Turn of the Century (9 page)

“Brian Williams is actually a very bright guy,” Featherstone says.

“The turnaround time won’t be murder?” Mose asks. “To stay topical?”

“Writing off the news will be the big challenge,” George says, “no question. But half of the Tuesday-Thursday shows will be non-timely evergreen stuff, relationship stories. Maybe more than half. And a lot of Tuesday-Thursday will be real, our process stuff—footage of camera setups, footage of staff meetings. Which will be about editing, not writing.”

“Postproduction Tuesday-Thursday will be a killer,” says Emily. “But we want it rough, real—”

Featherstone leaps in. “Like
Homicide
, Harold, but sexy and fun and
up
. Or the MTV shows—you know, the black-and-white, the hotties in the lofts, vacationing, et cetera. If the kids were grownups with jobs.”

“I get it,” Mose says.

“Talk about how we leverage in the interactive piece,” Featherstone says. “Reality-dot-com.” Featherstone still welcomes any excuse to say “dot-com.”

Harold Mose has become very alert.

George doesn’t want to get into the bells and whistles. “It’s just a notion,” he says. “It’s not a major thing.”

“Tell me,” says Mose.

“Well, we could let viewers access the news show in progress during the week on a web site. Give them bits of raw footage and wire copy and real e-mails and story lists and draft scripts, as if they’re hooking directly into our intranet …”

“Extranet, you mean,” Mose says.

“Right,”
Featherstone says.

“I guess so,” George says.

“You’d put up all the in-house material for anyone on the net to see?” Mose asks. “That’s taking transparency a bit far, isn’t it? Sounds dodgy.”

“No, we give them access to kind of a core sample, a
selection
of real material,” George says, making it up as he goes along. “Everything vetted, nothing confidential. Just enough to give an authentic insider’s feel. Not transparency. More like translucency.”

“Clever,” Mose says.

“Multiplatform it,” Featherstone says, winking, verging on meaninglessness. Then he chants, pumping one arm, “Convergence, convergence, convergence.”

“It’s Lizzie’s idea,” George says. “My wife.”

“I know Lizzie,” Mose says. He doesn’t wear a watch, so he checks Featherstone’s and looks up at George and Emily. “I need to be at Teterboro by seven-thirty if I’m going to have a nightcap in
Seattle
tonight.” Here the overenunciation is clearly derogatory, the way James Mason might have said
Cucamonga
or
tuna casserole
.

Emily leans toward Mose. “Timothy told you about
My People, Your People
? Our other … dramedy?”

Featherstone nods quickly.

“He called it ‘a twenty-first-century
Upstairs, Downstairs
meets
thirtysomething
.’ ” Mose pauses like a pro. “Haven’t we seen that? Wasn’t that
The Jetsons
?”

“Romantic comedy,” Emily says.

“The guy is the commissioner of the NBA,” George explains. “His wife is an architect, he’s white, she’s black, the kids are punky Vietnamese twins, her assistant’s a gay guy. The housekeeper is Bosnian.”

“Very Norman Lear,” Mose says.

“Right,” Featherstone says enthusiastically, “exactly.…” And then, getting Mose’s drift, he catches himself and repeats,
“Right,”
this time with a sneer, barely missing a beat.

“No, no,” George says, “
anti
-P.C., quirky, a little dark. We’ll spend as much time on the assistants’ lives as we do on the leads’.”

“It’s about class. Complicated class differences,” Emily says.

“Which nobody else is doing,” George adds.

“Correct, but maybe for good reason,” Mose says. “You want to do
A Very Upstairs, Downstairs Millennium
—Roseanne as Seinfeld’s nanny, the guy from
Cabaret
as Bebe Neuwirth’s secretary.
Married with Staff
. Oh, for all I know it’ll be the breakout smash hit. I’m just a birthday-card salesman. Picking pilots is Timothy’s job. But you know, when we call this the New Network for the New Century, I want us to
mean
it.” Mose is now an American citizen, but he has spent most of his life and made most of his fortune in real estate in Canada. He also has stakes in East Asian telephone companies and owns the world’s third-largest greeting-card company—it is, George has heard him say more than once, “the Hallmark of the Pacific Rim.” Before he conjured MBC into existence, Mose Media Holdings’ only media holding was his half interest in the Winter Channel, the faintly conservative sports-weather-and-holiday-themed channel carried on cable systems in Canada, the upper Midwest, and the Great Plains. Mose also operates two hundred movie theaters in Saskatchewan and Alberta, which, like greeting cards, apparently qualify as “media” under the loose modern definition.

