Ben leaps to the bar and grabs the telephone out of the bartender’s hand, then jabs the three numbers.
Poor Riley Dugger, Ben thinks. He can’t stop the next thought: very bad news for Dugger Broadcasting shares, between no sale of the stations, probate hell (multiple wives, eight children), estate taxes, and no more Riley Dugger to run the thing. Nor can he stop the thought after that: very bad news for Mose Media Holdings and MBC, since their last chance to acquire the Dugger Broadcasting stations is disappearing in there on the floor. Lose, lose, lose.
He describes the emergency to the 911 dispatcher, gives the address, and rushes back to the bathroom. Dugger has one leg cocked back under his butt, his head in a puddle under the urinal. His yellow shirt is pulled up to his neck. His face is blue. His penis, big and also blue, hangs out of his pink trousers. Peter Sutherland is pumping on his bare, hairless chest.
“My car and driver are right outside,” Ben says.
“No,” Sutherland says between pumps, “the ambulance”—hlawwnh!—“is best”—hlawwnh, hlawwnh!—“you go out”—hlawwnh!—“wait for them”—hlawwnh, hlawwnh, hlawwnh, hlawwnh!
Ben walks back to the front. The bartender asks how Dugger’s doing. Ben shrugs. The waitress asks if he’s the actor John Goodman, and Ben shakes his head. She asks if it’s Brian Dennehy, and the bartender says no, it’s that Republican writer guy, William Bennett. He tells them both no, he’s just a businessman named Riley Dugger.
Life imitates jokes. How many dozens of times has Ben said that if a CEO ever keeled over in front of him and the market was open, he wouldn’t know whether to call 911 or his trading desk? He goes to the table, picks up the StarTac, and says quietly but firmly, “Dianne? I need Heffernan. We have to buy a bunch of puts before the close.”
35
Rafaela has fed the children. (“Why did Mr. Gribbins treat us so weird today when us and Rafaela ran into him?” Max asked Lizzie as she arrived home. Mr. Gribbins is his Science and Society teacher. Lizzie tensed and asked, “Weirdly how?” “Like we’re sick or disadvantaged or something. Like McKinley Saltzman when he got sent to live with his grandparents.” “Beats me,” she lied. “Ignore it.”) Lizzie stands looking at her face in the bedroom mirror now, putting on earrings, smelling her perfumed self. Her mother never went anywhere dressed up at night alone until after Mike divorced her.
Sarah sits on the bed, flipping through the new bimonthly Home Again catalogue, which Zip Ingram has turned into even more of a pseudo-magazine. In one portfolio of news photographs, individual articles of clothing on Tony Blair (a shirt) and Angela Janeway (shorts) and Chris Rock (a leather jacket) are circled and lettered and available to order. “Will you be home in time to see the show?” Sarah asks. Real Time premieres tonight at nine-thirty.
“I’m afraid I won’t.” Lizzie is off to an MBC dinner at Zero with Mose, Featherstone, Penn McNabb, and the men who run the other internet and software firms the company has bought. Spouses are invited. George will be at the studio until ten, even though only a few short bits of the show tonight or Thursday are live. He needs to watch with the staff. “Which is why you need to be sure to tape it for me.”
“Sir is. I mean Max. Is that Alexander McQueen?” she asks about her mother’s burgundy linen dress and jacket.
“No, it’s my old Mizrahi.”
Sarah shrugs and shakes her head vaguely.
“A vintage piece,” Lizzie says with a smile, giving herself a final once-over.
“Oh my God, look!” Sarah says from the bed. “It’s us.”
Lizzie steps over. Sarah has the Home Again catalogue open to a six-page spread. Two panoramic photographs, one on each side of the gate-fold, show an ersatz family split in half. On one side of the gatefold are two girls and their father at an Adirondacks lake house: the blond kindergartner is pretending to shoot her smiling male-model dad with a stick, and the dark teenage daughter is alone at a computer on a dock, teleconferencing with her mother, whose face fills the laptop screen. On the back side of the gatefold is the most desirable loft imaginable, with twenty-foot-high ceilings and views of the East River in TriBeCa, the Pike Place market in Seattle, and in the distance, the golden hills of Tuscany. In front of an open casement window (an interior courtyard with a large vegetable garden is visible behind her, and the Empire State Building beyond), the gorgeous, blond, breeze-cooled mother sits at a red Corbusier table looking at her daughter on an iMac See, the “video-optimized” machine with a “semipliable” screen that Apple says it will introduce in 2001. Her young son is in the kitchen, standing in front of a wood-burning pizza oven, playing some exotic cat’s-cradle game with a serenely smiling, expensively dressed young Mongolian or Inuit woman, perhaps the au pair, perhaps the artist—fashion designer who lives downstairs. Every inanimate thing in the picture is for sale through Home Again, including the homes. (“Actual views may differ,” the fine print warns.)
