Lizzie, wearing her Helmut Lang pants and black silk Cynthia Rowley shirt, looks like the friend of a Spic-and-Span Casual visiting from New York, or an agent. In New York, Lizzie sometimes wonders if wearing her hair loose makes her look too girlish and foofy. In L.A., as long as she’s not wearing very short shorts or Lycra, or exposing belly flesh, she won’t be considered frivolous, which is a relief. On the other hand, nothing she can wear or do will ever get her or any other woman taken entirely seriously in Los Angeles. The category, woman-taken-entirely-seriously, does not quite exist here, does it, still? As always when she returns to L.A., she thinks of Barbra Streisand: for all the crappy movies, the sunstroke spiritualism, the pussycat feminism, the angry insecure art-collecting autodidacticism, the diehard paleoliberalism, despite attaching herself to Bill Clinton and James Brolin, as ridiculous and annoying as Barbra Streisand is, in the southern California context, you start feeling sympathetic. Lizzie does, at least.
“Your dad was certainly chipper,” George says.
“Of course. He feels important. Some reporter from USA Today who heard something called the hospital. Daddy told Dr. Hardiyanti to hold out for The New York Times, and offered to get him a TV agent for ‘the MOW deal.’ Remind me what MOW is?”
“Movie of the week,” Max says, standing up along with his little sister. “LuLu needs to go to the WC,” he announces over his shoulder as he walks away, using one of their former nanny’s phrases.
“Sarah?” Lizzie says.
“I’m reading my book,” says Sarah, who’s now deep into Kissing for Dummies. “He’s almost ten, Mom. They’ll be okay.”
“I hadn’t thought about that part,” George says. “The press. This is a story, isn’t it? This could be a big story. Jesus.” For a fleeting, terrible moment they both think: And next week we’re going to be the smiling freak-show loved-ones sidebar if he actually survives.
“Dr. Hardiyanti also asked me this afternoon who Ben Kingsley is. Daddy, of course, is already casting the movie.”
“Ben Kingsley in a TV movie? Maybe a feature—The Island of Dr. Moreau, but contemporary and comedic. And,” he adds, shifting down to an announcer’s bass, “inspirational. Possibly HBO.”
“My God: no wonder you and my father get along so well.”
“You had a whole childhood to get nauseated by show biz. I was vulgarity-deprived. I’m still gorging.” George glances at Sarah, who’s slouched down in her chair reading. “Cubby told me in St. Paul that Alice, quote, ‘has a few envy issues with her little brother.’ ”
“Duh.”
“He said she always feels like she’s my ‘spacer car.’ ”
“Spacer car?”
“I had no idea either. It’s a train thing—they attach an empty car to each end of a full car carrying a heavy load, to spread out the weight for when the train crosses bridges. So the bridge won’t collapse.”
“Who’s my spacer car?”
“We take turns?”
“What are you guys talking about?” Sarah asks, using her middle-of-the-conversation confusion as an opportunity to be annoyed.
“Trains,” George tells her.
“Fuck!” Lizzie says. Sarah looks up. “George, I just remembered, while you were in the shower, Iris called. I’m really sorry.…”
George hasn’t brought his phone to dinner. “On Saturday night? What’d she want?”
“She didn’t say. She wouldn’t. That’s why I forgot. I’m sorry. She said it’s confidential.”
No one else would notice, but Lizzie watches George go a little tense, disengage, and look away a few degrees, deciding whether to resist his urge to call Iris now, thinking, Mose has decided Real Time is too expensive, or too complicated, and backed out; or, they’re moving NARCS to Sunday to go against 60 Minutes; or, Angela Janeway is refusing to go back to work until I book Vaclav Havel as well as Mandela for guest shots.
Max and his sister have returned. “LuLu saw the actress who plays Clarissa taking a dump downstairs,” he announces.
“How charming, Sir,” Lizzie says. Since she is still fighting a holding action against butt, she decides to let dump pass this time. She capitulated on sucks two years ago.
“No, it was Sabrina!” Louisa corrects. “Sabrina!”
“Same actress,” Max explains to the table.
Yesterday the whole family debated whether they had watched Halle Berry or Jada Pinkett or Jasmine Guy waiting to get her BMW at the hotel. The day before, the confusion was over a man standing near them in one of the seventeenth-century rooms at the Getty Museum: was it Alex Trebek (Max and LuLu) or Tom Selleck (Sarah and George) or Kevin Kline (Lizzie)?
