Turn of the Century (20 page)

“Sarah?” Lizzie says.

“I’m reading my book,” says Sarah, who’s now deep into
Kissing for Dummies
. “He’s almost ten, Mom. They’ll be okay.”

“I hadn’t thought about that part,” George says. “The press. This is a story, isn’t it? This could be a big story.
Jesus
.” For a fleeting, terrible moment they both think:
And next week we’re going to be the smiling freak-show loved-ones sidebar if he actually survives
.

“Dr. Hardiyanti also asked me this afternoon who Ben Kingsley is. Daddy, of course, is already casting the movie.”

“Ben Kingsley in a TV movie? Maybe a feature—
The Island of Dr. Moreau
, but contemporary and comedic. And,” he adds, shifting down to an announcer’s bass, “
inspirational
. Possibly HBO.”

“My God: no wonder you and my father get along so well.”

“You had a whole childhood to get nauseated by show biz. I was vulgarity-deprived. I’m still gorging.” George glances at Sarah, who’s slouched down in her chair reading. “Cubby told me in St. Paul that Alice, quote, ‘has a few envy issues with her little brother.’ ”

“Duh.”

“He said she always feels like she’s my ‘spacer car.’ ”

“Spacer car?”

“I had no idea either. It’s a train thing—they attach an empty car to each end of a full car carrying a heavy load, to spread out the weight for when the train crosses bridges. So the bridge won’t collapse.”

“Who’s my spacer car?”

“We take turns?”

“What are you guys talking about?” Sarah asks, using her middle-of-the-conversation confusion as an opportunity to be annoyed.

“Trains,” George tells her.

“Fuck!” Lizzie says. Sarah looks up. “George, I just remembered, while you were in the shower, Iris called. I’m really sorry.…”

George hasn’t brought his phone to dinner. “On Saturday night? What’d she want?”

“She didn’t say. She wouldn’t. That’s why I forgot. I’m sorry. She said it’s confidential.”

No one else would notice, but Lizzie watches George go a little tense, disengage, and look away a few degrees, deciding whether to resist his urge to call Iris now, thinking,
Mose has decided
Real Time
is too expensive, or too complicated, and backed out;
or,
they’re moving
NARCS
to Sunday to go against
60 Minutes; or,
Angela Janeway is refusing to go back to work until I book Vaclav Havel as well as Mandela for guest shots
.

Max and his sister have returned. “LuLu saw the actress who plays Clarissa taking a dump downstairs,” he announces.

“How charming, Sir,” Lizzie says. Since she is still fighting a holding action against
butt
, she decides to let
dump
pass this time. She capitulated on
sucks
two years ago.

“No, it was Sabrina!” Louisa corrects.
“Sabrina!”

“Same actress,” Max explains to the table.

Yesterday the whole family debated whether they had watched Halle Berry or Jada Pinkett or Jasmine Guy waiting to get her BMW at the hotel. The day before, the confusion was over a man standing near them in one of the seventeenth-century rooms at the Getty Museum: was it Alex Trebek (Max and LuLu) or Tom Selleck (Sarah and George) or Kevin Kline (Lizzie)?

“This is like license-plate bingo,” George says.

“What’s license-plate bingo?” Sarah asks.

“Yes, Opie,” Lizzie asks, interested as ever by the residual oddments of middle Americana that cling to her husband, “what
is
license-plate bingo?”

After how many generations of upward social mobility and whizbang novelty is a plateau finally reached, George wonders, and children once again live the childhoods their parents lived? “Nobody else at this table has ever taken a cross-country car trip, have they?” George says, shaking his head and doing a sort of parody of a tough-old-fogey dad. “Private schools, nannies, computers … no firecrackers. License-plate bingo is where you spot car license plates from as many different states as you can.”

“Why?” Sarah asks.

“Were license plates white-and-black when you were a boy?”

“Yes, Louisa, whittled by hand out of wood by hillbilly slaves.”

“Really?”
she asks hopefully.

“Dad,” Max says, “you should have your network make a TV show out of TV-star bingo. With kids and adults competing against each other to search for the celebrities. Like a giant scavenger hunt, but for human beings.”

George doesn’t know exactly how that would work, and he has no desire to go into the game-show business, but he knows that his little boy has had a cunning commercial inspiration.

