Turn of the Century

by Kurt Andersen

  “¡Ay! ¡Chinga!” says one of the glove wearers as he touches his wrist to the hot light and nearly falls from his chair. As he steps for a moment onto the stone coffee table to steady himself, the tremor causes dozens of black, skyscraper-shaped candies set up like dominoes to fall. The domino candies, hundreds of them, had formed eight cursive letters—EVPCCSSP.

  “My God, you clumsy twat!” Saddler says.

  Emily gives George a look. It’s too late to sneak out. He shrugs. How ghastly. How unfortunate. How entertaining.

  “Hank?” Emily finally says, just as the final candy domino in the P hits the table. “I Know What Boys Like,” a song that played on the car radio constantly during George’s six weeks in Mexico and Central America, is blasting from the stereo. Saddler doesn’t hear Emily.

  “Can you please set it up again—E, V, P, C, C, S, S, P. ¿Comprendes?” Then, to the brush squad, wiggling a big toe over the carpet: “Right there—un poquito más verde.”

  “Hank!” George says, trying and failing to make a shout sound both tentative and friendly.

  For a moment, Saddler looks embarrassed.

  “I guess we’re … early?” Emily asks.

  Saddler quickly and gently touches his hairpiece with the nipple hand, then, reassured, grins like Bert Parks, or Bert Convy, a big, electric, dead-game-show-host grin and says, “Olly-olly-oxen free!” As he steps over an oblivious carpet brusher, up out of the pit, and toward them, buttoning his shirt as he comes, he checks his watch. “Oh, a smidge on the premature side. But what’s twenty-four minutes between teammates? We had a little guacamole disaster over in the inglenook.”

  “The invitation wasn’t for five?” Emily asks. “I was sure—”

  “Six,” Saddler says firmly, “but hey, this gives us time to talk, doesn’t it? Before the horde arrives. Welcome to the penthouse. Drinks? Ramón,” he says, turning to one of the men in turquoise, “bebidos para mis amigos.”

  Saddler kisses Emily on both cheeks and then, as he shakes George’s hand, pets his right forearm. This may be insinuating body language for Hey, look what I can do with my two hands, or, more generously, What a nice, nice arm—such a shame the other one got blown up.

  “We’re so pleased you could be here for the event. Is Elizabeth …” He pauses, maybe twitching his eyelids just barely in the direction of the missing hand. “Parking your car?”

  “She and the kids are on the way home.”

  “I understand. I do,” he says as he squeezes George’s forearm again. “I was hoping to speak to Elizabeth this evening. You know, Harold is very grateful for her help on the digital discussions. Extremely. She is a very cutting-edge business lady! Now, you let Ramón know what he can bring you—Ramón? ¿Por favor?—and I’ll be back in a jiff. Make yourselves at home in the Great Room.”

  George is drinking more than he did in his twenties and thirties, in relative terms—half a bottle of wine every second night, negligible in 1980, verges on problematic by 2000 standards. Writers are supposed to drink, of course, but hangover grogginess makes writing impossible for him. One of the secret perks of being an executive, he’s discovered, is that a bit of a hangover doesn’t interfere with work at all, not when you’re the boss and your job is almost entirely a matter of keeping a big picture in mind and delivering opinions. Generating fresh ideas and paragraphs requires tip-top energy, clarity, and confidence. Reacting to other people’s ideas and paragraphs requires … consciousness.

  Besides, cocktail party abstemiousness only generates an unbecoming sense of superiority, and seems as pointless as decaffeinated coffee or nonfat potato chips or phone sex, a denatured simulation of fun. As Emily takes a tall, frosty Stoli and tonic from Ramon, George thinks of her aphorism, which he had heard perhaps a hundred times over the last two years, and which he paid to have plastered on a billboard on Sunset for her birthday last summer: JUST DO IT. OR JUST SAY NO. BUT DON’T TRY SPLITTING THE DAMN DIFFERENCE.

  “Cheers,” he says, lifting his goblet.

  “Ted Danson,” Emily replies, raising her glass.

  They begin exploring. “So Boogie Nights,” Emily says. There’s nothing but rounded corners, rounded edges, thick wall-to-wall carpeting, and spherical light fixtures. There is an oil painting of a whale breaching off Maui at sunset. There is a lot of lime green, a lot of metallicized wallpaper, a lot of Lucite, a lot of high-priced shine.

