Rick Moody - The Diviners

A large number of people are guilty of bad sexual conduct, mostly true or mostly false? If you tested any of the managers in the room, any of those guys around him doodling little slashing, angry lines on their legal pads right now, they’d all have their obsessions, their dark secrets. None of them is talking. Edward Jones, the studio head, had himself filmed at an orgy with a bunch of male models back in the late seventies. You can download photos of the party on the Web. And the head of the beverages division, Stew Ledbetter, is so badly alcoholic that he never turns up at a meeting before noon, and even then with a cola can full of vodka. It’s widely known. Priscilla Rankin, in finance, has lost hundreds of thousands of dollars gambling on college basketball. There are ass men, men obsessed with breasts, there are men obsessed with youth, there are men who drive into the desert and weep, there are self-mutilators. All of them ambitious and successful professionals.

His own predilection dates back to a specific moment, or so he tells himself, back when he was a producer, back in the early eighties, when he was working on a film about a girl with bone cancer. She had come to wear the halo, this girl; you know, the contraption they attach to you that allows you to keep the head up straight in the midst of your hardships. Anyway, he hadn’t even noticed this actress, Celine something or other, Celine Thorpe, when she was hired for the job. She was just another actress in leg warmers trying to impress the director, who was a no-talent commercial guy who’d made his reputation directing spots for antacids. Maiser had only intended to be on the set the first day of filming.

In the meantime, the costume department had outfitted Celine Thorpe with the halo. She looked scared at first, coming out of the trailer. Her outfit was not terribly flattering. No designer threads that she could try to make off with when the shooting was done. And then there was the halo. Maiser ought not to have seen Celine Thorpe that day, ought not to have, ought to have contented himself with the little dead spots and recriminations in a long marriage. That’s what he ought to have done. But here he was, in the park, sitting in a canvas chair, and here was Celine Thorpe, coming down from the trailer. It was the magic hour, the hour when the light was just so, and the palms were just so, and the kids on the softball diamond were just so (here’s the crack of the softball coming off an aluminum bat), and the sun glinted from the glimmering halo. The scene involved the character with the debilitating bone disease managing to go to the park for the last time in her short life, and during this last visit she notices the preciousness of all things in the park, the softball players, the dog walkers, the butterflies dive-bombing the blossoms of bougainvillea. The fog machines were blowing up a subtle mist. And Celine was in her brace, and the unsteady way she walked through the moist grass of the park, it was just a beautiful, understated piece of acting. Maiser felt the conjunction of youth and metal cage, and it was as if he were being reflected in the light coming off the halo, and he realized that a bit of his heart began opening right then, by reason of fetish.

It was untrue what they said about angels, that angels were quaint birdlike agents who oversaw your daily life and ensured that you got the best of all parking spaces. No, these were not angels. Angels were apparitions of dread. Their annunciations were impossible burdens, and you greeted them only with terror. The angel that appeared in all the Annunciation paintings, that was no sweet angel. That angel scared the piss out of the Virgin Mary, who undoubtedly didn’t want to get knocked up by an abstraction. The same thing with Celine in her halo, she was a dark annihilator in the life of Jeffrey Maiser.

He threw himself into work, of course. He tried to distract himself from feeling. But when the disabled groups started writing in about how great the broadcast was and, boy, was that Celine Thorpe amazing, she brought such dignity and beauty to the role of the girl with the debilitating spinal disease, well, he realized something had changed. Bedding Celine Thorpe for the next few weeks in a suite at the Chateau Marmont was the least of it. She wore the prop without the least bit of hesitation, or that’s the way it seemed. There was a way the prop made any blemish, or even a couple of extra pounds, look great on Celine. He didn’t care if she was perfect. On the contrary. It was her imperfections that made her so sweet. And yet when he started seeing her out of costume, wearing a slinky gown at an awards show or being interviewed on Oprah, well, he felt like she was all wrong.

He volunteered to serve as the network emissary at a fund raiser in Santa Barbara for the disabled. The publicists at the studio should have attended in his stead. He had already RSVP’d for the baby shower of some news anchor. But he went to the fund raiser himself and he saw a half dozen women in back braces, halos, even the lowly neck braces of whiplash, and he could feel himself getting all sentimental. How could it be? He was a strong man, a man with a national reputation as an executive, and he was following a woman with a neck brace out of the hotel in Santa Barbara and watching the awkward way she walked, and he was feeling that he was about to beg this woman for a caress.

His daughter, the tomboy Allison, brought home her pal Firth. When was this? During the Gulf War, maybe. Firth was an Asian girl, so he was a little confused about the name. One of those adolescent things, probably. Her name was Yo Yo or something similar, but she changed it to Firth because that’s what you do when you’re thirteen. Anyway, Firth had scoliosis, and Maiser had become enough of an expert that he could recognize that this was front-to-back scoliosis, not left-to-right. Maiser took one look at Firth and realized that he would have to start working late at the office, whether it bothered his wife, Lois, or not, in order to avoid salivating over the thirteen-year-old Firth, who was meant to start wearing her back brace full-time during summer vacation. He would have been altogether too happy to administer deep tissue massage to the spot on her behind where the hamstring connected to the femur head.

You get into one of these groups of girls, adolescent girls, and the group is like a swarm, and suddenly there are more of these girl children, all of them broken in some way, all of them bearing one another up, each of them the crutch of another, each of them both nurse and patient. There’s the wall-eyed girl, the speech-defect girl with her twisted r’ s and s’ s, the girl with the clubfoot, the girl with the harelip, the girl with the prosthetic arm, who often goes around without. All of these girls at his house, around his pool, at one time or another, as though his daughter was a collector of them, though there was superficially nothing wrong with her. His daughter favored the broken girls because she thought the broken girls were superior to the blondes with their boob jobs and their Lexus convertibles.

Maiser was trying to stay at work through all of it, trying to get lost in the reports from advertising on the projected price of a thirty-second spot during a show they were developing, The Werewolves of Fairfield County, but some days he was weak, just as anyone would have been weak, and then all the broken girls thought he was the greatest dad of all time because he’d be coming out with dishes of sorbet or a tray full of crackers and cheese, and saying, “Just thought you guys might want a little snack,” his cheeks stinging as though he’d just been acupunctured. He remembered the time he helped a girl with no legs onto the raft in the pool. Another man might remember a trip abroad with his family, might think of the Caribbean Sea and some sunlit beach, the tranquil aqua cove where he had a daiquiri with his wife. Instead, Jeffrey remembers the day he helped a girl with no legs onto a raft in his pool. The smell of the water and the way the light danced around her. What perfect shape she was in, from all the wheeling around, and who could say she wasn’t the most beautiful woman, the woman who would have launched Greek ships? Her smile was diffident, sure, was self-conscious, but there was something wanton about it, too. “I have secrets,” she was saying in her way, “that you’ll never know. I have secrets, and they are only unlocked with respect.” He can remember the way he fumbled climbing the steps, out of the pool, as if he were just another pedophile brought to his knees.