David Wallace - Broom of the System

“That’s Mindy Metalman?” I shopped. I drove a late-model car.

“Mrs. A. S. Lang herself, now,” said Lang. “The big voice used to be this lady in Centerport, on Long Island? But she’s getting old, scratchy. Melinda Sue’s pretty much pushin’ her out of the business. ”

“Heavens,” I said, “That certainly sounds like an enormously interesting career. Does Mindy enjoy it?”

“Sure she enjoys it. It’s easy as shit. She just sits around like once a week, with a drink and a million-dollar tape recorder and a script with lines like ‘Change due, four dollars.’ It’s easy as hell. But she’s ambitious now, all of a sudden. Her and her manager.” Lang swallowed half his beer. “Alan Gluskoter, her manager. Ambitious Al. They’re ambitious, now.” More beer. “She wants television.”

“Television?”

Lang stared at himself. “You know the voice that says ‘This is CBS,’ or ‘This is ABC,’ or ‘Stay tuned to CBS, please’? She wants to be that voice. That’s her great aspiration.”

“Good heavens.”

“Yeah.”

I was about to wet my pants. The only pair of pants I’d brought on the trip.

I slid off my stool, stretched, pretended to yawn. “Think I’ll just dash into the men’s room,” I said. “I want to see something. I think I may have left my initials in the wood of the stall here.”

Lang smiled at both of us. “I know I did. I carved hell out of everything when I was a student here.” He stood. “Hell, I’ll go with you. Could use a squirt myself.”

“Quite,” I said.

In the men’s room Lang ranged expertly over the urinal, aiming for the deodorant disc. “Room for two, here, big guy,” he said.

I muttered something and hurried into the stall, ostensibly to hunt for initials, really so that I could shut the door. I tried to last just as long as I could. Long after my last tinkle had ceased to sound, I could still hear the roar of Lang’s jet. This was an Amherst man.

I looked for my initials. All I can say at this point is that I must have been confused. I was sure I’d left another R.V. in the Flange’s stall, up over the door latch, to the left, actually I even thought I could remember the occasion of the carving, but here in the spot I remembered was, instead of an R.V., a deep, wickedly sharp set of W.D.L., long since filled in with violet pen. I pored over the wooden surfaces of the stall until I saw Lang’s boat shoes under the door.

“Not there,” I said, opening the door. “My initials don’t seem to be there.”

“Maybe they went ahead and changed the door sometime since ‘69,” said Lang, coming into the stall with me and swinging the door shut, so that I had to sit on the toilet to give him room to look at the door.

“Same door as ‘83, though, ’cause here are mine, still,” he said, pointing at the deep W.D.L. over the latch. He brushed at the letters with a big thumb, removing a smidgeon of God knows what.

“W.D.L. for Andrew Sealander Lang?” I said.

“I got called Wang-Dang Lang all through school,” said Lang, grinning. “Actually I still get called Wang-Dang Lang, by my real good friends. You can call me Wang-Dang, if you want.” He stared lovingly at his initials.

“Thank you,” I said. I had to pee again, already, I felt.

There were sounds of the restroom door opening. Snickering. I thought I recognized the Approacher’s voice. They must have been looking at our four shoes in the crowded stall. The group attended to business, noisily, and eventually left, after teasing us by flicking the lights off and on several times. I was lost in thought, for the most part, trying to account for my memory of my initials in the Flange’s door, which memory was clear and distinct, in the face of the evidence. It certainly looked like the same door. Lang studied the door with me, thinking.

“Is your girlfriend Clarice’s younger sister?” he suddenly asked.

I looked up at him from the toilet. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, Lenore is two years younger than Clarice.”

“You know, I’m pretty sure I’ve met her, then,” said Lang, absently digging with his finger at some peanut in a molar, extracting some beige material. He looked at it. “ ‘Cause Clarice had a sister visiting her the night I met my wife. Or was it that other girl had a sister up?” He scratched. “No, I’m real sure it was Beadsman. I think I remember for sure she said her name was Lenore Beadsman.” He looked faraway.

“So you probably met my fiancée before I did,” I said.

Lang grinned down at me. “And you knew my wife before I even met her, when she was a little girl.”

I grinned back. “Not all that little.”

“I know what you mean,” Lang laughed. Spontaneously, out of the sheer odd warmth of the moment, we did the Psi Phi handshake again. “Quaaaango!” We laughed.

I got off the toilet. We left the restroom and went back into the bar. There were stage titters from the Approacher’s little television coterie. Wang-Dang Lang ignored them and clapped his arm around my shoulders.

“Ah, Rick, Rick,” he said. “I just don’t know what the hell to do.” He looked around. “I just feel like I need to…”

“Get outside,” I said. For us inside outsiders, the only real place to go was outside.

“Well, yeah. Exactly.” He looked me in the eye. “I feel like I need to get out. Just… out, for a while.” He ordered another beer as I chewed the whiskey out of my ice.

“Are things not well with you and the wife?”

In the mirror Lang said, “Things are the same as ever, fine and Daddy — excuse — fine and dandy as ever. I just feel… constricted, like I can’t breathe. Like I’m breathin’ used-up air. I’m living in the bitch’s town, in her house, working for her Daddy, hearing her voice when I get in my freaking car. I think we need a slight vacation from each other. Things are just less than wonderful right now. I think I just need to get out, for a period of time.”

“Establish other connections,” I said. “Hence the utter appropriateness of your little trip up here. It’ll do you a world of good.” God, there was a time when I would have given limbs to be constricted by Mindy Metalman.

“Eggzackly,” Lang said. He punched me affectionately in the arm. I struggled not to rub my shoulder.

“And so just one hell of a buzz, meetin’ you,” Land said to me in the mirror. “A House brother, a neighbor, damn near a relative. Like an uncle or something. Shit on fire. Ti symptosis.”

“What was that?” I asked.

“What was what?”

“ ‘Tea’ something,” I said.

“Ti symptosis?” said Lang. “It’s just this expression. ‘Ti symptosis’ is idiomatic modern Greek for, like, ’What a hell of a coincidence.‘ Which this is, sure enough, let me tell you.”

“Greek?” I said. “You speak modem Greek?”

Lang laughed loudly. “Does a bear make skata in the woods?” I intuited that even such as he was beginning to feel the lake of beer inside him. “Yeah,” he said, “I picked up Greek real well after college. I told you I was overseas? I was working for my Daddy’s company? This really kick-ass company called Industrial Desert Design, Dallas?”

I stared at Lang. “Your father owns Industrial Desert Design?”

“You know Industrial Desert Design?” said Lang.

“Jesus Christ,” I said, “I live in Ohio. Just north of your magnum opus.”

“I will be slapped, pinched, and rolled,” Lang said, pounding the bar with his fist. “This is just too goddamned great. Is that thing great or what? I worked on the crew for that, in the summer, when I was just eleven, twelve years old. I planted cactuses. That was a fucking blast.”