The Diviners (54 page)

“Do you want a doughnut, Allison Maiser?”

“I already had two.”

“Where are you from, anyway?”

“Santa Monica.”

“They have Krispy Kreme out there?”

The intern contorts herself into some kind of scorn that Vanessa believes is meant to convey that Allison cannot be bothered to think about doughnuts. However, Vanessa doesn’t want anyone, any staff member, even any intern, demeaning the integrity of the doughnut. Not in a bad-luck environment. Not now. There is bad luck everywhere, there are bad circumstances, and the least the intern could do would be to honor the integrity of the doughnut. However, because Allison Maiser is who she is, Vanessa says nothing. The intern is back to chewing at her hangnail when Thaddeus Griffin sticks his head in the doorway.

“Got a second?”

Griffin has not been around much in a few days, and when he has been around, he has been more than remote. Just another example of the kind of intrigues taking place out in the corridor beyond Vanessa’s control.

“Got something I want to tell you.”

He looks at the intern and then at the decorative palm in the corner, as if the two are equal in his sight.

“Don’t mind her. Have you guys met?”

Allison Maiser will not budge unless ordered. Vanessa points at the vacant chair. Thaddeus, running his hands nervously through his colorist-enhanced movie star hair, slinks across the office, clearing his throat several times. He sits in the empty chair next to the intern. He reaches for a doughnut.

“I’m not supposed to eat these.”

“No one in Hollywood is too smart for doughnuts.”

“But some in Hollywood are too thin.”

“If Atkins said eat doughnuts, people’d eat them by the dozen.”

He looks at the intern again, hoping she will remember some other assigned task. “The thing is, I got an offer for a big film,
The Tempest of Sahara.
”

“You got what?”

“An offer.
The Tempest of Sahara,
a big costume picture.”

“That can’t be the title.”

“It used to be called
Assassins,
but then they changed the title to
The Tempest of Sahara.
”

“That’s funny because —”

“Filming is in Morocco. Starts in January. Morocco. How often do you get to see Morocco? Yeah, and the wife wants to come. So we’ll be shipping off to Paris in December, for rehearsals, and from there to Morocco. Where we’ll smoke a lot of hashish. Probably be gone for four or five months.”

“I thought I . . .” Is the sinking feeling just a sinking feeling or could it be something worse? There are definitely going to be bad cramps today. Sometimes the cramps are so bad she wants to curl up and die. Is there ibuprofen in the desk drawer, skittering around with the paper clips and half-empty jars of antidepressants?

“It’s a great script. I think there are only three lines in the last half hour, and those are monosyllables. A lot of scantily clad women in their twenties. The ammunition budget exceeds the GDP of some of the African nations where the second unit will be shooting.”

“Are you —”

“I don’t feel like I have that much choice right now. It’s not like much else has been coming from my agent.”

“What about the miniseries?” Vanessa says.

What is it with actors? When a genuine emotion passes through them, a rare enough occurrence, it’s as if it’s a dental emergency. That’s how Thaddeus seems, like the dentist is going to send him out to specialists. He’s going to need implants, and his face is going to swell. But at the mention of the miniseries, he rallies, and the sullenness that perfumes him vanishes. He gathers himself up in the chair and starts riffing on the possibilities.

The networks can’t
help
but snap it up, he says. One of the cable affiliates, maybe. Lately, the cable networks are taking on a lot of this kind of thing. And Thaddeus says he has some ideas for writers, really great writers. And there are some subplots that she should really be thinking about. He gets so excited that he smacks the intern on the shoulder and then fishes a second doughnut out of the bag.

