Honey, guess what? she does not scream down. Microsoft wants to buy half the company now! And then she does not leap out over the rotting wooden cornice and, as she descends magically to the cobblestones right in front of George, add, For thirty-one-point-five million! Fuck.
Five hours later, the bass-laden snatches of a white rap song no longer radiate down to Lizzie and George’s bedroom from Sarah’s (“Scissors cut paper / Paper wraps rock / Rock smashes scissors”), but George is so tired he can’t fall asleep. “It’s the jet lag, I guess,” he says when he turns the lights back on. And, of course, the electricity of greed, his anticipation of Lizzie’s seven million dollars worth of Microsoft stock. She hasn’t even tried to sleep. They have talked and talked and talked. Their brains are sore. Both of them are sitting up in bed, naked, both with Grandma Mactier’s ripped and faded patchwork quilt pulled up almost to chest level. Both are staring through raised knees at Badlands, on the Miramax Channel, which is muted.
“So what in God’s name,” she says, holding the hand-rolled cigarette off to the side of the bed, toward the cracked-open window and its concealing breezes, “do you suppose that means?”
“It’s not a sex thing. I know what it means.”
“Yeah?” she says in a choked voice, holding her breath, looking over at him.
“Featherstone uses it. It’s like ‘do me a favor.’ ‘Can you do me a prop, George, and lose the greeting-card crack from your first act?’ ”
She exhales. “Are you making this up?”
“No. Jesus, Martin Sheen is so young. He is so much cooler-looking than his sons. Was. Don’t worry about Sarah. Some boy at school must have done her some kindness. Carried her books to class, given her a ride home.” George gingerly takes the burning cigarette from Lizzie’s fingers. “Paid for her abortion.”
Lizzie grimaces and nods in acknowledgment of the joke. “I’ve never heard of Felipe. ‘Felipe did me a prop,’ she said. I felt kind of sick when I heard her say it.”
For a couple of seconds, holding his breath, smiling, he says nothing, then exhales smoke between his knees toward Sissy Spacek.
“Is she still married to Sam Shepard?” Lizzie asks, pushing her hair, her entirely natural hair, behind her ears with both hands. She has always worried she looks like Sissy Spacek with a perm and henna.
“It’s not her, it’s Jessica Lange who’s married to Sam Shepard. But they’re not married.”
He holds the joint out toward her, but she shakes her head, and he turns and drops it, barely lit, into a turquoise-encrusted sterling silver cuff-link box that Mike Zimbalist gave him a few birthdays ago. It springs shut with a loud snap.
“Bruce is all bummed out we’re not going into business with his friend Grinspoon.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“God, we have been apart. Bruce’s friend, Buster Grinspoon, the user-interface biomimetics genius—the mental-modem guy. Bruce wanted me to buy Grinspoon out and move him to New York and spend half a million bucks a year on his cat-brain experiments. I decided I couldn’t afford it. And it’s not what we do. I guess now I could afford it, with the Microsoft money.” She pauses. “That is, Microsoft could afford it.” She pauses again. “How weird. How completely fucking weird.” And then: “Shall we have a party? A big spring party. With everybody we know? I feel like we need to get back in touch. We never had the housewarming we said we were going to.”
“Is this a party to not celebrate Fine Technologies’ liquidity event?”
George is curious but also joshing, and he knows Lizzie understands this, and Lizzie knows he knows she understands, so they both stare straight ahead, watching Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek make out.
“Maybe so,” she answers. “I ran into Cynthia on the street yesterday. She quit the agency! Just quit. ‘To garden for the summer,’ she said. I was jealous.”
“Like you are of Buddy?”
“I’m jealous of Cynthia and Rich because they’re the kind of people who you could imagine just giving up the rat race and moving to, you know—to Portland.”
“Which Portland?”
“Either Portland. Any Portland.”
“My phone finally died.” My phone. In his present state of mind this seems freighted with meaning. “I just realized that nobody says ‘cell phone’ anymore, or ‘mobile phone,’ or even ‘wireless phone.’ It’s just ‘phone.’ ”
She nods. “You still call e-mail ‘e-mail,’ though, right? In Seattle I’ve heard people call e-mail ‘mail’ since, I don’t know, 1997.”
