The Broom of the System (28 page)

“It sure is weird having it be Monday and no telephones. You were awesome with Walinda, Rick. I never would have believed it.”

“My ears still hurt like hell. It was as if the takeoff merely softened my ears up for the landing. It was beyond belief, Lenore.”

“I’m so sorry. What can I do?”

“Oh,
Route
9. Here it is. We’re on Route 9. God, the memories I have of Route 9. Good Lord, the Coolidge Bridge.”

“Haven’t you ever been back here, for reunions or stuff like that?”

“You must be joking.”

“....”

“The plane isn’t simply going to idle and wait for us at Bradley Field, Lenore, is it?”

“No way. That’s Stonecipheco’s one jet.”

“How thrifty.”

“I think it took off again almost right away. I think it had to get back home.”

“Places to go and people to see.”

“I’m not even sure. You hustled us into this limo in like four seconds.”

“The law of the East Coast. You see available transportation, you grab it immediately.”

“The plane’s supposed to be back for us by lunchtime tomorrow ... eleven-thirty.”

“Plenty of time to talk to LaVache.”

“Which is obviously going to be a waste of time, in terms of Dad, I predict. There’s no way Lenore’s talking to LaVache if she hasn’t talked to me. LaVache and Lenore hate each other. And he doesn’t even have a phone. And he and John hate each other, too. Or rather at least he hates John.”

“So much hating.”

“Well, it’s just family hating. It’s not like real hating.”

“My God. The Aqua Vitae restaurant. I thought that had been tom down. I haven’t thought of the Aqua Vitae in years. Good God. We used to pile in the car and go on down to the Aqua Vitae for monstrously huge hamburg
pizzas.”

“Hamburger.”

“Ah, regional linguistic clash. I love it. It all comes flooding back.”

“....”

“I really do have to pee, though.”

“Should we pull over? We can pull in really quick at this mall, here.”

“God, no, not a mall. We’re nearly there. We’re nearly here. I think perhaps it’s just excitement. Amherst is rife with restroom facilities, anyway. At least it used to be. I knew them all.”

“Hang in there, soldier.”

“At least you can watch the putative future of Stonecipheco in academic action. You can issue a full report to your father, back at his lair.”

“I’m not going to tell Dad anything except what I want to tell him. Dad told me like ninety lies in his office. I’m beginning to think Dad is maybe a compulsive liar. He lies pathologically, even sort of pathetically, when it comes to Miss Malig. And he had this guy who works for him, who I used to go to school with, spying on us. And he didn’t even tell him to come out until it was obvious that I’d seen his shoes under the window curtain.”

“Who is this person you went to school with? Have I been told about him before?”

“Look, an absolute moratorium on spasms is declared, here, Rick, OK? I’m just not in the mood at all.”

“....”

“And you should know I’m not my father’s messenger, or spy.”

“Relax. You’re among friends. You’re with the one person who places your interests above his own. Remember that.”

“Oh Rick.”

“I love you, Lenore.”

“But I have to admit I am sort of anxious to see what LaVache is like at school. He’s really smarter than John, I think. In terms of pure smarts, he’s the one person in the family who’s smarter than John. He never had to work a bit at Shaker School, I know. And at home in the summer he’s just a waste-product. He just sits around all day in the east wing, getting flapped and watching soap operas, and stuff like ‘The Flintstones,’ and carving designs in his leg.”

“ ”

“And at night, every night, he just goes out drinking with his spooky buddies, in their cars where the back is higher off the ground than the front.”

“Jacked-up.”

“Jacked-up cars. And Dad never knows what he’s doing, because Dad’s hardly ever around, or when he is he’s like tiptoeing around ever so discreetly with Miss Malig. Dad thinks LaVache works. He thinks LaVache is another him.”

“We’re almost there. This hill. We’re going to crest this hill, and we’ll be there.”

“I’m sure he must work, now, in college. I know I sure did.”

“And ... ahh, there it is. Good heavens.”

“Your eyes are misting.”

“Bet your ass. I make no bones about it. I haven’t been back here in exactly twenty years. This is my alma mater.”

“Well, of course it is, you silly.”

