Turn of the Century (62 page)

Tammy, it turns out, knew about the placebo procedure all along. The hospital had to have her permission. “Who says it didn’t work? I had
an extra month
with Mikey, sweetheart,” she said to Lizzie, “and we even got to make
love
one last time. What’s to be pissed about now? Mikey wouldn’t be.” Tammy told them she had performed fellatio on Mike in his deathbed not long before he lost consciousness for the last time. “ ‘I’m so glad I’m in the zone,’ ” she says he said to her happily, ‘I’m in the
center
of the
zone!’
” Mike Zimbalist’s cosmic last words were quoted at the Kaddish, and repeated lovingly by Tammy and Lizzie’s stepbrother Ronnie as evidence of Mike’s next-worldly bliss. George waited a week to tell Lizzie that by “the zone” Mike almost certainly meant not a corridor to the afterlife but the Hollywood production zone the studios established in the old days, back when her father was at Metro. It’s a sixty-mile circle, within which producers don’t have to pay per diems to actors and crews, and its center is the intersection of Beverly and La Cienega Boulevards—exactly where Mike Zimbalist died. George was charmed by the misunderstanding. Lizzie, monitoring her little isotope of hostility, was not.

To her surprise, she’s looking forward to her party tonight, the big, loud, expensive, everybody-we-know party she ordered up that dizzy morning weeks ago to (not) celebrate her Microsoft liquidity event.
Her party
. That’s how it seems. Even though this afternoon Alexi folded his arms and gave her the interventionist look, his maternal fret, when she leaves work early to prepare and primp, she feels she’s coming out of hiding.

It is such a luxury to be all alone at home (with Rafaela, but alone) in the still of a weekday afternoon. Rafaela’s attitude toward Lizzie has changed subtly but unmistakably, as though in Rafaela’s eyes Lizzie has finally become corporeal. Lizzie doesn’t know if it’s Mike Zimbalist’s death (The
gringa superhero, she suffers pain!
), or the murder of her own family, but Rafaela looks her in the eye now, as though they share a secret. Lizzie has tried to be kind. She arranged for the FedExing from Mexico of the children’s cremated remains. (Lizzie now knows that the mortuarial term of art is
cremains
. And her baby-sitter’s full name—Rafaela Ek Canul.) She and George attended the endless Spanish memorial service out in St. Albans, Queens, during which Lizzie got her period suddenly, heavily and tamponless. On the way out of the
church, marveling at the cookie-size red spot on the back of Lizzie’s white Calvin Klein silk sheath, LuLu asked, of course, “Does everyone here think Mommy was shot?”) Lizzie knows it’s sentimental and self-flattering, but Rafaela’s changed manner has in it the glint of something like solidarity. “Yeah,” George teased her the night she finally got up the nerve to mention this to him, “Mutt and
jefe
.”

“Rafaela?” she shouts down from the top landing, “your money is on the counter in the kitchen. Before you pick up the kids at school, can you help me carry these boxes downstairs?” Lizzie has let Ronnie and the stepsiblings keep most of her father’s glamorous memorabilia—the cream-colored spat bearing Jack Warner’s signature and several of Nancy Reagan’s crimson lip prints (also autographed), the brittle photo of Mike grabbing Bugsy Siegel’s ass with one hand and the nineteen-year-old Marilyn Monroe’s with the other, the framed signed contract with Elvis Presley that Elvis pissed on and Special Deliveried back to Mike. What Lizzie wanted, she culled and curated last month, in L.A. and Palm Springs, down to five big boxes (including the one filled with thick, dense, black Tommy Dorsey 78s and thick, dense, white stationery, one mint set from each old hotel).