A Chinese woman in her early twenties has appeared to take their order. She’s wearing a translucent Day-Glo yellow Bao Dai dress and has a tiny 1950s orbiting-atom tattoo on her neck just behind her right ear. George and Lizzie both wonder if her breasts, implausibly large, are real. Lizzie also thinks,
Ten years ago, you saw stylish, sexy Japanese women, but almost never Chinese (except for Pollyanna), and now suddenly they’re everywhere
. And George thinks,
Why aren’t there any Asian-American stars?

“Dad,” Max suddenly asks as George stands, “how famous are you, exactly?”

“Exactly?”
he says with a smile. “I don’t know. Not very. But give me a few minutes to calculate.”

When he finds the phone, he pushes the
VOICE
button on his new PalmPilot and says, “Contacts … Iris Randall … home” toward a tiny slot. Then on the pay phone he pushes the correct twenty-five-digit sequence necessary to reach his secretary in New York.

“Thank you very much for using Pacific Telesis,” a recorded female voice says before putting him through. “This evening. We really hope you have a super. Dinner at. Powerful on Sunset. Mr. Mac Tire.”

“It’s. Pronounced. Mc
Teer
,” George says, fooling around.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Iris, it’s me. You called?”

“You didn’t tell me about
Reality
getting picked up by the network! I’m brimming with pride for you!”

“Ah. Thanks. I guess I assume you know everything.”

“George!
Michael Milken
called you,” she says in the same insistent whisper that she says
Fifty-nine
. “His executive assistant. It was yesterday at, um, wait a second, let me find it.” And she’s gone. He hears her rustling; he hears her TV.
Mike Milken?
How would the richest and
most respected criminal in America chart out these days on Saddler’s Media Perception Index? Now there’s a true visionary, like Jay Gould and Lex Luthor and Dr. No were visionaries. Barry Diller, whom George knows slightly, introduced him to Milken at a party for the media watchdog magazine
Brill’s Content
, in which Diller was an investor. (George is embarrassed to admit, even to Lizzie, even to himself, that he had wished for the magazine’s demise—not out of idle Manhattan malice, but because he knew the magazine would wage a righteous and annoying crusade against
Real Time
.)

“Hello? Iris?” Nothing, just the noise of distant rummaging and the infamous TV ad for an advertising agency that has been running all winter on New York stations. (The commercial consists of magnificent stock shots of forests and American cities, run under a Satie piano étude and a vocal track of a woman moaning orgasmically.) George watches a young woman step out of the bathroom a few yards from the phone. She smiles as she passes. Women outside New York smile at strangers. He thinks she may be Dominique Swain—excellent memory, George!—who had the title role in the
Lolita
remake. Or is it Britney Spears? Is this who LuLu mistook for the girl who plays Clarissa and Sabrina? Do all blond twenty-two-year-old actresses look more or less the same to six-year-olds, the same way they do to forty-four-year-olds?

Where in God’s name have you gone, Iris?
He considers hanging up. Then he hears, as if out of his own brain, the opening bars of the
NARCS
theme music, the Wagner played on electric guitar and the strings-and-percussion stew (cellos, digital congas, timpani, automatic weapons cocking), which gives him goose bumps even now. It’s ten o’clock in New York,
NARCS
is just starting, and Iris is at home alone, on Saturday night, settling in to watch his show as it’s broadcast. This is why she keeps her job.

“At seven-fourteen,” she says.

“What?”

“The call from Michael Milken’s office. Last night. Well, yesterday afternoon, I guess, his time. No, it’s a Miami number, 305—so it was last night. I have the number. You want it? Shall I try patching you through? But it’s Saturday. And it’s late.”

“What did he want, Iris?”

“I don’t
know
. I asked. The assistant wouldn’t say.”

“Then why did you tell Lizzie that you were calling about something confidential?”

“Because you told me on Monday to be sure never to tell anyone anything, nothing, including Lizzie, because of fiduciary whatever, and church and state and competition we may not even be aware is competition, blah-blah-blah. Don’t you remember? On Monday you told me.”

“Can the Milken call wait until Monday?”

“Do you think I should try to get him now and find out?”

“Let’s return the call Monday morning. And Iris, we need a flight back home tomorrow, all five of us. After lunch.

“Also, Iris? Can you find out if Angela wants a free, um, therapy session for her dog?”

