The Diviners (15 page)

The new client has shown no aptitude for acting whatsoever. She has never taken a lesson. When the new client did a cola endorsement two years ago, they required thirty-six takes to get her to say her one line. Then they hired a voice-over actress. It is not clear whether the new client can, in truth, read. A prominent celebrity magazine has already given coverage to her “Struggle with Learning Disabilities.” And, according to the celebrity magazine, her recent single “Please Don’t Send Me That Letter,” in which she asks a boyfriend not to send her a breakup note, is widely understood to be a compassionate plea on behalf of dyslexics everywhere. Her scripts are always sent to her handlers, and, in all likelihood, they read and respond to the scripts for her.

The new client is why Vic cannot get into a long conversation with the old guy about the election. The new client was meant to be here twenty minutes ago, with entourage. And yet the old guy is still holding the manila envelope and looking at Vic with his hail-fellow optimism. If he has to be removed by security, he will be.

“Baseball follower?”

Vic says nothing.

“Let me tell you, when I was a younger man, I used to go down to the spring training games. I can’t stand the part of the year when there’s no baseball. Winter is just a bunch of weeks where I could slip and break something. That’s a real danger. So why don’t I go down to Florida then?”

“I’m sure that Sandra would be happy to —”

Sandra has the headset on and seems to be making bulk dental appointments for preventive scaling.

“You followed the series. Am I right?”

Vic tries to move away a few steps, toward the opaque glass doors through which any visitor must pass upon emerging from the shiny maw of the elevator. Vic mumbles some inoffensive words about golf.

“I like the team in Queens because I believe in an underdog.”

Vic Freese, of diminutive size and aspect like all the agents of Michael Cohen, not one of whom is over five foot nine, was not a presence on any athletic team in the entirety of his youth but does admit to certain agonizing years in the system known as Little League.

“Wasn’t very good,” he remarks.

This only buoys the messenger to say, “Let me see your swing. Just let an old fellow tell you a little bit about your swing.”

“Give your script to the receptionist,” Vic says.

People are excited to be in a major talent agency with a hundred-year tradition of serving the stars. W. C. Fields and Don Ameche and William Shatner have walked through these doors. At any moment talent might enter. A pint-size diva with a nosebleed and a stuffed bear the size of a sumo wrestler. She will demand to be given a chocolate milk and a contract for a sitcom, for which she expects a half million dollars per episode.

“I’m just delivering. Not to say a guy like me doesn’t have stories to tell. Don’t we all. We all have stories. Spicer is the name. Would you like to hear about how I met my wife?”

“I —”

“My wife died a few years ago of ovarian cancer. She played the harpsichord. Honest. The harpsichord. You get a lot of stories about the harpsichord come through here? No one plays the harpsichord. Do you know what a harpsichord is? A piano but without the loud part. I was a young man in the city, and my parents were from Europe. So was my wife’s family. She came here, she could barely speak English, but she could play the harpsichord. How she settled on it, I’ll never know. Anyhow, one time when I went to one of the big department stores in town, I think it was Gimbels, I heard in the lobby they had a recital on the harpsichord, and this musician was playing the music of J. S. Bach or somebody like that. It was a promotion. Arrow shirts. I sauntered in a leisurely way down to where the musician was playing. It was the beginning of that, oh, what is that piece called, you know, the —”

“Goldberg Variations?”

“Just the one!”

“Look, Mr. Spicer, I’m really waiting for an —”

The elevator sighs, as if weary at having to deposit yet another payload, and the heart of Vic Freese lodges up in his sinuses. And, as the hinges moan on the glass door that gives entrance to the Michael Cohen Agency, the sullen assistant of one of the other agents appears before him eating a muffin. Crumbs on her face like a skin condition. Joelle, the assistant in question, known to keep to herself, nods at Sandra and trudges up the spiral staircase to where the offices of the agents are laid out like a strand of defective chromosomes.

