“Ready?” Lizzie says, and they head into the hallway, passing the three-foot-high Campbell’s soup cans into which children are supposed to deposit real cans of Campbell’s soup for the poor, and passing the Taco Bell/KFC minicafeteria that provoked a ruckus among the parents before it finally opened in the fall. The ceilings in the anteroom off the headmaster’s office are twelve feet high. The portraits on the wall gleam. The oak wainscoting is old, and the plaster is real. Private school headmasters may not be paid well, but they get magnificent CEO offices.
Mr. Hoff will be just a moment. Mr. Hoff’s assistant seems a little scared of them, probably because they’re clients, Lizzie thinks, $62,000-a-year clients. Lizzie wonders if this meeting is some kind of sidelong fund-raising gambit. Or maybe Mr. Hoff wants to push Max into the new ultragifted program one of the parents has bragged about. In any event, she’s ready to receive praise—“Congratulations, Elizabeth,” she remembers the principal of Pally High saying such a brief time ago, “you’re second in the class.” “Congratulations, Elizabeth, you’re a National Merit Finalist.” “Congratulations, welcome to Radcliffe.” “Welcome to the business school.” “Congratulations, it’s a girl.” “He’s a great guy you’ve snagged.” “He’s a beautiful little boy.” “She’s a perfect little girl. Congratulations, Lizzie.”
George wonders if Mr. Hoff is going to tell them Max has some newly invented learning disability, or uses hate language to taunt his classmates. He’s catching the assistant’s funny looks too, and reads sadness and possibly disgust folded in with the fear. Maybe Max got caught with a lit cigarette, like George had. (Although where is the St. Andrew’s equivalent of the alley behind the metal shop?) Maybe Max has been secretly taking a dump on the floor of the boys’ bathroom every day for a week, like George’s friend Tuggy did before his parents sent him to military school. Maybe Max and his pals spelled out FUCK with their fingers in a class picture, as George did when he was a boy. (He had been the C, chosen because it had plausible deniability, although not plausible enough, as things turned out.) Or maybe Max dismembered the class hamster, as serial killers do when they’re boys.
“This is not an easy conversation,” Mr. Hoff begins, shocking Lizzie. “Are you … familiar with the Science and Society curriculum? The indoor-pollution homework the children have been doing these last weeks?”
They say they are, yes. Well, Mr. Hoff explains ponderously, when Max’s Science and Society instructor got Max’s indoor-pollution samples back from the lab, he discovered not just the usual—household poisons, lead paint flecks, tar, nicotine, and peanut dust. In the air and surface samples Max took from his parents’ bedroom—Mr. Hoff actually says “his parents’ bedroom”—the teacher found “incontrovertible evidence” of recent marijuana use.
“Now,” Mr. Hoff says, leaning forward, “this is not the first time we’ve had an … incident like this.”
George and Lizzie both nod, trying to look contrite rather than embarrassed and angry.
“It’s the fourth time,” Mr. Hoff says.
George’s brow is literally sweating. Lizzie feels a little like she did when the Harvard doctor told her she was pregnant with Sarah.
“After a discussion with our lawyers, we’ve decided to reaffirm the existing school policy, which is not to notify law-enforcement authorities.”
They both relax a little.
“However, I must tell you that in one of the previous cases, we did feel it appropriate to notify the child-welfare authorities.”
They both think: Which lawyer do we call? George’s show business attorney; Lizzie’s corporate attorney, Katherine; the trusts and estates guy; or the former assistant Manhattan DA they know? And George thinks of the Post headline writing itself (REAL NARCS BUST NARCS TV BIG).
“In that situation,” Mr. Hoff says, “a small trace of cocaine was registered as well as marijuana residue.”
George and Lizzie both nod, frowning, overacting, gravely affirming—yes, mm-hmmm—his distinction between marijuana and cocaine. After a few more minutes of quietly acknowledging the seriousness of the parenting responsibility, and agreeing what fine St. Andrew’s students all three children are, they say they will consider his suggestion of substance-abuse counseling.
