Turn of the Century (15 page)

“Harold Mose wants your advice. Cubby Koplowitz wants my advice.”

“George,”
Cubby says, grabbing his brother-in-law with both arms, beard pressing George’s cheek, hugging harder, shaking him.
“Geoooorrrge.”
Heterosexual men have been bear-hugging heterosexual male acquaintances for a quarter century, but George still can’t do it gracefully. George’s unhugginess, he knows, is essentially why he was an unconvincing hippie in the early seventies, his three years of long hair, intensive drug use, and Fabian socialism notwithstanding.

“Hi, Cubby.”

Cubby’s shirt cuffs are unbuttoned and rolled with his jacket sleeves up past his wrists. He’s wearing an M. C. Escher necktie, and his argyle V-neck sweater vest is tucked into his Dockers.

“I’m sorry you guys can’t stay over. We’d love to have the twins and your little ones interact.”

“No, I know, so would we, Cubby. But Lizzie really needs to get back.” They’re booked on a nine o’clock return flight. The desire to avoid a dinner with his sister and brother-in-law and their children is unspoken.

“I know you guys are crazy busy. Did Lizzie happen to mention Families Together Forever?”

George, figuring Families Together Forever is some religious group, smiles and shakes his head gently. Cubby was a Scientologist in the seventies. (In fact, he claimed to have invented a crucial technical innovation for the Scientologists’ “E-meter,” the device the church uses to measure adherents’ progress toward enlightenment. But his lawsuit against Scientology in the late eighties—in which he named John Travolta and Tom Cruise as codefendants—was dismissed.)

“Okay. Final resting locations. A totally fragmented, totally localized business, right? No economies of scale. No national marketing. And just no darned
fun
. Right? Okay, we acquire parcels of a hundred acres or more. That is, the franchisees acquire the acreage, mall-adjacent, which gives you visibility, which gives you convenience, which makes it easy and natural to visit Mom or Granddad frequently. Families. Together. Forever.” Cubby quickly looks around the room, nodding and making a sort of papal-blessing gesture with his hands.

“Huh.” George has no idea what Cubby is talking about.

“Right? You have a water feature, and a café facility—indoor-outdoor depending on season and climatic zone. You have a putting green, maybe even minigolf, we’re not sure—but you definitely use the grass motif, make it part of
life
. Tasteful minigolf, with traditional structures. Everything tasteful. The point is, we turn the cemetery experience into a
park
experience.”

“You’re starting a cemetery?”

“The business concept is cemeterial, but it’s really so much more than that, George. It’s location-based entertainment that’s nature-themed, spirit-themed, love-themed. And with a major personal video component. That’s my question for you, George.”

“What is?”

“Our memorial marker is a video concept. We’re developing a weatherproof monitor, polymer casing, approximate shape and size of a conventional headstone. Right? So instead of just a chunk of granite—‘Edith Hope Cranston Mactier, born 1918, died 2000, RIP,’ end of story—we’d have a loop of beautiful video scenes of your mom in life, dissolving, fading in, fading out—well,
you
know, George, better than I do, the show business possibilities. It’s mass customization. Right?”

In fact, George’s mother was cremated the night before. There will be no grave, no stone. “Every gravestone in the cemetery is a TV set?”

Cubby, nodding, gets to his point. “And what we need is a world-class anchor.”

“An
anchor
?” George is fascinated. He knows he ought to be appalled, and a year ago, before they sold
NARCS
to MBC, before he was running a business, when he was a journalist, he might have been. Journalists appall easily, for all their supposed impassivity.

“A host. Someone with real brand equity—serious, prestigious, likable, loving, caring. Someone who can be the Families Together Forever
Colonel Sanders, okay? Billy Graham without the religious baggage. Who we’d use in the marketing, but also integrate into every single headstone video package. He’d welcome the visitor, and segue into scenes of the loved one.”

Lizzie has returned, which lets George relax.

“You are one brilliant man, Cubby Koplowitz,” he says, meaning it, but also, since Lizzie is back, being a little arch. Sincerity plus irony simultaneously equals … what? Nuance. Cosmopolitanism. Weaseliness. Cosmopolitan weaseliness.

“Do you think,” Cubby asks, “that you could put me together with your boys Phil Donahue and Bill Moyers? They’re both on our very short list for spokespeople. You’d be doing them a favor, George. I mean, when the IPO goes—look out, ladies! Speaking of which, I’d love to talk to your Wall Street friend Benjy Gold about possibly getting involved. He’s into start-ups, isn’t he? Venture capital kinds of … ventures?”

