Rick Moody - The Diviners

Which indicated that it was now time for Annabel to leave. With a pig there was always a time to leave. A decisive moment. Many had walked out of the Cedar Tavern. Over the century of its existence as a local tavern, many had walked out on provocateurs, drunkards, decadents, on hidden drug problems, on voluminous anxieties, on unquenchable insecurities, unnamed wives. What did these men offer? They offered to take you to your room and then they offered to leave you in a bad, abrupt way. They were there, they were not there, hard to tell which was which, and then they came crawling back.

“Wait, I’m trying to talk about the script, I swear.”

“You’re twelve years older than I am. I’ve met your wife. She gave us those. . those maple thingies at Christmas last year.”

“Annabel! Sit!”

So he settled down. He told her that the Marquise needed to show her devotion and her desire to leave by page sixteen, that the church needed to be hunting down de Sade, with intent to kill, by the beginning of act two, that the Marquise needed to be helplessly in love with a priest, that Annabel needed to see that film with Glenda Jackson about Marat, and that Annabel needed to get rid of the voice-over sections because development people don’t understand large blocks of voice-over. He had two more drinks while he was doing this, and next thing she knew they were in Tompkins Square Park, and Thaddeus Griffin, action film hero, dyed-blond hair swept back perfectly as though it had been spray-painted on, was sitting on a bench sobbing, saying his work was worthless and he was a joke, he was a fucking joke. He said it was the worst thing imaginable, being a joke, and then he was saying, “Take me home with you. Just take me home with you; I’m too drunk to do anything, and anyway, that’s the stupidest thing in the world to do about loneliness, a drunken fuck. Just take me home with you, let me see your hair-care products, let me know if your bathrobe is tartan, or white, or one of those Japanese kimonos. I can’t think about our stories going off in separate directions, like if I go back to my house, it’s just going to be a split-screen thing, and I can’t take that.”

She asked about his wife. His wife was in San Diego shooting a commercial, as she always was. She was always shooting a commercial. She had some kind of repeating character. Her residuals were excellent. The product had to do with feminine itch or bloating or medicated pads. “Did I say that my wife has an artificial eye, Annabel? My wife has an artificial eye. When you look into her eyes, you can see that the left one is artificial, because the light is reflected from it in some weird way. Did I say that my wife only buys clothes online or clothes given to her by designers, because she has a phobia about being seen shopping? Did I say that my wife and I had a photographer take a series of pictures of us strolling that we periodically release to the tabloids, just to make sure we control our public image? Take me home with you, Duffy. Recite to me the cantos of your life.”

She did. And he passed out immediately.

After that, even though she was dating a couple other guys, an assistant at the Michael Cohen Agency and a dean from the experimental college in western Mass., Thaddeus would turn up without notice, because things had to be flexible, and he would call from his car, coming down the West Side, and he would ask if now was a good time, never asking if someone was there but asking nonetheless, because he never expected that they were involved in anything but some amusing film-world dalliance. As it wore on, and wore was a good word for what it did, it became all about Thaddeus’s cock, which, despite her education and intellectual training, she somehow came to love. Why could women be smart, decisive, and brilliant and then somehow irresolute at the sight of a cock? It was one of the depressing secrets of adult life. She loved his cock because she was the Marquise, because she became the Marquise, because that was how it had to go, because by being the Marquise she overcame her, knew her, could write about her, because the Marquise had the skin of an Algerian, the Marquise was a Moor, and she was the Marquise, and she put the cock of film star Thaddeus Griffin in her mouth, and she put the cock of film star Thaddeus Griffin in her vagina, and she let the cock of Thaddeus Griffin erupt onto her dark skin because he was film star Thaddeus Griffin and he wanted to do it that way. And he bought her a nose ring, and he paid for the tattoo on her lower back, just above her behind, and he had the best guy in the East Village do it, and he attended this assignation, and he begged her to pierce her nipples, and when he said, “I want more,” she felt stronger, and so in turn she gave more. She was the assistant who gave more, because she was the black assistant, and she felt stronger when she shouldered burdens ever more impossible. They wanted her to give more just to stay in the game, and she laid up dreams in the attic of her consciousness, hoping, like a remedial hoper, for the moment of tenderness. But she never did that one thing he wanted, she never let him be the guy who fucked a black girl in the ass, because he had to be desperate for something.

One day, Rosa, the mother of Minivan, called the office line, and in the middle of it, she started babbling incoherently about her grandfather or great-grandfather who possessed the fraudulently magic skill of dowsing. This was mixed in with her obsession with a certain talk show host. She couldn’t stop talking about this talk show host. Somehow, in the recounting, Annabel and Thaddeus appropriated the word, and it became the code for all things romantic: dowsing. Thaddeus let it trip off his tongue, “Is there dowsing in the forecast?” This is how it happens, see. This is how the whole lie gets started and begins to get up its head of steam. Annabel Duffy, the black intellectual, is locked in an affair she doesn’t really want to be having with a white action film star, who is riffling papers on her desk while an Indian guy in a turban is staring at her, smiling, and her boss is yelling at her from the next room about the call sheets and she’s asking about the treatment.

“I asked if you read the —”

Thaddeus Griffin has slyly stolen up on the action. He too notices that there is a Sikh in the office, and imagines, probably, that the Sikh is delivering something.

The Sikh says, “Mr. Griffin. You are a great and underutilized actor. My honor to meet you.”

“Why, thank you,” says Thaddeus. “You’re a new employee?”

“Yes, sir, I am the new employee in matters of television.”

And the Minivan shouts out again. “There’s buzz. There’s a volume of background noise about this treatment. I have heard things. And I want to know what it’s about and I want to know if it’s any good. Jeanine, where are the call sheets? And Annabel, I want to move the office out of this neighborhood. I don’t want to be in this neighborhood anymore. I don’t want to see another fucking Christmas tree out the window. I don’t want to have to listen to that music that the skaters skate to. I want to move downtown. And I want to know what that treatment is about.”

Which treatment? Annabel shuffles the papers around. She can’t find anything, can’t find coverage, can’t find any treatment. She looks up at Thaddeus. Lying is about to become the only way to survive, yet again. The Sikh smiles. Not even knowing what treatment it is now, what script, what book, what play, what was it that she was supposed to have seen last night, which younger playwright? How can she get the jump on Madison, to whose domain all of this material also belongs? Madison, who is hovering at the edge of the action, peeking out of her cubicle. The Sikh is smiling and Thaddeus is doing his agitated dance, his restless legs syndrome, and Madison is scowling, and Lois DiNunzio is calling to the Sikh that he should come over to her desk to sign some tax forms —