The Diviners (31 page)

The girl is light skinned and maybe part Hispanic or something. Beautiful and tall and thin, and the guy is maybe Jewish. He has the charm of an advertising guy. They are standing on the stoop, and Vanessa says, “Let’s go have a look.” She’s on her best behavior. And she takes them up to the top floor, and they are amazed at the view. They really like the brick, they like the floors, they like the old gas lamp out front. And what they probably really like is that Vanessa does not give a shit what color they are as long as they don’t make too much noise and pay their rent in a timely fashion. But on the way back down the stairs, she says, “Let’s just take a quick look and see if my mother is home, because she likes to be a part of this process.”

She’s not sure why she did it. It was not a good sign when the doorbell tolled unanswered three times. The appointment had been agreed upon. Like many people with problems, Vanessa’s mother was fanatical about her few appointments. She worried about them for days in advance. It was not a good sign when the bell rang and Rosa Elisabetta did not answer it. Nevertheless, Vanessa unlocked the door on the ground floor, after explaining that they should feel free to use the garden in the backyard, and then, as the door swung in, she found her mother passed out on the floor of the living room, arms flung wide as if in preparation for some fervent embrace, one leg of her Kmart double-knit trousers scrunched up enough to reveal a pink sock. The cat was sitting on top of her mother’s stomach.

“Maybe we’d better come back,” Vanessa said, giggling madly.

“Is she okay?” the woman asked.

“Sure,” Vanessa said. “The only problem here is the socks.”

More nervous laughter. Then there was a pause in the banter between landlord and lessees in the stairwell. And then the adman said: “We still really like the apartment. We’d like to sign the agreement.”

She gave them the lease on the spot. They had probably seen much worse, in this challenging real estate environment. The lease was on top of the stack of papers on her mother’s kitchen table, along with every other legal piece of paper she had ever needed in her life, including her will, her divorce agreement, and a suit filed against the City of New York for restrictive ballot requirements for third-party candidates in local elections. The three of them stood in the kitchen, looking at the lease agreement, while her mother snored in the center of the living-room floor. The renters had the paperwork notarized and returned, with the check, before Rosa woke.

That was a kind of love. There is love, and there is persuasion, and these are two of the colors of the universe. There is the postmodern Orientalism of Vanessa’s strategy, via Ranjeet, which is a strategy of multiple fronts, all operating simultaneously. The flow chart. She’s going through the scrolling alphabetical entries of her personal digital assistant, through its trove of names, Katzenberg and Meyer and Case and Bronfman and Brokaw, the telephone numbers that she has pried loose over the years, as if these telephone numbers were some kind of secret code. She uses the numbers rarely; she just covets them, keeps them in reserve. But on this wasteland of a Saturday, she is feeling that perhaps the moment has finally come. She can feel it, it’s an automatic function, a reflex, and what is more true than the expression of a reflex?

She dials the cell phone number of Jeffrey Maiser, senior vice president of network programming at UBC, the fledgling network built of affiliates in the hinterlands. UBC, network of the kids, the network with lots of shows for teenagers featuring werewolves and invisible children, werewolves dealing with water-weight gain and male-pattern baldness, and, more recently, a rash of enhanced-reality programs, such as the very successful
American Spy.
Jeffrey Maiser has been linked, and this is always how they put it in the relevant publications, with a certain brainless, one-named strumpet called Lacey. A singer, if you can call her that. For whom he is now acting as Svengali, according to the relevant publications. Jeffrey Maiser is working on a deal for a half-hour enhanced-reality program in which the one-named strumpet is to lie around on casual furniture such as beanbag chairs and waterbeds with her friends, listening to songs and watching videos. They will also rate various boys, hosts of video programs, members of various bands, and so forth. Jeffrey Maiser is developing this, according to the relevant publications, and he is also attempting to secure dramatic roles for Lacey, and this will be the fulcrum of the pitch that is even now beginning to form, like a boil, in Vanessa. Vanessa needs to tell the story of
The Diviners
so badly that resistance to it is making her irritable. Yet waiting will sharpen its edges. She goes into the kitchen, where there are the makings of a particularly good egg sandwich.

She likes interior decorating that looks as though it has been shipped over from Tuscany stone by stone. And thus there are real tiles in her bathroom and her kitchen, and faux-marble counters, and she has up-to-date culinary machines in industrial sizes. Seltzer is delivered to the house. The cat, having eaten, is following her around the kitchen, making a figure eight around her ankles, just in case a saucer of milk should appear beside the seltzer bottles in the pantry. The phone is still clamped between Vanessa’s shoulder and ear. And before she can connect to Maiser’s line she is interrupted by the Morse code of call waiting.

