Turn of the Century (11 page)

She mutes the TV.

“Bruce knows that guy.”

George is interested. “Bruce knows the CIA torturer?”

“No.”

“Brian Williams? So does Featherstone.”

“No,
no
, the person at U-Dub who did those animal-chip experiments.”

“U-Dub?”

“U of W, University of Washington,” Lizzie says. “Bruce worked with the guy in Oregon writing bioinformatics code.”

“Ah,” George says, feigning comprehension. “So who at Microsoft did you say
fuck
to that you shouldn’t have?”

“Some lawyer. A bean counter. They’re suddenly offering two-point-nine million. They’re not taking me seriously. They’re trying to gyp us.”

“Jesus, three million for a fifth of the company is an insult?
Gyp
is an ethnic slur, you know.”

“Two-point-nine is for a tenth—they say they only want ten percent of the company now.”

“It’s still free money, isn’t it? I mean, it’s not like you won’t be in control.”

Lizzie sighs again. “George, that would value Fine Technologies at
twenty-nine million dollars
.”

“Sounds okay to me.”

Lizzie is often charmed by George’s vagueness about business matters. But not right now. “We have earnings, George! Almost a half million dollars last year! When fucking TK Corporation, with two million in revenues and not a dime in earnings, gets a market cap of two hundred thirty million the day of their IPO? No way! Plus it’s
Microsoft
, George.” After she left the News Corporation online debacle, she joined a little company called Virtual Fortress that made firewall security software for web sites, just as prices for firewall security software started dropping; when Microsoft entered the business, her company immediately went belly up.

“TK Corporation is Nancy McNabb’s brother Penn’s company? So go public.”

“Why should I go public? This is a real business, with real products. The company doesn’t need the capital.”

“Then don’t go public.”

“And you and I don’t need the money. We can’t find any stuff for this place that we like enough to buy anyway,” she says, gesturing toward the dark, naked dining room and the dark, naked room with books and the piano but no name. “And not counting Russia, we haven’t taken a real vacation since about 1996.”

“You know, it’s funny. My mother used to say to my dad, after he bought some big wind-powered composting unit or gone on a sailplane fishing trip to Alaska or something, ‘Perry, you just can’t
spend money
fast
enough.’ We’ve actually reached the point now where we can’t spend it fast enough. You know? Literally. This couch is really not comfortable, you know.”

“With Microsoft it’s the
principle
of it, George. They said eight million for a fifth. It was a handshake deal.”

“Whose hand did you shake?”

“Figuratively.”

“Well, there you go.”

“You’re not taking this seriously.” Lizzie sips her martini, then puts her glass on the red coffee table that looks like scuffed, circa-1960 Formica but is, in fact, 1924 Le Corbusier—the single really expensive object they own. “Honey?” she says, her face softening. She puts her hands on his crossed knees. “How’re you feeling about your mom?”

He looks at Lizzie and shrugs. After a moment, he says, “I was all set for the ordeal. Months, years. ‘Is it better to have someone you love die suddenly or after a long illness?’ And now I get both. Bang
and
whimper.” He sticks his tongue into the apex of his glass, lapping the last, vermouthy drops of gin. “Two mints in one.” He looks up from the glass. “I haven’t talked to her in like … three weeks.” For several long minutes, they sit in silence, both looking out the six-foot-high back windows as Louisa dances with her shoulders hunched up around her ears and her arms turned inside out. She is doing one of her impromptu rap performances for Rafaela.

“I really should be doing this somewhere out West,” Lizzie suddenly says, sliding down and crossing her own legs so they are knee to knee.

“Fine. We’ll move. Make sure Rafaela tells the kids.”

“I can’t do this business here the way it should be done. I feel like I’m overseas, in some island outpost where I never quite know what’s going on back at headquarters. And everything needs translating, and the phones don’t work. It’s so hard.”

“Your phones don’t work?”

“Figuratively. So they bought
Reality?
That’s so excellent.”

George smiles. “He’s committed to thirty-nine weeks.”

“No! George!”

“I know. It’s crazy.” He’s still smiling. “I told him your fake-real web-site idea for the show. ‘Clever,’ he said.”

“So Mose gets it?” she asks.

“The show? I think so. Yeah. He wants to call it
Real Time
.”

“Mose must be smart.”

