Turn of the Century

by Kurt Andersen

  George turns and watches Sarah and Max, who are outside with Fanny Taft and Bruce. Like most fourteen-year-old girls, Sarah radiates excitement and panic about being fourteen, that mixture of embarrassment and sly pride about her astounding bosom. Just before the party started, he overheard Max say to Lizzie upstairs, “I guess you’re more famous than Dad now.” Are even the children sliding out of his gravitational field? He watches Featherstone, bobbing and shaking his head along with a klezmer solo riff, approach them. He watches him smile and shake hands with Bruce and Fanny and Boogie Boffin, and kiss Sarah on the cheek. Thirty seconds later he sees Featherstone touching Boogie’s horn implants covetously. George wonders if he should ask Featherstone for a 7-percent-higher license fee for Real Time just before the first shows air, or right afterward?

  Grownups are allowed to give either cocktail parties for two hundred people that end by nine o’clock, or six-table sit-down dinner parties. But they aren’t allowed to do what Lizzie would prefer, which is a cocktail party for two hundred that lasts well past midnight, with enough passed canapés to qualify as dinner. What she would prefer, as George said back when they had conversations, is a college beer blast with very high production values and no vomiting. So the dinner is served buffet style (the very phrase makes Lizzie feel old), and forty-year-olds in suits are obliged to sit balancing plates of calamari and baby lettuces between their knees.

  Arranging the places at tables has a certain godlike thrill, like brokering blind dates wholesale, but Lizzie gets a deeper satisfaction from seeing people she knows freely converge and settle into semirandom dinner-partner subsets on their own. What on earth is Hank Saddler saying to Fanny and Daisy and two of the Germans? Are Pollyanna and Ben bored explaining themselves to that awful earnest Newsweek woman Sally, who came with Greg Dunn? Or are the two of them enjoying her does-not-compute look of contempt and bewilderment as she listens to an Ivy League woman of color defending big tobacco (Pollyanna: “The price of all our personal freedoms is a certain number of extra deaths”) and a liberal Democrat explaining his plan to retrofit neighborhoods in London and Paris and Venice as seamless in situ urban theme parks? (Ben: “We’re doing the opposite of ‘destroying’ the Left Bank, we’re restoring a trashy piece of it, making it more authentic”). She spots George downstairs when she tells the caterers to start serving dinner, intensely chatting away with Warren Holcombe, George looking as worried and pale as Warren. Timothy Featherstone and Zip Ingram are born to be pals, sitting cross-legged and deep in their own fop-to-fop, grifter-to-grifter symposium about certain tiny bottlings of “the really austere Mendocino cabs.”

  And Lizzie is on the floor with Bruce, sharing a corner of the low Corbu table. If she’d ordered him next to her with a place card, it would be like an exit interview with goat cheese and focaccia, her enforced fond farewell, but here they are chatting, as if spontaneously.

  “So your friends in Redmond made another pass at Buster this week. They offered to invest in Terraplane.”

  “And?” Lizzie says, finishing her fourth glass of champagne.

  Bruce looks at her, frowning elaborately, saying nothing. Which means: No, we are not selling out to Microsoft before we’ve even started—and I’m shocked, in a half-serious, brotherly way, that you’d think otherwise.

  “The day after he told them to fuck off, his office was ransacked, and a bunch of his files and tapes were stolen.”

  “He doesn’t think Microsoft burgled his office?”

  Bruce smiles. “He would like to think so. But unfortunately there were Animal Salvation League pamphlets strewn all over the place, and even Buster’s not quite paranoid enough to really believe that burglars from Microsoft would leave them as disinformation.”

  She is going to miss Bruce. “You met our intern from Minnesota?”

  “She’s a really smart kid. Scarily.”

  “Scary because she’s a juvenile delinquent?” She glances up at the waiter bending over her with Dom Perignon. “Yes, please.” People are drinking a lot, it seems to Lizzie. That’s because the party is on a Friday. That’s why the party is on a Friday.

  “No, scarily smart. I mean, she’s not just some wanky ‘warez dood’ teenybopper. She knows her stuff, that kid. You should hear about how she hacked a few of the places that the feds don’t know about. She made me promise I wouldn’t tell you, but ask her sometime about what she and her pals dug out of the Kennedy School server up at Harvard.” He smiles, shaking his head. “By the way, you know how George always used to make such a big deal over the fact that you and I have no memory of President Kennedy’s death?”

