The Broom of the System

PART TWO


12
1990
/a/

“Perhaps I’ll try another crustless Hellman‘s-less ham sandwich, with you taking whatever steps might be possible to minimize the saltiness of the ham.”
“....”
“And a Canadian Club and distilled water.”
“Sure. How about Lenore? Is Lenore asleep?”
“Fnoof, fnoof fnoof.”
“So it would seem.”
“Sir, how about you? Would you like anything?”
“Ma‘am, while I take a minute to formulate a suitable answer to that, you could bring me a beer. I don’t need a glass.”
“All righty.”
“Thank you, miss.”
“....”
“Who the hell is that?”
“I think her name is Jennifer. She’s the Stonecipheco stewardess.”
“Hang me upside down if that’s not the beautifulest goddamn stewardess I ever saw. Would I like anything, she says.”
“Ahem. Lenore has given me to understand that Jennifer is married to the Stonecipheco pilot, in whose hands our lives at the moment happen to rest.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Would you care for some gum?”
“Not if I got beer coming. You sure chew a lot of gum, R.V.”
“I have ear trouble on planes. Normally I loathe gum.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Not to mention planes themselves.”
“Ho there, Lenore. You up?”
“Fnoof.”
“I so envy people who can sleep on planes, Andrew.”
“She sure is a nice sleeper. My wife, when she sleeps, sometimes her mouth hangs open. Sometimes a little bit of spit comes out of her mouth and gets on the pillow. I hate that.”
“Lenore is a lovely sleeper.”
“Look, R.V., does Lenore remember me or not? Like I said, I’m just positive it was her I met that night I met my wife. I was a little bit trashed, but still.”
“She hasn’t said anything to me. An appropriate context for discussing the issue didn’t arise, last night. She fell asleep almost immediately.”
“Those Howard Johnson’s beds are comfortable all right. Howard Johnson’s kicks ass. I appreciated the room, and the dinner, and the use of the razor. The Flange just about cleaned me out. I can’t believe I was too stupid to bring more money up with me.”
“Not a problem at all. Stonecipheco will absorb it. Consider it an advance.”
“Except the thing is, I’ve been thinkin’ about it ... hey, thanks, looks great. The beer, too. Heh-heh.”
“....”
“Thank you, miss. I believe that will be all for now.”
“Just ring if you want anything.”
“Thank you.”
“Just ring, she says. She’s a tease, ain’t she? Lord, though, look at that. That’s a first-rate pooper, under that skirt.”
“Crusts, again. The girl seems incapable of removing crusts.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Please go on with what you were saying.”
“Well, I was thinkin’ about the night I think I met Lenore, the night I met Melinda-Sue, and what happened was me and this other guy, who turned out later on to be a real loser, we went over to Mount Holyoke, and kind of barged on into these girls’ rooms, for a kind of fraternity thing. I don’t quite remember what.”
“....”
“And I remember I think Lenore got pissed off. She was real young and I don’t think she knew the whole story. I remember she threw a shoe at the guy I was with.”
“A shoe?”
“Yup. And she told Melinda-Sue she had ugly feet.”
“Shoes and feet, again.”
“Yup. So I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to act, if I should just pretend like I don’t know her, either, or what. I can’t tell if she’s still pissed off after all these years or not.”
“Real, sustained anger in Lenore is quite rare, I’ve found. Embarrassment, though, is not. I would be willing to bet that Lenore is simply embarrassed. When she’s embarrassed about something, she tends to pretend it doesn’t exist.”
“You think that’s why she sort of acts like she don’t remember me, from that night, or Melinda-Sue?”
“It’s very possible.”
“You say she works at Frequent and Vigorous too? So I’ll be workin’ with her?”
“Not directly. As of before we left, she answered telephones, at the Frequent and Vigorous switchboard, in the lobby, downstairs. But on this trip I’ve had a bit of an inspiration, I think.”
“An inspiration?”
“Yes. I think I’ve come to see that the switchboard is not a full-time place for a woman of Lenore’s capacities. She is chafing, I’m almost certain.”
“Chafing?”
“Yes. I’ve come to see that it all adds up. The context is right. Lenore is chafing. She likes stories. To the extent that she understands herself, it’s as having something like a literary sensibility. And you and I, here most significantly I, will at least for a while be occupied with the Stonecipheco project account. The crux is that I plan to put Lenore on my personal staff, part-time, as a reader.”
“A reader?”
“Yes, of pieces submitted to the high-quality literary review of which I am editor, the Frequent Review. She can weed out the more obviously pathetic or inappropriate submissions, and save me valuable weeding-time, which you and I can spend on the Corfu project.”
“Hell of an idea, R.V.”
“I rather think so myself.”
“Yes indeedy.”
“Of course I’ll have to make sure that her sensibilities are keened to precisely the right pitch for the Review ...”
“So we’ll be workin’ with her, but not exactly with her.”
“As far as you go, that is right.”
“Which works out good, because I’m not supposed to say what it is I’m workin’ on, to her.”
“Yes, unfortunately.”
“And if she asks, I have to say I’m ... let me look at this ... I’m supposed to say I’m translating this thing called ‘Norslan: The Third-World Herbicide That Likes People’ into idiomatic modern Greek.”
“Correct.”
