The Broom of the System Read online

  Eighteen?

  Yes. I was forty-two, after all. I was divorced, too, by the way.

  I sure didn’t look forty-two.

  How sweet. I was squirming like this in my seat because I remembered a phone call I just had to make, for the firm.

  I am back. I sure made a lot of really quick calls. Who was the Frequent in Frequent and Vigorous, anyway, could she ask.

  This was to an extent unclear. Monroe Frequent, I knew, was a fabulously wealthy clothier and inventor. He had invented the beige leisure suit. He had invented the thing that buzzes when a car is started without the seat belts being fastened. He was now, understandably, a recluse. I had been approached by a representative in wrap-around sunglasses. Interest in publishing. Outside New York and environs. Bold, new. Huge amounts of capital to invest. Full partnership for me. A salary out of all proportion to industry norm. If it’s assumed, as is reasonable, that our Frequent is Monroe Frequent, then it’s becoming clear that Frequent and Vigorous is really just a crude tax dodge.

  Golly.

  Yes. The only real benefit for me was having the opportunity to start my own quarterly. A literary thing. Enthusiastic agreement to .the condition. An air of legitimacy lent to the whole enterprise right off the bat, on Frequent’s view.

  The Frequent Review?

  Yes. Last year’s issues sold well.

  It was a good quarterly.

  How kind.

  There was also the Norslan account, of course.

  Yes, if publishing monosyllabic propaganda praising the virtues of a clearly ineffective and carcinogenic pesticide to be disseminated among the graft-softened bureaucracies of Third World countries could be considered an account, there was the Norslan account. Why on earth did she work as a telephone operator?

  Well, she obviously needed money to buy food. Her best friend, Mandible, who had gone to Oberlin too for a while, worked as an operator. Et cetera.

  Why didn’t she work at Stonecipheco for undoubtedly more money and thus more food?

  Food was not the issue. She felt little enough control over her life as it was. A job at Stonecipheco, or a home with her father and her old governess in Shaker Heights, would only localize and intensify feelings of helplessness, loss of individual efficacy of will. I hear me hearing the voice of Dr. Jay. I see me pounding the drum of my courage with a swizzle stick and trying to press my knee against Lenore’s under the tiny plastic-wood table, and finding that her legs were not there. Me sweeping the area under the table with my leg, her not being there at all. Me being insanely curious about where her legs were.

  I articulated my inability to understand this feeling of lack of control. Surely we all dealt with and reconciled ourselves to a life many of whose features were out of our control. It was part of living in a world full of other people with other interests. I was close to wetting my pants again.

  No, that wasn’t it. Such a general feeling of dislocation would not be a problem. The problem was a localized feeling. An intuition that her own personal perceptions and actions and volitions were not under her control.

  What did “control” mean?

  Who knew.

  Was this a religious thing? A deterministic crisis? I had had a friend ...

  No. Determinism would be fine if she were able to feel that what determined her was something objective, impersonal, that she were just a tiny part of a large mechanism. If she didn’t feel as though she were being used.

  Used.

  Yes. As if what she did and said and perceived and thought were having some sort of ... function beyond herself.

  Function. Alarm bells. Dr. Jay, after all. A plot thing?

  No, not a plot thing, definitely not a plot thing, she wasn’t making herself understood. The points of her hair swung like pendula below her chin as she shook her head. My napkin had unfortunately fallen under the table. How clumsy of me. Her legs were there, but curled back, underneath her chair, ankles crossed. Alarm bells or no, I wanted first to reach for an ankle, then to pee.

  No, she simply felt—at times, mind you, not all the time, but at sharp and distinct intuitive moments—as if she had no real existence, except for what she said and did and perceived and et cetera, and that these were, it seemed at such times, not really under her control. There was nothing pure.

  Hmmm.

  Could we talk about something else? Why for instance did I see Dr. Jay?

