by Rick Moody
“I think they were mentioning Krispy Kreme doughnuts.”
“Are you sure? Are you sure this telephone call had something to do with Krispy Kreme doughnuts? Mom, I need to know.”
“Telling you what I heard . . . and it was giving me a splitting headache . . . and if you don’t want to hear it . . . that’s your prerogative to believe that . . . You’re going to believe what you’re going to believe because you never had a tablespoon of respect. They were watching television in the lounge, and I was overhearing a telephone call between those . . . between Madison from the office and some black man . . . they were talking about financing . . . and then they were talking about doughnuts.”
“Were they talking about how I brought in doughnuts to the office the other day, Mom? Was that what they were saying?”
“They were talking about money . . . they were talking about getting money from the doughnut company. Somehow the future hinged on doughnuts.”
“You’re kidding me, Mom.”
The conversation stalled. After reminding her mother how much she was loved, Vanessa demanded that Rosa Elisabetta put her through to whichever official was attending on the ward at this hour. Was the doctor still on call? No, the doctor was gone and would not be back until Monday, because even the doctors had to have breaks from the delusions of the patients in the ward, which meant that there was no one in authority to whom Vanessa Meandro might speak. Still, Vanessa asked her mom if she could put the supervising nurse on the phone. Her mother pointed out that, unfortunately, the nurses would not speak into the pay phone on the ward. This was against ward policy. After all, how did they know if she was really the daughter of Rosa Elisabetta Meandro? She could just as easily be a drug dealer or other codependent person. Vanessa Meandro gently bade her mother farewell, after which she got the hospital information number from directory assistance.
So the first thing Vanessa does on this particular Saturday is to begin, from bed, berating various hospital operators with threats and abuses, allusions to how these people are all going to be brought up on a variety of malpractice charges, until at last she connects with the number for the ward in which her mother is warehoused. The nurse on duty answers. Vanessa has barely completed the recitation of biographical information before she moves into the argument phase.
“Do you guys realize that my mother believes that she’s receiving telephone calls inside her skull?”
The shades are drawn in Vanessa’s room, and the cat is batting at her with a request of some kind. Some eerie electronic music is playing because the clock radio is tuned to the Columbia University station. The sound is muffled behind the stacks of unread screenplays towering around it.
“I’m not allowed to give information relating to our patients over the phone.”
“You’d better rethink that policy, because last night I had a conversation with my mother that went on almost ten minutes in which she sounded lucid to me, except for the news about the telephone calls she’s receiving in her head. Or in her dental fillings. Or wherever they’re coming from. If you’re not talking to me about it, you should at least be talking to whoever the consulting physician is over there. I want it on record that my mother needs to be getting better care for her delusions. She wasn’t floridly psychotic when she checked herself in on Wednesday.”
“Sometimes patients —”
“She had a drinking problem. I can’t argue with you about that part. But she wasn’t hearing voices. And now she’s hearing the voices of people from my office talking to her. You’ve got to have some kind of medication for this stuff, right? I mean, haven’t there been big advances in these medications? Can’t you treat a complaint like this? I want to know first thing Monday —”
The nurse says something noncommittal about passing on the information. When the MD shows up on Monday, the information will be passed on. The nurse has become as silky in her delivery as a game show host hustling off a losing contestant. Requests for information need to be met with a rhetoric of delay. Requests for information are not the responsibility of this single party, a nurse-practitioner with two kids left behind at her sister’s house for the day. Et cetera.
Vanessa rises and pads into the kitchen in her robe, feeds the cat, and then she calls Madison because she knows that Madison will have been out until four. It is good to wake Madison to remind her of the importance of the chain of command. Madison should be attempting to stay one step ahead of Vanessa on all things. Madison should wake with a start, worrying about Vanessa. Madison should be able to leap tall buildings; Madison should be able to accept telephone calls on a Saturday, crack of dawn, despite three or four hours of sleep. So Vanessa dials the number, gets the machine, and while scooping the bonbons of cat shit out of the box, she says, “I heard you offered Mercurio a role in The Diviners without running it by me. Which is totally fucking unacceptable. And I understand you’re in conversation with Krispy Kreme for financing. And that’s not going to work yet, either. You’re supposed to keep me informed of this stuff. Call me as soon as you’re up.”
