David Wallace - Broom of the System

Lenore looked for evidence of Lang. By the bed — a bed tightly made; Lenore thought about trying the thing with the half-dollar and decided against it — was a duffel bag, stuffed full and with some of its contents vomited out onto the floor around it, which fact was partially hidden by a carefully folded blanket Lang had placed over most of the scene, as if he had been in a hurry. On the bed were some new shirts and white socks, all still in their store plastic. But that was all. On the whole it just didn’t seem like a Lang sort of room, to Lenore, at all.

“This just doesn’t seem like your kind of room,” Lenore said to Lang when he came back with his hands full of cans and glasses. She watched him put everything down carefully on the glass table.

“Well it’s a inexpensive room, and no bugs, and the neighbors are tough to beat.” Lang grinned.

“I just mean decor-wise. I just can’t picture you really living in a room with Swedish furniture and paintings of squares.”

Lang hunkered down on the couch and looked for a second over at the blank white television screen. “And so what kind of decor do you picture me in the middle of?” He closed his eyes and popped the top off a can of wine.

Lenore ran her hand along the mantle of Misty’s cold fireplace. “Oh, I don’t know.” She smiled to herself. “Smoky leather. Leather chairs. A leopardy rug, with maybe a snarling bear’s head on it. Lascivious calendars and posters…” She turned. “Maybe some expensive stereo stuff with its control-knobs all gleamy in an overhead light whose brightness you can adjust by turning a dial…”

Lang laughed and hit his knee with his fist. “Undamncanny. You just largely described my old college room.”

“Did I.”

“Forgot the animal heads on the walls, though.” Lang manipulated his eyebrows at her.

Lenore laughed. “The animal heads,” she said. “How could I.”

“And the mirrors on the ceiling…” Lang looked down and came back up holding a big glass. “A little vino?”

Lenore came over to the couch.

“Couldn’t find any damn wine glasses, so I used these. I hope it’s OK to just take glasses, if we wash them out after.” They were Road Runner glasses that Candy Mandible had gotten in some sort of fast-food restaurant promotion.

Lenore took a glass of wine. “It’s OK. They’re Candy’s. She’s pretty generous with her stuff. As I’m sure you know.” She sat down in the white chair, carefully pulling the back of her dress down so the skin of her legs wasn’t touching the burlap cushion. She crossed her legs.

“I figured they were either hers or yours, or poor old Misty Schwartz‘s,” said Lang. “And I didn’t think that poor girl needs any glasses about now.” He leaned back on the couch. “Sent her a card, by the way, in the hospital, saying who I was, about the room, saying I hoped she got better and all.”

“That was pretty nice of you,” Lenore said, picking the glass up from the table. The wine was yellow and sweet and so cold it hurt Lenore’s teeth. She put her glass back on the table and got a bit of a tooth-shiver from the sound of glass on glass, on top of the cold of the wine.

“Nah,” said Lang, crossing his leg over so his ankle was on his knee and holding onto the ankle with one big hand. Lenore looked at his shoe and his hairy ankle.

“Nah,” said Lang. “Just polite, is all. Melinda Sue had a similar thing happen to her, except I guess not as bad. Woman was still slathered to hell in Noxzema for a week.”

“Sounds horrible.”

“Should tell your sister to watch out, not get burnt.”

“Will do.”

“You like the wine?” Lang held his glass up toward the light fixture and tried to look at the wine around a cartoon of the coyote, who was wincing and holding a tiny umbrella over his head, apparently about to get clobbered by a boulder.

“It sure is cold,” Lenore said.

“Uh-huh,” said Lang. He looked over at the white screen again. “Should I just assume you don’t want to watch ‘Dallas,’ then?”

“I turned it on for a second,” Lenore said. “It’s really not my show, which doesn’t mean it’s a bad show or anything. If you want to watch it, go ahead; I’ll watch just about anything, at least for a while.”

“Nah,” said Lang. He took off his sportcoat and got up and hung it up. Lenore touched the sides of her hair. She could feel lines of heat going into her arms and legs, from the wine. She held her glass up to the light. On her glass the Road Runner was running, his legs were just a blur, and the curving road behind him looked used and limp and rubbery against the brown hills of some desert. There were cacti.

“Can I maybe ask where all those lottery tickets come from, that are in your purse?” Lang said, sitting down again, now on the edge of the couch closest to Lenore’s chair, so they could see each other in the glass of the table when they looked down. He looked down at her. “Who’s the lottery-playing demon around here?”

Lenore laughed. “Candy and I play a lot. I mean a lot .” She smoothed hair out of her eyes, and Lang watched her do it. “We play a lot. We have all these systems, using our birthdays and the letters in our names and stuff. Ohio has a really good lottery.”

Lang drank. “Ever win at all?”

“We will,” Lenore said. She laughed. “We started playing in college, just for fun, and I was a philosophy major, and for a joke we hit on this sort of syllogism, ostensibly proving we’d win—”

“Syllogism?”

“Yeah,” Lenore said. “Like a tiny little argument.” She smiled over at Lang and held up fingers. “One. Obviously somebody has to win the lottery. Two. I am somebody. Three. Therefore obviously I have to win the lottery.”

“Shit on fire.”

Lenore laughed.

“So why does that seem like it works, when it doesn‘t, since you haven’t won?”

“It’s called an E-screech equivocation. My brother disproved it to me that same year when I made him mad about something. It’s sort of a math thing.” Lenore laughed again. “The whole thing’s probably silly, but Candy and I still get a kick out of it.”

Lang played with the hairs on his ankle. “You were a phi-los-ophy major, then.” He drew out the word “philosophy.”

“Philosophy and then Spanish, too,” said Lenore, nodding. “I was a double major in school.”

“I personally majored in ec-o-nomics,” Lang said, doing it again.

Lenore ignored him. “I took an economics class one time,” she said. “Dad wanted me to major in it, for a while.”

“But you said no sir.”

“I just didn’t do it, is all. I didn’t say anything.”

“I admire that,” Lang said, pouring more wine for both of them and crushing the empty can in his hand. He threw it in the wastebasket from clear across the room. “Yes I do,” he said.

“Admire what?”

“Except I have trouble picturing you as a phi-los-opher,” he said. “I remember seeing you in Melinda-Sue’s room that one time, so long ago, and thinking to myself: artist. I remember thinking artist to myself, that time.”

The wine was warmer now. Lenore fought off a cough. “Well I’m sure not an artist, although Clarice has what you could call a sort of artsy talent. And I wasn’t ever a philosopher, I was just a student.” She looked into the table. “But how come you can’t picture it?”

“I dunno,” Lang said, throwing an arm back along the top of the couch, holding its steel bar in his hand and stroking it with his fingers. Lenore’s neck felt even tighter at the back. She felt like she could see Lang from all different angles all of a sudden: his profile next to her, his reflection down in the glass table, his other side in the window out past the couch and the television screen. He was all over, it seemed.