Turn of the Century (21 page)

“Lizzie will wonder where I am. She’s alone with all three kids.”

“Hey, man, it’s century twenty-one. Telecom!” Featherstone pulls from his pocket a black plastic object the size and shape of half a Ping-Pong ball, and twists its rim. Two rubbery, wormlike appendages unfurl and stiffen in opposite directions. He puts the flat side of the Ping-Pong hemisphere to his ear. The stubby neoprene worm pointing up must be an antenna, the head of the worm near Featherstone’s lips a mouthpiece. “Beverly. Hills. Hotel,” he says into it, then hands the phone to George. “Mad flossin’,
n’est-ce pas?
You can’t even buy it in this country yet.”

“I’m calling George Mactier, please,” George says.

Lizzie answers. “Buddy?”

“
Buddy?
No, this is your actual husband.”

She giggles. “Hi, darling.” Spouses can turn so nice, all flattered and patronizing, when they detect a little jealousy. “Buddy wants to meet us for early brunch at someplace in Sullivan Canyon, and I told him we would. He’s on his way to Mandeville Canyon to work on a horse, and I’m waiting for him to call back with directions. So we can drive to the restaurant.” So nice, and so forthcoming with babbly, excessive detail.

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“Whoever. You, me. All of us. You’re being silly. Buddy wants to see Sarah. It’s been five years.”

Buddy Ramo, child star turned equine massage therapist, unwittingly suicidal would-be liver donor, biological father of Sarah. George knows if he joins them he will be overcome by an L.A. cocktail of unworthy
emotions—three parts amused pity at Buddy’s ridiculous profession and surfer-dude manner, one part envy of Buddy’s buff good looks and surfer-dude manner, a dash of unjustifiable rage at the blood connection to his eldest daughter. “I’m here with Timothy on the street. We just bumped into each other.”

“Lucky you. God, the man is everywhere.”

“Timothy invited me to stop by his house for a bite to eat.”

“Okay, see you,” she says, maybe a hair too eagerly. “Enjoy yourself with your friend Timothy. I’ll see you back at the hotel by … noon?”

“Give my best to Li’l Gilligan. Hold on.”

Featherstone has raised his eyebrows and is pointing at his own sternum with his index finger. George hands the phone over and, inhaling a big warm lungful of tuberose, luxuriating in the endorphin flood—how he loves
the end
of a run!—and watches, half naked, as Timothy schmoozes his wife wirelessly from the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Benedict Canyon Drive.

“Queen Elizabeth! The sister with the
flow
! I just want you to know you saved Harold’s tushie the other day in Seattle. You really hipped us to it. I mean that. Gratitude squared. Absolutely! We were hoping for sixty/forty, but I’d say it went eighty/forty our favor, net/net, thanks to you. Now we know who wears the brains in the family.” Featherstone turns an inch toward George for a second and, George assumes, winks behind his very dark glasses. “No, I won’t breathe a word to George, I swear.” He turns and presumably winks again. “And by the way? Harold really meant what he said. That’s the God’s honest four-one-one. Okay, Zimbalista. See you around campus.” Featherstone gives the rim of the earpiece a quick hard squeeze and, as both appendages go limp and retract with a hurry-up snap, stuffs the phone in his pocket. Bulging the yellow pant leather, it looks like the head of a gargantuan penis. Maybe unintentionally.

“Let’s boogie,” Featherstone says to George, and then to the dogs,
“Avanti!
”

“ ‘Sort of’?”

Lizzie turns down La Cienega toward the airport. George has asked if they had a good time with Buddy.

“Yeah. It’s always vaguely depressing for me to talk to him.”

Yes!
George thinks.
Okay!

“Maybe we should’ve taken the freeway,” she says, slowing down for traffic. “I do think Max and LuLu had fun with Buddy. They got to sit on his client’s horse.”

“Daddy,” Louisa says, “did you know that if a horse gets sick? They just
kill
it.”

“And,” Lizzie continues, “I think it was interesting for Sarah to see Buddy.”

“He’s kind of a cretin,” says Sarah from the backseat.

