David Wallace - Broom of the System

— 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.