Turn of the Century (43 page)

Harold
. “Just that.”

“Oh! He must have meant the thing with ShowNet.”

“What?”

“I told you. I told Hank Saddler we wouldn’t help teach the Pentagon to use ShowNet for free, to keep track of the guerillas in Mexico.”

“Right.” Of course. She did tell him, he remembers, on the phone. George feels stupid.

“Was Harold pissed?” Lizzie asks. “He hasn’t responded to my memo.”

“No, he didn’t seem to be. You know, he took your advice about MBCNews.com. They’re shrinking it down to almost nothing. Getting rid of seventy-eight people.”

“Firing them?”

“Moving them to other jobs in the company.” Both watch Martin Sheen noiselessly shooting Sissy Spacek’s father to death. “That looks exactly like Verve. Around Grandpa and Grandma’s farm,” George says. And only then: “What memo?”

“The memo about what he should do on the web. My free consultation.” She looks at George. “I told you.” She’s not sure she did.

“No, you didn’t. This is the first I’ve heard about it.” A lie, but technically true.

“Yes, I did. You remember. Timothy called in St. Paul, from the plane, and said Harold wanted ‘the four-one-one on online video.’ Don’t look at me like that. We discussed this. How Timothy said I was ‘mad flossin’,’ and I didn’t know what he meant?” As soon as she says it, she remembers the “flossin’ ” conversation was with Sarah and Buddy, in the stable in Mandeville Canyon. George wasn’t there.
Oh, right, it wasn’t you—it was Buddy Ramo who I told about the work I’ve been doing for your boss. Sorry! By the way, did I mention Buddy had his shirt off at the time?
No. She turns on her side, toward George, and looks into his eyes, feeling girlish but wise, trying to snuff this before it becomes a fight, trying somehow to transmit the complicated stupid truth without words, the only possible way it won’t sting.

George doesn’t remember any conversation about her memo or Featherstone. But since he’s jet-lagged and stoned, thoroughly beat, he doesn’t trust his lack of memory or his mistrust of Lizzie. And she couldn’t have made up “mad flossin’.” Still, he has the dark, frightened thought: maybe she realized after she got home from L.A. that she left copies of her memo on his laptop, and now she’s admitting to it preemptively, pseudo-glancingly, pretending she told him, before he can confront her.

“One of us,” she says, snuggling toward him, “must have Alzheimer’s.”

Confront her about what? Explaining video search engines and megabytes-per-second to Harold Mose without George’s permission? Repeating his parrot analogy about online video without proper attribution? In the frenzy of the last ten days, she probably just forgot to mention the memo. Or maybe she did mention it, and he wasn’t listening. Or else, he thinks, he’s playing the Ingrid Bergman role in
Gaslight 2000: One of Us Must Have Alzheimer’s
. George smiles, and gives his head a tiny shake.

“What?” she says breathily, pushing against him. “What?” she says again.

He is too easy, he thinks.

He is
so
easy, she thinks, gratefully, a little enviously.

The second the tip of her tongue touches his chest, his erection launches, with each heartbeat rising again by half—like a simple but reliable toy, a sweet, homely, mechanical toy, premicrochip—and five, six, seven pumps later, her fingers are making circles on the skin behind and beneath it.

This seems new
, George thinks. He then has a jealous thought, ineluctably, neurotically, that he’s had before:
Where did she learn this?
But pleasure trumps suspicion. Scissors cut paper, paper wraps rock.

As his arm, the bad arm, moves back and forth across her lower back, stroking lower and harder, and then sawing, she kisses him furiously, gulping his tongue.
That’s new
, she thinks, feeling his arm pry her, and he’s teasing, pushing the arm, not quite, half again harder, then moving under and in, not hurting but goring, nudging in farther. His fingers, his other hand, the good hand, work the flesh, touching her in the usual way.
You never touch it
, he said on the phone last night about
the missing hand, his stump, like he was about to cry. Was he punishing her? Is he punishing her?

