Turn of the Century (18 page)

With Sarah tutored in the use of the Beverly Hills Hotel digital key card and installed at the Polo Lounge with the little kids for brunch, George and Lizzie head to the hospital. Even before they reach the ICU waiting room they hear Tammy, who is evidently talking on the phone. They see her before she sees them, dressed in a black T-shirt imprinted with a huge close-up of the singer Yanni, black yoga pants, black high heels, and sunglasses with dark green lenses the size of hockey pucks. Tammy was some kind of Adelaide music-hall gal turned television performer. To Mike’s credit, he married Rachel, his second wife, and Tammy, his third, when they were the same age as Lizzie’s mother would have been if she were alive. Tammy is extremely tan, almost bluish, tan in the way women tanned back in the days before SPFs and Nicorette and Evian.

“Elizabeth!” she says, hanging up the phone and springing toward them, her loose breasts swinging ahead of her as she moves in for the hug. “George! Darling hearts!” Women, George has no problem hugging. He and Lizzie both prefer Tammy to Rachel, who started calling George “my right-wing Reaganite son-in-law” after George admitted to her one night that he had voted for Rudy Giuliani for mayor.

“Are you exhausted? You just missed your brother, Elizabeth. Are you both about to collapse? I’m so sorry about your mom, George. What a week! I mean your brother Ronnie. George, you skinny boy! What a time! How was your flight? I’d kill for a cigarette, Elizabeth! Congratulations on the show, George! Where are you staying? When can I see the kids? The gray looks nice on you, George, it really does!”

“How is Daddy doing?” Lizzie asks.

“Good news! They’re taking him into surgery! A brilliant new procedure! Transplant! The ‘OR’ means surgery up here, doesn’t it? By the way, I was at Fred Segal and the Gap all morning—bought you and the kids
everything!
”

“They decided—they’re giving him a new liver?” George asks. “But I thought that wasn’t … available. Advisable. Possible. At his age. Right?”

“Right! That’s the genius part! Exactly! Only one liver for every three people who need one! Mike’s too old! That’s why he’s eligible
for this! You know, Elizabeth, Buddy Ramo called last night and offered to donate one of his livers. ‘One of his!’ Sweet, sweet Buddy.”

Lizzie puts her hands on Tammy’s shoulders. “Tammy? Tell us what’s going on here. Why is Daddy suddenly getting a liver transplant?” Then, lowering her voice: “Did he pull strings? Who did he hondle to arrange this?” Lizzie is surprised at her “hondle”; she never uses Yiddish phrases.

“No, Elizabeth! Mikey is a hero! A scientific hero! They offered! He didn’t ask! Xenotransplantation! He woke up early this morning for a sec and said, ‘Tam, I want to go for it!’ He wrote a note to you, signed the form, and went! History in the making! Do you believe it? Transgenic swine!”

“Tammy!” Lizzie says. “What the
fuck
are you talking about?”

It is always this way with Tammy. She has a funny kind of zero-sum relationship with the rest of humanity. The moment she succeeds in making someone else slightly cuckoo, she is grounded and becomes calm and linear. “Aw, poor darling. You’re upset. You’re upset about your dear old dad, aren’t you? Ohhhh. Poor tired babies, both of you. George, Elizabeth, over here. Sit. Eat some animal crackers. I brought them for the children. I’ll run and find Dr. Bob.” And she is off, down a corridor, heels clacking, big boobs swaying.

A few minutes later, Tammy returns, pulling an East Asian man about George’s age by his white coat. His name tag reads
BAMBANG S.H.H. “BOB” HARDIYANTI, M.D.

“Good morning. Your mother says you have several questions about our xenotransplantation protocols.”

She is not my mother
, Lizzie thinks. “I’d like to know what we’re doing to my father, yes.”
And by the way, Tammy, just for the record, Ronnie isn’t my brother, he’s my ex-stepmother’s sleazeball son
.

“Of course,” the doctor says. “We will be grafting a genetically enhanced organ from a special ungulate herd. The procedure is highly experimental, of course. As I explained to your father last evening.”

“What’s an ungulate herd?” Lizzie asks.

