The Diviners (37 page)

“What did you say?” she asks.

The yogin asks again.

“Are you asking what I’m thinking you’re asking?”

“It’s not going to be messy,” he says. “I’ll be careful.”

“Are you kidding me? Who do you think —”

It’s so sudden! The way the yogini performs the pose known as smacking the face, after which she makes her exit. Drawing up her workout clothes as though she is shuttering her own personal lingerie shop. The class was going so well, there was so much admirable work being done by the yogin, who really is getting close to being able to do a split, and to be here making this completely admirable progress, and to be entirely willing to pay the yogini as much riches as she desires, and then to have her perform the smacking pose while he’s in the middle of an extremely demanding asana, well, it’s inexplicable, and it’s sad, and, moreover, the lingam is limp on the carpet of the floor of the office of the False Guru, and his limbs are all taped up, his limbs are bound, and he is wearing no shorts. His shorts are around his ankles. He is wearing a loosely fitting T-shirt, and the room smells as if it was sweated through by professional wrestlers, and he is having a little trouble getting onto his knees, and there are pens and pencils that he swept off the desk in his enthusiasm, and they are on the floor and he has made a real mess, as always. He needs to get to a pair of scissors. He’s sliding awkwardly to the floor and attempting to loft himself somehow onto his feet so he can reach backward with his bound hands. He uses his head on the seat of the desk chair to lever himself up. He hops several times, closer to the desk. He’s fervent in his wish that there are some scissors in the desk of the False Guru that he can use to cut the tape, and then he can be on his way.

This is what is called the after-loneliness of the Adulterous Union. It was loneliness that launched him upon this difficult pose and it is loneliness that will accompany him onto the street. He is lonely, enfeebled, not like a proper yogin, not like a proper star of the firmament. He is not like the wandering mendicants of yogic practice, who withstood loneliness for two thousands of years. He is not a meditator in a cave of loneliness. Why can’t an actor in matinée films with a beautiful wife withstand loneliness for even a day, for even twelve hours?

Once freed, having torn out a surfeit of wrist and ankle hairs, he flees past the front desk of the ashram, past the battery of attractive employees at the console, checking people in, and his cheeks are flushed as he heads east, on foot, into the East Village, waving off a guy on crutches, a true mendicant, who recognizes him from
Single Bullet Theory
or some other action film from his
oeuvres complets.
Thaddeus shouts a half-hearted hello to the mendicant and to Asian tourists on St. Mark’s place, “Hey! Thanks for your support!” until he is below the window of one Annabel Duffy, and it is dusk, in November, and he is yelling at the window of Annabel Duffy, “Come on down! Hey! Let me in! Let me in! It’s me! Let me in! I haven’t smoked in at least seven hours! I won’t smoke in your apartment, and I’ll be nice to your cat, and I’ll buy . . . stuff! I’ll go home with you for the holidays! I swear!” But there’s no answer, no way in, as if the after-loneliness we have just mentioned is a condition of the improper practice of the hatha yoga, which is only exacerbated by the presence in the world of laundromats, shuttered television repair shops, half-abandoned shopping malls, feral cats. A neighbor calls out her window that he should please shut the fuck up, “And your movies are
not
good.” He can see the arm of the woman, the silhouette of her arm, as she backs away from the window and pulls the blind. The glimmer of a bracelet.

The cell phone rings as he’s heading back toward Avenue B. His agent. There’s a
great
opportunity here, his agent is saying, a really
fabulous
opportunity, in a picture that’s getting set up at one of the large studios, called
Assassins.
Big-budget picture. Set in the Middle East. He would get to ride camels and sleep under the stars in the desert and see a politically unstable part of the world, and it will be directed by that director of action classics, Waldo Schmeltz, the guy who made the one about the Amsterdam hookers who are informants during the Nazi occupation.

“I can’t talk right now,” Thaddeus tells him. It’s more that he doesn’t want to talk.

“Hey, pal, I’m sorry about the thing in the paper.”

“What thing in the paper?”

