Turn of the Century (73 page)

Chime
. “Mr. Mose is here,” announces the voice from the hidden sub-woofer.

And so he is, ambling in, wearing a pinkish suit as fine and silky as carpaccio, and a loose white shirt buttoned at the top. He looks like the richest architect on earth.

“And how is my digital president this fine, fetid morning? Christ! We might as well be in Bangkok.”

“Hello, Harold.”

“I trust you’re not already too disillusioned with the rampant incompetence and venality.” He comes closer. “Ah, MotorMind. Did we overpay less or more for them than we overpaid for WhamBam-dot-com?” WhamBam.com is a children’s web site that lets kids click on the names of toys and videos and other merchandise written into animated stories and games they can watch and play for free. By clicking on the names, the children receive e-mail advertising for the products—or, if their parents have provided a credit card number and a WhamBam.com “weekly allowance,” actually buy the stuff. “And TK Corporation—certainly we were fleeced more there than on Motor-Mind?” He sits.

“About the same,” she says. She does enjoy Mose. In fact, she is enjoying this job for the first time right now.

“But it does work, correct? Raging Id?”

“It does. And I assume internally, in News, it can be useful right away. For clip research.”

“Mmm. I wouldn’t predicate too much synergy on the MBC News division. MBC News is being … rethought.”

How she would love to be able to tell that to George! She knows she shouldn’t. Given his mood, she knows she won’t. “My only question,” she says to Mose, “is how ready regular people are to verbalize
everything. You know? ‘Send my mother tulips, but don’t spend more than thirty-five dollars.’ Do people want to say things like that, sitting alone in a room, talking to a machine? Or more embarrassing things. Typing and mouse clicking are discreet.”

Mose shakes his head. “People will adapt. Modern people don’t need much encouragement to spill their guts. Ten years ago, who’d’ve thought we could put on a circus like
No Offense, But …
every morning.”
No Offense, But …
is an hour-long talk show–game show hybrid on MBC, hosted by Dr. Juanita. Guests compete for prizes by predicting the embarrassing facts that friends and family will reveal about them on the air—and then, in the “Di$ ’Em Back!” round, try to double their money by revealing embarrassing facts about their friends and family. For five minutes at the end of each show, Dr. Juanita counsels the guests.

“But those people get to be on TV for an hour. That’s a big incentive to embarrass yourself.”

“Correct,” he says. Then he twists his permanent wry smile up a notch. “But what about your sexual-revolution paradigm? The same squares who become accustomed to oral sex also get used to talking dirty when the bedroom door is closed, don’t they?”

“I suppose.” She suddenly feels fastidious, mousy. “Yeah, that is analogous.”

Before the bubble of awkwardness drifts away, out of control, Mose says, “For the record, this is not sexual harassment. Or a hostile sexual environment. And I want a notarized affidavit to that effect from you by noon.”

She smiles. “Sure thing, boss. I’ll have my people negotiate the language with your people.”

“You’ve already earned your salary this month, Elizabeth. That gadget you got Hank to borrow from your friend at Lucent? Impressed the hell out of everybody in L.A.”

He’s talking about the Bell Labs panel, consisting of several hundred tiny microphones, that was mounted on the stage at the Mose Media shareholders meeting. Whenever a shareholder in the auditorium rose to make a comment or ask a question, it invisibly found the person and homed in from a hundred yards, amplifying the voice as if he or she were speaking directly into a mike a few inches away. The technology
is unsuited to real democratic hurly-burly, since it can only pluck out one speaker at a time. In order to function properly, as Lizzie has told her Lucent friend, it requires extreme politeness, everyone waiting their turn to talk—or else a bully ready to take over, since the thing is programmed to zoom in on the loudest voice in the room. It can deal with orderly corporate meetings and legislative deliberations, or Germany in 1932, but nothing in between.

“Half the audience comments were
about
the damn thing,” Mose says. “I’m afraid most of the people there thought we invented it. A misapprehension we made no special effort to correct. Timothy,” he says, grinning and shaking his head, “Timothy used it, after we adjourned, to eavesdrop on Hank gossiping with that stupid tart from CNBC, Maria what’s her name.”

“So I heard. May I ask an impolitic question?”

“
Please
. My favorite sort.”

“What is the deal with Timothy? I mean, I like him, I enjoy him, but … That’s one guy with a very high noise-to-signal ratio.” “Meaning he’s a jabbering fool? And an embarrassment?”

“ ‘Merry Chatterers’ is what George calls people like Timothy.”

“Does he? What does George call me?”

