The Diviners (39 page)

At the Saturday dinner, Maiser sat next to the ivory-maned battle-ax of Interstate Mortuary Services, Lorna Quinson. The red snapper was timidly prepared, and the strolling mariachi band was persistent, and after playing with his flatware for a while, Maiser found himself wanting to know a little about Quinson. About the billowing blue midcalf dress she had on, about her ringless fingers, about the dreams and nightmares of her childhood. Lorna looked like a great comic actress from one of the seventies sitcoms. Battle-ax with a heart of gold. How did someone with this kind of poise come to flourish as a leading light of the mortuary business, selling what had initially been a string of floundering family-owned mortuaries to one of the largest corporations in the country? And was she put off by being here among the big names of broadcasting and entertainment? Maiser made a few tentative inquiries during the fifteen minutes or so they were chatting. And just before each swiveled in the opposite direction, according to the obligations of dinner party politics, he asked her, “Did you write your essay yet?”

Lorna Quinson, with a cocked smile, shook her head.

This conversation gave him the opportunity to gaze. In the way that television executives can gaze. Quinson’s hair was gathered into an orderly bun, and he could see a bit of the back of her neck, the nape of it, and it was straight and comely. As he listened to a flunky at his right droning lengthily about his favorite network shows, Maiser was thinking instead of Quinson’s neck. Everybody knows that cop shows are about social control, the flunky droned. Quinson’s neck.
The Werewolves of Fairfield County,
best and most creative use of serial narrative in years. Quinson’s neck.

In the course of dessert, Quinson reached not for the pumpkin cheesecake but for her BlackBerry portable messaging device, which she carried in a small patent leather clutch. She stared down into its impenetrable secrets. Then she dabbed her lips, the color known as Cherries in the Snow, refolded her napkin, and excused herself.

Maiser went to the men’s room himself, where he called the office immediately, told his assistant to get Lorna Quinson’s e-mail address
now.
He brushed off the men’s room attendant, who, while Maiser rinsed his hands, claimed to be part of the Universal Ministries—which probably would be a division of UBC by the next fiscal quarter. Why not? The Ministries could provide boilerplate grief counseling to families at Interstate Mortuary Services, could furnish
The Werewolves of Fairfield County
with genuine apocalyptic subplots, and could offer apoplectic commentators to the new conservative talk shows that were being churned out like widgets. Maybe Maiser should leak news of the acquisition to some prominent shareholders and see what happened.

Back at the table, a case of expensive French whites, emptied, was toppled on the linens. As if some malcontent had yanked on the end of the tablecloth. Now, in the center of the ballroom, Naz Korngold, with a flourish, indicated he was turning in for the night. Upper management followed in a retinue, including Lorna Quinson. She was gone, the queen of morticians.

Maiser slipped out the back himself, trying to ditch the overeager guys from the news division, which he would have to dismantle before long. Outdoors, it was an Industrial Light and Magic night, with a myriad of shooting stars and orbiting satellites, and Maiser wondered if Naz Korngold had ordered it especially for the weekend. Maiser cursed golf and the people who had invented golf, on the way to his private casita. The MMPI and the Myers-Briggs tests hung over his head:
I think nearly anyone would tell a lie to keep out of trouble;
mark
T
for “true or mostly true” or
F
for “false or mostly false.”
Horses that refuse to move should be whipped,
true or false?
There is often a lump in my throat,
true or false?
I can easily make other people afraid of me, and sometimes do for the fun of it,
true or false?

Who is Jeffrey Maiser?
That was the essay question, printed right there along the top margin of a blank piece of paper. It was in his packet at registration, to be filled out in ballpoint pen and returned to Naz Korngold. Underneath, Jeff wrote, “Who’s asking?” And then he whited it out so that not a trace of this initial response remained visible.
I work best when I have a definite deadline,
true or false?

