The Broom of the System Read online

  Her daughter is in the same Home, over twenty years younger, a beautiful old woman, I’ve seen her, clear brown eyes and soft cheeks the color of a gently blooming rose and hair like liquid silver. An absolute idiot with Alzheimer‘s, unaware of who or where she is, a drooler out of moist, beautiful, perfectly preserved lips. Lenore hates her; both Lenores hate her. I do not know why this is so.

  Lenore’s great-grandmother’s hair is white as cotton and hangs in bangs and curls down on either side of her head nearly to meet in points below her chin, like the mandibles of an insect.

  Often we’ll lie together and Lenore will ask me to tell her a story. “A story, please,” she’ll say. I will tell her what people tell to me, what people ask me to like and allow others to like, what they send me in their brown manilas and scrawled stamped return envelopes and cover-letters signed “Aspiringly Yours,” at the Frequent Review. Telling stories that are not my own is at this point what I do, after all. With Lenore I am completely and entirely myself.

  But I get sad. I miss my son. I do not miss Veronica. Veronica was beautiful. Lenore is pretty, and she has a quality we’ve decided is game-related. Veronica was beautiful. But a beauty like a frozen dawn, dazzling and achingly remote. She was cool and firm and smooth to the touch, decorated with soft, chilly blond hair wherever appropriate, graceful but not delicate, pleasant but not kind. Veronica was a seamless and flawless joy to behold and hold ... exactly up to the point where one’s interests conflicted with hers. Between Veronica and all others there lay the echoing chasm of Interest, a chasm impossible to bridge because it turned out to have only one side. The Veronica side. Which is, I have come to see, simply another way of saying that Veronica was incapable of love. At least of loving me.

  Physically the marriage went from being a horror to being nothing at all. I cannot think, much less tell, of our wedding night, when all manner of shams were exposed. Finally Veronica came to accept and even appreciate the situation; it saved her effort and the tangy embarrassment of being embarrassed for me. To my knowledge she did not go elsewhere. Her existence, like her beauty and real worth, was intrinsically aesthetic, not physical or emotional. Veronica would be most comfortable, I remain convinced, as a human exhibit, motionless in the cool bright comer of a public hall, surrounded by a square of red velvet no-touch ropes, hearing only whispered voices and heels on tile. Veronica is now living on my support checks and preparing, I am told, to marry a quite old and thoroughly likeable man who owns a New York company involved in the manufacture of power-plant instrumentation. Go with God.

  I miss my son, though. Which is not to say that I miss an eighteen-year-old Fordham aesthete whose long nails glitter with transparent polish and who wears pants without pockets. I miss my son. My child. He was a magical child, I’m thoroughly convinced. Special, special qualities. A special and hilarious infant. Veronica drew the first of many lines at changing diapers, so I would usually change our baby. I would change his diapers, and often as not, as he lay on his back, with little legs of dough kicking, as I removed soggy old hot or ominously heavy diaper and manipulated crinkly new plastic Pamper, he would urinate up onto my hanging necktie, a pale, sweetly thin jet, and there would be smells of powder, and my tie would be heavy at my throat, and would drip, and we would laugh together, toothless he and sad, sleepy I, at my urine-soaked tie. I still own some of these ties, stiff and hard and dull; they hang on little toothed racks and clunk against my closet door when the winds of memory blow through the dark places in my apartment.

  This was a boy with an intimate but strange relation to the world around him, a dark-eyed silent boy who from the age of independent decision and movement reflected the world in his own special, wobbled mirror. Vance was for me a reflection. Vance would act out History and Event inside his own child’s world.

  At a very young age, very young, Vance would choose dark clothes, tie string around his head, put candy cigarettes in his mouth, and launch sudden, stealthy raids into rooms of the house, breathing hard and whirling, beating the air with his fists, finally diving behind furniture, crawling on his belly, clawing the air with a hooked finger. A lightning raid on the kitchen—the cat’s food would disappear. A silent assault on my den—in the leg of my desk would appear the vertical scratch of a pin. A careless squad of patio ants would walk into ambush and be efficiently obliterated via tennis-ball bombardment as Veronica and I looked on and at each other over gin-and-tonics. We were puzzled and frightened, and Veronica suspected motor dysfunction, until we noticed Vance’s eyes one night during dinner as on the evening news, correspondents brought us another installment of the death throes of the war in Indochina. Vance’s unblinking eyes and soundless breathing. And as Kissinger left Paris triumphant, a home in Scarsdale demilitarized.

