Something really strange is happening in the office, Madison McDowell, the diarist, scribbles, in a hand marked by excessive balloons, balloons intent on lofting the i’s of her composition above the other letters. She’s in bed, just before sleep, surrounded in a bunker of throw pillows and stuffed animals. Like for example what was that outfit that Annabel was wearing, she came into the office and she was wearing this suit, you’d probably get it at Ann Taylor, gray with pinstripes, some kind of cheap silk shirt, not even a good one, pumps with ankle straps, and get this—white nylons, and that’s a weird look on a black girl. So I ask around a little and Jeanine tells me that Annabel has to go see a lawyer. Something to do with her brother again. I have definitely been avoiding her since I heard about the whole thing, because I wouldn’t say I knew Samantha Lee well or anything like that, but I saw her, you know, at parties. There’s all kinds of girls from the art world that you see them around, but you don’t want to seem like you don’t care about somebody who got hurt. Maybe she’s going to have really horrible scars. Of course, Annabel says her brother didn’t do it, and that’s what they all say. The truth is I never trusted her that much to begin with. I can work with anyone pretty much, that’s one of the qualities that anyone would have to talk about if they were writing a reference letter for me or something, or if I were doing an interview, I can work with anyone.
Which reminds me, we’re trying to hire an intern again, and since Annabel had to go wear her Ann Taylor outfit out to see a lawyer, that only left me and Jeanine to do the interviewing for the interns, and they were all these boys who have to know everything, like one guy comes in and wants to talk about how horror movies from the fifties were like revolutionary texts or something, and Czech psychoanalysts, and The Crawling Eye and It Came from Within, this is supposed to impress me, but it doesn’t impress me at all. Thing is, the interns always want to direct, but they’d be a lot more interesting if they wanted to produce or they wanted to be marketing experts. Besides, all they’re going to do is messenger videotapes and file things, whatever, write coverage on scripts that somebody’s aunt sent to the office. I don’t give a shit if The Crawling Eye is meant to be an allegory, I just really don’t care.
Vanessa’s mom is rehabbing out in some hospital in Brooklyn, so Vanessa’s been even weirder than usual. Honestly, I don’t know where she thinks the company is going and if she even has it together enough to keep the company going. Of course, my mom is in the living room, drinking dessert wine and watching reports about politicians arguing in Florida, and that’s pretty good when you compare it to your mom being in some rehab in Brooklyn with skanky crackheads.
Anyway, in the afternoon, the Vanderbilt girls called, because they had finally gotten out of bed, and they said there’s going to be a righteous party on for when Mercurio launches his clothing line, which is going to be called PussyWhipped, already he has this logo that’s going to be on everything, it’s going to be the best logo ever, that’s what they were saying, and they tried to explain to me what the logo looked like, but come on. That’s just stupid. You can’t describe a logo over the phone. Logos are meant to be seen, not digitized. And making the logo before you make the clothes is like making the movie poster before you make the movie, but I guess a lot of movies do get made that way. In fact, I have been making little sketches of the bus poster for The Diviners, because I figure this will really help us. Okay, my idea is that the beginning of the show, the first episode, has to start with this big army sweeping down over some big plain. I mean, Mongolia, right, somewhere around there, it’s some country no one ever heard of, like what are the names of those countries over there? Like Uzbekistan or something. So the army is sweeping low down over some plain in Uzbekistan, I bet if there’s not a desert plain there, no one will know any better, and anyway they’re supposed to be Huns, so the Huns are sweeping down across the plain, pillaging and raping innocent girls, whatever it is that these armies do and the camera is sweeping above the army, like from a helicopter, above these men, just a ton of men, a whole bunch of men, and they’re all sweaty and wearing jerkins, right? I don’t care if the Huns didn’t wear jerkins, it doesn’t have to be historically accurate, it has to be sexy, and lots of the guys have bloody slices or cuts on their biceps and maybe on their faces, with just a little bit of blood, and that’s what’s going on down there with a lot of hacking and stuff and people are getting sliced. There are men on horses, but if you look up the hill toward the top, you see one general, I mean, did they have generals? Whoever their leaders are, one is riding down behind the marauders and one other man is turning the other way, and he’s got this bright light on him, and he’s raising this stick high above his head, could be a crutch from some old war injury, at first you’re not sure, but then you are, it’s not a crutch, it’s a diviner’s rod, and he’s raising it above, because it indicates that there’s another way to do things, and this guy, this really sexy guy with the divining rod, he’s raising it above everything, and he’s indicating that the diviner’s rod is the way of peace, or whatever you want to call it. And that’s my idea for the poster. It would look really good on buses. You know, buses have that big advertising space there. The Diviners: A New Mini-Series brought to you by UBC. Then some kind of marketing line: Love, famine, war, thirst, half-naked men, ethnic cleansing, the creation of Las Vegas. Produced by Means of Production, in association with UBC. Something like that.