She smiles, and says nothing.

“Timothy,”
Mose says, “is perfectly suited to this business in many ways. As nearly as I can tell, the only one of the living TV legends who has a mind is Barry Diller. Barry is an intelligent adult. (And even Barry has his tantrums.) No, most of the genius executives seem a little … well,
goofy
. Not stupid, but childlike. Michael Eisner is a giant boy. That’s why he’s worth a billion dollars. Timothy Featherstone loves watching TV! He’s like a kid when he talks about inventing a show based on your game …”

“Warps.”

He shakes his head again softly. “When I hired Timothy two years ago, he knew more about this ridiculous business than almost anyone I’d ever met.” Mose puts his hands on his knees, preparing to go. “That was two years ago. And will this company even be in the network entertainment business two years from now?” He raises his eyebrows and cocks his head, a miniature shrug equivalent. “Maybe not, if you’re as successful as I know you’ll be.” He stands. “But enough doctrinal
discussion! I’m boring myself. Mr. Mactier killing himself on
Real Time
, is he?”

“Mmm,” Lizzie replies, nodding.

She imagines the conversation at home.
Oh, honey? By the way? I think Harold is going to close down News, can Timothy, and maybe get out of entertainment altogether. Just FYI. Pass the hummus?
Ethics forbid her (don’t they?) from giving George any inkling of this conversation. If they were on better terms, she knows she would anyway—she’d at least give him “guidance,” as Ben calls it. So this breach has a silver lining: his rage makes her scruples easier. Maybe once
Real Time
is finally up and running and he snaps out of this psycho funk, she’ll violate the corporate confidences and begin to let George in on the truth.

“Well,” Mose says, “I’m back to L.A. tonight. Over to Vietnam for the start of the galley championships, then Hong Kong. I’m back here a week from Tuesday for our Elizabeth Zimbalist celebratory dinner. And—only a month late—mirabile dictu,
Real Time!
”

Lizzie thinks she hears a trace of derisive fake enthusiasm in the way he pronounces the name of the show.

“Say,” he says, “we don’t want to be in the internet chat-room business in the Chinese ‘special economic zones,’ do we?”

“I doubt it.”

“I thought not. Leave the People’s Republic to Rupert. Farewell, my dear.”

“So when do you start fucking Harold?” George said in their one screaming fight about her Mose deal. “Or am I behind the curve on that, too?”
Poor, silly, stupid George
, she thinks, contemplating her magnificent haploxylon (and the trees of the park behind it like a painted theatrical scrim). But then Lizzie thinks: she’s talking more to Harold Mose these days than to George, and Mose doesn’t even live in New York. She thinks: the conversation with her boss just now was more civilized and relaxed, smarter and sexier, than any encounter she’s had with her husband in a month. As the next thought begins to form (Would Harold Mose, spotted anonymously at a party or a restaurant, make her How Many Guys list?), she bears down on Penn McNabb’s one-sentence mission statement justifying the $327 million Mose Media Holdings paid for his company: “Although the very name of TK Corporation proudly privileges the central wealth-creation fact of
the New Economy—that the precise shape of the future as well as its component technologies are perpetually embryonic, perpetually ‘TK,’ or
to come
—there can be no question that our proprietary technology, Ultra-Streaming Video®, will be a mission-critical feature of that unfolding multimedia future.”

His brain aches
. He feels sick. The air and the light are rotten and inescapable. He keeps a bottle of Visine and a green plastic pint of Mylanta in his briefcase. There is not enough time. There is never enough time, of course. But this is worse. This is the worst. The Postshakedown Breakdown, the staff is calling it. They mean it as a cocky, making-their-TV-bones joke,
Postshakedown Breakdown
, a password to snicker in the fluorescent buzz over take-out pizza and Dr Pepper. It’s all a crazy multimillion-dollar dorm party for them, a two-month all-nighter to finish the term papers and cram for exams. They’re young. It’s a job. They’re not responsible.

The sixteen-hour days on
Real Time
mostly keep his mind off Lizzie, twenty-one floors above, but this compensation has not occurred to George. He does think, when he arrives alone at six-thirty or seven, before the regular guards are at work, that his elevator bank, for the thirtieth through the fifty-eighth floors, is different from hers. Until the sixth of June, he was oblivious to the Mose Media Holdings elevator-bank hierarchy. Now, even though he’s grateful for the lobby separation, for the thick, high, stone-and-wood bundling board between them, the sight each morning of the express elevator to Fifty-nine enrages
him, but for just an instant, so quickly he doesn’t even register it as a distinct speck of anger.

