David Wallace - Broom of the System

“Making me come. Me as a person,” said Vlad the Impaler. “Where is that ditzy bitch?”

“Sorry about that.”

“May I please have a ride to Rick’s? I left my car at the Building.” Lenore finished tying her shoes and brushed out the curves of her hair. “I think Vlad the Impaler’s going to be OK food-wise. He must not be eating much.”

“Yes you may have a ride. Listen, you going to water that plant, or what?”

“It’s like an experiment.”

“The sins of the feathers!” screamed Vlad the Impaler. “Who has the book?”

“What book?” Lenore asked Candy.

“Search moi. Listen, I’m late. Shall we.”

“Yes. Good night, Vlad the Impaler.”

“Love has no meaning. Love is a meaningless word to me.”

“Maybe we could get him on ‘Real People.’ ”

“ ‘Real Birds.’ ”

“Thanks again for this dress. It may get tom, I’m warning you now.”

“People should have wedding nights like your breakups.”

“Women need space, need space!”

/c/

“Are you bothered by speculations about whether it bothers me that you never tell me you love me?”

“Maybe sometimes.”

“Well you shouldn’t be. I know you do, deep down. Deep down I know it. And I love you, fiercely and completely — you do believe that.”

“Yes.”

“And you love me.”

“…. ”

“It’s not a problem. I know you do. Please don’t let it bother you.”

“….”

“Thank you for telling me the Grandmother news. I apologize for being a pain in the ass at dinner. I apologize for Norman.”

“Well, God, I wanted to tell you. Except I don’t really even feel like it’s telling. You tell facts, you tell things. These weren’t things, they’re just a collection of weirdnesses.”

“Even so. Are you bothered by the book being gone, too?”

“…. ”

“The book is a problem, Lenore. The book is your problem, in my opinion. Hasn’t Jay said you’re simply investing an outside thing with an efficacy to hurt and help and possess meaning that can really come only from inside you? That your life is inside you, not in some book that makes an old woman’s nightie sag?”

“How do you know what Jay’s told me?”

“I know what I’d tell you in his place.”

“…. ”

“Be legitimately concerned about a relative who’ll turn up with a Mediterranean tan and a terse explanation from your father, Lenore. Is all.”

“You fill me up, Rick, you know. You turn me inside out.”

“Pardon me?”

“You turn me inside out. When we.. you know. What we just did.”

“I fill you up?”

“You do.”

“Well thank you.”

“A story, please.”

“A story.”

“Please. Did you get any today?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Good.”

“I actually began a journal today, too, really. Just jottings. Random, et cetera. It was interesting. I had wanted to ever since I was young.”

“Well good. Can I read it, ever?”

“You most certainly cannot. A journal is almost by definition something no one else reads.”

“I guess I’ll just settle for a story, then, please.”

“Got another interesting one today.”

“Goody.”

“Sad, though, again. Do you know where all the really sad stories I’m getting are coming from? They’re coming, it turns out, from kids. Kids in college. I’m starting to think something is just deeply wrong with the youth of America. First of all, a truly disturbing number of them are interested in writing fiction. Truly disturbing. And more than interested, actually. You don’t get the sorts of things I’ve been getting from people who are merely… interested. And sad, sad stories. Whatever happened to happy stories, Lenore? Or at least morals? I’d fall ravenously on one of the sort of didactic Salingerian solace-found-in-the-unlikeliest-place pieces I was getting by the gross at Hunt and Peck. I’m concerned about today’s kids. These kids should be out drinking beer and seeing films and having panty raids and losing virginities and writhing to suggestive music, not making up long, sad, convoluted stories. And they are as an invariable rule simply atrocious typists. They should be out having fun and learning to type. I’m not a little worried. Really.”

“So let’s hear it.”

“A man and a woman meet and fall in love at a group-therapy session. The man is handsome and jutting-jawed, and also as a rule very nice, but he has a problem with incredible flashes of temper that he can’t control. His emotions get hold of him and he can’t control them, and he gets insanely and irrationally angry, sometimes. The woman is achingly lovely and as sweet and kind a person as one could ever hope to imagine, but she suffers from horrible periods of melancholy which can be held at bay only by massive overeating and excessive sleep, and so she eats Fritos and Hostess Cupcakes all the time, and sleeps far too much, and weighs a lot, although she’s still very pretty anyway.”

“Can you please move your arm a little?”

“And the two meet at the group-therapy sessions, and fall madly in love, and stare dreamily at each other across the therapy room every week while the psychologist, who acts very laid-back and nice and wears a flannel poncho, leads the therapy sessions. The psychologist by the way it’s important to know seems on the outside to be very nice and very compassionate, but actually it turns out we find out thanks to the omniscient narrator he’s the only real villain in the story, a man who as a college student had had a nervous breakdown during the GRE’s and hadn’t done well and hadn’t gotten into Harvard Graduate School and had had to go to N.Y.U. and had had horrible experiences and several breakdowns in New York City, and as a result just hates cities, and collective societal units in general, a really pathological hatred, and thinks society and group pressures are at the root of all the problems of everybody who comes to see him, and he tries unceasingly but subtly to get all his patients to leave the city and move out into this series of isolated cabins deep in the woods of whatever state the story takes place in, I get the feeling New Jersey, which cabins he by some strange coincidence owns and sells to his patients at a slimy profit.”

“….”

“And the man and the woman fall madly in love, and start hanging around together, and the man’s temper begins miraculously to moderate, and the woman’s melancholy begins to moderate also and she stops sleeping all the time and also stops eating junk food and slims down and becomes so incredibly beautiful it makes your eyes water, and they decide to get married, and they go and tell the psychologist, who rejoices with them and for them, as he puts it, but he tells them that their respective emotional troubles are really just on the back burner for a brief period, because of the distraction of their new love, and that if they really want to get cured for all time so they can concentrate on loving each other for ever and ever what they need to do is move away together from the city, I get the feeling Newark, into a cabin deep in the woods away from everything having to do with collective society, and he shows them some cabin-in-the-woods brochures, and suddenly the psychologist is here revealed to have tiny green dollar signs in the centers of his eyes, in a moment of surrealistic description I didn’t really care for.”

“Man oh man.”

“Yes but the man and the woman are by now pretty much completely under the psychologist’s clinical spell, after just a year of therapy, and also they’re understandably emotionally soft and punchy from being so much in love, and so they take the psychologist’s advice and buy a cabin way out in the woods several hours’ drive from anything, and the man quits his job as an architect, at which he’d been enormously brilliant and successful when he wasn’t having temper problems, and the woman quits her job designing clothes for full-figured women, and they get married and move out to their cabin and live alone, and, it’s not too subtly implied, have simply incredible sex all the time, in the cabin and the woods and the trees, and for a living they begin to write collaborative novels about the triumph of strong pure human emotion over the evil group-pressures of contemporary collective society. And they almost instantly, because of all the unbelievable though emotionally innocent sex, have a child, and they have a close call at labor time because they barely get to the tiny, faraway hospital in their four-wheel wilderness Jeep, which the psychologist also sold them, they barely get to the hospital in time, but everything’s ultimately OK and the child’s a healthy boy and on the way back from the tiny hospital deep in the woods, though still very far from their even deeper and more secluded cabin, they stop in and have a talk with a retired nun who lives in a cabin in a deep valley by the highway and spends her life selflessly nursing retarded people who are so retarded even institutions don’t want them, and the man and the woman and the retired nun dandle the baby on their knees and talk about how love can triumph over everything in general, and collective societal pressures in particular, all in some long but really quite beautiful passages of dialogue.”