The Diviners (16 page)

Because he has an idea. Not that he has a lot of professional ideas, but he has this little idea. Like a middle-aged mathematician, these days he has to hoard any idea that comes his way. This idea is formulated as a question: What if there’s something good in the manila envelope? What if there’s something to know? Some tidbit of knowledge, some insider information in the manila envelope? Isn’t it now an insider information world? The envelope, in fact, is coming from the competition, from International Talent and Media. Says so right there on the messenger form. Is this not access to the world of agents who take their jobs seriously, who perform? Is this not access to the seven habits of highly effective agents: evasiveness, impatience, deceit, hyperbole, manipulation, cruelty, and love of fellow man? This idea comes from his distant past, from the days of being a trainee, when steaming open the occasional letter and reading it was considered pragmatic. Once he was startled, in the men’s room, while steaming open a letter, only to discover that some other junior agent, also clutching an envelope, was about to attempt to do the same thing. And though he believed he had left behind the steaming open of envelopes, here he is. Because Vanessa Meandro has failed on three occasions to return his call. And she sweats too much. Here he is receiving a package from ITM meant for Vanessa Meandro, some project he doesn’t know about, and he thinks he’ll just have a look. A quick peek. To see what is to be seen.

Vic thanks Spicer for the lesson, cutting off a tiresome digression on the big band tunes of the postwar era, and invites the old guy through the smoky opacity of the door.

“Come back again soon!” He waves. “And when you develop the harpsichord story into a script, think of us.”

“You bet I will!”

Once Vic Freese has decided upon that habit of highly effective talent agents known as deceit, of which expedience is one substrategy, he realizes that everything is quieter than he expected. There’s a recess of autovilifications in his skull, the voice that says
too short,
the voice that says
too wimpy,
the voice that says
too passive,
the voice that says
too soft.
All of these voices sound remarkably like various heads of departments at the Michael Cohen Agency, but they have all gone on smoke break with the global conspiracy of cigarette smokers, and here he is sitting on the couch, opening the envelope, in an HVAC silence where there is only the faintest stirring of oxygen pumped into the stillness of reception. Sandra call-forwards in a murmur.

He likes the title,
The Diviners,
and he likes the fact that the treatment calls for not one but three separate films. Three films, to be filmed at once, in locations all across the globe, and thus with sequels built in. A franchise. A branding opportunity. He likes it. He likes the ambition of the franchise. He likes that there are dozens of protagonists. He likes that every single race, religion, and ethnicity he can think of is in the project. He likes that the story has Hungary in it, actually, because he is partly Hungarian (his grandmother’s mother). He likes the Gobi Desert. He likes exotic settings. There’s a little scene about the conflict in the Falklands. He likes it.

In fact,
The Diviners
seems made to order for Vic Freese because his taste is old-fashioned. He recently attempted to watch that television show where young people are thrown together in a house in Boston or is it Austin, where they talk in direct address to the camera about the one guy who doesn’t want do the dishes, and this guy’s a bleeping bleeping bleep, et cetera. He has no patience for this kind of thing. He tried watching the game show about people who want to be millionaires. He has no aptitude for this. He believes Regis Philbin is a cloning experiment gone horribly wrong and that the introduction of Regis Philbin and his hair into the larger genetic pool will result in global calamity. Vic has tried to go to the movies at the little art houses, after work, but he hates independent films. He thinks independent film people smoke too much pot. And anyway there is no such thing as independent cinema anymore, it’s a farm team for the big leagues, which is why he dislikes Vanessa Meandro, besides the fact that she sweats too much. She thinks she’s better than him.

Vic’s formative moviegoing experiences were epics. CinemaScope types of things. Deserts, world wars, voyages in outer space, biblical stories, dragons, armies of spear-throwers, stop-motion. These are the kinds of stories Vic Freese likes, the kind where it takes a year to film and there are calamities of fire and ice. The kind of films where extras lose limbs and entire villages have to be burned to the ground. Like
The Diviners.

Based on a novel by Margaret Howe Hinckley Firestone. Must be a real name because it’s so awful. It’s like she killed off half a dozen husbands with poison-laced tureens of soup and kept all the names. Hey, wait. Didn’t she write the fourth sequel to
Gone with the Wind
?

