Turn of the Century

by Kurt Andersen

  The word fucking and the low-budget-movie talk makes Lizzie remember her discovery when she paid the bills.

  “You watched porno movies in L.A. last month after I left,” she says delightedly. “Three.”

  He says nothing for a second.

  “They’re on the hotel bill,” she says.

  “Yeah? So what is this? Sex interrogation day? Jesus. Are you trying to start fights?”

  “Oh, Christ, George, please. I think it’s cute. It’s like a cute little secret boy thing.”

  “Okay, okay, okay. But cut me some slack. My work life pretty much turned to shit this morning.”

  “Your work life turned to shit? Mine isn’t so fucking peachy, either, bub.”

  “I know,” he concedes. “I know. But all this dumb, giant corporate stuff I have to deal with, I mean, Jesus.”

  “Giant and corporate sounds like a vacation right now. At least then it wouldn’t be me, me, me the Voice hates, me my employees hate. I was getting pretty used to the Microsoft idea. The buck stopping over there somewhere. You know? Maybe I should talk to Harold about his job.”

  “What?”

  “You know, his digital job.”

  “What do you mean? What are you talking about?”

  “He called me on the plane and said I should come and, I don’t know, run online for him. Whatever that means. It wasn’t like a serious job offer. It was just, you know, flattery, bullshit. I didn’t tell you?”

  “No.”

  “I thought I did.”

  “No.”

  He wants a Sorry. He gets only one of her little single-shouldered shrugs, which makes him want to hit her.

  He has always tried to tell the truth, as much as he can, especially to Lizzie. As Lizzie says, clichés are clichés because they’re true: sometimes the truth does hurt.

  “Well,” George says, “I should tell you I’m sorry. If I triggered this whole Microsoft craziness in the first place. It was an accident.”

  Inside, the phone rings. Up in the windows, he sees a child’s shadow fly across the white curtains.

  “Huh?” Lizzie says. She wonders if George is making a strange joke she doesn’t get, or if he’s even farther off some flaky abracadabra deep end than she imagined.

  “When I was in L.A. I mentioned your deal with Grinspoon to Timothy. And I guess Timothy probably told one of his Microsoft people about it.”

  Max opens one of the back windows and shouts, “Dad? The phone.”

  “Okay,” he says back.

  Lizzie is standing. “You just can’t keep your fucking mouth shut about anything, can you, George?” She is livid. It may have been George’s blabbing that made Microsoft double their offer, but she is still livid. The spleen wants what it wants. “No wonder you need Emily to run the business.” She turns and marches inside.

  He stands in the Seaport gloam, not flinching as the door slams, watching her disappear into the dark end of the kitchen, thinking, That’ll teach you to tell the truth, George Mactier.

  “Dad?” Max shouts again from the window upstairs. “It’s Greg Dunn at the Journal. He said he heard about Grandpa.”

  George takes a deep breath and looks at Lizzie inside, opening the refrigerator, coping with some trifle.

  “What about Grandpa?” Max asks.

  “I don’t know.” But now he knows. When he was at Newsweek, George phoned a woman in Brooklyn to ask her about the killing of her Grenadian son by the Army during the U.S. invasion of the island; she hadn’t known. It remains his most awful professional moment, worse than getting wounded, which he doesn’t remember, worse then firing people.

  “Greg Dunn said he loves you and Mom,” Max shouts, “and if you’re ‘grieving,’ you can call him back whenever.”

  28

  Is Lizzie still grieving? She’s hardly noticed the verb before, except passingly to hate it, both because it’s one of those words forced into verb drag and because grieving seems designed to turn sadness into a hobby. At Edith Hope’s funeral, the Unitarian minister talked about “a nurturing, web-connected community of grieving,” and gave George and Lizzie a “grieving video” that taught “grieving exercises” and incorporated bootlegged clips from Terms of Endearment, Ghost, Fried Green Tomatoes, and City of Angels.

  But when Mike died last month, Lizzie surprised herself by insisting that they fly to and from the funeral in L.A. on different planes, and astounded herself even more, when they got home, by staying away from the office for three days. “I need to organize my father’s stuff,” she told Alexi and Bruce and George, but that took only a day. She doesn’t understand precisely why she has been spending so much of her time in hiding—lunch hours at work on a bench in Madison Square Park and cigarettes on the roof of the building, avoiding Nancy McNabb’s IPO calls, canceling a drink with Pollyanna for no reason. But she has come to believe that grieving is not such a phony notion after all.

