Rick Moody - The Diviners

Arnie said, “Don’t make me have to explain it.”

“Don’t make you explain what?”

He said maybe he was falling hard. It should have been in a nicer place than Hank’s Franks. Because Hank’s Franks was just what it sounded like, a place where the entrées were wrapped in tinfoil, where there were always young men at the bar whose faces should not have been so crimson. Dog-faced young entrepreneurs who came from nothing, who tried drunkenly to make it across the avenue to the bus terminal and instead did the face plant in front of a hydrant. Miracle a taxi had not backed over them. When they woke, their wallets would be gone. That’s the kind of place where Lois first heard sentimental things from the mouth of Arnie Lovitz. When she was a teenager, no one ever said they cared, and even when she lost her virginity to the older brother of a friend on the girls’ basketball team, this older brother hadn’t said he cared, and he’d seemed uncomfortable when he passed her on the street after that. She hadn’t been nervous, she liked it, the thing they had done, and she didn’t care if that boy, Carl, loved her, because what she wanted was life’s experiences, which included taking your clothes off. Still, it would have been nicer to hear that you were loved in a museum, in front of a beautiful painting that showed a princess in a diaphanous robe, pregnant and standing with her soon-to-be prince of the realm. That would be a nice place to be told that you were loved. But this was Hank’s Franks. She needed to work fast.

The scene changes to a hotel out by the airport in Queens, because that was the kind of hotel that they could afford, if they were being fiscally sensible. Lois could see that Arnie was flush temporarily with his good fortune. He was proud of his love. The smokers of the promenade, watching the skaters go around and around, would have this bit of gossip to embellish soon enough. The smokers would be like hummingbirds over nectar. They would edit the story of Arnie and Lois into a little movie for the consumption of future smokers, Arnie’s tie winched over his head without being unknotted, flung onto the grimy wall-to-wall, his suit coat and his pants, pinstripes, cast onto the floor as if they were the body of a murder victim. And how about this, the two of them in the shower, two accountants, neither of them exactly thin and neither of them exactly beautiful, and here was her nipple, and she was presenting it as if it were a delectable item, and here were his lips upon it, and if they weren’t the most beautiful people God had ever put on the planet, or the most beautiful people to walk up and down the promenade to the ice-skating rink, at least they were two people in a cheap motel who could believe in this moment of love as much as anyone who ever believed in any romantic encounter. Reflections in the mirror in the bathroom were a little humbling, but soon the water vapor on the mirror made them as indistinct as any movie lovers; she wanted to laugh, it all made her so giddy, as he was putting his arms around her, because he had these gigantic arms and he was crushing her, naked in the shower, and she didn’t know that any man could fit his arms around her. It made her feel like a little girl. Soon the lights came up on the lovers on the couch, just like that, and she was the one saying that she would do anything he wanted her to do, all he had to do was to tell her, just say the words, and she would be whatever kind of lover he wanted her to be on this night, she swore it, and she believed she could be this lover, believed it without any reservation, in the motel near the LaGuardia Airport, and because of her belief no lover was any better. Arnie was stammering, throbbing with his nervousness, saying that he wanted that one thing that all men were always seeming as if they wanted, or at least that’s what she’d heard back when. It was a long time ago, a long time since she put that part of a man in her mouth, and she didn’t know if she could do it in a way that would be pleasurable for him because she wasn’t very experienced, even if she was a genius at believing. She thought that gentleness was the thing. If you treated this homely part of a body as though it were a beautiful little hatchling, no matter who it belonged to, then that person and that body would be stretched out before you like a little gossamer thread of heaven. So she treated the particular part of Arnie’s body, which was actually kind of small, as though reverence was invented for it. There was an awful lot of sadness in reverence, but that was what was good about reverence, that it was not easy. It was performed with a recognition of the absence of perfection in the world, closing in on midnight. Many things had already happened that day, and Arnie was starting to thrash around, and the thrashing said that this life was not as before, and she was about to taste bittersweet dignity in her mouth, a little bit of dignity that was coming out of Arnie Lovitz for the first time, and it was salty like tears, and also it tasted a little like bleach, bleach and tears. Arnie was being made into a good man, and Lois was being made into a tramp with a good heart at the same time. That’s how she felt about it; she felt that she was not sure. All she knew was that in the movies, sex was supposed to be excellent and you heard God’s voice, or else it was supposed to be sinful and you got an ice pick in the temple when the marauder appeared in the margin of the shot. But it was just two people on a banquette in a motel. Arnie started crying after he came.

He said, “Lois, I have to tell you something. I know we don’t know each other all that well, but I feel like I have to tell you just the same.”

She said, wiping off her chin, “Don’t you give me any bad news now. I don’t do this kind of thing very often, and it is not fair to give me any bad news right now, because I just acted like I was a porn star. So don’t give me any bad news.”

What he said was that he was an embezzler. It took a good thirty seconds for the information to sink in.

“You’re a what?”

“I’m an embezzler,” Arnie said. “Or I have been. I’ve been an embezzler, a thief. And God help me.”

If she were going to reach a preliminary conclusion, a snap judgment, her conclusion would have been that every good thing contains its opposite. The foul thing is all mixed up with the fair thing, they’re next-door neighbors, and any time you have a good afternoon, you can bet your last dollar that some nightmare is next on your schedule. You feel warm feelings for a person, and right behind those warm feelings will be a big challenge.

What Arnie did, apparently, was set up these fictitious corporations on these islands in the Caribbean. It was just one scam at first, one fictitious subsidiary for one particular corporation, except that no one knew that it was a wholly owned subsidiary and that it didn’t even exist. No one knew. There was no office in the Cayman Islands with a gently rotating ceiling fan and a rack of mainframes and an excellent view of that blue green water. The wholly owned subsidiary was Arnie’s creation, on paper and nowhere else, and it was so successful that soon he was setting up a second one. In this second instance, he had the parent company selling portions of itself to a subsidiary corporation and booking the sale as income and using the sale proceeds to set up another subsidiary on these islands in the Caribbean, on an island called St. Jude, appropriately enough, an island that didn’t even exist. He had even started making up geography now, in addition to office buildings. And this wholly owned subsidiary was buying and trading futures, using derivatives and other fiscal transactions that Lois didn’t understand because she had always worked for small arts-related organizations.