  George was surprised to discover as he grew up, after he left St. Paul, that the fondness for mirrored surfaces, porcelain figurines, clothes bearing words, and gratuitously motorized objects (window shades, TV cabinets, toothbrushes, beds, knives) is distributed more or less randomly among the classes. Rich people just have the means to be flamboyantly, magnificently, memorably vulgar, the wherewithal to own and display, for instance, a collection of tiny, expensive-looking toy weapons—an AK-47 the size of a stapler, a Luger no bigger than a paper clip, a perfect, itsy-bitsy Uzi, and a dozen more that Saddler has mounted on black velvet in a vitrine above his white desk.

  On the desk is a computer, the only object in the apartment George covets—and only the monitor, which is flat and huge, three inches thick and a couple of feet across. The computer is on, logged on to a stock brokerage web site called WinWin.com. A line of big green type speeds back and forth, back and forth across the screen: WELCOME BACK, WINWIN WINNER HENRY G. SADDLER IV! YOUR PENDING ORDER WILL BE EXECUTED WHEN THE MARKETS OPEN 12 HOURS AND 43 MINUTES FROM NOW.

  WinWin.com is only nine months old, but has received extensive press coverage because it lets its most successful customers trade as much as they want for free, as long as those customers consistently perform better, even a hair better, than the Dow. The company automatically mimics all the trades, for its own account, of its thousand anonymous Main Street geniuses—and also makes money from the tens of thousands of WinWin.com customers who pay standard commissions in the hope of someday getting comped as a WinWin Winner. At first the scheme looked like it must be illegal, but so far all the state attorneys general and federal regulators who’ve tried to make some kind of case have been stumped. Indeed, the Patent and Trademark Office has just awarded WinWin.com patent number 6,029,497 for its very premise, which the company describes as “selective strategic exploitation of voluntary client nonconfidentiality.”

  “Gorgeous, aren’t they?”

  “Hank!” George, turning to face Saddler, feels nabbed. Had he not just drained his glass, Saddler or his computer would be drenched in sauvignon blanc. “Yeah! I loved toy guns as a kid.”

  “Henry. And they’re not toys, George. I’m a collector. They are exacting replicas crafted by Russian craftsmen in Dallas. I’ve had six-figure offers for this collection.”

  George nods and stares at the little guns. Saddler, now fully dressed, with his hairpiece and hair-plugged hair artfully merged, is cuddling a spotted cat as big as a one-year-old child, petting it just as he petted George ten minutes ago. For the second time this week, George finds himself thinking he’s in a scene from a James Bond movie.

  “Beautiful cat,” George says, reaching toward its chin.

  Saddler jerks away. “Ah! No, no, no. He’s not friends with you yet. Mr. Gable is a Bengakl. A direct descendant of the wild Asian leopard.”

  “Hmmm,” George says. These are the sorts of declarations that leave George literally speechless. His mother would have said, I’ll be darned, the wild Asian leopard, now isn’t that interesting! and his dad would have grinned and said, What do you know? and shambled off, but George can bring himself neither to walk away nor to fill the silence with recombinant happy talk. What do you mean by “direct descendant”? Lizzie would probably say.

  “Bathroom?” asks Emily, pointing as she passes George and Saddler.

  “Left, just past the media room, before the lanai,” Saddler tells her, and then, after her: “Memorable Academy luncheon Friday, wasn’t it, Emily?”

  “Memorable?” she replies. “I guess seven women all wearing the same Jil Sa
nder suit is memorable. Hank? What’s EVPCCSSP?”

  Saddler’s sneer brightens noticeably. “Henry. Shoot, you guys saw my little surprise! Well, you’re talking to Mose Media Holdings’ new executive vice president, corporate communications, synergy, and special projects. The release goes on the wire tomorrow.” Saddler has been head of corporate communications just for the TV network, Mose Broadcasting.

  “Congratulations, Hank,” George says, lifting his empty glass.

  “Henry,” Saddler says, toasting. Emily touches her tumbler to the cat’s nose. Saddler, too hungry for the attention, doesn’t back away quickly enough. Mr. Gable hisses like a wild Asian leopard and leaps out of his arm. “Today, corporate communications, synergy, and special projects,” Emily says, turning toward the bathroom, “tomorrow, the world.”

  George, becoming a little desperate for small talk, pretends to gulp from his empty wineglass, then stares at the magenta beanbag chairs and hot tub out on the terrace, which is covered by half a geodesic dome. “So I guess you’ve lived here quite awhile?” he says, making a decorating inference, groping.

