Turn of the Century (87 page)

Lizzie shuts up for the rest of drinks. Wong tells them how his government is adapting one-ounce American model airplanes and flying saucer toys as MAVs—micro–air vehicles—for military and intelligence-gathering purposes. Mose tells Wong that Malaysia should imitate the
U.S. Army, and establish an advisory group of private businessmen with whom they can trade ideas and technologies.

“Our company just joined the Army board in the States, and it’s a remarkable partnership—Disney got to use some of the Army’s top-secret bulletproof glass on their new studio in Times Square, and the Army is using high-tech new Disney microphones to listen for sniper fire.”

“It is a super, public-private, win-win–type program,” Saddler pipes in. “I liaise with them almost every month. You know, Disney sent one of their TV directors from ABC down to Washington to teach the generals how to
direct
a war! Isn’t that fantastic? Because you know, with all the tons of video pictures the commanders have rushing at them now, from their smart bombs and wingtip cameras and so forth, the guys just weren’t dealing, not in a twenty-first-century way.”

“Warteurs,” Mose says for Lizzie’s benefit. He glances at her. The muscles around her mouth form a smile.

“Harold,” says Wong, reminded by Saddler’s testimonial of his own cutting-edge public-private video project, “the Malaysian boy, the little entertainment mogul in Negri Sembilan, has been taken care of. His unauthorized disks and videos have been eliminated. The American salesman’s as well—jazz privé.”

“
Thank
you, Mr. Wong,” Harold says. “We appreciate that.”

“Is that the visionary Canadian media mogul Harold Mose?” says a British voice from the shadows.

“Good
sir!
” Harold bellows. He stands and hugs the tall, handsome, smiling man who has arrived at their table. Wong stands and shakes the Englishman’s hand.

He turns to Lizzie. “Farley Lyman,” he says.

“Elizabeth Zimbalist.” She’s never heard of Farley Lyman.

“
Sir
Farley Lyman,” Harold says. And to his friend: “Elizabeth is our new cyberpresident, dragging us into the twenty-first century to save us from the fate of predigital dinosaurs like you.”

“A pleasure,” Lyman says. “And tragic that you won’t be dining with us tonight. Gentlemen,” he announces to Mose and Wong, “I’m afraid we’ll be late for General Rahmat and his friend if we don’t get going.”

The men leave.
Only six more months
, she thinks,
and I can cash out
. As Saddler pays, she keeps thinking about Wong’s assurances to Mose
about “jazz privé.” Private jazz? Is it the Asian VH1 concept Harold has been discussing? Or some internet music scheme? And then she realizes: not
jazz privé
, Chas Prieve, the conniving and disgruntled Chas Prieve, corporate blackmailer, alleged pornographer, failed Fine Technologies West Coast vice president.

“He’s a great war hero, you know,” Saddler says, “Sir Farley. And such a gentleman too. Ah, the English.”

But Lizzie’s not listening. She’s thinking about Harold Mose’s weird interest in Chas Prieve. And about the six months.

“Hi,” she says into her phone.

“Where are you?”

“Sydney. Driving from Darling Harbour to Homebush Bay. How
are
you, sweetheart?”

“Asleep. What time is it?”

He’s still in bed at nine o’clock? “It’s almost six here,” she says.
“P.M
. It’s already dark. How was L.A.?”

“Horrible.”

This is the second time she’s called him. She’s decided the morning, his time, would be best, before his mood has all day to become ingrown and nasty.

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.”

“Guess who I’m having dinner with?”

“Mel Gibson.”

“Zip Ingram! He’s doing some big Home Again shoot down here. Harold wants him to help set up this cable channel they’re trying to put together. Isn’t that wild?”

When I striate this raw, pus-filled area here, Mr. Mactier, before I apply the hot saline, does that sting a little?

“Yeah. Say hi. Have fun.”

“George.”

“Oh, that’s just
fantastic
news, honey! It sounds like a
really
exciting opportunity for Zip, and for the
company
, too!
Congratulations!
” He stops. “There. Is that better?”