“This is like license-plate bingo,” George says.
“What’s license-plate bingo?” Sarah asks.
“Yes, Opie,” Lizzie asks, interested as ever by the residual oddments of middle Americana that cling to her husband, “what is license-plate bingo?”
After how many generations of upward social mobility and whizbang novelty is a plateau finally reached, George wonders, and children once again live the childhoods their parents lived? “Nobody else at this table has ever taken a cross-country car trip, have they?” George says, shaking his head and doing a sort of parody of a tough-old-fogey dad. “Private schools, nannies, computers … no firecrackers. License-plate bingo is where you spot car license plates from as many different states as you can.”
“Why?” Sarah asks.
“Were license plates white-and-black when you were a boy?”
“Yes, Louisa, whittled by hand out of wood by hillbilly slaves.”
“Really?” she asks hopefully.
“Dad,” Max says, “you should have your network make a TV show out of TV-star bingo. With kids and adults competing against each other to search for the celebrities. Like a giant scavenger hunt, but for human beings.”
George doesn’t know exactly how that would work, and he has no desire to go into the game-show business, but he knows that his little boy has had a cunning commercial inspiration.
A Chinese woman in her early twenties has appeared to take their order. She’s wearing a translucent Day-Glo yellow Bao Dai dress and has a tiny 1950s orbiting-atom tattoo on her neck just behind her right ear. George and Lizzie both wonder if her breasts, implausibly large, are real. Lizzie also thinks, Ten years ago, you saw stylish, sexy Japanese women, but almost never Chinese (except for Pollyanna), and now suddenly they’re everywhere. And George thinks, Why aren’t there any Asian-American stars?
“Dad,” Max suddenly asks as George stands, “how famous are you, exactly?”
“Exactly?” he says with a smile. “I don’t know. Not very. But give me a few minutes to calculate.”
When he finds the phone, he pushes the VOICE button on his new PalmPilot and says, “Contacts … Iris Randall … home” toward a tiny slot. Then on the pay phone he pushes the correct twenty-five-digit sequence necessary to reach his secretary in New York.
“Thank you very much for using Pacific Telesis,” a recorded female voice says before putting him through. “This evening. We really hope you have a super. Dinner at. Powerful on Sunset. Mr. Mac Tire.”
“It’s. Pronounced. McTeer,” George says, fooling around.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Iris, it’s me. You called?”
“You didn’t tell me about Reality getting picked up by the network! I’m brimming with pride for you!”
“Ah. Thanks. I guess I assume you know everything.”
“George! Michael Milken called you,” she says in the same insistent whisper that she says Fifty-nine. “His executive assistant. It was yesterday at, um, wait a second, let me find it.” And she’s gone. He hears her rustling; he hears her TV. Mike Milken? How would the richest and most respected criminal in America chart out these days on Saddler’s Media Perception Index? Now there’s a true visionary, like Jay Gould and Lex Luthor and Dr. No were visionaries. Barry Diller, whom George knows slightly, introduced him to
Milken at a party for the media watchdog magazine Brill’s Content, in which Diller was an investor. (George is embarrassed to admit, even to Lizzie, even to himself, that he had wished for the magazine’s demise—not out of idle Manhattan malice, but because he knew the magazine would wage a righteous and annoying crusade against Real Time.)
“Hello? Iris?” Nothing, just the noise of distant rummaging and the infamous TV ad for an advertising agency that has been running all winter on New York stations. (The commercial consists of magnificent stock shots of forests and American cities, run under a Satie piano étude and a vocal track of a woman moaning orgasmically.) George watches a young woman step out of the bathroom a few yards from the phone. She smiles as she passes. Women outside New York smile at strangers. He thinks she may be Dominique Swain—excellent memory, George!—who had the title role in the Lolita remake. Or is it Britney Spears? Is this who LuLu mistook for the girl who plays Clarissa and Sabrina? Do all blond twenty-two-year-old actresses look more or less the same to six-year-olds, the same way they do to forty-four-year-olds?
Where in God’s name have you gone, Iris? He considers hanging up. Then he hears, as if out of his own brain, the opening bars of the NARCS theme music, the Wagner played on electric guitar and the strings-and-percussion stew (cellos, digital congas, timpani, automatic weapons cocking), which gives him goose bumps even now. It’s ten o’clock in New York, NARCS is just starting, and Iris is at home alone, on Saturday night, settling in to watch his show as it’s broadcast. This is why she keeps her job.
