Turn of the Century

by Kurt Andersen

  “Right,” Featherstone says.

  “I guess so,” George says.

  “You’d put up all the in-house material for anyone on the net to see?” Mose asks. “That’s taking transparency a bit far, isn’t it? Sounds dodgy.”

  “No, we give them access to kind of a core sample, a selection of real material,” George says, making it up as he goes along. “Everything vetted, nothing confidential. Just enough to give an authentic insider’s feel. Not transparency. More like translucency.”

  “Clever,” Mose says.

  “Multiplatform it,” Featherstone says, winking, verging on meaninglessness. Then he chants, pumping one arm, “Convergence, convergence, convergence.”

  “It’s Lizzie’s idea,” George says. “My wife.”

  “I know Lizzie,” Mose says. He doesn’t wear a watch, so he checks Featherstone’s and looks up at George and Emily. “I need to be at Teterboro by seven-thirty if I’m going to have a nightcap in Seattle tonight.” Here the overenunciation is clearly derogatory, the way James Mason might have said Cucamonga or tuna casserole.

  Emily leans toward Mose. “Timothy told you about My People, Your People? Our other … dramedy?”

  Featherstone nods quickly.

  “He called it ‘a twenty-first-century Upstairs, Downstairs meets thirtysomething.’ ” Mose pauses like a pro. “Haven’t we seen that? Wasn’t that The Jetsons?”

  “Romantic comedy,” Emily says.

  “The guy is the commissioner of the NBA,” George explains. “His wife is an architect, he’s white, she’s black, the kids are punky Vietnamese twins, her assistant’s a gay guy. The housekeeper is Bosnian.”

  “Very Norman Lear,” Mose says.

  “Right,” Featherstone says enthusiastically, “exactly.…” And then, getting Mose’s drift, he catches himself and repeats, “Right,” this time with a sneer, barely missing a beat.

  “No, no,” George says, “anti-P.C., quirky, a little dark. We’ll spend as much time on the assistants’ lives as we do on the leads’.”

  “It’s about class. Complicated class differences,” Emily says.

  “Which nobody else is doing,” George adds.

  “Correct, but maybe for good reason,” Mose says. “You want to do A Very Upstairs, Downstairs Millennium—Roseanne as Seinfeld’s nanny, the guy from Cabaret as Bebe Neuwirth’s secretary. Married with Staff. Oh, for all I know it’ll be the breakout smash hit. I’m just a birthday-card salesman. Picking pilots is Timothy’s job. But you know, when we call this the New Network for the New Century, I want us to mean it.” Mose is now an American citizen, but he has spent most of his life and made most of his fortune in real estate in Canada. He also has stakes in East Asian telephone companies and owns the world’s third-largest greeting-card company—it is, George has heard him say more than once, “the Hallmark of the Pacific Rim.” Before he conjured MBC into existence, Mose Media Holdings’ only media holding was his half interest in the Winter Channel, the faintly conservative sports-weather-and-holiday-themed channel carried on cable systems in Canada, the upper Midwest, and the Great Plains. Mose also operates two hundred movie theaters in Saskatchewan and Alberta, which, like greeting cards, apparently qualify as “media” under the loose modern definition.

  “That was my big note on this too,” Featherstone pipes in. “I mean, raise the stakes, guys! Raise the frigging stakes.”

  At this moment, George wouldn’t be unhappy if Featherstone died.

  “It seems to me you guys have an awful lot on your plate, with NARCS and this new monster of yours, your—”

  “Reality,” George says.

  “Correct. Reality,” Mose says, and pauses. “You know, I don’t know about Reality.…”

  George and Emily exchange a panicky glance. He’s already changed his mind? They are suddenly zero for two?

  “It’s so … arty. Like a scriptwriter’s idea of a newsmagazine.”

  “Fantastic note,” Featherstone says.

  George and Emily exchange another fast glance.

  “You have a problem with Reality, Harold?” George asks, wanting the end to come quickly now that he knows he’s doomed.

  “Now you may absolutely hate this,” Mose says, “but what about Real Time? Is that a horrible name for this show?”

  It’s only the name Mose doesn’t like.

  “No, that’s just fabulous. I mean it. It’s superb,” George says. Emily looks at George; she figures it’s the adrenaline talking. “Don’t you think so, Emily?”

  “Real Time could be perfect,” she says.

  “Yessss!” Featherstone says, clenching a fist, pumping his arm. “Out of the park! Homer alert!”

