The Diviners

  I pass this kid on the way in, I don’t even know whether it’s a boy kid or a girl kid, it’s just some kind of kid thing, and it’s sitting on the folding chair by the front door, near Jeanine’s desk, and this kid thing is wearing some shredded black stuff that got thrown out in the Dumpster at some heavy metal club, I mean, I guess it’s clothes, but who knows, the fishnets are so full of holes that the net couldn’t catch orca, and she’s got so much metal sticking out of her face that you could hang tinsel on her and stick an angel on top, and the amount of eye makeup, don’t even get me started, and her eyes are totally closed, so it looks like she’s sleeping, in the chair, and I sort of look at Jeanine, and Jeanine looks at the girl, and since the girl is sleeping, no one wants to wake her up. It’s amazing that she’s sleeping, because Vanessa is on the rampage, but she’s definitely asleep, and Vanessa, who doesn’t pay any attention to things if she doesn’t want to, she doesn’t pay attention, and I just go into the office, and Annabel comes in, looking worried and still wearing the Ann Taylor outfit, although she seems to have changed her blouse, and I ask her if things are okay, because now the papers think that there’s some kind of conspiracy between the guy who drove his car into the store in the Diamond District and the Samantha Lee attack and the desecrated temples on Long Island and some one-eye sheik on Atlantic Avenue, there’s headlines about Waves of Hatred, of course, it’s got to be some kind of Islamic thing, like when that guy blew up the building in Oklahoma City it was supposed to be an Islamic thing, but it turned out to be rednecks. But Annabel is not feeling great because the police still want her brother. He was supposed to be at her parents’ house, but then he left or something, and supposedly he’s just moving around, by train or who knows what.

  The good news today is that Vanessa thinks UBC is really seriously considering The Diviners. Who knows how they decide this kind of stuff, I guess they talk to advertisers, and they get the poster guy to come up with some kind of poster. Of course, I told her that I have a really good idea for the poster, but she just waved me off. The bad news is that there seems to be like three different people out there claiming to represent the project, and Vanessa has been calling Vic Freese at the Michael Cohen Agency, and I could hear her yelling in my office. Later she comes in and tells me that Vic is representing the writer of the original book, who is named Melody or something, and then there’s another version out there with Leonard Nimoy attached as a director, that version is by Shelley Ralston Havemeyer or somebody, and then there’s our version, which is totally different. Apparently, we have coverage of the Nimoy treatment, and there are no Mongolians in it. How could there be no Mongolians? The whole point was to start with the Huns! I feel like I want to have Huns in the story, and I’m especially happy with that poster that I sketched out. What if they change it and the story winds up being about a dysfunctional family in the suburbs with a misfit kid who gets voted the most likely to succeed at the prom? That would suck. Maybe one diviner is like another, because they’re all in touch with some kind of magical power, and we should just take what we can get, and if that means executive producer credits for Vanessa and me, well, okay, move on.

  I called the Vanderbilts to say that there are three different versions of our story out there, and it can’t be like with Weird Science, you know, there was some other science movie that came out at the same time, oh yeah, Outbreak, or whatever that one was, the plague movie glut, you know, there are just not going to be competing versions of the mini-series about diviners out there, not if we have anything to say about it, and then we go on this whole thing about Ranjeet, you know the Indian guy from the office, he was at the party for PussyWhipped, and I guess he has taken off his turban, because he was wearing this Prada suit at the PussyWhipped party, and somehow he got into the V.I.P. section, I don’t know how he got over there, but actually he looked really hot. He’s shaved his beard down to a little soul patch, and he has his hair all slicked back, and he’s wearing the Prada suit, and of course I think he’s just trying to get with all the girls, but he’s not talking to the girls, he’s talking only to the industry people, and when I go over to him, he gives me an air kiss and says that he’s been talking about some British version of a Jane Austen book that I never read, and he’s saying that it serves as a really good example of what The Diviners might mean, and I can see that he’s nervous, there’s a little line of sweat on his upper lip, and for a weird second I think maybe I should kiss him, that’s the part that I’m really shocked by, that and the Vanderbilts saying who was that hot Indian guy, and I say he’s not Indian he’s a Sikh, they come from a tradition of peace and spirituality, and the Vanderbilts are like what the hell are you talking about, and even I don’t know what I’m talking about. The thing is that Ranjeet was a car service driver, and now it turns out that he’s smarter and more hard-working than anybody who works in our office, which is why he hasn’t been around in a couple days, because Vanessa says he’s seeing a lot of agents, talking about various projects, trying to find people to line up behind the mini-series.

