The Broom of the System (55 page)

Lenore laughed. “Candy and I play a lot. I mean a
lot
.” She smoothed hair out of her eyes, and Lang watched her do it. “We play a lot. We have all these systems, using our birthdays and the letters in our names and stuff. Ohio has a really good lottery.”

Lang drank. “Ever win at all?”

“We will,” Lenore said. She laughed. “We started playing in college, just for fun, and I was a philosophy major, and for a joke we hit on this sort of syllogism, ostensibly proving we’d win—”

“Syllogism?”

“Yeah,” Lenore said. “Like a tiny little argument.” She smiled over at Lang and held up fingers. “One. Obviously somebody has to win the lottery. Two. I am somebody. Three. Therefore obviously I have to win the lottery.”

“Shit on fire.”

Lenore laughed.

“So why does that seem like it works, when it doesn‘t, since you haven’t won?”

“It’s called an E-screech equivocation. My brother disproved it to me that same year when I made him mad about something. It’s sort of a math thing.” Lenore laughed again. “The whole thing’s probably silly, but Candy and I still get a kick out of it.”

Lang played with the hairs on his ankle. “You were a phi-los-ophy major, then.” He drew out the word “philosophy.”

“Philosophy and then Spanish, too,” said Lenore, nodding. “I was a double major in school.”

“I personally majored in ec-o-nomics,” Lang said, doing it again.

Lenore ignored him. “I took an economics class one time,” she said. “Dad wanted me to major in it, for a while.”

“But you said no sir.”

“I just didn’t do it, is all. I didn’t say anything.”

“I admire that,” Lang said, pouring more wine for both of them and crushing the empty can in his hand. He threw it in the wastebasket from clear across the room. “Yes I do,” he said.

“Admire what?”

“Except I have trouble picturing you as a phi-los-opher,” he said. “I remember seeing you in Melinda-Sue’s room that one time, so long ago, and thinking to myself: artist. I remember thinking artist to myself, that time.”

The wine was warmer now. Lenore fought off a cough. “Well I’m sure not an artist, although Clarice has what you could call a sort of artsy talent. And I wasn’t ever a philosopher, I was just a student.” She looked into the table. “But how come you can’t picture it?”

“I dunno,” Lang said, throwing an arm back along the top of the couch, holding its steel bar in his hand and stroking it with his fingers. Lenore’s neck felt even tighter at the back. She felt like she could see Lang from all different angles all of a sudden: his profile next to her, his reflection down in the glass table, his other side in the window out past the couch and the television screen. He was all over, it seemed.

Lang was saying: “Just have this picture from school of all these phi-los-ophy guys in beards and glasses and sandals with socks in them, saying all this wise shit all the time.” He grinned.

“That’s just so wrong, Lenore said, leaning forward in the chair. ”The ones I know are about the least wise-seeming people you could imagine. At least the really good ones don’t act like they think they’re wise or anything. They’re really just like physicists, or math—“

“You care for a peanut?” Lang said suddenly.

“No thank you,” said Lenore. “You go ahead, though.”

“Nah. Little suckers get back in my teeth.”

“Mine too. I hate it when peanuts do that.”

“So go ahead with what you were saying, I’m sorry.”

Lenore smiled and shook her head. “It wasn’t important. I was just going to say that they’re like mathematicians, really, except they play their games with words, instead of numbers, and so things are even harder. At least that’s the way it got to seem to me. By the end of school I didn’t like it much anymore.”

Lang put some wine in his mouth and played with it. There was silence for a bit. Through Misty’s wood floor Lenore could hear faint sounds from the television in the Tissaws’ living room.

Then Lang said, “You’re weird about words, aren’t you.” He looked at Lenore. “Are you weird about words?”

“What do you mean?”

“You just seem weird about them. Or like you think they’re weird.”

“In what way?”

Lang felt his upper lip absently with a finger while he looked into the glass table. “Like you take them awful seriously,” he said. “Like they were a big sharp tool, or like a chainsaw, that could cut you up as easy as some tree. Something like that.” He looked up at her. “Is that from your education, in terms of college and your major and such?”

