The Diviners

by Rick Moody

  “Do you think he slept with Madison? This is so embarrassing. I can think of some embarrassing things in my life, but I have never talked with someone who slept with the same guy as me. It’s just, uh, you know.”

  What the waitress brings now is carrot cake and dessert forks, and the two women appear to have arrived at complete unanimity in the matter of dessert, the better to negotiate the awkwardness of their revelations. Further commentary on Griffin follows, some of it extremely embarrassing, as in the portion of the recording wherein Duffy asks Stampfel if Thaddeus Griffin started talking with her about “taking it to the next level.” Duffy guffaws at the recollection. No, Stampfel did not have any discussion about the next level, but Stampfel naturally asks, What is the next level?

  “The next level is the level of pain.”

  Which means? According to Duffy, as summarized briefly in the report of the detectives, the level of pain is chiefly the level of clothespins. And it is not the woman who must wear the clothespins, it is the woman who must apply the clothespins. Which means, deductively, that Griffin is the wearer of the clothespins. The target area for the clothespins is apparently the nipples of Griffin. At first. Then later, when the nipples have too reliably become the target area, the scrotal region becomes the target area for the clothespins. “It’s a lark,” according to Duffy, applying the clothespins to the scrotal region of Griffin. Maybe the scrotal application of clothespins to a major Hollywood action film star makes Annabel Duffy want to jangle her keys—this is more than audible on the tape. And yet the detectives also wonder how Duffy, sister of the suspect in a major felonious assault, can casually eat a luncheon and discourse on scrotal application of clothespins. And yet they are enough bemused by the scrotal application, and the application of clothespins to inner thigh, likewise the words binder clip, which in this context must be considered extremely painful, that they fail to notice some of the rather strange twists and turns of this conversation.

  “He never asked any of that sort of thing of me,” Jeanine says, devouring the last bite of cake. “I guess it didn’t get that far. I started to feel guilty about his wife.”

  “That’s the thing that made me want to attach the clothespins. The fact that he hurt so much when they were on, it was like he was feeling as bad as he should have felt about his wife. He’d be sweating and whining and saying ‘ouch’ over and over. It was kind of funny. The worst part, you know, is the part where you take the clothespins off. That’s the part that really hurts. You get used to them while they’re on, I mean, not that I know personally, but that’s what he said. But then he would take the clothespins off, and he would just be crying out when he did it. I put all this in my screenplay. You know, he promised to help me with my screenplay, that liar, so I guess maybe he finally did, because at least now I know that clothespins hurt more when you take them off.”

  “If my parents found out about this, they’d make me get on a plane immediately. If I said New York was like a man who can’t get an erection and who wants you to attach clothespins to him.”

  “He couldn’t —”

  “He tried to make up for it in other ways.”

  “I mean, not like I’m a size queen or anything. It’s a cute little one.”

  Another piece of carrot cake appears, as though agreed upon earlier in the secret signals of the union of anorexic women. Where the conversation seemed awkward and even tense before, now a common ground has been established between the sister of the suspect and her coworker, and the detectives are beginning to feel as though they have held their table longer than they ought. They are wondering whether they might repair to Union Square Park, there to await the next move of Duffy. One of the detectives stands, stretches languorously, heads for the men’s room. Here is what he glimpses as he strides past: He glimpses the moment when Annabel Duffy has taken the hand of Jeanine Stampfel in her own and is examining the “life line” of Jeanine Stampfel as if they were thirteen-year-old girls engaged in teen occult behavior. What’s with young people these days? Is adolescence now decades long? Thinking of none of this, the detective takes a deluxe leak. Much needed after sitting in the car all that time. While soaping up, he wonders if his wife will have the football game on when he gets home. Will there be chips?

  Back at the booth, his partner is ready to leave. The audio recorder is hidden away on his person. After paying, one detective says to the other that they have a lot of paperwork ahead. The other replies that they should cut it short. There’s always tomorrow. All of this while they are walking past the two women, as if they and the women have no connection at all, as if the city is not a chaotic network of lost connections and near misses. Only after they pass the hostess does one detective look back, one last time, to see that the Duffy woman has now rolled up the sleeve of the other, the Stampfel woman, and what she has revealed on the arm of Stampfel are tremendous third-degree-burn scars.

