The Broom of the System (61 page)

“Shopping?”

“....”

“Shopping?”

“Lenore, look out there. What is that flash, out on the water? Is that a sunlight-off-binoculars flash?”

“....”

“Good Lord it is. Lenore, what’s going on?”

“ ”

“It is. It’s Lang, in a boat. They’re rowing this way. They’ve been watching. Lenore, what is Lang shouting? Is that Lang, shouting?”

“Rick, I can explain ...”

“No problem at all. Let me just ... I have to hurry.”

“What are those?”

“These are our connection, Lenore. I forgive you.”

“Handcuffs? You’re going to forgive me with handcuffs that say ‘Bambi’s Den of Discipline’ on them?”

“The ... achingly lovely woman returns that night to the dentist’s hospital room with her copy of
McTeague.
She comes in the night to the numb dentist and taps to him. She taps the conclusion of
McTeague.
The book’s climax. Have you ever experienced the climax of
McTeague?”

“Rick, you just take it easy.”

“The climax consists of McTeague, the dentist, handcuffed to the corpse of his malevolent foe, Marcus Schouler, in the middle of a desert.”

“Desert? Handcuffs? Corpses? Oh shit. Andy!
Andy!”

“Andy? No,
Schouler.”

“Rick ...”

“And as she taps it, ever so gently, taking care not to hurt him any more than she has already, she looks at the dentist’s motionless face and sees a single tear emerge from one partly sedated eye and course down his cheek until it is silently absorbed by a cotton bandage. She, too, weeps, with no sound.... And she produces a pair of handcuffs, which she had gone to enormous expense and embarrassment to buy ... and ... joins herself ... to the wrist of the theoretical dentist, his inefficacious wrist ...”

“What are you doing? Let me
go
!”

“... with the deep oiled ...
click
of the handcuffs.”

“Jesus, Rick. This is it. You get these off right now. You get me out. I’ve told you I hate this torture and pain stuff, and you just don’t care! You’re a sick man!”

“Torture and pain? Lenore, I forgive you.”

“Forgive what, for Christ’s sake? Help! Andy! Neil!”

“God damn it, Rick, this is it. No talking, even. I wanted to talk, I said let’s talk Rick, but no, so now forget it, I’m sorry but that’s it.”

“We are now joined, my center and reference! In negation and discipline! Our bodies are husks!”

“You just better have the key. God, Andy, see if he’s got the key. ”

“What the fuck’s going on here?”

“Can’t you see? He’s
locked
us together!”

“Look you little wiener, cough up the key to these things or your ass is grass.”

“You are
fired,
Lang! You are
dismissed!”

“Fuck being
dismissed.
You let this little lady go.”

“Lenore, we will shrink into husks together. We will bleed in the sky. See it?”

“Wanger, is he crying? Is the little sucker crying?”

“Shut up, Neil.”

“Rick, please don’t. Let’s just talk about it. Don’t sit in the sand and cry. Everybody can see. Let’s stand up.”

“We’ll be joined in the light of the sky, Lenore. See the light of the sky? The dawn and sunset will be fed from our veins. We’ll be spread all over. We’ll be everything. We’ll be gigantic.”

“How fucking pathetic.”

“Shut up, Neil.”

“Look here, R.V., let’s just stand on up and talk this over, and unlock all this shit.”

“She is handcuffed. to a corpse, in the Desert. Don’t you see the ... irony?”

“Want me to just get a cop, here, Wanger?”

“If she weren’t three-dimensional, she wouldn’t be caught! Don’t you see? A three-dimensional husk!”

“I think old R.V.’s just lost a few cards out of a certain deck, Lenore. ”

“Rick.”

“That’s where we’ll be. We’ll be prodigious enough to feed the whole sky! Don’t you see? And whose fault is it, after all?”

“Aw, Rick, don’t you see? Fault just doesn’t enter into it at all.”

“Exactly. Exactly. It’s no one’s fault. We all agree.”

“Rick ...”

“Lenore sugar doll I care about you. I do. I don’t care who knows it. I care about you as a person. R. V. can put all the shit on you he wants. You’re mine now. I don’t care if the whole world knows it. Hey y‘all! I care about this little lady right here!”

“We’re in the sky. We can’t hear you.”

