Rick Moody - The Diviners

Vanessa means to work.

First, the cat must be fed. The cat comes howling to the bed where Vanessa is still lying, where she is plotting. At first she ignores the cat. She’s making plans, and she’s listening to news reports, and she is considering options relating specifically to the miniseries entitled The Diviners. Who knows if this mythology of diviners is legitimate? thinks Vanessa, lying in bed while Dade County performs its convulsions. The cat howls. The women of her office, her acquaintances in the business of independent film production wouldn’t believe that Vanessa Meandro is a worrier, but there are things that they don’t need to know; they don’t know about the telephone conversation with her mother last night, nor about her mother’s fevered whisperings. “I was just sitting. . in the lounge and thinking, and I was hearing. . things. . about some kind of, I don’t know, sort of a musician. . some kind of African American man, and he’s trying to get a part in the. . in that thing. . I heard all about it. I heard all about a man having a conversation with. . what’s her name, in the office there. . promising him that if he could help to arrange financing. . well, I didn’t understand all of it. . had to do with some money things, with financing. . give him some consideration for a part. .”

Vanessa said: “Are you kidding? You mean that guy, what’s his name? Mercurio? Right? The hip-hop guy? The guy with his own line of beauty products.”

“I don’t know anything about beauty products. . might have said something. . men’s jogging outfits.”

“Well, what else did he say?”

“That he wanted. . that he felt that he. . could really do right. . needed to break into acting. . getting in touch with the part of him that wanted to act. . and he could definitely put Madison in touch with people; I don’t know. . It gave me a headache.”

“Was there anything else?” Vanessa asked about the cellular telephone call that her mother imagined she had overheard in the adult psychiatric ward of the hospital in Park Slope while the other residents of the ward were watching reruns of situation comedies.

“Doughnuts.”

“What kind of doughnuts?”

“I think they were mentioning Krispy Kreme doughnuts.”

“Are you sure? Are you sure this telephone call had something to do with Krispy Kreme doughnuts? Mom, I need to know.”

“Telling you what I heard. . and it was giving me a splitting headache. . and if you don’t want to hear it. . that’s your prerogative to believe that. . You’re going to believe what you’re going to believe because you never had a tablespoon of respect. They were watching television in the lounge, and I was overhearing a telephone call between those. . between Madison from the office and some black man. . they were talking about financing. . and then they were talking about doughnuts.”

“Were they talking about how I brought in doughnuts to the office the other day, Mom? Was that what they were saying?”

“They were talking about money. . they were talking about getting money from the doughnut company. Somehow the future hinged on doughnuts.”

“You’re kidding me, Mom.”

The conversation stalled. After reminding her mother how much she was loved, Vanessa demanded that Rosa Elisabetta put her through to whichever official was attending on the ward at this hour. Was the doctor still on call? No, the doctor was gone and would not be back until Monday, because even the doctors had to have breaks from the delusions of the patients in the ward, which meant that there was no one in authority to whom Vanessa Meandro might speak. Still, Vanessa asked her mom if she could put the supervising nurse on the phone. Her mother pointed out that, unfortunately, the nurses would not speak into the pay phone on the ward. This was against ward policy. After all, how did they know if she was really the daughter of Rosa Elisabetta Meandro? She could just as easily be a drug dealer or other codependent person. Vanessa Meandro gently bade her mother farewell, after which she got the hospital information number from directory assistance.

So the first thing Vanessa does on this particular Saturday is to begin, from bed, berating various hospital operators with threats and abuses, allusions to how these people are all going to be brought up on a variety of malpractice charges, until at last she connects with the number for the ward in which her mother is warehoused. The nurse on duty answers. Vanessa has barely completed the recitation of biographical information before she moves into the argument phase.

“Do you guys realize that my mother believes that she’s receiving telephone calls inside her skull?”

The shades are drawn in Vanessa’s room, and the cat is batting at her with a request of some kind. Some eerie electronic music is playing because the clock radio is tuned to the Columbia University station. The sound is muffled behind the stacks of unread screenplays towering around it.

“I’m not allowed to give information relating to our patients over the phone.”

“You’d better rethink that policy, because last night I had a conversation with my mother that went on almost ten minutes in which she sounded lucid to me, except for the news about the telephone calls she’s receiving in her head. Or in her dental fillings. Or wherever they’re coming from. If you’re not talking to me about it, you should at least be talking to whoever the consulting physician is over there. I want it on record that my mother needs to be getting better care for her delusions. She wasn’t floridly psychotic when she checked herself in on Wednesday.”

“Sometimes patients —”

“She had a drinking problem. I can’t argue with you about that part. But she wasn’t hearing voices. And now she’s hearing the voices of people from my office talking to her. You’ve got to have some kind of medication for this stuff, right? I mean, haven’t there been big advances in these medications? Can’t you treat a complaint like this? I want to know first thing Monday —”

The nurse says something noncommittal about passing on the information. When the MD shows up on Monday, the information will be passed on. The nurse has become as silky in her delivery as a game show host hustling off a losing contestant. Requests for information need to be met with a rhetoric of delay. Requests for information are not the responsibility of this single party, a nurse-practitioner with two kids left behind at her sister’s house for the day. Et cetera.

Vanessa rises and pads into the kitchen in her robe, feeds the cat, and then she calls Madison because she knows that Madison will have been out until four. It is good to wake Madison to remind her of the importance of the chain of command. Madison should be attempting to stay one step ahead of Vanessa on all things. Madison should wake with a start, worrying about Vanessa. Madison should be able to leap tall buildings; Madison should be able to accept telephone calls on a Saturday, crack of dawn, despite three or four hours of sleep. So Vanessa dials the number, gets the machine, and while scooping the bonbons of cat shit out of the box, she says, “I heard you offered Mercurio a role in The Diviners without running it by me. Which is totally fucking unacceptable. And I understand you’re in conversation with Krispy Kreme for financing. And that’s not going to work yet, either. You’re supposed to keep me informed of this stuff. Call me as soon as you’re up.”

Having harassed Madison, she begins to feel a little better. She feels as though she might be able to raise the blinds or look in the mirror at her straw hair, her bad dye job, the rings around her eyes. But having come to this conclusion, she instead returns to the bedroom to locate her personal digital assistant, which lies on the far side of her queen-size mattress, as though she were in a long-term relationship with it. She starts at A with the stylus and she heads through the alphabet, looking for people she can call on business matters. When she gets to Annabel Duffy, she takes up the phone again and leaves a message with Annabel, who never answers. “Hi, I’m wondering why we haven’t solved this intern problem yet. I want to have an intern by next Friday because we’re getting behind. We need some people we can get working on these little tasks. Get some names. I don’t care where you get them from. Just get some people in. If we’re going to be in production on this miniseries, we need more people. We’re going to be flying back and forth to the coast, we’re going to be on location, and I don’t trust Madison to be looking after this issue, so get on it.”