The Diviners

by Rick Moody

  “You don’t deny it?”

  “I thought you were out filming the commercial in California.”

  “I had an emergency.”

  “Well, I thought that you were getting with what’s his name, the director. With the ponytail.”

  “You thought what?”

  He can feel that the point is Neanderthal; he can feel that everything that comes out of his mouth is Neanderthal. He feels like a schoolyard antagonist who has beat on the fat kid and who is now quivering in the hands of the relevant authorities. And if he’s been anticipating this moment, the moment when the scam unravels, he has nonetheless managed to deny its foreshadowing. This moment seems as though it has two moments in it, one in which he loves the truth and one in which he loves to lie to himself about how much he loves the truth. He loves the truth in which there is the comfort of the fiction about his wife and the commercial director. It has been the big happy fire in the fireplace of his consciousness, so refreshing that it felt better than the truth, which is desolate.

  “What are you saying about Derrick?”

  “I’m saying that you were getting next to Derrick. And I hate the way you say the guy’s name. How can anyone really be named Derrick? He sounds like a lacrosse player or something. I bet he does a lot of stomach crunches.”

  The argument is vaporizing before him. It seemed so good when it was propping things up, but now it feels like one of those defense-lawyer strategies. Your Honor! My client’s dental work receives radio signals!

  “Derrick is happily married, believe it or not. Some people really are happily married, Thaddeus. Some people really love their wives and their children, really cherish them. And maybe, just maybe, these men who are happy with their wives and their children, maybe these guys just like the work of certain actresses and look forward to working with them. Has that crossed your mind? That Derrick likes to work with me just because I’m good at my job? Maybe I’m not as important as you are to the teenagers in the malls across the country. Maybe I’m not as important to you, but I’m an actress and I do my job, no matter what the job is, I do my best, and if it means that I have to go three thousand miles away to work, and I have to leave you alone, and I have to sleep in some pretentious hotel with fresh flowers in the bathroom and watch wannabes in the bar on my way through the lobby to go sleep by myself, knowing the whole time that the second I’m not here you’re going to be out all night, so that I don’t know what to think, that you’re going to injure yourself somehow, that you’re going to be belly up in a ditch, run over by a taxi, out-of-control drunk, falling into the Hudson, because you don’t have enough sense to respect yourself, or me, if I have to live like that, well, I do it because I just want to try to have my own job. You don’t even have the sense to know that I’m working for my own self-respect. And because I love you enough to leave you alone. And so this is what you do for me. You get your picture in the paper coming out of the apartment of some black girl whose brother committed an assault, and I don’t even know what the next thing is, what the next problem is going to be, what to think of next: your drinking, or the women, or some gambling rampage, whatever. I don’t know what to think. Except that I should be allowed to work, just like you. My work shouldn’t call our marriage into question, and it shouldn’t be disrespectful to you, and it shouldn’t be an affront to you. Maybe I’m not the greatest actress or maybe I am a really good actress, I can’t tell anymore because I’m used to feeling awful about myself because of you. Because I try to pretend like I don’t care about what’s going on with you, but I care, I care about how everything always seems to be falling apart, and I don’t want to live like that. Get it?”

  What is there to understand? With a pathetic grin on his face, he goes to embrace her, because he really does feel impressed with her commitment and her sense of fairness, and he admires her. The admirer can stand beside the Thaddeus that is the failure in the room, and he can admire his wife, so he tries to embrace her, though she gives no indication that this strategy is welcome. In fact, she fends him off.

  “Isn’t it something we can fix?” he inquires.

  “Not if what you’re going to do, while we repair things, is mess around some more and pretend that there’s no problem and pretend that you don’t know the extent of the damage.”

  The phone rings, and then his wife’s voice, on the outgoing message, sings out in the front hall. The machine mumbles with the tones of some whispery caller.

