Willibald finishes his Sam Adams and says, “We should purport that Bill Gates is killed, in the same way. Hack the newspaper.”
There are chuckles and nods.
“Virtual assassination,” says Bruce, feeling like a kid again. “You’d be heroes.” He pauses. “Lizzie would certainly enjoy it.”
“Finish their anniversary celebrations with a … how do you call it,” says Humfried to Willibald, “a wirklicher ein realer Knall?”
“A real bang,” Willi tells him.
They talk about spoofing and pinging and sniffing and hacking for a while longer, about smurfs and smurf amplifiers, driving each other to more abstruse mischief-making extremes, Bruce mentioning November 29 (the day in 1975 when Gates first called his company “Micro-soft”), Willibald describing a new stealth-sniffer program a friend in Berlin told him about, Humfried recalling “Der verrückte Belgier who tossed the pie at Gates.” After Bruce wanders inside, Fanny and Humfried and Willibald get more raucous and comical, but more serious too, getting high off their own hypothetical power, confirming dates, declaring commitments, making oaths. Fanny mentions a hacker friend who once forced a core dump in a computer system of the “Rooters” news service.
“It’s R-e-u-t-e-r-s, but it’s pronounced Roy-ters,” Max says. “And this year November twenty-ninth is a Wednesday.”
“He can do that, with days and dates,” Sarah explains, slightly embarrassed.
Ben and Saddler have said nothing to each other for ten minutes. They’re both staring upward, pretending to be marveling at the unreasonably huge moon, just past full, rising over the house and the nine-story-tall stone anchorage of the Brooklyn Bridge.
“It’s like some wonderful black-and-white picture of old New York, isn’t it?” Saddler says.
“Sure is,” Ben replies, looking at the sky. He shouts over to his friend. “You see the moon, George?”
Standing across the grass and the gravel patch, near the house, George glances up, and then inside his house, where he sees that guests are beginning to leave. Has he ever hated a party more in his life? For some reason, though, its imminent end unsettles him. Everything is unsettling him, thanks to this beast of a television show he’s dreaming up, and Lizzie. He should go in and say goodbye to people, since he never said hello to most of them. But instead he starts flirting a little harder with Zip’s date, finding that her right-temple tattoo helps him avoid staring at her left-temple birthmark, and wondering if that is the idea. He used to be able to gin up strong momentary interest in almost anyone’s profession, but tonight, after two minutes, he has run out of questions about Canada and musical comedy (she is executive director of something called the Canadian Experimental Musical Comedy Archives). When she mentions that she grew up in Thailand, Pakistan, and Honduras, though, and her father’s twenty-six years of service in the CIA, his interest spikes.
“What was Bangkok like in 1975?”
“I don’t know. I was three. It smelled. We moved after my brother got addicted to opium.”
“When were you in Honduras?”
“In junior high. I’ll tell you everything I know about national security, but first you have to give me a cigarette.”
“This isn’t mine. And all they have over there,” George says, nodding toward the computer kids, “are menthols and cloves.”
“Blehhh. Zip is out too. I may have to leave.”
“My kingdom for a Marlboro. Hold on,” he says, ducks inside and turns left, trotting up the back stairs. (He loves excuses to use the back stairs, both because it’s the one part of the house that still smells like cocoa, and because it’s a secret passage.) Down the hall and into the cool, darkened bedroom, into the back closet, he reaches up and feels for Lizzie’s hidden stash, grabs the box, and trots back downstairs and out. A police helicopter is passing low and loud overhead, toward the river, its thud-thud-thud crescendo like airborne electronic timpani.
“No luck?” the woman asks.
“Voilà,” he says.
She slides out a Marlboro, and with it a tiny silver oval box of matches tucked in the box. She lights up, and hands the cigarettes and matches back to George. As she begins describing the insinuating lizardy men, evidently contra commanders, who would visit her parents’ house in Tegucigalpa with gifts of awful cinnamon-flavored chocolates for her, George tunes out. He’s looking at the exquisite little matchbox, with its embossed silver-on-silver lettering: ZERO, it says.
