The Diviners (9 page)

Annabel knows that a certain rarefied segment of the filmgoing public has exited at the conclusion of every film produced by Minivan determined to overthrow a despot or to work for the legal-aid society or maybe just to make a film. Everyone at her school in western Massachusetts, the one with the free-form curriculum, felt this way. Half of them have trooped through the Means of Production office, it seems, trying to get Minivan to back their documentary on the making of Miles Davis’s
Bitches Brew.
No? How about a film about the new East Village orgy scene?

The combination of the possibility of tenderness and a series of movies, not one of which cost more then ten million dollars to make, films that saved the lives of fifty thousand college students in the Northeast, this is enough for Annabel. She willingly shows up for work today, to be told by her boss that she looks like an Eritrean refugee. And here is her boss now, moving past Annabel’s desk, and then Jeanine’s, followed, inscrutably, by a Sikh guy in a turban. She drops a bag of Krispy Kreme doughnuts on Annabel’s desk.

“Want me to save these?” asks Annabel, holding the abject bag in her hands.

“Send in DiNunzio. Clean out the empty office. Squeegee the windows.”

To herself, Annabel pronounces the word
squeegee
as though it is a completely new word. The inexplicable Sikh guy, meanwhile, is smiling the most generous smile she’s ever seen, as though his smile could repair entrenched diplomatic problems. He’s standing in the hall by the sequence of portraits of great contemporary feminists by photographer Miranda Grossinger that Minivan has been collecting. Miranda wants to make a movie, too, and she has therefore been more than happy to improve the decor at Means of Production. The Sikh is leaning dangerously close to the photograph of Avital Ronell. He’s in danger of knocking the photograph off the wall because he’s so full of surprise and delight.

“Duffy, did you read the treatment? Do you have the coverage?”

Which treatment? Which coverage? Minivan’s head appears, disembodied, leaning out through the door frame. Annabel nods blankly. She knows better than to deny having read anything. On her day off, Election Day, which was not really a day off, she chased down a new wristwatch for Minivan and fired another intern, she worked on her script at the office, and only then did she go to stand in the line to vote on Seventh Street, where the elderly Hispanic ladies manning the booths were showering the voters with abuse. When she finished voting, it was after nine. Which was when Thaddeus came over. His wife, the commercial actress, had gone to San Diego to work on something, so Thaddeus was waiting on Annabel’s stoop when she got home. He complained the whole way up the four flights, as usual, “Haven’t you ever heard of elevators? Everywhere else they have elevators. They comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. I have a tobacco-related disability. I’d prefer to have a ground-floor romantic liaison, if you please.”

Thaddeus Griffin. She’s seen him holding a gun so many times that it seems as if he should always be carrying one, an ArmaLite or a Kalashnikov. Thaddeus Griffin, in
Single Bullet Theory;
Thaddeus Griffin, starring with a token African American pal, in
Single Bullet Theory II.
Thaddeus Griffin, starring in
Full Magazine,
about a heartbroken editor for a mercenary periodical who gets involved in a conspiracy to shoot the president, here starring alongside another token African American pal. Thaddeus, in fact, has never made a good film, despite having been brought up in New York City and despite having attended Union College in Schenectady, where he nearly graduated with a degree in marine biology. Thaddeus Griffin, the guy who comes to her house and weeps about his marriage and then with almost bloodless suddenness simulates a forced jocularity that would pass for charm on the networks. Everything is a joke! He can imitate anyone! He imitates his agent! He imitates studio heads and television personalities! He does his ongoing impression of Minivan! He’ll get an entire sushi roll in each side of his mouth, like when they were at that place on Ninth Street, and he’ll start talking about Michel Foucault and how knowledge
is
power, with sushi rolls in his mouth. Despite renting an office with Minivan for a year and a half, he has yet to be cast in anything, even though he has given Minivan free script advice and taken her out to Balthazar for dinner with one of the principals of DreamWorks, even pitched a script about the death of Trotsky to the studios for her. The favor bank has worked in one direction only.