  Lizzie, unsmiling, blinks for a long moment and nods.

  “Well,” Bruce says, “Fanny claims she doesn’t remember when when Jackie Kennedy died.”

  “Room for one more?” Nancy McNabb says.

  Lizzie scoots over, and Nancy pulls up an ottoman. Lizzie has watched Nancy at dinners, staring in apparent fascination at people (influential business people, so nearly always men) making the most banal statements in the most tedious possible ways. And at a black-tie diabetes fund-raising dinner, she watched Nancy stand up and leave the table just as the doctor sitting between them started to explain to Nancy why his possible breakthrough cure did not have, as she had put it, “any significant private-sector upside.” She was the one, however, who introduced Lizzie to George at Ben’s loft party twelve years ago, and she was the one who found them Margaret, the godsend baby-sitter Lizzie employed for nine years, and it was at her (and Roger’s) dinner party in 1997 that George had met Emily and started talking about NARCS. Those favors excuse everything else about Nancy.

  “Nancy McNabb, Bruce Helms. Bruce is the brains behind Fine Technologies.”

  Nancy shows tentative interest.

  “Was, I mean,” Lizzie says. “He’s starting his own company.” Nancy turns instantly to Bruce.

  “Yes?” she says. “Are you? Software? Or the net? Who’s VC-ing you? Tell me, tell me, tell me.”

  “We’re self-financing,” Bruce tells her, “and it’s really just basic research for now. For quite a while, probably.”

  “Ah,” Nancy says, finished with Bruce, turning back to Lizzie. “When are we going to do our transaction? The market is feeling very, very ripe to me again. Exceptionally ripe. Late-1998 ripe. By the way, that is gorgeous, Elizabeth. Badgley Mischka?”

  Lizzie nods. Nancy knows everything and, for all practical purposes, everyone. She runs the media and technology practice for the investment bank Cordman, Horton, which as nearly as Lizzie can tell calls itself a “merchant bank” purely as an affectation. Nancy wants Cordman, Horton to take Fine Technologies public. A year ago, just before the internet IPO market had its ugly spell, Cordman, Horton took her brother Penn’s TK Corporation public for $230 million (“a valuation equal to approximately infinity times earnings,” Lizzie likes saying), and they’ve just finished negotiating the sale of TK Corp. to Mose Media Holdings for $327 million. (“I see Penn McNabb’s P—E is up to one-point-four infinity,” she thought of saying to George this week, and said to Bruce instead.)

  “At least let me take you to lunch, all right? It’ll do you good to get up north of Fourteenth Street.”

  Lizzie knows that the riposte But, Nancy, my offices are on Eighteenth Street isn’t worth making. “Sure,” she says. “Although we’re insanely busy right now.”

  “Your utensils and beverage, Nan,” says Roger Baird—Jolly Roger. He’s not trying to be funny. Nancy takes the napkin-and-silverware roll from Roger without looking up, and he sets the glass down by her plate.

  “It’s just club soda,” he says, meaning that the bartender had no name-brand mineral waters. “Tap water avec gaz.” Now he’s trying to be funny.

  “I saw the thing in the Observer about the TriBeCa show, Roger,” Lizzie says. “Congratulations.” Roger looks like a commercial banker, or an old-fashioned gentleman publisher, but his business (which involves reselling parcels of telephone bandwidth
) is not his passion—his passion is “outsider art,” of which he is a major collector. He and Nancy specialize in sculpture and collages created by noninstitutionalized early- and mid-twentieth-century paranoid schizophrenics. Their privately printed catalogue raisonée, which Roger wrote himself, consists mainly of quotations from Antonin Artaud. He is sweetly ridiculous, like so many men married to tough, professional women in New York, the Charlie Browns to their Lucys, the Macbeths to their Lady Macbeths.

  “We just want the work seen,” Roger says, and then reminds his wife, “Cameron wanted you to call before bedtime, Nan. Since you’ll be on your way to London when she wakes up.” Cameron is their younger child. Lizzie can never remember if it’s a boy or a girl. Nancy takes the phone from Roger and punches the green button, since he has predialed their home number. That is, he has dialed the number for their live-in baby-sitter, Beth, famous Beth, who not only is white, but also graduated from Barnard and whom everyone in Nancy’s circle calls, with envy and awe, “Nancy’s Jewish nanny.” As she tucks in her daughter by remote control, Nancy holds the itty-bitty Motorola a couple of inches away from her ear, not because she worries about brain cancer (as Bruce imagines) but (as Lizzie and Roger know) to keep her hair perfect. Nancy once told Lizzie that she buys a new phone every four months “just on principle.” “What principle?” Lizzie asked. “Bestness,” Nancy said in all seriousness.

