The Diviners (10 page)

One day, Rosa, the mother of Minivan, called the office line, and in the middle of it, she started babbling incoherently about her grandfather or great-grandfather who possessed the fraudulently magic skill of
dowsing.
This was mixed in with her obsession with a certain talk show host. She couldn’t stop talking about this talk show host. Somehow, in the recounting, Annabel and Thaddeus appropriated the word, and it became the code for all things romantic:
dowsing.
Thaddeus let it trip off his tongue, “Is there dowsing in the forecast?” This is how it happens, see. This is how the whole lie gets started and begins to get up its head of steam. Annabel Duffy, the black intellectual, is locked in an affair she doesn’t really want to be having with a white action film star, who is riffling papers on her desk while an Indian guy in a turban is staring at her, smiling, and her boss is yelling at her from the next room about the call sheets and she’s asking about the treatment.

“I asked if you read the —”

Thaddeus Griffin has slyly stolen up on the action. He too notices that there is a Sikh in the office, and imagines, probably, that the Sikh is delivering something.

The Sikh says, “Mr. Griffin. You are a great and underutilized actor. My honor to meet you.”

“Why, thank you,” says Thaddeus. “You’re a new employee?”

“Yes, sir, I am the new employee in matters of television.”

And the Minivan shouts out again. “There’s buzz. There’s a volume of background noise about this treatment. I have heard things. And I want to know what it’s about and I want to know if it’s any good. Jeanine, where are the call sheets? And Annabel, I want to move the office out of this neighborhood. I don’t want to be in this neighborhood anymore. I don’t want to see another fucking Christmas tree out the window. I don’t want to have to listen to that music that the skaters skate to. I want to move downtown. And I want to know what that treatment is about.”

Which treatment? Annabel shuffles the papers around. She can’t find anything, can’t find coverage, can’t find any treatment. She looks up at Thaddeus. Lying is about to become the only way to survive, yet again. The Sikh smiles. Not even knowing what treatment it is now, what script, what book, what play, what was it that she was supposed to have seen last night, which younger playwright? How can she get the jump on Madison, to whose domain all of this material also belongs? Madison, who is hovering at the edge of the action, peeking out of her cubicle. The Sikh is smiling and Thaddeus is doing his agitated dance, his restless legs syndrome, and Madison is scowling, and Lois DiNunzio is calling to the Sikh that he should come over to her desk to sign some tax forms —

“I think I might have sent it back, the, uh, I think the script you’re asking about might have been sent back.”

“Are you kidding me?”

A torrent of abuse ensues. Minivan, like, well, a minivan plowing up onto a sidewalk and taking out a few pedestrians, begins a tirade. It’s so predictable that it’s as if she’s reading it off a cue card. Your stupidity
cannot
mean the end of my business, et cetera. Like it’s a monologue. There’s a moment of suspense at the end, though, because sometimes someone gets fired over these kinds of things. So will Annabel get fired? And does the treatment in question even exist? Or is this another test of stamina for the black assistant?

Until Thaddeus, smirking, says, “Vanessa, give it a rest. Don’t be a jerk. It’s on
my
desk. I read it. It’s hilarious. It’s the one about
dowsing.
”

5

Michael David Griffin, also known as Thaddeus, during his first Ashtanga series. At the Ashram of the False Guru. In this the seventh round of sun salutations, resistance in Michael David Griffin begins to fade blissfully away. He is perched in a corner of the ceiling, in some evolved yogi incarnation of himself, and he can see himself below. Thaddeus Griffin, in a silence of exertion, Thaddeus Griffin and the tidal movement of the breath.

He’s a beginner, understand, but the time has come for the Ashtanga series. The False Guru took aside Thaddeus Griffin on the way in to tell him of the excellent programs they have under way, like installing this indoor fountain and making available some synthetic yoga wear for the women who will want to sign up with Ford and Elite. Also there are harmoniums they have purchased for instructors. Wouldn’t Thaddeus like to be involved with the ashram in a more complete way? Wouldn’t Thaddeus like to be a part of the brochure of the False Guru, which elucidates the one true path to serenity and worldly abundance? His response was something bland and noncommittal regarding new program initiatives. He said, “Keep reminding me,” which he says when he is doing his best to forget everything just said. Thaddeus is unshaven, and his hair is standing on end, and he is in forearm stand, and his wife is in San Diego, most likely fucking that commercial director. Thaddeus works three months a year and then does a lot of interviews on prime-time newsmagazines. His movies give teenagers something to do.

