Read Turn of the Century Online
Authors: Kurt Andersen
“Fanny. I’m afraid you don’t understand.”
“I know you think I’m just some punk kid, and I don’t mean to be mean, but you’re sitting in this fucking Winnebago, like disconnecting from reality and going loony.”
They finish talking. She finishes her Snapple. He thanks her for stopping by and encourages her to apply to Wesleyan. He hugs her goodbye and tells her to stay out of trouble.
“Say hi to Mom,” he tells her as she steps down and out.
“My mom? I will. You mean
my
mom?”
He meant Lizzie. He isn’t certain what he meant. After Fanny leaves, he sits on the metal step, and stays there very quietly for an hour, looking at the rubble out on the pier, the twisted steel tie-rods and chunks of concrete, pretty in the light of the low evening sun. A few yards to his left, he sees a monarch butterfly flitting in and out of the open Cyclone gate, flying in circles, up and down, a spiral. Between George and the gate, a breeze off the Hudson catches a few dried leaves and carries them off the ground in a tiny whirlwind. For five seconds, the swirling leaves and the butterfly are perfect simulations of one another, side by side. He goes back inside, shuts down the PowerBook, picks up the phone, and calls Warren Holcombe again.
“You don’t mind
if I smoke, do you? Because I smoke.” Warren holds the edge of his apartment door in one hand and a burning True in the other.
“I see. I don’t mind.”
“I quit on New Year’s, but I started again. Increased, actually.”
George’s obligatory three sessions with Warren in the eighties, about his hand, took place in a regular medical office building. Warren smoked Trues then, too. You could smoke inside office buildings then.
“Follow me.”
Warren is not fat, but Warren lumbers. He’s lumbering down a long hallway toward the amplified sound of dinging and high-pitched plinking. George has not realized until right now how huge Warren’s bald spot has gotten, probably big enough to exceed the strict definition of “spot.” He’s wearing slippers. Otherwise, he is dressed exactly as always—wide-wale brown corduroys, long-sleeved turtleneck.
“You won’t mind the cage, will you?”
George wonders if he should leave.
“What? What cage?”
“The music,” he says as they step into his office. “John Cage. It always
seems like an insult to the randomness idea to turn off a Cage recording in the middle.”
“I do mind, Warren. I hate music like that.”
“Fine.” He flicks at the power button on the CD player like he’s shooting a marble. “Shall I assume we are not here this morning to pick up where we left off on December fourteenth, 1984, when you were telling me you thought the woman you were dating didn’t have any problem with the hand?” He directs George to an armchair, then sits down across from him, pulling an old-fashioned ashtray, a three-foot-by-ten-inch metal cylinder, closer to his own chair.
No couch! Nor any cage or unpleasant recordings. George is relieved.
“So I don’t know what the protocol is, in a case like this,” he says as Warren lights another cigarette.
“What is this case?”
“Because Pollyanna and Lizzie are such close friends. And I’m here to talk about Lizzie. About our relationship. God, I hate that word.”
“Why do you hate the word
relationship?
”
“Warren, I didn’t come here for that kind of thing. You know,” he says, “ ‘What were you feeling when you said just now, “Do you understand what I’m feeling?” ’ ”
“What did you come here for?”
“To find out if you think I’m cracking up, having some kind of breakdown.”
“What are your symptoms?”
Symptoms? He’s pissed off at his wife, who he thinks is having an affair with her boss, who canceled his TV show three months ago after one week on the air. “Well, for a week or so in August, my thoughts seemed to occur like non sequiturs.”
“Give me an example.”
“Oh, I was watching some Miss America preview show, and then for a half hour I couldn’t stop thinking about
Play Misty for Me
, then I thought about this old Mickey Mouse cartoon where Mickey gets whipped. And then about how the ice cream in our freezer gets all soupy after a week and the repair guy said there’s no mechanical explanation, and then I couldn’t stop thinking about Superman. Each one was sort of obsessive. And none of them had anything to do with the other.”
“It’s so interesting that they gave it to the blind girl, isn’t it? Miss America? When she stood up there with the dog and said to the guy, ‘I can see the new century and the new millennium as clear as anything, Bob, and they’re so beautiful it’s almost frightening.’ I got goose bumps watching her say that. Watching
Miss Mississippi
in the
personality
competition! I’ve got goose bumps again now.” He takes out a fresh True. “I apologize for the digression, George. I’m sorry. So, you’re worried you’ve got the clang.”