“I can’t tell for sure. He’s witty and articulate, which non-smart people never are nowadays. Not Americans, anyway. Although now that I think about it, there are a lot of articulate dumb people in TV. This afternoon Mose said, ‘You know “The New Network for the New Century”? I want all of us to
mean
it.’ I don’t know if he’s brilliant, or just unafraid of sounding superficial.”

“What’s the difference? At his level. That’s what makes a good leader. Not being afraid of sounding superficial. Really believing your own bullshit. ‘Men believe in the truth of all that is
seen
to be strongly believed.’ ”

“You remember you said that to me when they first brought up executive producer at ABC? My little Nietzsche.”

“That was so long ago.”

“Nineteen ninety-five, only.”

“Exactly,” Lizzie says. “I think the guy from Hiroshima Boy’s here.
Rafaela?
” she shouts.

He stands, grabbing both of Lizzie’s hands with his right, and as he slides her off the couch, which they’ve reupholstered in black leather, her jeans squeak. “I’m fat as a pig,” she says. As he uses his teeth to pull the cork from a half-f bottle of Chardonnay, it squeaks, and squeaks again as he jams it back in. As they pop open their dinners, the Styrofoam sushi containers squeak. In the bedroom, as Lizzie reads and deletes each e-mail, the computer makes its
eep
sound, its electronic squeak. In his office on the top floor, his rubber-soled Ferragamos squeak across the bare white wood. On the table is the photograph of his parents, smiling fifties newlyweds, his father making it appear as though a giant Paul Bunyan statue way behind them is between his fingers and on top of his mother’s head. His father died of a stroke just after George and Lizzie’s wedding. George, his throat tightening, squeaks.

“What?” Lizzie shouts up from the bedroom.

He exhales. “Nothing.”

Back down on the third floor, he sits on the bed. “I feel awful that I don’t feel like—how I’m feeling about my mother.”

She comes out of the bathroom, wearing only black panties and holding a piece of floss in one hand. He holds her around the waist,
and she, standing in front of him, presses his head to her chest, stroking his hair.

Down in the basement, the furnace ignites. “We have liftoff,” George does not say, as he often does when they’re alone together and hear that sound—the muffled bang, the deep rumble resolving into a continuous, quiet thunder. It reminds him of the space launches he never missed as a kid. Lizzie, born a year after the JFK assassination, doesn’t remember watching a space launch live until the one after
Challenger
exploded.

George sighs. “I mean, I was a wreck when my dad died. I could hardly function.”

“I know.” She rubs his temples. “With your mom, I think you’ve maybe already gotten kind of adjusted to the idea, you know? Because of the cancer.”

He looks up into her face. “And I hated it this morning when I tried to lie to you about Mose going to Seattle to meet with Microsoft. I mean, why did I do that?”

“Long day,” she says.

“Christ. Fuck.”

“I know.”

“I hate keeping secrets,” he says.

“Being a grownup,” she replies.

He kisses her belly and cups her left breast with his hand. She looks to see that the door is shut, kneels on the bed, and he pushes her over backward, deep into the comforter under her. As they squirm and pull and rub, squeeze and breathe and lick, and finally kiss, his sweater stays on. (It isn’t self-consciousness about the stump, he told her when she finally asked one night, right after they were married. But with only one hand, a demi-arm, he said, you sometimes have to do triage, make a choice between romantic momentum and romantic etiquette—and pants off trumps shirt off.)

Whimpering is so basic: whimpering is a sound of fear or grief, a starving man whimpers when he finally eats, marathon runners whimper at the point of exhaustion, and sex is an absolute racket of whimpering delirium. As always, very nearly always, George and Lizzie’s minutes of whimpers seem both perfectly endless and instant, like a dream with shape and weight and consequence, a dream dreamed
miraculously by both of them together. The whimpering grows louder, turns to rugged, rhythmic, loud syncopated whimpering, a ferocious duet of syncopated whimpering with the other’s hot breath on one’s neck and face until the sounds of the breaths rise together into a splendid aching crescendo of release and arrival.

A little later, Lizzie sits on the floor next to the wall, her panties back on, legs and arms both crossed in front of her, smoking a Marlboro Light. She has opened the window a crack, two inches—just enough to lean down and blow smoke out, not so wide to set off the burglar alarm, which is programmed to switch on automatically at midnight. She is back up to three or four cigarettes a day, a pack a week. She hides her smoking from the children.

“How much are you smoking?” he asks from the bed, propped on his left side, watching her looking out the window.

