“What?” George says.
“Your appearance of impropriety. You improperly paid twenty-seven thousand dollars for a Las Vegas hotel suite for a woman whose … services you improperly sought to promote on MBC News.”
Plummeting once more, terrified all over again, trapdoors within trapdoors, vicious new g-forces at each depth.
“She was Featherstone’s girlfriend! This is such bullshit, do you know that? I find it very hard to believe that Harold Mose is aware of what you’re trying to pull here.”
Snyder picks up a remote control.
“In fact, George,” Vlig says, “you’re right; Harold is not aware of most of these details. He accepted Laura’s decision to cancel Real Time, of course. But these other matters are between us. As I expect you’ll wish them to remain.”
Snyder punches a button. To George’s left, a monitor in the wall flashes on with the vertical rainbow and electronic monotone whistle—bars and tone, the five or fifteen seconds at the top of every tape in television. Beneath the bars it says e!2 mar6 2000. The picture appears, mid-pan, with ambient crowd chatter. It’s a party scene, handheld but professionally shot. Find a pair of young blond women in ball gowns limbo-ing, cut to Bucky Lopez shaking hands with a busboy. It’s Ben Gould’s BarbieWorld after-party in Las Vegas. Cut to William Shatner standing with the magician Penn Jillette. Cut to a close-up of a giggling young woman with brown pigtails leaning forward on a white leather couch, pull back to reveal a disheveled, middle-aged man grinning stupidly as the pigtailed giggler inserts his whole arm down into her low-cut top, between her breasts.
Snyder pushes the freeze-frame button. “In April,” he says, “while you were still technically executive producer of NARCS, Shawna Switzer worked for three days as an extra on the show.”
George has his mouth clenched tight. He’s shaking his head.
“Frankly?” Vlig says. “It’s not any single one of these unfortunate incidents that disturbs us. It’s the overall pattern.”
Snyder punches his remote. The tape rolls. Cut to Penn Jillette doing chin-ups for a small audience on the balcony, cut to blank leader, cut to a very slow wide-angle panning shot of the side of a building, a column and a door from up high, in color but so fuzzy it looks almost black-and-white. No audio. It’s from a surveillance camera. Find two human figures on a sidewalk, their backs to the camera, just as the taller figure takes three long-jump strides toward the building, leaping at it, attacking it, leaving a barely visible mark on the wall about eight feet above the ground.
All falling objects are the same: they stop accelerating, and eventually they stop. He clings to his simple Newtonian faith, surrenders to it, waits for the bottom, knows there must be some final thud.
“There are more of those scenes,” Snyder says. “As you may recall.” He stops the tape. “This came from the Treasury Department, by the way. The Secret Service reviewed all of that night’s surveillance videos from the hotel, because of the candidate’s presence. We informed them that you do not, as far as we are concerned, represent any threat to any of their protectees. And you’ll be glad to know the monetary damages claimed by the Venetian are negligible, four figures.” He almost smiles.
Snyder has returned to his accordion file. Vlig sits and stares.
This must be the bottom, then.
George thinks of the villain’s ritual speech halfway through the third act of James Bond movies: Before I kill you, Mr. Bond, you must take a tour of my installation as I explain every detail of my mad scheme. He thinks of what Lizzie says: All clichés turn out to be true.
Saddler opens the door, sticks his smiling face in. “Do we have closure?”
No one replies. George stands, and turns to retrieve his briefcase. His Journal and Post have slid out of the side pocket.
“Well,” Saddler says, “just promise you’ll think about the Judge Bork show. We see it as a very prestigious-type program.”
George, looking down at the counter, stuffing the newspapers back in one-handed, has his back to Saddler. “A signal-to-noise ratio that’s too high,” he said. “Lance the boil,” Vlig said.
“Also,” Saddler says, “tiny, tiny FYI? We would be grateful if you would take Mr. Milken’s calls. But in any event, George—and I know this reflects Harold’s feelings as well—just keep on being a neat guy.”
George is holding his briefcase, but he’s still looking down. He’s staring at a white curling brush wedged back between the edge of the wooden counter and the window. A NEW 59 FOR A NEW CENTURY it says in red on the white handle, and E. ZIMBALIST, TEAM 59.
