by Rick Moody
Who is Jeffrey Maiser? That was the essay question, printed right there along the top margin of a blank piece of paper. It was in his packet at registration, to be filled out in ballpoint pen and returned to Naz Korngold. Underneath, Jeff wrote, “Who’s asking?” And then he whited it out so that not a trace of this initial response remained visible. I work best when I have a definite deadline, true or false?
And so here he is on Sunday, having erased four more false starts for the essay while ignoring the speech by Al-Hassad. “Quality is present at the instant of the big bang,” Al-Hassad is intoning. “Quality is twelve billion years old, as old as the prima causa, like the carbon cells that make up each and every one of you. Each and every one of you is quality. You can be confident of that.” Maiser is chugging aspartame beverages and throwing away potential essay answers. For example: his participation in the occupation of the president’s office at Columbia. He was just a kid then. And it was not that he agreed politically with all the protesters. He just liked the drama of camping out. All that wood paneling and those gold-plated pen-and-pencil sets. Those kids with their heads full of Whitman and Hendrix and Eldridge Cleaver. He was a guy who always knew the potential of a good story, even then. Was this the Jeffrey Maiser of the essay question?
The true essay about Jeffrey Maiser would also have to talk about his marriage, which fell apart last year, and about his bad relationship with his daughter, who is at NYU film. It would have to speak of his inability to do well in the department of romance. Oh yeah, and there’s another thing he’s worried about, the thing that might show up on the MMPI-2, might skew him statistically toward category two, the category of the unstable.
What about Jeffrey Maiser the practical joker? Back in college days, he’d been tasked by a dean with serving as amanuensis and guide for a visiting professor, an important law professor from the state of Ohio. Instead of taking this Catholic and conservative law professor to the faculty club, as dictated by his schedule, Maiser took him to a brothel up on Upper Broadway someplace. He can still remember the look on the impressionable young law professor’s face when he saw the array of African and Latin hookers available for his delectation! The dope smoke was like a curtain over everything! What a laugh! The guy went on to become a Supreme Court justice, too. Later in his professional life, Maiser exchanged all the cars in the reserved spaces at the studio parking lot with the pink Cadillacs of Mary Kay Cosmetics, so that when the brass came out one afternoon they all had to drive a pink car home. Then there was that time he showed a trainee a broom closet in the building and told him that this would be his office from now on. He allowed the trainee to stay in the closet for nine days. Maiser even made up a television reviewer, Don Stankey, and wrote Stankey’s columns for one of the popular newsweeklies for two years in order to create strong buzz for UBC programming. Those early raves for The Werewolves of Fairfield County, those were Stankey’s columns, after which Stankey had a regrettable car accident on the Saw Mill, leaving behind a wife and three kids, one of whom had cerebral palsy. If only UBC had had a relationship with Interstate Mortuary Services in those days, Maiser could have thrown a proper memorial service for the guy. There would have been baroque music and a dramatic reading from the stories of Jack London.
A large number of people are guilty of bad sexual conduct, mostly true or mostly false? If you tested any of the managers in the room, any of those guys around him doodling little slashing, angry lines on their legal pads right now, they’d all have their obsessions, their dark secrets. None of them is talking. Edward Jones, the studio head, had himself filmed at an orgy with a bunch of male models back in the late seventies. You can download photos of the party on the Web. And the head of the beverages division, Stew Ledbetter, is so badly alcoholic that he never turns up at a meeting before noon, and even then with a cola can full of vodka. It’s widely known. Priscilla Rankin, in finance, has lost hundreds of thousands of dollars gambling on college basketball. There are ass men, men obsessed with breasts, there are men obsessed with youth, there are men who drive into the desert and weep, there are self-mutilators. All of them ambitious and successful professionals.
His own predilection dates back to a specific moment, or so he tells himself, back when he was a producer, back in the early eighties, when he was working on a film about a girl with bone cancer. She had come to wear the halo, this girl; you know, the contraption they attach to you that allows you to keep the head up straight in the midst of your hardships. Anyway, he hadn’t even noticed this actress, Celine something or other, Celine Thorpe, when she was hired for the job. She was just another actress in leg warmers trying to impress the director, who was a no-talent commercial guy who’d made his reputation directing spots for antacids. Maiser had only intended to be on the set the first day of filming.
