The Broom of the System

5
1990
/a/

Suppose someone had said to me, ten years ago, in Scarsdale, or on the commuter train, suppose the person had been my next-door neighbor, Rex Metalman, the corporate accountant with the unbelievable undulating daughter, suppose this was back in the days before his lawn mania took truly serious hold and his nightly paramilitary sentry-duty with the illuminated riding mower and the weekly planeloads of DDT dropping from the sky in search of perhaps one sod webworm nest and his complete intransigence in the face of the reasonable and in the beginning polite requests of one or even all of the neighbors that hostilities against the range of potential lawn enemies that obsessed him be toned down, at least in scale, before all this drove a wedge the size of a bag of Scott’s into our tennis friendship, suppose Rex Metalman had speculated in my presence, then, that ten years later, which is to say now, I, Rick Vigorous, would be living in Cleveland, Ohio, between a biologically dead and completely offensive-smelling lake and a billion-dollar man-made desert, that I would be divorced from my wife and physically distanced from the growth of my son, that I would be operating a firm in partnership with an invisible person, little more, it seems clear now, than a corporate entity interested in failure for tax purposes, the firm publishing things perhaps even slightly more laughable than nothing at all, and that perched high atop this mountain of the unthinkable would be the fact that I was in love, grossly and pathetically and fiercely and completely in love with a person eighteen count them eighteen years younger than I, a woman from one of Cleveland’s first families, who lives in a city owned by her father but who works answering telephones for something like four dollars an hour, a woman whose uniform of white cotton dress and black Converse hightop sneakers is an unanalyzable and troubling constant, who takes somewhere, I suspect, between five and eight showers a day, who works in neurosis like a whaler in scrim shaw, who lives with a schizophrenically narcissistic bird and an almost certainly nymphomaniacal bitch of a roommate, and who finds in me, somewhere, who knows where, the complete lover ... suppose all this were said to me by Rex Metalman, leaning conversationally with his flamethrower over the fence between our properties as I stood with a rake in my hand, suppose Rex had said all this to me, then I almost certainly would have replied that the likelihood of all that was roughly equal to the probability of young Vance Vigorous, then eight and at eight in certain respects already more of a man than I, that young Vance, even as we stood there to be seen kicking a football up into the cold autumn sky and down through a window, his laughter echoing forever off the closed colored suburban trees, of strapping Vance’s eventually turning out to be a ... a homosexual, or something equally unlikely or preposterous or totally out of the question.
Now the heavens resound with unkind giggles. Now that it’s become undeniably apparent even to me that I have a son who lends to the expression “fruit of my loins” whole new vistas of meaning, that I am here and do do what I do when there is anything to do, when I feel an empty draft and look down and find a hole in my chest and spy, in the open polyurethane purse of Lenore Beadsman, among the aspirins and bars of hotel soap and lottery tickets and the ridiculous books that mean nothing at all, the clenched purple fist of my own particular heart, what am I to say to Rex Metalman and Scarsdale and the sod webworms and the past, except that it does not exist, that it has been obliterated, that footballs never climbed into crisp skies, that my support checks disappear into a black void, that a man can be and is and must be reborn, at some point, perhaps points? Rex would be confused and would, as whenever confused, hide his discomfort by dynamiting an area of his lawn. I would stand, cold rake in white hand, knowing what I know, in a rain of dirt and grass and worms, and shake my head at all around me.
Then who is this girl who owns me, whom I love? I refuse to ask or answer who she is. What is she? This is a thin-shouldered, thin-armed, big-breasted girl, a long-legged girl with feet larger than average, feet that tend to point out a bit when she walks ... in her black basketball sneakers. Did I say troubling? These are shoes that I love. I will confess that I once in a moment of admittedly irresponsible degeneracy tried to make love to one of the shoes, a 1989 All-Star hightop, when Lenore was in the shower, but failed to be able to bring the thing off, for familiar reasons.
But what of Lenore, of Lenore’s hair? Here is hair that is clearly within and of itself every color—blond and red and jet-black-blue and honeynut—but which effects an outward optical compromise with possibility that consists of appearing simply dull brown, save for brief teasing glimpses out of the comer of one’s eye. The hair hangs in bangs, and the sides curve down past Lenore’s cheeks and nearly meet in points below her chin, like the brittle jaws of an insect of prey. Oh, the hair can bite. I’ve been bitten by the hair.
And her eyes. I cannot say what color Lenore Beadsman’s eyes are; I cannot look at them; they are the sun to me.
They are blue. Her lips are full and red and tend to wetness and do not ask but rather demand, in a pout of liquid silk, to be kissed. I kiss them often, I admit it, it is what I do, I am a kisser, and a kiss with Lenore is, if I may indulge a bit for a moment here, not so much a kiss as it is a dislocation, a removal and rude transportation of essence from self to lip, so that it is not so much two human bodies coming together and doing the usual things with their lips as it is two sets of lips spawned together and joined in kind from the beginning of post-Scarsdale time, achieving full ontological status only in subsequent union and trailing behind and below them, as they join and become whole, two now utterly superfluous fleshly bodies, drooping outward and downward from the kiss like the tired stems of overblossomed flora, trailing shoes on the ground, husks. A kiss with Lenore is a scenario in which I skate with buttered soles over the moist rink of lower lip, sheltered from weathers by the wet warm overhang of upper, finally to crawl between lip and gum and pull the lip to me like a child’s blanket and stare over it with beady, unfriendly eyes out at the world external to Lenore, of which I no longer wish to be part.
