The Diviners (45 page)

Here’s the really strange thing I forgot to say. Lois never came in today. Never called or anything.

Okay, so let’s just say I had the greatest idea ever for the company, just the greatest idea ever,
Madison writes, the pink vinyl journal in her lap, last curlicues of smoke from a stubbed-out joint hovering over her bedside table with its pile of unread scripts.
The idea is so good that I should get my paw print in front of that theater in Hollywood, way ahead of Brad Pitt, who doesn’t bathe enough. Anyway, here’s the idea, which is about the intern problem. We have all these boys coming in, with their stupid ideas, like one boy comes in with the train station sequence from
The Untouchables
all storyboarded, like that’s supposed to impress me, because the point is that we’re a company that’s mostly women except for this one womanizing jerk I wouldn’t give the time of day to and an Indian TV wonk. We need a girl intern! So I’m invited to the program of student films at NYU, and I hate going to those things, because all the movies are about whether or not some French woman influenced Freud’s conception of the death drive, or whatever, Jesus, get a pedicure or something. Anyway, so I noticed that the screenwriter for one of the films was a student called Allison Maiser. You’d think everyone in New York City would have the idea I was having, the idea about seeing if this Maiser was related to that Maiser, you know, head of UBC programming—I think Vanessa pitched him over the weekend. So I did a little checking, stealth phone calling, or maybe I made Jeanine do a little of the checking up, and it turns out that it’s her, all right, only question is how can we get hold of her. So I call up the Vanderbilt girls, get them on the phone, they’re back to talking about PussyWhipped again, everything is PussyWhipped this and PussyWhipped that, I tell them to quit with PussyWhipped, because my pussy is not whipped, I say look I have to figure out how to find this girl, this Maiser girl, and they put me on hold, seems like it’s only five minutes, but I’m reading a script anyway, and that’s okay because I love a story when you can just sink into it like it’s the best boyfriend you ever had, which is what this script is like, seems like it’s only five minutes later, and they say, we know how to get to her, we have her number, but we have something we need to tell you, it’s really important. What’s that? I say. They’re interrupting each other. Are you sure you want to know? Of course I want to know. Well, she’s like so not your type of girl. Who isn’t? The Maiser girl. She might have her bottom lip pierced or something, or her tongue pierced. She’s like a girl version of Dennis Rodman. I say, Forget about it! Dennis Rodman is so nineties! I say, it doesn’t matter if Allison Maiser doesn’t have any arms and legs! Because we’ll put her to work licking stamps, even if we don’t have any of those licking stamps anymore. We’ll do that because as soon as she walks in the door, we can call her father and say, your daughter is the best intern! Your daughter makes all the interns seem like, I don’t know, bricks of cheese! The Vanderbilts are skeptical, because they are almost certain that Allison is not a blonde either, not even a dyed blonde. She might have blue hair or something. They’re giving me a warning. Who gives a shit, I don’t always have to listen to them.

So I give the Maiser girl a call later, and I put on my best office voice, and I say where I’m calling from, I say the magic words that work on any college student, I say that I’m from Means of Production, I say we’re working on a Michel Foucault biopic, and we definitely need more help in the office, and we have heard good things about her short film, and it’s not like she is immediately jumping for joy, which I guess figures since her dad is like the most powerful man on earth, but she agrees to come in around ten the next morning, assuming I can get to the office by then. I tell Annabel that she has to interview her first, and I don’t tell Annabel who she is. I don’t tell anyone who she is, because I want to savor the idea for a little while. It’s worth savoring, because it’s the smartest idea ever.

Oh yeah, other news. It’s in all the papers! I don’t know why this kind of thing should always be in the tabloids first, but you’d have to be an idiot not to read the tabloids. This article says that there was a rumor going around that Samantha Lee was on her cell phone at the time she got hit in the head with the brick. I mean, maybe she got hit because she was on the cell phone and talking really loudly about bloating or something. I’ve wanted to kill a couple of people, especially when they were talking about stuff like that during a movie. I was watching one of those French movies, but you know it had a crazed nymphomaniac in it, and suddenly, right at the big death scene, someone takes a cell phone call. Takes the call and promises to call back but she can’t talk because right now she’s in the theater, and then the person says which theater it is, and how the movie is really great, and it has a crazed nymphomaniac in it, when are they going to get together.