In the meantime, the costume department had outfitted Celine Thorpe with the halo. She looked scared at first, coming out of the trailer. Her outfit was not terribly flattering. No designer threads that she could try to make off with when the shooting was done. And then there was the halo. Maiser ought not to have seen Celine Thorpe that day, ought not to have, ought to have contented himself with the little dead spots and recriminations in a long marriage. That’s what he ought to have done. But here he was, in the park, sitting in a canvas chair, and here was Celine Thorpe, coming down from the trailer. It was the magic hour, the hour when the light was just so, and the palms were just so, and the kids on the softball diamond were just so (here’s the crack of the softball coming off an aluminum bat), and the sun glinted from the glimmering halo. The scene involved the character with the debilitating bone disease managing to go to the park for the last time in her short life, and during this last visit she notices the preciousness of all things in the park, the softball players, the dog walkers, the butterflies dive-bombing the blossoms of bougainvillea. The fog machines were blowing up a subtle mist. And Celine was in her brace, and the unsteady way she walked through the moist grass of the park, it was just a beautiful, understated piece of acting. Maiser felt the conjunction of youth and metal cage, and it was as if he were being reflected in the light coming off the halo, and he realized that a bit of his heart began opening right then, by reason of fetish.
It was untrue what they said about angels, that angels were quaint birdlike agents who oversaw your daily life and ensured that you got the best of all parking spaces. No, these were not angels. Angels were apparitions of dread. Their annunciations were impossible burdens, and you greeted them only with terror. The angel that appeared in all the Annunciation paintings, that was no sweet angel. That angel scared the piss out of the Virgin Mary, who undoubtedly didn’t want to get knocked up by an abstraction. The same thing with Celine in her halo, she was a dark annihilator in the life of Jeffrey Maiser.
He threw himself into work, of course. He tried to distract himself from feeling. But when the disabled groups started writing in about how great the broadcast was and, boy, was that Celine Thorpe amazing, she brought such dignity and beauty to the role of the girl with the debilitating spinal disease, well, he realized something had changed. Bedding Celine Thorpe for the next few weeks in a suite at the Chateau Marmont was the least of it. She wore the prop without the least bit of hesitation, or that’s the way it seemed. There was a way the prop made any blemish, or even a couple of extra pounds, look great on Celine. He didn’t care if she was perfect. On the contrary. It was her imperfections that made her so sweet. And yet when he started seeing her out of costume, wearing a slinky gown at an awards show or being interviewed on Oprah, well, he felt like she was all wrong.
He volunteered to serve as the network emissary at a fund raiser in Santa Barbara for the disabled. The publicists at the studio should have attended in his stead. He had already RSVP’d for the baby shower of some news anchor. But he went to the fund raiser himself and he saw a half dozen women in back braces, halos, even the lowly neck braces of whiplash, and he could feel himself getting all sentimental. How
could it be? He was a strong man, a man with a national reputation as an executive, and he was following a woman with a neck brace out of the hotel in Santa Barbara and watching the awkward way she walked, and he was feeling that he was about to beg this woman for a caress.
His daughter, the tomboy Allison, brought home her pal Firth. When was this? During the Gulf War, maybe. Firth was an Asian girl, so he was a little confused about the name. One of those adolescent things, probably. Her name was Yo Yo or something similar, but she changed it to Firth because that’s what you do when you’re thirteen. Anyway, Firth had scoliosis, and Maiser had become enough of an expert that he could recognize that this was front-to-back scoliosis, not left-to-right. Maiser took one look at Firth and realized that he would have to start working late at the office, whether it bothered his wife, Lois, or not, in order to avoid salivating over the thirteen-year-old Firth, who was meant to start wearing her back brace full-time during summer vacation. He would have been altogether too happy to administer deep tissue massage to the spot on her behind where the hamstring connected to the femur head.
You get into one of these groups of girls, adolescent girls, and the group is like a swarm, and suddenly there are more of these girl children, all of them broken in some way, all of them bearing one another up, each of them the crutch of another, each of them both nurse and patient. There’s the wall-eyed girl, the speech-defect girl with her twisted r’s and s’s, the girl with the clubfoot, the girl with the harelip, the girl with the prosthetic arm, who often goes around without. All of these girls at his house, around his pool, at one time or another, as though his daughter was a collector of them, though there was superficially nothing wrong with her. His daughter favored the broken girls because she thought the broken girls were superior to the blondes with their boob jobs and their Lexus convertibles.
