Madison turns from the vast cabinet of beauty products in her mother’s bathroom at 860 Park. She turns from honey-maple astringent chiselers, verbena pore extruders, plasma essence nucleic epidermal triage treatments. To immerse herself in the shower, Madison stands with her face under the massaging showerhead trying to ignore the afterimage of the curtain’s floral print. During the next ten minutes, when she’s basically asleep again—until she finds herself warming up the espresso maker, dumping a demitasse into some steamed milk—she absently spoons into herself half a grapefruit for its negative calories while her mother complains about how recycling is actually creating more garbage. After which, Madison needs to get out of her pajamas, and this is actually one of the most stressful moments of the day because she has all these choices. She has gone to Agnès B., she has gone to Betsey Johnson, she has gone to Prada, she has gone to Dolce, she has even gone to Bergdorf’s, and she has bought these outfits, Michael Kors, Marc Jacobs. She has to wear one of them. If you buy the outfit, you have to wear the outfit. That’s the rule. It’s irritating and stressful. All these outfits, like strangers of whom you should ask questions at a cocktail party, at least according to her mom, who was trained to ask questions at parties by her own parents, her mom who used to be a fund-raiser at the City Opera and who now just hangs around the house complaining. Madison goes into the walk-in closet and she tries on the knee-length black skirt, then the pink corduroys, then the giant eyelet skirt, and the micromini, then superslim hip-huggers, settles on a leather skirt in claret, checks the drape of the trifle. She attempts to divine the tastes and inclinations of the male of the species by spinning around a couple of times in the mirror. Next, she goes in search of the right top, maybe something less sheer underneath something more sheer, or maybe just something black. After which there is emergency moisturizer, amber concealer, ebony eye pencil, extrahold disulfide support spray. Not that the male of the species gives Madison McDowell its undivided attention. When they do she finds reasons to resist. This one checks the length of his fingernails too often. This one is preoccupied with squash. This one uses the word portfolio too many times, and this one drives with one hand.
Which is why at twenty-eight she’s still living here. There’s no reason to live elsewhere yet. And she can’t afford her own place. In summer, she has the guesthouse all to herself out in the Hamptons, where she can float listlessly in the pool. While she’s at Means of Production she can save some money, and she can buy pieces (fur pants from Sean John) that are essential to the public image of Means of Production. Madison McDowell is the public image. That’s something that Vanessa Meandro recognizes, something that Vanessa needs, Madison McDowell with high heels and an address book and an expense account. Madison McDowell in the society pages. She can call her friends on the cell phone and she can commiserate about whatever it is that requires commiseration. She can scheme out loud about world domination, about her ultimate position as a female studio head, about her imaginary husband who is thirty-eight years older than she and bound to die leaving her a half-billion dollars in stock options.
She gets into the elevator, yelling back irritably at her mother, reminding this matriarch to go to Fendi for the sale, and upon depressing the L button, she fishes out the cell phone and conference calls the girls at Vanderbilt Publicity, and the girls start in immediately about what they saw last night, for example, you can’t believe who they saw last night, they were with that hip-hop guy, Mercurio. Almost every week they say this, they saw Mercurio, Mercurio, Mercurio, and they took him to the opening of an installation piece at a gallery in Chelsea where you could administer electric shocks to a male model, you wouldn’t believe it, and everyone was there, here is a list of people who were there, here is a list, because even if the girls themselves weren’t at an event, none of the people on the list would ever deny being at an event, that’s what the girls always say, you can always just report that these people were at an event any time you throw a party, even if they weren’t. The more times you say it, the more likely they are to come: Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson, Rod Stewart, John Leguizamo, Donald Trump, Matt Dillon, Isaac Mizrahi, Al Roker, Lacey, Jay McInerney, someone from the tabloids, just make up any name of someone from the tabs, because they love us, they love everything we do, and they will come to everything. How about plus-size models, there are always some plus-size models around, you can just say a plus-size model came to the party, like what’s her name, any of the guys from that hip-hop label on Staten Island, and you can say that anyone from the Young Republicans was at your party. Young Republicans, they will do anything you ask. Libertarians like to be tied up. Leave your Libertarian at home watching QVC, tied to your bed. The heiresses from that cosmetics fortune, they were undoubtedly at the party, the daughter of the guy who pulled the insurance scam where the Methodist Church got taken for millions, the dashing son of an indicted arms trader, twenty cousins of the Saudi royal family, two former New York City police chiefs. You can always get the staff of the pink weekly newspaper to come to your parties, and they almost always throw up at some point late in the night, especially that guy who does the movie reviews. Or how about the heroin-addicted singer for that band, the Corinthians, or Derek Jeter will come to your party, or Fred Durst, he will come to your party, the entire staff of Jet Set. All these people will come.