“Oh, hi.” Particularly unhappy at the sound of Vic Freese’s voice. “Go away. Not you. The cat. I’m making an egg sandwich. Fresh basil. No, Vic, I haven’t done anything. Sorry you had to stumble on it in the way you did. The parties responsible have been terminated. No, Vic. No. I haven’t done much in the way of casting. Hang on a second, I have to beat the eggs.”

For the sake of the pause. She looks out the window. The day is sunny, she notices abruptly. There are mutable shadows on the flagstone behind the house.

“Yeah, I thought of her, too. Are you saying that she might be willing . . . ? But isn’t she . . . Yeah, that’s what I heard. Guy in the Diamond District? So she’s willing to come back for a big part? That’s of some interest. No, no, I’m happy to do the pitching myself. I don’t want to turn over the story to you. I don’t want to turn anything over to you, no. What about the guys . . . You what? You already, no, I’d really appreciate if we could keep this between us. We’re working on writers. Yeah, yeah. A-list all the way. A-list. Of course. You think we’d be having this conversation if I hadn’t? Yeah, we contacted the romance novelist lady. Okay, okay. How is your family? Well, yeah. That’s great. Glad to hear it. Yep. Bye.”

Vic Freese and his nervousness are like fuel. She can put it off no longer. Doesn’t matter if the egg sandwich is not yet done. Doesn’t matter if it’s not even eight o’clock on the West Coast; nothing matters except the pressure of language, the pressure to use language to create meaning where there was none before. Here is a void of meaning and potential that will be filled in the creation of art and value. As a producer, Vanessa Meandro was born to do this. The rest of the particulars of her job, line-producer responsibilities, casting consultant, location scout, these are of no interest to her. Seeing the film through the editing and the launch. She can do these things, but without enthusiasm. She has some of the lukewarm yolk in her mouth and some of it on her chin, and she holds an imperial blue cloth napkin, and she is ready to make the pitch. What she does is cram a big bite of the sandwich into her mouth, and she dials the cellular number of Jeffrey Maiser again, and she chokes on a mass of egg sandwich, and the phone connects, and never was there a longer silence than at the advent of Jeffrey Maiser, and in the silence, as in all such silences, Vanessa briefly regrets her ill humor with her family and friends, and thinks that if this deal works, she will attempt to calm down, she will attempt to find a way to do better, and she will begin to eat vegan entrées only, and she will look in on her mom more often, and she will invite friends out to dinner, and she will keep better track of money; if this deal will go through, she’ll do all those things, she swears —

“Mr. Maiser?”

A grunt of assent.

“Vanessa Meandro here. With Means of Production? We’re making the Otis Redding biopic with Wonderment? That the, uh, that the studio over there is . . . ? Right, that’s the one. I’m calling today, Mr. Maiser, about something else entirely. I’m calling today about
thirst.
That’s right. Thirst. I know it’s a broad topic, but it’s an urgent topic, whether you know it or not, a topic that is at the heart of American entertainment today. I’m a collector, Mr. Maiser, that’s the first thing I want to explain to you, and what I collect, Mr. Maiser, are Moroccan pitchers. That’s right. We at Means of Production are very serious about our Moroccan pitchers. They’re made from a certain kind of clay, an earthenware clay, which is high in iron oxide, higher than any other earthenware clay, a clay that matures best in bonfire temperatures. Interestingly, this clay is really only found in Casablanca, Mr. Maiser. They perfected the art of the pitcher in Casablanca and Tangiers in the eleventh century, at a time when Christian and Islamic and Jewish influences in the area were at their peak. All these sects, Mr. Maiser, coexisting under the reign of one Ibn Tachafine, the founder of Marrakech.

“What I’m saying is that at the center of this bygone landscape was the notion of thirst, Mr. Maiser, and therefore at the center of this meeting of these faiths I’ve mentioned is the idea of thirst. You see it in the eleventh-century mystical texts of Alp Aslan, who conquered Byzantium and united the sultanates of Islam, Mr. Maiser. He understood the centrality of the pitcher and of Moroccan clay to this history of the pitcher. Think about it. You have these three faiths in the desert, in the lone and level sands, Mr. Maiser, all coming out of the compact between Abraham and his god. Abraham in the desert, desperate and thirsty, attempting to be blameless in the eyes of his god. Abraham taking his son to the killing place, willing to die of thirst, willing to sacrifice his son. Each of these peoples, Mr. Maiser, Christian, Jew, and Muslim, comes from this sort of desert, the wilderness. Which reminds me, of course, of the line from the work of Bob Dylan,
Where you want this killing done?
Are you familiar with the recordings of Bob Dylan, Mr. Maiser?”

