The Diviners

by Rick Moody

  Her mother says, “Don’t say these things to her. She is ill.”

  And her father says, “Why shouldn’t I say these things? I’m not going to sugarcoat things while she is learning what she has to learn, because then she’ll get the wrong ideas.”

  Samantha has more questions. Was she a happy person? She was a mostly happy person. And was she happy growing up, wherever it was she grew up? She grew up in the suburbs west of Philadelphia and yes, she was happy as a child, if a little shy. Who was her last boyfriend, because she can almost remember, she can remember things about him, or at least she can remember things about being next to his body, a body next to hers, and she can remember something about the joy of being next to another body, and there is no such feeling here in the hospital, which, though it is full of people and family, is a lonely place. Her last boyfriend, she is told, was a packager and transporter of art. Or, as her father seems to want to say, despite her mother’s diplomacy, he drove a moving truck. When did her parents meet? Her parents met a long time ago. How come she doesn’t have any siblings? Because they were not able to conceive any more babies. And do her parents still love each other? Of course. And why is everyone staring at her, wherever she goes in the hospital? Because she was in the newspapers a lot. Why was she in the newspapers? Because of the nature of the crime. And is she still in the newspapers? Sometimes. And who was the person the police believed committed the crime? This person was named Duffy. That was his last name? Yes, his name was William Duffy, but he preferred to be called Tyrone. The police believe that she was acquainted with this person, perhaps for some time.

  At the sound of the name, something happens in her. It is as if a whole second window of consciousness opens up. It is the window onto ornament, onto all the things that are inessential on their surface, and yet, when this window is reopened, she wonders how she lived without it, because in here are consigned the memories with no names attached to them, such as riding down the FDR in a taxi at night with the windows open in spring. How beautiful this memory is, and how beautiful are the lights, and how excellent is the FDR Drive. Likewise, the memory of the leaves changing color in the suburbs in autumn, and the memory of ballet class as a girl, and what it felt like to lace up her toe shoes, and also the memory of the taste of ice cream, especially mint-chocolate-chip ice cream, which in her girlhood tasted like cough syrup, only better, and the smell of people’s lunch bags in elementary school, and what it felt like to have to climb the ropes in gym, which she always hated, and how she always liked to look at the cards at the back of library books as a girl, and the satisfying sound that a videocassette made the first time she ever fed one into a machine. These images come tumbling out at the sound of the name Tyrone, and she can’t attach a significance to any of them, except that she knows that they all belong to her, all these memories belong to her, and she doesn’t know why she forgot them, nor why they are returning now, except that they are followed by colors and light, and the only possible idea she has of all these things, as she thinks of them, is that they are paintings, and there are a thousand images of cracked bits of pottery and illuminated manuscripts, and then there are the flattened devotional images of medieval painting, and then there are the Madonnas, all the Madonnas and all the little babies with them, and then all the deposition altarpieces, and then there are the court paintings of the Enlightenment, and then there are the scenes of country life, and then there are the early photographs, and then there are the paintings of the Impressionist period, she sees them all, and then there are the Cubist paintings, and the Fauvist paintings, and then the provocations of Dada and Surrealism. It all comes back to her, that she was once an art historian, that this was what made her go to work at the gallery, that she loves all these paintings, including contemporary art, she loves the anarchy of the contemporary, paintings that are nothing more than colors hovering in front of her, like windows into the original quality of colors, drips and scratches and lines and nothing more, just color, and paintings based on soup cans, and paintings based on comic strips; somewhere in here she recognizes that the paintings she’s seeing are by Tyrone, as if the entire history of art that she’s remembering while her parents sit and watch her leads to the paintings by Tyrone Duffy, and his mangled books, as that’s what a lot of his work is, mangled text, words torn out of their context and made new again. She feels a sudden excitement at having unlocked the door to where all the things were stored, this door has been kept closed for so long, and maybe she didn’t even know these things before, maybe these are only things you can know when you come back from some really empty space, or that’s what it feels like today, that she’s had some kind of insight, because of her brain injury, for no other reason. She can’t read, she barely remembers anything from the past, she barely knows who her parents are, and she only knows her name because they keep repeating it to her, but she knows for certain that Tyrone didn’t use the brick on her; there was no way that Tyrone used the brick. She tells her parents, “It wasn’t Tyrone; that’s ridiculous. I had a big crush on Tyrone . . . and . . . and . . . I think I was actually talking to him on the phone when I was hit, I think I was . . . I think I was trying to get him to go out with me.”

  29

  He is Randall Tork, the greatest wine writer in history. He is the writer of innumerable wine articles and wine books, and the author of an eponymously named franchise of annual wine-collecting guides, the Randall Tork Guide for Discerning Collectors. He is popularizer of such terms as barnyard and gymnasium when used in the description of fine wines. He is the man who made the Battenkill vineyard what it is. He created its reputation; no one else did it, though many stake their claim. He’s the one who destroyed a popular sommelier at one of the French restaurants by spreading the rumor that this so-called professional had no sense of smell. He did it with glee. He cares nothing about his subjects, the vintners, not about their feelings, not about their multimillion-dollar investments. They are the enemies of true invention.

