Rick Moody - The Diviners

She likes interior decorating that looks as though it has been shipped over from Tuscany stone by stone. And thus there are real tiles in her bathroom and her kitchen, and faux-marble counters, and she has up-to-date culinary machines in industrial sizes. Seltzer is delivered to the house. The cat, having eaten, is following her around the kitchen, making a figure eight around her ankles, just in case a saucer of milk should appear beside the seltzer bottles in the pantry. The phone is still clamped between Vanessa’s shoulder and ear. And before she can connect to Maiser’s line she is interrupted by the Morse code of call waiting.

“Oh, hi.” Particularly unhappy at the sound of Vic Freese’s voice. “Go away. Not you. The cat. I’m making an egg sandwich. Fresh basil. No, Vic, I haven’t done anything. Sorry you had to stumble on it in the way you did. The parties responsible have been terminated. No, Vic. No. I haven’t done much in the way of casting. Hang on a second, I have to beat the eggs.”

For the sake of the pause. She looks out the window. The day is sunny, she notices abruptly. There are mutable shadows on the flagstone behind the house.

“Yeah, I thought of her, too. Are you saying that she might be willing. .? But isn’t she. . Yeah, that’s what I heard. Guy in the Diamond District? So she’s willing to come back for a big part? That’s of some interest. No, no, I’m happy to do the pitching myself. I don’t want to turn over the story to you. I don’t want to turn anything over to you, no. What about the guys. . You what? You already, no, I’d really appreciate if we could keep this between us. We’re working on writers. Yeah, yeah. A-list all the way. A-list. Of course. You think we’d be having this conversation if I hadn’t? Yeah, we contacted the romance novelist lady. Okay, okay. How is your family? Well, yeah. That’s great. Glad to hear it. Yep. Bye.”

Vic Freese and his nervousness are like fuel. She can put it off no longer. Doesn’t matter if the egg sandwich is not yet done. Doesn’t matter if it’s not even eight o’clock on the West Coast; nothing matters except the pressure of language, the pressure to use language to create meaning where there was none before. Here is a void of meaning and potential that will be filled in the creation of art and value. As a producer, Vanessa Meandro was born to do this. The rest of the particulars of her job, line-producer responsibilities, casting consultant, location scout, these are of no interest to her. Seeing the film through the editing and the launch. She can do these things, but without enthusiasm. She has some of the lukewarm yolk in her mouth and some of it on her chin, and she holds an imperial blue cloth napkin, and she is ready to make the pitch. What she does is cram a big bite of the sandwich into her mouth, and she dials the cellular number of Jeffrey Maiser again, and she chokes on a mass of egg sandwich, and the phone connects, and never was there a longer silence than at the advent of Jeffrey Maiser, and in the silence, as in all such silences, Vanessa briefly regrets her ill humor with her family and friends, and thinks that if this deal works, she will attempt to calm down, she will attempt to find a way to do better, and she will begin to eat vegan entrées only, and she will look in on her mom more often, and she will invite friends out to dinner, and she will keep better track of money; if this deal will go through, she’ll do all those things, she swears —

“Mr. Maiser?”

A grunt of assent.

“Vanessa Meandro here. With Means of Production? We’re making the Otis Redding biopic with Wonderment? That the, uh, that the studio over there is. .? Right, that’s the one. I’m calling today, Mr. Maiser, about something else entirely. I’m calling today about thirst. That’s right. Thirst. I know it’s a broad topic, but it’s an urgent topic, whether you know it or not, a topic that is at the heart of American entertainment today. I’m a collector, Mr. Maiser, that’s the first thing I want to explain to you, and what I collect, Mr. Maiser, are Moroccan pitchers. That’s right. We at Means of Production are very serious about our Moroccan pitchers. They’re made from a certain kind of clay, an earthenware clay, which is high in iron oxide, higher than any other earthenware clay, a clay that matures best in bonfire temperatures. Interestingly, this clay is really only found in Casablanca, Mr. Maiser. They perfected the art of the pitcher in Casablanca and Tangiers in the eleventh century, at a time when Christian and Islamic and Jewish influences in the area were at their peak. All these sects, Mr. Maiser, coexisting under the reign of one Ibn Tachafine, the founder of Marrakech.

“What I’m saying is that at the center of this bygone landscape was the notion of thirst, Mr. Maiser, and therefore at the center of this meeting of these faiths I’ve mentioned is the idea of thirst. You see it in the eleventh-century mystical texts of Alp Aslan, who conquered Byzantium and united the sultanates of Islam, Mr. Maiser. He understood the centrality of the pitcher and of Moroccan clay to this history of the pitcher. Think about it. You have these three faiths in the desert, in the lone and level sands, Mr. Maiser, all coming out of the compact between Abraham and his god. Abraham in the desert, desperate and thirsty, attempting to be blameless in the eyes of his god. Abraham taking his son to the killing place, willing to die of thirst, willing to sacrifice his son. Each of these peoples, Mr. Maiser, Christian, Jew, and Muslim, comes from this sort of desert, the wilderness. Which reminds me, of course, of the line from the work of Bob Dylan, Where you want this killing done? Are you familiar with the recordings of Bob Dylan, Mr. Maiser?”

A noncommittal groan, but Vanessa will not admit it into the terms of the discussion —

“If you’re familiar with the recordings of Bob Dylan, then you are familiar with the Abrahamic faith and you are familiar with Moroccan pitchers, because in the deep space of that fish-eye photograph of Bob Dylan, next to the bellows by the fireplace, I’m speaking, of course, of Bringing It All Back Home here, you’ll see one of the very Moroccan pitchers I’m describing, painted white. It’s hard to see it in the image at first, a pitcher in which were poured many days of hard rain. The pitcher is the leitmotif in the project I’m proposing, Mr. Maiser, and what I’d like to argue is that the pitcher is the perfect narrative representation of the thirst of the mass television audience. And when I speak of thirst and a mass television audience, Mr. Maiser, I mean a mass television audience, I mean hundreds of millions, I mean the kind of audience that doesn’t know how thirsty it is until the pitcher full of meaning is presented to it. Just think how many kinds of thirst there are in America right now, Mr. Maiser. There is the thirst of the fundamentalists in the southern part of the nation. Tired of feeling like the government and the media elites of the Northeast and the West Coast are dictating to them the terms of their culture. There are voices rising up from this part of the world, the talk radio guys and their apologists, rising up thirsty for meaning. They want a sort of millennialist vision, they want a reconstituted Jesus strolling down Fifth Avenue, laying waste to readers of the New York Times. And the project I’m describing, Mr. Maiser, will not disappoint them because it deals with ancient times and the possibility for apocalypse. What about Mormon viewers, adherents of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? They are out there in the Great Salt Lake, on the salt flats, they have journeyed a thousand miles and created mythologies about the American Indians, the twelve tribes of American Indians, and they are thirsty, regionally, topographically, and they desire a clearly prophetic voice, a chaste and honorable prophetic voice, and this project that I’m proposing does this exactly, Mr. Maiser, when it depicts the Mormon exodus and, later, the founding of Las Vegas. The project delivers a story that the Southern Baptist Leadership Conference can get behind, since there are no homosexuals in it and no abortion providers, and it delivers a story that the Mormon elders can get behind, and the yogis and Buddhists of California; what could be more appropriate for their thirst, Mr. Maiser, than a story of diviners?