  “Do you want to tell me what you’ve done?” she says. “Do you want to begin by telling me what you’ve done? Because if you tell me some stuff, then maybe that will shine a little more light into the dark spaces. The way I see it, it’s like this, Thaddeus. It’s like you traded all those moviegoers for me. The people in the theaters in Sandusky and Pittsburgh, you traded what they know of you, the you who is filmed carrying firearms, for me. I’ve known you for eight years, and apparently I know nothing. So why don’t you start by telling me what you’ve done. Tell me just one thing that you’ve done, so that I can get to know you, the you that exists in real life, instead of in front of some blue screen.”

  It was important that the apartment look as though it could be in some magazine. When Marcus Atkins decorated it. So that now, as they are sitting in it, it’s impossible to sit in it as though it wants to be inhabited, this room, as though it means to be comfortable and inviting. Its inhospitality makes it hard for him to get his tongue wagging, makes it hard for this moment to be what it ought to be.

  “I don’t think you really want me to do that.”

  “Why?” Sabrina asks. “Because it’s awful?”

  “Pretty much,” mumbles Thaddeus, action film star of the side of right and justice, the guy who prosecutes the corruption, the guy who brings down the international cartel of terrorists. Usually when he’s supposed to cry on film, he needs the glycerin, and he needs strong direction.

  “Maybe it’s not an isolated case.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Well,” she says, and appears to ruminate. “I guess I want apologies that last for days at a time, and I want them in the press. I want your apology to be as public as your bullshit has been.”

  “How?”

  “You can go to the window right now and shout out of it. Or you can call the papers. You can call the papers and pretend to be an anonymous source. Or you can call your publicist or you can call your agent, and you can have them issue a statement. Or you can write a press release where you list all the movies you’ve made before going on to talk about what a wretched philandering fuck you are, and how you have arrived at this amazing decision about the spiritual value of telling the truth for a change, even though you’re a philanderer. But whatever you decide to do, you’ll have to do it by yourself, because I’m going across town to stay with my parents. I don’t want to have to feel like all I do is harass you about this stuff. I don’t want to be that person. So I’m going to stay with my parents, and you can begin the publicity campaign to save your marriage, and then you can go to sex-addiction rehabilitation or whatever else your team of psychiatrists advises, and we can meet each other at marriage counseling and discuss it there, and that’s the way it will go for a few months. You can do it my way, I mean, unless you want my lawyer to contact yours.”

  Now she’s standing, hands on hips.

  When she’s gone, it’s as if she wasn’t there at all, as if the conversation never took place. It’s all silences again, inhuman interior decorating, after-loneliness, and he can do what he wants. He can go play a computer game, or he can do some sun salutations, or he can go looking for hotties on the Web. He can call Annabel. Or he can feel this burning sensation. The burning sensation wants him to act, even if he doesn’t want to act. There are remedial steps in human behavior, and these could be first. He could change the sheets. In the master bedroom. There’s a woman who comes once a week to do the cleaning, but it suddenly feels as t
hough changing the sheets will ensure a really good night’s sleep. Changing the sheets will muffle the burning sensation. It has been years since he changed his own set of sheets. So this is medicinal, going into the closet where Sabrina, his wife, has stacked up the sheets just so, and he takes a pale blue top sheet and a pale blue fitted sheet, king size, a couple of pillowcases, really high thread count, or so Sabrina has told him. He goes into the master bedroom and rips the bedclothes from the bed and makes a tangle of them on the floor of the bedroom, and then he falls into this tangle, facedown. When he gets up, he will start to do something, maybe write that miniseries. Yeah, he’ll write.

  19

  The consultant from Poseidon Management Systems is backlit at the front of the conference room, a windowless inner sanctum. La Casa Grande, an exclusive West Coast convention center, San Diego. Wearing a polo shirt and pleated slacks, sporting an unmistakable rub-on tan, gesturing at the projection above, the consultant begins his song of bulleted points.

