And the good news has been spectacularly fine, a holiday media dream, as if orchestrated, exactly the sorts of stories Americans adore hearing and seeing at this season, exactly what producers and editors love giving them. On the twenty-second of December, the first day of Hanukkah, a dozen struggling charitable enterprises around the country received anonymous million-dollar donations, each check drawn on the same account, a mysterious nonprofit New York City corporation called Hey! Free Money! The next day another dozen Hey! Free Money! checks arrived at other charities, and the day after Christmas a dozen more—by yesterday, a million dollars apiece to a hundred methadone clinics, soup kitchens, and literacy groups, to law firms that defend indigent death row inmates and micro–credit agencies that write small loans to impoverished entrepreneurs.
The network news shows gave extensive coverage to one of the first day’s recipients, a battered-women’s shelter (and “animal rights outreach agency”) operated by a church in St. Paul, Minnesota, that lost its funding and was going to close on the thirty-first. “This money will endow our work in perpetuity,” the church’s large, red-faced minister told her TV interviewers. “We have no idea who the donor is—and as Unitarians we each have our own comfort level with the idea of divine intercession—but right now, I believe in miracles. As our sisters and brothers in Mexico would say, ‘¡Viva milagros!’ ”
LA PAZ? is the Daily News’s front-page headline this morning about the war in Mexico. (At first, George thought the delivery kid had left them a copy of El Diario by mistake.) Subcomandante Marcos, the leader of the Zapatista rebellion, had made a startling announcement during an interview yesterday with MTV News. Ever since his rebellion began in 1994, Subcomandante Marcos, a former graphic design professor, has been a self-consciously postmodern revolutionary. Sometimes his official communiqués are written in the ancient Aztec language Nahuatl, sometimes they quote Hamlet, and they often include the salutation, “¡Andale, ándale! ¡Arriba, arriba!” For a time, he even called himself Speedy Gonzalez, after the cartoon character. When the war heated up last spring and he received a stern letter at his secret mountain headquarters from the Warner Bros. legal department, reminding him that Speedy Gonzalez is a trademarked Looney Tunes character owned by Time Warner, he called in a CNN crew and a Time magazine reporter. He said into the CNN camera, “Trademark? Trademark? We don’t need no steenkin’ trademark!” then laughed and announced that “as a gesture of reasonableness” he was changing his nickname to Roadrunner. Yesterday, on the eve of the seventh anniversary of the beginning of his uprising, he held another press conference, outside the town of Polho, Mexico. He thanked the youth of North America for their financial and moral support of the rights of Mexico’s oppressed people (“in particular, one noble teenage girl who has been so very generous to our struggle”). And he announced that the Zapatista Front of National Liberation was declaring a unilateral sixty-day cease-fire. Furthermore, Subcomandante Marcos said, his group is now ready to begin good-faith negotiations with the Mexican government (which C-SPAN has agreed to broadcast live, twenty-four hours a day), leading toward what he called “the territorial autonomy we require, our 2001 space odyssey.” He said the new spirit of reconciliation was prompted by a hundred-million-dollar donation his group received last week from an anonymous “enlightened Wall Street capitalist” in New York City.
Lying on his stomach in front of the fireplace, George sees in the Sunday Times that both Subcomandante Marcos and the Global Computer Generation Y—symbolized by Willibald, Humfried, and Fanny—were runners-up for Time’s Man of the Year. He is pleased (and, at the same time, the tiniest bit disappointed) to see that neither in the paper’s extensive year-in-review coverage of the Microsoft hoax nor of the Manson parole debacle is George Mactier mentioned at all, just as Lizzie wasn’t mentioned in the Business section story about Intel’s acquisition of Terraplane, which she had helped broker. Hank Saddler’s plea in federal court last week is, of course, the kicker to the Times‘s Microsofthacker story—the paper says that Henry Saddler may be the first white-collar criminal defendant in history to plead not guilty by reason of temporary insanity.
