The Broom of the System

  “You’re probably just tense and worried about your fiancée being in the arms of my husband right now. God knows I’m not exactly thrilled myself.”

  “Not after tomorrow I’m not upset. Tomorrow is the end.”

  “End of what?”

  “Tomorrow Lenore and I are going to melt into the blackness, united in discipline and negation.”

  “Discipline?”

  “.....”

  “Negation?”

  “All so to speak.”

  “You’re just going to go out and buy admission tickets to Andy’s desert and look for Lenore’s grandmother climbing some dune. I know all about what you’re supposed to do tomorrow.”

  “Why on earth does Lenore tell you things like this?”

  “....”

  “Lenore never tells me anything, really.”

  “Rick, I don’t know how long I’ll be around, I mean I’m pretty sure I’ll have to go to Atlanta at some point in time, if you know what I mean, but while I’m here I think you’ll find I can do all kinds of things she can’t. Or won’t.”

  “I think it is always can’t. It now occurs to me that there has probably never been a bona fide won’t.”

  “You know Andy’s had your ex-wife, too, don’t you? I’m almost positive. I’ve seen him coming out of your house.”

  “She is a good person, it occurs to me.”

  “Who?”

  “Do you think of yourself as a good person, Mindy? When you think of yourself, do you think of yourself as good?”

  “Well of course, silly. Where are you if you don’t think of yourself as good?”

  “....”

  “Then you can’t even like yourself, and then where are you?” “....”

  “This is the Christian Broadcasting Network. Stay tuned for the Reverend Hart Lee Sykes, please.”

  “What about my son?”

  “What?”

  “Vance, my son.”

  “I think Andy’s pretty much left Vance alone. I don’t think you have to worry about Vance.”

  “I mean have you seen him. Does he come home, ever. Do you see him around the neighborhood.”

  “Remember when Vance would be out kicking footballs all day long? Honestly, I never could see how anybody could just kick a ball for hours and hours, over and over. And remember Daddy would spend the whole time looking out the window, making sure the ball never hit our lawn, and if it did he’d run out with a screwdriver and let all the air out of the ball?”

  “....”

  “I haven’t seen Vance for years, Rick. I don’t think I’ve seen Vance since I got out of school. Where is he now?”

  “He’s in the city. He’s at Fordham. At least I certainly pay tuition to Fordham. ”

  “I haven’t seen him.”

  “Nor have I.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Certainly not your fault.”

  “....”

  “....”

  “Look, you can take it off, you know.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your beret. You can take it off, you know. I like a spot. Daddy has a simply humongous spot, now.”

  “Great.”

  “Anyway, don’t be sorry, is what I want to say.”

  “Thank you, Mindy.”

  “But roll over.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. I think I can help you out if you’ll roll over.”

  “What?”

  “Trust me.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “This is ... going to hurt me more than it hurts you. Is that what I should say, Rick?”

  “Good Lord. What on earth have you been told?”

  “Daddy used to say I knew ... everything from the ... beginning ... of time. A ... witch in a tartan skirt, is ... what he said.”

  “Jesus.”

  /i/

  “Now this is definitely cuddling,” Lenore said. “Am I right? I think I know cuddling when I see it, and this is it.”

  Lang laughed.

  Lenore and Wang-Dang Lang were on Lang’s bed, on their sides, facing each other, amid shirts and socks in their plastic wrappers. Lenore had on her bra and panties and socks; Lang had on just his chinos and belt. Lenore’s legs were together, and Lang had one of his legs thrown over her hip. Lang was looking at Lenore’s breasts, in her bra. Being on her side was pressing them together, and they were pushing partway over the bra, which Lang obviously liked. He looked at Lenore, and touched her. He rubbed the back of her neck for her. And from time to time he would trace lines on her body with his finger. He would trace a line down the center of her lips, her chin, her throat, and down the line where her breasts pressed together, and over the bottom of the bra, and onto her stomach, where his hand would spread out and cover her, making Lenore need to blink, every time. He would also shift a bit and trace the line where her legs pressed together, from the bottom of her panties to the tops of her knees. He would press his finger deep into the line between her legs, and Lenore knew her legs felt soft and hot to him, from being pressed together. Lang had an erection in his slacks, Lenore could tell.

