Kurt Andersen ~ The New Yorker ~ My People, Your People

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE - April 26, 1999

My People, Your People

Being the boss in fin-de-siècle Manhattan.

by Kurt andersen

MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE that happens every day, and children aside, George Mactier loves coming to work, the arrival and the settling in, the wakeful, hopeful testingone- two-three-four sameness of that first hour. 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 the receptionist, with the story editors Paul and Phoebe, with Jerry the line producer, with the odd writer or production designer, with Iris Randall, his assistant. He likes seeing Iris make the fresh pots of freshly ground, freshly roasted coffee, and 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 “NARCS” 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 that 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 sevenyear- old to call him a “bunghole,” and she didn’t want the star to refer to Pat Robertson as a “born-again Nazi”), of leased camera cranes that won’t swivel or a fake-bullet squib that burns an actor. The beginning of the workday, from the moment he steps into the lobby until the 10 A.M. phone call with Emily Kalman, his Los Angeles partner, is a consistently fine, bright swath of life: organized, purposeful, optimistic. George takes pleasure in the anticipation of familiar problems. All problems are either soluble, in which case he promptly solves them, or insoluble, which is rare, and these he ignores.

Ever since “NARCS” went on the air, in October, five months ago, its average Nielsen rating has been 7.2, higher than that of any otherMBCprogram. (George figures that he receives a seventh of a cent each week for each person who watches each episode of his show, a calculation that makes his sixteen-thousand-sevenhundred- and-fifty-seven-dollar weekly salary—sixteen thousand seven hundred and fifty-seven dollars!—feel not so arbitrary and extreme and vertiginous. Just a few years ago, his salary at ABC News was sixteen thousand dollars a month, and his first job paid sixteen thousand dollars a year.) This past Saturday night, the “NARCS” rating was down to 6.9. When the pilot was picked up by Harold Mose, MBC’s founder and chairman, last May, George and Emily vowed never to obsess over ratings, certainly not the overnights. But of course they can’t help themselves. And their success has made them stew more.

Iris pokes her head in. “George!” she says. “Your ten o’clock with Emily!” For Iris, every long-distance call demands emotion, as if it were a special occasion. She’s in her forties, only a few years older than George, but she’s wired like a woman of his mother’s generation, always overexcited and killingly sincere.

“Hi ya, Emily.”

“It’s Becky, George. Go ahead, Emily, George is on.” “Good morning.” She’s on a speaker phone.

“Emily, the next time I get the assistant when it’s supposed to be you, I hang up.And if you stay on the speaker phone, I’m hanging up right now.”He’s kidding, sort of, and she knows it, sort of.

“So—nasty overnights.”

THE “NARCS” production meetings take place at a long, cheap, paintsplattered table right on the new soundstage in the basement of the MBC building. George likes the glamorously unglamorous industrial space, the Masonite slabs covering wood beams and tons of sand (to keep the floor level and vibration-free), the trusses and lights overhead, the cozy pool of light at the center of the dark factory cavern. Down here below the line, George is the master among his trusty craftsmen. The questions and answers are precise and straightforward. The chain of command is clear. The belowthe- line production staffers, unlike the writers, convey by their very demeanor a kind of proletarian deference: George is the boss, the showrunner, the auteur. Lizzie, his wife, who runs a software company in Chelsea, says she dislikes the sense of always scaring her employees a little, but George finds it pleasurable. He tries never to abuse it, but he figures that that combination of eager friendliness and fear, as if he were walking around with a live grenade, is just old-fashioned respect.

“Really excellent sound, the footsteps crunching on the cocaine, on Saturday night’s show,” George says to Fred, the sound designer and Foley artist, whose job it is to enhance natural noises—to intensify audio reality, sweeten it.

“You liked it? Cool.”

“George, we’ll use a little person, and not a real child, for the smuggler’s kid, right?” the director asks. “I got a time problem with kids.”

