Turn of the Century (22 page)

Their
PowerBook, technically, but he uses it more. Given her profession, Lizzie is only desultorily wired, aside from e-mail indifferent to computers in her personal life. George finds this charming. Neither of them fully embraces the web lifestyle. If you’re a reporter who requires many disparate bits of information quickly, fine. Or a trader in stocks
or bonds or currencies who really does need prices and news this very instant. Or if you’re a person in the thrall of a cult or pathology or hobby, or some lonely loser who can’t make friends the ordinary ways. Or a curious child. But otherwise, what is so compelling about the web? Instant access, at any time of day or night, to ten million corporate brochures, card catalogues, and strangers’ queer obsessions?

“But you just said it, sweetheart,” George told her the night in 1994 she was trying to convince herself not to go to work for Rupert Murdoch’s new online service. “You just hit on
exactly
why this World Wide Web”—the phrase
World Wide Web
already sounds as antique as motorcar or aeroplane—“really
will
work.”

“Because it’s a tewwible tongue twister?” Lizzie said.

“Because most Americans are in the thrall of some cult or pathology or hobby. Or don’t have any friends because they live in some ten-minute-old suburb in the middle of a cornfield or desert and spend all their spare time commuting and watching TV and looking at catalogues. Highways made the suburbs happen. The suburbs will make your World Wide Web happen.” She took the Murdoch job the next day. (And lost it a year later when the business had its plug pulled.)

Similarly, George has very little personal interest in prime-time television. Except for shows he produces and shows that compete directly with shows he produces, he literally has to force himself to watch TV at home. As a child, he watched his full American ration and then some, thirty-five or forty hours a week. Eating thickly frosted cookies, reading
Tom Swift
, doing homework, talking by walkie-talkie to his friend Tuggy Masterson two houses down or by phone to Jodie Eliason, building plastic models of military vehicles from the past and the distant future, jerking off—almost nothing George did as a child wasn’t done while watching TV. (“That’s why men multitask so much better than women,” Lizzie concluded from George’s description of his all-TV childhood. “That’s why they like looking at Bloomberg screens with seventeen different data streams. You’ve all been in training for this since you were boys.”) But in adolescence his TV gluttony was slaked, or suppressed, or desublimated. As an adult, George hasn’t watched more than a minute of most series on television—a disengagement that would have been simply unimaginable when he was young. He’s never admitted to anyone at work that the final episode of
Seinfeld
was the first time he watched the show. The night he had the idea for
NARCS
, half drunk, inventing on the spur of the moment, seated next to Emily at a dinner party, he had to ask Lizzie on the way home if his idea for
Drug War
(as he called it then) sounded too similar to
NYPD Blue
or
Homicide
, since he had never seen either show.

“What do you mean, ‘too similar’?” George remembers Lizzie saying in a taxi hurtling in the rain down Fifth Avenue. “All TV shows are like other TV shows. Fuck, George, just for having a police show with cool music and a woman commander and a virtuous cop who smokes pot you’ll get credit for being revolutionary. Make it good too, and you’ll be home free.”

George catches himself, and smiles: he has been standing for two minutes in front of his big window overlooking the hotel’s parking area, naked, combing through his pubic hair with his hand, staring at the top of a browned palm tree on Sunset, in full view of a pair of parking attendants sharing a cigarette. He grabs the curtain closed. Emily won’t be here for two hours to pick him up for Hank Saddler’s charity cocktail party. He’ll read the new script they e-mailed him from New York yesterday. The PowerBook is in sleep mode, which is more properly eyes-closed-pretending-to-sleep mode, since the computer springs instantly to full wakefulness the moment he touches it. Barely but precisely tickling a rectangular indentation near the keyboard, the body heat of his index finger moves the cursor (that is, the tiny drawing of an arrow) over the ragged mob of icons (that is, the little pictures of file folders) to the one labeled
NARCS
99–00, and he clicks, bursting open a sublist of file folders. Then, tickling the cursor down an alphabetical stack of other little file folder pictures, past
BUDGETS, CASTING, DIRECTORS, MEMOS
, and
KALMAN
, toward
SCRIPTS
, he comes across a file he doesn’t remember creating, tucked between
LINE PRODUCERS
and
NETWORK
. It’s called
MOSE
. He clicks it open without thinking, like swatting a gnat away.

