Rick Moody - The Diviners

“Nora.” She goes into a perfect split. “Don’t you want my number?”

Later, when he comes out of the changing room, hobbling, Nora is there. She extends her hand. Says she admires his work, which cannot be true. Does she like Single Bullet Theory ? With its triple-digit body count? She’s wearing one of those Greek fisherman’s caps. She has elegant cheekbones. The babbling of the indoor fountain says: Your superficial goals are good, and you may pursue them at your leisure. Here comes the human moment. It’s always here. It’s the Ashtanga series that brings it out in him. Don’t think of her as an expanse of skin that could rub against your skin, don’t think of her as a bonbon. Think of her as a complexity to be respected, a person tortured during field hockey practice, the only Jewish kid at Christian summer camp, the girl who vomited in college every morning.

With all this in mind, Griffin allows himself to be pulled away by the mulatto genius. He pulls away from the gravitational field of Nora. The mulatto genius is waiting. He is late. When he pulls open the door of the bar across the street, he feels an uncoiling of gratitude, yards and yards of gratitude in him. He has extruded poisons; he has had a reasonable human interaction. In the bar, on a stool, the mulatto genius balances, one lanky leg stretched all the way to the floor, stabilizing. She’s like a switchblade. There are many unknown things about the mulatto genius, and he has to stop calling her that. She is dressed in black leather pants and a black V-neck sweater from Agnès B., neither smiling nor frowning. If it were in a script, it would say They kiss quickly, and he would have a hundred questions: What does her mouth taste like, and does she close her eyes, is she wearing perfume, and is it a car-crash kiss or is it like the soft rolling of tides over a salt marsh?

On the small stage on the far wall, a soundman, wearing baggy pants and a hooded sweatshirt, plugs a cable into an amplifier.

Griffin says to Annabel, “It came to me during the Ashtanga series. I went out to the men’s room, I blew chow, went back in, fought off a couple rabid fans, wept over the condition of my life, apologized to the instructor, and then I got it.”

“What did you get?”

“The idea.”

“Which idea?”

“About the missing treatment.”

The sweatshirt yells Check into the microphone. The barkeep pauses in front of them.

“Make the coverage up.”

“Make it up?”

“Right here and now.” He warms to the idea. “I already told her it was about dowsing, diviners. Make it up tonight, like you’d spin out a story of love. Make it up like storytellers around a campfire.” Did she have a pen? Did she have paper? Did they have a napkin? Could a treatment be written on a napkin in one of the bars of the city? It happened every night. Could coverage be spray-painted on the city itself, New York City, as if of the city itself?

“You think Vanessa will ever know? She’ll never know. She only gives a shit about this script because it’s leverage. You lose a script, you fucked up. She loses a script, who gives a shit, find another copy.”

Then he improvises his monologue, again, about how to write, which is really a monologue about the nature of self-improvement. It’s the monologue that got him the space with Vanessa, the monologue that launched a thousand temporary production gigs. The monologue about being outside of the empire, outside the establishment, the monologue about how creativity comes at the expense of conventional thinking, at the expense of formula, at the expense of abstract values like tradition and love. The monologue about creativity as revolt, as bloody insurrection.

“The problem is that all film needs to be written automatically. It needs to be written by your pussy. Modern movies, this is what I’m saying, need to be written by cocks and pussies. The problem with these action films, for example, is not enough cock and pussy. People need to get words like cock and pussy out into the atmosphere, they need to say cock a lot, the way they say sunrise, the way they say pang of regret, they need to see that pussy is the most beautiful word in the world and that every script in the world needs to be written with a pussy and a cock in it, needs to be written by a pussy and a cock. No other reason to write. We think that it’s about art or commerce, we think it’s about the art people over here, wearing black and smoking, or the commerce people over here, with their tit jobs and their spray-on tans, but that’s not what it’s about, it’s about pussies and cocks, and if your pussy was not wet, sweetheart, when you were writing about the wife of the Marquis de Sade, then you might as well just give up the job. You should be dripping when you write a story, and your stomach should be churning with the head-splitting climax at your end of the story, the one that gets you off. The one where all the differences in the world, like the difference between a pussy and a cock, are obliterated in the reprise of the come shot of creation, the big grand unified come shot that made the conditions that made you and me and art and commerce and religion. Fuck art and fuck commerce. Abandon the Marquis and his marquise. Come away with me, and I’ll take you places you’ve never seen before, because that’s where we’re going to write this coverage, tonight, and I’ll show you how to write a story, and then tomorrow, when the sun comes up, you can put it on Vanessa’s desk, and when she loves it, which she will, you can say you wrote it yourself and you can know that you wrote it with your pussy. You can know that your pussy made this masterpiece.”

The barkeep keeps the shot glasses full. Glasses from a rack tintinnabulate as the dishwasher brings them back.

“You’ve never written anything. What do you know about it?”

“I know enough to have the title.”

“How can you have a title?”

“The Diviners.”

She says, “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“What do you mean? It’s fabulous. What could be better? It’ll look great. It’s got the accent on the second syllable. Just the idea got me hard in the changing room at the ashram. I was straining against my warm-up pants. That’s all we need to know. Just try saying it!”

At which point the scene changes, because he has exercised his seduction skills, naturally, skills given to him by God, and the bar vanishes away. These are the gray tones of a limousine interior. There’s no connective tissue to attach the one scene to another scene, there’s just the mystery of the raconteur. The location scouts have already been working, advance men and women, and suddenly Thaddeus Griffin and Annabel Duffy are in Washington Mews, that stretch of housing for professors from the university nearby, each carriage house as small as a one-bedroom but as charming as a villa. They walk halfway across the block, toward Fifth Avenue, on the cobblestones, and he finds the door he’s looking for. As they close in, his arm around her waist, he raises a single gloved hand to knock, and then pauses:

“You’re wondering why. You’re wondering why a guy who didn’t finish his degree has you here, on a block of professors. Well, I’ll tell you why. Because a guy I used to play chess with in high school, Charles Ng, is working toward tenure here. In the Asian Studies Department. He’s an incredibly promising scholar, one who has been contacted occasionally by the State Department to be of service in espionage cases and so forth. And why we are here is because Charles is about to corroborate my story, the story I’m about to tell you, which begins, of course, with the Mongol hordes.”