“What’s ‘the clang’?”
“Clang associations are when you move from one thought to another randomly. Or apparently randomly, based on the
sounds
of words more than the meanings. (In school, I wrote a paper on it called ‘The Modernist Disorder.’) See—
Miss
America, Play
Misty, Mickey
Mouse
cartoon, carton
of soupy ice cream in the
freezer
, freezer
repairman, soupy, Superman
. So this stopped? After August?”
“Yeah. Yes, it did.”
“Probably nothing. In fact, I’m probably the crazy one for making those links. Any other symptoms?”
“I’m sort of depressed. I don’t know if clinically I’m depressed. But …” He sits up. “Warren, has Pollyanna told you about Lizzie and me? We’re separated.” It’s the first time he’s said the word. “Not
‘separated’
separated, but I haven’t lived at home in a month almost.” He blows some of Warren’s smoke away. “I think she’s having an affair with her boss, and she says I’m an insane stalker.”
“Are you stalking her?”
“No. Not physically. Not following her around or anything. But sort of. Yeah. I suppose. Yes.”
“And the only reason you feel depressed, aside from your show getting canceled—I was so sorry about that, George; I
loved
it; it may have been my favorite show, network show,
ever
—but the single source of your depressed feelings and the focus of all your neurotic behaviors, as nearly as you can tell, is the fact that you believe your wife is sleeping with this other man?”
George breathes in deeply, and out. “Yes. That’s right. Yes. And that she was complicit in killing the show.”
Warren stares at him for a long time … three seconds, four, five, six. He stubs out his cigarette, stands, and lumbers toward the doorway. “Follow me,” he says.
They walk back down the long corridor, but take a left before they reach the front hall. Warren flips on an overhead light with his thumb, marble-shot style, and punches the start button on a computer the same way. They are in an office, smaller than the one they were just in. The shelves are filled with loose-leaf binders and bound trial transcripts and legal books.
“This is Pollyanna’s office?”
Warren turns to him and nods as the computer boots up. Standing over the keyboard, Warren types and taps, clicks the mouse, then clicks some more. Documents bloom open. He stands aside, puts one hand in his pocket, and does a parody of a maître d’, grandly waving George into the desk chair.
George starts reading. He turns and looks up at Warren, who frowns and nods and makes four little circles in the air with his hand. George continues reading. He clicks documents closed, reads, clicks, reads, clicks, reads, and then opens more. He reads for half an hour, and continues reading.
They are e-mails, dozens of them, short and long, sent by Lizzie to Pollyanna beginning last spring. Lizzie thanking Polly for introducing her to Zero, then Lizzie describing George working so hard on
Real Time
he doesn’t have any idea what hell she’s going through with Microsoft, or with the animal rights nuts, or with the “left-wing assholes AND right-wing assholes.” Lizzie explaining in the longest e-mail George has ever read her acute ambivalence about whether to sell Fine Technologies and take the job with Mose. Lizzie saying how much she misses George, even though they haven’t made love in weeks, and with the
Real Time
premiere postponed, “chances for improvement are approximately zero.” Lizzie worrying about poor George’s health. Lizzie hoping desperately that the show works. Lizzie in a state of shock when the show is canceled, and asking Pollyanna whether she should quit. Lizzie starting to worry seriously about the mental health of “PG” (poor George), and his repeated, “savage” accusations of infidelity with Harold Mose, even though she has “never even seriously THOUGHT about being unfaithful, although I’m frankly just about horny enough now.” Lizzie full of deepening dread in hotel rooms all over Asia, despising Gloria and Hank Saddler and finally even Harold, feeling in over her head, feeling like she’s “in two rotting marriages at once, one with a psycho husband who hates me and the other with a
slightly pathetic semicriminal who thinks I’ve got blue smoke and mirrors that are going to save his stupid company.” Lizzie plotting her escape from Mose Media Holdings before the end of the year. Lizzie frightened about “these crazy things George is involved in, criminal things, that you don’t even want to know about.” And Lizzie, in the weeks since he moved into “Zip Ingram’s fucking
trailer
,” growing even darker, fitfully resigning herself to the fact that “life can just suddenly derail for no reason,” and on October first, just a few days ago, that “PG may be really and truly mad” and “just lost to me forever. Which I cannot stand. Even though I may have to.”