The girls go on, yoked together in the ether of telecommunications as Madison thanks the doorman, gets into her cab. They talk about the menu at that restaurant Slab, how it is totally not that fattening, and how first they went to the benefit party for the museum, and they got so drunk, you wouldn’t believe, and they saw a real estate developer guy, and they saw a guy from that investment bank, and they saw the guy who had the Internet start-up that only just started to tank. But that’s after the stock was up a hundred and twenty percent in the first day of trading. A sweet guy and cuter than any man on earth, he’s a fox, they say. His hair is the color of wheat and just a little bit messy, and he says he wants to get involved in producing independent films! That’s what he said. They are serving this man up to Madison as though he were a big fish flopping on the deck, and all of this even though Madison has dark hair, which is not at all like the Vanderbilt girls themselves. They are totally being about blond, about the philosophy of the blonde. Even if you’re a fake blonde, it’s fine. But you have to be a blonde. They have decided to do this experiment with Madison; they are going to see if a natural brunette can make any headway in the world. But as part of the experiment, she will have to do as they say. Exactly as they say. And then, at a certain point, she will take a meeting with Mercurio. Mercurio really wants to do some film work and Mercurio is incredibly smart, you know, and he understands how it works. He really doesn’t want to do an action film where he’s the sidekick of some white guy, like a Thaddeus Griffin movie, because that’s demeaning, although he would consider doing an action film where he has a white sidekick, like Thaddeus Griffin, say, and maybe Thaddeus gets blown to pieces about half an hour from the end of the movie, but, seriously, what Mercurio would like to do is have a small part in a film where it’s not actually the worst film of the year.
Madison says, “Even Thaddeus doesn’t want to do a Thaddeus Griffin movie.”
Mercurio, the girls observe, is just pretending that he carries a loaded handgun and has guys working for him who are ruthless killers, because you have to have credibility with the fan base, and that fan base, the girls say, is white male private school students from large cities. Mercurio can’t afford to alienate white male private school students from large cities, and so he needs a handgun, the girls say, so that the private school kids believe in him. The Vanderbilt publicists do not have the same credibility problem and they don’t need handguns. They could borrow handguns if needed. They understand that credibility is imperative to all the people they represent, however, and they will do what they can at the corporate level to ensure that Mercurio’s credibility survives incessant advertising, television promotions, bad marriage choices, a house in the suburbs, homosexual dalliances, insider trading scandals, diva behavior, gavel-to-gavel trial coverage, all of that. Mercurio is so sweet and he has had such a rough life, what with losing his cousin in a plane crash. So you have to find something for Mercurio. He wants an independent film where he can work outside of his established persona, you know?
“Maybe a digitally animated version of the Tibetan Book of the Dead?”
“Does it have like a hundred kinky positions in it?”
The girls miss Madison’s withering sarcasm, not because they are uninformed, but because they are talking too fast. Madison is so smart! Brunettes are smart! Sometimes she has both of them on hold, the Vanderbilt girls on two separate lines, Barclay and Sophie, and she just goes back and forth between them, and sometimes they have each other on hold at the same time, and sometimes she has them conference calling her. To summarize, Mercurio would like to take a meeting with Madison and then he would like to take a meeting with Vanessa, and Madison should definitely call up the guy from the Internet start-up, hair the color of wheat, and she should take him out to lunch. The girls tell her that the Internet developer guy is really serious, he really wants to learn about the movies, he’s totally cute, you wouldn’t believe.