“As long as he looks like a kid,” George says. “I mean, we’re going to be pretty close.”

“Just his body is in the shot, not his head,” the director says. “It’s the head with the body that makes little people look like little people.”

“In that next scene,” one of the prop guys says, sounding excited and proud, “when the bad guy gets sliced to ribbons in the sugar-cane harvester? We’re getting a yard of actual bioengineered skin called Apligraf, the stuff surgeons use. It even feels real.”

There are a few smiling “Ewww”s around the table. “Nice,” George says. And the production meeting proceeds, calm and orderly, with each department head posing problems and offering solutions as they move through the script scene by scene during the next hour. George makes dozens of choices that will aggregate the look and sound and feel of the episode. He doesn’t have to do, he must only decide. It’s grand.

At MBC, the Fifty-ninth Floor, or Fifty-nine, or (as Timothy Featherstone, the head of programming, calls it) Five-Nine, is a proper noun. It is the floor where Harold Mose and all his senior New York executives have offices. Depending on context and vocal inflection, “Fifty-nine” can be portentous, menacing, flip, or contemptuous.

The Fifty-ninth Floor wants to lose the question mark in “The Janeane Garofalo Show?” as soon as possible.

Fifty-nine wants to try selling coffeebreak sponsorships company-wide.

No, she’s too skinny for daytime talk. Fifty-nine wants a “Day-O!” host more than thirty pounds and fewer than fifty pounds overweight.

The Fifty-ninth Floor just doesn’t understand why “Mr. McCourt” is cleared on only sixty-one per cent of the affiliates.

News will definitely have to get a sign-off from Fifty-nine to start announcing exit-poll numbers at eight Eastern Time.

Just today, Laura Welles, Featherstone’s deputy, said to George on the phone, “I’m frankly amazed Fifty-nine is cool with you going so urban.” In the entertainment business, “urban” is the euphemism for “black.” George and Emily have decided, starting with the March 4th show, to lay bits of rap into the “NARCS” soundtrack—what the show’s musical director calls their Spackle of Sound, a maximum of six seconds at a stretch, three times per episode. A week of audience testing in Omaha determined that was optimal: any less and the younger, rapfriendly audience segments didn’t respond, any more than eighteen seconds an hour and the anti-rap audience majority became, as the research firm described it, “assertively intolerant.” Testing over the last month had discovered a substantial audience segment, mostly whites in their thirties, who found the rap interludes on “NARCS” “energizing” and “stylish.” The research firm called this middle group the Hip Urban Ambivalents, or H.U.A.s. It is all such a delicate balance— fascinatingly so, for George, like constituency politics, like trying to keep soccer moms and Social Security recipients all voting Democratic, or Christian fundamentalists and libertarians in the G.O.P. No, not like politics, he realized last month, the day after the New Hampshire primary: getting an audience for a TV show is politics—what America has now in lieu of real politics.

“Iris,” George says as he and Emily leave his office and head for Fifty-nine, “we’ll be . . .”

“I know,” she says, in her perpetual stage whisper. “Fifty-nine.” From Iris’s mouth, “Fifty-nine” sounds like “the principal’s office” or “the oncologist.”

Emily has come straight from the airport. George carries the notes, as he always does when they go to meetings together. That way she doesn’t have to be the girl. They are about to present their new program, “Reality,” to Mose. It will consist of three linked prime-time installments each week. The Friday hour will be a straight newsmagazine show, but the two weekly half-hours, to be aired Tuesdays and Thursdays, will be semifictionalized depictions of the anchors’ and the correspondents’ lives, and of the making of that week’s news program.

“Hi,” George says, smiling big at Featherstone’s receptionist.

“We’re here to see Timothy.”

