Turn of the Century (61 page)

“You produce and own
Real Time
—your dream show. I produce and own
NARCS
. We’re both locked forever into passive creator participation
on each other’s shows. Financially, contractually, everything is still fifty-fifty.”

George finds it interesting how loquacious Emily has become now that she is breaking up with him and making complicated financial stipulations.

“So we raise the two children separately,” he says, “with visitation rights.”

Emily, who is unmarried and childless, doesn’t reply.

“Who would I get to do all the business stuff, Emily?”

“Any of a thousand people.”

“What about the projects in development?”

“
The Odds
is mine; the other two are yours.”

George wonders if she already has
The Odds
set up at a studio or a network. “You know we can’t move
NARCS
out to Burbank,” he says. “The network won’t let us. We’re half the reason for the soundstage on Fifty-seventh Street. Not to mention Angela and Lucas and—”

“I’ll move. I’ve got a bid in on a condo on West Sixty-fourth, by the Park.”

Decisions have been made. Plans are afoot. George has been clueless. “So I’m supposed to accept this as a fait accompli? Christ, Emily! You’ve probably cleared this with Featherstone already, too.”

She pauses. “Not really.”

“What the
fuck
does ‘not really’ mean?”

“It means he and Saddler called me yesterday after Lucas called him about your fight—”

“Hank
Saddler?
It was not a ‘fight.’ ”

“Timothy called to ask about
NARCS
. But I told him you and I talked about my coming back here to help run things for a while. And he said that sounded like a pretty sensible interim plan.”

George is accustomed to being the aggressively calm and reasonable combatant, letting the other person flail.

“Featherstone called it ‘a pretty sensible interim plan’? What, did Saddler use ventriloquism on him?”

“Timothy said, quote, ‘Himalaya, that is a genius short-term fix.’ Unquote. It doesn’t matter what he said, George. This isn’t a squeeze play against you. We’ve got two shows. I can’t be associated with one. Let’s solve the problem.
I’m
the liberal activist scumbag Stengel and
company are using to attack
Real Time
. Right? So dump me! We’ll say we made a tough choice, did the right thing, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.”

“You can’t be ‘associated’ with
Real Time
, but you’re willing to take the money.”

“I’d be happy to give you all the dough from
Real Time
and keep everything … what you want, George. As a matter of fact, I … given Mose’s … thrilled, although the budget looks closer to one-point-seven. But either we share cash flow, or we don’t. And worst case, you … better for the budget if I’m off your P and L …, to remember, George. It really isn’t
you
—it’s me.”

“You’re breaking up, Emily. You’re all static-y.”

“…  ville Canyon. I’m coming out now. Better?”

“Mmm.”

Neither says a thing for many seconds. Finally George, stumbling provisionally toward a no-fault concession speech, says, “Well, shit. This sucks, Emily, this really sucks.”

She says nothing.

“So I suppose you’ve already got lawyers drafting this?”

She says nothing, but George hears a kind of muffled keening.

“Emily? Are you crying? Emily?”

He still hears the electronic whine, which is just noise, not signal. The connection is lost.

He hangs up and joins Lizzie outside. He tells her Emily wants to dissolve the partnership.

“Welcome to the club,” she says.

“Bruce isn’t your partner.”

They talk it through. After George says he half expected it to happen, he wonders if he really did.

“It’s going to mean a fuck of a lot more work for me,” he says. “Alone.” George is still standing. “Did you talk to your dad today?”

“To Tammy. He was asleep. Oh my God! Guess what?”

He shakes his head.

“Tammy,” she says, “told me that Buddy is dating Emily.”

“Emily?
Emily
Emily? She dumped Michael?”

Lizzie nods enthusiastically. “Tammy thinks there’s an Alan Alda or Tony Roberts movie with exactly this plot. It’s amazing, isn’t it?”

“I guess she’s jettisoning everyone.”

Neither of them speaks for a while.

“Are we done talking about Emily?” Lizzie asks. “Because you know, the thing I
still
just can’t figure out about Microsoft is how they knew about me and Buster Grinspoon. If Bruce is right, and I’m sure he is, about their suddenly getting so hot for the company because they wanted Grinspoon’s patents. I remember now, at that meeting on Tuesday, how they really
knew
.” She doesn’t remember the deal memo she left in the backseat of her dial-car weeks ago, or the phone call her driver overheard.

