Rick Moody - The Diviners

That was maybe twelve weeks ago. And in those weeks, during which Vanessa got involved in a fight to the death with the director and editor of Cauldron of Belief, and during which the market began its unmistakable downward spiral, Lois felt like a robin picking worms from the lawn of life. She was happy, and even her neighbors in Astoria remarked on how happy she seemed. It was a good feeling at first, because she could understand Arnie now, as she was a fellow embezzler, and she would try to comfort him, and she could take him out to see the play-offs at Shea featuring his beloved Al Leiter, and in this way Arnie could try to get comfortable with the idea that men in trench coats weren’t following him each and every day. Lois felt happy because she was now charging administrative expenses to various French people that were nonetheless going straight into the coffers of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, twice a month, to the tune of about six thousand dollars, bottom line.

It had been a good fiscal quarter for Means of Production. Or at least for Lois. It was all good until she got the call from Arnie in late October. One of the online brokerage firms that Arnie used was calling in some short positions. Shorts were a satisfying way of seeing the world. He loved looking for companies that were fraudulent. It was the fraud in him that loved thinking about all his fellow frauds. She’d go over to his apartment in Yonkers, and he’d be calling up reporters, telling them that some company called Primadon or something was intimidating its wholesalers. He’d be smoking and laughing about the whole thing. Until this particular call came. He needed to cover this short, on Interstate Mortuary Services, a large-scale, publicly traded mortuary company that offered family burial plans at bargain rates and shipping across state lines, but which had not even checked the federal statutes on interstate shipping of caskets and dead bodies. A great company for Arnie. But apparently they were about to be bought out in a major deal.

“Lois,” he said, “I don’t want to put you through this.”

Living with Arnie was like plugging the dike of truth. You got one set of holes plugged, but you could see the tempest-tossed sea breaking through someplace else. Still, Lois and Arnie were an item now, and Lois didn’t give up easily. That’s just not what the women of the extended DiNunzio clan did. They were stick-around girls. They were loyal and they were tough. She picked up a towel from the floor of his mildewy bathroom. She carried it to the hamper in the closet. She fetched spray-on bleach.

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I’m telling you the truth.”

“I’ve heard that one before.”

Arnie said, “Just look at me.” And here he gestured at MSNBC on the cable television and the scrolling of stock prices as though the scrolling of prices were somehow identical with him.

For a moment she was impatient: “Arnie, act like you can do something about your predicament. Go out there and make fifty thousand dollars somehow, and show me and the world how you can do it. People have overcome a lot worse things. People who know less than you do. Be yourself and do the thing you can do. Create wealth!”

Lois felt sort of hollow even as she was saying the words. If you tipped over a rock and looked for chicanery and betrayal, you’d find these things under every rock. In every closet there was fraudulence secreted away, next to the frilly dresses. Fraudulence was there. Betrayal was there. And fraudulence was always in greatest supply where righteousness camped out. Arnie agreed with her sentiment. He agreed that he was going to try, as he always said, he was going to try to find the money in some legitimate way, like by selling cars or something, something he could do with his bounteous charm.

Which brings us up to date. Bad news brings us up to the Friday after the election, Friday, the tenth, the day that Lois DiNunzio, the Robin Hood of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, has decided to loot her employer, an independent production company known as Means of Production, of sixty-three thousand dollars, in order to cover the losses of her fiancé, who is posing as a day trader under an assumed name — the name of a deceased brother — so as not to attract the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, nor the Securities Exchange Commission, which may or may not now be looking into the matter of a certain falsely constructed subsidiary of a holding company owned chiefly by several prominent investors from Salt Lake City, whose former accountant and consultant was one Arnie Lovitz. Lois has not told Arnie she is doing this, looting the sixty-three thousand dollars, nor has she told anyone else. She is constructing fraudulent payments to some real publicists, these publicists being known as the Vanderbilt girls, who are working to get the name of a motion picture, Cauldron of Belief, into the paper, and she is billing this sixty-three thousand dollars as a series of publicity-related expenses on a series of bills she is submitting to the American distributor of the film, which isn’t even finished, and after she submits the bill and writes the check to Arnie’s all-but-liquidated consulting business, Lovitz Offshore Consulting, she will walk out of the Means of Production offices, and she will get in a used Honda Civic with a hundred and forty thousand miles on it, and she will tell her fiancé that they are going to Arizona, and then they will begin to drive, spending, she calculates, the first night in the Toledo area, where she has already researched a really good place for them to eat dinner, a family restaurant. After that, they will stop at the first mall in the area that’s showing one of the season’s slasher flicks.

The happy couples with their freshly cut lilies from the flower district; the pickup soccer players who never pass the ball; the weekend barbecue enthusiasts with their George Foreman barbecue products, their squeezable ketchup bottles, their chef’s hats; the park bench romancers, mashing their chapped lips together; the carp feeders in the botanical gardens, mallards clustering before them awaiting the stale white bread, Vanessa has contempt for them all. The life-loving weenie-roasting citizens of Saturdays. Likewise, all persons who would relentlessly display their knowledge of the chad. The plural of the word chad is actually chad. Must the chad be punched out in at least two corners? Two corners or three corners or four corners? Or perhaps one single corner alone? Must you be able to see light around a chad in order for that chad to indicate intention? This is Saturday, and somewhere in a county down near the Gulf of Mexico in humid weather, members of the county board of elections are toiling, as they have been toiling since Tuesday. There are three members of the board of elections in a school gymnasium, sports mascots painted on the walls, and they are observed in their efforts by a scoundrel from each of the political parties, likewise by scoundrels of the press. The party operatives are objecting yet again. Can light be seen around the chad? Is this chad a pregnant chad? Or is this a dimpled chad? Either way, the chad is not a legitimate chad, as a pregnant or dimpled chad does not indicate a legitimate vote. This is a nonvote or this is an undervote, depending on the point of view of the party operative making the argument. This is the news on Saturday. The light of the coastal resorts is visible around the indeterminate and partially punched-out chad, pastels of Floridian light, bleached and salt scoured. Yes, the chad exhibits intention, is perhaps pregnant with intention, and so the members of the board of elections in this county near to the Gulf of Mexico, in the tail end of hurricane season, are working furiously, their eyes itchy and red. Vanessa is not going to the farmers’ market to banter with the cheese ladies who hawk their excrescences, nor is she going to the dry cleaner’s to speak with the beautiful Korean girl who has changed the color of her hair for the fourth time in three weeks.