  Burn scars? Is that really what he saw? Did he really see what he thought he saw? wonders the detective. A man of inexhaustible fact, our detective, a man of inches and yards, a man who admits to nothing in the way of uncertainties. A man who is now seeing a beautiful blonde with third-degree-burn scars over the majority of her arm, perhaps both arms. And what about the high-necked blouse she’s wearing? Because of burns? Where do you get that kind of burn? And what does that kind of burn feel like, and how many weeks are you in the burn ward with that kind of a burn? Sometimes he is suffocated by the darkness of his job. He thinks longingly of the purity of the original glazed doughnut.

  The door swings in, and an I formation of hungover Europeans clogs in the threshold, impeding the progress of the two detectives. Bound for Bloody Marys and football games on inaudible monitors. Were they as observant as detectives, these carousers would overhear the end of the conversation, would overhear the Duffy woman ask the Stampfel woman how she got this, this molten bubbling along the length of her forearm.

  “Because I noticed the, uh, you know, in the office, I think I noticed like the first or second day, how could I not notice.”

  Quietly. “I was in a fire.” And then, inexplicably, the Stampfel woman asks: “Are they gone?”

  To which the Duffy woman replies, “Yeah, I think.” In the lowest of tones, while the scars lay exposed to the air, the drama of burns. “They always look like police, you know? Not like I had any doubt. Their sneakers are too new.”

  “Where is he?”

  “In Massachusetts. I think. Or he was there Friday. He might be still moving around. He knows not to call me now. But that only makes me more worried.”

  “And he didn’t do it? Whatever they’re saying he did?”

  “Guess how many black bike messengers there are in New York City?” Annabel says. “Okay, look, what I want you to do, I mean, if you feel like you can do it, is to take the key to his studio, see if you can get into his studio, get his computer and his cell phone. Because he says he was in his studio during the time when the woman was, uh, assaulted. Then if you can, just bring it all to work tomorrow. The computer and the phone. Just bring them in. There should be stuff on the computer that will prove —”

  Even more urgent is the confederacy of the moment.

  “His computer has everything on it, lots of his work, lists of things he ate, proposals for new works, and it’ll have some kind of alibi on it, and the phone bill will have his phone records on it. I’m supposed to take the computer and the phone to a lawyer in midtown. I know it’s a lot to ask, and I won’t, you know, I wouldn’t hold it against you if you can’t do it. But if you can, it’s like the sweetest thing anyone ever did.”

  “It was . . . it was, um, kind of nice getting to talk.”

  “What? Oh. We should, uh . . . Okay, I’m going out first, and I’m going to take these guys, the police, on a little shopping trip to find the most expensive lingerie in the Village. Hey, did you hear?”

  Stampfel is standing, one hand on the vinyl lining of the booth.

  “Shelley
Ralston Havemeyer.”

  “Who?” Jeanine says.

  “She wrote The Diviners. We actually found her.”

  “I thought her name was Marjorie something.”

  “Don’t believe everything you hear. She has two studios fighting over her.”

  Annabel, having had her only meal of the day, makes for the door, her Celtic tattoo just visible above the rim of her leather pants, in that sacral zone between belt and shirt hem. Out she goes into the rain. The Bloody Mary drinkers, aligned at the bar, in an intensity of forgetting, don’t see. The runway models, still irritated at waitressing or hostessing when by now they ought to have become supermodels, don’t see. Even the detectives, calling in to the precinct, indicating that they are just about done for the day, have not seen. The person with a scoop on the way these events connect is the woman in the conservative and sensible outfit, the one with the burn scars and a dead-bolt key.