And of course the cab is stuck in traffic, and the driver has one of those pine-scented tree car fresheners hanging from the mirror, and it’s going to pollute Madison, and she might have to puke. They pass St. Bart’s at a crawl. Madison is skeptical, as she is always skeptical, about the Internet start-up guy, but she takes out her personal digital assistant and she scans through the projects that she’s responsible for. Which of them might be worth bringing to the Internet start-up guy and which should she bring to Mercurio, and should she talk to Vanessa about Mercurio? And then she tells the girls that she has found a really excellent waxer, heard about her from a friend working at Jet Set, and the girls say, who? Like maybe they are a little irritated that they don’t already know about this waxer. But Madison doesn’t say who because sometimes you have to withhold information just a little bit, that’s how you end up being the monthly selection for the Vanderbilt girls, so she says that she is getting the Brazilian wax, and it is really excellent, and this happens not to be true at all, hurts like hell, and then the girls say, oh, by the way, did we tell you that the Internet start-up guy is a Mormon?
“A Mormon?”
“Yeah, a Mormon.”
“Really?”
From Utah and everything, and they do not know if this means that he has several wives all under the age of eighteen, but it does seem to mean that he doesn’t drink very much, if at all, and he comes from a parched western landscape, and maybe his great-grandparents, his people, came over the lip of the bluff in a wagon, having endured persecution and disrespect and murder all across these United States. Okay, Madison knows what Mormon is. A Mormon is someone with strange undergarments who has an obligation to go abroad to Africa when he’s fifteen to attempt to convert the Africans to his religion and who has, in the process, sexual experiences he never talks about. He has strange sheets. She says she’ll have to put them on hold, and she calls the Internet start-up guy, whose stock is plummeting, and she gets his assistant, and she says that she is Madison McDowell from Means of Production and she’d like to make a lunch date for that very day, which is Friday. Turns out the Internet start-up guy does have a name, and his name is Zimri. It’s the most incredible name, Zimri, sounds like a name for a Sufi dancer. Madison can understand how a half dozen sixteen-year-old Mormon girls would marry a guy called Zimri. And for a while she’s on hold at the office of the Internet start-up guy, and it’s playing music that is definitely not hip-hop Mercurio, and she’s wondering if maybe this is the music of the famous choir, or would that be a little obvious, you know, if you were a Mormon, to have the Mormon Tabernacle Choir playing on your voice mail service. Maybe she should option the life story of his great-grandparents, coming overland in their wagon trains, enduring persecution, fighting off mountain lions, singing about saints in the choir.
She’s responsible for the project about Otis Redding. Zimri might be interested in that. It’s a fictionalized narrative about Otis Redding, called Try a Little Tenderness, and it creates a thriller subtext around the life of Otis Redding, saying that Otis Redding did not have mob connections, you know, even though some people say he did. They really were not mob connections, according to the script, what they were was connections with the Nation of Islam. Which is ironic, because he was one of the first soul singers with a fully integrated band. Well, see, it’s an early point in his career, and he’s still back in Georgia and he’s just busting out of Little Richard’s band, where he got his start in the late fifties, and he falls under the sway of the Nation of Islam because he just wants to believe that some message of hope could transform the African American struggle. What Otis Redding does, in the script, is he comes to reject both the Nation of Islam and the gradualist politics of the white man. All of this while on his last tour, you know, before the plane goes down, just like with Mercurio’s cousin. Otis goes through an intellectual dark night of the soul on the last tour. He goes from the heights of ecstasy to the lowest lows; he sees into the troubled soul of this great land, and this is what enables him to write “(Sittin’ on the) Dock of the Bay” while visiting friends in Marin County. There’s some stuff about Herbert Hoover, but this part hasn’t been worked out entirely yet, and there’s some stuff about the great soul players in his band, and there’s a little bit about his white girlfriends, including a woman who was married to a prominent senator from the state of Virginia, but they have to be really careful about that because Otis remained married his entire life, and the family has given permission to have the movie made, and if they don’t like the white girlfriends, then there won’t be permission to call the film Try a Little Tenderness or to use any of the original music. The third act will answer the question of who had Otis Redding eliminated. And the answer is that they haven’t quite figured out who eliminated him yet, because Vanessa wants it to be terrorists, for some reason, while Madison and the writer are leaning toward Cubans, in revenge for the Bay of Pigs.
Because she’s been left on hold too long, Madison puts Zimri the Internet start-up guy on hold in return and she goes back over to Barclay, half of the Vanderbilt partnership, and says, “Maybe Mercurio could play Otis Redding.”
