Turn of the Century (72 page)

“Will you do it for me, George?” Flandy says. “For the Flan Man?”

George isn’t sure whether losing Angela Janeway would help or hurt
NARCS
. He can imagine the write-out episode:
Cowboy Quesada (Lucas Winton) kills Jennie O’Donnell (Angela Janeway) by mistake as they’re storming a crack factory. SEASON PREMIERE
. He ought to want the show to succeed. He created it, and he’ll still get a quarter of any profits it throws off. (He is, his new agreement with Emily affirms,
“a passive royalty recipient in perpetuity,” which makes him feel like he is signing a contract for a slot in a mausoleum.) George used to pride himself on his disinclination to schadenfreude, but now he wants Emily Kalman to fail, a little, with
NARCS
—not cancellation failure, but painful, bad-buzz failure. He wrote the season finale, and it got a 7.9 rating and 15 share. But because Emily changed the depraved Kahuna character from a charming, liberal senator to a thuggish conservative manufacturer (played by Stephen Baldwin) of a mind-reading “mental modem,” the show’s positive reviews didn’t wholly please him.

“Emily’s stubborn,” George says, “and I know she thinks I’m the cause of the problem, by hiring Jess and opening up the slot for Angela in News. But I’ll talk to her.”

“George?”

“Yeah?”

“I love you,” Sandy Flandy tells him. “I really mean that.”

He’s going to be late for Featherstone, his first lunch out in weeks, maybe a month, but Daisy stops him as he tries to shoot past her, holding up two fingers, like a peace sign.

“One,” she says, “Lizzie phoned again. It’s important but nothing bad, she said. Two, your very loud friend, Mr. Gould, is holding, and he also says it’s important.”

George grabs the receiver off Daisy’s desk.

“I’m late, Ben. What?”

“Pat and Mike! What do you think of Lizzie’s news?”

“What news?”

“Uh-oh. I’m not going to spoil it by telling you. I wish she hadn’t told me.”

“Am I going to wish she hadn’t told me?”

“No, it’s
positive
. It’s great for you guys. But it screws up my trading. Call her.”

“We did,” he says, glancing at Daisy. “It’s constantly busy.”

“Call the wireless number, dummy. The animal nuts are flooding the phone lines. She’s using her cell.”

Daisy punches the speed-dial button for George, who’s still standing by her desk. He’s looking out over the office, over the plain of four-foot-high green partitions and the tops of human heads, with the
folders and papers and books scattered everywhere like mulch. His secretary watches him as he waits for his wife to answer.

“It’s me,” Daisy hears George say into the phone.

He listens, staring, saying nothing for half a minute. Daisy has never seen his face do this, tighten and darken, almost change shape. He shuts his eyes for a moment and takes a deep breath.

“Yes,” he says finally in a careful, flat-line bass, like a POW. “No,” he says, and then with a flicker of rage, “No, as
me
. Not as a member of your ‘board.’ ” Seconds pass. “Where?” His whole body seems to deflate. “No,” he says after a while. More seconds pass. “No. It’s your life.” He flips the receiver away from his mouth as he takes another deep breath. Then: “Congratulations. I’ll see you.”

She finds evidence
every day of George’s occupying the house, his residue—wet soap, ripped dry-cleaning stubs, holes in the newspapers, coffee dregs—but she goes days without seeing him in the flesh. “It sounds more like forensics than marriage,” Pollyanna said. Lizzie knows couples who live this way all the time. Creating the show, as George says (said, six weeks ago), is “a fucking monster.” But since she’s taken the Mose job, his absences seem deliberate as well as unavoidable. The two of them are ships passing in the night, but he is now on an obviously calculated harbor-traffic schedule. He was home by seven the nights she was in San Jose and Burbank, the kids told her, and he stays around to help Rafaela get them off to school the mornings that Lizzie leaves early. (“Daddy wouldn’t answer my question,” LuLu told Lizzie after one of those mornings. “I asked if him working for you was a good thing or a bad thing.”) Lizzie hasn’t had dinner with George in a month, including weekends. The weather was still cool when they last ate breakfast together, at the table out back. The last time they had sex wasn’t long after the memorial service for Rafaela’s children, where Lizzie bled through her dress, in April. It is almost July. The weather is sweltering.

