Turn of the Century (63 page)

“Bennett, the Vatican City meetings went unbelievably well. We really have their blessing. I didn’t even have to sell them. Father Ludlum—he’s our go- to guy, a super guy, grew up in Ventura County too, turns out we rode at the same go-cart track when we were kids!—Father Ludlum says we have a ‘blinking green light.’ The Holy Father will need to sign off too, since this qualifies technically as a liturgical change, but approval is a done deal, Father Ludlum says.”

“Really?” Ben is excited. “That’s fabulous! They really get the concept?”

“They not only get it, they’d love us to time-frame the pilot project for a holiday-season premiere.
This
year’s holiday season. When I told Father Ludlum that on the rollout we’d help arrange prime-plus-one financing on a diocesan level, he was, well, he was
ecstatic
. They don’t like ‘location-based entertainment,’ though. As a phrase.”

“The deal with the rabbis is not an issue for them? And with what’s his name, the Orange County guy?”

“Reverend Schuller. No, in fact, Father Ludlum said that solves one of their concerns, that this would look too ‘RC-centric.’ They love the ecumenical concept. Especially now, in the jubilee year, since they’ve been taking a little flak on the Christian-themed millennium issue.”

“How about the name? Which name did they vote for?”

“Father Ludlum agrees with you about Sacred Visions—he didn’t actually say it sounded too Protestant, he said ‘low-rent.’ But they have no problem whatsoever with the Guild.”

“Koplowitz, this is a fucking miracle.”

Cubby’s notion is simple. The inspirational rituals and artifacts at the heart of all religious services—the organ music, chants, and choruses; the vestments, stained glass, groin-vaulted naves, and bone fragments of saints; the incense, wafers, and wine; the never-ending lamp oil; the gold-leaf kashi-kari mosaics, the calls to prayer from the minarets, and the circling mobs of the faithful; all of these are special effects, but special effects from a thousand years ago, special effects that have not advanced beyond a medieval state of the art. The night Cubby and Alice forced George and Lizzie to go see
Beauty and the Beast
(after that humiliating hansom cab ride down Broadway from Central Park to the Palace Theatre) was the night Cubby had his epiphany: If they could transform the Beast into the Prince onstage, imagine the pseudo-miracles that could be performed on altars and bemas and at mosques! Cubby’s specific ideas are still sketchy. He and Ben are recruiting a team of special-effects artists—engineers and designers who have worked on Six Flags Great Adventure attractions, Cirque du Soleil, and arena shows for U2 and Kiss, the computer-animated movie
Toy Story
, and the Broadway productions of both
The Phantom of the Opera
and
The Lion King
. They will collaborate with client denominations and sects to craft religion- and site-specific special effects and stunts. (Ben knows they need to come up with a more apposite proprietary phrase for “special effects and stunts.”) As Ben and Cubby envision it, the Guild will work within a wide range of budgets and sensibilities—from inexpensive and simple church retrofits with dramatic lighting, audio, fabrics, smoke, and synthetic scents, to more spectacular productions involving projected digital video images over the altar, blue-screen simulations behind the bema, motorized pew movement, holographic effects, and animatronic figures. In their first, pilot phase, the Guild is offering to create and install one of its shows (another word they need to replace with a solemn proprietary phrase) free of charge at a church or temple or mosque of each major faith in North America, South America, and Europe. Cubby is in Rome to get the Vatican’s go-ahead.

“I am very excited, Ben. I feel like we have a genuine winner.”

“Aren’t you glad I talked you out of the cemetery business?”

“You didn’t talk me out of it. You talked me
into
my other location-based entertainment concept, that’s all. I’m still committed to Families Together Forever, Ben. Which I do think leverages very nicely off this operation. By the way, the fellow I met with in Fez? He says they are interested in partnering—he called me here with a lead on a mosque in Rio de Janeiro.”

“Hey, terrific!” Dianne hands Ben the two stacks of Friday-afternoon reading. There’s his trading stack (companies’ fresh quarterly and annual reports, clippings from newsletters about metallurgy and cable TV) and his making stack (conceptual designs from his NASCAR track architect, deal memos for the rights to William Gaddis and Vladimir Nabokov books, the April P & L from BarbieWorld). She salutes and mouths “Goodbye” to Ben, who waves.

“Cubby,” he says into the phone, “may I ask you a personal question?”

“Sure thing. I enjoy personal questions.”

“What’s your real name? On the birth certificate.”

“What do you mean, Ben?”

“If we’re going to be in business together, I would love to be able to call you Andy or Jack or Myron or whatever your real name is. Every time I say Cubby, I think of the Mouseketeers. No offense, but it makes it hard for me to take you as seriously as I want to.”

“My real name
is
Cubby, Ben.”

The walk from the $ office in the Woolworth Building to George and Lizzie’s house is easy, particularly on a Friday in May. The dogwoods in City Hall Park, fully leafed, bob and shimmy in the evening breezes. The brokers and traders and bankers and their lawyers are long gone to East Seventy-eighth Street and Garden City and Summit, as are the cops and bureaucrats and the other sorts of downtown lawyers, back home to their boroughs and Nassau County townships. Ben’s driver, Melik, creeps along near Ben with the Mercedes, not because he has been asked to, but just in case Mr. Gould decides to cut his constitutional short, or send Melik off on some spontaneous errand.