“But except we still haven’t come to why exactly I have to say all this shit if she asks. If she’s just an employee, how come it matters? And what does she care if we’re tryin’ to sell nuclear baby food on Corfu?”
“This is unfortunately not entirely clear to me, Andrew, and just let me say I’m far from qualmless about the whole situation.”
“....”
“You are of course already aware that Stonecipheco is controlled by the Beadsman family, to a nearly exhaustive extent, and I’ll now inform you that Mr. Stonecipher Beadsman has stipulated in our contract that Lenore not know what is up in terms of Frequent and Vigorous involvement in the project until he wishes her to.”
“And you don’t find that just a tinch unusual?”
“Charitable speculation about Mr. Beadsman’s reasoning might suggest that he doesn’t want to involve Lenore in any more unpleasantness than is necessary. Suffice to say that the whole Corfu marketing venture is bound up with some family turbulence that’s worrying Lenore a lot, right now. Which turbulence is the main reason she and I came to Amherst, at all, so that Lenore might speak with her brother ...”
“The kid we had dinner with at Aqua Vitae.”
“Yes. Stonecipher LaVache Beadsman.”
“He was pretty goddamn wild, I thought. ‘Course I have to admit I was kind of wasted. We drank all that in the Flange, and then you dragged me all over hell’s half acre through those crowds in the forest. Shit I drank went to my head and roosted. He was wild, though, I could tell.”
“He’s had rather a rough time of it.”
“Satanic little dung beetle, too.”
“Dung beetle?”
“Little dude looked like the devil. And what was all that about talkin’ about his leg like it was another person? He would like address comments to his f*cking leg. What was all that about?”
“Lenore’s brother has only one leg. One of LaVache’s legs is artificial.”
“No shit.”
“None whatsoever. Couldn’t you tell?”
“He limped some, and he sat weird, but no.”
“He was wearing slacks at dinner. But he was wearing shorts when we first met him, on the hill. You didn’t see his leg then?”
“R.V., that hill got blacker than a panther’s ass when we got up top. The sun went right the hell down. It was darker than shit. I was wasted, too. I wouldn’t have been able to even see Lenore, if she hadn’t had that white dress on. And plus then I had to run right down to get my car over to Coach‘s, so I never really saw the sucker in shorts. I sure am sorry, though.”
“No need to be sorry. I was simply informing you of a fact.”
“Christ. What happened to his leg, then? How come they chopped it off?”
“No one chopped his leg off. LaVache was minus a leg from birth.”
“No shit. What, like a birth defect or something?”
“Not exactly.”
“What, then?”
“God, we’re over Lake Erie, now. This is my least favorite part of the trip, by far. My ears are also hurting like hell.”
“Too bad. That’s Lake Erie, huh?”
“Unfortunately.”
“Water’s kind of a funny color.”
“I’m sure whatever percentage of the lake is water is a perfectly lovely color. The percentage is however unfortunately quite small.”
“How come there’s no waves? How come the water doesn’t move?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“So what’s this about the kid’s leg, then? Legs don’t just disappear for no reason.”
“That’s obviously true.”
“....”
“Lenore is still asleep, isn’t she?”
“Fnoof.”
“Yup.”
“Lenore hates to be told about.”
“The leg story isn’t about her, though, is it?”
“What happened was that after the first three Beadsman children were born, Mrs. Beadsman’s health apparently got a bit ticklish. Nothing physically major—just a touch of anemia, or something like that. Mr. Stonecipher Beadsman III, Lenore’s father, however, through a troublingly ambiguous process of reasoning, came to the conclusion that Mrs. Beadsman was no longer entirely able to care for her children adequately, so at a certain point he hired a governess, a Miss Malig, a stunningly beautiful woman—she’s now an unbelievable battle-ax, with calves like chums, but back then she was apparently stunningly beautiful—which hiring itself represented a significant corporate coup, because Miss Malig had only the year before been named Miss Gerber in the annual Gerber Quality Brands beauty pageant, and Mr. Robert Gerber, Mr. Beadsman’s old college friend—Amherst, by the way, ‘61—and sworn corporate enemy, had been wild about her, and there had been rumors that he was going to divorce his striking Brazilian wife Paquita to devote all his time to the pursuit of Nancy Malig, but Mr. Beadsman, somehow, through maneuvers to this day unclear, spirited her away, and installed her in his home, at an exorbitant salary, ostensibly to take care of Clarice and John and Lenore.”
“What does all this have to do with legs?”