“She’s saying that,” Max explains to George, “because when Buddy asked when I’ll turn ten and I said ‘Saturday, April eighth,’ he said, ‘Wow, I couldn’t tell you what date
next
Saturday is.’ ”

George is glad his children have visited Buddy Ramo.

“Timothy’s house is in Bel Air?” Lizzie says. “I thought he said something on Mose’s jet about Los Feliz.”

“His girlfriend Ng’s
studio
is in Los Feliz,” George says.

“And what does Ng
do
in her studio?”

“Keeps a pet gibbon and ‘makes dance pieces.’ And does her homework, I guess.” But George wants to get back to the very promising Buddy Ramo discussion. “What was so depressing about Buddy?” he asks carefully, evenly, not quite fake-sensitively—as if he really cares about the well-being of the has-been pretty-boy who impregnated his wife fifteen years ago—but definitely glee-free.

“Nothing.
He’s
not depressing. His life is so simple. He’s so happy. It’s really kind of … I don’t know. Beautiful. He lives in some two-room cedar pavilion he designed and built himself up near Point Dume. He makes me feel like we’re doing something wrong.”

Oh, hell
. On a bad day, Buddy has always looked like Jeff Bridges or Kurt Russell on a good day, and now he’s achieved some kind of Zen mastery as well. Making no-account stupidity look like bliss: impressive. Even when George feels blissful, he never radiates a glow of inner peace or smiles infectiously—another reason he was not a very good hippie in the seventies.

“Oh,
wow
.”

“I’m serious.”

“Oh, honey,” George says, “come on. It’s just so California. He’s a caricature.”

“Mommy, why did he call you ‘my Pally gally’?” Louisa asks. “And is that good or bad?”

George waits for the answer, too.

“The high school I went to was called Pally,” Lizzie tells her, and then says to George, “You don’t have to tell me about California caricatures. I’m just telling you, I felt jealous. It tasted awfully real to me. And I’ve got to say, it tasted pretty good.”

George doesn’t reply. It tasted good? That’s an intimate verb,
tasted
. Suddenly a knot of ethical anxiety relaxes: Featherstone told him, over whipped mochaccinos
brûlée
in his rock garden this morning, that Mose is “seriously kicking the tires” of TK Corporation, Penn McNabb’s internet video software company, as a possible acquisition. “Still a ways to go before we open our kimono, but Harold’s definitely aroused.” George knows, strictly speaking, that he shouldn’t pass this news along to Lizzie, but he has assumed this morning that he will tell her anyway, because she is his wife and it’s good gossip. Right at this moment, however, George feels rigorously committed to the rules of fiduciary confidentiality.

“Buddy has the whole first sentence of
The Hobbit
tattooed on his chest,” Max says. “In big fairy-tale-book letters. It’s awesome.”

“So I’ve heard,” George says. Seconds pass. “I’m surprised he hasn’t updated himself, and tattooed
The Celestine Prophecy
on his butt.”

LuLu giggles. “
Daddy
said ‘butt’!”

“Uneducated people can have deep feelings,” Lizzie says.

George’s phone vibrates in his shirt pocket.

“You’re right.” He grabs his phone. “Maybe you could have that needlepointed on a saddle blanket for him,” George says, regretting the line even as he utters it. “Hello? Hi, Em. On the way to the airport. Uh-huh. Why? Really? You really think
I
need to be there? I mean, we’re five minutes from LAX right now, on our way out.” He’s looking at Lizzie, who now looks over at him. “Oh, sheesh. Whose idea was that? Yeah,
sure
. Yeah. What, so he can personally manage the California primary coverage? Bullshit. According to whom? Well, Harold is probably right about that. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Bye, Em.”

“What?”

“Mose wants Emily and me to spend Tuesday explaining
Real Time
to everyone out here. Timothy’s people, the ad sales guys. According to Emily, according to Timothy, Harold said, ‘If you want to go out of the box, first you have to sell it in-house.’ ”

“And Emily can’t do that alone?”

“Barry Stengel from News just happens to be flying out here tomorrow. For the primary. He’s already trying to poison the well against us.” George realizes he’s never told Lizzie about eavesdropping on the phone conversation between Featherstone and Stengel the other day. And he’s not going to tell her now, in front of the kids. “Emily can’t go up against Stengel by herself. I’ve got to be there.”