Having harassed Madison, she begins to feel a little better. She feels as though she might be able to raise the blinds or look in the mirror at her straw hair, her bad dye job, the rings around her eyes. But having come to this conclusion, she instead returns to the bedroom to locate her personal digital assistant, which lies on the far side of her queen-size mattress, as though she were in a long-term relationship with it. She starts at A with the stylus and she heads through the alphabet, looking for people she can call on business matters. When she gets to Annabel Duffy, she takes up the phone again and leaves a message with Annabel, who never answers. “Hi, I’m wondering why we haven’t solved this intern problem yet. I want to have an intern by next Friday because we’re getting behind. We need some people we can get working on these little tasks. Get some names. I don’t care where you get them from. Just get some people in. If we’re going to be in production on this miniseries, we need more people. We’re going to be flying back and forth to the coast, we’re going to be on location, and I don’t trust Madison to be looking after this issue, so get on it.”
Maximum friction between individuals. Instability between the players. Means of Production needs to have people competing in the same tasks. Fraternal rivalries. Catfights. The players need to be looking over their shoulders suspiciously, which is why it is so appropriate to have Thaddeus Griffin around, a black hole sucking in the radiant energy emanating from these talented women. They need to be able to fend him off; they need the skill, the power. Same thing with Ranjeet, although what Ranjeet also represents for Means of Production is an implied critique, he says, of Occidental meaning systems. The Occidental meaning system is looking toward equations, see, as though the equation is the perfect semantic unit for large organizations, he says, and this is true in the movies and it’s true in the business practices of an operation like Means of Production. On the other hand, maybe what Ranjeet stands for is an Asian system of meaning, which is more like non-euclidean geometry, where the parallel lines are actually circles; this is the theory of Ranjeet, this is the way in which Ranjeet is going to change what they’re doing, so that they are working on a variety of approaches to The Diviners, not just particular Occidental context-oriented approaches, but instead a variety of possible approaches to story and structure. As he says, this is more likely to yield fruit.
It’s her greatest moment, the moment of persuasion. It’s the thing she was born to do. She can feel it the way other people can feel they are ready to get into bed with someone. Other people feel desire and they go out into the dappled sunlight of the park and they compose sestinas using difficult-to-rhyme words like silvery, and they experience love, which is that feeling when you care more about the welfare of a person than you care about the sunlight. Maybe Vanessa has felt that or, lying in bed with the blinds drawn, maybe she thinks she has felt that for her mother, certain times when she carted her mother, passed out, from the floor of her l
iving room to her bed. Maybe in that moment, she felt something like this epic love of poetry. Caritas. For example, there was the time that her mother was meant to show the top-floor apartment to this couple. She remembers this vividly. April, maybe, two or three years ago, a Saturday like this Saturday. Vanessa was trying to make use of the new stepping machine that she’d ordered from an infomercial, and she intended to spend half an hour on it every day. She’s on the stepping machine, weeping and pretending to ski. The bell rings downstairs, and she hopes this couple isn’t an interracial couple, because there was this one interracial couple, and her mother was so rude to them that she couldn’t believe it. She tried to talk to her mother about it once, and her mother shouted Vanessa down. The bell rings, and then the bell rings again, and the bell rings a third time. The third ringing of the bell is not good, and so she goes downstairs, wearing her stretchy gym clothes. She’s lost eight pounds, and yet she’s been weeping over the improbability of losing weight, and she goes downstairs, and here’s this nice interracial couple.