There are two basic show-businessexecutive personality types, George has discovered—the Merry Chatterer (most talent agents, almost all TV executives) and the Inscrutable Hard- Ass (self-made C.E.O.s, insecure talent agents). Merry Chatterers can be silly, but what’s the point of show business if it doesn’t occasionally transmute work into a fiesta? George finds even insincere Hollywood gaiety pleasurable if it is energetic enough. Some Inscrutable Hard-Asses are brilliant, but every one is dead set on appearing to be brilliant—if you doubt that their still waters run deep, well, they might drown you just to prove the point. George’s preferred executive type is an old-fashioned mogul hybrid, the Merry Hard-Ass, who is surprisingly rare. Merry Hard-Asses are scary but fun, often physically large men; one half-expects them to shout “Fi! Fi! Fo! Fum!” when they rumble in for meetings.

Timothy Featherstone is pure Merry Chatterer. “Yabba dabba doo!” he says to George and Emily, instead of hello. “Long time no see, Emmy Lou!” He kisses Emily on both cheeks. “Let me take you into my la-bor-a-tory,” he says as he leads them into a conference room.

The walls are covered in magnesium panels, expensively riveted. A line of TV screens in the walls wraps all the way around the room like a belt.

“Well,” Featherstone says as they sit, “let me open my kimono and give you dudes the four-one-one du jour—we’re prepared to give ‘Reality’ a thirty-nineweek commitment. Rock solid.”

They had asked for only thirteen weeks.

“Thirty-nine?” Emily says to Featherstone. “At one point six million a week?”

“D’accord, darlin’.”

“No speaking French. That’s why I left Canada.” It’s Mose, striding through the door. Featherstone swivels his chair and bolts upright. George and Emily stand. Greetings are exchanged.

George always notices the aroma of Harold Mose. Why hasn’t Ralph Lauren bottled this fragrance? (Maybe he has.) It must be the daily haircut plus fresh flowers plus cashmere plus BMW leather plus the executive-jet oxygen mix plus a dash of citrus. That is, Mose smells luscious. He smells rich.

“Your little pilot was perfect for my attention span,” Mose says. “Can we make the actual show fifteen minutes a week?” George and Emily grin. They had produced a fifteen-minute “minipilot” for the show—a five-minute newscast and ten minutes of behind-thescenes fiction. “I expect that Timothy has badly misrepresented the program to me,” he continues, in his happy-gangster tenor. Are there Canadian gangsters? “So. Is this a mutant news program that all people of substance and seriousness will despise or a bizarre entertainment program that half the audience won’t understand even if they watch it, which they won’t?” He plucks the lime slice from his Pellegrino and bites the flesh.

“Well,” George says, “a lot of people in news are going to go nuts, unquestionably. The op-ed pages and the journalism professors will kill us.”

Featherstone glances anxiously at Mose.

“Oh, dear,” Mose says, pulling the lime from his mouth. “Oh gosh. Oh my. And the downside is?” It takes Featherstone a second to realize he should chuckle, and he does.

“When the noise clears,” Emily says, “this is smart, tough, good TV. Firstclass news. First-class drama.”

“Dramedy,” Featherstone amends, then turns to Mose. “Dramedy, Harold. That’s my top-line note. ‘Murphy Brown’ when it had an eighteen-pointsix rating. ‘Larry Sanders’ with heart, and a high-Q star. We want the halfhours zoomy.”

“And why the two half-hours?” Mose asks.

“So we can roll with events,” George says, “evolve the story lines during the week. As news unfolds, we adjust the tenor.”

“Maintain the arc, Harold,” Featherstone says.

“If the week starts off fun and games,” George continues, “a story like Clinton in Sausalito with his English actresses, but then, you know, a bunch of people are massacred in Mexico on Wednesday, we can adjust the trajectory before the Friday program.We need a middle episode to make the transition from the docudrama of the Tuesday show—”

“Docudramedy,” Featherstone says.

“—to the straight news hour on Friday. We can’t just go slam bang from ‘Murphy Brown’ to ‘60 Minutes.’ ”

Mose frowns. “I don’t know about ‘Reality.’ ”

George and Emily exchange a panicky glance. He’s already changed his mind?