“I want you to know,” Lizzie says as they stand, realizing Mr. Hoff has no threats or ultimatums up his sleeve, “that we very rarely, um, indulge. Once every few months, maybe.” Maybe, or maybe every few weeks. “And this is going to sound like an excuse, but we’ve both been under a tremendous amount of stress lately.”
“I understand,” he says, “and that’s why I’m urging you to seek the intervention of a counselor.”
Fuck you, Mr. Hoff, George would like to say.
Fuck you, Mr. Hoff, Lizzie would like to say.
As they leave the school, Max asks, “So what did Mr. Hoff want?”
“To tell us what a great student you are,” Lizzie answers almost before he finishes the question.
“He wanted to make sure we’re happy,” George adds. “You know, with St. Andrew’s.”
Their unspoken precinct-house bond has a half-life about as long as the ride home, however. Their perfect one-two instant dissembling to Max gives George and Lizzie both a little chill. As he unlocks the front door on Water Street, George even has the thought, She bought the pot, cravenly imagining his separate defense as he watches Max and LuLu tumble in and upstairs, driving the terrified cat ahead of them.
Sarah has gone out for dinner with Penelope and Felipe and Gwyneth, in order to plan their Saturday junket to a Junior Golden Gloves boxing match and tabulate the audience response cards rating their docudramas. (Sarah said Ms. Perez-Morrison told them that the videos that “test over 120” will get a minimum grade of B+. George told Sarah to make sure she gets at least 10 percent of first-dollar gross, but she didn’t laugh.)
Lizzie is sitting out back in a cheap folding aluminum chair placed in a spot where she can’t be seen from the rear living room windows. She’s smoking, mentally examining yet again each twist and turn and tunnel of her runaway Microsoft train ride, trying to figure out what happened. She can faintly hear the drone of the upstairs television—“… not only a small miracle, Debi, but hilarious too! Check this out …” The little kids are watching Small Miracles, LuLu’s favorite program, a “family variety show” that combines magic acts, circus performers, Believe It or Not freaks, and reports on UFO abductions, religious visions, and breakthroughs in cosmology and astrophysics. Small Miracles is the wholesome CBS rival show to MBC’s Freaky Shit!, and the promotional line of the people behind Small Miracles is that they’re “broadcasting America’s first and only advertising-free commercial program—a Small Miracle in itself!” Small Miracles is sponsored and produced by AgroSnax, however, which manufactures the Small Miracles line of “permanently fresh” chips, cookies, and “ ‘meat’ nubbins.” Max will watch anything, but he professes to dislike Small Miracles because his favorite television is the commercials: when George once mentioned having met the Coen brothers, his son said, “Whoa! You mean the guys who directed the Honda ad?” Max liked the Coens’ minivan commercial even more than Jean-Luc Godard’s new TV campaign for Apple, which is extreme praise for Max.
From his office on the top floor, George is finally talking to Emily, who’s in her car.
“Love the finale script. You nailed the arc. What the—fuck you! Jesus.”
“Emily?”
“Love you too, bitch! Mwah!”
“Emily?”
“Sorry. A 500SL cut me off. Thought it was a rapper ambush or something. But it’s somebody from Fox 2000 I know.”
“So you like the script?”
“Yup.”
“Great. Thanks.”
“George?”
“Some bad news.”
“What?” Her masseur quit. The polls have Gore way behind in Pennsylvania. They are over budget on Real Time. She’s found out she has cancer. She’s found out he has cancer.
“We should do this face-to-face.”
“Do what?”
“Divorce.”
“What are you talking about, Emily?”
“I’m not a journalist. I can’t do Real Time. It’ll give me ulcers. It’ll make me nuts.”
“You’re not; you won’t be. Like we said, you’ll take over NARCS with Phoebe and Paul, and I’ll do Real Time.”
