Turn of the Century (60 page)

Noticing all the the dark-skinned baby-sitters standing in their corner as he watches LuLu and Sarah, George remembers the moment, the horrible moment, last summer, when the grinning innkeeper on Martha’s Vineyard asked if “your au pair will be occupying her own room.” They had no baby-sitter on the Vineyard; the man had assumed Sarah, unsmiling dark-haired olive-skinned teenage Sarah, was paid to look after the two little blond Mactier children.

George found Felipe Williamson’s video remarkable and moving. He intercut shots of several Manhattanites and their Upper East Side travel agents discussing fancy Cancún and Puerto Vallarta vacation plans with interviews of Mexican and Salvadoran busboys and waiters at the Viva Zapata Taquería discussing the current Zapatista insurrection. George also praised Sarah and Penelope’s video,
1964
, which was about what you’d expect from fourteen-year-olds, although he regretted
that he couldn’t tell Sarah how much her soundtrack “mistake” pleased him. The old songs they finally used—“I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night,” “We Shall Overcome,” “Amazing Grace”—are instrumental versions by the Ray Conniff Orchestra, saccharine and ridiculous in a way that seems intentionally unsettling.

“That wasn’t the kind of movie I really like,” Max confides.

“Too … newsy?”

Max shakes his head. “No. Too
TV
. You knew everything that was going to happen before it happened. The good people were all
so
good and the bad people were so like
completely
bad.”

George cannot, of course, tell Max that his critique is exactly right. “I thought they did a fine job.”

“Do you think my movie is good?”

On his computer, Max has downloaded hundreds of video clips from which he’s stitched together a ninety-second trailer for a nonexistent feature film in which the running joke is the hero inexplicably vomiting small animals—a kitten, a gopher, and a pigeon—at inopportune times.

“I think your movie is brilliant.” The last time Max fished for this compliment, George called it “Buñuelian,” and Max stayed up most of the night looking at hundreds of the thousands of pages on the web that mention Luis Buñuel.

“Dad?”

“What?”

“Can I go talk to Griffin B.?” He waits, then says, “Will you be okay?”

May I hug you first, Max, squeeze you and kiss you, and then fall to my knees and sob? That wouldn’t embarrass you, would it, son?
“Sure, go ahead,” George says. “If you see your mom, tell her it’s time for us to go talk to Mr. Hoff.”

Griffin B. is Griffin Bisette, Penelope’s little brother. George has been amazed to discover that there were two Griffins in Max’s class this year, who are called Griffin B. and Griffin L., like bacterial strains. But Griffin is precisely the kind of name that’s in vogue among parents who send their children to nonreligious private schools called St. Andrew’s, who buy forty-dollar-a-gallon Martha Stewart paint and fifty-dollar doll-size American Girl butter churns made of solid chestnut.
One of Max’s classmates is named Huck—not Huckleberry, Huck—and in LuLu’s class there is a Truman, a Chester, a Sawyer, three Benjamins, two Coopers, a Walker, and a Hunter (Hunter Liu), as well as multiple Amandas, Lucys, and Hopes, and even a Gwyneth. In Sarah’s class, there is a black kid named Van Blount, short for Vantrel (“which we discovered is also a type of
rayon
,” Vantrel’s mother informed George at a parents’ night, laughing and unembarrassed). Blissed Henderson (a girl Sarah’s age who changed her name to Bee in fourth grade, then back to Blissed in eighth) is the only child in their kids’ classes with an over-the-top, movie-star-offspring name. Yet another of George’s stories the ABC News brass hated: how show business parents have taken up where hippie parents left off, inventing novelty names for their children—the Dakotas (Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith), the Deni Montanas (Woody Harrelson), the Jetts (John Travolta and Kelly Preston), and the Maya Rays (Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke). George didn’t learn until after the story ran that one of his semi-bosses at Disney had a son named E. (for “Eternal”) Frontier and a daughter named Angel Fire.

“Ready?” Lizzie says, and they head into the hallway, passing the three-foot-high Campbell’s soup cans into which children are supposed to deposit real cans of Campbell’s soup for the poor, and passing the Taco Bell/KFC minicafeteria that provoked a ruckus among the parents before it finally opened in the fall. The ceilings in the anteroom off the headmaster’s office are twelve feet high. The portraits on the wall gleam. The oak wainscoting is old, and the plaster is real. Private school headmasters may not be paid well, but they get magnificent CEO offices.

