The Broom of the System

17
1990
/a/

10 September
“You hurt me, Andy,” says Lenore. “You hurt me inside. ”
“Well sugar that’s love,” says W.D.L.
So look, very closely. If one looks, very closely, into the bowl of the toilet, one sees the water inside is in fact not still, but pulses in its thick porcelain cup; rises and falls, ever so slightly, influenced by the ponderous suck and slap of subterranean tides unimagined by any but the devoutest morning pilgrim.
/b/

“ ‘Down the Laughing Brook came Billy Mink. He was feeling very good that morning, was Billy Mink, pleased with the world in general and with himself in particular.’ ”
“Roughage,” said Concamadine Beadsman.
“ ‘When he reached the Smiling Pool he swam out to the Big Rock. Little Joe Otter was already there, and not far away, lazily floating, with his head and back out of the water, was Jerry Muskrat.
“ ‘ ”Hello, Billy Mink!“ cried Little Joe Otter.
“ ‘ ”Hello yourself,“ replied Billy Mink with a grin.’ ”
“And this one is called what again?” asked Mr. Bloemker from across Concamadine’s bed, doing something to his eye with a finger under his glasses.
“It’s called ‘Billy Mink Goes Dinnerless,’ ” Lenore said without looking up from the book. “Can we please just do it, here? I sense Concamadine really liking this one.”
“By all means.”
“Roughage.”
“ ‘ ”Where are you going?“ asked Little Joe Otter.
“ ‘ ”Nowhere in particular,“ replied Billy Mink.
“ ‘ ”Let’s go fishing down to the Big River,“ said Little Joe Otter.
“ ‘ ”Let’s!“ cried Billy Mink, diving from the highest point on the Big Rock.‘ ”
“Her face is healing well in the moisture, don’t you think?” said Mr. Bloemker.
Concamadine actually didn’t look all that good. There were sores, and there were bandages. A translucent white bandage stretched tight from just above Concamadine’s left eye up into her forehead; one of her tiny pale eyebrows was lost in the bandage that seemed to be growing into the skin.
“I think it was a splendid idea, having the humidifier brought in,” Mr. Bloemker said, looking at his thumb. “We’re just beginning to lose the heat and moisture that was in such generous attendance all season, as I’m sure you’re aware. Concamadine had such trouble last year, and if I recall correctly it was at just this time. As do so many of the J-ward residents. In any event, a splendid idea, Ms. Beadsman.”
“Roughage.”
“ ‘So off they started across the Green Meadows towards the Big River. Halfway there, they met Reddy Fox.’ ”
The red sores looked soft and bright in the light of the morning that spilled into Concarnadine’s wall of windows from the central courtyard full of colored water. They looked wet. No running, though. The bandage that Lenore particularly objected to covered a whole big patch like that, right above Concamadine’s eyebrow. Lenore thought of the adhesive sticking to the soft of a sore. She thought of the bandage getting taken off.
“How often do you guys change that bandage?” she said.
“I’m afraid I don’t know, precisely. I would imagine daily.”
“There’s no way you guys—”
“Roughage. ”
“—rip the thing off, right? You always wet it and peel it off carefully?”
“Of that I’m sure. We do not rip here.”
Lenore looked into Concamadine’s eyes. Concamadine smiled.
“ ‘ ”Hello Reddy! Come on with us to the Big River, fishing,“ called Billy Mink.
“ ‘Now Reddy Fox is no fisherman, though he likes fish to eat well enough. He remembered the last time he went fishing and how Billy Mink had laughed at him when he fell into the Smiling Pool. He was just about to say ”No“ when he changed his mind.
“ ‘ ”All right, I’ll go,“ said Reddy Fox.
“ ‘Now Billy Mink and Little Joe Otter are famous fishermen and can swim even faster than the fish themselves. But Reddy Fox is a poor swimmer and must depend upon his wits. When they reached the bank of the Big River they very carefully crawled down to a sandy beach. There, just a little way out from shore, a school of little striped perch were at play. Billy Mink and Little Joe Otter prepared to dive in and each grab a fish, but Reddy Fox knew that he could not swim well enough for that.’ ”
“Roughage roughage roughage roughage.”
Lenore remembered how last fall Mr. Bloemker had shown her a lot of other people in the Home with Concamadine’s particular condition. Mr. Bloemker had called the condition geriatric acne. He had had a theory. He said that both kinds of acne had to do with the skin not doing what it was supposed to do. He had said, “Someone disposed to see it this way might say that the skin is designed to keep what is properly inside the body inside the body and what is outside the body from getting in,” and then that, “whereas in the case of young people we might say that they are so full of interior life and energy and whatnot that said life and bits of its interior may actually protrude from the envelope of the skin, forced outward, in the case of the residents here we might say that the assault here works in the reverse direction, that the residents’ energies and attentions have collapsed on their still centers to such an extent that there is no longer sufficient interior life and energy to keep what is outside from puncturing the envelope and impinging on the steadily receding interior,” and so on. “Not infection rising from within, but injury punched into the tired envelope from without,” “the skin no longer a viable boundary,” and so on. He had not said membrane, to Lenore’s knowledge.
“Except it only happens in the fall, when it gets drier,” Lenore had said. “Next fall we’ll get Concarnadine a humidifier.”
“ ‘But Billy Mink jeered at Reddy Fox.
“ ‘ ”Pooh! You’re no fisherman, Reddy Fox! If I couldn’t catch fish when they are chased right into my hands I’d never go fishing.“
“ ‘Reddy Fox pretended to be indignant.
“ ‘ ”I tell you what, Billy Mink,“ said he, ”if I don’t catch more fish than you do to-day I’ll bring you the plumpest chicken in Farmer Brown’s dooryard, but if I do catch more fish than you do you will give me the biggest one you catch. Do you agree?“
“ ‘Now Billy Mink is very fond of plump chicken—’ ”
“Roughage.”
“ ‘—and here was a chance to get one without danger of meeting Bowser the Hound, who guards Farmer Brown’s chickens. So Billy Mink agreed to give Reddy Fox the biggest fish he caught that day if Reddy could show more fish than he could at the end of the day. All the time he chuckled to himself, for you know Billy Mink is a famous fisherman—’ ”
“Roughage.”
“ ‘—and he knows that Reddy Fox is a poor swimmer and does not like the water.’ ”
Concarnadine Beadsman, Mrs. Stonecipher Beadsman, Jr., had been in residence at the Shaker Heights Nursing Home even before the Home had been bought by Stonecipheco Baby Food Products. Concamadine Beadsman had unfortunately gone senile while still in her fifties. She had giggled in the rain at the funeral of her husband, after the accident involving the Jell-O alternative. She had moaned in the car on the way to the main Beadsman home in Shaker Heights, to which she was moved from her own home in Chagrin Falls after the death of her husband. Then, for a few years in Shaker Heights, her days had been filled with trips to the mailbox: two hours’ walk to the box at the end of the block; the meat of the day spent peering into the black mouth of the box as the slot was held open first with one hand and then the other, the day punctuated neatly by the mailman coming at four and unlocking the bottom of the box and mail heaving out all over—an end-of the-day release with which Concamadine often unfortunately found herself in involuntary empathy—followed by a thirty-second drive back to the house with a family-member who drove low in the seat and wore sunglasses.... Then just rest, relaxation, unlimited Lawrence Welk, a plethora of mail-watching options, function-labels for things. As far as Lenore could tell—and she did try—Concamadine was really happy.
“ ‘By and by they came to another sandy beach like the first one. They could see another school of foolish young fish at play. As before, Reddy Fox remained on shore while the others swam out and drove the fish in. As before, Reddy caught half a dozen, while Billy Mink and Little Joe Otter each caught one this time. Reddy had five and then pretended to be so tickled over catching one, the smallest of the lot, that Billy Mink didn’t suspect a trick.’ ”
Mr. Bloemker sighed to himself and jiggled a shoe.
Lenore looked at him. “You know, you’re really more than welcome to go. I’m sure you must be busy.”
“Roughage.”
“I have been instructed to wait for the owners of the facility, or of course for a representative,” said Mr. Bloemker. “I can just as well wait here. I hope to have a chance for an additional chat, once this delightful piece is through.”
“My father’s coming down here?”
“It is not impossible.”
“I think he’s too busy gearing up for getting all pissed off about Kopek Spasova doing Gerber ads in Erieview tonight.”
“Nevertheless.”
“Roughage.”
“Is it Karl Rummage who’s coming? Do they maybe want to have you look up patients’ ages for them again?”
“For your information, I have been led to understand that the relevant unavailable facility-connected individuals will apparently be back with us very soon.”
“You said the exact same thing a couple days ago, and I called Dad, and nada.”
“But this time I have been led to the above understanding by persons connected with the ownership of the facility.”
“Roughage.”
“Mr. Rummage?”
“A young person in Chemistry, at Stonecipheco Baby Foods.”
“Obstat?”
“That sounds right.”
“Dad swore up and down that he’d call me the minute he had anything about Lenore. He said he’s about ready to call the police if she and everything else missing don’t turn up, or at least drop a line.”
Mr. Bloemker didn’t say anything. He scratched at his beard.
“Anyway,” Lenore said, “the point is that he sure didn’t call this morning. So I don’t believe it.”
Bloemker looked at his shoe and shrugged.
“And Rick and I supposedly have alternate Lenore-finding plans. Largely and weirdly Rick-inspired, but still.”
“As you wish. I will of course pass on any and all relevant information, as per our agreement.”
“You and Brenda are too kind. ”
“Roughage.”
“ ‘For the rest of the day the fishing was poor. Just as Old Mother West Wind started from the Green Meadows to take her children, the Merry Little Breezes, to their home behind the Purple Hills, the three little fishermen started to count up their catch. Then Reddy brought out all the fish that he had hidden. When they saw the pile of fish Reddy Fox had, Billy Mink and Little Joe Otter were so surprised that their eyes popped out and their jaws dropped.’ ”
“Roughage.” Concamadine’s jaw dropped, too. Her legs were straight out before her as she sat up in bed; her feet, in wool socks, pointed in different directions. Her shins, visible between the flaps of her robe, were spotted.
“ ‘Reddy walked over to the big pickerel and, picking it up, carried it over to his pile. ”What are you doing with my fish?“ shouted Billy Mink angrily.
“ ‘ ”It isn’t yours, it’s mine!“ retorted Reddy Fox.’ ”
“Roughage.”
“ ‘Billy Mink fairly danced up and down he was so angry. ”It’s not yours!“ he shrieked. ”It’s mine, for I caught it!“
“ ‘ ”And you agreed that your biggest fish should be mine if I caught more fish than you did. I’ve caught four times as many, so the pickerel is mine,“ retorted Reddy, winking at Little Joe Otter.’ ”
“Roughage roughage roughage roughage,” said Concarnadine Beadsman.
