Vic Freese is at reception when the old guy comes in. Typical messenger. Why are the old messengers so challenged when it comes to shaving? Looks as though this one tried to shave with a rasp. Reddish scrapes where some follicles have been ripped out, and then some big neglected areas, mostly on his neck, where there is two or three days’ growth. In the nostrils, too, like stalactites protruding, like there’s wheat growing out of his brain. The guy is wearing double-knit slacks and he has belted these way up around the navel, the better to display the bold tartan of his socks. The old guy stinks. No amount of aftershave will conceal it, though he has liberally applied his aftershave nonetheless.
Vic admires and pities these messengers in equal amounts because he was once a mail room kid, like the majority of agents here at the Michael Cohen Agency. Good to stay busy. Good to know the city well enough, in advancing years, to be a messenger. Good to have people to talk to, places to go. But the old guy, because Vic is standing near to the console at reception, makes a beeline for him, and Vic’s pity ends immediately when the old guy draws close, because Sandra Konig is sitting right there at the desk, and the phone console hasn’t even started lighting up yet. It’s early. Vic points at Sandra, says nothing, and the old guy, and with him his noxious stink, moves laterally.
“Not the first time, you know,” the old guy says. “There was the one other election when the popular vote didn’t have a thing to do with it.”
Vic indicates, with the merest gestural signification, that he has no aptitude for politics. The Michael Cohen Agency is about entertainment. Everybody loves entertainment. Besides, Vic, with arms crossed, and wearing the conservative but stylish suit from a conservative but stylish British designer, is waiting for his new client. Due at ten, and now fifteen minutes late, the new client is his everything, the new client is the air he breathes, the food he eats, the water that slakes his thirst. Vic has his assistant poised at the phone to page him as soon as the call comes from the lobby downstairs, as soon as the limousine has pulled up. Vic has festooned his office with swags and balloons in order to welcome the new client to the Michael Cohen team. The new client was not ensnared by Vic, it is true, he did not sign the new client, and yet the new client has become his responsibility through the largesse of the music department in the Los Angeles office. This means scraps in terms of points because the signing percentage is the only percentage that matters at the end of the Michael Cohen year when the bonuses are handed out, and Vic did not sign the new client. The guy in the music department who did will take his piece of Vic’s action, and Vic will get the booking percentage instead of the signing percentage, which amounts to a percentage of a percentage. Still, just last week he was out there in Century City to shake hands with the manager of the new client. He still has the jet lag to prove that he will do what it takes.
And here is the bio. The new client records for that label in Belgium that packages singers with one name. The new client therefore has a single name, but Vic has a blockage about pronouncing the single name, since he knows, through due diligence, that the new client is actually called Tammy Gleick and that she was raised in Springfield, Illinois, until, in her teens, she moved to LA in pursuit of her big break. Her mother is the owner of a chain of hairdressing salons. The new client with one name has wanted to be a big star since she was a little girl. The new client is now twenty-two, and the new client drinks a lot, and the new client may also have a bit of a cocaine problem. This is well-known. Even Vic’s kids know this much about the new client.
Vic needs the new client. Thus, the streamers in his office. Thus, a brand-new leather handbag from Hermès. A gift item. The reason Vic Freese needs the new client is that Vic Freese is not really very good at his job and never has been. Vic Freese is the agent least likely to succeed. He doesn’t know why. He never tried to get other junior agents to quit when he was at the Mercury Agency, so that he could have their spots on the talent desk. He never had sex with the secretaries or the heads of departments. He never bought drugs for a client. Vic Freese has a wife and kids at home in Larchmont, and he doesn’t go out. Vic eats hamburgers and watches televised golf. These days, Vic tries to get home on the New Haven line as quickly as he can after whatever dinner or drink he’s supposed to have each day. He tries to see his son and daughter before they go to bed and he tries to read to them from rhyming books.
Senior agents in California have made clear that Vic Freese is operating on borrowed time. Vic has had his review with Mitch Adelstein, the head of television, who is a yeller, and Vic has been found wanting in every conceivable way, and now he has a brief few months left before he will have to move on to what would be his third agency in six years. He is the agent that other agents take great pride in leaving in the dust. Now the music department has thrown this booby-trapped new client in his lap, this handful who is unlikely to excel in television. She is five foot four inches of terror. Terror with a pierced navel. Terror in bottomless chaps. No one else wanted the new client and her delinquent past, and this was before she started snorting blow off the bars downtown. Luckily, the new client has a manager and a publicist and an agent in the music department in LA. Luckily, the new client has the label in Belgium to deal with her accidental overdoses and her diva scenes on airplanes. It is these other members of the team who must comment for the record on the inconstancy of the new client in the matter of her boyfriends.