Suddenly both girls are on the line, indicating that they will consider this. They will have a quick phone meeting while she’s on hold with Zimri, the Internet start-up guy, and they will also consider the Brazilian waxer and then maybe they will try to reach Mercurio. And Madison goes back to the music that sounds like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, but there’s no one there. Soon she gets another incoming call, but actually it’s just Barclay, who has called back on a new line because it was faster. They are talking on two different lines now.
“By the way, who is Otis Redding?”
“You don’t know who Otis Redding is?”
“Don’t make me feel stupid, you bitch.”
Barclay cackles. Madison claims to be just kidding about not knowing. But she’s not kidding, and she’s not letting on that she’s not kidding. Meanwhile, in her innermost core, which is surprisingly sweet, Madison McDowell will do almost anything not to let anyone know that she is a virtuoso on the violin, that she was in the All-City Orchestra, first violin, and had the chance to play with the Philharmonic when she was sixteen. She has never mentioned this thing about the violin to the Vanderbilt girls, for example, nor to Vanessa Meandro, and she has put the violin under her bed, and she has not tuned it lately, because if she tunes it and her mother is in the house, her mother will get all weepy about how great Madison was on the violin. Her mother will observe that any man would love a girl who bows the violin the way Madison McDowell bows. Sometimes she waits until her mother is out of the house and her father is traveling on business, and then she takes the violin out of the case and fits it under her chin, and she tightens the bow, and she plucks the strings a few times. Then she sets the bow on the strings, and there is the long low trembling of the G and D strings, and the vibrato as she moves up through first position. And then there is the first melody she plays, when she is rusty and alone and willing to be the violin player that nobody knows. Just to have practiced something, some scales, and a little J. S. Bach. She is unthinkable without the violin because she is sublime only on the violin, and her posture is perfect, and her ear is perfect, and she hears the locking counterpoint of string quartets in her future, never to be, and that’s why the other passion project she is developing is the story about the violin maker Stradivarius, who, although he made the greatest violins in history, was actually a libertine and a reprobate, at least in his early life, and, in this story, Stradivarius goes from bedding French prostitutes and playing bawdy songs on his sublime instruments to helping a Prussian general scheme against foreign intrigues. But then he experiences the ennobling of courtly love, you know, in the person of the daughter of a viscount, whom he cannot have. Something like that. And, of course, he makes the greatest violins in history in order to capture the sound of the voice of his beloved, because the value of love is commensurate with difficulty of attainment. The writer of the Stradivarius script, a guy she met at Fashion Week, a guy who tried to get her number, is still working on the third act. Vanessa has no idea why Madison likes all the historical stories, why she likes Napoleon and Stradivarius, but she thinks maybe she just identifies with the romance of women from costume dramas, and besides, girls love those kinds of movies and flock to them, like if you could get Lacey, the teenybopper, to play the chaste Elsa in the Stradivarius movie, then you’d have something that would really bring the girls into the theater in big flocks.
Barclay, on the other hand, doesn’t know about Otis Redding, and she doesn’t know anything about violins, and she got thrown out of a number of private high schools here in the city. Unless it’s a Swedish imported car or some tacky kind of champagne that costs five hundred dollars a bottle, Barclay doesn’t have a clue, but Sophie, the other Vanderbilt Publicity girl, knows about this kind of thing, a little bit, just because her father has an entire performing arts wing at NYU named after him. That’s how the Vanderbilt partnership works out. Barclay Weltz worries about the billing and doesn’t bother to get her eyebrows dyed. She goes to these parties wearing designer jeans and with her bra showing under her shirt, and she plants gossip items in the papers about people she doesn’t like in order to have them ruined. And Sophie Fiegelman closes the deals and plays the good-cop part. It’s Sophie who told Madison that she was their choice this month and that it bespoke a fabulousness that Madison should be very proud of. All the more reason why it’s scary when Sophie’s voice rings out, breaking through the interstellar white noise of the on-hold signal of Barclay, likewise breaking through the on-hold signal of Zimri, Internet start-up guy, just as Madison is climbing out of the cab at the side entrance to the Rockefeller Plaza.
Sophie’s voice is agitated. “Oh, my God, you guys, I just got the worst news! You won’t believe it!”
Barclay says, “What? What?”