This is the bottom. This is the thud.
He leaves, and on the way out, he spots Laura Welles in the instant before she ducks into an office, practically leaping away, out of sight.
At least Vlig’s lawyer didn’t pull out a copy of the St. Andrew’s Science and Society indoor-pollution study, the smoke-speck-per-billion evidence from his bedroom.
But maybe they do have it. Maybe they’re keeping that secret. If that became public, it would incriminate Lizzie as well. And Lizzie is a member of Team Fifty-nine.
Daisy is busy as George wafts past her desk toward his door. “Good news,” she says, bent down, holding a plug into the back of the printer as it prints, “I think it’s good news: we’re on hiatus this week.” Daisy sits up, but George is already hovering in his office near the window overlooking the park, disintegrating into a blackish mist that will momentarily disappear up into the HVAC vents. “Laura Welles’s office called,” she says, raising her voice.”Tomorrow through Friday in our slot they’re running an encore presentation of a miniseries called Roots 2063. So I guess we have an extra week to do the next shows.
“Does ‘encore presentation’ mean rerun?” Daisy says as she steps into his office. “Crikey, George, what spooked you?”
She went to sleep after a call from Hank Saddler, and she was awakened around six San Francisco time by another call from Hank Saddler. She assumed he was phoning again about Timothy Featherstone. But no, this morning he has good news to deliver—the most recent Media Perception Index results for Harold, the MBC, and Mose Media Holdings are all “trending very positive.” Buying the internet companies and Fine Technologies, and hiring Lizzie, he tells her, have already increased the instances of “shrewd-slash-savvy” and “bold-slash-visionary” by half. “And we’re getting a few pops on both the ‘stabilizing-slash-proactive’ and ‘enlightened-slash-progressive’ axes,” he says, “which we’ve never had. If the stock price follows, Lizzie, you’ll pay for yourself in no time!” She can’t get back to sleep, so she checks her messages at both offices, and her e-mail. And the stock price, which she finds she can’t resist doing anytime she checks her e-mail, since every point up or down is equivalent to $500,000 of her personal wealth. Paper wealth, she reminds herself at each peek, paper pretax wealth, which isn’t hers even on paper until the deal closes. The Dow had been down 44 points in the first ten minutes of trading, but ticker symbol ME, Mose Media Holdings, opened up 1¾. The six-month graph of the stock price still looks uncannily like an Etch-A-Sketch tracing of America’s southern border, ending as of this morning east of Panama City and Destin, where the Gulf cuts north toward Tallahassee. Maybe Saddler’s Media Perception Index does work, she thinks. A million dollars richer (on paper, pretax), she lets the room service boy bring in her grapefruit and currant-studded Irish oatmeal. “Are you enjoying your stay at Coppola Square?” he asks. So far, she has been asleep for eight of her nine-hours stay. “Yes,” she answers.
No one who should call does call. Not Mose, not Saddler, not George. She is walking out the door, headed for her nine o’clock with Penn McNabb in Milpitas, when the phone rings. It is a reporter named Jack something from Variety, an apparently young man who seems to be both channeling Walter Winchell and faking Walter Winchell’s idea of an Ivy League vocabulary.
“Sorry, I’ve got to go.”
“So you’re hypothesizing it was more creative diffs w
ith the big boys than it was just a cost-benefit Ax City kind of decision?”
“Since until two minutes ago I didn’t know about this, I have no idea what the reasons are,” she says. “I didn’t even know it was canceled. I’ve got to go.”
“Ms. Zimbalist, off the record, when the rubber meets the road on the Fifty-ninth Floor, has Harold Mose just bitten off a chewier chunk of metanews nouvelle cuisine than he can eat? And when the suits squeezed, he had no choice but to go FIFO on Real Time because it was a downside twofer—pricey and provocative?”
“Listen, I love my husband’s show. I think it’s brilliant. But I’ve only worked for MBC for a few weeks. I am not a television programmer. What those guys think an audience will or won’t like is not necessarily what I like or don’t like. I’ve got to go, I need to make some calls and I’m late for a meeting, okay?”