“Two trips, I think,” Lizzie says to Rafaela as both women, the dark one just over five feet and the rich one just under six, pick up a loaded UPS carton and begin stepping carefully down the stairs. The papers in these boxes—telegrams and letters and photos and ticket stubs and ledgers and clippings—have transformed Lizzie’s view of her father. Because Mike Zimbalist was such a chronic embellisher and dissembler, Lizzie had left home assuming that nearly all the fabulous stories about his past were just that, cooked-up tales meant to entertain acquaintances and children. But these boxes are a trove of evidence to the contrary. Mike Zimbalist’s tallest tales were true, it turns out. He really did sail to Tokyo as an eighteen-year-old tap dancer to perform as part of a secret vaudeville show imported by Emperor Hirohito’s courtiers, and he did have an onboard romance with his Japanese language tutor during the
Nitta Maru’s
Pacific crossing. (Imprinted in gay red letters on his NYK Lines ticket folder is the line,
SAY GOODBYE TO THE TURMOIL OF “SCARY HEADLINES”!)
He did cash in his first-class return ticket and head overland through India and Palestine, ending up in Paris, where he really did buy a Matisse oil for $475 in July 1939. And he really did sell
the Matisse privately in Palm Springs in 1961 to finance
Beatniks on Mars
, his disastrous attempt to become a writer-director-producer. Mike Zimbalist’s maternal great-grandfather
was
a cofounder in 1868 in St. Louis of a magazine called
The Communist
. (Its name was later changed to
The Altruist
, and it went bankrupt in 1917.) Zayde and Bubbe Zimbalist did emigrate from Berlin in 1924 after their pawnshop was wiped out by Weimar inflation, which really had amounted to 3.45 quintillion percent over a couple of years, and he did go to work for a federal agency actually called the U.S. Bureau of Efficiency. Lizzie never thought Mike was lying about the “quintillion percent” and “the Bureau of Efficiency”—she’d always assumed those parts of the story were purely jokes, like something out of
Willy Wonka
.

After they stack the cartons in the basement and Rafaela leaves, Lizzie has a few minutes for a cup of tea before she goes uptown to get her hair done—to “the beauty shop,” as she always calls it, an effort to take some of the curse off her three-hundred-dollar haircuts. Waiting for the water to boil, she notices that on Rafaela’s de facto patch of kitchen counter, between the Duolit toaster and the Nuova Simonelli espresso machine (a gift from MBC they never use but, because it’s worth twenty-four hundred dollars and looks cool, they keep), there’s an envelope addressed to Rafaela in Sarah’s handwriting. And sitting under it, a creased color snapshot of Rafaela squatting and smiling near an orchid tree in a forest, with her toddlers Fernando and Jilma. Stuck to the photo is a Post-it on which LuLu has written, “Here your kids piktur back, Rafaela. Louisa Z. Mactier.” Lizzie loves her children.

He dreads expiration days. He despises the gun to his head. “Billy,” Bennett Gould says, half standing, “what are we going to do with those Microsoft May 110 calls? And the USA Loves Toys May 9½ puts?”

In truth, he doesn’t care what Billy Heffernan thinks. It is his polite way of announcing that he now intends to decide what to do. It is thinking out loud.

Ben has always been bullish on Microsoft, and his enthusiasm reignited last winter, after he saw a preview of the Mendacita software and the company declared its three-for-two stock split. But Mendacita hasn’t taken off yet, the analysts’ sales projections for Windows 2000 were so extreme that it’s been hard for the company to beat them, and
the free Linux system is taking market share. The share price has been stalled between 108 and 112 for months now, which (especially for a stock like Microsoft) turns into a self-propelling stream of anxiety and dither—if
Microsoft
isn’t rising smartly, something must be wrong (even if nothing is wrong). His 9,000 Microsoft calls that expire momentarily are bets he made two months ago, in March, that the company would have a killer first quarter. Even their relaunch of the webzine
Slate
as a same-day-delivery home-office-supply site and selective-admission chat room looked auspicious to Ben, since it was evidence the company finally understood it had no business in media. But the Microsoft calls are more or less a wash—the stock price today is 112½. Ben hasn’t made or lost money.