Thaddeus’s campaign to know Annabel more perfectly is coincident with his fading prospects around the office of Means of Production. The campaign went like this. First, of course, he proposed to read the draft of
Fire Eater,
which he claimed to like. Then he invited Annabel out for drinks to discuss the script, at the history-laden Cedar Tavern. Three times people stopped him to say, “Hey, you’re the guy who killed that terrorist with a crossbow,” which was, of course, the climax of the original
Single Bullet Theory.
It was during this sequence that Thaddeus, with great concentration, uttered the words, “Jesus wept, motherfucker,” displaying a conviction rarely seen in modern cinema. You had to see it in context, really. And this was how he signed a cocktail napkin, for a fan, in the middle of the ring left by his neat scotch:
Single Malt Theory, Thad Griffin
2000.

“The script is really good,” Thad offered, when they were alone. “Really out there. I like it. I admire what you know.” Saying it in such a way that it was clear the opposite was the case. This seemed like the problem of celebrity, that the celeb could not uncouple him- or herself from the burdens and privileges of fame. The safe, uncontroversial remark that the celebrity was trained to deliver became his only refuge. With Thaddeus, she could not walk the street unperturbed. He would say, “We have to keep moving.” Maybe Thaddeus selected his profession for this reason, so that he would always have an excuse to move. At the same time, maybe he was not as famous as he thought; maybe nobody gave a shit about his films, which were generally acknowledged as all but worthless. Annabel believed that action films were inherently conservative anyhow, that they existed solely to offer support to libertarian positions on the Second Amendment. When you thought about it that way, you found pity for Thaddeus and his occasional attempts to be one of the people. You could see that Thaddeus had long since lost something, some set of skills that other people had: the ability to sit in a room without attempting to command its attention, the ability to look up at the smoggy night sky and know that it existed without any input from him at all and without the cooperation of tabloids.

“The thing about reading the Marquis,” he said, “the thing is that the Marquis really changes the way you think. I mean, you could just be going about your business and then you open up, uh, what’s that one called? You open up
Philosophy in the Bedroom,
and you hear what’s his name, the philosopher character, you hear him say, ‘Thrice Fuck of God, I discharge’ or whatever, and you know you are really being taken to a place where you don’t ordinarily go, a place in your body, a place in your emotional life. All the women with the strap-ons, the innocent girls. You’re in a lower part of nature, you know? You’re in one of those videotapes that record lions out on the Serengeti taking down the gazelles and ripping into them. You’re there, and now you know about bloodlust and power and the inner lives of men.”

Low lighting and bar noise. He was trying hard.

“So tell me why you want to work with this material, anyhow? I mean, why not write a screenplay about a blond girl who wants to give etiquette lessons to disadvantaged classmates and who in the process becomes president of the United States?”

The waitress, who had passed through a sullen period, was now happy and attentive. She had just realized she was serving a
movie star.
She hovered near the table.

“The Marquise’s life was like the lives of black women.”

“How do you figure? Ten words or less.”

“Her life was about intellectual and sexual slavery.”

“Why not write about slavery, then?”

“I might.”

Thaddeus polished off the last of a second scotch, attacked a third. A cop show, sound off, performed its rote dance on the monitor above the bar. He stared at it, absently, while formulating his comeback.

“Thing is, while I was reading the script, I did have that sensation that I could start eating steak tartare out of a dog bowl and it would be liberating somehow. I had to think. I mean, I couldn’t help myself from thinking one thing the entire time. I was thinking, This woman is really articulate, this woman has had a great education, this woman knows things other people just do not know. But I was also thinking this other thing —”

“Let me guess,” she said.

Thaddeus manufactured a facsimile of surprise. “Okay, go ahead. Guess.”

“You were thinking you’d never fucked a black girl before.”

“I can’t believe you talk like that, Annabel,” he said with mock horror. “It’s making me perspire. Wait. Let me collect my thoughts. Actually, believe it or not, I
have
had relations with a black woman before, because I wasn’t born yesterday. And I did have that black secretary character working with me in
Oath of Citizens.
On the novelty scale, the skin color thing just isn’t that high up. The novelty scale, in fact, is not that big a deal. Although it is true that I’ve never fucked a black girl
in the ass
before.”