“I’ll talk to you later, George.”

This conversation is no worse than the others.

In Australia as elsewhere, Lizzie hasn’t had much to do, except to demonstrate by her presence in meetings that Mose Media Holdings is a forward-looking, twenty-first-century enterprise. The main business here seems to involve the summer Olympics, which are two months away. Because Mose didn’t establish MBC until most of the Olympics marketing deals had already been struck, the company is left with the dregs, although Hank Saddler is doing his best, as they arrive at the restaurant, to keep spirits up; he’s auto-spinning.

“The torch relay is so old-fashioned, really,” he says when the talk turns enviously to Murdoch and Fox.

“What about the cultural events,” Gloria Mose asks, “couldn’t you sponsor those?”

“Fairfax has them,” Randy tells her, pretending that Gloria might acknowledge his existence. “I think it sounds like we have a shot at that webcast opportunity, though.”

At a meeting this afternoon, it was suggested that MBC might be able to buy the “semiexclusive internet advertising rights” to badminton, synchronized swimming, race-walking, and certain Paralympics events.

“Yes,” Hank Saddler says. “and that wheelchair rugby star they mentioned, the fellow who got paralyzed playing normal rugby—that sounds lovely. Real
Chariots of Fire
.”

Zip is already inside at the table. The moment he spots the Mose group arriving, he stands and upends an empty wineglass, holding it with both hands. And then he begins singing into the glass, shouting, “ ‘G-L-O-R-I-A, Glo-o-o-o-o-o-ri-a, I’m gonna shout all night …’ ”

Since Gloria Mose’s facial expression is always contemptuous, Lizzie has wondered how she’d manage to express exceptional contempt. Her face grows more taut than usual. She raises her chin a centimeter. Her dark glasses, shields before, transform somehow into offensive weapons, like one of the kids’ robot action figures.

“Hello, Edward,” she says to Zip. Zip met her thirty years ago. He was a third-tier rock-and-roll photographer. She was a tobacconist’s daughter who enjoyed posing nude for tiny, third-tier rock-and-roll photographers, and later giving free Laker Airways tickets and in-flight bathroom blowjobs to tiny, second-tier freelance newsweekly photographers.

“Hello, darling,” he says, standing on tiptoe to kiss each cheek. “The sun’s terribly bright in here, huh?” It’s dark. “Or—oh,
no
, I’m so
sorry
, Gloria—I didn’t know you’ve gone blind! That’s it, isn’t it?” He laughs and then hugs Lizzie, who’s teary, she’s so happy to see him. Then he offers his hand to Harold. “Hello,” he says, “Zip Ingram, sir, and it’s a privilege finally to meet the man with the largest testicles in television!”

Mose shakes his hand, chortling softly, smiling sheepishly.

“I mean it, Mr. Mose. Canceling
the
most interesting new program in years after just a week on the air
—that
takes
balls!
”

Tuna is healthy
. Fresh white tuna packed in water, eaten straight out of the can. Doesn’t tuna prevent all kinds of cancers? He doesn’t even mind it twice a day sometimes, lunch and dinner, with a side dish of walnut halves at night for fiber, each nut swirled individually in the butter tub. The sameness has a kind of monastic purity. Fish! Nuts! He’s
eating
healthily. Pink lemonade isn’t unhealthy. The Krispy Kremes every morning are an indulgence.

Is he supposed to call Ned Wisdom back to tell him he doesn’t want to write a screenplay involving black psychopaths and anal rape? Or was Ned Wisdom going to call him? Maybe he should call the Ned Wisdom Productions receptionist. She was a fan.

Lizzie has called him three times in the last ten days. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Thank goodness Lizzie will be back before LuLu and Max come home from camp. LuLu and Max alone might be too much to bear. For LuLu and Max.