“So you’re positing a kind of execu-lady difference, feminism as regards mass and niche on the tube, is that it?”
She hangs up.
Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, shit. She feels horrible for George. Feeling someone else’s pain has become a cheap joke, thanks to the president (like so much else), but Lizzie’s heart aches. She knows how it feels to fail quickly and spectacularly (Murdoch online), and she knows how much of himself he has poured into this show. Oh, George.
She calls George at work, but there’s no answer, and there’s no answer on his portable or at home either.
She’s crying.
She knows the real torture for him will be the pity. The calls and chance encounters brimming with kindly, soothing, there-there strokes for the poor, poor victim.
And her. His rage will curdle and harden, become a tumor of hatred. He won’t believe she’s known nothing about this. She will be a collaborator. She will be his enemy. (And maybe she is to blame: she never told him not to use the digital video-insert trick, because she couldn’t bear that conversation.) He will construe her as a beneficiary of his misfortune, she knows, the Krupp factory manager exceeding production quotas thanks to the slave labor, a Swiss banker shrugging off the vaultful of unclaimed ingots. Then she remembers the stock price: the reason it’s moving up this morning is because the show was canceled. Even if that isn’t true, he’ll be convinced it is. Should she go back home, display her tears, testify to her vicarious agony, hold him, explain? But if she cancels the trip, he will feel monumentally pitied. It may be best that she disappear for these couple of weeks, a stretch of pain that might prevent some deeper, longer, crippling set of wounds. If she’s out of his way, he can seethe and rail alone, without her trotting off to Fifty-seventh Street every morning, swearing her innocence and pitying him every night.
She phones him again, and still gets no answer anywhere. She calls Mose in Sun Valley, and leaves a message. She doesn’t know what else to do, and she needs to get going. It would be bad form to arrive late to fire her investment banker’s brother from the company he started.
The meeting with the staff lasts an hour. Some of them cry. Afterward, he takes fourteen of them to lunch. After lunch, he returns six calls from newspaper and magazine reporters and tries hard to sound sane and blithe. He has never before, as either journalist or subject, engaged in such a recondite discussion of ground rules as he does with the reporter from Variety, spending five full minutes specifying and negotiating the meanings of “not for attribution,” “off the record,” “background” and “deep background.” To all the reporters, on the record, he says only, “This is the business we have chosen” and “It’s just television,” but on background he encourages them to check out the network’s plans for a New Age cable channel. (He considers saying that the New Age channel was his and Emily Kalman’s idea that the network swiped, but decides it would muddy the issue and might strike the reporters as deranged.) Two of the reporters ask whether there is any connection between the cancellation of Real Time and Featherstone’s suicide, and to each he pauses meaningfully and says, “Off the record? I have no idea.” Three of them bring up Lizzie. George says, for the first time in his life, “I have no comment,” after first extracting from each of them a promise not to quote him saying “I have no comment.” He makes a few calls. He phones his lawyer. He phones Emily Kalman, who says she will put him in touch with her friend Bert Fields, the Hollywood lawyer. He phones Ben Gould. He phones Zip Ingram. And then he goes home.
On East Forty-second Street near the United Nations, as his car waits for the light, a yellow taxi bumps them lightly from behind. His driver, a young Russian or Eastern European, is out of his car and screaming, it seems to George, almost before the accident happened. And then the taxi accidentally bumps the parked Town Car again.
“You fucking stupidity Oriental!” his driver shouts. “You cock-fucking stupidity!”
Now the cabdriver, an older Asian man wearing boxer shorts and plastic flip-flops, is out on First Avenue as well.
“Dummy! You fucking stop for small! Fucking stop in roadway! Dummy! Dummy cunt!”
“I? I? No, you cock-fucking stupidity son of a bitch, Oriental, you criminal!”
“Arrest you! Arrest you! Dummy! Cunt!”
George gets out of the car. It isn’t rush hour yet. A taxi stops right away.
“Dad? Why are you home?” Max says from the landing as he comes up the stairs.
LuLu, hearing her brother, scampers out of the playroom, away from Rafaela, to the top landing.