“Holy cow!”
Ben shouts to Lizzie as she opens the front door on
Water Street, making her smile as she leans down to kiss him. “May I have a sexual encounter with you right this second?” Hank Saddler, chatting just inside the foyer, is startled. Lizzie’s wearing the Badgley Mischka dress she bought to wear to the Emmys last fall, its scrim of tiny violet beads tight against the indigo silk tight against her body. “I have to stare at your breasts for a second,” Ben says, and he does. The Louboutin mules give her an extra couple of inches on Ben, and her hair, pulled up and held in place with a silver tusk (Ted Muehling), makes her seem taller still. He keeps his arm around her waist as he steps into the house. “I mean it, Lizzie, you look amazing. Did you have work done or something?” Because she decided this afternoon to go for makeup (another hundred dollars) along with the hair, she blushes.

“How’s work?” Lizzie says as she leads Ben up to the second floor, just behind Hank Saddler, leaving the downstairs to George.

“Good, good—I thought of you the other day. I bought a few June puts on Mister Softee.”

She smiles. “Thank you, Benny.”

“It wasn’t vengeance, darling. I already sold them. It was just a quick buy on the lie—the Microsoft CFO got the shit misquoted out of him in
Barron’s
and I knew it’d be a day before it got corrected.” Most weeks Ben makes money this way, “buying on the lie,” as he calls it. He exploits the routine sloppiness of the press. When negative news about a company is about to come out that he believes is false, Ben will short the stock before the great mass of investors panics, then get rid of the short before the truth comes out and investors are reassured. The idea is to predict who the lynch mob will decide to hang next, get to the victim first, sell members of the mob tickets to the lynching, and then scram before the mob returns to its senses and decides against the lynching.

“Ben, do you know Hank Saddler? Hank is Harold’s right-hand man at Mose Media.” Lizzie can never keep titles straight, so some flattering generic—right-hand man, top person, secret weapon, marketing genius, creative wizard—is frequently her way of handling introductions.

“It’s Hen—” Saddler starts to say, but Ben interrupts.

“Really?”
Ben says, the pitch of his voice rising a half octave. “Wow, you guys are on a hell of a roll! How many more of these companies is Mose going to buy?”

Standing in the back doorway, one foot on gravel, George half listens to the bebop quartet in the backyard, half listens to Bruce Helms converse in their dialect (computers) with seventeen-year-old Fanny Taft, who is dressed in several layers of black mesh. Earlier he talked to Fanny by himself for five minutes, and liked her. He watches his friend arrive and kiss Lizzie, and eye-poppingly look at her cleavage as she giggles. He watches Ben and Lizzie talk. He watches her introduce him to Hank Saddler. He watches Lizzie drift upstairs, smiling at Hank Saddler, full of herself. He watches and listens to the efflorescence of the party, as people he knows and vaguely knows begin streaming in. He should animate; he’s supposed to host; but he sips his seltzer, grudgingly sober, still at work, nibbling at some of the hundred nagging and impending hangnails in
Real Time
, goddamn
Real Time
, which is supposed to go on the air in a month.

Phoebe and Gordon from
NARCS
arrive together, behind them a few of Lizzie’s employees (George assumes: very young men, tattooed and stubbly), and just behind them old Daniel Flood (a Kennedy White House intern and the MBC senior vice president for pointless ethical exercises). Stuck in the ad hoc receiving line behind courtly, slo-mo Dan Flood is Roger Baird—Mr. Nancy McNabb—grinning as he slides out a virgin bill for the beggar who has posted himself by the stoop. And there is dark, giant Nancy close behind on the cobblestones, grimly instructing their driver, turning to make an entrance in her empress-wear, a long purplish silk jacket and red silk pants. Nancy and Roger instinctively head upstairs, toward the cushier, quieter hum of voices and music (Bobby Darin singing not just “Mack the Knife” but the whole Brecht-Weill oeuvre) and waiters pouring champagne. Lizzie wanted the champagne.

Guests of a certain stripe head straight back, through the kitchen, past George, and into the garden. As people pass, he only nods as necessary, pretending to engage in Bruce and Fanny’s impassioned conversation about the UNIX operating system; he joined them because he thought they were discussing the virtues of eunuchs. The guests filing outside are attracted by the live music, the twilight air, the chance to have a cigarette. Almost no one buys cigarettes anymore, or officially smokes; but this is a party, and half the people in the backyard are
smoking bummed Marlboros or Merits or Trues, the same half who in 1979 would have been in the bathroom having a taste of someone else’s cocaine. The girl-boy ratio out back is three-to-two.

Both upstairs and down, there are younger, relatively poorer guests—their friends who teach school and write fiction, Lizzie’s junior game designers and old underlings from the foundation, George’s production assistants—who have the bemused and nonchalantly giddy air, somewhere between grateful and resentful, of local farmers and deacons invited into the great house for a fancy-dress ball. There are other guests—Nancy and Jolly Roger, Hank Saddler, a few of George and Lizzie’s law-partner friends, George’s agent, the publisher of
Perfectly
magazine—who have the self-satisfied expressions of uptowners on a mad lark down to an out-of-the-way bohemian happening.

Then there are the guests who are in their element, who live to straddle castes and realms, finding everyone and no one exotic. Like Zip, for instance, in his three-piece, creamy white linen suit, with a young date who has an archipelago of small port-wine stains dotting her left temple like the Aleutian Islands, and on her right temple a permanent tattoo simulation (but more abstract and geometrical) of the birthmark. And in a very different way, like Timothy Featherstone. He’s heading straight for George, booming.

“Mr.
Real
Time, the buzz monster partying hearty! T minus four weeks, four days, and counting! How is my homey?”

As Bruce and Fanny are blasted by the gale of Featherstone’s arrival out the door and into the garden, he makes a little Bob Hope growl toward Fanny’s back, then pounces hungrily onto the major MBC event of the week.