The Diviners

by Rick Moody

  When he had lost that money, what he had to do in order to keep his business was to write a few things onto the books of this one client, the venture capital company from Salt Lake City. He saddled them with some bad trades. He concealed it all on their books as a business expense.

  Now what he wanted was that Lois should forgive him for these things, because he knew what he’d done. Women had this magical capacity, according to Arnie, to forgive a man, and maybe it wouldn’t change the situation, but he’d feel a little better for a few hours. He wanted to go legit, he said, in the hotel by LaGuardia Airport, and he wanted her to see that he was a man who had no choice but to do what he did, namely, write off fifty thousand shares of a fly-by-night biotech stock onto the books of a Mormon venture capital company. Sooner or later those Mormons were going to find out. His story was confused; his despair was violent. His mood swung back and forth all over the place, on the bed in the motel.

  When he’d calmed down a little, they went to sleep.

  In the morning, Lois DiNunzio slipped out of the motel early, because she slept fitfully, and she paid the bill and left Arnie Lovitz there, temporarily peaceful. She drove back to Astoria and got herself into a clean outfit for work. Where another woman would have cried on that drive, on account of how passionately she had felt the night before, Lois didn’t cry, because she wasn’t the sort of woman who cried over things like failure. You’d end up crying too often.

  Means of Production was in one of its flush periods. The market was “top ticking.” That’s the kind of thing Arnie said. It seemed as if there was more money around for their kinds of movies, or this is what Vanessa told her whenever she called Lois into her office. Means of Production was on the gravy train with a Dutch conglomerate, with the guy who helped pioneer some programming language for servers, and with some French producers for a film about Catholic priests molesting kids in the suburbs. Cauldron of Belief, it was called. Lois thought the subject of this movie was appalling. She thought the movie painted a bad picture of her church because it claimed that the higher-ups were always protecting the lower-downs, that they didn’t care what these priests did.

  It was the day after Arnie had said what he said. Lois didn’t have the usual DiNunzio detachment, the kind that comes from losing your mother to congestive heart failure and taking care of your younger brothers, those spoiled brats. And so she made the mistake of saying to Vanessa that she didn’t think Catholic priests really did stuff like that. She reminded Vanessa that the church gave a lot of money to the poor, and it was a place for people to go who didn’t have anything, and anyway the church was the sum of all its parts and it didn’t need to be demonized just because of a couple of rogue priests who couldn’t keep their privates under their robes.

  “Leave the development issues to me,” Vanessa said.

  “I’m just saying.”

  “Have you read the script?”

  “I don’t need to read it,” Lois said. A big mistake.

  “When I start developing a movie about accountants, I’ll be sure to call you in.”

  She was eating, of course. Vanessa was always eating when she was in a mood for a tirade. Today it was jelly beans. Vanessa turned her back on Lois, looking in the direction of the window, toward the deluge.

  Lois said, “Your boorish displays don’t wash with me. I’ve heard it all before. You can say what you like, but I don’t pay attention to your rudeness. I’ve worked for you for two years. I’ve made sure you could keep the company going. I’ve kept the rest of the girls in line, and I make sure they are okay when you’re behaving like a little child. So you watch your mouth with me.”

  Vanessa needed a couple of breaths to really get going, but when she got going, it was as if she were a superhero swelling up in some fabulous demonstration of strength from the sheer force of her dissatisfaction.

  “You’re the accountant. You’re like the back part of the set, where all the two-by-fours are showing. You’re the classic example of a person who’s never had a creative thought and who never will have a creative thought, and that may play well at the big studios, where they have not had a creative thought in twenty-five years, but in here, in this office, it means that we tolerate you. We tolerate you here just because we need someone to cover the books. But don’t ever get the idea that your opinion is welcome or that it matters, because we barely recognize that you’re here. You were hired to do the numbers and to shut up. And, for the record, I’m a Catholic, too, in case you haven’t noticed, and every day that I have failed to slump in the pews of the Catholic Church is a day that I’ve improved as a person. I could show you some of the spots where I was personally scarred for life by the priests and nuns I’ve known, but I’m not going to because you’re not smart enough for that particular conversation, the one in which I get stronger and begin to overcome these things through the vitality of disgust. I’m the one developing Cauldron of Belief. I’m the one who story-edited a story where a priest in Wisconsin abuses a bunch of boys and tries to get away with it, okay? And every day that they shoot the movie, I feel a little bit better, just on principle, but also because every day that they shoot that movie, I’m getting paid. And so are you. And so are the women out there in the hall, right? They’re getting paid now because this movie is being made, because some French people hate the church as much as I do. So let’s collect the checks, and let’s deposit them, and let’s bill this particular conversation as a general administrative expense, all right? Now get the fuck out of my office.”

