Turn of the Century (76 page)

A black limo pulls up directly in front, and its driver scurries out to open the rear door. A couple of local teenagers on the sidewalk stop and stare. For all the billionaires and famous people out here in the summer, stretch Cadillac limousines (as opposed to $75,000 sedans and sports cars and SUVs) are rather rare. A grinning Peter Sutherland, wearing a blue blazer over yellow pants and a pink polo shirt, immediately lurches out, turns, and offers his hand to another, much bigger, fatter man, wearing pink pants and a yellow polo shirt and carrying a blue blazer. It’s Riley Dugger, the chairman, CEO, and largest shareholder of Dugger Broadcasting. As he huffs and finally yanks himself up out of the backseat, his glasses fall off his face into the gutter. Sutherland retrieves them as the driver helps the big guy toward the front door of Peggy’s (Formerly Morty’s).

In his
Forbes
400 entry this year, Dugger was called “a rough-hewn, plainspoken Coloradan” and “an ebullient self-made man of large appetites.”
Ben smiles.
It’s three-forty in the afternoon and they’re shitfaced
, he thinks.
This could be good
. Until three months ago, his 351,000 shares made him the fifth-largest holder of Dugger stock. After Sutherland signaled to Ben on the phone that the second quarter looked bad, Bennett Gould Partners liquidated most of that position. But Ben is an investor, and he can easily buy another half million shares of Dugger next year, or next week, so the chairman and his CFO are happy to hook up for a drink since they’re in the neighborhood.

“Pete! Mr. Dugger! Welcome to the Hamptons, gentlemen.”

Dugger thunders over to Ben and shakes his hand like a man tearing a drumstick from a turkey. “Great to be with you, Bennett! You know there wasn’t a single goddamn movie star anywhere over in … where the fuck was that?”

“Southampton,” Peter Sutherland says, grinning continuously.

“Where the hell
is
Kate Capshaw?!? Where’s Kim Basinger?!? Where’s Kathleen Turner?!? How long will it take us to get a couple of great big icy-cold Tanqueray gimlets, straight up? You’re a casual little fucker, aren’t you?” he says to Ben, guffawing as he slams down into a chair and fishes a Lucky Strike from his battered pack. “Who do I have to bribe to smoke a cigarette in this fucking place?”

Ben grabs a matchbox off the bar and lights Dugger.

Sutherland sits, and continues grinning.

“Happy FY 2001!” Ben says, lifting his glass of beer. The new fiscal year starts tomorrow.

“Says who?” Dugger howls. “It’s not fucking happy for my business, I’ll tell you. Not a bit fucking happy.”

“Come on!” Ben says, jollying him along. “Your top line is exploding, and the bottom line on your stations is still pretty great.”

“The fucking
stations
.” A waitress approaches carefully with the two martini glasses filled to the brim with gin. “Thank you, darling. Are you Christie Brinkley? I think you’re Christie Brinkley, aren’t you? Incognito. I tell you, sweetheart—don’t spill!—I’d love to get you for a few minutes in
my
cognito.” He guffaws again. “Cheers. No, Benjamin, we have had an outstanding fucking ride on the stations, but the train has reached the terminal. Last stop, everybody off. It ain’t 1998 anymore. Dugger Broadcasting has seen $95 a share for the last time. You know that, Ben. That’s why you sold out. Smart fucking move,
boy, I’ll tell you. Hell, our goddamn costs remind me of my first wife—I woke up one day and that girl was fat as a hog! (I’m not blaming you, Peter.) And this digital bullshit and ‘convergence’ bullshit is not going to make me a fucking dime in my lifetime, I’ll tell you that. Not one fucking Roosevelt dime. The easy money is all gone.” He’s finished half his gimlet already.

The market doesn’t close for fifteen minutes. Ben still has time to grab his StarTac and make a bet against Dugger Broadcasting. Or not even grab it. The line’s open.
Heffernan
, he thinks of yelling toward the phone,
buy me 200 August 85 puts on Dugger now!

“But I thought you were going to unload the station group on Mose? He’s got to have it for the network, or he’s stuck. In my opinion.”

“The board,” Sutherland says.

Dugger finishes the rest of his drink in one gulp. “Oh, Harold wants my stations. Harold Mose would pay through his prissy Canadian nose. Big time. But my fucking white-shoe, never-run-a-fucking-entertainment-operation, local-broadcasting-is-your-core-competency
board
doesn’t want to let go of these fucking third-rate stations. Sure, they minted money for a few years, but that mint is closing, son! That’s what the
board
won’t see. You don’t have a board, do you, Benjamin? You’re one fortunate SOB, I’ll tell you that right now.”

