The Diviners

by Rick Moody

  The clerk, who’s making do with hourly wages, picks at an incredibly long fingernail for a moment before moving to fill Vanessa’s order. She stares vacantly at a ring on the countertop left by somebody’s extra-large coffee. The patrons of Krispy Kreme are still for a moment, in the compulsion of ordering and devouring. Just then, someone taps Vanessa on the shoulder.

  The Indian guy.

  4

  Annabel Duffy calls her boss Minivan because her boss is that large. The size of a minivan. In the interiors of her consciousness, Annabel begins or ends all business-related exchanges thus: “Minivan, can I get you some coffee?” She thinks, “Gosh, that designer suit looks fetching on you, Minivan.” She thinks, Minivan, Minivan, Minivan. Because it’s the one effective rejoinder to the oppressions that Vanessa Meandro visits upon her. Like the day Annabel came to interview at 610 Fifth Avenue. Minivan had apparently decided to break down Annabel until she was a quivering protoplasmic blob. Minivan indicated, in this preliminary interview, that she’d interviewed nothing but “anal-compulsive gay men” for three days, and Minivan made it clear that she could not work with these men because they were “prima donnas.” What Minivan needed—and as she made her need clear, she rose up, swelling and posturing—was someone who would submit, someone who could sleep on a bed of nails, someone who could take an hour on the rack and demand more, someone who would be an untouchable, in the Hindu sense, without complaint, who would even be grateful for it. Did Annabel think she was this person? Bullshit. Annabel had no idea what submission meant! Annabel did not yet know what was required because she had not yet been forged in the underworld furnace of Minivan. It was clear to Annabel that Minivan was appraising Annabel’s presentability as she made this observation, that she was checking out Annabel’s skin tone, which was a much darker skin tone than that of any other employee in the office. But there was something carnivorous about the gaze, too; she was checking out Annabel’s breasts and ass, and because of this, Annabel made her first subversive assumption about Minivan: big dyke.

  Still, no informed hypothesis about Minivan’s personal life has ever been borne out by cold, hard facts. Minivan has never appeared to have a personal life. No men, no women. And Annabel, as the ass’t, has dealt with every aspect of Minivan’s character. Annabel makes Minivan’s appointments at that spa in Arizona that specializes in overeaters. Annabel fires Minivan’s therapists every few months and gets new referrals. Annabel has learned about Klonopin, Ambien, Paxil, Wellbutrin, and Halcion; she has learned about cocktails of mood stabilizers, antidepressants, and antianxiety medications; she has substituted lithium for Depakote, Serzone for Lamictal or Lexapro or Zoloft, which she substituted for Prozac, has held out antianxiety medication in her palm because Minivan, with remarkable insight into her own character, has noted that she isn’t to be trusted to keep the prescription in her own desk. Since Annabel has been doing all of these things for Minivan, Annabel believes she would have known about a girlfriend if a girlfriend in fact existed.

  Annabel knows, furthermore, that Minivan technically still lives at home, though this is a fact shrouded in secrecy, especially this day, because Annabel has been on the phone with the detox ward of the hospital in Brooklyn where Minivan’s mother was incarcerated as of one or two hours ago. Normally, her mother would have called by this time in the AM, in order to launch into some strange, ominous subject, like yesterday’s car crash involving a guy driving up onto a sidewalk in midtown and taking out two or three pedestrians. After which Minivan’s mother, referred to around the office by the name of Rosa, even by Minivan herself, is likely to go on to a torrid sociopolitical subtopic that will include Rosa herself, the mayor of New York City, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, pollution in the Gowanus Canal, gentrification in Red Hook, the new crosswalk at Radio City Music Hall, campaign finance reform, and shadowy state and federal agencies as yet unknown to the general public. As Annabel listens to these monologues, inevitably there is an urgent cry from the corner office: “Are you doing your nails or something? Do I pay you to do your nails?”