  It has to be one o’clock when Annabel comes in the office laughing. Ohmygod, she says, I just figured out who that girl is. I say, what girl, and she says the one who’s asleep out by Jeanine’s desk. And I say, oh my god, that’s a girl? Because I just wasn’t totally sure it was a girl, I thought it might be like some kind of vole, and Annabel says that’s no vole, that’s a girl who wants to be an intern! Oh my god! I say, that’s no girl that wants to be an intern, that’s Jeffrey Maiser’s daughter! Not the Jeffrey Maiser! Yes ma’am! I say, and it’s your job to interview her first, and remember to be really nice to her and say yes to whatever she says she wants to do, because we just want to keep her on the hook for a while, at least until we get the whole mini-series thing hooked up, and we’re still really laughing and I’m thinking why do I always forget that actually I really like Annabel, because when she’s laughing it kind of makes the entire world seem good somehow, and that’s when Thaddeus walks by, but it’s like a ghost goes over our grave because neither of us wants to say anything in front of Thaddeus anymore. It’s only a matter of time before he’s not here, that’s what I think, because Vanessa doesn’t want to work with him, and he keeps turning up in the tabs, and he seems like he just got spanked, which he definitely should be.

  I go out to the good sandwich place across the street that has the pesto, and I get a grapefruit and a Diet Coke, but not pesto, and when I get back Annabel has Allison Maiser in the conference room, and I can see them in there, and Annabel is pacing back and forth, and the girl looks like she might still be asleep. By the time I’ve eaten half of the grapefruit and thrown out the rest, it’s my turn with Allison. Annabel sighs and holds the door open.

  Okay, I say going in the door, so here we are, and you’ve met Annabel, who will be your boss, and you’ve met Jeanine, who will also be giving you some things to do when we need them done. What else do you want to know about what we do?

  Allison is just digging out some hangnail. She says, I don’t think any of your movies are so great. I say I don’t think they’re all great, either, but my job is to make it possible for Vanessa to produce the kinds of movies she wants to produce, and then when I have learned everything there is to learn about that I’ll make my own movies, and hopefully all of mine will be great. She says, you guys need a lot of help with story editing. I say, actually what we need is an intern who can do the intern stuff and who wants to learn. You’ll be going to the houses of international stars, like, say, Marcia Firestone, we worked with her on our last project, and you could go over there to her apartment, and help her get ready for the shoot. Our last intern got to go over to her place, make her coffee, make sure she got to the shoot on time. She’s just not choosing her roles very well anymore, Allison says. Well, listen, I say, why don’t you tell me what you think you could contribute. She launches into this amazing speech, well, I’ll tell you what kind of woman I am, and of course I can tell that she’d have a “y?
?? in “womyn” somewhere, because it’s just that kind of thing, she says: I’m the kind of woman that can’t read for a very long time, because I have a really short attention span, so I don’t want to sit around reading things, and I get really nervous when there’s a lot of pressure, I just can’t stand it when people yell at me, so I don’t want to be yelled at, and I don’t care who’s doing the yelling because if anyone yells at me I’m just going to walk out the door. I have a really upset stomach, they think I might have Crohn’s disease or something, and I need to know that I’ll have access to a bathroom, and that no one is going to say anything about the fact that I have to use the bathroom frequently. And I only want to work on the experimental projects, I don’t care what other stuff you’re working on, I don’t want to have anything to do with any Hollywood movies, and I don’t want to talk to anyone at the big studios, because they’re all stupid. What I bring to you is my future, and my future is going to be big, and you guys can be a part of that, or you can not, but I know that anyone who has me working for them is going to employ one of the most promising talents of her generation, that’s what I think, and I don’t want to have to come in until eleven, and I get as many personal days as I want.

  Okay, I say to her, the job is yours. Welcome to Means of Production.

  Tonight I had another date with Zimri Enderby, Madison writes, wearing silk pajamas, for the hour is late, but before I get to that, I should just say that today Vanessa didn’t show up at the office, and I can’t remember the last time that happened. I guess it’s something to do with her mom. Also, there was a note from her on my desk, I guess from yesterday, at the end of the day. The note was about Lois DiNunzio, and it said that she was pretty sure Lois hadn’t been murdered, because she’d been going through the books, and it’s clear that there’s a lot of money missing over the last few months, and she thinks that Lois probably took some of the money with her, and she thinks it might be something like fifty thousand dollars missing. Maybe even more. Who knows what we’ll find once we start poking around in accounts payable and all the expense accounting? And since tomorrow is Friday and that means payday, we have to make sure there’s money to pay everyone. She asks if I can keep it to myself, maybe we’ll talk to Thaddeus if we have to.

  It’s pretty scary, because what are we going to do when the rent comes due? We need to get something going, like the Otis Redding project, or the mini-series, or else we’re going to have to lay some people off. At least we don’t have Lois’s salary to worry about, this pay period, but we also don’t have anyone looking after the books. Probably we’d lay off Jeanine first, but Jeanine’s smart enough that she could do the books for a while. Until we get some project going somewhere. It was like a dungeon in the office, and we’re all waiting to hear if someone will call about UBC. I even called up the Vanderbilts and told them that we had to spread some evil rumors about Vic Freese and the Michael Cohen Agency, or else they’re liable to get their especially dumb version of The Diviners sold, and we’ll all be getting day jobs in retail. I could always audition for the holiday show at Radio City, they always need subs in the violin section.

  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 me
n 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.