Dugger lights another Lucky, leans back, and roars over to the waitress. “Christie? I’d like to pay you five hundred dollars American for another one of those good cocktails
—if
you’ll join us for one yourself?”

“So,” Ben says, “your board’s a little risk-averse, are they?”

“Hell, I’m risk-averse. They’re just pussies,
stupid
pussies, since they don’t believe me when I tell them we have to do the Mose deal before the whole goddamn world knows that our margins are shooting south like the fucking Special Forces through Mexico.” He does a sloshed little double take. “Benjamin! Why don’t
you
become a director of Dugger Broadcasting, Benjamin?” He turns to Sutherland. “Why in Sam Hill didn’t we think of this before, Petey?” He leans close to Ben. “I’m five hundred percent serious. I want you to think about it.” He pushes himself up and knocks his chair backward, but catches it before it hits the floor. “Urination break,” he says, stomping off toward the men’s room.

“Work must be fun for you, Pete,” Ben says.

“It’s never dull.”

The waitress brings Dugger’s second drink, and Sutherland and Ben both order sparkling water.

“So,” Ben says softly to Sutherland, “it sounds like the deal with Mose for the stations is a nonstarter.”

Sutherland shrugs. “Unless he can get another two votes to go his way on the board.”

“The kids are good?” Ben asks.

“Just great. Jasper’s hitting .318.”

Ben nods. “Fantastic.”

The Perriers arrive. Each man takes a sip, and then another.

“I think your boss is setting a new marathon peeing record.”

“Yeah,” Sutherland says, smiling a little nervously. He heads back to the bathroom.

Ben has told Lizzie he’ll walk on the beach with her and the kids at four-thirty, and it’s a fifteen-minute drive back to the house. He checks his watch. It’s ten until four. After the holiday, first thing Wednesday morning, he’s going to short Dugger Broadcasting.

“
Help!
Emergency! 911! Call 911,
somebody!
There’s a man dying! Please!” It’s Sutherland screaming from inside the bathroom, where he’s kneeling on the floor, holding the door open with one hand.

Ben leaps to the bar and grabs the telephone out of the bartender’s hand, then jabs the three numbers.

Poor Riley Dugger
, Ben thinks. He can’t stop the next thought: very bad news for Dugger Broadcasting shares, between no sale of the stations, probate hell (multiple wives, eight children), estate taxes, and no more Riley Dugger to run the thing. Nor can he stop the thought after that: very bad news for Mose Media Holdings and MBC, since their last chance to acquire the Dugger Broadcasting stations is disappearing in there on the floor. Lose, lose, lose.

He describes the emergency to the 911 dispatcher, gives the address, and rushes back to the bathroom. Dugger has one leg cocked back under his butt, his head in a puddle under the urinal. His yellow shirt is pulled up to his neck. His face is blue. His penis, big and also blue, hangs out of his pink trousers. Peter Sutherland is pumping on his bare, hairless chest.

“My car and driver are right outside,” Ben says.

“No,” Sutherland says between pumps, “the ambulance”—
hlawwnh!
—“is best”
—hlawwnh, hlawwnh!
—“you go out”
—hlawwnh!—
“wait for them”
—hlawwnh, hlawwnh, hlawwnh, hlawwnh!

Ben walks back to the front. The bartender asks how Dugger’s doing. Ben shrugs. The waitress asks if he’s the actor John Goodman, and Ben shakes his head. She asks if it’s Brian Dennehy, and the bartender says no, it’s that Republican writer guy, William Bennett. He tells them both no, he’s just a businessman named Riley Dugger.

Life imitates jokes. How many dozens of times has Ben said that if a CEO ever keeled over in front of him and the market was open, he wouldn’t know whether to call 911 or his trading desk? He goes to the table, picks up the StarTac, and says quietly but firmly, “Dianne? I need Heffernan. We have to buy a bunch of puts before the close.”

Rafaela has fed
the children. (“Why did Mr. Gribbins treat us so weird today when us and Rafaela ran into him?” Max asked Lizzie as she arrived home. Mr. Gribbins is his Science and Society teacher. Lizzie tensed and asked, “Weirdly how?” “Like we’re sick or disadvantaged or something. Like McKinley Saltzman when he got sent to live with his grandparents.” “Beats me,” she lied. “Ignore it.”) Lizzie stands looking at her face in the bedroom mirror now, putting on earrings, smelling her perfumed self. Her mother never went anywhere dressed up at night alone until after Mike divorced her.

Sarah sits on the bed, flipping through the new bimonthly Home Again catalogue, which Zip Ingram has turned into even more of a pseudo-magazine. In one portfolio of news photographs, individual articles of clothing on Tony Blair (a shirt) and Angela Janeway (shorts) and Chris Rock (a leather jacket) are circled and lettered and available to order. “Will you be home in time to see the show?” Sarah asks.
Real Time
premieres tonight at nine-thirty.