He was gone as usual by the time she got up this morning, and the ReadyAim system went haywire. The kids have been out of school for two weeks, but every minute beginning at seven-fifteen, the phone rang, each time with the same recorded message: “Your child’s transportation will be waiting at the designated location in zero minutes, zero seconds! Got milk? Got milk? Got milk? Got milk?” After the fifth call, Lizzie left the phone off the hook.

Because she’s been putting in an appearance at Eighteenth Street for a couple of hours each morning before going up to MBC, and because it’s gotten hot, she capitulated a week ago and started taking the car service to work. She still calls Go! Now! herself each morning to order the car, though. A standing reservation would be like buying a whole carton of cigarettes. Today, though, since she gave the Fine Technologies staff the day off (it’s the beginning of the long Independence Day weekend, Warps is nearly finished), she’s heading straight for Fifty-seventh Street.

As she swings around the horn, and the FDR turns into the West Side Highway, Lizzie looks out at the Hudson, trying to catch glimpses of the three- and four-masted schooners, antiques as well as fake antiques, sailing past the buildings of Battery Park City.

“I take you before,” the driver says suddenly, glancing at her in the rearview.

“Oh,” Lizzie says. “Hmmm.”

“You work with Microsoft, yes?”

She doesn’t remember the driver. But she can’t imagine that she ever discussed the Microsoft deal with him.

“No. Not really,” she says, baffled, eager to end the conversation.

“Yes. And a dill to do with booster grime-spawn?”

“Nope. Sorry. It wasn’t me.” Whatever the fuck you’re talking about. She hunkers down into her
Wall Street Journal
. In the month since she agreed to become a corporate executive, she has started reading the boring stories in the
Journal
.

“Booster
grime-spawn
, his brain
cheap?
Yes?”

She doesn’t look up. “Nope.”

She’s forcing herself through a story about American companies buying up Asian companies since the crash in ’97, utterly bored (“Although companies like Microsoft have benefited from this anomalous
trend in the ringgit-yen exchange rate …”) until she comes to a paragraph that mentions Mose Media Holdings. “Some U.S. investment banks are scrambling to take advantage of the Asian economic comeback before prices get too high. ‘There’s still misery and chaos over there, which continues to present fabulous opportunities for client companies,’ says Nancy McNabb, senior managing director at Cordman, Horton, which, sources say, is scouring East Asia for acquisition bargains on behalf of Microsoft, Chase-Citigroup, and Mose Media Holdings.”

Nancy is amazing. Three weeks ago, after accusing Lizzie of slandering her brother and her brother’s company to Harold Mose (true) and thus lowering the price Mose Media paid, she took credit for convincing Harold to offer her two million shares for Fine Technologies (possibly true). At the end of the conversation Lizzie had, in any event, agreed to let Nancy handle the deal, out of which Cordman, Horton will get a fee of one million dollars. And, evidently, new business from Harold Mose.

Coming back to midtown every day reminds her of being young, but now that she’s executive vice president, Mose Media Holdings, as well as president, Mose Media Holdings, Digital (“I guess that’s like being a wife
and
a mother,” Pollyanna said), working in a tower on Fifty-seventh Street makes her feel middle-aged. The giant metal letters on the sidewalk out front,
THE MBC
, slick and swaggery, are
so
mid-town. Because the logo is italic, the letters look like they’re tipping over. A smiling tourist dad is framing a digital snapshot of his teenage tourist son cowering just to the right of the
C
, clowning, as if he’s about to be crushed.
“Ein bisschen mehr ängstlich,”
the man commands his son, and the boy puts on a look of terror.

Her office is on the Fifty-ninth Floor. During the only real conversation she had with George about selling her company and taking this job, he went suddenly mute when she said she thought she’d be working on Fifty-nine, and a minute later started yelling.

It’s silent here, hermetic and still, unlike any place Lizzie has ever worked. The children’s foundation was always quiet, but the space was tight, with people crammed everywhere sharing desks, so that one was always aware of nice, polite, modestly paid people
being
quiet. Here on Fifty-nine the silence seems more religious or royal, less like a busy library
than a sanctum where few mortals are permitted entrance. It reminds her of Myst. (She has yet to find a computer game that she loves playing, but Myst and Riven she found actively unpleasant, opaque and pretentious and dull.) Even Featherstone seems to subdue when he’s on Fifty-nine. She’s seen him just once, and he called her “Beth,” the most drab and desultory nickname of the twenty or thirty he’s called her in the year she’s known him.