“Alma mater.”

“....”

“Shall we just proceed right to Stone, Lenore? That is where LaVache lives, correct?”

“Right.”

“Driver, please take us directly to Stone Dormitory, Amherst College. You are, I’m afraid, on your own in terms of finding it. It’s one of the new ones, with which I’m not familiar, not having—”

“No problem, buddy.”

“How nice. Good heavens. How truly eerie, seeing all this. The trees are just barely hinting at beginning to turn, see? You can see it in some more than in others. Look there, for instance.”

“Pretty, all right.”

“Have you ever been here?”

“I’ve been to Mount Holyoke. I went there once, when Clarice was there.”

“Did you find it pretty?”

“It was March, but it was pretty. The campus was really pretty.”

“I’ve always liked Mount Holyoke, in a general sort of way.”

“What does that mean?”

“God, I really must pee, Lenore.”

“You can pee in LaVache’s room.”

“....”

“Oh, God, no! Rick, those shoes, still.”

“Pardon?”

“Those shoes. See those shoes, on those people? The boat shoes? With the leather shoe and white plastic sole?”

“Well, yes.”

“See those two girls and that guy? God, everybody’s still wearing them out here. Boy do I hate those shoes.”

“They, umm, seem all right to me. They seem harmless enough.”

“I have what I’m sure is this totally irrational hatred for those shoes. I think a big reason is that everyone at school wore them with no socks.”

“....”

“Which meant that they weren’t just wearing sneakers without socks, which would have been plenty repulsive enough, they were wearing nonsneakers without socks. Which is just incredibly ...”

“Unhygienic?”

“Make fun if you want, smart guy. You’re the one who’s dumb if you pay Dr. Jay all that money and then don’t even listen to him. It’s not just that it’s unhygienic, it’s downright sick. It stinks. At school, I can remember, I’d be sitting in my carrel, in the library, doing homework or something, minding my own business, and somebody would sit down in the next carrel, with those shoes, and then they’d take them
off,
and I’d all of a sudden be smelling somebody else’s feet.”

“....”

“Which did not smell good, let me tell you, from constantly being in shoes without socks. I mean I really think foot-smell should be a private thing, don’t you?”

“....”

“What are you grinning at? Are those ridiculous feelings? Does that make no sense at all?”

“Lenore, it makes perfect sense. It’s just that I’d never given the matter that much thought. Never much thought to the ... socio-ethics of foot-smell.”

“Now I can tell you’re being sarcastic.”

“You completely misread me.”

“....”

“Is that why you always wear two pairs of socks? Under constant and invariable sneakers?”

“Partly. Partly because it’s comfortable, too.”

“Stone Dorm, pal.”

“Which one of these is Stone?”

“The one we’re right in front of, pal.”

“I see .... Lord am I stiff.”

“You want to just bolt right in and pee?”

“....”

“Rick?”

“I rather think not, now that the moment has arrived.”

“What does that mean? You did nothing but talk pee, in the car.”

“Have you the bags?”

“You know perfectly well they’re in the trunk.”

“The question really meant, do you suppose you could manage getting them inside yourself, making absolutely sure to take my bag in, too, with my underwear and toothbrush and Old Spice and all essentials?”

“I suppose so, but I don’t get it.”

“Meter’s still running, ace.”

“I think with your permission I will simply leave you, here, for a bit. I feel emotions and feelings washing over me that are perhaps best confronted alone.”

“What?”

“I’m going to go wander among the blasted crags of memory, for a while.”

“Pardon me?”

“I’m going to go take a look around.”

“Oh. Well, OK.”

“Till later, then.”

“You want to just come back here and meet me? We can check in at Howard Johnson’s at five and then go to dinner?”

“Fine. Goodbye.”

“It’s room 101, remember.”

“Righto. See you soon.”

“Are you OK?”

“Yes. Goodbye. Thank you ever so much, driver.”

“....”

“Can you please help me with the bags?”

“I guess so, lady. What’s with him?”

“He gets this way, sometimes, when he has to go to the bathroom.”

