Rick Moody - The Diviners

Madison turns from the vast cabinet of beauty products in her mother’s bathroom at 860 Park. She turns from honey-maple astringent chiselers, verbena pore extruders, plasma essence nucleic epidermal triage treatments. To immerse herself in the shower, Madison stands with her face under the massaging showerhead trying to ignore the afterimage of the curtain’s floral print. During the next ten minutes, when she’s basically asleep again — until she finds herself warming up the espresso maker, dumping a demitasse into some steamed milk — she absently spoons into herself half a grapefruit for its negative calories while her mother complains about how recycling is actually creating more garbage. After which, Madison needs to get out of her pajamas, and this is actually one of the most stressful moments of the day because she has all these choices. She has gone to Agnès B., she has gone to Betsey Johnson, she has gone to Prada, she has gone to Dolce, she has even gone to Bergdorf’s, and she has bought these outfits, Michael Kors, Marc Jacobs. She has to wear one of them. If you buy the outfit, you have to wear the outfit. That’s the rule. It’s irritating and stressful. All these outfits, like strangers of whom you should ask questions at a cocktail party, at least according to her mom, who was trained to ask questions at parties by her own parents, her mom who used to be a fund-raiser at the City Opera and who now just hangs around the house complaining. Madison goes into the walk-in closet and she tries on the knee-length black skirt, then the pink corduroys, then the giant eyelet skirt, and the micromini, then superslim hip-huggers, settles on a leather skirt in claret, checks the drape of the trifle. She attempts to divine the tastes and inclinations of the male of the species by spinning around a couple of times in the mirror. Next, she goes in search of the right top, maybe something less sheer underneath something more sheer, or maybe just something black. After which there is emergency moisturizer, amber concealer, ebony eye pencil, extrahold disulfide support spray. Not that the male of the species gives Madison McDowell its undivided attention. When they do she finds reasons to resist. This one checks the length of his fingernails too often. This one is preoccupied with squash. This one uses the word portfolio too many times, and this one drives with one hand.

Which is why at twenty-eight she’s still living here. There’s no reason to live elsewhere yet. And she can’t afford her own place. In summer, she has the guesthouse all to herself out in the Hamptons, where she can float listlessly in the pool. While she’s at Means of Production she can save some money, and she can buy pieces (fur pants from Sean John) that are essential to the public image of Means of Production. Madison McDowell is the public image. That’s something that Vanessa Meandro recognizes, something that Vanessa needs, Madison McDowell with high heels and an address book and an expense account. Madison McDowell in the society pages. She can call her friends on the cell phone and she can commiserate about whatever it is that requires commiseration. She can scheme out loud about world domination, about her ultimate position as a female studio head, about her imaginary husband who is thirty-eight years older than she and bound to die leaving her a half-billion dollars in stock options.

She gets into the elevator, yelling back irritably at her mother, reminding this matriarch to go to Fendi for the sale, and upon depressing the L button, she fishes out the cell phone and conference calls the girls at Vanderbilt Publicity, and the girls start in immediately about what they saw last night, for example, you can’t believe who they saw last night, they were with that hip-hop guy, Mercurio. Almost every week they say this, they saw Mercurio, Mercurio, Mercurio, and they took him to the opening of an installation piece at a gallery in Chelsea where you could administer electric shocks to a male model, you wouldn’t believe it, and everyone was there, here is a list of people who were there, here is a list, because even if the girls themselves weren’t at an event, none of the people on the list would ever deny being at an event, that’s what the girls always say, you can always just report that these people were at an event any time you throw a party, even if they weren’t. The more times you say it, the more likely they are to come: Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson, Rod Stewart, John Leguizamo, Donald Trump, Matt Dillon, Isaac Mizrahi, Al Roker, Lacey, Jay McInerney, someone from the tabloids, just make up any name of someone from the tabs, because they love us, they love everything we do, and they will come to everything. How about plus-size models, there are always some plus-size models around, you can just say a plus-size model came to the party, like what’s her name, any of the guys from that hip-hop label on Staten Island, and you can say that anyone from the Young Republicans was at your party. Young Republicans, they will do anything you ask. Libertarians like to be tied up. Leave your Libertarian at home watching QVC, tied to your bed. The heiresses from that cosmetics fortune, they were undoubtedly at the party, the daughter of the guy who pulled the insurance scam where the Methodist Church got taken for millions, the dashing son of an indicted arms trader, twenty cousins of the Saudi royal family, two former New York City police chiefs. You can always get the staff of the pink weekly newspaper to come to your parties, and they almost always throw up at some point late in the night, especially that guy who does the movie reviews. Or how about the heroin-addicted singer for that band, the Corinthians, or Derek Jeter will come to your party, or Fred Durst, he will come to your party, the entire staff of Jet Set. All these people will come.

The girls go on, yoked together in the ether of telecommunications as Madison thanks the doorman, gets into her cab. They talk about the menu at that restaurant Slab, how it is totally not that fattening, and how first they went to the benefit party for the museum, and they got so drunk, you wouldn’t believe, and they saw a real estate developer guy, and they saw a guy from that investment bank, and they saw the guy who had the Internet start-up that only just started to tank. But that’s after the stock was up a hundred and twenty percent in the first day of trading. A sweet guy and cuter than any man on earth, he’s a fox, they say. His hair is the color of wheat and just a little bit messy, and he says he wants to get involved in producing independent films! That’s what he said. They are serving this man up to Madison as though he were a big fish flopping on the deck, and all of this even though Madison has dark hair, which is not at all like the Vanderbilt girls themselves. They are totally being about blond, about the philosophy of the blonde. Even if you’re a fake blonde, it’s fine. But you have to be a blonde. They have decided to do this experiment with Madison; they are going to see if a natural brunette can make any headway in the world. But as part of the experiment, she will have to do as they say. Exactly as they say. And then, at a certain point, she will take a meeting with Mercurio. Mercurio really wants to do some film work and Mercurio is incredibly smart, you know, and he understands how it works. He really doesn’t want to do an action film where he’s the sidekick of some white guy, like a Thaddeus Griffin movie, because that’s demeaning, although he would consider doing an action film where he has a white sidekick, like Thaddeus Griffin, say, and maybe Thaddeus gets blown to pieces about half an hour from the end of the movie, but, seriously, what Mercurio would like to do is have a small part in a film where it’s not actually the worst film of the year.