Lizzie, closer to the fire and sitting with her arms wrapped around her knees, is staring, her thoughts roaming in a post-lunch, long-holiday-weekend, absolute-last-day-of-the-millennium drift. LuLu has carefully propped up around the living room every Christmas card they received, as she did last year, but to have enough space this year, she required the Corbu coffee table and both Shaker end tables as well as the mantelpiece. So many are family portraits, Lizzie notices—but black-and-white, as maximum tastefulness now requires. They received several what-the-family-has-been-doing-all-year holiday form letters, like the corny ones Edith Hope used to send out every year, except that all of their friends’ versions wink at themselves, in one way or another apologizing for indulging in the custom—neo-corn.
She remarks on the unusual number of cards. George nods and keeps reading.
“What I mean is, doesn’t it make you feel good?” she says. “That with all the crap about us in the papers, people are using the opportunitty to reach out and say, ‘We’re thinking of you’?”
George looks up and smiles skeptically at his wife. He says, “ ‘We’re thinking of you, because now you’re infamous, and we want to feel like friends of celebrities, even though you’re celebrated for being suspected criminal coconspirators, because the crime is so sexy.’ That doesn’t make me feel bad. But I wouldn’t attribute all the cards entirely to an outpouring of spirituality and good will, no.”
“I hadn’t thought of that at all,” she says, looking at the fire, not quite smiling. “What an unsentimental prick you are.”
“That’s why you love me,” he says, throwing the A section aside and belly-crawling the four feet across the rug to put his head in her lap, “that’s part of my pluckiness.”
She puts a hand on his temple and stares into the fireplace. The fire is hot on his face. “So, Señor Plucky,” she says, “how long would the film take you to do, do you really think?”
“A month? Two? I don’t know. Maybe longer. Depends what it turns out to be.” George is leaving Tuesday for a week in Mexico, laying the groundwork for a documentary he plans to make about Zapatista teenagers as an MTV-PBS coproduction, to be partially underwritten by Benetton. He’s taking Sarah with him, since she’s on winter break.
“I need to get a real job, you know. We don’t exactly have fuck-you money.”
Her 498,000 shares of Mose Media Holdings stock vested on the twenty-ninth, the day before yesterday, and she promptly sold them all, as she has always planned to do. She planned, however, to cash out for $24 million (the value of her shares in June, when the deal was done), or for $11 million (the value on Christmas Day, before the Chapter 11 announcement), not for only $2.181 million.
“I guess the money said ‘Fuck you,’ ” George says. He turns over on his back and looks up at his wife’s face. “Hey, I canceled the lease on the Aston Martin. That’s twenty-three hundred dollars a month right there. Seriously, won’t the interest on your two million cover the nut for a while? The house, food, the car, tuition? There’s also my Real Time settlement and your consulting money from Bruce and Buster, plus we have the NARCS royalty. If it lasts.”
She looks down at him. “I gave the St. Andrew’s fund two thousand dollars this year, by the way.”
“Protection money,” George says. “Good thinking.”
“We’ll get by. I should clean up the lunch mess so we’re out of the caterers’ way when they get here. When’re your sister and Cubby coming over? Get off, my leg’s falling asleep.”
“Kiss me first. Not until three. He had a run-through at St. Patrick’s.”
Cubby and Ben’s religious light-and-magic business, the Guild, is having its American debut tonight at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. (“Spectacle of the Spirit” is being cosponsored by Lincoln-Mercury and Versace.) George and Lizzie will go to the early show, then
come home for the traditional New Year’s Eve dinner party.
Lizzie leans down, yogilike, and smooches him quick and sloppy, then bobs up, slides his head to the floor, and stands. “You should put out the thing, their gift,” Lizzie says. Alice and Cubby’s Christmas present to George and Lizzie is a Home Again reproduction of a red-white-and-yellow turn-of-the-century carnival ring-toss game that looks like a Jasper Johns painting. Unbeknownst to Alice and Cubby, Zip copied it from an antique carnival ring-toss game that George and Lizzie have hanging in the house on Lake Marten.