The rumor in the paper says that there’s a cell phone, and that the cell phone will prove that Annabel’s brother, a suspect in the case, was actually calling Samantha at the time of the attack, and so he could not have been the attacker, because he was calling from a land line, and now there are all these police swarming around the spot where it all happened, except that no one can quite find the cell phone, you know, because it got knocked loose when half of her head was crushed by the brick that the psychotic guy hit her with. The weird part is that Annabel doesn’t seem all that surprised by the news. Still, if she planted the story, then I’m pretty proud of her, because that’s a good skill to have at your command, you know? I try to plant things in the press all the time, and if I had better contacts, I’d plant even more stuff, like that Mercurio is definitely going to be in
The Diviners
and that I am destined to head one of the major studios.

I didn’t go out tonight. I just came home and painted on skin care products. Then I ran around the house terrorizing the dogs. They don’t know it’s me, because my facial mask is purple.

P.S. Still no Lois.

The super went to Lois’s apartment to see if she was dead,
Madison writes on Wednesday, after the big party for PussyWhipped, Mercurio’s sportswear line. Because she’s a little drunk, she’s writing in her lingerie, feeling fat, like a porpoise splayed on an expensive mattress.
So far all we know is that Lois is not answering the door, and we should probably file a missing persons report, but Vanessa doesn’t want to do it yet, because someone from Lois’s family should do it. As far as I’m concerned the question is whether Lois actually has a family, because I’m betting she was spawned by an adding machine or a calculator or one of those slide rule things. Right from the first second when I got into the office Vanessa was on the rampage, and first it was back to that thing about how we had to get the
fuck
out of the
fucking
office because it’s a
fucking
dump and it depresses the
fuck
out of her, like I rented the suite or something. I asked where she wanted to move the office, and she says downtown of course, because everyone wants to be downtown, but personally I like the office here. Because my commute is really easy. And if I had time to skate now I would, at the rink, and I would wear a cashmere scarf and I would skate backwards under the big tree, and I would drink hot chocolate and tell some man what a hunk he was.

I pass this kid on the way in, I don’t even know whether it’s a boy kid or a girl kid, it’s just some kind of kid thing, and it’s sitting on the folding chair by the front door, near Jeanine’s desk, and this kid thing is wearing some shredded black stuff that got thrown out in the Dumpster at some heavy metal club, I mean, I guess it’s clothes, but who knows, the fishnets are so full of holes that the net couldn’t catch orca, and she’s got so much metal sticking out of her face that you could hang tinsel on her and stick an angel on top, and the amount of eye makeup, don’t even get me started, and her eyes are totally closed, so it looks like she’s sleeping, in the chair, and I sort of look at Jeanine, and Jeanine looks at the girl, and since the girl is sleeping, no one wants to wake her up. It’s amazing that she’s sleeping, because Vanessa is on the rampage, but she’s definitely asleep, and Vanessa, who doesn’t pay any attention to things if she doesn’t want to, she doesn’t pay attention, and I just go into the office, and Annabel comes in, looking worried and still wearing the Ann Taylor outfit, although she seems to have changed her blouse, and I ask her if things are okay, because now the papers think that there’s some kind of conspiracy between the guy who drove his car into the store in the Diamond District and the Samantha Lee attack and the desecrated temples on Long Island and some one-eye sheik on Atlantic Avenue, there’s headlines about
Waves of Hatred,
of course, it’s got to be some kind of Islamic thing, like when that guy blew up the building in Oklahoma City it was supposed to be an Islamic thing, but it turned out to be rednecks. But Annabel is not feeling great because the police still want her brother. He was supposed to be at her parents’ house, but then he left or something, and supposedly he’s just moving around, by train or who knows what.

