Turn of the Century Read online

  Lizzie saves him. “We’ll go to St. Paul in the morning. Sarah’s got a sleepover at our house with Penelope tonight, anyway, to work on their video. We can go tomorrow.”

  “Did you tell the kids?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “Lizzie, do the kids know about my mom?”

  The connection is lost. Taking full advantage of the convenience of the wired era, George finds, can be very difficult.

  He dials home, using his thumb, and the voice mail picks up (“Hello—we’re not here,” his own voice says to him, which always gives him the willies), then calls her office (“This is the office of Elizabeth Zimbalist at Fine Technologies,” the recording of Lizzie’s assistant Alexi says. “Please leave—”), and finally the phone in the Land Cruiser, which generates a sort of Disney World PA-system announcer: “Welcome to AT&T Wireless Services. The cellular customer you have called is unavailable, or has traveled outside the coverage area.” George specifically hates this passive-aggressive record-o-man. The prissy, vague excuse—“unavailable”?—always strikes him as a prevarication meant to keep him from speaking to Lizzie, or his colleagues, or other cellular customers. (Nothing like America Online’s digital butler, with his fake-enthusiastic utopian-zombie voice. George continues to find “You’ve got mail!” entertaining enough, even ten thousand repetitions later, so that he didn’t finally deactivate it until around the time the movie came out and he read that the AOL man, whose first name is Elwood, has his own web site.)

  “U.S. West!” a female electronic voice says over the opening chords to the overture from John Williams’s new U.S. West Symphony, “Directory assistance … for which community in the … 6-5-1 … area code?”

  “St. Paul,” George says.

  “Which customer listing?” the robot operator asks.

  “Edith Hope Mactier.” He figures his sister is at his mother’s house. He can never recall his mother’s new phone number, which she changed a few years ago to dodge telemarketers; from now on, he won’t have to try to remember it.

  “One moment,” the robot operator replies.

  John Williams, “Fanfare for the New Economy,” the same four chords, once again. “Northwest Airlines flies … five … convenient, comfortable nonstops to the Twin Cities from … New York/Newark … every day! The number you requested … can be automatically dialed by pressing the star or dollar keys, or by saying the word please.”

  Dollar key? The star key on his cell phone has not worked for a year. George, walking past Radio City, says, “Please.”

  His sister answers.

  “We’ll do the modified fondue option,” she is saying, “but we do not need Smithfield ham,” and then, into the phone, “Hello?”

  “Alice? Hi, it’s me.”

  “Hello, George.”

  He sighs. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” she says, sniffling violently. “When are you coming?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow, huh.”

  “Sarah has to finish some important school project tonight.”

  His sister doesn’t reply.

  “I mean,” George continues, filling the space, not quite lying, not quite being honest, “I guess I could fly out with Max tonight and then she and Lizzie and Louisa could come tomorrow.”

  Still no response.

  “Tomorrow, I—we’ll all be there before lunch. Alice?”

  The connection is lost. Maybe, he thinks as he lurches into the revolving door of the tower on Fifty-seventh Street, he really ought to get a new phone, a smaller, digital one. This phone cost a fortune when he had ABC News pay for it four years ago; the same model now sells for twenty-nine dollars. Did the thing really work better in 1996, he wonders, or did it just feel more reliable and powerful when it was selling for seven hundred dollars? It was the smallest one available back then, but now it seems as clunky and enormous as an eight-track tape cartridge. On the other hand, George, six foot three and one-ninety, feels out of scale using the new three-inch-long, 1.9-ounce models, like he’s handling a piece of fragile dollhouse furniture or someone else’s newborn.

  Which leads George to an idea for NARCS, a B-story for an episode this spring: the new deputy commissioner wants the detectives to start using tiny pocket-size computers, a vice-cop intranet, and Jennie has to get the old guys cyberready … No, he thinks, no … make Jennie resist the computers as trendy bullshit.

