The Diviners (8 page)
She bolts for her taxi, almost drops the bag of doughnuts on the way. She tells the Hispanic driver that they absolutely have to stay ahead of the Sikh guy, they have to lose him. She tells the driver to take some impossible route, with lots of doubling back, to Pennsylvania Station. Lose him by Macy’s at that big Broadway merge.
“My parents were making love, and I was interrupting them in my silver bow tie. You get the picture. My mother had figured out a way to put herself between me and my father. You know? That’s what the therapist is always saying. I don’t experience any kind of intimacy because it has to be in a triangular shape. I’m always thinking about triangular constructs. Anyway, my mother rolls off my dad and tells me to get the hell out, go make myself breakfast. So I do. I go out, I make myself
another
breakfast, I take it out on the patio, more Quisp. On the patio I hear shouting. Not that shouting is anything new. But when I come back in, my dad is not there. That’s not new, either, except that this was the last time I saw him. A moment like this, most of it is submerged, you know. Only a tiny little bit of it protrudes above the surface. Just the tip, really.”
Glazed sour cream is preposterously good. But by the time she gets to the second one, she’s already had enough doughnuts for the day. And yet how long does a feeling like that last? It doesn’t last very long. She wants another, though the thought nauseates her. If the taxi driver could just swerve right, here in the flower district, drive through a storefront, glass and exotic tropical plants scattered everywhere. Then she’d stop eating doughnuts.
“I don’t even remember that much about it. I know he was there and then he wasn’t there, and my mother has her version. In her version, I drove him off. But I didn’t drive anyone off, because I was, what? I was seven.”
She leans close to the perforated spot in the bulletproof divider.
“What do you think? My mother claims it was the bow tie. That’s her opinion. I get him a bow tie for his birthday, and my mother says it’s that I wasn’t ladylike. Why couldn’t I wear clothes like a girl? Why didn’t I want to wear designer jeans in the late seventies? She has a lot of opinions on this stuff. Never wear black tights. Always wear nylons. Use curlers. Always have on a dark shade of fingernail polish. I remember her coming to a field hockey game once. I was playing in the park, and she’s sitting on the sidelines, knitting some really fem sweater and starting all these conversations so she can tell people that she’s knitting the sweater for me. I could hear everything she was saying.”
As soon as the taxi halts at the back entrance to Penn Station, Vanessa is out. And it’s the same at Seventy-second Street on the West Side and the Upper East Side location, the glazed devil’s food doughnut; the lemon-filled doughnut; the raspberry jelly- filled, with its excess of confectioner’s sugar, the powder somehow like the wigs of French aristocrats just before the Revolution; custard-filled doughnuts, dessert of libertines, fifteen grams of fat per. She wants to see a line of morbidly obese people at the register, noshing, in the line at Krispy Kreme, ordering four or five doughnuts apiece. She knows the location of all the distributors, and she labors back and forth across Central Park, with the tab on the taxi closing in on fifty dollars. And then, at last, she heads for 125th Street. When she was at film school at Columbia, she used to go to the Twin Donut on Broadway, right under the elevated subway, but Twin Donut seems a lifetime away. Her romance is with Krispy Kreme now. It’s not only the remoteness of 125th Street, as a locale for a doughnut adventure, it’s not only that she’s going to be the only white face in the Krispy Kreme of 125th Street, it’s that she has the most decadent doughnut possible on her mind. It will be her fourteenth doughnut of the morning, and the contemplation of this sweetmeat is such that she hasn’t even explained it to her taxi driver. Yes, the most perfect representation of her isolation and restlessness is the
triple-chocolate variety,
with Bavarian chocolate custard, chocolate icing, and chocolate chips. You really have to put off the triple-chocolate doughnut until last, because if you start with it, it’s possible that you could go into a coma before you get to 125th, and then you will not have visited every single freestanding Krispy Kreme in the city of New York, then you will not have skipped out on a morning’s work, then you will not have driven yourself even further from the possibility of human affection. The light is elegiac. You’d need a blue filter to correct for its sentimentality. Empty polyethylene bags with the names of local pharmacies emblazoned on them lift off in the open intersection. Inside, Vanessa takes her place in line.
The clerk, who’s making do with hourly wages, picks at an incredibly long fingernail for a moment before moving to fill Vanessa’s order. She stares vacantly at a ring on the countertop left by somebody’s extra-large coffee. The patrons of Krispy Kreme are still for a moment, in the compulsion of ordering and devouring. Just then, someone taps Vanessa on the shoulder.
The Indian guy.
Annabel Duffy calls her boss
Minivan
because her boss is that large. The size of a minivan. In the interiors of her consciousness, Annabel begins or ends all business-related exchanges thus: “Minivan, can I get you some coffee?” She thinks, “Gosh, that designer suit looks fetching on you, Minivan.” She thinks,
Minivan, Minivan, Minivan.