Filling half the screen is a catalogue of three documents:
HAROLD MEMO, WEBTV-REALVIDEO RESEARCH
, and
BLAH-BLAH-BLAH NOTES
.

It’s a folder of Lizzie’s, stored automatically and inadvertently in his
NARCS
folder.

HAROLD MEMO?
Not
MOSE MEMO
. Not
MBC MEMO. HAROLD
.

He looks at the names of each of the files again, taking refuge in the mechanical act of reading and rereading. Suddenly the quiet in the
room seems noisy: the soft but audible electronic gear shifting inside the idling computer, the breeze jostling the plastic wand hanging from the drape rod, the burble of valet Spanish from the asphalt outside.

George pulls the
MOSE
window open wider. He looks at the column of three dates. She last worked on
HAROLD MEMO
and
WEBTV-REALVIDEO RESEARCH
this morning,
SUN, MAR 5, 2000, 8:05 AM
. While he was out running. She must have stopped when he called from the street. The last time she worked on
BLAH-BLAH-BLAH NOTES
was
SUN, MAR
5, 2000, 12:05
AM
. Which was last night, after they turned off
Saturday Night Live
. (Paul Simon was guest host and the Rolling Stones were the band, the announcer said, for the first of twenty-five twenty-fifth-anniversary shows; Lizzie thought it was a joke; George wasn’t sure.) It was after she declined to make love, after he turned his light back on to read and mope and punish her for a few minutes, after he fell asleep.

He wiggles the cursor over
HAROLD MEMO
hesitantly. He presses the execute button once, blackening the name of the file. And then with a flick of his index finger he shoots the cursor up to the top of the screen, slides it to
SPECIAL
and
SHUT DOWN
, then in one quick motion pushes himself away from the desk and stands up, moving away, into the bathroom to get clean for Saddler’s party.

“I’ve never been to an apartment in Los Angeles.”

The elevator door opens. “Tasteful,” Emily says as they step into a car covered in a LeRoy Neiman mural of snowboarders, except for the floor, which is a spiral of throbbing green neon tubing beneath a translucent plastic sheet.

“Which level do you desire?” says a deep, young male voice from out of nowhere. It sounds like a soap opera actor playing a butler.

“
What
is
that
?” Emily says, looking up.

“Penthouse,” George tells the elevator, his chuckle turning the word into several syllables.

“I didn’t understand,” the elevator says, now a little put out. “Please repeat your request for me.”

“Pent-house,” George says, this time unconsciously imitating the machine intonation, the same way he puts on a slight French accent whenever a maître d’ answers the phone,
“Bon soir!”

“Tell me again, what’s this for?”

“Just Get Along.”

“What?”

“Just Get Along is the charity. Pro bono anger management counseling for the poor of Los Angeles.”

“Have a splendid time at The Wellingtons on Wilshire!” the elevator says, its tone once again deferential as George and Emily step out, and then, after the door is almost closed and they’re too far into the apartment to hear, adds softly, even a little wistfully, “It’s five thirty-five
P.M.”

They see Saddler before he sees them. He stands in a semicircular white-shag-carpeted depression—what used to be called a conversation pit—shirt unbuttoned, left hand on his hip and right hand hanging on to his right nipple the way another man might park a thumb in a belt loop. He’s looking down at two young Latino men, both in turquoise-colored shirts and pants, on their hands and knees just in front of him, scrubbing furiously with toothbrushes. Two other turquoised Hispanics stand precariously on the arms of chairs set on the rim of the pit, wearing oven mitts as they reach up toward the blazing halogen track lights bolted to the ceiling. The lights are all pointing toward a single patch of floor.

