George is in the kitchen, opening two more bottles of Chardonnay and staring at the window behind the sink. At eye level, clinging to the wood mullion between two of the panes, is a fly. At first he is surprised that it doesn’t buzz away when he blows at it, but now he sees that it’s dead, an absolutely perfect, undamaged dead housefly stuck in situ. It’s fantastic, he thinks, this tiny accidental museum of natural history. He wonders how he might phrase a note to the local girl who cleans the house that won’t make her think he is insane: Cora—Please don’t touch the top panes of the window by the sink. We want to keep the dead fly right where it is. He could lie and say it’s a child’s science project.
When he returns to the living room, they’re still discussing Lizzie’s worries about trying to run a software business in New York, three thousand miles from the mainstream. This line of conversation, with its implicit threat of relocation, never pleases George. Her anxiety breeds his counteranxiety. And in response, she finds herself defending the digital Northwest against easy New York disparagement like some mixed-breed ambassador.
“I guess I should move to L.A., then,” George says, smiling as he tops up Pollyanna and Warren, spilling a drop on Warren’s corduroys. George has known Warren for fifteen years, but he doesn’t know him quite well enough to ask why, no matter the season or the venue, he wears wide-wale brown corduroys and a long-sleeved turtleneck. Here and now, it’s a good outfit. But in the summer, Warren always looks hot.
“George,” Pollyanna says.
“Sinbad reads The Economist,” he says. “And Francesca, the woman from MTV, watches fifteen-year-old documentaries about Central American civil wars.”
George and Lizzie exchange friendly, oversize, fuck-you smiles.
“I would rather live in a sunny city of stupid pretty people,” George continues, “than a rainy city of smart ugly people like Seattle. I would.” He doesn’t know if he really would, but he enjoys saying so.
“New York is more like all those other places now, anyway,” Warren says.
“How would you know?” Pollyanna says. “You barely go outside, let alone to other cities.”
“I read, my dear. And I don’t want to go out when I read that there are now twenty-eight thousand missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in New York City now. Yes. Twenty-eight thousand. Almost as many Mormons as there are cops. According to the article, there were only four thousand of them twenty years ago. I think they’ve been drawn to the city by Chelsea Piers and the World Financial Center and Disney and MetroCards and no-smoking laws. Didn’t we all come to New York to escape Mormons?”
“Have some more to drink, Warren,” George says.
Pollyanna and Lizzie have been out running since before Emily and Michael arrived. Emily and Warren are sitting in the sun on the porch with George, along with Suzie, Warren’s weekend-custody au pair, who’s holding the Holcombe baby. George suddenly realizes there’s no polite way to indicate to Emily and her boyfriend that Suzie is not Warren’s cute, young, blond wife, but rather his employee with a Texas BA in Caregiving. But since Emily met Michael when he was her employee (he played the DA on Girlie), George decides his impulse for caste clarity is priggish and beside the point. Let the ambiguities fly.
Out in the yard, between them and the lake, Max catches his baseball, looks at it, and shouts “Sixty-eight!” before throwing it back to Michael. Emily brought the children gifts—a play surgery kit for LuLu and a Rawlings Radar Ball for Max. Packed inside the thread and rubber at the ball’s core is a speedometer, wired to a tiny LCD window on the surface that gives a readout for the speed of each pitch.
“Fifty-nine,” Michael shouts to Max, then throws back. Sitting on the porch of his country house, holding a mug of coffee as his son plays catch with this pleasant, dumb, handsome, childless, two-handed actor, George feels like a well-satisfied burgher relieved of a child-rearing duty—Michael can be Max’s sports wet nurse for the weekend.
Then, as he watches the caretaker drive his muddy Dodge truck up the road, he feels even more like a recreating Knickerbocker. Charlie climbs out of his pickup with his fly-fishing gear and a package in a tight garbage-bag wrapping.
“How are you, Mr. Mactier?”
“Fine, Charlie, how are you?” My good man. “How’s the winter been up here?”
“Not too bad. I took care of the barn cats, like you asked. Except that one cute little calico.”