  The company is Universal Beverages Corporation. The product is quality. The theme of the conference is Growing Quality. Across diverse product lines, Universal Beverages makes and sells quality to a considerable portion of the consumers in this country and the world. The product lines are: alcoholic beverages, snack foods, television broadcasting, film production and marketing, and, the newest line of business, interstate mortuary services.

  The goal of the three-day off-site management conference, here at La Casa Grande, will be creating synergies between the divisions so that the Universal Beverages Corporation can increase market share and Grow Quality. And the company will Grow Quality because quality is like small potted cacti, which are to be given gratis to each and every conference participant to take back to his or her office, where he or she will Grow Quality, symbolized by these thriving and persistent cacti. Growing Quality is not an easy strategy. It depends on fundamentals: a healthy seedling, abundant sunlight, water, fertilizer, and excellence. The Poseidon Management Systems team will be here, during the off-site, to help the employees of Universal Beverages find analogies for sunlight, water, fertilizer, and excellence in the rough-and-tumble worlds of entertainment, comestibles, and mortality. Tactics such as team building, creative innovation, and sales maximization will be explored over three days in the spirit of Growing Quality. Quality assurance, quality control, quality innovation, quality as expressed in synergy and cross-marketing opportunities, quality in human resources. These are the watchwords of the conference.

  Which indicates to Jeffrey Maiser, head of network programming at UBC, that the stock has fallen off the edge of the earth. Like he doesn’t know already. Like he doesn’t know about the condition of his options. Like he doesn’t know about trending downward, 11 percent, since the high in March. Like he doesn’t know that the guys at the top of the Universal Beverages pyramid are not happy about the studio, with its recent shutout at the Oscars, and the television subsidiary and its grim efforts during the ratings sweepstakes. Like they don’t call him several times a week, threatening him. Just as he has called the news and sports divisions and demanded that they meet their targets for the quarter or else contact their headhunters.

  The moderator introduces Ibn Al-Hassad for the morning session. Al-Hassad got his start during the Human Potential Movement. He’s a veteran of Alan Watts’s seminars and an expert in the art of archery. He’s a protégé of Abraham Maslow, Fritz Perls, et cetera. Al-Hassad has demonstrated fire walking in public and is an admirer of spoon benders, past-life regressionists, mediums, diviners, and other wackos. The title of his book, featured recently on the UBC morning news program, is The Revelation of Finance. Al-Hassad, according to bulleted points PowerPointed above the head of the moderator, will speak first on finance and spirituality, and then he will speak on salesmanship, after which he will touch on Growing Quality. In the video feed, with its stirring and faintly military music, Maiser can see that Al-Hassad has the perfect television face. His face is a slate cleaned of all its markings except for traces of inoffensiveness and self-regard. Not a wisp of profundity remains to challenge the UBC managers.

  And yet Maiser doesn’t give his full attention to the mesmeric face of Ibn Al-Hassad, for the simple reason that the chief executive officer of Universal Beverages Corporation, Naz Korngold, decreed at the kickoff dinner last night that several things would happen during this management off-site: “I just want to say from right here at the podium . . . what I want to say is that tonight somebody will drink too much of our own product,” at which there was mock dismay and consternation, “and tonight somebody will sleep with someone else’s wife or husband, and tonight someone will reveal that he does not have the wherewithal to do what we are here to do, which is to grow quality. There will be evasions and denials of our estimable mission. That’s the way off-sites go. The wheat is separated from the chaff at these off-sites, or, to use the metaphor of our newest division, you have your pine box and you have your deluxe, silk-lined, diamond-encrusted, with pillows of eiderdown. If you are part of the hardworking majority of Universal Beverages, you have no cause to worry. You’re here to make our business universal, like it says on the logo, to make our products dominant in the competitive global environment. Each of you should strive for this goal, each of you make sure it’s not you who fails to innovate, make sure it’s not you who resists growing quality. Get to know the manager to your left and to your right. One of the three of you will be fired by the end of the year. Now, drink up and get to work!” Stunned silence and then anemic applause.