“No, George. What about my Jesse Jackson documentary? What about the NARAL hoedown this summer? What happens if I work in the Gore administration?”
“The Gore administration?” Good luck, he thinks. “He’s promised you a job if he wins?”
“No. Hypothetically. But I can’t put my deepest convictions in a blind trust for the sake of some stupid journalism rule. If it’s journalism versus loyalty and friendship, loyalty wins. I can’t split the difference. Some kind of fake, arm’s-length relationship won’t cut it.”
George considers making a joke about fake arm’s length and cut it, pretending to take offense. But if she’s going to go earnest, he’ll go earnest too.
“So what do you mean? You take NARCS and I get Real Time? I’d call that an asset parity problem, Em.” When they negotiated their deal to create Well-Armed Productions two years ago, her lawyer repeatedly used the phrase “asset parity problem” as a euphemism for the fact that George had never produced an entertainment show and Emily had. What George means now is that NARCS is a hit that might pump out millions of dollars for years to come; Real Time is a kooky idea for a show that doesn’t exist yet.
“You produce and own Real Time—your dream show. I produce and own NARCS. We’re both locked forever into passive creator participation on each other’s shows. Financially, contractually, everything is still fifty-fifty.”
George finds it interesting how loquacious Emily has become now that she is breaking up with him and making complicated financial stipulations.
“So we raise the two children separately,” he says, “with visitation rights.”
Emily, who is unmarried and childless, doesn’t reply.
“Who would I get to do all the business stuff, Emily?”
“Any of a thousand people.”
“What about the projects in development?”
“The Odds is mine; the other two are yours.”
George wonders if she already has The Odds set up at a studio or a network. “You know we can’t move NARCS out to Burbank,” he says. “The network won’t let us. We’re half the reason for the soundstage on Fifty-seventh Street. Not to mention Angela and Lucas and—”
“I’ll move. I’ve got a bid in on a condo on West Sixty-fourth, by the Park.”
Decisions have been made. Plans are afoot. George has been clueless. “So I’m supposed to accept this as a fait accompli? Christ, Emily! You’ve probably cleared this with Featherstone already, too.”
She pauses. “Not really.”
“What the fuck does ‘not really’ mean?”
“It means he and Saddler called me yesterday after Lucas called him about your fight—”
“Hank Saddler? It was not a ‘fight.’ ”
“Timothy called to ask about NARCS. But I told him you and I talked about my coming back here to help run things for a while. And he said that sounded like a pretty sensible interim plan.”
George is accustomed to being the aggressively calm and reasonable combatant, letting the other person flail.
“Featherstone called it ‘a pretty sensible interim plan’? What, did Saddler use ventriloquism on him?”
“Timothy said, quote, ‘Himalaya, that is a genius short-term fix.’ Unquote. It doesn’t matter what he said, George. This isn’t a squeeze play against you. We’ve got two shows. I can’t be associated with one. Let’s solve the problem. I’m the liberal activist scumbag Stengel and company are using to attack Real Time. Right? So dump me! We’ll say we made a tough choice, did the right thing, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.”
“You can’t be ‘associated’ with Real Time, but you’re willing to take the money.”
“I’d be happy to give you all the dough from Real Time and keep everything … what you want, George. As a matter of fact, I … given Mose’s … thrilled, although the budget looks closer to one-point-seven. But either we share cash flow, or we don’t. And worst case, you … better for the budget if I’m off your P and L …, to remember, George. It really isn’t you—it’s me.”
“You’re breaking up, Emily. You’re all static-y.”
“… ville Canyon. I’m coming out now. Better?”
“Mmm.”
Neither says a thing for many seconds. Finally George, stumbling provisionally toward a no-fault concession speech, says, “Well, shit. This sucks, Emily, this really sucks.”
She says nothing.
“So I suppose you’ve already got lawyers drafting this?”