“What happened was that this hiring of Nancy Malig—with whom by the way Mr. Beadsman almost certainly began having an immoderate sexual affair that may very well continue to this day— and the at least partial separation from her children such a hiring represented and entailed, made Mrs. Beadsman, who had always been naturally rather melancholy, intensely sad. And the intense sadness had further non-good consequences for her health, now by implication emotional health, as well as physical. And so Mr. Beadsman, by now inarguably to some extent under Miss Malig’s erotic spell, and in any event naturally disposed to be very weird indeed about his children, and obsessed with the future of the family, and of Stonecipheco, Inc., even though at that point he was still only a vice president, since his father had not yet died in a Jell-O accident, and in any event disposed to be constantly giving his three children all sorts of specially developed standardized tests, academic and psychological, to begin the process of determining on whom the mantle of corporate power would someday devolve, became convinced somehow that Mrs. Beadsman’s mere presence was a harmful thing for the children, and thus the family, and thus the Company, and he began to take active steps to keep the children away from her altogether, which steps consisted of, a, expanding and combining the three children’s rooms into an immense impregnable combination nursery and playroom and bedroom and dining room, et cetera, with a heavy boltable iron door, and its own restroom facilities, and a dumbwaiter link to the kitchen, and so on, a maneuver which in intended effect isolated the children and Miss Malig in one wing of the Beadsman home in Shaker Heights, the east wing, an almost tower-ish extension of the house, with a lovely white trellis draped with dusky green vines running up the outer wall to the windows, a wing I’ve obviously personally seen, given this description. So the children, under Miss Malig’s malevolent eye, were isolated from the rest of the house, through which the now more than a little troubled Mrs. Beadsman would roam, in a flowing white cotton dress, often in the company of Mrs. Lenore Beadsman, Mr. Beadsman’s grandmother, who usually as a rule kept to her study, poring over meaningless tomes she’d been exposed to in her days as a student, which she still in effect was, a student, that is Mrs. Lenore Beadsman kept to her study until the mother-separated-from-children situation began really to assert itself, and old Lenore began to perceive the evilness of the Stonecipher-Malig liaison, and so would roam the house with Mrs. Beadsman, Patrice, also in a flowing white dress, trying to help Patrice think of ways to get in to see the children.”
“....”
“That is they roamed until Mr. Beadsman took step b, which consisted of demanding that Patrice Beadsman become a world-class contract bridge player—she’d been quite a spectacular bridge player in college—so as to get her out of the house and away from the children and him and Miss Malig. And so he arranges to have built a special little bungalow in the back of the house, for Patrice to by and large live in, and to practice bridge in, every moment, and he enters her in all sorts of world-class bridge tournaments, and hires a coach and partner for her, Blanchard Foamwhistle, a world-class contract bridge player, and, interestingly enough, the father of the man who is now Mr. Beadsman’s executive secretary at Stonecipheco. And Foamwhistle is paid an exorbitant salary, and he and Patrice are confined for days at a time to the bridge bungalow, ostensibly working on bridge strategy and bridge theory, and soon Patrice becomes mysteriously once again pregnant, and it is to me unclear whether she became pregnant by Foamwhistle or by Mr. Beadsman, although Mr. Beadsman gave no indication that he suspected anything sexually amiss, and in any event announced his intention to name the baby—which baby would without a doubt, he maintained, be a boy—Stonecipher, and he instructs Miss Malig to set up another crib in the impregnable east wing fortress.”
“You got this shit down, don’t you?”
“You want your question answered or not?”
“I guess.”
“Well that’s what I’m attempting.”
“....”
“And so by this time Mrs. Beadsman’s pregnancy, with its attendant hormonal and general chemical consequences, together with the original unhappiness and troubles, together with the continued isolation of the children, who are as a matter of routine hustled right up to the east wing tower after school, while Foamwhistle, on Mr. Beadsman’s high-paid instructions, keeps Patrice confined as best he can in the bridge bungalow, together with the obviously planned additional isolation of the baby, too, when it’s born, all combine to make Mrs. Beadsman understandably even more intensely unhappy, and frantic, and disoriented, and emotionally not a little unwell. And this has truly disastrous consequences for her contract bridge, a game which you may or may not know demands a clear undistracted mind and nerves of steel and absolute emotional soundness, and Patrice and Foamwhistle lose in the first round of every single world-class bridge tournament they enter, even though Foamwhistle is acknowledged to be one of the world’s very finest contract bridge players, which gives you some idea of the truly pathetic state of Patrice’s bridge, and soon they no longer even legitimately qualify for the world-class tournaments, because they get annihilated all the time, but Stonecipher Beadsman persistently bribes and coerces various tournament officials into continuing to admit Patrice and Foamwhistle to the tournaments, which the already frazzled Patrice finds excruciatingly embarrassing, and so becomes even more frazzled, and so on.”
“....”
“And this goes on until about the eighth or ninth month of Patrice’s pregnancy, and finally she and Foamwhistle get absolutely demolished in the preliminary round of a marginally world-class tournament in Dayton, by two eight-year-old contract bridge prodigies who wear matching beanies with propellers on top, and who deny Patrice and Foamwhistle even one trick, which represents a true thumping of ass, in bridge, and Patrice comes home, huge with child, and wildly frazzled, and deeply humiliated, and immediately on her arrival she runs into the east wing and up the tower stairs and pounds on the iron door of the children’s impregnable ward, pleading for entry, and apparently little Lenore on the other side pounds back, but Stonecipher Beadsman appears at the door and says that Patrice is obviously in no condition to have anything but a bad effect on the children, who are at this point undergoing a battery of intricate standardized psychological tests administered by Miss Malig to help see which one is best suited to assume control of Stonecipheco one day, and the tests are at the final and most critical stage, Stonecipher says, and so he demands that Patrice return to the bridge bungalow with Foamwhistle, to practice, and he orders Foamwhistle to keep her confined as best he can, and so she’s installed back in the bungalow with only a card table and some decks of cards, and of course Foamwhistle.
