Turn of the Century (32 page)

“Because little kids aren’t really supposed to be here now, honey,” Ben says. “This is the grownup area of BarbieWorld. And also because it’s your bedtime. Watch your step, Sasha! You know, if you were home in New York, it would be nine-forty!”

“My home is in Connecticut, Daddy.”

“Look, Sasha! It’s Uncle George!”

Sasha points. “That’s not Uncle George,” she says, happy for the opportunity to contradict her father. “That man is brown-skinned. And Uncle George lives near the docks, in the stinky fish market in New York City. And he’s not my actual uncle, anyway.”

Sasha, who was a grim, whiny, demanding child even before Ben and her mother divorced, turns away and walks right up to the bar. Her nanny silently follows.

“I want a Shirley Temp—wait, what type of ginger ale do you use?” she asks the bartender.

The bartender glances toward Ben and winks. “Shasta, madam,” he says. His accent is Australian.

“Then I’ll just have a Pellegrino. But with four cherries in it.” She rejoins her father, who is now at George’s table. Her nanny remains one pace behind.

“See, Uncle George just has a tan, honey,” Ben tells his daughter. “Sorry we’re late. Sasha was cleaning out some SKUs downstairs. Can you say hello to Uncle George?”

Sasha, looking out at the lasers, says nothing.

“Hello, Sasha!” George says. “How’s school?”

“I’m the second smartest in my class.”

“Best little Sasha in the whole world,” Ben says.

Ignoring her father’s boilerplate compliment, she says to George, “My school is lots nicer than the real Spence.” Sasha’s mother moved last summer from East Seventy-eighth Street to Connecticut, and enrolled Sasha in Spence/Greenwich, which is a new affiliate of the Manhattan private school—“along the lines of the Guggenheim in Bilbao,” the parents and administrators like to say. Like the Guggenheim, the Greenwich parents even paid for a famous architect, Robert A. M. Stern, to design the school. “It has an indoor velodrome,” says
the girl, “an art gallery, and a conflict-resolution lab, with a doctor.” George knows about the gallery, since the
Times
just reviewed its Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibit.

“Do you like BarbieWorld?” Uncle George asks.

She screws up her mouth and sighs. “It’s not like I imagined it.
I
thought it up. It was supposed to be like a
whole city
. This is just a mall. And the Ken and Barbie people look cheap. Why don’t those lasers
move
, Daddy? I want them to make pictures in the sky.”

“The people who run the airport said no, sweetheart.”

“They should be fired.”

“That isn’t nice, Sasha,” Ben says. “You’re tired, aren’t you, pumpkin? Kiss Daddy good night. You and I have a very early flight to catch tomorrow morning.”

“But it’s our plane,” Sasha says. “We don’t have to catch it. We can get on it anytime we want. The pilot works for you.”

“Night-night. Etta, we’ll have breakfast at about eight-thirty tomorrow. All right? Thanks.”

As the little girl leads her handler to the spiral staircase, she says, not looking back, “The croissants at the hotel suck.”

Ben leans toward George with an excited grin. “Sick, isn’t it?” George knows he means BarbieWorld. “Wait until you see the show. A documentary crew flew in to film it for the
Whitney!
The goddamn Whitney Museum of American
Art!
How great is that?”

“Sasha didn’t make you sign an NDA?” George says. George didn’t know what NDA meant the first time he was handed one, a year ago, but since then he has signed a nondisclosure agreement every other month. Journalists are supposed to disclose; grownups, businesspeople—players—are not.

“Hey! No joke, man. Her mother’s lawyer called and wanted to negotiate a lifetime royalty from this place for Sasha. A percentage of gross! I told him, look, asshole, I’m just a limited partner, and it was not really her idea—her dolls gave me the idea—but I’m not about to negotiate against my kid. She can have my entire interest in the thing, which is jack, like five million,
today
.” He pauses. “The daily implosion
was
her idea.” Every evening in the atrium of the hotel 1960, a large-scale model of the hotel itself will be “demolished” with internal explosive devices.