“At seven-fourteen,” she says.
“What?”
“The call from Michael Milken’s office. Last night. Well, yesterday afternoon, I guess, his time. No, it’s a Miami number, 305—so it was last night. I have the number. You want it? Shall I try patching you through? But it’s Saturday. And it’s late.”
“What did he want, Iris?”
“I don’t know. I asked. The assistant wouldn’t say.”
“Then why did you tell Lizzie that you were calling about something confidential?”
“Because you told me on Monday to be sure never to tell anyone anything, nothing, including Lizzie, because of fiduciary whatever, and church and state and competition we may not even be aware is competition, blah-blah-blah. Don’t you remember? On Monday you told me.”
“Can the Milken call wait until Monday?”
“Do you think I should try to get him now and find out?”
“Let’s return the call Monday morning. And Iris, we need a flight back home tomorrow, all five of us. After lunch.
“Also, Iris? Can you find out if Angela wants a free, um, therapy session for her dog?”
“Of course! George? How’s Mr. Zimbalist doing? Is he … copacetic?” She pauses just long enough for George to start to take a breath. “No, I apologize, it’s none of my beeswax. So I hope he’s fine. See you Monday. Bye.” Does she mean copacetic or comatose?
9
How I hate running, George thinks as he runs east up Sunset past gardeners’ pickups arriving for work, his lungs burning, mouth wide open, slurping air, blinded by the rising sun, on each left stride the brand-new nylon shorts tugging scrotum flesh. Dropping dead while running: George dreads the prospect of an ironic death. As interesting-story deaths go, being killed by the contra mortar shell in 1984 would have had its virtues. The line-of-duty nobility; the youthful and politically correct martyrdom (although it could have been a Sandinista round just as easily); the clips from the movie Under Fire that the TV news shows would have run to sex up their reports; the tacit rebuke to all the baby-boom pussies who will wind up dying on the StairMaster or some rusty nursing-home gurney.
“My God! Gordon MacRae!” yells a man enthusiastically a half block down Santa Monica.
Where? George wonders, running. Is Gordon MacRae still alive? Movie-star bingo, live.
“Hey, Gorgeous George!” the man yells.
A nut. An interesting nut. In fact, the perfect Beverly Hills lunatic. He’s walking several extremely tiny dogs. George veers right, giving the guy room, and averts his glance.
“Whoa! One-armed man! David Janssen chasing you or what?”
It’s Featherstone, of course. He has on yellow leather pants, a complicated white collarless shirt, and dark glasses with frames so fine and wirelike that at first George thinks he’s wearing a pair of smoked-glass monocles. Which, someday, Timothy Featherstone might very well do, depending on the caprices of twenty-first-century fashion.
“Timothy!” George huffs. “Great to see you!” He holds up his index finger as he tries to catch his breath. “One sec.” At first George thinks his discombobulation is due to the unexpectedness of the encounter, or because he’s dressed in embarrassing ad-wear (a Y2KRx T–shirt, shorts with the Gap logo). Ordinarily, around Featherstone, George feels a kind of beneficent superiority—certainly not nervousness or deference. But this, George realizes, is their first face-to-face encounter since the network pickup of Real Time has had time to sink in. Last week, before they had the deal, George could be pessimistic and carefree. Not anymore. His long shot has come in, and his reflexive grovel is part of the price, the agony of victory. It must run deep, this ancient human impulse to suck up.
“My main dude!” Featherstone holds a hand near George’s crotch, palm up. George, sweaty and out of breath in his running clothes, for once feels butch enough to slap five.
“Cute poodle.”
“Bichon frise.”
“What?”
“Peter is a bichon frise.”
“Ah. Right.” All four dogs are odd-looking, but the weirdest seems literally extraterrestrial: eight inches high, cartoonishly fluffy, and all white except for a perfect black triangle around each of its huge surprised eyes. It could be a canine-feline crossbreed, combining the least endearing aspects of each species. “That’s a really interesting one.”
“Paul? Paul’s a Japanese chin. Fabulous breed. Johnny Depp has a chin. I’m told that Jennifer Aniston is into chins. Paul”—he tugged on the leash of what looked like a shrunken, hairless German shepherd—“is a xoloitzcuintili. And Ringo, here, is a schipperke pup.”