  Her father’s death got her mind off the Microsoft fiasco quickly, and has kept her from obsessing over the Molly Cramer attack, which was worse than the Voice attack, because a few people actually saw it. In “America’s Side,” her Post column, and in her Fox News commentary, Cramer accused Lizzie of being “the perfect twenty-first-century limousine liberal hypocrite. This is a woman who once disrespected my friend and employer Mr. Murdoch at a public event and who, Pentagon sources tell me, compromised American national security by refusing to sell one of her computer programs to the armed forces. She cuddles up to bleeding-heart liberal Democrats like Al Gore—all while she fires disabled employees because they’re disabled! Now that Ms. Cyber-Chic Radical is hoist with her own P.C. petard, we get the last laugh. This is Molly Cramer,” she had said, grinning into the camera, “on America’s side.”

  In the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross five-stage bereavement scheme, which is now a pillar of American popular science (as real to most people as the laws of thermodynamics, more real than theories of relativity and quantum foam), anger is supposed to be stage two. But Lizzie has proceeded directly to anger, passing up denial completely. She spent the flight out to L.A. rereading that morning’s Molly Cramer column until she could recite it, which she proceeded to do for George as soon as his flight landed. Dr. Bambang S.H.H. Bob Hardiyanti met them at LAX with two limousines, one for the kids and one for George and her. On the drive into town, Dr. Hardiyanti started congratulating Lizzie fulsomely, saying that Mike and she and the whole family have been “the key actors” in “a historic breakthrough moment in medicine.” What made her angry, so angry that she ordered Dr. Hardiyanti to get “out of this fucking limo, now” on Century Boulevard (George overruled her and let him stay), was the doctor’s proud revelation that Mike Zimbalist’s swine-liver transplant had never actually taken place. He’d had no surgery! There’d been no pig liver! The doctor explained excitedly that it had been “a fantastic validation of a new placebo protocol, placebo surgery,” and that because Mike believed he had a new liver, he had lived “much longer with a very much superior quality of life” than if he had simply been told the truth. What kept Lizzie’s rage burning, however, like a small fission reaction she could control but not stop, was the fact that George wasn’t angry enough about the charade.

  Tammy, it turns out, knew about the placebo procedure all along. The hospital had to have her permission. “Who says it didn’t work? I had an extra month with Mikey, sweetheart,” she said to Lizzie, “and we even got to make love one last time. What’s to be pissed about now? Mikey wouldn’t be.” Tammy told them she had performed fellatio on Mike in his deathbed not long before he lost consciousness for the last time. “ ‘I’m so glad I’m in the zone,’ ” she says he said to her happily, ‘I’m in the center of the zone!’ ” Mike Zimbalist’s cosmic last words were quoted at the Kaddish, and repeated lovingly by Tammy and Lizzie’s stepbrother Ronnie as evidence of Mike’s next-worldly bliss. George waited a week to tell Lizzie that by “the zone” Mike almost certainly meant not a corridor to the afterlife but the H
ollywood production zone the studios established in the old days, back when her father was at Metro. It’s a sixty-mile circle, within which producers don’t have to pay per diems to actors and crews, and its center is the intersection of Beverly and La Cienega Boulevards—exactly where Mike Zimbalist died. George was charmed by the misunderstanding. Lizzie, monitoring her little isotope of hostility, was not.

  To her surprise, she’s looking forward to her party tonight, the big, loud, expensive, everybody-we-know party she ordered up that dizzy morning weeks ago to (not) celebrate her Microsoft liquidity event. Her party. That’s how it seems. Even though this afternoon Alexi folded his arms and gave her the interventionist look, his maternal fret, when she leaves work early to prepare and primp, she feels she’s coming out of hiding.

  It is such a luxury to be all alone at home (with Rafaela, but alone) in the still of a weekday afternoon. Rafaela’s attitude toward Lizzie has changed subtly but unmistakably, as though in Rafaela’s eyes Lizzie has finally become corporeal. Lizzie doesn’t know if it’s Mike Zimbalist’s death (The gringa superhero, she suffers pain!), or the murder of her own family, but Rafaela looks her in the eye now, as though they share a secret. Lizzie has tried to be kind. She arranged for the FedExing from Mexico of the children’s cremated remains. (Lizzie now knows that the mortuarial term of art is cremains. And her baby-sitter’s full name—Rafaela Ek Canul.) She and George attended the endless Spanish memorial service out in St. Albans, Queens, during which Lizzie got her period suddenly, heavily and tamponless. On the way out of the church, marveling at the cookie-size red spot on the back of Lizzie’s white Calvin Klein silk sheath, LuLu asked, of course, “Does everyone here think Mommy was shot?”) Lizzie knows it’s sentimental and self-flattering, but Rafaela’s changed manner has in it the glint of something like solidarity. “Yeah,” George teased her the night she finally got up the nerve to mention this to him, “Mutt and jefe.”

