The Diviners (21 page)

She’s responsible for the project about Otis Redding. Zimri might be interested in that. It’s a fictionalized narrative about Otis Redding, called
Try a Little Tenderness,
and it creates a thriller subtext around the life of Otis Redding, saying that Otis Redding did not have mob connections, you know, even though some people say he did. They really were not mob connections, according to the script, what they were was connections with the Nation of Islam. Which is ironic, because he was one of the first soul singers with a fully integrated band. Well, see, it’s an early point in his career, and he’s still back in Georgia and he’s just busting out of Little Richard’s band, where he got his start in the late fifties, and he falls under the sway of the Nation of Islam because he just wants to believe that some message of hope could transform the African American struggle. What Otis Redding does, in the script, is he comes to reject both the Nation of Islam and the gradualist politics of the white man. All of this while on his last tour, you know, before the plane goes down, just like with Mercurio’s cousin. Otis goes through an intellectual dark night of the soul on the last tour. He goes from the heights of ecstasy to the lowest lows; he sees into the troubled soul of this great land, and this is what enables him to write “(Sittin’ on the) Dock of the Bay” while visiting friends in Marin County. There’s some stuff about Herbert Hoover, but this part hasn’t been worked out entirely yet, and there’s some stuff about the great soul players in his band, and there’s a little bit about his white girlfriends, including a woman who was married to a prominent senator from the state of Virginia, but they have to be really careful about that because Otis remained married his entire life, and the family has given permission to have the movie made, and if they don’t like the white girlfriends, then there won’t be permission to call the film
Try a Little Tenderness
or to use any of the original music. The third act will answer the question of who had Otis Redding eliminated. And the answer is that they haven’t quite figured out who eliminated him yet, because Vanessa wants it to be terrorists, for some reason, while Madison and the writer are leaning toward Cubans, in revenge for the Bay of Pigs.

Because she’s been left on hold too long, Madison puts Zimri the Internet start-up guy on hold in return and she goes back over to Barclay, half of the Vanderbilt partnership, and says, “Maybe Mercurio could play Otis Redding.”

Suddenly both girls are on the line, indicating that they will consider this. They will have a quick phone meeting while she’s on hold with Zimri, the Internet start-up guy, and they will also consider the Brazilian waxer and then maybe they will try to reach Mercurio. And Madison goes back to the music that sounds like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, but there’s no one there. Soon she gets another incoming call, but actually it’s just Barclay, who has called back on a new line because it was faster. They are talking on two different lines now.

“By the way, who
is
Otis Redding?”

“You don’t know who Otis Redding is?”

“Don’t make me feel stupid, you bitch.”

Barclay cackles. Madison claims to be just kidding about not knowing. But she’s not kidding, and she’s not letting on that she’s not kidding. Meanwhile, in her innermost core, which is surprisingly sweet, Madison McDowell will do almost anything not to let anyone know that she is a virtuoso on the violin, that she was in the All-City Orchestra, first violin, and had the chance to play with the Philharmonic when she was sixteen. She has never mentioned this thing about the violin to the Vanderbilt girls, for example, nor to Vanessa Meandro, and she has put the violin under her bed, and she has not tuned it lately, because if she tunes it and her mother is in the house, her mother will get all weepy about how great Madison was on the violin. Her mother will observe that any man would love a girl who bows the violin the way Madison McDowell bows. Sometimes she waits until her mother is out of the house and her father is traveling on business, and then she takes the violin out of the case and fits it under her chin, and she tightens the bow, and she plucks the strings a few times. Then she sets the bow on the strings, and there is the long low trembling of the G and D strings, and the vibrato as she moves up through first position. And then there is the first melody she plays, when she is rusty and alone and willing to be the violin player that nobody knows. Just to have practiced something, some scales, and a little J. S. Bach. She is unthinkable without the violin because she is sublime only on the violin, and her posture is perfect, and her ear is perfect, and she hears the locking counterpoint of string quartets in her future, never to be, and that’s why the other passion project she is developing is the story about the violin maker Stradivarius, who, although he made the greatest violins in history, was actually a libertine and a reprobate, at least in his early life, and, in this story, Stradivarius goes from bedding French prostitutes and playing bawdy songs on his sublime instruments to helping a Prussian general scheme against foreign intrigues. But then he experiences the ennobling of courtly love, you know, in the person of the daughter of a viscount, whom he cannot have. Something like that. And, of course, he makes the greatest violins in history in order to capture the sound of the voice of his beloved, because the value of love is commensurate with difficulty of attainment. The writer of the Stradivarius script, a guy she met at Fashion Week, a guy who tried to get her number, is still working on the third act. Vanessa has no idea why Madison likes all the historical stories, why she likes Napoleon and Stradivarius, but she thinks maybe she just identifies with the romance of women from costume dramas, and besides, girls love those kinds of movies and flock to them, like if you could get Lacey, the teenybopper, to play the chaste Elsa in the Stradivarius movie, then you’d have something that would really bring the girls into the theater in big flocks.