  Oh, just some dream-orientation, general rapping. I had a sort of detached interest in the whole analysis scene, really. My problems were without exception very tiny. Hardly worth discussing at that point. I saw Jay in particular because I liked him least of any of the [very many] Cleveland clinicians with whom I’d rapped. I found an atmosphere of antagonism vital to the whole process, somehow. Lenore too? No, Lenore had been referred to Jay by a physician, friend of the family, old old crony of her great-grandmother, a physician to whom Lenore had gone with a persistent nosebleed problem. She’d stayed ever since. She found Jay irritating but fascinating. Did I find him fascinating? Actually, I went simply to ride the chairs; I found the chairs fun things. A release.

  The chairs. She loved the heavy clanking pull as the chain drew her down the track to the Sanctum. She had gone to a fair once with her brother and her governess, and had ridden a rollercoaster that at the start had pulled and clanked like that. Sometimes she really almost expected a drastic rollercoaster plunge when she entered Jay’s inner office. [Give it time.] She had gone to the state fair in Columbus once with her sister Clarice and they had gotten lost in the House of Mirrors and Clarice’s purse had been stolen by a man who had pretended to be a reflection until the very last moment. It had been scary as hell.

  What did her mother do?

  She was hanging out, more or less, in Wisconsin.

  Were her parents divorced?

  Not exactly. Could we go. She had to be at work to give me my paper in the morning, after all. Very late all of a sudden. Had she eaten, would she like something to eat? Ginger ale was surprisingly filling. Her car was in the shop, choke trouble. She had taken the bus to work that day. Well then. She had one of those new cars made by Mattel, also the maker of Hot Wheels. Only slightly larger than same. Really more toy than car. And so on.

  I see us driving down the insanely shaped Inner Belt of I-271 South, toward lower East Corinth. I see Lenore in the car keeping her knees together and swinging both legs over to the side, toward me, so that I touch her knee with the back of my hand as I shift.

  With my stomach I see disaster. I see me dropping Lenore off at her place, us on the porch of a huge gray house that looked black in the soft darkness of the April night, the house Lenore in a small voice said belonged to an oral surgeon who lent out two rooms to her and Mandible and one to a girl who worked for her sister at CabanaTan. Lenore lived with Mandible. I see her thanking me for the ginger ale and the ride. I see me leaning, lunging over the rustle of the white collar of her dress and kissing her before she has finished saying thank you. I see her kicking me, in the knee, where the knee nerve is, with a sneaker that is revealed to be surprisingly heavy and hard. I see me squealing and holding my knee and sitting down heavily on a step of the porch bristling with nails. I see me howling and holding my knee with one hand and my ass with the other and pitching headlong into an empty flowerbed of soft spring earth. I see Lenore kneeling beside me—how sorry, she didn’t know what made her do that, I had surprised her, she had been taken by surprise, oh shit what had she done. I see me with dirt in my nose, I see lights going on in the gray house, in other houses. I am horribly sensitive to pain and almost begin to cry. I see Lenore run through the door of the oral surgeon’s house. I see my car tilting ever closer as I hop madly toward it on one leg. I am convinced that I heard the voice of Candy Mandible high overhead.

  I knew that I loved Lenore Beadsman when she failed to appear for work the next day. Mandible informed me with wide eyes that Lenore had assumed she was fired. I called Lenore’s landlady, the surgeon
’s wife, a two-hundred-pound Bible-thumping bom-again fanatic. I asked her to inform Lenore that she was in fact not fired. I apologized to Lenore. She was incredibly embarrassed. I was embarrassed. Her supervisor, the switchboard supervisor, Walinda Peahen, really did want to fire Lenore, ostensibly for not showing up for work. Walinda dislikes Lenore for her privileged background. I am Walinda’s supervisor. I soothed her. Lenore began to hand me my paper as before.

  Where are you now?

  For there was the magic night later, a magic night, untalka boutable, when my heart was full of heat and my bottom had healed and I left the office in a trance before six, descended, on wire, saw across the dark empty stone lobby Lenore in her cubicle, alone, for the moment Priethtless, reading, the switchboard mute as usual. I slipped across the blackly shadowed floor and melted into the white desk-lamp light of the tiny office, behind Lenore at her console. She looked up at me and smiled and looked back down at her book. She was not reading. Through the giant window high over the cubicle a thin spear of the orange-brown light of a Cleveland sunset, saved and bent for a moment by some kindly chemical cloud around the Erieview blackness, fell like a beacon on the soft patch of cream just below Lenore’s right ear, on her throat. I bent in my trance and pressed my lips gently to the spot. The sudden beeping of the switchboard mechanism was the beating of my heart, transported into Lenore’s purse.

