Rick Moody - The Diviners

She’ll have to crawl over a half dozen of the beleaguered to get to the vacant seat in the corner. She doesn’t know if she can. An anemic sunshine illuminates dust in the window facing south. Faces of the sufferers are lit up with it, with anemic sun. They are trying hard to make this a better day. Maybe they have acted out already this morning, they have given in to their urges, and they are trying to appear as though they will not do it again. If only there will be evidence of remission. Just for today. They are fervent, for this hour. A coffee pot in the corner cooks down the astringent tar. No cookies, anywhere. In the front, a girl so badly anorexic that she resembles a famine appeal introduces herself again. Paisley, compulsive overeater. Paisley asks, cheerfully, “Anyone new here today or attending their first few meetings?”

The woman sitting next to Vanessa smiles in her direction, inviting her to make herself known. Vanessa fluffs her hair nervously. She does some nervous stretching. “Is that a hand back there?”

“I’m Vanessa.”

Everyone cries out a greeting to the newcomer. Paisley reiterates that it’s not to single out the newcomers that they’re so identified, it’s so they might feel welcome! This is a safe place, Paisley reassures them. Then there’s some more nonsense about the steps, during which Vanessa takes out her personal digital assistant and begins scrolling through the appointments she’s missing. Meetings here at the Clubhouse are an hour and fifteen minutes, with a fellowship portion in the middle, where you can’t eat anything. The sufferers stand around nervously, knotting and unknotting their fingers. Last week, Vanessa heard a woman blustering during the fellowship break, enlisting friends in her plan to keep more movie theaters from opening downtown. Just too many movie theaters downtown! Vanessa wanted to invite her to go back to her cave and rot. No one was listening to the woman, but no one was brushing her off, either. She was just there, anxiously murmuring during the five minutes of fellowship.

Since no addict can abbreviate her remarks, since everyone has to blather on until he or she has enumerated everything that has happened in the last twenty-four hours, including specifics about irregularity and skin rashes, one volunteer holds a stopwatch during the meeting to make sure that people don’t go on beyond their allotted four minutes. Vanessa wishes for an even shorter duration. These are the dullest storytellers on earth. They would bore rock formations. They are worse than habitual dream recounters or film agents with their plot summaries. She would like to create some special quarantine for film agents and dream recounters. The next ward over would have the compulsive overeaters.

Now Paisley welcomes her close personal friend, a real power of example, Dean, and Vanessa realizes that she actually recognizes Dean. Dean is not just a regular obese woman with knee trouble, acid reflux, and diabetes. Dean is a former supermodel. Dean is a Vogue cover girl, a former lingerie model, and, if the reports are right, an unrepentant heroin addict.