And so here he is on Sunday, having erased four more false starts for the essay while ignoring the speech by Al-Hassad. “Quality is present at the instant of the big bang,” Al-Hassad is intoning. “Quality is twelve billion years old, as old as the
prima causa,
like the carbon cells that make up each and every one of you. Each and every one of you
is
quality. You can be confident of that.” Maiser is chugging aspartame beverages and throwing away potential essay answers. For example: his participation in the occupation of the president’s office at Columbia. He was just a kid then. And it was not that he agreed politically with all the protesters. He just liked the drama of camping out. All that wood paneling and those gold-plated pen-and-pencil sets. Those kids with their heads full of Whitman and Hendrix and Eldridge Cleaver. He was a guy who always knew the potential of a good story, even then. Was this the Jeffrey Maiser of the essay question?

The true essay about Jeffrey Maiser would also have to talk about his marriage, which fell apart last year, and about his bad relationship with his daughter, who is at NYU film. It would have to speak of his inability to do well in the department of romance. Oh yeah, and there’s another thing he’s worried about, the thing that might show up on the MMPI-2, might skew him statistically toward category two, the category of the unstable.

What about Jeffrey Maiser the practical joker? Back in college days, he’d been tasked by a dean with serving as amanuensis and guide for a visiting professor, an important law professor from the state of Ohio. Instead of taking this Catholic and conservative law professor to the faculty club, as dictated by his schedule, Maiser took him to a brothel up on Upper Broadway someplace. He can still remember the look on the impressionable young law professor’s face when he saw the array of African and Latin hookers available for his delectation! The dope smoke was like a curtain over everything! What a laugh! The guy went on to become a Supreme Court justice, too. Later in his professional life, Maiser exchanged all the cars in the reserved spaces at the studio parking lot with the pink Cadillacs of Mary Kay Cosmetics, so that when the brass came out one afternoon they all had to drive a pink car home. Then there was that time he showed a trainee a broom closet in the building and told him that this would be his office from now on. He allowed the trainee to stay in the closet for nine days. Maiser even made up a television reviewer, Don Stankey, and wrote Stankey’s columns for one of the popular newsweeklies for two years in order to create strong buzz for UBC programming. Those early raves for
The Werewolves of Fairfield County,
those were Stankey’s columns, after which Stankey had a regrettable car accident on the Saw Mill, leaving behind a wife and three kids, one of whom had cerebral palsy. If only UBC had had a relationship with Interstate Mortuary Services in those days, Maiser could have thrown a proper memorial service for the guy. There would have been baroque music and a dramatic reading from the stories of Jack London.

A large number of people are guilty of bad sexual conduct,
mostly true or mostly false? If you tested any of the managers in the room, any of those guys around him doodling little slashing, angry lines on their legal pads right now, they’d all have their obsessions, their dark secrets. None of them is talking. Edward Jones, the studio head, had himself filmed at an orgy with a bunch of male models back in the late seventies. You can download photos of the party on the Web. And the head of the beverages division, Stew Ledbetter, is so badly alcoholic that he never turns up at a meeting before noon, and even then with a cola can full of vodka. It’s widely known. Priscilla Rankin, in finance, has lost hundreds of thousands of dollars gambling on college basketball. There are ass men, men obsessed with breasts, there are men obsessed with youth, there are men who drive into the desert and weep, there are self-mutilators. All of them ambitious and successful professionals.

His own predilection dates back to a specific moment, or so he tells himself, back when he was a producer, back in the early eighties, when he was working on a film about a girl with bone cancer. She had come to wear the
halo,
this girl; you know, the contraption they attach to you that allows you to keep the head up straight in the midst of your hardships. Anyway, he hadn’t even noticed this actress, Celine something or other, Celine Thorpe, when she was hired for the job. She was just another actress in leg warmers trying to impress the director, who was a no-talent commercial guy who’d made his reputation directing spots for antacids. Maiser had only intended to be on the set the first day of filming.

