David Wallace - Broom of the System

Lang put his shoe out onto the glass tabletop, twisted it back and forth. “He does like to spin, doesn’t he,” he said absently. He paused and looked over at Lenore. Lenore looked down at her shoe. Lang cleared his throat. “I probably shouldn’t do this, but I’ve been wanting to ask you about this one whopper R.V. told me about your brother, with his leg: how the little sucker lost his leg when your mother fell off the side of your house trying to get away from her bridge coach and break into your nursery. Or some such. Now just how much of that is true, and how much was my own personal leg getting pulled, on that plane?”

A lot of little lines seemed to come out of the lines of heat in Lenore’s body. She stared at Lang’s shoe on the table. She closed her eyes and felt her neck. Lang watched her. “Let me get this straight,” she said finally. “Rick told you personal stuff about my family? On the plane? While I was right there, asleep?”

“Was that a mistake, telling you what he told me? Lenore, hurt me with something hot if I just screwed up in any way. Just forget I said anything.”

Lenore kept looking at the glass table, and Lang’s shoe, and Lang’s shoe’s reflection, and Lang’s reflection. “He told you all that while I was asleep,” she said. In the table it looked as though Lang was looking away from her, because the real Lang was looking at her. When he finally looked down at the table, Lenore stared at him.

“Well he said you were his fiancée,” Lang said, “and how he was just passionately and totally interested in everything about his fiancée. It all seemed real innocent to me. Not to mention just articulate as ell. ”

Lenore had looked up. “He told you I was his fiancée? As in soon-to-be-married fiancée?”

“Oh shit.” Lang hit his forehead with the heel of his palm. “Oh shit, did I just do it again? Oh Lord. Just forget what I said. Just forget I said anything.”

“Rick said we were engaged? He just said that to you, unsolicited, out of the blue?”

“He probably just didn’t mean it the way he said it.”

“Shit on a twig.”

“Now Lenore I sure don’t want to come between two people who—”

“What the hell did he say there even was to come between?”

“Jesus H.,” Lang said, massaging his jaw. His reflection in the glass looked away from Lenore. Then it looked down, and seemed actually almost to wink, in the glass, all of a sudden. Lenore looked up, but the real Lang was looking at his hands.

“Jesus H. Christ,” he was saying to himself. He drank some wine. Lenore smoothed her hair back with hot fingers.

“Look,” said Lang. “I’m just real sorry. How about if I just tell you everything, everything that’s been making me feel all terribly guilty around you, and then we can just go ahead and—”

“Why on earth should you feel guilty because of Rick?” Lenore said tiredly, massaging her neck with her eyes closed again. “That he told you stuff is no reason for you to feel bad, Andy. I’m not mad at you about it.”

“Except there’s a few sort of sizable items R.V. doesn’t feel inclined to tell, it looks like,” said Lang. He took a very deep breath and looked at his hands again. “Like I’m not in actual fact translating any herbicide or pesticide crap into idiomatic Greek for you.” He looked at her. “Like I’m really working on a pamphlet for your own personal Daddy’s company, and its wild-ass new food that makes kids supposedly talk, like your bird can do.”

Lenore looked into the table. There was silence. “You’re really working for Stonecipheco,” she said.

Lang didn’t say anything.

“Which means Rick is, too. And Rick didn’t tell me.”

“I’m afraid that’s right. Except like I say I’m sure there was a good reason for his not.”

Lenore slowly reached for the open can and poured some more wine into her Road Runner glass. She hunched forward in the white burlap chair until her face was right over the table. She could see some of Lang in the top of her wine, erratic and shimmery, with mint eyes, in the yellow.

“And for his more or less ordering me not to tell you, either,” Lang was saying. He looked at the side of Lenore’s face. “The thing is, Lenore, he more or less ordered me not to tell you, which is why I didn’t tell you.”

Lenore shook the glass a little, rattled the bottom against the tabletop. The wine in the glass sloshed; Lang was broken into pieces that didn’t fit.

“Which means I’m afraid I need to ask you maybe to promise not to tell R.V. I told you, for fear of my job and all,” he said.

“Just like you yourself apparently promised Rick not to tell.”

Lang took his shoe off the table and leaned forward too, so his head was alongside Lenore‘s, a big curl of her hair hanging in the air between them. Lang looked at the curl. “I guess that promise has to get chalked up to what you might call strategic misrepresentation,” he said, very quietly.

“Strategic misrepresentation.”

“Yes. ‘Cause I made it before I ever got exposed to your good qualities and began to care about you as a person.” Lang set his glass of wine down and slowly took hold of some of Lenore’s curl and twisted it this way and that, all very gently.

“I see.”

“Not entirely sure you do, here, Lenore.”

“Oh, I think I do,” Lenore said, getting up and gently getting her hair out of the reach of Lang’s fingers. She walked over to the window and looked out at the houses across the Tissaws’ dark street. All the houses seemed to have their lights on.

“Well then maybe I should ask what do you think,” Lang said from back at the couch, where Lenore could see in the window he’d recrossed his legs and picked up his wine again. “What do you think about it, then,” he said.

“I don’t know,” Lenore said after a minute, breathing on the cold window. She watched how what she said made it hard to see out. “I don’t know what to think, old Wang-Dang Lang. Tell me what to think, please, and then I’ll think that way about it.”

“Well now that’s no way to talk, Lenore.”

Lenore didn’t say anything.

“And you should call me Andy,” said Lang. “You shouldn’t call me anything but Andy, I don’t think.”

“There, that’s what we need,” Lenore said, nodding, with her eyes closed. “We need it explicit. We need this control thing made explicit. No more games. People tell me what to do and think and say and call them, and I do it. It’ll all be simple. Then everybody can stop whispering when I’m asleep, and hiring each other behind my back, and wearing gas masks. They can just start making sense.” Lenore turned around. “So let’s really do it, OK? How are you supposed to be mixed up with my great-grandmother?”

“Now let’s just hold up here a second, Lenore,” said Lang. He put down his glass and came over to within a few feet of where Lenore was standing, at the window. On one side of them was the television screen; behind Lang was the way to the door. “Whoa there,” Lang was saying. “I don’t know anything about any great-grandmother mix-ups. And all‘I got to do with your family is basically you.” He shook his head. “Far as I know there’s nobody sneaking around about you and me.”

Lenore looked at the floor and put one of her curls behind her ear and crossed her arms. Lang was between her and the door. Her eyes began to get big and hot, and she felt as if there was wood in her voice box. She looked at Lang, who had his thumbs hooked into the pockets of his pants.

“Then how come I feel like the whole universe is playing pimp for me with you?” she said quietly. She thought she felt herself beginning to cry.