“Now let’s have a night to remember, and remember each other always,” Vlad the Impaler said to his reflection.
Lenore slipped a clean dress over her head. “When does this night to remember begin?”
Candy looked at the clock just as it clicked and buzzed a new minute. “Any time now. I’m just going to go over to his place for dinner, then I imagine we’ll mate like animals for hours and hours and hours.”
“A real romantic,” said Lenore. “Jesus wept, Vlad the Impaler. The sins of the fathers. I shall not want.”
“Jesus shall not want.”
“Attaboy.”
“I’m still waiting to hear about Rick, you know, mating-wise.” Candy called from back in her room. “It’s been months, after all, and if he’s as super as you say ... I’m waiting for minute anatomical tale-telling. Otherwise you’ll just force me to find out for myself.”
“Yes, well, ummm.” Lenore put on clean socks.
“Just kidding. But really, we are partners in crime after all. And describing one can make you feel closer to it. I mean him. Really. Angles and bends and birthmarks and everything. It makes you intimater.” Candy came in, in a pale old violet cotton dress that had been Lenore’s for a long time, and was just perfectly too small for Candy, and clung to the not insignificant swell of her hips. She knelt at the window in the shadow and put mascara on, looking at her reflection in the black lower rectangle of the clear glass pane. Outside, crickets were starting.
“Making me come. Me as a person,” said Vlad the Impaler. “Where is that ditzy bitch?”
“Sorry about that.”
“May I please have a ride to Rick’s? I left my car at the Building.” Lenore finished tying her shoes and brushed out the curves of her hair. “I think Vlad the Impaler’s going to be OK food-wise. He must not be eating much.”
“Yes you may have a ride. Listen, you going to water that plant, or what?”
“It’s like an experiment.”
“The sins of the feathers!” screamed Vlad the Impaler. “Who has the book?”
“What book?” Lenore asked Candy.
“Search moi. Listen, I’m late. Shall we.”
“Yes. Good night, Vlad the Impaler.”
“Love has no meaning. Love is a meaningless word to me.”
“Maybe we could get him on ‘Real People.’ ”
“ ‘Real Birds.’ ”
“Thanks again for this dress. It may get tom, I’m warning you now.”
“People should have wedding nights like your breakups.”
“Women need space, need space!”
/c/
“Are you bothered by speculations about whether it bothers me that you never tell me you love me?”
“Maybe sometimes.”
“Well you shouldn’t be. I know you do, deep down. Deep down I know it. And I love you, fiercely and completely—you do believe that.”
“Yes.”
“And you love me.”
“.... ”
“It’s not a problem. I know you do. Please don’t let it bother you.”
“....”
“Thank you for telling me the Grandmother news. I apologize for being a pain in the ass at dinner. I apologize for Norman.”
“Well, God, I wanted to tell you. Except I don’t really even feel like it’s telling. You tell facts, you tell things. These weren’t things, they’re just a collection of weirdnesses.”
“Even so. Are you bothered by the book being gone, too?”
“.... ”
“The book is a problem, Lenore. The book is your problem, in my opinion. Hasn’t Jay said you’re simply investing an outside thing with an efficacy to hurt and help and possess meaning that can really come only from inside you? That your life is inside you, not in some book that makes an old woman’s nightie sag?”
“How do you know what Jay’s told me?”
“I know what I’d tell you in his place.”
“.... ”
“Be legitimately concerned about a relative who’ll turn up with a Mediterranean tan and a terse explanation from your father, Lenore. Is all.”
“You fill me up, Rick, you know. You turn me inside out.”
“Pardon me?”
“You turn me inside out. When we .. you know. What we just did.”
“I fill you up?”
“You do.”
“Well thank you.”
“A story, please.”
“A story.”
“Please. Did you get any today?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Good.”
“I actually began a journal today, too, really. Just jottings. Random, et cetera. It was interesting. I had wanted to ever since I was young.”
“Well good. Can I read it, ever?”
“You most certainly cannot. A journal is almost by definition something no one else reads.”