  “And besides, Timothy,” Mose says, “aren’t we calling that other project RealityVision? The Reality Network? The Reality Channel?”

  “Reality Channel. No ‘The.’ ” Keeping his body facing Mose, he turns his head a good 120 degrees toward George and Emily. “Possible concept shift for the Winter Channel. A New Age cable channel, although ‘New Age’ is a no-no. Demi, Deepak, Marianne Williamson, Mars and Venus, Mayans and the Sphinx, gyroscopes, high colonics, homeopathics, chiropractic, yoga, Enya, John Tesh, Dr. Weil, Kenny G, vitamin E, herbs, Travolta, Cruise, lifestyle, feng shui, ginseng, ginkgo, tofu, emu oil, psychics, ESP, E.T., et cetera, et cetera. Aromatherapy. VH1 meets Lifetime meets the PBS fund-raising specials meets those good-looking morning-show doctors meets QVC meets the Food Network. You know? And in the late-night daypart, tantric sex.”

  “I do know,” George says to Featherstone, who has already turned toward Mose, grinning, preparing himself to appreciate the imminent bon mot.

  “Or, as I like to call it,” Mose says, “the Lunatic Network—all credulity, all the time.” Everyone smiles. He stands. “I’m not completely convinced it’s scalable. I don’t know how it will scale.” Mose salutes the room—“Gentlemen. Lady.”—and starts out, Featherstone at his heels. But Mose stops. “George,” he says, “I was terribly sorry to hear about your mother. Anything we can do. Do you understand? Anything you need, ask Dora.” Then, to Featherstone—“We’ve got to lance the boil now, Timothy. I want both versions of the broadband presentation in Redmond, in case they have some idea that they can”—and then they’re gone. In the conference room, it’s as if a violent afternoon storm has suddenly passed. George and Emily are drenched, but now the sun is shining.

  “ ‘Scalable’?” Emily asks. “Canadian union-buster talk?”

  “No. The internet. It means, can the thing be rolled out wide? So I guess we have a show, Em.” George hasn’t felt quite so jazzed, so supremely confident, in months.

  “I guess,” she says, nodding. “A show. It’s do-and-die time now.” Of the two ideas they were here to pitch, My People, Your People is the series Emily has been most eager to make. Real Time will be difficult to produce. And while she likes imagining the seriousness it will confer on her in Los Angeles, the prospect of actually doing it—news?—is frightening.

  “I actually do think the name Real Time works,” George says. “It’s good.”

  “Only good? Not”—she takes a sharp breath, and squeals—“fabulously superb?”

  “Fuck you. Did you notice our New Age joke has been stolen? The channel we invented that night at Nobu?”

  “I did. Fine. Let Timothy know we know it’s ours. Let Harold know we know. It’s leverage on series ownership. Plus we may not have to go to hell.”

  George smiles, and stands to leave. “Really? Passive beneficiaries of evil ideas are hell-exempt?”

  “Well, you’ll probably be going to hell, anyway. Journalist hell. On account of Reality.”

  “Real Time.”

  5

  Lizzie left the office a few minutes after five. It’s the first time this winter she’s left before dark. Entirely apart from Edith Hope’s death, it’s been a lousy day, ten hours at work without even a whiff of science. The whiffs of science are what draw her into this business, real
business, in the first place. But today she has accomplished nothing. She signed expense accounts, extended supplier contracts, agreed to pay $940 a month extra to insure her employees against carpal tunnel syndrome (which she secretly considers a half-phony fad disability), interviewed prospective employees, and screamed about hypothetical seven- and eight-figure sums of money to a man in Redmond she has never met. Today has been one of those days when she feels like America’s most overeducated, overinvested postal clerk. Since making breakfast for the kids and handing them their backpacks, she has done nothing gratifying or important, even though she’s exhausted, as drained as if she’d spent the day overseeing the invention of a disposable solar-powered twenty-five-cent supercomputer the size of a cricket.

  She was too tired to go to yoga, so she’s been wandering for an hour and a half toward home, around Chelsea and the Village and the neighborhoods she refuses to call NoHo and NoLIta, through Chinatown and the Lower East Side, looking in shop windows, looking at her reflection in shop windows, wondering if she looks thirty-five, stepping into shops, not shopping. Now, in a store on Grand Street, an 1891 map of Minnesota decorated with a border of old paper strings from dozens of Hershey’s Kisses (folk art: $300) has started her quietly sobbing. Edith Hope’s death is discombobulating her. It isn’t because she is reminded of her own mother’s death, Lizzie feels certain. Her own mother’s death was depressing, because it made her face up to just how little they loved each other, but this is different. Edith Hope’s death has made Lizzie sad, surprisingly sad. The surprise makes her even sadder.