The models around him, here at the ashram, move from their elaborate series of advanced bridge poses up onto their feet, then back over their heads into a handstand, as though they are made of pipe cleaners. He would like to fuck these models. He would like to fuck each and every one. He would like them, in bridge pose, to serve as coffee tables in his apartment. He is the minister of false consciousness. Why is it that he is always thinking about these things? Why is it that he experiences spiritual advancement only when next to the perfect ass? He is in bridge pose and he is arching toward the ceiling, and then he is down, and then he is up, and then he is down and then he is up. Just three more, the instructor says. Something in Thaddeus Griffin is shattering. Not literally, like when his friend Jorie popped her hip out of its socket during the Ashtanga series here at the Ashram of the False Guru. Sounded like a champagne cork ejecting. (She was taken out screaming.) No, it’s as if Griffin finds himself in the spin cycle of human souls. His mediocre career as a movie actor is colliding with the reality of the wife who is fucking a commercial director and this is colliding with the fact that he isn’t working and this is colliding with the fact that he isn’t producing films, either, which was his plan for escaping from the hustle of being a chump actor, which is colliding with the fact that even his young mistress will no longer put up with him. The twenty-eight-year-old mulatto genius won’t sleep with him, and now plank pose, and he can feel the extrusion of toxins from muscle tissue, dioxins, PCBs, the poisonous things in him, which are many. The instructor is quoting from the Sanskrit. The rich and the privileged come to perform the Ashtanga series so that they can learn justice, the instructor seems to be saying; this is where rich New York, which is primarily white New York, comes to learn compassion for that part which is brown, black, red, and yellow. This grotto, this ashram where the False Guru puts in his indoor fountain and names it serenity. Is the instructor saying this? Or is Thaddeus Griffin shearing apart? And is this shearing apart not a two- or three-times-a-week occurrence? Now the instructor is leading them in the chant of the guilty white liberal. The long low drones of the harmonium, with its bellows like the gritted exhalations of a chump movie actor. Michael David Griffin is beginning to sob again. It is good for actors to sob; it indicates serious craft.
We would all do better / We would all do better / But we are on deadline / We are on deadline / We would all do better / We would all do better / We will do something for the poor and unfortunate when we get back / But we have compassion, we really do.
The harmonium, and the Sanskrit, and another round of the full wheel, and the head of a model goes between her legs and her ankles drape over her shoulders.

His failures are so numerous, pouring from him during the Ashtanga series. Like when he seduced that development girl, Madison McDowell. He seduced her and then took her for a weekend to the track in Saratoga Springs, and he bet twenty thousand dollars on a filly and boy was that money gone fast. They had breakfast at the track, and he put Tabasco on the eggs, he ate the sprig of parsley, and he told Madison that her eyes were the bluest eyes he had ever seen, and then he bet twenty thousand dollars on a filly and lost. But her eyes were really closer to hazel. Then Madison took a call from that harpy Vanessa Meandro, and Madison cooked up an excuse to take the train back down the Hudson to the city. He’d rented the house on Union Avenue for a whole week. Then there was Jeanine Stampfel, Vanessa’s personal assistant. Few office assistants have been as miserable as Jeanine. Jeanine the self-immolator. Somewhere in the recesses of her apartment, which was actually her parents’ apartment when they were in town from Scottsdale, she was taking a common household lighter and she was applying it to her ivory skin. Here was Jeanine, in a pinafore, in her white bobby socks. Jeanine was on a fainting couch beside a leather globe that still listed Ceylon; she was taking an antique Zippo lighter out of a desk drawer and setting fire to herself. Her sharp intake of breath was like a chump-movie-actor attempt to do a standing split. Her forearm liquefied. He saw the scars.

“Excuse me,” a voice whispers next to him. A young woman in black leotard and leg warmers. Always the ones in leg warmers. “Excuse me.” He looks up to see where the spotter is. Across the room, by the bank of windows facing the theater across the street. The spotter is attending to someone’s hunched shoulders.

“Excuse me.”

Michael David Griffin says, “I’m trying to do my Ashtanga series, here. Can we talk later?”

She holds out a handkerchief. Folded perfectly, as if a secret message were contained within. Her ass is a temple. Greek city-states were founded on less. Michael David Griffin says nothing and wipes his eyes, and now his bodily fluids are on her handkerchief. She could have biological materials cloned from the weave of her handkerchief. Nervously, he hands back the handkerchief, smiles, tells her his name is Thaddeus.

“I know your name,” she says.

“Then I’m at a disadvantage.” In his inattentiveness he collapses onto his sticky mat. The smells coming off him are not covered in the Kyoto protocols.

“Nora.” She goes into a perfect split. “Don’t you want my number?”