“What’s with this roughage stuff?” Lenore said. “How come she keeps saying ‘roughage’?”
“We have noted that as the autumn begins to cut into the heat that infallibly and understandably drove so many of the J-ward residents into themselves, the residents begin as it were to come around, to begin to rediscover the rewards of communication,” Mr. Bloemker said. “Recall that Concamadine said absolutely nothing all summer. Now we hear words for the sake of words. Explanation? A nurse probably remarked that it would be good for Concarnadine to eat her salad, for the roughage it contained, and Concarnadine fastened on the word, more than likely. Of course you know that here at the Shaker Heights facility we like to encourage regularity through the consumption of fiber, not through harsh chemicals.”
“Roughage.”
“Except she probably doesn’t have any idea what the word stands for,” Lenore said.
“Doubtless. Although Lenore did have ‘roughage’ in the J-ward lexicons. Shall I hunt around for one?”
“And why that word to get fixated on?” Lenore said. “Concarnadine never used to care what she ate. She even ate Stonecipheco stuff, a lot of the time, when it was around the house. She was a weird eater. One time I was little, and we went over for Christmas, and Gramma C. and Grandaddy had had a fight, and Gramma C. didn’t eat all day; she just stayed in the basement, throwing darts at a poster of Jayne Mansfield.”
Concamadine Beadsman smiled.
Mr. Bloemker leaned over the bed toward Lenore. His eyes had a way of attracting sunlight and turning weird colors behind his glasses.
“Ms. Beadsman, may I bounce a theory off you, bearing on matters we’ve previously discussed?”
“Let me finish this story. You can tell by her smile she likes it.”
“Roughage.”
“Merely this. Has it not occurred to you that a sense of shall we say social history is strongest among the young, not the old?”
“ ‘Then Billy Mink did a very foolish thing; he lost his temper completely. He called Reddy Fox bad names. But he did not dare try to take the big pickerel away from Reddy, for Reddy is much bigger than he. Finally he worked himself into such a rage that he ran off, leaving his pile of fish behind.’ ”
“That as people age, accumulate more and more private experience, their sense of history tightens, narrows, becomes more personal? So that to the extent that they remember events of social importance, they remember only for example ‘where they were’ when such-and-such occurred. Et cetera et cetera. Objective events and data become naturally more and more subjectively colored. Does this account seem reasonable?”
“ ‘Reddy Fox and Little Joe Otter took care not to touch Billy Mink’s fish, but Reddy divided his big pile with Little Joe Otter. Then they, too, started for home, Reddy carrying the big pickerel.’ ”
“Roughage.”
“Any thoughts on this? I am of course extrapolating on some of the issues we tackled when last we met face to face. Of course I feel the insight holds particularly true of Midwestemers, who stand in such an ambiguous geographical and cultural relation to certain other less occluded parts of the country that the very objective events and states of affairs that are proper objects of a social awareness must pass in transit to the awarenesses of the residents here through the filters both of subjectively colored memory and geographical ambivalence. Hence perhaps the extreme complication we can see all around us at the Shaker Heights facility.”
Behind Concamadine’s lovely red lip and the bottom row of her even teeth Lenore could see a clear lake of saliva accumulating, growing, lapping with each breath at the backs of the teeth and beginning to shine at the corners of Concamadine’s mouth as her jaw still hung low.
“ ‘Late that night, when he had recovered his temper, Billy Mink began to grow hungry. The more he thought of his fish, the hungrier he grew.’ ”
“Any thoughts at all, then?”
“Not really.”
“Roughagegegege.”
“Oh, dear.”
“She just got too much saliva in her mouth, is all.” Lenore reached for some Kleenex from the bedside table. “Just a little too much saliva.”
“Happens to the best of us.”
“Mr. Blumker?” At the doorway was Neil Obstat, Jr., knocking faintly at the thin pretend-wood paneling, staring at Lenore, who was bent over a smiling beautiful gray-haired figure in a cotton bathrobe and wool socks, with a handful of sopped Kleenex. “Hello,” he said. “Hi, Lenore.”
“Hi.”
“How are you today?”
“Roughage,” said Concarnadine, wiggling her toes.
“You can swallow, you know, Gramma C. You can just swallow your saliva, you know.”
“How’s your Mom, there?” said Obstat.
“Perhaps we’ll just step outside and let you finish reading to Concamadine,” Mr. Bloemker said, his finger tracing the outline of his beard.
Lenore put the wet Kleenex in Mr. Bloemker’s outstretched hand and bent to the book again. She heard the tissues drop into Concamadine’s metal wastebasket with a heavy sound as Mr. Bloemker went for the door where Obstat was standing.
“Mr. Blumker I’m Neil Obstat, Jr., of Stonecipheco Baby Food Products,” Lenore heard Obstat say. She could tell he was still looking at her from the back.
“Bloemker, actually ... ,” Lenore heard. “Just step out a bit ... hall.” There were sounds.
“ ‘Finally he could stand it no longer and started for the Big River to see what had become of his fish.’ ”
Lenore could remember that at Shaker School one time Neil Obstat had been given a wedgie in the boys’ locker room by Ed Creamer and Jesus Geralamo and the whole sinister crew, and had been left by Creamer hanging by his underwear from a coat-hook in the hall outside the locker rooms, in full view of Lenore and Karen Daughenbaugh and Karen Baum and all the rest of the girls in seventh-hour P.E. who were on the way to the bus, and that a janitor had had to lift Obstat down, and that Karen Baum had said she’d been able to see just about Neil Obstat’s whole butt.
“ ‘He reached the strip of beach where he had so foolishly left them just in time to see the last striped perch disappear down the long throat of Mr. Night Heron.’ ”
“Roughage.” Concamadine was foraging for something in her mouth with a finger. Lenore looked back down at the book.
“Membrane, Concamadine,” Lenore said, trying to make her voice deep. “I say to you ‘membrane.’ ”
“Roughage.”
LaVache Beadsman had said, years ago, that Lenore hated Concamadine because Concarnadine looked like her. True, Concarnadine’s hair was long and full and curled down all over the shoulders of her pink bathrobe, where Lenore’s was of course shorter and brown and hung in two large curls to meet in points below her chin. But Concamadine’s actual face was Lenore’s face, too, more or less, the less being a dust of wrinkles at the comers of Concamadine’s eyes and two deep smile-furrows from the corners of her mouth down into her jaw.
“Lenore hates Concamadine because Concarnadine looks like her,” LaVache had said to John, in the east wing, while Lenore read by the window and listened. “Lenore identifies with her in some deep and scary way.”
“Then are we invited to extend the same reasoning to your relationship with Dad?” John had said with a laugh. “Since we all know that you’re basically just Dad’s image in a tiny little mirror.”
LaVache had moved in, brandishing the leg. And Lenore had watched Miss Malig, current in her fingers, iodine in her eyes, descend, restore order.
“Oh, Lenore.”
Lenore looked up from the book. “Pardon?”
“Roughage roughage.” The bathrobe was now up over her knees, knees that looked to be covered with the kind of gray skin usually found at the backs of elbows.
Obstat’s voice was in the hall. Lenore could hear the wet sound of Mr. Bloemker doing something to his own face. Protruding from the edge of the frame of the door, she could see, was the bottom of Mr. Bloemker’s brown sportcoat. The floor of the doorway looked dusted with a faint black that trailed out into the hall. Lenore wished Concamadine’s room were cleaner.
“ ‘And this is how it happened that Billy Mink went dinnerless to bed. But he had learned three things, had Billy, and he never forgot them—that wit is often better than skill; that it is not only mean but is very foolish to sneer at another; and that to lose one’s temper is the most foolish thing in the world.’ ”
Lenore watched steam chug out of Concamadine’s humidifier and turn pale yellow in the light of the glass wall. The steam made her think of another room.
“What should we do, Gramma C. ?”
Concamadine smiled beautifully and plucked at the papery skin on the backs of her hands. Lenore watched her roll her head back and forth at the ceiling, for joy.
/c/

10 September

Shall we begin, then. Calves. Posture. Scent. Sounds amid fields of light.
One. Calves. Shall we discuss the persistent habit the light of the sun had of reflecting off Mindy Metalman’s calves. Thus then the calves themselves. An erotic surface being neither dull nor hard. A dull surface equalling no reflection; a hard surface equalling a vulgar, glinting spangle.
But a reflection from soft, smooth—perfectly shaved smooth—perfectly clean suburban skin. Light off the shins of her calves as said calves projected their curves from chairs, or scissored the air above clogs that made solid sounds in the sidewalk ... or yes go ahead hung over the edge of the country club pool, pressing, so that the flesh of the calf behind swelled out and made the reflection two ovals of light.
I pull a new red-eyed Vance Vigorous from the pool, and as we enter into com-dog negotiations there is Mindy Metalman, in a deck chair, sipping something cold through a straw, and there is the light of the Scarsdale sun, reflecting from her smooth shins, and I am elsewhere as Vance shrinks on the deck.
Heavy of necktie, I rise from the plume over baby Vance’s crib to see Mindy Metalman, and yes perhaps two or three incidental neighborhood children around her, for decoration, doing her Circe dance around Rex Metalman’s sprinkler. And yes there is the light, reflected from her legs through the water, and the light comes out and breaks the mist of the sprinkler into color, and the mist and the light settle into the wet grass and the light remains and affects the air around it; I see it even much later as I sip something from my den window and watch Rex on his knees in the trampled, sprinkled, misted lawn, straightening each precious bent blade with tweezers. And in the breeze of late afternoon my own chaotic blades vibrate in sympathy.
From my den window, here, is to be seen Mindy Metalman, at her own window, seated on her desk, legs up and calves demurely thrust curving over the sill of the open pane, shaving in the sun. She sees me across the fence and laughs. Fresh air does absolutely everything good, doesn’t it? And here the blade moves down, too slowly by far to be taken seriously by me, for whom the whole process is a rite entirely other, but at any rate each furrow of foam in the curving field is replaced by an expanse of soft shaved gold, in the light.
Calves, light, legs, light, everything will be all right.
Two. Posture. Am invited by Rex Metalman to a cotillion for his daughter, Melinda Susan Metalman. (Was it a real cotillion? Why can’t I remember?) Am invited by Rex Metalman to some Puberty-Rite function for his daughter.
Said function consisting of row after row, group after group, whole nations of tired, nervous, bad-postured girls in immoderate pink gowns. Thin, heads thrust out, hands resting on one another’s shoulders, lips moving just inside one another’s ears. I squint a bit over my third or fourth something and am in a tinkling, frosted swamp, a cold pond of candy flamingos, flowers of snow, slowly hardening under a varied crystal sun. Then the girls change and become for a while vaguely reptilian, heads out like turtles, vaguely amphibian, seeming ever to scan for threat or reward—pimples to be seen at some of the comers of some of the mouths.