“It’s so . . . arty. Like a scriptwriter’s idea for the name of a news magazine.” “Fantastic note,” Featherstone says.

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

“I do,” Mose says. “But what about ‘Real Time’? Is that a horrible name for this show?”

It’s only the name Mose doesn’t like.

“Sure! That’s fine. It’s superb,” George says.

“Yessss!” Featherstone says, clenching a fist, pumping his arm. “He shoots, he scores!”

Being the boss, Lizzie finds, consists of two main tasks. “Finding the signal in the noise” is the first. It means the same thing as “separating the wheat from the chaff.” She used to call it “torching through the bullshit” until Bruce Helms, the chief technology officer at Lizzie’s software company, provided the more felicitous metaphor. To be the boss also requires making snap judgments and making them confidently— big, consequential snap decisions, dozens of all kinds, every day. It is all improvisation.

"Two-color packaging for the game is fine. As long as it doesn’t look too much like we can’t afford four colors. The idea with Warps is to look elegant and semi-old-fashioned— like black-and-white movies in the eighties and magazine covers in the nineties.

"Ask Bruce, but Softimage is obviously the preference. Because Microsoft owns them.

"How about two weeks paid, four unpaid ? Because it ’s a policy for paternity leave, and they don’t have to nurse the fucking kid is why.

"Why does he want to know how realistic the digital fur will be? (What digital fur?)

"We absolutely do, too, have N.E.C.’s permission to use Power VR in advertising. Then double-check, but don’t let N.E.C. know.

"Tell him Tony said a year ago—no, two years ago—that he’d pay for fireproofing the I-beams.

"No, Fox has an option on TV rights to Warps, nobody has novelization rights. That’s different—the novel is called 'Chocolate-Chip Cookie-Dough Haagen Dazs,' but Douglas Coupland didn’t base it on the ice cream. I ’m pretty sure.

"Please ask him to stop playing that same awful 'Massive Attack' CD. I think it’s making people stupider.

"Duh. No.

"Stall them; we ’ll only get more if we wait.

"Tell them Warps will be to Time Commando as 'The Simpsons' is to 'The Flintstones.' Or 'Men in Black' is to 'Godzilla.' More “prestigious”? O.K., as James Joyce is to Gertrude Stein.

"Say I ’ll call back. No.Tell them Madeline will call back."

Sometimes Lizzie very much likes being boss. Not, of course, enduring the parent-and-child-like grousing about salaries and expense accounts and window sightlines and the relative square footage of cubicles. Or firing incompetent salespeople who happen to be single mothers, or being deposed by former employees’ attorneys in order to deny on the record that one is a Satanist violator of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Not the irreducible third of the job that is the stupid, draining, thankless equivalent of buying Pampers, phoning exterminators, writing tuition checks, sending back screen doors that are a sixteenth of an inch too wide, of telling a whining fourteen-year-old she may not go to a midnight Golden Gloves match in Brooklyn. Lizzie likes being boss because at last she’s a member of a cool club that she likes, president of the club, a club custom-made by her for her. As a girl, Lizzie’s popularity hovered around six or seven on a one-to-ten scale. (In fifth grade, right after she learned decimals, she actually gave herself weekly popularity rankings in her diary, and graphed them.) But club after club had failed to satisfy. She has come to accept her particular Catch-22, a variation on the Groucho Marx line: the sorts of people who join clubs are not, by and large, the sorts of people with whom Lizzie wants to be clubmates. So now she has reverseengineered her way to contentment. She has her own nineteen-thousandsquare- foot clubhouse in a loft in Chelsea, where she does her best to keep everyone busy and interested, but she gets to decide who joins, who stays, and what the rules and projects are. The vicissitudes of popularity and democracy have been transcended, the thing has a fucking point, she can swear as much as she wants, and there aren’t any mothers or faculty sponsors overlooking, organizing, patronizing, clucking. Except her.

