The Diviners (40 page)
Maiser was trying to stay at work through all of it, trying to get lost in the reports from advertising on the projected price of a thirty-second spot during a show they were developing,
The Werewolves of Fairfield County,
but some days he was weak, just as anyone would have been weak, and then all the broken girls thought he was the greatest dad of all time because he’d be coming out with dishes of sorbet or a tray full of crackers and cheese, and saying, “Just thought you guys might want a little snack,” his cheeks stinging as though he’d just been acupunctured. He remembered the time he helped a girl with no legs onto the raft in the pool. Another man might remember a trip abroad with his family, might think of the Caribbean Sea and some sunlit beach, the tranquil aqua cove where he had a daiquiri with his wife. Instead, Jeffrey remembers the day he helped a girl with no legs onto a raft in his pool. The smell of the water and the way the light danced around her. What perfect shape she was in, from all the wheeling around, and who could say she wasn’t the most beautiful woman, the woman who would have launched Greek ships? Her smile was diffident, sure, was self-conscious, but there was something wanton about it, too. “I have secrets,” she was saying in her way, “that you’ll never know. I have secrets, and they are only unlocked with respect.” He can remember the way he fumbled climbing the steps, out of the pool, as if he were just another pedophile brought to his knees.
Then there was the girl who turned up just before Allison went off to boarding school. This was the last spring of the broken girls. She was younger than the rest. There was nothing special about her. A nondescript girl with a herniated disk. She came with a walker. There was something so poignant about a twelve-year-old girl with a walker, just beginning to have breasts, just beginning to flower into womanhood, and here she was with a walker. What made her the one? This girl from Illinois? Allison was contemptuous of the girl with the walker, as if she knew that this time of broken girls had come to an end. As if she were already off at boarding school, back east, where there was not going to be a steady supply of the deformed. On the contrary, there would be a lot of WASPs with season passes at the local ski resorts. Allison called the girl Granny, like it was a nickname of long-standing, and the girl withstood it, inching toward a piece of patio furniture as if it were the only safe spot for miles around. As soon as she had lowered herself onto the chaise longue—Maiser remembers seeing it from the window upstairs—Allison just got up and strode off, leaving Granny with her walker beside her like a trusty friend. The light was failing, but the kitchen in the guesthouse was lit up as if on fire. Norm, the caretaker, was making ramen noodles. Jeff remembers seeing Granny patiently sitting by at first, and then less patiently, and then attempting to get up with the walker, and failing, and beginning to cry. Until he went out to help.
She said her name was Lacey.
He got her up from the chaise longue, and he helped her into his car and drove her home, and he admonished his daughter on the subject, and he sent Lacey a card when she was getting ready for her spinal fusion surgery, and then he gave in, and the giving in was delicious. He visited her in the hospital, and he fed her Jell-O in her bed, and he buzzed the nurses and demanded more Vicodin on her behalf, and he made her a thousand promises in her hospital bed. He was a middle-aged man pronouncing absurd oaths of fealty, and this was before he even planted a kiss on her forehead, not to mention before he planted a kiss on her lips, and he begged her not to give in to his demands, and then cried out with joy when she did, and then he deflowered her, telling her how he wouldn’t do it unless she was sure it was what she wanted, and he paid for her singing and dancing lessons, because she said that was what she wanted. She wanted to be transformed from the girl with the bad back and incipient osteoporosis into the one-named entertainer of legend, the one who didn’t have a Jewish last name. So he secured her management, and he got her her first recording contract, and he read the fine print for her, and he knew that what had made her beautiful when she wasn’t beautiful was gone, so that the announcement of eternal fealty was an announcement of abridged fealty, the announcement of true love was a betrayal of true love, because with the broken girls (like Dante and Beatrice, when you think about it), love is breached at the moment of its honor. Jeff Maiser was forever fielding calls complaining about the apartment he got for her, from Tammy Gleick, a.k.a. Lacey, complaining that it wasn’t like it had been, even for her it wasn’t, even she knew that everything he gave her was corrupt, until there was nothing left of her in his life but articles in the tabloids. Lacey, the one-named international superstar, breast implants insured by Lloyd’s of London, Lacey and her string of Hispanic bodybuilder boyfriends who trained her and her bionic body parts.