“I guess I’ll just settle for a story, then, please.”
“Got another interesting one today.”
“Goody.”
“Sad, though, again. Do you know where all the really sad stories I’m getting are coming from? They’re coming, it turns out, from kids. Kids in college. I’m starting to think something is just deeply wrong with the youth of America. First of all, a truly disturbing number of them are interested in writing fiction. Truly disturbing. And more than interested, actually. You don’t get the sorts of things I’ve been getting from people who are merely ... interested. And sad, sad stories. Whatever happened to happy stories, Lenore? Or at least morals? I’d fall ravenously on one of the sort of didactic Salingerian solace-found-in-the-unlikeliest-place pieces I was getting by the gross at Hunt and Peck. I’m concerned about today’s kids. These kids should be out drinking beer and seeing films and having panty raids and losing virginities and writhing to suggestive music, not making up long, sad, convoluted stories. And they are as an invariable rule simply atrocious typists. They should be out having fun and learning to type. I’m not a little worried. Really.”
“So let’s hear it.”
“A man and a woman meet and fall in love at a group-therapy session. The man is handsome and jutting-jawed, and also as a rule very nice, but he has a problem with incredible flashes of temper that he can’t control. His emotions get hold of him and he can’t control them, and he gets insanely and irrationally angry, sometimes. The woman is achingly lovely and as sweet and kind a person as one could ever hope to imagine, but she suffers from horrible periods of melancholy which can be held at bay only by massive overeating and excessive sleep, and so she eats Fritos and Hostess Cupcakes all the time, and sleeps far too much, and weighs a lot, although she’s still very pretty anyway.”
“Can you please move your arm a little?”
“And the two meet at the group-therapy sessions, and fall madly in love, and stare dreamily at each other across the therapy room every week while the psychologist, who acts very laid-back and nice and wears a flannel poncho, leads the therapy sessions. The psychologist by the way it’s important to know seems on the outside to be very nice and very compassionate, but actually it turns out we find out thanks to the omniscient narrator he’s the only real villain in the story, a man who as a college student had had a nervous breakdown during the GRE’s and hadn’t done well and hadn’t gotten into Harvard Graduate School and had had to go to N.Y.U. and had had horrible experiences and several breakdowns in New York City, and as a result just hates cities, and collective societal units in general, a really pathological hatred, and thinks society and group pressures are at the root of all the problems of everybody who comes to see him, and he tries unceasingly but subtly to get all his patients to leave the city and move out into this series of isolated cabins deep in the woods of whatever state the story takes place in, I get the feeling New Jersey, which cabins he by some strange coincidence owns and sells to his patients at a slimy profit.”
“....”
“And the man and the woman fall madly in love, and
start hanging around together, and the man’s temper begins miraculously to moderate, and the woman’s melancholy begins to moderate also and she stops sleeping all the time and also stops eating junk food and slims down and becomes so incredibly beautiful it makes your eyes water, and they decide to get married, and they go and tell the psychologist, who rejoices with them and for them, as he puts it, but he tells them that their respective emotional troubles are really just on the back burner for a brief period, because of the distraction of their new love, and that if they really want to get cured for all time so they can concentrate on loving each other for ever and ever what they need to do is move away together from the city, I get the feeling Newark, into a cabin deep in the woods away from everything having to do with collective society, and he shows them some cabin-in-the-woods brochures, and suddenly the psychologist is here revealed to have tiny green dollar signs in the centers of his eyes, in a moment of surrealistic description I didn’t really care for.”
“Man oh man.”