  The name of the company shall be Means of Production, referring here to a meanness of character, a paucity of compassion. Minivan will not commit to this interpretation because she will not commit to any interpretation. Minivan is about pragmatism, realpolitik. Every complaint about Annabel Duffy’s on-the-job performance also contains discussion of Annabel’s weight, as Annabel is willowy, svelte, twiggy. “You know you’re not supposed to be able to see all the bones in your elbow. If you can see them, there is a problem. Think about it.” Or: “Is this a political thing with you? Not eating? You’re expressing solidarity with subsistence farmers of developing nations?” Or: “You’re making me look bad, Duffy. I didn’t hire you to look like a model. You’re here in a miniskirt in order to make me look like a whale. Am I right? Wear a garbage bag or something. Wear a warm-up suit. Go down to Old Navy and buy a fucking warm-up suit that’s four sizes too big and wrap yourself in Ace bandages or something. This is not an environment that I can work in. Go eat a sundae. Get two sundaes, in fact. Bring one back for me.”

  Whereupon Minivan will insist that Annabel really do it, really get the sundae as described. Likewise, Annabel has taken entire gross boxes of chocolate bars out of Minivan’s office, per her direction, replacing them with a more dainty jelly bean display. She’s ordered pizzas at ten o’clock at night, multiple pizzas. Back-to-back lunches for Minivan. Followed by drinks, followed by dinner, followed by a separate dessert engagement with some other agent. Annabel has ordered four sides of bacon for Minivan from a room service menu, in the Gallic tongue, because Minivan, lounging at poolside in the south of France, claims her French isn’t up to the task.

  Traditional Hollywood fare. Like all those mailroom stories, some of which Minivan is fond of telling herself. The producer, for example, who used to walk around in the parking lot first thing in the morning, checking the hoods of the cars of his employees to see how warm they were. The guy with the warmest hood was insufficiently ambitious. Gluttony, selfishness, megalomania, chocolate addiction, pathological lying, promiscuity, obsessive-compulsive disorder. The world of cinema. And yet there are two reasons why Annabel continues to work for Vanessa Meandro. The first reason is a steadfast if misguided belief in the possibility of tenderness. As Annabel conceives of it, the moment of tenderness is not a theory, but a genuine probability, like democracy in China or a Middle East peace accord. The moment of tenderness is a possibility in all interactions. It is the neutrino of human events. The moment of tenderness becomes ever more predictable, statistically, the worse things get. Bad luck is the catalytic agent for tenderness. The moment of tenderness cannot be resisted forever. Minivan, one day, will have to express kindness, if only by accident. There is no other way to think about the world. The longer Annabel works, the more likely is the moment of tenderness, the more Annabel wants to be present when the inconceivable happens, when the world of light opens in Minivan like a flower. Greatness in the film world happens in inconceivable moments. When the predictable torrents of horror films for teenagers have overspilled the drains and sewers and engulfed the corners of all the sidewalks, then the rain will stop, and the sun will rise, and only Annabel will continue to believe in it, a moment of tenderness.

  The existence of the moment of tenderness, however, is in dispute according to all others employed at Means of Production. These hard-core empiricists number exactly four. Another personal assistant, Jeanine, who is responsible for travel arrangements and most of the call logs for Minivan. A development girl, Madison, who once had Annabel’s job and whose hazel eyes are bottomless. A celebrated action film star, Thaddeus Griffin, who is sharing the cost of the office suite with Minivan while he tries to parlay his action film credits into independent film respectability. And the bookkeeper, a middle-aged woman called Lois DiNunzio, who has successfully eradicated all signs of human emotion. These four employees (and the occasional heroin-addicted intern from Tisch Schoo
l of the Arts) coexist badly within the domain of Minivan and yet they agree on one thing: the complete implausibility of any moment of tenderness. They give Annabel endless amounts of shit for believing in this moment of tenderness. They have each recounted, in whispers, the Christmas-evening harangue from Minivan, when they were called selfish, witless, moronic, and weak. Or, moving from adjectives to nouns, they were called such epithets as coke slut, mannequin, industry whore. For these reasons and others, Annabel’s fellow employees have asserted that the moment of tenderness does not and cannot and will never exist.