“Ever after, whenever I heard the music of the harpsichord, which was a lovely kind of music, I saw the auburn hair of this musician in my mind’s eye, and I saw her crimson fingernails, polished up beautifully, and I thought this was the most magical thing I’d ever heard, and I thought all harpsichord music was like that, as magical as that, so afterward I went to any harpsichord performance in the tristate area. No matter who was playing, I went. I knew all the music for that instrument because that was the music of love. And I knew one day I would see my wife again, just by following the music. This was during the war. Did I say that? Did I say that I was about to be drafted? I was. You know what that means, that means the destruction of entire cities, like Dresden, which was where some of my cousins came from before they emigrated. I was stationed in Germany, the country that my family had fled. I was there at the end of the war, the mopping-up part. All I could think of over there in Germany was the music of the harpsichord. The music I had heard before I got drafted. I was sentimental about the music, is the truth. When I got back to the city, again I chased around the music of the harpsichord, all around; any time there was a concert, I was there, with this idea that one day I would find my girl. It was months and months, though, and I never did see her, and I just about gave up. I went to work in the garment district.”

Freese hates to admit it to himself, but he does sort of want to know the end of the story, even though he will have to be in the company of Spicer’s smell for at least another two minutes. A prospect made even more alarming because, with each passing second, it is more likely that the new client will walk through the door and she will see him talking to a foul-smelling septuagenarian with argyle socks. And this will be her first impression of the New York office. He turns to remark to Sandra that she had best take the package from Spicer, the messenger, because Mr. Spicer undoubtedly has further deliveries to make, but Sandra is now abandoning her post for her smoke break. He knows, because he has seen her out front, that she is part of the guilty crew on smoke break. And where is her temporary replacement?

“I was going to the ballpark at the same time, which you’d think was not a place where much music got played. Not a lot of classical music at the ballpark, except when an internationally known tenor came to town. But I was at the ballpark, watching the Brooklyn Dodgers. They were my boys. Eddie ‘the Brat’ Stanky, Pee Wee Reese, Cookie Lavagetto, and so on. What a team. They were heroes, even if they didn’t make the play-offs that year. That was the year of Jackie Robinson, if I remember correctly. So one day I was watching my Brooklyn Dodgers, the greatest team ever in the history of New York City. And it happened to be the day of a promotion. They were actually giving out nylon stockings. Nylons were brand-new at the time. The loudspeaker announced the national anthem. And everyone was standing proud. By the way, did I mention that I have eleven grandchildren?”

He asks if Vic is a man with children. Vic is horrified at the possibility of giving away personal information to a guy who may potentially memorize statistical abstracts about baseball. But yes, he admits he has two children. They are little animated characters gamboling in Vic’s mind’s eye. Even in the midst of important meetings there is in Vic Freese the sound of his children demanding again to dance to mopey British pop songs from the eighties. Where is the voice in him that indicates that he must put first the needs of the new client? Why didn’t he cultivate that voice? If there were a scale before him now, the new client would top out at an ounce and a half. And his children would weigh thirty-eight and forty-nine pounds, respectively. If his son were here, he’d still be saying the words
campfire song,
over and over, as he has been saying for three days now because Vic made a joke about campfire songs he had to sing as a kid, like “Charlie on the MTA,” et cetera, and if his daughter were here, she, too, would be repeating it,
campfire song,
because she repeats whatever his son says,
campfire song, campfire song,
until the words become, through transmutation, precious. This idea of the sound of children’s voices, so adorable and so memorable, is an evolutionary triumph.

“Who do you think was playing the national anthem on the harpsichord at the baseball stadium? Can you guess who it was? Like I said, the stadium was promoting attendance by the ladies, so they had a beautiful lady onto Ebbets Field to play the national anthem. She was a tiny little speck down there on the field. She told me later that they had to truck the harpsichord out first thing in the morning and then tune it, parked at home plate. They were using a brand-new public-address system at the park, and the national anthem was never so glorious. Maybe it was beautiful because there’d been the brawl the day before where Stanky started throwing punches at Len Merullo. Or because the war was over. I only know it was wondrous, and it was played by the woman I was going to marry. And I had a hunch that she’d stay for the game. Because it was a great game. There was another brawl, but then Pete Reiser stole home, even though he was injured. He stole home seven times that season. And the boys pulled it out, two to one. I missed most of that, however, because I was waiting out in the parking lot. I was betting that my future wife would be wherever the harpsichord was, and, sure enough, she was standing by the truck in the parking lot. They had the game on the radio.”