“Fuck off, R. V. Look, Lenore, I’m gonna go ahead and just break the chain on these things. OK? I think I can break ‘em. I’ve broke shit like this before.”

“Go ahead and try, Lang. You just go ahead and try it, and see what happens!”

“Is that OK, Lenore?”

“....”

“You ready?”

The time last night when Lenore Beadsman cried in front of Andrew Sealander Lang was the first time she had ever cried in front of anybody else, at all.

Rick Vigorous has cried in front of lots of people.

Disorder asserted itself in the lobby of the Bombardini Building soon after Lenore Beadsman arrived, in a nearly unprecedented state of piss-off, to clear her personal items out of the Frequent and Vigorous/Bombardini Company switchboard cubicle.

Candy Mandible was at the board, filling in briefly for Mindy Metalman, who’d been installed as a temporary at the say-so of Rick Vigorous, and who was for starters supposed to work the day shift today, Saturday, but who had, this morning, finally been able to get hold of Dr. Martin Tissaw, the oral surgeon, Lenore’s landlord, at home, in East Corinth, and had dashed over at lunchtime to see him, to talk about “birds, miracles, dreams and professionalism, not necessarily in that order,” as she’d said to Candy when Candy came in to relieve her. Mindy’s call had awakened Candy at Nick Allied’s Shaker Heights home, where Candy had spent an unhappy night waiting for Allied, who was supposed to return from a product-evaluation trip with his stenographer around midnight, but never had, and hadn’t even called.

The thing is that even before Lenore and Lang arrived, Candy Mandible was getting a hard time of it from any number of sources. There was, for example, Judith Prietht, who had weekends off because the Bombardini Company switchboard was down from Friday night to Monday morning, but who usually came on into the lobby on Saturday anyway, to knit shapeless sweaters and listen to her radio and watch the Erieview shadow move along the lobby walls, and who had today actually brought in her cat, which, when Judith saw that it was Candy at the console, she was for obvious reasons very anxious to introduce to her. And so Judith was hanging around the outside of the cubicle, hefting the cat, being bothersome and artificially nice, and dropping all sorts of heavy hints about blessings and autographs and partnership. Her new idea was to have the Reverend Hart Lee Sykes deliver a personal blessing to the cat, whose name was apparently Champ, and who was the single most obese cat Candy had ever seen, anywhere, but anyway who was supposed to receive the blessing, personally, while he placed a chubby paw on Judith’s television screen. Judith told Candy that Reverend Sykes made time for a viewer-touching-the-screen moment in every installment of ‘The Partners With God Club,’ believing that theologically and economically important Sykes/viewer communications could be established this way.

There was also the matter of Clint Roxbee-Cox, who had kept calling Candy at Nick’s place last night, and not saying anything, and who was now doing the same thing at the F and V board, although he must have had to call many times just to get through at all, because the Frequent and Vigorous switchboard situation was worse than ever. Mindy was too new to get really pissed off yet, but Candy had just about had it with the switchboard. Not only was she getting illegitimate calls for other places, with Fuss ‘n’ Feathers Pet Shop and Cleveland Towing both enjoying unprecedented volume, but now the board had taken to lighting up and ringing and beeping her console phones for what appeared to be no reason at all, with no one on the other end, at all, just static, which was distinguishable from an illegitimate but still human Roxbee-Cox call by the breathing that was a prominent feature of the latter. The phones simply would not shut up, and Candy couldn’t shut down the console, because she didn’t have a ratchet wrench. With great reluctance she tried calling to complain at Interactive Cable, and was informed that Console Service Technician Peter Abbott should at that very moment have been on his way over to the Bombardini Building, by way of Enrique’s House of Cheese, to relate news of some importance to the appropriate Frequent and Vigorous personnel. Ms. Peahen had already been contacted, and they were trying to reach Mr. Vigorous.

“Super,” Candy said.