“I’m afraid I won’t.” Lizzie is off to an MBC dinner at Zero with Mose, Featherstone, Penn McNabb, and the men who run the other internet and software firms the company has bought. Spouses are invited. George will be at the studio until ten, even though only a few
short bits of the show tonight or Thursday are live. He needs to watch with the staff. “Which is why you need to be sure to tape it for me.”

“Sir is. I mean Max. Is that Alexander McQueen?” she asks about her mother’s burgundy linen dress and jacket.

“No, it’s my old Mizrahi.”

Sarah shrugs and shakes her head vaguely.

“A vintage piece,” Lizzie says with a smile, giving herself a final once-over.

“Oh my God,
look!
” Sarah says from the bed. “It’s us.”

Lizzie steps over. Sarah has the Home Again catalogue open to a six-page spread. Two panoramic photographs, one on each side of the gate-fold, show an ersatz family split in half. On one side of the gatefold are two girls and their father at an Adirondacks lake house: the blond kindergartner is pretending to shoot her smiling male-model dad with a stick, and the dark teenage daughter is alone at a computer on a dock, teleconferencing with her mother, whose face fills the laptop screen. On the back side of the gatefold is the most desirable loft imaginable, with twenty-foot-high ceilings and views of the East River in TriBeCa, the Pike Place market in Seattle, and in the distance, the golden hills of Tuscany. In front of an open casement window (an interior courtyard with a large vegetable garden is visible behind her, and the Empire State Building beyond), the gorgeous, blond, breeze-cooled mother sits at a red Corbusier table looking at her daughter on an iMac See, the “video-optimized” machine with a “semipliable” screen that Apple says it will introduce in 2001. Her young son is in the kitchen, standing in front of a wood-burning pizza oven, playing some exotic cat’s-cradle game with a serenely smiling, expensively dressed young Mongolian or Inuit woman, perhaps the au pair, perhaps the artist—fashion designer who lives downstairs. Every inanimate thing in the picture is for sale through Home Again, including the homes. (“Actual views may differ,” the fine print warns.)

“It is us,” Lizzie says very evenly.
Zip …

“Are you upset?”

She shakes her head.

“Oh! Oh!
Urrahhh! Urrahhh!! Urrahhh!!!
” The screams, the paroxysms, like someone having a seizure, are from downstairs. Somebody is ululating.
“¡Díos mío! Urrrahhhhhhhh!”
It’s Rafaela.

By the time Lizzie and Sarah make it to the ground floor, Rafaela
has collected her things (a
JAVA!
baseball cap, the day’s discarded newspapers, a canvas
New Yorker
tote bag filled with meats cheaper than she can find in Queens), and she’s running, literally running, for the door.

“Rafaela,” Lizzie asks from the bottom step, “what is it? Are you all right? What’s the matter?”

She doesn’t answer, and leaves.

Back in the kitchen, LuLu and Max both stand motionless, stricken. LuLu starts sobbing, not the everyday selfish boo-hoos that Lizzie practically ignores, but a terrified, sorrowful, half-silent heaving that makes Lizzie feel like crying too.

“I didn’t mean to, Mommy, I
didn’t
,” LuLu says between breaths, then crumples to the terra-cotta floor, hiding her face, sobbing some more.

“We gave Rafaela a birthday present,” Max says.

“What?” Lizzie asks. “It’s Rafaela’s birthday? Why did that upset her?”

“It was the
dolls
,” LuLu says, shuddering and crying.

“She turned thirty today,” Sarah says.

“What in
God’s
name
upset
her?” Lizzie asks, crouching down to take LuLu in her arms. “It’s okay, sweetie, it’s all right.”

Sarah shrugs and shakes her head. Louisa, her cries more like squeaks now, buries herself deeper into the dark of Lizzie’s Mizrahi jacket.

Max explains. It was LuLu’s idea, but he helped. Rafaela had shown them a picture of her two children, and LuLu borrowed it to make a copy. Max and LuLu specified the correct skin tones (light brown for Fernando, olive for Jilma), hair and eyebrow colors (brown-black), hair length (ear length for Fernando and mid-back for Jilma) and style (bone straight), bangs style (slightly curled under for Jilma, none for Fernando), eyebrow shape (“other,” which Max carefully drew) and thickness (full), colors for eyelashes (black) and eyes (T30), Jilma’s pierced ears and the mole on Fernando’s right cheek. They put all their savings together, $299.75, and sent in their order to the My Twinn catalogue.