Turn of the Century (3 page)

When her machine picks up, he remembers that he just spoke to Alice at their mother’s house. He has only a few seconds to decide whether to hang up; to leave a message admitting he dialed the wrong number—which Alice might attribute to grief-stricken insensibility or (more likely) heartlessness—or to leave a message pretending that it’s earlier in the day and that he hasn’t, in fact, spoken to her already. But what if her phone machine registers the times of incoming calls?

At the beep, he finesses a not-quite-lie that straddles options two and three.

“Hi, Alice, it’s George. You’re over at Mom’s? I’ll try there. If I don’t get you this morning, we’ll see you tomorrow around lunchtime. Okay. Bye.”

Iris has entered, shiny brass watering can in hand, to water the huge flowering plants that don’t annoy him quite enough to make her remove them.

“You know the author Dr. John Gray?
Guys Are from Mars …
Men … whatever? Last night in my book group we discussed his new
one,
Children Are from Pluto
. You and Lizzie would
love
it, and there was this new woman there I kind of know from Harold Mose’s office—You don’t care. I’m droning, sorry, let me spritz your orchids, bye.”

“My mom died last night, Iris.”

“What?”

“In a car accident.”

“Oh,
George
! Oh, my
God
.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty … shocking. Lizzie is going to be really upset.”

“Of
course
. That is
terrible
. Oh, my
God.…
”

“We need to fly to St. Paul for the funeral—”

“Whatever I can do—”

“—so we’ll need reservations for tomorrow morning for the two of us and all three kids. Nonstop. To Minneapolis.”

A pause.
“Business class
for the
baby
?”

“She’s six, Iris. That’s a little large for laps.” The price sensitivity mooted by earning $16,575 a week sometimes needs to be supplied artificially by Iris or Lizzie. Sometimes, coming from Iris, there’s more point of view than necessary.

“
George
, I am
so
sorry, how old
was
she? I
loved
your mom. May she rest in peace.”

“Uh …” This year, 2000, minus 1918 equals eighty-two, but Armistice Day is months away. “Eight-one. She’s eighty-one. Was.”

Iris starts to cry, and leaves her extremely shiny watering can on his desk, dripping onto the tiger maple, as she rushes out.

Almost immediately, she is back, now wearing a black sweater and sunglasses. “George,” she says, holding back sobs, “I know it’s only nine, but pick up for your ten o’clock.”

“Hiya, Emmy.”

“Hi, George, it’s Becky. I have Emily for you. Go ahead, Emily, it’s George.”

“Morning.” She’s on a speakerphone.

“Emily, the next time I get the assistant when it’s supposed to be you, I hang up. And if you stay on the speakerphone, I’m hanging up right now.” He’s kidding, sort of, and she knows it, sort of. “And why aren’t you on the plane?”

“Tranh’s doing me. I’m coming
—ahh!
—as soon as I finish here.”

“Emily, I’m not sure I want to have a serious business discussion with one of us naked and greasy.”

“So: nasty numbers.” She means the instant overnight ratings, derived every night from a sample of TV viewers in big cities. “The nationals’ll drop.” One of the reasons George enjoys being in business with Emily (in addition to the fact that she’s an experienced show-runner, and has actually created and produced her own network entertainment series
—Girlie
, a 1996 Fox show about a hooker turned feminist lawyer) is her extreme economy of speech. Except when she gets excited, she speaks as though she’s being charged by the word, double for verbs.

“Yeah,” he says, “the numbers are not what one would hope for.” Since
NARCS
went on the air in October, five months ago, its average rating has been 7.2, and its average share 14—which means, as every American knows, that the show is watched in about 7 million households, which, at ten o’clock on Saturday nights, amounts to 14 percent of the houses in which TVs are on. This past Saturday night the rating was 7 and the share 12, down .4 and 2 respectively, from last week’s rating and share. George and Emily vowed, the day the
NARCS
pilot was picked up by Mose for thirteen episodes the previous May, never to obsess over ratings, certainly not the weekly overnights. But of course they can’t help themselves. And their success has made them stew more.

“
Dharma Minus Greg
only got a six, nine,” George says hopefully. “And we were up against the Rosie O’Donnell special with Tom Cruise, and all the septuplets and octuplets on NBC, and the big NBA game, at least in the West—”

“And Ken Burns’s show about Des Moines in the fifties was on PBS. Stop. No excuses.”

