Turn of the Century (64 page)

“So what’d you think of the
Journal
story?” he asks George.

“Today, about the MotorMind and TK Corporation acquisitions? It was pretty straightforward. The internet skepticism paragraph was pure boilerplate. And calling us a rival to WebTV is good, right?”

“No! I mean the hatchet job on Stengel! Savage!” He is smiling.

A month ago, Glenn Murkowski, George’s editor acquaintance at the
Journal
, called about a big story the paper was planning on all the second-tierTV news and quasi-news operations—MSNBC, Fox, MBC, E!
²
, the Chopper Channel, and so on. George told him that MSNBC and Fox were old stories, and E!
²
and the Chopper Channel were too
niche. Why not just focus on MBC News? Murkowski happened to assign the story to George’s old
Newsweek
colleague Greg Dunn, who naturally called George for information on MBC News. Greg’s initial take on Stengel was predictable and positive—serious broadcast journalist heroically adhering to old-fashioned standards in a screwy new world. Greg apparently knew nothing of George’s fight with Stengel over
Real Time
. And George trusted Greg enough to talk to him off the record about MBC News. In the
Journal
article he quoted George twice, one of those times as “a knowledgeable MBC colleague” saying that Barry Stengel “is, in all fairness, too stupid to realize that he’s a hypocrite.”

“It
was
a dumb thing News did,” George says, “but the
Journal
piece actually made me feel sorry for Barry.” Which was true, even though it had pleased him as well. The article was much tougher than George expected. And page one! The most damaging item was the “airbrushed news” revelation. On last month’s hour-long premiere of
Finale
, the MBC News obitutainment show, they aired a live remote of mourners arriving at the service in Hollywood for a young movie star who died of a heroin overdose. The live shot of the funeral was dominated by a Fox TV billboard next to the mortuary advertising the home-video compilation special
When Celebrities Go Berserk II!
The executive producer of
Finale
used a digital technique to “erase” the Fox billboard from the live broadcast. In Greg’s
Journal
story, Stengel claimed he was unaware of the digital airbrushing, and that such techniques are “contrary to MBC News policy.” However, “an MBC source familiar with news practices” (George) was quoted as saying, “Tell me why Stengel’s guy even had the software available. Either Barry is running a very loose ship, or he’s not telling the truth now.”

“Hank’s still freaking about it big time,” Featherstone says. “Do you think Barry’s cred is totally toast? I mean, in the news community?”

George shrugs. Featherstone moves closer to him and lowers his voice to a confidential murmur.

“So I understand the lady of the abode is still giving Harold thumbs up—thumbs down on all these other cockamamie internet outfits the strategic planning boys are wet for.”

George shrugs again. He doesn’t know. Every time they’ve started talking about the advice she’s giving Mose, the conversation has turned into a fight and stopped.

“His lips are sealed! Keep the shit on the low! Strong encryption! Straight up, home,” he says, grabbing a cilantro ratatouille tartlet from one waiter’s tray and at the same time carefully lifting his martini from another. “But we’re counting on you to do everything you can to help the team, George M. Cohan.”

George cannot simply shrug a third time. So he says, “Needless to say.”

“Thanks. And the show is grooving? I liked the feminist-anchor-chick-breakthrough hokey-pokey in the Sunday
Times
. Terrific counterbuzz to the snarkocity of all those tight-ass fantasy-reality snipes. Oh, and I loved the
People
thing on Francesca’s monkeyshines with Brad Pitt. Did Saddler make that up and plant it?”

“No, they’ve dated.”

“What the fox-in-the-henhouse does ‘post-gay’
mean?
”

George shakes his head and shrugs once again.

“And the show? No problems production-wise?”

“Nothing major.” If you don’t count Jess Burnham and Francesca Mahoney each complaining to George once a week that her coanchor can’t act her way out of a paper bag, and that both have a point.

“Stupendo. Off to check out some of these babes in toyland,” he says, raising his eyebrows and nodding slightly toward the backyard, then following his own nod.