“The Mormon exodus. Think about it. I mean, they walked across the desert to Salt Lake City, pursued by murderous bands. There was a lot of division in the church at that time. The polygamy thing could play really big on the screen. You could have a strong leading man playing Brigham Young. De Niro. He’d look really good with a beard, a big beard, and he’d have all these wives, and it would sort of be like Charlton Heston not making it into the promised land, right? Brigham Young with his wives, and they’re pursued by murderers, going over the Rocky Mountains. They ring the wagons and they take out their guns. How many of the heads of Mormon households will get murdered? And not just a little bit murdered, but cut up and fed to the wolves out there? How many wives are cut down because the Christian oppressors won’t accept that the polygamous Mormons are God’s chosen people? And there’s never any water, and there’s a day where Brigham Young, he’s just had enough, and maybe he really thinks that Joseph Smith made up the entire business about Moroni, and he just doesn’t know; his faith is weak. He calls up a diviner from his midst! Brigham Young, he’s just always taken these women around him for granted, he’s got all these wives, cousins of his other wives, and he’s just always taken them for granted, and he’s never known that they had special skills, and he retires to his tent to pray to God to ask if this is the right thing to do. And the dowser turns out to be Brigham’s wife Honora, who is played by Susan Sarandon or one of those other beautiful older women! Will the Indians, who are supposed to be the special allies of the Mormons, allow them free passage through the plains? It’s a great story, see, and that would be the way to ensure that Madison’s new boyfriend —”

“Her what?”

“Yeah, you know. He wants to —”

“Oh, yeah. The Interstate Mortuary Services guy.”

“I heard it out in the hall.”

Vanessa asks Thaddeus about his last day, and he says he’ll come in next week to pick up stuff and after that he’s on his way. He stands behind the chair now, drums on its seat back. Thaddeus Griffin, of
Single Bullet Theory.
A guy who’s no good at saying good-bye, who’s no good at anything except holding steady a firearm full of blanks. Vanessa writes on her pad,
Thaddeus goes to Morocco.
He comes around the desk to give her a hug.

“I still work here,” he says. “You need help with anything, you know what to do.”

He gives the intern a wary glance and makes for the door.

It’s the sentimentality part that she can’t stand. With the menses. The mother bird feeding the little birds on the nature program. It was a while back, she was flipping around the dial, as if all she ever did was flip around the dial, and whether by chance or design, she landed on this channel, and there was the mother bird feeding the little birds the regurgitated worm or grub or whatever it was, and the little birds were really hungry, edging out one another to be the first chick to devour the regurgitations. What could be more tender on this earth than the little birds and the awful New Age music? The whole phenomenon was so irritating that she took the remote and hid it in the closet with the hardware and the cat litter, and she couldn’t find it for a week.

Maybe Thaddeus would do it, knock her up on a noninterventionist basis if she asked in the right way. She’d have to learn some basic romancing skills. She’d have to ask if he were having a good day and how was his wife, and she’d have to ask if she could help him with the crossword. Whatever that stuff was that people did. He’s fucked everybody else in the office. Nobody has to tell her; she’s not an idiot. Is she that much worse than everyone else? She’s a fashionable dresser, and even if she has not exhibited much interest in men, it’s not that she doesn’t
like
them —

“Do you want lunch?” the intern breaks in.

“Huh?”

“I thought I’d ask if you wanted lunch, because I’m going to go out and get some lunch.”

“What are you getting?”

“Tofu scramble. A shot of wheatgrass.”

“You just ate three doughnuts.”

“Well, if they’re in front of me —”

“Get me some fried dumplings at the Chinese place.”

The intern stands up and puts out her hand. For the cash.

“No one’s given you the lesson yet?”

