Turn of the Century (50 page)

She turns back to Thayer. “Antivivisection isn’t my issue. I’d rather have a few of your rabbits go blind than my customers.”

“Exactly,” Thayer says, popping a yellow SweeTart in his mouth. Lizzie is reminded of the detergent disks her parents’ housekeeper used to let her throw into the washing machine. “But a guy over here at U-Dub has been getting just
creamed
for using animals in his work. They’re basically riding him out of town on a rail. The town of Kirkland actually passed a law saying they didn’t want him to live there.”

Lizzie knows he’s talking about Buster Grinspoon. Deciding to commit a fib of omission, to let a sleeping lie lie, she changes the subject to smaller talk. She points to their name tags. Each has a blinking green digital display in the center—some pointless boys’ club high-tech trick, she figures. “Why do you LED your ID numbers like that? And why is your number seven digits and Robbie’s only five?”

Robbie, sulking since his basketball was taken away, now looks like he’s about to cry. He stands suddenly, says, “Later,” and rushes out of Thayer’s office.

Thayer ignores him, so Lizzie does too.

“They look kind of cool,” she says.

“Ms. New Yorker! They’re not supposed to
look
cool. It’s not an ID number, it’s how many shares and exercisable options we own.” He flips his tag up and looks down at it, then points at a little line of type. “The ID number is printed down here.” He glances up. “You just zapped Robbie in his sore spot. He’s only got, what, ninety thousand shares, and I’ve got a million-one. But I’ve worked for the company
three years
,” he says. Robbie feels like he’s gotten to the start-up party too late. You know? Like all these kids out here now. They’re jealous of how much easy money they think people our age piled up in the nineties.”

Yet another generation gap! This time not between the greedy old and idealistic young, but between supergreed rewarded and supergreed denied. Lizzie felt something similar when she arrived in Manhattan and discovered that in the early eighties people hardly older than she had bought houses in the Village for $255,000 and giant Fifth Avenue duplexes for $324,000. And once again she thinks of the Microsoft numbers
($31.5 million
for half the company,
$7 million
for her general partner’s share), flashy and titillating, like advertising blimps hovering always just overhead.

“Are you guys making money here?” she asks. She knows you’re not supposed to ask this of computer entrepreneurs, that it’s the equivalent of asking religious people for proof of God’s existence. And like a fundamentalist Christian convinced that the rapture is going to occur the week after next, Thayer smiles at Lizzie’s childish, benighted, old-paradigm question.

Robbie returns, licking and biting an ice cream bar as big as his foot.

“Are we ‘making money’?” Thayer says, slightly mocking, repeating the phrase as if she has asked where she could go poop. “Well, if you subtract our sales and marketing costs, we’re profitable
today
. Even if we don’t ‘make money’ until ’02, in the sense of bottom-line
earnings
, the market cap will keep moving money into the business. Nongame video applications are what will take us over the top. But unfortunately, there’s still an East Coast. People back there still aren’t even doing rich e-mail.”

By “rich” e-mail he means e-mail messages that contain photos, recorded voices, video clips. “My husband’s company in New York has v-mail,” Lizzie says.

“Did they do a VCR?” asks Robbie, the corners of his mouth smeary with chocolate.

As Lizzie hesitates, Thayer explains, “Video CIMBLE Retrofit.”

“Beats me,” she says. “What’s a video symbol?”

“C-I-M-B-L-E,” Robbie says, practically giggling with pleasure at her ignorance. “CIMBLE stands for CADETT Interactive Multi-User Business Learning Environment.”

They all wait, exchanging glances, Thayer and Robbie smiling.

“Okay, you stumped the girl.
Cadet?
”

“Consortium,” Robbie says, pausing to catch a melting vanilla stream with his tongue, “for ADvanced Education and Training Technologies.
I have a question for you. On your game, with the polygon attribute editor in the Softimage Sega GDE, is the control of the Sega-specific rendering attributes on a per-polygon basis really up to snuff?”

“I’m not that deeply involved in the architecture of the technology.” This is a line she delivers often.

Robbie smiles and nods. She knows he thinks she’s mortified. She isn’t. But in Seattle and down in Silicon Valley all the nonengineers are a little intimidated by the Robbies among them, because only the engineers understand, deeply understand, how the products work.

“I run the company,” Lizzie adds. “I don’t spend a lot of time debugging lines of code.”

“Got you,” Thayer says as if charmingly. “It’s the you’re-from-Venus-we’re-from-Mars deal. We program and slay the beasts, and you,” he says, pausing, chuckling, “market, or whatever.”

Defending the Northeast against the Northwest, now driven to defend her gender; this really does feel like Harvard 1983. “You know, of course,” Lizzie says, forcing a smile, standing to go, “that the first computer was programmed entirely by women. To do the calculations of ballistic trajectories. To blow up Nazis.”

“You mean ENIAC?” Robbie says, sucking on his spatula-size Popsicle stick.

“Uh-huh.” She prays for a pop quiz—she knows it stands for electronic numerical integrator and computer.

“ENIAC wasn’t the first computer,” Robbie says. “The
first
computer was developed at Iowa State by John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry. ENIAC was
based
on Atanasoff-Berry.”

“He shoots, he
scores
against the lady from New York,” says Thayer, giggling.

Lizzie smiles and, shaking their hands, promising to be in touch, wishing them well, looking at both men’s skulls, thinks for a purgative couple of seconds about her brand-new, two-pound, two-foot-long Charlet Moser ice ax sitting in an REI shopping bag in the trunk of her rental car.