A “zuh loytz-queen-teeley” and a “shkeep-ur-kuh.” The breeds sound like extemporaneous nonsense, the kind of words Max makes up when he tries to scare LuLu. Featherstone’s xoloitzcuintili is yapping angrily at George, which makes the schipperke start yipping at the xoloitzcuintili.
“So what’re you doin’ out here in my hood, man? Prago! No! Prago!” he says sharply to the dogs, which instantly stop barking. “The trainer is from Umbria.”
“Lizzie’s father went into the hospital on Monday.”
“Ay-yai-yai! Rough week for the Mactier-Zimbalists. Ringo! Sedersi giù, cane! Sedersi. Where you staying?”
“The Beverly Hills.” The A-list hotels are the Bel Air and the Peninsula. The Beverly Hills is a bit A-minus, especially since the renovation in the nineties polished away the singed, mildewy, Dewar’s-and-soda patina of old Hollywood.
“Really? Hmmm. Why don’t you pop over with me and have a mochaccino and a scone, whatever. Mi crib es tu crib.”
“Lizzie will wonder where I am. She’s alone with all three kids.”
“Hey, man, it’s century twenty-one. Telecom!” Featherstone pulls from his pocket a black plastic object the size and shape of half a Ping-Pong ball, and twists its rim. Two rubbery, wormlike appendages unfurl and stiffen in opposite directions. He puts the flat side of the Ping-Pong hemisphere to his ear. The stubby neoprene worm pointing up must be an antenna, the head of the worm near Featherstone’s lips a mouthpiece. “Beverly. Hills. Hotel,” he says into it, then hands the phone to George. “Mad flossin’, n’est-ce pas? You can’t even buy it in this country yet.”
“I’m calling George Mactier, please,” George says.
Lizzie answers. “Buddy?”
“Buddy? No, this is your actual husband.”
She giggles. “Hi, darling.” Spouses can turn so
nice, all flattered and patronizing, when they detect a little jealousy. “Buddy wants to meet us for early brunch at someplace in Sullivan Canyon, and I told him we would. He’s on his way to Mandeville Canyon to work on a horse, and I’m waiting for him to call back with directions. So we can drive to the restaurant.” So nice, and so forthcoming with babbly, excessive detail.
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“Whoever. You, me. All of us. You’re being silly. Buddy wants to see Sarah. It’s been five years.”
Buddy Ramo, child star turned equine massage therapist, unwittingly suicidal would-be liver donor, biological father of Sarah. George knows if he joins them he will be overcome by an L.A. cocktail of unworthy emotions—three parts amused pity at Buddy’s ridiculous profession and surfer-dude manner, one part envy of Buddy’s buff good looks and surfer-dude manner, a dash of unjustifiable rage at the blood connection to his eldest daughter. “I’m here with Timothy on the street. We just bumped into each other.”
“Lucky you. God, the man is everywhere.”
“Timothy invited me to stop by his house for a bite to eat.”
“Okay, see you,” she says, maybe a hair too eagerly. “Enjoy yourself with your friend Timothy. I’ll see you back at the hotel by … noon?”
“Give my best to Li’l Gilligan. Hold on.”
Featherstone has raised his eyebrows and is pointing at his own sternum with his index finger. George hands the phone over and, inhaling a big warm lungful of tuberose, luxuriating in the endorphin flood—how he loves the end of a run!—and watches, half naked, as Timothy schmoozes his wife wirelessly from the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Benedict Canyon Drive.
“Queen Elizabeth! The sister with the flow! I just want you to know you saved Harold’s tushie the other day in Seattle. You really hipped us to it. I mean that. Gratitude squared. Absolutely! We were hoping for sixty/forty, but I’d say it went eighty/forty our favor, net/net, thanks to you. Now we know who wears the brains in the family.” Featherstone turns an inch toward George for a second and, George assumes, winks behind his very dark glasses. “No, I won’t breathe a word to George, I swear.” He turns and presumably winks again. “And by the way? Harold really meant what he said. That’s the God’s honest four-one-one. Okay, Zimbalista. See you around campus.” Featherstone gives the rim of the earpiece a quick hard squeeze and, as both appendages go limp and retract with a hurry-up snap, stuffs the phone in his pocket. Bulging the yellow pant leather, it looks like the head of a gargantuan penis. Maybe unintentionally.
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