“And to Foamwhistle’s enormous consternation and pity Patrice begins beating her head against the edge of the card table, crying out that if she can’t see the children she’s going to die, and she’s totally hysterical, and in a very bad way, and Foamwhistle’s heart almost breaks—that there is some sort of ambiguous emotional connection between Patrice and Foamwhistle is by this time hardly open to doubt—and his heart is breaking, and he decides to do his best to help Patrice see the children, at least for a moment, and he asks her what he can do to help. And Patrice looks at him with doe-like gratitude and trust, and tells him that she’s been thinking, and that if he can just somehow arrange to get one of the outside windows of the children’s east-wing nursery fortress unlocked, she can scale the white trellis running up the outer wall of the east wing and pop in to see the children, and touch them, if only briefly, before anyone can stop her. A really bad idea, for a woman huge with child, and actually, you are probably beginning to intuit, an ominous and disastrous idea. But Foamwhistle, who is vicariously frazzled by Patrice’s clear emotional distress, unwisely agrees to do it. And so he waits until the children’s nap time, and then goes to the nursery fortress and shouts through the door to Miss Malig that Patrice is asleep, too, and that he wants to come in and give Miss Malig a contract bridge lesson, and also maybe fool around, a bit—who knows what all was going on by that time—and Miss Malig lets him in, and at some point, when her attention is diverted, Foamwhistle goes to the window and unlocks it and opens it ever so slightly—this was in May, by the way, of ‘72, just as I was moving to Scarsdale—and but anyhow Foamwhistle slips out of the ever-so-slightly opened window a card—the Queen of Spades—which is the pre-arranged signal to Patrice that all is set, and the card flutters down through the soft May air to Patrice, there in her white dress at the bottom of the trellis.”
“Are you bullshitting me, here, R.V.? I mean come on.”
“Since I sense impatience on your part, I’ll make a long story short by saying that Patrice attempts to scale the trellis to the open window, and that, near the top, her pregnant weight pulls the troublingly weak and unsteady trellis away from the tower wall, and the trellis breaks, and, with a shriek, Patrice falls a significantly and disastrously long way to the ground, and lands on her pregnant belly, and spontaneously gives explosive birth to LaVache, which is to say Stonecipher, who lands several yards away in a flowerbed, minus a leg, the leg in question, which was tom off in LaVache’s explosive ejaculation from Patrice’s womb, and both infant and mother are grievously hurt, and in a horrible way, but Foamwhistle hears Patrice’s shriek and runs to the window and looks down and bites his knuckle in grief and relocks the window and calls ambulances and fire engines and rushes down to administer the appropriate sustaining first-aid, and Patrice and LaVache are rushed to the hospital, and both survive, but Patrice is now hopelessly emotionally troubled, out of her head, to be more exact, and she has to be institutionalized, and spends the rest of the time between then and now in and out of institutions, and is as a matter of fact in one now, in Wisconsin.”
“Shit on fire.”
“In any event, hence LaVache’s leglessness.”
“Holy shit.”
“And once Patrice is psychologically out of the picture—about which Stonecipher the father apparently feels little guilt, since he, presumably through the filter of Miss Malig’s erotic spell, had already perceived Patrice as off her nut for some time—once she’s out of the house, more or less for good, the physical and emotional isolation of the children gradually stops, and Miss Malig eventually lets them live semi-normal, childish lives, including Little League and Brown ies and slumber parties, et cetera, when they’re not busy being tested, but in all events by this time all sorts of damage has been done, to the family and the individual family-members.”
“Not to mention the poor little satanic sucker’s leg.”
“Right.”
“Christ on a Kawasaki.”
“Fnoof.”
“....”
“Lenore tell you all that?”
“I think we’re getting close. I sense the closeness of Cleveland. Can you smell that? A smell like removing the lid from a pot of something that’s been left in one’s refrigerator just a little too long?”
“Can’t say as I smell anything but beer and Wrigley’s Spearmint, R.V.”
“I’m just acutely sensitive to the odor of Cleveland, I suppose. I have a monstrously sensitive sense of smell.”
“....”
“Though not as sensitive as some people I could name.”
“So what books have y‘all published? Have I likely read some books you put out?”
“We’re definitely getting close. See all the dead fish? The density of the fish goes up significantly as we approach shore. It looks as if I’m to be spared a sludge-death yet again.”
“Uh-huh.”
“....”
“So you think I can get a temporary room at this house Lenore lives at, right?”
“I’m practically positive. The young lady who lives directly below Lenore and her roommate Ms. Mandible will be involuntarily out of her apartment for at least three months, guaranteed. Mrs. Tissaw will be predictably anxious to ensure occupancy and so rent payment for that period.”
“How come you know for sure the little lady’s gone for three months?”
“She works for Lenore’s sister, Clarice, who now owns a chain of tanning parlors in the area. There was a horrible accident. The girl will be all right, but will require at least three months of hospitalization and continual Noxzema treatments.”
“You mean ... ?”
“Yes. Tanning accident.”
“Bad news.”
“Yes. But at least an available apartment, cheap. And your assignment with the firm cannot possibly last for more than three months, barring utter disaster.”
“OK by me.”
“Andrew, listen, may I ask a question?”
“Shoot.”
“Will Mindy be coming out to join you? You have told her the developments—she does know where you’re going to be, doesn’t she? What exactly is the Mindy situation?”