“George?”
He turns. Warren hands him a box of Kleenex. George has been sniffing and making whimpery throat sounds for ten minutes, but has only just now started bawling, bellowing, weeping like a child. He cries for a long time. Warren pads in and out three times and smokes a fresh cigarette before George is finished.
“There’s also Polly’s diary on there,” Warren says when he stops, nodding toward the computer, “which includes synopses of some phone calls and a couple of lunch conversations about you. If you’re not convinced.” He arches his eyebrows and twists his mouth. “Although frankly, showing you that material would carry this to a whole new level of ethical dubiousness that I’d just as soon avoid.”
“No. No. That’s okay.”
“Well, you’re cured.” He looks at his big digital watch. “And your fifty minutes are up.”
November
December
January
“The screen market’s
1¾,” Billy Heffernan says, looking at the options scroll on one of his two screens. He has one phone in his lap, another pressed to his temple. He’s on the wire, on one of his permanently open lines, waiting for his favorite broker on the options desk at Smith Barney.
“What’s the
price
, Billy?” Ben Gould asks.
“Can I show my guy the whole picture?”
“If it helps, sure. Same as the others.”
“I want you to work it, but I want to get this trade on.”
Ben is impatient, even more of a flibbertigibbet than usual, and Heffernan doesn’t know why. Bennett Gould Partners is 19 percent up for the year, with a month left to go; 6 percent ahead of the Dow, 8 percent ahead of Standard & Poor’s 500. Maybe it’s personal. Ben has been having more arguments than usual with the ex-wife, simultaneously whispered and shouted in Big Room style, the latest just this morning, about their daughter. (Her fourth-grade teacher at Spence/Greenwich declined to dismiss the class early on Thanksgiving eve—even though Sasha informed him clearly at half past two that “the driver” would be
there in fifteen minutes to drive her and three friends to “the secret underground tunnel under Rockefeller Center for a private showing of the giant Christmas tree by one of the Rockefellers and a professional elf.” She “fired” the teacher for keeping the class until three, and walked out.)
Heffernan holds up an index finger in Ben’s direction and snaps the phone back to his ear. “Bennett doesn’t like Microsoft,” he says to Smith Barney. “What can you show me, size, in the Microsoft 120s? We want 5,000.”
“That’s a lot of puts,” his Smith Barney pal says. “What’s going on? What should I know? You hedging a long position? Or is Microsoft in trouble? Are they preannouncing?” Companies are required to announce any major financial bad news in advance, before it would ordinarily become public at the end of the quarter, if the number looks to be a lot worse than everyone expects. Of course, the motor of the market up and down, these days more than ever, is surprises—surprising profits, a surprising deal, a surprising change in top management—but the government has decided that the world needs to be warned in advance about surprises, especially unpleasant ones, beyond a certain size.
Bennett Gould owns no shares of Microsoft common stock. “We’re not hedging,” Heffernan says to the broker, glancing at Ben, who is looking from screen to screen to screen in front of him. “We’re just not liking tech. Give me a menu.” Heffernan pivots the phone from his mouth to his forehead while he waits.
“Keep him on the
line!
” Ben shouts, still staring at his screens. “Keep him on the
line!
Don’t let him go short it himself!”
This is how Ben Gould always behaves when one of his guys is in the middle of a big trade, in the moments of flux before a deal is done. Heffernan knows that Ben knows that Microsoft will drop a couple of dollars as soon as this trade hits the tape, as it ticked down a dollar or two for a few hours after each of the other Microsoft buys they’ve made this month. The put sellers, Billy Heffernan’s broker friends (friends of a sort), will only lose money on the trades with Bennett Gould Partners if Microsoft drops twenty points in the next three weeks. This is an easy trade for them to make, a candy trade.
“Keep him on the
line!
” Ben says again. “Come back with something! Fuck, Billy, come
on!
” Ben stands, twists his neck violently, with
seven quick loud cracks, then performs a tae kwan do move and slams back down in his chair. And stands up again, shoving his face close to his Bloomberg screen. This is manic behavior even for him.