That I must in the final analysis remain part of the world that is external to and other from Lenore Beadsman is to me a source of profound grief. That others may dwell deep, deep within the ones they love, drink from the soft cup at the creamy lake at the center of the Object of Passion, while I am fated forever only to intuit the presence of deep recesses while I poke my nose, as it were, merely into the foyer of the Great House of Love, agitate briefly, and make a small mess on the doormat, pisses me off to no small degree. But that Lenore finds such tiny frenzies, such conversations just inside the Screen Door of Union, to be not only pleasant and briefly diverting but somehow apparently right, fulfilling, significant, in some sense wonderful, quite simply and not at all surprisingly makes me feel the same way, enlarges my sense of it and me, sends me hurrying up the walk to that Screen Door in my best sportjacket and flower in lapel as excited as any schoolboy, time after time, brings me charging to the cave entrance in leopardskin shirt, avec club, bellowing for admittance and promising general kickings of ass if I am impeded in any way.
We met, oddly enough, not at the Bombardini Building, but at the office of the counselor whose ear it turned out we shared, Dr. Curtis Jay, a good man but a strange and in general I’m coming to believe thoroughly poor psychologist, about whom I don’t wish to speak at the moment because I am more than a little incensed at his latest and completely preposterous interpretation of a certain dream that has recently been recurring and troubling me not a little, a dream having to do with Queen Victoria, manipulative prowess, and mice—obviously to any reasonable sensitivity a profoundly sexual dream, which Dr. Jay tiresomely insists is not sexually fixated but has rather to do with what he terms “hygiene anxiety,” which I simply and flatly reject, along with Jay’s whole Blentnerian hygiene-bent, which I believe he has at some level both pirated from and added to Lenore’s own private well of neurotic cathex; rather I know that that’s the case, because one of Dr. Jay’s redeeming qualities, and certainly the chief reason why I continue to see him in the face of mounting evidence of major incompetence, is the fact that he is also completely unethical and an incorrigible gossip who tells me all of what Lenore tells him. All of it.
Lenore and I met in Dr. Jay’s reception room, I clankily leaving his office, she waiting in the other fabric track-chair in flowing white gown and worn black Converses, reading, her legs crossed ankle on knee. I knew I had seen her at the firm’s switchboard, had in fact gotten my paper from her that very day, and what with the setting I was a little embarrassed, but Lenore, oh so very Lenorishly I know now, was not. She said hello, and called me Mr. Vigorous, and said she hoped we would have things to publish soon, she felt in her marrow we would. She said “marrow.” She said she was seeing Dr. Jay chiefly for help with feelings of disorientation and identity-confusion and lack of control, which I could to an extent understand, because I knew her to be the daughter of the proprietor of Stonecipheco Baby Food Products, one of Cleveland’s very leading and if I may say so in my perception evil industries, at any rate certain to be an oppressive and unignorable influence in the life of anyone in any way connected with its helm. I recall that at this point her mechanical chair on its track was caused to move toward the door of the inner office of Dr. Jay—whose fondness for useless gadgets would, I’m convinced, be-of significant interest to his colleagues—and we called goodbye. I looked at the back of her neck as she disappeared into Jay’s lair, undid the seat belt of my own ridiculous carnival appliance, and went out into the brown lake breezes with a lighter heart, somehow.
How did things progress, after that? I see for the most part not isolated events, not history, but a montage, to some sort of music, not any sort of brisk or invigorating The Fighter Gets Ready For The Big Fight montage, but rather a gauzy, tinkly thing, Rick Vigorous Fashions An Infatuation With Someone About The Same Age As His Own Child And Prepares To Make A Complete Ass Of Himself Over And Over, moving in watercolor, over which is imposed in even more liquid hues the ghostly scene of Lenore and me running toward each other in slow motion through the pale gelatin of our respective inhibitions and various troubles.
I see me getting my Plain Dealer every morning from Lenore over the switchboard counter, blushing and enduring the snorts of Candy Mandible or of Ms. Prietht, both of whom I loathe. I see me looking for Lenore in Dr. Jay’s waiting room, her time never again coinciding with mine, me slumped in my chair as it moves slowly, noisily, toward Jay’s inner office. I see me, at night, in my bed, in my apartment, performing my two-fingered Ritual of Solace, while over my head swim filmy visions in which a certain flowing, predatory-haired, black-shoed figure begins to predominate. I see me squirming in my chair in Dr. Jay’s office, wanting to ask him about Lenore Beadsman, to spill the emotional beans, but too embarrassed to do so yet, feeling like an idiot while Jay strokes his walrus mustache with his perfumed hankie and sagely interprets my discomfort and distraction as signs of an impending “breakthrough,” and urges me to double the number of my weekly visits.
Finally I see me, fed up with the whole business, unable to concentrate on my lack of work at the firm, unable to do any useful work on the Review, which really did, thank God, require real work. So I see me lurking one day like a ridiculous furtive spying child behind a marble pillar, within snapping reach of the jaws of the Erieview shadow, in the lobby of the Bombardini Building, waiting for Judith Prietht to hearken to one of the many daily calls of her impossibly small bladder. I see me accosting Lenore Beadsman in the claustrophobic cubicle after Prietht leaves. I see Lenore looking up to smile at my approach. I see me exhausting the subject of the weather, then asking Lenore if she might perhaps care to have a drink, with me, after work. I see one of the rare occasions I’ve encountered in which the word “nonplussed” might profitably be used in description. I see Lenore momentarily nonplussed.
