The Diviners

by Rick Moody

  Weller then speaks to the art of elephants in captivity, and gorillas. What do we know about the intentionality of these artists? Is intentionality a condition of front-brain function, Weller asks, unhindered by disorder of any kind? If so, art is rather limited in terms of its effects and strategies. Art by bipolar artists is noteworthy for connections being made between disparate agencies or entities, connections suggestive of conspiracy. Members of families, for example, are considered agents of foreign powers. Teachers or clergypersons are considered secret members of fraternities and possessed of Masonic insights into the workings of the world. For bipolar adolescents, according to Weller, the discovery of these conspiracies can even be joyful, as in the case of one adolescent painter who produced in a matter of weeks a number of diagrams, painted on very large canvases, detailing connections between multinational corporations and the regimes of twentieth-century despots like Pol Pot and Idi Amin. This painter was ecstatic about his output and slept little, if at all, during the period of its creation. As Weller states:

  Perception of entanglement, my word for a particular set of symptoms that appears frequently in paintings by adolescent bipolar sufferers, precedes formulation of aesthetic strategy, and since entanglement is merely a symbolically exaggerated representation of the fact that the patient is connected to other people and feels, in this connection, exaggerated sets of human emotions, is it correct to interpret canvases featuring entanglement as types of discretionary choice, or rather as diagrams that offer possibilities for self-understanding or even recovery? Perhaps in this way, as in the automatic activity of the surrealist movement, so-called genuine artwork, art in the category of the high, begins to become more meaningful as it recoils from aesthetic strategy and moves closer to the compensatory and therapeutic artwork of disturbed adolescents.

  The victim, in her diary, uses these and other passages from volumes by Weller in order to talk about a particular series of artworks by Tyrone Duffy, apparently made toward the end of his productive life as an artist. These paintings, according to the victim, are known in some circles as the Thirst Paintings, at least among collectors of the work, though this title was not of the artist’s own design. Thirst here coheres with a theme noticed by the victim in Weller’s book:

  Thirst is a frequent symptom of some of the medication used in treatment of these adolescents, both in outpatient clinics and in the hospital. Antidepressant medications, as well as lithium, used in the treatment of bipolar disorder, have dry mouth as a side effect. Inpatient psychiatric treatment centers frequently make sure that their clients have plenty of water to drink.

  But, Weller goes on, as quoted by the diarist:

  Doesn’t this thirst stand for something else, too? Doesn’t it stand for a quality that all adolescents have? A desire for religiosity and spiritual experience? A desire to be a part of adult life? A desire to have the self-determination of adults? Especially when confined in hospital, when self-determination is at a minimum, the adolescent thirsts, and so it’s no surprise that this parched quality is often a part of their dialogue and even of their artwork.

  Duffy’s Thirst Paintings, according to the victim, here also compiling stories told by others, involve defaced works by contemporary novelists, wherein certain words are highlighted, as if to indicate patterns concealed in the work, patterns known only to Duffy himself, and although there is no indication that Duffy intended thirst to be the only theme of the work, he did, on every occasion, highlight the word thirst. The paintings themselves consist of paint applied with a “random energy” to leaves from books shellacked, varnished, or otherwise affixed to canvases. The paint then simultaneously conceals and reveals the secret texts, according the style known as palimpsest, so that, again, “entanglement is the secret being revealed, a secret web of stuff, people, themes, places, lives,” according to the diarist.

  In middle October, the victim apparently made contact with Tyrone Duffy himself. The meeting took place in a Polish coffee shop in the East Village known for serving twenty-four hours a day. Her first impression, she says, is that Duffy is “completely sexy.” And she goes on to ask, with intuition about her own motivation, whether it’s desperation that looks desirable or some inherently attractive quality.

