Turn of the Century (77 page)

“They look perfect,” Max says, disappointed that a great idea went so badly awry.

In the back, near the door to the garden, are the two two-foot-high dolls, still in their packaging. Johnny is pawing and sniffing at the boy.
Fernando wears blue jeans and a green Lacoste shirt, Jilma (according to her label) a Country Garden dress.

Lizzie doesn’t know what to say. LuLu’s crying is now more normal.

“They’re poseable,” Max says. “That was ten dollars extra apiece.”

She deputizes Sarah, finally settles LuLu and Max down in front of
Ren & Stimpy
(Nickelodeon is running Nick’s Nonstop Nostalgic Nineties Flashback), and says goodbye.

“Can one of you go to a special soccer parents’ meeting on Thursday night?” Max asks blankly, staring at the TV. “Some parents want to hire a pro coach for us for the fall.”

“Your father’s second show is Thursday. I’ll try. Did you set the VCR for nine-thirty?”

“Yeah.” Max turns to look at her.

“Do you think Dad is ever going to get, you know, normal again?”

“Mommy said Daddy looks dead,” Louisa says, not taking her eyes off
Ren & Stimpy
.

“I said he looks ‘dead
tired.’
I’ll see you both later.”

“Isn’t it sort of unfair to review the show before the full week’s been on? Like reviewing just the first act of a play?”

“Yeah,” George says to Lizzie. “I’ll file an objection with the fairness police.”

The children are excited and well behaved, like they’re at a restaurant. Both parents awake, both here, eating together,
speaking
. He still looks waxen and ill. But he brought a cup of tea to the breakfast table for her. Lizzie mentioned her work, and said that Fifty-nine is like Darth Vader’s Berchtesgaden designed by Michael Graves on a Crate & Barrel budget. He
giggled
. They had a gentle conversation with LuLu, in which they discussed the definition of crying and her claim that tears by themselves do not count. (She threw the My Twinns away, and when Rafaela discovered the dolls in the garbage she freaked out all over again, and LuLu teared up.) They had a conversation with Max about soccer. (They both disagree with the St. Andrew’s parents’ vote in favor of an Adidas endorsement deal to pay for a professional coach.) They had a conversation with Sarah about her trip to France in August and the journal she’s supposed to keep for her European Past class next fall. “They can’t call it European
history?
” George said.
But no one minded. George the old grouch is preferable to absent George.

Now he is having a real conversation with her, about the show, the problems, the surprises, the reviews (no worse than expected), the overnights (not terrible), the high points and many low points of his first days on the air. The children aren’t interrupting or grabbing each other’s Eggos and bagel chunks.

“May I ask a question, Daddy?” Louisa says, a perfect old-fashioned daughter.

“Shoot.”

“Did Ben Gould stop that man from dying at the bar?”

Riley Dugger has survived, but he had a stroke as well as a heart attack. He will not be running his company for some time, if ever. Ben’s stock market bets against Dugger Broadcasting are very much in the money.

“He helped.”

“I have another question also.” “What, honey?” George says.

“What if they do let the murderer go free this afternoon?”

She’s talking about Charles Manson. On the Tuesday program they intercut real taped excerpts from Manson’s most recent parole hearing. In one four-second live scene, Cole Granger was shown standing among the members of the California Board of Prison Terms as they filed out of the hearing room. Because state officials would allow only a robot camera in the vestibule, however, George inserted Granger into the shot digitally, even though he was actually at the MBC studios in Burbank. The real magic of the technique (which Barry Stengel, the idiot, hadn’t even used at the funeral in
Finale
) is that it permits occlusion. Occlusion means that when Manson shuffled between the camera and the digital illusion of the live correspondent, Granger was realistically obscured for the instant he passed, and the camera could zoom in on the correspondent’s face apparently reacting (as Cole said as portentously and frequently as possible) to “California state prisoner number B-33920.” The shot looked completely real. It was astonishing. In his quotes in the
Times
yesterday morning
(EXPERTS DEBATE “REMOTE PRESENCE” OF “NEWSMAN” AT MANSON HEARING)
, George pointed out that both the Tuesday and the Thursday shows, despite incorporating actual news
clips, are repeatedly labeled as fiction at the beginning and end of the program and after every commercial break. On Tuesday, the announcer’s disclaimer was even more aggravatingly explicit: “Viewers should understand that the scene of Cole Granger with Charles Manson following the parole board hearing is a digital modification of a real event. Granger was not physically present in that hallway.” Until she read the
Times
story, Lizzie didn’t know that George had indeed used the same technique that got Barry Stengel fired. She hadn’t dared talk to him about it ahead of time, and there’s no point now.

“They’re not going to let Charles Manson out of jail, LuLu,” her mother says. “Not ever.”

“Is that true, Daddy?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Then why are they pretending to think about it?”

“Is that a rhetorical question, Louisa?”

“What’s that?”

“Your father’s joking, honey.” She turns to George. “So if Gordon is such a problem, fire him. You don’t have to work with him on
NARCS
anymore, so who cares? Get somebody who’s directed documentaries or something.”

“Is that the official Fifty-nine line?”

“
Stop
. (By the way, I’m working late tonight in some Asia strategy-planning session.) No, about Gordon, I just mean it’s like what I need to do with Penn McNabb. The one thing about this company is they don’t seem to second-guess you if you need to hire someone or get rid of someone. If you don’t think Gordon gets the show, and he isn’t going to get it, and he’s messing it up, then … lance the boil.”