Only a television executive can know this stuff, that the image is the thing, and the image is the secret, and the secret is that the broken girls are things of myth, things you can devote yourself to, and that the devotion has to be in secret because only things in secret last, because when the broken girl leaves and takes up with a sequence of club rats, a sequence that may or may not include a guy who drives his car into a diamond merchant’s display window, then you know that you still have your secret, and you treasure your secret, your humiliation, while your own body wastes away, and your career dwindles into twilight, and your wife leaves and begins her insane sequence of plastic surgeries, only a television executive can know all these things, all these sorrows.
It would show up on the MMPI.
I am worried about sex,
mostly true?
I am often looking through glossy magazines for women with back injuries,
mostly true or false? The women with the back injuries are going to show up on the test, and there is nothing to do about it. He is going to spike in the paraphilia section of the results. A whole day of presentations about Growing Quality passes with reveries such as this. Before Maiser knows it, it’s dinnertime, and he goes right over to the table where Lorna Quinson is sitting, and he trades his place card with the guy sitting at her right, and he banishes this guy to a table between the head of children’s programming and someone from the art department.
“What a surprise,” Quinson mumbles.
“Not really,” Maiser says. “I mean, I —”
“And to what do I owe the pleasure again?”
“Feelings of desperation?” Maiser says. “I can’t accept any more offers of sexual slavery from young producers. It’s going to tarnish my squeaky-clean image.”
“I’m sure that’s not what
I
heard,” says Quinson, without looking him in the eye. She fingers a barrette and does not elaborate.
“Your ideas on programming,” he says, with the charm tap now firmly screwed into the open position. “I’m here because I need your ideas on programming. You know, my guys are not performing like they’re meant to perform, and I need to take the pulse of the entire television-watching community. Wherever I might find them. Tonight that means you. Tonight that means let’s take some time, here at dinner, and you tell me what you watch and why you watch it, what the medium means to you, what makes you laugh and what makes you cry. Then I’ll get to work on a few programs that reflect your insights.”
At last, she could be said to be imperceptibly smiling. But before he can take pleasure in the certainty of this uncertain smile, there’s a hand on his shoulder. It’s Naz Korngold’s obsequious secretary, Georgia, a southern gal with a peroxided mane coiffed with military severity. Korngold refers to her as Georgia the Peach.
“Jeffy,” she says. “Naz wants you at his table. Last-minute sort of thing. Analysts.”
No! There’s no recourse for the unavoidable dinner that lies ahead but frequent deployment of the term
synergies,
always in the plural, and aggressive, salesmanlike alcohol abuse. Indeed, he pursues these strategies in a single-minded way so that the rest of the evening shuts over him like the curtain after the bloodbath of act five —
Abruptly, he wakes for day number three and its schedule of team building and Growing Quality in the Context of Community, and, yes, he has the kind of headache that led primitive man to assume he was possessed by evil spirits. Maiser drags himself out of the king-size bed and throws on some jogging clothes. Turns out that La Casa Grande is located outside of San Diego in a small neglected desert village, though no one at the resort would admit to it. When Maiser calls the front desk and asks how far it is to town, making clear that he intends to walk the distance before breakfast, they urge him to reconsider. Maybe some time in the sauna instead? A massage? But Jeffrey knows about the evil spirits and he knows what it takes to rid himself of their spells. The brisk constitutional. And so it is out of the climate control and onto a two-lane road with a speed limit of seventy-five. No sidewalks. The desert of Southern California has never looked more Saharan. A few last-chance palms rise up from otherwise scorched expanses of white sand. A roadside billboard advertises four hundred acres at rock-bottom prices. Up ahead, in the distance, whether from the physics of mirage or from hangover, a Dairy Queen staffed entirely by morose teenagers shimmers. Nonetheless, he quickly establishes that he should turn back, except that when he does so, another vision materializes before him, a revelation of the worst kind. It’s a battalion of laborers, mostly Mexican, building a large plywood wall.