“Of course! George? How’s Mr. Zimbalist doing? Is he … copacetic?” She pauses just long enough for George to start to take a breath. “No, I apologize, it’s none of my beeswax. So I hope he’s fine. See you Monday. Bye.” Does she mean copacetic or comatose?

How I
hate
running
, George thinks as he runs east up Sunset past gardeners’ pickups arriving for work, his lungs burning, mouth wide open, slurping air, blinded by the rising sun, on each left stride the brand-new nylon shorts tugging scrotum flesh. Dropping dead while running: George dreads the prospect of an ironic death. As interesting-story deaths go, being killed by the contra mortar shell in 1984 would have had its virtues. The line-of-duty nobility; the youthful and politically correct martyrdom (although it could have been a Sandinista round just as easily); the clips from the movie
Under Fire
that the TV news shows would have run to sex up their reports; the tacit rebuke to all the baby-boom pussies who will wind up dying on the StairMaster or some rusty nursing-home gurney.

“My God! Gordon MacRae!” yells a man enthusiastically a half block down Santa Monica.

Where?
George wonders, running. Is Gordon MacRae still alive? Movie-star bingo, live.

“
Hey
, Gorgeous George!” the man yells.

A nut. An interesting nut. In fact, the perfect Beverly Hills lunatic. He’s walking several extremely tiny dogs. George veers right, giving the guy room, and averts his glance.

“Whoa! One-armed man! David Janssen chasing you or what?”

It’s Featherstone, of course. He has on yellow leather pants, a complicated white collarless shirt, and dark glasses with frames so fine and wirelike that at first George thinks he’s wearing a pair of smoked-glass monocles. Which, someday, Timothy Featherstone might very well do, depending on the caprices of twenty-first-century fashion.

“Timothy!” George huffs. “Great to see you!” He holds up his index finger as he tries to catch his breath. “One sec.” At first George thinks his discombobulation is due to the unexpectedness of the encounter, or because he’s dressed in embarrassing ad-wear (a Y2KRx T–shirt, shorts with the Gap logo). Ordinarily, around Featherstone, George feels a kind of beneficent superiority—certainly not nervousness or deference. But this, George realizes, is their first face-to-face encounter since the network pickup of
Real Time
has had time to sink in. Last week, before they had the deal, George could be pessimistic and carefree. Not anymore. His long shot has come in, and his reflexive grovel is part of the price, the agony of victory. It must run deep, this ancient human impulse to suck up.

“My main dude!” Featherstone holds a hand near George’s crotch, palm up. George, sweaty and out of breath in his running clothes, for once feels butch enough to slap five.

“Cute poodle.”

“Bichon frise.”

“What?”

“Peter is a bichon frise.”

“Ah. Right.” All four dogs are odd-looking, but the weirdest seems literally extraterrestrial: eight inches high, cartoonishly fluffy, and all white except for a perfect black triangle around each of its huge surprised eyes. It could be a canine-feline crossbreed, combining the least endearing aspects of each species. “That’s a really interesting one.”

“Paul? Paul’s a Japanese chin. Fabulous breed. Johnny Depp has a chin. I’m told that Jennifer Aniston is into chins. Paul”—he tugged on the leash of what looked like a shrunken, hairless German shepherd—“is a xoloitzcuintili. And Ringo, here, is a schipperke pup.”

A “zuh loytz-queen-teeley” and a “shkeep-ur-kuh.” The breeds sound like extemporaneous nonsense, the kind of words Max makes up when he tries to scare LuLu. Featherstone’s xoloitzcuintili is yapping
angrily at George, which makes the schipperke start yipping at the xoloitzcuintili.

“So what’re you doin’ out here in my hood, man?
Prago!
No!
Prago!
” he says sharply to the dogs, which instantly stop barking. “The trainer is from Umbria.”

“Lizzie’s father went into the hospital on Monday.”

“Ay-yai-yai! Rough week for the Mactier-Zimbalists. Ringo!
Sedersi giù, cane! Sedersi
. Where you staying?”

“The Beverly Hills.” The A-list hotels are the Bel Air and the Peninsula. The Beverly Hills is a bit A-minus, especially since the renovation in the nineties polished away the singed, mildewy, Dewar’s-and-soda patina of old Hollywood.

“Really? Hmmm. Why don’t you pop over with me and have a mochaccino and a scone, whatever.
Mi
crib
es tu
crib.”