Lizzie feels sorry for George, and for Cubby. George has met Donahue twice, and talked once with Moyers, sixteen years ago about the PBS Central America show.

“I don’t know, Cubby. I could mention it to Bennett. But I don’t really know Donahue or Moyers. I can find out for you who their agents are.…”

“And I can use your name?”

“Well … I guess, sure. Okay.”

“Okay,
super
!” Cubby hugs George again. “Super. Now don’t sneak out of here without telling your brother-in-law goodbye. Bye-bye, Lizzie.”

George and Lizzie glance at each other, happy to be married, happy to live elsewhere, ready to leave.

“Hello, George Mactier.”

He turns. “Jodie Eliason.” He hasn’t seen her in twenty-five years, not since the disastrous Thanksgiving weekend she spent with him in his freshman room at Wesleyan, after taking the bus fourteen hundred miles from St. Paul. He leans in to kiss both cheeks, which startles Jodie, as it would most Minnesotans.

“I did love your mom a lot,” Jodie tells George, sandwiching his hand between hers. Releasing George, she turns to Lizzie, extending her right hand. “Hi. You must be Elizabeth. I’m Jodie Eliason Taft.” A
skinny, pale teenage girl in tattered tights and a short denim skirt, with very short, very black hair and one blue eyebrow, lurks nearby. “And this,” Jodie says, “is my daughter Fanny.”

“Hi,” Fanny says, her eyes fixing on Lizzie. “Good to meet you.” Fanny looks uncannily like Jodie did as a teenager, except cool and angry, more like George wished Jodie had looked in 1973.

“Well, I just wanted to, like, stop by and say a quick hi,” Jodie says. “
NARCS
is just the best, by the way.” Not great, not her favorite on Saturday night, not the best new hour-long dramatic series in several seasons, but just “the best.” She still talks like she did in tenth grade, when she told George that “Thoreau is just the best.”

“Thanks a lot for coming. How’s …”

“Billy? We split up in ’97.”

“Ah,” George says, recalling the time Billy Taft slugged him in the face, without warning and for no apparent reason, at a church dance in the seventh grade.

“There’s a bug in Y2KRx,” Fanny abruptly announces to Lizzie. “It doesn’t recognize January first, 2001, at all. At least not running on Pentium III it doesn’t.”

Lizzie is dumbstruck. Jodie shakes her head, putting on a who-can-understand-these-kids-today smile. “Fanny is our computer genius. Loves the computers and the software and whatnot. When I told her I knew you, kind of, she was mighty impressed, let me tell you.”

God, she’s middle-aged
, George thinks. Outside big cities, people seem to age faster, become fatter and balder sooner, even though they also tend to dress and talk and eat like adolescents at thirty and forty and fifty. They’re teenagers with mortgages and multiple marriages and forty extra pounds.

Fanny asks Lizzie, “Um … when does Range Daze ship?”

“You don’t work for Microsoft, do you?” Lizzie says, quietly thrilled by this encounter with a bona fide fan—her first fan, Fanny.

Shaking her head quickly and looking away, Fanny smiles despite herself, then giggles.

“End of the year, I hope,” Lizzie says. “You know, the bug in Yack-ety-rex was in the beta version only. We fixed it before it shipped.”

“Cool,” Fanny says, “but I have a question? About Range Daze?” Fanny asks. “In terms of multiplayer functionality? Are you going to
optimize for copper wire fifty-six-six or SDL or cable modem or what?”

“We’re completely agnostic,” Lizzie says, oblivious to where she is.

Jodie, grinning, frowning, and shaking her head, turns to George and asks, “Do you understand all this crazy stuff, George? Or are you in the wrong generation, like me?”

He shrugs, just like his father used to do when he didn’t want to answer a question, and starts jollying his wife away. Lizzie notices that Fanny is wearing a ridged, purple plastic ankle bracelet a half inch wide. It looks cool, she thinks, and wonders if she could get away with wearing a plastic ankle bracelet. Probably not, she decides, at least not in New York.

