Rick Moody - The Diviners

Well, it’s her party. It’s Melody’s party, and she has gathered her friends here, and she has put her credibility on the line, her literary celebrity, and there’s really no option but that she should be the first, the first to have the injection or the series of injections. The first to be in the strong, masculine hands of Dr. Iveshka Maevka as he passes this milestone in his practice, his first Santa Monica Botox party. The occasion is momentous in so many ways. Melody raises her hand, and there’s nervous laughter in the room as her friends realize how brave Melody is and how sweet for bringing them all together like this.

“It’s material for the next book,” she says, “so don’t worry!” Everyone laughs. “And I’m even writing off the catering bill!”

Dr. Maevka gestures toward the daybed situated strategically by the enormous potted fern. From here, Melody can see the ripples on the surface of the pool through the French doors. She can hear birds twittering in the palms. Was any afternoon more deluxe? She sits up straight, since her posture is never less than good, and she looks up at Dr. Maevka as though it’s a conversion experience that is promised in this moment, and before she knows it, the injection is upon her, a slight pinch. She’s conscious of the fact that she feels nothing, really, in the spot of the injection. The pressure being relieved as the needle is withdrawn, nothing more. When you get right down to it, how few things there are that really deliver on the promise of eliminating sensation. How many hedonistic pleasures are about acuteness of perception, roller coasters and white-water rafting and casinos, but how precious and few are genuine moments of relief, as when one is in bed, and the light is extinguished, and the oncoming dreams are confused with the afternoon’s appointments. Then there’s a sharp sting of an additional injection, two more, right above her eyebrows, as if she’s having her third eye drained, and the sting narrows, intensifies, and Melody swallows in the sting, the chemical aftertaste, and the light opens up, and it contains people, and stillness, and faint chlorine fumes.

Sherry Horst. That’s Sherry’s ring, that awesome rock with its many facets, glimmering above the heads of the other women. Her hand aloft. This is amazing in itself because Sherry is never early out of the gate on anything. She’s fond of lawsuits, since that’s what her husband, that poorly dressed oaf with the worst teeth in Los Angeles, does for his livelihood. Dr. Maevka has certainly sold his product well — through the inexorable cheer that makes his practice so profitable — if he has sold Sherry Horst. Melody makes a mental note to be sure she has the number of Sherry’s platinum card.

“Does it hurt?” Sherry asks Melody, as the doctor with his impressive needle approaches, an attractive nurse trailing behind him submissively.

“Of course not.” Although Melody does feel a little as if she’s been attacked by hornets. She hopes it’s nothing serious.

The doctor again performs his clinical benedictions. Four or five aging women in sequence, all of them speaking of nothing but boutique sales in town and what certain movies have grossed and who is pandering to the tabloids, as needles plunge into their faces. They are thirsty for good news, these friends of Melody’s. Because what has this nation told them, here in the new millennium? This nation has told these women to get out of the way. It has told these women that if they are not wearing blue jeans with their, what’s that word, with their booties hanging out of them, then they are not real women. It has told them that if they do not have a ring hanging out of their navels they are not women. It has told them that they are the leftovers of domesticity, they are the residue, they are what child rearing leaves as its waste product, they are what the nineteen-sixties and — seventies left in their wake. They are decades of ill-considered license. They are the end stage of bed-hopping and jet travel to the Caribbean and experimentation with pot and Dubonnet and low-tar cigarettes. They are what America once said it wanted. And so the least that capitalism can do is to give these women a way to feel a little dignity now while the sluts in the low-riders get themselves compromised and go through it all, the day care and the nannies and the private schools. It’s no wonder, when you think this way about it, because of all the sorrow and all the paradox, that at this moment there is a commotion at the front door, an overheard sort of commotion. It’s almost a beautiful sound at first, commotion on expensive tile work, or maybe it’s just the side effects of the treatment, the hornets careening around the room, maybe the hornets lead to increased echo. It takes a minute for Melody to grasp that her name is being bandied about in the commotion. Sluggishly, she rises from the daybed, looks back toward the foyer.

Ohmygod. It’s Lois Maiser. A crisis. It’s a genuine crisis! And she knows! Lois knows she wasn’t invited! She wasn’t invited to the party, and all of her friends were invited, and now Lois is here, and all these other people are here, and they all RSVP’d! How could Melody have been such a horse’s ass, how could Melody have willfully overlooked the possibility that such a moment was lying in wait for her? The sense that propriety has failed is in the room and it’s as certain as billowing curtains and sunlight and peppermint tea and chlorinated-water vapor. The women look down at the expensive Italian tile beneath them, as if by studying the tile they will at least not make the situation worse. It’s just like one of those movies, one of those insipid television movies where a fellow shows up who would never be there at all, in order to have the dramatic confrontation! My God. Actually, it’s like Reign of Frogs, that novel she once wrote about a counterespionage agent who is incarcerated in a Chinese psychiatric hospital and forcibly medicated, only to find her own husband is being held in the same ward. What a coincidence!

“Lois, I. . Come in, sweetheart. Come on in.”

In truth, Lois’s face just now resembles nothing so much as an African mask. Well, it’s an African mask with a perm and blond highlights, but it’s still a mask, the kind of mask that you see on a shelf in an expensive psychiatrist’s office, which is of course where Lois has spent a lot of time recently. Her serotonin levels are like the roller coaster on the Santa Monica pier, first up and then down, down, down. And one of her side effects must be ravenous hunger, because Lois has packed on a good twenty pounds, and without replacing her wardrobe.

“Melody,” Lois starts slowly, without the hysteria to which she resorted to get in the front door, “I’m really sorry to show up this way —”

“Oh, it’s nothing, honey. Come, sit.”

“It’s not like I’m here to break up the party. That’s not why I’m here. It looks like a lovely party, and I’m hoping that I get invited next time, and that I’m not too late to get one of these lovely eye pillows. .”

Melody Howell Forvath might laugh were it not beginning to dawn on her that Lois is not here to make a complaint about the hostess, nor about the fact that she wasn’t invited. No, there’s something far more terrifying going on, something far more inimical to partygoing merriment. Lois means to make a complaint against Dr. Maevka. Melody can see the recognition dawning in him now, the recognition of Lois. Lois as the accretion of bad luck. Dr. Maevka’s lantern jaw is set in a hard way, as though he’s a tight end who is going to have to fight his way over linebackers.

“Listen up, everyone,” Lois is saying, holding one of the lavender eye pillows in a clenched fist. “I think most of you know me here, and so I think I’m not without credibility. You know it’s me, someone from your own community, who’s about to say what I’m going to say. And what I’m going to say is that the procedure you’re undertaking today —”