Which indicated that it was now time for Annabel to leave. With a pig there was always a time to leave. A decisive moment. Many had walked out of the Cedar Tavern. Over the century of its existence as a local tavern, many had walked out on provocateurs, drunkards, decadents, on hidden drug problems, on voluminous anxieties, on unquenchable insecurities, unnamed wives. What did these men offer? They offered to take you to your room and then they offered to leave you in a bad, abrupt way. They were there, they were not there, hard to tell which was which, and then they came crawling back.

“Wait, I’m
trying
to talk about the script, I swear.”

“You’re twelve years older than I am. I’ve met your wife. She gave us those . . . those maple thingies at Christmas last year.”

“Annabel! Sit!”

So he settled down. He told her that the Marquise needed to show her devotion and her desire to leave by page sixteen, that the church needed to be hunting down de Sade, with intent to kill, by the beginning of act two, that the Marquise needed to be helplessly in love with a priest, that Annabel needed to see that film with Glenda Jackson about Marat, and that Annabel needed to get rid of the voice-over sections because development people don’t understand large blocks of voice-over. He had two more drinks while he was doing this, and next thing she knew they were in Tompkins Square Park, and Thaddeus Griffin, action film hero, dyed-blond hair swept back perfectly as though it had been spray-painted on, was sitting on a bench sobbing, saying his work was worthless and he was a joke, he was a fucking joke. He said it was the worst thing imaginable, being a joke, and then he was saying, “Take me home with you. Just take me home with you; I’m too drunk to do anything, and anyway, that’s the stupidest thing in the world to do about loneliness, a drunken fuck. Just take me home with you, let me see your hair-care products, let me know if your bathrobe is tartan, or white, or one of those Japanese kimonos. I can’t think about our stories going off in separate directions, like if I go back to my house, it’s just going to be a split-screen thing, and I can’t take that.”

She asked about his wife. His wife was in San Diego shooting a commercial, as she always was. She was always shooting a commercial. She had some kind of repeating character. Her residuals were excellent. The product had to do with feminine itch or bloating or medicated pads. “Did I say that my wife has an artificial eye, Annabel? My wife has an artificial eye. When you look into her eyes, you can see that the left one is artificial, because the light is reflected from it in some weird way. Did I say that my wife only buys clothes online or clothes given to her by designers, because she has a phobia about being seen shopping? Did I say that my wife and I had a photographer take a series of pictures of us strolling that we periodically release to the tabloids, just to make sure we control our public image? Take me home with you, Duffy. Recite to me the cantos of your life.”

She did. And he passed out immediately.

After that, even though she was dating a couple other guys, an assistant at the Michael Cohen Agency and a dean from the experimental college in western Mass., Thaddeus would turn up without notice, because things had to be flexible, and he would call from his car, coming down the West Side, and he would ask if now was a good time, never asking if someone was there but asking nonetheless, because he never expected that they were involved in anything but some amusing film-world dalliance. As it wore on, and
wore
was a good word for what it did, it became all about Thaddeus’s cock, which, despite her education and intellectual training, she somehow came to love. Why could women be smart, decisive, and brilliant and then somehow irresolute at the sight of a cock? It was one of the depressing secrets of adult life. She loved his cock because she was the Marquise, because she became the Marquise, because that was how it had to go, because by being the Marquise she overcame her, knew her, could write about her, because the Marquise had the skin of an Algerian, the Marquise was a Moor, and she was the Marquise, and she put the cock of film star Thaddeus Griffin in her mouth, and she put the cock of film star Thaddeus Griffin in her vagina, and she let the cock of Thaddeus Griffin erupt onto her dark skin because he was film star Thaddeus Griffin and he wanted to do it that way. And he bought her a nose ring, and he paid for the tattoo on her lower back, just above her behind, and he had the best guy in the East Village do it, and he attended this assignation, and he begged her to pierce her nipples, and when he said, “I want more,” she felt stronger, and so in turn she gave more. She was the assistant who gave more, because she was the black assistant, and she felt stronger when she shouldered burdens ever more impossible. They wanted her to give more just to stay in the game, and she laid up dreams in the attic of her consciousness, hoping, like a remedial hoper, for the moment of tenderness. But she never did that one thing he wanted, she never let him be the guy who fucked a black girl in the ass, because he had to be desperate for something.