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.
I go out to the good sandwich place across the street that has the pesto, and I get a grapefruit and a Diet Coke, but not pesto, and when I get back Annabel has Allison Maiser in the conference room, and I can see them in there, and Annabel is pacing back and forth, and the girl looks like she might still be asleep. By the time I’ve eaten half of the grapefruit and thrown out the rest, it’s my turn with Allison. Annabel sighs and holds the door open.
Okay, I say going in the door, so here we are, and you’ve met Annabel, who will be your boss, and you’ve met Jeanine, who will also be giving you some things to do when we need them done. What else do you want to know about what we do?
Allison is just digging out some hangnail. She says, I don’t think any of your movies are so great. I say I don’t think they’re all great, either, but my job is to make it possible for Vanessa to produce the kinds of movies she wants to produce, and then when I have learned everything there is to learn about that I’ll make my own movies, and hopefully all of mine will be great. She says, you guys need a lot of help with story editing. I say, actually what we need is an intern who can do the intern stuff and who wants to learn. You’ll be going to the houses of international stars, like, say, Marcia Firestone, we worked with her on our last project, and you could go over there to her apartment, and help her get ready for the shoot. Our last intern got to go over to her place, make her coffee, make sure she got to the shoot on time. She’s just not choosing her roles very well anymore, Allison says. Well, listen, I say, why don’t you tell me what you think you could contribute. She launches into this amazing speech, well, I’ll tell you what kind of woman I am, and of course I can tell that she’d have a “y” in “womyn” somewhere, because it’s just that kind of thing, she says: I’m the kind of woman that can’t read for a very long time, because I have a really short attention span, so I don’t want to sit around reading things, and I get really nervous when there’s a lot of pressure, I just can’t stand it when people yell at me, so I don’t want to be yelled at, and I don’t care who’s doing the yelling because if anyone yells at me I’m just going to walk out the door. I have a really upset stomach, they think I might have Crohn’s disease or something, and I need to know that I’ll have access to a bathroom, and that no one is going to say anything about the fact that I have to use the bathroom frequently. And I only want to work on the experimental projects, I don’t care what other stuff you’re working on, I don’t want to have anything to do with any Hollywood movies, and I don’t want to talk to anyone at the big studios, because they’re all stupid. What I bring to you is my future, and my future is going to be big, and you guys can be a part of that, or you can not, but I know that anyone who has me working for them is going to employ one of the most promising talents of her generation, that’s what I think, and I don’t want to have to come in until eleven, and I get as many personal days as I want.
Okay, I say to her, the job is yours. Welcome to Means of Production.
Tonight I had another date with Zimri Enderby, Madison writes, wearing silk pajamas, for the hour is late, but before I get to that, I should just say that today Vanessa didn’t show up at the office, and I can’t remember the last time that happened. I guess it’s something to do with her mom. Also, there was a note from her on my desk, I guess from yesterday, at the end of the day. The note was about Lois DiNunzio, and it said that she was pretty sure Lois hadn’t been murdered, because she’d been going through the books, and it’s clear that there’s a lot of money missing over the last few months, and she thinks that Lois probably took some of the money with her, and she thinks it might be something like fifty thousand dollars missing. Maybe even more. Who knows what we’ll find once we start poking around in accounts payable and all the expense accounting? And since tomorrow is Friday and that means payday, we have to make sure there’s money to pay everyone. She asks if I can keep it to myself, maybe we’ll talk to Thaddeus if we have to.
