Turn of the Century (14 page)

“You apparently had Harold slime the mayor to let you use the fucking NYPD as extras.
That
was interesting to find out about.”

“Stop it,” Max orders.

“Really,” adds Sarah.

“Fine,” says George. As he turns to fix his gaze out the side window: “You’re going eighty-five, you know.” Then, after a few pouty seconds, he says as if musing, “You can take the girl out of Harvard Business School …”

“Fuck
you
.”

“Greetings!” The Unitarian
minister, a husky, scrubbed, red-faced Minnesota woman with both palms open and raised toward the mourners, has never met George’s mother. “Greetings! Peace!” Smiling fiercely, head back, she takes a deep breath, field-mare nostrils aimed at her audience. “We gather today to celebrate a being of peace, a being who lived her life in a century of violence. Born the very day the War to End All Wars ended, Edith Hope Cranston Mactier represents, I think, for all of her friends and loved ones, something very special. She was, like her name, a creature brimming with hope.…”

George sighs, then swallows back a sob and wipes his right eye. At last! He’s not crying because his mother has died, exactly, but because his dead mother is being depicted generically, conveniently, a name scribbled into a fill-in-the-blanks, goodie-goodie Unitarian garble. “You know, George, the day you were born,” he remembers his mother saying to him on the phone on the day Max was born, “I didn’t even realize I was in labor. Not until the doctor came. I thought it was just, you know, a little hangover. From all the Manhattans we’d had the evening before.” He can’t remember if she told this story before or after she said, “
Max
. That’s a Jewish baby name, is it?”

George feels the electric tremble in his pants pocket. Mashing his hand against his pocket as if he’s taking a palmprint, he makes the phone stop vibrating.

Lizzie’s thoughts have already drifted away, away from her mother-in-law, away from the service, from the Twin Cities, from winter. How much attention does anyone pay in church? She is thinking about hydrangea and the Adirondacks. But the minister is suddenly shouting. “
Bless
the new millennium!
Bless
this year 2000! Bless the United Nations resolutions on Mexico! And,” she shouts, raising both arms, “
viva
Edith Hope Mactier! May she rest …” and here she pauses for a couple of seconds once again to pan the room meaningfully—“in
peace
.” Smiling, she balls her hands into fists and brings them together against her breasts, as if in prayer, or handcuffs.

Again the phone does its frantic wiggle in George’s pants. This time the vibration is different, slow ticks accelerating to rapid in repeating five-second cycles—the silent code Iris has programmed to signify urgency, and which she triggers at least once a day. Every couple of weeks, she really does have an important call to patch through.

A quartet—piano, Irish pennywhistle, bow-hammered dulcimer, and didgeridoo—begins performing “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing,” which was one of Edith Hope’s favorites.

“Iris is buzzing me,” George says to Lizzie, standing and pointing toward his crotch. “Let me go take it, and I’ll see you all downstairs in two minutes.”

As his family shuffles out of the pew and turns toward the back of the church, everyone eyeing them sympathetically, George darts in the opposite direction. A few people glance at his odd, hasty exit and have the Minnesotan thought:
Look, poor George doesn’t want us to see him crying, he’s gone back somewhere to compose himself
. Although the fundamental insight is almost correct—George despises pity of any kind—right now he’s simply trying to find a private place to take a phone call from New York. Circling behind the altar (or do Unitarians just call it the podium?), passing into the short hallway to the “new wing,” as he still thinks of it, George, now safely out of view, flips open his phone.

“Iris?”

No answer, but he hears her chatting with someone.

“Iris?”
Fuck
, Iris. Waiting, staring at the handcrafted yellow china light switch, which is marked
TURNED ON!
and
NOT TURNED ON YET!
In
painted purple letters, George realizes where he is: it’s the Rap Room. The Rap Room is where, in 1970 at age fourteen, he helped organize counseling sessions for prospective seventeen- and eighteen-year-old draft dodgers. It was also where, late one Friday night in 1971 after a Free University group discussion of Alan Watts, as he first cupped Jodie Eliason’s breast—the first time he got to second base with any girl—she whispered, unimaginably, “Pinch it, George.”