He lies on his side, facing away. She is in the bathroom. They’ve had one exchange in the forty-five minutes since the last guests left. The conversation consisted of “Did you lock the back door?” (Lizzie) and “Yeah” (George).
“Well,” she says abruptly from the bathroom, “I had a wonderful time. I think people did.”
George says nothing.
“Are you asleep?”
“No.”
“Isn’t Fanny Taft a great kid?”
“She is. She is.”
“I was surprised to see you spending so much time with Warren. Was he his usual upbeat self?”
“I like the guy. He said he thinks Max could be a candidate for antidepressants.”
“What?”
“He says he fits a pediatric predepressive profile.”
“Bullshit.”
“Warren says they make a minty-flavored liquid Prozac for kids.”
She pops her head out of the bathroom. “Max is not a fucking depressive, and Warren is an asshole.” She pops it back in.
“Are you drunk?” he says. Soberly.
“A little. Too bad you aren’t. Gloria Mose said a very Gloria thing to me tonight. They went to a Lincoln Center tribute to Sophia Loren tonight, where somebody apparently quoted Victorio De Sica. We were talking about Giuliani and Clinton and—”
“Vittorio.”
“Sorry, Monsieur Cinéma. Anyhow, she said, ‘Elizabeth, as De Sica said, “If you remove adultery from the lives of the bourgeoisie, there’s no drama left!” ’ Isn’t that pure Gloria? And then Bruce said that only ten percent of the animals who supposedly mate for life are actually faithful. Among primates, he said, only marmosets and tamarins don’t fuck around. Gloria loved that. Did you know she used to be a stewardess for Laker Airways? Zip told me she picked up the first husband literally on the sidewalk at Gatwick.”
George thinks of mentioning the matches from Zero. Zero, the restaurant where Lizzie evidently dined with Harold Mose. He wouldn’t mind the fight per se. But if he has caught her at something, he doesn’t want to give her the satisfaction of knowing he’s upset. And if it’s nothing, just some lunch sometime she didn’t happen to mention, then he’ll seem paranoid, and he certainly doesn’t want to give her the satisfaction of thinking he’s nuts.
“Did I ever tell you about my sidewalk sex censuses?” he asks, still lying down, facing away, both arms beneath his pillow.
She turns out the bathroom light and sits on the bed.
“What?” she says with a small giggle.
“Every so often when I’m walking down the street, I look at every woman on the sidewalk coming toward me, and decide if I’d like to fuck them or not. Yes or no; boom, boom, boom; half a second to decide each one. (It’s difficult in midtown, it’s so crowded.) I usually do a hundred, and keep a running tally, sixteen out of a hundred, or whatever it comes out to.”
“Huh,” she says.
“I guess you think that’s some sick, sexist thing.”
“No! I think it’s funny. Pollyanna and I used to do almost that same thing with all the men at a party, or in a bar, or wherever, and then we’d announce our totals to each other. Polly called it How Many Guys. When I’m traveling by myself, sometimes, or waiting for you at a restaurant, I still do it, just in my head. Like your thing, only not with percentages.” She snaps off the black snakelike halogen lamp on her side of the bed, and turns over, believing they’ve had their first pleasant conversation in weeks. “Night.”
Seven hours later, the phone
is ringing. George is gone already. He’s working weekends now on Real Time, every Saturday and some Sundays. Lizzie experiences what is always for her the hangover nadir—that first conscious moment, when she feels so … disappointed, not in herself but in the mingy, second-rate day that now lies ahead. “Hello? Hello.” She’s rehearsing, making sure she doesn’t surprise herself and the caller with a croaking, phlegmy hello, working toward a believable simulation of wakefulness. She picks up the phone. “Hello?”
“Hello! We had such an interesting time. You know so many interesting people! I wish I’d had a chance to talk to George. Was he feeling all right?”
“Hi, Nancy. It was good seeing you and Roger too.” Why the fuck is she phoning at six minutes after nine on Saturday morning? Unless Roger has dropped dead since ten-thirty last night (and even Nancy wouldn’t sound so cheerfully widowed so quickly), this call is unnecessary, bordering on inexcusable.