  And Lenore Beadsman slowly took her right hand and slid it back up my own neck, cradling with soft hesitant warmth the right side of my jaw and cheek, her long fingers with their dull bitten nails holding me in position against her throat, comforting, her head now tilted left so I could feel the tiny thunder of an artery against my lips. I lived, truly and completely and for the first time in a very long time, in that moment. Lenore said, “Frequent and Vigorous” into the phone she held with her left hand, looking out into the approaching black. The magic of the night was that the magic has lasted. Come to work.

  /b/

  —Frequent and Vigorous. Frequent and Vigorous.

  —Ms. Beadsman?

  —Yes?

  —David Bloemker.

  —Mr. Bloemker!

  —Ms. Beadsman, you are at ... Frequent and Vigorous Publishing, are you not?

  —Yes, why do—?

  —I’m afraid I just dialed your number and spoke to a young lady who proposed to have me pay her for hurting me.

  —We’re having horrible mix-ups with our phone lines, is all. Have you—?

  —No, unfortunately no. There are in addition, we find, one unfindable resident and one staff member.

  —Pardon?

  —Twenty-six missing, now.

  —Sheesh.

  —Have you been able to contact your father yet, Ms. Beadsman?

  —His line’s been busy. He talks on the phone at the office a lot. I was just about to try again. I’ll have him call you, I promise.

  —Thanks ever so. Again, please allow me to say just how sorry I am.

  —OK, go ahead.

  —Pardon me?

  —Look, I’ve got a call waiting, I can see. I have to go. I’ll be in touch.

  —Thank you.

  —Frequent and Vigorous.

  —What are you ... wearing?

  —Excuse me?

  —Are you ... warmer than average, shall we say?

  —Sir, this is the publishing firm of Frequent and Vigorous. Are you trying to reach Cleveland Dial-a-Darling?

  —Oh. Well, yes. How embarrassing.

  —Not at all. Shall I give you that number, though it may not work?

  —Wait a minute. What are your own thoughts on pudding?

  —Goodbye.

  —Click.

  —What a day....

  —Stonecipheco Baby Food Products.

  —President’s office, please, Lenore Beadsman calling.

  —One moment.

  —... At least it’s not busy.

  —President’s office, Foamwhistle.

  —Sigurd. Lenore.

  —Lenore. What’s goopin‘?

  —May I please speak to my father?

  —Impossible.

  —Emergency.

  —Not here.

  —Shit on a twig.

  —Sorry.

  —Listen, big emergency. He had someone ask me to call him right away. Family emergency.

  —He’s really unreachable right now, Lenore.

  —Where is he?

  —Annual summit with Gerber’s. It’s August, after all.

  —Rats.

  —Trying to mess with the old creamed-fruit demand curve.

  —Sigurd, it could literally be life or death.

  —Phoneless, sweet thing. You know the rules. You know how Gerber is.

  —How long?

  —Not sure. Not more than a couple, three days.

  —Where are they?

  —Not allowed to say.

  —Sigurd.

  —Corfu. Some dark and secluded spot on Corfu. All I know. I’ll be murdered if he knows I told. I’ll end up in a thousand jars of the whipped lamb, while the little Foamwhistles ironically starve.

  —When did he leave?

  —Yesterday, right after tennis with Spaniard, about eleven.

  —How come you’re not with him, secretarying? Who’ll make his Manhattans?

  —Roughing it. Didn’t want me. Just him and Gerber, he said. Man to man. They may arm-wrestle, who knows? Alternately poking each other in the ribs, singing Amherst songs, trying to sink knives in each other’s backs. A market-share struggle is not a pretty sight.

  —Damn it, he told me to call him, and this was like this morning. He’s got to ... hey, you haven’t heard from Dad’s grandmother, have you?