  18

  “With that,” he says, and he means the masking tape, on the desk of the False Guru, in the office of the False Guru, in the Ashram of the False Guru, where he’s located with a woman named . . . what’s her name again? Her name is Nora. He has removed many items from this desk, just in case a surface is needed. His good fortune owes to the fact that he has agreed to be a part of the next gala benefit thrown by the False Guru for the Foundation of the True Practice, a foundation that aims to bring remnants of Eastern wisdom to the thirsty Western masses. The False Guru has the cooperation of a number of persons with perfect skin and large fortunes, and Thaddeus Griffin has now agreed to lend his name, in concert with these persons who have fortunes, and this has caused the office of the False Guru to be made available on short notice, for an important private lesson with one Nora Richards, whom he’d earlier thought to be merely another student of the False Guru. But no. She’s not simply a student, she’s a yoga instructor in training, and she has proven her willingness to conduct this private lesson in the office of the False Guru, a lesson commencing in seated posture on the Oriental carpet. Quite a lovely and expensive carpet, when you pause to consider that the False Guru was at one time a practitioner of the fine arts, a free-wine-in-plastic-cups-drinker at local art openings. But then the False Guru traveled to India to learn the binding poses. He practiced renunciations and the diverse skills that would enhance the business that he was launching here on the fringes of Noho.

  One with the carpet, one with the tumbleweeds of dust on the carpet. Thaddeus accepts a gentle correction in the performance of the auspicious pose, bhadra-asana, bringing the soles of his feet together under the scrotum, hollowing the hands above the feet in the shape of the tortoise. He allows Nora to push roughly upon his shoulders because the problem is that his shoulders are always up around his ears, and this is inauspicious. Thaddeus makes the shape of a tortoise, indicating receptivity. There is a siren going past the Ashram of the False Guru, and somewhere there is the faint tinkling of the indoor fountain installed at considerable expense, also the chittering of beautiful yoga practitioners in their expensive outfits. This is the poetry of sounds, respiration, siren, fountain, and the liquid vowels of practitioners, and this is the magnificence of incense, and this is the raising up of prayer, and this is the knowledge of subtle things, a knowledge of things that are hidden away, which is one of the tasks of the yogin. When the yogin knows these subtle things, then shall he mash his mouth against the mouth of his yogini.

  She was once employed in the helping professions. She told him so. She was once employed in the profession of exotic dancing, and so it does not seem as though she will turn away from the desperate collision of soft tissue, this mashing of faces. She has an Indian guru. She has learned to play the harmonium. She is allowing herself to be kissed by Thaddeus Griffin, movie star and practitioner of yoga, and she is kissing back a little bit, and this is the pose called the Adulterous Union, wherein two practitioners, who are elsewhere participants in love’s vast covenant, conjoin their mouths on the Oriental carpet in the ashram.

  “I really can’t help myself, you know, I can’t help what I’m going to say, so I’m just going to say it. Because why hold back, you know? You’re just incredibly beautiful, do you know? Do you know how beautiful you are?” The yogin says these things as though to say them were a chant. It’s no falsehood to speak in this way. Falsehoods are not noble truths. She is beautiful, even if it is also true that the yogin thinks virtually everybody is beautiful. Fully two-thirds of the yoginis he passes on the street are ravishing. They don’t know this about themselves because a ravishment doesn’t know what it is. For example, the way a certain woman wears glasses, tiny spectacles, pinched onto her nose like a fence that protects the male of the species from the memorable hue of her eyes. She probably works for Internal Revenue. There’s a way she shifts her weight from side to side as she walks, she has the most beautiful ass he’s ever seen, and this ass was created as an evolutionary novelty so that men would see the ass of this Internal Revenue employee and these men would beg to be with her, and she would preserve her rajas, or genital ejaculate, and suck up bindu, thereby ensuring fruitful multiplication, in turn creating the chromosomal reproduction of the perfect ass, and thus the continuity of a brave line of Internal Revenue employees.