  What followed did not include any slamming of doors, nor any bitter tears. Lois DiNunzio simply walked out of Vanessa’s office and back into her own, passing, on the way, Annabel and Jeanine. They were blushing at what they’d overheard. But Lois didn’t pay any attention to this because she’d already made her decision. She wasn’t at her desk fifteen minutes before she’d cut a check made out to St. Patrick’s Cathedral in the amount of a thousand dollars, which, as accountant, she was empowered to sign in the absence of Vanessa Meandro, who was leaving that afternoon for the West Coast to sit in on the beginning of editing on Cauldron of Belief. The check was backdated by one day. It was legal tender in every one of the fifty states. She took a package of foreign cigarettes from her purse, and she rode the elevator down to the promenade, and she smoked for a few minutes, and then, with a lightness in her step, she carried the check across the street to St. Patrick’s Cathedral and slipped it into one of the little boxes where people leave coins in exchange for an illuminated candle. Lois said a little prayer, the gist of which was that Vanessa Meandro should be struck with grace, as if grace were a safe falling out of the sky, and should, in that dizzy experience of being so concussed, suffer with a love for her fellow mankind and womankind that was so overwhelming that her present life would be rendered unlivable because of it. And also, dear Lord, please make her business acumen seize up and make her smitten with some fabulous unrequited longing for some grossly unpleasant and homely person. That is my prayer, amen.

  That was maybe twelve weeks ago. And in those weeks, during which Vanessa got involved in a fight to the death with the director and editor of Cauldron of Belief, and during which the market began its unmistakable downward spiral, Lois felt like a robin picking worms from the lawn of life. She was happy, and even her neighbors in Astoria remarked on how happy she seemed. It was a good feeling at first, because she could understand Arnie now, as she was a fellow embezzler, and she would try to comfort him, and she could take him out to see the play-offs at Shea featuring his beloved Al Leiter, and in this way Arnie could try to get comfortable with the idea that men in trench coats weren’t following him each and every day. Lois felt happy because she was now charging administrative expenses to various French people that were nonetheless going straight into the coffers of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, twice a month, to the tune of about six thousand dollars, bottom line.

  It had been a good fiscal quarter for Means of Production. Or at least for Lois. It was a
ll good until she got the call from Arnie in late October. One of the online brokerage firms that Arnie used was calling in some short positions. Shorts were a satisfying way of seeing the world. He loved looking for companies that were fraudulent. It was the fraud in him that loved thinking about all his fellow frauds. She’d go over to his apartment in Yonkers, and he’d be calling up reporters, telling them that some company called Primadon or something was intimidating its wholesalers. He’d be smoking and laughing about the whole thing. Until this particular call came. He needed to cover this short, on Interstate Mortuary Services, a large-scale, publicly traded mortuary company that offered family burial plans at bargain rates and shipping across state lines, but which had not even checked the federal statutes on interstate shipping of caskets and dead bodies. A great company for Arnie. But apparently they were about to be bought out in a major deal.

  “Lois,” he said, “I don’t want to put you through this.”

  Living with Arnie was like plugging the dike of truth. You got one set of holes plugged, but you could see the tempest-tossed sea breaking through someplace else. Still, Lois and Arnie were an item now, and Lois didn’t give up easily. That’s just not what the women of the extended DiNunzio clan did. They were stick-around girls. They were loyal and they were tough. She picked up a towel from the floor of his mildewy bathroom. She carried it to the hamper in the closet. She fetched spray-on bleach.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I’m telling you the truth.”

  “I’ve heard that one before.”

  Arnie said, “Just look at me.” And here he gestured at MSNBC on the cable television and the scrolling of stock prices as though the scrolling of prices were somehow identical with him.

  For a moment she was impatient: “Arnie, act like you can do something about your predicament. Go out there and make fifty thousand dollars somehow, and show me and the world how you can do it. People have overcome a lot worse things. People who know less than you do. Be yourself and do the thing you can do. Create wealth!”

  Lois felt sort of hollow even as she was saying the words. If you tipped over a rock and looked for chicanery and betrayal, you’d find these things under every rock. In every closet there was fraudulence secreted away, next to the frilly dresses. Fraudulence was there. Betrayal was there. And fraudulence was always in greatest supply where righteousness camped out. Arnie agreed with her sentiment. He agreed that he was going to try, as he always said, he was going to try to find the money in some legitimate way, like by selling cars or something, something he could do with his bounteous charm.