“Buzzy.” George suddenly realizes that his instruction to Charlie as they were driving away last November—“You’ll take care of the cats?”—must have been very badly misinterpreted.
“Not much browse all winter, so the deer chewed up your garden some. Nice season for us, though,” he says, holding out the neat garbage-bag package to George.
George takes it. It’s frozen solid and weighs ten pounds.
“Some venison,” Charlie says, nodding at the frosty black plastic.
George feels silly over his momentary horror that he was holding the frozen carcasses of six cats. “The season,” of course, is deer-hunting season.
“Thanks very much, Charlie.” I shan’t demand the thirty pecks of barley this jubilee year, however, nor the night with your comely eldest daughter.
“Mr. Mactier, will it be any bother to you if I’m fishing down at your stream today?”
“No, not at all, Charlie, go right ahead.”
“Excuse me,” Warren says from the porch, “may I ask you a question?”
Charlie, startled and apprehensive, has no choice but to turn. “Yes, sir?”
“You’re a fly fisherman, right?”
“That’s right.”
“Do you buy them,” Warren asks earnestly, “or do you farm these flies yourself?”
Charlie apparently thinks this turtlenecked snob from the city is teasing him. George intervenes.
“They aren’t real flies, Warren. They’re made out of feathers and Mylar line and glue.” He turns back to smile at Charlie, who looks thrilled by the instant passing of humiliation from himself to the stranger.
But Warren is a psychiatrist from the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He does not humiliate easily, if at all.
“Interesting,” he says. “I also have another question. Do you trap martens around here?”
“What are you talking about?” George says.
“Lake Marten. You know, martens—they’re a kind of weasel,” he says to Charlie, “aren’t they?”
“Sure,” the caretaker says. “I took my six last season.” He pauses. “You didn’t want any pelts, did you, Mr. Mactier?”
Dinner is done, the peach and rhubarb pies are heating, the wine is still being poured.
“You don’t bring your nanny to the country?” Emily asks. Max and LuLu are upstairs watching the new animated Lusitania with Michael, Suzie the au pair, and Warren’s baby.
Lizzie shakes her head and George says, “Between Charlie, and the housecleaner, and the contractor, and the pond man, I think—oh, and the kid who mows, and the snowplow guy—we’ve got enough servants up here without throwing Rafaela into the mix.” He is smiling and means to be self-mocking. “You must have a big staff, Em.”
“Gardener, pool boy, housekeeper. That’s it. At the house.”
“Plus Michael,” George teases. “Did you ever think we would employ so many people?”
“Shall I put on the Big Chill soundtrack now or later?” Pollyanna says.
Emily is counting on her fingers as Michael returns to join the grownups. “Lawyer, lawyer, agent, manager, Becky, kid at Paramount, business manager, doctor, doctor, shrink, and Tranh.”
“That’s about four FTEs,” Lizzie says. Everyone looks at her.
“Full-time equivalents,” she explains.
“Our liability insurance policy on this place,” George says, “actually has a clause saying it covers ‘the accidental dismemberment’ of ‘the occasional servant.’ I don’t think it means the occasional dismemberment.”
“Why does this all not embarrass us?” Lizzie asks.
“Why should it?” Emily says. “We’re good bosses. In L.A. there’s none of that guilt. About help.”
“The slave class,” George says, “that allows you and Barbra to spend your time raising money for Gore and stopping the war in Mexico.”
“There isn’t real servant guilt in New York either,” Warren says. “Trust me.”
“In Seattle there is,” Lizzie says. “About private schools, even. They’re democrats. Small d.”
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” Michael asks.
Instead of answering, Lizzie continues. “I think it’s because they’re not jaded enough yet to live with hypocrisy. You know? They’re too rational, in a kind of easy, adolescent way. I feel like Kirk with Spock or Picard with Data whenever I’m out there.”
“But that’s why you like it,” George says. “That’s why you want to move there.”
“I do not want to move there.”
“No, you do; it’d be like Cambridge all over again. Rainy and brainy. You’d like it too, Emily. Very lefty. They’ve got a municipal department of ecology.”
“In Los Angeles,” Michael says, “we have a Museum of Tolerance.”
