Rick Moody - The Diviners

“Uh, actually, her brother didn’t do it, the thing with the. . whatever. He didn’t do it.”

“How do you know that, Thaddeus? The newspapers don’t know, and for the moment they don’t care. They only care about this juicy story. The issue here —” A stifled gasp and some more tears. “The issue is not whether this guy really hit the woman with the brick, Thad. The issue is whether you have any respect. For your marriage. For anyone at all. The issue is whether I’m supposed to do anything about it, the fact that you don’t have any respect for me, or the fact that you stood up in front of our parents and friends and vowed certain things, in fancy language, and we released doves, and five years ago you even danced in an Italian fountain with me, and now you are spitting in the face of —”

“Of course I do have respect for my —”

“Then you deny —”

“I —”

He tries to figure out a position that he can take. He tries to figure out a debating position he can occupy, and he finds that there is no such position. He goes around the room turning on lights, in a madness of switching things on. He realizes that he is still carrying his knapsack with the warm-up clothes in it, all this time, and so he sets the knapsack on the floor. The warm-up clothes seem to come from an entirely different epoch, the epoch before this. Time is divided, there’s a forking of events, and the time before now is commercial and jovial, like a holiday billboard advertisement for advanced shaving technologies.

“You don’t deny it?”

“I thought you were out filming the commercial in California.”

“I had an emergency.”

“Well, I thought that you were getting with what’s his name, the director. With the ponytail.”

“You thought what?”

He can feel that the point is Neanderthal; he can feel that everything that comes out of his mouth is Neanderthal. He feels like a schoolyard antagonist who has beat on the fat kid and who is now quivering in the hands of the relevant authorities. And if he’s been anticipating this moment, the moment when the scam unravels, he has nonetheless managed to deny its foreshadowing. This moment seems as though it has two moments in it, one in which he loves the truth and one in which he loves to lie to himself about how much he loves the truth. He loves the truth in which there is the comfort of the fiction about his wife and the commercial director. It has been the big happy fire in the fireplace of his consciousness, so refreshing that it felt better than the truth, which is desolate.

“What are you saying about Derrick?”

“I’m saying that you were getting next to Derrick. And I hate the way you say the guy’s name. How can anyone really be named Derrick? He sounds like a lacrosse player or something. I bet he does a lot of stomach crunches.”

The argument is vaporizing before him. It seemed so good when it was propping things up, but now it feels like one of those defense-lawyer strategies. Your Honor! My client’s dental work receives radio signals!

“Derrick is happily married, believe it or not. Some people really are happily married, Thaddeus. Some people really love their wives and their children, really cherish them. And maybe, just maybe, these men who are happy with their wives and their children, maybe these guys just like the work of certain actresses and look forward to working with them. Has that crossed your mind? That Derrick likes to work with me just because I’m good at my job? Maybe I’m not as important as you are to the teenagers in the malls across the country. Maybe I’m not as important to you, but I’m an actress and I do my job, no matter what the job is, I do my best, and if it means that I have to go three thousand miles away to work, and I have to leave you alone, and I have to sleep in some pretentious hotel with fresh flowers in the bathroom and watch wannabes in the bar on my way through the lobby to go sleep by myself, knowing the whole time that the second I’m not here you’re going to be out all night, so that I don’t know what to think, that you’re going to injure yourself somehow, that you’re going to be belly up in a ditch, run over by a taxi, out-of-control drunk, falling into the Hudson, because you don’t have enough sense to respect yourself, or me, if I have to live like that, well, I do it because I just want to try to have my own job. You don’t even have the sense to know that I’m working for my own self-respect. And because I love you enough to leave you alone. And so this is what you do for me. You get your picture in the paper coming out of the apartment of some black girl whose brother committed an assault, and I don’t even know what the next thing is, what the next problem is going to be, what to think of next: your drinking, or the women, or some gambling rampage, whatever. I don’t know what to think. Except that I should be allowed to work, just like you. My work shouldn’t call our marriage into question, and it shouldn’t be disrespectful to you, and it shouldn’t be an affront to you. Maybe I’m not the greatest actress or maybe I am a really good actress, I can’t tell anymore because I’m used to feeling awful about myself because of you. Because I try to pretend like I don’t care about what’s going on with you, but I care, I care about how everything always seems to be falling apart, and I don’t want to live like that. Get it?”

What is there to understand? With a pathetic grin on his face, he goes to embrace her, because he really does feel impressed with her commitment and her sense of fairness, and he admires her. The admirer can stand beside the Thaddeus that is the failure in the room, and he can admire his wife, so he tries to embrace her, though she gives no indication that this strategy is welcome. In fact, she fends him off.

“Isn’t it something we can fix?” he inquires.

“Not if what you’re going to do, while we repair things, is mess around some more and pretend that there’s no problem and pretend that you don’t know the extent of the damage.”

The phone rings, and then his wife’s voice, on the outgoing message, sings out in the front hall. The machine mumbles with the tones of some whispery caller.

“Do you want to tell me what you’ve done?” she says. “Do you want to begin by telling me what you’ve done? Because if you tell me some stuff, then maybe that will shine a little more light into the dark spaces. The way I see it, it’s like this, Thaddeus. It’s like you traded all those moviegoers for me. The people in the theaters in Sandusky and Pittsburgh, you traded what they know of you, the you who is filmed carrying firearms, for me. I’ve known you for eight years, and apparently I know nothing. So why don’t you start by telling me what you’ve done. Tell me just one thing that you’ve done, so that I can get to know you, the you that exists in real life, instead of in front of some blue screen.”

It was important that the apartment look as though it could be in some magazine. When Marcus Atkins decorated it. So that now, as they are sitting in it, it’s impossible to sit in it as though it wants to be inhabited, this room, as though it means to be comfortable and inviting. Its inhospitality makes it hard for him to get his tongue wagging, makes it hard for this moment to be what it ought to be.

“I don’t think you really want me to do that.”

“Why?” Sabrina asks. “Because it’s awful? ”

“Pretty much,” mumbles Thaddeus, action film star of the side of right and justice, the guy who prosecutes the corruption, the guy who brings down the international cartel of terrorists. Usually when he’s supposed to cry on film, he needs the glycerin, and he needs strong direction.