“I don’t think so,” said Lenore. She shrugged her shoulders. “I think I just tend to be sort of quiet. I don’t think words are like chainsaws, that’s for sure.”

“So was that really all just bullshit, what I said?”

Lenore recrossed her legs and played with the wine in her glass. She looked down into her purse, with the tickets, next to her chair. “I think it’s just that my family tends to be kind of weird, and very ...
verbal
.” She looked into the table and sipped. “And it’s hard sometimes not being an especially verbal person in a family that tends to see life as more or less a verbal phenomenon.”

“Sure enough.” Lang smiled. He looked at Lenore’s legs. “And now can I ask you how come you wear those Converse sneakers all over? Your legs are just way too nice to be doing that all the time. How come you do that?”

Lenore shifted in her chair and looked up at Lang to make him stop looking at her legs. “They’re comfortable, is all, really,” she said. “Everybody likes different kinds of shoes, I guess.”

“Takes all kinds of shoes to make up a world, am I right?” Lang laughed and drank.

Lenore smiled. “My family really is funny about wordy things, though. I think you’re right about that. My great-grandmother especially, and she sort of dominated the family for a while.”

“And your Daddy and your housekeeper-lady, too,” said Lang, nodding.

Lenore looked up sharply. “How come you know about them?”

Lang shrugged and then grinned at her. “Think R.V. mentioned something or other.”

“Rick did?”

“But funny how?” Lang said. “I mean it’s not too unusual just to get people who like to talk. World is full of dedicated and excellent talkers. My mother used to get talking, and my Daddy’d say only way to really get her to hush was to hit her with something blunt.”

“Well but see, it wasn’t just talking a lot,” Lenore said, smoothing her hair. “Although everybody sure did. But it was as you said, the
importance
they attached to everything they said. They made just a huge deal out of what got said.” Lenore felt the rim of her glass for a second. She smiled. “Like to take an example I was just remembering this morning, my little brother Stoney had this stage of his childhood where he called everything
brands
of things. He’d say, ‘What brand of dog is that?’ or ‘That’s the brand of sunset where the sun makes the clouds all fiery,’ or ‘That brand of tree has edible leaves,’ et cetera.” She looked over at Lang, who was looking at her in the table. He looked up at her. Lenore cleared her throat. “Which obviously, you know, wasn’t all that big a deal,” she continued, “although it was kind of irritating, but still understandable, because Stoney watched television like all the time, back then.” Lenore recrossed her legs; Lang was still looking at her. “But my family was just having a complete spasm about it, after a while, and one time they even arranged to have Stoney out of the house so we could all supposedly sit down in the living room for like a summit meeting about how to get him to start saying ‘kind’ instead of’brand,‘ or whatever. It was a huge family deal, although my father I remember kept talking on the phone during the meeting, or going to get stuff to eat, or even reading, and not paying attention, because my great-grandmother was running the meeting, and they don’t get along too well. At least they didn’t.”

“Now is this your Amherst brother you’re talking about?” said Lang. “LaVache, the one at Amherst now?”

“Yes. LaVache is Stonecipher’s middle name. Stonecipher’s his real name.”

“Then so how’d they break the little guy of the habit? He didn’t say ‘brand’ at dinner, at all, that one time—at least not to his leg, which was about all he was talking to.”

“I think it just stopped,” Lenore said. “I think it just petered out. Unless Miss Malig started hitting him with blunt things on the sly.” She laughed. “I guess anything’s possible.”

“Miss Malig, your nanny, with legs like churns and all?”

At this, Lenore stayed looking into the table for some time, while Lang watched the side of her face. Finally she said, “Look, how do you know all this stuff, Andy?” She put her glass down in its circle of moisture on the table and looked calmly at Lang. “Are you trying to freak me out? Is that it? I think I need to know what exactly Rick told you.”

Lang shook his head seriously. “Freaking you out never even crossed my mind,” he said. He popped the tab on another can of wine. “This was just on the plane, coming on out here, while you were sleeping your pretty head off. We didn’t have nobody to talk to except us.” He tossed off some wine and smiled. “R. V. I remember was telling me about how he was going to promote you up from the phone board up to reader and weeder, and how you’d really get fulfilled by that.”