Vanessa makes up the lesson on the spot. The lesson is how to extract a free lunch from the good Chinese place by claiming to be part of a movie filming on location in the area. You go into the Chinese place, you say that you are making a movie with the biggest star imaginable. You say you are making a movie with Julia Roberts or you say you are making a movie with Tom Cruise or a movie with Brad Pitt or a movie with Nicole Kidman, whoever. You use the name of the most famous movie star imaginable and you say that you really have to have this order as quickly as possible. The difficulty is that the guys in the Chinese place speak very little English, and they have grown up in some unheated cinder-block project in a city like Shanghai, and they have been beset by graft-addicted informers their whole lives long, and they probably owe some toothless slave trader twenty thousand dollars for getting them out of China, and they don’t give a shit about Ms. Kidman or Ms. Roberts or Mr. Cruise. And therefore you are going to have to start to cry, you will need to produce tears at the Chinese place, and you will have to say that your job is on the line. If you don’t bring these dumplings over to the trailer right now, your job is on the line. You will have to say that you are having a really bad day, and you will have to say that you are getting your period and that you are about to get fired and that you forgot to bring the petty cash from the office, and can’t they just give it to you this one time, you’ll bring the cash tomorrow, and you’ll also bring them the autograph of one of the big stars tomorrow. And you might mention that the movie is being underwritten by some multinational entertainment conglomerate, like, try Universal Beverages, and see if that gets the attention of the heartbroken maître d’, try saying “Steve Case” over and over again and see if that gets their attention, because they understand Steve Case and they understand Bill Gates and Naz Korngold. Tell them that Naz Korngold is underwriting the movie or that Bill Gates will give you the money tomorrow and that you will get the signature of Bill Gates or Naz Korngold, who is definitely making a movie with Thaddeus Griffin, and see if that works. And so your objective is to bring back lunch without taking any money and to do it
fast.

At the conclusion of these remarks, Vanessa feels better, and there is a poignant light moving through the confines of her office, illuminating bits of dust. The light is moving across the piles of paper, the light is passing. And then the phone rings.

Vic Freese has been promoted this week, that’s the word. He is codirector of the television division and he is brimming with confidence, which is almost impossible to take. Vanessa has felt, in the week of conversations with him, that he is getting closer and closer to edging her out of
The Diviners.

He says, “Lacey has definitely signed on to play Nurit in the Hungarian section, and we have been discussing the idea of her playing a second part later in the film, too. You know, maybe an old woman in the . . . uh, Mormon episode.”

“What Mormon episode? I just had Thaddeus in here, and he was making up all this shit about the Mormons; I thought he was just —”

“Van,” he says, “you have to stay up to date. The Mormon section was a condition of sharing expenses with Interstate Mortuary Services.”

“Interstate Mortuary Services?”

“A subsidiary of UBC.”

“I know who they are.”

“They want to get involved in content. Content is the future. For Interstate Mortuary Services and their shareholders. Every consumer that they can get acquainted with the Interstate Mortuary brand is more likely to call on them later, when they are confronting a fatality situation.”

“A fatality situation? Listen, I just want to make sure that we’re . . . that Means of Production is the development arm of the series right now, because we have all our people working on it. We have it out with two writers, and I’m going to see who comes up with the best treatment for the first episode, and then we’re going to move the ball forward.”

“You don’t even have a writer yet? Jesus. We’re talking principal photography no later than September.”

“We have
names.
”

“Look, I don’t know how long I can hold the place for you. There are other parties interested. Big names, names I’m not at liberty to reveal. There are people who think there’s theme park potential here. Everybody loves a water ride. There’s cross-marketing potential with the divining rods. The toy companies have been contacted. And did I tell you about the really great product placement underwriting agreement we have right now?”

“Uh, don’t tell me . . . doughnuts.”

“Exactly!”

“My people
secured
that Krispy Kreme financing.”

“Vanessa, don’t bullshit me. My assistant here is in close touch with the chairman at Krispy Kreme. . . . Hang on. Gretchen? Gretchen? How many calls have we made to the guys at Krispy Kreme on the thing? The
thing!
Hang on. Vanessa, did you hear that? Did you hear what she just said? She says we’ve made at least twenty calls this week to the Krispy Kreme guys alone. In the last two weeks. Their involvement was a prerequisite for all the talks with UBC.”

“You didn’t talk to UBC, Vic. I talked to UBC. I talked to Maiser right after I talked to you . . . what day was that? Saturday? I talked with him right after that. He didn’t mention talking to you. It was all me. I did the pitch, and I’m in touch with the guy. Don’t mess with my contacts.”

“How long can I hold the spot for you? Can I hold it forever for you? Vanessa, I can’t. I would like to, but I can’t. That’s all. Get your story together. Tell me who’s attached, and as long as they’re clients of this agency, we’re in business. I think I can get you the line producer job on the actual filming if you want it.”