  Which brings us up to date. Bad news brings us up to the Friday after the election, Friday, the tenth, the day that Lois DiNunzio, the Robin Hood of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, has decided to loot her employer, an independent production company known as Means of Production, of sixty-three thousand dollars, in order to cover the losses of her fiancé, who is posing as a day trader under an assumed name—the name of a deceased brother—so as not to attract the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, nor the Securities Exchange Commission, which may or may not now be looking into the matter of a certain falsely constructed subsidiary of a holding company owned chiefly by several prominent investors from Salt Lake City, whose former accountant and consultant was one Arnie Lovitz. Lois has not told Arnie she is doing this, looting the sixty-three thousand dollars, nor has she told anyone else. She is constructing fraudulent payments to some real publicists, these publicists being known as the Vanderbilt girls, who are working to get the name of a motion picture, Cauldron of Belief, into the paper, and she is billing this sixty-three thousand dollars as a series of publicity-related expenses on a series of bills she is submitting to the American distributor of the film, which isn’t even finished, and after she submits the bill and writes the check to Arnie’s all-but-liquidated consulting business, Lovitz Offshore Consulting, she will walk out of the Means of Production offices, and she will get in a used Honda Civic with a hundred and forty thousand miles on it, and she will tell her fiancé that they are going to Arizona, and then they will begin to drive, spending, she calculates, the first night in the Toledo area, where she has already researched a really good place for them to eat dinner, a family restaurant. After that, they will stop at the first mall in the area that’s showing one of the season’s slasher flicks.

  15

  The happy couples with their freshly cut lilies from the flower district; the pickup soccer players who never pass the ball; the weekend barbecue enthusiasts with their George Foreman barbecue products, their squeezable ketchup bottles, their chef’s hats; the park bench romancers, mashing their chapped lips together; the carp feeders in the botanical gardens, mallards clustering before them awaiting the stale white bread, Vanessa has contempt for them all. The life-loving weenie-roasting citizens of Saturdays. Likewise, all persons who would relentlessly display their knowledge of the chad. The plural of the word chad is actually chad. Must the chad be punched out in at least two corners? Two corners or three corners or four corners? Or perhaps one single corner alone? Must you be able to see light around a chad in order for that chad to indicate intention? This is Saturday, and somewhere in a county down near the Gulf of Mexico in humid weather, members of the county board of elections are toiling, as they have been toiling since Tuesday. There are three members of the board of elections in a school gymnasium, sports mascots painted on the walls, and they are observed in their efforts by a scoundrel from each of the political parties, likewise by scoundrels of the press. The party operatives are objecting yet again. Can light be seen around the chad? Is this chad a pregnant chad? Or is this a dimpled chad? Either way, the chad is not a legitimate chad, as a pregnant or dimpled chad does not indicate a legitimate vote. This is a nonvote or this is an undervote, depending on the point of view of the party operative making the argument. This is the news on Saturday. The light of the coastal resorts is visible around the indeterminate and partially punched-out chad, pastels of Floridian light, bleached and salt scoured. Yes, the chad exhibits intention, is perhaps pregnant with intention, and so the members of the board of elections in this county near to the Gulf of Mexico, in the tail end of hurricane season, are working furiously, their eyes itchy and red. Vanessa is not going to the farmers’ market to banter with the cheese ladies who hawk their excrescences, nor is she going to the dry cleaner’s to speak with the beautiful Korean girl who has changed the color of her hair for the fourth time in three weeks.

  Vanessa means to work.

  First, the cat must be fed. The cat comes howling to the bed where Vanessa is still lying, where she is plotting. At first she ignores the cat. She’s making plans, and she’s listening to news reports, and she is considering options relating specifically to the miniseries entitled The Diviners. Who knows if this mythology of diviners is legitimate? thinks Vanessa, lying in bed while Dade County performs its convulsions. The cat howls. The women of her office, her acquaintances in the business of independent film production wouldn’t believe that Vanessa Meandro is a worrier, but there are things that they don’t need to know; they don’t know about the telephone conversation with her mother last night, nor about her mother’s fevered whisperings. “I was just sitting . . . in the lounge and thinking, and I was hearing . . . things . . . about some kind of, I don’t know, sort of a musician . . . some kind of African American man, and he’s trying to get a part in the . . . in that thing . . . I heard all about it. I heard all about a man having a conversation with . . . what’s her name, in the office there . . . promising him that if he could help to arrange financing . . . well, I didn’t understand all of it . . . had to do with some money things, with financing . . . give him some consideration for a part . . .”

  Vanessa said: “Are you kidding? You mean that guy, what’s his name? Mercurio? Right? The hip-hop guy? The guy with his own line of beauty products.”

  “I don’t know anything about beauty products . . . might have said something . . . m
en’s jogging outfits.”

  “Well, what else did he say?”

  “That he wanted . . . that he felt that he . . . could really do right . . . needed to break into acting . . . getting in touch with the part of him that wanted to act . . . and he could definitely put Madison in touch with people; I don’t know . . . It gave me a headache.”

  “Was there anything else?” Vanessa asked about the cellular telephone call that her mother imagined she had overheard in the adult psychiatric ward of the hospital in Park Slope while the other residents of the ward were watching reruns of situation comedies.

  “Doughnuts.”

  “What kind of doughnuts?”