  —Lenore? No, thank God. Is she OK?

  —Yes. Listen, I’m desperate, here. When exactly do you think he’ll be back?

  —There’s an enormous skull on my tentative calendar in the square marked three days from now. That can only mean one thing.

  —Hot spit in a hole.

  —Listen, seriously, if there’s anything I can do ...

  —Sweet Sigurd. My thing’s lighting. I have another call. I have to go.

  —Stay in touch.

  —Bye ... wait!

  —What?

  —What about Rummage? Did he take Rummage?

  —Hey now, I don’t know. That’s definitely a thought. Try over at Rummage and Naw. You have the number?

  —Are you kidding? Numbers I’ve got.

  —So long.

  —Frequent and Vigorous.

  /c/

  Which is of course not and never to say that things have been unceasingly rosy. My inability to be truly inside of and surrounded by Lenore Beadsman arouses in me the purely natural reactive desire to have her inside of and contained by me. I am possessive. I want to own her, sometimes. And this of course does not sit well with a girl thoroughly frightened of the possibility that she does not own herself.

  I am madly jealous. Lenore has a quality that attracts men. It is not a normal quality, or a quality that can be articulated. “... ,” he said, about to try to articulate it. “Vulnerability” is of course a bad word. “Playfulness” will not do. These both denote, and so fail. Lenore has the quality of a sort of game about her. There. Since that makes very little sense it may be right. Lenore soundlessly invites one to play a game consisting of involved attempts to find out the game’s own rules. How about that. The rules of the game are Lenore, and to play is to be played. Find out the rules of my game, she laughs, with or at. Over the board fall shadows like the teeth of fences: the Erieview Tower, Lenore’s father, Dr. Jay, Lenore’s great-grandmother.

  Lenore sometimes sings in the shower, loudly and well, Lord knows she gets enough practice, and I will hunch on the toilet or lean against the sink and read submissions and smoke clove cigarettes, a habit I appropriated from Lenore herself.

  Lenore’s relationship with her great-grandmother is not a wholesome thing. I’ve met the woman once
or twice, mercifully short appointments in a room so hot it was literally hard to breathe. She is a small, birdish, sharp-featured thing, desperately old. She is not spry. One is not even vaguely tempted ever to say “Bless her heart.” She is a hard woman, a cold woman, a querulous and thoroughly selfish woman, one with vast intellectual pretensions and, I suppose, probably commensurate gifts. She indoctrinates Lenore. She and Lenore “talk for hours.” Rather Lenore listens. There is something sour and unsavory about it. Lenore Beadsman will not tell me anything important about her relationship with Lenore Beadsman. She says nothing to Dr. Jay either, unless the little bastard is holding back one last card on me.

  It’s clear, though, that this is a great-grandmother with Views. I believe she is harming Lenore, and I believe she knows that she is, and I believe she does not really care. She has, from what little I can gather, convinced Lenore that she is in possession of some words of tremendous power. No, really. Not things, or concepts. Words. The woman is apparently obsessed with words. I neither am nor wish to be entirely clear on the matter, but apparently she was some sort of phenomenon in college and won a place in graduate study at Cambridge, no small feat for a woman, in the twenties; but in any event, there she studied classics and philosophy and who knows what else under a mad crackpot genius named Wittgenstein, who believed that everything was words. Really. If your car would not start, it was apparently to be understood as a language problem. If you were unable to love, you were lost in language. Being constipated equalled being clogged with linguistic sediment. To me the whole thing smacks strongly of bullshit, but old Lenore Beadsman quite definitely bought it, and has had seventy years to simmer and distill the brew she pours in Lenore’s heat-softened porches every week. She teases Lenore with a certain strange book, the way an exceptionally cruel child might tease an animal with a bit of food, intimating that the book has some special significance for Lenore, but refusing to tell her what it is, “yet,” or to show her the book, “yet.” Words and a book and a belief that the world is words and Lenore’s conviction that her own intimate personal world is only of, neither by nor for, her. Something is not right. She is in pain. I would like the old lady to die in her sleep.