  Downstairs, George says to Ben, “This is all a joke, isn’t it? You just got off so much on horrifying Sally Chatham about the Euro Quarter projects that now you’re just riffing, right? By making fun of my sister’s pathetic husband.” The two of them are sitting scrunched together on the old backyard stump. Between his legs, George has a lit votive candle—one of the gross of them Lizzie bought for the party. He’s staring at it and dipping his pinky finger into the molten wax. Three of the four musicians are taking a break, but the pianist is playing a minor-key arrangement of “How High the Moon.”

  “No, I think we might actually make something happen.”

  George looks up from the candle. “You are going to finance his idiotic cemetery theme parks? With the video gravestones? Ben.”

  “They’d be regulatory and operational nightmares, but the idea isn’t stupid. But no, your brother-in-law and I have been working on something else. An amazing idea.”

  “It’s not the organic sequins and recycled yarn thing? Eco-Krafts?”

  “No. This is big. This is a whole new industry. Ten-figure revenues in ten years.”

  “So?”

  “Totally off the record, George?” “Fuck you.”

  Ben tells him about the Guild, and the plans to install special-effects packages in five thousand churches and temples and mosques by 2005 at a median price of $300,000, literal smoke and mirrors and sub-woofers and lasers, all computer controlled, to make the glory of Jesus (or Jehovah or Allah or Ron Hubbard or … whomever) more palpable to the believers.

  “And on his own,” Ben is saying, “Cubby’s already trademarked ‘Unbelievably Believable!’ ‘Too Good to Be Untrue,’ ‘Making Every Church a Cathedral,’ and ‘Push-Button Miracles for the New Millennium.’ The guy is some kind of weird genius.”

  Now George is pushing his little finger to within millimeters of the flame itself. Ben’s explanation, excited as ever, is making George gloomy and apprehensive. (Gloomier and more apprehensive.) Not because it debases and degrades faith and ritual. Who cares? Not because he’s envious of Cubby Koplowitz getting rich or Ben getting richer. Who cares? George isn’t sure why it’s depressing him. It’s depressing him because it feeds this tumor of dread, his sense that beyond the cone of candlelight, inside, upstairs, on Fifty-nine, out in the Valley, everywhere just beyond view, outside his control, alliances and loyalties are shifting by means of whispers and nods, all shifting in a direction unfavorable to George Mactier.

  He is slowly shaking his head.

  “But, you know,” Ben says, “maybe recordings of humpback whales and Martian winds, all synched up with lighting effects. Tasteful. More abstract.”

  “Unitarians really aren’t into spectacle, I don’t think,” George says. “They’re like Baptists and Moslems. Atheistic Baptists and Moslems.”

  “And ‘theotainment’ and ‘sacredtainment,’ ” Ben asks him, “those both suck, don’t they? I mean, let the journalists invent the stupid catchphrases on their own. Right?”

  “I guess.” George is staring blankly, past animated clusters of party guests, through the glass doors, into the kitchen filled with waiters and drinkers. He sees the most officious of the caterers suddenly leave her mates, head down the hall toward the front door and out of sight, then after a few seconds he sees Harold Mose, in a dinner jacket, accompanied by Gloria, stepping smartly into his house before they make the zigzag toward the stairs and disappear again. Harold has come. As George stands, he thinks of the LuLu question (Is that a good thing, Daddy, or a bad thing?) and rubs his waxy fingers on the tree stump before heading inside. As he makes the landing and sees the fringes of the crowd, he notices the pseudo-casual fuss being made over Mose, like iron filings moving in slow motion toward a magnet. He arrives in his living room just in time to see Harold retract from kissing Lizzie and hold both her hands at a distance, scrutinizing her for a moment like a superb new Milanese highboy.

  Kissing Gloria Mose, George grazes his eye on the corner of her dark glasses as he swings over and heads in for the second cheek.

  “We’ve just come from supper at Zero. You’re so right. Brilliant place.”

  Every time he encounters Gloria, George feels clueless. “We haven’t been to Zero,” he says, willing himself to smile.

  “Ah. It’s Harold’s new favorite, and he says Elizabeth introduced him to it. So I assumed.”

