Dr. Hardiyanti smiles a little too broadly, takes a deep breath, and nods. “Quite right. Yes. From a special herd we cosponsor. The … ‘pigs’ are genetically altered. We redesign their cells especially, you see, to trick the human immune system—your father’s immune system—into accepting the liver, into letting it become his liver. And the liver cells are tricked, as I say, so to speak, into believing they are still living in the pig. You see? We fool the flesh, I like to say. With the goal of making each side able to live together.”
Lizzie doesn’t know if it’s jet lag or Dr. Hardiyanti’s pseudo-Etonian Singapore singsong, but she realizes she’s taking in his explanation on two channels, like simultaneous translation. On one channel he’s describing a liver transplant, but on the other he’s speaking metaphorically, about some noble and terrifying scheme to engineer a global solution to racial and ethnic hate. She says nothing.
George asks, “And he won’t be at risk for catching some kind of … pig illness?”
Dr. Hardiyanti is loving this. “These are sterile livers, I assure you. Exceptionally sterile. The piglets are removed from the womb by cesarean section. They don’t suckle, they don’t have any contact at all with their mothers. So they are disease free. And in a sense, they don’t even know they are swine.”
Lizzie is still a little spooked. When will the doctor say something that isn’t ripe with Brave New World double meaning?
“Isn’t it fantastic!” Tammy says. “Is this the twenty-first century or what? And you know, this would cost five hundred thousand dollars! At least! But they’re doing it for us for free! I’m so proud of Mikey. He said, ‘Maybe I’ll be a celebrity, the next Christopher … Bernard.’ What’s the name? That first guy to get a heart transplant? The South African?”
“Christiaan Barnard,” George says, “performed the transplant.”
“See, you still remember his name!”
“We do appreciate your mother’s enthusiasm,” Dr. Hardiyanti says. “But I want to be quite candid. The chances of survival are, you must understand, small.”
“How small?” asks George.
“Quite small.”
“Like one in ten?” George asks. “One in twenty?”
The doctor says nothing.
“One in a hundred?”
“We are having real success with skin grafts from swine. And routinely for heart valves. And islets—the bits in the pancreas? At our research facility in Ventura we have a baboon that is living very successfully with a transplanted swine liver. His postop survival is now at”—Dr. Hardiyanti checks his watch—“one hundred sixty-seven days.”
George chews a fleck of flesh from the inside of his lower lip. Lizzie looks over at Tammy, who’s nodding excitedly.
“This is a wholly experimental procedure,” Dr. Hardiyanti says, smiling more broadly than ever. “Wholly new. With human recipients, the success rate remains approximately zero.” His beeper goes off.
“Approximately zero?” George and Lizzie say together in a mixture of incredulity and curiosity that sound unpleasantly to Dr. Hardiyanti like a peer review.
Slightly taken aback, he checks his beeper message and stands. “Approaching zero, yes. In Ukraine, they claim to have a girl living for the last five months with a baby gorilla’s liver. But we are, quite frankly, skeptical.”
George swallows hard against a sob. Lizzie thinks of Mike Zimbalist: irrational optimist, freeloading ham, a man who claims he wrote the line “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!” for Al Jolson, now betting everything on an expensive, untried, inherently ridiculous procedure with no chance of success. What a surprise.
Dr. Hardiyanti shifts his weight to leave. But then the doctor can’t resist mocking Ukrainian medicine a little more. “The same researchers in Ukraine, by the way, announced in January that they had transplanted the entire head of a weasel onto the body of a codger.” He clucks. They stare. “A badger, I mean a badger, of course. Can you imagine? It’s been a pleasure to meet you both.”
Tammy grabs the doctor’s right hand with both of hers, and snuggles it. “Thanks so much, Dr. Hearty Yenta. Thank you, Doctor!”
Another weasel, George and Lizzie both think. What is it with weasels? George and Lizzie each have just enough embers of spiritual impulse that any curious coincidence always catches their attention for a breathless second or two as it bursts prettily into flame. (Synchronicity.) And then disappears.
It’s intense, the sun, for the first of March. Lizzie feels as anxious about work (back in the room just now, she played her controller’s voice mail: Microsoft isn’t showing any flexibility, and they want an answer soon) as she does about her father’s operation. Which is natural, she told herself on the way down to the pool, since Mike Zimbalist’s survival, unlike Fine Technologies’, lies entirely beyond her control. Is that Zen? Or cold?