Sandra is back, and she distracts Vic from a portion of Spicer’s heartfelt monologue, the monologue that Spicer has probably delivered nine times this morning. Vic’s assistant is on the line. Sandra punches the buttons and holds up the handset. Vic abandons Spicer in the middle of telling him about selling the harpsichord after his wife died, the cost of tuning and upkeep for a harpsichord. Half attending to Spicer, half listening to the emergency. At first he thinks it’s his wife, because when you are a father this is always your worry. One of your kids is banged up. But it’s not his wife, it’s the personal manager of the new client.

It takes him a moment to put it all together. A moment until the personal manager is in the middle of saying, “. . . going to be really unfortunate from a legal angle, not to mention from a, you know, publicity angle. So, anyway, she’s going to go to Europe for a few weeks, to relax, maybe to record some new things, out of the spotlight. In fact, she’s already at the airport. Sorry I didn’t call earlier.”

Vic says, “I can’t believe what I’m hearing.” By which he means that he wasn’t listening to what he was hearing. The handset, still warm, smells like Binaca. The manager keeps saying “Ramon Martinez.”

“Ramon Martinez? Who the hell is Ramon Martinez?”

Spicer, the messenger, is listening to the whole thing, and he chimes in. Soon everyone is saying “Ramon Martinez,” as though it’s the adult-world equivalent of the precious incantation
campfire song,
and Vic has it pieced together that the new client, now on her way to Paris, used to be the girlfriend of someone called Ramon Martinez, and this Ramon Martinez has done something truly awful, and Spicer is saying, “Diamond District, in the Diamond District,” and so is Sandra, so Vic sees the tabloid headlines assembling in the developing tray of his consciousness, that sensational newspaper photo. He starts to see Ramon Martinez driving his car into the jewelry store on Sixth Avenue, cursing the Jews. A senseless crime for a senseless time perpetrated by a senseless guy. The new client was his girlfriend, the girlfriend of Ramon Martinez. Or, at least, the new client was photographed with him, the new client had him in her private company for a span of seven consecutive nights,
canoodling,
as the tabloids will have it. Therefore, the new client, it is revealed, was consort to this known perpetrator of a hate crime. Vic Freese should see this as a dark day for the agency, he should see this as an insurmountable difficulty for his stewardship of the fledgling television career of the new client; instead, in a way, all he can feel is relief. Now the streamers in the office are for his own celebration, the celebration of his ability to go home at
5:30
and do the thousand dances with his kids to New Order instead of beseeching producers and casting agents to think Lacey, Lacey, Lacey, Lacey. Lacey with her pierced navel, Lacey with her hip-huggers, Lacey with her thongs, with her constant traveling homunculus, also known as Neil the hairdresser. Lacey, friend of manslaughterers. He cradles the handset in its postderegulation console.

Spicer says, “Now let’s see that swing.”

Vic says, with a new optimism, “There was always some trouble driving off my back leg. I had fallen arches as a teen.”

“That can be an asset, you know. Upper-body strength. Give me a look.”

And Vic Freese, soon-to-be-former television agent, stands in reception with a messenger who smells like he’s bathed in formaldehyde and drives off the right leg. Spicer puts the manila envelope on the coffee table in reception, where
Variety
and
Premiere
are stacked in perfect diagonal lines. Some nice photos hanging in this room, too. Fictional film stills by the woman who is in all her own photos. Black-and-whites. Also: tiger lilies in a vase. Right before Vic swings at the second imaginary pitch, an off-speed thing that tails in over the inside corner, he looks down at the envelope and he sees the name on it. Which is not his own name. Nor is it the name of any current employee of the Michael Cohen Agency. Actually, the name on the envelope is the name of a producer of his acquaintance, at a production company called Means of Production.

Spicer has a lot of corrections for Vic. Vic is turning his wrists too soon, he’s letting his shoulder drop out. Spicer argues for lifting the front leg a little higher, planting it firmly. Spicer lets it be known that he could have been a scout if he’d wanted to, plenty of guys he’s met at the minor leagues have told him so. He has the eye. Knows about the importance of offense. And Vic lets him draw a diagram, including right triangles, to which Spicer adds a little analysis about why pulling the ball is a failed strategy. And Spicer actually draws this diagram on the manila envelope that is now officially delivered to the wrong address, and Vic does not stop him.