The Broom of the System (32 page)

Lang stared into the mirror. “Naw, I haven’t been back much either. ‘Course I only been out a few years. And I’ve come back for a couple Homecomings. Those kick ass.”

“I remember they were fun.”

“You bet.”

“Are you married, in Scarsdale?” I asked. I must here confess that I asked the question for an admittedly immature and selfish reason. I instinctively and involuntarily regard all other men as potential threats to my relationship with Lenore. One more married man was one fewer member of the great threat-set.

“Yeah, I’m married.” Lang looked at his reflection in the mirror.

I giggled sympathetically.

“Is the wife up with you?” I asked.

“No she is not,” said Lang. He paused to belch. “The wife ... ,” he looked at his watch, “... the wife is at this second indubitably out in the back yard, on the lawn chair, with a martini and a
Cosmopolitan,
reinforcin’ the old tan.”

“I see,” I said.

Lang looked at me. “I really don’t know why the hell I came up here, to tell the truth. I just ... felt like I needed to come home, somehow.” He drummed his knuckle on the bar.

“Yes, yes.” I almost clutched at his arm. “I understand completely. Trying to come back inside ...”

“What?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing. What do you do, Andrew? May I call you Andrew?”

“Sure you can, Dick,” he said. He turned back toward me, and there was peanut-smell. His eyes went dull. “Right now I’m in accounting. My wife’s Daddy’s an accountant and all, and so I do some work for him. I mostly fuck off, though. I’m gonna quit. I think I in effect quit today, by not showing up.” He gulped beer and wiped his lip, looking faraway. “When I got out of school, I worked overseas for a while, for my Daddy. My Daddy owns this company, in Texas, and I worked for them overseas, for a couple years. That was the balls.”

“But then you got married.”

“Yup.” Peanuts. “You married, Dick? That’s right, you said you’re engaged. ”

“I ... I am engaged. To a wonderful, wonderful girl.” He was married, after all. “I was married before. I got divorced.”

“And engaged again now. Whooee. A glutton for punishment, Dick.”

“Please call me Rick,” I said. “My friends call me Rick. And an entirely different situation, this time, fortunately.” I felt a bit uncomfortable. Lenore and I were, after all, not explicitly engaged, although it was only a matter of waiting for the combination of the right moment and sufficient saliva.

“Well good for you. What’s the lucky little lady’s name?”

“Ms. Lenore Beadsman, of East Corinth, which is to say Cleveland, Ohio,” I said.

Lang speculatively sucked the salt off a peanut. He looked in the mirror and removed something from his lip. “Beadsman. Beadsman.” He looked at me. “Hmmm. She didn’t go to school around here, did she? Or more exactly Mount Holyoke?”

“No, no,” I said, excited, feeling connection potential—‘83, after all. “But her sister did. Ms. Clarice Beadsman. Now Mrs. Alvin Spaniard, Cleveland Heights, Ohio.”

“Well I will be goddamned,” said Lang. “Clarice Beadsman was one of my wife’s roommates, one year. My sophomore year. I knew her. Christ in a camper, that seems like just too goddamned long ago. My wife and her didn’t get along too good.”

“But they knew each other. Really. Really.” I squirmed with excitement and a full bladder. No possible way I was going to the men’s room before Lang, though. “What is your wife’s name, pray, so I can tell it to Lenore and she to Clarice?”

“My wife’s maiden name was Miss Melinda Metalman,” said Andrew Lang to the mirror.

The earth tipped on its axis. The spit was vacuumed from my mouth and disappeared out the back of my head. Melinda Metalman. Mindy Metalman, perhaps the most erotic girl I have ever seen in person. Rex Metalman’s daughter, who had done things around a lawn sprinkler no thirteen-year-old should be able to do. Sweat leapt to my brow.

“Mindy Metalman?” I croaked.

Lang turned again. “Yeah.” His eyes were old, dull.

I looked at my whiskey. “You don’t perhaps know whether her father might by any chance live on ... Vine Street, in Scarsdale,” I said.

Lang grinned to himself. “Yeah, you’re from Scarsdale, that’s right. Well, yup. 14 Vine Street. Except he don’t anymore, ‘cause he gave the house to me and Mindy last year. He lives in an apartment now. One supposedly without a lawn. Having a lawn fucked with old Rex’s mind. But except now he’s starting a lawn at his building, he says. Just a real tiny one. Hardly a lawn at all, he says. Who the hell knows.” Lang looked at the mirror. “I live at 14 Vine now, more or less.”