“That was my big note on this too,” Featherstone pipes in. “I mean, raise the stakes, guys!
Raise the frigging stakes
.”

At this moment, George wouldn’t be unhappy if Featherstone died.

“It seems to me you guys have an awful lot on your plate, with
NARCS
and this new monster of yours, your—”

“Reality,”
George says.

“Correct.
Reality
,” Mose says, and pauses. “You know, I don’t know about
Reality
.…”

George and Emily exchange a panicky glance. He’s already changed his mind? They are suddenly zero for two?

“It’s so … arty. Like a scriptwriter’s idea of a newsmagazine.”

“Fantastic note,” Featherstone says.

George and Emily exchange another fast glance.

“You have a problem with
Reality
, Harold?” George asks, wanting the end to come quickly now that he knows he’s doomed.

“Now you may absolutely hate this,” Mose says, “but what about
Real Time?
Is that a horrible name for this show?”

It’s only the
name
Mose doesn’t like.

“No, that’s just fabulous. I mean it. It’s superb,” George says. Emily looks at George; she figures it’s the adrenaline talking. “Don’t you think so, Emily?”

“Real Time
could be perfect,” she says.

“Yessss!” Featherstone says, clenching a fist, pumping his arm. “Out of the park! Homer alert!”

“And besides, Timothy,” Mose says, “aren’t we calling that other project RealityVision? The Reality Network? The Reality Channel?”

“Reality Channel. No ‘The.’ ” Keeping his body facing Mose, he turns his head a good 120 degrees toward George and Emily. “Possible concept shift for the Winter Channel. A New Age cable channel, although ‘New Age’ is a no-no. Demi, Deepak, Marianne Williamson, Mars and Venus, Mayans and the Sphinx, gyroscopes, high colonics, homeopathics, chiropractic, yoga, Enya, John Tesh, Dr. Weil, Kenny G, vitamin E, herbs, Travolta, Cruise, lifestyle, feng shui, ginseng, ginkgo, tofu, emu oil, psychics, ESP, E.T., et cetera, et cetera. Aromatherapy. VH1 meets Lifetime meets the PBS fund-raising specials meets those good-looking morning-show doctors meets QVC meets the Food Network. You know? And in the late-night daypart, tantric sex.”

“I do know,” George says to Featherstone, who has already turned toward Mose, grinning, preparing himself to appreciate the imminent bon mot.

“Or, as I like to call it,” Mose says, “the Lunatic Network—all credulity, all the time.” Everyone smiles. He stands. “I’m not completely convinced it’s scalable. I don’t know how it will scale.” Mose salutes the room—“Gentlemen. Lady.”—and starts out, Featherstone at his heels. But Mose stops. “George,” he says, “I was terribly sorry to hear about
your mother. Anything we can do. Do you understand? Anything you need, ask Dora.” Then, to Featherstone—“We’ve got to lance the boil now, Timothy. I want both versions of the broadband presentation in Redmond, in case they have some idea that they can”—and then they’re gone. In the conference room, it’s as if a violent afternoon storm has suddenly passed. George and Emily are drenched, but now the sun is shining.

“ ‘Scalable’?” Emily asks. “Canadian union-buster talk?”

“No. The internet. It means, can the thing be rolled out wide? So I guess we have a show, Em.” George hasn’t felt quite so jazzed, so supremely confident, in months.

“I guess,” she says, nodding. “
A
show. It’s do-and-die time now.” Of the two ideas they were here to pitch,
My People, Your People
is the series Emily has been most eager to make.
Real Time
will be difficult to produce. And while she likes imagining the seriousness it will confer on her in Los Angeles, the prospect of actually doing it—
news?
—is frightening.

“I actually do think the name
Real Time
works,” George says. “It’s good.”

“Only
good?
Not”—she takes a sharp breath, and squeals—
“fabulously superb?”

“Fuck you. Did you notice our New Age joke has been stolen? The channel we invented that night at Nobu?”

“I did. Fine. Let Timothy know we know it’s ours. Let Harold know we know. It’s leverage on series ownership. Plus we may not have to go to hell.”

George smiles, and stands to leave. “Really? Passive beneficiaries of evil ideas are hell-exempt?”

“Well,
you’ll
probably be going to hell, anyway. Journalist hell. On account of
Reality
.”

“
Real Time
.”