“It is us,” Lizzie says very evenly. Zip …
“Are you upset?”
She shakes her head.
“Oh! Oh! Urrahhh! Urrahhh!! Urrahhh!!!” The screams, the paroxysms, like someone having a seizure, are from downstairs. Somebody is ululating. “¡Díos mío! Urrrahhhhhhhh!” It’s Rafaela.
By the time Lizzie and Sarah make it to the ground floor, Rafaela has collected her things (a JAVA! baseball cap, the day’s discarded newspapers, a canvas New Yorker tote bag filled with meats cheaper than she can find in Queens), and she’s running, literally running, for the door.
“Rafaela,” Lizzie asks from the bottom step, “what is it? Are you all right? What’s the matter?”
She doesn’t answer, and leaves.
Back in the kitchen, LuLu and Max both stand motionless, stricken. LuLu starts sobbing, not the everyday selfish boo-hoos that Lizzie practically ignores, but a terrified, sorrowful, half-silent heaving that makes Lizzie feel like crying too.
“I didn’t mean to, Mommy, I didn’t,” LuLu says between breaths, then crumples to the terra-cotta floor, hiding her face, sobbing some more.
“We gave Rafaela a birthday present,” Max says.
“What?” Lizzie asks. “It’s Rafaela’s birthday? Why did that upset her?”
“It was the dolls,” LuLu says, shuddering and crying.
“She turned thirty today,” Sarah says.
“What in God’s name upset her?” Lizzie asks, crouching down to take LuLu in her arms. “It’s okay, sweetie, it’s all right.”
Sarah shrugs and shakes her head. Louisa, her cries more like squeaks now, buries herself deeper into the dark of Lizzie’s Mizrahi jacket.
Max explains. It was LuLu’s idea, but he helped. Rafaela had shown them a picture of her two children, and LuLu borrowed it to make a copy. Max and LuLu specified the correct skin tones (light brown for Fernando, olive for Jilma), hair and eyebrow colors (brown-black), hair length (ear length for Fernando and mid-back for Jilma) and style (bone straight), bangs style (slightly curled under for Jilma, none for Fernando), eyebrow shape (“other,” which Max carefully drew) and thickness (full), colors for eyelashes (black) and eyes (T30), Jilma’s pierced ears and the mole on Fernando’s right cheek. They put all their savings together, $299.75, and sent in their order to the My Twinn catalogue.
“They look perfect,” Max says, disappointed that a great idea went so badly awry.
In the back, near the door to the garden, are the two two-foot-high dolls, still in their packaging. Johnny is pawing and sniffing at the boy. Fernando wears blue jeans and a green Lacoste shirt, Jilma (according to her label) a Country Garden dress.
Lizzie doesn’t know what to say. LuLu’s crying is now more normal.
“They’re poseable,” Max says. “That was ten dollars extra apiece.”
She deputizes Sarah, finally settles LuLu and Max down in front of Ren & Stimpy (Nickelodeon is running Nick’s Nonstop Nostalgic Nineties Flashback), and says goodbye.
“Can one of you go to a special soccer parents’ meeti
ng on Thursday night?” Max asks blankly, staring at the TV. “Some parents want to hire a pro coach for us for the fall.”
“Your father’s second show is Thursday. I’ll try. Did you set the VCR for nine-thirty?”
“Yeah.” Max turns to look at her.
“Do you think Dad is ever going to get, you know, normal again?”
“Mommy said Daddy looks dead,” Louisa says, not taking her eyes off Ren & Stimpy.
“I said he looks ‘dead tired.’ I’ll see you both later.”
“Isn’t it sort of unfair to review the show before the full week’s been on? Like reviewing just the first act of a play?”