“Who knows?” George says. “The grapevine.” In fact, he’s afraid he knows exactly. He believes he’s the vine—by mentioning Lizzie and Grinspoon’s research to Featherstone, who, George figures, mentioned it to one of his contacts at Microsoft. “There’s a message from Pollyanna for you, by the way. About some Vermont trip. You’re going climbing? When did you start climbing again?”

“Polly and I talked about it, yeah.”

He says nothing.

“I figured Memorial Day weekend when we go up to the house, we might spend Saturday in Vermont, climbing. Polly and I.”

He stops to muse, staring past Lizzie, who’s carefully grinding out the cigarette on a giant terra-cotta pot. Buddy and Emily, Lucas Winton and Iris, Stengel and the
Post
reporter, Shawna Cindy Switzer and Sandi Bemis … he sees them all over the country, all over the globe—Vermont, the Hollywood Hills, Las Vegas, Madison Avenue, MBC News, Fifty-nine, up in the Bombardier at fifty thousand feet—the enemies of George are all trading glances, grinning, allying, plotting. Not the
enemies
, maybe, but not the friends either—the Switzerlands, the Frances, the Jordans, the nonaligned nations, all the amiable quislings and collaborators-in-waiting. Harold Mose and Lizzie.

“Daddy is sleeping a lot, Tammy said, but the doctors told her his condition is still stable. He might get out of the ICU next week.”

George’s hazy, frightened little glimmer is stupid, he tells himself, baroque, some stress-related hallucination, paranoid delusion as hokey montage. (
Use it!
Featherstone would say.
Use it in the work!
)

“How long have they been ‘dating’?” he says, emphasizing the sanitized word choice. “Emily and Buddy.”

George is sitting down now, on the ancient oak stump that has been used as a chair for decades, and before that as a chopping block for fowl. He hasn’t forgotten that he’s engaged in some sort of domestic cold war, but he has lost track of the real grievances, if there are real grievances, and is relieved that Lizzie seems to have moved past his “Page Six” quasi-infidelities.

“I guess he was a technical adviser on
Mr. Dead
.”
Mr. Dead
is Emily’s little supernatural teen comedy for Paramount about the avenging ghosts of dead mustangs. “They ran into each other again at the screening for the crew, and started fucking.”

Since it’s Buddy’s penis she’s talking about, the “fucking” stings a little. (For three years in the eighties George avoided seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger movies because his girlfriend at the time had slept with Arnold in the seventies.)

The word
fucking
and the low-budget-movie talk makes Lizzie remember her discovery when she paid the bills.

“You watched porno movies in L.A. last month after I left,” she says delightedly. “Three.”

He says nothing for a second.

“They’re on the hotel bill,” she says.

“Yeah? So what is this? Sex interrogation day? Jesus. Are you
trying
to start fights?”

“Oh, Christ, George,
please
. I think it’s cute. It’s like a cute little secret boy thing.”

“Okay, okay, okay. But cut me some slack. My work life pretty much turned to shit this morning.”

“
Your
work life turned to shit? Mine isn’t so fucking peachy, either, bub.”

“I know,” he concedes. “I know. But all this dumb, giant corporate stuff I have to deal with, I mean,
Jesus
.”

“Giant and corporate sounds like a vacation right now. At least then it wouldn’t be me, me,
me
the
Voice
hates,
me
my employees hate. I was getting pretty used to the Microsoft idea. The buck stopping over
there
somewhere. You know? Maybe I should talk to Harold about his job.”

“What?”

“You know, his digital job.”

“What do you mean? What are you talking about?”

“He called me on the plane and said I should come and, I don’t know, run online for him. Whatever that means. It wasn’t like a serious job offer. It was just, you know, flattery, bullshit. I didn’t tell you?”

“No.”

“I thought I did.”

“No.”

He wants a
Sorry
. He gets only one of her little single-shouldered shrugs, which makes him want to hit her.

He has always tried to tell the truth, as much as he can, especially to Lizzie. As Lizzie says, clichés are clichés because they’re true: sometimes the truth does hurt.

“Well,” George says, “I should tell you I’m sorry. If I triggered this whole Microsoft craziness in the first place. It was an accident.”

Inside, the phone rings. Up in the windows, he sees a child’s shadow fly across the white curtains.

“Huh?” Lizzie says. She wonders if George is making a strange joke she doesn’t get, or if he’s even farther off some flaky abracadabra deep end than she imagined.

“When I was in L.A. I mentioned your deal with Grinspoon to Timothy. And I guess Timothy probably told one of his Microsoft people about it.”

