Rick Moody - The Diviners

Maximum friction between individuals. Instability between the players. Means of Production needs to have people competing in the same tasks. Fraternal rivalries. Catfights. The players need to be looking over their shoulders suspiciously, which is why it is so appropriate to have Thaddeus Griffin around, a black hole sucking in the radiant energy emanating from these talented women. They need to be able to fend him off; they need the skill, the power. Same thing with Ranjeet, although what Ranjeet also represents for Means of Production is an implied critique, he says, of Occidental meaning systems. The Occidental meaning system is looking toward equations, see, as though the equation is the perfect semantic unit for large organizations, he says, and this is true in the movies and it’s true in the business practices of an operation like Means of Production. On the other hand, maybe what Ranjeet stands for is an Asian system of meaning, which is more like non-euclidean geometry, where the parallel lines are actually circles; this is the theory of Ranjeet, this is the way in which Ranjeet is going to change what they’re doing, so that they are working on a variety of approaches to The Diviners, not just particular Occidental context-oriented approaches, but instead a variety of possible approaches to story and structure. As he says, this is more likely to yield fruit.

It’s her greatest moment, the moment of persuasion. It’s the thing she was born to do. She can feel it the way other people can feel they are ready to get into bed with someone. Other people feel desire and they go out into the dappled sunlight of the park and they compose sestinas using difficult-to-rhyme words like silvery, and they experience love, which is that feeling when you care more about the welfare of a person than you care about the sunlight. Maybe Vanessa has felt that or, lying in bed with the blinds drawn, maybe she thinks she has felt that for her mother, certain times when she carted her mother, passed out, from the floor of her living room to her bed. Maybe in that moment, she felt something like this epic love of poetry. Caritas. For example, there was the time that her mother was meant to show the top-floor apartment to this couple. She remembers this vividly. April, maybe, two or three years ago, a Saturday like this Saturday. Vanessa was trying to make use of the new stepping machine that she’d ordered from an infomercial, and she intended to spend half an hour on it every day. She’s on the stepping machine, weeping and pretending to ski. The bell rings downstairs, and she hopes this couple isn’t an interracial couple, because there was this one interracial couple, and her mother was so rude to them that she couldn’t believe it. She tried to talk to her mother about it once, and her mother shouted Vanessa down. The bell rings, and then the bell rings again, and the bell rings a third time. The third ringing of the bell is not good, and so she goes downstairs, wearing her stretchy gym clothes. She’s lost eight pounds, and yet she’s been weeping over the improbability of losing weight, and she goes downstairs, and here’s this nice interracial couple.

The girl is light skinned and maybe part Hispanic or something. Beautiful and tall and thin, and the guy is maybe Jewish. He has the charm of an advertising guy. They are standing on the stoop, and Vanessa says, “Let’s go have a look.” She’s on her best behavior. And she takes them up to the top floor, and they are amazed at the view. They really like the brick, they like the floors, they like the old gas lamp out front. And what they probably really like is that Vanessa does not give a shit what color they are as long as they don’t make too much noise and pay their rent in a timely fashion. But on the way back down the stairs, she says, “Let’s just take a quick look and see if my mother is home, because she likes to be a part of this process.”

She’s not sure why she did it. It was not a good sign when the doorbell tolled unanswered three times. The appointment had been agreed upon. Like many people with problems, Vanessa’s mother was fanatical about her few appointments. She worried about them for days in advance. It was not a good sign when the bell rang and Rosa Elisabetta did not answer it. Nevertheless, Vanessa unlocked the door on the ground floor, after explaining that they should feel free to use the garden in the backyard, and then, as the door swung in, she found her mother passed out on the floor of the living room, arms flung wide as if in preparation for some fervent embrace, one leg of her Kmart double-knit trousers scrunched up enough to reveal a pink sock. The cat was sitting on top of her mother’s stomach.

“Maybe we’d better come back,” Vanessa said, giggling madly.

“Is she okay?” the woman asked.

“Sure,” Vanessa said. “The only problem here is the socks.”

More nervous laughter. Then there was a pause in the banter between landlord and lessees in the stairwell. And then the adman said: “We still really like the apartment. We’d like to sign the agreement.”

She gave them the lease on the spot. They had probably seen much worse, in this challenging real estate environment. The lease was on top of the stack of papers on her mother’s kitchen table, along with every other legal piece of paper she had ever needed in her life, including her will, her divorce agreement, and a suit filed against the City of New York for restrictive ballot requirements for third-party candidates in local elections. The three of them stood in the kitchen, looking at the lease agreement, while her mother snored in the center of the living-room floor. The renters had the paperwork notarized and returned, with the check, before Rosa woke.

That was a kind of love. There is love, and there is persuasion, and these are two of the colors of the universe. There is the postmodern Orientalism of Vanessa’s strategy, via Ranjeet, which is a strategy of multiple fronts, all operating simultaneously. The flow chart. She’s going through the scrolling alphabetical entries of her personal digital assistant, through its trove of names, Katzenberg and Meyer and Case and Bronfman and Brokaw, the telephone numbers that she has pried loose over the years, as if these telephone numbers were some kind of secret code. She uses the numbers rarely; she just covets them, keeps them in reserve. But on this wasteland of a Saturday, she is feeling that perhaps the moment has finally come. She can feel it, it’s an automatic function, a reflex, and what is more true than the expression of a reflex?

She dials the cell phone number of Jeffrey Maiser, senior vice president of network programming at UBC, the fledgling network built of affiliates in the hinterlands. UBC, network of the kids, the network with lots of shows for teenagers featuring werewolves and invisible children, werewolves dealing with water-weight gain and male-pattern baldness, and, more recently, a rash of enhanced-reality programs, such as the very successful American Spy. Jeffrey Maiser has been linked, and this is always how they put it in the relevant publications, with a certain brainless, one-named strumpet called Lacey. A singer, if you can call her that. For whom he is now acting as Svengali, according to the relevant publications. Jeffrey Maiser is working on a deal for a half-hour enhanced-reality program in which the one-named strumpet is to lie around on casual furniture such as beanbag chairs and waterbeds with her friends, listening to songs and watching videos. They will also rate various boys, hosts of video programs, members of various bands, and so forth. Jeffrey Maiser is developing this, according to the relevant publications, and he is also attempting to secure dramatic roles for Lacey, and this will be the fulcrum of the pitch that is even now beginning to form, like a boil, in Vanessa. Vanessa needs to tell the story of The Diviners so badly that resistance to it is making her irritable. Yet waiting will sharpen its edges. She goes into the kitchen, where there are the makings of a particularly good egg sandwich.