Rick Moody - The Diviners

An Indian waiter takes away the ceremonial plates.

“I’m familiar with some of the movies your production company has done,” Zimri says, “and I have to say, they’re provocative and interesting. Why don’t you tell me what you’re doing now.” Provocative and interesting? Aren’t these adjectives from somebody’s porch furniture catalogue? Madison pauses dramatically. She takes in her surroundings. The Indian restaurants in midtown are always decorated in crimson, like you’re in somebody’s mouth. Here’s the soft palate and here’s the uvula. She looks around at the tassels and the fringe on the draperies.

“Well, we have a couple of projects we’re working on that are certain to get distribution, and, uh, we’re thinking they’re going to get a lot of attention at the awards, all of that. Stars are attached.” She tries to think about what kinds of films a Mormon might like. Maybe he should bankroll some animated films about Native American princesses with hourglass figures or something. Means of Production is always shaking things up. This is what she tells him, using language that is straight out of that brochure that Annabel had printed and which she forgot to bring. She says that Means of Production is about “shaking things up,” about “avoiding the pieties of mainstream cinema,” about the “freshness and energy” of independent cinema, which means directors and actors who are “hungry for expression.” She watches his face while she repeats stuff like this, like she’s a waitress announcing daily specials, recommending sauces that she has never heard of before and mispronouncing the names of exotic mushrooms, and she waits to see the flicker of prejudice or disdain that she figures is hidden in the faces of the fervently religious. Madison associates any kind of religious anything with mental retardation. But when she doesn’t see the prejudice there, she gets bold and she starts to talk about her passion project, her film about Stradivarius, and anyway, it doesn’t have any gratuitous bondage sequences or any transvestites in it, and it has no references to Michel Foucault in it, nor does it heroize the labor movement. She kind of warms to the whole subject, though she doesn’t want to give away that she actually plays the violin. She says, “Have you ever held a violin? The Stradivarius, it’s really beautiful. People cry sometimes, just holding a Stradivarius, and we want to make a movie that feels like that.” And then she tells him about Otis Redding and she tells him about the remake of Citizen Kane from the point of view of the Marion Davies character. He has his arms folded pensively, but then he remembers that he has food, and he pokes at the chicken tikka masala, when he’s not watching her as though he’s waiting for her secret.

“I don’t really know what I’m thinking about with the movie business yet. I’m just learning about it. And what I do when I learn about something is I just take it all in. I’m taking in the film business and I’m thinking about what I might be able to do that no one else has done.”

Madison asks what the Internet start-up business is all about. Because, as her mother has pointed out, it is important to ask questions.

“I’m proceeding on two fronts, really.” The one front, he says, is a company called Rural Electrification, Inc., and the goal of Rural Electrification, Inc., is to put wireless broadband service in the hands of people in rural communities. Most of these people, he says, have to go to libraries to have any access to the Internet at all, but wireless broadband is just around the corner and it would enable farmers to access information while out on their land. For example, if they have a question about soil pH balance, or a question about the water table or the possible effects of dam projects in the West. Wireless broadband would enable the rural culture of the West to feel that it was not lagging behind coastal centers in terms of information management. It would give the rural West a level playing field. That’s one of the projects he tells her about, and the other project concerns privacy and privacy issues. It involves a Web site that could be used as a portal for accessing other Web sites in order to protect consumer privacy, and it would also offer software and information about privacy in an era when more and more of what happens on the Internet is being stored, saved, and sold by large Web merchandisers. “Imagine we were having this conversation on some instant messaging service, you know? That’s not terribly difficult to monitor these days. Say I mentioned that I knew radicals out West, water rights activists, and I happened to know that the government had a computer that monitored users any time the words water rights activist turned up anywhere on the Internet. We’re looking to create services and situations that will protect consumers from these malicious invasions of privacy. And the conjunction of these two projects, Rural Electrification, Inc., and the Privacy Project, will really benefit the lives of people from the part of the country where I was born and raised, a part of the country that cherishes liberty. But, you know, start-ups are sort of a side project for me, really. My father is a rancher. That’s the family business. I’m just here on my passion projects, looking for financing.”

“Backers, that’s what I’m after all the time,” Madison says. “Always hustling for backers.”

“The sad part of it,” Zimri says, emboldened, “is that an era is kind of fading away. An era when the markets were parched for innovation. Four or five years ago, there was this feeling that if you had an idea and you knew how to talk to it, then you were going to monetize that idea. I imagine the same thing is true in the movie business, that it’s really no different from agriculture. You need the seed money and you need to tend to the crops to make sure they flourish. Most people only respect marketing, because the genius of real ideas is threatening to them. The people who come up with ideas are always the ones with the wild eyes.”

She likes watching his mouth. Nothing is sexier than agricultural metaphors, really. They’re so earthy. But it’s sort of irritating to Madison that she can’t instantly figure out what’s wrong with Zimri Enderby, because there must be something wrong besides the button-down collars and that piece of chana saag on his incisor — should she tell him? — and she wishes she could ask about his strange Mormon sheets and his years as a teenage missionary. Because somewhere in there is the concealed gay affair, or the episode of sexual abuse, or the binges at Indian casinos. The secret is in there somewhere and only God knows what it is. Does he have to wear a different ring for each of the seven underage wives?

“Venture capitalists used to think like poets. They were dreamers, they were renegades. And now it’s starting to look like those doors are going to be closed for a long while. And that’s why I’d like to make a leap into content, you know, because content is forever. The world always needs the artists and dreamers. I appreciate the energy on the content end of the Internet story. You know, out West, back when everyone was a rancher or working the fields, there were the stars to navigate from. Men would be out in the fields with the livestock, looking up at the stars. And that was their entertainment. Stars and a campfire crackling in the desert. There are no stars here in the city, except the poets and dreamers and actors and filmmakers, the content providers, so that’s where I want to concentrate my attention.”

Soon after, they swap cards, and she heads for the office, checking in, on the way, with the women of Vanderbilt Publicity to offer an affidavit that, yes, the hair is wheat colored and, no, there doesn’t seem to be any ring on his ring finger and, yes, he is in possession of her number and, yes, he is too perfect to be true, and has he maybe RSVP’d for anything they’re doing, in the way of parties, you know, the next few nights? She would like to know so she can clear her schedule, but she says all these things because the cynic is a lapsed something or other, everybody knows that. How quickly does the lapsed something or other begin to hope? Hope is in robin’s-egg blue, tucked into the leaves of a book, like a Victorian flower. Hope is a perfumed envelope, and she can feel a little bit of a spring in her step. She hates it. She hates the hoper in herself. She notices that she accidentally flipped her hair when saying good-bye to him, and all those girls who flip their hair, blondes, always flipping their hair, what is it with them, is it a neurological thing? It should be in the catalogue of neurological disorders next to Tourette’s, and so it’s best to disconnect the cell phone and go back to the office and submit to Vanessa, who wants to know all about the Mormon guy, is he a Jack Mormon, which apparently means a Mormon who’s not a Mormon, and she asks, of course, “Were you attracted to him? Tell me you didn’t agree to go out on a date or anything, because you just can’t fuck up the business relationships with these guys by going out on dates with them, okay? And what projects did you talk to him about?”