George turns and watches Sarah and Max, who are outside with Fanny Taft and Bruce. Like most fourteen-year-old girls, Sarah radiates excitement and panic about being fourteen, that mixture of embarrassment and sly pride about her astounding bosom. Just before the party started, he overheard Max say to Lizzie upstairs, “I guess you’re more famous than Dad now.” Are even the children sliding out of his gravitational field? He watches Featherstone, bobbing and shaking his head along with a klezmer solo riff, approach them. He watches him smile and shake hands with Bruce and Fanny and Boogie Boffin, and kiss Sarah on the cheek. Thirty seconds later he sees Featherstone touching Boogie’s horn implants covetously. George wonders if he should ask Featherstone for a 7-percent-higher license fee for
Real Time
just before the first shows air, or right afterward?

Grownups are allowed to give either cocktail parties for two hundred people that end by nine o’clock, or six-table sit-down dinner parties.
But they aren’t allowed to do what Lizzie would prefer, which is a cocktail party for two hundred that lasts well past midnight, with enough passed canapés to qualify as dinner. What she would prefer, as George said back when they had conversations, is a college beer blast with very high production values and no vomiting. So the dinner is served buffet style (the very phrase makes Lizzie feel old), and forty-year-olds in suits are obliged to sit balancing plates of calamari and baby lettuces between their knees.

Arranging the places at tables has a certain godlike thrill, like brokering blind dates wholesale, but Lizzie gets a deeper satisfaction from seeing people she knows freely converge and settle into semirandom dinner-partner subsets on their own. What on earth is Hank Saddler saying to Fanny and Daisy and two of the Germans? Are Pollyanna and Ben bored explaining themselves to that awful earnest
Newsweek
woman Sally, who came with Greg Dunn? Or are the two of them enjoying her does-not-compute look of contempt and bewilderment as she listens to an Ivy League woman of color defending big tobacco (Pollyanna: “The price of all our personal freedoms is a certain number of extra deaths”) and a liberal Democrat explaining his plan to retrofit neighborhoods in London and Paris and Venice as seamless
in situ
urban theme parks? (Ben: “We’re doing the opposite of ‘destroying’ the Left Bank, we’re restoring a trashy piece of it, making it more authentic”). She spots George downstairs when she tells the caterers to start serving dinner, intensely chatting away with Warren Holcombe, George looking as worried and pale as Warren. Timothy Featherstone and Zip Ingram are born to be pals, sitting cross-legged and deep in their own fop-to-fop, grifter-to-grifter symposium about certain tiny bottlings of “the really
austere
Mendocino cabs.”

And Lizzie is on the floor with Bruce, sharing a corner of the low Corbu table. If she’d ordered him next to her with a place card, it would be like an exit interview with goat cheese and focaccia, her enforced fond farewell, but here they are chatting, as if spontaneously.

“So your friends in Redmond made another pass at Buster this week. They offered to invest in Terraplane.”

“And?” Lizzie says, finishing her fourth glass of champagne.

Bruce looks at her, frowning elaborately, saying nothing. Which means:
No, we are not selling out to Microsoft before we’ve even started—and I’m shocked, in a half-serious, brotherly way, that you’d think otherwise
.

“The day after he told them to fuck off, his office was ransacked, and a bunch of his files and tapes were stolen.”

“He doesn’t think Microsoft burgled his office?”

Bruce smiles. “He would like to think so. But unfortunately there were Animal Salvation League pamphlets strewn all over the place, and even Buster’s not quite paranoid enough to really believe that burglars from Microsoft would leave them as disinformation.”

She is going to miss Bruce. “You met our intern from Minnesota?”

“She’s a really smart kid. Scarily.”

“Scary because she’s a juvenile delinquent?” She glances up at the waiter bending over her with Dom Perignon. “Yes, please.” People are drinking a lot, it seems to Lizzie. That’s because the party is on a Friday. That’s why the party is on a Friday.