“You know . . . that
thing?
”

“Which paper are you talking about? And what
thing?
What do you mean
thing?
”

“Listen . . . there’s my other line. I’ll get back to you. We’ll catch up. Pal, think about
Assassins.
Let me know how you feel in the next day or so. Could be huge. Could be top ten. Plus the possibility of awards.”

“You said
thing
just now. What is that? And I have a question for you, too. About
The Diviners.
Have you heard —”

But the connection is severed. Too logistically difficult now to duck into a men’s room in order to rinse off this conversation. Usually a powerful antibacterial soap will get rid of any oily residue associated with a film agent. Now he’s in a cab. The cabbie is fleet, but why the fuck does Thaddeus live on the Upper West Side? He hates the Upper West Side, with its socialism lite and Zabar’s and people wandering around with new food processors and fancy cheese assortments and laser-whitened teeth. Perambulators clogging the sidewalks, SUVs double-parked, all because they have to pick out some cheeses to serve tonight, out in the Hamptons, to their friends from the corporate-law firm. They will eat veggie chips in the SUVs stuck on the LIE on the way to the Hamptons to serve up their cheeses. Thaddeus wants to live in Tribeca, in the shadows of Wall Street, where it’s all painters with drinking problems flinging pigment straight out of the tube onto the canvas before going to some screening of a Hong Kong action film. Painters with lead poisoning, short-term memory loss, tossing back shots at Fanelli’s, because they’re willing to die for what they do. That’s how passionately they feel about their craft. Thaddeus is willing to die
in
what he does, at least if someone else does the stunts.

He lives on the Upper West Side because his wife’s father gave them a duplex. At the time, they were scrambling. Her dad the corporate lawyer was on retainer for the tobacco manufacturers of the world. And Thaddeus is stuck here with his wife, who’s out in San Diego filming a commercial. What is the commercial for? He can’t even remember, feminine products maybe. She’s filming a commercial for feminine products, and soon he’ll be making a film in the desert, where he gets to ride a camel and eat hummus until it becomes impossible to eat it again, and his wife will be making a commercial for feminine products, and they never will see each other again, except in airport lounges. Thaddeus strides past the doorman with a salute and a lopsided grin that says, I know I’m supposed to feel lucky.

In his apartment, Thaddeus Griffin is nobody. In the living room, in the pantry, in the dining room, in the spare room that is never used for anything at all. Most of all in the bedroom, he’s nobody, and his condition of being nobody in his apartment dwarfs the lack of privacy that is his burden in every other place. He’s afraid to go outside and he can’t wait to go outside. On the street, he’s somebody, can’t walk a block without being Thaddeus Griffin, but here in his apartment, he’s another lost guy with another case of after-loneliness. In his apartment, he watches television, plays video blackjack, practices darts. He’s really good at darts. In his apartment, he’s among the best player of darts ever.

The lights are off.

And he’s not alone.

Because, sitting in the dark, in the living room decorated by Marcus Atkins, is his betrothed. His bride. In one of the big stuffed easy chairs, bent over as if she’s hinged, face in her hands, her hands hollowed like a tortoise shell, holding her face. Sobbing. How long has she been here, he wonders, when instead she was supposed to be hawking feminine products for a network commercial that would have meant residuals, et cetera? How long was she just waiting for him? In order to perform these sobs? Is this an Equity-approved showcase?

“Honey, I didn’t —”

She’s so startlingly beautiful that people draw up short on the street. As if she were the diagram in the physics textbook labeled “Electromagnetism.” Dark hair, which right now has blond highlights in it, falling all around her face, blue eyes the color of a blue screen, easy smile, freckles that the makeup people like to cover up for some reason, especially across the bridge of her slightly pudgy but adorable nose, and she is often to be seen in bulky sweaters that cover the swell of her completely perfect breasts, and tonight, when he turns on the light, he sees that she is wearing an old pair of jeans, used to be his, and they always look really good on her somehow, because she’s tall enough that she doesn’t even have to cuff them or anything. Yes, his wife implies an eternal question, one that has haunted him through the seven years of their union. How can someone this beautiful have an inner life? And if she does, why is it that he has never, ever had a part in it?

