Turn of the Century Read Online Free Page A

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.”
    Iris’s head is suddenly in his office. “George! Your ten-thirty!”
    “Bye, Em,” he says, “see you this afternoon.” He turns to Iris. “My ten-thirty?”
    “Caroline Osborne,”
she whispers loudly, surely loud enough for Caroline Osborne to hear.
    “Ah.” Caroline Osborne is Gloria Mose’s twenty-five-year-old daughter by a previous billionaire. Featherstone, when he asked George last week to meet with her, called her “the viscountess,” which may or may not have been a joke. She isn’t, technically, Harold Mose’s stepdaughter,