A noncommittal groan, but Vanessa will not admit it into the terms of the discussion —

“If you’re familiar with the recordings of Bob Dylan, then you are familiar with the Abrahamic faith and you are familiar with Moroccan pitchers, because in the deep space of that fish-eye photograph of Bob Dylan, next to the bellows by the fireplace, I’m speaking, of course, of
Bringing It All Back Home
here, you’ll see one of the very Moroccan pitchers I’m describing, painted white. It’s hard to see it in the image at first, a pitcher in which were poured many days of hard rain. The pitcher is the leitmotif in the project I’m proposing, Mr. Maiser, and what I’d like to argue is that the pitcher is
the
perfect narrative representation of the thirst of the mass television audience. And when I speak of thirst and a mass television audience, Mr. Maiser, I mean a mass television audience, I mean hundreds of millions, I mean the kind of audience that doesn’t know how thirsty it is until the pitcher full of meaning is presented to it. Just think how many kinds of thirst there are in America right now, Mr. Maiser. There is the thirst of the fundamentalists in the southern part of the nation. Tired of feeling like the government and the media elites of the Northeast and the West Coast are dictating to them the terms of their culture. There are voices rising up from this part of the world, the talk radio guys and their apologists, rising up thirsty for meaning. They want a sort of millennialist vision, they want a reconstituted Jesus strolling down Fifth Avenue, laying waste to readers of the
New York Times.
And the project I’m describing, Mr. Maiser, will
not
disappoint them because it deals with ancient times and the possibility for apocalypse. What about Mormon viewers, adherents of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? They are out there in the Great Salt Lake, on the salt flats, they have journeyed a thousand miles and created mythologies about the American Indians, the twelve tribes of American Indians, and they are thirsty, regionally, topographically, and they desire a clearly prophetic voice, a chaste and honorable prophetic voice, and this project that I’m proposing does this exactly, Mr. Maiser, when it depicts the Mormon exodus and, later, the founding of Las Vegas. The project delivers a story that the Southern Baptist Leadership Conference can get behind, since there are no homosexuals in it and no abortion providers, and it delivers a story that the Mormon elders can get behind, and the yogis and Buddhists of California; what could be more appropriate for their thirst, Mr. Maiser, than a story of diviners?

“That’s right, Mr. Maiser, what we’re talking about today is a multigenerational saga, but not one that’s confined to a particular disenfranchised population, like
Roots
was or like
Holocaust
was back in 1978, a story that reaches out to every population and confers honorary disenfranchised status on it, the disenfranchised status of thirst, Mr. Maiser. Every group wants to be the group
out
of power, so that it can be restored to power through the capacity of the Moroccan pitcher to slake its metaphorical thirst, but with legitimacy and through acclamation, Mr. Maiser. The Jews, a people reviled in Europe, were driven out of Morocco, I can’t remember exactly when, but I know they were driven out of there at some point, because that’s history, am I right? And the one thing the Sephardim took with them, in addition to their sacred texts, was the knowledge of the manufacture of these sacred pitchers. Well, in fact, Mr. Maiser, they also took with them the kabalistic knowledge of divining, Mr. Maiser. You didn’t know this? Divining is a highly secretive skill still taught in some ultra-Orthodox sects, Mr. Maiser. Divining. You saw it going back to the reign of the Hun, Mr. Maiser, and the proposal I’m going to be e-mailing you directly, so that you can have it on the desks of your people in your department on Monday morning, Mr. Maiser, will deal with the first episode of a thirteen-part miniseries I’m proposing that will depict the ancient times, Mr. Maiser, when the Hun first descended from the plains and began to rout Western civilization. The Hun brought destruction to the eastern edge of the Roman Empire, the Hun brought rape, the Hun pillaged, Mr. Maiser, and the Hun also brought, as marauders do, magic, in the person of the diviner. So when the earth was scorched, and the Romans were driven out of their empire, what they received in compensation was the diviner, leading them over the hill to the place of water.”