Rick Moody - The Diviners

“I can’t talk right now,” Thaddeus tells him. It’s more that he doesn’t want to talk.

“Hey, pal, I’m sorry about the thing in the paper.”

“What thing in the paper?”

“You know. . that thing? ”

“Which paper are you talking about? And what thing? What do you mean thing? ”

“Listen. . there’s my other line. I’ll get back to you. We’ll catch up. Pal, think about Assassins. Let me know how you feel in the next day or so. Could be huge. Could be top ten. Plus the possibility of awards.”

“You said thing just now. What is that? And I have a question for you, too. About The Diviners. Have you heard —”

But the connection is severed. Too logistically difficult now to duck into a men’s room in order to rinse off this conversation. Usually a powerful antibacterial soap will get rid of any oily residue associated with a film agent. Now he’s in a cab. The cabbie is fleet, but why the fuck does Thaddeus live on the Upper West Side? He hates the Upper West Side, with its socialism lite and Zabar’s and people wandering around with new food processors and fancy cheese assortments and laser-whitened teeth. Perambulators clogging the sidewalks, SUVs double-parked, all because they have to pick out some cheeses to serve tonight, out in the Hamptons, to their friends from the corporate-law firm. They will eat veggie chips in the SUVs stuck on the LIE on the way to the Hamptons to serve up their cheeses. Thaddeus wants to live in Tribeca, in the shadows of Wall Street, where it’s all painters with drinking problems flinging pigment straight out of the tube onto the canvas before going to some screening of a Hong Kong action film. Painters with lead poisoning, short-term memory loss, tossing back shots at Fanelli’s, because they’re willing to die for what they do. That’s how passionately they feel about their craft. Thaddeus is willing to die in what he does, at least if someone else does the stunts.

He lives on the Upper West Side because his wife’s father gave them a duplex. At the time, they were scrambling. Her dad the corporate lawyer was on retainer for the tobacco manufacturers of the world. And Thaddeus is stuck here with his wife, who’s out in San Diego filming a commercial. What is the commercial for? He can’t even remember, feminine products maybe. She’s filming a commercial for feminine products, and soon he’ll be making a film in the desert, where he gets to ride a camel and eat hummus until it becomes impossible to eat it again, and his wife will be making a commercial for feminine products, and they never will see each other again, except in airport lounges. Thaddeus strides past the doorman with a salute and a lopsided grin that says, I know I’m supposed to feel lucky.

In his apartment, Thaddeus Griffin is nobody. In the living room, in the pantry, in the dining room, in the spare room that is never used for anything at all. Most of all in the bedroom, he’s nobody, and his condition of being nobody in his apartment dwarfs the lack of privacy that is his burden in every other place. He’s afraid to go outside and he can’t wait to go outside. On the street, he’s somebody, can’t walk a block without being Thaddeus Griffin, but here in his apartment, he’s another lost guy with another case of after-loneliness. In his apartment, he watches television, plays video blackjack, practices darts. He’s really good at darts. In his apartment, he’s among the best player of darts ever.

The lights are off.

And he’s not alone.

Because, sitting in the dark, in the living room decorated by Marcus Atkins, is his betrothed. His bride. In one of the big stuffed easy chairs, bent over as if she’s hinged, face in her hands, her hands hollowed like a tortoise shell, holding her face. Sobbing. How long has she been here, he wonders, when instead she was supposed to be hawking feminine products for a network commercial that would have meant residuals, et cetera? How long was she just waiting for him? In order to perform these sobs? Is this an Equity-approved showcase?

“Honey, I didn’t —”

She’s so startlingly beautiful that people draw up short on the street. As if she were the diagram in the physics textbook labeled “Electromagnetism.” Dark hair, which right now has blond highlights in it, falling all around her face, blue eyes the color of a blue screen, easy smile, freckles that the makeup people like to cover up for some reason, especially across the bridge of her slightly pudgy but adorable nose, and she is often to be seen in bulky sweaters that cover the swell of her completely perfect breasts, and tonight, when he turns on the light, he sees that she is wearing an old pair of jeans, used to be his, and they always look really good on her somehow, because she’s tall enough that she doesn’t even have to cuff them or anything. Yes, his wife implies an eternal question, one that has haunted him through the seven years of their union. How can someone this beautiful have an inner life? And if she does, why is it that he has never, ever had a part in it?

“Did you happen to look at this?” she asks. A newspaper cylindered into the gap next to her in the chair. When she flings the paper into the space of the living room, the leaves drift in several directions, separating. “Did you happen to see your picture in the paper today?”

“I don’t know what —”

“Don’t be full of shit.”

He didn’t read the tabloids this morning. Because he didn’t go into work. He took the morning off because there was nothing going on at the office and the scripts on his desk looked dull. He was thinking he would go to an audition or two today. He wants to play a romantic lead instead of an action hero, and if he has to audition, well, okay. But then he didn’t go to any auditions, he just called his broker and played solitaire on the computer. He made an omelet with week-old Brie. When he went into the office, in the afternoon, it was quiet because it was Monday. Vanessa had already left. He didn’t talk to her, nor to the girls in the office. Was there a reason that the girls in the office were so quiet? This afternoon? Was there a reason that Madison didn’t come out of her office when he went past? Was there a reason Jeanine was pretending to be involved with some new intern? And why was Annabel all cool and businesslike? Why didn’t she say anything about the script? Was there a symbolic meaning to the moment when Annabel walked past and went to the water cooler? Could he construe this as a judgment of some kind? A moral disapproval? He and Annabel were supposed to be talking about sketching out the miniseries, they were going to do it together, it was going to be their thing, and she didn’t say anything about it, not a single word. She walked by him on the way to the water cooler and she filled up a plastic bottle at the water cooler, and she turned smartly on the heels of her boots, and he didn’t think any more about it, not then.

His wife rises, crosses the room, finds the correct page from those disparate on the carpet. The picture of him. It is, in fact, unmistakably a picture of him leaving Annabel’s apartment over the weekend. He recognizes the large Hispanic woman sitting on the stoop behind him. It’s kind of a bad picture. He seems to have a number of chins in this photograph. And below the photograph there’s an item about him leaving the apartment, including the time that he left the apartment, which was not long before sunrise. Waking up in a strange bed makes him feel more ashamed. Always a problem. The item goes on to note how much weight he seems to have put on.

“Don’t say anything, okay? I think you should give me, you know, at least four or five minutes here where I get to be the one who talks. And the first thing I want to say is that you are just so incredibly stupid, Thad. Do you know who this girl in the office is? You’re carrying on with some girl in the office? Do you even know who she is? She’s related to some guy who. . who committed a crime, you know, who just hit a woman on the street with a brick; isn’t that what the paper is implying here? You don’t think that the sister of the guy who hit a girl in the head is going to be of interest to the papers? Doesn’t cross your mind? While you are getting your freak on with this girl? Didn’t cross your mind that you might try to keep your name out of the papers, for me, for example?”