David Wallace - Broom of the System

“Why are you in town?” I asked Lang. “Is ‘83 having some function?”

“Naw,” said the Texan. “ ‘83 never has functions. I just felt like I had to… to get the heck out of Scarsdale. Just get out for a while. Plus I really like it up here in the fall. ’Course it’s not really fall yet. Too goddamned hot.”

“Still, though.”

“Right. Exactly. Now but I bet you didn’t come all the way out here from Ohio just to get out, though, right?”

“No, you’re right.” I shook my head. I asked the now explicitly hostile bartender for another drink. The bartender glared at Lang. Lang ignored him. “No,” I said, “my fiancée is here visiting her brother, ‘93, and I just came along on a bit of a lark. I hadn’t even been back before.”

Lang stared into the mirror. “Naw, I haven’t been back much either. ‘Course I only been out a few years. And I’ve come back for a couple Homecomings. Those kick ass.”

“I remember they were fun.”

“You bet.”

“Are you married, in Scarsdale?” I asked. I must here confess that I asked the question for an admittedly immature and selfish reason. I instinctively and involuntarily regard all other men as potential threats to my relationship with Lenore. One more married man was one fewer member of the great threat-set.

“Yeah, I’m married.” Lang looked at his reflection in the mirror.

I giggled sympathetically.

“Is the wife up with you?” I asked.

“No she is not,” said Lang. He paused to belch. “The wife…,” he looked at his watch, “… the wife is at this second indubitably out in the back yard, on the lawn chair, with a martini and a Cosmopolitan, reinforcin’ the old tan.”

“I see,” I said.

Lang looked at me. “I really don’t know why the hell I came up here, to tell the truth. I just… felt like I needed to come home, somehow.” He drummed his knuckle on the bar.

“Yes, yes.” I almost clutched at his arm. “I understand completely. Trying to come back inside…”

“What?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing. What do you do, Andrew? May I call you Andrew?”

“Sure you can, Dick,” he said. He turned back toward me, and there was peanut-smell. His eyes went dull. “Right now I’m in accounting. My wife’s Daddy’s an accountant and all, and so I do some work for him. I mostly fuck off, though. I’m gonna quit. I think I in effect quit today, by not showing up.” He gulped beer and wiped his lip, looking faraway. “When I got out of school, I worked overseas for a while, for my Daddy. My Daddy owns this company, in Texas, and I worked for them overseas, for a couple years. That was the balls.”

“But then you got married.”

“Yup.” Peanuts. “You married, Dick? That’s right, you said you’re engaged. ”

“I… I am engaged. To a wonderful, wonderful girl.” He was married, after all. “I was married before. I got divorced.”

“And engaged again now. Whooee. A glutton for punishment, Dick.”

“Please call me Rick,” I said. “My friends call me Rick. And an entirely different situation, this time, fortunately.” I felt a bit uncomfortable. Lenore and I were, after all, not explicitly engaged, although it was only a matter of waiting for the combination of the right moment and sufficient saliva.

“Well good for you. What’s the lucky little lady’s name?”

“Ms. Lenore Beadsman, of East Corinth, which is to say Cleveland, Ohio,” I said.

Lang speculatively sucked the salt off a peanut. He looked in the mirror and removed something from his lip. “Beadsman. Beadsman.” He looked at me. “Hmmm. She didn’t go to school around here, did she? Or more exactly Mount Holyoke?”

“No, no,” I said, excited, feeling connection potential—‘83, after all. “But her sister did. Ms. Clarice Beadsman. Now Mrs. Alvin Spaniard, Cleveland Heights, Ohio.”

“Well I will be goddamned,” said Lang. “Clarice Beadsman was one of my wife’s roommates, one year. My sophomore year. I knew her. Christ in a camper, that seems like just too goddamned long ago. My wife and her didn’t get along too good.”

“But they knew each other. Really. Really.” I squirmed with excitement and a full bladder. No possible way I was going to the men’s room before Lang, though. “What is your wife’s name, pray, so I can tell it to Lenore and she to Clarice?”

“My wife’s maiden name was Miss Melinda Metalman,” said Andrew Lang to the mirror.

The earth tipped on its axis. The spit was vacuumed from my mouth and disappeared out the back of my head. Melinda Metalman. Mindy Metalman, perhaps the most erotic girl I have ever seen in person. Rex Metalman’s daughter, who had done things around a lawn sprinkler no thirteen-year-old should be able to do. Sweat leapt to my brow.

“Mindy Metalman?” I croaked.

Lang turned again. “Yeah.” His eyes were old, dull.

I looked at my whiskey. “You don’t perhaps know whether her father might by any chance live on… Vine Street, in Scarsdale,” I said.

Lang grinned to himself. “Yeah, you’re from Scarsdale, that’s right. Well, yup. 14 Vine Street. Except he don’t anymore, ‘cause he gave the house to me and Mindy last year. He lives in an apartment now. One supposedly without a lawn. Having a lawn fucked with old Rex’s mind. But except now he’s starting a lawn at his building, he says. Just a real tiny one. Hardly a lawn at all, he says. Who the hell knows.” Lang looked at the mirror. “I live at 14 Vine now, more or less.”

“I used to live at 16 Vine,” I said quietly. Lang turned to me. The “Bob Newhart” crowd must have thought we were in love. Our eyes shone with the thrill of apparent connection. It was something of a thrill, given the context. I tingle a bit even now, in the motel. “My ex-wife still lives there, though I’ve been led to believe she’s preparing to sell,” I said.

“Mrs. Peck?” Lang’s eyes opened wide. “Veronica?”

“Ms. Peck,” I said, clutching for real now at Lang’s sportcoat sleeve. “Peck was her maiden name. And I used to play tennis with Rex Metalman, long ago. I used to watch Rex go at his lawn almost every day. It was a neighborhood event.”

“I will be dipped and fried and completely goddamned,” said Lang. “I just had no idea Ronnie’d been married to an Amherst alum. Sheeit.” He thumped the bar with his hand again. I noticed his hand, suddenly. It was heavy, and brown, and strong. A hard hand.

“Ronnie?” I said.

“Well, I know her pretty good, her living next door and all.” Lang looked down to play with the ring of moisture his beer glass had made on the dark wood of the bar.

“I see,” I said. “How is Ronnie?”

We looked at each other in the mirror. “Last time I saw her, she was just fine,” Lang said. He poured more beer into the suds at the bottom of the glass. I saw salt, from the peanuts, on the rim. “What exactly do you do, Rick? In Cleveland.”

“Publishing,” I said. “I manage a publishing firm in Cleveland. Frequent and Vigorous, Publishing, Inc.”

“Hmmm,” Lang said.

“What about Mindy?” I asked. “I knew her, slightly, as a girl. Is Mindy well? Does Mindy have a career of her own?”

“Mindy does have a career,” Lang said after a moment. “Mindy is a voice.”

“A voice?” I said. My head was filled with visions of Mindy Metalman. Her bedroom had been directly across the fence from my den.

“A voice,” said Lang. He played with a cocktail napkin decorated with a huge lipstick-kiss design. “You ever been in a grocery? And when you pay for your items and all at the cash register, the girl pushes the items over the scanner thing, that beeps, and then this voice in the register says the price? Or do you have one of them late-model cars that says to please fasten seat belts when you didn’t fasten your seat belts? Melinda Sue is the voice in things.”