  “Rafaela?” she shouts down from the top landing, “your money is on the counter in the kitchen. Before you pick up the kids at school, can you help me carry these boxes downstairs?” Lizzie has let Ronnie and the stepsiblings keep most of her father’s glamorous memorabilia—the cream-colored spat bearing Jack Warner’s signature and several of Nancy Reagan’s crimson lip prints (also autographed), the brittle photo of Mike grabbing Bugsy Siegel’s ass with one hand and the nineteen-year-old Marilyn Monroe’s with the other, the framed signed contract with Elvis Presley that Elvis pissed on and Special Deliveried back to Mike. What Lizzie wanted, she culled and curated last month, in L.A. and Palm Springs, down to five big boxes (including the one filled with thick, dense, black Tommy Dorsey 78s and thick, dense, white stationery, one mint set from each old hotel).

  “Two trips, I think,” Lizzie says to Rafaela as both women, the dark one just over five feet and the rich one just under six, pick up a loaded UPS carton and begin stepping carefully down the stairs. The papers in these boxes—telegrams and letters and photos and ticket stubs and ledgers and clippings—have transformed Lizzie’s view of her father. Because Mike Zimbalist was such a chronic embellisher and dissembler, Lizzie had left home assuming that nearly all the fabulous stories about his past were just that, cooked-up tales meant to entertain acquaintances and children. But these boxes are a trove of evidence to the contrary. Mike Zimbalist’s tallest tales were true, it turns out. He really did sail to Tokyo as an eighteen-year-old tap dancer to perform as part of a secret vaudeville show imported by Emperor Hirohito’s courtiers, and he did have an onboard romance with his Japanese language tutor during the Nitta Maru’s Pacific crossing. (Imprinted in gay red letters on his NYK Lines ticket folder is the line, SAY GOODBYE TO THE TURMOIL OF “SCARY HEADLINES”!) He did cash in his first-class return ticket and head overland through India and Palestine, ending up in Paris, where he really did buy a Matisse oil for $475 in July 1939. And he really did sell the Matisse privately in Palm Springs in 1961 to finance Beatniks on Mars, his disastrous attempt to become a writer-director-producer. Mike Zimbalist’s maternal great-grandfather was a cofounder in 1868 in St. Louis of a magazine called The Communist. (Its name was later changed to The Altruist, and it went bankrupt in 1917.) Zayde and Bubbe Zimbalist did emigrate from Berlin in 1924 after their pawnshop was wiped out by Weimar inflation, which really had amounted to 3.45 quintillion percent over a couple of years, and he did go to work for a federal agency actually called the U.S. Bureau of Efficiency. Lizzie never thought Mike was lying about the “quintillion percent” and “the Bureau of Efficiency”—she’d always assumed those parts of the story were purely jokes, like something out of Willy Wonka.

  After they stack the cartons in the basement and Rafaela leaves, Lizzie has a few minutes for a cup of tea before she goes uptown to get her hair done—to “the beauty shop,” as she always calls it, an effort to take some of the curse off her three-hundred-dollar haircuts. Waiting for the water to boil, she notices that on Rafaela’s de facto patch of kitchen counter, between the Duolit toaster and the Nuova Simonelli espresso machine (a gift from MBC they never use but, because it’s worth twenty-four hundred dollars and looks cool, they keep), there’s an envelope addressed to Rafaela in Sarah’s handwriting. And sitting under it, a creased color snapshot of Rafaela squatting and smiling near an orchid tree in a forest, with her toddlers Fernando and Jilma. Stuck to the photo is a Post-it on which LuLu has written, “Here your kids piktur back, Rafaela. Louisa Z. Mactier.” Lizzie loves her children.

  He dreads expiration days. He despises the gun to his head. “Billy,” Bennett Gould says, half standing, “what are we going to do with those Microsoft May 110 calls? And the USA Loves Toys May 9½ puts?”

  In truth, he doesn’t care what Billy Heffernan thinks. It is his polite way of announcing that he now intends to decide what to do. It is thinking out loud.