It’s really good. It’s really, really, really, really good. It’s fresh. It’s fantastic. It’s the best treatment he’s read in a year. It’s big, it’s subtle. It’ll make you laugh. It’ll make you cry. It’ll make you leave the theater and throw up your arms in joy and kiss your best friend’s wife. It’ll make you want to sit and think for an hour. It’ll make you want to call a friend and tell her all about it. It’s a film for women because it has love in it. It’s a film for men because it has war. It has the man-versus-nature theme that’s so important according to a teacher he had in the ninth grade. It’s a movie of such potential that it can’t help but give Vic Freese another idea, and he’s on a real streak this morning with the ideas. This additional idea is even better than the idea about reading the contents of the manila envelope: The new client would make a really good Nurit. Nurit is a character in
The Diviners,
the Jewish daughter of the shopkeepers in Budapest who falls in love with a Gypsy boy, Babu. A star-crossed-love kind of thing. What could be better? He can see her, with a dark wig on, wearing some kind of torn shirt, the curve of her silicone-enhanced C cup just visible beneath. Her pierced navel will come in sort of handy, too. She and her lover and her family will flee across the Caspian Sea on a raft. Her belly is perfect. Nurit, the devoted and pure daughter of the shopkeepers. Nurit will wash away the bloody public relations stain of Ramon Martinez.

Vic Freese gets up from the couch in the sweet calm of reprieve. He goes upstairs to visit the kids in photocopy.

8

That afternoon, Jeanine gets the order she’s been dreading all day: Go deal with the Indian guy. He’s in the empty office. No one wants to go in there.

Vanessa definitely won’t go because Vanessa signs the checks. Madison won’t go because she had to do these errands for two years. Once you’re relieved of that responsibility, you work hard not to go back. Annabel won’t go because there’s this general hesitation about asking her to do any menial task. Thaddeus won’t go because he’s a movie star. His idea of gallant is trying to persuade you that you should go to his nephew’s school play in his place. Ms. DiNunzio won’t go because she’s the accountant. Her desk is spotless.

That leaves Jeanine. The Indian guy has had the door closed all day. You can hear him chanting. Shiva must be a melancholy deity, if the chant is any evidence. Thaddeus makes jokes about it because he seems to want Jeanine to sleep with him again. But she’s not doing it. After she sleeps with him she just goes back to the apartment that she shares with her girlfriend from college and she does her laundry. The transition from love to bleach is too violent. Thaddeus never returns her calls, and then he kisses the air by her cheek and explains about Shiva the destroyer, and that’s supposed to be enough.

Movie executives are aroused by people without power. Read any manual. Everyone is turned on by the girl with nothing. Tenderness offered to the assistant ennobles he who offers. Doesn’t matter if you abuse the girl for weeks at a time, doesn’t matter if you make her use the plumber’s helper to unplug the ladies’ room down the hall. If you are nice to her for three minutes on her birthday, you are golden.

Vanessa comes out of her lair and steals a doughnut from a new bag. Vanessa waves in the direction of down the corridor. “Get your butt down there and see if Ranjeet is comfortable and has everything he needs.”

It’s because she’s younger. It’s because she’s from the Southwest. It’s because of the disfigurement. They feel pity for her because of the disfigurement, and then they treat her even worse. That’s their kind of pity.

A cheap composite-wood door with a hollow core. This is what separates the chanting from the rest of Means of Production. She knocks tentatively.
Siva yeah, Siva yeah, Siva, Siva, Siva yeah.
Or that’s how it sounds. She knocks again. She can hear him shifting in the space. At last, Ranjeet opens the door. Just wide enough for his face to appear in it.

“I’m supposed to come in here and help,” Jeanine says. “Do you need help with anything?”

“What is it that you need help with?”

“I don’t need help,” Jeanine says. “I’m supposed to help you.”

“I do not have time to help.”

“No, I’m supposed to help
you,
” Jeanine says. She looks down the hall to where Annabel is typing. Annabel won’t meet her eyes. Annabel is pretending that the exchange is not being overheard because Annabel only really cares about her screenplay and about getting a production credit somehow. Every indie guy that comes into Means of Production, even if he hasn’t showered in five days and has needle tracks, Annabel is all over him, covering this guy with friendly caresses, giving lots of tips about submitting his work, asking him if she can get him a cup of coffee. Call any time, please.