Yes and of course the key here is except for Mindy Metalman, who was in a white gown, with a carnation of pink sugar, and her hair pulled up in a tight bun, but with a burst of a black curl here, and there, and here, hinting at the dark nova the hair could become at any time, should someone outside my influence wish it.
And Melinda Metalman standing straight, with a straight spine, but for the swan’s curve of her neck and the bit of the hip-shot pelvis with which she pummeled the unwary, a solid, straight, juicy girl, her gown just low enough to afford the thinking man imaginative access to the systems that must have lain just within, revolving broad and silent about their still red point. And, and this posture—what was it about a head, with its dark, spreading, fluttery eyes, about a head placed so easily atop a simple vertical line? Perhaps just the contrast with the rest of the wildlife in that cold frosted marsh, perhaps merely the fact that the head was easy and content to let things come, that it did not jut out to snap at them. Sounds of snapping were all around me, and I loathed them, and I loathed too and still do loathe any and all heads which jut.
But dancing was of course out of the question, and this girl in the throes of Rite of course either danced or installed herself in a social orbit around the hors d‘oeuvre bar, and I will never ever again approach a female at an hors d’oeuvre bar.
And yes too following me about the perimeter of the room as I circled, joined at the soft parts of our bones, was as always the deeply chilling presence of Veronica Vigorous, and so yes anything at all was rendered impossible, assuming that it wouldn’t have been, which it would have, and so here I was tiny and icy and tired. But I can remember in the cold bath of the chandelier that vertical line, and the hair, and the eyes that were wings in a head to which jutting was clearly a thing unfamiliar, to be laughed at with the toss of a tiny star-burst curl.
She said Mr. Vigorous what a terribly wonderful surprise seeing you here of all places after all these years, do you remember who I am, and there with her was Mandible, and there in the cubicle the northern regions of the dark planet of Walinda Peahen’s hair, and there was Raring, setting up his magnetic chessboard, he plays chess with himself all night, and there was Lenore, she had wanted to bolt back into the elevator when we stepped into the lobby, she had seen, I could feel, and Mandible was petting the arm of Mindy’s coat as if it were an Airedale, and there she was, and the day had been such that when she said Mr. Vigorous what a terribly wonderful surprise to see you I felt deep beneath all our feet a heavy liquid clicking, as if the gears and cogs of some ponderous subterranean device had all moved into positions of affinity within their baths of lubricant, and she was saying Lenore do you remember me, I certainly remember you, I will bet you remember my husband, at whom you threw a shoe, how is Clarice, and as I rode the rhythm of the device I heard from above talk of parlors and tanning accidents, and uncountably many words from her about husbands, and lawns, and schools, and some dress or other, and careers, and marriage therapy, and Lenore was monosyllabic throughout, and then the tangent involving the type of switchboard equipment we used, and temporary things, and the whole Peahen planet dawned over the cubicle horizon, and cogs bit into one another, and eyes were rolled, and there was talk of Lenore’s bird, our bird, all in the context of the husband being in some bar with a self-flagellating bartender, and the Desert was mentioned, suddenly, and Lenore’s nostrils abruptly flared as she pulled away, and a long look passed that did something to the air between them, and over it all and muffling it all was the sound of hoofs on the marble lobby floor, the Scarsdale Express, bearing down, cold sparks at the wheels, pulled by the marvelous set of horses that whip themselves: Calves, Posture, Scent and Sounds, and all the suns went down.
Three. A scent came off her. Turn just right and it would go through me and leave a tiny hole in which the wind whistled, when I turned just right.
I was behind her in the car, on occasion, when Rex would drive into the city and she to school and me to work. When I rode in the back she would be in front, on the passenger side. She would not wear a seatbelt, and Rex would say You are riding in the Death Seat Melinda, the seat you are in is called the Death Seat you know, and I would be directly behind her, in the Rear Death Seat, with my feet not touching the floor except at the hump in the middle.
And now in the passenger window beside her were reflected at an angle the images of the oncoming cars and trucks, and there was her image, there, too, waiting; and the cars and trucks bore down in the window and emptied head-on into her reflection, were swallowed and exploded, and out the back of her reflection into my sleepy puffy face came fragments of light, the street made pale, and a wash of scent.
Yes the scent really came off her head, not off images exploding into light in glass; I am not a complete shitty fool. It was just a scent: clean, rich, vaguely fleshy. Imagine something blown dry on a line in a soft wind. Much should not be made of what is only a horse with cold hoofs.
Or once finding myself behind her and a friend on a city street. I was eating a pretzel for lunch, big and soft as my own face, a monstrously salty pretzel, and soon the pretzel man’s partner some blocks down would cheerfully sell me a Pepsi, but here were the solid, very solid sounds of her boots on the pavement, like a pump in the roots of a deep well, and here was the dark, thick hair, hanging almost all the way down her back, and having things done to it by the wind, and of course hair equals scent, and I was riddled, and salt poured from me like sand, and Mrs. Lot stood stock still in her beret in the middle of gridlock, transfixed by a red light.
Too much cannot be made of a scent.
Four. Sounds and a Lonely Little Thing.
Veronica and Vance were somewhere, away. For Veronica and me it had been a matter of years, so you can imagine. And it was August, and had my usual Rex-Metalman-world-of-pollen Scarsdale allergies, and was into my second week of being wired on antihistamines, salivaless and bumping into walls ...
And it was nighttime, and I was in my den, and because it was nighttime the light was on, and over across the fence Mindy Metalman’s light was on, in her room, and her window was open, but the shades were drawn. Antihistamines make me dream. My light was on, and, it being August, insects wanted in. I established for my purposes levels of insects, levels of entry, each corresponding to a field of light. The lit den made the insects tap and bounce on the windowscreen, wanting in. And a few would get in, that was OK, but then I would hear tiny dry sounds of impact and I would look up and there would be the insects, bouncing off the frosted glass shell around the light fixture: let us in let us in. And unscrew the shell, and then there you would be as before, but with the insects now bouncing off the hot thin skin of the lightbulb itself, let us in, banging with blunt heads and burnt wings, let us in. All right, but where did they want to go? Because break the lightbulb open with, say, the tiny screwdriver you use to fix the keys of your typewriter, break open the skin of the bulb to let them in, and either the light they want is killed and the game is over, or else they simply orbit the unenterable filament until they are fried dry and fall away.
So I stood on tiptoe on my desk, with my screwdriver, and bits of glass in my hair, and a dry mouth, in the dark, wishing for a Flit gun, or else to know where the appropriate place to want in was, then; and I heard sounds, from across the fence.
And they came from Mindy Metalman’s room. Behind the white shade there were shadows. And, too, there were the sounds ... like the scent, tiny but penetrating ... of a passion, not a person, being yielded to. And I got down on fours on the desk amid papers and glass and allergy capsules and looked out and saw in the Metalmans’ driveway a strange, deep-red Mustang with big rear tires, and the shade with its shadow dance, and behind and above the car and the house the slow, liquid pulse of a distant aerial tower’s red light that matched the spasms of my own drugged heart and so became my falling star. And there were the sounds of Mindy Metalman, in another world, the world of the liquid pulse; and the thought of someone unknown to me sharing the world with her, the thought that some actual person with big rear tires was with her, now, all this sent me off the desk and into the bathroom to climb atop the laundry hamper and brush away hot insects and listen at the lightbulb. For my dry dull head full of pollen thought that if we could just catch something the same, here, the insects and I could all kick off our shoes and have a beer.
I have said to her, no I will not be going to any gymnastic babyfood spectaculars with you.
And when she says why not I say ask Lang.
I say by all means, take the morning off. Go roll about. Be three-dimensional. Sign bottoms.
And she says I am going to go read to my grandmother.
And I say go, ask valid young Lang whom to take to Erieview, he’s in the next room.
And she stands there in her sneakers and says don’t push at me. Darling darling darling, tell me about the reversal I say.
How something or other to have her down below, in my network, all over again. In the cubicle. The lobby will resound, glow. I have bought breath mints.
Lenore what does it mean to feel that you must either kill or die. Does that make us an insect, in a field of light that can be only desired, or else extinguished?
Between yesterday and me lies a whole field of it.
The mints make it cold when I suck at the air. A suck at the air equals a sigh. Dinner, with Mindy Metalman? Oh yes oh no.

The burnt house stands delicate and everything is still arranged but now everything is black and hollow and featherlight and near dust and squeaks in the wind. The toilet is untouched, and pulses quietly as the wind blows through hollow ribs, all around it.

One, Two, Three, Four: that’s utter tripe, says his Lenore.
/d/

“I know what I know, is all.”
“What does that mean, ‘I know what I know’?”
“I know the whole story.”
“Well if I don’t know the story I obviously don’t know if you know the story.”
“The Andy story.”
“What, like his historical story, the story of his life, or what he’s been doing here, or what?”
“You are so funny.”
“Why am I funny?”
“This isn’t the same material, you know.”
“It’s close. It’s the same color.”
“But it’s not the same texture. I want that thin cotton texture, that fadedness and thinness, that it-could-give-way-at-any-second quality.”
“Well maybe you should know that this particular dress is like ten years old, is why it’s so thin. I don’t know why you’re so fixated on this dress.”
“I’d buy it from you, but if it barely fits you like that there is simply no way it could fit me.”
“Who says I’d sell it?”
“So what we need is this color in a lighter, more cottony material.”
“Anyway, it’s Lenore’s. I couldn’t sell Lenore’s dress. I’d have to buy it from her, which I’ll probably do anyway given the Nick thing, but then I wouldn’t want to sell it. See?”
“Relax. It wouldn’t fit me anyway.”
“....”
“I am having lunch in the cafeteria of something called Moora dian’s Department Store, Cleveland, Ohio. Alan and Muffin would just die.”
“This is a really good store. Don’t underrate this store.”
“Not mad about its fabric selection one bit.”
“I’ll give you the names of some other stores, but I can’t go with you, I don’t think. Walinda embolisms if I go over an hour for lunch.”
“She is not my very favorite person.”
“She’s just hard to get to know. You get to know her, everything’s OK. She just didn’t like your jacket, probably. She tends not to like people who have a lot of money. Which you pretty obviously do.”
“....”
“Have money, I mean.”
“....”
“Which if you’ll excuse me makes me sort of wonder why you’re even considering working even as a temporary at the Frequent and Vigorous board. Which don’t get me wrong is not a horrible job or anything, I’m not talking down my job, but it just isn’t too exciting, and right now it’s especially hectic and a pain because of line trouble, and you might or might not know it only pays four an hour, which is a pretty un-princely sum.”
