“Can we listen to the blues?” LuLu asks, by which she means a Screamin’ Jay Hawkins CD they have somewhere in the car.
“I can’t find it and stick it in while I’m driving, sweetie. This,” he says, nodding toward the radio, “is related to the blues. Probably.”
WNYC is playing African music that sounds like a concerto for oboe, very flat string quartet, and the-men-of-the-village-making-cricketlike-sounds. George likes international music because he can’t understand it, neither the words nor the music. It’s the same reason American graphic designers love Japanese magazines. It’s why strangers speaking foreign languages look more attractive and interesting than they would if they were speaking English—we hear their voices without judgment, snobberies deactivated, oblivious to nuances of class and education and geography. Conversely, it’s why fashion models become less beautiful the moment they speak. It’s why the temptations of a Shawna Cindy Switzer become easier to resist as the night goes on. He has to remember to tell Lizzie about Shawna Cindy Switzer.
“Related to the blues,” Max asks, “like apes are related to us?”
“Well. Yeah. Sort of like that,” George says. But my dad told me that African-Americans are like monkeys, Mrs. Bosgang. George begins constructing his explanation of why an analogy involving apes and the music of black people is inherently tricky and probably unwise. But they are only a block from St. Andrew’s. He decides to let it pass.
Max and LuLu are already scrabbling across the seat toward the curbside door by the time he brakes to a stop.
“Have a great day,” says their father. The moment the children are out of the car, as he always does when he drives them to school, he switches from NPR to Howard Stern.
“So,” Stern is saying as George drives sixty through the empty Brooklyn Battery Tunnel on his way to the NARCS location shoot in Staten Island, “if I could say something intelligent to you about, like, the presidential election campaign or the Mexican rebels or something, then you might make love to me? You’d consider making love to me? Like, even though you’re on MTV and every rock star on the planet wants to get in your pants, the fact that I’ve got a tiny penis isn’t a problem for you, right? Because even though you’re very hot and even though you live in L.A., you’re an intellectual chick.”
“Something like that.”
George slows to let the E-ZPass ray gun read the bar code stuck to the inside of his windshield, and then speeds through the open gate. Magic! E-ZPass is one of the great blessings of dehumanized modern life. Online book buying, ATM machines, MovieFone, and E-ZPass.
“Now what’s the deal with the name? Did your manager make that up for you to sound sexier?”
“My parents named me Francesca. I’m afraid that’s my name.”
“Were they like Italians or something?”
“Just pretentious.”
The car phone rings. It is, of course, Iris.
“So those are what, C cups?” Howard asks Francesca. George turns off the radio.
“George,” Iris says in her Def-Con 4 whisper, “a producer from MBC News says she needs to talk to you about Mr. Zimbalist right away! Shall I patch her through?”
18
Of course she doesn’t like the name business class. But she likes it, the class. Since the airlines have defined discomfort down, flying business class isn’t profligacy (she reassures herself), it’s playing along with a protection racket—you pay extra, or you just might get roughed up in coach. If it were up to George, they’d be flying first class all the time. His line lately is, “I’m tall, we’re rich.” She knows he’s being deliberately coarse with the “we’re rich” part, but it still makes her nervous, reminding her of how her father brought home brand-new his-and-her 1975 Mercedes coupes the week before MGM fired him. “That upper-middle mama-bear thing is very … sweet, Lizzie,” George said once, making her feel like a frump. “I guess in your family Great Depression anxiety skipped a generation.” Last summer, after she drove two hours round-trip to spend $950 on shoes at the secret Manolo Blahnik factory outlet in New Jersey, he said, “Neoluxury. You’re the poster girl.” Jokes about neoluxury and neolimos she doesn’t mind.
The armrest Airfone is ringing. She turns to dig the telephone out of its compartment, and gives an apologetic little smile to the pudgy man in the suit and tie working next to her. He looks like a congressman. Almost everyone in business class looks like a congressman.
“Alexi?”
