Turn of the Century (91 page)

“Well,” Willi tells him, “that was us. We’re the ‘wacko practical jokers.’ ”

George raises his glass. “Kudos.”

“So that got us interested,” Fanny says, “in how the media, you know, like
works
.” She doesn’t like lying, but she adores Lizzie and George. She needs to protect him.

“You hate Microsoft too?” Willi asks George.

“They fucked over my wife pretty badly.” And if Microsoft hadn’t reneged on the deal to buy Fine Technologies, she would not be with Harold Mose now. “Yeah, I do hate Microsoft.”

Willibald refills his glass and raises it. “Death to the Microsofties!” he says.

“Death to the Microsofties,” Fanny says a little meekly, blushing.

“Skoal,” George says.

In the end, he doesn’t ask about hacking into a Bombardier Global Express’s onboard computer to make it crash. He’s decided it would harsh everyone’s mellow.

Lizzie and Sarah
and Max and LuLu have all arrived home during the same twenty-four hours, which has reinforced the household’s apparent mood of normalcy and sanity. George has kissed Lizzie and thought he smelled Rose’s lime juice on her breath, but then decided that was his imagination. His skepticism of his own suspicions reassures him that he has not gone entirely around the bend. Lizzie thought George looked tired but pretty good, considering.

She asked him what he ate while she was gone, and he said “summery stuff—tuna, lots of tuna, and citrus.”

“So you probably don’t want takeout from Hiroshima Boy tonight? I really don’t feel like cooking.”

“That’s fine,” he said. “Good date for it too.” It’s August 6, the fifty-fifth anniversary of the bomb. Daisy Moore married Cole Granger in California today.

Later, as she drops the Sunday-night recycling box of papers and magazines by the stoop, she sees a book wedged in among
Posts
and
Timeses
and all the redundant Home Again catalogues. She digs it out, and sees it’s
Transitions: From Good to Bad to Better Than Ever!
It makes her want to cry to think he bought a book like this, and makes her
choke up more to see that it hasn’t even been cracked. Poor George. Tucked inside the back cover there’s a discarded FedEx envelope. From
C. PRIEVE
in Woodside, California.

Chas Prieve is corresponding with George!

Lizzie finally forces herself to take a breath. She feels cold. It’s over eighty degrees.

George has really gone off the deep end. He’s involved in Chas Prieve’s blackmail scheme against Mose Media, whatever Chas’s scheme is
.

Oh, Lord, what is George doing?

I can’t confront him now, tonight. Tomorrow, maybe
, she thinks.
And I can’t tell Harold
.

It might be something innocent
.

How can it be innocent? George never even met Chas when he was working for me
.

Lord God, what is George thinking?

“Mommy?” LuLu has opened the front door. “Have you seen Johnny?”

It could be worse
, she thinks. He waves off all her attempts to talk about
Real Time
, but he’s not picking fights with her, or shouting. He was great with LuLu about Johnny, and Lizzie was careful not to betray any blame in voice or mannerism. (She does blame him.) He was almost sociable at Zip’s six-person cocktail party to commemorate both his refusal of the Reality Channel presidency (“the first million-dollar job Zip Ingram ever turned down, and by God I hope the last”) and his imminent move from the Winnebago. On the other hand, when she told George the day after she got home that she didn’t like working for Mose Media and was trying to figure out how to quit without messing up the Fine Technologies acquisition and forfeiting their Mose stock, he didn’t act pleased or even interested. From that reaction, Lizzie decided he couldn’t yet bear to talk about anything Mose-related. In the fall, she decides hopefully, after Labor Day, he’ll start his descent back to earth. She’ll talk him down.

He wanders for miles around Manhattan during the day, most days, and comes home drenched in sweat. “Rediscovering the city,” he says to the family when they ask why. “Getting some exercise.”
Avoiding the children and Rafaela
, he does not say. When he’s home, he stays in his
office on the top floor, starting to go through the unopened boxes and boxes of
NARCS
and
Real Time
files. And using the computer.

On a web site that keeps track of urban legends, he discovers a reference to “the Harold Mose masturbation tape.” It’s a fresh legend to which the web site gives a veracity rating of two Walt Cubes out of five—a Walt Cube being a doodled icon of Walt Disney’s cryogenically frozen head.

The web-cam images in New York are of such a superior quality to the ones from Jakarta. And there are dozens—inside restaurants, on roofs, on sidewalks, everywhere. Once, George is fairly sure, he actually spots her on one of the two cams mounted at the entrance to the James Bond Casino Royale, walking east down Fifty-seventh Street. But of course, when the next image comes up, she is gone.

One day he wonders what Lizzie does on the web, and goes down to her computer. He launches her browser, and does something Willibald mentioned, opening the record of her browsing history, and follows the trail of her web-site visits since she’s been home. For all her claims of web indifference, she is on it a lot, it seems to George. Yet after spending almost three hours examining the last three hundred pages she’s visited, he has found nothing very revealing—an Adirondacks rock-climbing site, HelmutLang.com (she bought a $550 shirt), MoseMedia.com, a story about the Microsoft-buying-Mose-Digital rumor on TheStreet.com, MapsOnUs.com directions to Zip’s RV on the Hudson.

He made Lizzie his America Online Buddy. The AOL Buddy system is intended to allow people to exchange instant e-mail messages with friends on AOL. But George has never used it for its intended purpose. Because she’s his Buddy now, he knows when she’s logged on. His computer makes a sound, the creak of a door, when she logs on and when she logs off. He’s discovered she logs on and off to get her e-mail seven or eight times a day. Whenever she logs off, he clicks his browser over to each of the West Fifty-seventh Street cams, and the two on Seventh Avenue, to see if he might catch her coming out of the MBC building. So far he hasn’t.