“Money isn’t even an issue. I’m on vacation. I have unlimited vacation time, nearly, in my career. Retail food prices aren’t expected to change in the next few weeks.”
“What a job. I couldn’t believe it. I can’t believe you do that.”
“....”
“Hey, do it again.”
“Not here, Candy.”
“Come on. It’s noisy, no one’ll hear. Please.”
“Honestly.”
“Please.”
“Total: seventeen-fifty. Cash: twenty dollars. Change due: two-fifty.”
“That’s just too super.”
“It gets less super as time goes on, believe me.”
“But so you’d only work at F and V to be near Andy.”
“Maybe in a way.”
“What way is that, if you don’t mind my asking? And why do you want another version of this dress? I don’t get it.”
“You are an inquisitive little thing.”
“You and I look enough alike as it is. Why do you want my dress?”
“That was the point, a minute ago. As you pointed out, it’s Lenore’s dress, not your dress.”
“All right, this is technically Lenore’s dress, if you want to get technical. And this is the dress she wore the time you met her.”
And the time Andy met her.“
“Right.”
“Right.”
“So what?”
“I know what I know.”
“How about letting me know a little of what you know, then?”
“Look, I know all about Andy and Lenore Beadsman. I know you’re her friend, and you can go ahead and tell her I know all about it.”
“What do you know?”
“Everything.”
“I mean what is there to know?”
“Listen, I know you two are friends, but if I’m going to be honest with you you can at least not insult my intelligence.”
“I’m not insulting anything, Mindy.”
“See, I can not only see what’s going on, but I have the advantage that I can also see why it’s going on.”
“Hey, Lenore doesn’t even like Andy very much, to tell the truth.”
“Frankly Lenore does not interest me. My husband, he interests me. And I can see why he’s doing what he’s doing.”
“What’s he doing?”
“Don’t you see why? Yes we’ve had a bad period, but you know all relationships go through bad periods. There are bad times in all relationships. But yes this was a bad period. And now Andy sees your little friend Lenore, in the middle of this admittedly bad period, and suddenly he feels he’s able to go back to a branch in the tree of his life, the branch nine years ago, when he met me and fell in love with me and started a relationship with me, but also, see, the exact same branch he met Lenore at, sitting in her little violet dress and being antisocial and throwing shoes at people, and so suddenly Andy feels as if maybe he can go back and just take a different path from the same branch, to—”
“She threw shoes?”
“Andy sees in this Lenore person a chance to change the past. Andy is always trying to change what he can’t change. He’s a silly. And remember there are two sides to every coin.”
“....”
“Always lots of branches in the same relationship-tree.”
“I don’t think this branch stuff is right, Mindy.”
“You’ve made that perfectly clear.”
“Lenore is pretty heavily involved with Mr. Vigorous, is the thing.”
“Ah, Mr. Vigorous.”
“Who was really your neighbor, in New York City, when he was married?”
“In Scarsdale he was, yes.”
“This whole thing is making me feel a little eerie.”
“Branches and trees, darling.”
“But they’re involved, Mindy. They have been for like a year and a half. Really involved.”
“Andy sometimes likes to hurt, too, when he’s not himself.”
“But I mean they’re really close. Lenore more or less lives over there with him a lot of the time. Mr. Vigorous is incredibly jealous.”
“Poor thing.”
“He even bought the bird for Lenore that’s on ‘The Partners With God Club’ right now.”
“ ‘The Partners With God Club’? On the evangelist network?”
“Didn’t you even see it when you went over to Gilligan’s Isle to see Andy?”
“I only saw him. I was only there to say hello, it turned out. I was only there a moment or two.”
“What did he say?”
“He said, I remember this, he said, ‘Guess how much shit I want out of you right now, Melinda-Sue.’ He says that sometimes.”
“Sheesh.”
“He calls me Melinda Sue.”
“....”
“But you say her bird is on the show?”
“Her bird more or less is the show right now. The bird, Vlad the Impaler, except on the show he’s got some weird Italian name that Reverend Sykes said Vlad the Impaler chose in a moment of ecstasy ...”
“Hart Lee Sykes?”
“Yes. Vlad the Impaler is a cockatiel who can sort of talk, or at least repeat things so convincingly it’s apt to seem.like he’s talking, and the Reverend gets him to ask people in pathetic-Christian-TV- viewer-land to send money, and they do. Our landlady is with him in Atlanta, and our landlord says she says the money is supposedly tidal-waving in, right now.”
“I’ll have to watch this.”
“It’s on every night on cable at eight, on I think like channel ninety, one of those cable channels.”
“Hmmm.”
“Except now Rick’s being all spastic and weird about the bird, Lenore says. He has the receipt from Fuss ‘n’ Feathers pet shop, which if you do any time at the F and V board you’ll get to know really well, because our lines are like super fouled up and we get a lot of their calls, but anyway he has the receipt, and he says because Lenore didn’t give him this certain gift at Christmas, Vlad the Impaler is legally and emotionally his. That’s what Lenore says he says.”
“....”
“And maybe he’s really trying to get ahold of the royalties, because Vlad is apparently raking in a lot of royalties, from the tidal wave of money, but that just wouldn’t be like Rick. Rick is intensely weird, but he’s not weird about money. Money just isn’t very important to him.”
“But he legally owns the bird because Lenore didn’t give him something?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“I really shouldn’t say.”
“I’ll pay for lunch. Including dessert.”
“A spanking. Rick supposedly wanted a spanking.”
“A spanking?”
“That’s really all I should say.”
“And he owns the bird, on the show.”
“Kind of hard to take a man seriously who wants a spanking for Christmas.”
“That doesn’t match my memory. My memory is of a nice man in a beret who spent a lot of time at his den window and helped get Daddy out of the lawn, sometimes. I guess we’ll see.”
“Your Daddy was in the lawn?”
“....”
“I think you’ve misjudged Lenore.”
“So I gather.”
“I think you’ve misjudged Andy, too, if you excuse my saying so. I don’t think you can expect to get him back by pretending to be a different violet branch of the same tree.”
“Shall we go?”
“Here’s the check, thanks a lot, Mooradian’s tends to get a little expensive.”
“God, you’re not kidding. This bill is obscene.”
“I think you and Andy just need to sit down and rap. You should try to go out of your way to see him tonight, straighten things out.”
“Tonight Andrew S. Lang is taking Lenore Beadsman to some gymnastics show.”
“No.”
“The symbolism of which doesn’t escape me, rest assured.”
“I think there’s been some kind of mistake. I think you maybe misheard him.”
“We’ll see.”
/e/

“This is suck!” said a small oriental man ahead of Lenore in the line.
He turned to her and said it again. “This is suck!”
With him was another man and two women, all in leatherish jackets. They were all nodding, agreeing that it was suck. Lenore thought they were maybe Vietnamese. She knew Vietnamese people tend to have really high cheekbones. Lenore’s junior roommate at Oberlin had been a Vietnamese woman.
“Pardon me?” Lenore said to the man.
The man took his hands out of his jacket pockets. “This is suck, that we must wait like this. We have been this line for a long time.”
“Pretty decent little old crowd, all right,” said Wang-Dang Lang. He jingled his car keys.
Lenore turned from the man and looked behind her in line. There she could see two girls, from maybe about high school, with short hair Lenore could tell was a very strange color, even between the lights of the Building and the marquee. They both had on big winter coats that looked like some shiny quilts sewn together. Whatever they were talking about they couldn’t believe.
“I just could not believe it,” said one of the girls, who, Lenore saw, had paper clips hanging from her ears.
“What an a*shole,” said the other girl.
“No, I mean I could not believe it. When he said it to me, I just totally freaked out. I totally freaked. I was like:” the girl gestured.
“What a gleet.”
It was cold for September, tonight. Lenore had on her gray cloth coat. Lang had on a sheepskin jacket with some false wool fluff around the collar. They were now near the ticket window, after about half an hour.
“Very nice of you to take me, Andy,” Lenore said. “On such short notice, what with Mindy in town, work, et cetera.”
Lang smiled down at her and played with his keys.
“Rick just pretty clearly didn’t feel like going,” Lenore went on, “and he more or less told me to ask you to go.”
“Well shoot, that makes it a bit like an order, then.”
“Candy has to work tonight over at Allied, is the thing.”
“I don’t look at it like a job, Lenore,” Lang said. “I’m looking forward to it.”
“Kopek Spasova’s really supposed to be great.”
“And your Daddy told you to go?”
“Dad doesn’t tell me to do anything. He said he’d appreciate it, is all. If I didn’t want to go, I wouldn’t go.”
Lang grinned. “You sure about that, now.”
“Of course I’m sure. If I thought this was going to be suck, to coin a phrase, I wouldn’t do it.”
“My own personal Daddy tells me to do something, I as a rule do it.”
Lenore looked at him. Her breath went up toward him a little before it disappeared. “Except he told you not to marry Mindy Metalman, you said in the car.”
Lang laughed. “OK, usually I do what he says.” He looked serious. “Sometimes me and Daddy just take a while to see eye to eye.”
Erieview Plaza was all lit up. A marquee had been set up in front of the Erieview Tower lobby, by the ticket window. On the marquee a little electric girl was pulsing around a bar, connected to it by her feet. Beside her throbbed the bright-white perimeter of a baby, with a spoon in its hand. Yellow light from the windows of the Bombardini Building across the Plaza illuminated the rear of the line for the tower lobby.
“So let me get this totally straight, for the record and all,” said Lang, watching his own breath. “You’re just here ‘cause you want to be. In toto. ”
“I like gymnastics. I was totally glued to the TV for the World Championships, last month.”
“But what I understand, this little girl’s helping these Gerbers launch a kind of a Tet Offensive against your Daddy’s company. That’s what Neil said.”
“That’s beside the point. I’m not Dad, or Dad’s company.”
“So what’re we doing here, then? I can think of a thousand funner places for us to be.”
“You’re no joke, brother,” the Vietnamese man in front of them said as his group got to the ticket window. He and one of the women began to talk very fast at the man behind the window.
“Good God, that’s Mr. Beeberling, selling tickets,” said Lenore.
Lang looked briefly at the ticket window before returning to scanning the line.
“He’s really Bob Gerber’s right hand man,” Lenore said. “He’s the one who supposedly came up with this ingredient in Gerber baby food that’s supposed to help babies chew.”
“Instead of singing like birds?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
There was definitely some sort of controversy at the window. The Vietnamese man was jabbing his finger toward the doors to the Erieview lobby. Mr. Beeberling was being told that he was suck.