“Cut!” says Gordon. “Perfect. It’s a wrap.”

“Wrapping!” the first AD announces.

Featherstone is back talking to Lucas Winton, who didn’t appear in
the last scene. If employing Timothy Featherstone and building a soundstage in the basement on Fifty-seventh Street are the irrational prices Harold Mose pays to keep his own show business fantasies burning bright, driving his Hummer an hour through a tunnel and over a bridge to a grubby street in Staten Island is Featherstone’s.

“God, I do love being on location,” he says as George joins him.

“The smell of greasepaint,” says George.

Featherstone sniffs. “Hmmm. I don’t smell anything. Hey, George, can you give me a lift into the city?”

“You didn’t drive your Humvee?” George asks.

“Sergeant Winton of the SAG wants to take command of the Hummer for a test-drive into occupied Manhattan.” MBC pays for Featherstone to lease two identical bright blue three-and-a-half-ton turbo-diesel Hummer wagons, this one and another in L.A., even though they cost twice as much as a stretch limo and three times as much as a Town Car. The budgetary rationalization is that he drives himself. (“Lean, mean, and chauffeur-free!” Featherstone says.) George has wondered how he manages parking. But as they drop Lucas off at the Hummer on the way to the Land Cruiser, George sees that Featherstone’s car has both NYP license plates, the New York laissez-passer for working journalists to park where regular civilians can’t,
and
, in his front window, a location-scouting permit from the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting. George feels both envious and superior, since he has never used either perk.

“
Extremely
cool device,” Featherstone says about the driving prosthesis as George clamps it onto the steering wheel and heads for the Verrazano. “I’ve never seen you with that on. Is it Italian? Is that magnesium or titanium?”

“Just stainless steel, I think,” George says.

“Man, I’m jealous of you.
I
want one.” George smiles, but he knows Featherstone well enough to understand that his covetousness is sincere. If only to eat up dead airtime, George calls the office. Iris does not answer, and the machine picks up.

“You don’t have your girl do the recording?” Featherstone says as they listen to George’s voice on the car speaker. George dials the voice-mail number to retrieve messages—Milken’s office again, a science teacher from St. Andrew’s (if one of the kids had been killed,
wouldn’t he have called the set?), and Francesca from MTV, who’s in town and desperately wants to hook up. As Featherstone listens, his eyebrows rise and his smile grows more salacious.

“I’ve been trying to get a hold of you all morning, and your wonderful assistant told me you were on the floor—”

“
Damn
it, Iris.” To be “on the floor” means shooting in the studio, down beneath Fifty-seventh Street.

“—and she also said you were going to be meeting an old pal for a drink at Madison Avenue at six, but said you wouldn’t mind if I joined you at six-thirty. So I hope that is okay. Great item in
Variety
this morning. I still really want it. Bye.”

“You old fuck monkey! I’m getting hard just listening. ‘I still really want it’?”

“She wants us to hire her for
Real Time
.”

“That’s not a caca concept.”

“What
Variety
story?”

“You didn’t see it? Yeah, about your show. Saddler was cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.”

“Happy, you mean?”

“Way happy. It called us ‘the premium weblet with class
and
controversy,’ and quoted somebody calling Harold ‘visionary.’ And some analyst said he’s ‘bold’ and ‘brave.’ Even though ‘brave’ means we’re crazy motherfuckers to commit fifty big ones to you for this candy-mint/breath-mint show of yours. But any publicity is good publicity. What you got cooking with the Milken man?”

“Milken and I are buying the network, Timothy. An LBO. It was in
The Hollywood Reporter
today.”

George looks straight ahead, not smiling. He has never joked like this with Featherstone, and in the two seconds of silence he can practically hear his mental gyroscope tripping and reversing as it strains to cope.

“Do you think we, I mean, if it happens …” Featherstone stops, and provisionally regains his composure. “You’re yanking my chain, aren’t you, G-boy? Very funny. But what is the deal with Milken?”

“I have no idea.”

“Harold says he’s got a red herring for this new power-of-positive-thinking company. Maybe he wants to pick your brain about his Good
News cable channel. Loserama if you ask me. I mean, it’s like a parrot—the talking is a cute gimmick for the first five minutes, but do you really want to listen to it
say
anything? I don’t think so.”

“Is that what Lizzie said? The parrot thing?”

“No, that’s what Harold said.”

So. He’s already watched his online-parrot analogy go from Lizzie to Harold to Barry Stengel, and now Timothy has made it his own and is offering it to him, a nice little closed loop—rhetorical incest. Should he be amused? He is not.

George hasn’t been looking forward to the ride into the city with Featherstone. He gives emphatic but vague notes (“warm
er
but not
warm
”) on Lucas’s and Angela’s performances (“You know I used to act, right? As a kid I played Taylor and Burton’s son in
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
on Broadway”) and says to “keep laying some deck so the audience can read the arc of the whole season.” He also suggests to George that Sandi Bemis could be a technical adviser on the ESP-drug-dealers-and-K-9s episode. But then, after he asks what the Land Cruiser’s “approach angle” is (George says he doesn’t know; Featherstone says “the Hummer does seventy-two degrees without a winch, believe it or not”), and what he thinks of “that
wack
foul against my man Shaq last night” (George says he missed the Rangers game), Featherstone falls asleep. And so all the way up the West Side Highway to Fifty-seventh Street, through two different traffic jams caused by two different convoys of black Chevy Suburbans for two different presidential candidates, George can chew on his sour new wad of suspicion.