“Yeah,” George says to Lizzie. “I’ll file an objection with the fairness police.”
The children are excited and well behaved, like they’re at a restaurant. Both parents awake, both here, eating together, speaking. He still looks waxen and ill. But he brought a cup of tea to the breakfast table for her. Lizzie mentioned her work, and said that Fifty-nine is like Darth Vader’s Berchtesgaden designed by Michael Graves on a Crate & Barrel budget. He giggled. They had a gentle conversation with LuLu, in which they discussed the definition of crying and her claim that tears by themselves do not count. (She threw the My Twinns away, and when Rafaela discovered the dolls in the garbage she freaked out all over again, and LuLu teared up.) They had a conversation with Max about soccer. (They both disagree with the St. Andrew’s parents’ vote in favor of an Adidas endorsement deal to pay for a professional coach.) They had a conversation with Sarah about her trip to France in August and the journal she’s supposed to keep for her European Past class next fall. “They can’t call it European history?” George said. But no one minded. George the old grouch is preferable to absent George.
Now he is having a real conversation with her, about the show, the problems, the surprises, the reviews (no worse than expected), the overnights (not terrible), the high points and many low points of his first days on the air. The children aren’t interrupting or grabbing each other’s Eggos and bagel chunks.
“May I ask a question, Daddy?” Louisa says, a perfect old-fashioned daughter.
“Shoot.”
“Did Ben Gould stop that man from dying at the bar?”
Riley Dugger has survived, but he had a stroke as well as a heart attack. He will not be running his company for some time, if ever. Ben’s stock market bets against Dugger Broadcasting are very much in the money.
“He helped.”
“I have another question also.” “What, honey?” George says.
“What if they do let the murderer go free this afternoon?”
She’s talking about Charles Manson. On the Tuesday program they intercut real taped excerpts from Manson’s most recent parole hearing. In one four-second live scene, Cole Granger was shown standing among the members of the California Board of Prison Terms as they filed out of the hearing room. Because state officials would allow only a robot camera in the vestibule, however, George inserted Granger into the shot digitally, even though he was actually at the MBC studios in Burbank. The real magic of the technique (which Barry Stengel, the idiot, hadn’t even used at the funeral in Finale) is that it permits occlusion. Occlusion means that when Manson shuffled between the camera and the digital illusion of the live correspondent, Granger was realistically obscured for the instant he passed, and the camera could zoom in on the correspondent’s face apparently reacting (as Cole said as portentously and frequently as possible) to “California state prisoner number B-33920.” The shot looked completely real. It was astonishing. In his quotes in the Times yesterday morning (EXPERTS DEBATE “REMOTE PRESENCE” OF “NEWSMAN” AT MANSON HEARING), George pointed out that both the Tuesday and the Thursday shows, despite incorporating actual news clips, are repeatedly labeled as fiction at the beginning and end of the program and after every commercial break. On Tuesday, the announcer’s disclaimer was even more aggravatingly explicit: “Viewers should understand that the scene of Cole Granger with Charles Manson following the parole board hearing is a digital modification of a real event. Granger was not physically present in that hallway.” Until she read the Times story, Lizzie didn’t know that George had indeed used the same technique that got Barry Stengel fired. She hadn’t dared talk to him about it ahead of time, and there’s no point now.
“They’re not going to let Charles Manson out of jail, LuLu,” her mother says. “Not ever.”
“Is that true, Daddy?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Then why are they pretending to think about it?”
“Is that a rhetorical question, Louisa?”
“What’s that?”
“Your father’s joking, honey.” She turns to George. “So if Gordon is such a problem, fire him. You don’t have to work with him on NARCS anymore, so who cares? Get somebody who’s directed documentaries or something.”
“Is that the official Fifty-nine line?”
“Stop. (By the way, I’m working late tonight in some Asia strategy-planning session.) No, about Gordon, I just mean it’s like what I need to do with Penn McNabb. The one thing about this company is they don’t seem to second-guess you if you need to hire someone or get rid of someone. If you don’t think Gordon gets the show, and he isn’t going to get it, and he’s messing it up, then … lance the boil.”