  As for doing anything much more than they were doing, though, Lenore had said she needed time to think it over carefully, and to think about absolutely everything having to do with Rick, before anything like that could even be possible.

  “I couldn’t have intercourse with you without coming to an understanding with Rick first,” she’d said. “Not the way things are now. I have to talk with him. That’s just the way I feel.”

  Lang had traced a line. “I don’t think I agree that we owe R.V. anything, but I’ll respect your decision for now.”

  “Thank you.”

  Lang laughed. “You’re welcome.” He was very smooth: Lenore ran her hand over his arm and part of his back. It was really smooth. His chest had a fine covering of yellow hairs that were hard to see in the bright line of the overhead fixture. There was more hair on his stomach, in a line.

  “And you shouldn’t say ‘intercourse.’ You should say something else. ‘Intercourse’ sounds like you saw it in a manual.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Well don’t be sorry,” Lang laughed, touching Lenore’s lip with his lip. “I was just making a point is all. Intercourse is what people have when they’re married, and about maybe sixty, and they’ve been married for years, and have kids and all.”

  “What would we be having, then, do you think?”

  “Something very much else, believe you me. You just trust me and you’ll see.”

  Lenore had been tracing a line of her own, from the point on Lang’s forehead where his eyebrows almost met, down his nose and into the furrow of his upper lip. When she got to his lip she stopped and looked at him and took her hand away.

  “Hey,” she said. “What happened to the way you talk all of a sudden? Why aren’t you talking the way you usually do? Why aren’t you saying stuff like, ‘Well strap me to the hind end of a sow and sell me to Oscar Mayer’?”

  Lang laughed at Lenore’s imitation of his voice. He ran his hand over the flank of her hip and smiled. “I guess I don’t know,” he said softly. “I guess I just don’t feel like it about now. I guess maybe we all talk differently with different people. The good old boy stuff is what I grew up on, and then at school I was from Texas and so everybody expected this sort of talking, and so it kind of became my thing, at school. At school you more or less got to have a thing.”

  “So I hear.”

  “Without a thing there, believe me, you’re nothing,” Lang said. His finger was in the hot part of her legs again.

  “What about Biff Diggerence?” Lenore said. “What was his thing? No, let me guess: I’ll bet his thing was burping.” She made a face.

  Lang took his hand out of her legs to scratch along his jaw. “That’s kind of a tender subject, Lenore,” he said. “Old Biff got screwed up at school. School messed him up. He got weird.”

  “What’s he doing now?” r />
  “I do not know. I think he’s back in Pennsylvania or wherever. He got real screwed up, at school.”

  “Screwed up how? Did he maybe get tetanus from making people sign his bottom, or what?”

  “Now that’s not very kind, Lenore,” Lang said. He sat up and bent to get his glass of warm wine by the bed. Lenore looked at his back while he drank. “He just got real screwed up,” he said. “Basically he just started stayin’ in his room all the time. And I mean all the time. Never seein’ anybody, never talkin’ to anybody. Just locked up in his room, with the door locked.”

  “Well that doesn’t sound all that awful,” Lenore said. “Lots of people keep to themselves. Lots of people stay in their rooms a lot. I stayed in my room a lot at school.”

  Lang turned around to her and shook his head. “Yeah,” he said. “But when it gets to the point where you’re like pissin’ in empty beer cans so you don’t have to go out of your room to the bathroom just down the damn hall, then that’s gettin’ to be bad news, in my opinion.”

  “No argument on this end.”

  “He got creepy. He got weird.”

  “Maybe he pounded too many walls with his head.”

  Lang grinned down at Lenore. “Except what you don’t know is he started a real tradition with that. Everybody started doin’ it. He got to be a sort of legend, by our senior year. I don’t think folks even knew he was the one who stayed up in his room all the time. I think they thought he was somebody else.”

  Lenore thought of big Biff Diggerence, all alone in a room. Moving around from time to time. Going to the bathroom in beer cans. She remembered his bottom, and his playing with Sue Shaw’s hair while she cried.

  “He didn’t marry Sue Shaw, did he?”

  “That girl?” Lang said. “Good Lord no. Least I don’t think so. Unless you know something I don’t.”