“George Mactier’s office.”

“It’s me. You called me. What is it, Iris?”

“George!”
For Iris, every long-distance call demands emotion, as if it were a special occasion, a surprise reunion. She is only a few years older than George, but she is wired like a woman of his mother’s generation, always overexcited and killingly sincere. And thus happy to be his secretary.

“I’m at my mom’s funeral. What is it?”

“Timothy Featherstone! Calling from Seattle!”

“Okay.”

Silence—the soft, random, hum-click-static ghost-voice pseudo-silence of modern telecommunications. George wonders, looking around, if this place is still a social center for Unitarian teenagers. (Or has the whole culture gone so Unitarian—so relativistic, so empathetic, so concerned about teen suicide and teen pregnancy—that the real thing has become moot?) There are three cots. And a wicker basket filled with dirty laundry. And—
no;
phone to his ear, he walks over to the slick cardboard dispenser on a counter;
yes
—condoms! The Unitarian Church provides a room for teenagers
to fuck
! His instant hybrid reaction, envy plus disapproval, surprises him, interests and disappoints him.

“Mac the Knife!”

“Hi, Timothy. What’s up?”

“Just a great big gabfest up here in Geekopolis. Very strange place, man. It’s like a bunch of writers and DPs and grips took over the world. Is your smarter half around?”

“Lizzie?”

“Yeah, Harold has something he wants to run past her. A question on some streaming bandwidth thingamajig. If she wouldn’t mind. Before Harold and Bill G. talk this afternoon.”

“No. No, she’s—she’s at the event, the reception. For my mother. Harold wants to speak to Lizzie?”

“Just a quick hey-ho, ninety seconds—before four our time, six yours. Probably easiest to have her call my Iridium number. Okay? Thanks, Mackinac.
Adiós
.”

Mose has never called George for a quick hey-ho. He evidently thinks he can use Lizzie as some kind of free computer consultant just because he happens to be in business with her husband. Presumptuous bastard.

George considers calling Emily. In case she’s had any second thoughts about
Real Time
, or about back-end ownership. He should be abreast of any fresh tremors in the deal force field before Lizzie calls Harold back and sends the energies rippling off along some new vector.

He’s about to dial, but there’s a voice coming from the phone.

“—and, Faith? After I talk to Barry, I want you to get me Ng at her studio.”

George holds his breath. It’s Featherstone, speaking to one of his Los Angeles secretaries. They’re still patched through to George’s phone.

“No, she isn’t,” Featherstone says to someone else in the room with him. “I told him to have her ring us back after the service.”

George is “him,” and Lizzie is “her”; Featherstone must be with Mose. Can anyone tell he’s listening? Does a switchboard diode in L.A. flash a warning? Will he leave some kind of Caller ID fingerprint? But he stays on, guilty and a little frightened by what he might hear and too thrilled not to listen, the mouthpiece now at his forehead. (He hasn’t planned to eavesdrop. It’s serendipity.) Featherstone’s next call is ringing through.

“Hello?”

“Gooseberry! It’s Timothy Featherstone.”

“We’re not really calling the show
Night of the Living Dead
, Timothy. I don’t know how the putz at the
Times
got that, but it was just an internal joke—”

George recognizes the voice of Barry Stengel, the president of MBC News.

“I know, I know,” Featherstone says, “and on Five-Nine we thought it was pretty funny.” (One morning last winter, after some B-list celebrity’s murder by her children’s nanny dominated news coverage for half a week, George cracked to Featherstone,
You ought to do a whole weekly
prime-time show—nothing but the deaths and funerals of famous people
. The obit series, which will also cover the illnesses and recoveries of celebrities, is now in preproduction, scheduled to go on the air next month.)

“Speaking of the obit show, Barry,” Featherstone says, “I think we may have figured out a way to get you all the staff you need for it. Shifting some heads around.”

“From where?” Stengel asks. “You know we don’t have bodies to spare in News. And we cannot use infotainment jokers on a real news program. Those banana-brains at
Freaky
, or from that game show—”

“One Heck of a Week.”