“I remember as a little kid,” he says, “noticing one day that everybody had stopped saying ‘transistor radio.’ Sometime after ‘Purple People Eater’ and before ‘Satisfaction.’ ”
“ ‘Purple People Eater’? Was a song?”
He smiles. “Yes. From a few years before the presidential assassination that happened before you were born. You know, this is sort of the same thing that happened with plastics.”
“Oh, wow, like … plastic?” she says, in a mock-stoned idiot’s voice, imitating the hippie girl she never pretended to be.
“When I was little, plastic objects were cheap and crummy. Nobody wanted a plastic anything—even plastic toys were kind of suspect and low-rent. Nothing any grownup cared about was made from plastic. (Except telephones.) I may be a member of the last generation to remember when a plastic object was by definition an inferior object.”
“You are. I have no plastic stigma whatsoever.” She turns to face him. “You know, George, you have a high signal-to-noise ratio, but I even find your noise pretty interesting.”
He smiles, at the compliment as well as at the nerdy engineering trope. “And your signal-to-noise ratio is … what?”
“Too high, probably.”
Their mutual debriefing spirals further into randomness. They have already been through every major ramification of the Microsoft offer (fiduciary duty requires that she do the deal at this price, she needs to go to Seattle soon, he thinks Real Time is on track) and of her father’s situation (he seems good, and despite his movie-of-the-week deal, no interviews, none) and the children (when Max’s nosebleed wouldn’t stop this afternoon, Sarah said, LuLu proposed letting Rafaela “come and live in his room after he dies”). They are down to third- and fourth-level agenda items—to automatic file sharing, to filler.
Mentioning Harold Mose’s mysterious remark now, George thinks, wouldn’t seem paranoid or disproportionate or weak. He turns to look at Lizzie.
“What did Mose mean when he told me you told him to go to hell?”
“What?” she asks, surprised.
“Harold Mose said you’re a liberal who told him to get fucked.”
“Told him to get fucked?” She is smiling in a way that doesn’t please George. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What did Harold say?”
Harold. “Just that.”
“Oh! He must have meant the thing with ShowNet.”
“What?”
“I told you. I told Hank Saddler we wouldn’t help teach the Pentagon to use ShowNet for free, to keep track of the guerillas in Mexico.”
“Right.” Of course. She did tell him, he remembers, on the phone. George feels stupid.
“Was Harold pissed?” Lizzie asks. “He hasn’t responded to my memo.”
“No, he didn’t seem to be. You know, he took your advice about MBCNews.com. They’re shrinking it down to almost nothing. Getting rid of seventy-eight people.”
“Firing them?”
“Moving them to other jobs in the company.” Both watch Martin Sheen noiselessly shooting Sissy Spacek’s father to death. “That looks exactly like Verve. Around Grandpa and Grandma’s farm,” George says. And only then: “What memo?”
“The memo about what he should do on the web. My free consultation.” She looks at George. “I told you.” She’s not sure she did.
“No, you didn’t. This is the first I’ve heard about it.” A lie, but techn
ically true.
“Yes, I did. You remember. Timothy called in St. Paul, from the plane, and said Harold wanted ‘the four-one-one on online video.’ Don’t look at me like that. We discussed this. How Timothy said I was ‘mad flossin’,’ and I didn’t know what he meant?” As soon as she says it, she remembers the “flossin’ ” conversation was with Sarah and Buddy, in the stable in Mandeville Canyon. George wasn’t there. Oh, right, it wasn’t you—it was Buddy Ramo who I told about the work I’ve been doing for your boss. Sorry! By the way, did I mention Buddy had his shirt off at the time? No. She turns on her side, toward George, and looks into his eyes, feeling girlish but wise, trying to snuff this before it becomes a fight, trying somehow to transmit the complicated stupid truth without words, the only possible way it won’t sting.