“Look here,” Lang said, leaning way over to make himself heard in Lenore’s ear above the din around the window. The side of his jaw was smooth and smelled sweet, even in the cold air.
“Look here,” he said. “If we just go on back right now, ‘Dallas’ is on. We can watch ’Dallas.‘ It’s a show that kicks ass. I just got a new TV, a big sucker. I got wine. We’ll have more fun than a whole barrel full of prehensile-toed little tumblers.” He stopped and looked at Lenore. “Of course I guess that’s assuming you’re only doing what you want to do, not what your Daddy or anybody else tells you to do.”
“Hey, look ...,” Lenore was saying up to Lang when they were pushed by the force of the line behind them into the glass of the ticket window. Lang lost his cowboy hat. Lenore dropped her purse, and lottery tickets spilled out and went everywhere. She bent and started picking them up. Some blew away.
“Hold your horses God damn it!” Lang shouted back at the line. The two girls, orange and pink hair in the light of the marquee, gestured.
“Hi Mr. Beeberling,” Lenore said, stuffing the last of the bright tickets into her purse. “Two, I guess, please.”
“Lenore,” said Mr. Beeberling. “Lenore Beadsman.”
“Andrew Sealander Lang, here,” Lang said absently, looking around for his hat.
“Two coming up,” smiled Mr. Beeberling. He opened a drawer and began to rummage. He was wearing a porkpie hat that said GERBER’S across the brim. “Just missed Foamwhistle and your Jars guy, Goggins, you know,” he said. “Just came through.”
“Blanchard, or Sigurd?” said Lang.
Lenore turned and stared at Lang.
“Well now here we go,” said Mr. Beeberling. He pushed back his hat and smiled. “That’ll be four hundred dollars, please.”
“Pardon?”
“Special Stonecipheco rate,” Mr. Beeberling said. “If you’re going to scout us out, you can at least help to defray costs.”
“But except I’m not here for Stonecipheco,” Lenore said as Lang fought off another surge of the line behind them. “I’m just here because I really like Kopek Spasova.”
“Well certainly,” said Mr. Beeberling. “So you can be thoroughly entertained, and help defray, all at once.” He gestured back at the long line and the circle of pale breath that wove into itself and vanished above it. “You see what the fray is like. Surely you want to help defray.”
“There’s just no way you can tell me two tickets can cost four hundred dollars,” Lenore said.
“Well, these’re really big tickets, as you can see for yourself,” Mr. Beeberling said, holding up two large black tickets behind the window and sizing them up suggestively with a thumb and forefinger.
“You dung beetle,” Lang said to Beeberling, who smiled and made a little bow.
“I don’t have near that much on me,” said Lenore.
“What an arse!” the two girls were yelling in unison at Lang’s back.
“Lenore, let’s just git. Who needs this, if we’re just doin’ what we want?”
“Mr. Beeberling I’m not here for Stonecipheco.”
Mr. Beeberling grinned and scratched his head under his hat. The electronic image of Kopek Spasova kept lightening and darkening sections of the street.
“This is suck, isn’t it,” said Lenore.
“You can’t get pushed around like this, Lenore. Screw him. Let’s git.” Lang twirled his car keys on a bandaged finger.
“Shit on a twig.”
lfl

“I think you should. I hope you shall.”
“Should I, Rick? Oops, may I call you Rick?”
“Of course. We’re both adults, now. Call me anything.”
“Should I, Rick?”
“As I see it, you would be doing everyone a favor. We need the help. We’re marginally frantic right now, though of course not unpleasantly so. It would be an enjoyable, brief taste of college memories for you, apparently. And I-thank you, waiter.”
“Sure thing.”
“We need some more vino.”
“More wine, please.”
“Right away sir.”
“I should like to be able to see you around, every day, working. It would be nice. And you would of course have the opportunity to spend time around ... those Frequent and Vigorous personnel whom you wished to be near.”
“Whoever I wanted to be near?”
“What does that mean?”
“Hey, this is yummy.”
“The eclairs are good here, I’ve found. Lenore and I sampled the eclairs here, not too far back, with Norman Bombardini, our Building-mate, and—”
“It’s really good.”
“I think you should. I so hope you will, Mindy. May I call you Mindy?”
“You silly.”
“Mindy, it would simply be fun. That’s all I’m saying. And how long could it be?”
“Good question.”
“What?”
“Can I have some more of that vino?”
“....”
“And then but what will Lenore think?”
“....”
“Rick, what about Lenore?”
“What about Lenore?”
“How will she feel about me taking her place at the switchboard, however temporarily? I saw that she still has a lot of her personal items scattered around in there. How will she feel about me being in the middle of her personal items?”
“Her items can be moved with minimal trouble.”
“That’s not exactly what I mean, Rick.”
“Perhaps if you were a bit more explicit, then.”
“Let’s just say it has to do with my husband and your fiancée.”
“Lenore is not quite exactly my fiancée.”
“And Andy might not be my husband much longer.”
“What?”
“Did you know he was taking Lenore to see gymnastics tonight? The symbolism of which doesn’t escape me, rest assured.”
“Here the answer is that I told Lenore to ask Lang to go to this function with her, I’m afraid. We had a tiff this morning and I told her to. I was being juvenile.”
“But Andy told me last night he was taking her. He told me he didn’t want any ... any flak from me about it. That was last night, not this morning.”
“More wine?”
“Rick, can I ask do you really own that fabulous bird who’s lighting up religious television?”
“If you’re referring to Vlad the Impaler, he is Lenore’s cockatiel.”
“That’s not what I heard, emotionally speaking.”
“What did Lenore say to you?”
“Rick, should I be straight with you?”
“You can certainly be straight about anything Lenore told you.”
“I find you very attractive. I’m sorry if that offends you, but I always have, really, in a way, ever since I was little, and you and Daddy would walk around the lawn in tennis clothes, looking for weeds and drinking things that I’d get to drink the last bits of out in the kitchen.”
“....”
“I remember how wet the glasses got in the summer, the water ran down the sides. I remember that. And you were out there in tennis clothes. It was like a childhood crush.”
“... restroom, very briefly, if you’ll perhaps excuse me for just a second, I’ll be ...”
“And all it would take is one word from Lenore, or you, to CBN, to get me in the door as a voice on ‘The Partners With God Club.’ Rick, you could be an absolutely tremendous help to me.”
“What about Andy? What would he think?”
“What about Andy? What about Lenore?”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand what’s going on.”
“Look. I’m a professional voice. I’m the best young corporate voice on the market today. Listen to this. This is CBN. This is ‘The Partners With God Club,’ with your host, Father Hart Lee Sykes, and his bird Vlad. Stay tuned, please.”
“That really is awfully good.”
“Damn right it’s awfully good. I’m a professional.”
“But the bird’s stage name is Ugolino, not Vlad.”
“Ugolino?”
“Yes. Sykes claims Vlad the Impaler revealed his own stage name on the plane to Atlanta, amid a divinely induced aura of glazed blue light. Sykes claims Ugolino is some Biblical character or other. He’s still trying to pin down the reference.”
“And his bird, Ugolino. Please stay tuned.”
“No argument about quality from this end, Mindy.”
“You could call the Christian people tomorrow.”
“Lenore and I have an uncancellable appointment during the day tomorrow.”
“An appointment?”
“You might say we are going to the dentist.”
“You’re going to the Ohio Desert, mister. I know all about it. Andy told me all about it. He’s going, too.”
“No he isn’t. That is not possible. Just Lenore and I are going. That’s a fact.”
“Relax. So maybe he’s going on his own. Maybe he’s going with that creepy guy from the baby food company who helped him with the Desert a long time ago. All I know is he said he was going to wander and commune.”
“Just Lenore and I are going with each other, though.”
“Whatever you say.”
“....”
“So OK. I’ll fill in for a while.”
“Good. Good. Fine.”
“It’ll be fun, and like you said I’ll be able to be around whoever I want to be near.”
“Yes.”
“Except there’s still the matter of training.”
“Not a problem at all.”
“I’ll need to be trained. Although I think you’ll find I can remember whatever you want me to remember. I have a great memory.”
“Well certainly. Ms. Peahen ... gave me some introductory material for you, which I as a matter of fact have right here ... somewhere. Walinda is willing to install you temporarily at my say-so.”
“Train me.”
“Just listen to this: ‘A Phase III Centrex 28 console with a number 5 Crossbar has features which greatly aid the console operator in the efficient performance of his or her duties.’ ”
“That isn’t what I meant, Rick.”
“Excuse me?”
“I have an idea. Let’s go discuss training. I’m staying right over at the Marriott.”
“....”
“It’ll be fun and instructive. Trust me. Check please!”
“Not entirely sure I even ...”
“And but what are those reflections in the street, Rick? Look there, by the comer. The street lights up, and then it doesn’t. What’s going on?”
“Neon. Gymnastic neon, I think.”
“Neon. Isn’t that pretty. Off, on. One, two.”
“You don’t find it a bit troubling?”
“Not one tiny bit.”
/g/

“I don’t know,” Lang said. “I just don’t know what’s with these freakin’ locks.”
“You have to jiggle the key sometimes. Sometimes Candy and I have to jiggle it.”
“You’re telling me,” Lang muttered. He got the door open.
Misty Schwartz’s second-floor apartment looked a lot like Lenore’s room, except it was a bit smaller, and had only one west window, and was definitely much tidier. Lenore looked around, then up at the ceiling that was her floor upstairs.
“You must be very neat,” she said.
Lang was hanging up their coats. “I was a boy, and I’d make my bed, and here’d come my Daddy with a Kennedy half-dollar, and he’d flip it onto the bed, and if the thing didn’t just bounce right back up onto my Daddy’s thumb with the Kennedy head back on top I had to make the sucker up all over again.”
“Geez.”
“Look, you maybe want a can of wine?” Lang said, making motions toward the door of the apartment. “I got some wine downstairs, in the Fridgidaire. It’s next to your soda water, you might have seen.”
“A can of wine?”
“They were on sale.”
“Think I’ll pass,” Lenore said. She smoothed out her dress from the hairy ride on the Inner Belt in Lang’s new Trans Am. A plane came in very low now, and for a moment everything seemed to slow way down, in the noise. Lang stood by the door, looking at her. Lenore could see the way the bright light from Misty’s overhead fixture hit off Lang’s eyes, hitting and breaking up like there were chips of mint in his eyes. Lenore felt the back of her neck with her hand.
As Lang smiled and turned to go she said, “Look, why not. I’ll try a can, or some of your can, whatever. Why not try some wine,” she said.
“Well that’s just fine,” said Lang. “You can warm up that old TV, if you want.” He went out and left the door open.