Mr. Hoff will be just a moment. Mr. Hoff’s assistant seems a little scared of them, probably because they’re clients, Lizzie thinks, $62,000-a-year clients. Lizzie wonders if this meeting is some kind of sidelong fund-raising gambit. Or maybe Mr. Hoff wants to push Max into the new ultragifted program one of the parents has bragged about. In any event, she’s ready to receive praise—
“Congratulations, Elizabeth,”
she remembers the principal of Pally High saying such a brief time ago,
“you’re second in the class.” “Congratulations, Elizabeth, you’re a National Merit Finalist.” “Congratulations, welcome to Radcliffe.” “Welcome to the business school.” “Congratulations, it’s a girl.” “He’s a great guy you’ve
snagged.” “He’s a beautiful little boy.” “She’s a perfect little girl. Congratulations, Lizzie.”

George wonders if Mr. Hoff is going to tell them Max has some newly invented learning disability, or uses hate language to taunt his classmates. He’s catching the assistant’s funny looks too, and reads sadness and possibly disgust folded in with the fear. Maybe Max got caught with a lit cigarette, like George had. (Although where is the St. Andrew’s equivalent of the alley behind the metal shop?) Maybe Max has been secretly taking a dump on the floor of the boys’ bathroom every day for a week, like George’s friend Tuggy did before his parents sent him to military school. Maybe Max and his pals spelled out
FUCK
with their fingers in a class picture, as George did when he was a boy. (He had been the
C
, chosen because it had plausible deniability, although not plausible enough, as things turned out.) Or maybe Max dismembered the class hamster, as serial killers do when they’re boys.

“This is not an easy conversation,” Mr. Hoff begins, shocking Lizzie. “Are you
 … familiar
with the Science and Society curriculum? The indoor-pollution homework the children have been doing these last weeks?”

They say they are, yes. Well, Mr. Hoff explains ponderously, when Max’s Science and Society instructor got Max’s indoor-pollution samples back from the lab, he discovered not just the usual—household poisons, lead paint flecks, tar, nicotine, and peanut dust. In the air and surface samples Max took from his parents’ bedroom—Mr. Hoff actually says “
his parents’
bedroom”—the teacher found “incontrovertible evidence” of recent marijuana use.

“Now,” Mr. Hoff says, leaning forward, “this is not the first time we’ve had an
 … incident
like this.”

George and Lizzie both nod, trying to look contrite rather than embarrassed and angry.

“It’s the fourth time,” Mr. Hoff says.

George’s brow is literally sweating. Lizzie feels a little like she did when the Harvard doctor told her she was pregnant with Sarah.

“After a discussion with our
lawyers
, we’ve decided to reaffirm the existing school policy, which is not to notify law-enforcement authorities.”

They both relax a little.

“However, I must tell you that in one of the previous cases, we did feel it appropriate to notify the child-welfare authorities.”

They both think:
Which lawyer do we call?
George’s show business attorney; Lizzie’s corporate attorney, Katherine; the trusts and estates guy; or the former assistant Manhattan DA they know? And George thinks of the
Post
headline writing itself (
REAL NARCS BUST
NARCS
TV BIG
).

“In
that
situation,” Mr. Hoff says, “a small trace of
cocaine
was registered as well as marijuana residue.”

George and Lizzie both nod, frowning, overacting, gravely affirming—yes,
mm-hmmm
—his distinction between marijuana and cocaine. After a few more minutes of quietly acknowledging the seriousness of the parenting responsibility, and agreeing what fine St. Andrew’s students all three children are, they say they will consider his suggestion of substance-abuse counseling.

“I want you to know,” Lizzie says as they stand, realizing Mr. Hoff has no threats or ultimatums up his sleeve, “that we very rarely, um, indulge. Once every few months, maybe.” Maybe, or maybe every few weeks. “And this is going to sound like an excuse, but we’ve both been under a tremendous amount of stress lately.”

“I understand,” he says, “and
that’s
why I’m urging you to seek the intervention of a counselor.”

Fuck you, Mr. Hoff
, George would like to say.

Fuck you, Mr. Hoff
, Lizzie would like to say.

As they leave the school, Max asks, “So what did Mr. Hoff want?”

“To tell us what a great student you are,” Lizzie answers almost before he finishes the question.