George, Lizzie, and Sarah are lying on adjacent chaises. Lizzie picks up Sarah’s paperback translation of The Aeneid and reads at random.
So easily one slithers down to hell—
By night or day, no matter, one gets in.
Microsoft, Lizzie thinks. And Mose, for all she knows. For a few years after college, as she abandoned her absolute adolescent rejection of fuzzyheaded mysticism, she occasionally used an I Ching computer program for advice. But she found the hexagrams a little arcane (“The new roofbeam warps upward. A withered willow sprouting leaves at the foot of its trunk”) to be useful for evaluating jobs or boyfriends. Western directness—So easily one slithers down to hell—is more her oracular speed.
But grappling one’s way up again to light,
That is the task, the toil.
She looks up from the paperback. “You know, Daddy looked good. It isn’t depressing to me.”
“He did. It isn’t. To me either.”
“Warn me first if you drown me!” Louisa says happily to Max, who’s carrying her piggyback in the pool ten feet away. George is looking at Sarah’s premiere issue of Teen Nation, The Nation magazine’s “Super-Rad Journal of Politics & the Environment for a New Generation.” (The cover story is “Jimmy Smits and Jennifer Lopez in Mexico: This Revolution Will Be Televised.” George wonders what Sarah thinks of the articles, such as “Girls 2 Grrrls,” a column by Morgan Fairchild and Susan Sarandon on “reproductive choice and other teen issues,” and the journalist Bill McKibben’s anti-fast-food, anti-TV, anti-sport-utility-vehicle jeremiad “Wasted!” There are also comic strips that make fun of Bruce Willis, Ken Starr, Dan Quayle, William Rehnquist, and Ted Nugent.
“Are you sure,” asks Sarah, reading a hospital booklet called To Life! To Livers! A Hepatology Primer, “if Grandpa was, you know, mentally there when he signed the consent form? According to this, ‘End-stage liver patients frequently experience delirium.’ ”
“Tammy was with him,” Lizzie says. “I’m sure he knew exactly what he was doing. Besides, when isn’t my father delirious?”
“God!” Sarah says. “ ‘Hopefully, the national five-year nonsurvival rate for liver-involved oncology patients, which remains at an unsatisfactory ninety-four percent level, will improve with increased research resources.’ ”
“Sarah,” her mother says, “we can do without the fun facts.”
“ ‘This service is hygienized automatically at every use,’ ” George says. He saw that phrase on a sign above a urinal in Savannah during their honeymoon, and they have both used it ever since as a private shorthand whenever they encounter especially egregious English written by native speakers.
Reminded of their honeymoon, Lizzie strokes George’s hand. “Can I look at this?” he says, touching the envelope Lizzie has stuck in the hepatology pamphlet. She nods. It’s a note to Lizzie from her father that Tammy gave her at the hospital, written on stationery from the Ingleside Inn in Palm Springs. Everything Mike Zimbalist has ever written by hand, as far as Lizzie knows, is written on hotel stationery. He keeps drawers full of it. As with so much her father does, this mortified Lizzie as a teenager. The f
irst time he sent George one of his notes, on a sheet from the Astor Hotel with the phone exchange ROosevelt 7 (and the slogan: “Air-Conditioned Elegance in the Cosmopolitan Heart of Gotham”), George was so thoroughly charmed that Lizzie felt embarrassed that she’d ever been embarrassed by her father’s stationery cache. “ ‘My Dearest Darling Lizzie,’ ” George reads. “ ‘Welcome to LA! You don’t have to love Ronnie and the stepsiblings, but please call them?’ ” That Zimbalist family phrase, Ronnie and the stepsiblings, always makes George smile. It sounds to him like a fifties singing group.
Just in case whatever, may I rest in peace, a few details:
• You can sell the Palm Springs place if you want (you & I still each own 1/3, the stepsiblings own 1/3 and in the event of blah-blah-blah my 1/3 goes to you), but I remember how much you loved it there, and I dig the idea of my grandchildren in that pool, etc.! Up to you. (If you sell, please, please, PLEASE give Gennifer the listing. Family is family, etc.) The Dalí oil feel free to get rid of. (Tammy hates it also.)
