Turn of the Century (17 page)

The nose of a tiny, sleek, bronze-colored bullet train, practically noiseless, shoots out of a translucent, sandblasted glass tube under a two-inch-wide gush of water, toward them, then sharply turns away, rising toward some kind of randomly throbbing orange glow behind a rocky hill in the back of his brother-in-law’s garage. The train doesn’t seem to be riding on a track. It seems to float. George looks at Cubby.

“My new mag-lev loco.”

When he’s in here, does Cubby speak some sci-fi lingo that he’s also invented? George feels drugged. “It’s what?” George asks in a surprisingly tiny voice. His throat is dry.

“Mag lev. The locomotive runs by magnetic levitation. It’s a real, real nifty little item. It actually floats, just barely—see?—right over the track. Five hundredths of a millimeter. Just got it a couple of weeks ago off the web from a guy in Dresden who makes them. That is the future right there, George. They’re constructing a mag-lev line from Hamburg to Berlin as we speak. Japan’s got it, too. The real ones go two hundred miles an hour. And they’re capable of going double or triple that.”

“You designed all this, Cubby? The buildings? And those—those gardens?”

“Eco-malls, they call them. Well,
I
call them. And that one way over there, behind the mercury ponds? Is a Families Together Forever facility.” A hundred little simulated-video tombstones flicker in a trees-of-paradise grove.

“The parallel lines of light over there are lasers?”

“Actually not parallel, George—just off. The idea is they’re power lines, and meet up a hundred miles away. You know, in another city. If there were another city. So, uh-huh, mostly, I guess you could say I designed
it all. I mean, a lot of the operating equipment, like the mag lev, I got from vendors, but otherwise … yeah.”

“Like those towers over there,” George says, pointing to the cathedral neighborhood. “Did you base them on particular models? Angkor Wat? Or Gaudí?”

“Who?” Cubby regards George with the kind of wounded look Alice perpetually gives her little brother from New York. “This is all my design, George. A hundred percent.”

“Oh, I
know
, no, it’s
amazing
, I just … Does it have a name?”

“Well, I sometimes used to call it my Mini-Epcot, you know, just to myself and my wife and friends and, you know. Ex-wife, I mean. Look! Did you see the old N-scale diesel loco go into the wooden sports dome? I love this. Listen!” An unseen crowd inside the stadium boos. “For a while after that I called it Kennedy. The city of Kennedy. I had this whole story behind that, which is some Chinese terrorists shot down President John F. Kennedy, Jr., and his family and Caroline in 2016, and the United States established a new city called Kennedy in their honor outside San Juan, Puerto Rico, and so forth, and this is the city a hundred eighty-four years after that. It’s set two hundred years in the future. Your sister hated my calling it Kennedy. I guess because your mom and dad hated the Kennedys so much. So anyway, now I just call it the Project.”

“Can we go, Daddy?” Louisa has grabbed onto George’s belt with both hands, and is propelling herself off the ground, up his leg.

“In one second, honey,” he says, putting a foot forward and leaning back to let her climb. “It’s always two hundred years in the future?”

“Right,” Cubby says, looking over his creation. “When I started, it was 2171. Now it’s the year 2200—that orange light over behind Mount Diana would be, like, some turn-of-the-century commemoration. And next year it’ll be 2201. And so on.” He looks at his brother-in-law. “So do you like it?”

“I’ve never seen anything so incredible. You should be very proud. It’s spectacular. It’s wonderful.”

“Hey, thanks, man,” says Cubby, grabbing his brother-in-law for a hug, making George regret his effusiveness a little.

“We’ll see you,” he says, decoupling. “Tell Alice goodbye again for me.”

“Will do. Hey! That’s a new model, isn’t it?” He’s grabbed George’s prosthetic driving hand.

“No, I’ve had it a few years.”

“Hmmm,” says Cubby, examining the wrist mechanism. “This servomotor here looks exactly like what I’ve just started using on the retractable roofs on some of the newer buildings. On the Project,” he says, nodding sideways. “Who’s the vendor on this? Dutch? I’ll bet it’s Dutch. Benelux for sure.”

“I don’t have any idea, Cubby,” he says, pulling his hand away.

It has started snowing outside, and the sun is down. As he drives back to his mother’s house, George can’t stop thinking about Cubby’s imaginary city. After his initial astonishment, he looked for some unintentional flaw, some sign of amateurishness or stupidity. But even the Koplowitzian turns of phrase—Eco-malls, Families Together Forever—are perfect. The difference between a piece of art and a piece of folk art is a matter of schooled versus self-taught, knowing versus innocent, slick versus raw (or willfully raw versus authentically raw). Where does that put Cubby? Slick folk art? Kitsch profundity? A web-empowered naïf? Genius dimwit? Maybe Cubby Koplowitz is the first twenty-first-century man.

George glances at the sign announcing the next several interstate exits. Harold Stassen Drive is closed for repairs.