She says nothing, but George hears a kind of muffled keening.
“Emily? Are you crying? Emily?”
He still hears the electronic whine, which is just noise, not signal. The connection is lost.
He hangs up and joins Lizzie outside. He tells her Emily wants to dissolve the partnership.
“Welcome to the club,” she says.
“Bruce isn’t your partner.”
They talk it through. After George says he half expected it to happen, he wonders if he really did.
“It’s going to mean a fuck of a lot more work for me,” he says. “Alone.” George is still standing. “Did you talk to your dad today?”
“To Tammy. He was asleep. Oh my God! Guess what?”
He shakes his head.
“Tammy,” she says, “told me that Buddy is dating Emily.”
“Emily? Emily Emily? She dumped Michael?”
Lizzie nods enthusiastically. “Tammy thinks there’s an Alan Alda or Tony Roberts movie with exactly this plot. It’s amazing, isn’t it?”
“I guess she’s jettisoning everyone.”
Neither of them speaks for a while.
“Are we done talking about Emily?” Lizzie asks. “Because you know, the thing I still just can’t figure out about Microsoft is how they knew about me and Buster Grinspoon. If Bruce is right, and I’m sure he is, about their suddenly getting so hot for the company because they wanted Grinspoon’s patents. I remember now, at that meeting on Tuesday, how they really knew.” She doesn’t remember the deal memo she left in the backseat of her dial-car weeks ago, or the phone call her driver overheard.
“Who knows?” George says. “The grapevine.” In fact, he’s afraid he knows exactly. He believes he’s the vine—by mentioning Lizzie and Grinspoon’s research to Featherstone, who, George figures, mentioned it to one of his contacts at Microsoft. “There’s a message from Pollyanna for you, by the way. About some Vermont trip. You’re going climbing? When did you start climbing again?”
“Polly and I talked about it, yeah.”
He says nothing.
“I figured Memorial Day weekend when we go up to the house, we might spend Saturday in Vermont, climbing. Polly and I.”
He stops to muse, staring past Lizzie, who’s carefully grinding out the cigarette on a giant terra-cotta pot. Buddy and Emily, Lucas Winton and Iris, Stengel and the Post reporter, Shawna Cindy Switzer and Sandi Bemis … he sees them all over the country, all over the globe—Vermont, the Hollywood Hills, Las Vegas, Madison Avenue, MBC News, Fifty-nine, up in the Bombardier at fifty thousand feet—the enemies of George are all trading glances, grinning, allying, plotting. Not the enemies, maybe, but not the friends either—the Switzerlands, the Frances, the Jordans, the nonaligned nations, all the amiable quislings and collaborators-in-waiting. Harold Mose and Lizzie.
“Daddy is sleeping a lot, Tammy said, but the doctors told her his condition is still stable. He might get out of the ICU next week.”
George’s hazy, frightened little glimmer is stupid, he tells himself, baroque, some stress-related hallucination, paranoid delusion as hokey m
ontage. (Use it! Featherstone would say. Use it in the work!)
“How long have they been ‘dating’?” he says, emphasizing the sanitized word choice. “Emily and Buddy.”
George is sitting down now, on the ancient oak stump that has been used as a chair for decades, and before that as a chopping block for fowl. He hasn’t forgotten that he’s engaged in some sort of domestic cold war, but he has lost track of the real grievances, if there are real grievances, and is relieved that Lizzie seems to have moved past his “Page Six” quasi-infidelities.
“I guess he was a technical adviser on Mr. Dead.” Mr. Dead is Emily’s little supernatural teen comedy for Paramount about the avenging ghosts of dead mustangs. “They ran into each other again at the screening for the crew, and started fucking.”
Since it’s Buddy’s penis she’s talking about, the “fucking” stings a little. (For three years in the eighties George avoided seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger movies because his girlfriend at the time had slept with Arnold in the seventies.)
Turn of the Century Page 44