  What he despises: the delusions of wine connoisseurs, how they actually believe that they can taste all those faint traces, tobacco and chocolate and toasted almond, how they defer to whatever costs the most and is most prized by the heirs and heiresses who haven’t spent a sober afternoon in forty-five years. The look in the eyes of wine collectors at the word Bordeaux makes Randall Tork want to drive forks into these eyes, and when he encounters these people at wine tastings, he invariably selects the “best” wine at random and then argues for the perfection of the vintage, saying that the rest of the region tastes as though it has formaldehyde in it, and he then adheres to the result unswervingly.

  He wrote the column that is whispered about by every informed collector, the remarks in which he compared the entire run of 1997 California chardonnays to the actress Elke Murnaugh. Who could forget?

  These wines are flabby in the way the cellulite bulges from the too-tight pouches of her nulliparous behind, they are fruity like the desserts that are favored by the disadvantaged children that Murnaugh and her never-to-be-mentioned partner take into their house so that she can be photographed leering, like a wine taster, surrounded by her brood, on the covers of celebrity weeklies. These chardonnays have the mouthfeel of neglected vaginas begging to be brought beseechingly out of retirement, musty, undeodorized, and sentimental. They have the aftertaste of excessive reuse of Lysol spray in the bovine bathrooms of salacious celebrities who are otherwise lax about germs, and they are garish like appalling Broadway productions, the casts of which are full of malnourished thespians who would do anything for a plug from her flatulent fabulousness. Have I neglected to mention the overused dance belts of Broadway dancers, ossified with eons of sweat and antifungals? These wines have hints of these exquisite tastes. And the so-called wine drinkers who favor these chardonnays are, like Murnaugh herself, pustular pretenders to the great tradition of wine producing who would never save a bottle of anything, who would drink a capful of cheap perfume and call it French wine, if only
they have been told by some online sewing circle of hacks that they should do so. Let these Murnaugh urine specimens be drunk by the aforementioned imbeciles and then praised to the stars. Persons who use words like zippy, zingy, and fun should be lined up and shot, and perhaps their moldering remains will bring a more satisfying fermentation process to the creation of a wine than we find in this repellent grape.

  The fact that he once had to sit behind Elke at a certain performance of a certain Broadway spectacular did not enter into the review, of course, and how dare the suggestion be made. Randall Tork is the greatest writer in wine history, and his contempt for the edifice of wine consumption is owing to the fact that he cares about the truth. Indeed, at forty-nine years of age, and completely repulsive in the matter of his physical demeanor, being rather short, rather fat, and rather covered with acne scars, and having large muttonchop sideburns, and eyes too close together, and given to wearing a beret because of hair that is thinning on the top, there is nothing else for him to care about but wines.

  His parents, who separated in his earliest childhood, found him unlovable and his feminine primping and mincing worthy of contempt, and they abused him mercilessly, and may they rot in hell. He had no friends as a child, and in the instances where people were moved to pity by his circumstances, he spit on these people, reviled them, and felt good about it after the fact.

  Today’s august task is to work the term “festering boil” into a review of a Moselle, and to compare the owners of a restaurant in Marin County that once failed to honor his reservation to Vichy collaborators, after which he will return again to one of his favorite leitmotifs, the “gentle crushing of the fruit.” The foot crushing the grape in the bathtub is where wine began, in an intimacy, in a humanness. What enology has lost, and there is always something lost, is this very humanness, the slave in the bathtub crushing the grape at the behest of his cruel master. There should be slaves, of course, and there should be masters, and there should be a calm, serene attitude about the fermentation process: Keep the room cool, require absolute cleanliness, make certain that the man who is monitoring temperatures is a man who knows to check every hour. Don’t forget about elevage, the interval between fermentation and bottling; it is an art that has been handed down through the oral tradition. Randall can talk about these things. He can talk about triage and malic acidity and cap management, and the role in this era of the great French families, the way père et fils have conspired generation after generation to do this one perfect thing, and how this has not happened in the appalling United States of Baptist wine swillers because what have we here? In this country? We have the kind of tradition in which a fawning twenty-three-year-old wine writer comes to call at your vineyard, though he is unable to recognize appropriate tannins and wouldn’t care if the wineglass was filled with antifreeze.

  Thus, Randall begins to compose:

  Is that what you want for your vineyard? Do you want to have an expensive meal with a twenty-three-year-old with genital herpes, so that when you attempt to bed him in order to ensure the fine review of your pestilential product he infects you with his suppurating sores? Is that what you want? Maybe if you calved off his finger warts and mixed them in it would improve your beverage.

  The language is closing in on what he needs. Truth is a condition of language, and when the outrage is pure, then the review is accurate.