“R.V., look and listen. It’s like I told you, I just felt like I had to get out for a while. Breathe some temporarily Melinda-Sue-free air. She and I had a bit of a tiff before I drove up to school, I make no bones. But it’s more’n that. To my mind there’s just this temporary lack of wonderfulness about our whole relationship.”
“....”
“So things are just temporarily up in the air.”
“....”
“And no, I didn’t exactly call her from school, I didn’t tell her I’d run into y‘all and was coming out here to do some work. But she’ll be able to find out when she wants. I had to leave my car with Coach Zandagnio, who was my lacrosse coach, and sort of my mentor, at school, and I told him the whole story. And Melinda-Sue knows that if anybody knows where I would have gone from school, it’s old Stenetore, ’cause she knew him too, he went to our wedding when she got out of school; he gave us a gravy boat.”
“You played lacrosse at Amherst?”
“I was a lacrosse-playing fool.”
“Always struck me as a staggeringly savage game.”
“A truly and completely kick-ass game. A game that kicks ass.”
“I see.”
“....”
“Lenore darling, are you awake?”
“Fnoof.”
“Girl can do some serious sleeping.”
“May I be explicit, here, for a moment, Wang-Dang?”
“Draw and fire, R. V.”
“I am passionately, fiercely, and completely in love with Lenore. She is not quite as explicitly my fiancée as I may have inadvertently led you to believe in the Flange, but she is nevertheless mine. I have a bit of a jealousy problem, I’m told. My setting in motion the process of your possibly temporarily sharing a building with Lenore, actually, to be honest, my inviting you to come and temporarily enter our lives and work for Frequent and Vigorous, at all, was predicated on the understandable assumption that you were emotionally involved with and attached to Mindy Metalman, a woman who, just let me say in all candor, strikes me as the sort of woman an attachment to whom on, for example, my part would leave me completely uninterested in any and all of the world’s other females. Do you get my drift?”
“Go on.”
“Then the drift now becomes a tide, and I say that, in light of what I now know, given what seems to be at least a partial and temporary unattachment to your wife, Mindy, a past that includes an acquaintance with Lenore, under whatever circumstances, prior to my own, and at least clear verbal evidence of vigorous hormonal activity on your part, I feel I can be truly comfortable only in the context of an explicit recognition on your part of the fact that Lenore is mine, and thus out of bounds, that as I am to be regarded as a sort of brother, or uncle, whatever you will, so Lenore is to be regarded by you as a sort of sister, or aunt, with whom any sort of attempted romantic involvement is and would be entirely unthinkable.”
“....”
“There.”
“Damned if you’re not the most articulate little rooster I ever heard crow.”
“....”
“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a tiny bit hurt by the idea that I might do something like what you’re afraid of to a Psi Phi brother, to an Amherst uncle. But to put your mind at rest ... your mind isn’t quite at rest, here, is it?”
“It can be put so with utter ease, by you.”
“OK, then let me just say, right here, that I give you my word of honor as an alumni of the single finest undergraduate institution in the land that I will not harbor any but the most honorable of thoughts toward your woman.”
“I’m all too aware that it’s silly, but could you promise not to take her away?”
“R.V., I promise not to take her away.”
“Thank you. Well there. That’s out of the way.”
“You all right? Your forehead’s wet as hell. You want to use my hankie?”
“No thank you. I have my own.”
“Gentlemen, the captain asks that you please refasten your seat belts for landing.”
“My ears are rumbling like mad.”
“You wouldn’t by any chance want to help me with my particular belt, here, ma‘am, would you?”
“Ixnay—ilotpay.”
“....”
“Fnoof.”
“Lenore.”
“Fnoof. What?”
“Damned if you can’t sleep up a storm, Lenore.”
“What time is it?”
“We’re apparently preparing to land.”
“Boy am I tired.”
“Sweet dreams?”
“I’m not sure. My mouth tastes like a barn. I would kill for a shower. ”
“Have some gum.”
“Want to try some Skoal?”
“Not for anything in the world.”
“Lenore, my ears are in their own private hell.”
“Poor Rick. What can I do to help?”
“Perhaps a bit of a temple massage ...”
“Let me just get my big old carcass out of the way, here ...”
/b/

By the time Rick dropped Lenore and Wang-Dang Lang off near the Tissaws’ it was almost four, and beginning to mist a little, so that even though it wasn’t very cold Lenore could see her breath, and Lang’s. Rick dashed off to attend to some affairs at Frequent and Vigorous, but promised, as he dropped them a few hundred yards from the oral surgeon’s big gray house, to be back as soon as possible to take them both to dinner.
“Super,” said Lenore.
“Straight up,” said Lang.
The reason Rick had to drop Lenore and Lang off near, rather than at, the Tissaws’ was that the street all around the house was totally clogged with cars, and especially vans. A lot of the vans were white, with the ornate letters P.W.G. on the sides, in red. Lenore had never seen the street so crowded.
“I’ve just never seen the street so crowded,” Lenore said.
“Don’t suppose all these folks are here to try to sublet Misty Schwartz’s room, do you?” said Lang.
“Not a chance.”
“Must be a really bitching party going on around here, then,” said Lang.
“On a Tuesday afternoon?”
“My kind of neighborhood.”
