Turn of the Century

by Kurt Andersen

  “Fifteen next month,” says Lizzie, rolling her eyes, “and believe me, I really wish she had something else she was this passionate about. I’m prepared to be completely embarrassed if this happens. Probably even disgusted. But it is an interesting project, isn’t it?”

  Zip stands and dings his glass. “Since everyone else here is too bloody cool to properly salute the beginning of the new millennium—”

  “Hey!” Ben Gould shouts, “enough with the two-thousandth-birthday crap, you anti-Semite. You’re making Zimbalist and me feel bad.”

  George looks at Lizzie smiling at Ben and wonders, in some theoretical microscopic sense: Did she ever sleep with him?

  Rehoisting his glass, Zip resumes, “A toast, then, Mr. Gould, to the conclusion of the fin de siècle—”

  “Rerun! Rerun!” Ben says.

  “Zip,” George agrees, “that is exactly the same thing you said, standing right there, a year ago tonight.”

  “All right, then,” Zip says, suddenly more pleased with himself than ever, “a toast: to this fin de sequel.” People groan. “May we all continue to have the strength to live in these interesting times.”

  Glasses are raised, cheers mumbled. George stands.

  “I have two toasts,” he says. “No, three.”

  “No need, George,” Emily Kalman says.

  “Don’t worry, Emily,” he replies, getting a laugh. “First, to Elizabeth Zimbalist, who allowed me this year to discover all by myself the differences between fact and fiction.” No one but Lizzie (and Warren) is quite sure what he means, but there is a sentimental hum of awwwwwws around the table, as there is for any modern husband’s sincere public display of uxoriousness. “And also to my brother-in-law, Cubby Koplowitz,” he says, “who showed me one afternoon last winter that it’s possible to construct a world in a room no bigger than this, a strange and perfect little world that doesn’t need to be test-marketed or sold. In a garage, in St. Paul, Minnesota. Thank you, Cubby.” No one but Lizzie and Cubby and Alice (who is choking up) has any idea at all what this means, but it sounds eloquent, so they smile and say cheers. “And to Ben Gould, for finally giving my brother-in-law the wherewithal to test-market and sell all of his other nutty, appalling ideas.”

  The teasing relaxes the room. Ben stands.

  “And to Zip Ingram,” George continues, “for providing me with a lovely padded cell on wheels, for a month this fall.”

  “Hey!” Ben says, “that’s four, toast hog. Sit down. Tonight, I want to salute all the weasels in the world”—as Lizzie’s eyes lock onto George’s, he shrugs—“to forgive them their trespasses against us. Because there but for the grace of God go I. And sometimes there go I.”

  Before the laughter subsides, Ben’s heartbreakingly gorgeous date stands. Turning to stare at her in her astonishing Versace dress, the men at the table lock their smiles from a second ago in order to disguise their plain pig yearning, every one of them, for Caroline Osborne.

  “I want to thank you all so much for letting me crash your dinner. And in particular, our hosts. George and Lizzie,” she says, smiling warmly, “at the risk of being … well, risky, let me say, as someone with long personal experience being both expensively provided for and rather brutally manhandled by the charming Mr. Harold Mose, I feel as though you and I have something very much in common. To George and Lizzie.”

  Racy metaphor? Literal fact? Too much champagne? In any event, the other guests now have something to discuss among themselves for the remainder of the millennium.

  51

  Just after midnight on New Year’s Eve, Max came running down to announce breathlessly that one of his twenty-three tickets in the MegaMillennium drawing was only a single digit away from the billion-dollar winning number that was drawn in Las Vegas on TV. Max was excited and pleased by his proximity to fortune, even though his luck won him absolutely nothing. “Close, and a cigar,” Zip Ingram said to him, stuffing a Carrington Robusto into Max’s shirt pocket. But the MegaMillennium moment, as a reminder of real life’s long-odds all-or-nothing disappointments, its black-or-white disparities, took some of the fizz out of the grownups’ mood.

  A day and a half later, Max is still looking at his almost-winning ticket, touching it, deciding how he’ll mount and frame it. George left with Sarah for the airport two hours ago to catch the nine-thirty flight to Mexico City (2001, he thought as he stepped into the Saarinen terminal at JFK), but he’s calling home from the plane just after takeoff.

  “I can see you!” George says excitedly as soon as Lizzie picks up. “We’re circling sort of low around the tip of the island, and I really think I can actually make out the house. I’m serious! I wish you guys had time to run up to the roof, and, what—”

  On the phone, Lizzie hears a popping noise, not loud to her but loud, it sounds like, on the plane.

  “George? What was that? George?” She hears a woman talking, loud and frantic, in the background.

  “Jesus, sweetie,” George says, his voice worried as it starts to dwindle into static, “we just dropped, I guess it was an air pocket, but—whoa, fuck! There’s another one. It’s all right, Sarah. Lizzie, I love you, you know I—”

  The connection is broken. On the plane, George hangs up the phone and holds his daughter’s hand, and remembers what Zip said to him as he was passing out in the helicopter flying over northern Nicaragua, thinking he was about to die: Can you still hear me, George, because you’re alive if you can hear me—hearing’s the last to go, after sight and taste and smell and touch …

  On the ground, inside her home, Lizzie hears nothing. She hears nothing. Does she want to look? Can she bear to watch? She puts the phone down and walks away quickly, LuLu at her heels.

  “What is it, Mommy? Where are you going?”

  “Daddy and Sarah’s plane.” She opens the front door. “I need to go see if I can see.”

  “Mommy? You know what?” LuLu says with absolute conviction as they step outside into the shocking January cold.

  “What?” Lizzie says, hurrying onto the cobblestones, looking up into the southern sky.

  “They’re not dying.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  KURT ANDERSEN writes for The New Yorker. He was co-founder and editor of Spy magazine, and editor in chief of New York magazine. At Time, he was a writer on crime and politics, and for eight years the magazine’s architecture and design critic. He has also created and produced several network television programs, and co-wrote Loose Lips, a satirical stage revue. Turn of the Century is his first novel. Andersen lives with his wife and daughters in New York City.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  David Remnick and Tina Brown, who gave me time off from my work for The New Yorker, were models of benevolence.

  Bruce Birenboim, Bob Brienza, Carolyn Meinel, Tom Phillips, and David Owen were unstinting with their advice, although the expertise and chance comments of many people (among them Andy Aaron, Katherine Andersen, Lucy Andersen, David Black, Tom Brokaw, Holly Brubach, Graydon Carter, Eric Ellenbogen, Bruce Feirstein, Kim France, Jeff Frank, Deb Futter, Rob Glaser, Bruce Handy, Lynn Hirschberg, Michael Hirschorn, Tibor Kalman, Peter Kaminsky, Michael Kinsley, Gerry Laybourne, Kit Laybourne, Guy Martin, Patty Marx, Susanna Moore, Susan Morrison, Susan Mulcahy, Patrick Naughton, Lawrence O’Donnell, George Rohr, Ilene Saul, Strat Sherman, Ozzie Stiffelman, and Kit White) helped make these fictions ring truer.

  Henry Finder, Beth Pearson, and Diana Donovan provided essential editorial guidance.

  Four friends—Jim Cramer, Leslee Dart, Joanne Gruber, and Paul Simms—shared their knowledge with a generosity that bordered on excess. And the faith and enthusiasm of Suzanne Gluck and Ann Godoff, from beginning to end, were simply indispensable.