George doesn’t remember any conversation about her memo or Featherstone. But since he’s jet-lagged and stoned, thoroughly beat, he doesn’t trust his lack of memory or his mistrust of Lizzie. And she couldn’t have made up “mad flossin’.” Still, he has the dark, frightened thought: maybe she realized after she got home from L.A. that she left copies of her memo on his laptop, and now she’s admitting to it preemptively, pseudo-glancingly, pretending she told him, before he can confront her.
“One of us,” she says, snuggling toward him, “must have Alzheimer’s.”
Confront her about what? Explaining video search engines and megabytes-per-second to Harold Mose without George’s permission? Repeating his parrot analogy about online video without proper attribution? In the frenzy of the last ten days, she probably just forgot to mention the memo. Or maybe she did mention it, and he wasn’t listening. Or else, he thinks, he’s playing the Ingrid Bergman role in Gaslight 2000: One of Us Must Have Alzheimer’s. George smiles, and gives his head a tiny shake.
“What?” she says breathily, pushing against him. “What?” she says again.
He is too easy, he thinks.
He is so easy, she thinks, gratefully, a little enviously.
The second the tip of her tongue touches his chest, his erection launches, with each heartbeat rising again by half—like a simple but reliable toy, a sweet, homely, mechanical toy, premicrochip—and five, six, seven pumps later, her fingers are making circles on the skin behind and beneath it.
This seems new, George thinks. He then has a jealous thought, ineluctably, neurotically, that he’s had before: Where did she learn this? But pleasure trumps suspicion. Scissors cut paper, paper wraps rock.
As his arm, the bad arm, moves back and forth across her lower back, stroking lower and harder, and then sawing, she kisses him furiously, gulping his tongue. That’s new, she thinks, feeling his arm pry her, and he’s teasing, pushing the arm, not quite, half again harder, then moving under and in, not hurting but goring, nudging in farther. His fingers, his other hand, the good hand, work the flesh, touching her in the usual way. You never touch it, he said on the phone last night about the missing hand, his stump, like he was about to cry. Was he punishing her? Is he punishing her?
Twenty-five minutes later, they have not dissolved into a creamy pool of unconsciousness, hand in hand, hip to hip, in the dark. George is uncovered, looking at the TV but simultaneously regarding his own naked body, thinking how gothic penises look, like gargoyles, as opposed to the elegance of women—symmetrical, discreet, spare, classical. Lizzie’s light is on, and she’s reading The Aeneid.
On the TV now is the Millennium Channel, a yearlong “multiplexed, infomercialized edutainment joint venture of Microsoft and The Learning Channel,” George remembers reading in Variety. The program on now, Information Ecstasy, is narrated by Madonna. “Because our whole planet, and each and every one of us on it, is moving together through the universe at six hundred sixty thousand miles per hour,” Madonna is saying, “forty times as fast as the space shuttle.”
“That fact actually makes me nauseous,” George says.
Lizzie lays the book on her stomach. “I guess this is an offer we can’t resist, like Lance said—”
“Refuse. ‘Can’t refuse.’ ”
“Whatever. But I still don’t like Microsoft. I don’t. I can’t. No matter how many billion shares of stock we own.”
“It is the business we have chosen, Elizabeth.”
She picks up the book and reads:
A few succeed
By Jove’s grace or a hero’s soaring will.
Just as the sweet Nebraskans are about to electrocute Martin Sheen, George snaps off the TV. “Speaking of the business,” he says, looking over at her from his dark side of the bed as he sinks into the pillow. “Asset-backed securities? Mose wants to create asset-backed securities based on NARCS. Should we let him? Am I going to wind up in jail?”
Lizzie does not look up from her page. She smiles and says, “Let me send you a memo on that.”
PART TWO
March
April
May
June
16
They are driving back into winter. Mile by mile as they head north, the signs of spring disappear. The trees are budding in Jacob Riis Park on the Lower East Side. The new sign outside Pepsi/Taco Bell Yankee Stadium lists the times and dates for the season openers. But even in Westchester the green is attenuated, and now in Columbia County the landscape is gray and skeletal and people on the side of the road are wearing down jackets.