Maiser was trying to stay at work through all of it, trying to get lost in the reports from advertising on the projected price of a thirty-second spot during a show they were developing, The Werewolves of Fairfield County, but some days he was weak, just as anyone would have been weak, and then all the broken girls thought he was the greatest dad of all time because he’d be coming out with dishes of sorbet or a tray full of crackers and cheese, and saying, “Just thought you guys might want a little snack,” his cheeks stinging as though he’d just been acupunctured. He remembered the time he helped a girl with no legs onto the raft in the pool. Another man might remember a trip abroad with his family, might think of the Caribbean Sea and some sunlit beach, the tranquil aqua cove where he had a daiquiri with his wife. Instead, Jeffrey remembers the day he helped a girl with no legs onto a raft in his pool. The smell of the water and the way the light danced around her. What perfect shape she was in, from all the wheeling around, and who could say she wasn’t the most beautiful woman, the woman who would have launched Greek ships? Her smile was diffident, sure, was self-conscious, but there was something wanton about it, too. “I have secrets,” she was saying in her way, “that you’ll never know. I have secrets, and they are only unlocked with respect.” He can remember the way he fumbled climbing the steps, out of the pool, as if he were just another pedophile brought to his knees.
Then there was the girl who turned up just before Allison went off to boarding school. This was the last spring of the broken girls. She was younger than the rest. There was nothing special about her. A nondescript girl with a herniated disk. She came with a walker. There was something so poignant about a twelve-year-old girl with a walker, just beginning to have breasts, just beginning to flower into womanhood, and here she was with a walker. What made her the one? This girl from Illinois? Allison was contemptuous of the girl with the walker, as if she knew that this time of broken girls had come to an end. As if she were already off at boarding school, back east, where there was not going to be a steady supply of the deformed. On the contrary, there would be a lot of WASPs with season passes at the local ski resorts. Allison called the girl Granny, like it was a nickname of long-standing, and the girl withstood it, inching toward a piece of patio furniture as if it were the only safe spot for miles around. As soon as she had lowered herself onto the chaise longue—Maiser remembers seeing it from the window upstairs—Allison just got up and strode off, leaving Granny with her walker beside her like a trusty friend. The light was failing, but the kitchen in the guesthouse was lit up as if on fire. Norm, the caretaker, was making ramen noodles. Jeff remembers seeing Granny patiently sitting by at first, and then less patiently, and then attempting to get up with the walker, and failing, and beginning to cry. Until he went out to help.
She said her name was Lacey.
He got her up from the chaise longue, and he helped her into his car and drove her home, and he admonished his daughter on the subject, and he sent Lacey a card when she was getting ready for her spinal fusion surgery, and then he gave in, and the giving in was delicious. He visited her in the hospital, and he fed her Jell-O in her bed, and he buzzed the nurses and demanded more Vicodin on her behalf, and he made her a thousand promises in her hospital bed. He was a middle-aged man pronouncing absurd oaths of fealty, and this was before he even planted a kiss on her forehead, not to mention before he planted a kiss on her lips, and he begged her not to give in to his demands, and then cried out with joy when she did, and then he deflowered her, telling her how he wouldn’t do it unless she was sure it was what she wanted, and he paid for her singing and dancing lessons, because she said that was what she wanted. She wanted to be transformed from the girl with the bad back and incipient osteoporosis into the one-named entertainer of legend, the one who didn’t have a Jewish last name. So he secured her management, and he got her her first recording contract, and he read the fine print for her, and he knew that what had made her beautiful when she wasn’t beautiful was gone, so that the announcement of eternal fealty was an announcement of abridged fealty, the announcement of true love was a betrayal of true love, because with the broken girls (like Dante and Beatrice, when you think about it), love is breached at the moment of its honor. Jeff Maiser was forever fielding calls complaining about the apartment he got for her, from Tammy Gleick, a.k.a. Lacey, complaining that it wasn’t like it had been, even for her it wasn’t, even she knew that everything he gave her was corrupt, until there was nothing left of her in his life but articles in the tabloids. Lacey, the one-named international superstar, breast implants insured by Lloyd’s of London, Lacey and her string of Hispanic bodybuilder boyfriends who trained her and her bionic body parts.