That old TV was a huge white sail of a screen that curved predator-like over a squat mahogany box. Inside the box a projector pointed like a gun at the screen’s breadbasket. Lenore hit a red button on the box, and an enormous head filled the screen, and there was volume. She hastily turned the thing off, and the screen drizzled and was blank again. The head had been someone from “Dallas,” though, Lenore was pretty sure.
When someone has the same general kind of room you do, it’s usually very interesting to see what they’ve done with it. In Misty Schwartz’s case it wasn’t quite as interesting as it might have been. Lenore didn’t know Misty very well; there had been some unpleasantness over a phone bill, on the Tissaws’ central kitchen phone, a few months ago, and Lenore had since been down to Misty’s place only once or twice, when she had to borrow necessities. Candy Mandible, who had borne the brunt of the phone bill unpleasantness, had said that the only reason Misty Schwartz wasn’t a lesbian was that she had never seen her own face in the mirror. Lenore thought that made no sense at all.
Which didn’t keep her from really not caring too much for Misty’s apartment, though: a room in which lines of steel and a certain kind of grainy white burlap fabric predominated. There was a chair made of white burlap cushions collected and given shape in a frame of polished metal bars. A clear glass table with the same kind of metal frame. At right angles a small couch of the same material as the chair. On the wall a painting of a plain pale orange square against a white background; also a picture of Misty Schwartz and some man on a black statue of a sperm whale, the kind of whale with those jaws. The man was down lying in the jaws, with his arm back over his forehead like Pauline in Peril, and Misty was riding on the thing’s back, pretending to give it the whip, her mouth and eyes open wide. The photo was right flush up next to the painting. That was it for the walls, except for the television screen, which was pretty clearly a Lang addition.
Lenore looked for evidence of Lang. By the bed—a bed tightly made; Lenore thought about trying the thing with the half-dollar and decided against it—was a duffel bag, stuffed full and with some of its contents vomited out onto the floor around it, which fact was partially hidden by a carefully folded blanket Lang had placed over most of the scene, as if he had been in a hurry. On the bed were some new shirts and white socks, all still in their store plastic. But that was all. On the whole it just didn’t seem like a Lang sort of room, to Lenore, at all.
“This just doesn’t seem like your kind of room,” Lenore said to Lang when he came back with his hands full of cans and glasses. She watched him put everything down carefully on the glass table.
“Well it’s a inexpensive room, and no bugs, and the neighbors are tough to beat.” Lang grinned.
“I just mean decor-wise. I just can’t picture you really living in a room with Swedish furniture and paintings of squares.”
Lang hunkered down on the couch and looked for a second over at the blank white television screen. “And so what kind of decor do you picture me in the middle of?” He closed his eyes and popped the top off a can of wine.
Lenore ran her hand along the mantle of Misty’s cold fireplace. “Oh, I don’t know.” She smiled to herself. “Smoky leather. Leather chairs. A leopardy rug, with maybe a snarling bear’s head on it. Lascivious calendars and posters ...” She turned. “Maybe some expensive stereo stuff with its control-knobs all gleamy in an overhead light whose brightness you can adjust by turning a dial ...”
Lang laughed and hit his knee with his fist. “Undamncanny. You just largely described my old college room.”
“Did I.”
“Forgot the animal heads on the walls, though.” Lang manipulated his eyebrows at her.
Lenore laughed. “The animal heads,” she said. “How could I.”
“And the mirrors on the ceiling ...” Lang looked down and came back up holding a big glass. “A little vino?”
Lenore came over to the couch.
“Couldn’t find any damn wine glasses, so I used these. I hope it’s OK to just take glasses, if we wash them out after.” They were Road Runner glasses that Candy Mandible had gotten in some sort of fast-food restaurant promotion.
Lenore took a glass of wine. “It’s OK. They’re Candy’s. She’s pretty generous with her stuff. As I’m sure you know.” She sat down in the white chair, carefully pulling the back of her dress down so the skin of her legs wasn’t touching the burlap cushion. She crossed her legs.
“I figured they were either hers or yours, or poor old Misty Schwartz‘s,” said Lang. “And I didn’t think that poor girl needs any glasses about now.” He leaned back on the couch. “Sent her a card, by the way, in the hospital, saying who I was, about the room, saying I hoped she got better and all.”
“That was pretty nice of you,” Lenore said, picking the glass up from the table. The wine was yellow and sweet and so cold it hurt Lenore’s teeth. She put her glass back on the table and got a bit of a tooth-shiver from the sound of glass on glass, on top of the cold of the wine.
“Nah,” said Lang, crossing his leg over so his ankle was on his knee and holding onto the ankle with one big hand. Lenore looked at his shoe and his hairy ankle.
“Nah,” said Lang. “Just polite, is all. Melinda Sue had a similar thing happen to her, except I guess not as bad. Woman was still slathered to hell in Noxzema for a week.”
“Sounds horrible.”
“Should tell your sister to watch out, not get burnt.”
“Will do.”
“You like the wine?” Lang held his glass up toward the light fixture and tried to look at the wine around a cartoon of the coyote, who was wincing and holding a tiny umbrella over his head, apparently about to get clobbered by a boulder.
“It sure is cold,” Lenore said.
“Uh-huh,” said Lang. He looked over at the white screen again. “Should I just assume you don’t want to watch ‘Dallas,’ then?”
“I turned it on for a second,” Lenore said. “It’s really not my show, which doesn’t mean it’s a bad show or anything. If you want to watch it, go ahead; I’ll watch just about anything, at least for a while.”
“Nah,” said Lang. He took off his sportcoat and got up and hung it up. Lenore touched the sides of her hair. She could feel lines of heat going into her arms and legs, from the wine. She held her glass up to the light. On her glass the Road Runner was running, his legs were just a blur, and the curving road behind him looked used and limp and rubbery against the brown hills of some desert. There were cacti.
“Can I maybe ask where all those lottery tickets come from, that are in your purse?” Lang said, sitting down again, now on the edge of the couch closest to Lenore’s chair, so they could see each other in the glass of the table when they looked down. He looked down at her. “Who’s the lottery-playing demon around here?”
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.”
Lenore slowly reached for the open can and poured some more wine into her Road Runner glass. She hunched forward in the white burlap chair until her face was right over the table. She could see some of Lang in the top of her wine, erratic and shimmery, with mint eyes, in the yellow.
“And for his more or less ordering me not to tell you, either,” Lang was saying. He looked at the side of Lenore’s face. “The thing is, Lenore, he more or less ordered me not to tell you, which is why I didn’t tell you.”
Lenore shook the glass a little, rattled the bottom against the tabletop. The wine in the glass sloshed; Lang was broken into pieces that didn’t fit.
“Which means I’m afraid I need to ask you maybe to promise not to tell R.V. I told you, for fear of my job and all,” he said.
“Just like you yourself apparently promised Rick not to tell.”
Lang took his shoe off the table and leaned forward too, so his head was alongside Lenore‘s, a big curl of her hair hanging in the air between them. Lang looked at the curl. “I guess that promise has to get chalked up to what you might call strategic misrepresentation,” he said, very quietly.
“Strategic misrepresentation.”
“Yes. ‘Cause I made it before I ever got exposed to your good qualities and began to care about you as a person.” Lang set his glass of wine down and slowly took hold of some of Lenore’s curl and twisted it this way and that, all very gently.
“I see.”
“Not entirely sure you do, here, Lenore.”
“Oh, I think I do,” Lenore said, getting up and gently getting her hair out of the reach of Lang’s fingers. She walked over to the window and looked out at the houses across the Tissaws’ dark street. All the houses seemed to have their lights on.
“Well then maybe I should ask what do you think,” Lang said from back at the couch, where Lenore could see in the window he’d recrossed his legs and picked up his wine again. “What do you think about it, then,” he said.
“I don’t know,” Lenore said after a minute, breathing on the cold window. She watched how what she said made it hard to see out. “I don’t know what to think, old Wang-Dang Lang. Tell me what to think, please, and then I’ll think that way about it.”
“Well now that’s no way to talk, Lenore.”
Lenore didn’t say anything.
“And you should call me Andy,” said Lang. “You shouldn’t call me anything but Andy, I don’t think.”
“There, that’s what we need,” Lenore said, nodding, with her eyes closed. “We need it explicit. We need this control thing made explicit. No more games. People tell me what to do and think and say and call them, and I do it. It’ll all be simple. Then everybody can stop whispering when I’m asleep, and hiring each other behind my back, and wearing gas masks. They can just start making sense.” Lenore turned around. “So let’s really do it, OK? How are you supposed to be mixed up with my great-grandmother?”
“Now let’s just hold up here a second, Lenore,” said Lang. He put down his glass and came over to within a few feet of where Lenore was standing, at the window. On one side of them was the television screen; behind Lang was the way to the door. “Whoa there,” Lang was saying. “I don’t know anything about any great-grandmother mix-ups. And all‘I got to do with your family is basically you.” He shook his head. “Far as I know there’s nobody sneaking around about you and me.”
Lenore looked at the floor and put one of her curls behind her ear and crossed her arms. Lang was between her and the door. Her eyes began to get big and hot, and she felt as if there was wood in her voice box. She looked at Lang, who had his thumbs hooked into the pockets of his pants.
“Then how come I feel like the whole universe is playing pimp for me with you?” she said quietly. She thought she felt herself beginning to cry.
Lang looked at her. “Hey now please don’t cry,” he said.
“When I didn’t ask for it at all?” Lenore said. “When I didn’t even like you? I didn’t want you.” She looked past Lang at the door and began to sob, felt her shoulders curl down over her chest.
Then there was Lang, and her face was in Lang’s shirt, and a Kleenex got pressed into her hand from out of nowhere, and the wood in her throat seemed to break apart and go in all different directions, hurting.
Lang was making a soft rhythmic sound with his mouth into Lenore’s hair.
“I hated you,” Lenore said into his shirt, talking to his chest. “You came in that time, and terrorized us, and were drunk, and that guy’s stupid bottom, and Sue Shaw was so scared. ”
“It’s OK,” Lang was saying softly. “It’s OK. We were all just kids. We were just kids. That’s all it was.”
“And I say I don’t want you, that I’m mad, and have a right to be, and everybody just winks, and nudges, and gets a tone, and pushes, pushes, pushes.” Lang’s shirt was getting wet. “I’ve just felt so dirty. So out of control.”
Lang pushed her away a bit and dried her eyes with his sleeve. Lenore looked into his eyes for a second and thought for no reason of mint, lima beans, tired grass. His eyes were totally unbloodshot. “Lenore,” he was saying, “it’s OK. Just believe I don’t want to push you, OK? Just believe it,” he said, “OK? You can believe that, ‘cause it’s true. I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you, one bit.” He rubbed at his perfect eye and Lenore went back to smelling his chest. It was true that even while she was crying she had been able to feel him through his clothes, and her clothes.