She was a little duplicitous at breakfast, or at least incomplete. She said Randy, Doug, Hank Saddler, and almost everyone on Fifty-nine except Featherstone do seem like deacons in the Martian Church of Latter-day Satans. George smiled when she said that. They do have the brainpower of Boston College and the self-importance of Harvard. He smiled again. Fifty-nine is expensively dreary and too quiet, like Beverly Hills. She does hate being there most of the time. It is despicably political, she said after the kids left.
Lizzie has had five real jobs. At Procter & Gamble she was at the lowest executive rung. At the foundation and at News Corporation, she was still nowhere near the top. Virtual Fortress was too small and hippie-hackerish to have a meaningful top or bottom. At Fine Technologies she is the top. But at Mose Media Holdings she is, for the first time, very near a truly corporate apex. As one of six executive vice presidents and four presidents—eight different human beings—Lizzie realizes that her job is simple. Each of the other executives on Fifty-nine has two jobs: pleasing Harold, and also keeping the others from fatally badmouthing himself to Harold. She doesn’t need the salary (the ridiculous, $1.1 million base salary) anymore, since on paper she now has serious fuck-you money (fuck-Mose money, in the form of Mose common stock), so all she has to do is please Harold Mose. That is now her job. Reductionist but true. It reminds Lizzie of what her mother said the night in 1973, when she left with Mike to fly to Washington for Nixon’s second inaugural, despite her flagrant McGovernism. “Lizzie, when you’re older you’ll understand that any woman’s job, at the end of the day, is to please one man.” This is different. For one thing, Serene Zimbalist probably meant at the end of the day literally, and for another, Lizzie has the wherewithal to walk away anytime she wants. This is different.
What she didn’t tell George at breakfast is that a lot of the time she’s enjoying herself too. Is it possible to jerry-build a third-rate TV network together with some software and internet businesses, make a few shrewd alliances, and end up with a sustainable twenty-first-century … what? Entertainment platform? Information medium? Infotainment plat du jour, medium well? Maybe or maybe not, but it’s her job to scope it out and say the magic words. One month into it, too soon to fail or feel frustrated (she knew coming in that Hank Saddler is a smarmy freak), Lizzie is having fun doing it. She’s being paid to think big. She’s a consultant who runs budgets, a strategist who can hire and fire, a general with troops. And the relief of being on a work release from the cage of her humid, high-strung, downtown clubhouse—
“Right there’s fine,” she tells her driver, “by that sign, THE MBC.”
—is like a sabbatical. For the first time in
years, she feels unburdened. “One piece of advice, honey-girl,” her father told her when she was starting Fine Technologies. “The downside of being your own boss and running your own show is being your own goddamn boss and running your own fucking show. The great thing about a studio gig is it’s twice as much money and half as much work as real work.” She is not Mose New Media. It’s a studio gig. She is no longer personally signing a $200,000 biweekly payroll check, or mothering eighty-four people who are under the impression that they’re in graduate school or a commune. What Lizzie did not mention to George is that while she loathes Fifty-nine qua Fifty-nine, she is happiest on the days, once or twice a week, when Harold Mose is in the office.
“It’s very simple,” Mose is saying to her and her fellow senior executives, and the COO, Arnold Vlig, in the conference room on Fifty-nine. Arnold Vlig, with his tired animal eyes and lips like an optical illusion (squinted at from one angle he’s grimacing, from another always grinning, troll-like), is at Mose’s right. But a foot or so back from the table, as if to suggest a Rasputinesque puppeteer’s power. Timothy Featherstone must be in Burbank. “At the end of the day,” Mose says, “each and every one of you has only one job.” He pauses. “What is that job?”
“Customer service?” Doug says.
“No. Your job is making me happy.”
They all snigger. Lizzie’s comes with a little gasp. She thinks of Buster Grinspoon’s mental modem. She doesn’t believe in ESP, but in some obscure way she thinks serendipity is not always coincidental. When she was younger, Lizzie used the word synchronicity a lot.
“You laugh. But it is precisely the case. And I have only one job. To make the stock market happy. The Market, capital M, is my only real boss. Pleasing him, or her,” he adds, smiling at Lizzie, “is my job. Full stop. End of story.”
They all smile.
“A question. Let’s imagine our stock price is a dense little disk, sitting in the middle of the ice. It hasn’t moved anywhere lately. It’s just sitting there. How should we make it move in the right direction?”
Turn of the Century Page 56