  Later they had switched. Lang lay where Lenore had been and she moved over into his spot. Lang had shoved his duffel bag under the bed and had put the shirts and socks in a drawer that still had some of Misty Schwartz’s clothes in it. The big television was now on, with the volume low. Out of the comer of her eye, Lenore could see enormous heads on the screen, flashing back and forth, talking about the news. There were shots of gymnastics, but Lenore didn’t really watch.

  Lang told Lenore that he had been unhappy. He told her that he had felt trapped and constricted and claustrophobic for quite a while now. That he had been an accountant lately and hated it with a righteous fire. About his wife’s voice being all around him. Lenore told Lang a little bit more about LaVache, and about Clarice and Alvin Spaniard and their troubles, and family theater.

  Lang told Lenore that what he really wanted to do, he was pretty sure, was to go back to work for Industrial Desert Design, Dallas. He told her about the Great Ohio Desert, and about Neil Obstat, Jr., and Ed Roy Yancey, Jr., and about the Corfu Desert. He told her what had happened was that his father had said that if Andy married a Jewish lady, he wouldn’t let him into the company. His father had been dumb and stubborn, and so had Lang, and so Lang had been an accountant for the past few years.

  “And it wasn’t even like she was really Jewish, even,” Lang said. “She never goes to church. And God knows her Daddy don’t go to any Jewish churches. Her Daddy’s this insane pantheist fucker who worships his lawn.” Lang told Lenore some items of interest concerning Rex Metalman, and his lawn, and Scarsdale, and Rick’s ex-wife, Veronica. Then he kissed her for a long time.

  They probably kissed for about five solid minutes. Lang was an unbelievably gentle kisser. Lenore wouldn’t have believed it. Rick’s kisses had always been really intense. Rick had said they mirrored and were informed by the intensity of his passion and commitment toward her.

  While Lang traced lines everywhere with his finger, Lenore told him about her brother in Chicago, about a strange dream she’d had last night in which she dreamed that her mother dreamed where her brother was, and the dream made him be in that place, someplace with bright lights and people you could just tell were kind.

  Lang said he felt really strongly that everything was going to be all right. He felt John was going to be OK, and he now knew for sure, personally speaking, that he was going to get a divorce from Mindy. Then he told Lenore a story about his own brother, his half-brother, who had been much older than he, his father’s son by his first marriage, and about how this brother had unfortunately been killed in the conflict in Vietnam, in the Marines.

  What had happened was that Lang’s brother had been trained, along with all the other Marines at a certain training fort in Virginia, to throw grenades into enemy buildings and then wait just out by the door while the grenade exploded inside and put everybody out of commission, and then to come in and finish people off. And how, in Vietnam, Lang’s brother had been fresh off the plane, and had tried to pull the grenade maneuver on a hut in a small village, apparently an enemy hut of some kind, but anyway that the walls of the hut had, not surprisingly, been made of grass and straw and dried water-buffalo droppings, and so the grenade’s explosion not surprisingly tore right through the soft wall of the hut, and killed Lang’s brother where he stood, waiting to finish people off. Lang said he had hardly known his brother at all. He said that the Marines had revised the fort’s training after a lot of other Marines educated in Virginia had died this way. This was apparently early in the Vietnam conflict.

  Lenore told Lang about the situation involving Lenore Beadsman, her great-grandmother. It turned out that Lang knew a lot already, from Neil Obstat, Jr.

  “He’s got your picture in his wallet, you know,” Lang said. “Neil does.”

  “I’ve always found him a little on the creepy side,” said Lenore. “He used to follow me around in school, when we went to school together, but never say anything.” At this point Lang kissed the part of Lenore’s throat right under her chin, and Lenore held his head there with her hand. “I didn’t like him because I thought his head looked like a skull, I’m afraid. I know that’s really shallow.” She massaged the back of Lang’s head while he kissed her throat. “And one time some bigger kids hung him from a hook by his underpants in P.E., and I saw him there, and I remember I felt like I was seeing somebody dead, because his head was all skully, and his eyes were closed, and we could see pretty much his whole bottom. ”

  Lang said that in reality Neil Obstat wasn’t a bad guy at all. He said that he and Neil were thinking about taking the day off tomorrow, seeing how it was Saturday, and going off somewhere. He said Lenore was more than welcome to come along, that he’d keep Obstat from being at all creepy. Lenore laughed. Then she told Lang that she was supposed to go out to the Great Ohio Desert with Rick Vigorous tomorrow, that they had made the plans already, and that the plans were pretty unchangeable. Lang was not too pleased.

