Rick Moody - The Diviners

“I mean, not like I’m a size queen or anything. It’s a cute little one.”

Another piece of carrot cake appears, as though agreed upon earlier in the secret signals of the union of anorexic women. Where the conversation seemed awkward and even tense before, now a common ground has been established between the sister of the suspect and her coworker, and the detectives are beginning to feel as though they have held their table longer than they ought. They are wondering whether they might repair to Union Square Park, there to await the next move of Duffy. One of the detectives stands, stretches languorously, heads for the men’s room. Here is what he glimpses as he strides past: He glimpses the moment when Annabel Duffy has taken the hand of Jeanine Stampfel in her own and is examining the “life line” of Jeanine Stampfel as if they were thirteen-year-old girls engaged in teen occult behavior. What’s with young people these days? Is adolescence now decades long? Thinking of none of this, the detective takes a deluxe leak. Much needed after sitting in the car all that time. While soaping up, he wonders if his wife will have the football game on when he gets home. Will there be chips?

Back at the booth, his partner is ready to leave. The audio recorder is hidden away on his person. After paying, one detective says to the other that they have a lot of paperwork ahead. The other replies that they should cut it short. There’s always tomorrow. All of this while they are walking past the two women, as if they and the women have no connection at all, as if the city is not a chaotic network of lost connections and near misses. Only after they pass the hostess does one detective look back, one last time, to see that the Duffy woman has now rolled up the sleeve of the other, the Stampfel woman, and what she has revealed on the arm of Stampfel are tremendous third-degree-burn scars.

Burn scars? Is that really what he saw? Did he really see what he thought he saw? wonders the detective. A man of inexhaustible fact, our detective, a man of inches and yards, a man who admits to nothing in the way of uncertainties. A man who is now seeing a beautiful blonde with third-degree-burn scars over the majority of her arm, perhaps both arms. And what about the high-necked blouse she’s wearing? Because of burns? Where do you get that kind of burn? And what does that kind of burn feel like, and how many weeks are you in the burn ward with that kind of a burn? Sometimes he is suffocated by the darkness of his job. He thinks longingly of the purity of the original glazed doughnut.

The door swings in, and an I formation of hungover Europeans clogs in the threshold, impeding the progress of the two detectives. Bound for Bloody Marys and football games on inaudible monitors. Were they as observant as detectives, these carousers would overhear the end of the conversation, would overhear the Duffy woman ask the Stampfel woman how she got this, this molten bubbling along the length of her forearm.

“Because I noticed the, uh, you know, in the office, I think I noticed like the first or second day, how could I not notice.”

Quietly. “I was in a fire.” And then, inexplicably, the Stampfel woman asks: “Are they gone?”

To which the Duffy woman replies, “Yeah, I think.” In the lowest of tones, while the scars lay exposed to the air, the drama of burns. “They always look like police, you know? Not like I had any doubt. Their sneakers are too new.”

“Where is he?”

“In Massachusetts. I think. Or he was there Friday. He might be still moving around. He knows not to call me now. But that only makes me more worried.”

“And he didn’t do it? Whatever they’re saying he did?”

“Guess how many black bike messengers there are in New York City?” Annabel says. “Okay, look, what I want you to do, I mean, if you feel like you can do it, is to take the key to his studio, see if you can get into his studio, get his computer and his cell phone. Because he says he was in his studio during the time when the woman was, uh, assaulted. Then if you can, just bring it all to work tomorrow. The computer and the phone. Just bring them in. There should be stuff on the computer that will prove —”

Even more urgent is the confederacy of the moment.

“His computer has everything on it, lots of his work, lists of things he ate, proposals for new works, and it’ll have some kind of alibi on it, and the phone bill will have his phone records on it. I’m supposed to take the computer and the phone to a lawyer in midtown. I know it’s a lot to ask, and I won’t, you know, I wouldn’t hold it against you if you can’t do it. But if you can, it’s like the sweetest thing anyone ever did.”

“It was. . it was, um, kind of nice getting to talk.”

“What? Oh. We should, uh. . Okay, I’m going out first, and I’m going to take these guys, the police, on a little shopping trip to find the most expensive lingerie in the Village. Hey, did you hear?”

Stampfel is standing, one hand on the vinyl lining of the booth.

“Shelley Ralston Havemeyer.”

“Who?” Jeanine says.

“She wrote The Diviners. We actually found her.”

“I thought her name was Marjorie something.”

“Don’t believe everything you hear. She has two studios fighting over her.”

Annabel, having had her only meal of the day, makes for the door, her Celtic tattoo just visible above the rim of her leather pants, in that sacral zone between belt and shirt hem. Out she goes into the rain. The Bloody Mary drinkers, aligned at the bar, in an intensity of forgetting, don’t see. The runway models, still irritated at waitressing or hostessing when by now they ought to have become supermodels, don’t see. Even the detectives, calling in to the precinct, indicating that they are just about done for the day, have not seen. The person with a scoop on the way these events connect is the woman in the conservative and sensible outfit, the one with the burn scars and a dead-bolt key.

“With that,” he says, and he means the masking tape, on the desk of the False Guru, in the office of the False Guru, in the Ashram of the False Guru, where he’s located with a woman named. . what’s her name again? Her name is Nora. He has removed many items from this desk, just in case a surface is needed. His good fortune owes to the fact that he has agreed to be a part of the next gala benefit thrown by the False Guru for the Foundation of the True Practice, a foundation that aims to bring remnants of Eastern wisdom to the thirsty Western masses. The False Guru has the cooperation of a number of persons with perfect skin and large fortunes, and Thaddeus Griffin has now agreed to lend his name, in concert with these persons who have fortunes, and this has caused the office of the False Guru to be made available on short notice, for an important private lesson with one Nora Richards, whom he’d earlier thought to be merely another student of the False Guru. But no. She’s not simply a student, she’s a yoga instructor in training, and she has proven her willingness to conduct this private lesson in the office of the False Guru, a lesson commencing in seated posture on the Oriental carpet. Quite a lovely and expensive carpet, when you pause to consider that the False Guru was at one time a practitioner of the fine arts, a free-wine-in-plastic-cups-drinker at local art openings. But then the False Guru traveled to India to learn the binding poses. He practiced renunciations and the diverse skills that would enhance the business that he was launching here on the fringes of Noho.

One with the carpet, one with the tumbleweeds of dust on the carpet. Thaddeus accepts a gentle correction in the performance of the auspicious pose, bhadra-asana, bringing the soles of his feet together under the scrotum, hollowing the hands above the feet in the shape of the tortoise. He allows Nora to push roughly upon his shoulders because the problem is that his shoulders are always up around his ears, and this is inauspicious. Thaddeus makes the shape of a tortoise, indicating receptivity. There is a siren going past the Ashram of the False Guru, and somewhere there is the faint tinkling of the indoor fountain installed at considerable expense, also the chittering of beautiful yoga practitioners in their expensive outfits. This is the poetry of sounds, respiration, siren, fountain, and the liquid vowels of practitioners, and this is the magnificence of incense, and this is the raising up of prayer, and this is the knowledge of subtle things, a knowledge of things that are hidden away, which is one of the tasks of the yogin. When the yogin knows these subtle things, then shall he mash his mouth against the mouth of his yogini.