The Broom of the System (60 page)

“Blond? A blond psychologist?”

“Affirmative.”

“Why is this story beginning to give me the creeps?”

“It means you’re beginning really to relate. You’re being intuitive about it.”

“What does being intuitive have to do with it?”

“Here’s the end of the trail. Shall we strike off into the interior? I sense that whatever it is we’re looking for is best looked for in the interior. In the heart of the Desert, Lenore. What do you say?”

“Let’s just go back the way we came. My nose hurts. This is clearly a waste of time. At least this way I get to look at the lake.”

“Christ, the lake, again. The lake is just a bunch of people fishing for black fish. Who cares about the lake?”

“Rick, why are you sweating like this? It’s hot, but it’s not that hot. Are you OK?”

“...”

“Rick, are you all right I said.”

“Maybe just the effects of trying to relate a difficult and emotionally intricate story in the face of your complete insensitivity you bitch!”

“What?”

“I’m sorry.”

“What did you say to me?”

“Please, forget I said anything. Let’s just walk back along the lake.”

“We really need to talk, buster, and I mean now.”

“Just trust me.”

“What the hell are we even doing out here? Andy was right.”

“Have I not earned some trust?”

“I don’t like this at all,” Lang was saying. He squatted on his hams in the bow, resting his elbows on his knees and looking through the binoculars. “Not one little red bit, good buddy.”

Obstat took two Pop Tarts out of their wrapper and tossed the wrapper into the lake. “At least they’ve stopped for a second,” he said with his mouth full. “My arms are fucking numb, Wanger.”

“Something’s up,” said Lang. “The little dung beetle’s up to something.”

“What’s he doing?”

“It’s not so much what he’s doing.” Lang shifted up into a seat. “It’s the way Lenore’s looking, here.”

“How’s that dress doing in all this heat, is what I want to know,” Obstat said eagerly. “She got that little V of sweat at the chest yet? I love that little V.”

“Fuck off,” Lang said.

“Hey now Wanger, you said I could look at the legs, and the V too if there was one!”

“Stop whining goddammit Neil,” Lang said angrily. He looked at Obstat, who was looking at him as he chewed. Lang rolled his eyes. “Here, then. Just take a fast goddamn look if you have to.” He passed the binoculars over to Obstat and rubbed his face.

Obstat scanned with the glasses. Lang could see that he was getting Pop Tart filling on them. “Oh Jesus God I’m in love,” Obstat whispered. “This is it. Mommy.”

“I told you to cut that shit out about Lenore.”

“Who’s talking about Lenore? I’m talking about this totally unbelievable babe under a sun umbrella that Lenore and the little double-chinned guy just went by.”

“Just went by?” Lang sat up. “Where’re they going?”

“They just turned around, looks like. They’re going back the way they came I guess.” Obstat was still aimed at the beautiful woman, in a black swimsuit, under an umbrella.

“Turned around? The
fuck.
Give me those things.”

Obstat looked up from the glasses, pissed off. “Hey,” he said. “Look here. If my ass gets dragged all the way out here and then gets made to row a stupid boat so you can try to read people’s lips, and if you’re going to get all hinkey about Lenore and not let me express feelings, you can at least let me scope a little bit.”

“You little skull-head,” Lang said. He yanked the binoculars out of Obstat’s hands and scanned the black rim of the Desert. “Holy shit, they are goin’ back,” he said. Obstat munched his Pop Tart in a funk. “I don’t like this at all,” Lang was saying. He reached out and knocked the Pop Tart out of Obstat’s hand into the water.

“Hey!” Obstat said.

“Row!” yelled Lang. People in the other boats looked over. Lang squatted back in the bow. “Turn this fucker around and row back the way we came.” He looked through the binoculars again as Obstat muttered and picked up the heavy oars.

“And also start gettin’ us in closer to shore,‘” Lang said, pausing for just a moment to look back at what was undeniably a really unbelievable woman, in that swimsuit. “I want us a whole lot closer to shore.”

11 September

“An excellent question, Monroe, ” said Slotnik, glancing over at Evelyn, in a new dry robe and nothing else, looking at her reflection in the dark living room window and trying on wigs. Slotnik turned back. “]ust what can you say, my friend, with your wet wrinkled clothes and smelly, kinky head? What can the universe say, when my supposedly good and respectable neighbors worship my children on the sly, and my supposedly good friend and colleague balls my wife, pokes and punctures the object of my every non-professional thought, tries to take my wife away, from me, to whom she rightfully belongs.
”
He stared at Fieldbinder. “What is to say, Monroe?”

Fieldbinder grinned coolly, then wryly. “Is it,
”
he said. He slowly felt at the feathers with his good hand.

“Yes,
”
he said again. “This is it. You’ve let yourself in for it, Monroe. ” He turned. “You’ve put your precious, prodigious self in connection with another. And now I’m taking the other back. Evelyn and I are now joined together, forever, in discipline and negatian. ”

“She is now gone, the connection severed, and so you are done,
”
said Slotnik, holding up his handcuffed wrist for effect. Evelyn’s arm moved with his.

“What an interestingly absurd theory, Don,
”
Fieldbinder said coolly.

“I’m afraid he means it, Monroe,
”
said Evelyn into the window. “Don has always been a man of his word. ” She turned and cocked her head, modelling a blond wig. “What do you think of this one, before you have to go?”

“What’s this? Are we checking out today?”

“....”

“Is that what we’re doing, Mr. Beadsman? Checking out?”

“Yes.”

“Well I have a form for you to sign right here, and then I guess off you go into the blue.”

“... ”

“We usually don’t release on Saturday you know Mr. Beadsman. I had to get this form out of a locked drawer you know.”