“I think I would like Seattle,” Emily says, “except for the rain. That innocence, and the missionary spirit. Like writers, but not cynical.”
“Please,” George says.
“No, Emily’s right,” Lizzie says, recanting for the moment her recent renunciation of Seattle. “The dream of the big score out there isn’t so much about getting rich or getting famous or getting laid or getting invited to fab parties.”
“Because they’re already rich,” George says.
“No, no,” his wife says. “They sincerely believe they’re bringing the New World into being. It’s sort of creepy. And admirable.”
“Mormons,” Warren says. “Creepy and admirable.”
“Do they do drugs?” Pollyanna asks Lizzie.
“I don’t think so, much,” Lizzie says. “But, you know, that constant tingle out there, even more down in the Valley—the money, IPO, next-big-thing mania—reminds me a lot of cocaine. The cocaine high, I mean. Not just their speediness, but their intoxication with their own brilliance and infallibility. Very coke-y.”
“Mormons on coke,” Warren says. “Truly frightening.”
“I thought you always said they were more egoless than people in L.A. and New York?” George says. “What, they’re egoless egomaniacs?”
“No, what I said was that in Seattle, nobody ever puts his own name in his company’s name.”
“No Warner Bros. or Goldwyn or Mayer in Seattle, huh?” Emily says. “Or Morgan Stanley or Lazard Frères or whatever?”
“That’s right. I can’t tell you how often people in New York think that my name is Elizabeth Fine—Fine Technologies.”
Michael, evidently operating on a several-minute time delay, asks, “It rains a lot in Seattle?”
There’s a pause as everyone registers that he’s not joking.
“One hundred and seventy-four days last year,” Lizzie finally says.
“I think people in Seattle take the gray weather as some kind of proof they’re not superficial,” George says. “Cloudiness equals intellectual depth. In some Scandinavian way. Just like New Yorkers secretly need all their man-made unpleasantnesses—noise and real estate prices and co-op boards and no place to park—so they can feel like soulful survivors. Like Berliners used to be.”
“That’s sad,” Michael says.
“You’re such a bullshitter, George,” Emily says.
“Who’s articulate who you don’t think is a bullshitter, Emily?”
George is sitting outside, finishing the Sunday paper. Lizzie steps out onto the porch with LuLu, about to join everyone else down at the lake.
“Is there some reason,” she says as they pass him, “you felt the need to be such an asshole last night?” She looks at the shadow of her hands on the side of the house, gesticulating as she searches for her words. “I’m not your enemy, George. And I don’t believe Emily is, either.”
“Isn’t ‘asshole’ bad?” LuLu asks.
George doesn’t reply.
“Are the deer and the squirrels homeless?”
“What do you mean, LuLu?” her father asks.
“They live outside all the time, and nobody feeds them. They act scared and crazy. They’re like bums.”
Lizzie remembers a book she read in college by a nineteenth-century writer named Cesare Lombroso, who believed that animals were, in fact, criminals by nature, violent and homicidal. She remembers learning in the same course that weasels kill more prey than they can eat. But after George’s Cambridge crack last night, she decides not to mention Lombroso or weasels.
“No,” Lizzie says, taking LuLu by the hand and walking toward Lake Marten. “Animals can’t be bums, honey.”
17
The phone in the kitchen rings as it does every weekday morning around now. Ordinarily, Lizzie takes the call, but she left for the airport when it was still dark. “Sarah?” George yells, getting up from the fiberglass Eames chair to answer it. Your bus!” He picks up the receiver, but doesn’t say hello. He sometimes does, and then feels stupid. “Hello!” the machined female voice on the other end of the line announces brightly, almost lovingly. “Today is Tuesday. Your child’s transportation will be waiting at the designated location in. Four minutes. And thirty seconds!” Lizzie would hang up now, but George, not yet coffeed up and curious to hear today’s non sequitur, stays on the line. “Campbell’s soup is m’m-m’m-good!” the ReadyAim lady says. Then, after a pause, her voice suddenly quickens and empties of emotion. “This ReadyAim automated advisory was not reviewed by human staff, and by terminating this call you waive any and all liability claims against ReadyAim, its employees, and agents.” He smiles and snorts once as he hangs up.