As they went up the walk, Lenore saw that the Tissaws’ front door was propped partly open by a network of thick black cables that led out from the backs of two of the white P.W.G. vans—vans parked halfway onto the grass of the Tissaws’ lawn—and disappeared into the house. Lenore all of a sudden heard what was unmistakably Candy Mandible shout something from her third-story window, a window that looked strangely lit up, right now, and actually had a bit of a tiny rainbow-doughnut around it in the cool wet air, and then from the front porch Lenore heard Candy running down the stairs of the house to meet them at the door.
“Lenore I swear to God you will just not believe it,” said Candy.
“What the heck is going on here?” Lenore said, looking around. “Are we having sewer trouble?”
“Not exactly, come on, it’s Vlad the Impaler,” Candy said, starting to try to pull Lenore toward the stairs, up which the black cables from the vans ran and disappeared from sight. Candy was wearing that violet dress.
“Hey, ho, and hello,” Lang said to Candy. He hefted the suitcases.
“Hi,” said Candy, barely looking at Lang. “Lenore, come on. You’ll flip and die!”
“What can Vlad the Impaler have to do with vans and letters and cables?”
“Mrs. Tissaw heard him say things, God knows what, really, and she just freaked out.” One of the shoulder straps of the violet dress had slipped off Candy’s shoulder. Lang hefted the suitcases again. “She’s getting him on television. Well, religious television, on cable. But still, television.”
“Television?”
“Vlad the Impaler?” said Wang-Dang Lang.
“My bird,” Lenore said. “Who is now troublingly and also obscenely able to talk.” She turned to Candy. “Who gave permission for him to get put on television?”
“Mrs. Tissaw says it’s in lieu of the bill for the chewed wall and the guano-damage to the floor, which she knows you can’t pay because she talked to Prietht at the board and Prietht very helpfully told her you’re broke ...” Candy stopped and looked up the staircase. There was noise from the third floor. Lots of it. “But look,” she said, “come on, they’re going to make him a star, they say. They say literally. ”
“Literally? A star? Of what?”
“Come on. ”
Lenore let herself be pulled. Lang followed her and Candy up the stairs with the suitcases, watching their bottoms.
/c/

“Friends, as subscribing members of the Reverend Hart Lee Syke’s Partners With God Club you can expect the entry of the Almighty into your own personal life in twenty-four hours or less,” Vlad the Impaler was saying, staring blankly into a lavishly unfamiliar little unsmeared mirror perimetered with tiny light bulbs. Lenore’s own personal room was full of television cameras and towering metal lamps, and bright-white light. The room was cruising at about a hundred degrees. Thick black cables, and panels with colored lights winking on and off, and sunglasses were everywhere. The brown velvet chair, the uneven-legged desk chair, the bed, and all the black corduroy cushions on the windowsills were occupied by people holding various sorts of electronic equipment, or thick sheaves of paper, and all smoking, and all tapping cigarette ashes onto the floor. Vlad the Impaler was in his cage, his enormous feet hooked over the arms of a tiny director’s chair, licking tentatively at the hot surface of his lit-up mirror. A truly enormous gray box of a television camera, with a little red light on top, was trained on him. Pushed back onto Vlad’s spiky pink mohawk Lenore thought she could see a tiny pair of sunglasses. Vlad the Impaler’s old smeared mirror, on its chain of Frequent and Vigorous paper clips, was gone.
“Holy shit,” said Lenore.
“You wouldn’t believe what’s been happening,” said Candy.
“One hell of a dress, there, ma‘am,” Lang said to Candy. “A. S. Lang, here.”
“Perfect! Perfect!” came shouts from a huge man with a white leather body suit, and an enormous beehive of sculptured black hair, and several chins. Red sequins on the chest of his body suit formed the letters P.W.G.
“Love it! Love that bird!” the man was yelling.
“Cut!” yelled somebody else, from the middle of the mob near the windows. The windows were smeared with steam, from breath.
“Twist my major limbs if that’s not Hart Lee Sykes himself,” Wang-Dang Lang said, staring at the man in white leather.
“Who?” said Lenore.
“It is, that’s Hart Lee Sykes,” said Candy. She got close to Lenore’s ear to make herself heard. “He’s this truly enormous wheel at CBN, the Christian Broadcasting Network? He used to host this show called ‘Real People and Animals of Profound Religious Significance,’ a sort of religious spin-off of ‘Real People.’ But now he hosts this incredibly successful show on cable called ‘The Partners With God Club.’ ”
“He’s A-OK,” Lang said to Lenore, setting down the suitcases amid a litter of Styrofoam cups and candy wrappers and butts. “My Daddy watches his show all the time. My Daddy thinks Hart Lee’s the spiritual balls.”
“Who are you?” Candy said to Lang.
“This is Andrew Sealander Lang,” said Lenore, “a friend of Rick’s and now a very temporary F and V employee. I’m supposed to get Mrs. Tissaw to rent him Misty’s room while she’s in the hospital.”
“And a friend of you fine ladies, now, too, I hope,” said Lang. “I—”
“Inside out! A camel! The bird has been touched by Auden!” shrieked Vlad the Impaler. A sound-man yelped and tore off his headphones.