  His eyes are really far away, though I’m not even sure what I mean by that. He has trouble making eye contact. He never seems like he’s looking at me at all. There’s never any of that seesawing of glances you get when men are doing their seductive thing. I never look away and then catch him looking at me. But especially if I say anything about the work, about having seen some of the work, he doesn’t seem to want to hear about it. His voice is a whisper, pretty much, and he mostly refuses to talk about things. He says, “Well, that was all a long time ago, and I haven’t done anything like that lately.” He says he just reads now. Says he started reading the books in those paintings, instead of painting on them, and that he regrets defacing some of those books. Says he figured he’d go to graduate school, where he could read more, and then he stopped going to classes. I asked him what he was reading, because it would keep the conversation alive, and he said Frantz Fanon and Michel Foucault and Edward Said. I’m not really sure he has stopped painting. I think he hasn’t and just says it.

  The conversation between the victim and Duffy does not last that long because Duffy claims to need to return to work. When asked his profession at present, he looks at the victim skeptically, as if she should be able to tell. The victim indicates that a certain inexplicable horror overcomes her when she first learns that Duffy is now working as a bicycle messenger because it seems so hard. It seems to the victim that the economics of fame, however brief, however long ago, should have inoculated him against a marginal working-class job. And so she is simply hoping it is not true. However, it is true. At this point the victim asks Tyrone Duffy the one question she has been intending to ask him all along, which is simply: “Do you have any of the old work left?” To which Duffy, according to the diary, responds, “I got a whole mini- storage box of that stuff. Not that I’ve been in there in a while.” After which he makes an exit, “like a cavalier on his mount.” The victim reports that her feelings afterward were like “love feelings, all confused, like he was going to start affecting my appetite. I think it’s just the work, or the proximity to the work. Maybe to talk to Tyrone is to take my own job seriously, whether he can take his work seriously or not.”

  At this point, the detectives would like to observe that it is a salutary development for the case that the victim is such a prodigious diarist. If the perpetrator were aware that a diary existed, the perpetrator would certainly have taken steps to prevent its being obtained by law enforcement. But the perpetrator didn’t remove the diary from the person of the victim, nor did the perpetrator take any money, nor did the perpetrator exert any sexual control over the victim. The perpetrator, who may have been on a bicycle, simply carried a brick in his hand until, for whatever reason, he saw the back of the head of the victim as she walked on a sidewalk, on Third Avenue, and the perpetrator then cocked his arm and battered the head of the victim. She stumbled forward and collapsed.

  Once the facts are released by electronic mail message to the force about the possibility of Tyrone Duffy as suspect, by virtue of his being a bicycle messenger, the report comes back from a guy on traffic duty: He broke up a fight on Thursday morning between a bicycle messenger and some guys in midtown. That bicycle messenger sounds like this bicycle messenger. And that bicycle messenger’s name is Tyrone Duffy. Soon thereafter, the story has leaked to the press. Eyewitnesses are coming forth. Amid the hysteria of the city in recent days, the car crash in the Diamond District, et cetera, the detectives admit that reading the diary has been a pleasant way to spend a few hours. Even if the diary is sad, and even if the diary is the intimate record of a woman who now appears to have very little, if any, short-term memory. Most days, the detectives find themselves with chalk circles indicating the final resting place of deceased per
sons, and it is nice to read about the life and loves of a young woman, a woman who may well recover, and they find that in this way, they love the victim. The victim seems to have pluck and enthusiasm for the world, and the victim seems to stand for things that a young woman of New York should stand for, like hard work and frequent use of the public library system, and they think that maybe if they were younger and not married, they could fall for her, or at least each of them feels this way in his own private reserve, and it is at this point that they decide to go to the hospital to see if Samantha Lee is alert and receiving visitors.