“Lenore?” Lang said after he’d let her breathe into his shirt for a while. “Hey, Lenore?” He bent and cupped his hands around her ear and made as if he were talking into a bullhorn. “Lenore Beadsman.”
Lenore laughed a convulsive laugh and brought the Kleenex up to her face. It was hot, and wet, and little bits of it were all over her hand.
“I’ll just say it, Lenore,” Lang said. “I sure don’t want to control you at all. Believe that. But I’ll just go ahead and say that I think the one’s maybe trying to do more controlling than’s good for anybody is old R.V.”
For no reason Lenore looked up past Lang at Misty’s ceiling, her own floor.
“Lenore,” said Lang. He stroked the white sleeve of Lenore’s dress with a big warm hand, and through Lenore’s body from the hand went heat.
“Lenore,” he said quietly, “R.V. sat there in that plane, with his little feet dangling and all, sweating like a freaking pig”—he put his hand through his hair—“and just flat out told me you were his, and said I had to promise not to even try to take you away from him.” He looked down at her. “I just thought you should know that.”
Lenore took Lang’s hand from her sleeve and held it while her eyes dried. She could smell herself.
“Like you were his car, or a TV,” Lang was saying, shaking his head. “He wanted me to promise to like respect his ownership of you, or some such.”
His arm brought Lenore into his chest again. She felt something pressing against her stomach, and didn’t even think what it was until later.
“How does he think something like that’s going to make us feel?” Lang was saying into her hair. “Where’s what’s fair in that?”
/h/

“Just sorry, is all.”
“....”
“If such is appropriate.”
“....”
“Which I rather think it is.”
“Ricky that’s silly, don’t be sorry. There’s no need to be sorry.”
“....”
“The situation, the way it turns out we are, sorry doesn’t enter into it at all.”
“As it were.”
“What?”
“....”
“You’re probably just all tense and worried, Rick. Being tense and worried is world-famous for doing this.”
“Look, even if I weren’t tense and worried, you wouldn’t have been able to tell. Is that not clear?”
“You’re probably just tense and worried about your fiancée being in the arms of my husband right now. God knows I’m not exactly thrilled myself.”
“Not after tomorrow I’m not upset. Tomorrow is the end.”
“End of what?”
“Tomorrow Lenore and I are going to melt into the blackness, united in discipline and negation.”
“Discipline?”
“.....”
“Negation?”
“All so to speak.”
“You’re just going to go out and buy admission tickets to Andy’s desert and look for Lenore’s grandmother climbing some dune. I know all about what you’re supposed to do tomorrow.”
“Why on earth does Lenore tell you things like this?”
“....”
“Lenore never tells me anything, really.”
“Rick, I don’t know how long I’ll be around, I mean I’m pretty sure I’ll have to go to Atlanta at some point in time, if you know what I mean, but while I’m here I think you’ll find I can do all kinds of things she can’t. Or won’t.”
“I think it is always can’t. It now occurs to me that there has probably never been a bona fide won’t.”
“You know Andy’s had your ex-wife, too, don’t you? I’m almost positive. I’ve seen him coming out of your house.”
“She is a good person, it occurs to me.”
“Who?”
“Do you think of yourself as a good person, Mindy? When you think of yourself, do you think of yourself as good?”
“Well of course, silly. Where are you if you don’t think of yourself as good?”
“....”
“Then you can’t even like yourself, and then where are you?” “....”
“This is the Christian Broadcasting Network. Stay tuned for the Reverend Hart Lee Sykes, please.”
“What about my son?”
“What?”
“Vance, my son.”
“I think Andy’s pretty much left Vance alone. I don’t think you have to worry about Vance.”
“I mean have you seen him. Does he come home, ever. Do you see him around the neighborhood.”
“Remember when Vance would be out kicking footballs all day long? Honestly, I never could see how anybody could just kick a ball for hours and hours, over and over. And remember Daddy would spend the whole time looking out the window, making sure the ball never hit our lawn, and if it did he’d run out with a screwdriver and let all the air out of the ball?”
“....”
“I haven’t seen Vance for years, Rick. I don’t think I’ve seen Vance since I got out of school. Where is he now?”
“He’s in the city. He’s at Fordham. At least I certainly pay tuition to Fordham. ”
“I haven’t seen him.”
“Nor have I.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Certainly not your fault.”
“....”
“....”
“Look, you can take it off, you know.”
“Excuse me?”
“Your beret. You can take it off, you know. I like a spot. Daddy has a simply humongous spot, now.”
“Great.”
“Anyway, don’t be sorry, is what I want to say.”
“Thank you, Mindy.”
“But roll over.”
“What?”
“You heard me. I think I can help you out if you’ll roll over.”
“What?”
“Trust me.”
“What are you doing?”
“This is ... going to hurt me more than it hurts you. Is that what I should say, Rick?”
“Good Lord. What on earth have you been told?”
“Daddy used to say I knew ... everything from the ... beginning ... of time. A ... witch in a tartan skirt, is ... what he said.”
“Jesus.”
/i/

“Now this is definitely cuddling,” Lenore said. “Am I right? I think I know cuddling when I see it, and this is it.”
Lang laughed.
Lenore and Wang-Dang Lang were on Lang’s bed, on their sides, facing each other, amid shirts and socks in their plastic wrappers. Lenore had on her bra and panties and socks; Lang had on just his chinos and belt. Lenore’s legs were together, and Lang had one of his legs thrown over her hip. Lang was looking at Lenore’s breasts, in her bra. Being on her side was pressing them together, and they were pushing partway over the bra, which Lang obviously liked. He looked at Lenore, and touched her. He rubbed the back of her neck for her. And from time to time he would trace lines on her body with his finger. He would trace a line down the center of her lips, her chin, her throat, and down the line where her breasts pressed together, and over the bottom of the bra, and onto her stomach, where his hand would spread out and cover her, making Lenore need to blink, every time. He would also shift a bit and trace the line where her legs pressed together, from the bottom of her panties to the tops of her knees. He would press his finger deep into the line between her legs, and Lenore knew her legs felt soft and hot to him, from being pressed together. Lang had an erection in his slacks, Lenore could tell.
As for doing anything much more than they were doing, though, Lenore had said she needed time to think it over carefully, and to think about absolutely everything having to do with Rick, before anything like that could even be possible.
“I couldn’t have intercourse with you without coming to an understanding with Rick first,” she’d said. “Not the way things are now. I have to talk with him. That’s just the way I feel.”
Lang had traced a line. “I don’t think I agree that we owe R.V. anything, but I’ll respect your decision for now.”
“Thank you.”
Lang laughed. “You’re welcome.” He was very smooth: Lenore ran her hand over his arm and part of his back. It was really smooth. His chest had a fine covering of yellow hairs that were hard to see in the bright line of the overhead fixture. There was more hair on his stomach, in a line.
“And you shouldn’t say ‘intercourse.’ You should say something else. ‘Intercourse’ sounds like you saw it in a manual.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Well don’t be sorry,” Lang laughed, touching Lenore’s lip with his lip. “I was just making a point is all. Intercourse is what people have when they’re married, and about maybe sixty, and they’ve been married for years, and have kids and all.”
“What would we be having, then, do you think?”
“Something very much else, believe you me. You just trust me and you’ll see.”
Lenore had been tracing a line of her own, from the point on Lang’s forehead where his eyebrows almost met, down his nose and into the furrow of his upper lip. When she got to his lip she stopped and looked at him and took her hand away.
“Hey,” she said. “What happened to the way you talk all of a sudden? Why aren’t you talking the way you usually do? Why aren’t you saying stuff like, ‘Well strap me to the hind end of a sow and sell me to Oscar Mayer’?”
Lang laughed at Lenore’s imitation of his voice. He ran his hand over the flank of her hip and smiled. “I guess I don’t know,” he said softly. “I guess I just don’t feel like it about now. I guess maybe we all talk differently with different people. The good old boy stuff is what I grew up on, and then at school I was from Texas and so everybody expected this sort of talking, and so it kind of became my thing, at school. At school you more or less got to have a thing.”
“So I hear.”
“Without a thing there, believe me, you’re nothing,” Lang said. His finger was in the hot part of her legs again.
“What about Biff Diggerence?” Lenore said. “What was his thing? No, let me guess: I’ll bet his thing was burping.” She made a face.
Lang took his hand out of her legs to scratch along his jaw. “That’s kind of a tender subject, Lenore,” he said. “Old Biff got screwed up at school. School messed him up. He got weird.”
“What’s he doing now?”
“I do not know. I think he’s back in Pennsylvania or wherever. He got real screwed up, at school.”
“Screwed up how? Did he maybe get tetanus from making people sign his bottom, or what?”
“Now that’s not very kind, Lenore,” Lang said. He sat up and bent to get his glass of warm wine by the bed. Lenore looked at his back while he drank. “He just got real screwed up,” he said. “Basically he just started stayin’ in his room all the time. And I mean all the time. Never seein’ anybody, never talkin’ to anybody. Just locked up in his room, with the door locked.”
“Well that doesn’t sound all that awful,” Lenore said. “Lots of people keep to themselves. Lots of people stay in their rooms a lot. I stayed in my room a lot at school.”
Lang turned around to her and shook his head. “Yeah,” he said. “But when it gets to the point where you’re like pissin’ in empty beer cans so you don’t have to go out of your room to the bathroom just down the damn hall, then that’s gettin’ to be bad news, in my opinion.”
“No argument on this end.”
“He got creepy. He got weird.”
“Maybe he pounded too many walls with his head.”
Lang grinned down at Lenore. “Except what you don’t know is he started a real tradition with that. Everybody started doin’ it. He got to be a sort of legend, by our senior year. I don’t think folks even knew he was the one who stayed up in his room all the time. I think they thought he was somebody else.”
Lenore thought of big Biff Diggerence, all alone in a room. Moving around from time to time. Going to the bathroom in beer cans. She remembered his bottom, and his playing with Sue Shaw’s hair while she cried.
“He didn’t marry Sue Shaw, did he?”
“That girl?” Lang said. “Good Lord no. Least I don’t think so. Unless you know something I don’t.”
Later they had switched. Lang lay where Lenore had been and she moved over into his spot. Lang had shoved his duffel bag under the bed and had put the shirts and socks in a drawer that still had some of Misty Schwartz’s clothes in it. The big television was now on, with the volume low. Out of the comer of her eye, Lenore could see enormous heads on the screen, flashing back and forth, talking about the news. There were shots of gymnastics, but Lenore didn’t really watch.