  “No,” Saddler answers, possibly miffed, “uh-uh. We purchased the property last year.” He pushes one remote control button that instantly replaces a Belinda Carlisle song with Pachelbel’s Canon, and then another that makes two enormous televisions sink pneumatically into the floor. “Everything’s brand spanking new,” he says as he bustles away.

  George walks around the conversation pit—the inglenook—to the floor-to-ceiling window facing east, downtown, which is awash in a perfect L.A. evening orange. Could he live here? These days, the only thing New York has that Los Angeles lacks is the Upper West Side and overt meanness, and he’s never liked the Upper West Side. He thinks he could live here. He thinks he would if Lizzie would. But she won’t. He thinks he probably should.

  LuLu and Max have finally nodded off, and the Town Car glides down the FDR Drive, almost deserted on a Sunday evening in late winter. Lizzie’s favorite cityscape swings into view—the East River (which isn’t actually a river, but a strait), the Woolworth Building (which now has nothing to do with Woolworth’s), and the Brooklyn Bridge framed by the Manhattan Bridge, across which a line of little automobiles move above two subway trains with rows of tiny lighted windows, all the cars and trains seeming to travel at precisely the same speed in both directions, a little fake-looking, as if a single gear runs it all. It makes her think of George, of his flabbergasted description of Cubby Koplowitz’s model city, and she smiles, in love with her excitable forty-four-year-old boy and pleased that after more than a decade in the city, she still feels, nearly every time she returns, this sentimental, Gershwinized, Manhattan-vista rush.

  Twenty-two years, exactly half his life, a New Yorker since 1978.… He smells patchouli.… Olfactory hallucination? Midlife crisis? He feels light-headed. If this is a stroke, it’s not so bad. He doesn’t see but rather senses a bright white light. He turns. An impossibly tall, golden Asian woman is suddenly very close, at his side, staring at him, angelically glowing, adoring. (Weasels, pork, beautiful Asian women …) He smiles back. How young she is. Is she naked? This is the Los Angeles he dreams and worries about, the abyss of easy pleasure. He thinks: I’m dying, and the future, my unlived life, is passing before my eyes.

  Then he realizes that the woman is wearing an off-the-shoulder dress. Only her shoulders are naked. George feels like an idiot.

  “Hi,” he says.

  Two hands land hard on his neck. “Captain McTavish,” a man whispers in a thick, fake Scottish accent, “we’ve got to stop meeting like this.” It’s Featherstone. And his slightly, tastefully pregnant girlfriend, Ng.

  “Hi, I’m George Mactier,” he says to Ng, putting his hand out.

  “My gosh, I know!”

  “Ng,” Featherstone says, no longer Scottish, “is your number one fan.”

  “NARCS is incredible. I mean, it’s changed the way I think about reality.”

  “Thank you … thanks very much.”

  “The show on New Year’s? Where you arrested the real dealer? I was like, ‘This is so incredible.’ It gave me chills.”

  “I apologize,” he says.

  “No! I mean, it was like the most powerful thing I’ve seen on television. Ever? One of my cultural studies professors told us it was a watershed.”

  “Really? Thanks.” George never receives compliments very gracefully, even when he feels entitled to them, which he usually does. Praise at this new order of magnitude, show business praise, extreme and frothy, with the breathless southern California edge, that enraptured reverence, rattles him. He feels like Goofy.

  The bright light has not been a near-death vision of the afterlife, he sees now, but a very bright battery-powered light. A video team has just arrived at Saddler’s, and one of the two crew members, a guy wearing an E!2 baseball cap, is lugging a shotgun microphone and miniature arc light. They’re walking slowly backward as they shoot a skinny young redhead in an iridescent blue top, electric green stretch pants, and old-fashioned black plastic eyeglasses. Her facial expression is unsettled, a frown fighting a come-hither smile. She must be famous—famous enough, anyway, for E!2.

  E!2, pronounced “E squared,” is the E! entertainment channel’s new second-string service, a kind of show business C-SPAN. E!2 runs nothing but raw coverage of celebrity events twenty-four hours a day—movie premieres, Broadway first nights, cocktail party fund-raisers for Los Angeles County supervisors, charity softball games in Westlake, publicists’ wedding receptions in East Hampton, magazine cover shoots, Hollywood High reunions, Vancouver film festivals, Actors’ Equity meetings in Hell’s Kitchen, anything and everything celebrity—anchor-free, unstructured, and unmediated. On E!2, both “celebrity” and “event” are construed generously.