“I used to live at 16 Vine,” I said quietly. Lang turned to me. The “Bob Newhart” crowd must have thought we were in love. Our eyes shone with the thrill of apparent connection. It was something of a thrill, given the context. I tingle a bit even now, in the motel. “My ex-wife still lives there, though I’ve been led to believe she’s preparing to sell,” I said.

“Mrs. Peck?” Lang’s eyes opened wide. “Veronica?”

“Ms. Peck,” I said, clutching for real now at Lang’s sportcoat sleeve. “Peck was her maiden name. And I used to play tennis with Rex Metalman, long ago. I used to watch Rex go at his lawn almost every day. It was a neighborhood event.”

“I will be dipped and fried and completely goddamned,” said Lang. “I just had no idea Ronnie’d been married to an Amherst alum. Sheeit.” He thumped the bar with his hand again. I noticed his hand, suddenly. It was heavy, and brown, and strong. A hard hand.

“Ronnie?” I said.

“Well, I know her pretty good, her living next door and all.” Lang looked down to play with the ring of moisture his beer glass had made on the dark wood of the bar.

“I see,” I said. “How is Ronnie?”

We looked at each other in the mirror. “Last time I saw her, she was just fine,” Lang said. He poured more beer into the suds at the bottom of the glass. I saw salt, from the peanuts, on the rim. “What exactly do you do, Rick? In Cleveland.”

“Publishing,” I said. “I manage a publishing firm in Cleveland. Frequent and Vigorous, Publishing, Inc.”

“Hmmm,” Lang said.

“What about Mindy?” I asked. “I knew her, slightly, as a girl. Is Mindy well? Does Mindy have a career of her own?”

“Mindy does have a career,” Lang said after a moment. “Mindy is a voice.”

“A voice?” I said. My head was filled with visions of Mindy Metalman. Her bedroom had been directly across the fence from my den.

“A voice,” said Lang. He played with a cocktail napkin decorated with a huge lipstick-kiss design. “You ever been in a grocery? And when you pay for your items and all at the cash register, the girl pushes the items over the scanner thing, that beeps, and then this voice in the register says the price? Or do you have one of them late-model cars that says to please fasten seat belts when you didn’t fasten your seat belts? Melinda Sue is the voice in things.”

“That’s Mindy Metalman?” I shopped. I drove a late-model car.

“Mrs. A. S. Lang herself, now,” said Lang. “The big voice used to be this lady in Centerport, on Long Island? But she’s getting old, scratchy. Melinda Sue’s pretty much pushin’ her out of the business. ”

“Heavens,” I said, “That certainly sounds like an enormously interesting career. Does Mindy enjoy it?”

“Sure she enjoys it. It’s easy as shit. She just sits around like once a week, with a drink and a million-dollar tape recorder and a script with lines like ‘Change due, four dollars.’ It’s easy as hell. But she’s ambitious now, all of a sudden. Her and her manager.” Lang swallowed half his beer. “Alan Gluskoter, her manager. Ambitious Al. They’re ambitious, now.” More beer. “She wants television.”

“Television?”

Lang stared at himself. “You know the voice that says ‘This is CBS,’ or ‘This is ABC,’ or ‘Stay tuned to CBS, please’? She wants to be that voice. That’s her great aspiration.”

“Good heavens.”

“Yeah.”

I was about to wet my pants. The only pair of pants I’d brought on the trip.

I slid off my stool, stretched, pretended to yawn. “Think I’ll just dash into the men’s room,” I said. “I want to see something. I think I may have left my initials in the wood of the stall here.”

Lang smiled at both of us. “I know I did. I carved hell out of everything when I was a student here.” He stood. “Hell, I’ll go with you. Could use a squirt myself.”

“Quite,” I said.

In the men’s room Lang ranged expertly over the urinal, aiming for the deodorant disc. “Room for two, here, big guy,” he said.

I muttered something and hurried into the stall, ostensibly to hunt for initials, really so that I could shut the door. I tried to last just as long as I could. Long after my last tinkle had ceased to sound, I could still hear the roar of Lang’s jet. This was an Amherst man.

I looked for my initials. All I can say at this point is that I must have been confused. I was sure I’d left another R.V. in the Flange’s stall, up over the door latch, to the left, actually I even thought I could remember the occasion of the carving, but here in the spot I remembered was, instead of an R.V., a deep, wickedly sharp set of W.D.L., long since filled in with violet pen. I pored over the wooden surfaces of the stall until I saw Lang’s boat shoes under the door.