“Do we think doing ‘The Real Deal’ so early on was a strategic mistake? You know, maybe we raised the bar too high too soon.”

“No. We got a
fourteen
, George. Ted Koppel said it transformed the face of television.”

“It wasn’t praise.”

“It wasn’t not. But you do have to top it for May sweeps.”

“Emily,”
he says, mock sternly, fondly, as he might say
“Max”
to his son after a loud fart at the dinner table.

Ordinarily, each forty-four-minute-long episode of
NARCS
is filmed and edited a few weeks before it airs. Eight weeks ago, on the first night of the year (and of the decade, the century, the millennium),
they broadcast an episode of
NARCS
called “The Real Deal” live, from four locations in Queens, the Bronx, and Manhattan, and on three sets on their soundstage. Doing a dramatic show live is not an original stunt, but it is still rare, and none had ever been so … 
ambitious
is the word George and Emily used in interviews. The episode’s B-story was its unannounced climax, an actual bust of an actual Ecstasy dealer on Ludlow Street who had been celebrating the New Year for twenty-four hours straight. Actual New York police detectives made the arrest, but the
NARCS
stars were in the shots with them, physically handling and delivering scripted lines to the bewildered suspect, who was in handcuffs and bleeding from a small, telegenic cut on his forehead. The dealer’s actual girlfriend, a pale, very pretty young blonde wearing only underwear and an unbuttoned leather coat, stood sobbing in the doorway; one camera was isolated on her during nearly the whole arrest, and the director, with George’s encouragement from inside the motor-home control room on Houston Street, had cut to her repeatedly, including a long fade-out to the final commercial break.

It was extremely cool television. That’s really all George was trying for. Didn’t the fact that they wrote the sensational cinema verité scene as the finale of the B-story, not even of the main story line, demonstrate their restraint? Editorial writers and legal scholars were unanimously appalled. Nearly everyone else was fascinated and amused and thrilled as well as a tiny bit appalled. The dealer, it turned out, had appeared briefly in
Rent
in 1998, and belonged to Actors’ Equity; his lawyer asked for and got scale plus 10 percent for his client’s “involuntary performing services” during the arrest. It was Emily’s idea to sign the boy to the series for a possible recurring role, which provoked a small second wave of news coverage, all of which contained a lead sentence containing the word
ironically
. Stories about the show appeared everywhere, including the cover of
Entertainment Weekly
and even page A-1 of the
Times. Nightline
devoted a whole program to the episode. Ted Koppel mentioned in his introduction that George was “a respected former television journalist who used to work with us here at ABC News.” It felt odd, being splashed with drops of Ted Koppel’s disapproval, but not awful. When the episode was rebroadcast the following week, it got a 16 rating and a 29 share, twice the highest rating Mose Broadcasting has gotten for any show ever.

“So. (Thanks, Tranh.)” The fuzzy ambient sound of her office disappears as she picks up the receiver at last. “Why are you so … wormy?”

“My mom died last night.” He swivels away from the desk and puts his feet on the maple credenza, and stares up toward the park, the snowy, astounding park. Why doesn’t he adore Central Park as much as everyone else? Maybe because it’s uptown, and uptown still disconcerts him slightly, even though he’s making $16,575 a week. (Twenty years ago, his annual salary was $16,000. Five years ago, his and Lizzie’s combined salaries were still only—only—$16,000 a month. They are discovering that they like making plenty of money, particularly George, even though it reinforces their disapproval of people who seem motivated by money.)

“Why didn’t you say?”

“I guess I’m sort of numb.”

“She was sick?”

“She was. But it was a car accident. She was, you know, boom, it was instant. We’re flying out in the morning.”

“Anything I can do …”

“Thanks. I know. Thanks.”

“You’re okay?”

“Yeah. I am.”

“Well …” Seconds pass. “So, Mose, six-thirty?” Emily asks. “Ready?”

“I think.”

“Yesterday Timothy said to me on the phone, and I quote, ‘Let’s literally lock and load, my mad dude.’ ”

“No.”

“Uh-huh.” Whenever George mentions Timothy Featherstone, Mose’s head of programming, it briefly sets Emily off, which both of them enjoy. Provoked by the idea of Featherstone, her language becomes practically expansive.