  George watches Saddler kiss the young woman on both cheeks. As they exchange small talk, with Saddler holding one of her hands in each of his, their faces are both pivoted about fifteen degrees off axis from each other, toward the camera and light—show biz heliotropism.

  “Sarah Michelle Gellar?” Ng says.

  “New hair,” Featherstone says. “WB talent at an MBC party? Smooth move, Hankster.”

  George, thankful for the clue, recognizes the name of the star of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, on the WB Network. He’s never seen the show, but Sarah—Sarah his stepdaughter—has said since she was eleven that it sucks, and Max agrees, so George takes their word for it.

  “Fourteen minutes and fifty-six,” Featherstone says, watching the actress, “fifty-seven, fifty-eight … How long before we stick a fork in that chick?”

  George has never witnessed Featherstone’s casually cruel side. Is it his way of trying to make a visiting New Yorker feel at home? Maybe in L.A. Featherstone just feels freer (or more compulsive) about denigrating the competition. So Los Angeles has straight-ahead public scabrousness after all. It does make George feel more comfortable.

  “You know,” Featherstone says, still staring, as the video crew and the young woman come closer, “that isn’t Sarah Michelle. It’s—what’s her name, Francesca. From MTV News. The new new Tabitha Soren.” MTV News—that explains the eyeglasses. “George!” Featherstone says suddenly, turning to him, “What the hell are you cooking up with Mr. Milken? His office was calling my office trying to get ahold of you.”

  “Yeah, I know. I mean, he called me in New York too. I don’t know. I hardly know him. I don’t know him.”

  “Harold and Mike are two musketeers, you know. Serious buds.”

  “Right,” George says, now recalling an article, he thinks, that said Mose had Milken’s help building the greeting-card business in the eighties. Why should this make him anxious? It’s a good thing, not a bad thing, that he and Mose have overlapping social circles, that George isn’t some anonymous network grind, “an $80,000-a-year man” (as Ben Gould calls journalists generically), that he’s a—you know, a—a player. George actually forms the word mentally, player, disgustin
g himself. Player is a hateful word, the flip side of loser, possibly worse. Lizzie would be appalled.

  It’s dark and cold and quiet on Water Street as Lizzie signs the charge slip and they all pile out of the Go! Now! dial-car, Max carrying a Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes/World Wildlife Fund bag, Sarah grabbing a suitcase, Lizzie struggling with the duffel bag as well as the sleeping LuLu. The front stoop seems unusually well lit—it’s the neighbors’ new giant TV screen. By the bluish glow of a five-foot-high close-up of Agent Scully’s face, Lizzie picks out the keys to the front door.

  Featherstone has folded his arms across his chest, and silently examining Francesca, he furrows his brow and twists his mouth thoughtfully, as if to signal that he isn’t about to say Really excellent booty for an anchorwoman, or You think Kurt Loder gets to do her? “George,” he says, “has she paid enough dues yet to be considered the real thing in your, you know, journalistic community?”

  Paid dues? The real thing? His journalistic community? George considers answering, Timothy, are you aware that Geraldo Rivera is a senior NBC News correspondent and anchor? But he glances at Featherstone, who shows every sign of being serious, and then back at Francesca. “I think she does have some Washington reporting experience,” he says evenly, “but I don’t know that she’s really on anyone’s radar yet, one way or the other,” realizing as the words leave his mouth that it’s not just ass kissing, this respectful new attitude around Featherstone—it is his old coat-and-tie newsman mode reasserting itself. Half of Real Time will be a real news program. Now that the show has a green light, George is reverting, in automatic atavistic anticipation, to the kind of self-serious conventional wisdom that journalism demands of its senior … players.

  Francesca now stands about ten feet away from George and Ng and Featherstone, talking to a Spic-and-Span Super-Casual who is younger than George but wears oversize glasses with yellow-orange lenses, the kind that shellacked Hollywood big shots from the fifties and sixties wear when they get old. George, Featherstone, and Ng are in the background of Francesca’s E!2 shot. After several glasses of champagne at his ABC News going-away party a year ago, George remembers joking to Peter Jennings that he should start just referring to himself simply as Peter, like Francesca. Jennings grinned that reticent anchorman grin and patted George on the back. George couldn’t decide if the tight smile and the back pat meant he was pissed off or saddened or confused. And at that merry instant, George didn’t care. In journalism, he had been the kooky kid, precocious and refreshingly irreverent. Now, in show business, he’s the graybeard intellectual, the grownup, seasoned and refreshingly substantial.