Turn of the Century

by Kurt Andersen

  “And you. Can we get menus?”

  “They don’t have menus. Last Sunday I was at the office all day working, and I had my stuff in a white plastic bag. The doorman at his building was new, some black guy with an attitude. He went into his little booth to call up to Warren, and came back and said, ‘Dr. Holcombe informs me that he already received his Chinese food this evening.’ ”

  “No!”

  “Yes. I was so pissed,” Pollyanna says, taking a drag and elaborately exhaling, “I turned right around and went home.”

  “Did you call?” Lizzie is an eager audience for her unmarried friends’ relationship stories, even and maybe especially the nightmares. She enjoys the hits of vicarious unhappiness.

  “No. And when I called the next day, I was like, ‘Why the fuck didn’t you call my apartment? I could’ve been dead!’ And he said, ‘Because I fell asleep, and in the morning I figured out what had probably happened.’ ”

  “Yikes. That’s not good, Polly. That’s bad.” A habit of extreme directness is one virtue of spending a lot of time with small children.

  Pollyanna says nothing, then, “Yeah, well, it’s badder than that.… There’s a cute new boy at work.”

  “Uh-oh,” Lizzie says, smiling. “The return of Danger Girl!” Danger Girl is the third-person alter ego nickname Lizzie and Pollyanna traded back and forth in the eighties, when both of them were single. She is kind of an imaginary super-antiheroine who smoked and drank too much, sometimes used cocaine, had imprudent sex with incorrect men, but always got every bit of work done perfectly. At thirty-five, Pollyanna, with her deceptively lost-little-Chinatown-girl smile and cascade of straight black hair down her back, still communes with Danger Girl occasionally. Another flavor of vicarious emotion Lizzie counts on her friends to provide.

  “He’s pretty seriously cute. I mean, he’s still a lawyer. I’ve hardly talked to him. But he listens to Philip Glass on his Walkman.”

  “Possible asshole. Liking Philip Glass is one of those things that can really go either way.”

  “He also Rollerblades. Which, I know, can also go either way. But Philip Glass plus Rollerblading … Each, like, sort of counteracts the other?”

  “Don’t you think he’s probably more a symptom of things being shitty with Warren than he is, you know, da-dum, a boy?” Lizzie and most of her friends have never stopped referring to men, especially single men, as boys. It’s simultaneously girlish and mock girlish, and Lizzie has found it to be a generational litmus test—most smart women over fifty don’t call men boys, and they disapprove of smart young women who call each other girls. During the only real fight about feminism she’s ever had in her life, with her stepmother Rachel, who dined out for decades on the fact that she once played tennis with Betty Friedan in Sagaponack, Lizzie argued that calling men boys was a way of putting men and sex in their proper places.

  “Badder how?” Lizzie asks, taking another cigarette.

  “Did I tell you how, a couple of weeks ago, he called me an emasculating bitch? No, I’m sorry, it was ‘castrating,’ not emasculating. I was like, What? And he said, ‘Sometimes the literal prefigures the symbolic.’ I wanted to kill him for a second. I mean actually. I can’t stand it when he gets all psychiatric like that. The last time I got that mad was when he tried to make something out of the fact that I played alto sax as opposed to tenor.”

  “So you did tell him. About the … thing in medical school.”

  “He’s a shrink.”

  Pollyanna started at Harvard Medical School the same September Lizzie started at the Business School. But she dropped out after the third time she accidentally mutilated her male cadaver’s genitals, and started over at Harvard Law the next fall. “But it was just so dumb. You know? ‘Castrating bitch.’ It’s like an eighteen-year-old’s idea of an insult. I mean, I’m a lot of bad things—an addict, prejudiced against Koreans, a lung-cancer profiteer—but I do not hate men. That’s a stupid cliché.”

  “George and I were saying last week, about his mother and my father? It turns out the clichés about parents dying are true.”

  “That’s why they become clichés.”

  “And there’s practically nothing to say except clichés! Also about having children. About all the important stuff.” Lizzie regrets the swerve into childbearing smugness, but Pollyanna is lighting a cigarette, which helps them squeak past the moment. “All these deep, authentic emotions have been turned into fucking greeting cards and little gift books on the checkout counter at Barnes and Noble. Which makes you feel corny and inferior for having the emotions. Which is wrong.”