  10

  Madison turns from the vast cabinet of beauty products in her mother’s bathroom at 860 Park. She turns from honey-maple astringent chiselers, verbena pore extruders, plasma essence nucleic epidermal triage treatments. To immerse herself in the shower, Madison stands with her face under the massaging showerhead trying to ignore the afterimage of the curtain’s floral print. During the next ten minutes, when she’s basically asleep again—until she finds herself warming up the espresso maker, dumping a demitasse into some steamed milk—she absently spoons into herself half a grapefruit for its negative calories while her mother complains about how recycling is actually creating more garbage. After which, Madison needs to get out of her pajamas, and this is actually one of the most stressful moments of the day because she has all these choices. She has gone to Agnès B., she has gone to Betsey Johnson, she has gone to Prada, she has gone to Dolce, she has even gone to Bergdorf’s, and she has bought these outfits, Michael Kors, Marc Jacobs. She has to wear one of them. If you buy the outfit, you have to wear the outfit. That’s the rule. It’s irritating and stressful. All these outfits, like strangers of whom you should ask questions at a cocktail party, at least according to her mom, who was trained to ask questions at parties by her own parents, her mom who used to be a fund-raiser at the City Opera and who now just hangs around the house complaining. Madison goes into the walk-in closet and she tries on the knee-length black skirt, then the pink corduroys, then the giant eyelet skirt, and the micromini, then superslim hip-huggers, settles on a leather skirt in claret, checks the drape of the trifle. She attempts to divine the tastes and inclinations of the male of the species by spinning around a couple of times in the mirror. Next, she goes in search of the right top, maybe something less sheer underneath something more sheer, or maybe just something black. After which there is emergency moisturizer, amber concealer, ebony eye pencil, extrahold disulfide support spray. Not that the male of the species gives Madison McDowell its undivided attention. When they do she finds reasons to resist. This one checks the length of his fingernails too often. This one is preoccupied with squash. This one uses the word portfolio too many times, and this one drives with one hand.

  Which is why at twenty-eight she’s still living here. There’s no reason to live elsewhere yet. And she can’t afford her own place. In summer, she has the guesthouse all to herself out in the Hamptons, where she can float listlessly in the pool. While she’s at Means of Production she can save some money, and she can buy pieces (fur pants from Sean John) that are essential to the public image of Means of Production. Madison McDowell is the public image. That’s something that Vanessa Meandro recognizes, something that Vanessa needs, Madison McDowell with high heels and an address book and an expense account. Madison McDowell in the society pages. She can call her friends on the cell phone and she can commiserate about whatever it is that requires commiseration. She can scheme out loud about world domination, about her ultimate position as a female studio head, about her imaginary husband who is thirty-eight years older than she and bound to die leaving her a half-billion dollars in stock options.

  She gets into the elevator, yelling back irritably at her mother, reminding this matriarch to go to Fendi for the sale, and upon depressing the L button, she fishes out the cell phone and conference calls the girls at Vanderbilt Publicity, and the girls start in immediately about what they saw last night, for example, you can’t believe who they saw last night, they were with that hip-hop guy, Mercurio. Almost every week they say this, they saw Mercurio, Mercurio, Mercurio, and they took him to the opening of an installation piece at a gallery in Chelsea where you could administer electric shocks to a male model, you wouldn’t believe it, and everyone was there, here is a list of people who were there, here is a list, because even if the girls themselves weren’t at an event, none of the people on the list would ever deny being at an event, that’s what the girls always say, you can always just report that these people were at an event any time you throw a party, even if they weren’t. The more times you say it, the more likely they are to come: Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson, Rod Stewart, John Leguizamo, Donald Trump, Matt Dillon, Isaac Mizrahi, Al Roker, Lacey, Jay McInerney, someone from the tabloids, just make up any name of someone from the tabs, because they love us, they love everything we do, and they will come to everything. How about plus-size models, there are always some plus-size models around, you can just say a plus-size model came to the party, like what’s her name, any of the guys from that hip-hop label on Staten Island, and you can say that anyone from the Young Republicans was at your party. Young Republicans, they will do anything you ask. Libertarians like to be tied up. Leave your Libertarian at home watching QVC, tied to your bed. The heiresses from that cosmetics fortune, they were undoubtedly at the party, the daughter of the guy who pulled the insurance scam where the Methodist Church got taken for millions, the dashing son of an indicted arms trader, twenty cousins of the Saudi royal family, two former New York City police chiefs. You can always get the staff of the pink weekly newspaper to come to your parties, and they almost always throw up at some point late in the night, especially that guy who does the movie reviews. Or how about the heroin-addicted singer for that band, the Corinthians, or Derek Jeter will come to your party, or Fred Durst, he will come to your party, the entire staff of Jet Set. All these people will come.