“Didn’t want to bother you at home, but I insist for your sake on getting our lunch calendared immediately. And I’m already on my way to London, so.”
And if you somehow managed to get hold of a working telephone in England, by the time you called me, it might be as late as four, even five in the afternoon my time. So …
“I don’t have my book in front of me,” Lizzie says.
“Then why don’t we say you’ll come up to Cordman, Horton around noon the Tuesday after Memorial Day, we’ll figure out how rich we want to make you, then grab a bite at Square One? I’ve already cleared the decks for you. The middle of my day is all yours. Let my kids know if that isn’t doable.”
By “kids,” Lizzie knows Nancy means her two assistants, rather than Cameron and Sydney, her actual children, but she’s never heard anyone outside show business use kids in that sense. Square One is the imitation-1945 McNally bistro (Brian McNally, Keith McNally … one or both of their ex-wives, she can’t remember which) that just opened in the old Times Square Howard Johnson.
“All right? Otherwise, I’ll see you the thirtieth. Shall we send a car down?”
“No,” Lizzie says, “that’s okay. But if you could arrange a nonstop for me on the A train, that would be terrific.”
After a beat, Nancy says, “That’s why you know so many interesting, irreverent people, Lizzie—because you are. Here I am—No, driver, British Air! You’ll have to loop all the way around now. ‘Loop’! You don’t understand the word loop?—I’m sorry, Lizzie. And you’re lobbying to let in more immigrants?” This is supposed to be funny. “See you Tuesday, dear.”
She’ll blame Nancy. It’s Nancy who’s forcing her to have a cigarette at nine in the morning, she thinks as she gets up and heads toward the closet. She feels. She gropes. She pulls in a chair and stand and squints and hunts some more. Somebody has taken her cigarettes. If it wasn’t George, it was a kid; and if it was a kid who took them to smoke (and not to throw in the garbage, which Max and LuLu always threaten to do), she isn’t quite sure what posture of disapproval she’ll strike.
29
Arrogant little fucker, he thinks, hanging up the phone on the high-pitched altar boy of a Time reporter and his dumb Feature Writing 101 questions. There always have been reporters who go for that passive-aggressive interview style, contempt disguised as earnestness, but it seems to George that in younger journalists it’s more virulent and unconscious, and certainly more irritating. He glances out the window, not to contemplate Olmstead and Vaux’s blooming glory, nor to bring some fleeting inspiration about the show into sharper focus, nor just to catch his breath. He is trying to remember what he is supposed to do next. These cartoon moments of slow, deliberate, banal recollection—I, um … huh?—make George feel like Ronald Reagan.
What he can’t remember is that he’s supposed to go watch the recut Mexican war footage, with more of the jerky firefight shots of Francesca taking cover in her Kevlar tank top.