Ranjeet laughs like a maniac. “Just making sport with you. Of course. Please do come in.” There is only the desk and chair. And it’s dark. On the north side, were Ranjeet to look out the window, he could see the skaters on their way around the rink. He could see the statue of Prometheus, firebringer. In a couple of weeks, the Christmas tree. There’s a guy whose job it is to go around the country, in a subcompact, looking for just the right tree. He stops at diners along the country roads. He gets a feel for the region. There must be some intuitive, magical understanding to the task. Hello, ma’am, would it be possible to take down the tree in your yard? You will be handsomely paid.

Coverage all over the floor. Pages and pages of the stuff. Spilled everywhere, like a gale has swept through. She picks up a crumpled leaf. It says MM on it, which means it’s Madison’s. Adaptation of a novel by Marie Callahan concerning Napoleon’s exile to St. Helena and a relationship he had with a stunning island lass. The lass is obsessed with prisms and lenses. She convinces Napoleon that prisms have a military application. Madison’s final comment:

Not really clear what prisms have to do with Napoleon, but they’re a filmic device that, in the right hands, could be beautiful to look at. The second act, in which Elsa betrays Napoleon by signaling (with mirrors) to a British frigate about his plans for a return to France, is heartbreaking and surprising, especially since she’s pregnant with his child. Too bad the story falls apart after that.

Ranjeet is reading it over her shoulder.

“I don’t know what I am meant to do with these,” he says.

“Sometimes you can find some good ones.”

She sweeps up a half dozen pages from the floor. Genre: sci-fi/ exploitation. Budget: one hundred million. Setting: Alpha Centauri. Reader: TG.

“Sometimes finished scripts get submitted, especially to Thaddeus. We like to read his coverage.”

The disembodied robot heads go to war against one another because each group suspects that another is guilty of passing secrets to the human slave population. Technology has given the robots the faults of small-town folks. Like envy and small-mindedness. Unfortunately, the dialogue resembles an interview with an East German shot-put expert. I’d rather develop a romantic comedy about dog walkers.

“Dog walkers?”

“You know, the people who are hired to walk other people’s dogs?”

The Indian guy is staring deeply into her eyes, as though he read about this strategy in a manual about the business. She’s tired. She has a lot of work to do. There’s something more that she should be doing, and that’s why she still has this job. There’s always more to do, and there’s always something she has done wrong. Vanessa is pissed, for example, because Jeanine wouldn’t eat any of the doughnuts. And she messed up the thing with Kinesthesia Productions, where she was supposed to deliver a script at exactly five o’clock because if the script got there before five o’clock, then one of the embittered assistants at Kinesthesia would pass on it. They pass on everything. But if it got there
right at five o’clock,
then it would go to Biedermeier’s country house in Rhinebeck with him. The embittered twenty-four-year-olds wouldn’t have a chance to pass on it. Vanessa has threatened to fire her three times this week. And the Indian guy is looking at her in this way like he feels compassion about all of this and yet still wants to touch her ass.

He says, “Would you like to sit on the desk, please?”

“On the desk?”

“I am going to explain something about television. Which is why I am here. I am a person who understands this medium. I learned this in my country. I’m the teacher of the meaning of television in the West. Or, to put it another way: I am the guru of television. I intend now to begin explaining.”

Afternoon light dances on the wall. Outside in the world all these people are in a frenzy about
chads.
Hanging. Perforated. The Indian guy doesn’t know what a chad is and doesn’t care. The Indian guy can’t vote. Jeanine didn’t vote because she didn’t have time. She was scouring the soap scum out of the corners of her shower at home yesterday because it made her feel better about things. It’s her parents’ apartment, for occasions when they visit NYC, and it needs to be spotless. Her roommate keeps inviting her out for things. She won’t meet anyone if she’s always at the office or ridding the bathroom of soap scum. But she doesn’t need to meet anyone when there is an action film star who tells her that she has great tits and begs her to let him please forgo the use of a condom.