“He wanted to make sure we’re happy,” George adds. “You know, with St. Andrew’s.”

Their unspoken precinct-house bond has a half-life about as long as the ride home, however. Their perfect one-two instant dissembling to Max gives George and Lizzie both a little chill. As he unlocks the front door on Water Street, George even has the thought,
She bought the pot
, cravenly imagining his separate defense as he watches Max and LuLu tumble in and upstairs, driving the terrified cat ahead of them.

Sarah has gone out for dinner with Penelope and Felipe and Gwyneth, in order to plan their Saturday junket to a Junior Golden
Gloves boxing match and tabulate the audience response cards rating their docudramas. (Sarah said Ms. Perez-Morrison told them that the videos that “test over 120” will get a minimum grade of B+. George told Sarah to make sure she gets at least 10 percent of first-dollar gross, but she didn’t laugh.)

Lizzie is sitting out back in a cheap folding aluminum chair placed in a spot where she can’t be seen from the rear living room windows. She’s smoking, mentally examining yet again each twist and turn and tunnel of her runaway Microsoft train ride, trying to figure out what happened. She can faintly hear the drone of the upstairs television—
“…  not only a small miracle, Debi, but hilarious too! Check this out …”
The little kids are watching
Small Miracles
, LuLu’s favorite program, a “family variety show” that combines magic acts, circus performers,
Believe It or Not
freaks, and reports on UFO abductions, religious visions, and breakthroughs in cosmology and astrophysics.
Small Miracles
is the wholesome CBS rival show to MBC’s
Freaky Shit!
, and the promotional line of the people behind
Small Miracles
is that they’re “broadcasting America’s first and only advertising-free commercial program—a Small Miracle in itself!”
Small Miracles
is sponsored and produced by AgroSnax, however, which manufactures the Small Miracles line of “permanently fresh” chips, cookies, and “ ‘meat’ nubbins.” Max will watch anything, but he professes to dislike
Small Miracles
because his favorite television
is
the commercials: when George once mentioned having met the Coen brothers, his son said, “
Whoa!
You mean the guys who directed the Honda ad?” Max liked the Coens’ minivan commercial even more than Jean-Luc Godard’s new TV campaign for Apple, which is extreme praise for Max.

From his office on the top floor, George is finally talking to Emily, who’s in her car.

“Love the finale script. You nailed the arc. What the—
fuck you!
Jesus.”

“Emily?”

“Love you too, bitch!
Mwah!
”

“Emily?”

“Sorry. A 500SL cut me off. Thought it was a rapper ambush or something. But it’s somebody from Fox 2000 I know.”

“So you like the script?”

“Yup.”

“Great. Thanks.”

“George?”

“Some bad news.”

“What?” Her masseur quit. The polls have Gore way behind in Pennsylvania. They
are
over budget on
Real Time
. She’s found out she has cancer. She’s found out he has cancer.

“We should do this face-to-face.”

“Do what?”

“Divorce.”

“What are you talking about, Emily?”

“I’m not a journalist. I can’t do
Real Time
. It’ll give me ulcers. It’ll make me nuts.”

“You’re not; you won’t be. Like we said, you’ll take over
NARCS
with Phoebe and Paul, and I’ll do
Real Time
.”

“No, George. What about my Jesse Jackson documentary? What about the NARAL hoedown this summer? What happens if I work in the Gore administration?”

“The Gore administration?”
Good luck
, he thinks. “He’s promised you a job if he wins?”

“No. Hypothetically. But I can’t put my
deepest convictions
in a blind trust for the sake of some stupid
journalism
rule. If it’s journalism versus loyalty and friendship, loyalty wins. I can’t split the difference. Some kind of fake, arm’s-length relationship won’t cut it.”

George considers making a joke about
fake arm’s length
and
cut it
, pretending to take offense. But if she’s going to go earnest, he’ll go earnest too.

“So what do you mean? You take
NARCS
and I get
Real Time?
I’d call
that
an asset parity problem, Em.” When they negotiated their deal to create Well-Armed Productions two years ago, her lawyer repeatedly used the phrase “asset parity problem” as a euphemism for the fact that George had never produced an entertainment show and Emily had. What George means now is that
NARCS
is a hit that might pump out millions of dollars for years to come;
Real Time
is a kooky idea for a show that doesn’t exist yet.