“No, no, no!” screamed Hart Lee Sykes, stamping a pointy-toed cowboy boot on the wooden floor. “The next line is ‘All contributing subscriptions are tax-deductible.’ Cindy honey ... where’s Cindy?” Hart Lee Sykes spotted Candy by the door with Lenore and Lang and made his way over as all heads turned toward them. Lenore began to edge toward the door. Sykes towered over all of them, even Lang. To Candy he said, “Cindy honey, you’ve simply got to make the miraculous little incarnation behave. Now if you‘ll—”
“Reverend Sykes, this is finally Lenore Beadsman, who owns Vlad,” Candy said, preempting Lenore’s flight with an iron hand at the small of her back.
The Reverend stopped, turned to Lenore, seemed almost to be getting ready to bow. “Miss Beadsman, at ever so long last. The owner, to the extent that any single man can be called the owner, of this animal—dare I say animal?—touched by the Lord and guided by His hand to His humble servant, me.” Sykes’s voice had risen from whisper to shout. A murmer went through the room from the people looking through scripts and checking equipment.
“Jesus knew the sex was great!” squawked Vlad the Impaler.
“A pleasure to meet you, and a sincere expression of the profoundest gratitude for allowing us into your home and into the presence of an animal of vital theological importance,” Sykes was saying to Lenore, ignoring Lang’s outstretched hand. “Our friend Mrs. Tilsit has told me all about you and your profound relationship with your profound pet.”
“Tissaw,” said Candy Mandible.
“Tissaw.” Sykes smiled. “A bird through which the voice of the Lord has been personally heard by me to cry out for exposure to the American people, through the medium of, again, to my profound and humble honor, me.”
“Hmmm,” Lenore said.
“Lenore, Lenore,” twittered Vlad the Impaler. “Make me come. I need space, as a person. Let’s get rid of this disgusting unprofessional mirror. You will be a star in the electronic firmament of American evangelical theology! Like Charlotte’s Web!”
“Boy, he’s gotten even worse,” Lenore said to Candy.
“Worse?” cried Hart Lee Sykes. “Worse? The lady jests with us all, friends. Miss surely you are aware that your feathered companion has been touched by the hand of the Lord Himself.”
“Probably bit it, then,” muttered Lenore.
“Mmm-hmmm,” the crowd of technicians was rumbling at Sykes.
“... that he represents a theological development of the very highest order, a manifestation of the earthly intervention and influence of the Almighty comparable in significance to the weeping fir tree of Yrzc, Poland, and the cruciform tar-pit formations of Sierra Leone! Worse, she jests!”
The crowd of technicians laughed.
“Hart Lee, sweetheart,” crooned Vlad the Impaler.
“You live here too?” Lang whispered to Candy.
“Sshh,” Candy hissed. Lang grinned and put his finger to his lips, nodding.
“Mrs. Tissaw told you to put Vlad the Impaler on religious television?” Lenore was saying to Reverend Sykes. Vlad the Impaler was going to the bathroom on his little director’s chair.
“My little friend, the directive to afford this creature exposure to an American populace crying out for divine direction and reaffir mation came from a source far, far higher than Mrs. Tyson, or you, or I!” cried Sykes, standing on tiptoe in his pointed boots.
Lenore stared at Sykes. “Not my father.”
“Exactly, young Miss. The Father of us all!” Sykes looked around him. “I am the recipient of the mandate which all true humble servants of the Lord pray for, all their miserable lives. Thank you. Thank you.” Sykes made motions toward trying to kiss Lenore’s hand.
“It’s Tissaw,” Candy said wearily. Sykes gave her the fish-eye.
“Andrew Sealander Lang, here, padre,” Lang said to Sykes, taking the Reverend’s pudgy hand from Lenore’s and shaking it. “One of Ms. Beadsman’s closest friends and a deep admirer of her bird, and of your show, sir.”
The Reverend shook Lang’s hand without looking at him. He stared into Lenore’s eyes. Lenore could smell his breath. “Miss Beadsman, you are in a position to aid us in delivering to the American people and to the world the Lord’s true contemporary message, through His chosen feathered vehicle.”
“Look, I’m afraid I just don’t understand what you’re talking about,” said Lenore. “There’s a pretty troubling explanation for Vlad’s talking, I’m afraid, that shouldn‘t—”
“The only even remotely problematic problem is that the Lord is moving in such very mysterious ways through your pet that the miraculous little thing isn’t saying quite what requires to be said, quite as quickly as he might, given the extreme expense involved in delivering the message of the Lord these days,”said the Reverend. “The bird in its secular aspect seems to be so understandably caught up in the ecstasy of the Lord’s verbal presence within him that he goes far beyond what actually needs and is proper to be said, given the import of the mission.”
“Little f*cker sounds pretty healthy to me,” said Vlad the Impaler, crunching a sunflower seed.
“A case in point,” the Reverend said solemnly to Lenore. “What you find yourself in a position to do is to help the bird deliver the message intended and required. His next line in the relevant initial message is, ‘All contributing subscriptions are tax-deductible.’ ” The Reverend’s smile reached almost to his ears. “If you could simply use your privileged position to reemphasize to the bird the vital importance of his mission, and prompt him to deliver the lines he’s directed by our Father through me to deliver, and also perhaps get him to stop biting the makeup-man ...” Sykes gestured toward a pale man with a bandaged hand.
“I still don’t get it,” said Lenore.
“May I, Reverend?” Candy said, trying to ignore something Lang was whispering into her ear.
“By all means.” Sykes folded his arms and tapped a pointed boot on the floor. The director looked at his watch.