“How’s the flight? Harold Mose called. That boy you interviewed for the Seattle job, Chas Prieve? The dip from Boston? The I’m-your-guy guy? He called to follow up, and I told him you were on your way to Seattle, and he was like, ‘Well, I just happen to be overnighting in Seattle tomorrow night on my way back from Vietnam to talk to some major VC people.’ And he’d love to get together with you.”
“Kismet.”
“I told him you were fully booked. On the other hand, he did call all the way from Asia. It’s gumption.”
“I guess I should see him. Tell Chad to meet me for coffee at the Sorrento.”
“Chas. Also, the invites to your soiree are going out today, Karen worked all night and finished them. A hundred thirty-eight! She’s a good slave. Go look—it’s open.”
“What?”
“Bruce. He needs some article he says he left in your office. Speaking of slaves, the girl from St. Paul, Fanny Taft? She gets here May the tenth. I forged your name on some Justice Department affidavit about her.”
The man seated next to her, only a little older than she, is now snoring, and his necktie has flopped over the armrest onto Lizzie. As she hangs up, she uses the opportunity to toss the tie back onto his belly and glance at the spreadsheets and yellow legal pad on his lap. On the top sheet he has written only “PURPOSES?” and underlined it twice. The instant she’s finished shoving the phone down into its home, it rings again, startling her.
“What is it, Alexi?”
“Ah-ha,” the man’s voice says, “Alexi! The lover with whom you’re rendezvousing in Novopolotsk.”
“Who is this?”
“It’s Harold Mose,” he says from his office on the Fifty-ninth Floor in New York, standing alone with the door closed in a room as big and quiet and lush as a pond, looking out over the northern half of Manhattan, the view that makes rich New Yorkers feel richer, wiser, untouchable. As he turns and moves behind the desk and sits, the tiny video lens built into the rim of his computer monitor pivots and rotates, finding him, zooming back as he wheels in closer, focusing. “Don’t worry, Lizzie, I won’t breathe a word to George.”
She smiles. “Hello, Harold.” He makes his own calls, she thinks, a little impressed, and also a little impressed with herself for getting the call. “Alexi’s my assistant. The guy who gave out this number without authorization?”
“Correct.”
“What can I do for you?”
“You’ve done it.” Mose’s computer is on, and as he speaks he clicks around the screen from window to window, the contemporary equivalent of doodling. His mouse is heavy and black, carved out of Indonesian onyx; the little rubber trackball lodged inside, like a ship in a bottle, is a globe. “I’ve been meaning to call you for weeks to tell you your memo is absolute genius.” Open in one window on Mose’s screen is Lizzie’s memo.
“Thanks,” she says. “It’s good to know my six years in this stupid business weren’t for naught.” (“Looks like our spin control was all for naught,” Lizzie said to her father on the phone yesterday after she told him Newsweek was threatening to go ahead with a story about his transplant because MBC had announced its plans for the TV movie they’re calling Mr. Piggy. “ ‘For naught,’ ” Mike Zimbalist said back. “I can’t believe you’re my kid, Lizzie, and not some goddamn Redgrave.”)
“One does tend to forget that the average Joe does not have a T1 line or a cable modem installed in his rumpus room yet. Streaming video isn’t exactly mass-market, is it?” Another of the open windows on Mose
’s computer contains a video image, live television as small as a pack of matches, streaming in crisply across his T1.
“Not quite.”
“So I suppose you’re not going to tell me about your sudden secret mission to Seattle, are you?”
Did Alexi tell Mose where she’s headed? Now she can’t lie, but she can’t tell the truth either. So she creates the illusion of candor. “It’s been in the trade press—we’ve talked to Microsoft about selling a small equity piece. You know that, don’t you?”
“Correct. By the way, we didn’t even come close to a deal that made sense for the MBC. We’re not talking any longer.”
“No?”