It’s pretty scary, because what are we going to do when the rent comes due? We need to get something going, like the Otis Redding project, or the mini-series, or else we’re going to have to lay some people off. At least we don’t have Lois’s salary to worry about, this pay period, but we also don’t have anyone looking after the books. Probably we’d lay off Jeanine first, but Jeanine’s smart enough that she could do the books for a while. Until we get some project going somewhere. It was like a dungeon in the office, and we’re all waiting to hear if someone will call about UBC. I even called up the Vanderbilts and told them that we had to spread some evil rumors about Vic Freese and the Michael Cohen Agency, or else they’re liable to get their especially dumb version of The Diviners sold, and we’ll all be getting day jobs in retail. I could always audition for the holiday show at Radio City, they always need subs in the violin section.
Which reminds me, Vanessa called in later saying that her mother might have left the hospital, at least one nurse told her that her mother left the hospital, but her mother isn’t answering the phone at the house. I know I should try to help out, but what do you do with Vanessa? You sure don’t try to hug her or anything, because she’s just not the type of girl that you’d go hugging. I’m not sure I could hug her, for one, and another thing, she just hates me. It wouldn’t really do any good.
Anyway, it all gave me the idea to call Zimri Enderby for dinner. I could tell that the Vanderbilts were still hot for him, because I kept seeing his picture in the paper at philanthropic things. Like there was a picture of him with Mrs. Astor at the library, or somewhere else his name was in boldface. It said he was a venture capitalist specializing in Internet-related ventures, and it said that he had also been an early investor in a business called Interstate Mortuary Services, which sounds pretty creepy, but I guess dead people have to go somewhere.
Zimri met me at this sweet new restaurant in Tribeca called Slab. The chef was trained in Lyons, and it’s like his third restaurant, and I had to work extra hard to get the table, like I basically had to promise that we would shoot something at the restaurant or have an entire movie catered by Slab, but I don’t know if we’ll do that because some people are vegetarians, you know, and Slab is not for them, at Slab you get to choose your own cut of meat, and you get to say how you want it done and with what kinds of sauces and so forth. Zimri thought it was the greatest because he comes from Utah, and apparently there is a lot of meat out there. I was looking around to see if there was anyone I knew at Slab, I’m pretty sure that I saw whatshername, that actress from movies of the seventies and eighties, Pia Zadora.
I was explaining it all to Zimri, about Harold Robbins, how when you read Harold Robbins it was all about zipping through the narrative sections to try to get to the dirty parts. Never enough dirty parts, as far as I was concerned, and I learned a lot about things from these Harold Robbins books. He always had bad euphemisms for body parts. Zimri says he wasn’t allowed to read any books like that when he was a boy, because of how strict his parents were. Mostly he read westerns, where there were wholesome descriptions of the range life and battles with the Indians, but even that was sort of borderline material. I keep thinking that people basically all believe the same things, but maybe I just have no idea. Also, Zimri tells me that I look really pretty, and that he’s lucky to be out with such a beautiful woman, but I still feel like I’m fifteen, because I’m living at home, and I wonder when that waiting-room feeling of being adolescent is over. But I tell him that I’m touched by what he says.
Next, I ask Zimri why if he’s such a good-looking man, and if people from where he comes from get married young and start families, why isn’t he married, and what’s he doing in New York, which is about the last place most people from Utah would want to be. Zimri gets a serious look and says that in order to explain all this he has to explain more about the idea of mission, which is this idea that when you are of a certain age you have to go out into the world, and you have to try to evangelize for the church. (I already know this stuff but I let him tell me anyway.) Some people go far away. They go to Zimbabwe, or they go to Congo, or they go to Malaysia, or something, and they know that their faith is with them, except that sometimes the faith isn’t with them. This is what I’m pretty sure Zimri was trying to say. It’s the first time some people are away from home, and they’ve never had a drink, they’ve never even had caffeine, and they’re out there in the world, in Zimbabwe or something. It’s a big world, Zimri says, and he says it in this gentle way, like he wishes he could protect even me from it.