6 September

The sudden strength with which the desire to go see whether the initials I’d carved so long ago in the wood of the stall in the men’s room of the Art Building were still there, the sudden and unexpected and overwhelming strength with which these feelings had washed over me, there at the dormitory, with Lenore, was a frightening thing. As I joined the serpentine line of students walking up the ungentle hill to the Art and Science Buildings, all of us falling into the vaguely floppy, seal-like gait of the hurried hill-climber, most of us seals apparently late for class, one of us late for an appointment with a tiny ocean of his own past, stretching away and down beside the carved dock of his childhood, an ocean into which this particular seal was going to pour a strong (hopefully unitary) stream of his own presence, to prove that he still is, and so was—that is, provided of course the bathroom and toilet and stall were still there—as I joined the line of seals in short pants and loose short-sleeved shirts and boat shoes and backpacks, and as I felt the fear that accompanied and was in a way caused by the intensity of the wash of feelings and desires and so on that accompanied even the thought of a silly men’s room in a silly building at a silly college where a sad silly boy had spent four years twenty years ago, as I felt all these things, there occurred to me a fact which I think now as I sit up in bed in our motel room, writing, the television softly on, the sharp-haired object of my adoration and absolute center of my entire existence asleep and snoring softly in the bed beside me, a fact which I think now is undeniably true, the truth being that Amherst College in the 1960’s was for me a devourer of the emotional middle, a maker of psychic canyons, a whacker of the pendulum of Mood with the paddle of Immoderation.

That is, it occurs to me now in force that in college things were never, not ever, at no single point, simply all right. Things were never just OK. I was never just getting by. Never. I can remember I was always horribly afraid. Or, if not horribly afraid, horribly angry. I was always desperately tense. Or, if not tense, then in an odd hot euphoria that made me walk with the water-jointed jaunt of the person who truly does not give a shit one way or the other. I was always either so unreasonably and pointlessly happy that no one place could seem to contain me, or so melancholy, so sick and silly with sadness that there was no place I could stomach the thought of entering. I hated it here. And I have never been as happy as when I was here. And these two things together confront me with the beak and claws of the True.

One of the trees at the top of the hill, which I stopped to look at as I played with my hat and recovered from the climb, the line of students forking past either side of me and disappearing into buildings to the sound of bells, one of the trees was just beginning to bum, a bit, with color, a flush of hesitant red suffusing the outline of the tree against the southerly sun, the tree’s blood draining out of those leaves most distant from the heart first; and I looked at the flush of crinkled red crowning a body of soft green, with the sunlight winking through the branches as they moved and creaked in the breeze, until I was drawn away by the twin urges to remember and to pee.

And the initials were still there, the tiny carved “R.V.,” near the bottom of the stall. Someone had filled in the carving with ballpoint pen. Near the initials were another set of initials, “S.U.X.,” which I come to see now were to be a joke at my expense. And, near the joke-at-my-expense initials, someone, some tiny soul, probably during exam time, in a gesture the emotion behind which I could completely understand, had put the single word, “Mommy”—which predictably, someone else, a mean person, had altered in a slightly different color to become “Your Mommy hates you.”

“She does
not,”
I put—still being a really incorrigible graffiti man, I’m afraid—under the cruel alteration, although I had to get on hands and knees in the scum-laden stall to do it, and managed to dip my tie neatly in the toilet bowl in the process; let Jay and Blentner have a look at this. And my present bubbled and frothed in my past, and was borne naturally away.

Out the door of the Art Building and through the courtyard I pass into a quad, the quad, where loosely clothed barefoot boys with liquid wrists are playing Frisbee under the lying leaves, running like deer, throwing the plastic plate every which way. We dinosaurs used to play a similar game here, with trays taken from the dining hall, metal trays back then, with sharp digit-removing edges, so that, I remember, the trays had to be caught in midair by the tweezer of finger and thumb.... We would play and bleed. Now they are only high-tech and beautiful, and the bright disc hangs motionless in the air while earth and trees and lithe slippery boys slide underneath as if on oil to receive it again. I clap my hands a bit, hem and haw, throw my cap into the air, practice some motions, make it clear that I want to be invited to play, but I am ignored.