  “Ladies,” says a blond man in an expensively baggy four-button brown suit, his grand but quiet and sincere manner more that of a clergyman than of a waiter. “Welcome to Zero. What shall we prepare for you this evening?”

  Spending $186 for dinner at Zero, just for her own dinner, does not offend her tonight, partly because the meal (“wild baby North Atlantic salmon from the Hebrides” in a “sauce of “hwaysah berries hand-picked in the Tanzanian highlands”) was as excellent as it was pretentious, and partly because George is out of town and, fuck it, she can spoil herself once in a while.

  Confessing her professional anxieties to Pollyanna, however, did not diminish them. Rolling down Fifth Avenue (the Russian driver is now playing Charles Ives, a major improvement), she stares at the folder of papers next to her, now straight and neat (nice guy! she’ll tip big). “Are you scared of leaving New York?” Pollyanna asked during the second bottle of fifty-five-dollar Chardonnay. “If I were in your business, I think I might be scared of not leaving, of becoming like Dixieland after bebop, you know? Cute and eclectic and surviving but way too proud of itself and, like, just … out of it.” Polly had hit a sore spot. It’s easy to feel successful in New York in the software business because nobody expects you to become Amazon.com or Yahoo!: you can’t really succeed here, so you can’t really fail. Silicon Alley? Pathetic. New York lets her have it both ways: major-league city, minor-league digital culture. Bruce says they’re fish out of water, but she’s also a big fish in a small pond—a big mutant fish trying to do too many disparate things. And she’s not even so big. She’s just a lucky mutant fish without any go-go gene, a complacent, conservative Dixieland jazz fish. She’s so proud of being profitable. Three quarters of earnings. So? So? Are earnings good or bad, Mommy? The go-go companies don’t have earnings at all. Ben Gould wasn’t joking when he said he prefers some companies not to have earnings. “Don’t be a victim of the mom-and-pop fallacy, Zimbalist,” he said as the last Fine Technologies board meeting was breaking up. “Manage for growth, not earnings. Maybe it’s a girl thing.” That was a joke, the “girl thing” remark. Bennett Gould is Mike Zimbalist version 2.0. Her father always managed for growth. Her father was never a victim of any mom-and-pop fallacy, Lord knows. What is it with these guys? Everything’s on the come, always on the come. The jackpot is there up ahead, right there, we’re sure, just up ahead, honest, just ahead. This economy is geared to the Ben Goulds and Mike Zimbalists, and she just doesn’t have the balls for it. Maybe it is a girl thing. She hasn’t had this much to drink in a long time, since Christmas. Since 1999. Since the previous century.

  She phones her office number to leave a message, reminding herself to tell Lance to run the new Microsoft numbers and to ask Katherine about the legal implications of co-owning Buster Grinspoon’s software patents.

  “You are in softvare business?” the driver suddenly says. “I also. I also vork vith Microsoft before. I am Yuri.”

  Lizzie smiles. She’s dialing again.

  “You know grime-spawn?” the driver seems to ask. “I know grime-spawn.”

  “Hmmm,” Lizzie says. But in the middle of waiting the three seconds for her new phone to lock onto a TRW satellite 6,473 miles overhead in geostationary orbit, bounce 6,473 miles back down to an antenna bolted onto the concrete wall of a 1906 warehouse on Peck Slip, then course underground through copper wire the 242 yards
to their old brick house, she isn’t really inclined to engage Yuri in a discussion of Microsoft and grime-spawn, whatever grime-spawn are. “Hello, Rafaela,” she says, speaking as slowly and clearly as a kindergarten teacher. “It’s Lizzie. Uh-huh. Bennett Gould called back when? Okay, I’m on my way home. Are the kids in bed? I’ll be home in about fifteen minutes. Okeydokey, Rafaela? Bye-bye.” Okeydokey? She upbraids herself for saying “okeydokey” to a Mayan peasant who knew no English two years ago.

  It was weird how the check-in guy had snapped to attention and repeated George’s name, yes Mr. Mactier, absolutely Mr. Mactier, as soon as he’d heard it. Is it possible he knows that George is a TV producer with a hit series? (“Dad, how famous are you, exactly?”) No. He might recognize the name Steven Bochco or David Kelley or Marcy Carsey, this kid, given that Entertainment Weekly and Entertainment Tonight have replaced Time and The CBS Evening News in the hearts and minds of the twenty-two-year-olds who get jobs behind reception desks at expensive hotels. But still: they have not heard of George Mactier. Maybe Ben put him on a VIP list.

