The Diviners (14 page)

Six minutes, eighteen seconds now, and Spicer is back at the Forty-ninth Street entrance to the R train, asking directions. He inquires of a young woman the kind of bagel she’s eating. He prefers the salt bagel, himself. Will only eat the salt bagel; well, also the onion bagel, and sometimes the bagel with everything, but all varieties of bagel must have lox upon them. Fresh lox. Spicer does not have a prayer of victory, does not have a chance.

Tyrone Duffy is singing “Up on the Roof” as though it were an allegory about elliptical orbits when he is again knocked from his bike, by a large pedestrian, apparently on purpose. That is, a force is impressed against the inert body of Tyrone Duffy, at point P, along velocity tangent F prime. This is Tyrone, about to make a turn on Forty-eighth, along which axis Worldwide Plaza moves into view, whereupon he is brought to a standstill by a certain pedestrian of malevolent intent. A large man, apparently of Mediterranean origin, and it seems this man has a problem with the institution of bicycle messengers, if messengers, as a marginalized populace, can be said to be institutional. A message is announced at the moment that force is impressed upon Tyrone: Something something, motherfuckers, something something. That Tyrone is heading the wrong way up Broadway is apparently inadvisable and contrary to etiquette and worthy of violent confrontation in the view of this pedestrian of Mediterranean origin.

“Broadway goes downtown, you ignorant piece of shit.”

Tyrone brushes himself off with Buster Keaton understatement. The man begins to assume the stance of a combatant. The preliminary stance of fisticuffs. The planets are complex. They are not of uniform cast.

“Whoa.” Tyrone mutters a reply, reaching for his glasses and his bandanna, which are scattered upon the curbside. A circle begins to form around the two men.

Another pedestrian says, “You were riding the wrong way!”

Soon a third and a fourth.

“Before the month is up, it will rain,” Tyrone says, well aware of his inexplicability. His bike is upended, the Mediterranean man is coming at him, and he can see the ring on the fifth finger of the hand of the Mediterranean man, a high school graduation bauble, and he can tell that this ring is about to make a deep impression on his cheek, and he can see that the circle of onlookers is like the plasma of the early universe, gathering energy. All he can think of is “inner force,” the notion that a body does what it is doing because of its inner force, and this force carries Tyrone on the glide, and the glide takes him from east to west and it takes him from north to south, and if the glide is good, then the day is good. This is his inner force. And if the glide is bad, then the day is bad, and all is darkness. The fist of the Mediterranean man is now, in roundhouse style, swung in his direction, and this blow falls across his face, and again his glasses go flying, and the bystanders, all of them white, hold Tyrone by the arms because they have all had infelicitous interactions with the centaurs of the empire. They have all had the centaurs drive them into other pedestrians, the centaurs riding the wrong way on one-way streets, the centaurs shouting at them, whistling on their centaur whistles, and now Tyrone is going to pay. One guy says, “Don’t you have anything to say?” and Tyrone thinks long and hard, and he says, “?198-157?
v ~
(1/
R
²
) x
R
²
= 1,” and he says this with such clarity that it belies everything he has done or thought in weeks. He grins. The oppositional force of the Mediterranean man, with his outer-Brooklyn accent, makes Tyrone feel alive as he has not felt in weeks. It is true that if you had but fifteen minutes left to live, it would be most satisfying to have your hands around the neck of a white man, particularly a fat, detestable, middle-aged white man, and another blow comes now, and he attempts to kick the Mediterranean man centrally, but then a squad car pulls up close, and out come the cops, and Tyrone is let free as though never restrained. At once bystanders are consumed by the lobby ingresses of nearby buildings. “What seems to be the problem?” et cetera.

The collection of passersby that remains, significantly reduced, offers the unanimous perception that Tyrone was riding in the wrong direction on Broadway. All of these persons are unaware that Tyrone was solving elementary propositions of astrophysics. The cops slap a moving violation on Tyrone. The Mediterranean man gets clean away.

“That guy punched me in the face,” he says in his throaty whisper. “For no reason. And he knocked me off the bike and may have damaged my rims from throwing my bike around. You’re going to do nothing about that?”