It’s almost midday, and the skaters are already doing their thing, and the colors are bright because it’s autumn. No time is as perfect as autumn, even if you’re a development girl on the phone with hack publicists and you are late. Madison listens absently and walks down to the edge of the rail overlooking the rink. The holidays feel like some fever up ahead, and that’s what she’ll remember thinking when Sophie breaks the news that this girl she knows, Samantha Lee, from one of the galleries—beautiful girl, knows a ton of people—she was walking in midtown yesterday and this guy, some guy, he just came up behind her and he just smashed her head with a brick, just took this brick and swung it at her head and just totally knocked her out, like, knocked her down on the street, and then she was on the street with her skull all smashed in and bleeding and everything.
“Oh, my God,” Barclay says. “That is so awful. That is so horrible. That is so sad. Is she dead?”
“She’s in the hospital. It’s all over the papers.”
Madison says, “Did she go to Lenox Hill? She should definitely go to Lenox Hill.”
“What party did she come to?” Barclay asks.
“She came to a lot of parties,” Sophie says. “You know who she is. She was going out with that guy, what was his name, the painter guy.”
And that’s what Madison takes with her, along with her impatience and her irritation, on the way into the office. She is carrying the name of a woman who got her head smashed in by some guy on the street, and it’s all kind of too much, the prospect of Vanessa is too much, so she pretty much turns right around and leaves, to meet Zimri, the Internet start-up guy, for lunch at the new Indian place on Forty-eighth Street, because why not? Madison likes a guy who doesn’t have to look through a hundred calendar pages before he can make a lunch date, or who at least has an efficient secretary, and she also really likes a guy who is standing when she comes in. Slow this instant down for a second, how about? Because the most important part of the day is the part you spend at lunch, and she does the important phone calls in the cab and then she just goes straight to lunch, because lunch is a legitimate expression of business.
Zimri Enderby is pleased to meet her, and Zimri is cute, and Zimri has an oblique smile that is endearing and impossible to pin down at the same time, like no matter what you say to him, you will not be able to figure out what he thinks. He holds her seat for her, and touches her on the biceps, just faintly, a brushing past of the fingertips, like he’s the archaeologist and she’s the intact vase in the peat bog, and then he sits. There’s something stern about Zimri Enderby. That’s what Madison thinks, even though he also has a button-down collar on his shirt, it’s so frigging preppie, are Mormons preppies? And he orders everything as if he’s familiar with it. Well, so he’s a Mormon who knows how to order Indian food. And pleasantries get exchanged, according to some etiquette manual of pleasantries. Zimri hints about how he thinks the election will turn out, and Madison is tempted to say something, but the Vanderbilt girls, when they decided that Madison was the selection for this month, they insisted that she not say anything about politics for the entire month, no matter what, because no one pays any attention to politics anyhow and no one ever got a business started by caring about politics. The only thing you need to know about politics is that a check of a certain size will buy you access to politicians of any party at any time. Ten thousand bucks gets you all the access you need. Zimri is the kind of guy who could write a check of a certain size.
An Indian waiter takes away the ceremonial plates.
“I’m familiar with some of the movies your production company has done,” Zimri says, “and I have to say, they’re provocative and interesting. Why don’t you tell me what you’re doing now.” Provocative and interesting? Aren’t these adjectives from somebody’s porch furniture catalogue? Madison pauses dramatically. She takes in her surroundings. The Indian restaurants in midtown are always decorated in crimson, like you’re in somebody’s mouth. Here’s the soft palate and here’s the uvula. She looks around at the tassels and the fringe on the draperies.
“Well, we have a couple of projects we’re working on that are certain to get distribution, and, uh, we’re thinking they’re going to get a lot of attention at the awards, all of that. Stars are attached.” She tries to think about what kinds of films a Mormon might like. Maybe he should bankroll some animated films about Native American princesses with hourglass figures or something. Means of Production is always shaking things up. This is what she tells him, using language that is straight out of that brochure that Annabel had printed and which she forgot to bring. She says that Means of Production is about “shaking things up,” about “avoiding the pieties of mainstream cinema,” about the “freshness and energy” of independent cinema, which means directors and actors who are “hungry for expression.” She watches his face while she repeats stuff like this, like she’s a waitress announcing daily specials, recommending sauces that she has never heard of before and mispronouncing the names of exotic mushrooms, and she waits to see the flicker of prejudice or disdain that she figures is hidden in the faces of the fervently religious. Madison associates any kind of religious anything with mental retardation. But when she doesn’t see the prejudice there, she gets bold and she starts to talk about her passion project, her film about Stradivarius, and anyway, it doesn’t have any gratuitous bondage sequences or any transvestites in it, and it has no references to Michel Foucault in it, nor does it heroize the labor movement. She kind of warms to the whole subject, though she doesn’t want to give away that she actually plays the violin. She says, “Have you ever held a violin? The Stradivarius, it’s really beautiful. People cry sometimes, just holding a Stradivarius, and we want to make a movie that feels like that.” And then she tells him about Otis Redding and she tells him about the remake of Citizen Kane from the point of view of the Marion Davies character. He has his arms folded pensively, but then he remembers that he has food, and he pokes at the chicken tikka masala, when he’s not watching her as though he’s waiting for her secret.