After he had such fun unloading his USA Loves Toys stock last month, he decided he wasn’t finished hating the company. And so he bought 5,000 USA Loves Toys puts, one-month-long bets that the stock would continue its ugly downward slide. USA Loves Toys is still at 10, so he can just let the puts expire worthlessly. Or, if he’s convinced now that the fighting in Mexico will put a crimp in the manufacturing schedules for USA Loves’s two big new Christmas toys (a remote-controlled flying saucer called Alien Craft and some stuffed piece of shit called To Hell ‘n’ Back Booby Babies), he can keep his money on the table, essentially roll his puts over by buying some June puts. If on the other hand he decides to exercise the puts he owns now, Heffernan will do nothing, and next Monday Bennett Gould’s account at Goldman Sachs will automatically have 500,000 shares of USA Loves Toys shorted. Ben doesn’t like being short common stock, because then he has unlimited liability. The more USA Loves Toys goes up then, the more he loses. If he’s short 500,000 shares of USA Loves Toys at 9½ on Monday, and it pops to 20 on Tuesday after some bogus e-commerce announcement by the company, Ben would be liable for $5.25 million. And in his professional lifetime, the market only goes up, always up. Ben likes to think of himself as a contrarian, but shorting common stock feels uncomfortable and dangerous, like some alien sexual practice. On the 5,000 puts, he’s out maybe $100,000—$200,000 maximum. His downside is capped.

“Fucking USA Loves Toys. I still think it’s going to tank big time before the end of the quarter. Price out some June nine puts.”

Heffernan tells him, “They’re the same as July.”

“Buy the Julys.” Ben is extending his bet for another two months that USA Loves Toys will indeed fall below $9 a share.

“People are not going to like this close,” Melucci says, checking his unhappy red screens.

Ben asks Heffernan, “You sold all the Micron calls, right?”

“EBay just collapsed,” Melucci says.

“Ms. Grundy,” Dianne says, “is on three-seven.”

“
What?
She calls me at ten minutes till
four?
What is that woman thinking? I don’t need to talk to her. Tell her yes to all eight, at her bids, except the Bellow. I’d go up to 800 on the Bellow.” Ms. Grundy is the pseudonym of the agent who runs his movie and TV company, which is called Permanent Productions. Ben has committed $25 million to Permanent, which is in turn a shell holding company for other movie and TV production entities he has set up all over the English-speaking world—Chimera Filmed Entertainment; Invisible Media Ltd.; the Over the Rainbow Company; Null & Void Productions; Charade, Incorporated; and a dozen more. In the two years since he set up shop, he has spent $14.4 million purchasing the film and television rights to thirty-two mid- and late-twentieth-century novels, plays, and stories that have never been filmed and that he particularly loves. He started with a wish list of a hundred, and his intention is to buy up, anonymously, the rights to as many as he can. He has no intention of making any of them into motion pictures or TV shows. In fact, his idea is just the opposite: Ben Gould wants to save contemporary literature from Hollywood, the same way conservation groups organize in rural areas to buy up farms to save virginal landscapes from real estate developers. Having fairly compensated the rights’ holders—studios and producers, writers and writers’ estates—Permanent Productions and all its component entities will simply sit on the rights in perpetuity. The man in Los Angeles who runs Mirage doesn’t know he’s a corporate sibling of the husband and wife in London who operate Invisible; they all deal individually with Ms. Grundy. Ben tells himself he would prefer to be doing this on the up-and-up. But he knows honesty would distort the market—the press attention would make it look like a stunt and complicate the process. Agents would hold him up, and he knows some writers actually want their books turned into Meryl Streep vehicles and HBO miniseries.

In the Big Room, the flaps are up, the landing gear is down, seat belts are fastened, and tray tables are in their locked and upright positions.

“There’s four million Merck for sale,” Melucci tells Ben. “Do you care?”

“No. Ugly close,” Ben says. “Ugly close. Where is Mose going out?”

“At 45 and a teeny,” Berger tells him. A teeny is a sixteenth of a dollar.

It’s five minutes after four.

“We’re done,” Ben says, propelling himself away from his desk with a shove as he does every afternoon at this moment.

Everyone in the Big Room calms down, even Ben, relatively speaking. They have until five-thirty to tell their brokers what to do with their thousands of expiring put and call options, whether to exercise them or sell them. Because it’s Friday, he won’t be able to trade Tokyo in four hours, as he does some nights. The trading week is over.

Dianne announces, “I’ve got Cubby Koplowitz holding from Rome.”

“Hey! Mr. Koplowitz!
Buòna sera
, partner!”