  Maybe if it were only the moment of tenderness, Annabel would not have stuck it out for five years, having taken the position fresh from the college in western Massachusetts with the experimental curriculum. The other reason to stay is her screenplay. During the workday, Annabel acts out the ingenue roles of Juliette or Justine, while at night she has begun working on a screenplay about the wife of the Marquis de Sade, called Fire Eater. Despite the lack of easy financing inherent in the kinds of projects Minivan favors, she has continued to make great movies. And Annabel knows, eventually, that even if she must be subjected to the very kind of torture that the Marquis visited upon his wife, which includes, in Annabel’s screenplay, experimenting with erotic asphyxiation, penetrating his wife with devices, encouraging others to do so, fucking teenage boys in front of his wife, demanding that teenage boys fuck him in front of his wife, sexually abusing the children of his parish, and forcing his wife to sodomize him, Annabel knows eventually that Minivan will see the light about Fire Eater, and Annabel’s project will fit right into a Means of Production release schedule that in the past has included an entire film made about Charles Manson’s final remarks before sentencing; a film about the last years of the life of Mark Rothko; a film about the arrest of the Weather Underground; a George Jones biopic; and the celebrated Means of Production love story, Offenders, about the schoolteacher, Mary Kay Letourneau, who romanced her middle school student. Offenders had that incredibly moving passage where the teacher and her thirteen-year-old lover go skydiving together, just before neighbors inform on them. Here’s the moment that critics, at least at the alternative weeklies, liked so much, that moment in the trailers when Mary Kay’s thirteen-year-old lover gets ready to leap out of the plane at the behest of their instructor. He has no fear, and the blue sky outside the plane looks almost colorized, a tissue paper cloud here and there. He’s attached to the cable that ensures that the parachute opens properly, and he looks back at Mary Kay, a goofy grin on his face because he’s afraid of nothing. He thinks that the whole world is a professional-wrestling episode. Mary Kay, however, knows what this dive means. Suddenly she’s reaching out to him, but he’s gone, their hands failing to meet, causing her to jump, too, and the plane banks left, and their chutes open, and the sere flatlands of the Northwest are below them, and a married woman has just thrown away her life for a profane love. Never has the wailing of the wind sounded so desolate. The absence of music makes the film more persuasive. Lili Taylor’s finest moment, really.

  Annabel knows that a certain rarefied segment of the filmgoing public has exited at the conclusion of every film produced by Minivan determined to overthrow a despot or to work for the legal-aid society or maybe just to make a film. Everyone at her school in western Massachusetts, the one with the free-form curriculum, felt this way. Half of them have trooped through the Means of Production office, it seems, trying to get Minivan to back their documentary on the making of Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew. No? How about a film about the new East Village orgy scene?

  The combination of the possibility of tenderness and a series of movies, not one of which cost more then ten million dollars to make, films that saved the lives of fifty thousand college students in the Northeast, this is enough for Annabel. She willingly shows up for work today, to be told by her boss that she looks like an Eritrean refugee. And here is her boss now, moving past Annabel’s desk, and then Jeanine’s, followed, inscrutably, by a Sikh guy in a turban. She drops a bag of Krispy Kreme doughnuts on Annabel’s desk.

  “Want me to save these?” asks Annabel, holding the abject bag in her hands.

  “Send in DiNunzio. Clean out the empty office. Squeegee the windows.”

  To herself, Annabel pronounces the word squeegee as though it is a completely new word. The inexplicable Sikh guy, meanwhile, is smiling the most generous smile she’s ever seen, as though his smile could repair entrenched diplomatic problems. He’s standing in the hall by the sequence of portraits of great contemporary feminists by photographer Miranda Grossinger that Minivan has been collecting. Miranda wants to make a movie, too, and she has therefore been more than happy to improve the decor at Means of Production. The Sikh is leaning dangerously close to the photograph of Avital Ronell. He’s in danger of knocking the photograph off the wall because he’s so full of surprise and delight.

  “Duffy, did you read the treatment? Do you have the coverage?”