Barclay, on the other hand, doesn’t know about Otis Redding, and she doesn’t know anything about violins, and she got thrown out of a number of private high schools here in the city. Unless it’s a Swedish imported car or some tacky kind of champagne that costs five hundred dollars a bottle, Barclay doesn’t have a clue, but Sophie, the other Vanderbilt Publicity girl, knows about this kind of thing, a little bit, just because her father has an entire performing arts wing at NYU named after him. That’s how the Vanderbilt partnership works out. Barclay Weltz worries about the billing and doesn’t bother to get her eyebrows dyed. She goes to these parties wearing designer jeans and with her bra showing under her shirt, and she plants gossip items in the papers about people she doesn’t like in order to have them ruined. And Sophie Fiegelman closes the deals and plays the good-cop part. It’s Sophie who told Madison that she was their choice this month and that it bespoke a
fabulousness
that Madison should be very proud of. All the more reason why it’s scary when Sophie’s voice rings out, breaking through the interstellar white noise of the on-hold signal of Barclay, likewise breaking through the on-hold signal of Zimri, Internet start-up guy, just as Madison is climbing out of the cab at the side entrance to the Rockefeller Plaza.

Sophie’s voice is agitated. “Oh, my God, you guys, I just got the worst news! You won’t believe it!”

Barclay says, “What? What?”

It’s almost midday, and the skaters are already doing their thing, and the colors are bright because it’s autumn. No time is as perfect as autumn, even if you’re a development girl on the phone with hack publicists and you are late. Madison listens absently and walks down to the edge of the rail overlooking the rink. The holidays feel like some fever up ahead, and that’s what she’ll remember thinking when Sophie breaks the news that this girl she knows, Samantha Lee, from one of the galleries—beautiful girl, knows a ton of people—she was walking in midtown yesterday and this guy, some guy, he just came up behind her and he just smashed her head with a brick, just took this brick and swung it at her head and just totally knocked her out, like, knocked her down on the street, and then she was on the street with her skull all smashed in and bleeding and everything.

“Oh, my God,” Barclay says. “That is so awful. That is so horrible. That is so sad. Is she dead?”

“She’s in the hospital. It’s all over the papers.”

Madison says, “Did she go to Lenox Hill? She should definitely go to Lenox Hill.”

“What party did she come to?” Barclay asks.

“She came to a lot of parties,” Sophie says. “You know who she is. She was going out with that guy, what was his name, the painter guy.”

And that’s what Madison takes with her, along with her impatience and her irritation, on the way into the office. She is carrying the name of a woman who got her head smashed in by some guy on the street, and it’s all kind of too much, the prospect of Vanessa is too much, so she pretty much turns right around and leaves, to meet Zimri, the Internet start-up guy, for lunch at the new Indian place on Forty-eighth Street, because why not? Madison likes a guy who doesn’t have to look through a hundred calendar pages before he can make a lunch date, or who at least has an efficient secretary, and she also really likes a guy who is standing when she comes in. Slow this instant down for a second, how about? Because the most important part of the day is the part you spend at lunch, and she does the important phone calls in the cab and then she just goes straight to lunch, because lunch is a legitimate expression of business.

Zimri Enderby is pleased to meet her, and Zimri is cute, and Zimri has an oblique smile that is endearing and impossible to pin down at the same time, like no matter what you say to him, you will not be able to figure out what he thinks. He holds her seat for her, and touches her on the biceps, just faintly, a brushing past of the fingertips, like he’s the archaeologist and she’s the intact vase in the peat bog, and then he sits. There’s something stern about Zimri Enderby. That’s what Madison thinks, even though he also has a button-down collar on his shirt, it’s so frigging preppie, are Mormons preppies? And he orders everything as if he’s familiar with it. Well, so he’s a Mormon who knows how to order Indian food. And pleasantries get exchanged, according to some etiquette manual of pleasantries. Zimri hints about how he thinks the election will turn out, and Madison is tempted to say something, but the Vanderbilt girls, when they decided that Madison was the selection for this month, they insisted that she not say anything about politics for the entire month, no matter what, because no one pays any attention to politics anyhow and no one ever got a business started by caring about politics. The only thing you need to know about politics is that a check of a certain size will buy you access to politicians of any party at any time. Ten thousand bucks gets you all the access you need. Zimri is the kind of guy who could write a check of a certain size.

