Turn of the Century (2 page)

“I’m really—oh, jeez, look at your pants, too. I’m
sorry
.” George leans in to help him up, but then remembers the kid hasn’t been knocked down. He was kneeling when George flung the coffee, fiddling with his bike, and so instead, George just quickly touches his sweaty green-and-pink-spandexed shoulder and says again, “Sorry.”

“The thing was brand-
new
, like three
hundred
dollars, I think.
Man
.” They stare together across the street at the bashed, cracked pink helmet still wobbling crazily. (Stenciled on its side in big teal letters is a phrase George reads as !MOM !69. A rap group? A brand of heroin? A lifestyle choice?)

“The coffee cup sort of like … 
collapsed
.” Sort of.

The silent, five-second-long vibrating alert on the tiny device in George’s pocket has given way to the up-and-down
do-re-mi-fa-mi-redo
chromatic tweet of the audible alert. His wife, Lizzie, has said it sounds like reveille for pixies, and his stepdaughter, Sarah, has asked him if he cares if it makes strangers think he is gay. But George has stuck with the little tune rather than any standard beeeeeep choice, because it subverts the display of self-importance, he hopes, of getting a cell-phone call on the sidewalk, in an elevator, at a restaurant table. It has finally become possible, for about three years now, to carry on a phone conversation walking down the street and not look like an asshole. It’s still not possible in a restaurant, he and Lizzie agree. Yet is consistently
looking
like an asshole really any different from
being
an asshole? This they are less sure about.

“My phone,” George says to the messenger with a lame, bashful smile. He nods toward the silly electronic noise
deedle-de-deeing
from his chest and starts to move away. “Sorry.” Shrug, step. “Sorry.” Five paces later, crucially beyond the latte blast radius, freed again to be just another pedestrian, George puts his briefcase on the sidewalk and finally pulls out the phone.

“Hello?”

“George? Honey—”

“Yeah?” He hears nothing. “Lizzie?” Nothing. “Hello?” He punches END. He will wait for her to call back. Holding the phone a
foot from his face, he leans against the sandstone of Rockefeller Center, the
real
Rockefeller Center, staring distractedly through the mists of his own winter breath at new Rockefeller Center, the stolid late-fifties and early-sixties addendum across the avenue. The sunlight has diffused now. But the buildings still look strangely, unaccountably handsome. Have they been steam-cleaned? Is it the new outdoor sculpture (
Torqued Mousetrap with Logo
, three blocks long, by Richard Serra) that Disney installed on the sidewalk? Or is it because Lizzie announced this morning as he said goodbye and she spat out toothpaste that she is desperate for him to fuck her? Where has his contempt gone? Then he realizes: the skyscrapers that looked atrocious in 1980 and 1990 now, in 2000, look quaint, elegant, swingy. He isn’t aware of having revised his opinion; his opinion has been changed for him, updated automatically, gradually, by sensibility osmosis, leeching from glossy magazines and newspaper style sections into George’s brain. First Frank Sinatra, cocktails, Palm Springs, rayon garments, plastic furniture, and all kinds of Cold War bibelots were resuscitated, even the words
VIP
and
chick
—and now,
as of this morning
, these buildings, which George has spent a few seconds every week of his adulthood loathing actively, are looking kind of cool. He doesn’t know whether to feel pathetic or liberated by the insight.

The phone jiggles.

“Yeeeesss?” he says joshingly.

“Oh, George.”

“What is it?”

“Your mother died last night.”

“Ohhhhh …” He feels like he’s been shot in the face at close range. With blanks, but it’s still loud and sickening. “Oh, Christ.”

“I’m so sorry, darling.”

“How? I mean …”

“Honey?”

“She told me a couple of weeks ago her doctor said she probably has years.”

“It wasn’t the cancer. She was in a car accident, honey. She was driving home on the interstate from her line-dancing class, and she slowed way down for some animal, a weasel, and a giant semi rammed into her.”

“Which car?”

“Which car? The Yugo.”

“Christ.”

“Your sister says she, you know, she didn’t—it all happened so fast, she died instantly.”

George watches the messenger he victimized pedal west toward Times Square. With the helmet now right side up, he sees that the odd legend, on the satchel as well as the helmet, isn’t !MOM !69, but GO! NOW! It’s the name of a messenger service; the same company operates the car service Lizzie uses at work.

“So,” Lizzie says, “I’ll go home and pack.”

