Turn of the Century (83 page)

“You fucking
stupidity
Oriental!” his driver shouts. “You cock-fucking
stupidity!
”

Now the cabdriver, an older Asian man wearing boxer shorts and plastic flip-flops, is out on First Avenue as well.

“Dummy! You fucking stop for small! Fucking stop in roadway! Dummy! Dummy cunt!”

“
I? I?
No,
you
cock-fucking stupidity son of a bitch, Oriental,
you
criminal!”

“Arrest you!
Arrest
you! Dummy! Cunt!”

George gets out of the car. It isn’t rush hour yet. A taxi stops right away.

“Dad? Why are you home?” Max says from the landing as he comes up the stairs.

LuLu, hearing her brother, scampers out of the playroom, away from Rafaela, to the top landing.

“Daddy?”
she yells down.

He tells them both what happened.

They think it’s a joke. They think it’s like when he claims he’s withdrawn them from school and they’re all moving to a houseboat in International Falls, Minnesota, where he’s going to become a professional bear hunter, or like when he says their mother is an alien from the Crab Nebula who abducted and hypnotized him in 1988. Once last year, he went a whole hour insisting that LuLu was a robot he’d bought from the Sharper Image catalogue.

“I’m really not kidding you. The men who run the company hated the show. They killed it.”

“How do you
kill
a TV show?” LuLu asks, smiling and wide-eyed.

But Max is finally persuaded he’s telling the truth.

“Can I still go to camp?”

“Of course.”

“Dad?” he asks.

“What is it?”

“Why didn’t Mom stop them from killing your show?”

“I guess she couldn’t,” George says.

Lizzie is right
. Lizzie happens to have been right. It is better for him to be here alone awhile and think about what he’s going to do. She was heading off, and she just kept on going. Perfect. But he is glad. He didn’t want to have to recapitulate the details of the meeting with Vlig and the lawyer, the fraudulent hotel-suite charge sheets and the tapes. The tapes.
The tapes
. It’s always tapes nowadays, isn’t it? He could explain to her about Sandi Bemis and the knife attack on the Venetian and even his arm tucked for a few minutes between Shawna Cindy Switzer’s breasts. But he could not bear to put himself on the defensive, not on Monday and not now. He does not want to have to make the weenie denials and self-deprecating explanations of his Las Vegas behavior. And if she were here, her own denials and explanations—she had no idea, she was out of the loop—would kill him, and make him want to kill her. “It isn’t you,” she said on the phone from San Francisco, “it’s not your fault, and it’s not my fault either, it’s just fucking television,” which reminded him of what all her old boyfriends must have heard her say, gently, wide-eyed, sincerely, as she tossed them over,
It’s not you, it’s me
. “I do think we need some space anyway,” she also said.
Some space
. He deliberately didn’t ridicule her phrase,
some space
,
didn’t even snort, and he was glad he didn’t, since his stone-sober silence made her apologize preemptively for using it, forced her to fill the silence with a real apology, an embarrassed apology piled onto her steamy heap of automatic, blameless apology, all that merciless pity. Some emotions can make their way down a copper wire intact, but even when it’s sincere, apology turns inert and anodyne over the phone. And the apologizer, if she’s really listening, can’t help but hear it too, her words transmuted to crap in the nanosecond between mouthpiece and earphone. She started apologizing harder but to no effect, powerless to make the
sorrys
and
awfuls
sound genuine no matter how she stretched and sweetened her voice. He could hear her frustration. He enjoyed it. “It’s not even two weeks,” she finally said. “And then we’ll sit down and deal with everything.”

He is putting on a good show of Dad buoyancy for the children, whose pity makes him sad (for them) rather than angry (at her). But they’ll be gone soon—Max and LuLu to camp on Saturday, Sarah to Provence with the Williamsons on Sunday—and he’ll be able to relax. On Sunday he can stop smiling. He can walk around naked and unwashed, figuratively, and do nothing, literally. What George really wants to do is nothing. Although he’s decided he will go to L.A. for a couple of days, on Emily’s advice. “Take advantage of your moment in the trades,” she said. “You’re notorious.” There’s also a memorial service for Timothy Featherstone next Monday afternoon in L.A., at Mortons Restaurant.