Max opens one of the back windows and shouts, “Dad? The phone.”

“Okay,” he says back.

Lizzie is standing. “You just can’t keep your fucking mouth shut about anything, can you, George?” She is livid. It may have been George’s blabbing that made Microsoft double their offer, but she is still livid. The spleen wants what it wants. “No wonder you need Emily to run the business.” She turns and marches inside.

He stands in the Seaport gloam, not flinching as the door slams, watching her disappear into the dark end of the kitchen, thinking,
That’ll teach you to tell the truth, George Mactier
.

“Dad?” Max shouts again from the window upstairs. “It’s Greg Dunn at the
Journal
. He said he heard about Grandpa.”

George takes a deep breath and looks at Lizzie inside, opening the refrigerator, coping with some trifle.

“What
about
Grandpa?” Max asks.

“I don’t know.” But now he knows. When he was at
Newsweek
, George phoned a woman in Brooklyn to ask her about the killing of her Grenadian son by the Army during the U.S. invasion of the island; she hadn’t known. It remains his most awful professional moment, worse than getting wounded, which he doesn’t remember, worse then firing people.

“Greg Dunn said he loves you and Mom,” Max shouts, “and if you’re ‘grieving,’ you can call him back whenever.”

Is Lizzie still grieving?
She’s hardly noticed the verb before, except passingly to hate it, both because it’s one of those words forced into verb drag and because
grieving
seems designed to turn sadness into a hobby. At Edith Hope’s funeral, the Unitarian minister talked about “a nurturing, web-connected community of grieving,” and gave George and Lizzie a “grieving video” that taught “grieving exercises” and incorporated bootlegged clips from
Terms of Endearment, Ghost, Fried Green Tomatoes
, and
City of Angels
.

But when Mike died last month, Lizzie surprised herself by insisting that they fly to and from the funeral in L.A. on different planes, and astounded herself even more, when they got home, by staying away from the office for three days. “I need to organize my father’s stuff,” she told Alexi and Bruce and George, but that took only a day. She doesn’t understand precisely why she has been spending so much of her time in hiding—lunch hours at work on a bench in Madison Square Park and cigarettes on the roof of the building, avoiding Nancy McNabb’s IPO calls, canceling a drink with Pollyanna for no reason. But she has come to believe that grieving is not such a phony notion after all.

Her father’s death got her mind off the Microsoft fiasco quickly, and
has kept her from obsessing over the Molly Cramer attack, which was worse than the
Voice
attack, because a few people actually saw it. In “America’s Side,” her
Post
column, and in her Fox News commentary, Cramer accused Lizzie of being “the perfect twenty-first-century limousine liberal hypocrite. This is a woman who once disrespected my friend and employer Mr. Murdoch at a public event and who, Pentagon sources tell me, compromised American national security by refusing to sell one of her computer programs to the armed forces. She cuddles up to bleeding-heart liberal Democrats like Al Gore—all while she
fires
disabled employees because they’re disabled! Now that Ms. Cyber-Chic Radical is hoist with her own P.C. petard,
we
get the last laugh. This is Molly Cramer,” she had said, grinning into the camera, “on
America’s
side.”

In the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross five-stage bereavement scheme, which is now a pillar of American popular science (as real to most people as the laws of thermodynamics, more real than theories of relativity and quantum foam), anger is supposed to be stage two. But Lizzie has proceeded directly to anger, passing up denial completely. She spent the flight out to L.A. rereading that morning’s Molly Cramer column until she could recite it, which she proceeded to do for George as soon as his flight landed. Dr. Bambang S.H.H. Bob Hardiyanti met them at LAX with two limousines, one for the kids and one for George and her. On the drive into town, Dr. Hardiyanti started congratulating Lizzie fulsomely, saying that Mike and she and the whole family have been “the key actors” in “a historic breakthrough moment in medicine.” What made her angry, so angry that she ordered Dr. Hardiyanti to get “
out
of this fucking limo, now” on Century Boulevard (George overruled her and let him stay), was the doctor’s proud revelation that Mike Zimbalist’s swine-liver transplant had never actually taken place. He’d had no surgery! There’d been no pig liver! The doctor explained excitedly that it had been “a fantastic validation of a new placebo protocol, placebo surgery,” and that because Mike
believed
he had a new liver, he had lived “much longer with a very much superior quality of life” than if he had simply been told the truth. What kept Lizzie’s rage burning, however, like a small fission reaction she could control but not stop, was the fact that George wasn’t angry enough about the charade.