Lizzie needs to hire someone to open a Fine Technologies office on the West Coast, probably in Seattle, because it’s halfway to Asia, where business is picking up again, because the rest of the industry is there, and because of Microsoft, with whom she has been talking about selling a piece of the company. She has interviewed people for two weeks. Out in Seattle or San Jose, she knows, she could have seen half a dozen qualified people the first day. In New York, the candidates are adagency- account jerks looking for any way out, the hustler marketing partners from bankrupt Web-site design shops, bullshitters (uninteresting bullshitters), and losers. George doesn’t like it when she uses the term “loser,” and neither does she, really—it’s too categorically harsh, too lacking in nuance. But in her world the losers seem to be multiplying. Partly this is a classic Ponzi-scheme latecomer phenomenon, where the logic of a mania finally requires a big crowd of failed contenders—the thirty-eightyear- olds who decided in 1997 that this on-line Web thing looked like it was going to be big. And partly it’s the fact that there have always been a lot of losers in the computer business who were given the benefit of the doubt during most of the nineties, when dozens of former losers were getting rich or looking brilliant, or both.

She heads toward the back of the loft for her daily midmorning encounter with Bruce Helms, who dresses every day in identical charcoal-gray Brooks Brothers suits and white button-down shirts. He isn’t a square; he’s a thirtyone- year-old blues devotee and former morphine addict. He dresses like a square, a perfect 1965 square, not exactly in a spirit of parody but as a function of a deep native sense of decorum, expressed . . . was it ironically? “No, um—allusively,” Bruce said, embarrassed, during Lizzie’s one conversation with him about his clothes. Lizzie plops onto his bright-green Astro-Turfcovered armchair, the only piece of upholstered furniture at Fine Technologies, and leans back.

“Man,” she says, shaking her head, “I don’t know, finding anyone here who can do the Seattle job is a nightmare.”

“I hope you didn’t hire the Mormon.”

“Shush. They’ll arrest us for discrimination. That’s creed.”

“And race. Ultra-whiteness. So interview out there. The job is vice-president for Microsoft, right?” As he speaks, his right hand remains on his mouse, and only between sentences does he glance away from his twenty-five-inch monitor and look at Lizzie. His speaking manner, almost monotonic but essentially sunny, is the way people their age and younger tend to talk.Whateverese, she calls it, and it reminds her of Huckleberry Hound’s voice, or, as George once said, Eeyore on antidepressants. Bruce finally lifts his hand from the mouse and swivels to face Lizzie. “Why would that hypothetical person still be in New York?” he asks.

“You’re in New York. I’m in New York.”

“You’re here because of George and the kids. I’m here because my act would seem too much like an act out there. And because we don’t want to live in a company town.We like being fish a little bit out of water.” “Yeah, well,” she says, “sometimes I think I could get used to being a fish in water. You know?”

Lizzie swings her legs down off the arm of the chair and as she sits forward both feet fly, thwack, onto the grubby yellow-pine floor. Her stomp is a halfconscious device, allowing her to change the subject instantly to the business of the day. It’s a kind of segueless conversational shorthand among colleagues in twitchy new businesses, the kind of cheerful-hysterical brusquerie endemic to the digital Northwest but still uncommon in New York and nonexistent in old Hollywood.

But before she can ask how far behind schedule the designers and programmers are on Warps, Alexi shouts from across the loft. “Lizzie! Important call! Moorhead, the Microsoft talk-to guy.” Lizzie has agreed in principle to sell twenty per cent of Fine Technologies to Microsoft, plus warrants giving them the right to buy another twenty per cent. Warrants . . . The deal made her feel as if she had finally crossed to some other side. During her time working for the foundation, she used to look down on her business-school classmates who had gone straight to Wall Street and into M. & A., the jerks who couldn’t let a conversation pass without mentioning rollups and debt tranches and mezzanine rounds and secondaries and warrants.

“Hello, this is Lizzie Zimbalist.”