“What apparently happened was that Mrs. Tissaw was in here dusting,” Candy said, “two days ago, the day you went right from the switchboard to Clarice’s and then I guess to Rick‘s, ’cause you sure weren’t around, and I was out too, because Nick Allied and I finally ...”
“Ahem,” said the Reverend.
“Anyway,” Candy said, “Mrs. Tissaw was in here, and she heard the little ... the bird, and he I guess was saying religious stuff ...”
“Of the profoundest importance,” Sykes added.
“... and she just had a complete spasm, from excitement, and she called ‘Real People,’ to try to get them to come have a look at him, because he’d supposedly been squawking something about ‘Real People’ ...”
“Well Candy you know how come he was saying that,” Lenore said.
“We all know tonight,” said Sykes, nodding solemnly. Affirmation-noise swelled from the cigarette smoke above the technicians’ heads.
Candy rolled her eyes. “And I guess ‘Real People’ figured he wasn’t their cup of tea, weird-mixture-of-Biblical-and-obscene-stuff-wise, but the guy in charge told the guy on the phone to tell her to call CBN ...”
“Which is of course me,” Sykes said.
“And she did, and they flew somebody out here from the Reverend’s office,” Candy said. “And this was yesterday, when you were obviously totally out of town, and your Dad’s office said your brother didn’t have a phone, and that you were unreachable.”
“LaVache and his stupid lymph node,” muttered Lenore.
“But anyway the guy came and had a look, and I guess Vlad was just in incredible form, that day.”
“As was of course meant from the beginning to be,” said the Reverend.
“And but anyway the guy from ‘Partners With God Club’ saw him, and I guess just did a spiritual back-flip, and spasmed his way over to the phone, with Mrs. Tissaw like wringing her hands for joy beside him ...”
“No need to embellish, Cindy,” said Sykes, looking with annoyance over at Wang-Dang Lang, who was at the cage, poking at Vlad the Impaler through the bars with a section of Styrofoam cup, while Vlad eyed him beadily.
“And first the guy tried to call me, at work, to get me to try to call you, at Mrs. Tissaw’s surprisingly considerate suggestion, but I guess they never could get through, because the phone-situation at F and V is still really biting the big wazoo ...”
“Ahem,” said Sykes.
“But obviously if you were phoneless I wouldn’t have been able to reach you anyway, but anyway they tried, and then the guy of course called ‘Partners With God Club’ headquarters, and more or less told Father Sykes the story, and I guess they all decided old Vlad was much hotter stuff than just for ’Real Religious People’ or whatever, and the Reverend hightailed it up here from Atlanta ... ”
“And the rest you can of course glean from what you see and feel here tonight,” said Sykes. “So then, if you’ll simply indicate to the bird its appointed lines, we can—”
“So it looks like Mrs. Tissaw is who I ought to talk to,” Lenore said. “Because if she thinks she can just put a drugged bird on television, without even—”
“Drugged with the intoxicating overdue message of the very Lord Himself!” Sykes cried. Lang suddenly yelled as Vlad latched onto his finger. The sound-man rushed over to get him loose.
“So where is Mrs. Tissaw, is the big question,” said Lenore. “Maybe I could grab a quick shower, and then she and I could just sit down, and—”
“Mrs. Tissaw is out shopping,” Sykes beamed.
“Father Sykes’s agent gave her a really disturbing amount of money, as like an advance,” said Candy.
“We sow to reap, here in America,” Sykes said, drawing the loudest affirmation yet from the technicians.
“She’s out buying clothes, and girdles, and getting her hair tinted,” Candy said. “She’s getting ready to take Vlad the Impaler down to Atlanta with the Father.”
“She’s going to what?”
“The bird will be the first cohost in the history of the ‘Partners With God Club’!” Sykes cried, pointing a finger at the ceiling. Lang, who was back by Candy with a Kleenex around his finger, looked up to see what Sykes was pointing at.
“Sow to reap!” shrieked Vlad the Impaler.
“Mrs. Tissaw says she gets the bird temporarily in return for the chewed wall, and damage from Vlad pooping on the floor, which she says is more damage than you can pay for,” said Candy. “So she says she’ll temporarily just take Vlad instead. Her husband’s backing her up, just to get her out of town for a while, I think.”
“The bird belongs to the ages, now,” the Reverend said quietly.
“Not legally, though, if you guys want to have things get unpleasant,” Candy said, putting her arm around Lenore, who continued to edge toward the door.
“Of course, Mrs. Simpson needn’t come at all, if you wish as would be only natural to accompany the chosen vehicle yourself into the new epoch it’s made possible,” Sykes said to Lenore.
“Does this mean I don’t get the apartment?” said Lang.
“Bathroom,” Lenore squeaked faintly in Candy’s ear.
“All contributing subscriptions are deductible! Like this!” said Vlad the Impaler.
“At last!” Sykes cried. He flew to the cage.
“Action!” yelled the director.
“Lay your sleeping head, my deductible love!”
“Miss Beaksman, hear the mandate!” thundered Sykes. The camera zoomed in, filling everything.
The hallway was cool and empty, after her room. Lenore wedged the bathroom door shut with the toe of a sneaker. She looked at the painted parrots on the shower curtain.
“You say one word, and there’s going to be lunging like nobody’s ever seen.”