“Alice actually thanked me yesterday,” George tells her, sitting up, “for connecting Cubby to Ben. I almost cried. I think it’s the first time she’s ever thanked me for anything in her life.”
“What did she ever have to thank you for before?” Lizzie says on her way down to the kitchen.
“I’m the unsentimental prick?” he replies, trailing after her.
“George, what are those boxes in the closet under the stoop? Are those presents you forgot to give?”
“No.” He shouldn’t lie. Even the small lies can be trouble. “It’s some sporting goods I bought during, you know, in August. I’m returning them.”
She turns to look at him. She is stunned. “Sporting goods?”
“And other stuff. You don’t want to know.”
In the boxes are: a Maptrek, a GPS device for skiers that records their paths and speed, but which George planned to hide somehow on Lizzie’s person in order to track her movements; a GPS “vehicle locator” that attaches to the car phone, which was to have been a redundant backup system to the Maptrek; and something called Walker’s Game Ear, which hunters use to amplify the sounds of deer flanks rustling bush boughs and hooves crackling dried leaves from a hundred yards away. George never developed a specific plan for using the Game Ear, but it only cost $179.99.
“George Mactier purchases sporting goods. There’s a clinical definition of insanity. You’re sure you didn’t also buy the pistol?”
He puts his arms around her and grinds himself into her. “Ready to fire.”
The phone rings.
“That’s probably the kids,” Lizzie says. “Antichrist! lets out at two-something and you’re supposed to pick them up.”
“Hello? … This is he.” He gives Lizzie a funny look, opening his mouth and popping his eyes. Then, “Hello! This must be the longest game of phone tag in history.”
Lizzie stares at him, trying to guess the identity of the caller by interpolation.
“Sure,” he says into the phone. “No, that’s okay.… I do remember.… No, Harold never did. Uh-huh … Uh-huh … No, I know you do.… Well, I’m afraid I’ve got bad news.… It’s real. I don’t wear a toupee.… Well, whatever you call them.… Nope.… Right.… I understand. No problem.… No … Really? … I hope we can.… You have a happy New Year too. Bye-bye.” He hangs up. He looks at her, grinning and dismayed. “Guess.”
“I have no fucking idea.”
“Michael Milken. He said he admired my hairpiece ‘tremendously’ when we met at that party a year ago, and hasn’t stopped thinking about how ‘authentic’ it looked. He said ever since, he’s wanted to know who my ‘vendor’ is.”
Lizzie shakes her head.
“He also said, ‘I hope you can come to my little party for Nancy McNabb and Harold.’ Apparently Nancy’s left Roger for Mose.”
“When the two angels flew in at the end and landed on the altar,” Daisy Moore Granger is saying to Cubby Koplowitz and Lizzie, “I thought, ‘Clever. Very nice.’ But then when they started glowing, and then sort of became that blue light that filled the whole nave, and then the thunder and whirling noise—I tell you, I actually felt like kneeling. And I’m not Catholic.”
Lizzie wonders for a second, almost unconsciously, like a fragrance on a stray breeze: Did my husband sleep with you?
“And that’s not even state-of-the-art, holography-wise,” Cubby tells Daisy. “At the mosque in Chicago next month, as a surprise to everyone at the conclusion of the service, we’re going to have the prophet mingle among the congregation.”
“So,” Lizzie asks her brother-in-law, “you and Ben really have a shot at getting Bill Clinton to be your cemetery anchorman?”
At the other end of the table, Bruce Helms’s girlfriend, a university-press book editor named Agnes who has annoyed everyone all night long, is talking past Warren Holcombe (whose book, The Modernist Madnesses, she once declined to publish) to Ben Gould’s date, a young Englishwoman named Caroline Osborne—the prettiest person in the room by far and, as it happens, Gloria Mose’s daughter.
