Rick Moody - The Diviners

Which reminds me, Vanessa called in later saying that her mother might have left the hospital, at least one nurse told her that her mother left the hospital, but her mother isn’t answering the phone at the house. I know I should try to help out, but what do you do with Vanessa? You sure don’t try to hug her or anything, because she’s just not the type of girl that you’d go hugging. I’m not sure I could hug her, for one, and another thing, she just hates me. It wouldn’t really do any good.

Anyway, it all gave me the idea to call Zimri Enderby for dinner. I could tell that the Vanderbilts were still hot for him, because I kept seeing his picture in the paper at philanthropic things. Like there was a picture of him with Mrs. Astor at the library, or somewhere else his name was in boldface. It said he was a venture capitalist specializing in Internet-related ventures, and it said that he had also been an early investor in a business called Interstate Mortuary Services, which sounds pretty creepy, but I guess dead people have to go somewhere.

Zimri met me at this sweet new restaurant in Tribeca called Slab. The chef was trained in Lyons, and it’s like his third restaurant, and I had to work extra hard to get the table, like I basically had to promise that we would shoot something at the restaurant or have an entire movie catered by Slab, but I don’t know if we’ll do that because some people are vegetarians, you know, and Slab is not for them, at Slab you get to choose your own cut of meat, and you get to say how you want it done and with what kinds of sauces and so forth. Zimri thought it was the greatest because he comes from Utah, and apparently there is a lot of meat out there. I was looking around to see if there was anyone I knew at Slab, I’m pretty sure that I saw whatshername, that actress from movies of the seventies and eighties, Pia Zadora.

I was explaining it all to Zimri, about Harold Robbins, how when you read Harold Robbins it was all about zipping through the narrative sections to try to get to the dirty parts. Never enough dirty parts, as far as I was concerned, and I learned a lot about things from these Harold Robbins books. He always had bad euphemisms for body parts. Zimri says he wasn’t allowed to read any books like that when he was a boy, because of how strict his parents were. Mostly he read westerns, where there were wholesome descriptions of the range life and battles with the Indians, but even that was sort of borderline material. I keep thinking that people basically all believe the same things, but maybe I just have no idea. Also, Zimri tells me that I look really pretty, and that he’s lucky to be out with such a beautiful woman, but I still feel like I’m fifteen, because I’m living at home, and I wonder when that waiting-room feeling of being adolescent is over. But I tell him that I’m touched by what he says.

Next, I ask Zimri why if he’s such a good-looking man, and if people from where he comes from get married young and start families, why isn’t he married, and what’s he doing in New York, which is about the last place most people from Utah would want to be. Zimri gets a serious look and says that in order to explain all this he has to explain more about the idea of mission, which is this idea that when you are of a certain age you have to go out into the world, and you have to try to evangelize for the church. (I already know this stuff but I let him tell me anyway.) Some people go far away. They go to Zimbabwe, or they go to Congo, or they go to Malaysia, or something, and they know that their faith is with them, except that sometimes the faith isn’t with them. This is what I’m pretty sure Zimri was trying to say. It’s the first time some people are away from home, and they’ve never had a drink, they’ve never even had caffeine, and they’re out there in the world, in Zimbabwe or something. It’s a big world, Zimri says, and he says it in this gentle way, like he wishes he could protect even me from it.

The thing is, Zimri came to New York on his mission, and he worked for a while in the branch of a genealogical library that they have here, up near Lincoln Center, and he filed stuff, and that’s how he paid his rent, filing pieces of microfiche, although his parents also gave him money, and he went out into the streets sometimes, and he tried to talk to people who were living in the streets, and most of the time no one would have anything to do with him, he says, and he didn’t think he made more than one or two converts in the time he was in New York, and he never got into much trouble either, although, and here he says he’s being really honest with me, he says, he saw beautiful women every day, everywhere he went, he saw women of such beauty. And he went to the opera, and he went to hear jazz, and he learned that black music was this beautiful thing, and everywhere in New York City there was this beauty and this despair and the two things were right next to each other.

The reservation had to be for late, so Slab was clearing out a little bit, and we’d been there a while, and Zimri had been telling me about trying to convert some guys down near the Bowery, because there were still a lot of homeless guys down there, they were like historical characters, the men who still remembered the old Bowery, and one of these guys gave him the flask and said, taste this, and as if he were punctuating the story, Zimri picked up my glass of wine, because he didn’t have one, and he held it up and got a good long smell of its smell, and his eyes sort of went crossed for a moment, and he said, that’s got a real kick to it. And that’s when I thought, well, I really like this man.

It’d be a lie if I said that I didn’t think about how Zimri was good for me and good for Means of Production, maybe even good for The Diviners, and I don’t want to start lying in my journal, so I’m not going to say I didn’t think about those things. That’s why I went out with him in the first place. But suddenly I didn’t feel like that was why I was here, suddenly I thought that I liked this man, and that maybe I was wanting to kiss him and maybe I was wanting to do some other things that I don’t exactly feel like writing down yet.

Everybody looks good in candlelight, and Zimri looked handsome in candlelight. You wouldn’t think a place called Slab would have such a nice interior, all maroon and navy blue and everything. It’s just for cigar-chomping bond traders and their cronies. But Zimri looked handsome. Maybe it was because I wasn’t supposed to kiss him that he looked so sexy. Maybe it was that I didn’t know what would happen next. Maybe it was that you weren’t supposed to think certain things about a man who believed in God, and that’s definitely the case with some of the things that I was thinking about. The Vanderbilts were always asking why I didn’t date anyone. Who was I supposed to date? Some musician with his underwear showing and he probably had some kind of disease? After I was with Thaddeus, I said to myself that I didn’t want to go through that again, especially not with some idiot actor guy with not a single brain cell in his head and no heart where his heart should have been, and so I just made my job something I loved, and it still is the thing I love, that’s the truth. But I also loved this moment when I finally asked a man if I could kiss him, just like that, and it was like a big emancipation to say that I wanted to kiss him.

He said yes.

Well, his hotel room was as big as my parents’ apartment, which is big for a hotel room, and it was at the top of the hotel, and his hotel was downtown, it was the Soho Grand, and he walked me past the bar, with his arm entwined around my arm. At night that bar is all willowy girls wearing not enough clothes, and they were all dancing by the bar, they didn’t even buy those outfits, they were paid in those outfits, and Zimri was saying to me, we’re just going to kiss, that’s all we’re going to do, and suddenly I thought he was the boy on the mission again, the boy on the mission who had the wine glass of New York City held up to his nose. And soon we were through the lobby, and soon we were in the elevator, and soon we were in his hotel room, and soon we were on his bed, and not a single item of clothing was coming off, and I don’t even know if I want to write about the stuff that happened after this part, because maybe some things are meant to be in your memory only, not even in your journal, because I don’t want my older self looking back at these lines and saying I shouldn’t have done what I did with that poor man who didn’t know what he was getting into, because I heard a man calling out my name, and I loved hearing my name, I loved it, and I’m not going to say I didn’t love it, and when we were done he had his face in his hands, and he said he was grateful and he held me like he was grateful and like he wanted to be grateful again soon.