“Hi, I’m Dean, and I’m a food addict. I have to talk first about my esophageal ulcers, because they are very real for me right now.” After which Dean proceeds to the recital, first time as a girl, when, lanky and unloved, teased for her horsey legs, her bulbous nose that she didn’t get fixed until later, she put her fingers down her throat after some uninvited attention from a drunk friend of her father’s. Gulping down drinks with Kahlua in them while the friend, a local minister, tells her about the glory of the Divine, the look in his eyes a mixture of famishment and terror; she goes upstairs to the bathroom, thirteen years old, puts her hand down her throat, bathroom interior like one of those antigravitational swimming pools that astronauts train in. A pleasant thing, ridding herself of the Kahlua, the stolen drinks, ridding herself of the ambiguous glory of the Divine, ridding herself of some middle-aged man with salt-and-pepper beard, so she keeps putting her fingers down her throat, and it is good. It is good to observe purity doctrines because these are doctrines about the glory of the Divine. It is good to refuse food or to feast only on feast days, the saints did it, but some days she would eat a half gallon of ice cream, put her fingers down her throat, try to get her hand out of the way before it all came up; she began to like the look of it on her face, a little bit of vomit, because everyone liked her face so much, which was a face perfected by surgery, its pathos amplified by some rape; every woman gets raped, guys are rapists, that’s the truth of the story, Dean says. Some nights she liked the look of last night’s ice cream on her chin, the chin that was so prominent on the cover of some magazine or another, it looked good to her, vomit on her chin, reminded her somehow of the guys who blacked out the teeth of actresses on subway posters. It all worked fine for a while; she smoked, she had her teeth brightened and then capped, didn’t have a living tooth in the back of her mouth, couldn’t eat more than a cup of soup most days because of how much damage she’d done; in the morning she was empty. She liked mornings when there was both mist and sunshine over the park that her house overlooked, and she was empty, and there was baroque music playing, it was all good, and then the bleeding started. Who cared? Her father had an ulcer, her brother, everyone ulcerated, that was just part of being an American, you bled internally, you oppressed other countries, outside you looked great. But when her esophagus started bleeding, it got her attention, the bleeding got her attention, like the night she ate three hundred and sixty-five caramels, it just seemed like a good number, she was on the phone talking to some guy who’d just had an IPO for a company he started, sold surgical tools and medical materials over the Web, he was twenty-eight, and the stock had appreciated 113 percent on the first day, and he had given her chlamydia, this guy, though she hadn’t told him, and she talked to him and let him tell his stories about his IPO, she let him suggest that she buy some shares, and that was really funny, in a depressing sort of way, and then she went into the bathroom, and there was all this blood, the color of it was shocking, it was Technicolor blood, some of the caramels coming up whole, that’s how horrible it was, they were like the cubist blocks of some painting, the caramels when they came up, but the blood was more red than red, it was like cadmium, fresh from the earth, filings of cadmium from a mine somewhere exotic, the disintegration of her. There was only ice cream and Kahlua, or she was on a diet that consisted entirely of the licorice called the Twizzler because that was what the doctor told her, the doctor of her interior monologues told her to eat only Twizzlers, fuck what anyone thought, she went out to lunch with her agent, who was always trying to keep everyone away from her, except socially acceptable guys like the IPO guy who gave her chlamydia, then she ordered salad and pushed the salad around on the plate in the most brazen way, like when she was a kid and her mother tried to give her laxatives; it was good for a girl to have laxatives. Meals were more like plowing than eating. The day comes when she can no longer eat a meal at all. She tries the occasional Twizzler, just because there is an obscene beauty to the Twizzler. It’s American; it reminds her of times past when candy was still a surprise. These guys are still calling, leveraged-buyout specialists are calling, and movie executives are calling, not the kinds you want to call. She’s embarrassed by it but doesn’t know how not to talk about it, these guys are calling, and basically she thinks they’re probably porn business people, that’s what they look like, always with the gold chains, and then she can’t go a day without putting her fingers down her throat, it’s every day, and sometimes the night, sometimes it’s the last thing that happens after she looks at the meteor showers over her bungalow on Long Island, she goes into the bathroom, insults herself with her right hand, gets her hand out of the way as the food comes up, looks at herself in the mirror, her pride, the sweat on her brow, she uses some deluxe mouthwash, doesn’t smile now, because smiling gives away the lie, avoids men, except when they force themselves on her, never kisses them, just sleeps with them, until she goes to the ear, nose, throat specialist to the stars, and the specialist takes one look at her throat and explains in graphic detail what is going to happen soon: intravenous drip, psychiatric hospital, halfway house, or all three. Later, she goes to a Christmas party with her father — her mother is dead, having left a slim corpse — and who should happen by but the minister. Her father’s friend. Since she last saw him she has become the exemplar of heroin chic photographs. Even though she has never been a heroin addict, she looks dead, and a medieval glow hovers around her. She can’t do her own shopping, she doesn’t know how to balance her checkbook, but she has read and memorized portions of the Imitatio Christi. So she comforts her father’s friend late into the night, and she explains that he has fallen far from his path, and she goes upstairs and coughs up a couple of cups of blood.