  The girls go on, yoked together in the ether of telecommunications as Madison thanks the doorman, gets into her cab. They talk about the menu at that restaurant Slab, how it is totally not that fattening, and how first they went to the benefit party for the museum, and they got so drunk, you wouldn’t believe, and they saw a real estate developer guy, and they saw a guy from that investment bank, and they saw the guy who had the Internet start-up that only just started to tank. But that’s after the stock was up a hundred and twenty percent in the first day of trading. A sweet guy and cuter than any man on earth, he’s a fox, they say. His hair is the color of wheat and just a little bit messy, and he says he wants to get involved in producing independent films! That’s what he said. They are serving this man up to Madison as though he were a big fish flopping on the deck, and all of this even though Madison has dark hair, which is not at all like the Vanderbilt girls themselves. They are totally being about blond, about the philosophy of the blonde. Even if you’re a fake blonde, it’s fine. But you have to be a blonde. They have decided to do this experiment with Madison; they are going to see if a natural brunette can make any headway in the world. But as part of the experiment, she will have to do as they say. Exactly as they say. And then, at a certain point, she will take a meeting with Mercurio. Mercurio really wants to do some film work and Mercurio is incredibly smart, you know, and he understands how it works. He really doesn’t want to do an action film where he’s the sidekick of some white guy, like a Thaddeus Griffin movie, because that’s demeaning, although he would consider doing an action film where he has a white sidekick, like Thaddeus Griffin, say, and maybe Thaddeus gets blown to pieces about half an hour from the end of the movie, but, seriously, what Mercurio would like to do is have a small part in a film where it’s not actually the worst film of the year.

  Madison says, “Even Thaddeus doesn’t want to do a Thaddeus Griffin movie.”

  Mercurio, the girls observe, is just pretending that he carries a loaded handgun and has guys working for him who are ruthless killers, because you have to have credi
bility with the fan base, and that fan base, the girls say, is white male private school students from large cities. Mercurio can’t afford to alienate white male private school students from large cities, and so he needs a handgun, the girls say, so that the private school kids believe in him. The Vanderbilt publicists do not have the same credibility problem and they don’t need handguns. They could borrow handguns if needed. They understand that credibility is imperative to all the people they represent, however, and they will do what they can at the corporate level to ensure that Mercurio’s credibility survives incessant advertising, television promotions, bad marriage choices, a house in the suburbs, homosexual dalliances, insider trading scandals, diva behavior, gavel-to-gavel trial coverage, all of that. Mercurio is so sweet and he has had such a rough life, what with losing his cousin in a plane crash. So you have to find something for Mercurio. He wants an independent film where he can work outside of his established persona, you know?

  “Maybe a digitally animated version of the Tibetan Book of the Dead?”

  “Does it have like a hundred kinky positions in it?”

  The girls miss Madison’s withering sarcasm, not because they are uninformed, but because they are talking too fast. Madison is so smart! Brunettes are smart! Sometimes she has both of them on hold, the Vanderbilt girls on two separate lines, Barclay and Sophie, and she just goes back and forth between them, and sometimes they have each other on hold at the same time, and sometimes she has them conference calling her. To summarize, Mercurio would like to take a meeting with Madison and then he would like to take a meeting with Vanessa, and Madison should definitely call up the guy from the Internet start-up, hair the color of wheat, and she should take him out to lunch. The girls tell her that the Internet developer guy is really serious, he really wants to learn about the movies, he’s totally cute, you wouldn’t believe.