“I ran
into
the second-dumbest man in TV at the Getty just last night. He had both kids—it was a Flemish seventeenth-century circus, a fund-raiser for Yucatán war orphans—
and
the pregnant twenty-one-year-old Chinese girlfriend.”

“Vietnamese, I think,” George says.

“Whatever. The girlfriend and the older daughter—bare-bellied, and pierced, both of them. Matching belly rings, I think. They sang the
Melrose Place
theme song together.”

“Wow. It had words?”

“No, you know, humming it. And
Timothy
knew the tune too. And sang it.
On
the Getty plaza, in front of
everyone, arm in arm
with his daughter and his mistress. It was just … stupendous. I cannot believe he still has that job.”

“He doesn’t, really. Mose does.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“So I’ll see you. Safe trip.”

“Live
here
, George,” Emily says. For five months last summer and fall, Emily decamped to New York to get
NARCS
on its feet, with George as her apprentice show-runner. “Seriously.”

Iris’s head is suddenly in his office. “George! Your ten-thirty!”

“Bye, Em,” he says, “see you this afternoon.” He turns to Iris. “My ten-thirty?”

“Caroline Osborne,”
she whispers loudly, surely loud enough for Caroline Osborne to hear.

“Ah.” Caroline Osborne is Gloria Mose’s twenty-five-year-old daughter by a previous billionaire. Featherstone, when he asked George last week to meet with her, called her “the viscountess,” which may or may not have been a joke. She isn’t, technically, Harold Mose’s stepdaughter, but here she is, come to talk to George about working for
NARCS
as an associate producer. As soon as George sees her stepping up quickly, bobbling a little on her high heels, to shake his hand—even before he makes a point of pronouncing Magdalen College correctly and asks her about her job at Channel 4 in London—he knows this interview is just a courtesy, a formality. He will not hire Caroline Osborne to work in this office. It’s not just that she’s English (“Scottish, actually”), although that is part of his problem. It’s the way she looks and acts. His state of mind may now be in violation of city, state, and federal antidiscrimination laws. It’s unfair, he knows, even piggish in some convoluted way. But she is unacceptable. She’s too pretty, too bosomy, too beautifully dressed, too ripe, too smart, too funny, too flirty, and too tempting to have around all day, every day.

“Sorry, what?”

“I said, how are your direct reports incented?” The tan ectomorph in his late twenties—Chad? Chas?—is sitting in Lizzie’s office questioning her. He is, he has said twice in the last twenty minutes, “the senior relationship manager, business interface, and technology liaison” at a software company outside Boston.

Huh? “Incented?” What in tarnation do you mean by that, young fella?
Lizzie is tempted to reply, but instead talks his talk, figuring that if the interview proceeds with maximum efficiency, Chad, or Chas, who has an MBA, will go away sooner. She says, “Bonuses, based on meeting revenue goals, maxing out at a hundred and fifty percent of base salary, plus equity, with two-year vesting that’s IPO-accelerated.”

She dislikes the part of her work that requires conversations like this. During the second of her two brief periods of employment by big companies (ages ago, Procter & Gamble for nine strange months in 1987 and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation in 1994) she always complained that dealing with the human resources department was the worst part of the job. Now she realizes that having a human resources department, so she never had to discuss vesting and
bonus targets and inpatient mental health benefits with employees and potential employees, was actually the best thing about the Murdoch job.

Lizzie wants to hire someone to open and run a Fine Technologies office on the West Coast, because it’s halfway to Asia, where business is picking up again, and because the rest of her industry is there. She has been interviewing people for two weeks. According to Chas/Chad’s résumé, before he moved east (“
back
east,” as they say in Seattle) he worked at Microsoft and Starwave. And Chas/Chad is not the worst. Out in Seattle or San Jose, Lizzie knows, she could have seen half a dozen qualified people the first day. In New York, the candidates are ad agency account jerks looking for any way out, the hustler marketing partners from bankrupt web-site design shops, bullshitters (
uninteresting
bullshitters) and losers. George doesn’t like it when she uses the word
loser
, and neither does she, really—it’s so categorically harsh. But in her world, the losers seem to be multiplying. Partly this is a classic Ponzi-scheme latecomer phenomenon, where the logic of a mania finally requires a big crowd of failed contenders—the thirty-eight-year-olds who decided in 1998 that this online web thing looked like it was going to be
big
.