“I don’t really drink,” she said, after a moment, looking back down at her book.
I felt a sinking. “You don’t drink liquid of any sort?” I asked her.
Lenore looked back up at me and gave a slow smile. Her moist lips curved up softly. They really did. I resisted the urge to lunge into disaster right there in the lobby. “I drink liquid,” she admitted, after a moment.
“Splendid. What sort of liquid do you prefer to drink?”
“Ginger ale’s an especially good liquid, I’ve always thought,” she said, laughing. We were both laughing. I had a fierce and painful erection, one which, thanks to one of the few advantages of my physical character, was not even a potential source of embarrassment.
“I know a wonderful place where they serve ginger ale in thin glasses, with tiny straws,” I said. I was referring to a bar.
“Sounds super.”
“Good.”
I see us in a bar, I hear a piano I did not hear, I feel me getting thinly intoxicated on perhaps half a weak Canadian Club and distilled water, having to urinate almost at once and coming back and having to urinate again right away. I see Lenore’s lips close around the tiny short straw of her ginger ale with a natural delicate ease that sent shivers through the large muscles of my legs. We were . made for each other. I see me learning all about Lenore, Lenore in one of her pricelessly rare unself-conscious moments telling me of a life she would, I can say now, come to believe was in some sense not hers.
Lenore had a sister and two brothers. Her sister was married to a rising executive at Stonecipheco and was in some vague way connected with the tanning-parlor industry. One brother was an academic in Chicago who was not well. One brother was on the last leg of his first year at Amherst College, in Amherst, Massachusetts. [I, Rick Vigorous, I insert here, had gone to Amherst.] What a coincidence, I said, I went to Amherst too. Gosh, said Lenore. I remember how the jaws of her hair caressed the straw as she drew the ginger ale out of the tall frosted glass. Yes, she said, her brother was at Amherst, her father had gone to Amherst, her sister had gone to Mount Holyoke, a few miles away [how well I knew], her grandfather had gone to Amherst, her great-grandfather had gone to Amherst, her grandmother and great-grandmother to Mount Holyoke, her great-grandmother on to Cambridge in the twenties, where she had been a student of Wittgenstein, she still had notes from his classes.
Which brother was at Amherst now?
Her brother LaVache.
Where had her other brother gone to school? What was her other brother’s name? Would she like another ginger ale, with a tiny straw?
Yes that would be fine, his name was John, her other brother’s name was really Stonecipher but he used LaVache which was his middle name and had been their mother’s maiden name. John, the oldest, hadn’t gone to college as such, he had a Ph.D. from U. Chicago, he had in junior high school proved certainly hitherto unprovable things, with a crayon from Lenore’s own crayon box, on a Batman writing tablet, and had shocked hell out of everyone, and had gotten a Ph.D. a few years later without really going to any classes.
This was the one who was now not well.
Yes.
It was hoped that it was nothing serious.
It was unfortunately very serious. He was in his room, in Chicago, unable to receive any but a very few visitors, having problems eating food. Lenore did not wish to talk about it, at that point, obviously.
So then, where had Lenore gone to school, had Lenore gone to Mount Holyoke?
No, Lenore had not liked Mount Holyoke very much, she had gone to Oberlin, a small coed college south of Cleveland. Her sister’s husband had gone there, too. Lenore had graduated two years ago next month. And I had gone to Amherst?
Yes, I had gone to Amherst, class of ‘69, had taken a quick Masters in English at Columbia, had gone to work at the publishing firm of Hunt and Peck, on Madison Avenue, in New York City.
That was a huge firm.
Yes. And for reasons that remain unclear, I was very successful there. I made obscene amounts of money for the House, rose to such dizzying editorial heights that my salary became almost enough to live on. I married Veronica Peck. I moved to Scarsdale, New York, a short distance from the City. I had a son. He was now, eighteen.
Eighteen?
Yes. I was forty-two, after all. I was divorced, too, by the way.
I sure didn’t look forty-two.
How sweet. I was squirming like this in my seat because I remembered a phone call I just had to make, for the firm.
I am back. I sure made a lot of really quick calls. Who was the Frequent in Frequent and Vigorous, anyway, could she ask.
This was to an extent unclear. Monroe Frequent, I knew, was a fabulously wealthy clothier and inventor. He had invented the beige leisure suit. He had invented the thing that buzzes when a car is started without the seat belts being fastened. He was now, understandably, a recluse. I had been approached by a representative in wrap-around sunglasses. Interest in publishing. Outside New York and environs. Bold, new. Huge amounts of capital to invest. Full partnership for me. A salary out of all proportion to industry norm. If it’s assumed, as is reasonable, that our Frequent is Monroe Frequent, then it’s becoming clear that Frequent and Vigorous is really just a crude tax dodge.
Golly.
Yes. The only real benefit for me was having the opportunity to start my own quarterly. A literary thing. Enthusiastic agreement to .the condition. An air of legitimacy lent to the whole enterprise right off the bat, on Frequent’s view.
The Frequent Review?
Yes. Last year’s issues sold well.
It was a good quarterly.
How kind.
There was also the Norslan account, of course.