“I apologize for any inconvenience.”

“Oh I was just joking with you. That was just a joke. There’s no inconvenience at all.”

“May I please leave, then?”

“That’s a good signature you’ve got there, Mr. Beadsman, isn’t it? Now is somebody meeting you, or what?”

“No.”

“Dr. Nelm told me to expect somebody to meet you, Mr. Beadsman. Are we being naughty?”

“I want to take a taxi to the airport.”

“Are we going home, Mr. Beadsman? Are we going home to see our family?”

“....”

“Well all I can say is you just get your mother to give you something to eat. You just don’t eat enough, is part of your problem, if you want my two cents’ worth. You just eat, you hear?”

“Can you please call me a taxi?”

“And your father’s been notified, Dr. Nelm told me.”

“I’ll notify everyone.”

“Looks like a beautiful day out there. I heard it was going to rain, but I’ll take sunshine bouncing off our lake any old day won’t you?”

“....”

“I wish I was going to the airport on such a beautiful day.”

“I’m afraid the sun will hurt my eyes, I’ve been inside so long.”

“Now don’t you worry. You can just squint until you get used to it. Your old eyes will adjust to the outside lickety-split, mine always do.”

....“

“This is just a bright town we live in Mr. Beadsman.”

“So this goes on, really for longer than is necessary in order to get the narrative job done, with scene after scene of the wife coming in, tapping some
McTeague
onto the theoretical dentist’s lip, the psychologist coming in and fondling the achingly lovely wife from behind, even as she taps the
McTeague
code, the wife finally unable to resist any longer and throwing herself into the arms of the psychologist, and their rutting like crazed weasels on the hospital room floor while the theoretical dentist lies helpless in his bed, drowning in numb blackness and despair, vividly imagining precisely the scene that is taking place on the floor below him.”

“Although I bet it’s at least ninety-eight point six out here right now, don’t you think? I don’t know about at night, but I think the Desert could maybe support Lenore during the day. But maybe I’m just grasping at straws. Do you think I’m just grasping?”

“But see, part of the theoretical dentist’s despair stems from the fact that he really doesn’t and can’t blame his achingly lovely wife for what is happening. He knows all about his wife’s being troubled. He knows that she needs something which he is now, through no fault of his own, unable to give her. So he doesn’t and cannot blame her. But imagine his despair, Lenore. In his numb helpless black isolation he needs the emotional center of his life, the object of his complete adoration, his fiancée, more than ever; and yet he knows that it is precisely his state of helpless, inefficacious isolation—a state he is in through exactly zero fault of his own—that is of necessity driving the lovely woman he adores farther and farther away. So he forgives, Lenore. He forgives. But he bums every minute in a cold flame of unimaginable torment.”

“What’s going on, Rick?”

“He forgives her, Lenore. From the icy depths of his helpless isolation and fierce and complete love, he extends a theoretical hand of forgiveness, like so ...”

“Ow!”

“Dear me, excuse us, please.”

“Watch where you’re waving your hands, buddy!”

“Terribly sorry.”

“Freaking crowds. Let’s get, Rick. We’re just playing games. Lenore isn’t around here.”

“So on it goes. Finally the theoretical dentist’s brother, who is an estate attorney in Philadelphia, is able to break away from his incredibly successful practice and personal life to come see the withered husk of the theoretical dentist. Since the brother had gone through the Scouts right alongside the dentist, for him Morse code communication to the dentist is no problem, though communications from the dentist are still cumbersome as hell. Nevertheless we’re subjected to long and difficult coded conversations between the two in the hospital room, while the lovely wife, consumed with understandable self-loathing, and afraid that she would not be able to help making a pass at the devastatingly handsome estate-attorney brother, stays shacked up in the malevolent blond psychologist’s apartment, rutting, and also watching gymnastics on television, the symbolism of which doesn’t escape the reader, rest assured.”

“OK Rick, that’s it. Cut the story charade. We’re having a talk.”

“You bet your lovely bottom we are.”

“So why can’t we just have a talk without you pretending it’s something else, Rick? I find this pretty disturbing.”

“But see finally the wife can no longer stay away, she realizes that whatever physical connection she may crave because of her disastrously weak self-network, she and the dentist are connected in a much deeper and more profound and yes in some sense even more fulfilling and three-dimensional way, namely an
emotional
way, and so she rushes to the hospital, brushes aside nurses and orderlies, and bursts into the theoretical dentist’s room, only to see to her horror the dentist’s brother, leaning over the prone dentist, beginning to remove the dentist’s upper lip with a Boy Scout knife.”

“Oh, really, come on.”

“As the dentist, it turns out, had
requested.
Which, given the context, the sensitive reader of course regards as food for thought. But and so the wife screams, and the previously brushed-aside nurses and orderlies rush in, and they restrain the estate-attorney brother, and he is carried off, and the achingly lovely woman positively falls on the dentist’s mangled upper lip, trying to stop the bleeding and save the lip, lashing out at doctors who come near, tapping over and over into the gore that she loves the dentist, that she is sorry, please to forgive her. And through his pain the helpless dentist feels her tap, and his heart almost breaks, and though he knows it will do no good, because her pathetic neurosis will, he knows, soon drive the wife into outside connections again, he does forgive her, he does, and he moves his lip in his pathetically tiny way, to let her know he forgives her, but the heart-tweakingly tiny familiar movement of the lip is here of course obscured by the flow of blood from the attempted lip-removal, and so the wife just cannot see the movement, no matter how frantically the helpless dentist tries to move his lip, and so the wife, getting no visible results, finally reels from the dentist’s room in despair and horror and guilt, and immediately goes shopping.”