“Swine,” the doctor says, smiling. “The liver was harvested from our own transgenic swine.”

“You’re giving my father a pig’s liver?” Lizzie asks, not shocked, not horrified, just impatient at having to wade through so much euphemistic politesse.

Dr. Hardiyanti smiles a little too broadly, takes a deep breath, and nods. “Quite right. Yes. From a special herd we cosponsor. The … ‘pigs’ are genetically altered. We redesign their cells especially, you see, to trick the human immune system—your father’s immune system—into accepting the liver, into letting it become
his
liver. And the liver cells are tricked, as I say, so to speak, into believing they are still living in the pig. You see? We fool the flesh, I like to say. With the goal of making each side able to live together.”

Lizzie doesn’t know if it’s jet lag or Dr. Hardiyanti’s pseudo-Etonian Singapore singsong, but she realizes she’s taking in his explanation on two channels, like simultaneous translation. On one channel he’s describing a liver transplant, but on the other he’s speaking metaphorically, about some noble and terrifying scheme to engineer a global solution to racial and ethnic hate. She says nothing.

George asks, “And he won’t be at risk for catching some kind of … pig illness?”

Dr. Hardiyanti is loving this. “These are sterile livers, I assure you. Exceptionally sterile. The piglets are removed from the womb by cesarean section. They don’t suckle, they don’t have any contact at all with their mothers. So they are disease free. And in a sense, they don’t even know they are swine.”

Lizzie is still a little spooked. When will the doctor say something that isn’t ripe with
Brave New World
double meaning?

“Isn’t it fantastic!” Tammy says. “Is this the twenty-first century or what? And you know, this would cost five hundred thousand dollars! At least! But they’re doing it for us for free! I’m so proud of Mikey. He said, ‘Maybe I’ll be a celebrity, the next Christopher … Bernard.’ What’s the name? That first guy to get a heart transplant? The South African?”

“Christiaan Barnard,” George says, “
performed
the transplant.”

“See, you still remember his name!”

“We do appreciate your mother’s enthusiasm,” Dr. Hardiyanti says. “But I want to be quite candid. The chances of survival are, you must understand, small.”

“How small?” asks George.

“Quite small.”

“Like one in ten?” George asks. “One in twenty?”

The doctor says nothing.

“One in a hundred?”

“We are having real success with skin grafts from swine. And routinely for heart valves. And islets—the bits in the pancreas? At our research facility in Ventura we have a baboon that is living very successfully with a transplanted swine liver. His postop survival is now at”—Dr. Hardiyanti checks his watch—“one hundred sixty-seven days.”

George chews a fleck of flesh from the inside of his lower lip. Lizzie looks over at Tammy, who’s nodding excitedly.

“This is a wholly experimental procedure,” Dr. Hardiyanti says, smiling more broadly than ever. “Wholly new. With human recipients, the success rate remains approximately zero.” His beeper goes off.

“
Approximately
zero?” George and Lizzie say together in a mixture of incredulity and curiosity that sound unpleasantly to Dr. Hardiyanti like a peer review.

Slightly taken aback, he checks his beeper message and stands. “Approaching zero, yes. In Ukraine, they claim to have a girl living for the last five months with a baby gorilla’s liver. But we are, quite frankly, skeptical.”

George swallows hard against a sob. Lizzie thinks of Mike Zimbalist: irrational optimist, freeloading ham, a man who claims he wrote the line “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!” for Al Jolson, now betting everything on an expensive, untried, inherently ridiculous procedure with no chance of success. What a surprise.

Dr. Hardiyanti shifts his weight to leave. But then the doctor can’t resist mocking Ukrainian medicine a little more. “The same researchers in Ukraine, by the way, announced in January that they had transplanted the entire head of a weasel onto the body of a codger.” He clucks. They stare. “A
badger
, I mean a badger, of course. Can you imagine? It’s been a pleasure to meet you both.”

Tammy grabs the doctor’s right hand with both of hers, and snuggles it. “Thanks so much, Dr. Hearty Yenta.
Thank you
, Doctor!”