“Those people are not journalists. We’d be laughingstocks.”

“I’ll let you know. But Harold wants me to give you a heads-up right away about a show we’ve got going. It’s very edge-of-the-envelope. And we don’t want you to hear about it from some reporter.”

“I think I already have. Is this the fake news show George Mactier’s trying to sell you? Because if what I hear is true, then we’ve got a problem.”

Until this instant, George has felt, at worst, neutral toward Stengel, even inclined to like him. The pernicious fucker.

“Whoa! Hold on, Stingo.”

“I told the nigger he be sipping dialysis fluid,” shouts an old black woman coming through the glass door twenty feet from George to a young black woman following her. “But he say, ‘Hey! Cocktail’s a cocktail’!”

“Shiiiit!”
the younger woman screams happily.

The women spot George and freeze.

“Barry?” he hears Featherstone saying on the phone, “what the hell is—” George punches the power button.

“My mother died,” he says to the women, who stare at the one-handed white stranger in the blue Brioni suit holding a cellular phone.

“Well, this is the shelter, you know,” the old woman finally says to him. “The women’s shelter?”

“Ah,” George says. “I’m here for my mother’s funeral.”

“Uh-huh,” the woman says.

George forces an awkward, cheerless smile, pockets his phone, and starts to leave. He feels like a jerk.

“Condolences,” the younger woman says.

“Thanks,” George says, turning back for a moment, blushing. “Thank you.”

The old woman is not, in fact, old. Doreen Wiggins graduated in the class of 1975 from Henry Wallace High School, a year behind George.

“Would you like some sangria, Dad?”

George smiles at his son, who he realizes has never before worn a necktie. “Yes, I will have some sangria, Sir, thanks.” George takes the plastic Dixie cup, pleased and amused by the outburst of etiquette.

George always loved coming to this room as a child, the smell of varnish and candles and (he realizes now) mildew, the fussy oak paneling and Tiffany lamps. It was for George an oasis of northeasternism, where men in cardigans smoked pipes and pronounced aunt “ahnt” instead of “ant.” One Sunday morning here, when he was eleven, the Sunday school class was divided randomly into teams for a four-way debate in front of all the parents. His big sister, Alice, was on the Christian side, and George, as the Buddhist team’s leader, humiliated her over the issue of transubstantiation.

“Hi,” Lizzie says. “That took a long time. What was the problem?”

“It was Featherstone, from Redmond. Harold Mose wants you to call him.” He sips some sangria, and instantly spits it back into his plastic Dixie cup. “What
is
this shit?”

“
What?
Why did he call? You’re dribbling, George. Sugar-free Hawaiian Punch and St. John’s wort. Why does Harold want to talk to me?”

“I guess he wants some advice about computers.”
Maybe he wants you to fire his whole online staff personally.… Don’t
. “Whatever it is, you’re supposed to call him back before six.”

“Huh.” Lizzie fights back a smile. “How odd.”

“Kind of sexist.”

“How do you mean?” Then, as George tries to work out what he does mean, Lizzie almost imperceptibly flicks her chin toward George’s right and says: “Cubby’s about to come over. He has a business idea he wants to run past you. I’m going to the bathroom. Watch the kids.” Cubby Koplowitz is Alice’s second husband, a man brimming with ideas. Cubby owns two big arts-and-crafts-and-collectibles stores, Cubby’s Holes. At his own wedding nine years ago, he asked George if
Nightline
might do a story about To Hell ‘n’ Back Booby Babies, his line of humanoid plush toys. The packaging calls them “fuzzy li’l devils who escaped Satan and now need your love!” To Hell ‘n’ Back Booby Babies were advertised on the Winter Channel and became a hit in the upper Midwest. When Beanie Babies appeared two years later, George and Lizzie decided that Cubby did indeed possess some kind of awful genius. Alice said last fall that they sold To Hell ‘n’ Back Booby Babies to some big company that was going to manufacture them offshore for a national relaunch this year, and George dreads that he’s about to be begged for help with a fresh round of motorized plush toy promotion.