  Vanity, he thinks, looking closely at his crow’s feet. Vanity, vanity, vanity. George seldom uses cologne or mouthwash, but he uses both when he’s traveling. Away from home, his fragrance consciousness runs much higher. Hotels encourage a kind of toiletry hyperawareness, with these round magnifying mirrors and wee soap bars and bottles of cleansers and conditioners, the sunlamps, the bathrobe antitheft warnings masquerading as price lists, the wall phones next to the toilets and TVs by the sink, the symbolic paper virginity strip encircling the toilet seat. And when he uses cologne and mouthwash George invariably thinks of early adolescence, and his excited death row primping for church dances. (It was in the darkened basements of Protestant churches, Methodist and Congregational as well as Unitarian, that George experienced all his early foretastes of sex, slow-dancing cheek to cheek, chest to breasts, tightly denimed erection to panty-hosed leg.) Turning to leave the room, tapping off the light, taking one final look in the mirror, pulling down his left shirt cuff, he feels the recurring jolt of gratitude that he didn’t lose the hand until he was twenty-eight. He imagines adolescence as an amputee, the Special Olympics kindnesses, the sympathy slow-dances. The thought actually makes him shudder.

  When the elevator opens, George recognizes a pair of the Wall Street assholes from Ben’s suite earlier today. They’re ten, maybe fifteen years younger than George, about his height but harder and tanner than he is, tall and tan and young and lovely. The one speaking nods to George, the other only glances.

  “… because Q1, I hear, will kind of suck is why.”

  “Suck how bad? Preannounce suck?”

  “No. A penny, a couple of cents. No. But if he doesn’t have serious Q2 growth, I mean serious, he’s fucked. He’s working on some big net play Q2, I hear.”

  George has always tended not to like men like this on sight, the big white smirking prosperous know-it-alls. He disliked them in Little League when they were ten and talked about bunts and balks and the strike zone, and when they were thirteen in Protestant church basements playing air guitar along with “Sunshine of Your Love,” and on airplanes leaning over seats fondling each other’s new laptops. These two probably earn a million apiece, maybe more. George understands that overpay is not the form of economic injustice on which he should be squandering outrage, but he can’t help it. The Saturday morning last winter that George watched himself, carrying LuLu on his back, ribbing his Sneden’s Landing neighbor, a childless professor of medieval art his own age, about how long it was taking him to shovel his driveway was the morning he agreed with Lizzie that they had to move back into the city. There are plenty of jerks living in the city, but not as many of the kind George worries about becoming.

  “Big how? Big what? There’s no big left to do.”

  “E-commerce. A sticky video portal. I’m not sure. But my M and A buddy has a boner.”

  “Acquisition by? Or of?”

  “All I know is he’s talking to tech people. Don’t count Harold out, man. He gets it.”

  Harold? Mose.

  “I don’t know. The TV shows suck.”

  “They get some great numbers. Network numbers. That artsy cop show they have, with that bleeding-heart actress. You know, older, but cute, with the tits, Annie …”

  The elevator opens.

  “Angela Janeway,” says the other Wall Street asshole, stepping into the air-conditioned interior piazza. “I hate that cunt. Won’t watch it because of her. Besides,” George hears the Angela-hater say as the two men march off, “isn’t that show kind of over?”

  Wait. No! No! According to the most current audience research, eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-old A County male viewers—fellows like you!—have 63 percent positive feelings about Angela and the Jennie character. And while, yes, ratings have slipped lower for two consecutive episodes, modestly lower, the average rating, even excluding the New Year’s show (which you guys probably heard about), is still higher for the second half of the season to date than for the first half. And while the producers have certainly experienced their own share of exasperation with Angela over the last year, successful creative people are by their very natures passionate and strong-willed. You arrogant know-nothing frat-boy Wall Street assholes.

  “Good evening, Mr. Mactier,” a concierge says, grinning and bowing slightly as George passes. “So glad to have you here in person.” Not bad. “In person?” Maybe the idea is to make everyone feel like a star, someone who exists other than in person. A doorman winks. It’s Vegas.

  He grabs a leaflet about the new hotel’s trained pigeons (“four flock-shifts of two hundred Old World birds, together comprising the most complex animal entertainment production in Las Vegas”) and walks off smartly across St. Mark’s Square in the direction of the Strip and BarbieWorld, sending a dozen of the current pigeon flock-shift skittering out of his way toward the Doges’ Palace.