Another weasel
, George and Lizzie both think. What is it with
weasels?
George and Lizzie each have just enough embers of spiritual impulse that any curious coincidence always catches their attention for a breathless second or two as it bursts prettily into flame. (
Synchronicity
.) And then disappears.

It’s intense, the sun, for the first of March. Lizzie feels as anxious about work (back in the room just now, she played her controller’s voice mail:
Microsoft isn’t showing any flexibility, and they want an answer soon
) as she does about her father’s operation. Which is natural, she told herself on the way down to the pool, since Mike Zimbalist’s survival, unlike Fine Technologies’, lies entirely beyond her control. Is that Zen? Or cold?

George, Lizzie, and Sarah are lying on adjacent chaises. Lizzie picks up Sarah’s paperback translation of
The Aeneid
and reads at random.

Microsoft
, Lizzie thinks.
And Mose
, for all she knows. For a few years after college, as she abandoned her absolute adolescent rejection of fuzzyheaded mysticism, she occasionally used an I Ching computer program for advice. But she found the hexagrams a little arcane (“The new roofbeam warps upward. A withered willow sprouting leaves at the foot of its trunk”) to be useful for evaluating jobs or boyfriends. Western directness
—So easily one slithers down to hell
—is more her oracular speed.

She looks up from the paperback. “You know, Daddy looked good. It isn’t depressing to me.”

“He did. It isn’t. To me either.”

“
Warn
me first if you drown me!” Louisa says happily to Max, who’s carrying her piggyback in the pool ten feet away. George is looking at Sarah’s premiere issue of
Teen Nation, The Nation
magazine’s “Super-Rad Journal of Politics & the Environment for a New Generation.” (The cover story is “Jimmy Smits and Jennifer Lopez in Mexico: This Revolution
Will
Be Televised.” George wonders what Sarah thinks of the articles, such as “Girls 2 Grrrls,” a column by Morgan Fairchild and Susan Sarandon on “reproductive choice and other teen
issues,” and the journalist Bill McKibben’s anti-fast-food, anti-TV, anti-sport-utility-vehicle jeremiad “Wasted!” There are also comic strips that make fun of Bruce Willis, Ken Starr, Dan Quayle, William Rehnquist, and Ted Nugent.

“Are you sure,” asks Sarah, reading a hospital booklet called
To Life! To Livers! A Hepatology Primer
, “if Grandpa was, you know, mentally
there
when he signed the consent form? According to this, ‘End-stage liver patients frequently experience delirium.’ ”

“Tammy was with him,” Lizzie says. “I’m sure he knew exactly what he was doing. Besides, when isn’t my father delirious?”

“God!” Sarah says. “ ‘Hopefully, the national five-year nonsurvival rate for liver-involved oncology patients, which remains at an unsatisfactory ninety-four percent level, will improve with increased research resources.’ ”

“Sarah,” her mother says, “we can do without the fun facts.”

“ ‘This service is hygienized automatically at every use,’ ” George says. He saw that phrase on a sign above a urinal in Savannah during their honeymoon, and they have both used it ever since as a private shorthand whenever they encounter especially egregious English written by native speakers.

Reminded of their honeymoon, Lizzie strokes George’s hand. “Can I look at this?” he says, touching the envelope Lizzie has stuck in the hepatology pamphlet. She nods. It’s a note to Lizzie from her father that Tammy gave her at the hospital, written on stationery from the Ingleside Inn in Palm Springs. Everything Mike Zimbalist has ever written by hand, as far as Lizzie knows, is written on hotel stationery. He keeps drawers full of it. As with so much her father does, this mortified Lizzie as a teenager. The first time he sent George one of his notes, on a sheet from the Astor Hotel with the phone exchange ROosevelt 7 (and the slogan: “Air-Conditioned Elegance in the Cosmopolitan Heart of Gotham”), George was so thoroughly charmed that Lizzie felt embarrassed that she’d ever been embarrassed by her father’s stationery cache. “ ‘My Dearest Darling Lizzie,’ ” George reads. “ ‘Welcome to LA! You don’t have to love Ronnie and the stepsiblings, but please call them?’ ” That Zimbalist family phrase, Ronnie and the stepsiblings, always makes George smile. It sounds to him like a fifties singing group.