The new client has shown no aptitude for acting whatsoever. She has never taken a lesson. When the new client did a cola endorsement two years ago, they required thirty-six takes to get her to say her one line. Then they hired a voice-over actress. It is not clear whether the new client can, in truth, read. A prominent celebrity magazine has already given coverage to her “Struggle with Learning Disabilities.” And, according to the celebrity magazine, her recent single “Please Don’t Send Me That Letter,” in which she asks a boyfriend not to send her a breakup note, is widely understood to be a compassionate plea on behalf of dyslexics everywhere. Her scripts are always sent to her handlers, and, in all likelihood, they read and respond to the scripts for her.
The new client is why Vic cannot get into a long conversation with the old guy about the election. The new client was meant to be here twenty minutes ago, with entourage. And yet the old guy is still holding the manila envelope and looking at Vic with his hail-fellow optimism. If he has to be removed by security, he will be.
“Baseball follower?”
Vic says nothing.
“Let me tell you, when I was a younger man, I used to go down to the spring training games. I can’t stand the part of the year when there’s no baseball. Winter is just a bunch of weeks where I could slip and break something. That’s a real danger. So why don’t I go down to Florida then?”
“I’m sure that Sandra would be happy to —”
Sandra has the headset on and seems to be making bulk dental appointments for preventive scaling.
“You followed the series. Am I right?”
Vic tries to move away a few steps, toward the opaque glass doors through which any visitor must pass upon emerging from the shiny maw of the elevator. Vic mumbles some inoffensive words about golf.
“I like the team in Queens because I believe in an underdog.”
Vic Freese, of diminutive size and aspect like all the agents of Michael Cohen, not one of whom is over five foot nine, was not a presence on any athletic team in the entirety of his youth but does admit to certain agonizing years in the system known as Little League.
“Wasn’t very good,” he remarks.
This only buoys the messenger to say, “Let me see your swing. Just let an old fellow tell you a little bit about your swing.”
“Give your script to the receptionist,” Vic says.
People are excited to be in a major talent agency with a hundred-year tradition of serving the stars. W. C. Fields and Don Ameche and William Shatner have walked through these doors. At any moment talent might enter. A pint-size diva with a nosebleed and a stuffed bear the size of a sumo wrestler. She will demand to be given a chocolate milk and a contract for a sitcom, for which she expects a half million dollars per episode.
“I’m just delivering. Not to say a guy like me doesn’t have stories to tell. Don’t we all. We all have stories. Spicer is the name. Would you like to hear about how I met my wife?”
“I —”
“My wife died a few years ago of ovarian cancer. She played the harpsichord. Honest. The harpsichord. You get a lot of stories about the harpsichord come through here? No one plays the harpsichord. Do you know what a harpsichord is? A piano but without the loud part. I was a young man in the city, and my parents were from Europe. So was my wife’s family. She came here, she could barely speak English, but she could play the harpsichord. How she settled on it, I’ll never know. Anyhow, one time when I went to one of the big department stores in town, I think it was Gimbels, I heard in the lobby they had a recital on the harpsichord, and this musician was playing the music of J. S. Bach or somebody like that. It was a promotion. Arrow shirts. I sauntered in a leisurely way down to where the musician was playing. It was the beginning of that, oh, what is that piece called, you know, the —”
“Goldberg Variations?”
“Just the one!”
“Look, Mr. Spicer, I’m really waiting for an —”
The elevator sighs, as if weary at having to deposit yet another payload, and the heart of Vic Freese lodges up in his sinuses. And, as the hinges moan on the glass door that gives entrance to the Michael Cohen Agency, the sullen assistant of one of the other agents appears before him eating a muffin. Crumbs on her face like a skin condition. Joelle, the assistant in question, known to keep to herself, nods at Sandra and trudges up the spiral staircase to where the offices of the agents are laid out like a strand of defective chromosomes.