The intercom
chimes
. They use intercoms up here whenever possible, and the speakers in the phones on Fifty-nine are so high-end that every time a call comes, it sounds like a cymbal has been gonged by someone hiding under her desk.

“Mr. Saddler is here.” It’s the voice of William, her secretary, a grave Mrs. Danvers—y man of about fifty. Lizzie has not yet transplanted Alexi north.

“Okay,” she says.

She is still thrown by the extended five- or six-second time delay between William’s announcement of visitors and their arrival in her office. It makes her self-conscious, the waiting. More of the imperial hush. She’s convinced that the physical distances up here reinforce the sense of executive self-seriousness, since everyone has so much time to prepare for each encounter, to put on a face.

“Welcome,
Lizzie
,” Saddler says, a little whispery, pronouncing her nickname like a plaything. “I’m just back from the big island. Pardon my tizzy.” His tan is deep and dark. He was on vacation when she started work, although he’s sent several video e-mails from Hawaii to tell her “how thrilled Harold and I are about your joining the MMH team.”

“Hello, Hank. Are we supposed to speak in rhyme?”

“Funny! Are you in the swing? Anything you need from me? FYI, I’ve already got an MPI running on you personally, pre- and post-MMH.”

“Nope, I’m fine. Already deep into it,” she says, waving at her stacks of papers. “I think I’ve almost finished repurposing and remastering myself.”

“ ‘Repurposing and remastering myself,’ ” he says as though she were Noël Coward. “Oh! What a genius bite. I’m going to steal it for Harold. If I may?”

“Sure.”

“Magnificent haploxylon,” he says, looking over her shoulder. “I’m so glad.” He must mean the tree. Every Mose senior executive office has a live white pine tree in his or her office, and three framed vintage Eugène Atget photographs. Lizzie’s black-and-white photos are of a butcher’s window, a broken stone planter, and a grave. “Well, I’m here. And Harold and I feel so blessed that you’re here.”

Blessed?
“Me too, Hank. Thank you.”

“Henry,” he says, and leaves.

She returns to the profit-and-loss statements for MotorMind, one of the newly acquired internet companies she’s overseeing. She is to meet with the CEO today. MotorMind’s main product is Raging Id, a plain-speech search engine that is supposed to enable people anywhere in the vicinity of their computers to blurt out desires—
I want a pound of pancetta overnighted from Umbria and a gift certificate for Pilates training in Sherman Oaks! I want to tell that Jess Burnham she’s a liberal cunt! I want to see the
Hindenburg
blowing up!
—and have their wishes fulfilled instantly, invisibly. The MotorMind strategic plan calls Raging Id an example of EUI, or “extroverted user interfacing.” (It reminds Lizzie of the Clapper.) In its ten months of existence, according to its P&L, MotorMind has all
L
($16.2 million), no P, and a total income, all in the “Interest & Misc.” category, of $174,383. Mose Media Holdings paid $137 million in stock for MotorMind—another price-earnings ratio on the high side of infinity, and a multiple-of-revenue valuation somewhere around 800. The MotorMind numbers make her think that the price they’re paying (we’re paying? he’s paying?) for Fine Technologies may be low. She knows a hundred million is absurdly high, but still, she wonders if it’s too low.

The
chime
. “Mr. Mose’s office called,” Mr. Danvers says. “Mr. Mose is on his way.”

Extra-early warning! Mose has not been in New York since she’s worked for him. She finds herself quietly freezing in place, papers still on her lap, pen clutched in her hand. She is making a point of doing absolutely nothing different from what she was doing, acting unnaturally natural.

It isn’t Myst or Riven that Fifty-nine is like, she realizes, staring at her white pine. It’s Japanese Noh drama, just as she was taught in her freshman seminar. Scenery consisting of one painted pine tree. Stylized
lines of verse spoken by characters in weird makeup or masks (Saddler), the colloquial
kyôgen
farce episodes (Featherstone), the insane characters (Mr. Danvers) and “festive spirit” characters (Mose, Featherstone). She’s pleased with herself. George would love this, if George could bear to listen to her talk about work.

Then she remembers the other stock Noh character—the woman with a tragic destiny. But Noh performers are exclusively male, Lizzie tells herself, feeling silly and superstitious.