  “Hello, NARCS.” Daisy Moore, the twenty-six-year-old English receptionist, looks up, punches a button—not a button, really, but a picture of a button printed on the flat plastic plane of her black telephone console—and says, parodying deference, “Good morning, Mr. Mactier, sir,” taps the little picture of a button again and says into her headset, “Hello, NARCS.” Being black as well as English, Daisy said to George when she was interviewing for the job, she would give him two for the price of one—convenient not only in the routine way that black receptionists are convenient in America, but also in pandering to Americans’ Anglophilia. Her second week, in a conversation with Daisy about her family, George used the term African-American. “Crikey, George!” she had said, “I’m English!”

  George loves coming to work, the arrival and the settling in, the wakeful, hopeful, testing one-two-three-four sameness of that first hour. Each morning he all but marches through the reception area and down the corridor that bisects the open space, his hair still wet, his eleven-year-old Armani overcoat unbuttoned and flapping, and makes the ritual heartfelt exchanges of hellos with Daisy, with the story editors, Paul and Phoebe, with Jerry the line producer and Gordon the director, with the odd writer or production designer, with Iris Randall, his assistant. He likes the sight of Iris making the fresh pots of freshly ground, freshly roasted coffee, and of his in-baskets filling tidily with fresh Nielsen packets, fresh Daily Varietys and Hollywood Reporters, fresh network memos, fresh drafts of scripts. He gets a little high on the sense of readiness, even if that readiness is almost always also the imminence of frenzy, of third-act scenes that weren’t ever fresh and aren’t working now, of MBC executives quibbling knowingly and meaninglessly about “beats” and “arcs” and “laying pipe” in scripts they haven’t read, of sulky guest stars, incremental ticks in the ratings, negotiations with the network standards-and-practices woman (she didn’t want a character’s seven-year-old son to call him a bung-hole, and she didn’t want the star to refer to Pat Robertson as “a born-again Nazi” or to a colleague as “white trash”), of leased camera cranes that won’t swivel or a fake-bullet squib that burns an actor, of do-or-die presentations to the chairman. (“Do and die,” as Emily Kalman, his L.A. partner, says at every opportunity about every important task.) The beginning of the workday, from the moment he steps into the lobby until the ten A.M. phone call with Emily, is a consistently fine, bright swath of life: hopeful, purposeful, organized. George takes pleasure in the anticipation of familiar problems. All problems are either soluble, in which case he promptly solves them, or else insoluble, which is rare, and these he ignores.

  As he checks his e-mail, he realizes that his mother’s death has completely slipped his mind.

  He has never assigned his sister a programmed speed-dial number on his office phone, so he has to punch in nine for an outside line, zero, all eleven digits of her phone number, and then the fourteen digits of his calling-card number, since it’s a personal call. (He has become scrupulous about that kind of fiscal niggle, almost obsessively so. Since he is now making $16,575 a week—an astonishing figure that occurs to him often, daily—he can afford it.) Twenty-seven digits, all from memory! Given the proliferation of number-dialing automation and number-dialing assistants in his life, it seems to George a sweet, old-fashioned task, like subway riding, that he seldom performs anymore.

  When her machine picks up, he remembers that he just spoke to Alice at their mother’s house. He has only a few seconds to decide whether to hang up; to leave a message admitting he dialed the wrong number—which Alice might att
ribute to grief-stricken insensibility or (more likely) heartlessness—or to leave a message pretending that it’s earlier in the day and that he hasn’t, in fact, spoken to her already. But what if her phone machine registers the times of incoming calls?

  At the beep, he finesses a not-quite-lie that straddles options two and three.

  “Hi, Alice, it’s George. You’re over at Mom’s? I’ll try there. If I don’t get you this morning, we’ll see you tomorrow around lunchtime. Okay. Bye.”

  Iris has entered, shiny brass watering can in hand, to water the huge flowering plants that don’t annoy him quite enough to make her remove them.

  “You know the author Dr. John Gray? Guys Are from Mars … Men … whatever? Last night in my book group we discussed his new one, Children Are from Pluto. You and Lizzie would love it, and there was this new woman there I kind of know from Harold Mose’s office—You don’t care. I’m droning, sorry, let me spritz your orchids, bye.”

  “My mom died last night, Iris.”

  “What?”

  “In a car accident.”

  “Oh, George! Oh, my God.”