  Sometimes in those days too we would find Vance alone in a room, facing the blank comer in which he stood, both arms stiffly upraised and two fingers of each hand out in Peace-signs. It began to become clear that, through the miracle of televsion, Vance Vigorous enjoyed a special relationship with Richard Nixon. As Wa tergate wore on in brilliant color, Vance took to furtive looks, pinched whiteness around the bridge of his nose, refusals to explain his whereabouts or give reasons for what he did. My tape recorder—admittedly tapeless and not even plugged in but nevertheless my tape recorder—began to appear places: under the dining room table at dinner, in the back seat of the car, under our bed, in the drawer of the mail table. Vance would, when confronted, look blankly at the tape recorder and at us. Then he would pretend to look at his watch. After the resignation, Vance was sick in bed for a week, with very real symptoms. We were frightened. There followed years in which he silently but with formal expression forgave every apparent wrong done him by us and the world; would fall and cover his chest with his hands at the slightest criticism; would flip backwards off the couch in the living room and land nicely on both feet, putting cracks in the ceiling each time; would wear his tiny suit to school and enlist a follower to carry the tiny briefcase he insisted we give him for Christmas; would walk blindfolded through rooms littered with torn drawings of the flag. Who knew what most of this was. This was the world the monadic Vance Vigorous received and mirrored through himself. I preferred him to the world, really.

  He was a great athlete as a child, a maker of solid clanks with aluminum Little League baseball bats, heavy whumps with hard autumn footballs, gentle tissued whispers with the nets of basketball hoops. He could run sweeps in children’s football, could run so fast and with such liquidly curving, teasing grace that he could make other boys fall down just trying to touch him. Feel what I felt in my chest, the little man in the beret, long coat whipped by the wind, watching the fruit of my loins. Vance was a boy who could make touchdowns from far away, make PeeWee mothers yell shrilly and release plastic-wrapped hair to clap into my ear, small-sounding outdoor claps, away on the wind like tattered things, as were the thuds of my leather gloves. The one little boy in those games on whom the helmet did not seem huge and hilariously out of place. A gracious blond black-eyed boy who never bragged and always helped others to their feet and gave credit where credit was due, before returning home, silent in the car beside me, to play Iranian hostage in his bedroom.

  His last great historical act came when he was eleven, as school was beginning. A jumbo jet was brought down over a sea by a Russian fighter, killing congressmen and nuns and children, sending shoes and shirtsleeves and paperbacks and eyeglass frames floating onto the northern shores of Japan. Vance would stare for hours at magazine pictures of the plane’s passengers, photos served up in large and vivid detail, family snapshots against green backyard colors, stiff yearbook photos, three-for-a-quarter shots of cheerleaders in Groucho noses; he looked at the eyes of the people in the pictures. One day soon after, he climbed onto the roof of the house and jumped off. All without a sound. Our house had only a basement and one story. The fall was twelve feet and sprained his ankle very thoroughly. Vance apologized. The next day he jumped off t
he roof again and broke a foot. He was taken to the hospital and moved from floor to floor, and was finally taken to a doctor off Central Park who somehow in one visit “cured” Vance of whatever ailed him. Vance never jumped or raided or fell or mimicked again. Veronica was very pleased. I had never thought there was anything particularly wrong with Vance at all, though of course jumping from high places was unacceptable. I was sad.

