons,” he says, touching his temple, “so simulating a human brain will take like ten billion lines of code. Hell, these goat rodeos sweat shit to write a hundred
million
lines of code.”