“Ever after, whenever I heard the music of the harpsichord, which was a lovely kind of music, I saw the auburn hair of this musician in my mind’s eye, and I saw her crimson fingernails, polished up beautifully, and I thought this was the most magical thing I’d ever heard, and I thought all harpsichord music was like that, as magical as that, so afterward I went to any harpsichord performance in the tristate area. No matter who was playing, I went. I knew all the music for that instrument because that was the music of love. And I knew one day I would see my wife again, just by following the music. This was during the war. Did I say that? Did I say that I was about to be drafted? I was. You know what that means, that means the destruction of entire cities, like Dresden, which was where some of my cousins came from before they emigrated. I was stationed in Germany, the country that my family had fled. I was there at the end of the war, the mopping-up part. All I could think of over there in Germany was the music of the harpsichord. The music I had heard before I got drafted. I was sentimental about the music, is the truth. When I got back to the city, again I chased around the music of the harpsichord, all around; any time there was a concert, I was there, with this idea that one day I would find my girl. It was months and months, though, and I never did see her, and I just about gave up. I went to work in the garment district.”
Freese hates to admit it to himself, but he does sort of want to know the end of the story, even though he will have to be in the company of Spicer’s smell for at least another two minutes. A prospect made even more alarming because, with each passing second, it is more likely that the new client will walk through the door and she will see him talking to a foul-smelling septuagenarian with argyle socks. And this will be her first impression of the New York office. He turns to remark to Sandra that she had best take the package from Spicer, the messenger, because Mr. Spicer undoubtedly has further deliveries to make, but Sandra is now abandoning her post for her smoke break. He knows, because he has seen her out front, that she is part of the guilty crew on smoke break. And where is her temporary replacement?
“I was going to the ballpark at the same time, which you’d think was not a place where much music got played. Not a lot of classical music at the ballpark, except when an internationally known tenor came to town. But I was at the ballpark, watching the Brooklyn Dodgers. They were my boys. Eddie ‘the Brat’ Stanky, Pee Wee Reese, Cookie Lavagetto, and so on. What a team. They were heroes, even if they didn’t make the play-offs that year. That was the year of Jackie Robinson, if I remember correctly. So one day I was watching my Brooklyn Dodgers, the greatest team ever in the history of New York City. And it happened to be the day of a promotion. They were actually giving out nylon stockings. Nylons were brand-new at the time. The loudspeaker announced the national anthem. And everyone was standing proud. By the way, did I mention that I have eleven grandchildren?”
He asks if Vic is a man with children. Vic is horrified at the possibility of giving away personal information to a guy who may potentially memorize statistical abstracts about baseball. But yes, he admits he has two children. They are little animated characters gamboling in Vic’s mind’s eye. Even in the midst of important meetings there is in Vic Freese the sound of his children demanding again to dance to mopey British pop songs from the eighties. Where is the voice in him that indicates that he must put first the needs of the new client? Why didn’t he cultivate that voice? If there were a scale before him now, the new client would top out at an ounce and a half. And his children would weigh thirty-eight and forty-nine pounds, respectively. If his son were here, he’d still be saying the words campfire song, over and over, as he has been saying for three days now because Vic made a joke about campfire songs he had to sing as a kid, like “Charlie on the MTA,” et cetera, and if his daughter were here, she, too, would be repeating it, campfire song, because she repeats whatever his son says, campfire song, campfire song, until the words become, through transmutation, precious. This idea of the sound of children’s voices, so adorable and so memorable, is an evolutionary triumph.
“Who do you think was playing the national anthem on the harpsichord at the baseball stadium? Can you guess who it was? Like I said, the stadium was promoting attendance by the ladies, so they had a beautiful lady onto Ebbets Field to play the national anthem. She was a tiny little speck down there on the field. She told me later that they had to truck the harpsichord out first thing in the morning and then tune it, parked at home plate. They were using a brand-new public-address system at the park, and the national anthem was never so glorious. Maybe it was beautiful because there’d been the brawl the day before where Stanky started throwing punches at Len Merullo. Or because the war was over. I only know it was wondrous, and it was played by the woman I was going to marry. And I had a hunch that she’d stay for the game. Because it was a great game. There was another brawl, but then Pete Reiser stole home, even though he was injured. He stole home seven times that season. And the boys pulled it out, two to one. I missed most of that, however, because I was waiting out in the parking lot. I was betting that my future wife would be wherever the harpsichord was, and, sure enough, she was standing by the truck in the parking lot. They had the game on the radio.”