  As evidence of all this madness, for example, the decree has come down that the heads of the divisions should fill out the Myers-Briggs personality test and the MMPI-2, and write a personal essay, as described in the packets at the registration tables. The heads of divisions should return these items to Korngold’s assistant by the end of the first day, after which they should extract the same materials from their subordinates. And so on down the line.

  At the Saturday dinner, Maiser sat next to the ivory-maned battle-ax of Interstate Mortuary Services, Lorna Quinson. The red snapper was timidly prepared, and the strolling mariachi band was persistent, and after playing with his flatware for a while, Maiser found himself wanting to know a little about Quinson. About the billowing blue midcalf dress she had on, about her ringless fingers, about the dreams and nightmares of her childhood. Lorna looked like a great comic actress from one of the seventies sitcoms. Battle-ax with a heart of gold. How did someone with this kind of poise come to flourish as a leading light of the mortuary business, selling what had initially been a string of floundering family-owned mortuaries to one of the largest corporations in the country? And was she put off by being here among the big names of broadcasting and entertainment? Maiser made a few tentative inquiries during the fifteen minutes or so they were chatting. And just before each swiveled in the opposite direction, according to the obligations of dinner party politics, he asked her, “Did you write your essay yet?”

  Lorna Quinson, with a cocked smile, shook her head.

  This conversation gave him the opportunity to gaze. In the way that television executives can gaze. Quinson’s hair was gathered into an orderly bun, and he could see a bit of the back of her neck, the nape of it, and it was straight and comely. As he listened to a flunky at his right droning lengthily about his favorite network shows, Maiser was thinking instead of Quinson’s neck. Everybody knows that cop shows are about social control, the flunky droned. Quinson’s neck. The Werewolves of Fairfield County, best and most creative use of serial narrative in years. Quinson’s neck.

  In the course of dessert, Quinson reached not for the pumpkin cheesecake but for her BlackBerry portable messaging device, which she carried in a small patent leather clutch. She stared down into its impenetrable secrets. Then she dabbed her lips, the color known as Cherries in the Snow, refolded her napkin, and excused herself.

  Maiser went to the men’s room himself, where he called the office immediately, told h
is assistant to get Lorna Quinson’s e-mail address now. He brushed off the men’s room attendant, who, while Maiser rinsed his hands, claimed to be part of the Universal Ministries—which probably would be a division of UBC by the next fiscal quarter. Why not? The Ministries could provide boilerplate grief counseling to families at Interstate Mortuary Services, could furnish The Werewolves of Fairfield County with genuine apocalyptic subplots, and could offer apoplectic commentators to the new conservative talk shows that were being churned out like widgets. Maybe Maiser should leak news of the acquisition to some prominent shareholders and see what happened.

  Back at the table, a case of expensive French whites, emptied, was toppled on the linens. As if some malcontent had yanked on the end of the tablecloth. Now, in the center of the ballroom, Naz Korngold, with a flourish, indicated he was turning in for the night. Upper management followed in a retinue, including Lorna Quinson. She was gone, the queen of morticians.

  Maiser slipped out the back himself, trying to ditch the overeager guys from the news division, which he would have to dismantle before long. Outdoors, it was an Industrial Light and Magic night, with a myriad of shooting stars and orbiting satellites, and Maiser wondered if Naz Korngold had ordered it especially for the weekend. Maiser cursed golf and the people who had invented golf, on the way to his private casita. The MMPI and the Myers-Briggs tests hung over his head: I think nearly anyone would tell a lie to keep out of trouble; mark T for “true or mostly true” or F for “false or mostly false.” Horses that refuse to move should be whipped, true or false? There is often a lump in my throat, true or false? I can easily make other people afraid of me, and sometimes do for the fun of it, true or false?