Rick Moody - The Diviners

As evidence of all this madness, for example, the decree has come down that the heads of the divisions should fill out the Myers-Briggs personality test and the MMPI-2, and write a personal essay, as described in the packets at the registration tables. The heads of divisions should return these items to Korngold’s assistant by the end of the first day, after which they should extract the same materials from their subordinates. And so on down the line.

At the Saturday dinner, Maiser sat next to the ivory-maned battle-ax of Interstate Mortuary Services, Lorna Quinson. The red snapper was timidly prepared, and the strolling mariachi band was persistent, and after playing with his flatware for a while, Maiser found himself wanting to know a little about Quinson. About the billowing blue midcalf dress she had on, about her ringless fingers, about the dreams and nightmares of her childhood. Lorna looked like a great comic actress from one of the seventies sitcoms. Battle-ax with a heart of gold. How did someone with this kind of poise come to flourish as a leading light of the mortuary business, selling what had initially been a string of floundering family-owned mortuaries to one of the largest corporations in the country? And was she put off by being here among the big names of broadcasting and entertainment? Maiser made a few tentative inquiries during the fifteen minutes or so they were chatting. And just before each swiveled in the opposite direction, according to the obligations of dinner party politics, he asked her, “Did you write your essay yet?”

Lorna Quinson, with a cocked smile, shook her head.

This conversation gave him the opportunity to gaze. In the way that television executives can gaze. Quinson’s hair was gathered into an orderly bun, and he could see a bit of the back of her neck, the nape of it, and it was straight and comely. As he listened to a flunky at his right droning lengthily about his favorite network shows, Maiser was thinking instead of Quinson’s neck. Everybody knows that cop shows are about social control, the flunky droned. Quinson’s neck. The Werewolves of Fairfield County, best and most creative use of serial narrative in years. Quinson’s neck.

In the course of dessert, Quinson reached not for the pumpkin cheesecake but for her BlackBerry portable messaging device, which she carried in a small patent leather clutch. She stared down into its impenetrable secrets. Then she dabbed her lips, the color known as Cherries in the Snow, refolded her napkin, and excused herself.

Maiser went to the men’s room himself, where he called the office immediately, told his assistant to get Lorna Quinson’s e-mail address now. He brushed off the men’s room attendant, who, while Maiser rinsed his hands, claimed to be part of the Universal Ministries — which probably would be a division of UBC by the next fiscal quarter. Why not? The Ministries could provide boilerplate grief counseling to families at Interstate Mortuary Services, could furnish The Werewolves of Fairfield County with genuine apocalyptic subplots, and could offer apoplectic commentators to the new conservative talk shows that were being churned out like widgets. Maybe Maiser should leak news of the acquisition to some prominent shareholders and see what happened.

Back at the table, a case of expensive French whites, emptied, was toppled on the linens. As if some malcontent had yanked on the end of the tablecloth. Now, in the center of the ballroom, Naz Korngold, with a flourish, indicated he was turning in for the night. Upper management followed in a retinue, including Lorna Quinson. She was gone, the queen of morticians.

Maiser slipped out the back himself, trying to ditch the overeager guys from the news division, which he would have to dismantle before long. Outdoors, it was an Industrial Light and Magic night, with a myriad of shooting stars and orbiting satellites, and Maiser wondered if Naz Korngold had ordered it especially for the weekend. Maiser cursed golf and the people who had invented golf, on the way to his private casita. The MMPI and the Myers-Briggs tests hung over his head: I think nearly anyone would tell a lie to keep out of trouble; mark T for “true or mostly true” or F for “false or mostly false.” Horses that refuse to move should be whipped, true or false? There is often a lump in my throat, true or false? I can easily make other people afraid of me, and sometimes do for the fun of it, true or false?

Who is Jeffrey Maiser? That was the essay question, printed right there along the top margin of a blank piece of paper. It was in his packet at registration, to be filled out in ballpoint pen and returned to Naz Korngold. Underneath, Jeff wrote, “Who’s asking?” And then he whited it out so that not a trace of this initial response remained visible. I work best when I have a definite deadline, true or false?

And so here he is on Sunday, having erased four more false starts for the essay while ignoring the speech by Al-Hassad. “Quality is present at the instant of the big bang,” Al-Hassad is intoning. “Quality is twelve billion years old, as old as the prima causa, like the carbon cells that make up each and every one of you. Each and every one of you is quality. You can be confident of that.” Maiser is chugging aspartame beverages and throwing away potential essay answers. For example: his participation in the occupation of the president’s office at Columbia. He was just a kid then. And it was not that he agreed politically with all the protesters. He just liked the drama of camping out. All that wood paneling and those gold-plated pen-and-pencil sets. Those kids with their heads full of Whitman and Hendrix and Eldridge Cleaver. He was a guy who always knew the potential of a good story, even then. Was this the Jeffrey Maiser of the essay question?

The true essay about Jeffrey Maiser would also have to talk about his marriage, which fell apart last year, and about his bad relationship with his daughter, who is at NYU film. It would have to speak of his inability to do well in the department of romance. Oh yeah, and there’s another thing he’s worried about, the thing that might show up on the MMPI-2, might skew him statistically toward category two, the category of the unstable.

What about Jeffrey Maiser the practical joker? Back in college days, he’d been tasked by a dean with serving as amanuensis and guide for a visiting professor, an important law professor from the state of Ohio. Instead of taking this Catholic and conservative law professor to the faculty club, as dictated by his schedule, Maiser took him to a brothel up on Upper Broadway someplace. He can still remember the look on the impressionable young law professor’s face when he saw the array of African and Latin hookers available for his delectation! The dope smoke was like a curtain over everything! What a laugh! The guy went on to become a Supreme Court justice, too. Later in his professional life, Maiser exchanged all the cars in the reserved spaces at the studio parking lot with the pink Cadillacs of Mary Kay Cosmetics, so that when the brass came out one afternoon they all had to drive a pink car home. Then there was that time he showed a trainee a broom closet in the building and told him that this would be his office from now on. He allowed the trainee to stay in the closet for nine days. Maiser even made up a television reviewer, Don Stankey, and wrote Stankey’s columns for one of the popular newsweeklies for two years in order to create strong buzz for UBC programming. Those early raves for The Werewolves of Fairfield County, those were Stankey’s columns, after which Stankey had a regrettable car accident on the Saw Mill, leaving behind a wife and three kids, one of whom had cerebral palsy. If only UBC had had a relationship with Interstate Mortuary Services in those days, Maiser could have thrown a proper memorial service for the guy. There would have been baroque music and a dramatic reading from the stories of Jack London.