Yes, if publishing monosyllabic propaganda praising the virtues of a clearly ineffective and carcinogenic pesticide to be disseminated among the graft-softened bureaucracies of Third World countries could be considered an account, there was the Norslan account. Why on earth did she work as a telephone operator?
Well, she obviously needed money to buy food. Her best friend, Mandible, who had gone to Oberlin too for a while, worked as an operator. Et cetera.
Why didn’t she work at Stonecipheco for undoubtedly more money and thus more food?
Food was not the issue. She felt little enough control over her life as it was. A job at Stonecipheco, or a home with her father and her old governess in Shaker Heights, would only localize and intensify feelings of helplessness, loss of individual efficacy of will. I hear me hearing the voice of Dr. Jay. I see me pounding the drum of my courage with a swizzle stick and trying to press my knee against Lenore’s under the tiny plastic-wood table, and finding that her legs were not there. Me sweeping the area under the table with my leg, her not being there at all. Me being insanely curious about where her legs were.
I articulated my inability to understand this feeling of lack of control. Surely we all dealt with and reconciled ourselves to a life many of whose features were out of our control. It was part of living in a world full of other people with other interests. I was close to wetting my pants again.
No, that wasn’t it. Such a general feeling of dislocation would not be a problem. The problem was a localized feeling. An intuition that her own personal perceptions and actions and volitions were not under her control.
What did “control” mean?
Who knew.
Was this a religious thing? A deterministic crisis? I had had a friend ...
No. Determinism would be fine if she were able to feel that what determined her was something objective, impersonal, that she were just a tiny part of a large mechanism. If she didn’t feel as though she were being used.
Used.
Yes. As if what she did and said and perceived and thought were having some sort of ... function beyond herself.
Function. Alarm bells. Dr. Jay, after all. A plot thing?
No, not a plot thing, definitely not a plot thing, she wasn’t making herself understood. The points of her hair swung like pendula below her chin as she shook her head. My napkin had unfortunately fallen under the table. How clumsy of me. Her legs were there, but curled back, underneath her chair, ankles crossed. Alarm bells or no, I wanted first to reach for an ankle, then to pee.
No, she simply felt—at times, mind you, not all the time, but at sharp and distinct intuitive moments—as if she had no real existence, except for what she said and did and perceived and et cetera, and that these were, it seemed at such times, not really under her control. There was nothing pure.
Hmmm.
Could we talk about something else? Why for instance did I see Dr. Jay?
Oh, just some dream-orientation, general rapping. I had a sort of detached interest in the whole analysis scene, really. My problems were without exception very tiny. Hardly worth discussing at that point. I saw Jay in particular because I liked him least of any of the [very many] Cleveland clinicians with whom I’d rapped. I found an atmosphere of antagonism vital to the whole process, somehow. Lenore too? No, Lenore had been referred to Jay by a physician, friend of the family, old old crony of her great-grandmother, a physician to whom Lenore had gone with a persistent nosebleed problem. She’d stayed ever since. She found Jay irritating but fascinating. Did I find him fascinating? Actually, I went simply to ride the chairs; I found the chairs fun things. A release.
The chairs. She loved the heavy clanking pull as the chain drew her down the track to the Sanctum. She had gone to a fair once with her brother and her governess, and had ridden a rollercoaster that at the start had pulled and clanked like that. Sometimes she really almost expected a drastic rollercoaster plunge when she entered Jay’s inner office. [Give it time.] She had gone to the state fair in Columbus once with her sister Clarice and they had gotten lost in the House of Mirrors and Clarice’s purse had been stolen by a man who had pretended to be a reflection until the very last moment. It had been scary as hell.
What did her mother do?
She was hanging out, more or less, in Wisconsin.
Were her parents divorced?
Not exactly. Could we go. She had to be at work to give me my paper in the morning, after all. Very late all of a sudden. Had she eaten, would she like something to eat? Ginger ale was surprisingly filling. Her car was in the shop, choke trouble. She had taken the bus to work that day. Well then. She had one of those new cars made by Mattel, also the maker of Hot Wheels. Only slightly larger than same. Really more toy than car. And so on.
I see us driving down the insanely shaped Inner Belt of I-271 South, toward lower East Corinth. I see Lenore in the car keeping her knees together and swinging both legs over to the side, toward me, so that I touch her knee with the back of my hand as I shift.
With my stomach I see disaster. I see me dropping Lenore off at her place, us on the porch of a huge gray house that looked black in the soft darkness of the April night, the house Lenore in a small voice said belonged to an oral surgeon who lent out two rooms to her and Mandible and one to a girl who worked for her sister at CabanaTan. Lenore lived with Mandible. I see her thanking me for the ginger ale and the ride. I see me leaning, lunging over the rustle of the white collar of her dress and kissing her before she has finished saying thank you. I see her kicking me, in the knee, where the knee nerve is, with a sneaker that is revealed to be surprisingly heavy and hard. I see me squealing and holding my knee and sitting down heavily on a step of the porch bristling with nails. I see me howling and holding my knee with one hand and my ass with the other and pitching headlong into an empty flowerbed of soft spring earth. I see Lenore kneeling beside me—how sorry, she didn’t know what made her do that, I had surprised her, she had been taken by surprise, oh shit what had she done. I see me with dirt in my nose, I see lights going on in the gray house, in other houses. I am horribly sensitive to pain and almost begin to cry. I see Lenore run through the door of the oral surgeon’s house. I see my car tilting ever closer as I hop madly toward it on one leg. I am convinced that I heard the voice of Candy Mandible high overhead.