  “It’s just that about a million people seem to think Lenore’s out there,” Lenore said. “As they keep making incredibly clear.” Here Lang tried gently to lift her knee up with his hand, but stopped when she resisted.

  “Also Rick really wants to go for some reason,” Lenore said. “Today he was completely unsubtle about it. He almost yelled. And my brother, my father, Mr. Bloemker at the nursing home ... everybody looks to be made weirdly happy if I just go out and look for Lenore on a dune for a day.” She had put her hand on Lang’s cheek. “I’m too tired and pissed off to argue with them anymore,” she said. “And I guess now I need the chance to talk things over with Rick.”

  “Please just don’t be too hard on him, Lenore,” Lang said. He ran his thumb all the way along Lenore’s leg, making her blink again.

  Lang said he sensed everything was going to be all right with respect to Lenore’s great-grandmother, too. He said he just felt it. But he said he didn’t think Lenore should go to the G.O.D.

  “Nobody ever finds anybody in a place like that,” he said. “People don’t go to a place like that to look for other people. That’s the opposite of the whole concept that’s behind the t
hing.”

  “I think I ought to grab the opportunity to talk to Rick in private, though, anyway,” Lenore said.

  “Uh-huh,” Lang said.

  Faint music was coming from the television screen now. Heads kept replacing one another on the screen. Lang had a finger just under the elastic band of Lenore’s panties, on her hip. Lang said the curve of Lenore’s particular hip drove him right straight wild. He kissed her throat again.

  Lang said grandmothers made him awfully sad. He said grandmothers were in his opinion basically sad things, especially the really old ones, who had all kinds of sad troubles. He told Lenore he remembered his father’s mother in a nursing home in Texas in the 1960s. He said his grandfather had died and his father and mother had taken the grandmother in, for a time, but that things just hadn’t worked out, even with a sort of nurse hired to come in during the day to look after the grandmother, and that Lang’s father and grandmother had sat down and had a talk and Lang’s father had told her she was going to get moved to a nursing home.

  “She was just real decrepit, I remember,” Lang said. “I remember she didn’t move good at all, and her eyes they got milkier and milkier as time went by. She didn’t kick up at the idea of going to the nursing home. I remember she nodded when my Daddy told her. You could tell she knew things just weren’t working out.

  “And the thing was we’d visit her in that nursing home every Saturday,” Lang said. “We made it like a routine. My Daddy tried real hard to be a good son. And the place wasn’t but over in Fort Worth, so we’d all just pile in the car and go see her. Always my Daddy, goddamn near always me. Sometimes my mother and my brother. We’d pile in, and drive over, and we’d come through this gate of the place and have to go up this long, real windy gravel road to the place. This was a real nice place, too. It was real expensive. I can’t say anything against the care she must of got.”

  Lenore nodded, and Lang touched her lip.

  “So we’d just wind on up that road, and I remember how it always looked all sinister up at the actual home itself, which was at the top of a kind of hill, ‘cause my Daddy always had tinted glass in his cars, so when I’d look up at the place through the windshield I’d see all this shit through tinted glass, and it’d look dark as hell, and like it was going to rain and storm and all. It always looked weird,” Lang said. “And we could always see her, as we were coming up that road, ’cause she was always waiting for us on the porch of the place, every time. Place had a real nice porch, raised up. We’d see her as we drove up, see her from far away, ‘cause she had this bright-white hair you could see for miles, and a wheelchair. But and anyway she’d be out there, and we’d come up and pile out, and up we’d go to visit. She was always real glad to see us. It was good to see her, too, but also of course kind of an obligation, you couldn’t deny the fact. I remember I bitched about it, some Saturdays. Had other shit to do. I was like eight.” Lang took his hand off Lenore’s hip and brushed it softly back and forth over her breasts. “But you know we’d visit and all, and she’d fill us in on what she was doing. Which didn’t take much time, ’cause I remember what she was always doing was just making pot holders, for my mother. She made about one pot holder a month, was all. Her hands always moved like it was real cold.”