“Daddy, are you happy?” LuLu says from the passenger seat. “Why are you smiling?”

“Oh, I was thinking about Uncle Cubby. And Grandpa.”

“Do you know why I’m holding the pen like this?”

George looks over at Louisa, who is holding a Bic with both hands against her forehead, ball point facing forward.

“No, LuLu. Put it down. Why are you?”

“Because in case we crash? And the air bag goes off? The pen will pop it so it can’t smother me.” Louisa’s morbidity is never overtly fearful. She is simply fascinated by the physiology of death, the psychology, the sociology (thus her stunt in preschool), the theology, actuarial issues, all of it.

As George gets out of the car and heads for the side door, he sees Sarah sitting on the front porch, coatless, staring at a yew twig, stripping it of needles one by one. “Sir?” LuLu yells, shooting inside ahead
of George. “The cousins have a stuffed pet possum they shot themselves!”

“Do we want half of Mom’s ashes?” George asks Lizzie, more jovially than he intends, as he comes into the warm kitchen. She’s crouching at a cabinet, reaching way into the back. “Alice offered to FedEx my half to us.”

Lizzie withdraws her head from the cabinet and turns to face him. She sighs. “Mike’s in the hospital.”

“Come on. No. Your dad?”

She stands, nodding. “He’s in the ICU. His liver. I made reservations for all of us. We leave at six-something tomorrow morning, and get to L.A. at ten. Sorry about this.”

The sob starts as a cycle of several quick, violent exhalations alternating with deep, ravenous gulps. It looks like a seizure. Now, fifteen seconds later, instead of the breathy gasp for air comes a real sound, a high-pitched, unsteady screech, like a violin string bowed wrong. Lizzie feels terrible for him. “Shhhhhhhh,” she says, gently reaching up to stroke his face, and keeps her arms tight around him as he falls into a chair, crying and crying.

“A convertible?” Lizzie
says when they find their parking space in the Hertz lot.

“I always ask for a convertible in L.A.”

Lizzie thinks of saying,
That’s like if I insisted on canoeing every time we go to Minnesota
, or even,
That’s like the time Cubby and Alice came to New York and made us ride with them in the hansom cab to dinner at Tavern on the Green—and when you spotted Roone Arledge walking along Central Park South, you crouched down so he wouldn’t see you
. But she finds his L.A. out-of-townerism sweet, says nothing, and lifts her luggage, LAX tags dangling, into the trunk of the Saab.

Some well-to-do young people born during the era of Lizzie’s girlhood (temporarily) despised the comfortable lives provided by their parents as bland and phony. But what Lizzie disliked about Los Angeles, still dislikes, is not so much the phoniness as the lack of rigor. She doesn’t think that people in Los Angeles are lazier than people elsewhere—in high school, a Chicano boy in Lizzie’s urban history class accused her of being a racist on just this count. But their minds do tend to waft from place to place and from notion to notion uncritically, childishly, almost randomly, like colored tissue paper and strands of cotton
candy drifting along on breezes. For Lizzie, it all became clear in a series of blazing revelations in her seventh-grade Peoples of Earth class at Oakwood. (Learning has never since been quite so ecstatic for her.) Los Angeles, she realized at age twelve, is a hunter-gatherer society, a city of believers in the permanent cornucopia, cargo cultists. Natural Angelenos are people inclined, when they feel hungry, to pick the nearest ripe papaya or accept any old sitcom role, to go with the flow, live off the land. Lizzie announced to her parents that she was more of a Mesopotamian, attracted to tilling, planting, and harvesting. “You mean,” Mike Zimbalist said to her at the breakfast table as he cocked his head back and slid a girder of reheated tofu tempura into his mouth like a giant French fry, “you’re a Jew.” Until that moment in 1976, Lizzie believes, she had never heard anyone say the word
Jew
.

At age ten, this world-historical revelation—Lizzie Zimbalist as an agrarian among nomads—transformed her personality, liberated her from the tyranny of the mellow. As soon as she realized that she didn’t need to be a feckless hunter-gatherer like her parents, she lightened up dramatically. In the middle of seventh grade she had been a glum, chunky, lonely Wednesday Addams junior beatnik who neglected her homework; by eighth grade she was a geography-loving, cello-playing, field-hockey-starring A student, cheerful and thin and full of grace, with goody-goody friends, nerd friends, punk friends. It was like puberty in reverse. Her mother, alarmed by the sudden mysterious transformation, hired an Orange County cult deprogrammer to examine Lizzie secretly; the deprogrammer, at Serene Zimbalist’s direction, posed as her fill-in sailing instructor, but when during her second lesson he pronounced jib “jibe” and Lizzie had to tell him what a keel was, he admitted the ruse to her. “Mother?” Lizzie said coolly that evening as Serene walked in from a Sargent Shriver for President fund-raiser at Ma Maison, “I just want you to know that I will never, ever trust you again.” She didn’t speak to her mother for two weeks. Although her parents separated a few months after this incident, Lizzie never blamed herself for their divorce.

