“Mommy?” comes a voice from all the way upstairs.
“Hello, Sarah.”
“Hi,” Sarah yells down. “Sir spilled the perfume, not me. Penelope and I already had dinner. Can you get firm tofu next time? Can we use one of your old cigarette lighters for our video?” Max changed his name to Sir almost two years ago, in second grade, after seeing some old war movie on television. At about the same time, it seemed to Lizzie that half the boys in school were named Max, and she felt some regret that they had given their son the name: too trendy too late in the wave. So she and George decided to let Max call himself Sir. Everyone but his parents and grandparents now called him Sir, and even Lizzie sometimes does, for fun. “And, Mom?” Sarah yells. “What time are we leaving for Minneapolis tomorrow?”
“Eleven. What’s the lighter for? Sarah, I don’t want to shout.” She and her classmate thunder down the stairs like a 1970 drum solo, recklessly fast and loud, almost virtuosic.
Sarah and Lizzie hug. “Is he okay?” Sarah says softly into her mother’s neck.
Lizzie feels her sinuses sting. Her eyes water. “Yes, I think. Yeah.” They decouple. “What do you want to burn?”
“Well, in the southern part, the sheriff is going to torture Penelope while she’s in jail? Put a cigarette near her face and burn her hair.”
“Really just singe it, more,” Penelope says, looking from Sarah to Lizzie. Penelope has magnificent hair, tiny glistening labor-intensive coils that Sarah has informed Lizzie are not to be called dreadlocks, but simply ’locks or microbraids. “I promised my mom. And my locktician,” she adds with a smile that could indicate either embarrassment or pride.
“Be very careful. Who plays the trooper?”
“Sir,” Sarah says.
“Interesting casting,” Lizzie says. “Make sure he’s really careful with the flame.”
“We’re not, like, cretins.”
“Where did you get the cigarette?”
“Penelope’s brother. I was going to ask George to play the trooper, but—”
“No,” Lizzie said.
“I know.” Lizzie feels a pang whenever Sarah calls her stepfather “George,” which she is doing more and more. It seems to be one of those small adolescent cruelties passing as grownup sophistication. Sarah’s biological father is a man named Buddy Ramo, whom she and Lizzie haven’t seen in years, and who lives somewhere north of Malibu. Buddy Ramo was a child actor managed by Lizzie’s father, Mike. His biggest break was the title role on Li’l Gilligan, a Gilligan’s Island prequel series that was canceled after two episodes. He was a crush that lasted fifteen years and ended only after he and Lizzie finally slept together a few times the summer before her last year of college. Buddy is the stupidest man with whom she has ever had sex. Once, when she heard Emily call Timothy Featherstone “the second-stupidest man in television,” Lizzie actually wondered for an instant if Buddy Ramo was well enough known to be considered the stupidest.
“Your brother’s on the computer?”
“Yeah. I have to go force him to stop.”
Without another word, Sarah, wearing a blood-red U.S. OUT OF MEXICO NOW T-shirt, and Penelope, wearing a lavender Ralph Lauren alpaca turtleneck, start back upstairs, two steps at a time, to continue shooting their Unfortunate American History docudrama.
Lizzie turns on the computer in the kitchen—the musical chord that Macs play as they boot up pleases her, as always, like a little electronic dawn—and she sends a message to her son, who is upstairs. As a surprise housewarming present last year, Bruce, from the office, wired the family’s five computers together into a local-area network, which George and Lizzie at first regarded as a joke conversation piece but now find themselves using.
HI. DINNER IN 20 MINUTES WHEN DADDY GETS HOME.
Max replies instantly.
I ATE WITH SARAH AND PENELOPE ALL READY. BYE.
When George walks in, Lizzie is sitting in the big, ratty old leather armchair in their bedroom looking at pictures of their wedding, of George dancing with his mother, of his mother dancing with her father, of the Laura Ashleyed toddler Sarah on George’s shoulders.
“Did you just sneeze?” he asks from the hallway. “I thought I heard you sneezing from out on the street.” Lizzie always sneezes violently, without restraint. George finds it sexy. He reaches their room and sees her. Her eyes are red. Her cheeks are wet. She hasn’t been sneezing.
“Aw, sweetie,” he says.
“I miss your mom.”
“Sweetie.”
“I hate people dying. I know that’s stupid to say. But I hate it.”
Lizzie continues crying. Kneeling in front of the chair, George puts his arm around her. He doesn’t cry.
“I know,” he says. “I know.”
From upstairs they hear Max shout, “We got ways of making you show a little respect, you uppity nigger girl!”
George pushes Lizzie back from his shoulder and looks at her.
They hear the girls laugh and Sarah says, “Great! That was awesome, Sir.”
“Sarah’s video. About civil rights,” Lizzie says, and then gives a long, loud, sinus-clearing snort. “God.” She chuckles through her final sob. “How was your meeting with Mose?”
“I think we sold the Reality show.”
“I think I queered my Microsoft deal.”
“Mose didn’t like My People, Your People.”
“Good. I’m sorry. But I didn’t want our life to be a sitcom.”
George smiles. “It’s not a sitcom, it’s a”—George makes quick little midair quotation marks with his hands—“ ‘dramedy.’ Emily wants to take it to ABC. What happened with Microsoft?”
“I say fuck too much.” George smiles. “According to some anti-Semitic sexist asshole in Seattle. But I do swear too much. I’ll tell you about it later.” She stands up. “I need a big drink. The kids have eaten. You want to order sushi in? Hiroshima Boy?”
They had martinis on their first date, almost twelve years ago. She was twenty-four and he was just thirty-two and drinking martinis was still, for people their age, a self-conscious, tongue-in-cheek act, playing grownup. They’d met at a Dukakis fund-raiser at Bennett Gould’s triplex on East Thirteenth Street, and they left together for a drink at a noir-in-outer-space-themed bar in the East Village called Blue Velveteen. The olives were plastic. Sometime after their second martinis, Lizzie did a Kitty Dukakis impersonation that made George laugh so suddenly he sprayed gin out his nose all over baby Sarah, sleeping next to him on the tatty velvet banquette.
Twelve years later, the martinis in Manhattan are sipped without olives or irony. Martinis for two remains a residual romantic ritual. George has punched on the television, and it plays its turn-on music, the five-note Intel-inside jingle. That started when they installed the cable modem. He sits next to Lizzie on the couch in the living room, looking down on Rafaela playing with Louisa outside in the dark.
“… the actress denied the allegations, and spokespeople for both Senator Kennedy and the White House declined to comment.” One, one thousand. “Are humans about to become bionic?”
“Oh, lose the smirk, asshole,” George says. “I still can’t figure where they all learn to smirk.” He turns to Lizzie. “Does any actual person switch between a frown and a smirk all the time like that?”
“… at the University of Washington, where a controversial scientist reported today that he has succeeded in establishing a direct communications link between two living mammals’ brains by means of computer chips.”
“As opposed to dead mammals’ brains,” George says.
“Although computer industry observers agreed the feat was exciting, they—”
“ ‘Industry observers agreed,’ ” George says. “God, TV news sucks.”
“Shhh,” Lizzie says, waving the remote toward him like a giant black index finger.
“—that the practical applications of the so-called mental modem are years away. In Mexico, a spokesman for the American embas
sy denied allegations that an American military attaché had participated in the torture of civilians in the Chiapas village of Taniperla. Calling the charges—”
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-full 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 Seatt
le 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.
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