“Not even close. Elizabeth, I need to take this company to the next level. Quickly. As you say in your memo, convergence really is coming. As you also say, we can’t afford to get locked out of the game. Whatever the goddamn game turns out to be.” Mose is now looking at another window on his screen, the one he keeps permanently open, under a large red ME, Mose Media Holdings’ New York Stock Exchange ticker symbol. The box displays not just the current stock price , down 1⅞ since this morning’s open) and trading volume (a little higher than usual), but the number of Mose shares sold short (much higher than usual); the relevant Wall Street analysts’ public guesses about the company’s earnings for the quarter that just ended; the company’s internal reckonings of its earnings; and the ratings of last night’s MBC prime-time programs—an empire of messy facts and squirrelly hunches collected and conflated and then distilled down to the salient digits, and that salience reduced still further and squeezed neatly into a few square inches of pixels. “I found them to be arrogant shits, Gates and his boys,” Mose says to Lizzie. “For once somebody’s lousy press is correct, eh?”
“Absolutely,” she says, pleased. “They can be assholes.” Not that she’s planning to turn down their $31.5 million tomorrow morning. (Sixty-three million. Fine Technologies is worth sixty-three million dollars!) But discovering a shared personal loathing is the single quickest way to forge a friendship, Lizzie has found. There’s seldom time, like there was in her teens and twenties, to construct relationships a brick at a time, by agreeing on enthusiasms—for the Talking Heads, for big gin martinis straight up, for William Carlos Williams and Saki, for onion rings, for cunnilingus, for Richard Diebenkorn and seventeenth-century Dutch painting, for the woods, for Albert Brooks, for children—all the personal-ad particulars that become embarrassing in synopsis. Besides, Harold Mose probably doesn’t know “Psycho Killer” or Paterson, and Lizzie doesn’t foresee much opportunity to bring them up.
“So who needs the evil empire? Come be my digital czar. Czarina.”
“Yeah, right.” Lizzie giggles. He isn’t serious. “I’m afraid I’ve got a company of my own to run.”
“So you do. And so do I. Did you know that word of your brilliant husband’s brilliant new show is leaking out and nudging our stock price down? Evidently the Wall Street herd agrees with Arnold that committing two hours a week and fifty million dollars to his mad, untried concept is bad business.” Arnold is Arnold Vlig, the Mose Media Holdings chief operating officer.
“Is that really what happened?” Lizzie says, not knowing how to respond, not wanting to sound alarmed and wifely. Phone calls aboard airplanes are lousy under the best of circumstances. Straining to hear, shouting a little to be heard (and trying not to be overheard), it’s telephony as it must have been in Graham Bell’s day. Divining nuance is impossible, and Lizzie has no sense now of Mose’s intent—frank concern about Real Time and Mose Media stock, or just idle fuck-the-Wall-Street-pissants small talk in his Ted Turner manqué mode?
“Ah, well,” Mose replies, “George just has to make a hit and show the little bastards. I won’t take any more of your time. You have your company to run.”
In fact, she has a company to sell. Thanks again, my pleasure, great, see you, absolutely, stay in touch, bye. She starts to dial her father in the hospital, but that’s a conversation she doesn’t want to conduct in a semi-shout aboard an airplane. (I know they just medicated you, Daddy, but I can’t hear you! Your ass feels like what?) Seattle is two hours away, and she hasn’t looked at the pages and pages of financials Lance has prepared. The Newtish man next to her has just awakened with a noisy apneic snort, and returned to his computerized spreadsheet and empty yellow list of underlined “PURPOSES?” It’s not business class, she thinks, settling in with her own columns and rows of numbers, it’s study hall.
Lizzie stares at her numbers but cannot engage. She is too anxious. She is anxious about the prospect of selling half her company and selling it for $31.5 million and selling it to Microsoft. She is anxious on George’s behalf over what Mose said about the Wall Street reaction to Real Time. She is anxious about whether she should tell George or not. Even Mose’s “digital czarina” line has made her anxious, anxious that her trifling surge of interest is somehow disloyal to … her employees? Herself? But Mose wasn’t serious about the job, she decides. It was CEO auto-charm, Mose’s version of White House M&M’s with the presidential seal, a cheap bit of flirty praise that means next to nothing. Even though all well-executed flattery feels good, no matter how insincere, like a drug, or sex.