The thing is, Zimri came to New York on his mission, and he worked for a while in the branch of a genealogical library that they have here, up near Lincoln Center, and he filed stuff, and that’s how he paid his rent, filing pieces of microfiche, although his parents also gave him money, and he went out into the streets sometimes, and he tried to talk to people who were living in the streets, and most of the time no one would have anything to do with him, he says, and he didn’t think he made more than one or two converts in the time he was in New York, and he never got into much trouble either, although, and here he says he’s being really honest with me, he says, he saw beautiful women every day, everywhere he went, he saw women of such beauty. And he went to the opera, and he went to hear jazz, and he learned that black music was this beautiful thing, and everywhere in New York City there was this beauty and this despair and the two things were right next to each other.
The reservation had to be for late, so Slab was clearing out a little bit, and we’d been there a while, and Zimri had been telling me about trying to convert some guys down near the Bowery, because there were still a lot of homeless guys down there, they were like historical characters, the men who still remembered the old Bowery, and one of these guys gave him the flask and said, taste this, and as if he were punctuating the story, Zimri picked up my glass of wine, because he didn’t have one, and he held it up and got a good long smell of its smell, and his eyes sort of went crossed for a moment, and he said, that’s got a real kick to it. And that’s when I thought, well, I really like this man.
It’d be a lie if I said that I didn’t think about how Zimri was good for me and good for Means of Production, maybe even good for The Diviners, and I don’t want to start lying in my journal, so I’m not going to say I didn’t think about those things. That’s why I went out with him in the first place. But suddenly I didn’t feel like that was why I was here, suddenly I thought that I liked this man, and that maybe I was wanting to kiss him and maybe I was wanting to do some other things that I don’t exactly feel like writing down yet.
Everybody looks good in candlelight, and Zimri looked handsome in candlelight. You wouldn’t think a place called Slab would have such a nice interior, all maroon and navy blue and everything. It’s just for cigar-chomping bond traders and their cronies. But Zimri looked handsome. Maybe it was because I wasn’t supposed to kiss him that he looked so sexy. Maybe it was that I didn’t know what would happen next. Maybe it was that you weren’t supposed to think certain things about a man who believed in God, and that’s definitely the case with some of the things that I was thinking about. The Vanderbilts were always asking why I didn’t date anyone. Who was I supposed to date? Some musician with his underwear showing and he probably had some kind of disease? After I was with Thaddeus, I said to myself that I didn’t want to go through that again, especially not with some idiot actor guy with not a single brain cell in his head and no heart where his heart should have been, and so I just made my job something I loved, and it still is the thing I love, that’s the truth. But I also loved this moment when I finally asked a man if I could kiss him, just like that, and it was like a big emancipation to say that I wanted to kiss him.
He said yes.
Well, his hotel room was as big as my parents’ apartment, which is big for a hotel room, and it was at the top of the hotel, and his hotel was downtown, it was the Soho Grand, and he walked me past the bar, with his arm entwined around my arm. At night that bar is all willowy girls wearing not enough clothes, and they were all dancing by the bar, they didn’t even buy those outfits, they were paid in those outfits, and Zimri was saying to me, we’re just going to kiss, that’s all we’re going to do, and suddenly I thought he was the boy on the mission again, the boy on the mission who had the wine glass of New York City held up to his nose. And soon we were through the lobby, and soon we were in the elevator, and soon we were in his hotel room, and soon we were on his bed, and not a single item of clothing was coming off, and I don’t even know if I want to write about the stuff that happened after this part, because maybe some things are meant to be in your memory only, not even in your journal, because I don’t want my older self looking back at these lines and saying I shouldn’t have done what I did with that poor man who didn’t know what he was getting into, because I heard a man calling out my name, and I loved hearing my name, I loved it, and I’m not going to say I didn’t love it, and when we were done he had his face in his hands, and he said he was grateful and he held me like he was grateful and like he wanted to be grateful again soon.
He said he intended to work with us too.