“I still see a smidge of green,” Saddler says, indicating with his bare foot the intensely illuminated spot of carpet.
“¡Verde! ¡Aquí! ¡Verde!”

“¡Ay! ¡Chinga!”
says one of the glove wearers as he touches his wrist to the hot light and nearly falls from his chair. As he steps for a moment onto the stone coffee table to steady himself, the tremor causes dozens of black, skyscraper-shaped candies set up like dominoes to fall. The domino candies, hundreds of them, had formed eight cursive letters—
EVPCCSSP
.

“
My God
, you clumsy twat!” Saddler says.

Emily gives George a look. It’s too late to sneak out. He shrugs. How ghastly. How unfortunate. How entertaining.

“Hank?” Emily finally says, just as the final candy domino in the
P
hits the table. “I Know What Boys Like,” a song that played on the car radio constantly during George’s six weeks in Mexico and Central America, is blasting from the stereo. Saddler doesn’t hear Emily.

“Can you
please
set it up again—
E, V, P, C, C, S, S, P. ¿Comprendes?
” Then, to the brush squad, wiggling a big toe over the carpet: “Right there—
un poquito más verde
.”

“Hank!” George says, trying and failing to make a shout sound both tentative and friendly.

For a moment, Saddler looks embarrassed.

“I guess we’re … early?” Emily asks.

Saddler quickly and gently touches his hairpiece with the nipple hand, then, reassured, grins like Bert Parks, or Bert Convy, a big, electric, dead-game-show-host grin and says, “Olly-olly-oxen
free!
” As he steps over an oblivious carpet brusher, up out of the pit, and toward them, buttoning his shirt as he comes, he checks his watch. “Oh, a smidge on the premature side. But what’s twenty-four minutes between teammates? We had a little guacamole disaster over in the inglenook.”

“The invitation wasn’t for
five?
” Emily asks. “I was sure—”

“Six,” Saddler says firmly, “but hey, this gives
us
time to talk, doesn’t it? Before the
horde
arrives. Welcome to the penthouse. Drinks? Ramón,” he says, turning to one of the men in turquoise,
“bebidos para mis amigos.”

Saddler kisses Emily on both cheeks and then, as he shakes George’s hand, pets his right forearm. This may be insinuating body language for
Hey, look what I can do with my two hands
, or, more generously,
What a nice, nice arm—such a shame the other one got blown up
.

“We’re so pleased you could be here for the event. Is Elizabeth …” He pauses, maybe twitching his eyelids just barely in the direction of the missing hand. “Parking your car?”

“She and the kids are on the way home.”

“I understand. I do,” he says as he squeezes George’s forearm again. “I was hoping to speak to Elizabeth this evening. You know, Harold is very grateful for her help on the digital discussions. Extremely. She is a very cutting-edge business lady! Now, you let Ramón know what he can bring you—Ramón?
¿Por favor
?—and I’ll be back in a jiff. Make yourselves at home in the Great Room.”

George is drinking more than he did in his twenties and thirties, in relative terms—half a bottle of wine every second night, negligible in 1980, verges on problematic by 2000 standards. Writers are supposed to drink, of course, but hangover grogginess makes writing impossible for him. One of the secret perks of being an executive, he’s discovered, is that a bit of a hangover doesn’t interfere with work at all, not when you’re the boss and your job is almost entirely a matter of keeping a big picture in mind and delivering opinions. Generating fresh ideas and paragraphs requires tip-top energy, clarity, and confidence. Reacting to other people’s ideas and paragraphs requires … consciousness.

Besides, cocktail party abstemiousness only generates an unbecoming sense of superiority, and seems as pointless as decaffeinated coffee or nonfat potato chips or phone sex, a denatured simulation of fun. As Emily takes a tall, frosty Stoli and tonic from Ramon, George thinks of her aphorism, which he had heard perhaps a hundred times over the last two years, and which he paid to have plastered on a billboard on Sunset for her birthday last summer:
JUST DO IT. OR JUST SAY NO. BUT DON’T TRY SPLITTING THE DAMN DIFFERENCE
.