She was a little duplicitous at breakfast, or at least incomplete. She said Randy, Doug, Hank Saddler, and almost everyone on Fifty-nine except Featherstone do seem like deacons in the Martian Church of Latter-day Satans. George smiled when she said that. They do have the brainpower of Boston College and the self-importance of Harvard. He smiled again. Fifty-nine is expensively dreary and too quiet, like Beverly Hills. She does hate being there most of the time. It is despicably political, she said after the kids left.

Lizzie has had five real jobs. At Procter & Gamble she was at the
lowest executive rung. At the foundation and at News Corporation, she was still nowhere near the top. Virtual Fortress was too small and hippie-hackerish to have a meaningful top or bottom. At Fine Technologies she is the top. But at Mose Media Holdings she is, for the first time, very near a truly corporate apex. As one of six executive vice presidents and four presidents—eight different human beings—Lizzie realizes that her job is simple. Each of the other executives on Fifty-nine has two jobs: pleasing Harold, and also keeping the others from fatally badmouthing himself to Harold. She doesn’t need the salary (the ridiculous, $1.1 million base salary) anymore, since on paper she now has serious fuck-you money (fuck-Mose money, in the form of Mose common stock), so all she has to do is please Harold Mose. That is now her job. Reductionist but true. It reminds Lizzie of what her mother said the night in 1973, when she left with Mike to fly to Washington for Nixon’s second inaugural, despite her flagrant McGovernism. “Lizzie, when you’re older you’ll understand that any woman’s job, at the end of the day, is to please one man.” This is different. For one thing, Serene Zimbalist probably meant
at the end of the day
literally, and for another, Lizzie has the wherewithal to walk away anytime she wants. This is different.

What she didn’t tell George at breakfast is that a lot of the time she’s enjoying herself too. Is it possible to jerry-build a third-rate TV network together with some software and internet businesses, make a few shrewd alliances, and end up with a sustainable twenty-first-century … what? Entertainment platform? Information medium? Infotainment plat du jour, medium well? Maybe or maybe not, but it’s her job to scope it out and say the magic words. One month into it, too soon to fail or feel frustrated (she knew coming in that Hank Saddler is a smarmy freak), Lizzie is having fun doing it. She’s being paid to think
big
. She’s a consultant who runs budgets, a strategist who can hire and fire, a general with troops. And the relief of being on a work release from the cage of her humid, high-strung, downtown clubhouse—

“Right there’s fine,” she tells her driver, “by that sign,
THE MBC.”

—is like a sabbatical. For the first time in years, she feels unburdened. “One piece of advice, honey-girl,” her father told her when she was starting Fine Technologies. “The downside of being your own
boss and running your own show is being your own goddamn boss and running your own fucking show. The great thing about a studio gig is it’s twice as much money and half as much work as real work.” She is not Mose New Media. It’s a studio gig. She is no longer personally signing a $200,000 biweekly payroll check, or mothering eighty-four people who are under the impression that they’re in graduate school or a commune. What Lizzie did not mention to George is that while she loathes Fifty-nine qua Fifty-nine, she is happiest on the days, once or twice a week, when Harold Mose is in the office.

“It’s very simple,” Mose is saying to her and her fellow senior executives, and the COO, Arnold Vlig, in the conference room on Fifty-nine. Arnold Vlig, with his tired animal eyes and lips like an optical illusion (squinted at from one angle he’s grimacing, from another always grinning, troll-like), is at Mose’s right. But a foot or so back from the table, as if to suggest a Rasputinesque puppeteer’s power. Timothy Featherstone must be in Burbank. “At the end of the day,” Mose says, “each and every one of you has only one job.” He pauses. “What is that job?”

“Customer service?” Doug says.

“No. Your job is making me happy.”

They all snigger. Lizzie’s comes with a little gasp. She thinks of Buster Grinspoon’s mental modem. She doesn’t believe in ESP, but in some obscure way she thinks serendipity is not always coincidental. When she was younger, Lizzie used the word
synchronicity
a lot.

“You laugh. But it is precisely the case. And
I
have only one job. To make the stock market happy. The Market, capital
M
, is
my
only real boss. Pleasing him, or her,” he adds, smiling at Lizzie, “is my job. Full stop. End of story.”

They all smile.

“A question. Let’s imagine our stock price is a dense little disk, sitting in the middle of the ice. It hasn’t moved anywhere lately. It’s just sitting there. How should we make it move in the right direction?”

Gnomic sports metaphors and patronizing Socratic dialogues: the first top-level corporate headquarters meeting of her life, and it’s already turning out precisely as she assumed it couldn’t really be. She picks up her sharp new Mose Media Holdings pencil, and scribbles a reminder on her virginal yellow legal pad,
HOCKEY = STOCK, ACAT
.
ACAT stands for All Clichés Are True. During the animal-rights insanity, she started keeping a list.

Mr. Sales has got it. “You skate out there fast as the devil,” Randy says, “make sure your defensemen are doing their jobs, and you shoot that puck down the ice as hard as you can and skate like hell after it.” He radiates self-pleasure even more than usual.

“And then,
Randy
, you are tossed out of the game. This game.”

Everyone sniggers except Randy and Lizzie.

“Mose Media Holdings has been playing hockey. Building a new network, just as the network business is crumbling, out of its very rubble—a cross-check,
bam
, the stock shoots up the ice. We score! The crowd roars! Our new internet and digital acquisitions,” Mose says, glancing at Lizzie again, “more hockey—whack, whack,
whack
, shoot them down the ice. And the crowd—the Market, my boss, that crowd—loved it. But then the stock price got big, and heavy—like what?”