Alice has just left, but Lizzie hears George still upstairs, wandering, inspecting. Max is in the living room watching a forty-year-old episode of
The Twilight Zone
in which a pioneer travels eighty years forward through time in a Conestoga, to 1960, to get medicine for his sick child back in the nineteenth century. Louisa has refused to watch (“
Mom!
Grandma has only a
white-and-black
TV! The commercials are white-and-black, too!”), even though Max explained to her that the show itself would be black-and-white on the TV at home, too. She finally got bored using Edith Hope’s Clapper to turn lamps on and off, and couldn’t understand the jokes in the old
Reader’s Digests
, so she consented to go with Aunt Alice to play with the twins. Sarah, wearing a T-shirt Lizzie has never seen (FORGET THE ALAMO. STOP THE WAR.), is in the kitchen, eating prepeeled baby carrots out of the bag, dipping them into a jar of Cheez Whiz the size of a beach bucket, and giggling at her mother.

“It wasn’t
jewelry
, Mom, it was a
device
. That’s so funny you thought it was jewelry. It’s so some police guy knows where she is all the time. Because of getting arrested for computer hacking. An arf ID, she said it was.”

“RFID,” Lizzie says. “A radio-frequency ID tag. We’ve fooled around with them at the office for the time-travel game.”

“Whatever. I think it’s kind of sick. She has to wear it for nine more months. I feel sorry for her.” Sarah sucks and licks off the synthetic cheese, orange on orange, and dips the same wet, uneaten carrot back
in for more. Her mother frowns and starts to open her mouth, but then lets it go; it’s been a long day, and anyway, no one else is going to be eating Edith Hope’s Cheez Whiz.

“Mom? Is it weird for you to meet a woman George has fucked? Fanny’s mom?”

“You don’t have to use that word, Sarah.”

“But—”

“And don’t say ‘but
you
use it,’ because I do not use it to mean making love. It’s ugly.” She thinks better of adding,
Even for a super-sophisticated eighth grader
, and says instead, in a higher-pitched, what-time-is-it tone of voice, “Did Fanny tell you that?”

“Uh-huh.” Sarah licks the same carrot a third time. “She was really nice to me. But also strange,” she decides, slurping the last of this Cheez Whiz load. “In a pretty cool way.” The slick little carrot plunges back into the jar. “So?
Is
it weird for you? Were you jealous at the church this afternoon?”

“No,” Lizzie says. “Oh, maybe. You think about it for a second. But it’s so stupid. I mean, they were children at the time.
Eat
the carrot, Sarah.”

“Children?”

Unfortunate word choice
. “They were young.” No. “Eighteen, I think.”
Fifteen, liar
.

“Has George told you about every woman he ever, you know … made love to?”

“No. And I haven’t gone into detail about every old boyfriend, either. But we haven’t
not
. I’m surprised Edith Hope would have baby carrots. They’re expensive.”

“She doesn’t. I brought them from New York.”

In the attic, George, relieved that his sister has gone, is reminded of the two dozen afternoons he spent here as a kid. Once or twice a year he’d wander up to search through his parents’ stuff. He never went looking for anything in particular, but to wallow in the heavenly, mote-filled dormer light, the TV- and chatter- and Formica-free austerity. Downstairs, almost everything was useful and unimportant; up here, jammed into raw utilitarian space, was only meaningful residue, all the useless and important things. Suddenly his dreamy childhood hours take on the tang of precognition: Did he sit here, on a Saturday
afternoon in 1963 or a Sunday morning in 1967, somehow anticipating this Tuesday afternoon in 2000? Now, for once, this one last time, he is
supposed
to be snooping through his parents’ private papers and precious castoffs. Is there a word for the converse of déjà vu?

Then the sun moves just under the eaves, spraying the room with a gorgeous honey glow. For ten seconds, George stares toward the piles of artifacts, in a trance, as sunlight floods in. The attic, George notices now, seeing the exposed joists, the unfinished planks, the pure, uninterrupted space and sheet-metal ductwork bursting out of and into walls and floors exactly like a sculpture George saw at the Dia Foundation in the early eighties, is a loft—a nice raw loft, a couple of thousand square feet, light on three sides, river view. Like those white corporate monoliths along Sixth Avenue, the attic (of all rooms) in his parents’ house (of all places) has become accidentally stylish, innocently, unwittingly, posthumously cool. Snapping to, George sees the scene, and himself backlit in it, as a shot from a very expensive television ad, the inspirational kind for Cotton Incorporated or General Electric that make Lizzie tear up against her will. But George doesn’t let knowing TV-commercial reverb spoil the moment. Conventional beauty does not equal kitsch. Not all sentiment is sentimentalism.