“Did you happen to look at this?” she asks. A newspaper cylindered into the gap next to her in the chair. When she flings the paper into the space of the living room, the leaves drift in several directions, separating. “Did you happen to see your picture in the paper today?”

“I don’t know what —”

“Don’t be full of shit.”

He didn’t read the tabloids this morning. Because he didn’t go into work. He took the morning off because there was nothing going on at the office and the scripts on his desk looked dull. He was thinking he would go to an audition or two today. He wants to play a romantic lead instead of an action hero, and if he has to audition, well, okay. But then he didn’t go to any auditions, he just called his broker and played solitaire on the computer. He made an omelet with week-old Brie. When he went into the office, in the afternoon, it was quiet because it was Monday. Vanessa had already left. He didn’t talk to her, nor to the girls in the office. Was there a
reason
that the girls in the office were so quiet? This afternoon? Was there a reason that Madison didn’t come out of her office when he went past? Was there a reason Jeanine was pretending to be involved with some new intern? And why was Annabel all cool and businesslike? Why didn’t she say anything about the script? Was there a symbolic meaning to the moment when Annabel walked past and went to the water cooler? Could he construe this as a judgment of some kind? A moral disapproval? He and Annabel were supposed to be talking about sketching out the miniseries, they were going to do it together, it was going to be their thing, and she didn’t say anything about it, not a single word. She walked by him on the way to the water cooler and she filled up a plastic bottle at the water cooler, and she turned smartly on the heels of her boots, and he didn’t think any more about it, not then.

His wife rises, crosses the room, finds the correct page from those disparate on the carpet. The picture of him. It is, in fact, unmistakably a picture of him leaving Annabel’s apartment over the weekend. He recognizes the large Hispanic woman sitting on the stoop behind him. It’s kind of a bad picture. He seems to have a number of chins in this photograph. And below the photograph there’s an item about him leaving the apartment, including the time that he left the apartment, which was not long before sunrise. Waking up in a strange bed makes him feel more ashamed. Always a problem. The item goes on to note how much weight he seems to have put on.

“Don’t say anything, okay? I think you should give me, you know, at least four or five minutes here where I get to be the one who talks. And the first thing I want to say is that you are just so incredibly
stupid,
Thad. Do you know who this girl in the office is? You’re carrying on with some girl in the office? Do you even know who she is? She’s related to some guy who . . . who committed a
crime,
you know, who just hit a woman on the street with a brick; isn’t that what the paper is implying here? You don’t think that the sister of the guy who hit a girl in the head is going to be of interest to the papers? Doesn’t cross your mind? While you are getting your freak on with this girl? Didn’t cross your mind that you might try to keep your name out of the papers,
for me,
for example?”

“Uh, actually, her brother didn’t do it, the thing with the . . . whatever. He didn’t do it.”

“How do you know that, Thaddeus? The newspapers don’t know, and for the moment they don’t care. They only care about this juicy story. The issue here —” A stifled gasp and some more tears. “The issue is not whether this guy really hit the woman with the brick, Thad. The issue is whether
you
have any respect. For your marriage. For anyone at all. The issue is whether I’m supposed to do anything about it, the fact that you don’t have any respect for me, or the fact that you stood up in front of our parents and friends and vowed certain things, in fancy language, and we released doves, and five years ago you even danced in an Italian fountain with me, and now you are spitting in the face of —”

“Of course I do have respect for my —”

“Then you deny —”

“I —”

He tries to figure out a position that he can take. He tries to figure out a debating position he can occupy, and he finds that there is no such position. He goes around the room turning on lights, in a madness of switching things on. He realizes that he is still carrying his knapsack with the warm-up clothes in it, all this time, and so he sets the knapsack on the floor. The warm-up clothes seem to come from an entirely different epoch, the epoch before this. Time is divided, there’s a forking of events, and the time before now is commercial and jovial, like a holiday billboard advertisement for advanced shaving technologies.

“You don’t deny it?”

“I thought you were out filming the commercial in California.”