“You know, you
look
like a producer! With that tan you could almost pass for a Jew! And without that drink. Your wife says hello, speaking of the tribe. We just got off the phone about this new Microsoft offer. I told her to hold out. If she’s bamboozled those pricks into paying five-point-five, she can get them to pay ten. Seven-five, anyway. But she sounded like she’s already broken out the champagne.”

George smiles and nods with a generic manly meaningfulness,
Que sera, sera
, not wanting to let Ben know that he knows nothing about any new Microsoft offer. He holds up the Working Assets swizzle stick to change the subject. “Now
this
is sick. Your idea?”

“My idea was to give a percentage of the net directly to NOW and NARAL and a bunch of women’s groups. Barbie paying feminist reparations. It became this,” he says, flicking the swizzle stick with an index finger, “the pussies, because this way the protection money is spread around to so many different groups it’s like we’re not confessing any specific wrongdoing.” He shakes his head and says, unsmiling, “It’s a joke.”

George watches the three Wall Street assholes trot up the stairs. As they get to the top and head toward the double-wide express elevator down to Swank City, the black Wall Street asshole is holding up a hand for one of his white buddies to sniff.

“So, all these Wall Street assholes—”

“Hey!
You
can’t use that phrase,” Ben says. “It’s like if I said ‘nigger.’ ”

“So, are all these Wall Street assholes you invited actually friends of yours?”

“Are you nuts? They’re guys I trade with, guys I do business with, sell-side guys. I knew this would be exactly the sort of thing they’d lap up. No, I’ve never set eyes on a lot of these guys before. Even though I may talk to them on the phone every week. But ‘friends’? I haven’t made a new friend in ten years. Besides, most of them probably
are
assholes.”

In show business, George thinks, people you deal with a few times a year are, almost by definition, your friends. If you do business with them every week, they would automatically be your very close friends.

“Come on,” Ben says, jumping up, “get another drink, we’ve got a couple of minutes before the show starts. You’ve got to come see the casino.”

Sinatra is singing “Witchcraft” over the speaker in the elevator.

An opening elevator door has never seemed more like curtains parting at the beginning of a play. And given the four steps down into the casino, in the moment before he and Ben make their entrance into the happy, snappy swarm, George has the peculiar mirror-image sensation of being onstage himself.

“Good evening, Mr. Gould!” says a good-looking young man far darker than any of the Kens over in BarbieWorld. He has Pat Riley hair and an iridescent green dinner jacket. “Welcome to Swank City, sirs.”

The place is a glamorized dream version of a Vegas casino of forty years ago, not a literal reproduction, which, as Ben says, people today would find cramped and crummy. “That’s why the idiots at ITT just spent two hundred million dollars wreck-ovating the old Desert Inn,” Ben says. Swank City seems old, but the only genuinely old things in the room, according to Jackie, their guide, are two dozen chrome-and-yellow-enamel slot machines—vintage Bally Money Honeys and Watling Roll-A-Tops.
“Jackie,”
Ben whispers to George, “is his nom de casino.”

“How can you afford to have so few slot machines?” George asks Ben. “Isn’t that how most casinos make all their money?”

“You haven’t been down to the basement!”

“No, the theater, you mean?” George says.

“On the other side of the firewall from the J and B Theater-in-the-Round,” Jackie explains, “right underneath the hotel 1960, that’s the Rec Room. The Rec Room has distinct period theming elements, a separate entrance, and contains eleven thousand slot machines—”

“Twelve
acres
, nothing but people playing slots,” Ben says. “It’s a shame Diane Arbus is dead. You should take a look. No, you shouldn’t, actually.”