I knew that I loved Lenore Beadsman when she failed to appear for work the next day. Mandible informed me with wide eyes that Lenore had assumed she was fired. I called Lenore’s landlady, the surgeon’s wife, a two-hundred-pound Bible-thumping bom-again fanatic. I asked her to inform Lenore that she was in fact not fired. I apologized to Lenore. She was incredibly embarrassed. I was embarrassed. Her supervisor, the switchboard supervisor, Walinda Peahen, really did want to fire Lenore, ostensibly for not showing up for work. Walinda dislikes Lenore for her privileged background. I am Walinda’s supervisor. I soothed her. Lenore began to hand me my paper as before.


Where are you now?
For there was the magic night later, a magic night, untalka boutable, when my heart was full of heat and my bottom had healed and I left the office in a trance before six, descended, on wire, saw across the dark empty stone lobby Lenore in her cubicle, alone, for the moment Priethtless, reading, the switchboard mute as usual. I slipped across the blackly shadowed floor and melted into the white desk-lamp light of the tiny office, behind Lenore at her console. She looked up at me and smiled and looked back down at her book. She was not reading. Through the giant window high over the cubicle a thin spear of the orange-brown light of a Cleveland sunset, saved and bent for a moment by some kindly chemical cloud around the Erieview blackness, fell like a beacon on the soft patch of cream just below Lenore’s right ear, on her throat. I bent in my trance and pressed my lips gently to the spot. The sudden beeping of the switchboard mechanism was the beating of my heart, transported into Lenore’s purse.
And Lenore Beadsman slowly took her right hand and slid it back up my own neck, cradling with soft hesitant warmth the right side of my jaw and cheek, her long fingers with their dull bitten nails holding me in position against her throat, comforting, her head now tilted left so I could feel the tiny thunder of an artery against my lips. I lived, truly and completely and for the first time in a very long time, in that moment. Lenore said, “Frequent and Vigorous” into the phone she held with her left hand, looking out into the approaching black. The magic of the night was that the magic has lasted. Come to work.
/b/

—Frequent and Vigorous. Frequent and Vigorous.
—Ms. Beadsman?
—Yes?
—David Bloemker.
—Mr. Bloemker!
—Ms. Beadsman, you are at ... Frequent and Vigorous Publishing, are you not?
—Yes, why do—?
—I’m afraid I just dialed your number and spoke to a young lady who proposed to have me pay her for hurting me.
—We’re having horrible mix-ups with our phone lines, is all. Have you—?
—No, unfortunately no. There are in addition, we find, one unfindable resident and one staff member.
—Pardon?
—Twenty-six missing, now.
—Sheesh.
—Have you been able to contact your father yet, Ms. Beadsman?
—His line’s been busy. He talks on the phone at the office a lot. I was just about to try again. I’ll have him call you, I promise.
—Thanks ever so. Again, please allow me to say just how sorry I am.
—OK, go ahead.
—Pardon me?
—Look, I’ve got a call waiting, I can see. I have to go. I’ll be in touch.
—Thank you.
—Frequent and Vigorous.
—What are you ... wearing?
—Excuse me?
—Are you ... warmer than average, shall we say?
—Sir, this is the publishing firm of Frequent and Vigorous. Are you trying to reach Cleveland Dial-a-Darling?
—Oh. Well, yes. How embarrassing.
—Not at all. Shall I give you that number, though it may not work?
—Wait a minute. What are your own thoughts on pudding?
—Goodbye.
—Click.
—What a day....
—Stonecipheco Baby Food Products.
—President’s office, please, Lenore Beadsman calling.
—One moment.
—... At least it’s not busy.
—President’s office, Foamwhistle.
—Sigurd. Lenore.
—Lenore. What’s goopin‘?
—May I please speak to my father?
—Impossible.
—Emergency.
—Not here.
—Shit on a twig.
—Sorry.
—Listen, big emergency. He had someone ask me to call him right away. Family emergency.
—He’s really unreachable right now, Lenore.
—Where is he?
—Annual summit with Gerber’s. It’s August, after all.
—Rats.
—Trying to mess with the old creamed-fruit demand curve.
—Sigurd, it could literally be life or death.
—Phoneless, sweet thing. You know the rules. You know how Gerber is.
—How long?
—Not sure. Not more than a couple, three days.
—Where are they?
—Not allowed to say.
—Sigurd.
—Corfu. Some dark and secluded spot on Corfu. All I know. I’ll be murdered if he knows I told. I’ll end up in a thousand jars of the whipped lamb, while the little Foamwhistles ironically starve.
—When did he leave?
—Yesterday, right after tennis with Spaniard, about eleven.
—How come you’re not with him, secretarying? Who’ll make his Manhattans?
—Roughing it. Didn’t want me. Just him and Gerber, he said. Man to man. They may arm-wrestle, who knows? Alternately poking each other in the ribs, singing Amherst songs, trying to sink knives in each other’s backs. A market-share struggle is not a pretty sight.
—Damn it, he told me to call him, and this was like this morning. He’s got to ... hey, you haven’t heard from Dad’s grandmother, have you?
—Lenore? No, thank God. Is she OK?
—Yes. Listen, I’m desperate, here. When exactly do you think he’ll be back?
—There’s an enormous skull on my tentative calendar in the square marked three days from now. That can only mean one thing.