  “Yeah, it’s pretty … shocking. Lizzie is going to be really upset.”

  “Of course. That is terrible. Oh, my God.…”

  “We need to fly to St. Paul for the funeral—”

  “Whatever I can do—”

  “—so we’ll need reservations for tomorrow morning for the two of us and all three kids. Nonstop. To Minneapolis.”

  A pause. “Business class for the baby?”

  “She’s six, Iris. That’s a little large for laps.” The price sensitivity mooted by earning $16,575 a week sometimes needs to be supplied artificially by Iris or Lizzie. Sometimes, coming from Iris, there’s more point of view than necessary.

  “George, I am so sorry, how old was she? I loved your mom. May she rest in peace.”

  “Uh …” This year, 2000, minus 1918 equals eighty-two, but Armistice Day is months away. “Eight-one. She’s eighty-one. Was.”

  Iris starts to cry, and leaves her extremely shiny watering can on his desk, dripping onto the tiger maple, as she rushes out.

  Almost immediately, she is back, now wearing a black sweater and sunglasses. “George,” she says, holding back sobs, “I know it’s only nine, but pick up for your ten o’clock.”

  “Hiya, Emmy.”

  “Hi, George, it’s Becky. I have Emily for you. Go ahead, Emily, it’s George.”

  “Morning.” She’s on a speakerphone.

  “Emily, the next time I get the assistant when it’s supposed to be you, I hang up. And if you stay on the speakerphone, I’m hanging up right now.” He’s kidding, sort of, and she knows it, sort of. “And why aren’t you on the plane?”

  “Tranh’s doing me. I’m coming—ahh!—as soon as I finish here.”

  “Emily, I’m not sure I want to have a serious business discussion with one of us naked and greasy.”

  “So: nasty numbers.” She means the instant overnight ratings, derived every night from a sample of TV viewers in big cities. “The nationals’ll drop.” One of the reasons George enjoys being in business with Emily (in addition to the fact that she’s an experienced show-runner, and has actually created and produced her own network entertainment series—Girlie, a 1996 Fox show about a hooker turned feminist lawyer) is her extreme economy of speech. Except when she gets excited, she speaks as though she’s being charged by the word, double for verbs.

  “Yeah,” he says, “the numbers are not what one would hope for.” Since NARCS went on the air in October, five months ago, its average rating has been 7.2, and its average share 14—which means, as every American knows, that the show is watched in about 7 million households, which, at ten o’clock on Saturday nights, amounts to 14 percent of the houses in which TVs are on. This past Saturday night the rating was 7 and the share 12, down .4 and 2 respectively, from last week’s rating and share. George and Emily vowed, the day the NARCS pilot was picked up by Mose for thirteen episodes the previous May, never to obsess over ratings, certainly not the weekly overnights. But of course they can’t help themselves. And their success has made them stew more.

  “Dharma Minus Greg only got a six, nine,” George says hopefully. “And we were up against the Rosie O’Donnell special with Tom Cruise, and all the septuplets and octuplets on NBC, and the big NBA game, at least in the West—”

  “And Ken Burns’s show about Des Moines in the fifties was on PBS. Stop. No excuses.”

  “Do we think doing ‘The Real Deal’ so early on was a strategic mistake? You know, maybe we raised the bar too high too soon.”

  “No. We got a fourteen, George. Ted Koppel said it transformed the face of television.”

  “It wasn’t praise.”

  “It wasn’t not. But you do have to top it for May sweeps.”

  “Emily,” he says, mock sternly, fondly, as he might say “Max” to his son after a loud fart at the dinner table.

  Ordinarily, each forty-four-minute-long episode of NARCS is filmed and edited a few weeks before it airs. Eight weeks ago, on the first night of the year (and of the decade, the century, the millennium), they broadcast an episode of NARCS called “The Real Deal” live, from four locations in Queens, the Bronx, and Manhattan, and on three sets on their soundstage. Doing a dramatic show live is not an original stunt, but it is still rare, and none had ever been so … ambitious is the word George and Emily used in interviews. The episode’s B-story was its unannounced climax, an actual bust of an actual Ecstasy dealer on Ludlow Street who had been celebrating the New Year for twenty-four hours straight. Actual New York police detectives made the arrest, but the NARCS stars were in the shots with them, physically handling and delivering scripted lines to the bewildered suspect, who was in handcuffs and bleeding from a small, telegenic cut on his forehead. The dealer’s actual girlfriend, a pale, very pretty young blonde wearing only underwear and an unbuttoned leather coat, stood sobbing in the doorway; one camera was isolated on her during nearly the whole arrest, and the director, with George’s encouragement from inside the motor-home control room on Houston Street, had cut to her repeatedly, including a long fade-out to the final commercial break.

