Rick Moody - The Diviners

Then there was the girl who turned up just before Allison went off to boarding school. This was the last spring of the broken girls. She was younger than the rest. There was nothing special about her. A nondescript girl with a herniated disk. She came with a walker. There was something so poignant about a twelve-year-old girl with a walker, just beginning to have breasts, just beginning to flower into womanhood, and here she was with a walker. What made her the one? This girl from Illinois? Allison was contemptuous of the girl with the walker, as if she knew that this time of broken girls had come to an end. As if she were already off at boarding school, back east, where there was not going to be a steady supply of the deformed. On the contrary, there would be a lot of WASPs with season passes at the local ski resorts. Allison called the girl Granny, like it was a nickname of long-standing, and the girl withstood it, inching toward a piece of patio furniture as if it were the only safe spot for miles around. As soon as she had lowered herself onto the chaise longue — Maiser remembers seeing it from the window upstairs — Allison just got up and strode off, leaving Granny with her walker beside her like a trusty friend. The light was failing, but the kitchen in the guesthouse was lit up as if on fire. Norm, the caretaker, was making ramen noodles. Jeff remembers seeing Granny patiently sitting by at first, and then less patiently, and then attempting to get up with the walker, and failing, and beginning to cry. Until he went out to help.

She said her name was Lacey.

He got her up from the chaise longue, and he helped her into his car and drove her home, and he admonished his daughter on the subject, and he sent Lacey a card when she was getting ready for her spinal fusion surgery, and then he gave in, and the giving in was delicious. He visited her in the hospital, and he fed her Jell-O in her bed, and he buzzed the nurses and demanded more Vicodin on her behalf, and he made her a thousand promises in her hospital bed. He was a middle-aged man pronouncing absurd oaths of fealty, and this was before he even planted a kiss on her forehead, not to mention before he planted a kiss on her lips, and he begged her not to give in to his demands, and then cried out with joy when she did, and then he deflowered her, telling her how he wouldn’t do it unless she was sure it was what she wanted, and he paid for her singing and dancing lessons, because she said that was what she wanted. She wanted to be transformed from the girl with the bad back and incipient osteoporosis into the one-named entertainer of legend, the one who didn’t have a Jewish last name. So he secured her management, and he got her her first recording contract, and he read the fine print for her, and he knew that what had made her beautiful when she wasn’t beautiful was gone, so that the announcement of eternal fealty was an announcement of abridged fealty, the announcement of true love was a betrayal of true love, because with the broken girls (like Dante and Beatrice, when you think about it), love is breached at the moment of its honor. Jeff Maiser was forever fielding calls complaining about the apartment he got for her, from Tammy Gleick, a.k.a. Lacey, complaining that it wasn’t like it had been, even for her it wasn’t, even she knew that everything he gave her was corrupt, until there was nothing left of her in his life but articles in the tabloids. Lacey, the one-named international superstar, breast implants insured by Lloyd’s of London, Lacey and her string of Hispanic bodybuilder boyfriends who trained her and her bionic body parts.

Only a television executive can know this stuff, that the image is the thing, and the image is the secret, and the secret is that the broken girls are things of myth, things you can devote yourself to, and that the devotion has to be in secret because only things in secret last, because when the broken girl leaves and takes up with a sequence of club rats, a sequence that may or may not include a guy who drives his car into a diamond merchant’s display window, then you know that you still have your secret, and you treasure your secret, your humiliation, while your own body wastes away, and your career dwindles into twilight, and your wife leaves and begins her insane sequence of plastic surgeries, only a television executive can know all these things, all these sorrows.

It would show up on the MMPI. I am worried about sex, mostly true? I am often looking through glossy magazines for women with back injuries, mostly true or false? The women with the back injuries are going to show up on the test, and there is nothing to do about it. He is going to spike in the paraphilia section of the results. A whole day of presentations about Growing Quality passes with reveries such as this. Before Maiser knows it, it’s dinnertime, and he goes right over to the table where Lorna Quinson is sitting, and he trades his place card with the guy sitting at her right, and he banishes this guy to a table between the head of children’s programming and someone from the art department.

“What a surprise,” Quinson mumbles.

“Not really,” Maiser says. “I mean, I —”

“And to what do I owe the pleasure again?”

“Feelings of desperation?” Maiser says. “I can’t accept any more offers of sexual slavery from young producers. It’s going to tarnish my squeaky-clean image.”

“I’m sure that’s not what I heard,” says Quinson, without looking him in the eye. She fingers a barrette and does not elaborate.

“Your ideas on programming,” he says, with the charm tap now firmly screwed into the open position. “I’m here because I need your ideas on programming. You know, my guys are not performing like they’re meant to perform, and I need to take the pulse of the entire television-watching community. Wherever I might find them. Tonight that means you. Tonight that means let’s take some time, here at dinner, and you tell me what you watch and why you watch it, what the medium means to you, what makes you laugh and what makes you cry. Then I’ll get to work on a few programs that reflect your insights.”

At last, she could be said to be imperceptibly smiling. But before he can take pleasure in the certainty of this uncertain smile, there’s a hand on his shoulder. It’s Naz Korngold’s obsequious secretary, Georgia, a southern gal with a peroxided mane coiffed with military severity. Korngold refers to her as Georgia the Peach.

“Jeffy,” she says. “Naz wants you at his table. Last-minute sort of thing. Analysts.”

No! There’s no recourse for the unavoidable dinner that lies ahead but frequent deployment of the term synergies, always in the plural, and aggressive, salesmanlike alcohol abuse. Indeed, he pursues these strategies in a single-minded way so that the rest of the evening shuts over him like the curtain after the bloodbath of act five —

Abruptly, he wakes for day number three and its schedule of team building and Growing Quality in the Context of Community, and, yes, he has the kind of headache that led primitive man to assume he was possessed by evil spirits. Maiser drags himself out of the king-size bed and throws on some jogging clothes. Turns out that La Casa Grande is located outside of San Diego in a small neglected desert village, though no one at the resort would admit to it. When Maiser calls the front desk and asks how far it is to town, making clear that he intends to walk the distance before breakfast, they urge him to reconsider. Maybe some time in the sauna instead? A massage? But Jeffrey knows about the evil spirits and he knows what it takes to rid himself of their spells. The brisk constitutional. And so it is out of the climate control and onto a two-lane road with a speed limit of seventy-five. No sidewalks. The desert of Southern California has never looked more Saharan. A few last-chance palms rise up from otherwise scorched expanses of white sand. A roadside billboard advertises four hundred acres at rock-bottom prices. Up ahead, in the distance, whether from the physics of mirage or from hangover, a Dairy Queen staffed entirely by morose teenagers shimmers. Nonetheless, he quickly establishes that he should turn back, except that when he does so, another vision materializes before him, a revelation of the worst kind. It’s a battalion of laborers, mostly Mexican, building a large plywood wall.