—Hot spit in a hole.
—Listen, seriously, if there’s anything I can do ...
—Sweet Sigurd. My thing’s lighting. I have another call. I have to go.
—Stay in touch.
—Bye ... wait!
—What?
—What about Rummage? Did he take Rummage?
—Hey now, I don’t know. That’s definitely a thought. Try over at Rummage and Naw. You have the number?
—Are you kidding? Numbers I’ve got.
—So long.
—Frequent and Vigorous.
/c/

Which is of course not and never to say that things have been unceasingly rosy. My inability to be truly inside of and surrounded by Lenore Beadsman arouses in me the purely natural reactive desire to have her inside of and contained by me. I am possessive. I want to own her, sometimes. And this of course does not sit well with a girl thoroughly frightened of the possibility that she does not own herself.
I am madly jealous. Lenore has a quality that attracts men. It is not a normal quality, or a quality that can be articulated. “... ,” he said, about to try to articulate it. “Vulnerability” is of course a bad word. “Playfulness” will not do. These both denote, and so fail. Lenore has the quality of a sort of game about her. There. Since that makes very little sense it may be right. Lenore soundlessly invites one to play a game consisting of involved attempts to find out the game’s own rules. How about that. The rules of the game are Lenore, and to play is to be played. Find out the rules of my game, she laughs, with or at. Over the board fall shadows like the teeth of fences: the Erieview Tower, Lenore’s father, Dr. Jay, Lenore’s great-grandmother.
Lenore sometimes sings in the shower, loudly and well, Lord knows she gets enough practice, and I will hunch on the toilet or lean against the sink and read submissions and smoke clove cigarettes, a habit I appropriated from Lenore herself.
Lenore’s relationship with her great-grandmother is not a wholesome thing. I’ve met the woman once or twice, mercifully short appointments in a room so hot it was literally hard to breathe. She is a small, birdish, sharp-featured thing, desperately old. She is not spry. One is not even vaguely tempted ever to say “Bless her heart.” She is a hard woman, a cold woman, a querulous and thoroughly selfish woman, one with vast intellectual pretensions and, I suppose, probably commensurate gifts. She indoctrinates Lenore. She and Lenore “talk for hours.” Rather Lenore listens. There is something sour and unsavory about it. Lenore Beadsman will not tell me anything important about her relationship with Lenore Beadsman. She says nothing to Dr. Jay either, unless the little bastard is holding back one last card on me.
It’s clear, though, that this is a great-grandmother with Views. I believe she is harming Lenore, and I believe she knows that she is, and I believe she does not really care. She has, from what little I can gather, convinced Lenore that she is in possession of some words of tremendous power. No, really. Not things, or concepts. Words. The woman is apparently obsessed with words. I neither am nor wish to be entirely clear on the matter, but apparently she was some sort of phenomenon in college and won a place in graduate study at Cambridge, no small feat for a woman, in the twenties; but in any event, there she studied classics and philosophy and who knows what else under a mad crackpot genius named Wittgenstein, who believed that everything was words. Really. If your car would not start, it was apparently to be understood as a language problem. If you were unable to love, you were lost in language. Being constipated equalled being clogged with linguistic sediment. To me the whole thing smacks strongly of bullshit, but old Lenore Beadsman quite definitely bought it, and has had seventy years to simmer and distill the brew she pours in Lenore’s heat-softened porches every week. She teases Lenore with a certain strange book, the way an exceptionally cruel child might tease an animal with a bit of food, intimating that the book has some special significance for Lenore, but refusing to tell her what it is, “yet,” or to show her the book, “yet.” Words and a book and a belief that the world is words and Lenore’s conviction that her own intimate personal world is only of, neither by nor for, her. Something is not right. She is in pain. I would like the old lady to die in her sleep.
Her daughter is in the same Home, over twenty years younger, a beautiful old woman, I’ve seen her, clear brown eyes and soft cheeks the color of a gently blooming rose and hair like liquid silver. An absolute idiot with Alzheimer‘s, unaware of who or where she is, a drooler out of moist, beautiful, perfectly preserved lips. Lenore hates her; both Lenores hate her. I do not know why this is so.
Lenore’s great-grandmother’s hair is white as cotton and hangs in bangs and curls down on either side of her head nearly to meet in points below her chin, like the mandibles of an insect.
Often we’ll lie together and Lenore will ask me to tell her a story. “A story, please,” she’ll say. I will tell her what people tell to me, what people ask me to like and allow others to like, what they send me in their brown manilas and scrawled stamped return envelopes and cover-letters signed “Aspiringly Yours,” at the Frequent Review. Telling stories that are not my own is at this point what I do, after all. With Lenore I am completely and entirely myself.
But I get sad. I miss my son. I do not miss Veronica. Veronica was beautiful. Lenore is pretty, and she has a quality we’ve decided is game-related. Veronica was beautiful. But a beauty like a frozen dawn, dazzling and achingly remote. She was cool and firm and smooth to the touch, decorated with soft, chilly blond hair wherever appropriate, graceful but not delicate, pleasant but not kind. Veronica was a seamless and flawless joy to behold and hold ... exactly up to the point where one’s interests conflicted with hers. Between Veronica and all others there lay the echoing chasm of Interest, a chasm impossible to bridge because it turned out to have only one side. The Veronica side. Which is, I have come to see, simply another way of saying that Veronica was incapable of love. At least of loving me.