“Not there,” I said, opening the door. “My initials don’t seem to be there.”

“Maybe they went ahead and changed the door sometime since ‘69,” said Lang, coming into the stall with me and swinging the door shut, so that I had to sit on the toilet to give him room to look at the door.

“Same door as ‘83, though, ’cause here are mine, still,” he said, pointing at the deep W.D.L. over the latch. He brushed at the letters with a big thumb, removing a smidgeon of God knows what.

“W.D.L. for Andrew Sealander Lang?” I said.

“I got called Wang-Dang Lang all through school,” said Lang, grinning. “Actually I still get called Wang-Dang Lang, by my real good friends. You can call me Wang-Dang, if you want.” He stared lovingly at his initials.

“Thank you,” I said. I had to pee again, already, I felt.

There were sounds of the restroom door opening. Snickering. I thought I recognized the Approacher’s voice. They must have been looking at our four shoes in the crowded stall. The group attended to business, noisily, and eventually left, after teasing us by flicking the lights off and on several times. I was lost in thought, for the most part, trying to account for my memory of my initials in the Flange’s door, which memory was clear and distinct, in the face of the evidence. It certainly looked like the same door. Lang studied the door with me, thinking.

“Is your girlfriend Clarice’s younger sister?” he suddenly asked.

I looked up at him from the toilet. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, Lenore is two years younger than Clarice.”

“You know, I’m pretty sure I’ve met her, then,” said Lang, absently digging with his finger at some peanut in a molar, extracting some beige material. He looked at it. “ ‘Cause Clarice had a sister visiting her the night I met my wife. Or was it that other girl had a sister up?” He scratched. “No, I’m real sure it was Beadsman. I think I remember for sure she said her name was Lenore Beadsman.” He looked faraway.

“So you probably met my fiancée before I did,” I said.

Lang grinned down at me. “And you knew my wife before I even met her, when she was a little girl.”

I grinned back. “Not all that little.”

“I know what you mean,” Lang laughed. Spontaneously, out of the sheer odd warmth of the moment, we did the Psi Phi handshake again. “Quaaaango!” We laughed.

I got off the toilet. We left the restroom and went back into the bar. There were stage titters from the Approacher’s little television coterie. Wang-Dang Lang ignored them and clapped his arm around my shoulders.

“Ah, Rick, Rick,” he said. “I just don’t know what the hell to do.” He looked around. “I just feel like I need to ...”

“Get outside,” I said. For us inside outsiders, the only real place to go was outside.

“Well, yeah. Exactly.” He looked me in the eye. “I feel like I need to get out. Just ... out, for a while.” He ordered another beer as I chewed the whiskey out of my ice.

“Are things not well with you and the wife?”

In the mirror Lang said, “Things are the same as ever, fine and Daddy—excuse—fine and dandy as ever. I just feel ... constricted, like I can’t breathe. Like I’m breathin’ used-up air. I’m living in the bitch’s town, in her house, working for her Daddy, hearing her voice when I get in my freaking car. I think we need a slight vacation from each other. Things are just less than wonderful right now. I think I just need to get out, for a period of time.”

“Establish other connections,” I said. “Hence the utter appropriateness of your little trip up here. It’ll do you a world of good.” God, there was a time when I would have given limbs to be constricted by Mindy Metalman.

“Eggzackly,” Lang said. He punched me affectionately in the arm. I struggled not to rub my shoulder.

“And so just one hell of a buzz, meetin’ you,” Land said to me in the mirror. “A House brother, a neighbor, damn near a relative. Like an uncle or something. Shit on fire. Ti
symptosis.”

“What was that?” I asked.

“What was what?”

“ ‘Tea’ something,” I said.

“Ti symptosis?”
said Lang. “It’s just this expression.
‘Ti symptosis’
is idiomatic modern Greek for, like, ’What a hell of a coincidence.‘ Which this is, sure enough, let me tell you.”

“Greek?” I said. “You speak modem Greek?”

Lang laughed loudly. “Does a bear make skata in the woods?” I intuited that even such as he was beginning to feel the lake of beer inside him. “Yeah,” he said, “I picked up Greek real well after college. I told you I was overseas? I was working for my Daddy’s company? This really kick-ass company called Industrial Desert Design, Dallas?”