Rick Moody - The Diviners

One afternoon about dusk, in early October, which is after all a perfect time for a shocking revelation, Raoul, weeping, put his hand on the knee of his patron and said that he was again putting the needle in his arm. It was not what he wanted to do, he said, lapsing into the Spanglish patois that was so divine, “The thing calls to me, and I cannot refuse.”

Randall listened to the circles of Raoul’s reasoning, and his disgust was with himself, more so than with the rampant lies that peppered the confession. Because he had not yet sacrificed enough, as anyone could see. Holding the emaciated head of his lover in his lap, he said, “How can I help?”

“I must stop. I don’t want to hurt nobody.”

Randall said, “I could just give you whatever amount of money you need to ensure that if you are going to use drugs you buy from the most reputable dealers in these drugs, that you get the safest drugs, and that you always use the cleanest needles, and in that way, you take the fewest risks. Because if money is going to enable you to feel comfortable, then I need to help, because I am the man who loves you.”

After consideration, Randall added, “We can go through this together.”

Raoul wept for a while and when he again met Randall Tork’s eyes, it was with a kind of gratitude that Tork was not used to seeing, even from the wine publicists who had dodged the exploding ordnance of his malice. Randall could tell that Raoul was high even at the moment of confession, because he knew the look. The look of the simulation of self-knowledge by one who is able in deceit. He knew Raoul was high and he suspected it would get worse, that there was no ending ahead but a bad ending. This bad ending might contain the assault of his own person, the robbery thereof. Still, he had come this far, and for the moment there was no course but to trust further and to attempt to lead Raoul to the light of nobility, especially as this light was indicated in the tradition of the production of wine. He urged Raoul to come to tastings with him, and Raoul attempted to comply on a few occasions. But for each boondoggle that featured Raoul’s guest appearance, there were days when he was gone, and, for all Randall knew, he was out on the street, playing the putain for an extra twenty or thirty clams. Randall Tork tried to make sure that the boy never left without cash, and he always snuck a half-dozen condoms into his pocket when Raoul’s blue jeans came out of the wash.

As Halloween rolled around, Randall Tork began to get an even more desperate notion. That he would like to marry Raoul. Marry him? He could not marry Raoul, for so many reasons, chief among them that Raoul Rodriguez was Catholic, and in the Roman Catholic Church there was no such thing as the love between men. The blood of Christ congealed at the very notion. And there was also the law of the land, the nauseating Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibited two men from meeting in the nuptial bower to celebrate their love. Formidable problems, indeed, and yet Randall Tork, the greatest living wine writer, did not accept that anyone could tell him what he might do. He would marry Raoul, and they would promenade down the steps of some church, sparklers sparkling everywhere around them. He would utter his vows to the boy and he would know the joy the vows brought down on their utterers.

Was it delusional? He’d known Raoul three months. Three delicious months during which he had never once shrunk from holding the boy’s head when he upchucked, nor from cleaning up after his bouts of diarrhea. He cherished every joke and every moment of kindness; he loved every landscape that had Raoul in it. He was occasionally struck by the notion that Raoul would not live out the whole of his term. For example, Randall Tork should have been finishing a big article for a big glossy magazine about the Afghani vineyards that were springing up in place of the once plentiful fields of opium poppies. But he could not finish the article because he was too busy thinking about getting married. Where might they conduct the ceremony? Should they travel to some faraway country that recognized their type of union? Would Raoul be able to fly without having to give himself an injection? Which designer should they select for the creation of their wedding suits? And, most important, what would be the wine? In the past few weeks, Randall Tork had been vacillating between two different choices: the 1945 Mouton Rothschild, with its light amber edges, and the 1959 Lafite Rothschild, memorable for, dare he say it, the black truffle overtones. He found himself curiously irresolute, as if the idea that he might now be married had begun to affect somehow his professional credentials in the matter of this selection. Scandal!

Into these interesting times, as if dropped from the air, a movie star projected himself. Randall had met the movie star at a wine tasting at a Sonoma vineyard, Lonely Lake, owned by a certain film producer. Randall Tork felt that the wines of Lonely Lake were beneath contempt, as were all but a few American wines, but he had made an exception and graced this tasting with his presence for the simple reason that Lonely Lake had the best wine label he had ever seen. It hadn’t escaped Randall’s notice that some of the California vineyards had brought to the design of their labels the expertise and sublimity that their wine making lacked. The pen-and-ink elegance and the almost Victorian calligraphy of the Lonely Lake label appealed to Randall, as did the invocation in its title of that most romantic of emotions. What did Randall know better than wine? Just the one thing. Loneliness. The idea that a purveyor of popular pabulum like the producer who owned this vineyard would willingly invoke that most perfect word, loneliness, in the pursuit of a drinkable simulation of a Malbec, it was enough to roust him from Raoul and his house.

Randall Tork recalls that he was talking to a thoroughly moronic author of mystery novels, whose visage looked as though it had been face-lifted by a drunken home renovator, and she was boasting about how her next novel was going to be about a wine writer, when all at once there was a commotion in the room, and the movie star and his wife made their entrance. Of course, Randall Tork is not the sort to be surprised by stardom. He has seen stardom come and go. He has seen great chefs laid low by pedophilia and vainglory, and he has seen vineyards that were red-hot in one vintage produce nothing but detergent for a decade. He has seen it all. Still, Randall Tork admired a fine entrance. When the movie star and his wife entered the party, the general astonishment of the wine tasters was a fine thing to behold. The wine tasters laid aside their gossip about the movie producer and his wines long enough to take note of the white minidress that the wife was wearing and the ensemble that the movie star himself sported, a pair of torn blue jeans, a silk T-shirt, a blazer from Armani, and cowboy boots.

Randall Tork was introduced to the movie star as the world’s greatest living wine writer, and neither he nor the movie star disputed this characterization. There were two giants in the room now, and this was one of those moments when those destined to greatness must sniff around each other’s behinds to settle the question of whether or not to attack.

What impressed Randall about the movie star immediately was that the movie star ignored everyone for the rest of the afternoon and devoted himself exclusively to Tork. This indicated, on the part of the movie star, a developed palate. He believed that the movie star showed promise. And the movie star, unlike many straight men of reputation, was not at all uncomfortable around a man of Randall Tork’s persuasions. On the contrary, the movie star seemed to enjoy talking to a wine writer no matter qu’il fait la drague. It was only when they had been talking for some fifteen or twenty minutes that the movie star admitted that he actually did collect a little bit, under the tutelage of his father-in-law, who really knew about these things, and it happened that in this context, the wine-collecting context, the movie star had indeed read some of Randall Tork’s reviews.