The girl is light skinned and maybe part Hispanic or something. Beautiful and tall and thin, and the guy is maybe Jewish. He has the charm of an advertising guy. They are standing on the stoop, and Vanessa says, “Let’s go have a look.” She’s on her best behavior. And she takes them up to the top floor, and they are amazed at the view. They really like the brick, they like the floors, they like the old gas lamp out front. And what they probably really like is that Vanessa does not give a shit what color they are as long as they don’t make too much noise and pay their rent in a timely fashion. But on the way back down the stairs, she says, “Let’s just take a quick look and see if my mother is home, because she likes to be a part of this process.”
She’s not sure why she did it. It was not a good sign when the doorbell tolled unanswered three times. The appointment had been agreed upon. Like many people with problems, Vanessa’s mother was fanatical about her few appointments. She worried about them for days in advance. It was not a good sign when the bell rang and Rosa Elisabetta did not answer it. Nevertheless, Vanessa unlocked the door on the ground floor, after explaining that they should feel free to use the garden in the backyard, and then, as the door swung in, she found her mother passed out on the floor of the living room, arms flung wide as if in preparation for some fervent embrace, one leg of her Kmart double-knit trousers scrunched up enough to reveal a pink sock. The cat was sitting on top of her mother’s stomach.
“Maybe we’d better come back,” Vanessa said, giggling madly.
“Is she okay?” the woman asked.
“Sure,” Vanessa said. “The only problem here is the socks.”
More nervous laughter. Then there was a pause in the banter between landlord and lessees in the stairwell. And then the adman said: “We still really like the apartment. We’d like to sign the agreement.”
She gave them the lease on the spot. They had probably seen much worse, in this challenging real estate environment. The lease was on top of the stack of papers on her mother’s kitchen table, along with every other legal piece of paper she had ever needed in her life, including her will, her divorce agreement, and a suit filed against the City of New York for restrictive ballot requirements for third-party candidates in local elections. The three of them stood in the kitchen, looking at the lease agreement, while her mother snored in the center of the living-room floor. The renters had the paperwork notarized and returned, with the check, before Rosa woke.
That was a kind of love. There is love, and there is persuasion, and these are two of the colors of the universe. There is the postmodern Orientalism of Vanessa’s strategy, via Ranjeet, which is a strategy of multiple fronts, all operating simultaneously. The flow chart. She’s going through the scrolling alphabetical entries of her personal digital assistant, through its trove of names, Katzenberg and Meyer and Case and Bronfman and Brokaw, the telephone numbers that she has pried loose over the years, as if these telephone numbers were some kind of secret code. She uses the numbers rarely; she just covets them, keeps them in reserve. But on this wasteland of a Saturday, she is feeling that perhaps the moment has finally come. She can feel it, it’s an automatic function, a reflex, and what is more true than the expression of a reflex?
She dials the cell phone number of Jeffrey Maiser, senior vice president of network programming at UBC, the fledgling network built of affiliates in the hinterlands. UBC, network of the kids, the network with lots of shows for teenagers featuring werewolves and invisible children, werewolves dealing with water-weight gain and male-pattern baldness, and, more recently, a rash of enhanced-reality programs, such as the very successful American Spy. Jeffrey Maiser has been linked, and this is always how they put it in the relevant publications, with a certain brainless, one-named strumpet called Lacey. A singer, if you can call her that. For whom he is now acting as Svengali, according to the relevant publications. Jeffrey Maiser is working on a deal for a half-hour enhanced-reality program in which the one-named strumpet is to lie around on casual furniture such as beanbag chairs and waterbeds with her friends, listening to songs and watching videos. They will also rate various boys, hosts of video programs, members of various bands, and so forth. Jeffrey Maiser is developing this, according to the relevant publications, and he is also attempting to secure dramatic roles for Lacey, and this will be the fulcrum of the pitch that is even now beginning to form, like a boil, in Vanessa. Vanessa needs to tell the story of The Diviners so badly that resistance to it is making her irritable. Yet waiting will sharpen its edges. She goes into the kitchen, where there are the makings of a particularly good egg sandwich.