Twenty-five minutes later, they have not dissolved into a creamy pool of unconsciousness, hand in hand, hip to hip, in the dark. George is uncovered, looking at the TV but simultaneously regarding his own naked body, thinking how gothic penises look, like gargoyles, as opposed to the elegance of women—symmetrical, discreet, spare, classical. Lizzie’s light is on, and she’s reading
The Aeneid
.

On the TV now is the Millennium Channel, a yearlong “multiplexed, infomercialized edutainment joint venture of Microsoft and The Learning Channel,” George remembers reading in
Variety
. The program on now,
Information Ecstasy
, is narrated by Madonna. “Because our whole planet, and each and every one of us on it, is moving together through the universe at six hundred sixty thousand miles per hour,” Madonna is saying, “forty times as fast as the space shuttle.”

“That fact actually makes me nauseous,” George says.

Lizzie lays the book on her stomach. “I guess this is an offer we can’t resist, like Lance said—”

“Refuse. ‘Can’t refuse.’ ”

“Whatever. But I still don’t like Microsoft. I don’t. I can’t. No matter how many billion shares of stock we own.”

“It is the business we have chosen, Elizabeth.”

She picks up the book and reads:

Just as the sweet Nebraskans are about to electrocute Martin Sheen, George snaps off the TV. “Speaking of the business,” he says, looking over at her from his dark side of the bed as he sinks into the pillow. “Asset-backed securities? Mose wants to create asset-backed securities based on
NARCS
. Should we let him? Am I going to wind up in jail?”

Lizzie does not look up from her page. She smiles and says, “Let me send you a memo on that.”

They are driving
back into winter. Mile by mile as they head north, the signs of spring disappear. The trees are budding in Jacob Riis Park on the Lower East Side. The new sign outside Pepsi/Taco Bell Yankee Stadium lists the times and dates for the season openers. But even in Westchester the green is attenuated, and now in Columbia County the landscape is gray and skeletal and people on the side of the road are wearing down jackets.

Last spring, after they sold the house in Sneden’s Landing and moved back into the city, they also bought a country place in the lower Adirondacks on Lake Marten. This is the first trip up since Thanksgiving. George and Lizzie are looking forward to it, but not with the pure, blithe anticipation of brainless submission to nature. Rather, they feel like old allies heading to Camp David for a weekend of confidence-building measures that they hope will lead to a renewal of their historic ties and long-standing confederation. Pollyanna and Warren, who have moved in together instead of breaking up, are in the car right behind them, along with Warren’s son and au pair. Emily arrives tomorrow morning by plane with a boyfriend.

It’s a four-and-a-half-hour drive from the city. A satellite leased by Toyota has locked in on the Land Cruiser, beaming down data and
thirty channels of video as Lizzie speeds north into the twilight middle of nowhere. In the backseat, Max is hunched over the built-in laptop, clicking around the web site of a college in Ohio. (LuLu is asleep, and Sarah is in the city alone; her St. Andrew’s fund-raising dance for Zapatista medical supplies is tonight.) On the TV screen that folds out over the glove compartment, George switches back and forth between MBC’s
Great Big Nutty Wayne Newton and Robert Goulet Variety Hour
and Jim Lehrer on PBS discussing a guerilla attack on a hydroelectric dam in Chiapas.

Lizzie, driving, spots a black man walking along the shoulder of the parkway in an orange jumpsuit and says, “Escaped convict?”

George looks up from Goulet and Newton, who are impersonating Gore and Clinton in a skit. “Racist,” he says, joking but mirthless.

“You’re the one who always thinks black guys driving Mercedeses are drug dealers.”

“Or UN diplomats,” he says, returning to the video screen.

Five minutes later, Lizzie passes a sedan with a long whip antenna on the roof, driven by a smiling young Japanese man. His passenger, a smiling Japanese woman, is holding a big, boxy black telephone or radio, like a military walkie-talkie. A few cars later Lizzie passes another car of smiling young Japanese, with the same antenna and strange phone, and then another. Is this some game? A tourist caravan? George will make another joke about racist paranoia if she mentions it, so she doesn’t.