“I don’t really know what I’m thinking about with the movie business yet. I’m just learning about it. And what I do when I learn about something is I just take it all in. I’m taking in the film business and I’m thinking about what I might be able to do that no one else has done.”
Madison asks what the Internet start-up business is all about. Because, as her mother has pointed out, it is important to ask questions.
“I’m proceeding on two fronts, really.” The one front, he says, is a company called Rural Electrification, Inc., and the goal of Rural Electrification, Inc., is to put wireless broadband service in the hands of people in rural communities. Most of these people, he says, have to go to libraries to have any access to the Internet at all, but wireless broadband is just around the corner and it would enable farmers to access information while out on their land. For example, if they have a question about soil pH balance, or a question about the water table or the possible effects of dam projects in the West. Wireless broadband would enable the rural culture of the West to feel that it was not lagging behind coastal centers in terms of information management. It would give the rural West a level playing field. That’s one of the projects he tells her about, and the other project concerns privacy and privacy issues. It involves a Web site that could be used as a portal for accessing other Web sites in order to protect consumer privacy, and it would also offer software and information about privacy in an era when more and more of what happens on the Internet is being stored, saved, and sold by large Web merchandisers. “Imagine we were having this conversation on some instant messaging service, you know? That’s not terribly difficult to monitor these days. Say I mentioned that I knew radicals out West, water rights activists, and I happened to know that the government had a computer that monitored users any time the words water rights activist turned up anywhere on the Internet. We’re looking to create services and situations that will protect consumers from these malicious invasions of privacy. And the conjunction of these two projects, Rural Electrification, Inc., and the Privacy Project, will really benefit the lives of people from the part of the country where I was born and raised, a part of the country that cherishes liberty. But, you know, start-ups are sort of a side project for me, really. My father is a rancher. That’s the family business. I’m just here on my passion projects, looking for financing.”
“Backers, that’s what I’m after all the time,” Madison says. “Always hustling for backers.”
“The sad part of it,” Zimri says, emboldened, “is that an era is kind of fading away. An era when the markets were parched for innovation. Four or five years ago, there was this feeling that if you had an idea and you knew how to talk to it, then you were going to monetize that idea. I imagine the same thing is true in the movie business, that it’s really no different from agriculture. You need the seed money and you need to tend to the crops to make sure they flourish. Most people only respect marketing, because the genius of real ideas is threatening to them. The people who come up with ideas are always the ones with the wild eyes.”
She likes watching his mouth. Nothing is sexier than agricultural metaphors, really. They’re so earthy. But it’s sort of irritating to Madison that she can’t instantly figure out what’s wrong with Zimri Enderby, because there must be something wrong besides the button-down collars and that piece of chana saag on his incisor—should she tell him?—and she wishes she could ask about his strange Mormon sheets and his years as a teenage missionary. Because somewhere in there is the concealed gay affair, or the episode of sexual abuse, or the binges at Indian casinos. The secret is in there somewhere and only God knows what it is. Does he have to wear a different ring for each of the seven underage wives?
“Venture capitalists used to think like poets. They were dreamers, they were renegades. And now it’s starting to look like those doors are going to be closed for a long while. And that’s why I’d like to make a leap into content, you know, because content is forever. The world always needs the artists and dreamers. I appreciate the energy on the content end of the Internet story. You know, out West, back when everyone was a rancher or working the fields, there were the stars to navigate from. Men would be out in the fields with the livestock, looking up at the stars. And that was their entertainment. Stars and a campfire crackling in the desert. There are no stars here in the city, except the poets and dreamers and actors and filmmakers, the content providers, so that’s where I want to concentrate my attention.”