  They were never soulmates. “Honey, will the offspring be Jewish, too?” Edith Hope said to Lizzie with a big smile over coffee an hour after they met, during the 1988 Republican Convention in New Orleans, which George was covering for ABC and where Edith Hope was a Minnesota alternate delegate pledged to Jack Kemp. “Yes, Mom, they will,” George said. “But if they’re boys they won’t be circumcised, so no one will know.” His mother just nodded.

  Edith Hope and Lizzie spoke every few months at most, and saw each other only once a year. But her mother-in-law finally seemed to love her more easily than her own mother ever did—not love her more, maybe, but enjoy her company, cut her some slack, get a little drunk with her on Thanksgiving after the dishes were done and everyone else was sprawled on the davenport in the family room (the davenport! the family room!) staring at football. Six or seven Thanksgivings ago—six; she wasn’t pregnant—after Alice and the twins had gone home with all the leftovers, LuLu must have been asleep, George and Sarah and Sir were half watching The Philadelphia Story, one of the three videotapes Edith Hope owned. The two women were leafing through George’s old school pictures. Lizzie said that when George was in junior high he looked like the singer Beck. Edith Hope said that people always thought George’s father looked like Jimmy Stewart. She asked Lizzie when she realized she was in love with George. Lizzie grinned. “On his couch during our first real date, about ninety seconds before we fucked,” she said. Edith Hope looked as if she’d been slugged. Lizzie lurched protectively an inch in her direction, feeling she was watching some dear old vase fall to the floor. Then her mother-in-law said, “Goodness! I don’t think I’ve heard anyone use that word since George’s uncle Vance died.” Then she smiled. “The way you just … say it sounds so”—Edith Hope wiggled her shoulders and moved her eyebrows up and down, Donna Reed doing Mae West—“It’s like … a movie.” Edith Hope finished her third vodka and cranberry juice, and the ice dregs with it. “Good for you, dear. I’m glad you were in love. Before.”

  Lizzie is so glad to be living in the city again. She is so glad they can afford to admit that their two-year country-squire experiment in Sneden’s Landing was a disaster. Walking down Delancey Street, she passes a store that sells wigs and knives and bootleg videos. There seem to be a lot of wig stores in New York, more than necessary. Lizzie enjoys their presence the way she enjoys the storefront psychics and the Dominican flavored-shaved-ice vendors, all the unsanitary but unthreatening alien city bits. Wig stores (like psychics) strike her as implicitly pornographic—the hubba-hubba cartoon volume of the hairdos, the insane Slurpee colors, the fibers that make no human-hair pretense, the smudged-shop-window intimacy that seems more charged than the stores selling penis-shaped loaves of pumpernickel and multizippered black vinyl panties.

  Crossing a quiet stretch of Kenmare Street at sunset, a backlit old wino comes toward her through the gloaming, pushing a packed, smoky shopping cart and chanting, in a turn-of-the-last-century oystermonger singsong, “Flaming potatoes! Now. Flaming potatoes! Now.” From a good four feet away, Lizzie reaches into her pocket and tosses all her change at the box hanging from his cart handle. (Performance folk art: only $1.37.)

  On Broadway, she stops in a Korean deli to buy milk, and notices that the rack of produce is oddly speckled. Looking closer, she picks up an avocado and sees that the speckle is a tiny red, star-shaped sticker that says GORE 2000. It’s a campaign ad. She looks around and sees now that almost every piece of fruit and every vegetable in the place has one of the little stickers. On the apples, the GORE 2000 stars are embossed directly into the skins. (Pop art: $2.50 a pound.)

  As she gets closer to home, Lizzie automatically turns to glance up at St. Andrew’s School, thinks of LuLu and Max, and feels relief. Heading east toward Water Street, she breathes deeper, as usual, and feels calmer, even cheery, as if she’s had half a beer. Two buildings down from theirs, she glances in at the rococo parlor and sees something new—filling the room is a giant television screen, on it an intense electronic cyan background with foot-high letters that say NINETEENTH-CENTURY EUROPEAN LEADERS. She is bewildered and delighted (Installation art: free), but a moment later, as she pulls her keys out, she realizes what she’s seen, and thinks that if she were the Jeopardy! contestant she definitely would have picked a different category for $300, Alex.