  Ben has always been bullish on Microsoft, and his enthusiasm reignited last winter, after he saw a preview of the Mendacita software and the company declared its three-for-two stock split. But Mendacita hasn’t taken off yet, the analysts’ sales projections for Windows 2000 were so extreme that it’s been hard for the company to beat them, and the free Linux system is taking market share. The share price has been stalled between 108 and 112 for months now, which (especially for a stock like Microsoft) turns into a self-propelling stream of anxiety and dither—if Microsoft isn’t rising smartly, something must be wrong (even if nothing is wrong). His 9,000 Microsoft calls that expire momentarily are bets he made two months ago, in March, that the company would have a killer first quarter. Even their relaunch of the webzine Slate as a same-day-delivery home-office-supply site and selective-admission chat room looked auspicious to Ben, since it was evidence the company finally understood it had no business in media. But the Microsoft calls are more or less a wash—the stock price today is 112½. Ben hasn’t made or lost money.

  After he had such fun unloading his USA Loves Toys stock last month, he decided he wasn’t finished hating the company. And so he bought 5,000 USA Loves Toys puts, one-month-long bets that the stock would continue its ugly downward slide. USA Loves Toys is still at 10, so he can just let the puts expire worthlessly. Or, if he’s convinced now that the fighting in Mexico will put a crimp in the manufacturing schedules for USA Loves’s two big new Christmas toys (a remote-controlled flying saucer called Alien Craft and some stuffed piece of shit called To Hell ‘n’ Back Booby Babies), he can keep his money on the table, essentially roll his puts over by buying some June puts. If on the other hand he decides to exercise the puts he owns now, Heffernan will do nothing, and next Monday Bennett Gould’s account at Goldman Sachs will automatically have 500,000 shares of USA Loves Toys shorted. Ben doesn’t like being short common stock, because then he has unlimited liability. The more USA Loves Toys goes up then, the more he loses. If he’s short 500,000 shares of USA Loves Toys at 9½ on Monday, and it pops to 20 on Tuesday after some bogus e-commerce announcement by the company, Ben would be liable for $5.25 million. A
nd in his professional lifetime, the market only goes up, always up. Ben likes to think of himself as a contrarian, but shorting common stock feels uncomfortable and dangerous, like some alien sexual practice. On the 5,000 puts, he’s out maybe $100,000—$200,000 maximum. His downside is capped.

  “Fucking USA Loves Toys. I still think it’s going to tank big time before the end of the quarter. Price out some June nine puts.”

  Heffernan tells him, “They’re the same as July.”

  “Buy the Julys.” Ben is extending his bet for another two months that USA Loves Toys will indeed fall below $9 a share.

  “People are not going to like this close,” Melucci says, checking his unhappy red screens.

  Ben asks Heffernan, “You sold all the Micron calls, right?”

  “EBay just collapsed,” Melucci says.

  “Ms. Grundy,” Dianne says, “is on three-seven.”

  “What? She calls me at ten minutes till four? What is that woman thinking? I don’t need to talk to her. Tell her yes to all eight, at her bids, except the Bellow. I’d go up to 800 on the Bellow.” Ms. Grundy is the pseudonym of the agent who runs his movie and TV company, which is called Permanent Productions. Ben has committed $25 million to Permanent, which is in turn a shell holding company for other movie and TV production entities he has set up all over the English-speaking world—Chimera Filmed Entertainment; Invisible Media Ltd.; the Over the Rainbow Company; Null & Void Productions; Charade, Incorporated; and a dozen more. In the two years since he set up shop, he has spent $14.4 million purchasing the film and television rights to thirty-two mid- and late-twentieth-century novels, plays, and stories that have never been filmed and that he particularly loves. He started with a wish list of a hundred, and his intention is to buy up, anonymously, the rights to as many as he can. He has no intention of making any of them into motion pictures or TV shows. In fact, his idea is just the opposite: Ben Gould wants to save contemporary literature from Hollywood, the same way conservation groups organize in rural areas to buy up farms to save virginal landscapes from real estate developers. Having fairly compensated the rights’ holders—studios and producers, writers and writers’ estates—Permanent Productions and all its component entities will simply sit on the rights in perpetuity. The man in Los Angeles who runs Mirage doesn’t know he’s a corporate sibling of the husband and wife in London who operate Invisible; they all deal individually with Ms. Grundy. Ben tells himself he would prefer to be doing this on the up-and-up. But he knows honesty would distort the market—the press attention would make it look like a stunt and complicate the process. Agents would hold him up, and he knows some writers actually want their books turned into Meryl Streep vehicles and HBO miniseries.