She likes interior decorating that looks as though it has been shipped over from Tuscany stone by stone. And thus there are real tiles in her bathroom and her kitchen, and faux-marble counters, and she has up-to-date culinary machines in industrial sizes. Seltzer is delivered to the house. The cat, having eaten, is following her around the kitchen, making a figure eight around her ankles, just in case a saucer of milk should appear beside the seltzer bottles in the pantry. The phone is still clamped between Vanessa’s shoulder and ear. And before she can connect to Maiser’s line she is interrupted by the Morse code of call waiting.
“Oh, hi.” Particularly unhappy at the sound of Vic Freese’s voice. “Go away. Not you. The cat. I’m making an egg sandwich. Fresh basil. No, Vic, I haven’t done anything. Sorry you had to stumble on it in the way you did. The parties responsible have been terminated. No, Vic. No. I haven’t done much in the way of casting. Hang on a second, I have to beat the eggs.”
For the sake of the pause. She looks out the window. The day is sunny, she notices abruptly. There are mutable shadows on the flagstone behind the house.
“Yeah, I thought of her, too. Are you saying that she might be willing . . . ? But isn’t she . . . Yeah, that’s what I heard. Guy in the Diamond District? So she’s willing to come back for a big part? That’s of some interest. No, no, I’m happy to do the pitching myself. I don’t want to turn over the story to you. I don’t want to turn anything over to you, no. What about the guys . . . You what? You already, no, I’d really appreciate if we could keep this between us. We’re working on writers. Yeah, yeah. A-list all the way. A-list. Of course. You think we’d be having this conversation if I hadn’t? Yeah, we contacted the romance novelist lady. Okay, okay. How is your family? Well, yeah. That’s great. Glad to hear it. Yep. Bye.”
Vic Freese and his nervousness are like fuel. She can put it off no longer. Doesn’t matter if the egg sandwich is not yet done. Doesn’t matter if it’s not even eight o’clock on the West Coast; nothing matters except the pressure of language, the pressure to use language to create meaning where there was none before. Here is a void of meaning and potential that will be filled in the creation of art and value. As a producer, Vanessa Meandro was born to do this. The rest of the particulars of her job, line-producer responsibilities, casting consultant, location scout, these are of no interest to her. Seeing the fi
lm through the editing and the launch. She can do these things, but without enthusiasm. She has some of the lukewarm yolk in her mouth and some of it on her chin, and she holds an imperial blue cloth napkin, and she is ready to make the pitch. What she does is cram a big bite of the sandwich into her mouth, and she dials the cellular number of Jeffrey Maiser again, and she chokes on a mass of egg sandwich, and the phone connects, and never was there a longer silence than at the advent of Jeffrey Maiser, and in the silence, as in all such silences, Vanessa briefly regrets her ill humor with her family and friends, and thinks that if this deal works, she will attempt to calm down, she will attempt to find a way to do better, and she will begin to eat vegan entrées only, and she will look in on her mom more often, and she will invite friends out to dinner, and she will keep better track of money; if this deal will go through, she’ll do all those things, she swears —
“Mr. Maiser?”
A grunt of assent.
“Vanessa Meandro here. With Means of Production? We’re making the Otis Redding biopic with Wonderment? That the, uh, that the studio over there is . . . ? Right, that’s the one. I’m calling today, Mr. Maiser, about something else entirely. I’m calling today about thirst. That’s right. Thirst. I know it’s a broad topic, but it’s an urgent topic, whether you know it or not, a topic that is at the heart of American entertainment today. I’m a collector, Mr. Maiser, that’s the first thing I want to explain to you, and what I collect, Mr. Maiser, are Moroccan pitchers. That’s right. We at Means of Production are very serious about our Moroccan pitchers. They’re made from a certain kind of clay, an earthenware clay, which is high in iron oxide, higher than any other earthenware clay, a clay that matures best in bonfire temperatures. Interestingly, this clay is really only found in Casablanca, Mr. Maiser. They perfected the art of the pitcher in Casablanca and Tangiers in the eleventh century, at a time when Christian and Islamic and Jewish influences in the area were at their peak. All these sects, Mr. Maiser, coexisting under the reign of one Ibn Tachafine, the founder of Marrakech.