  Which treatment? Which coverage? Minivan’s head appears, disembodied, leaning out through the door frame. Annabel nods blankly. She knows better than to deny having read anything. On her day off, Election Day, which was not really a day off, she chased down a new wristwatch for Minivan and fired another intern, she worked on her script at the office, and only then did she go to stand in the line to vote on Seventh Street, where the elderly Hispanic ladies manning the booths were showering the voters with abuse. When she finished voting, it was after nine. Which was when Thaddeus came over. His wife, the commercial actress, had gone to San Diego to work on something, so Thaddeus was waiting on Annabel’s stoop when she got home. He complained the whole way up the four flights, as usual, “Haven’t you ever heard of elevators? Everywhere else they have elevators. They comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. I have a tobacco-related disability. I’d prefer to have a ground-floor romantic liaison, if you please.”

  Thaddeus Griffin. She’s seen him holding a gun so many times that it seems as if he should always be carrying one, an ArmaLite or a Kalashnikov. Thaddeus Griffin, in Single Bullet Theory; Thaddeus Griffin, starring with a token African American pal, in Single Bullet Theory II. Thaddeus Griffin, starring in Full Magazine, about a heartbroken editor for a mercenary periodical who gets involved in a conspiracy to shoot the president, here starring alongside another token African American pal. Thaddeus, in fact, has never made a good film, despite having been brought up in New York City and despite having attended Union College in Schenectady, where he nearly graduated with a degree in marine biology. Thaddeus Griffin, the guy who comes to her house and weeps about his marriage and then with almost bloodless suddenness simulates a forced jocularity that would pass for charm on the networks. Everything is a joke! He can imitate anyone! He imitates his agent! He imitates studio heads and television personalities! He does his ongoing impression of Minivan! He’ll get an entire sushi roll in each side of his mouth, like when they were at that place on Ninth Street, and he’ll start talking about Michel Foucault and how knowledge is power, with sushi rolls in his mouth. Despite renting an office with Minivan for a year and a half, he has yet to be cast in anything, even though he has given Minivan free script advice and taken her out to Balthazar for dinner with one of the principals of DreamWorks, even pitched a script about the death of Trotsky to the studios for her. The favor bank has worked in one direction only.

  Thaddeus’s campaign to know Annabel more perfectly is coincident with his fading prospects around the office of Means of Production. The campaign went like this. First, of course, he proposed to read the draft of Fire Eater, which he claimed to like. Then he invited Annabel out for drinks to discuss the script, at the history-laden Cedar Tavern. Three times people stopped him to say, “Hey, you’re the guy who killed that terrorist with a crossbow,” which was, of course, the climax of the original Single Bullet Theory. It was during this sequence that Thaddeus, with great concentration, uttered the words, “Jesus wept, motherfucker,” displaying a conviction rar
ely seen in modern cinema. You had to see it in context, really. And this was how he signed a cocktail napkin, for a fan, in the middle of the ring left by his neat scotch: Single Malt Theory, Thad Griffin 2000.

  “The script is really good,” Thad offered, when they were alone. “Really out there. I like it. I admire what you know.” Saying it in such a way that it was clear the opposite was the case. This seemed like the problem of celebrity, that the celeb could not uncouple him- or herself from the burdens and privileges of fame. The safe, uncontroversial remark that the celebrity was trained to deliver became his only refuge. With Thaddeus, she could not walk the street unperturbed. He would say, “We have to keep moving.” Maybe Thaddeus selected his profession for this reason, so that he would always have an excuse to move. At the same time, maybe he was not as famous as he thought; maybe nobody gave a shit about his films, which were generally acknowledged as all but worthless. Annabel believed that action films were inherently conservative anyhow, that they existed solely to offer support to libertarian positions on the Second Amendment. When you thought about it that way, you found pity for Thaddeus and his occasional attempts to be one of the people. You could see that Thaddeus had long since lost something, some set of skills that other people had: the ability to sit in a room without attempting to command its attention, the ability to look up at the smoggy night sky and know that it existed without any input from him at all and without the cooperation of tabloids.