“No, scarily smart. I mean, she’s not just some wanky ‘warez dood’ teenybopper. She knows her stuff, that kid. You should hear about how she hacked a few of the places that the feds
don’t
know about. She made me promise I wouldn’t tell you, but ask her sometime about what she and her pals dug out of the Kennedy School server up at Harvard.” He smiles, shaking his head. “By the way, you know how George always used to make such a big deal over the fact that you and I have no memory of President Kennedy’s death?”

Lizzie, unsmiling, blinks for a long moment and nods.

“Well,” Bruce says, “Fanny claims she doesn’t remember when when
Jackie
Kennedy died.”

“Room for one more?” Nancy McNabb says.

Lizzie scoots over, and Nancy pulls up an ottoman. Lizzie has watched Nancy at dinners, staring in apparent fascination at people (influential business people, so nearly always men) making the most banal statements in the most tedious possible ways. And at a black-tie diabetes fund-raising dinner, she watched Nancy stand up and leave the table just as the doctor sitting between them started to explain to Nancy why his possible breakthrough cure did not have, as she had put it, “any significant private-sector upside.” She was the one, however, who introduced Lizzie to George at Ben’s loft party twelve years ago, and she was the one who found them Margaret, the godsend baby-sitter Lizzie employed for nine years, and it was at her (and Roger’s) dinner party in 1997 that George had met Emily and started
talking about
NARCS
. Those favors excuse everything else about Nancy.

“Nancy McNabb, Bruce Helms. Bruce is the brains behind Fine Technologies.”

Nancy shows tentative interest.

“Was, I mean,” Lizzie says. “He’s starting his own company.” Nancy turns instantly to Bruce.

“Yes?” she says. “
Are
you? Software? Or the net? Who’s VC-ing you? Tell me, tell me, tell me.”

“We’re self-financing,” Bruce tells her, “and it’s really just basic research for now. For quite a while, probably.”

“Ah,” Nancy says, finished with Bruce, turning back to Lizzie. “When are
we
going to do our transaction? The market is feeling very, very ripe to me again. Exceptionally ripe. Late-1998 ripe. By the way, that is gorgeous, Elizabeth. Badgley Mischka?”

Lizzie nods. Nancy knows everything and, for all practical purposes, everyone. She runs the media and technology practice for the investment bank Cordman, Horton, which as nearly as Lizzie can tell calls itself a “merchant bank” purely as an affectation. Nancy wants Cordman, Horton to take Fine Technologies public. A year ago, just before the internet IPO market had its ugly spell, Cordman, Horton took her brother Penn’s TK Corporation public for $230 million (“a valuation equal to approximately infinity times earnings,” Lizzie likes saying), and they’ve just finished negotiating the sale of TK Corp. to Mose Media Holdings for $327 million. (“I see Penn McNabb’s P—E is up to one-point-four infinity,” she thought of saying to George this week, and said to Bruce instead.)

“At least let me take you to lunch, all right? It’ll do you good to get up north of Fourteenth Street.”

Lizzie knows that the riposte
But, Nancy, my offices are on Eighteenth Street
isn’t worth making. “Sure,” she says. “Although we’re insanely busy right now.”

“Your utensils and beverage, Nan,” says Roger Baird—Jolly Roger. He’s not trying to be funny. Nancy takes the napkin-and-silverware roll from Roger without looking up, and he sets the glass down by her plate.

“It’s just club soda,” he says, meaning that the bartender had no
name-brand mineral waters. “Tap water
avec
gaz.” Now he’s trying to be funny.

“I saw the thing in the
Observer
about the TriBeCa show, Roger,” Lizzie says. “Congratulations.” Roger looks like a commercial banker, or an old-fashioned gentleman publisher, but his business (which involves reselling parcels of telephone bandwidth) is not his passion—his passion is “outsider art,” of which he is a major collector. He and Nancy specialize in sculpture and collages created by noninstitutionalized early- and mid-twentieth-century paranoid schizophrenics. Their privately printed catalogue
raisonée
, which Roger wrote himself, consists mainly of quotations from Antonin Artaud. He is sweetly ridiculous, like so many men married to tough, professional women in New York, the Charlie Browns to their Lucys, the Macbeths to their Lady Macbeths.