Rick Moody - The Diviners

“I know you have a lot going on right now,” Annabel continues, “and I know you’re really concerned about your. . Well, my situation is important, too, otherwise I wouldn’t ask, and I just need to be up in Newton, where I can be closer to what’s going on.”

Vanessa wants to point out that she, Vanessa, is at work, and her mother has escaped from detox, and she is here at her desk while her mother is hiding out with Emilia Commito, matriarch of the Park Slope ravioli empire. Her mother is attempting to punish Vanessa for carting her off to detox in the first place, and so Vanessa’s mother has gone to Emilia’s, where she’s lying on the couch watching talk shows and complaining about Mark Green’s mayoral campaign, and Vanessa feels distraught and awful and has been having Jeanine call the police and the hospitals every few hours.

“What are you going to do up there? Isn’t it going to be kind of boring? ”

Annabel gives her a doe-eyed look, as if Vanessa has said something really awful, and that’s when it strikes Vanessa. Vanessa always forgets that the entire office is and has long been synchronized in this area, the menses. But Annabel doesn’t cry; she shimmies up some metaphorical flagpole of resolve, to rest there pridefully. Where the healing is.

“It doesn’t have that much to do with what I need,” Annabel says. “It has to do with just thinking, like, what’s the best thing for Tyrone? The best thing is if I go up there and help out.”

“I don’t really think it’s that great a thing for your career. I mean, I think if you are expecting to have a long career in independent film, you need to put this organization ahead of everything else. Like Adam Weinstein, who gave up his apartment so he could sleep on the editing-room floor. That’s letting no one come between you and the project. That’s creative control. Or Hope Oliver, maxing out her credit card, persuading her mother and stepfather to take out a second mortgage, you know. Then selling the broadcasting rights for millions. People do what has to be done. That’s the way to do business.”

“We don’t always agree,” Annabel says. She’s standing by the door. She must not be feeling as bad as Vanessa usually feels when the cramps really start roiling in her. Maybe healing and closure are even more powerful than ambition and sentimentality and cramps, and who is Vanessa to criticize closure, although she just hates the fact that anything could be more important than Means of Production. Annabel tells her to take care, and then she’s gone, and Vanessa thinks she’ll probably never be back again.

She puts Annabel’s name down on the list.

The intern comes in. The intern has a bag of doughnuts. The wordless intern, who looks as if she’s about to play the role of victim in a women’s self-defense class, in her torn fishnets, miniskirt, and black long-sleeved rock-and-roll tour T-shirt. The intern has brought the original glazed doughnuts of the Krispy Kreme empire. The intern sets these on Vanessa’s desk and then she stands there digging at a hangnail while Vanessa plunges a hand into the bag of doughnuts and selects one. Nothing could be better at the present stressful moment.

The intern has been associated with Means of Production for a number of days now, despite which Vanessa has not yet thought to ask the intern if she has a name, or any interests, or what she is working on. Yet suddenly she wants to ask the intern this information because the intern has brought doughnuts (the cane, that is, loosens the tongue), and also because it is definitely the case that the intern has not been here long enough to have her period synchronize with everyone else’s. She is therefore the one person who is free of abdominal suffering.

“Hey, so what’s your name?”

The intern gives her first name.

“Do you have a surname, Allison?”

“Maiser.”

Vanessa chews the doughnut in silence, doesn’t let on that she has heard anything out of the ordinary. But she has; she has heard syllables that could change her entire future, that could change everything for Means of Production in this trying organizational moment. Visions of a new office in a hip downtown location again dance in Vanessa’s head, likewise awards speeches, a country house, a personal trainer, cheese of the month.

“Do you want a doughnut, Allison Maiser?”

“I already had two.”

“Where are you from, anyway?”

“Santa Monica.”

“They have Krispy Kreme out there?”

The intern contorts herself into some kind of scorn that Vanessa believes is meant to convey that Allison cannot be bothered to think about doughnuts. However, Vanessa doesn’t want anyone, any staff member, even any intern, demeaning the integrity of the doughnut. Not in a bad-luck environment. Not now. There is bad luck everywhere, there are bad circumstances, and the least the intern could do would be to honor the integrity of the doughnut. However, because Allison Maiser is who she is, Vanessa says nothing. The intern is back to chewing at her hangnail when Thaddeus Griffin sticks his head in the doorway.

“Got a second?”

Griffin has not been around much in a few days, and when he has been around, he has been more than remote. Just another example of the kind of intrigues taking place out in the corridor beyond Vanessa’s control.

“Got something I want to tell you.”

He looks at the intern and then at the decorative palm in the corner, as if the two are equal in his sight.

“Don’t mind her. Have you guys met?”

Allison Maiser will not budge unless ordered. Vanessa points at the vacant chair. Thaddeus, running his hands nervously through his colorist-enhanced movie star hair, slinks across the office, clearing his throat several times. He sits in the empty chair next to the intern. He reaches for a doughnut.

“I’m not supposed to eat these.”

“No one in Hollywood is too smart for doughnuts.”

“But some in Hollywood are too thin.”

“If Atkins said eat doughnuts, people’d eat them by the dozen.”

He looks at the intern again, hoping she will remember some other assigned task. “The thing is, I got an offer for a big film, The Tempest of Sahara. ”

“You got what?”

“An offer. The Tempest of Sahara, a big costume picture.”

“That can’t be the title.”

“It used to be called Assassins, but then they changed the title to The Tempest of Sahara. ”

“That’s funny because —”

“Filming is in Morocco. Starts in January. Morocco. How often do you get to see Morocco? Yeah, and the wife wants to come. So we’ll be shipping off to Paris in December, for rehearsals, and from there to Morocco. Where we’ll smoke a lot of hashish. Probably be gone for four or five months.”

“I thought I. .” Is the sinking feeling just a sinking feeling or could it be something worse? There are definitely going to be bad cramps today. Sometimes the cramps are so bad she wants to curl up and die. Is there ibuprofen in the desk drawer, skittering around with the paper clips and half-empty jars of antidepressants?

“It’s a great script. I think there are only three lines in the last half hour, and those are monosyllables. A lot of scantily clad women in their twenties. The ammunition budget exceeds the GDP of some of the African nations where the second unit will be shooting.”

“Are you —”

“I don’t feel like I have that much choice right now. It’s not like much else has been coming from my agent.”

“What about the miniseries?” Vanessa says.

What is it with actors? When a genuine emotion passes through them, a rare enough occurrence, it’s as if it’s a dental emergency. That’s how Thaddeus seems, like the dentist is going to send him out to specialists. He’s going to need implants, and his face is going to swell. But at the mention of the miniseries, he rallies, and the sullenness that perfumes him vanishes. He gathers himself up in the chair and starts riffing on the possibilities.