• I’ve been to a marvelous party—i.e., since the whole medical enchilada is comped (!!!), feel free to go crazy on a service—caterers, music (Duchin? Sedaka?), so forth. Invite Rachel (and pls do not tell her about my new you-know-what liver; you know her, why get her upset, etc.).
• I came out 180° different than my folks. You came out 180° different than me. But you’re nothing like my folks, either. So? Life ain’t geometry! Remember it.
• Love & xxxxxx to the world’s most wonderful WASP. And beautiful Sarah and Max and Louisa.
Hasta Dan Tana’s,
Pop
“Extremely Daddy, isn’t it?” Lizzie says.
George, holding the note but looking away, doesn’t answer. Like his wife and eldest daughter, George is wearing dark glasses. Small children’s delusion that they become invisible by shutting their eyes tight is halfway to the truth—by wearing dark glasses adults can become semi-invisible, invisible enough to stare at strangers on the subway, or to privately cry in public.
“Baby?” Lizzie asks, touching his arm. “Are you okay?” George nods his head, holding his breath for a second, swallowing hard, and hands the envelope back to her.
David Spade, on the opposite side of the pool in tiny red trunks, laughs explosively and mulishly into a phone, sounding like Burt Reynolds circa 1975. Only in the Talk Show Age, George thinks, can we recognize and cross-reference the guffaws of the celebrated.
“By the way,” Lizzie says, “just for the record, I never enjoyed going to Palm Springs as a kid. It always felt like that Dalí painting he has. Surreal in a really tawdry, boring, obvious, sucky, duh way.”
“Can we go to Palm Springs?” Sarah says, grabbing her Teen Nation, open to an article called “PCBs: Why Leonardo DiCaprio Says N-O to NBC and GE,” off George’s chaise. “We could see the windgenerator fields they have there. Isn’t Palm Springs where Quentin Tarantino jumped that movie critic guy you know?”
“Mommy! Daddy!” Louisa yells from the pool, smiling. “Look! Sir is dead!” Max is floating face down, arms and legs limp.
“No, we’re not going to Palm Springs. Stop that, Max! LuLu, time to get out of the pool! You too, buster. It’s almost four. Now!”
In the west, the sky had turned faintly violet, the color of a sigh.
As they pack up their lotions, reading material, and children, Sarah urgently whispers, “Sinbad.”
Her parents look where she’s looking. Across the pool, just behind David Spade, the comedian Sinbad, holding a copy of The Economist with a giant flaming question mark on the cover, has come lumbering out of a cabana, accompanied by a perfect, tiny blonde.
“She’s practically your age, Sarah,” Lizzie teases.
“Right,” replies Sarah, dubious, embarrassed, and flattered all at once.
“Could be an assistant,” George suggests halfheartedly as the five of them shuffle toward the looming pinkness of the hotel. “Remember when they formally forbade us from doing that piece at ABC?”
“What piece?”
“Black celebrities, white chicks.”
“Racist,” Lizzie says good-naturedly as George holds open the door for her and Sarah and the sopping children.
He has said nothing so far. Dr. Hardiyanti and a female colleague stand at the foot of the bed. Tammy is between them, squeezing both doctors’ hands. Mike Zimbalist opened his eyes ten seconds ago, but now he’s laboriously, twitchily shutting the left one tight. George, wondering if there’s some neurological problem, glances at the doctors, who are still beaming. Lizzie, holding her father’s left hand, idly rubbing the big gold pinky ring, realizes the eye shutting is a wink—a slow-motion, postanesthesia wink. Her father is a big winker, and he always winks before he makes a wisecrack. Lizzie prepares to cringe. (A couple of days before his parent-teacher conference with Lizzie’s seventh-grade teacher, he had one of his comedian clients write him a half dozen jokes about the New Math, Jimmy Carter, and disco, “just in case things get slow.” Lizzie was aghast. The teacher, of course, was smitten.) Mike Zimbalist lets his winked left eye pop open, and purses his lips. He’s going to speak. “Oink!” he says. “Oink! Oink! Oink!” Everyone chuckles—even Lizzie.
Three days later, he’s still alive, still in critical condition, still beguiling the medical staff with pig jokes. “Hey, I guess now I’m really a male chauvinist pig.” Interspecies transplantation “isn’t just chopped liver.” He could do an endorsement for the hospital, touting “the other white meat.”
