Rick Moody - The Diviners

“Duffy, did you read the treatment? Do you have the coverage?”

Which treatment? Which coverage? Minivan’s head appears, disembodied, leaning out through the door frame. Annabel nods blankly. She knows better than to deny having read anything. On her day off, Election Day, which was not really a day off, she chased down a new wristwatch for Minivan and fired another intern, she worked on her script at the office, and only then did she go to stand in the line to vote on Seventh Street, where the elderly Hispanic ladies manning the booths were showering the voters with abuse. When she finished voting, it was after nine. Which was when Thaddeus came over. His wife, the commercial actress, had gone to San Diego to work on something, so Thaddeus was waiting on Annabel’s stoop when she got home. He complained the whole way up the four flights, as usual, “Haven’t you ever heard of elevators? Everywhere else they have elevators. They comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. I have a tobacco-related disability. I’d prefer to have a ground-floor romantic liaison, if you please.”

Thaddeus Griffin. She’s seen him holding a gun so many times that it seems as if he should always be carrying one, an ArmaLite or a Kalashnikov. Thaddeus Griffin, in Single Bullet Theory; Thaddeus Griffin, starring with a token African American pal, in Single Bullet Theory II. Thaddeus Griffin, starring in Full Magazine, about a heartbroken editor for a mercenary periodical who gets involved in a conspiracy to shoot the president, here starring alongside another token African American pal. Thaddeus, in fact, has never made a good film, despite having been brought up in New York City and despite having attended Union College in Schenectady, where he nearly graduated with a degree in marine biology. Thaddeus Griffin, the guy who comes to her house and weeps about his marriage and then with almost bloodless suddenness simulates a forced jocularity that would pass for charm on the networks. Everything is a joke! He can imitate anyone! He imitates his agent! He imitates studio heads and television personalities! He does his ongoing impression of Minivan! He’ll get an entire sushi roll in each side of his mouth, like when they were at that place on Ninth Street, and he’ll start talking about Michel Foucault and how knowledge is power, with sushi rolls in his mouth. Despite renting an office with Minivan for a year and a half, he has yet to be cast in anything, even though he has given Minivan free script advice and taken her out to Balthazar for dinner with one of the principals of DreamWorks, even pitched a script about the death of Trotsky to the studios for her. The favor bank has worked in one direction only.

Thaddeus’s campaign to know Annabel more perfectly is coincident with his fading prospects around the office of Means of Production. The campaign went like this. First, of course, he proposed to read the draft of Fire Eater, which he claimed to like. Then he invited Annabel out for drinks to discuss the script, at the history-laden Cedar Tavern. Three times people stopped him to say, “Hey, you’re the guy who killed that terrorist with a crossbow,” which was, of course, the climax of the original Single Bullet Theory. It was during this sequence that Thaddeus, with great concentration, uttered the words, “Jesus wept, motherfucker,” displaying a conviction rarely seen in modern cinema. You had to see it in context, really. And this was how he signed a cocktail napkin, for a fan, in the middle of the ring left by his neat scotch: Single Malt Theory, Thad Griffin 2000.

“The script is really good,” Thad offered, when they were alone. “Really out there. I like it. I admire what you know.” Saying it in such a way that it was clear the opposite was the case. This seemed like the problem of celebrity, that the celeb could not uncouple him- or herself from the burdens and privileges of fame. The safe, uncontroversial remark that the celebrity was trained to deliver became his only refuge. With Thaddeus, she could not walk the street unperturbed. He would say, “We have to keep moving.” Maybe Thaddeus selected his profession for this reason, so that he would always have an excuse to move. At the same time, maybe he was not as famous as he thought; maybe nobody gave a shit about his films, which were generally acknowledged as all but worthless. Annabel believed that action films were inherently conservative anyhow, that they existed solely to offer support to libertarian positions on the Second Amendment. When you thought about it that way, you found pity for Thaddeus and his occasional attempts to be one of the people. You could see that Thaddeus had long since lost something, some set of skills that other people had: the ability to sit in a room without attempting to command its attention, the ability to look up at the smoggy night sky and know that it existed without any input from him at all and without the cooperation of tabloids.

“The thing about reading the Marquis,” he said, “the thing is that the Marquis really changes the way you think. I mean, you could just be going about your business and then you open up, uh, what’s that one called? You open up Philosophy in the Bedroom, and you hear what’s his name, the philosopher character, you hear him say, ‘Thrice Fuck of God, I discharge’ or whatever, and you know you are really being taken to a place where you don’t ordinarily go, a place in your body, a place in your emotional life. All the women with the strap-ons, the innocent girls. You’re in a lower part of nature, you know? You’re in one of those videotapes that record lions out on the Serengeti taking down the gazelles and ripping into them. You’re there, and now you know about bloodlust and power and the inner lives of men.”

Low lighting and bar noise. He was trying hard.

“So tell me why you want to work with this material, anyhow? I mean, why not write a screenplay about a blond girl who wants to give etiquette lessons to disadvantaged classmates and who in the process becomes president of the United States?”

The waitress, who had passed through a sullen period, was now happy and attentive. She had just realized she was serving a movie star. She hovered near the table.

“The Marquise’s life was like the lives of black women.”

“How do you figure? Ten words or less.”

“Her life was about intellectual and sexual slavery.”

“Why not write about slavery, then?”

“I might.”

Thaddeus polished off the last of a second scotch, attacked a third. A cop show, sound off, performed its rote dance on the monitor above the bar. He stared at it, absently, while formulating his comeback.

“Thing is, while I was reading the script, I did have that sensation that I could start eating steak tartare out of a dog bowl and it would be liberating somehow. I had to think. I mean, I couldn’t help myself from thinking one thing the entire time. I was thinking, This woman is really articulate, this woman has had a great education, this woman knows things other people just do not know. But I was also thinking this other thing —”

“Let me guess,” she said.

Thaddeus manufactured a facsimile of surprise. “Okay, go ahead. Guess.”

“You were thinking you’d never fucked a black girl before.”

“I can’t believe you talk like that, Annabel,” he said with mock horror. “It’s making me perspire. Wait. Let me collect my thoughts. Actually, believe it or not, I have had relations with a black woman before, because I wasn’t born yesterday. And I did have that black secretary character working with me in Oath of Citizens. On the novelty scale, the skin color thing just isn’t that high up. The novelty scale, in fact, is not that big a deal. Although it is true that I’ve never fucked a black girl in the ass before.”