The officers look at him as though he has just said ?198-157?
v ~
(1/
R
²
) x
R
²
= 1. They hand him the lightweight
Mysterium Cosmographicum,
and he limps the last block across, until he’s chaining the steed in front of Worldwide Plaza, from whence is now emerging Jack Spicer, retiree, parkinsonian patient, carrying a manila envelope. They nod.

Soon Tyrone Duffy calls into the message center at International Talent and Media and is told, of course, that he is redundant, as the package has already been picked up by an old guy. Salt is applied to the wound. On the sidewalk, he then telephones his sister. He tells her his new litany of sorrows. It’s almost impossible, he says, to get out of bed. Bed has some incredible electromagnetic convection, and he can’t get out of the bed, and he hasn’t eaten anything but Special K for three weeks because he’d rather read Spinoza or socialist-worker propaganda than boil an egg, and it’s always like that, the bad news piles up and rolls off his back, oh yeah, and he just bought a Harley-Davidson, and he’s going to disassemble it and mount it on the wall of his studio apartment.

“Hey, uh, I was supposed to bring some package by there, but I guess I didn’t get there in time. There was an incident.”

Annabel says the word
honey
like it is the first time the word has ever been used, like honey has just been discovered by a woodland animal. And then she whispers. To explain her own conundrum. To tell him about
The Diviners,
the treatment she typed last night, late into the night, and how a friend at a film agency agreed to send it over to Means of Production as though it were a genuine submission.

“Wait a second,” Tyrone mumbles. “You —”

“Made it up. With that guy. Thaddeus.”

Nothing to say about this. It’s clear that Thaddeus is a traditional Lothario with multiple sexually transmitted diseases and a death wish and a battalion of gossip columnists drunk on expense accounts tracking his every move.

“We’re gonna see if she goes for it.”

He asks the name of the author of the source material. Because there has to be an origin, even if it’s a fictive origin, or perhaps because it’s fictitious there has to be an origin. And she agrees that it’s a really good question. The name of the author. They picked a bunch of names of dead romance novelists. The stupider the novel, the better the film, Annabel says. A novel where the prose is so horrible it’s like the prose equivalent of mac and cheese in a box, that’s the ticket. Add in a deformity of some kind. Romance novelists, the people who write these things, have three names. Late in the evening, she and Thaddeus Griffin worked on the three names more than on the treatment itself. They chose one from each of three different dead romance writers.

“Shelley Ralston Havemeyer.”

“I may have spackled her living room,” Tyrone mumbles. “It was summer when I was in, uh, school. Till I stopped showing up.”

He has to be off to Wall Street. She asks if he took his medication.

Back at Omni Delivery, Spicer turns up, huffing and puffing, after taking the elevator, and Ivan Polanski whoops with joy at the forty dollars he’s about to collect. Spicer has no idea. Tyrone has no idea. Polanski has picked the right horse, an old windbag who trembles and who has a job because he needs something to do. Polanski tells him to take an extralong lunch. Their business will be extinct within a year, and they should all relax. Invest wisely. Buy on the dips. And then Polanski looks at the copy of the messenger form.

“Wait a second, Mr. Spicer. How come it says Michael Cohen on here?”

“I thought you said Michael Cohen. You always send me to Michael Cohen.”

“I didn’t say Michael Cohen. I said deliver to Means of Production.”

“What the heck is Means of Production?”

“What do you mean, what is Means of Production? It’s the address I gave you. I repeated it twice.”

“You didn’t repeat it twice. I
asked
you to repeat it twice. But you didn’t.”

Polanski throws up his hands. And Edwin (Sanchez) from Delancey Street makes ready to accept the US legal tender bills.

7

Vic Freese is at reception when the old guy comes in. Typical messenger. Why are the old messengers so challenged when it comes to shaving? Looks as though this one tried to shave with a rasp. Reddish scrapes where some follicles have been ripped out, and then some big neglected areas, mostly on his neck, where there is two or three days’ growth. In the nostrils, too, like stalactites protruding, like there’s wheat growing out of his brain. The guy is wearing double-knit slacks and he has belted these way up around the navel, the better to display the bold tartan of his socks. The old guy stinks. No amount of aftershave will conceal it, though he has liberally applied his aftershave nonetheless.