  When George first walked down the Strip one afternoon in 1972 (a date closer to World War II, he obsessively-compulsively calculates, than to the present time), he was alone, just about the only pedestrian on the eight-lane highway between the Desert Inn and Caesars Palace. Back then it didn’t seem like a city at all, Vegas along the Strip, but like upper Manhattan in the 1870s, or a twenty-second-century NASA colony—gawky, melancholy stretches of vacant sun-blasted flatland with one odd structure stuck randomly here and another way, way over there. Now the Strip is almost entirely packed with buildings, complete from Sahara to Tropicana, and packed with thousands of people on foot. Isn’t the Las Vegas Strip pretty close to the urban planning paragon of the last forty years? Motley (that is, diverse) crowds of people strolling in and out of diverse, people-friendly architecture! Rich and poor, black and white and brown and yellow, old and young! Very young, tonight. George has passed dozens of happy little girls carrying shiny pink BarbieWorld bags. The Strip is a genuine Main Street that happens to be built at super-jumbo XXXL size. Where is a livelier urban space between Chicago and the Sierras? “George, it’s just a giant carnival,” Sally Chatham, one of the Newsweek snobs, said when he proposed a special issue on Las Vegas. “It’s just a shopping mall on steroids, George,” one of the ABC News snobs said when he proposed a prime-time documentary on Vegas. Yeah. So? He mounted the same defense in both instances, struggling to seem neither snappish nor pedantic nor arch. Carnivals and shopping malls were just early, slapdash attempts to cook up some urban juice in the middle of the American nowhere, beta versions, and Vegas is the best and latest iteration, a midway that’s a real city. Whatever, George, their smiles said. He cannot abide dumb snobbery, easy snobbery, snobbery ten or twenty years behind the curve.

  BarbieWorld! It’s bigger than it looks in the photographs in GQ and Wallpaper and the Times Magazine. The grand opening has been under way all day, but the children are now being ushered out a side door as the invited grownup guests arrive. The complex has three parts. BarbieWorld proper is like a curvilinear Alvar Aalto glas
s vase enlarged to Claes Oldenburg size. It’s pink, a soft pink that glows from within the translucent, undulating cast-glass walls of the building. On the roof, there’s a transparent dome with people inside, surrounded by rays of pink and purple and golden laser lights shooting out into the night sky. The BARBIEWORLD sign is classic Vegas semicursive lettering, twenty-five feet high and hot pink. Inside each letter, gallons of viscous pink liquid bubble and flow, sequentially filling and draining the hundred-and-fifty-foot-long word every half minute or so, in a kind of perpetual slow-motion flood surge. Next to the big pink building is a fifties-style casino building, low and rectangular, all glass and white steel. It’s brand-new, the synthetic lava nuggets on the ground around the last palm tree even now being tamped down by a skinny man in a dirty pink jumpsuit. The casino is called Swank City, and an old-fashioned flashing yellow-and-silver sign says CASINO AND VIP LOUNGE. Swank City is small and decorous by Vegas 2000 standards. Tucked behind BarbieWorld and Swank City is the third piece of the complex, a black high-rise, a half-size Seagram Building with a shining sign on top, hotel 1960, spelled out in turquoise lowercase letters.

  Limousines, all of them white and just long enough to be ridiculous, are lined up around the circular driveway and for a half block down Las Vegas Boulevard. Out of the one now at the entrance steps a very tall, very pretty woman, about twenty-five, with big blond hair and wearing a tight, bright blue sequined gown that’s vulgar but oddly demure—very large breasts, relatively little décolletage. Photographers flash, nobodies clap and yell. She must be a TV star, George figures; he has no idea who. Her close-cropped escort, extremely and blandly handsome, follows her out of the limo and onto the serpentine, rainbow-colored people mover that leads to the BarbieWorld entrance. Onlookers applaud more enthusiastically. Photographers pop off frames of the couple, standing still and waving as they’re conveyer-belted away. The man is famous too? Maybe he’s the star of Ben-Hur, the new ABC series. Which could make her, George hypothesizes, one of the Cartright great-granddaughters from Bonanza: The New Generation, on NBC. (He read somewhere that the Ben-Hur guy and the Bonanza girl met and fell in love last Thanksgiving at a pistol range in Hollywood.)