  We entered a sad, sad time. As Vance grew older, I grew younger and sadder. Veronica retreated ever farther into her crystal case of polite indifference. Vance began, at her urging, listlessly to date girls, never went anywhere with one more than once, as far as I could tell. Vance waited silently for puberty and puberty waited until Vance was fifteen; he lost his size and strength advantage, and there were no more cold windy afternoons on crunchy sidelines. Only sounds of music from under Vance’s door, and colored chalk on his fingers, and black circles under his black eyes, and the beautiful, beautiful drawings—flat and clear and sad as our cement drive, smooth and clean and as devoid of interstices as his mother—and the softly persistent sweet smell of marijuana from my son’s basement room. Vance is now at Fordham, studying art. I have not talked to Vance in almost a year. I do not know why this is so.

  I miss Vance with a fierceness we reserve for the absent who cannot return. Vance no longer exists. He was pithed in a Park Avenue office in 1983 by a man who charged us a hundred dollars for the procedure. Vance is, I happen to know for a fact, a homosexual, and probably a drug addict, washed and turning slowly in the odorless breezes of his mother’s cold Scarsdale breath, producing his flat and soulless perfect chalk drawings with greater and greater precision. I have received one: a startled me in the lawn with my rake, Veronica appearing incongruously over my shoulder, carrying something to drink on a black tray. The picture was sent me in a brown envelope, in care of the Frequent Review, and so not even opened for weeks.

  I miss Lenore, sometimes. I miss everyone. I can remember being young and feeling a thing and identifying it as homesickness, and then thinking well now that’s odd, isn’t it, because I was home, all the time. What on earth are we to make of that?

  I miss and love with all my purple fist a strange girl from a flamboyant and frightening family, in many ways a flamboyant and frightening girl, perched high in the crow’s nest of the Frequent and Vigorous vessel, scanning gray electrical expanses for the lonely spout of a legitimate telephone call. I am lately informed by Ms. Peahen that the possibility of such a call is, now, thanks to some malfunction in the phone system of which we are a part, even more remote than before. As I sit here, the block of the Erieview shadow slowly dips my office in liquid darkness. Halfway, now. It is one o‘clock. My lights turn the shadow half of the office to licorice, and make the half still under the influence of the sun a glinting yellow-white horror at which I may not look. Lenore, I shall try once more, and if you are not here I will assume the worst, and will succumb finally to the charms of Moses Cleaveland, who even now grins and beckons whitely from the pavement six floors below. This is our last chance.

  /d/

  As Lenore sifted through a tidal wave of misdirected calls and got ready to try to call Karl Rummage over at Rummage and Naw, Walinda Peahen appeared in the cubicle behind the switchboard counter.

  “Hi Walinda,” Lenore said. Walinda ignored her and began to look through the Legitimate Call Log, a desperately thin notebook with one or two pages filled. Judith Prietht had hit her Position Busy button and was talking to a girlfriend on the private line.

  “What these messages for you in the Log in Candy’s writing?” Walinda turned-and looked down at Lenore from under green eye shadow.

  “I guess if they’re legitimate then they’re messages for me,” said Lenore.

  “Girl I ain’t playin’ with you, so I wish you’d learn not to play. You supposed to be here at ten. There’s messages for you here at eleven and eleven-thirty.”

  “I was unavoidably detained. Candy said she’d cover.”

  “That flakey Frequent and Vigorous girl is getting chewed out by her supervisor,” Judith Prietht was saying into her phone, watching.

  “Girl detained where? How do I look if I think somebody workin’ and they not?”

  “I had to go to the nursing home.”

  “What time she get here?” Walinda asked Judith Prietht.

  “Look, I don’t want to say anything, I don’t want to get her in trouble,” Judith said to Walinda. Into the phone she said, “The supervisor wanted me to say when she got here, but I said I wouldn‘t, I didn’t want to get her in trouble.”

  “I got here at like a little after twelve.”

  “Like a little after twelve. Girl that’s over two hours late.”

  “It was an emergency.”

  “What kind of goddamn emergency?”

  Judith Prietht had stopped talking into the phone and was watching intently.

  “I can’t tell you right at the moment, Walinda,” Lenore said.

  “Girl, you gone, you done, I don’t care who you doin’ up, you can’t play. You done played the last time.”

  The console began to beep, the light with a quick, in-house flash.