  It was extremely cool television. That’s really all George was trying for. Didn’t the fact that they wrote the sensational cinema verité scene as the finale of the B-story, not even of the main story line, demonstrate their restraint? Editorial writers and legal scholars were unanimously appalled. Nearly everyone else was fascinated and amused and thrilled as well as a tiny bit appalled. The dealer, it turned out, had appeared briefly in Rent in 1998, and belonged to Actors’ Equity; his lawyer asked for and got scale plus 10 percent for his client’s “involuntary performing services” during the arrest. It was Emily’s idea to sign the boy to the series for a possible recurring role, which provoked a small second wave of news coverage, all of which contained a lead sentence containing the word ironically. Stories about the show appeared everywhere, including the cover of Entertainment Weekly and even page A-1 of the Times. Nightline devoted a whole program to the episode. Ted Koppel mentioned in his introduction that George was “a respected former television journalist who used to work with us here at ABC News.” It felt odd, being splashed with drops of Ted Koppel’s disapproval, but not awful. When the episode was rebroadcast the following week, it got a 16 rating and a 29 share, twice the highest rating Mose Broadcasting has gotten for any show ever.

  “So. (Thanks, Tranh.)” The fuzzy ambient sound of her office disappears as she picks up the receiver at last. “Why are you so … wormy?”

  “My mom died last night.” He swivels away from the desk and puts his feet on the maple credenza, and stares up toward the park, the snowy, astounding park. Why doesn’t he adore Central Park as much as everyone else? Maybe because it’s uptown, and uptown still disconcerts him slightly, even though he’s making $16,575 a week. (Twenty years ago, his annual salary was $16,000. Five years ago, his and Lizzie’s combined
salaries were still only—only—$16,000 a month. They are discovering that they like making plenty of money, particularly George, even though it reinforces their disapproval of people who seem motivated by money.)

  “Why didn’t you say?”

  “I guess I’m sort of numb.”

  “She was sick?”

  “She was. But it was a car accident. She was, you know, boom, it was instant. We’re flying out in the morning.”

  “Anything I can do …”

  “Thanks. I know. Thanks.”

  “You’re okay?”

  “Yeah. I am.”

  “Well …” Seconds pass. “So, Mose, six-thirty?” Emily asks. “Ready?”

  “I think.”

  “Yesterday Timothy said to me on the phone, and I quote, ‘Let’s literally lock and load, my mad dude.’ ”

  “No.”

  “Uh-huh.” Whenever George mentions Timothy Featherstone, Mose’s head of programming, it briefly sets Emily off, which both of them enjoy. Provoked by the idea of Featherstone, her language becomes practically expansive.

  “I ran into the second-dumbest man in TV at the Getty just last night. He had both kids—it was a Flemish seventeenth-century circus, a fund-raiser for Yucatán war orphans—and the pregnant twenty-one-year-old Chinese girlfriend.”

  “Vietnamese, I think,” George says.

  “Whatever. The girlfriend and the older daughter—bare-bellied, and pierced, both of them. Matching belly rings, I think. They sang the Melrose Place theme song together.”

  “Wow. It had words?”

  “No, you know, humming it. And Timothy knew the tune too. And sang it. On the Getty plaza, in front of everyone, arm in arm with his daughter and his mistress. It was just … stupendous. I cannot believe he still has that job.”

  “He doesn’t, really. Mose does.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “So I’ll see you. Safe trip.”

  “Live here, George,” Emily says. For five months last summer and fall, Emily decamped to New York to get NARCS on its feet, with George as her apprentice show-runner. “Seriously.”