“Yes but the man and the woman are by now pretty much completely under the psychologist’s clinical spell, after just a year of therapy, and also they’re understandably emotionally soft and punchy from being so much in love, and so they take the psychologist’s advice and buy a cabin way out in the woods several hours’ drive from anything, and the man quits his job as an architect, at which he’d been enormously brilliant and successful when he wasn’t having temper problems, and the woman quits her job designing clothes for full-figured women, and they get married and move out to their cabin and live alone, and, it’s not too subtly implied, have simply incredible sex all the time, in the cabin and the woods and the trees, and for a living they begin to write collaborative novels about the triumph of strong pure human emotion over the evil group-pressures of contemporary collective society. And they almost instantly, because of all the unbelievable though emotionally innocent sex, have a child, and they have a close call at labor time because they barely get to the tiny, faraway hospital in their four-wheel wilderness Jeep, which the psychologist also sold them, they barely get to the hospital in time, but everything’s ultimately OK and the child’s a healthy boy and on the way back from the tiny hospital deep in the woods, though still very far from their even deeper and more secluded cabin, they stop in and have a talk with a retired nun who lives in a cabin in a deep valley by the highway and spends her life selflessly nursing retarded people who are so retarded even institutions don’t want them, and the man and the woman and the retired nun dandle the baby on their knees and talk about how love can triumph over everything in general, and collective societal pressures in particular, all in some long but really quite beautiful passages of dialogue.”
“Killer story, so far.”
“Just wait. And they go back into the woods as before, and for a few years everything is great, unbelievably great. But then, like tiny cracks in a beautiful sculpture, little by little, their old emotional troubles begin to manifest themselves in tiny ways. The man sometimes gets unreasonably angry at meaningless things, and this sometimes makes the woman melancholy, and an ominous empty Frito bag or two begin to appear in the wastebasket, and she puts on a little weight. And right about then their child, who’s about six, now, begins to have a horrible medical problem in which whenever he cries—which little children are obviously wont to do, they’re always falling down and bumping into things and banging themselves up—in which whenever he cries, the child goes into something like an epileptic fit; his limbs thrash around and flail uncontrollably and he almost swallows his tongue, and it’s just very scary, obviously, and the parents are extremely worried, even though they think and hope that it might be just a phase, but still they love the child so fiercely and completely that they’re frantic. And the woman is now pregnant again. And all these little ominous things go on until, months later, they’ve gone in the Jeep all the way to the tiny far-off hospital for the woman to have the second baby, and as the baby’s being delivered the older child happens to slip on a wet patch in the hall and falls and bangs his head, and he naturally begins to cry, and he immediately starts to flop around in a convulsive fit, and meanwhile the baby is being bom, a girl, and when the kindly old country doctor slaps her bottom to get her to breathe she of course starts to cry, and she right away goes into a miniature epileptic convulsive fit of her own, so both children are at the same time having fits, and the quiet little backwoods hospital is suddenly a madhouse. But the kindly old country doctor quickly gets things back under control and examines both children on the spot and diagnoses them as suffering from an extremely rare neurological condition in which crying for some reason decimates their nervous systems, it harms their hearts and brains by making those organs disposed to swell and bleed, and he says that every time the children cry, as of course normal children can be counted on to do quite a bit, the fits will get worse and worse, and that more and more damage will be done, and that they will be in danger of dying, eventually—especially the older child, in whom the condition is more advanced and serious—unless, that is, treatment is administered to keep them really ever from crying.”
“Wow.”
“And the kindly old country doctor hands the man and the woman roughly a hundred little bottles of a certain special very rare and hard-to-make anticrying medicine, since it’s such a prohibitively long and difficult trip from their secluded cabin to the tiny hospital, and he promises that as long as the children have a dose of the medicine whenever they look as if they might start to cry, to nip the crying in the bud and so prevent fits, they’ll definitely be fine, and the parents are of course frantically worried but also relieved that it’s at least a treatable condition, but also the strain is making their old emotional problems a little worse, and the man is ominously unreasonably angry at the universe for making his children have epileptic fits when they cry, and at the really unavoidably exorbitant bill for all the rare and hard-to-make anticrying medicine, and the woman is ominously yawning, and she makes them stop at the tiny deep-woods grocery store and buy virtually every junk-food item in the place, which clearly pisses the man off, because she’s already put on some weight, even though she’s still very pretty, and his being pissed off makes the woman even more sad and sleepy and hungry, and so on in what we can see has the potential to be a vicious circle.”
“Would you like some of this ginger ale?”