“Daddy?” she yells down.
He tells them both what happened.
They think it’s a joke. They think it’s like when he claims he’s withdrawn them from school and they’re all moving to a houseboat in International Falls, Minnesota, where he’s going to become a professional bear hunter, or like when he says their mother is an alien from the Crab Nebula who abducted and hypnotized him in 1988. Once last year, he went a whole hour insisting that LuLu was a robot he’d bought from the Sharper Image catalogue.
“I’m really not kidding you. The men who run the company hated the show. They killed it.”
“How do you kill a TV show?” LuLu asks, smiling and wide-eyed.
But Max is finally persuaded he’s telling the truth.
“Can I still go to camp?”
“Of course.”
“Dad?” he asks.
“What is it?”
“Why didn’t Mom stop them from killing your show?”
“I guess she couldn’t,” George says.
38
Lizzie is right. Lizzie happens to have been right. It is better for him to be here alone awhile and think about what he’s going to do. She was heading off, and she just kept on going. Perfect. But he is glad. He didn’t want to have to recapitulate the details of the meeting with Vlig and the lawyer, the fraudulent hotel-suite charge sheets and the tapes. The tapes. The tapes. It’s always tapes nowadays, isn’t it? He could explain to her about Sandi Bemis and the knife attack on the Venetian and even his arm tucked for a few minutes between Shawna Cindy Switzer’s breasts. But he could not bear to put himself on the defensive, not on Monday and not now. He does not want to have to make the weenie denials and self-deprecating explanations of his Las Vegas behavior. And if she were here, her own denials and explanations—she had no idea, she was out of the loop—would kill him, and make him want to kill her. “It isn’t you,” she said on the phone from San Francisco, “it’s not your fault, and it’s not my fault either, it’s just fucking television,” which reminded him of what all her old boyfriends must have heard her say, gently, wide-eyed, sincerely, as she tossed them over, It’s not you, it’s me. “I do think we need some space anyway,” she also said. Some space. He deliberately didn’t ridicule her phrase, some space, didn’t even snort, and he was glad he didn’t, since his stone-sober silence made her apologize preemptively for using it, forced her to fill the silence with a real apology, an embarrassed apology piled onto her steamy heap of automatic, blameless apology, all that merciless pity. Some emotions can make their way down a copper wire inta
ct, but even when it’s sincere, apology turns inert and anodyne over the phone. And the apologizer, if she’s really listening, can’t help but hear it too, her words transmuted to crap in the nanosecond between mouthpiece and earphone. She started apologizing harder but to no effect, powerless to make the sorrys and awfuls sound genuine no matter how she stretched and sweetened her voice. He could hear her frustration. He enjoyed it. “It’s not even two weeks,” she finally said. “And then we’ll sit down and deal with everything.”
He is putting on a good show of Dad buoyancy for the children, whose pity makes him sad (for them) rather than angry (at her). But they’ll be gone soon—Max and LuLu to camp on Saturday, Sarah to Provence with the Williamsons on Sunday—and he’ll be able to relax. On Sunday he can stop smiling. He can walk around naked and unwashed, figuratively, and do nothing, literally. What George really wants to do is nothing. Although he’s decided he will go to L.A. for a couple of days, on Emily’s advice. “Take advantage of your moment in the trades,” she said. “You’re notorious.” There’s also a memorial service for Timothy Featherstone next Monday afternoon in L.A., at Mortons Restaurant.
Practically every phone call brings another twinge of pain, not salt rubbed into the wound but sodium chloride instilled in it with a surgical instrument, applied precisely to the bleeding nerve ends. A reporter from the Journal called yesterday looking for dirt on Mose Digital, for anything George knows about the rumors that the division would be spun off or sold to Microsoft. He evidently had no idea (and George didn’t tell him) that George Mactier, presumptively disgruntled former MBC executive producer, is married to the starry, splashy corporate up-and-comer Elizabeth Zimbalist, the new president of Mose Digital. “She’s a very sexy story,” the reporter said, meaning sexy, George believes, in the nonsexual sense.
Turn of the Century Page 60