He’s angry at Molly Cramer, who somehow got a dub of the Friday shakedown show. Cramer accused George, “the millionaire pro-heroin producer,” of “apparently pulling the plug on his Deep Throat ‘exposé’ for fear of angering his liberal media buddies.” He’s angry at
Time
for calling
Real Time
, before the show has aired, before he’s even finished inventing it, “a highly worrisome new postmodern milestone in the helter-skelter morphing of fact into fiction and news into entertainment.” (If they only knew: he turned down a videotape of Michael Jackson swimming with Joey Heatherton and two dolphins in a pool of water dyed red, and not just because of Jackson’s stipulation that the on-air copy contain the words
bizarre
and
kinky
.) “Fucking
Time
magazine,” he ranted to Timothy Featherstone, “this from the company that publishes
InStyle
and puts pay-per-view porno on my cable TV and owns professional wrestling.” He got angry when Featherstone replied that
InStyle
is his and Ng’s favorite magazine. He’s angry at Hank Saddler, for telling him “Harold and I found BetaWeek a little buggy,” and for coming down to his office on Monday to complain about George’s quoted claim in
Time
that “our Friday news segments will be the hardest news in prime time.” “I don’t need to tell you, George,” Saddler said, “that the perception of ‘hard news’ is ratings poison. And ‘hard’ can also strike people as meaning difficult to understand, or painful, which I know you don’t want. Especially given your own MPI trendline.” He’s angry at himself for giving Saddler the go-ahead to use “Postmodern milestone!” as a blurb in the newspaper ads for the show. In her e-mail about the
Time
story, Lizzie tried to laugh off his quote denigrating MBC News coverage of yoga and rock climbing and video games, but her ha-ha-ha magnanimity had also made him angry.

It was easier when she was angry too, that first night. “You’re acting like a fucking
child
, George,” she said to him, “a pathetic, disturbed child. There’s no cabal plotting against George Mactier. It’s a new job. And it’s a business deal that makes sense for me. For
us
, for Christ’s sake.
Period
.” Okay, sell the company. Okay, go to work up on Fifty-nine. But why didn’t she let him know she was going to Mose’s apartment? (George has never been to the apartment. George has
never been invited to a golf outing with the guys from Fifty-nine, either, an exclusion for which he’s been grateful until now.) What had made her tell Mose about Inscrutable Hardasses and Merry Chatterers? Featherstone claimed he wasn’t pissed off at George (“I’ve been called worse, believe me”), but he seemed upset. Probably what Featherstone overheard in Mose’s apartment that morning (“They were talking blowjobs, man, straight up”)
was
, as she insisted (with that patronizing chuckle), “a completely metaphorical discussion of bandwidth and interactivity.” But who chose the metaphor? And who deleted the files from the laptop? Who sneaked into his desk at home sometime in the last couple of months, dug out the PowerBook, and deleted
HAROLD MEMO
and
BLAH-BLAH-BLAH NOTES?
He has no evidence, but the files didn’t evaporate. And he never did read them. “You’re too honest, Mactier,” Ben has always said, and George has always taken it as a backhanded compliment, never as a warning.

George is angry that he’s going to be working all weekend, through the Fourth, while Lizzie and the kids are out in East Hampton with Ben. He was angry, at first, about the postponement of the premiere. “One piece of event programming at a time, G-man,” Featherstone said. Starting Monday, MBC will be broadcasting the Classical Galley world championship race, live by satellite, across the South China Sea from Ho Chi Minh City to Bandar Seri Begawan. “It’ll give you more time for testing and tweaking your baby,” he’d said, “supertesting and supertweaking.”

But Featherstone is right. The extra month to test
Real Time
has been useful. The test screenings have shown him how blurry the lines are, for most viewers, between fiction and nonfiction. They’ve shown him that reality and make-believe are more fungible, for most viewers, than he’d dreamed possible. The month has given him time to fight the fights with Fifty-nine
before
the show is on the air rather than after. The scores of the first regular testings of the Tuesday and Thursday shakedown shows, awarded by 337 strangers in the San Fernando Valley, are encouraging. A 100 is average, and the shows got a 120. The Friday news hour, however, tested poorly, as George knew it would. He has done his best for months to lowball Fifty-nine’s expectations about the Friday hour. “It’s
news
,” George said when the disappointing number came in.
“Real news.” But as Featherstone said, “Seventy is still seventy, George, even if you expect seventy. Would you
want
to fuck the ugly ho just because your boy told you beforehand she wasn’t yummy?”