“Thank you.”
“....”
“And so they get back to the cabin, and things are more or less as they were before, although the woman is eating and sleeping a lot and gaining weight fast, and the man is so angry at the exorbitant price of the anticrying medicine that he vows to make a special effort to control his temper and be extremely nice to both children so they’ll cry as little as possible. But of course meanwhile his old emotional temper problem is little by little getting worse and worse, and the strain of being artificially nice to the children is really telling on him, and at ever more frequent intervals he has to run deep into the woods to yell and punch trees with his fists, and he becomes involuntarily cruel to the sweet sad woman, and hisses at her about her steadily increasing weight late at night when the children are asleep at the other side of the tiny cabin, which hissing of course only makes the woman more melancholy and sleepy and hungry, and she quickly shoots up to her old pre-love weight, and then some. And this goes on for roughly a year, with some potentially really terrifying epileptic crying fits from the children, especially the older one, being averted only by administering the special medicine just in time.”
“I’m engrossed, I admit it.”
“Well, and now on the disastrous and climactic night of the story, symbolized by a really unbelievable rainstorm outside, with the wind screaming and big gelatinous globs of rain pelting the cabin, the four are sitting at dinner, and the woman’s plate is piled almost to the ceiling with Hostess Cupcakes, and she’s yawning, and the man, who is under enormous strain, is unbelievably pissed off, and struggling every mom
ent to control his temper, and the older child, who’s now about seven, whines a little bit about not wanting to eat his peas, which the woman had been too sleepy and gorged even to bother to unfreeze and cook, and the whine on top of everything else so angers the man that he involuntarily fetches the child a tremendous slap, purely involuntarily, and the child flies out of his chair, and falls, and knocks over a little table, on which are kept, in a place of honor, on a purple felt pad, all the precious bottles of the rare and hard-to-make anticrying medicine, and all the bottles are broken, and all the medicine in an instant ruined, and of course the child naturally starts crying from the tremendous slap and goes right away into a severe epileptic fit, and the baby, at all the negative commotion, begins to cry, too, and goes into a little fit of its own, and so suddenly the man and the woman have both children having epileptic crying fits, and no medicine to keep the fits from grievously harming the childrens’ hearts and brains and maybe killing them. And they’re frantic, and the kids are flopping around, and the woman finally manages to get the baby semi-calmed down by holding it and bouncing it and crooning to it, but the older child is in a very bad way indeed.”
“Good God.”
“So both parents are completely frantic, and they decide all they can do is for the man to take the older child in the Jeep and try to get to the tiny far-off hospital just as quickly as possible, while the woman calls ahead and gets them to make up an emergency batch of anticrying medicine right away, and that thus the woman should stay and try to call and keep the baby, who is now more or less stable in the mother’s arms but who hates to ride in the Jeep and would certainly cry disastrously on the way to the tiny hospital, from crying and convulsing any more, until the father can get back with the medicine and the also hopefully saved older child. And so the man carries the flopping boy out to the Jeep in the gelatinously heavy rain and off they go, and the woman begins to try to call the tiny far-off hospital but can’t get through because, as the narrator tells us, the hospital’s lines have been hit by lightning, and so in desperation the woman finally calls their old psychologist in the city, because he’d told them when he’d sold them their cabin that if they ever needed anything not to hesitate to call, and she gets hold of him at his downtown penthouse and begs him to drive to the tiny far-off hospital and get some anticrying medicine for the baby and bring it down to the cabin right away. And the psychologist, after he’s reminded of who the woman is—he’d forgotten—reluctantly says OK, he’ll do it, even though it’s raining gelatinously, and says he’ll be right there, but as soon as he hangs up, who should stop by but a current patient, whom the psychologist had been trying to convince to buy a cabin and live out in seclusion, and so the psychologist delays for a bit while he stays and shows the patient brochures and tries to convince him to buy a cabin, and we’re again rather irritatingly reminded that there are tiny green dollar signs in the centers of the psychologist’s eyes.”
The Broom of the System Page 12