Only a television executive can know this stuff, that the image is the thing, and the image is the secret, and the secret is that the broken girls are things of myth, things you can devote yourself to, and that the devotion has to be in secret because only things in secret last, because when the broken girl leaves and takes up with a sequence of club rats, a sequence that may or may not include a guy who drives his car into a diamond merchant’s display window, then you know that you still have your secret, and you treasure your secret, your humiliation, while your own body wastes away, and your career dwindles into twilight, and your wife leaves and begins her insane sequence of plastic surgeries, only a television executive can know all these things, all these sorrows.
It would show up on the MMPI. I am worried about sex, mostly true? I am often looking through glossy magazines for women with back injuries, mostly true or false? The women with the back injuries are going to show up on the test, and there is nothing to do about it. He is going to spike in the paraphilia section of the results. A whole day of presentations about Growing Quality passes with reveries such as this. Before Maiser knows it, it’s dinnertime, and he goes right over to the table where Lorna Quinson is sitting, and he trades his place card with the guy sitting at her right, and he banishes this guy to a table between the head of children’s programming and someone from the art department.
“What a surprise,” Quinson mumbles.
“Not really,” Maiser says. “I mean, I —”
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br /> “And to what do I owe the pleasure again?”
“Feelings of desperation?” Maiser says. “I can’t accept any more offers of sexual slavery from young producers. It’s going to tarnish my squeaky-clean image.”
“I’m sure that’s not what I heard,” says Quinson, without looking him in the eye. She fingers a barrette and does not elaborate.
“Your ideas on programming,” he says, with the charm tap now firmly screwed into the open position. “I’m here because I need your ideas on programming. You know, my guys are not performing like they’re meant to perform, and I need to take the pulse of the entire television-watching community. Wherever I might find them. Tonight that means you. Tonight that means let’s take some time, here at dinner, and you tell me what you watch and why you watch it, what the medium means to you, what makes you laugh and what makes you cry. Then I’ll get to work on a few programs that reflect your insights.”
At last, she could be said to be imperceptibly smiling. But before he can take pleasure in the certainty of this uncertain smile, there’s a hand on his shoulder. It’s Naz Korngold’s obsequious secretary, Georgia, a southern gal with a peroxided mane coiffed with military severity. Korngold refers to her as Georgia the Peach.
“Jeffy,” she says. “Naz wants you at his table. Last-minute sort of thing. Analysts.”
No! There’s no recourse for the unavoidable dinner that lies ahead but frequent deployment of the term synergies, always in the plural, and aggressive, salesmanlike alcohol abuse. Indeed, he pursues these strategies in a single-minded way so that the rest of the evening shuts over him like the curtain after the bloodbath of act five —
Abruptly, he wakes for day number three and its schedule of team building and Growing Quality in the Context of Community, and, yes, he has the kind of headache that led primitive man to assume he was possessed by evil spirits. Maiser drags himself out of the king-size bed and throws on some jogging clothes. Turns out that La Casa Grande is located outside of San Diego in a small neglected desert village, though no one at the resort would admit to it. When Maiser calls the front desk and asks how far it is to town, making clear that he intends to walk the distance before breakfast, they urge him to reconsider. Maybe some time in the sauna instead? A massage? But Jeffrey knows about the evil spirits and he knows what it takes to rid himself of their spells. The brisk constitutional. And so it is out of the climate control and onto a two-lane road with a speed limit of seventy-five. No sidewalks. The desert of Southern California has never looked more Saharan. A few last-chance palms rise up from otherwise scorched expanses of white sand. A roadside billboard advertises four hundred acres at rock-bottom prices. Up ahead, in the distance, whether from the physics of mirage or from hangover, a Dairy Queen staffed entirely by morose teenagers shimmers. Nonetheless, he quickly establishes that he should turn back, except that when he does so, another vision materializes before him, a revelation of the worst kind. It’s a battalion of laborers, mostly Mexican, building a large plywood wall.