Lizzie sighs. “Whatever.”

“So,” George says, “I guess I’ll drop you guys off at the airport and fly home Tuesday night.”

“This sort of sucks,” Lizzie says.

“You’re telling me. We go back into production this week.”

“You’re not coming on the airplane with us, Daddy?”

He turns around. “No, honey, I guess not.”

“That’s bad, but it’s also good,” Louisa says. “Because if our plane crashes? You can be alive to hunt for the pieces of us.”

Beverly Hills, Sunday afternoon, family eight miles over Iowa, nowhere he has to go, nothing he must do. Such scrumptious sloth! The TV is, of course, on. He’s lying on the half-made king-size bed, naked. He has already finished a little six-dollar bag of minibar blue corn chips, half a five-dollar eight-ounce Evian, and six minutes of Spectravision. (Just as video pornography is more pornographic than filmed pornography ever could be, pornography watched in daylight is almost too pornographic to enjoy. Almost. But maybe, it occurs to George, he’s just old–fashioned.) He has dumped a fourteen-dollar jar of minibar macadamias onto one of the four huge, plump pillows, and he swigs a nine-dollar minibar Heineken. He’s discovered Channel 53, something called the Chopper Channel. It runs nothing but news shot from helicopters, all aerial panning all the time—a high-speed police chase in Orange County and a five-alarm fire in downtown San Diego and an overturned tractor-trailer on the 10, but also the Dublin Marathon, a herd of wild mustangs in Montana, a five-hundred-acre oil spill in the North Sea, surprised rock climbers in Yosemite, guerillas cowering in the helicopter’s backdraft somewhere south of Oaxaca, live and taped, from southern California and the world. The Chopper Channel! George isn’t sure if it’s insane, or brilliant, or both. So many things today are both. The Americas Cup training race off Catalina is losing him, though, and
the third time he hears Morgan Freeman giving the channel ID slogan—“The big picture, from the air, on the air, for you”—he flicks off the TV. This set, however, is a kind he’s read about: push TV. It can’t be turned off. Pressing the off button only switches the set into a low-power mode, during which advertising copy appears noiselessly on the screen. George hops out of bed, idly fluffs his pubic hair and ruffles his testicles, and, wandering toward the desk, shoves the door of the TV cabinet shut with his elbow so he won’t have to look at the flashing words
WOULDN’T YOU LIKE TO SEE YOUR MESSAGE
HERE?
YOU CAN!
alternating every ten seconds with
NOT JUST THE FINEST HOTEL IN LAS VEGAS. THE MOST SPLENDID EXPERIENCE ON EARTH. THE VENETIAN
.

He phones Iris at home and, blessedly, gets her machine. “Hi, Iris, it’s George. Lizzie and the kids are flying back, but I’m staying in L.A. for meetings in Burbank on Tuesday. First, I need a reservation Tuesday on an afternoon flight back to JFK. Or Newark. Second, I need to fly to Las Vegas tomorrow afternoon, returning to LAX first thing Tuesday morning. And a room in Vegas tomorrow night. At the, um, the Venetian, I guess. Third, you need to get all my
Real Time
files there, in Las Vegas, by tomorrow night. Okay? By courier or whatever. Tomorrow. Thanks. Bye.”

This morning the room had been theirs, George and Lizzie’s, a comforting fifty-fifty mingle of his scent (espresso) and hers (lavender), her detritus (Chinese vitamins, jade earrings, a fax from Nancy McNabb, loose tampons that inevitably remind George of the rubber bullets he picked up off the street one night in Bethlehem as souvenirs of the intifada) and his detritus (paragraphs torn from newspapers and magazines,
NARCS
faxes, spare lithium ion batteries for the fake driving hand, inside-out black socks on the floor, which always look like husks left to rot after the fruits have been extracted). Now it’s just his—his Post-it stuck to the lamp, his wads of fives and ones in the armchair, his room-service tray and salad leavings, his damp towel on the couch, his warm PowerBook G3 on the desk.