  However, upon seeing this woman on the way to the Ashram of the False Guru, the yogin’s reverie about her ass is interrupted because passing close by her, in the opposite direction, is another yogini in a conservative suit who is wearing a high-visibility hard hat. She is so beautiful with the hard hat on that it is almost impossible not to propose to her on the spot, and the fact that she has a mole on the side of her nose is completely irrelevant to the enlightened yogin, she has to wear that hard hat, she must keep wearing that hard hat, and as a matter of course he’d still be thinking about her, except that now he passes a woman with that little calf muscle, the calf muscle from too much high-heel wearing, or perhaps it is just the advanced practice of uttankoormasana, resulting in a sculpting of calves; she smiles as she walks, the yogini, and the smile of a yogini is philosophically overwhelming, emanating from the third eye center; it is as if the yogini knows that the universe is situated in her body; it is as if the yogini drinks the water from the cranial bowl of the yogin; if they all smiled while walking, yogins would be as idiots stunned by the multitude of smiling yoginis, and still he is thinking about these calves, that smile, wondering if he should run after the yogini in order to get to know her in her quintessence, in her rajas, whoever she is, this as he enters into the ashram, signs in for class, only to find, again, by the sale leotards and the CDs of thunder drums, as the fountain spills into its retaining pool, the aforementioned Nora Richards.

  “So how much for a private lesson, anyway?”

  Which brings us to this moment. Nora is attempting to observe the rigors of private tutelage, pushing against his pelvis as she tries to get him to do the second warrior pose with binding, reminding him to lock in the belly, performing in this way the mula bandha. Close the anus and strongly draw upward the excreting energy. She reaches under, and she must know how enlightening it is to have her reaching under him in this way. He is truly experiencing the enlightenment and the freedom from rebirth. And it is then, in a state of enlightenment where there is no room for individual consciousness, that Thaddeus suggests that she masking-tape his wrists together in order to ensure that the binding in the pose is performed according to tradition.

  “What?” Nora asks.

  He is balanced in sushumna, between inhalation and exhalation, between the masculine and the feminine. He is thinking that this is a bad idea, this private class, in that it does not observe abstinence from the eight kinds of erotic action, namely, to think it, to praise it, to joke about it, to look with desire, to converse in private, to decide to do it, to attempt to do it, to perform it. And yet it seems like a very, very good idea at the same time, because self-discipline splits the personality in two, as the masters say, and without self-discipline one drinks in
the fluids of the moon.

  “With that.” He selects from among the personal effects of the False Guru. Standard-issue American masking tape, the sign of a well-equipped desk.

  “Isn’t it going to hurt?”

  “It’s going to make it so that I do the pose right, you know, and that’s what I’m after. I’m all about trying to do the pose right. That’s why we’re here.” He’s in the pose and he really does feel like a warrior, because he is a warrior of the Adulterous Union, he is a warrior of expedient decision making and inadvisable seductions, and he’s in the pose, the warrior pose, and this is the presentation of the lingam, the gesture of the lingam, in which concentration on longing is in the shape of an arrow shining like a thousand suns, and this is good, because sometimes he has to resort to the philters of Western medicine to achieve the proper presentation of the lingam, and he reaches one arm under himself and one around his side and says, “Bind me.”

  “What about getting it off later? That’s going to burn.”

  His impatience is plain to see. For this is the lingam gesture. Nora peels up the end of the tape, wraps it around his wrists twice, and then, under pressure, a third time. This is the pose of the Humiliated Pupil, and once in it, he scuttles, as if crustacean, closer to her, where he can plant his five o’clock shadow on her hams, and she giggles, and he kisses her thigh. Her thigh has the excellence of distant galaxies.

  “Take off the gear.” He means that the time is so short. And she does the perfect yogic removal of layers, one leg at a time, like a pink flamingo of yogic abandon. And because she has the experience in the helping professions, she has eliminated coarse overgrowth from her body, except for a landing strip, in the Brazilian style, and she giggles as he cranes with his neck, winching forward to make a landing in the folds of her, though she cannot help but say, “Flat back, shoulders down, please. Shoulders down,” and then there’s a little rush of the breath of the ocean, a silencing, as he has now placed his tongue where he would prefer to have his tongue, his subtle tongue of the candle flame. Exertion is involved because his hands are in the binding position and so his hands cannot be used. And it is said that meditation upon the mandala on the wall in the office of the False Guru shall alleviate conditions of suffering, the mandala on the tapestry, that representation of Shiva the destroyer, but this causes distraction from the presentation of the lingam, which causes the lingam to fail. There is no other explanation but the explanation of unnecessary concentration upon the mandala. How could this always happen? Losing himself in the shambhavi mudra when he should be engaged with the tantra and the yogini. How could it happen?