The new self-knowledge was why Lizzie left her excruciatingly hip Hollywood private school and enrolled in Palisades High, and why she understood that she would go to college in the east and settle there. (“In a sophisticated urban center the other side of 38° latitude and 88°
longitude,” according to her eighth-grade diary.) It’s why at Harvard she studied biological anthropology, disappointing her father (he wanted her to major in visual and environmental studies), her mother (French), and her stepmother (social work, which Harvard didn’t offer). It’s why she married George, why she got her MBA, why she got into the software business. Although programmers are odd, they think and speak precisely. Their insufferability, Lizzie thinks, is just an extreme, involuted version of her own.

But this
weather
, she has to admit, zooming up the 405 at eighty with the convertible top down in the middle of winter, hair whipping her neck, shades on, wind too loud to chat, is delicious. And she does like driving. It’s short-term mindlessness, mindlessness with a definite and necessary purpose, like pulling weeds. Back in her teenage know-it-all days, she regarded southern California’s wiffiness and its happy weather as flip sides of the same coin—she used to tell Californians she loved the
real seasons
of the Northeast, bittersweet autumn, unmitigated February. The L.A. climate, she enjoyed saying to her parents when she was home from college on winter break, was a smiley-face climate, the weather of stasis, of denial, of death itself. But lately she’s realized she likes sunny skies, and no longer disapproves of endless dry days in the seventies. Maybe life is changeable and tough and interesting enough, she thinks, pulling into the Westwood exit lane; maybe the weather doesn’t have to be, too.

George, twisting around to stroke Lizzie’s neck and shoulder with his right hand, asks in a loud voice, “You okay?”

“Fine!”
she screams back. She’s afraid the scream, necessitated by the wind and the freeway noise, misrepresents her emotional state. “Really, I’m good,” she says to George at normal volume, now that they’re off the freeway, on Wilshire, heading for Beverly Hills. She is. In fact, Mike Zimbalist has come so close to dying so many times—the mysterious beating outside Slapsy Maxie’s nightclub by “a couple of Eye-tie savages,” the melanoma, the midnight stumble with a young Czech actress off the cantilevered deck on Mulholland Drive (“the Mariel Hemingway of the Warsaw Pact,” he told her and Serene in the emergency room at three A.M.), the second melanoma, the seaplane accident in Central America, the quadruple bypass, the tequila-related snorkeling emergency in Tahoe—she realizes she has already fully discounted
for her father’s demise. It’s like in the stock market, when investors expect some specific piece of bad news—higher interest rates, lower earnings, a dying CEO, whatever—and when the bad news actually arrives it has no effect on share prices.

“Elizabeth Zimbalist, sometimes I think you’re half adding machine!” her father would say if he knew what she was thinking right now, as he says whenever she acts a little too candidly or sensibly for his tastes. He said it when she dumped Buddy Ramo. (“Buddy’s a
client
!” he said the night she announced she was breaking up with him. “There’ve been a gazillion times I’ve wanted to dump Buddy myself, you know, but I didn’t, you know why? Because the beautiful little dumbbell needs me.” “All right, Daddy,” Lizzie replied, “from now on
I’ll
book Buddy into dinner theaters and
you
have sex with him.”) He said it when she cashed in his college graduation present to her, a ninety-nine-day-long round-the-world “cruise to the grand past” (“Constantinople,” “Ceylon,” “Siam,” “Saigon”), and instead invested the money in Compaq stock. (“Why would I want to spend the entire summer on a stupid ship with a bunch of strangers living some good-old-days hallucination?” “Because, Ms. Wet Blanket, it’s
romantic
, that’s why! My God: did your mother have intercourse with an adding machine at some orgy back in the sixties? Is that what happened?”) He said it when she declined to take a week off from work to attend his wedding to Tammy, his third wife, in Australia five years ago. (“Dad, I’m trying to start a business.” “Yeah? And? So? Do you know how many businesses your old man has started, Ms. CEO?
Every
engagement for
every
client is a separate business!” At the time, she figured this was a piece of Mike Zimbalist hyperbole. But a year later, George brought home a clipping from
Daily Variety
reporting that her father, doing business as Major Show Business Attractions LLC, had signed a consent decree with the California State Attorney General in which he agreed to dissolve the 1,278 shell corporations he had established during the previous six years.) And Mike Zimbalist said it the last time she was with him, late the Saturday night after Passover last year in Palm Springs. Tammy had gone to bed and Lizzie had presumed to ask how her four stepsiblings would be treated in his will. (Lizzie and her father had finished two one-liter buckets of frozen margaritas from the built-in frozen-margarita machine.) The single major irrational act of
her life, deciding at age twenty-one to carry Buddy Ramo’s baby to term and to raise her alone, made Mike Zimbalist weepy with pride.