Somewhere in Rensselaer County, the phone rings. George snaps off
Hero
, the NBC hit about regular people who acquire superpowers for twenty-four hours. No one but Alexi, Iris, Emily, and Featherstone has the car-phone number.

“Mobile unit one, this is the MBC HQ!”

“Hey, Timothy. What’s up?”

“Nothing major. You rusticating?”

“We’re on our way upstate, yeah.”

“Where exactly do you cats do your rural brand-extension thing?”

“A place in the Adirondacks.”

“Hip.”

“Near the Vermont border.”

“Convergence! Harold and Gloria have a glorioso lodge-type mansion in Vermont. Robert Frost stayed there. You should shag an invite.”

“Right,” says George, wondering how long this will go on. A pointless gibbering Hollywood call to a car on Friday evening seems extreme even for Featherstone.

“Hey, bud, I can’t spend all night shooting the fat. Is the sophisticated lady available?”

“You want Lizzie? Sure.”

“Plant you now, dig you later, Gorgonzola.”

George hands the phone to his wife, and turns the TV back on. Under the circumstances, he must pout privately.

“I put a bowl of milk but I only see Buzzy,” LuLu tells her parents an hour after they arrive at Lake Marten.

Lizzie glances out at the calico cat and nods.

When they were last here, seven skittish cats and kittens were perpetually outside around the house, living high off weekend scraps of risotto and veal and guacamole. Now, it seems, there is only one. Charlie, the caretaker, was supposed to have fed them over the winter.

Weekends in the country regularly feature some awkward dance of misunderstanding, of course. At the Grand Union outside Albany where they stopped for groceries, they were happy to find endive, radicchio, and fiddlehead ferns, but they went through the usual little duel of mutual embarrassment with the checkout girl (whose name tag George half expected to say
SHAWNA
) as she asked them to identify not only the endive, radicchio, and fiddleheads for her, but avocados, then zucchini, then parsley, then rhubarb, and then nectarines as well.

George is in the kitchen, opening two more bottles of Chardonnay and staring at the window behind the sink. At eye level, clinging to the wood mullion between two of the panes, is a fly. At first he is surprised that it doesn’t buzz away when he blows at it, but now he sees that it’s dead, an absolutely perfect, undamaged dead housefly stuck in situ. It’s fantastic, he thinks, this tiny accidental museum of natural history. He wonders how he might phrase a note to the local girl who cleans the house that won’t make her think he is insane:
Cora—Please don’t touch the top panes of the window by the sink. We want to keep the dead fly right where it is
. He could lie and say it’s a child’s science project.

When he returns to the living room, they’re still discussing Lizzie’s worries about trying to run a software business in New York, three
thousand miles from the mainstream. This line of conversation, with its implicit threat of relocation, never pleases George. Her anxiety breeds his counteranxiety. And in response, she finds herself defending the digital Northwest against easy New York disparagement like some mixed-breed ambassador.

“I guess I should move to L.A., then,” George says, smiling as he tops up Pollyanna and Warren, spilling a drop on Warren’s corduroys. George has known Warren for fifteen years, but he doesn’t know him quite well enough to ask why, no matter the season or the venue, he wears wide-wale brown corduroys and a long-sleeved turtleneck. Here and now, it’s a good outfit. But in the summer, Warren always looks hot.

“George,”
Pollyanna says.

“Sinbad reads
The Economist
,” he says. “And Francesca, the woman from MTV, watches fifteen-year-old documentaries about Central American civil wars.”

George and Lizzie exchange friendly, oversize, fuck-you smiles.

“I would rather live in a sunny city of stupid pretty people,” George continues, “than a rainy city of smart ugly people like Seattle. I would.” He doesn’t know if he really would, but he enjoys saying so.

“New York is more like all those other places now, anyway,” Warren says.

“How would you know?” Pollyanna says. “You barely go outside, let alone to other cities.”