He thinks, when he thinks about it, that he’s enduring these ninety-hour weeks and all the time away from the family because he’s reveling in the very hell of the job. He thinks his mood has brightened because he’s back in journalism (half back), because he’s an adrenaline addict, and because of all the thumb sucking and chin stroking he’s provoking among the thumb-sucking, chin-stroking class. He thinks he’s just professionally excited and panicked about Real Time, which (much more than with NARCS) he feels as if he’s squirting from his brain directly onto television, making it from scratch, inventing. It’s not just another drama set in a newsroom, or a comedy set in a newsroom, or a comedy-drama hybrid set in a newsroom, like the twenty-two shows—literally, twenty-two of them, on the air right now—set in proscenium newsrooms and proscenium media lofts. Nor is it just another newsmagazine show, like the nineteen metastasizing through the networks’ and cable’s news schedules (the meiotic and mitotic doublings and redoublings of Dateline NBC, 60 Minutes, 48 Hours, 20/20, CNN Newsstand). Real Time is new. Real Time is new. Which is why so many thumb suckers and chin strokers are concerned and outraged and sickened (“Sickened,” a Washington Post columnist said on CNN over the weekend) by the mere prospect. Yesterday, reading the paper, he thought: It’s the same scaredy-cat, constipated caste of official twits and drudges who couldn’t bear listening to Le Sacre du Printemps when it was first performed eighty-seven years ago. There is only one person to whom he could dare mention this analogy with the correct mixture of seriousness and self-ridicule (I’m Stravinsky, and Timothy Featherstone is Diaghilev), so he will mention it to no one. “May 29, 1913” was the first entry in “Today in History” in yesterday’s paper: “The Rite of Spring melee in Paris—as the debut performance of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet finished, and the Chosen Victim convulsed in the ‘Sacrificial Dance,’ bewildered and horrified audience members panicked.” Maybe Real Time is his destiny, God forgive him. Destiny is a word she would use. Not only was yesterday the twenty-ninth of May (she and the kids were up at the house on Lake Marten all weekend with Pollyanna), his producer pointed out that next Tuesday, the night of the first shakedown episode, happens to fall on June 6. Their D-day is actually D-Day. She would enjoy that. That would be a bolt of synchronicity for Lizzie, some kind of flaming sign in the sky. But they’ve hardly seen each other in the last month.
The three shows he’s producing next week won’t go to air. But the idea is to come as close to broadcast ready as possible, with real tape packages, actual second-week-of-June-2000 breaking news. “More than fake, less than real,” George said to the staff. He didn’t mean it as a joke, just shorthand, but it instantly became a kind of nervous, joshing mantra among the staff. The two half hours, the Tuesday and the Thursday, are mostly in the can, and for the news hour they will go live to tape next Friday, start the cameras at five-thirty and roll the credits at six twenty-nine. Around the office they’re calling it “shakedown”—shakedown is a week away, the cast (“the talent,” George continually corrects) feels good about shakedown, the shakedown overrun has to stay in the low six figures. Saddler officially named it BetaWeek. (He even registered the trademark, so that every reference in all network memos is to Real Time® BetaWeek®.) Featherstone calls it their “damp run,” as opposed to dry run, which is witty for Featherstone.
“George,” Daisy says, “it’s the guy from Time magazine again. On three-two.”
“Fuck him. Call back. I have to go down to editing.”
“He says he only has one more quick question.”
George picks up. “Hello.”
“Mr. Mactier? Hi. Barry Stengel told us that you have—let me find his quote—’an agenda as committed as it’s ever been to the destruction of hard-news broadcasting.’ Do you have a response to that?”
“And I’ve stopped beating my wife, too.”
“You what? This is Boris Faber, Mr. Mactier, calling from Time.”
“Look, our Friday program is going to be hard news by any definition. We’re not going to run naked interviews with Jim Carrey to promote a movie, like Barry Stengel did on MBCWe
ek. We’re not going to have service pieces about … celebrity yoga or, you know … the medical benefits of rock climbing.”
“Mr. Stengel broadcast stories about rock climbing and yoga when he was running the news division?”
Barry Stengel “resigned” last week.
“I don’t know. All the shows put on stories like that. Those are hypothetical examples. Here’s my quote: our Friday Real Time news segments will be the hardest news in prime time. Bar none. Okay?”
“And one more question? How do you feel about ABC moving Right/Left to go up directly against you on Fridays at nine?”
How do I feel? I feel personally assaulted on several fronts. I’d like them to fail. Right/Left is the new ABC News show now on Saturday night, hosted by George Stephanopoulos and one of the skinny, blond conservative women. It consists of half an hour each week of newsmagazine stories produced with an unabashed right-wing bias, interlarded with half an hour of stories produced with an unabashed left-wing bias. At the beginning of the show, the cohosts flip a silver dollar, on air, to see whose team of investigative ideologues gets to go first.
“We welcome it. That is soft news. That is agenda mongering. So now viewers will have a stark choice. Between the real news on Real Time—interspersed with a little entertainment that’s honest enough to call itself entertainment—and stories on ABC about … video games or something.”
Turn of the Century Page 48