In the meantime, the costume department had outfitted Celine Thorpe with the halo. She looked scared at first, coming out of the trailer. Her outfit was not terribly flattering. No designer threads that she could try to make off with when the shooting was done. And then there was the halo. Maiser ought not to have seen Celine Thorpe that day, ought not to have, ought to have contented himself with the little dead spots and recriminations in a long marriage. That’s what he ought to have done. But here he was, in the park, sitting in a canvas chair, and here was Celine Thorpe, coming down from the trailer. It was the magic hour, the hour when the light was just so, and the palms were just so, and the kids on the softball diamond were just so (here’s the crack of the softball coming off an aluminum bat), and the sun glinted from the glimmering halo. The scene involved the character with the debilitating bone disease managing to go to the park for the last time in her short life, and during this last visit she notices the preciousness of all things in the park, the softball players, the dog walkers, the butterflies dive-bombing the blossoms of bougainvillea. The fog machines were blowing up a subtle mist. And Celine was in her brace, and the unsteady way she walked through the moist grass of the park, it was just a beautiful, understated piece of acting. Maiser felt the conjunction of youth and metal cage, and it was as if he were being reflected in the light coming off the halo, and he realized that a bit of his heart began opening right then, by reason of fetish.

It was untrue what they said about angels, that angels were quaint birdlike agents who oversaw your daily life and ensured that you got the best of all parking spaces. No, these were not angels. Angels were apparitions of dread. Their annunciations were impossible burdens, and you greeted them only with terror. The angel that appeared in all the Annunciation paintings, that was no sweet angel. That angel scared the piss out of the Virgin Mary, who undoubtedly didn’t want to get knocked up by an abstraction. The same thing with Celine in her halo, she was a dark annihilator in the life of Jeffrey Maiser.

He threw himself into work, of course. He tried to distract himself from feeling. But when the disabled groups started writing in about how great the broadcast was and, boy, was that Celine Thorpe amazing, she brought such dignity and beauty to the role of the girl with the debilitating spinal disease, well, he realized something had changed. Bedding Celine Thorpe for the next few weeks in a suite at the Chateau Marmont was the least of it. She wore the prop without the least bit of hesitation, or that’s the way it seemed. There was a way the prop made any blemish, or even a couple of extra pounds, look
great
on Celine. He didn’t care if she was perfect. On the contrary. It was her imperfections that made her so sweet. And yet when he started seeing her out of costume, wearing a slinky gown at an awards show or being interviewed on
Oprah,
well, he felt like she was all wrong.

He volunteered to serve as the network emissary at a fund raiser in Santa Barbara for the disabled. The publicists at the studio should have attended in his stead. He had already RSVP’d for the baby shower of some news anchor. But he went to the fund raiser himself and he saw a half dozen women in back braces, halos, even the lowly neck braces of whiplash, and he could feel himself getting all sentimental. How could it be? He was a strong man, a man with a national reputation as an executive, and he was following a woman with a neck brace out of the hotel in Santa Barbara and watching the awkward way she walked, and he was feeling that he was about to beg this woman for a caress.

His daughter, the tomboy Allison, brought home her pal Firth. When was this? During the Gulf War, maybe. Firth was an Asian girl, so he was a little confused about the name. One of those adolescent things, probably. Her name was Yo Yo or something similar, but she changed it to Firth because that’s what you do when you’re thirteen. Anyway, Firth had scoliosis, and Maiser had become enough of an expert that he could recognize that this was front-to-back scoliosis, not left-to-right. Maiser took one look at Firth and realized that he would have to start working late at the office, whether it bothered his wife, Lois, or not, in order to avoid salivating over the thirteen-year-old Firth, who was meant to start wearing her back brace full-time during summer vacation. He would have been altogether too happy to administer deep tissue massage to the spot on her behind where the hamstring connected to the femur head.

You get into one of these groups of girls, adolescent girls, and the group is like a swarm, and suddenly there are more of these girl children, all of them broken in some way, all of them bearing one another up, each of them the crutch of another, each of them both nurse and patient. There’s the wall-eyed girl, the speech-defect girl with her twisted
r’
s and
s’
s, the girl with the clubfoot, the girl with the harelip, the girl with the prosthetic arm, who often goes around without. All of these girls at his house, around his pool, at one time or another, as though his daughter was a collector of them, though there was superficially nothing wrong with her. His daughter favored the broken girls because she thought the broken girls were superior to the blondes with their boob jobs and their Lexus convertibles.