An Indian waiter takes away the ceremonial plates.

“I’m familiar with some of the movies your production company has done,” Zimri says, “and I have to say, they’re provocative and interesting. Why don’t you tell me what you’re doing now.” Provocative and interesting? Aren’t these adjectives from somebody’s porch furniture catalogue? Madison pauses dramatically. She takes in her surroundings. The Indian restaurants in midtown are always decorated in crimson, like you’re in somebody’s mouth. Here’s the soft palate and here’s the uvula. She looks around at the tassels and the fringe on the draperies.

“Well, we have a couple of projects we’re working on that are certain to get distribution, and, uh, we’re thinking they’re going to get a lot of attention at the awards, all of that. Stars are attached.” She tries to think about what kinds of films a Mormon might like. Maybe he should bankroll some animated films about Native American princesses with hourglass figures or something. Means of Production is always shaking things up. This is what she tells him, using language that is straight out of that brochure that Annabel had printed and which she forgot to bring. She says that Means of Production is about “shaking things up,” about “avoiding the pieties of mainstream cinema,” about the “freshness and energy” of independent cinema, which means directors and actors who are “hungry for expression.” She watches his face while she repeats stuff like this, like she’s a waitress announcing daily specials, recommending sauces that she has never heard of before and mispronouncing the names of exotic mushrooms, and she waits to see the flicker of prejudice or disdain that she figures is hidden in the faces of the fervently religious. Madison associates any kind of religious anything with mental retardation. But when she doesn’t see the prejudice there, she gets bold and she starts to talk about her passion project, her film about Stradivarius, and anyway, it doesn’t have any gratuitous bondage sequences or any transvestites in it, and it has no references to Michel Foucault in it, nor does it heroize the labor movement. She kind of warms to the whole subject, though she doesn’t want to give away that she actually plays the violin. She says, “Have you ever held a violin? The Stradivarius, it’s really beautiful. People cry sometimes, just holding a Stradivarius, and we want to make a movie that feels like that.” And then she tells him about Otis Redding and she tells him about the remake of
Citizen Kane
from the point of view of the Marion Davies character. He has his arms folded pensively, but then he remembers that he has food, and he pokes at the chicken tikka masala, when he’s not watching her as though he’s waiting for her secret.

“I don’t really know what I’m thinking about with the movie business yet. I’m just learning about it. And what I do when I learn about something is I just take it all in. I’m taking in the film business and I’m thinking about what I might be able to do that no one else has done.”

Madison asks what the Internet start-up business is all about. Because, as her mother has pointed out, it is important to ask questions.

“I’m proceeding on two fronts, really.” The one front, he says, is a company called Rural Electrification, Inc., and the goal of Rural Electrification, Inc., is to put wireless broadband service in the hands of people in rural communities. Most of these people, he says, have to go to libraries to have any access to the Internet at all, but wireless broadband is just around the corner and it would enable farmers to access information while out on their land. For example, if they have a question about soil pH balance, or a question about the water table or the possible effects of dam projects in the West. Wireless broadband would enable the rural culture of the West to feel that it was not lagging behind coastal centers in terms of information management. It would give the rural West a level playing field. That’s one of the projects he tells her about, and the other project concerns privacy and privacy issues. It involves a Web site that could be used as a portal for accessing other Web sites in order to protect consumer privacy, and it would also offer software and information about privacy in an era when more and more of what happens on the Internet is being stored, saved, and sold by large Web merchandisers. “Imagine we were having this conversation on some instant messaging service, you know? That’s not terribly difficult to monitor these days. Say I mentioned that I knew radicals out West, water rights activists, and I happened to know that the government had a computer that monitored users any time the words
water rights activist
turned up anywhere on the Internet. We’re looking to create services and situations that will protect consumers from these malicious invasions of privacy. And the conjunction of these two projects, Rural Electrification, Inc., and the Privacy Project, will really benefit the lives of people from the part of the country where I was born and raised, a part of the country that cherishes liberty. But, you know, start-ups are sort of a side project for me, really. My father is a rancher. That’s the family business. I’m just here on my passion projects, looking for financing.”