  What about the piece he fashioned entirely of similes? Reviewing the wines of Paraguay? Magnificent, really.

  What are these wines like? They are like the teenage sacrifices of the Aztec peoples at the moment that these sacrifices wet themselves; like the smoked banana peels of banana republics; like the scorched smell of freebasing at the coca-producing factories of the Colombian cartels; like the acidified pages of the tomes of the Magic Realists; like the revolutionistas, unwashed and unfed; like the Disappeared after a good six months in their unmarked graves; like the punctured rectums of the fervent Catholic altar boys on their way to another round in the confessional with the good Father; like the smoking sky over the scorched rain forest; like the rainwater running down the gutter of an Indian village with no plumbing; like the throbbing bosoms of the sun-ripened, thong-wearing transvestites of the humid slums; like the discarded thatch of a continent’s worth of Brazilian bikini waxes; like the cannibalism of the interior tribes; like the moldy grooves of another box full of warped tropicalia LPs; like the nectar of slug-infested mangos; like the ear-splitting cry of the toucan and like its gaudy, excessively colorful exterior and its thinly constructed beak; like the bomb shelters of the hidden Latin American Nazis; like the still throbbing organs of their victims; and like the soiled loincloths of the victims of cannibalism at the moment of their demise.

  Yes, he is the greatest, and no one can take the mantle from him, and yet there is the one thing missing, namely a personal life of any kind. There were some married men, in his later teens, the sort of men who liked much younger boys, no matter the appearance of these boys. He has been with some of these men, and he loved these men, and he learned a lot from them, including something about wine. But many years have since elapsed with nothing to show for them but the occasional tawdry sally with a vigneron or a sommelier. These never did satisfy, especially when he tried to get them to tie him up properly.

  In the wake of this realization, there was no choice, really, but to take the search for love out into the world. And that was how he, Randall Tork, the greatest wine writer in history, came to conduct wine tastings at the hospices and in the chronic-care wards of the Bay Area. To be Randall Tork, stripped of his reputation and his franchise, in a hospital ward, with a couple of bottles of swill and a box of digestives, filling plastic cups for men and women who had cast off all but the last few pounds of their body weight, this was actually a rather moving experience for him. He got the okay from les médicines: a glass or two would not unduly affect the tripartite cocktail of chemicals routinely prescribed for his étudiants. He began spinning out his tales of wine excellence, how the grace to make a good wine did not take just root stock and ample sunshine, it took five hundred years of perfection and the beneficence of the gods, and he spoke of the kinds of political stability (monarchy being especially good) that made this perfection possible and of the secret languages that needed to be handed down, and in telling these stories, he found that he suddenly had a greater purpose. He found that he could feel great affection for the HIV afflicted, even when they made uninformed evaluations of the wines. He looked forward to getting out of the house.

  It was in this context that Randall met a certain handsome gentleman. Raoul was not exactly who Randall Tork was imagining when he went to speak in the wards of the damned. Many of the men in the hospices at least dimly recognized the importance of wine, perhaps as part of their dining lives. Some of them even had strong opinions on the subject. They would occasionally take issue with him, and there was vigorous back-and-forth. Raoul was not one of these men, and Randall was of the opinion that Raoul had never even tasted wine before he had his first plastic cupful on the ward. He knew so little of wine that he had no idea that the stuff in the chalice at church on Sundays was reputed to be the same beverage that Randall Tork was now handing out. Raoul, it seemed, was mostly interested in professional baseball, the argot of which he pronounced in a charming Hispanic way.

  Whippet thin, with short curly black hair, Raoul also sported one brown eye and one that was sort of greenish, a combination so lovely that Randall Tork felt a need to compose lines on the subject. It turned out, of course, that the vehicle for these lines was a review of a New Zealand white that everyone said was so vivacious, full-bodied, like an Oakland hooker, with the fruit of her cheap douche and the overtones of a Sumatran boar barbecued on a spit. Yet still this wine reminds me of the multicolored eyes of a beautiful man who once offered to take me to see the legends of local baseball frolic on their fields. Always Barry Bonds this, Barry Bonds that, Barry Bonds is a Greek god, he will live into eternity. This wa
s Raoul’s sweet song, along with the fact that his surname, he said, proved that he was related to someone called A-Rod. Raoul was full of strong opinions about baseball, as befitted a young man, and seemed to come to the wine tastings with the cross-purpose of perseverating on America’s pastime.

  Raoul said he was straight, which is what they all say, especially those men of the Catholic countries to our south, notwithstanding that they have all been around the block, pledging their eternal love to their boyhood friends before going and knocking up some she-vixen because they are too prideful to use a condom. Raoul said to Randall at the first tasting, “I am not a fruity wine like these others here,” and then he giggled as if he had never said anything so amusing in his life, which was perhaps true. Maybe he was straight, because who knew about these things? The libido is as mysterious as soil and sunlight and precipitation and the vine.