The good news today is that Vanessa thinks UBC is really seriously considering
The Diviners.
Who knows how they decide this kind of stuff, I guess they talk to advertisers, and they get the poster guy to come up with some kind of poster. Of course, I told her that I have a really good idea for the poster, but she just waved me off. The bad news is that there seems to be like three different people out there claiming to represent the project, and Vanessa has been calling Vic Freese at the Michael Cohen Agency, and I could hear her yelling in my office. Later she comes in and tells me that Vic is representing the writer of the original book, who is named Melody or something, and then there’s another version out there with Leonard Nimoy attached as a director, that version is by Shelley Ralston Havemeyer or somebody, and then there’s our version, which is totally different. Apparently, we have coverage of the Nimoy treatment, and there are no Mongolians in it. How could there be no Mongolians? The whole point was to start with the Huns! I feel like I want to have Huns in the story, and I’m especially happy with that poster that I sketched out. What if they change it and the story winds up being about a dysfunctional family in the suburbs with a misfit kid who gets voted the most likely to succeed at the prom? That would suck. Maybe one diviner is like another, because they’re all in touch with some kind of magical power, and we should just take what we can get, and if that means executive producer credits for Vanessa and me, well, okay, move on.

I called the Vanderbilts to say that there are three different versions of our story out there, and it can’t be like with
Weird Science,
you know, there was some other science movie that came out at the same time, oh yeah,
Outbreak,
or whatever that one was, the plague movie glut, you know, there are just not going to be competing versions of the mini-series about diviners out there, not if we have anything to say about it, and then we go on this whole thing about Ranjeet, you know the Indian guy from the office, he was at the party for PussyWhipped, and I guess he has taken off his turban, because he was wearing this Prada suit at the PussyWhipped party, and somehow he got into the V.I.P. section, I don’t know how he got over there, but actually he looked really hot. He’s shaved his beard down to a little soul patch, and he has his hair all slicked back, and he’s wearing the Prada suit, and of course I think he’s just trying to get with all the girls, but he’s not talking to the girls, he’s talking only to the industry people, and when I go over to him, he gives me an air kiss and says that he’s been talking about some British version of a Jane Austen book that I never read, and he’s saying that it serves as a really good example of what
The Diviners
might mean, and I can see that he’s nervous, there’s a little line of sweat on his upper lip, and for a weird second I think maybe I should kiss him, that’s the part that I’m really shocked by, that and the Vanderbilts saying who was that hot Indian guy, and I say he’s not Indian he’s a Sikh, they come from a tradition of peace and spirituality, and the Vanderbilts are like what the hell are you talking about, and even I don’t know what I’m talking about. The thing is that Ranjeet was a car service driver, and now it turns out that he’s smarter and more hard-working than anybody who works in our office, which is why he hasn’t been around in a couple days, because Vanessa says he’s seeing a lot of agents, talking about various projects, trying to find people to line up behind the mini-series.

It has to be one o’clock when Annabel comes in the office laughing. Ohmygod, she says, I just figured out who that girl is. I say, what girl, and she says the one who’s asleep out by Jeanine’s desk. And I say, oh my god, that’s a girl? Because I just wasn’t totally sure it was a girl, I thought it might be like some kind of vole, and Annabel says that’s no vole, that’s a girl who wants to be an intern! Oh my god! I say, that’s no girl that wants to be an intern, that’s Jeffrey Maiser’s daughter! Not the Jeffrey Maiser! Yes ma’am! I say, and it’s your job to interview her first, and remember to be really nice to her and say yes to whatever she says she wants to do, because we just want to keep her on the hook for a while, at least until we get the whole mini-series thing hooked up, and we’re still really laughing and I’m thinking why do I always forget that actually I really like Annabel, because when she’s laughing it kind of makes the entire world seem good somehow, and that’s when Thaddeus walks by, but it’s like a ghost goes over our grave because neither of us wants to say anything in front of Thaddeus anymore. It’s only a matter of time before he’s not here, that’s what I think, because Vanessa doesn’t want to work with him, and he keeps turning up in the tabs, and he seems like he just got spanked, which he definitely should be.