Lizzie left the
office a few minutes after five. It’s the first time this winter she’s left before dark. Entirely apart from Edith Hope’s death, it’s been a lousy day, ten hours at work without even a whiff of science. The whiffs of science are what draw her into this business, real business, in the first place. But today she has accomplished nothing. She signed expense accounts, extended supplier contracts, agreed to pay $940 a month extra to insure her employees against carpal tunnel syndrome (which she secretly considers a half-phony fad disability), interviewed prospective employees, and screamed about hypothetical seven- and eight-figure sums of money to a man in Redmond she has never met. Today has been one of those days when she feels like America’s most overeducated, overinvested postal clerk. Since making breakfast for the kids and handing them their backpacks, she has done nothing gratifying or important, even though she’s exhausted, as drained as if she’d spent the day overseeing the invention of a disposable solar-powered twenty-five-cent supercomputer the size of a cricket.

She was too tired to go to yoga, so she’s been wandering for an hour and a half toward home, around Chelsea and the Village and the neighborhoods she refuses to call NoHo and NoLIta, through Chinatown
and the Lower East Side, looking in shop windows, looking at her reflection in shop windows, wondering if she looks thirty-five, stepping into shops, not shopping. Now, in a store on Grand Street, an 1891 map of Minnesota decorated with a border of old paper strings from dozens of Hershey’s Kisses (folk art: $300) has started her quietly sobbing. Edith Hope’s death is discombobulating her. It isn’t because she is reminded of her own mother’s death, Lizzie feels certain. Her own mother’s death was depressing, because it made her face up to just how little they loved each other, but this is different. Edith Hope’s death has made Lizzie sad, surprisingly sad. The surprise makes her even sadder.

They were never soulmates. “Honey, will the offspring be Jewish, too?” Edith Hope said to Lizzie with a big smile over coffee an hour after they met, during the 1988 Republican Convention in New Orleans, which George was covering for ABC and where Edith Hope was a Minnesota alternate delegate pledged to Jack Kemp. “Yes, Mom, they will,” George said. “But if they’re boys they won’t be circumcised, so no one will know.” His mother just nodded.

Edith Hope and Lizzie spoke every few months at most, and saw each other only once a year. But her mother-in-law finally seemed to love her more easily than her own mother ever did—not love her more, maybe, but enjoy her company, cut her some slack, get a little drunk with her on Thanksgiving after the dishes were done and everyone else was sprawled on the davenport in the family room (the davenport! the family room!) staring at football. Six or seven Thanksgivings ago—six; she wasn’t pregnant—after Alice and the twins had gone home with all the leftovers, LuLu must have been asleep, George and Sarah and Sir were half watching
The Philadelphia Story
, one of the three videotapes Edith Hope owned. The two women were leafing through George’s old school pictures. Lizzie said that when George was in junior high he looked like the singer Beck. Edith Hope said that people always thought George’s father looked like Jimmy Stewart. She asked Lizzie when she realized she was in love with George. Lizzie grinned. “On his couch during our first real date, about ninety seconds before we fucked,” she said. Edith Hope looked as if she’d been slugged. Lizzie lurched protectively an inch in her direction, feeling she was watching some dear old vase fall to the floor. Then her mother-in-law said, “Goodness! I don’t think I’ve heard anyone use that word since
George’s uncle Vance died.” Then she smiled. “The way you just … 
say
it sounds so”—Edith Hope wiggled her shoulders and moved her eyebrows up and down, Donna Reed doing Mae West—“It’s like … a movie.” Edith Hope finished her third vodka and cranberry juice, and the ice dregs with it. “Good for you, dear. I’m glad you were in love.
Before
.”

Lizzie is so glad to be living in the city again. She is so glad they can afford to admit that their two-year country-squire experiment in Sneden’s Landing was a disaster. Walking down Delancey Street, she passes a store that sells wigs and knives and bootleg videos. There seem to be a lot of wig stores in New York, more than necessary. Lizzie enjoys their presence the way she enjoys the storefront psychics and the Dominican flavored-shaved-ice vendors, all the unsanitary but unthreatening alien city bits. Wig stores (like psychics) strike her as implicitly pornographic—the hubba-hubba cartoon
volume
of the hairdos, the insane Slurpee colors, the fibers that make no human-hair pretense, the smudged-shop-window intimacy that seems more charged than the stores selling penis-shaped loaves of pumpernickel and multizippered black vinyl panties.