Practically every phone call brings another twinge of pain, not salt rubbed into the wound but sodium chloride instilled in it with a surgical instrument, applied precisely to the bleeding nerve ends. A reporter from the
Journal
called yesterday looking for dirt on Mose Digital, for anything George knows about the rumors that the division would be spun off or sold to Microsoft. He evidently had no idea (and George didn’t tell him) that George Mactier, presumptively disgruntled former MBC executive producer, is married to the starry, splashy corporate up-and-comer Elizabeth Zimbalist, the new president of Mose Digital. “She’s a very sexy story,” the reporter said, meaning sexy, George believes, in the nonsexual sense.

Then there was the call from Ben, not the first, wonderful, screaming one at the office Monday afternoon (nobody is better at loyal apoplexy
than Ben Gould), but the second one, early Tuesday morning here at home. At first George listened, a good audience as usual, amused but unsure where Ben was going with his line about Calvin Klein (“Who would have thought you could double the price of Jockey shorts by printing the name of some silly guy from the Bronx on the elastic?”) or his calculation that the two of them personally know one in every five hundred regular buyers of Häagen-Dazs and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. “Two words, George,” Ben said.
“Black Dog.”
George is familiar with his claims to being the first person to take Bill Clinton to the Black Dog restaurant on Martha’s Vineyard, before he was president. Now Ben wanted to confect chic, eccentric businesses like the Black Dog from scratch. “These are truffle businesses,” he said, “but I want to figure out how to
cultivate
truffles.” The trick, he said, is to go into towns like Sag Harbor and Aspen and Malibu, invent the right bar or ice cream parlor or bait-and-sporting-goods store (or bar-and-bait-and-ice-cream shop) that reeks of quirky local authenticity, then roll each one out to a few other resort towns (“five physical locations, tops”), and finally launch them into direct-mail and web-commerce brands. Black Dog had turned into a retailing phenomenon unintentionally, even reluctantly, and that took them a decade. Ben said that, with the right ideas, and capital, and
focus
, they could accomplish the same alchemy by 2003. “If RJR and Philip Morris and AT&T can go fake-funky and sell Red Kamel cigarettes and Red Dog beer and Lucky Dog phone service, why can’t we do it for leisure retail, pardon the expression? You know? And let’s move beyond dogs, and the color red. Hey, what do you say? Ben and George’s. (I’m not serious about the name.)” George did not reply, “I’m a journalist, Ben,” or “I’m a television producer, Ben,” or “I want to write and direct films, Ben,” or “I’ve never heard such a depressing proposal in my life, Ben.” It’s one thing to enjoy his friend’s sick, splendid business ideas from afar. But it shocked George that Ben would try to enlist him in one of his schemes. He said, “I don’t want to start a chain of yuppie ice cream saloons.” Which pissed off Ben. “You’re part of the natural aristocracy, I guess? You want to live like a prince, but actually
making money
is just too tawdry for the refined sensibilities of George Mactier?” “Maybe my brother-in-law would like to do it,” George said. “He sure would,” Ben replied, pushing the salt grains deeper into the exploded tissue, “but I wanted to offer it to you first.”

This morning, Sarah breezed off to work at her web site in a T-shirt that says
PUSSY POWER
in pink letters. What would Lizzie have done? What would he have done a week ago? But he didn’t have the strength to discuss it. (
What exactly do you mean by
PUSSY POWER
, honey? And when did you stop wearing a bra?
) At least the letters are small. At least it doesn’t have an exclamation point, or an illustration.

The rich get richer; the bleak get bleaker. It depresses him to bump and scoot past Rafaela during the day, as if they’re both intruding. At lunch it depresses him when Max and LuLu insist that he fry up the precut carpaccio he buys from Balducci’s. It depresses him to see the half-used bottle of Rose’s lime juice in the refrigerator—the Harold Mose mixer. Ordinarily, it pleased him to pound meat thin with the huge cartoony wooden mallet, his single favorite kitchen task. But beating the chicken breasts tonight makes him recall the Sunday he and Tuggy Masterson used two stolen Butterball turkeys for .22 target practice, which depressed him in 1967, and does again now.