“A couple a day.”

“You know, if we lived out in Kirkland or Palo Alto or somewhere like that, you wouldn’t be able to smoke
anywhere
. I mean, I think you can literally be arrested.”

She smiles. “Another reason to move. Protect me from myself.”

She takes another drag.

“Whoa!” she says. “When did they start doing those pulsing Day-Glo lights on the Empire State Building? Have you seen this? It’s kind of cool. Why have I never noticed that?”

“I do love you, Lizzie Zimbalist.”

The phone rings, and when George answers it, Lizzie sees the squirt of adrenaline make him over instantly.

“Hello,” and then, “Hi, Timothy Featherstone.”

“Porgy! Not calling too late, am I?”

“Are you in Seattle, Timothy?” Snuffing out her cigarette in a Pellegrino cap, Lizzie exchanges a look with George. She closes the window.

“Nope. Meet-and-greet with the geeks got moved. We’re flying out tomorrow. Harold asked me to ask if you and the family want a lift out to Manitoba on the jet. We can drop you.”

“It’s Minnesota. But, that’s, we’re—” He looks at Lizzie, who frowns and mouths,
What?
“Timothy, that would be great. That’s really nice. You know there’s, there’ll be five of us.”

“No problemo. It’s just three of us from Five-Nine. The rest of our people are cruising up from L.A. You’ll need to be at Teterboro at eight o’clock. Wheels up at eight-fifteen.”

“Great. Thanks.”

“Hey, George-o? You see the news about the ESP computers?”

“Yeah. Lizzie knows the guy.”

“It wasn’t a
guy
. It was a cat, a cat’s soul they wired up.”

“She knows the scientist who’s doing it.”

“Cool. Well, I was thinking it would be a great arc for the show—high-tech dope dealers who can’t be caught because they only
think
about their drug deals, and never actually talk out loud about them. Could be scaled up into a series of its own.”

“That’s an interesting idea, Timothy. We’ll kick it around.”

“Cool! See you locked and loaded at dawn in Joisey.”

George flips over so that his right arm is next to the phone, and hangs up. Lizzie is back on the bed now.

“Mose is flying us to St. Paul.”

For a long time, they stare at each other, their minds too jammed to speak.

From upstairs, where Sarah and Penelope are still working on their school project, George and Lizzie hear John Lennon singing “Imagine.”

“Their video,” Lizzie says, nodding upward.

“I thought it was set in ’63 and ’64?”

Lizzie shrugs.

Then they hear Max logging off his computer. “Goodbye!” says the online voice, exactly as chipper as ever.

George sits in
the front passenger seat of the car next to the driver (a Russian in a black suit), Lizzie in back with the kids, Louisa on her lap. Up ahead is a perfect, black BMW 750 with one door open, and right in front is Mose’s hunter-green Bombardier Global Express, idling, with its door open. A pilot in dark glasses stands at the foot of the stairs beside the jet. In the distance, George and Lizzie and the kids see Manhattan, the sun ridiculously huge and pink just above the World Trade towers. As their car-service Lincoln glides past a security guard directly onto the runway, George starts
ding-de-de-ding-dinging
the opening electric-guitar riff from
Goldfinger
. They come to a stop just behind the big BMW.

George turns and looks at the children sternly. “Sarah. And Sir,” he says in a grave, exaggerated bass, “it is now … zero eight hundred hours. Do not activate your weapons until I give the signal.”

Sarah has grown up understanding that, a lot of the time, George is joking. When something he says doesn’t make sense, she knows to assume he’s kidding. On another day she might ignore it or roll her eyes. Today, because they are on their way to his mother’s funeral, she looks at him and smiles.

“Whoa! Coo-
ool
!” says Max, snapping pictures of the jet, desperate to get aboard.

“
Hey
there, little man!” It’s Hank Saddler, Mose Broadcasting Company’s president of corporate communications, standing just inside the door of the jet. He tousles a handful of Max’s hair overenergetically, clumsily, like someone who has read about avuncular hair tousling in a manual but never actually seen it done. “Elizabeth. And George.
George
.” The ooze has instantly changed flavor, from Coach Hank to the Most Reverend Saddler. Frowning sympathetically, he seems to be shaking his own hand, or resisting the urge to kneel down on the tarmac and pray. “I’m
so
pleased we could grant this … token of the company’s condolences to you and yours at your moment of personal grief.”