This morning, he went online right after she left for work. Usually he goes out walking by noon, but it’s now almost three, and he hasn’t heard the creaking door all day or seen her screen name, LizzieZim,
pop up on his Buddy list. Which must mean she hasn’t gone to the office.

She must be at Mose’s apartment. She’s on his bed, naked, in some yoga position, saying to him, You want me to finger my hot juicy cunt? Should I do it like this? Or do
you
want to finger Lizzie’s hot juicy cunt now, Harold?

He goes downstairs and turns on her computer. It comes on, but then a message he’s never seen before fills the screen.
PLACE YOUR INDEX FINGER ON THE FINGERPRINT PAD FOR USER VERIFICATION
, it says. He tries to click the message box closed. It won’t go away.
PLACE YOUR INDEX FINGER ON THE FINGERPRINT PAD FOR USER VERIFICATION
. Then he sees a tiny black pad between the keyboard and monitor. It has a logo, Veridicom Open Touch, and a cable leads to the back of the computer, where it’s not just plugged but bolted and wired into the machine. He can’t get into her computer. She’s hooked up this fingerprint device to lock him out.

“LuLu,” Lizzie shouts, “if you keep the bug in there any longer, he
will
die.” She turns to Sarah, who’s reading the
Teen Nation
special issue on Mexico. “Will you go punch some holes in that thing for your sister, please?”

They’re finishing dinner outside. Max has already retired to his computer.

“I notice you have a new gadget,” George says. “The fingerprint thing.”

“Kind of stupid and Big Brothery, isn’t it? The company that makes it wouldn’t stop badgering me, so I let them install it.”

They watch Sarah and LuLu playing at the end of the yard.

“Speaking of computers,” he says, “do you ever use instant messaging on AOL? The Buddy system?”

She shakes her head and says, “You know, that’s funny, I had it on, but I never used it, and I found it annoying to see when everybody I knew was logging on and off. To me it wasn’t a friendly ‘community’ at all, it was like some oppressive little small town where everybody knows what everybody else is doing all the time. I turned it off yesterday anyway, since I’m mostly on the MMH system now, instead of using AOL. Why?”

“I don’t know. I just discovered it.”

Since she’s been at Mose, Lizzie has assumed that any conversations between them about computers or software or the web are dangerous, tacitly off-limits. This is a friendly tangent. She decides it’s the opportunity.

“Chas Prieve used to instant-message me all the time. It gave me the willies. I’d log on to get my e-mail, and there he’d be, ‘Hi, Lizzie, FYI, the Singapore deals look very close, high six figures! What’s new?’ You never met Chas Prieve, did you?”

C. Prieve. Chas Prieve. What ugly game is she playing?

“No, I didn’t. Who is he?”

He’s pretending he doesn’t know Chas. This is sick
.

“The weird guy who ran the office in the Valley for two months until I fired him after I found out he was incompetent. And a pathological liar.”

“The cricket is already dead, Mom,” Sarah shouts from the back fence. George and Lizzie watch LuLu open the empty pink-lemonade jug and shake the bug out.

He badly wants
to buy a convertible sports car.
All clichés turn out to be true, Lizzie says, so why not this one?
If anyone deserves to experience a midlife crisis in caricature, he does. And as long as she’s paying the bills (with Mose’s money, he never forgets), he’ll keep spending. It’s perfect, in fact. This really is how lottery winners live.

He needs a car. “You probably need a car,” Lizzie herself said the last time they spoke. He liked the Plymouth Pronto. The body is made entirely of plastic, which the salesman said is “a breakthrough automotive achievement.” He liked the idea of buying an American car, too. (It was Lizzie who vetoed the Ford and Jeep SUVs.) But he just couldn’t get past the name—he didn’t want to have to say,
That’s mine over there, the Plymouth—the purple Plymouth Pronto Spyder
. But the car made of
plastic
gave him his next idea: a red 1966 Alfa Romeo Spider 1600 Duetto, the car Dustin Hoffman drove in
The Graduate
. In ten minutes on the web he finds a dozen of them for sale, including one on Long Island, but then he decides he’s delusional—he just doesn’t have the patience or mechanical skill to keep a thirty-four-year-old sports car repaired and tuned. But the movie-car notion led to the winning idea, which struck him with the force of one of his big, magnificent once-a-year
inspirations. He’s going to New Jersey tomorrow to buy a new, five-speed Aston Martin convertible. He’s not going all the way—it’s not a vintage DB5, it’s the 2001 model DB7, brand-new, but it is the car Bond drove before the movie producers struck their product placement deal with BMW. It costs $154,000. But Lizzie is rich.

“Is that Water Street address your home address, Mr. Mactier?” the excited, solicitous salesman from Jersey asked on the phone.

“It’s my mailing address, yes.”

George thought he would queer the deal if he said,
I don’t have a home address, but I guess if you wrote The Winnebago Parked on Pier 58, just south of the golf driving range, New York, New York, 10011, it would probably get to me
. It’s reassuring that even though he’s a disgraced, unemployed bum who hasn’t had a job since July 17 … for eleven weeks … more than eleven weeks … fifty-nine weekdays—
Fifty-nine!
—the world is still very eager to sell him a $154,000 sports car on credit.

He moved into Zip’s motor home a week after Labor Day. It was empty, since Zip has moved to a rented triplex loft on Franklin Street. “Home Again says I have to buff my ‘profile’ in the design and retail communities,” he said, “and throw all these bloody parties!” Zip invited George to stay with him in the loft, but George declined. He thought it would raise his-friends-versus-her-friends ugliness unfairly. Or at least prematurely, before he was ready to enjoy it.