Because it’s the one effective rejoinder to the oppressions that Vanessa Meandro visits upon her. Like the day Annabel came to interview at 610 Fifth Avenue. Minivan had apparently decided to break down Annabel until she was a quivering protoplasmic blob. Minivan indicated, in this preliminary interview, that she’d interviewed nothing but “anal-compulsive gay men” for three days, and Minivan made it clear that she could not work with these men because they were “prima donnas.” What Minivan needed—and as she made her need clear, she rose up, swelling and posturing—was someone who would submit, someone who could sleep on a bed of nails, someone who could take an hour on the rack and demand more, someone who would be an untouchable, in the Hindu sense, without complaint, who would even be grateful for it. Did Annabel think she was this person? Bullshit. Annabel had no idea what submission meant! Annabel did not yet know what was required because she had not yet been forged in the underworld furnace of Minivan. It was clear to Annabel that Minivan was appraising Annabel’s presentability as she made this observation, that she was checking out Annabel’s skin tone, which was a much darker skin tone than that of any other employee in the office. But there was something carnivorous about the gaze, too; she was checking out Annabel’s breasts and ass, and because of this, Annabel made her first subversive assumption about Minivan:
big dyke.
Still, no informed hypothesis about Minivan’s personal life has ever been borne out by cold, hard facts. Minivan has never appeared to have a personal life. No men, no women. And Annabel, as the ass’t, has dealt with every aspect of Minivan’s character. Annabel makes Minivan’s appointments at that spa in Arizona that specializes in overeaters. Annabel fires Minivan’s therapists every few months and gets new referrals. Annabel has learned about Klonopin, Ambien, Paxil, Wellbutrin, and Halcion; she has learned about cocktails of mood stabilizers, antidepressants, and antianxiety medications; she has substituted lithium for Depakote, Serzone for Lamictal or Lexapro or Zoloft, which she substituted for Prozac, has held out antianxiety medication in her palm because Minivan, with remarkable insight into her own character, has noted that she isn’t to be trusted to keep the prescription in her own desk. Since Annabel has been doing all of these things for Minivan, Annabel believes she would have known about a girlfriend if a girlfriend in fact existed.
Annabel knows, furthermore, that Minivan technically still lives at home, though this is a fact shrouded in secrecy, especially this day, because Annabel has been on the phone with the detox ward of the hospital in Brooklyn where Minivan’s mother was incarcerated as of one or two hours ago. Normally, her mother would have called by this time in the AM, in order to launch into some strange, ominous subject, like yesterday’s car crash involving a guy driving up onto a sidewalk in midtown and taking out two or three pedestrians. After which Minivan’s mother, referred to around the office by the name of Rosa, even by Minivan herself, is likely to go on to a torrid sociopolitical subtopic that will include Rosa herself, the mayor of New York City, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, pollution in the Gowanus Canal, gentrification in Red Hook, the new crosswalk at Radio City Music Hall, campaign finance reform, and shadowy state and federal agencies as yet unknown to the general public. As Annabel listens to these monologues, inevitably there is an urgent cry from the corner office: “Are you doing your nails or something? Do I pay you to do your nails?”
The name of the company shall be Means of Production, referring here to a meanness of character, a paucity of compassion. Minivan will not commit to this interpretation because she will not commit to any interpretation. Minivan is about pragmatism, realpolitik. Every complaint about Annabel Duffy’s on-the-job performance also contains discussion of Annabel’s weight, as Annabel is willowy, svelte, twiggy. “You know you’re not supposed to be able to see all the bones in your elbow. If you can see them, there is a problem. Think about it.” Or: “Is this a political thing with you? Not eating? You’re expressing solidarity with subsistence farmers of developing nations?” Or: “You’re making me look bad, Duffy. I didn’t hire you to look like a model. You’re here in a miniskirt in order to make me look like a whale. Am I right? Wear a garbage bag or something. Wear a warm-up suit. Go down to Old Navy and buy a fucking warm-up suit that’s four sizes too big and wrap yourself in Ace bandages or something. This is not an environment that I can work in. Go eat a sundae. Get two sundaes, in fact. Bring one back for me.”
Whereupon Minivan will insist that Annabel really do it, really get the sundae as described. Likewise, Annabel has taken entire gross boxes of chocolate bars out of Minivan’s office, per her direction, replacing them with a more dainty jelly bean display. She’s ordered pizzas at ten o’clock at night, multiple pizzas. Back-to-back lunches for Minivan. Followed by drinks, followed by dinner, followed by a separate dessert engagement with some other agent. Annabel has ordered four sides of bacon for Minivan from a room service menu, in the Gallic tongue, because Minivan, lounging at poolside in the south of France, claims her French isn’t up to the task.
