Rick Moody - The Diviners

The new client is why Vic cannot get into a long conversation with the old guy about the election. The new client was meant to be here twenty minutes ago, with entourage. And yet the old guy is still holding the manila envelope and looking at Vic with his hail-fellow optimism. If he has to be removed by security, he will be.

“Baseball follower?”

Vic says nothing.

“Let me tell you, when I was a younger man, I used to go down to the spring training games. I can’t stand the part of the year when there’s no baseball. Winter is just a bunch of weeks where I could slip and break something. That’s a real danger. So why don’t I go down to Florida then?”

“I’m sure that Sandra would be happy to —”

Sandra has the headset on and seems to be making bulk dental appointments for preventive scaling.

“You followed the series. Am I right?”

Vic tries to move away a few steps, toward the opaque glass doors through which any visitor must pass upon emerging from the shiny maw of the elevator. Vic mumbles some inoffensive words about golf.

“I like the team in Queens because I believe in an underdog.”

Vic Freese, of diminutive size and aspect like all the agents of Michael Cohen, not one of whom is over five foot nine, was not a presence on any athletic team in the entirety of his youth but does admit to certain agonizing years in the system known as Little League.

“Wasn’t very good,” he remarks.

This only buoys the messenger to say, “Let me see your swing. Just let an old fellow tell you a little bit about your swing.”

“Give your script to the receptionist,” Vic says.

People are excited to be in a major talent agency with a hundred-year tradition of serving the stars. W. C. Fields and Don Ameche and William Shatner have walked through these doors. At any moment talent might enter. A pint-size diva with a nosebleed and a stuffed bear the size of a sumo wrestler. She will demand to be given a chocolate milk and a contract for a sitcom, for which she expects a half million dollars per episode.

“I’m just delivering. Not to say a guy like me doesn’t have stories to tell. Don’t we all. We all have stories. Spicer is the name. Would you like to hear about how I met my wife?”

“I —”

“My wife died a few years ago of ovarian cancer. She played the harpsichord. Honest. The harpsichord. You get a lot of stories about the harpsichord come through here? No one plays the harpsichord. Do you know what a harpsichord is? A piano but without the loud part. I was a young man in the city, and my parents were from Europe. So was my wife’s family. She came here, she could barely speak English, but she could play the harpsichord. How she settled on it, I’ll never know. Anyhow, one time when I went to one of the big department stores in town, I think it was Gimbels, I heard in the lobby they had a recital on the harpsichord, and this musician was playing the music of J. S. Bach or somebody like that. It was a promotion. Arrow shirts. I sauntered in a leisurely way down to where the musician was playing. It was the beginning of that, oh, what is that piece called, you know, the —”

“Goldberg Variations?”

“Just the one!”

“Look, Mr. Spicer, I’m really waiting for an —”

The elevator sighs, as if weary at having to deposit yet another payload, and the heart of Vic Freese lodges up in his sinuses. And, as the hinges moan on the glass door that gives entrance to the Michael Cohen Agency, the sullen assistant of one of the other agents appears before him eating a muffin. Crumbs on her face like a skin condition. Joelle, the assistant in question, known to keep to herself, nods at Sandra and trudges up the spiral staircase to where the offices of the agents are laid out like a strand of defective chromosomes.

“Ever after, whenever I heard the music of the harpsichord, which was a lovely kind of music, I saw the auburn hair of this musician in my mind’s eye, and I saw her crimson fingernails, polished up beautifully, and I thought this was the most magical thing I’d ever heard, and I thought all harpsichord music was like that, as magical as that, so afterward I went to any harpsichord performance in the tristate area. No matter who was playing, I went. I knew all the music for that instrument because that was the music of love. And I knew one day I would see my wife again, just by following the music. This was during the war. Did I say that? Did I say that I was about to be drafted? I was. You know what that means, that means the destruction of entire cities, like Dresden, which was where some of my cousins came from before they emigrated. I was stationed in Germany, the country that my family had fled. I was there at the end of the war, the mopping-up part. All I could think of over there in Germany was the music of the harpsichord. The music I had heard before I got drafted. I was sentimental about the music, is the truth. When I got back to the city, again I chased around the music of the harpsichord, all around; any time there was a concert, I was there, with this idea that one day I would find my girl. It was months and months, though, and I never did see her, and I just about gave up. I went to work in the garment district.”

Freese hates to admit it to himself, but he does sort of want to know the end of the story, even though he will have to be in the company of Spicer’s smell for at least another two minutes. A prospect made even more alarming because, with each passing second, it is more likely that the new client will walk through the door and she will see him talking to a foul-smelling septuagenarian with argyle socks. And this will be her first impression of the New York office. He turns to remark to Sandra that she had best take the package from Spicer, the messenger, because Mr. Spicer undoubtedly has further deliveries to make, but Sandra is now abandoning her post for her smoke break. He knows, because he has seen her out front, that she is part of the guilty crew on smoke break. And where is her temporary replacement?

“I was going to the ballpark at the same time, which you’d think was not a place where much music got played. Not a lot of classical music at the ballpark, except when an internationally known tenor came to town. But I was at the ballpark, watching the Brooklyn Dodgers. They were my boys. Eddie ‘the Brat’ Stanky, Pee Wee Reese, Cookie Lavagetto, and so on. What a team. They were heroes, even if they didn’t make the play-offs that year. That was the year of Jackie Robinson, if I remember correctly. So one day I was watching my Brooklyn Dodgers, the greatest team ever in the history of New York City. And it happened to be the day of a promotion. They were actually giving out nylon stockings. Nylons were brand-new at the time. The loudspeaker announced the national anthem. And everyone was standing proud. By the way, did I mention that I have eleven grandchildren?”

He asks if Vic is a man with children. Vic is horrified at the possibility of giving away personal information to a guy who may potentially memorize statistical abstracts about baseball. But yes, he admits he has two children. They are little animated characters gamboling in Vic’s mind’s eye. Even in the midst of important meetings there is in Vic Freese the sound of his children demanding again to dance to mopey British pop songs from the eighties. Where is the voice in him that indicates that he must put first the needs of the new client? Why didn’t he cultivate that voice? If there were a scale before him now, the new client would top out at an ounce and a half. And his children would weigh thirty-eight and forty-nine pounds, respectively. If his son were here, he’d still be saying the words campfire song, over and over, as he has been saying for three days now because Vic made a joke about campfire songs he had to sing as a kid, like “Charlie on the MTA,” et cetera, and if his daughter were here, she, too, would be repeating it, campfire song, because she repeats whatever his son says, campfire song, campfire song, until the words become, through transmutation, precious. This idea of the sound of children’s voices, so adorable and so memorable, is an evolutionary triumph.