“Ms. Zimbalist, this is Howard Moorhead, in Redmond. How are you today?”

The carefully fondled “Ms.” and the stranger unction make Lizzie recoil. “Sorry I kept you waiting. I was just in a meeting about Warps. Our game.”

“That’s super. I know our people down at WebTV are very anxious to hear about your deliverability issues on that? I’m sure we’ll all be excited to see the product?” Like many men raised in the South, Moorhead turns his sentences up at the end, transforming statements into acknowledgment-seeking quasi-questions. Growing up in Los Angeles in the seventies, Lizzie trained herself out of the same verbal tic in sixth grade. “And your Mr. Haft seemed to think our proposed time frame on the warrant expirations is no problem? 2005 is acceptable to you?”

Lizzie still cannot quite take years like 2005 seriously, even now, two months into the new century. Plans and deals involving dates in the aughts and the teens inflame her chronic, secret sense of work as a big make-believe game, dress-up Monopoly. Sure, Moorhead, she thinks, as long as you pay me in fresh, crisp twenty-million-dollar bills— the bright-pink ones.

“Sure,” she says. “2005 sounds fine.”

“Ms. Zimbalist, I did want to let you know that based on the data you’ve supplied we’ve done some new calculations? Of the projected earnings multiples for your out years?

“Uh-huh.”

“And we think right now we’re looking at a somewhat adjusted acquisition benchmark number for our investment?”

A pause. “What are you saying?”

“Well, we’re now prepared to offer two point nine million dollars for tenper- cent equity in the company.”

Lizzie stares for an extra, calming beat at the photograph on her desk, all three kids laughing by the Neva River last summer in St. Petersburg, Max and Sarah holding hands with Louisa, airborne and blurry, between them. Sarah still had long hair.

“For ten per cent of the company?” “Exactly,” Moorhead says, his smile audible, as if Lizzie had just agreed to the new terms. “Exactly right.” “Two point nine million dollars? You are fucking kidding me.”

For three full seconds, Moorhead says nothing.

“Ms. Zimbalist,” he finally manages, “I, I, that type of language—”

“Two point nine means a valuation for this company of twenty-nine million. In every discussion I’ve had with Microsoft, the valuation ballpark has been forty million. Two point nine is bullshit.” Lizzie is almost screaming. She curses often, but she seldom screams.

“I do not appreciate that type of language, Ms. Zimbalist.”

This jerk, this geek—not even a geek, this oily lawyer—is upset! About a girl swearing! She needed to get off the phone before she was overcome. Her language!

“And I don’t appreciate the bait-andswitch. You and Lance Haft can try to resolve the numbers. Goodbye.” She bangs the phone down on its cradle. “Fuck.”

Bruce pokes his head in, smiling, with Alexi hovering avidly just behind.

She shoots to her feet, sending the Aeron chair wheeling into her CD tower, which totters. Two disks (Morcheeba and Stravinsky’s “Apollon Musagete”) fall to the floor, and Lizzie steps on them, cracking the plastic cases— “Shit!”—as she comes out from behind her particle-board desk. “I do not believe those duplicitous shits.Two point nine million. Christ. And my language. My language! Give me a fucking break.” She sighs so violently she roars.

Alexi points to the phone. “It’s Louisa,” he says, enunciating extra crisply, “on Line 3.”

“Hello, my baby duck!” Lizzie says, with her free hand tucking her reddishbrown hair behind her extremely red ears. Bruce and Alexi wander off. “Yes, it is Mommy, LuLu. I am not a robot mommy. It’s Mommy.” Her brain is still hot. “No, I am not an alien. O.K. . . . Who’s there? Ahtch? Ahtch who?”