Traditional Hollywood fare. Like all those mailroom stories, some of which Minivan is fond of telling herself. The producer, for example, who used to walk around in the parking lot first thing in the morning, checking the hoods of the cars of his employees to see how warm they were. The guy with the warmest hood was insufficiently ambitious. Gluttony, selfishness, megalomania, chocolate addiction, pathological lying, promiscuity, obsessive-compulsive disorder. The world of cinema. And yet there are two reasons why Annabel continues to work for Vanessa Meandro. The first reason is a steadfast if misguided belief in the possibility of tenderness. As Annabel conceives of it, the moment of tenderness is not a theory, but a genuine probability, like democracy in China or a Middle East peace accord. The moment of tenderness is a possibility in all interactions. It is the neutrino of human events. The moment of tenderness becomes ever more predictable, statistically, the worse things get. Bad luck is the catalytic agent for tenderness. The moment of tenderness cannot be resisted forever. Minivan, one day, will have to express kindness, if only by accident. There is no other way to think about the world. The longer Annabel works, the more likely is the moment of tenderness, the more Annabel wants to be present when the inconceivable happens, when the world of light opens in Minivan like a flower. Greatness in the film world happens in inconceivable moments. When the predictable torrents of horror films for teenagers have overspilled the drains and sewers and engulfed the corners of all the sidewalks, then the rain will stop, and the sun will rise, and only Annabel will continue to believe in it, a moment of tenderness.
The existence of the moment of tenderness, however, is in dispute according to all others employed at Means of Production. These hard-core empiricists number exactly four. Another personal assistant, Jeanine, who is responsible for travel arrangements and most of the call logs for Minivan. A development girl, Madison, who once had Annabel’s job and whose hazel eyes are bottomless. A celebrated action film star, Thaddeus Griffin, who is sharing the cost of the office suite with Minivan while he tries to parlay his action film credits into independent film respectability. And the bookkeeper, a middle-aged woman called Lois DiNunzio, who has successfully eradicated all signs of human emotion. These four employees (and the occasional heroin-addicted intern from Tisch School of the Arts) coexist badly within the domain of Minivan and yet they agree on one thing: the complete implausibility of any moment of tenderness. They give Annabel endless amounts of shit for believing in this moment of tenderness. They have each recounted, in whispers, the Christmas-evening harangue from Minivan, when they were called selfish, witless, moronic, and weak. Or, moving from adjectives to nouns, they were called such epithets as coke slut, mannequin, industry whore. For these reasons and others, Annabel’s fellow employees have asserted that the moment of tenderness does not and cannot and will never exist.
Maybe if it were
only
the moment of tenderness, Annabel would not have stuck it out for five years, having taken the position fresh from the college in western Massachusetts with the experimental curriculum. The other reason to stay is her screenplay. During the workday, Annabel acts out the ingenue roles of Juliette or Justine, while at night she has begun working on a screenplay about the wife of the Marquis de Sade, called
Fire Eater.
Despite the lack of easy financing inherent in the kinds of projects Minivan favors, she has continued to make great movies. And Annabel knows, eventually, that even if she must be subjected to the very kind of torture that the Marquis visited upon his wife, which includes, in Annabel’s screenplay, experimenting with erotic asphyxiation, penetrating his wife with devices, encouraging others to do so, fucking teenage boys in front of his wife, demanding that teenage boys fuck
him
in front of his wife, sexually abusing the children of his parish, and forcing his wife to sodomize him, Annabel knows eventually that Minivan will see the light about
Fire Eater,
and Annabel’s project will fit right into a Means of Production release schedule that in the past has included an entire film made about Charles Manson’s final remarks before sentencing; a film about the last years of the life of Mark Rothko; a film about the arrest of the Weather Underground; a George Jones biopic; and the celebrated Means of Production love story,
Offenders,
about the schoolteacher, Mary Kay Letourneau, who romanced her middle school student.
Offenders
had that incredibly moving passage where the teacher and her thirteen-year-old lover go skydiving together, just before neighbors inform on them. Here’s the moment that critics, at least at the alternative weeklies, liked so much, that moment in the trailers when Mary Kay’s thirteen-year-old lover gets ready to leap out of the plane at the behest of their instructor. He has no fear, and the blue sky outside the plane looks almost colorized, a tissue paper cloud here and there. He’s attached to the cable that ensures that the parachute opens properly, and he looks back at Mary Kay, a goofy grin on his face because he’s afraid of nothing. He thinks that the whole world is a professional-wrestling episode. Mary Kay, however, knows what this dive means. Suddenly she’s reaching out to him, but he’s gone, their hands failing to meet, causing her to jump, too, and the plane banks left, and their chutes open, and the sere flatlands of the Northwest are below them, and a married woman has just thrown away her life for a profane love. Never has the wailing of the wind sounded so desolate. The absence of music makes the film more persuasive. Lili Taylor’s finest moment, really.