David Wallace - Broom of the System

“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.