This morning, Tammy invited the whole family to move in to her and Mike’s house “for the duration.” And what is the duration? This morning, Lizzie dared to broach the topic for the first time with George. They were still in bed, and Lizzie was watching TV. On the KABC local news a man with a chirpy, nasal voice was delivering almost telegraphic reviews of forthcoming movies, ten in a minute. “Can a woman from the year 2000 save the world and get a boyfriend when she finds herself in the year 2125? Julia Roberts stars in The Good Old Days, B-plus! Opening Friday!”
“This asshole sounds like a recorded message,” Lizzie said. “You know? He sounds like the ‘Welcome to MovieFone, press one now for a theater near you’ guy.”
George, face down with his eyes still closed, said into his pillow, “It is the MovieFone guy.”
“No! It isn’t.”
“Uh-huh. He’s become a critic.”
“Amazing.”
“You’re suggesting he’s not qualified?”
“Just amazing.” She punches MUTE on the remote. “The kids have missed four days of school already.” She poked at George’s nearest buttock with an index finger. “George? Are you going to fly home with the kids tomorrow?”
George turned over and sat up. He had an extremely sincere expression that took Lizzie aback.
“They could go without us,” he said. “Sarah would be in charge. With Rafaela. And both of us stay here for a while, playing it by ear with your dad.”
As she had feared: empathy one-upsmanship. “Until when? Tammy says they’re not going to let him go home for at least four weeks, best case. If and when we need to come back, well, you know, we will.” If and when her father’s immune system finally wakes up and realizes that the liver isn’t just new, it’s from a pig, and does what it is designed to do—attack the pig liver, kill the pig liver, fight to keep Mike Zimbalist pure and (his native cells believe) healthy … the dumb, tragic loyalty of antibodies. If and when they need to attend the Neil Sedaka funeral gala at Merv Griffin’s Beverly Hilton.
The family has just arrived for Saturday dinner at a big, dark, sleek Chinese restaurant called Powerful on Sunset, at the Beverly Hills end of West Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard. On one wall hangs a life-size, photorealistic black-and-white portrait of the Gang of Four, overprinted in pink with the Courier typeface line INT. SECRET LAB, SAN BERNARDINO, NIGHT. On the matches and menus is the restaurant’s subtitle: CHINESE CUISINE FOR THE THIRD MILLENNIUM. The giveaway that they a
re in a West Los Angeles restaurant is the background music: in a restaurant this smart in Manhattan, there would be no Lite FM instrumental medley.
The male half of the restaurant’s clientele can be divided just about evenly into thirds, the standard West L.A. cut. There are those wearing mint-condition blue jeans or chinos, perfectly white sneakers, and freshly laundered casual shirts—the Spic-and-Span Super-Casuals, tanned and aggressively cheerful Maliboomers (Emily Kalman’s phrase) who would prefer that you envy their happiness and serenity more than their money and power. The Sullen Seven-Figure Scruffs, about a decade younger and dressed in well-worn jeans and dirty sneakers and shirts that do not look lemony fresh, are happening nerds and young dudes—wan, chubby sitcom creators, and actors with 1870s-by-way-of-the-1970s first names like Ethan, Billy, Christian, Vince, Ben, Skeet, and Stash. The nameless third group of men, lawyers and lawyerlike executives and older agents, are in jackets and dress shirts—they’d be more comfortable wearing suits and ties, but can’t because it’s the weekend; it would make them seem uptight to the Spic-and-Span Casuals, the Seven-Figure Scruffs, and their own wives. The female half does not divide so neatly. Most (but not all) of the classic southern Californians, the genetically and surgically awesome Nicole Simpsons, are at tables with group-three men.
George hasn’t shaved today. But with his short new haircut he thinks the stubble might pass for rugged instead of slovenly. (“A grayer Mel Gibson?” he asked Lizzie the night he walked in with it. “A taller Rowan Atkinson?” she replied.) In his khaki pants, the peach-colored polo shirt he bought yesterday at the Gap, and an old blue Armani blazer, and with his fresh tan, George might pass for a Spic-and-Span Super-Casual. Which is fine with him. It seems the lesser evil, or anyway the less unattractive evil. Spic-and-Span Super-Casuals are, in effect, a youngish subset of Merry Hardasses and Merry Chatterers; David Geffen, a Merry Hardass, is paradigmatic, the Cary Grant of Hollywood’s underdressed generation.
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