“Daddy?” LuLu asks between mouthfuls of high-fiber Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace Home Video–themed Eggos, “Why do you laugh so much?”
“I didn’t laugh.”
“You did that thing. Like a laugh.”
“You did, Dad,” says Max, who is at the counter carefully filling out an order form. Max loves filling out forms, dry-run forms he rips out of magazines (subscription cards, subscriber surveys, NRA postcards to congressmen, credit card applications) and the forms his teachers give him (order forms for Scholastic books, for Disney Books, for Nickelodeon software, for Time for Kids’ current events activities books, and Cool Candy of the Month Club order forms masquerading as consumer surveys). George glances at Max. Buying stuff didn’t qualify as homework when I was a kid, he refrains from saying for the tenth time this school year, probably because Lizzie is not around to hear it.
“Oh,” George says, “the bus recording was sort of funny.”
“You mean the part at the end where she says it’s not their fault if your child gets stolen or killed?” LuLu asks. “That makes Mommy sad to hear, so she doesn’t listen.”
“Uh-huh,” George says, turning the pages of the Post, scanning and skipping the midsection of disappearing-Queens-hubby and murdered-Bronx-tot articles.
“I don’t think it’s funny or sad,” LuLu says. “Daddy, why does Mommy think the men at Microsoft might kill her? Will they kill her?”
“No. It’s a figure of speech. She’s worried they’ll be mean to her. Finish your waffles.”
“They’re Eggos.”
Tag-team marriage, he thinks. If he were still working for ABC, he would be ready to suggest a GMA second-hour piece with the title already invented. No, no—first commission the book, Tag-Team Marriage: New Relationships for the New Century (or A Third Way to Love: Staying Married in the Third Millennium; test both), get a pleasant Dr. Somebody to be the author, a clinical psychologist or psychiatric social worker, a high-energy female shrink who then gets her interview with the Society writer at Newsweek, and off that her two-minu
tes-thirty on morning TV, and then sell a show to Lifetime. Since he’s left journalism, his daydreams have become more vertically integrated.
Sarah appears, her short hair still wet from the shower. Zipping up the loose olive-green jacket, strapping on the overstuffed thirty-pound backpack, unsmiling as ever, she looks like a scared, brave young B-29 crewman suiting up to fly across the Channel.
“This afternoon?” she says to George, beginning her statement in the middle to avoid the intimacy of Dad or the snub of George. “I’m going with my friend Felipe to see his older brother’s web site office. In Chelsea? I’ll be home at roughly five. Thirty?”
“Who is Felipe?” George asks. He knows he has Lizzie’s proxy here, although by overstressing the first and last words the question sounds more contemptuous (more Wall Street asshole, more Republican) than he intends.
“A guy in my class. Felipe Williamson.”
“It’s Philip Williamson, Dad,” Max says from the other side of the kitchen. Philip Williamson, Jr.! Philip Jr. is the pale, blond son of a Goldman Sachs partner and a Davis Polk partner. He has been Sarah’s classmate off and on since first grade.
George does not smile. “How did Philip become Felipe?” he asks Sarah.
“He was adopted, you know. From Arizona, he found out last year. So he changed his name.”
“His biological parents were … Mexican?” George asks.
“They could have been,” she says. “I have to go.”
“Right,” George says, straight-faced.
George and the little kids leave a half hour later for the drive to school. Gaping potholes are fine, uneven cobblestones are fine, even the collapsed sawhorse and shards of drywall in the middle of Beekman Street are fine. They all make George feel as if he has a good excuse for wheeling a giant sport-utility vehicle around Manhattan. They’d bought the Land Cruiser (George wanted a Land Rover, but Lizzie vetoed it—her Anglophilia phobia) when they moved to Sneden’s Landing. Their single longest off-road experience has been parking at Nancy McNabb and Roger Baird’s outdoor wedding in Litchfield County, but George figures that navigating New York City’s infrastructure qualifies as utility, maybe even sport.
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