“You don’t have to. We can fly out in the morning.”

“Why not tonight?”

“We’re presenting the shows to Mose at six-thirty, which means I’m out of here at seven. At the earliest. This is
the
meeting, Lizzie. I guess we could try to reschedule, but Emily’s flying in from L.A. for it, and she needs to be in Washington at some Kennedy Center Al Gore thing tomorrow.” He knows he’s babbling. “But, I guess, if we could maybe get in to Mose tomorrow … No, shit, tomorrow is, he’s—Mose and the rest of them are going—are in, uh, Washington State? … Maybe Vancouver. Someplace out there, I’m not sure, for something.” He coughs; so lame. “I think I really ought to be here this afternoon.”

His mother was killed hours earlier; he and his partner are to have an audience with the chairman of the network to pitch two new shows; now he’s concealing a business secret probably not worth concealing from his wife, and doing it clumsily. He isn’t even sure what he’s dissembling about. He’s only heard snippets, glancing references, roundabout allusions, all equally plausible and implausible, all equally reliable and unreliable. Asian video-game programming? An agreement to earmark MBC’s extra digital channels for data transmission in return for putting the network’s two-A.M.-to-five-A.M. home-shopping show
Booty!
on Microsoft’s WebTV? Some grander plot to ally with Microsoft against Intel, or to make life a little unpleasant for NBC vis-à-vis MSNBC? Computers and the internet, so radiant with revolutionary promise and terror, change everyone’s business strategy every other month, so the gossip changes every week to keep up. All he knows definitely is that he shouldn’t be frank with Lizzie. The
strands of anxiety are too much, each exacerbating the other and making George feel guilty and stupid.

Lizzie saves him. “We’ll go to St. Paul in the morning. Sarah’s got a sleepover at our house with Penelope tonight, anyway, to work on their video. We can go tomorrow.”

“Did you tell the kids?”

She doesn’t answer.

“Lizzie, do the kids know about my mom?”

The connection is lost. Taking full advantage of the convenience of the wired era, George finds, can be very difficult.

He dials home, using his thumb, and the voice mail picks up (“Hello—we’re not here,” his own voice says to him, which always gives him the willies), then calls her office (“This is the office of Elizabeth Zimbalist at Fine Technologies,” the recording of Lizzie’s assistant Alexi says. “Please leave—”), and finally the phone in the Land Cruiser, which generates a sort of Disney World PA-system announcer: “Welcome to AT&T Wireless Services. The cellular customer you have called is unavailable, or has traveled outside the coverage area.” George specifically hates this passive-aggressive record-o-man. The prissy, vague excuse—
“unavailable”?
—always strikes him as a prevarication meant to keep him from speaking to Lizzie, or his colleagues, or other cellular customers. (Nothing like America Online’s digital butler, with his fake-enthusiastic utopian-zombie voice. George continues to find
“You’ve got mail!”
entertaining enough, even ten thousand repetitions later, so that he didn’t finally deactivate it until around the time the movie came out and he read that the AOL man, whose first name is Elwood, has his own web site.)

“U.S. West!” a female electronic voice says over the opening chords to the overture from John Williams’s new
U.S. West Symphony
, “Directory assistance … for which community in the … 6-5-1 … area code?”

“St. Paul,” George says.

“Which customer listing?” the robot operator asks.

“Edith Hope Mactier.” He figures his sister is at his mother’s house. He can never recall his mother’s new phone number, which she changed a few years ago to dodge telemarketers; from now on, he won’t have to try to remember it.

“One moment,” the robot operator replies.

John Williams, “Fanfare for the New Economy,” the same four chords, once again. “Northwest Airlines flies … 
five
 … convenient, comfortable nonstops to the Twin Cities from … 
New York/Newark
 … every day! The number you requested … can be automatically dialed by pressing the star or dollar keys, or by saying the word
please
.”

Dollar key? The star key on his cell phone has not worked for a year. George, walking past Radio City, says,
“Please.”

His sister answers.

“We’ll do the modified fondue option,” she is saying, “but we do
not
need
Smithfield
ham,” and then, into the phone, “Hello?”

“Alice? Hi, it’s me.”

“Hello, George.”

He sighs. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” she says, sniffling violently. “When are you coming?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow, huh.”

“Sarah has to finish some important school project tonight.”

His sister doesn’t reply.