Before dinner, lying on the Biedermeier couch in the living room (their first joint Christmas present to themselves; doubly depressing), he’s reading the biography of Jean Cocteau that he asked Daisy to get for him during one of his misunderstood-genius rants a few weeks back. He’s in the middle of a passage describing the May midnight in 1913 when Cocteau watched Diaghilev, Stravinsky, and Nijinsky sobbing and keening together in the Bois de Boulogne, disconsolate over the spectacular failure of their ballet. George is just forming the thought,
Is it too ridiculous to imagine that a century from now …
, when LuLu leaps onto his lap suddenly and says, “That man on your book looks like you, Daddy. Is he dead?” Then, looking at the cover, realizing that he’s trying to use a child’s random observation to talk himself into a link between
Le Sacre du Printemps
and
Real Time
, he is overcome by a sense of his own spuriousness.

Of course, today, July 20, is also their tenth wedding anniversary, which would be depressing enough, but it turned excruciatingly so when her gift, a photo of the whole family floating and grinning in Lake Marten last year, arrived by UPS. “Have a good evening, Mr. Zimbalist,” the UPS guy said. He hasn’t opened the note that came with it.

And now, sitting outside on a rich, cool July evening with all three
real live children, finishing a dinner of fried chicken salad by candlelight, his sadness is so exquisite it’s breathtaking.

“I talked to Francesca today,” Sarah tells him, apropos of nothing but the standard family dinner-table download.

“Really?” George says. “Why’d you call her?”

“We talked at you guys’ party about
1964
, and I sent the tape to her last week, and she said she thought it was awesome. She says there’s some new, like, teen documentary series this fall on MTV,
The Good Fight?
That it would be perfect for. Francesca thinks.” Sarah smiles, proud of herself. She shrugs hopefully.

“That’s terrific, honey.” Now he feels professionally envious of his fourteen-year-old daughter. How depressing. Max catches his eye. George assumes the boy is thinking,
Dad, you think her video is as corny and confused as I do, don’t you?

“She said she thought we should give it a new soundtrack. You remember it, right? What do you think would go best—ska, rap, electro-acoustic, ambient, garage, gothic, psychedelic, noise, or twee-pop?” Except for rap, ambient, and psychedelic, and (maybe) ska, George doesn’t know what any of those sound like. That’s depressing.

“Ambient might be cool,” he says, depressing himself by sounding like some ponytailed, middle-aged asshole.

“Is it okay with you if I go up and work on the computer?” Max asks.

Requesting special permission to leave the table, to abandon his poor old man: how unbearably sweet. “Sure it is, Max. You’re not up there spending a jillion bucks on ten-dollar-an-hour web gaming, are you?” His anti-video-game crack reminds George of Lizzie.

“Nope,” the boy says as he heads inside.

George asks Sarah if she’s packed for her trip to France, and she says yes, mostly, and asks him if he’s ever been to Nice, and he says yes, remember, a year ago last spring when he went to sell
NARCS
to foreign TV buyers (with your mother, he doesn’t say), and she asks if she can borrow Lizzie’s Japanese shawl, and he nods, barely. LuLu asks about the single firefly flitting around the backyard (“Is he lonely, Daddy?” she says, as if a midsummer’s line has been written for her), and then about what kind of music they play in hell, and what kind in heaven.

Sarah, of course, professes her disbelief in heaven and hell.

“Ambient, maybe,” he says, “in heaven,” to which Sarah gives a tiny sympathy smile. No smile at all would have been less depressing.

“Maybe,” LuLu says with a pixie preperformance smile as she dips her index finger into the dregs of her father’s sauvignon blanc, “it’s this.” She begins running the wet fingertip around the rim of his glass, three circles every two seconds as he’s taught her. He’s always pleased that she’s enchanted by such a sad, serious, beautiful noise. It’s dark enough now, he hopes, that his daughters can’t see his eyes. “Just
tears
,” he remembers LuLu insisting a few weeks ago (only a few weeks), “do
not
count as crying. They don’t.”

She’s struggling to
keep in mind the distinction between guilt and sorrow. The plane makes it harder, since flying on private jets always gives a vestigial frisson of guilt, about ten stretch-limo-rides’ worth. Exchanging small talk with Harold and Hank and Randy just now as they all boarded, the mere fact of chat, has also provoked a guiltlike sensation.

But she has not betrayed George. She is not betraying him. They canceled his show because it was expensive and the test audiences hated it.
She
didn’t cancel his show. She didn’t have any idea they were going to cancel it.

What if the show were still on the air, and they’d fired her? Would George resign from
Real Time
in some grand act of solidarity? Exactly.