David Wallace - Broom of the System

“Then you’re a confused little specimen.”

“And you love me.”

“You are an amazing woman if you think that’s today’s message. You amaze me, Melinda-Sue. I’d take my hat off to you, except I think I left it next door. And hey, you should probably either get out of the window, or else put something on.”

“….”

“No sense givin’ it away.”

/b/

A bright day, in very early September, everything dry, the sun an explicit thing, up there, with heat coming right off it, but a flat edge of cool running down the middle of the day. A jet airplane stood at lunchtime on Runway 1 at CHA, pointed west to go east, a red-ink drawing of a laughing baby on its side, guys with earmuffs and orange plastic flags torn at by the wind off the flatness taking iron prisms out from under the airplane’s wheels, the air behind the engines hot and melting the pale green fields through it, the engines hissing through the dry wind like torches, fuel-shimmers. The guys slowly waving the orange flags. The sun glinting off the slanted glass of the windshield, behind which there are sunglasses and thumbs-ups. One of the flag-guys is wearing a Walkman, instead of earmuffs, and he twirls with his flag.

/c/

“There is an ominous rumbling in my ears.”

“That’s the engine, right outside the window.”

“No, the engine is a piercing, nerve-jangling, screaming whine. I’m talking about an ominous rumbling.”

“….”

“My ears are going to hurt horribly on this flight, I know. The change in pressure is going to make my ears hurt like hell.”

“Rick, in my purse are like fifty packs of gum. I’ll keep shoving gum in your mouth, and you’ll chew, and swallow your saliva, and your ears will be OK. We’ve discussed this already.”

“Maybe I’d better have a piece now, all unwrapped and ready to go in my hand.”

“Here, then.”

“Bless you, Lenore.”

“A story, please.”

“A story? Here?”

“I’m really in the mood for a story. Maybe a story will take your mind off your ears.”

“My ears, God. I’d almost begun to have hopes of forgetting, what with the gum in my hand, and you go and mention my ears.”

“Let’s just have a minimum of spasms, here in public, on the plane, with a pilot and stewardess who’re probably going to tell my father everything we do and say.”

“How comforting.”

“Just no spasms, please.”

“But a story.”

“Please.”

“….”

“I know you’ve got some. I saw manila envelopes in your suitcase when I put stuff in.”

“Lord, they’re getting ready to take off. We’re moving. My ears are rumbling like mad.”

“….”

“Ironically enough, a man, in whom the instinct to love is as strong and natural and instinctive as can possibly be, is unable to find someone really to love.”

“We’re starting the story? Or is this just a Vigorous pithy?”

“The story is underway. The aforementioned pre-sarcastic-interruption fact is because this man, in whom the instincts and inclinations are so strong and pure, is completely unable to control these strong and pure instincts and inclinations. What invariably happens is that the man meets a halfway or even quarterway desirable woman, and he immediately falls head over heels in love with her, right there, first thing, on the spot, and blurts out ‘I love you’ as practically the first thing he says, because he can’t control the intensely warm feelings of love, and not just lust, now, it’s made clear, but deep, emotionally intricate, passionate love, the feelings that wash over him, and so immediately at the first opportunity he says ’I love you,‘ and his pupils dilate until they fill practically his whole eyes, and he moves unself-consciously toward the woman in question as if to touch her in a sexual way, and the women he does this to, which is more or less every woman he meets, quite understandably don’t react positively to this, a man who says ’I love you’ right away, and makes a bid for closeness right away, and so the women as an invariable rule reject him verbally on the spot, or hit him with their purse, or worst of all run away, screaming screams only he and they can hear.”

“Look down a second, Rick. Out the window.”

“Where?”

“Right down there.”

“Heavens, I know her! That’s…”

“Jayne Mansfield.”

“Jayne Mansfield, right. What’s she doing as a town? Is that East Corinth?”

“I’ll explain later.”

“My God, will you look at that west border. That 271. That’s the Inner Belt. I’ve driven over that.”

“Meanwhile, back with the lover whose love drives the lovee away with silent screams.”

“Right. So the man is understandably not too happy. Not only is he denied the opportunity to love, but it’s the very strength and intensity of his own love-urge that denies him the opportunity, which denial thus understandably causes him exponentially more sadness and depression and frustration than it would you or me, in whom the instincts are semi-under-control, and so semi-satisfiable.”

“More gum?”

“And so the man is in a bad way, and he loses his job at the New York State Department of Weights and Measures, at which he’d been incredibly successful before the love-intensity problem got really bad, and now he wanders the streets of New York City, living off the bank account he’d built up during his days as a brilliant weights-and-measures man, wandering the streets, stopping only when he falls in love, getting slapped or laughed at or hearing silent screams. And this goes on, for months, until one day in Times Square he sees a discreet little Xeroxed ad on a notice board, an ad for a doctor who claims to be a love therapist, one who can treat disorders stemming from and connected to the emotion of love.”

“What, like a sex therapist?”

“No, as a matter of fact it says ‘Not A Sex Therapist’ in italics at the bottom of the ad, and it gives an address, and so the man, who is neither overjoyed with his life nor overwhelmed with alternatives for working out his problems, hops the subway and starts heading across town to the love therapist’s office. And in his car on the subway there are four women, three of them reasonably desirable, and he falls in love in about two seconds with each of the three in turn, and gets hit, laughed at, and subjected to a silent scream, respectively, and then eventually he looks over at the fourth woman, who’s conspicuously fat, and has stringy hair, and Coke-bottle glasses, and an incredibly weak chin, weaker even than mine, and so the fourth woman is prohibitively undesirable, even for the man, and besides she’s very hard to see because she’s pressed back into the shadow of the rear of the car, with her coat collar pulled up around her neck, which neck is also encased in a thick scarf. Did I mention it was March in New York City?”

“No.”

“Well it is, and she’s in a scarf, pressed back into the shadow, with her cheek pressed against the grimy graffiti-spattered wall of the subway car, clutching an old Thermos bottle that’s jutting halfway out of her coat pocket, and she just basically looks like one of those troubled cases you don’t want to mess with, which cases New York City does not exactly have a scarcity of.”

“You’re telling me.”

“And then on top of everything else the fat stringy-haired woman with the Thermos has been watching the man telling the other three women that he loves them, and making bids for closeness, out of the comer of her eye, as she hugs the wall of the car in shadow, and then so when she sees the man even look at her, at all, she obviously flips out, it really bothers her, and she bolts for the door of the subway car, as fast as she can bolt, which isn’t too fast, because now it becomes clear that one of her legs is roughly one half the length of the other, but still she bolts, and the car is just pulling into a station, and the door opens, and out she flies, and in her excessive haste she drops the old Thermos she’d been clutching, and it rolls down the floor of the subway, and it finally clunks against the man’s shoe, and he picks it up, and it’s just an old black metal Thermos, but on the bottom is a piece of masking tape on which is written in a tiny faint hand a name and an address, which he and we assume to be the woman‘s, in Brooklyn, and so the man resolves to give the woman back her Thermos, since it was probably he and his inappropriate emotional behavior that had caused her to drop it in the first place. Besides, the love therapist’s office is in Brooklyn, too.