Rick Moody - The Diviners

Wilkinson wanted Maiser’s job and, given Maiser’s rather public domestic problems of late, he probably had a good shot at it. Wanted it last year, wanted it this year, wants it ever more fervently at the base of the wall out behind La Casa Grande. About the only good thing Jeffrey Maiser can say about Wilkinson is that he has a withered thumb. Maiser doesn’t know the cause of this deformity, what peculiarity of genetic material brought about the thumb, which resembles the little penile nub of a newborn. There is no way that thing is opposable. Wilkinson is forever clapping you on the shoulder with the left hand, so that you get a close-up look at the nubbin, whereupon his face will fall in some expression of beleaguered self-consciousness. In these moments, it is hard not to feel compassion for Len Wilkinson.

Oh yeah, the fifth member of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, here at the wall, is none other than Lorna Quinson, who is wearing an attractively modest dress from the Lands’ End catalogue. She tugs at Maiser’s shirt. “I think I’m woefully overdressed, Jeffrey,” she says, gesturing at the outfit, in which her socks match the deep blue of the dress.

The management consultant expert interrupts his spiel in mid-enthusiasm. “Listen up, ladies and gentlemen. You are going to have to pay closer attention if you want to actively pursue the goal of excellence here this morning. You are being timed against your subordinates. Everyone’s being timed here today, and there will be tremendous prizes, not to mention bragging rights, for whichever team brings in the best time.”

“It’d make a good midseason replacement program, Jeff, don’t you think?” Wilkinson crows. “ Management Olympians or something like that. Where Fortune 50 °CEOs and their subordinates compete for the reins of their corporations? Tuesday night, maybe, right after the soft news.”

Still, it’s obvious Wilkinson is a little nervous. He’s shifting from foot to foot as though he’s got some kind of prostate infection and he’s jiggling change in his pocket. And Stew Ledbetter is sopping his face with a brightly colored handkerchief. Leslie Aaronson is reapplying her lipstick.

“Team building,” the management consultant continues, “working in concert, working together as one, finding commonalities, synergies. You’ll have to decide who goes over the wall first and who helps the others up from the top, and you’ll have to decide who waits at the top while the rope is being used on the far side, because the wall is eighteen feet, and there’s only the one rope.”

Suddenly it’s as if the consultant is looking right at Wilkinson’s deformity, the thumb. It’s as if Naz Korngold has assembled this crew of misfits precisely to put the colossal hurt on Jeff Maiser. And Maiser, who is a three-times-a-week-at-the-gym kind of guy, sees the way it is going. He sees that he is outdoors in the ninety-degree heat with an alcoholic, a mall doll in leather pants and high heels, an embalmer, and a guy with no opposable thumb.

“Okay,” the consultant guy says. “You have five minutes to prepare.”

An interval of reflection settles over the participants. They’re looking at one another with unalloyed contempt. Each one, the way Maiser sees it, is thinking that he or she is the one surrounded by deadwood. Each is jockeying for position. Each is closing in for the kill. Each is thinking, I have to make do with this? This is the best management team at the best multinational entertainment and coffin provider in the world? This is it?

“Stew,” Jeff ventures. “How you feeling? Feeling like maybe you want to go up first?”

“Never better, Jeff,” Stew says. “I’m feeling nothing that a nap and a couple of those migraine pills wouldn’t cure. But I’m ready to go; I’m ready to contribute. In fact, I want to contribute.”

“How were you in the chin-up department? You good for five or ten chin-ups back in your day?”

“I got the draft deferment, Jeff, if that’s what you mean. I went back to business school. And I can’t say that I have done a lot of chin-ups since that time. But I’m willing to try.”

Leslie chimes in. “Look, I think I should just go over really fast, because I can do it expeditiously, and that will bring us that much closer to winning. My husband is a trainer.”

“Leslie,” Jeff says, “you might as well just take off the heels right now, and maybe the leather pants, too. Don’t you think the pants are a little too constricting for this exercise? We don’t need you to lap dance here, we need you to scale a wall. Personally, I’m happy to avert my eyes.”

“I bet you are, Jeffrey.”

“Have it your way, girl.”

Lorna stays out of the infighting. Modestly, she removes her flats and her navy blue socks, modestly she sets these aside, under the partial shade of a yucca, along with her sweater and a pair of bracelets. Forty-five seconds, thirty seconds, fifteen seconds. Lorna has this humility about the demands of the wall, an almost philosophical humility. Must be the mortuary business. Must be the way she has made her money. She has some of the serene efficiency of the mortician. And then it hits Jeffrey Maiser, at once, who Lorna reminds him of. And it’s not in any obvious way at all, but that doesn’t make him less of a moron. It’s in some throwaway gesture, an offhanded refixing of a stray hair. She reminds him of the thing that he lost, the person he lost so completely when he embarked on the madness of Lacey. He lost the grace of women his own age, the way they survive. Those were the few quiet years in his life, the years when his marriage was good. Those were the years when the yammering in his skull was quieter, and those years are gone, and there’s no one to blame but himself. When the management consultant calls time, this is what Maiser is thinking, that he misses his wife.

Lorna’s hand around his wrist calls him forth from the past, because Len Wilkinson has thrown Leslie Aaronson aside, in a pretty rough way, so that she has fallen to the ground beside the rope, twisting her ankle. The two of them, Lorna and Jeffrey, watch in an almost ecstatic paralysis as Wilkinson, with only the one hand, attempts to fling himself up the wall in such a way that the potential for severe back injury is unignorable.

“Jeffrey,” Lorna says, “I’ve been thinking about what you said last night. And I know this really isn’t the right time to bring it up. But I just thought I’d let you know. About the programming issue. I’m not really the most terrific sleeper, and last night, instead of writing my essay, I made a list of television programs I’ve liked over the years —”

Wilkinson is grunting with the exertion, and Stew Ledbetter is pushing against his ass, trying to help but in a sort of halfhearted way, as though he wishes the whole thing would end.

“You son of a bitch, Len! You think I’m going to let you work on The Green Lantern publicity with me this summer? No fucking way!” says Leslie, massaging her ankle. She castigates the consultant guy, too. “I hope you’re taking notes or something.”

“— It’s the miniseries, Jeff. Gosh, I know, it’s just the most old-fashioned thing imaginable right now. That sort of thing is banished to cable television or something, and no one watches them, or that’s the theory. But what I like is a big multigenerational story, Jeff, with a lot of characters, and I like the big themes — love, death, war, adultery — and I like a sense that there is order in the universe, that we’re not all out here clawing our way to the top for no reason. So that’s what I’d say. I’d watch Richard Chamberlain in The Thorn Birds any day, and that little girl who later becomes his wife, just adorable. What a pretty landscape!”