Physically the marriage went from being a horror to being nothing at all. I cannot think, much less tell, of our wedding night, when all manner of shams were exposed. Finally Veronica came to accept and even appreciate the situation; it saved her effort and the tangy embarrassment of being embarrassed for me. To my knowledge she did not go elsewhere. Her existence, like her beauty and real worth, was intrinsically aesthetic, not physical or emotional. Veronica would be most comfortable, I remain convinced, as a human exhibit, motionless in the cool bright comer of a public hall, surrounded by a square of red velvet no-touch ropes, hearing only whispered voices and heels on tile. Veronica is now living on my support checks and preparing, I am told, to marry a quite old and thoroughly likeable man who owns a New York company involved in the manufacture of power-plant instrumentation. Go with God.
I miss my son, though. Which is not to say that I miss an eighteen-year-old Fordham aesthete whose long nails glitter with transparent polish and who wears pants without pockets. I miss my son. My child. He was a magical child, I’m thoroughly convinced. Special, special qualities. A special and hilarious infant. Veronica drew the first of many lines at changing diapers, so I would usually change our baby. I would change his diapers, and often as not, as he lay on his back, with little legs of dough kicking, as I removed soggy old hot or ominously heavy diaper and manipulated crinkly new plastic Pamper, he would urinate up onto my hanging necktie, a pale, sweetly thin jet, and there would be smells of powder, and my tie would be heavy at my throat, and would drip, and we would laugh together, toothless he and sad, sleepy I, at my urine-soaked tie. I still own some of these ties, stiff and hard and dull; they hang on little toothed racks and clunk against my closet door when the winds of memory blow through the dark places in my apartment.
This was a boy with an intimate but strange relation to the world around him, a dark-eyed silent boy who from the age of independent decision and movement reflected the world in his own special, wobbled mirror. Vance was for me a reflection. Vance would act out History and Event inside his own child’s world.
At a very young age, very young, Vance would choose dark clothes, tie string around his head, put candy cigarettes in his mouth, and launch sudden, stealthy raids into rooms of the house, breathing hard and whirling, beating the air with his fists, finally diving behind furniture, crawling on his belly, clawing the air with a hooked finger. A lightning raid on the kitchen—the cat’s food would disappear. A silent assault on my den—in the leg of my desk would appear the vertical scratch of a pin. A careless squad of patio ants would walk into ambush and be efficiently obliterated via tennis-ball bombardment as Veronica and I looked on and at each other over gin-and-tonics. We were puzzled and frightened, and Veronica suspected motor dysfunction, until we noticed Vance’s eyes one night during dinner as on the evening news, correspondents brought us another installment of the death throes of the war in Indochina. Vance’s unblinking eyes and soundless breathing. And as Kissinger left Paris triumphant, a home in Scarsdale demilitarized.
Sometimes in those days too we would find Vance alone in a room, facing the blank comer in which he stood, both arms stiffly upraised and two fingers of each hand out in Peace-signs. It began to become clear that, through the miracle of televsion, Vance Vigorous enjoyed a special relationship with Richard Nixon. As Wa tergate wore on in brilliant color, Vance took to furtive looks, pinched whiteness around the bridge of his nose, refusals to explain his whereabouts or give reasons for what he did. My tape recorder—admittedly tapeless and not even plugged in but nevertheless my tape recorder—began to appear places: under the dining room table at dinner, in the back seat of the car, under our bed, in the drawer of the mail table. Vance would, when confronted, look blankly at the tape recorder and at us. Then he would pretend to look at his watch. After the resignation, Vance was sick in bed for a week, with very real symptoms. We were frightened. There followed years in which he silently but with formal expression forgave every apparent wrong done him by us and the world; would fall and cover his chest with his hands at the slightest criticism; would flip backwards off the couch in the living room and land nicely on both feet, putting cracks in the ceiling each time; would wear his tiny suit to school and enlist a follower to carry the tiny briefcase he insisted we give him for Christmas; would walk blindfolded through rooms littered with torn drawings of the flag. Who knew what most of this was. This was the world the monadic Vance Vigorous received and mirrored through himself. I preferred him to the world, really.
He was a great athlete as a child, a maker of solid clanks with aluminum Little League baseball bats, heavy whumps with hard autumn footballs, gentle tissued whispers with the nets of basketball hoops. He could run sweeps in children’s football, could run so fast and with such liquidly curving, teasing grace that he could make other boys fall down just trying to touch him. Feel what I felt in my chest, the little man in the beret, long coat whipped by the wind, watching the fruit of my loins. Vance was a boy who could make touchdowns from far away, make PeeWee mothers yell shrilly and release plastic-wrapped hair to clap into my ear, small-sounding outdoor claps, away on the wind like tattered things, as were the thuds of my leather gloves. The one little boy in those games on whom the helmet did not seem huge and hilariously out of place. A gracious blond black-eyed boy who never bragged and always helped others to their feet and gave credit where credit was due, before returning home, silent in the car beside me, to play Iranian hostage in his bedroom.