  She tosses her leather backpack on the kitchen table, and the scrape of the metal Prada tag across the zinc surface scares the cat off its window seat. “Hello, Johnny,” Lizzie says to the cat. “Where is everybody?” She sees that Max has brought home this year’s school pictures, twelve unsmiling Maxes on one sheet, plus two big five-by-seven unsmiling Maxes. The cheap generic portraits always give Lizzie a chill. The pictures make her children look like any children, like pathetic children in the newspaper or on milk cartons, like victims. She turns away.

  She scans the mail. Do other people get real letters? The only personal correspondence George and Lizzie receive regularly are invitations (three today: a Roger Baird and Nancy McNabb “Remember the 1980s?” costume party at the Frick Museum to raise money to supply T1 internet hookups for the fifty poorest schools in New York, a party celebrating the Philip Morris Corporation’s sponsorship of the upcoming Jean-Genet-and-Jim-Morrison season at Brooklyn Academy of Music, one addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. Zimbalist” from Bennett Gould reminding them about the grand-opening party at BarbieWorld in Las Vegas next week); thank-you notes (one today from her friend Beverly for a Tiffany’s silver teething ring); and those quasi-celebrity chain letters (the last one from Angela Janeway, soliciting ten dollars for clinics in southern Mexico—copies of which also were sent by Danny Goldberg to Courtney Love, to Pete Hamill by Ken Kesey, to Bianca Jagger by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., by Mort Zuckerman to Tony Blair, by Patricia Duff to Harold Mose, and by a hundred other quasi-celebrities to five hundred other quasi-celebrities who are all pleased, in the name of a good cause, to make you aware that they know one another). Nowadays even thank-you notes and Christmas cards have addresses laser-printed on an adhesive label. The last piece of absolutely bona fide personal mail Lizzie received was a note in December from George’s mother that included a recipe for Szechwan Christmas succotash (“Very zippy!!”) and a Minneapolis Star Tribune clip about a coven of suburban teenage computer hackers, all girls. (“Thought you’d be interested regarding female computer ‘progress’ out in these parts! Tell George one of these gals f
rom Edina is the daughter of his high school friend Jodie—small world!”) The note, the recipe, and the newspaper clipping were all included with their 1999 Christmas present, a “media-storing ottoman,” which had an upholstered plaid hinged top and a drawer. It could hold three hundred compact discs or a hundred videos. Max said LuLu could use it as a mausoleum for her Barbies. Lizzie gave it to the cleaning lady the Monday after Christmas.

  Louisa, sounding like a dropped piece of carry-on luggage, comes tumbling down the three flights of stairs. During the brief pause at each landing Lizzie hears the slow, even footsteps of Rafaela, their new baby-sitter. (Lizzie won’t use the word nanny.)

  “Hello, baby-duck!” Lizzie says, mail in hand, as Louisa finally stands before her.

  The six-year-old, zipped into her snowsuit, looks past her mother, bows her head, frowns, and says, “Hello, Missus.”

  “What?” Lizzie says, startled, smiling, staring at LuLu, who runs out to the tiny backyard. (Lizzie won’t use garden as a synonym for yard, even though it would be more accurate.)

  Rafaela arrives in the kitchen. She is wrapped in an old Missoni cardigan of George’s and a prop DEA jacket from NARCS, with a WIRED watchcap pulled way down.

  “Hi, Rafaela.”

  “Hello, Missus,” she says, not quite making eye contact, following Louisa outdoors. She turns. “Missus, the store don’t have whole-wheat Mega-Cheerios you want. Store brand only.”

  “The children will survive, Rafaela. That’s fine.”

  “Okay,” Rafaela says, and pulls the back door shut.

  With Margaret, the previous and perfect baby-sitter, who went home to St. Kitts at Christmas and decided to remain there with the husband she’d abandoned eleven years earlier, George and even Lizzie enjoyed the Anglo-Caribbean bits Louisa and Max had picked up—saying “straightaway” instead of “immediately,” pronouncing the first syllable of “radiator” with a broad a. A few years back, however, Max required heavy persuasion to stop referring to black people as “colored,” even though Margaret, who was black, would continue to do so. “Is Margaret bad for saying ‘colored’?” LuLu asked then. Now she will need to be told why she shouldn’t call her mother “Missus,” even though Rafaela does.