“I mean,” George continues, filling the space, not quite lying, not quite being honest, “I guess I could fly out with Max tonight and then she and Lizzie and Louisa could come tomorrow.”

Still no response.

“Tomorrow, I—we’ll all be there before lunch. Alice?”

The connection is lost. Maybe, he thinks as he lurches into the revolving door of the tower on Fifty-seventh Street, he really ought to get a new phone, a smaller, digital one. This phone cost a fortune when he had ABC News pay for it four years ago; the same model now sells for twenty-nine dollars. Did the thing really work better in 1996, he wonders, or did it just feel more reliable and powerful when it was selling for seven hundred dollars? It was the smallest one available back then, but now it seems as clunky and enormous as an eight-track tape cartridge. On the other hand, George, six foot three and one-ninety, feels out of scale using the new three-inch-long, 1.9-ounce models, like he’s handling a piece of fragile dollhouse furniture or someone else’s newborn.

Which leads George to an idea for
NARCS
, a B-story for an episode this spring: the new deputy commissioner wants the detectives
to start using tiny pocket-size computers, a vice-cop intranet, and Jennie has to get the old guys cyberready … No, he thinks, no … make Jennie
resist
the computers as trendy bullshit.

“Hello,
NARCS
.” Daisy Moore, the twenty-six-year-old English receptionist, looks up, punches a button—not a button, really, but a picture of a button printed on the flat plastic plane of her black telephone console—and says, parodying deference, “Good morning, Mr. Mactier, sir,” taps the little picture of a button again and says into her headset, “Hello,
NARCS
.” Being black as well as English, Daisy said to George when she was interviewing for the job, she would give him two for the price of one—convenient not only in the routine way that black receptionists are convenient in America, but also in pandering to Americans’ Anglophilia. Her second week, in a conversation with Daisy about her family, George used the term African-American. “Crikey, George!” she had said, “I’m
English
!”

George loves coming to work, the arrival and the settling in, the wakeful, hopeful, testing one-two-three-four sameness of that first hour. Each morning he all but marches through the reception area and down the corridor that bisects the open space, his hair still wet, his eleven-year-old Armani overcoat unbuttoned and flapping, and makes the ritual heartfelt exchanges of hellos with Daisy, with the story editors, Paul and Phoebe, with Jerry the line producer and Gordon the director, with the odd writer or production designer, with Iris Randall, his assistant. He likes the sight of Iris making the fresh pots of freshly ground, freshly roasted coffee, and of his in-baskets filling tidily with fresh Nielsen packets, fresh
Daily Variety
s and
Hollywood Reporters
, fresh network memos, fresh drafts of scripts. He gets a little high on the sense of readiness, even if that readiness is almost always also the imminence of frenzy, of third-act scenes that weren’t ever fresh and aren’t working now, of MBC executives quibbling knowingly and meaninglessly about “beats” and “arcs” and “laying pipe” in scripts they haven’t read, of sulky guest stars, incremental ticks in the ratings, negotiations with the network standards-and-practices woman (she didn’t want a character’s seven-year-old son to call him a bung-hole, and she didn’t want the star to refer to Pat Robertson as “a born-again Nazi” or to a colleague as “white trash”), of leased camera cranes that won’t swivel or a fake-bullet squib that burns an actor, of do-or-die presentations to the chairman.
(“Do
and
die,” as Emily Kalman, his L.A. partner, says at every opportunity about every important task.) The beginning of the workday, from the moment he steps into the lobby until the ten A.M. phone call with Emily, is a consistently fine, bright swath of life: hopeful, purposeful, organized. George takes pleasure in the anticipation of familiar problems. All problems are either soluble, in which case he promptly solves them, or else insoluble, which is rare, and these he ignores.

As he checks his e-mail, he realizes that his mother’s death has completely slipped his mind.

He has never assigned his sister a programmed speed-dial number on his office phone, so he has to punch in nine for an outside line, zero, all eleven digits of her phone number, and then the fourteen digits of his calling-card number, since it’s a personal call. (He has become scrupulous about that kind of fiscal niggle, almost obsessively so. Since he is now making $16,575 a week—an astonishing figure that occurs to him often, daily—he can afford it.) Twenty-seven digits, all from memory! Given the proliferation of number-dialing automation and number-dialing assistants in his life, it seems to George a sweet, old-fashioned task, like subway riding, that he seldom performs anymore.