His last great historical act came when he was eleven, as school was beginning. A jumbo jet was brought down over a sea by a Russian fighter, killing congressmen and nuns and children, sending shoes and shirtsleeves and paperbacks and eyeglass frames floating onto the northern shores of Japan. Vance would stare for hours at magazine pictures of the plane’s passengers, photos served up in large and vivid detail, family snapshots against green backyard colors, stiff yearbook photos, three-for-a-quarter shots of cheerleaders in Groucho noses; he looked at the eyes of the people in the pictures. One day soon after, he climbed onto the roof of the house and jumped off. All without a sound. Our house had only a basement and one story. The fall was twelve feet and sprained his ankle very thoroughly. Vance apologized. The next day he jumped off the roof again and broke a foot. He was taken to the hospital and moved from floor to floor, and was finally taken to a doctor off Central Park who somehow in one visit “cured” Vance of whatever ailed him. Vance never jumped or raided or fell or mimicked again. Veronica was very pleased. I had never thought there was anything particularly wrong with Vance at all, though of course jumping from high places was unacceptable. I was sad.
We entered a sad, sad time. As Vance grew older, I grew younger and sadder. Veronica retreated ever farther into her crystal case of polite indifference. Vance began, at her urging, listlessly to date girls, never went anywhere with one more than once, as far as I could tell. Vance waited silently for puberty and puberty waited until Vance was fifteen; he lost his size and strength advantage, and there were no more cold windy afternoons on crunchy sidelines. Only sounds of music from under Vance’s door, and colored chalk on his fingers, and black circles under his black eyes, and the beautiful, beautiful drawings—flat and clear and sad as our cement drive, smooth and clean and as devoid of interstices as his mother—and the softly persistent sweet smell of marijuana from my son’s basement room. Vance is now at Fordham, studying art. I have not talked to Vance in almost a year. I do not know why this is so.
I miss Vance with a fierceness we reserve for the absent who cannot return. Vance no longer exists. He was pithed in a Park Avenue office in 1983 by a man who charged us a hundred dollars for the procedure. Vance is, I happen to know for a fact, a homosexual, and probably a drug addict, washed and turning slowly in the odorless breezes of his mother’s cold Scarsdale breath, producing his flat and soulless perfect chalk drawings with greater and greater precision. I have received one: a startled me in the lawn with my rake, Veronica appearing incongruously over my shoulder, carrying something to drink on a black tray. The picture was sent me in a brown envelope, in care of the Frequent Review, and so not even opened for weeks.
I miss Lenore, sometimes. I miss everyone. I can remember being young and feeling a thing and identifying it as homesickness, and then thinking well now that’s odd, isn’t it, because I was home, all the time. What on earth are we to make of that?
I miss and love with all my purple fist a strange girl from a flamboyant and frightening family, in many ways a flamboyant and frightening girl, perched high in the crow’s nest of the Frequent and Vigorous vessel, scanning gray electrical expanses for the lonely spout of a legitimate telephone call. I am lately informed by Ms. Peahen that the possibility of such a call is, now, thanks to some malfunction in the phone system of which we are a part, even more remote than before. As I sit here, the block of the Erieview shadow slowly dips my office in liquid darkness. Halfway, now. It is one o‘clock. My lights turn the shadow half of the office to licorice, and make the half still under the influence of the sun a glinting yellow-white horror at which I may not look. Lenore, I shall try once more, and if you are not here I will assume the worst, and will succumb finally to the charms of Moses Cleaveland, who even now grins and beckons whitely from the pavement six floors below. This is our last chance.
/d/

As Lenore sifted through a tidal wave of misdirected calls and got ready to try to call Karl Rummage over at Rummage and Naw, Walinda Peahen appeared in the cubicle behind the switchboard counter.
“Hi Walinda,” Lenore said. Walinda ignored her and began to look through the Legitimate Call Log, a desperately thin notebook with one or two pages filled. Judith Prietht had hit her Position Busy button and was talking to a girlfriend on the private line.
“What these messages for you in the Log in Candy’s writing?” Walinda turned-and looked down at Lenore from under green eye shadow.
“I guess if they’re legitimate then they’re messages for me,” said Lenore.
“Girl I ain’t playin’ with you, so I wish you’d learn not to play. You supposed to be here at ten. There’s messages for you here at eleven and eleven-thirty.”
“I was unavoidably detained. Candy said she’d cover.”
“That flakey Frequent and Vigorous girl is getting chewed out by her supervisor,” Judith Prietht was saying into her phone, watching.
“Girl detained where? How do I look if I think somebody workin’ and they not?”
“I had to go to the nursing home.”
“What time she get here?” Walinda asked Judith Prietht.
“Look, I don’t want to say anything, I don’t want to get her in trouble,” Judith said to Walinda. Into the phone she said, “The supervisor wanted me to say when she got here, but I said I wouldn‘t, I didn’t want to get her in trouble.”
“I got here at like a little after twelve.”
“Like a little after twelve. Girl that’s over two hours late.”
“It was an emergency.”
“What kind of goddamn emergency?”
Judith Prietht had stopped talking into the phone and was watching intently.
“I can’t tell you right at the moment, Walinda,” Lenore said.
“Girl, you gone, you done, I don’t care who you doin’ up, you can’t play. You done played the last time.”
The console began to beep, the light with a quick, in-house flash.
“Don’t even get it, you gone,” Walinda said to Lenore. She reached for the phone and Accessed. “Operator ...” Her eyebrows plunged. “Yes she is, Mr. Vigorous. Hold on one moment please.” She held her hand over the phone as she passed it to Lenore. “I don’t care what you get the little pecker to say, you gone,” she hissed.
“She’s really in trouble, it looks like, for a change,” said Judith into her phone.
“Hi Rick.”