Maiser kicks aside a few busted bricks while he watches. He wipes a slick of hundred-proof perspiration from his forehead. There’s only one purpose for a wall out here in the elements. There’s only one purpose for this wall on the day for which team-building exercises are called in the schedule. It’s the Obstacle Course.
He hails the poor sons of bitches from Mexico who are working hard and trying not to get shipped back across the border. “Muchachos? Hola!” A guy with a Padres cap on backward and a goatee dusts off his hands and comes over slowly, as though it’s a chore.
“It’s okay, sir. We speak English.”
“Sorry to bother you. Do you guys have any idea why you’re building this wall? Any idea at all?”
“We’re told to build a wall to certain specifications. We build a wall.” He gestures at it as if it’s a thing of beauty.
“That wall looks like it could easily hold a very large man or woman,” Maiser says, expecting no reply. The implications are there for anyone to see. Without taking leave of the laborers, he trudges back along the road to his casita. In the meantime, of course, the more ambitious corporate managers are coming in from the putting green in their smart little golf carts, looking tanned, rested, and self-satisfied.
Jeffrey Maiser should be happier about being right, about the wall, about the tragic course of the management off-site, about human nature in general. But he’s not happy about being right, insight and contentedness being on opposite ends of life’s superstructure. Within a half hour, he will be here, unbreakfasted, slouching in front of the wall, getting instructions from some management consultant bonehead. As usual, Maiser will not be listening carefully, precisely because the facts of daily life have a shocking tendency to be easily forecasted, and he still has not written the essay required by Naz Korngold, nor has he completely filled out the MMPI;
I used to like to play hopscotch and jump rope,
false or mostly false?
There is now a rope affixed to the wall and it is swaying gently. And Jeffrey Maiser is standing in front of the wall next to some of the most important people in the Universal Beverages Corporation family. Stew Ledbetter, the president of the beverages division, who looks and smells as if he has recently emptied the contents of his stomach; Leslie Aaronson, the thirty-one-year-old head of the UBC film studio, who will probably be out of a job in under a year, just like the last three studio heads; himself, Jeffery Maiser, one of the most driven, respected, and astute minds in television; and Len Wilkinson, the word guy.
Boy, does he fucking hate Len Wilkinson. If Ibn Al-Hassad had devoted a portion of yesterday’s speech, a mere bulleted point, a fancy software-enhanced graph, to the greatest enemy of Growing Quality, Maiser missed it, but he knows nonetheless that the greatest enemy to Growing Quality is “dissension in the ranks.” Naz Korngold, if he remembers correctly, mentioned it at dinner last night before Maiser’s brownout. Naz pointed out how it was the natural tendency of people during “times of crisis” to begin to “take it out on one another.” It was natural for there to be an upsurge of “dissension in the ranks.” And yet in truth, this was a time to “pull together,” according to Naz, a time to “keep our eyes on the prize.” The implication being, perhaps, that Maiser is himself one of the problems, a guy who trusts nobody, who keeps his own counsel, who is merciless and solitary, like a timber wolf.
There’s one good reason for trusting no one, and that reason is Len Wilkinson.
Wilkinson came up through corporate communications, straight out of some state school, University of Ohio, maybe, where he’d been a sportswriter. He had great dreams of a journalistic vocation ahead. And there he would have stayed if not for a moment of stunning creativity, the kind of breathtaking moment that can really launch a career. That moment was the composition of the expression “inspired by a true story.” Yes, somebody had to be the coiner and promoter of this piece of etymological flab, and that somebody was Len Wilkinson, who’d gotten his start in the mail room at UBC films. It was not long after that the studio was having a bad spell. Nothing was doing the kind of business it ought to have done. UBC had worked the market for sequels for a good five or six years, and still the public was less excited about the sequels than the superior original products. Wilkinson was given the task of writing a press release for a little-known telefilm, developed by the studio and cross-marketed to the network, based on the wartime career of a recent president of the United States, and in the midst of this press release, he had described the film as “inspired by a true story,” with all the religious nuances implied. He went on, of course, to argue in meetings that television had no mission to document but rather to “inspire.” Naturally, the press release was recast in a dozen major reviews for the film, so much so that “inspired by a true story” became an industrywide, if not global, standard.