“—with
extremely
easy access for the handicapped and semihandi-capped,” Jackie continues, gesturing by way of counterexample at all the thickly carpeted steps and platforms here in sumptuous Swank City. “And in the Rec Room we offer free cocktails for AARP members and their companions.” He winks. In other words, George understands, the dreary RV seniors, all the people old enough actually to remember the era being simulated here, are sluiced away, incentivized with giveaway liquor to stay out of sight to pump quarters into nonvintage video
slot machines. Here in “the Swank,” as Jackie calls it, the scattered elderly are almost all well dressed or Runyonesque, classy or “classy”—no sweatshirts or New Balances. The idea behind Swank City is not only to evoke the boom-boom Frank and Dean ideal, to be Planet Rat Pack, but also to be the cool superpremium boutique casino, the high-butterfat, high-thread-count casino, the Barneys, the Miramax, the Häagen-Dazs gambling joint. The hotel 1960 has only 720 guest rooms—a quaint, tiny inn by Vegas standards. The lighting in the casino is more variegated than in other places, dramatically unhomogenized, with shadowy zones and hot spots, and the waitresses, dressed in sleeveless, mid-calf satin dresses, are prettier. Because only a tiny fraction of the gamblers who come to the Swank are expected to smoke cigarettes, the designers have equipped the HVAC ducts with devices called cracked-oil foggers that pump in stage smoke near the ceiling to ensure 1960 verisimilitude
—
“
noir
without the carcinogens,” as Ben says. The loudspeakers sweeten the ambient sound of the room with recorded tracks of cocktail-party crowds, laughter, and the occasional winner’s shriek or growl, mixed and adjusted continuously to supplement the spontaneous live human sounds.

As George watches a group of rambunctious, crew-cut young men in white shirts, dark suits, and skinny black ties playing craps—“
Give
it to Daddy!” the shooter shouts—two women wearing capri pants, one blond and one redheaded, pass by a few feet in front of George and Ben. The one not wearing dark glasses, who’s evidently impersonating Tuesday Weld or Angie Dickinson (as opposed to her partner’s Juliet Prowse or Shirley MacLaine), glances hard at George. George, trying to be a good sport, smiles.

“All these actors,” George says to Ben. “They’re hired just for the grand opening? Or are those
Reservoir Dogs
boys and the babes all part of the entertainment every night?”

“No!
No!
That’s what I thought too, like the Kens and Barbies next door, but I asked,” Ben says, whispering, but so excited that his voice assumes its hoarse castrato pitch. “These are all just people off the street, people from L.A., from the sticks, from I don’t know where. The place was loaded with guys and dolls like this last night too! They’re
ordinary people
, George. Theme it and they will come! I said it was fucking sick, didn’t I?”

Jackie pokes his head close to Ben. “Mr. Gould? The program in the J and B Theater-in-the-Round is about to begin.”

“Holy smokes, come on!” As Ben speed-walks off toward an invisible, unmarked exit, George carefully sets his half-finished third bourbon down on a flashing Money Honey and with a slight zero-to-five lurch turns to rush after him.

Inside the former coffee-and-chocolate counting house, 168 years old, nothing is pretending to be old. Three floors down, the thunder of the oil burner stops, and Lizzie hears the sudden quiet. Outside and above her, a little east and a little north, she notices for the first time since she sat down the soft, chronic Doppler purr of traffic speeding up and down the FDR Drive, coming and going across the Brooklyn Bridge. There’s a pause in the titter-tatter of her fingers on the keyboard as she stares at the spiral of tea steam rising from her mug and listens to the sounds from the top floor—a scream chopped off before it finishes, a group chant, dogs barking, the same scream repeated in full, Barry Goldwater speaking about extremism and virtue, snatches of the Supremes. Sarah’s staying up way too late to edit her civil rights video, another rules violation of which Lizzie approves. She returns to her Harold Mose memo, staring at the screen, writing as fast as she thinks. Rereading the first part of her memo on the advisability of Mose’s acquiring TK, Penn McNabb’s online video software company (“PROS: high-profile name, Silicon Valley presence, potentially good product; CONS: overpriced shares, product delays, undermanaged company”), she decides it isn’t too flip. Now, in the next sections, she’s worried she’s getting into realms she barely understands, dispensing advice not just about video and content, but about
TV
and
journalism
—subjects in which she is an expert-by-marriage, at best.