  Struggling to maintain the smile, a smile that feels phonier than any he has ever faked, literally like a Halloween mask, George says, “I understand that your daughter took a job at Miramax.” What is her name? Has he been too addled even to remember the name of the girl he wanted (theoretically) to fuck and wouldn’t consider hiring? “That’s great. She actually—Caroline seemed more interested in making movies than American television, anyway.” “American television”—George, you miserable panderer.

  “She’s working for their publishing bit, actually.”

  A waiter and Nancy McNabb arrive simultaneously, both eager to please a Mose, any Mose, and interrupting George and Gloria’s conversation about a restaurant he’s never been to and her daughter he didn’t hire. He uses the moment to move two furtive steps to his left, but by the time he’s there, Lizzie, jaunty Lizzie, is moving Harold away into the crowd, off to meet someone new. George is left literally in the lurch. And then he stands in his lurch, giving a quick nod and a smiled “Hello” toward the halogen torchère in the back corner of the room, in case anyone is watching.

  Happy-looking nightmares are even scarier, George finds himself thinking, startling himself; he regrets having drunk so much, and then remembers that he’s had nothing but plain soda all night. It’s Lizzie who’s been drinking like a flapper. Drinking like a flapper is a phrase that hasn’t occurred to him for decades; it’s something his mother learned from her mother, he recalls dimly, and used to say about his Aunt Nora (that is, “Perry’s divorced sister Nora”) and about his father’s blond strumpet secretary.

  Outside, it’s gotten chilly, and some of the votives have burned out. The quartet is playing again (a Raymond Scott medley, its kooky wah-wah 1939 gaiety not so much leavening George’s mood as tickling it, mocking it), and George is smoking somebody’s cigarette, his first in years, down here in the courtyard with all the odd people out, the people with no interest in discussing the new think tank Steven Rattner’s funding and whether he’ll hire Clinton, or the outrageous thing Howard Stringer said about PBS and the BBC, or the thirty-one-page pundits’ roundtable critique of pundit-on-pundit punditry that appeared in the final issue of Brill’s Content.

  The discussi
on group huddled on the gravel in the corner by the pink Victorian playhouse, quiet but for the occasional gasp of antic laughter, consists of the cool-cat geeks, the computer youth—Fanny, her new German programmer pals, and Bruce, with Max and Sarah standing nearby as unaccredited observers. Next to them, splayed in Smith & Hawken teak chairs, are Ben Gould and Hank Saddler drinking port. Each is trying to worm information out of the other—Ben about Mose Media Holdings’ “internet acquisition spree” (as the business reporters are calling it), Saddler about two Vancouver Stock Exchange companies he’s interested in short-selling. During their pseudo-gentlemanly Sandeman-sipping pauses, both men eavesdrop on the conversation going on next to them.

  “It’s not a virus,” Fanny is saying to Bruce and the Germans, “it’s a really nasty applet. With a nasty applet I could crash any machine with twenty lines of code.”

  “A friend at home,” says Willibald, the cutest and most stylishly sallow of the sallow German programmers, “says he was informed that the explosion of that big American telecom rocket at Baikonur in Russia? Was a hack that went bad.”

  “Globalstar,” says the other German, Humfried, who’s wearing a TELETUBBIES T-shirt. “The Globalstar Corporation,” he elaborates, pleased to repeat the company’s perfectly sinister name.

  “Or maybe a hack that went right,” Bruce says, getting into the late-night James Bond spirit. “Globalstar’s value went down, I don’t know, about half a billion dollars five minutes after those satellites blew up.”

  “So somebody who, like, hated the company did it?” Fanny asks.

  “Well, somebody who wanted the stock of the company to go down, maybe,” Bruce says.

  Before any of them can ask what he means, Max speaks. “Fanny,” he says, “what did you do, exactly? Why did they arrest you?”

  “Max!” his big sister says.

  “That’s cool,” Fanny says. She enjoys explaining her life in crime. Since her arrival in New York a week ago she has bewitched Willi and Humfried with her hacker creds. As far as they are concerned, working alongside a seventeen-year-old American political prisoner is a job perk. “Two girlfriends and I hacked a federal computer and had it send money to some women’s shelters that they’d, like, cut off from funding or whatever? I think they were going to let us go, but the day before they busted us for that, we jacked into the local newspaper system and posted a thing about our principal, saying that he, like, had sex with the star of Felicity but then killed himself—just as a joke? But then our thing ran in the paper the next day, and that really pissed everyone off. So then they decided to prosecute.”