Then there was the unlikely pair of Mr. Bloemker and Alvin Spaniard, whom Candy didn’t know from a hole in the ground, and who had been lurking in the lobby for about half an hour, waiting to see Lenore. Mr. Bloemker claimed that they’d called the Tissaws’ boarding house and spoken to a strangely familiar-sounding young woman who had said she knew for a positive fact that Lenore was on her way to the Bombardini Building. Candy had shrugged, at the console. She assumed the woman on the phone had been Mindy Metalman, but had no idea how Mindy was supposed to know where Lenore was. Anyway, the two men had looked at their watches and at each other, and said they’d wait, and their waiting had made for an unpleasant half hour, because Alvin Spaniard kept making what Candy thought might have been eyes at her, and Judith Prietht kept making what Candy knew from her long acquaintance with Judith definitely were eyes at Mr. Bloemker, and Mr. Bloemker was just being unnecessarily creepy—scratching violently at his beard, having bits of random sunlight reflect off his glasses, sometimes acting as if he were whispering to someone under his arm when there was clearly no one there, and asking Judith and Candy how they perceived their own sense of the history of the Midwest. Champ had hissed at him. Now Bloemker and Alvin Spaniard were walking slowly around the huge perimeter of the inside of the lobby, pointing at the floor in various places and speaking in low tones. Candy just could not wait for Mindy Metalman Lang to get back.

But now in through the revolving door came Lenore, and following her was Andy Lang, and out in front was the sound of Neil Obstat peeling out in Lang’s Trans Am, he having been signalled on his Stonecipheco beeper the minute the three of them had gotten far enough north on 77 to be in beeper range. Obstat was supposed to come back for them as soon as he could.

Lenore didn’t even seem to notice her brother-in-law and Mr. Bloemker when she came in. She didn’t seem to notice anything. She was also walking funny, and her dress was dirty, and she had a smear of black dust on her face, plus a brightly sunburned nose, and on her wrist Candy could see what was pretty clearly a handcuff, trailing a short length of broken pretend-silver chain.

“Jesus Lenore,” Candy said when Lenore got inside the cubicle. Judith and Champ were staring from the counter.

“Don’t want to hear it Candy,” Lenore said, without looking up. She opened one of the white switchboard cabinets and began taking some of her books out and sorting them on the counter. Out came a little cloth bag with soap, toothbush, and toothpaste. Lenore wordlessly hunted for other items in the cabinet. She opened the next cabinet door and brought out a stack of old lottery tickets bound with a rubber band.

“Hey there Candy,” Lang nodded tiredly from the switchboard counter, rubbing his face.

Candy folded her arms and looked at the handcuff hanging from Lenore’s wrist. The handcuff kept clanking on the insides of the cabinets. The skin of Lenore’s wrist was all red. On the handcuff itself Candy could see part of a pair of metal lips shaped in a kiss-design; on the lips was embossed “Bambi’s Den Of.”

“ ‘Bambi’s Den Of?’ ” she said. She looked up at Lang. Lenore was sifting through some of her magazines.

“Hi there, Lenore,‘” Judith Prietht was saying in a high, pretend-cat voice, holding Champ and moving the cat’s paw up and down in a hello. She made a move to bring the cat back into the cubicle.

“Please stay out, Judith,” Lenore said quietly.

“Ladies, let’s not give Lenore any more grief than need be, she’s had a bad enough day as it is,” Lang said, leaning his elbows on the counter.

“A bad day?” Candy said.

“Don’t want to talk about it.”

“Bad grandmother-news?”

“Don’t want to talk about it.”

“Grandmothers and Desert bondage?”

“Hush, now, Candy,” said Lang.

It wasn’t clear how long Mr. Bloemker and Alvin Spaniard had been at the edge of the counter, next to the hissing Champ. Now Mr. Bloemker rubbed an eye and cleared his throat.

Lang looked over at him. “We help you, chief?”

Mr. Bloemker gave him a bland look. “We are here to speak to Ms. Beadsman,” he said.

Lenore had meanwhile sat down, in Judith’s Bombardini-switchboard chair, and closed her eyes. Now she looked up at Bloemker and Alvin, as if she didn’t recognize them for a moment.

“Hi,” she said.

“Well hello, Lenore,” Alvin said. He was smiling the way someone smiles when he doesn’t feel very well.

“Hi.”

“We come on unprecedentedly urgent business, Ms. Beadsman,” said Bloemker.

“Do you.”

“Gentlemen, the little lady’s had herself a rough morning,” Lang said, moving over behind Bloemker and Alvin and putting a hand on each man’s shoulder. “What say we all just give her some time to collect, here.”

The phones had of course been ringing and beeping like crazy this whole time. Candy Mandible kept Accessing one trunk after another, and there would just be static, and tones.