Lizzie leaves the office a few minutes after six. It is the first time this winter she has left before dark. It has been a lousy day, ten hours at work without even a whiff of science. The whiffs of science were what drew her into this business in the first place. But today she has accomplished nothing. She has signed expense accounts, extended supplier contracts, agreed to pay nine hundred and forty dollars a month extra to insure her employees against carpal-tunnel syndrome (which she secretly considers a half-phony fad disability) and screamed about hypothetical seven- and eight-figure sums of money to a man in Redmond whom she has never met. Today has been one of those days when she feels like America’s most overeducated, overinvested postal clerk. She has done nothing gratifying or important, even though she’s exhausted, as tired as if she had spent the day overseeing the invention of a disposable solar-powered twenty-fivecent supercomputer the size of a cricket.

Arriving at home, she tosses her leather backpack on the kitchen table, and the scrape of the metal Prada tag across the zinc surface scares the cat off its window seat. “Where is everybody?” Lizzie asks the cat.

She scans the mail and culls out the bills. Do other people receive real letters? The only personal correspondence George and Lizzie get regularly is invitations (one here to a black-tie “Remember the 1980s” party at the Frick to raise money for T-1 Internet hookups for the fifty poorest schools in New York) and those quasi-celebrity chain letters (most recently from Angela Janeway, soliciting ten dollars for Mexican clinics—copies of which also had been sent by Danny Goldberg to Courtney Love, to Pete Hamill by Ken Kesey, to Bianca Jagger by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., by Mort Zuckerman to Tony Blair, by Patricia Duff to Harold Mose, and by a hundred other quasi-celebrities to five hundred other quasi-celebrities who are all pleased, in the name of a good cause, to make you aware that they know one another). Nowadays even thank-you notes and invitations have addresses laser-printed on an adhesive label.

Louisa, sounding like a dropped piece of luggage, comes tumbling down the three flights of stairs. During the brief pause at each landing Lizzie can hear the slow, even footsteps of Rafaela, the new babysitter.

“Hello, baby duck!” Lizzie says as Louisa finally stands before her.

The six-year-old, zipped into a brightyellow snowsuit, looks past her mother, bows her head, frowns, and says, “Hello, Missus.”

“What?” Lizzie says, startled, smiling, staring at LuLu, who runs out to the tiny back yard.

Rafaela arrives in the kitchen.

“Hi, Rafaela.”

“Hello, Missus,” she says, not quite making eye contact, following Louisa outdoors. She turns. “Missus, the store don’t have whole-wheat Cheerios you want. Store brand only.”

“The children will survive, Rafaela. That’s fine.”

“O.K.,” Rafaela says, and pulls the back door shut.

With Margaret, the previous babysitter, who was from St. Kitts, George and Lizzie had enjoyed the Anglo- Caribbean bits Louisa and Max picked up—saying “straightaway” instead of “immediately,” pronouncing the first syllable of “radiator” with a broad “a.” Max had required heavy persuasion to stop referring to black people as “colored,” even though Margaret continued to do so. Now LuLu would need to be told why she shouldn’t call her mother

“Missus,” even though Rafaela did.

“Mommy?” comes a voice from all the way upstairs.

“Hello, Sarah.”

“Hi,” Sarah yells down. “Max and I already had dinner. Can you get firm tofu next time? I’m using one of your old lighters for a scene in my history documentary.” Sarah is making a video about civil rights in Alabama in 1964.

“I think I queered my Microsoft deal. I say ‘fuck’ too much. According to some sexist asshole in Seattle.” George smiles. Lizzie stands up.

“I need a big drink,” she says. “The kids have eaten.We don’t have anything for dinner. You want to order sushi from Hiroshima Boy?”

They had Martinis on their first date, twelve years ago. She was twenty-four and he was just thirty-two, and drinking Martinis was still, for people their age, a self-conscious, tongue-in-cheek act, playing grownup. They’d met at a Dukakis fund-raiser on East Thirteenth Street, and left together for a drink at a noir-inouter- space-themed bar in the East Village called Blue Velveteen. The olives were plastic. Sometime after their second Martini, Lizzie had told a Kitty Dukakis joke that made George laugh so suddenly he sprayed gin out his nose all over Lizzie’s baby, Sarah, sleeping next to him on the tatty velvet banquette.

