David Wallace - Broom of the System

“And so the man arrives at the love therapist’s office, and actually wouldn’t ordinarily have gotten in to see the love therapist at all, because she’s apparently a truly great and respected love therapist, and incredibly busy, and her appointment calendar is booked up months in advance, but, as it happens, the love therapist’s receptionist is a ravingly desirable woman, and the man immediately and involuntarily falls head over heels in love with her, and actually begins involuntarily reciting love poems to her, then eventually sort of passes out, swoons from the intensity of his love, and falls to the carpeted floor, and so the receptionist runs in and tells the love therapist what’s happened, that this is obviously a guy who really needs to be seen right away, out here, on the rug, and so the love therapist skips her lunch hour, which she was just about to take, and they pick the man up off the reception-area rug and carry him into the office and revive him with cold water, and he gets an appointment right away.

“And it turns out that one of the reasons why this love therapist is so great is that she can usually hew to the bone of someone’s love-problem in one appointment, and doesn’t keep the patient stringing along month after expensive month with vague predictions of breakthrough, which we are both in a position to appreciate the desirability of, I think, and so the love therapist hews to the bone of the man’s problem, and tells the man that surprisingly enough it’s not that his emotional love-mechanism is too strong, but rather that some of its important features are actually too weak, because one of the big things about real love is the power to discriminate and decide whom and on the basis of what criteria to love, which the man is very obviously unable to do — witness the fact that the man fell deeply and intricately for the receptionist without even knowing her, and has already said ‘I love you’ to the love therapist, herself, about ten times, involuntarily. What the man needs to do, the love therapist says, is to strengthen his love-discrimination mechanism by being around women and trying not to fall in love with them. Since this obviously will be hard for the man to do at the start, the love therapist suggests that he begin by finding some woman so completely and entirely undesirable, looks-wise and personality-wise, that it won’t be all that hard to keep from falling in love with her right away, and then proceeding to hang around her as much as he can, to begin to strengthen the mechanism that lets men hang around with women without necessarily falling in love with them. And the man is dazed from the one-two punch of the ravingly desirable receptionist and the wise and kind and obviously exceedingly competent and also not unerotic love therapist, but the back part of his brain, the part that deals with basic self-preservation, knows that things cannot keep going as they have been, and he resolves to give the love therapist’s advice a try, and then he happens to look down at the Thermos he’s still holding, and he sees the piece of masking tape with the name and address of the Thermos woman on it, and he has an epiphany-ish flashback to the subway, and sees that the Thermos woman is just a prime candidate for non-love, stringy-hair-and-uneven-leg-wise, and clearly-troubled-personality-wise, and as the scene ends we see him looking speculatively at the Thermos and then at the love therapist.”

“How’s the gum doing?”

“New piece, please.”

“Here.”

“….”

“Is the gum working?”

“Do you hear me complaining yet?”

“Good point.”

“And so as the next scene opens it’s a few days later, and the man and the Thermos woman are walking in Central Park, or rather walking and limping, respectively, and they’re holding hands, although for the man it’s just a friendly platonic hand-holding, although we’re not sure what it is for the Thermos woman, and it’s made clear that the man had gone to the Thermos address and had talked to the woman and had, after a reasonably long time and many visits, broken down some of her really pathological shyness and introversion, though only some. And they’re walking hand in hand, although it’s inconvenient, because the woman clearly has a pathological need always to be in shadow, and so they keep having to veer all over Central Park to find shadow that she’ll be able to walk in, and she also has a pathological need to keep her neck covered, and keeps fingering at one of the seemingly uncountable number of scarves she owns, and she also strangely always seems to want to have only her right side facing the man, she keeps her left side turned away at all times, so all the man ever sees of her is her right profile, and as he turns from time to time and moves relative to her she keeps moving and positioning herself like mad to keep only her right side facing him.”

“….”

“And she also seems really aloof and not emotionally connected with anyone outside herself at all, except her family, who live in Yonkers, but as the man works to exercise his love-discrimination mechanism and starts hanging around the woman and beginning to get to know her better, it seems clear to him that she actually wants to be connected with people outside herself, very much, but can‘t, for some strange reason that he can’t figure out, but knows has something to do with the shadows, the scarves, and the profiles.”

“ ”

“And a funny thing happens. The man begins to like the Thermos woman. Not love, but like, which is something the man has never experienced before, and finds different, because it involves directing a lot more emotional attention to the actual other person than the old uncontrollable passionate love had involved, involves caring about the whole other person, including the facets and features that have nothing whatsoever to do with the man. And now it’s implied that what has happened is that the man has for the first time become really connected to a person other than himself, that he had not really ever been connected before, that his intense-love tendency, which might at first glance have seemed like the ultimate way to connect, has really been a way not to connect, at all, both in its results and, really, as a little psychological analysis is by implication indulged in, in its subconscious intent. The inability to bring the discriminating faculty of love to bear on the world outside him has been what has kept the man from connecting with that world outside him, the same way the Thermos woman has been kept from connecting by the mysterious shadow-scarf-and-profile thing.

“Which thing, by the way, really begins to bother the man, and makes him intensely curious, especially as he begins to feel more and more connected to the woman, though not exactly in a passionate-love way, and thinks he feels her yearning to connect, too. And so he gradually wins her trust and affection, and she responds by starting to wash her hair, and dieting, and buying an extra thick shoe for her obscenely short leg, and things progress, although the Thermos woman is still clearly pathologically hung up about something. And then one night in very early April, after a walk all around the quainter parts of Brooklyn, the man takes the Thermos woman back to her apartment and has sex with her, seduces her, gets her all undressed — except, compassionately, for her scarf — and he makes love to her, and it’s at first surprisingly, but then when we think about it not all that surprisingly, revealed that this is the first time this incredibly passionate, love-oriented man, who’s about thirty, has ever had sex with anybody, at all.”

“….”

“Um, first time for the Thermos woman, too.”

“….”

“….”

“What’s the matter?”

“My ear! Shit! God!”