Dear Harold
, he thinks.
I just wanted to let you know that Timothy sent me a letter explaining everything before he killed himself. I guess I should be angry about what he revealed, but learning the whole truth has actually been
good for me. And your own guilt, I’m sure, is punishment enough for you. George Mactier
. But what if there actually is some plot against George? What if Mose really did cause Timothy to kill himself? And then, because of a hoax letter, dispatches a hitman to rub out George? Ho ho! Wouldn’t
that
be ironic?
Dear Harold Mose, We know everything you told Timothy Featherstone, and exactly why he killed himself. Beware. Beware
. That would work. It would seem to be a letter from an anonymous creep—either a delusional creep, or a creep who somehow possesses dangerous information. No downside. Nice upside. Win, win!

But it would make George, who has neither delusions nor dangerous information, the creep. And anonymous creeps are the worst kind. There are limits.

The phone rings, for the first time since sometime before lunch. (This morning it was a real estate broker, asking if George wanted to put their house on the market. He said yes, just to see how much the woman thought it would be worth.) He turns over in bed and answers the phone. He listens. “No, I’m afraid Ms. Zimbalist won’t be able to take advantage of your no-obligation gift of parabolic skis to switch for two years to MCI long distance. She died.… Yes. A skiing accident, in fact, just last weekend in Vermont. In fact, I think she was on old-fashioned, nonparabolic skis. You have a pleasant afternoon too.”

The tuna cans and empty half-gallon pink lemonade jug on the bedside table are … what, depressing? Perfect? The cleaning lady comes tomorrow anyway, or the day after.

This is how rich people live. Rich people probably put on pants during the day. But maybe not. This is how lottery winners live. Except they have powerboats.

Each of his good friends has called once. Some (Emily, Ben) have called twice. His lawyer has called several times, once to tell George he really shouldn’t have signed a contract that gave MBC the out if he went over budget. He has persuaded George that litigation would be long and expensive and probably unsuccessful, but he thinks he can negotiate “a quick seven-figure settlement, low seven.” (“How low?” George asked. “One million,” the lawyer replied.) He thought there would be more phone calls. He doesn’t know from whom, but he thought there would be more. That’s why he bought the Caller ID contraption that plugs into the television, so he could screen calls
while he was watching TV. Convergence, right here, right now. He saw the thing demonstrated on those two new fat women’s syndicated talk show, he called right then, and the FedEx man delivered it the next morning, twenty-four hours from impulse to satisfaction. And right after he hooked it up, the personal calls mostly stopped. It wasn’t cause and effect, but it seems like it.

Now that he’s not making television anymore, he has time to watch it. That
is
cause and effect. This afternoon he watched the Cubs beat the Astros, their eighty-third win of the season. It is the first baseball game he’s watched since he was a kid. In the sixties, he forced himself to watch some games all the way through with his father, three or four, in order to make Perry Mactier happy. Staring at baseball for three hours made him feel stoned.

Tonight,
Freaky Shit!
runs a story about a Swiss victim of a terrible train crash whom they call “the most bionic man on the planet.” He has an artificial heart, an artificial voice box, an artificial eye, artificial skin on one side of his face, a colostomy, false teeth, a hairpiece, two plastic hipbones, a prosthetic right leg below the knee, a below-the-elbow right arm (it looks to George like an Otto Bock model), and pins holding the left arm to his shoulder. The man happily tells the
Freaky Shit!
interviewer that he takes Viagra and Prozac, his wife has had silicon breast implants, and he communicates with the world almost exclusively via e-mail. The other main story on
Freaky Shit!
is about a hillbilly farmer in southern Missouri whose college-educated son has turned the family’s 160 acres into a tourist attraction called American Farm 2000. They’re growing potatoes that have been genetically manipulated to increase antibodies against
E. coli
bacteria; an antibacterial French-fry stand in the barn has done a booming business all summer. They’re also growing cotton from genetically manipulated seeds; it comes out of the ground dark pink and yellow and blue, and they’re feeding their sheep a protein called BioClip that makes the animals shed their fleece—sheep shearer, another doomed occupation. George wonders if they’ll stick with the name American Farm 2000 after this year, like Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66 did after 1966.