Lang told Lenore that he had been unhappy. He told her that he had felt trapped and constricted and claustrophobic for quite a while now. That he had been an accountant lately and hated it with a righteous fire. About his wife’s voice being all around him. Lenore told Lang a little bit more about LaVache, and about Clarice and Alvin Spaniard and their troubles, and family theater.
Lang told Lenore that what he really wanted to do, he was pretty sure, was to go back to work for Industrial Desert Design, Dallas. He told her about the Great Ohio Desert, and about Neil Obstat, Jr., and Ed Roy Yancey, Jr., and about the Corfu Desert. He told her what had happened was that his father had said that if Andy married a Jewish lady, he wouldn’t let him into the company. His father had been dumb and stubborn, and so had Lang, and so Lang had been an accountant for the past few years.
“And it wasn’t even like she was really Jewish, even,” Lang said. “She never goes to church. And God knows her Daddy don’t go to any Jewish churches. Her Daddy’s this insane pantheist f*cker who worships his lawn.” Lang told Lenore some items of interest concerning Rex Metalman, and his lawn, and Scarsdale, and Rick’s ex-wife, Veronica. Then he kissed her for a long time.
They probably kissed for about five solid minutes. Lang was an unbelievably gentle kisser. Lenore wouldn’t have believed it. Rick’s kisses had always been really intense. Rick had said they mirrored and were informed by the intensity of his passion and commitment toward her.
While Lang traced lines everywhere with his finger, Lenore told him about her brother in Chicago, about a strange dream she’d had last night in which she dreamed that her mother dreamed where her brother was, and the dream made him be in that place, someplace with bright lights and people you could just tell were kind.
Lang said he felt really strongly that everything was going to be all right. He felt John was going to be OK, and he now knew for sure, personally speaking, that he was going to get a divorce from Mindy. Then he told Lenore a story about his own brother, his half-brother, who had been much older than he, his father’s son by his first marriage, and about how this brother had unfortunately been killed in the conflict in Vietnam, in the Marines.
What had happened was that Lang’s brother had been trained, along with all the other Marines at a certain training fort in Virginia, to throw grenades into enemy buildings and then wait just out by the door while the grenade exploded inside and put everybody out of commission, and then to come in and finish people off. And how, in Vietnam, Lang’s brother had been fresh off the plane, and had tried to pull the grenade maneuver on a hut in a small village, apparently an enemy hut of some kind, but anyway that the walls of the hut had, not surprisingly, been made of grass and straw and dried water-buffalo droppings, and so the grenade’s explosion not surprisingly tore right through the soft wall of the hut, and killed Lang’s brother where he stood, waiting to finish people off. Lang said he had hardly known his brother at all. He said that the Marines had revised the fort’s training after a lot of other Marines educated in Virginia had died this way. This was apparently early in the Vietnam conflict.
Lenore told Lang about the situation involving Lenore Beadsman, her great-grandmother. It turned out that Lang knew a lot already, from Neil Obstat, Jr.
“He’s got your picture in his wallet, you know,” Lang said. “Neil does.”
“I’ve always found him a little on the creepy side,” said Lenore. “He used to follow me around in school, when we went to school together, but never say anything.” At this point Lang kissed the part of Lenore’s throat right under her chin, and Lenore held his head there with her hand. “I didn’t like him because I thought his head looked like a skull, I’m afraid. I know that’s really shallow.” She massaged the back of Lang’s head while he kissed her throat. “And one time some bigger kids hung him from a hook by his underpants in P.E., and I saw him there, and I remember I felt like I was seeing somebody dead, because his head was all skully, and his eyes were closed, and we could see pretty much his whole bottom. ”
Lang said that in reality Neil Obstat wasn’t a bad guy at all. He said that he and Neil were thinking about taking the day off tomorrow, seeing how it was Saturday, and going off somewhere. He said Lenore was more than welcome to come along, that he’d keep Obstat from being at all creepy. Lenore laughed. Then she told Lang that she was supposed to go out to the Great Ohio Desert with Rick Vigorous tomorrow, that they had made the plans already, and that the plans were pretty unchangeable. Lang was not too pleased.
“It’s just that about a million people seem to think Lenore’s out there,” Lenore said. “As they keep making incredibly clear.” Here Lang tried gently to lift her knee up with his hand, but stopped when she resisted.
“Also Rick really wants to go for some reason,” Lenore said. “Today he was completely unsubtle about it. He almost yelled. And my brother, my father, Mr. Bloemker at the nursing home ... everybody looks to be made weirdly happy if I just go out and look for Lenore on a dune for a day.” She had put her hand on Lang’s cheek. “I’m too tired and pissed off to argue with them anymore,” she said. “And I guess now I need the chance to talk things over with Rick.”
“Please just don’t be too hard on him, Lenore,” Lang said. He ran his thumb all the way along Lenore’s leg, making her blink again.
Lang said he sensed everything was going to be all right with respect to Lenore’s great-grandmother, too. He said he just felt it. But he said he didn’t think Lenore should go to the G.O.D.
“Nobody ever finds anybody in a place like that,” he said. “People don’t go to a place like that to look for other people. That’s the opposite of the whole concept that’s behind the thing.”
“I think I ought to grab the opportunity to talk to Rick in private, though, anyway,” Lenore said.
“Uh-huh,” Lang said.
Faint music was coming from the television screen now. Heads kept replacing one another on the screen. Lang had a finger just under the elastic band of Lenore’s panties, on her hip. Lang said the curve of Lenore’s particular hip drove him right straight wild. He kissed her throat again.
Lang said grandmothers made him awfully sad. He said grandmothers were in his opinion basically sad things, especially the really old ones, who had all kinds of sad troubles. He told Lenore he remembered his father’s mother in a nursing home in Texas in the 1960s. He said his grandfather had died and his father and mother had taken the grandmother in, for a time, but that things just hadn’t worked out, even with a sort of nurse hired to come in during the day to look after the grandmother, and that Lang’s father and grandmother had sat down and had a talk and Lang’s father had told her she was going to get moved to a nursing home.
“She was just real decrepit, I remember,” Lang said. “I remember she didn’t move good at all, and her eyes they got milkier and milkier as time went by. She didn’t kick up at the idea of going to the nursing home. I remember she nodded when my Daddy told her. You could tell she knew things just weren’t working out.
“And the thing was we’d visit her in that nursing home every Saturday,” Lang said. “We made it like a routine. My Daddy tried real hard to be a good son. And the place wasn’t but over in Fort Worth, so we’d all just pile in the car and go see her. Always my Daddy, goddamn near always me. Sometimes my mother and my brother. We’d pile in, and drive over, and we’d come through this gate of the place and have to go up this long, real windy gravel road to the place. This was a real nice place, too. It was real expensive. I can’t say anything against the care she must of got.”
Lenore nodded, and Lang touched her lip.
“So we’d just wind on up that road, and I remember how it always looked all sinister up at the actual home itself, which was at the top of a kind of hill, ‘cause my Daddy always had tinted glass in his cars, so when I’d look up at the place through the windshield I’d see all this shit through tinted glass, and it’d look dark as hell, and like it was going to rain and storm and all. It always looked weird,” Lang said. “And we could always see her, as we were coming up that road, ’cause she was always waiting for us on the porch of the place, every time. Place had a real nice porch, raised up. We’d see her as we drove up, see her from far away, ‘cause she had this bright-white hair you could see for miles, and a wheelchair. But and anyway she’d be out there, and we’d come up and pile out, and up we’d go to visit. She was always real glad to see us. It was good to see her, too, but also of course kind of an obligation, you couldn’t deny the fact. I remember I bitched about it, some Saturdays. Had other shit to do. I was like eight.” Lang took his hand off Lenore’s hip and brushed it softly back and forth over her breasts. “But you know we’d visit and all, and she’d fill us in on what she was doing. Which didn’t take much time, ’cause I remember what she was always doing was just making pot holders, for my mother. She made about one pot holder a month, was all. Her hands always moved like it was real cold.”
Lang cleared his throat. “But then after some time went on like that, on one particular Saturday we didn’t go. We couldn’t go that time. My Daddy had some emergency, I had shit to do, so on. So we didn’t go that Saturday. And the next day I remember we couldn’t go that day either. There was just no two ways about it. But Monday we did go, to make up the visit, like surprise her with a visit, to make it up, which seemed fair and all. We all went ahead and piled in that Monday after I got off school. We went, and as we pull up that long drive up the hill we’re confused, ‘cause we can see her, hair all white and wheelchair shining, there on the porch, with everything looking all dark and nasty around her in the tinted glass. And my Daddy goes ’What the hell?‘ ’cause here it was Monday, not Saturday. And it was cool out, you know. It was like November, and things could get cool. But and so she’s sitting there anyway on the porch, in her chair, in blankets, so on.
“And we get up there and get out of the car and go on up to the porch, and she’s glad as hell to see us, like I said her eyes were milky but the milk seemed like it went out of them when she was real happy. She was clapping her hands real slow and soft, and smiling, and trying to hurry to pull pot holders and shit out of the blankets in her lap to show my mother, and grabbing at us and all, and my Daddy says something like ‘Momma it’s Monday, it’s not Saturday, we couldn’t come Saturday so we come today instead to be fair, now you tell me how’d you know to be out here waiting for us today, we didn’t tell anybody we was coming,’ so on. And she looks at my Daddy I remember like she don’t understand, for a time, and then she smiles, real nice, and shrugs, and looks around at us and says well she waits for us every day. Then she nods. Every day, see. She says it like she thought we knew how she waited for us to maybe visit every goddamned day.”
Lenore watched Lang.
“Turned out she didn’t know Saturday from Adam anymore,” Lang said. “She didn’t know we had this shit down to a routine.” He looked out past Lenore. “Or else maybe she did know, but she waited anyway, thinkin’ maybe she’d get lucky and we’d want to see her even on some day when we didn’t have to. Even when it got real cool out on the porch of the place she’d wait, it turned out. She just kept looking at my Daddy like she didn’t see what the problem was, this was just her life, now, here, didn’t we know it? While all the while we just stood around feeling terrible. I remember I felt like shit after that. I was big-time sad.” Lang rubbed at an eye. “She died after that, too, ‘fore I got much older.”
Lenore watched Lang rub one eye. She thought about his grandmother. Lang stopped rubbing his eye and looked at her. Lenore found her throat aching again. She began to cry, just a little bit.
“Now I didn’t mean to make you sad,” Lang said. He smiled kindly. “That’s my sad, it’s not your sad.”
He began kissing at Lenore’s eyes, to get the tears. He did it so gently that Lenore put her arms around his neck. After a minute Lang rolled her toward him and began with one hand to try to unhook the fastener on her bra. Lenore let him, and kept her arms around his neck. Lang played with Lenore’s breasts while she cried and held onto him and thought of a sky in Texas, in November, through tinted glass.