  “Don’t even get it, you gone,” Walinda said to Lenore. She reached for the phone and Accessed. “Operator ...” Her eyebrows plunged. “Yes she is, Mr. Vigorous. Hold on one moment please.” She held her hand over the phone as she passed it to Lenore. “I don’t care what you get the little pecker to say, you gone,” she hissed.

  “She’s really in trouble, it looks like, for a change,” said Judith into her phone.

  “Hi Rick.”

  6

  1990

  /a/

  “How are your steaks, tonight?”

  “Our steaks, sir, are if I may say so quite simply superb. Only the choicest cuts of beef, carefully selected and even more carefully aged, cooked to perfection as perfection is defined by your instructions, served with your choice of potato and vegetable and richly delicious dessert.”

  “Sounds scrumptious.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll have nine.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Bring me nine steaks, please.”

  “You want nine steak dinners?”

  “Please.”

  “And who, sir, may I ask is going to eat them?”

  “You see anybody else sitting here? I’m going to eat them.”

  “And how on earth are you going to do that, sir?”

  “Well, gee, let’s see, I think I’ll use my right hand to cut, tonight. I’ll put pieces into my mouth, I’ll masticate, acidic elements in my saliva will begin breaking down the muscle fiber. I’ll swallow. Et cetera. Bring ‘em on!”

  “Sir, nine steaks would make anyone sick.”

  “Look at me. Look at this stomach. Do you think I’ll get sick? No way. Come here—no, really, come around and look at this stomach. Let me lift up my shirt ... here. See how much I can grab with my hand? I can’t even sit close to the table. Have you ever seen anything so hugely disgusting in your whole life?”

  “I’ve seen bigger stomachs.”

  “You’re just being polite, you just want a tip. You’ll get your tip, after you’ve brought me nine steak dinners, with perfection being defined as medium-rare, which is to say pink yet firm. And don’t forget the rolls.”

  “Sir, this is simply beyond my range of experience. I’ve never served any one individual nine simultaneous orders on my own authority. I could get in horrible trouble. What if, for example, you have an embolism, God forbid? You could rupture organs.”

  “Didn’t I say to look at me? Can’t you tell what I am? Listen to me very carefully. I am an obese, grotesque, prodigal, greedy, gour mandizing, gluttonous pig. Is this not clear? I am more hog than human. There is room, physical room, for you in my stomach. Do you hear? You see before you a swine. An eating fiend of unlimited capacity. Bring me meat.”

  “Have you not eaten in a very long time? Is that it?”r />
  “Look, you’re beginning to bother me. I could bludgeon you with my belly. I am also, allow me to tell you, more than a little well-to-do. Do you see that Building over there, the one with the lit windows, in the shadow? I own that Building. I could buy this restaurant and have you terminated. I could and perhaps will buy this entire block, including that symbolically tiny Weight Watchers establishment across the street. See it? With the door and windows so positioned as to form a grinning, leering, hollow-cheeked face? It is within my financial power to buy that place, and to fill it with steaks, fill it with red steak, all of which I would and will eat. The door would under this scenario be jammed with a gnawed bone; not a single little smug psalm-singing baggy-skinned apostate from the cause of adiposity would be able to enter. They would pound on the door, pound. But the bone would hold. They’d lack the bulk to burst through. Their mouths and eyes would be wide as they pressed against the glass. I would demolish, physically crush the huge scale at the end of the brightly lit nave at the back of the place under a weight of food. The springs would jut out. Jut. What a delicious series of thoughts. May I see a wine list?”

  “Weight Watchers?”

  “Garçon, what you have before you is a dangerous thing, I warn you. Human beings act in their own interest. Huge, crazed swine do not. My wife informed me a certain time-interval ago that if I did not lose weight, she would leave me. I have not lost weight, as a matter of fact I have gained weight, and thus she is leaving. Q.E.D. And A-1, don’t forget the A-1.”

  “But sir, surely with more time ...”

  “There is no more time. Time does not exist. I ate it. It’s in here, see? See the jiggle? That’s time, jiggling. Run, run away, fetch me my platter of fat, my nine cattle, or I’ll envelop you in a chin and fling you at the wall!”