Vic admires and pities these messengers in equal amounts because he was once a mail room kid, like the majority of agents here at the Michael Cohen Agency. Good to stay busy. Good to know the city well enough, in advancing years, to be a messenger. Good to have people to talk to, places to go. But the old guy, because Vic is standing near to the console at reception, makes a beeline for him, and Vic’s pity ends immediately when the old guy draws close, because Sandra Konig is sitting right there at the desk, and the phone console hasn’t even started lighting up yet. It’s early. Vic points at Sandra, says nothing, and the old guy, and with him his noxious stink, moves laterally.

“Not the first time, you know,” the old guy says. “There was the one other election when the popular vote didn’t have a thing to do with it.”

Vic indicates, with the merest gestural signification, that he has no aptitude for politics. The Michael Cohen Agency is about entertainment. Everybody loves entertainment. Besides, Vic, with arms crossed, and wearing the conservative but stylish suit from a conservative but stylish British designer, is waiting for his new client. Due at ten, and now fifteen minutes late, the new client is his
everything,
the new client is the air he breathes, the food he eats, the water that slakes his thirst. Vic has his assistant poised at the phone to page him as soon as the call comes from the lobby downstairs, as soon as the limousine has pulled up. Vic has festooned his office with swags and balloons in order to welcome the new client to the Michael Cohen team. The new client was not ensnared by Vic, it is true, he did not sign the new client, and yet the new client has become his responsibility through the largesse of the music department in the Los Angeles office. This means scraps in terms of points because the signing percentage is the only percentage that matters at the end of the Michael Cohen year when the bonuses are handed out, and Vic did not sign the new client. The guy in the music department who did will take his piece of Vic’s action, and Vic will get the booking percentage instead of the signing percentage, which amounts to a percentage of a percentage. Still, just last week he was out there in Century City to shake hands with the manager of the new client. He still has the jet lag to prove that he will do what it takes.

And here is the bio. The new client records for that label in Belgium that packages singers with one name. The new client therefore has a single name, but Vic has a blockage about pronouncing the single name, since he knows, through due diligence, that the new client is actually called Tammy Gleick and that she was raised in Springfield, Illinois, until, in her teens, she moved to LA in pursuit of her big break. Her mother is the owner of a chain of hairdressing salons. The new client with one name has wanted to be a big star since she was a little girl. The new client is now twenty-two, and the new client drinks a lot, and the new client may also have a bit of a cocaine problem. This is well-known. Even Vic’s kids know this much about the new client.

Vic needs the new client. Thus, the streamers in his office. Thus, a brand-new leather handbag from Hermès. A gift item. The reason Vic Freese needs the new client is that Vic Freese is not really very good at his job and never has been. Vic Freese is the agent least likely to succeed. He doesn’t know why. He never tried to get other junior agents to quit when he was at the Mercury Agency, so that he could have their spots on the talent desk. He never had sex with the secretaries or the heads of departments. He never bought drugs for a client. Vic Freese has a wife and kids at home in Larchmont, and he doesn’t go out. Vic eats hamburgers and watches televised golf. These days, Vic tries to get home on the New Haven line as quickly as he can after whatever dinner or drink he’s supposed to have each day. He tries to see his son and daughter before they go to bed and he tries to read to them from rhyming books.

Senior agents in California have made clear that Vic Freese is operating on borrowed time. Vic has had his review with Mitch Adelstein, the head of television, who is a yeller, and Vic has been found wanting in every conceivable way, and now he has a brief few months left before he will have to move on to what would be his third agency in six years. He is the agent that other agents take great pride in leaving in the dust. Now the music department has thrown this booby-trapped new client in his lap, this handful who is unlikely to excel in television. She is five foot four inches of terror. Terror with a pierced navel. Terror in bottomless chaps. No one else wanted the new client and her delinquent past, and this was before she started snorting blow off the bars downtown. Luckily, the new client has a manager and a publicist and an agent in the music department in LA. Luckily, the new client has the label in Belgium to deal with her accidental overdoses and her diva scenes on airplanes. It is these other members of the team who must comment for the record on the inconstancy of the new client in the matter of her boyfriends.