Rick Moody - The Diviners

Suddenly, your coworkers were contemptuous of you. As if the legislation tapped an enmity that had long been gathering. Madison McDowell, for example, the poor little rich girl, frequently offended with insensitive comments about Lois’s smoking. If Lois closed the office door, it was her own business whether her bronchi were sprouting malignancies. It was not Madison’s business. When Lois emerged from her office with the budgetary printouts for Vanessa or the paychecks, when she emerged for whatever stack of envelopes was in her in-box, the women of Means of Production were always staring at her. Oh, there’s the smoker again. Lois began going downstairs.

For a while, Lois stood on Fifth Avenue and smoked. In fair weather and foul. Because she liked looking at the cathedral. Sometimes she ventured into the cathedral after work, where she lit candles for the other girls in the office. It wasn’t that she cared so much about the other girls. But she liked the long wooden matchsticks, the deep red cups in which the candles flickered. In the distance, clericals in vestments scurried about. Lois had been raised on Long Island and had gone to Pace, not to some fancy school. It didn’t mean that she didn’t have any feelings. She did her job, and she would bake a chocolate cake from a mix if it was someone’s birthday. She made a cake for Annabel’s birthday. That was just a couple of months ago. Devil’s food cake. Lois didn’t understand why no one expected a kindly gesture from her. She was full of polite and well-meaning thoughts. Annabel was a good kid, and Lois wanted to do the right thing.

One day, she’s out there smoking, and this fellow is smoking alongside her, and he’s smoking a foreign kind of cigarette. It’s black and it has gold foil around the filter. There’s a sensual manner to his smoking. Like with smokers of old. He’s a big man; Lois would say he is a stout man, even. He has a mustache, thinning hair. Mirror sunglasses. And the foreign cigarettes. She doesn’t mind admitting it: She was a little boy crazy back in her day. So Lois goes straight up to the stout man with the foreign cigarettes and she asks, “What kind of cigarette you have there?” She’s never picked a guy up before, even though she was a little boy crazy, but maybe now she is going to do it, because there’s a first time for everything. Arnie, that’s his name, replies with the brand of the cigarette, some brand she can’t remember. He offers her one. Remember that stretch in summer where all it did was rain? She smoked the black cigarette in the drizzle, and what it made her feel was light-headed.

Or maybe it was Arnie who made her light-headed. Those foreign cigarettes were more potent, they were nicotine delivery systems, like the politicians said, and so she was dizzy, but there was also the stout man, Arnie. A little girl was carrying past a brace of balloons, she remembers, and Lois thought, I’m going to see this man again. The balloons prove it. And she planned to take her break the next day at the exact same time, which was 11:14. Arnie wasn’t there the next day, with his foreign cigarettes, but the day after that he was, and soon they were talking about many things.

Arnie grew up in Forest Hills. Lois grew up in Great Neck. They were from the same part of the world and they had common interests. Horror movies, for example. They had both seen a whole bunch of horror movies. Of course, Lois was working for this company that made movies, but she didn’t think she had seen more than one or two of the movies they made at her company. Means of Production movies were nonsense, really. They were in English, but they could have been from Timbuktu for all Lois cared. Arnie liked Nightmare on Elm Street, those sorts of things. When he talked about teenagers getting hacked up on-screen, he cackled in a nervous way that was endearing, as though he didn’t expect anyone to feel likewise, but he couldn’t stop himself.

Soon there was a good crew of them out there, a shifting constituency, a society of smokers facing the promenade and the ice-skating rink. Mostly secretaries, but occasionally there would be a middle-management fellow in his bow tie, or maybe the prim and proper office manageress in midcalf skirt and square-heeled pumps. They were all out there, and they were the society of the medically uninsurable. Laughing and gossiping and complaining. They discussed going bowling on the weekends. They were all going to go bowling one day, to the lanes in the bus terminal. But you took one look at Arnie, you’d see he hadn’t done any bowling in years. If he tried to go bowling or do yard work, well then he was going to have an aneurysm, because all he did was smoke and come up with plans for his business. He was a smoker and he did all his best thinking while flourishing a Gitane or a Dunhill.

Though the smokers were warm and supportive, though theirs was a caring environment, it was months before Lois realized that Arnie had once been an accountant. Isn’t that amazing! She can still remember how it came up, that day when Arnie was stubbing out one of his cigarettes and plunging the butt into the stylish metallic receptacle there. “What is it that you do, Lois?” She thought he’d never ask, but now he had, and she told him, because she liked it when people asked a question of her. He said, “I’m a consultant, myself. I do some other things on the side. I’m an innovator, I guess that’s what you’d call me.”

He’d been with a consultant division at one of the Big Five firms. He got hired onto the teams that went into large-cap companies and he advised the companies on public offerings, portfolio review, acquisitions, all kinds of things, and then he explained the angles from his unique vantage point, which was the vantage point of a guy with a proven track record who worked at one of the Big Five firms. What Arnie liked to say was there was nothing he wouldn’t do for the client, the client was number one, “Anything within the bounds of law and several things without.” That’s what he liked to say, and then he would give Lois this look.

They went to one of those new horror movies where all the jokes are about other horror movies. The homely kid knows he’s going to get killed first because he’s seen it all before in other horror movies. Arnie was explaining to her, before the trailers, how he’d done anything within the bounds of law and several things without, and he was telling her not to repeat any of this because if anyone found out, Arnie said, “I’d have to kill you.” After the movie he asked, “Do you think that serial killers really kill pets and all that?” It was sort of unsettling, Lois thought, but a little endearing at the same time. “They’re always saying this kind of thing. The serial killers, when they’re kids, supposedly they kill other people’s pets. They don’t feel any remorse.” He laughed nervously.

She said, “So you’re a serial killer now?”

That’s not what he meant at all! Arnie said. “But if someone wanted me to play one in a movie, I think I’d be good at it.”

People thought she could get them parts in movies. They offered up their thespian moves, their high school dramatic credentials, every day of the week, but she didn’t pay any attention, and especially not when Arnie said what he said. Maybe she had become light-headed because she’d started smoking his foreign cigarettes. She was neglecting things at the office or just barely getting the work done but not in any particularly satisfying way. She was smoking foreign cigarettes and going out for Kahlua and milk at Hank’s Franks with Arnie from Forest Hills. He knew the accountant for the Ramones. He had a summer rental down the shore. A weekend at Atlantic City was a good thing. At Hank’s Franks, Arnie remarked that a man could certainly find that he had become devoted to a woman. That’s what he said. And she replied, “Don’t try to flatter me, Arnie. I know who I am.” Who she was was a plain middle-aged woman without a husband, who didn’t expect flattery because if she did, she would have got frustrated a long time ago. “I live a quiet life and I stay home in my neighborhood and I don’t wait around for anyone.” She was as serious as she’d ever been because even if the society of smokers, with its daily menu of humor and gossip, was never serious, it didn’t mean that Lois couldn’t be.