Twelve years later, the Martinis in Manhattan are sipped without olives or irony. But Martinis for two remains a romantic ritual.

“So who did you say ‘fuck’ to that you shouldn’t have?”

“Oh, this asshole from Microsoft. They’re suddenly offering two point nine million for ten per cent. They’re trying to gyp us.”

“Jesus, three million for a tenth of the company is a gyp? It’s still free money, isn’t it? ‘Gyp’ is a racist slur, by the way.”

Lizzie was often charmed by her husband’s vagueness about business. But not right now.

“We have earnings, George!”

“So go public.”

“Why should I go public? The company doesn’t need the capital. And we don’t need the money.We can’t find any stuff for this place that we like enough to buy anyway,” she says, gesturing toward the dark, naked dining room and the dark, naked room with books and a piano but no name.

“You know, it’s funny. My mother used to say to my dad, after he’d bought some fancy wind-powered composting unit or something, Perry, you just can’t spend money fast enough.We’ve actually reached the point now where we can’t spend it fast enough. Literally.” He repositions himself on the Biedermeier sofa. “This thing is really not comfortable, you know.” Lizzie sips her Martini, and puts her glass on the red-andyellow coffee table that looks like scuffed, circa-1960 Formica but is in fact 1924 Le Corbusier, the single really expensive object they own.

For several long minutes, they sit in silence, both looking out the eight-foothigh back windows as Louisa dances in the back yard with her shoulders up around her ears and her arms turned inside out. She is doing one of her impromptu rap performances for Rafaela.

“So I can’t believe they really bought ‘Reality.’ That’s so excellent.”

“I know. It’s crazy.” He’s still smiling.

“It’s going to be a bitch to do. Three shows a week.”

“Mose gets it?” she asks.

“The show? I think so. Yeah. He wants to call it ‘Real Time.’ ”

“Is he smart?”

“I can’t tell for sure. This afternoon he said, ‘You know “The Network for the New Century”? I want all of us to mean it.’ I don’t know if he’s brilliant, or just unafraid of sounding superficial.”

“What’s the difference? At his level. That’s what makes a good leader. Not being afraid of sounding superficial. Really believing your own bullshit. ‘Men believe in the truth of all that is seen to be strongly believed in.’ ”

“My little Nietzsche.”

He stands, grabbing both of Lizzie’s hands with his right, and as he slides her off the couch, which they’d reupholstered in black leather, her jeans squeak. “I’m fat as a pig,” she says.

Down in the basement, the furnace ignites. “We have liftoff,” George does not say, as he often does when they’re alone together and hear that sound—the muffled bang, the deep rumble resolving into a continuous, quiet thunder. It reminds him of the space launches he never missed as a kid. Lizzie, born a year after the J.F.K. assassination, doesn’t remember watching a space launch live until her senior year in college, the one after Challenger exploded.

George is lying in bed naked, watching his wife, to whom he has just made love. Lizzie sits on the floor next to the wall, her panties back on, legs and arms both crossed in front of her, smoking a Marlboro Light and staring out the window. She has opened it a crack, two inches—just enough to lean down and blow smoke out. She is back up to four cigarettes a day. She hides her smoking from the children.

“How many are you up to?” he asks, propped up on his right side.

“A couple a day.”

“You know, if we lived out in Kirkland or Palo Alto or somewhere like that you wouldn’t be able to smoke anywhere.”

She smiles. “Another reason to move. Protect me from myself.” From upstairs, where Sarah is now in digital postproduction on her school project, George and Lizzie hear John Lennon singing “Imagine.” “Her video,” Lizzie says, nodding upward.

“I thought it was set in 1964? ‘Imagine’ is from like 1974.”

Lizzie shrugs.

Then they hear Max logging off his computer. “Goodbye!” says the America Online voice, as chipper as ever.