Last spring, after they sold the house in Sneden’s Landing and moved back into the city, they also bought a country place in the lower Adirondacks on Lake Marten. This is the first trip up since Thanksgiving. George and Lizzie are looking forward to it, but not with the pure, blithe anticipation of brainless submission to nature. Rather, they feel like old allies heading to Camp David for a weekend of confidence-building measures that they hope will lead to a renewal of their historic ties and long-standing confederation. Pollyanna and Warren, who have moved in together instead of breaking up, are in the car right behind them, along with Warren’s son and au pair. Emily arrives tomorrow morning by plane with a boyfriend.
It’s a four-and-a-half-hour drive from the city. A satellite leased by Toyota has locked in on the Land Cruiser, beaming down data and thirty channels of video as Lizzie speeds north into the twilight middle of nowhere. In the backseat, Max is hunched over the built-in laptop, clicking around the web site of a college in Ohio. (LuLu is asleep, and Sarah is in the city alone; her St. Andrew’s fund-raising dance for Zapatista medical supplies is tonight.) On the TV screen that folds out over the glove compartment, George switches back and forth between MBC’s Great Big Nutty Wayne Newton and Robert Goulet Variety Hour and Jim Lehrer on PBS discussing a guerilla attack on a hydroelectric dam in Chiapas.
Lizzie, driving, spots a black man walking along the shoulder of the parkway in an orange jumpsuit and says, “Escaped convict?”
George looks up from Goulet and Newton, who are impersonating Gore and Clinton in a skit. “Racist,” he says, joking but mirthless.
“You’re the one who always thinks black guys driving Mercedeses are drug dealers.”
“Or UN diplomats,” he says, returning to the video screen.
Five minutes later, Lizzie passes a sedan with a long whip antenna on the roof, driven by a smiling young Japanese man. His passenger, a smiling Japanese woman, is holding a big, boxy black telephone or radio, like a military walkie-talkie. A few cars later Lizzie passes another car of smiling young Japanese, with the same antenna and strange phone, and then another. Is this some game? A tourist caravan? George will make another joke about racist paranoia if she mentions it, so she doesn’t.
Somewhere in Rensselaer County, the phone rings. George snaps off Hero, the NBC hit about regular people who acquire superpowers for twenty-four hours. No one but Alexi, Iris, Emily, and Featherstone has the car-phone number.
“Mobile unit one, this is the MBC HQ!”
“Hey, Timothy. What’s up?”
“Nothing major. You rusticating?”
“We’re on our w
ay upstate, yeah.”
“Where exactly do you cats do your rural brand-extension thing?”
“A place in the Adirondacks.”
“Hip.”
“Near the Vermont border.”
“Convergence! Harold and Gloria have a glorioso lodge-type mansion in Vermont. Robert Frost stayed there. You should shag an invite.”
“Right,” says George, wondering how long this will go on. A pointless gibbering Hollywood call to a car on Friday evening seems extreme even for Featherstone.
“Hey, bud, I can’t spend all night shooting the fat. Is the sophisticated lady available?”
“You want Lizzie? Sure.”
“Plant you now, dig you later, Gorgonzola.”
George hands the phone to his wife, and turns the TV back on. Under the circumstances, he must pout privately.
“I put a bowl of milk but I only see Buzzy,” LuLu tells her parents an hour after they arrive at Lake Marten.
Lizzie glances out at the calico cat and nods.
When they were last here, seven skittish cats and kittens were perpetually outside around the house, living high off weekend scraps of risotto and veal and guacamole. Now, it seems, there is only one. Charlie, the caretaker, was supposed to have fed them over the winter.
Weekends in the country regularly feature some awkward dance of misunderstanding, of course. At the Grand Union outside Albany where they stopped for groceries, they were happy to find endive, radicchio, and fiddlehead ferns, but they went through the usual little duel of mutual embarrassment with the checkout girl (whose name tag George half expected to say SHAWNA) as she asked them to identify not only the endive, radicchio, and fiddleheads for her, but avocados, then zucchini, then parsley, then rhubarb, and then nectarines as well.
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