Soon after, they swap cards, and she heads for the office, checking in, on the way, with the women of Vanderbilt Publicity to offer an affidavit that, yes, the hair is wheat colored and, no, there doesn’t seem to be any ring on his ring finger and, yes, he is in possession of her number and, yes, he is too perfect to be true, and has he maybe RSVP’d for anything they’re doing, in the way of parties, you know, the next few nights? She would like to know so she can clear her schedule, but she says all these things because the cynic is a lapsed something or other, everybody knows that. How quickly does the lapsed something or other begin to hope? Hope is in robin’s-egg blue, tucked into the leaves of a book, like a Victorian flower. Hope is a perfumed envelope, and she can feel a little bit of a spring in her step. She hates it. She hates the hoper in herself. She notices that she accidentally flipped her hair when saying good-bye to him, and all those girls who flip their hair, blondes, always flipping their hair, what is it with them, is it a neurological thing? It should be in the catalogue of neurological disorders next to Tourette’s, and so it’s best to disconnect the cell phone and go back to the office and submit to Vanessa, who wants to know all about the Mormon guy, is he a Jack Mormon, which apparently means a Mormon who’s not a Mormon, and she asks, of course, “Were you attracted to him? Tell me you didn’t agree to go out on a date or anything, because you just can’t fuck up the business relationships with these guys by going out on dates with them, okay? And what projects did you talk to him about?”
Madison, in front of a bowl of Swedish fish, admits to Otis Redding. She admits to Stradivarius.
“You didn’t tell him about The Diviners?”
“What’s The Diviners?”
“The miniseries.”
“What miniseries? Since when is it a miniseries?”
“Since this morning, which you would know if you bothered to come into the office in the morning. Now I want you to get the writer on the phone and tell him to put something about water rights in western states into the treatment. And maybe Native American turquoise. Western guys love turquoise.”
“Who’s the writer?”
“It’s based on a novel by Marjorie Howell Finkelstein; I think she’s a big features writer for women’s magazines. I think she wrote the treatment herself, but we have to get a different writer on the project. There’s no way we can work with her. I called Vic Freese this morning, he claims to be repping it, but I told him we had already optioned the story and that we were going to bring all of our resources to bear on the project. We were going to make it our project.”
Vanessa gets up, absently rubbing her neck as though it’s a magic lantern that will yield ever greater reservoirs of falsehood.
“Did you actually option it?”
“We have to find Marjorie Howell Finkelstein and we have to option it before you go home tonight. Find out who her agent is, track her down. Get on it. Get western water rights into the treatment, and turquoise, and Indians, and have a copy of it on the Mormon guy’s desk tomorrow, with a budget sketched out. And here, have a Swedish fish.”
Then Vanessa does a thing she never does. She gets ready to leave early. She says she is going out for drinks, even though it’s only three in the afternoon. The dingy black raincoat flies around Vanessa as though she’s a vampire, and she’s out the door. Madison remains behind, leaning against the flimsy divider of Annabel’s cubicle.
“Any idea where the hell I’m supposed to find Marjorie Howell Finkelstein?”
“I think it’s Melanie Horace Fahnstock,” Annabel says. “That’s the writer’s name.”
“Any idea how to contact her?”
“I might be able to find out.”
“Never mind. I’ll do it.”
Thaddeus comes out of his lair with a crumpled-up piece of paper and, in front of the assembled (Jeanine off in the distance, looking like an orthopedist’s brochure on bad posture), he attempts to do some kind of double-pump layup thing into the trash barrel.
“Do you know anything about this Finkelstein woman?” Madison asks, though she tries to avoid talking to him. “The one who wrote this Diviners thing. Are we really supposed to be taking it seriously?”
“You’re definitely supposed to be taking it seriously, and I think the writer’s name is Fedderman, actually. Melanie Fedderman. There’s some middle name, too, because, you know, genre writers, they always have a middle name or two in there. The story has enormous promise, by the way.”
“Nobody gives a shit about any miniseries now. We should do a show where attractive girls, like, show their cervixes to advertisers. That would make a splash.”
Annabel says, “I’ll write up a proposal.”
Thaddeus says, “My agent knows her agent. Want me to make the call?”
“I’m supposed to make some kind of offer.”
Mrs. DiNunzio rustles past, carrying a couple of files. The office poltergeist.