“What is the official term for the kinds of articles your magazine prints,” Agnes says to Caroline, “is it gossip, or celebrity confession, what?”
“Journalism is the official term,” Caroline says. “But I suppose you could call it ‘cultural studies primary texts,’ couldn’t you?”
Bruce’s girlfriend aside, the dinner is going well. The standard gaiety is bound up tonight with a complicated sense of gravity. Almost everyone at the table feels it, as they eat and drink and flirt and chatter, this sense of some new hybrid sentiment seeping over them. It’s not fear, or giddiness. Is it cheerful rue? Is it wonder? Imminence or immanence or both? What they’re feeling, one of them thinks (or maybe several of them), is a mood of respite rather than of completion, pausing here in the middle of the expedition to trade stories and collect thoughts. They’ve learned the queer new truth that the best way to move between two points isn’t always a short, straight line (FedEx and satellites carry urgent messages thousands of miles to move them ten), that any of the zigs or zags may be important. Most of the men and women here have been out on the trail long enough now to understand that the wild beasts do bite and the quicksand kills—that every special effect in life is real—but also that their good luck so far impels them to go back out for more, together and apart, after tonight. Where to? Nobody knows. The road ahead isn’t necessarily a road, as everyone in this room should realize by now.
“ ‘All clichés turn out to be true,’ that’s what Lizzie’s always said.” George is reassuring Jess Burnham about her plans to adopt a Korean infant. Jess joked that she would be committing two clichés in one—adoptive lesbian mother and transracial adoptee. “Anyhow, you’re now a gay CBS News anchor—that’s a total non-cliché, I think.”
“If you keep repeating ‘All clichés are true’ at every whipstitch, Mactier,” Zip Ingram leans over to say, “that’s going to turn into a cliché as well.”
“Which would be perfect, right?” says Pollyanna Chang from Zip’s other side. “Then it can become the final cliché, the ultimate cliché.”
“We don’t have an English word for cliché, do we?” George says. “I mean, with cliché, shouldn’t Americans be like the Eskimos, with their twenty words for snow and ice?”
“Actually,” says Bruce’s date, Agnes, who specializes in books with titles that contain colons, “that’s a kind of racist myth—this idea that there are so many different words among the Arctic indigenous peoples for ice and snow. And so, right there you have an example of a cliché that is not true.” She smiles just enough to indicate how pleased she is with her cavil.
Lizzie, three people away, cannot resist coming to George’s defense.
“Actually,” says George Mactier’s anthropology-major wife, leaning in front of both Warren Holcombe and Emily Kalman, “in the language spoken by Greenland’s Eskimos (who are the only Eskimos I know anything about) there really are a huge number of different words for ice and snow.” When Agnes reacts with a doubtful little smile, Lizzie adds, “At least according to Fortescue, in West Green-landic,” and then returns to her conversation with Francesca Mahoney.
“So,” Lizzie says, “you really think MTV might want to help out with Sarah’s new project?”
“I do,” Francesca says. “I’m going to talk to them about it on Tuesday.” Sarah and her friend Felipe are organizing a thematically driven,
site-specific multimedia performance piece (their phrase) to be performed simultaneously by a hundred cyberpornographic “actors” around the world. Sarah and Felipe would write dozens of simple commands in advance—“Stroke your left breast,” “Suck your thumb,” “Shake your hair,” “Bend forward,” “Frown,” and so on—which would be delivered electronically in a random sequence for ten minutes to all hundred performers at once. The idea is for the hundred naked men and women, sitting in front of a hundred video cameras in a hundred different grotty cubicles all over the world, to obey each instruction in unison. All hundred images would be shown together on a giant patchwork of monitors—ideally, Sarah and Felipe think, on the video-wall skin of the Viacom building in Times Square.
“I think it’s so cool that you support her on this,” Francesca says, “since she’s only, like, what … ?”
Turn of the Century Page 74