“Rick told you then that he was going to do that? That’s like two days before he told me he was going to do that.”

“But are you getting fulfilled? Is it rewarding like he said?”

Lenore looked for sarcasm in Lang’s face. She could never tell whether Lang was being sarcastic or not. Her neck really hurt, now. “It’s at least rewarding to the tune of ten smackers an hour,” she said slowly. “And some of the stories are really good.”

“R.V. says you really get into stories. He says you understand yourself as a literary sensibility.”

“He said that?”

“He did.”

Lenore looked back into the table. “Well I do like stories. And Rick likes them too. I think that’s one reason we seem to get along so well. Except what Rick really likes to do is tell them. Sometimes when we’re together he’ll just tell me stories, the whole time. From what gets submitted to him.”

Lang put his shoe out onto the glass tabletop, twisted it back and forth. “He does like to spin, doesn’t he,” he said absently. He paused and looked over at Lenore. Lenore looked down at her shoe. Lang cleared his throat. “I probably shouldn’t do this, but I’ve been wanting to ask you about this one whopper R.V. told me about your brother, with his leg: how the little sucker lost his leg when your mother fell off the side of your house trying to
get
away from her bridge coach and break into your nursery. Or some such. Now just how much of that is true, and how much was my own personal leg getting pulled, on that plane?”

A lot of little lines seemed to come out of the lines of heat in Lenore’s body. She stared at Lang’s shoe on the table. She closed her eyes and felt her neck. Lang watched her. “Let me get this straight,” she said finally. “Rick told you personal stuff about my family? On the plane? While I was right there, asleep?”

“Was that a mistake, telling you what he told me? Lenore, hurt me with something hot if I just screwed up in any way. Just forget I said anything.”

Lenore kept looking at the glass table, and Lang’s shoe, and Lang’s shoe’s reflection, and Lang’s reflection. “He told you all that while I was asleep,” she said. In the table it looked as though Lang was looking away from her, because the real Lang was looking at her. When he finally looked down at the table, Lenore stared at him.

“Well he said you were his fiancée,” Lang said, “and how he was just passionately and totally interested in everything about his fiancée. It all seemed real innocent to me. Not to mention just articulate as
ell.
”

Lenore had looked up. “He told you I was his
fiancée?
As in soon-to-be-married fiancée?”

“Oh
shit.”
Lang hit his forehead with the heel of his palm. “Oh shit, did I just do it again? Oh Lord. Just forget what I said. Just forget I said anything.”

“Rick said we were engaged? He just said that to you, unsolicited, out of the blue?”

“He probably just didn’t mean it the way he said it.”

“Shit on a twig.”

“Now Lenore I sure don’t want to come between two people who—”

“What the hell did he say there even was to come between?”

“Jesus H.,” Lang said, massaging his jaw. His reflection in the glass looked away from Lenore. Then it looked down, and seemed actually almost to wink, in the glass, all of a sudden. Lenore looked up, but the real Lang was looking at his hands.

“Jesus H. Christ,” he was saying to himself. He drank some wine. Lenore smoothed her hair back with hot fingers.

“Look,” said Lang. “I’m just real sorry. How about if I just tell you everything, everything that’s been making me feel all terribly guilty around you, and then we can just go ahead and—”

“Why on earth should you feel guilty because of Rick?” Lenore said tiredly, massaging her neck with her eyes closed again. “That he told you stuff is no reason for you to feel bad, Andy. I’m not mad at you about it.”

“Except there’s a few sort of sizable items R.V. doesn’t feel inclined to tell, it looks like,” said Lang. He took a very deep breath and looked at his hands again. “Like I’m not in actual fact translating any herbicide or pesticide crap into idiomatic Greek for you.” He looked at her. “Like I’m really working on a pamphlet for your own personal Daddy’s company, and its wild-ass new food that makes kids supposedly talk, like your bird can do.”

Lenore looked into the table. There was silence. “You’re really working for Stonecipheco,” she said.

Lang didn’t say anything.

“Which means Rick is, too. And Rick didn’t tell me.”

“I’m afraid that’s right. Except like I say I’m sure there was a good reason for his not.”