Sandra is back, and she distracts Vic from a portion of Spicer’s heartfelt monologue, the monologue that Spicer has probably delivered nine times this morning. Vic’s assistant is on the line. Sandra punches the buttons and holds up the handset. Vic abandons Spicer in the middle of telling him about selling the harpsichord after his wife died, the cost of tuning and upkeep for a harpsichord. Half attending to Spicer, half listening to the emergency. At first he thinks it’s his wife, because when you are a father this is always your worry. One of your kids is banged up. But it’s not his wife, it’s the personal manager of the new client.
It takes him a moment to put it all together. A moment until the personal manager is in the middle of saying, “. . . going to be really unfortunate from a legal angle, not to mention from a, you know, publicity angle. So, anyway, she’s going to go to Europe for a few weeks, to relax, maybe to record some new things, out of the spotlight. In fact, she’s already at the airport. Sorry I didn’t call earlier.”
Vic says, “I can’t believe what I’m hearing.” By which he means that he wasn’t listening to what he was hearing. The handset, still warm, smells like Binaca. The manager keeps saying “Ramon Martinez.”
“Ramon Martinez? Who the hell is Ramon Martinez?”
Spicer, the messenger, is listening to the whole thing, and he chimes in. Soon everyone is saying “Ramon Martinez,” as though it’s the adult-world equivalent of the precious incantation campfire song, and Vic has it pieced together that the new client, now on her way to Paris, used to be the girlfriend of someone called Ramon Martinez, and this Ramon Martinez has done something truly awful, and Spicer is saying, “Diamond District, in the Diamond District,” and so is Sandra, so Vic sees the tabloid headlines assembling in the developing tray of his consciousness, that sensational newspaper photo. He starts to see Ramon Martinez driving his car into the jewelry store on Sixth Avenue, cursing the Jews. A senseless crime for a senseless time perpetrated by a senseless guy. The new client was his girlfriend, the girlfriend of Ramon Martinez. Or, at least, the new client was photographed with him, the new client had him in her private company for a span of seven consecutive nights, canoodling, as the tabloids will have it. Therefore, the new client, it is revealed, was consort to this known perpetrator of a hate crime. Vic Freese should see this as a dark day for the agency, he should see this as an insurmountable difficulty for his stewardship of the fledgling television career of the new client; instead, in a way, all he can feel is relief. Now the streamers in the office are for his own celebration, the celebration of his ability to go home at 5:30 and do the thousand dances with his kids to New Order instead of beseeching producers and casting agents to think Lacey, Lacey, Lacey, Lacey. Lacey with her pierced navel, Lacey with her hip-huggers, Lacey with her thongs, with her constant traveling homunculus, also known as Neil the hairdresser. Lacey, friend of manslaughterers. He cradles the handset in its postderegulation console.
Spicer says, “Now let’s see that swing.”
Vic says, with a new optimism, “There was always some trouble driving off my back leg. I had fallen arches as a teen.”
“That can be an asset, you know. Upper-body strength. Give me a look.”
And Vic Freese, soon-to-be-former television agent, stands in reception with a messenger who smells like he’s bathed in formaldehyde and drives off the right leg. Spicer puts the manila envelope on the coffee table in reception, where Variety and Premiere are stacked in perfect diagonal lines. Some nice photos hanging in this room, too. Fictional film stills by the woman who is in all her own photos. Black-and-whites. Also: tiger lilies in a vase. Right before Vic swings at the second imaginary pitch, an off-speed thing that tails in over the inside corner, he looks down at the envelope and he sees the name on it. Which is not his own name. Nor is it the name of any current employee of the Michael Cohen Agency. Actually, the name on the envelope is the name of a producer of his acquaintance, at a production company called Means of Production.
Spicer has a lot of corrections for Vic. Vic is turning his wrists too soon, he’s letting his shoulder drop out. Spicer argues for lifting the front leg a little higher, planting it firmly. Spicer lets it be known that he could have been a scout if he’d wanted to, plenty of guys he’s met at the minor leagues have told him so. He has the eye. Knows about the importance of offense. And Vic lets him draw a diagram, including right triangles, to which Spicer adds a little analysis about why pulling the ball is a failed strategy. And Spicer actually draws this diagram on the manila envelope that is now officially delivered to the wrong address, and Vic does not stop him.
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.