19
George is polite with the MBC News producer, who wants exactly what George assumed she wants: exclusive TV access to the world’s first person to survive with a pig liver. “Your father-in-law is in play,” she says, sounding more terrified than terrifying, like the Wolfman just as the full moon comes over the horizon. I am a journalist, and I am driven by forces beyond my control! Her line would make Lizzie hang up immediately. But driving across the Verrazano Narrows one-handed, speaking into the microphone Velcroed to the roof of the car, he cannot easily hang up. Plus, he knows what she means. So he doesn’t get snippy, or tell her that Dateline NBC and 20/20 are both after Mike, with the implicit “fuck off, you loser” disparagement of MBC News. He doesn’t tell the lie he advised Lizzie to tell the reporter from Time, about how Mike’s condition is too precarious for interviews. He tells the truth, that the family doesn’t want any attention. But then he feels bad for the woman, who is desperately wheedling and pleading (just like George used to wheedle and plead with sources and subjects, despising every second of it), and promises her the TV exclusive if they decide to talk to the press. It is some kind of atavistic professional courtesy. It is also, he knows, a thrown bone that might prevent her from telling her executive producer that George is stiffing his own network, which might prevent the executive producer from complaining to Barry Stengel, with whom George does not need another drop of bad blood before Real Time gets going. In other words, he’s trading Mike Zimbalist’s dignity for some hypothetical leverage on behalf of the new show. Or more like a hypothetical option on a small piece of Mike’s dignity, a dignity derivative. Exactly as Mike himself would do, George tells himself, and then bats the thought away as he pulls the red Land Cruiser up to the yellow POLICE LINE tape that real police from the department’s movie and TV unit have strung up to cordon off the fake police and make-believe federal agents in the nonexistent squad that George has invented for NARCS.
There are only two autograph scroungers today, both middle-aged men in ratty coats with many zippers, paparazzi without portfolio (or cameras). There is the usual ad hoc crowd of civilian bystanders, but small because the location is way out in Great Kills, which is one of the reasons the location is here. They can get by with fewer production assistants. Two teenagers in extra-huge cargo pants and extra-extra-huge T-shirts, both chewing gum and one feeding her baby daughter granola and bits of celery; a thin, plain woman in a wide-brimmed Gibson girl hat and lace-up boots, displaced Manhattanite or strenuously Manhattanesque; a pair of Hasidic men talking and gesturing with their lit cigarettes toward the Panaflex Platinum cameras; and a dozen dark, chunky neighborhood guys watching the dark, chunky Teamsters standing around doing nothing for forty-six dollars an hour on the other side of the yellow tape. Sometim
es, to save money when they’re shooting a crime scene, the NARCS crew turns a camera around and shoots the crowd of New York pedestrians staring at makeup trailers and craft-services buffets, thus transforming them for a second or two of screen time into actors playing New York pedestrians staring over a police line at corpses and pallets of cocaine. (Whenever anyone questions some niggardly production decision, Emily Kalman says, “It’s the MBC, not NBC,” or simply, “MBC—M.”) Today’s bystanders, George thinks, wouldn’t cut it—too dressed, too art-directed, and the Hasids would look like some mysterious plot point.
Beyond the makeup RV and the wardrobe RV, he passes the day players’ RVs, each with taped-on paper signs indicating the designated actor-occupants—MIDDLE-CLASS BLACK GUY, SHY GUY, MULE/RETARD, and ORIENTAL SLUT with ORIENTAL crossed out and ASIAN scribbled over it.
Outside Angela Janeway’s trailer, George sees Gordon Downey and Phoebe Reiss, his director and executive story editor. They are having a furious whispered conversation.
“Good morning,” George says. “Why aren’t we shooting? It’s quarter past nine. Whom do I punish?”
“Angela and Lucas both have ‘issues’ with the new pages,” Gordon tells him. “The end of the bust scene.” Lucas Winton is Angela Janeway’s costar. Their characters, Jennie O’Donnell and Horace “Cowboy” Quesada, are supposed to be mismatched teammates, the Queens-girl NYPD detective and the rich-boy DEA agent who, according to the show bible that George wrote a year ago, “love and loathe each other in equal measure.” The loathing scenes tend to be shot in one take.
Turn of the Century Page 33