Later, when he comes out of the changing room, hobbling, Nora is there. She extends her hand. Says she admires his work, which cannot be true. Does she like
Single Bullet Theory
? With its triple-digit body count? She’s wearing one of those Greek fisherman’s caps. She has elegant cheekbones. The babbling of the indoor fountain says:
Your superficial goals are good, and you may pursue them at your leisure.
Here comes the human moment. It’s always here. It’s the Ashtanga series that brings it out in him. Don’t think of her as an expanse of skin that could rub against your skin, don’t think of her as a bonbon. Think of her as a complexity to be respected, a person tortured during field hockey practice, the only Jewish kid at Christian summer camp, the girl who vomited in college every morning.

With all this in mind, Griffin allows himself to be pulled away by the mulatto genius. He pulls away from the gravitational field of Nora. The mulatto genius is waiting. He is late. When he pulls open the door of the bar across the street, he feels an uncoiling of gratitude, yards and yards of gratitude in him. He has extruded poisons; he has had a reasonable human interaction. In the bar, on a stool, the mulatto genius balances, one lanky leg stretched all the way to the floor, stabilizing. She’s like a switchblade. There are many unknown things about the mulatto genius, and he has to stop calling her that. She is dressed in black leather pants and a black V-neck sweater from Agnès B., neither smiling nor frowning. If it were in a script, it would say
They kiss quickly,
and he would have a hundred questions: What does her mouth taste like, and does she close her eyes, is she wearing perfume, and is it a car-crash kiss or is it like the soft rolling of tides over a salt marsh?

On the small stage on the far wall, a soundman, wearing baggy pants and a hooded sweatshirt, plugs a cable into an amplifier.

Griffin says to Annabel, “It came to me during the Ashtanga series. I went out to the men’s room, I blew chow, went back in, fought off a couple rabid fans, wept over the condition of my life, apologized to the instructor, and then I got it.”

“What did you get?”

“The idea.”

“Which idea?”

“About the missing treatment.”

The sweatshirt yells
Check
into the microphone. The barkeep pauses in front of them.

“Make the coverage up.”

“Make it up?”

“Right here and now.” He warms to the idea. “I already told her it was about dowsing, diviners. Make it up tonight, like you’d spin out a story of love. Make it up like storytellers around a campfire.” Did she have a pen? Did she have paper? Did they have a napkin? Could a treatment be written on a napkin in one of the bars of the city? It happened every night. Could coverage be spray-painted on the city itself, New York City, as if
of
the city itself?

“You think Vanessa will ever know? She’ll never know. She only gives a shit about this script because it’s leverage.
You
lose a script,
you
fucked up. She loses a script, who gives a shit, find another copy.”

Then he improvises his monologue, again, about how to write, which is really a monologue about the nature of self-improvement. It’s the monologue that got him the space with Vanessa, the monologue that launched a thousand temporary production gigs. The monologue about being outside of the empire, outside the establishment, the monologue about how creativity comes at the expense of conventional thinking, at the expense of formula, at the expense of abstract values like tradition and love. The monologue about creativity as revolt, as bloody insurrection.

“The problem is that all film needs to be written automatically. It needs to be written by your
pussy.
Modern movies, this is what I’m saying, need to be written by cocks and pussies. The problem with these action films, for example, is not enough cock and pussy. People need to get words like
cock
and
pussy
out into the atmosphere, they need to say
cock
a lot, the way they say
sunrise,
the way they say
pang of regret,
they need to see that
pussy
is the most beautiful word in the world and that every script in the world needs to be written with a pussy and a cock in it, needs to be written
by
a pussy and a cock. No other reason to write. We think that it’s about art or commerce, we think it’s about the art people over here, wearing black and smoking, or the commerce people over here, with their tit jobs and their spray-on tans, but that’s not what it’s about, it’s about pussies and cocks, and if your pussy was
not
wet, sweetheart, when you were writing about the wife of the Marquis de Sade, then you might as well just give up the job. You should be dripping when you write a story, and your stomach should be churning with the head-splitting climax at your end of the story, the one that
gets you off.
The one where all the differences in the world, like the difference between a pussy and a cock, are obliterated in the reprise of the come shot of creation, the big grand unified come shot that made the conditions that made you and me and art and commerce and religion. Fuck art and fuck commerce. Abandon the Marquis and his marquise. Come away with me, and I’ll take you places you’ve never seen before, because that’s where we’re going to write this coverage, tonight, and I’ll show you how to write a story, and then tomorrow, when the sun comes up, you can put it on Vanessa’s desk, and when she loves it, which she will, you can say you wrote it yourself and you can know that you wrote it with your
pussy.
You can know that your pussy made this masterpiece.”