The Broom of the System

by David Foster Wallace

  /f/

  Ideas for Monroe Fieldbinder Story Collection, 27 August 1. Monroe watches a house burn down. Or Monroe’s house burns down, symbolizing destruction of the structure of his life as estate attorney, a plunging into chaos and disorientation, etc.

  2. Monroe has enormous sex organ—the adoration of women only sharpens and defines by opposition his sense of self-loathing and disgust.

  3. Monroe Fieldbinder sees psychologist to bounce ideas off him. One of Fieldbinder’s ideas is that the phenomenon of modem party-dance is incompatible with self-consciousness, makes for staggeringly unpleasant situations (obvious resource: Amherst/Mt. Holyoke mixer ‘68) for the at all self-conscious person. Modem party-dance is simply writhing to suggestive music. It is ridiculous, silly to watch and excruciatingly embarrassing to perform. It is ridiculous, and yet absolutely everyone does it, so that it is the person who does not want to do the ridiculous thing who feels out of place and uncomfortable and self-conscious ... in a word, ridiculous. Right out of Kafka: the person who does not want to do the ridiculous thing is the person who is ridiculous. (Idea: Kafka at an AmherstlMt. Holyoke mixer, never referred to by name, only as “F.K.,” only one not dancing ... ) Modern party-dance an evil thing.

  4. Monroe Fieldbinder’s psychologist has movable chair like that idiot Jay. Lampoon Jay unmercifully in Fieldbinder collection. Make Jay look like an idiot.

  10

  1990

  /a/

  The reason Lenore Beadsman’s red toy car had a spidery network of scratches in the paint on the right side was that by the driveway of the home of Alvin and Clarice Spaniard, in Cleveland Heights, lived a large, hostile brown shrub, bristling with really thorny branches. The bush hung out practically halfway across the drive, and scratched hell out of whatever or whoever came up. “Scritch,” was the noise Lenore heard as the thorns squeaked in their metal grooves in the side of her car, or rather “Scriiiiitch,” a sound like fingernails on aluminum siding, a tooth-shiver for Lenore.

  The only other thing even remotely irritating about the Spaniard home was the fact that the front doorknob was right in the middle of the door, rather than over on the right or left side, where door-knobs really should be, and so the door never seemed to swing open so much as just fall back, when someone opened it. There was also the very incidental fact that the house had a funny smell about it, on the inside, as if something not quite right were growing on the underside of some of the carpets in some of the rooms.

  But it was on the whole a very nice home, a two-story brick home with a huge elaborate antenna on the roof, a home in which lived Alvin Spaniard, Clarice Spaniard, Stonecipher Spaniard, and Spatula Spaniard (the latter named for Ruth Spatula Spaniard, Alvin Spaniard’s mother).

  Alvin Spaniard, Vice President of Advertising in Charge of Gauging Product-Perception, Stonecipheco Baby Food Products, opened the door to Lenore’s ring and stepped nimbly aside as the door seemed to fall back at him, and asked Lenore in, calling to Clarice and the kids that Lenore was here. Alvin immediately offered Lenore gin.

  “No thank you,” Lenore said. “Gin makes me cough.”

  Alvin Spaniard liked gin a lot. Lenore asked for a seltzer-and-lime. “You do know it’s family theater night,” Alvin said quietly as they moved in the direction of the living room.

  “Clarice told me on the phone. I really need to talk to her, though. I sort of hoped I could grab her during intermission or something.”

  In the living room, under hanging Mexican Aztec woven tapestries featuring suns and bird-gods with their heads at angles inappropriate with respect to their necks, Stonecipher, who was five, and Spatula, who was four, were playing Chutes and Ladders with Clarice, who was twenty-six, and who was only ostensibly playing Chutes and Ladders, while really watching an Olympic recap on television, in preparation for family theater, with a gin-and-tonic. It was quarter of eight.

  “Hey guys, here’s Aunt Lenore to play Chutes and Ladders with you;” said Clarice. She winked at Lenore.

  “Super,” said Lenore.

  Chutes and Ladders was perhaps the most sadistic board game ever invented. Adults loathed the game; children loved it. The universe thus dictated that an adult invariably got snookered into playing the game with a child. Certain rolls of the dice entitled you to certain movements on the board, some of which movements entitled you to move up ladders toward the base of the golden ladder at the top of the board (the climbing of which ladder represented the ultimate telos and reward-in-itself of the whole game). Moving up ladders was desirable because it saved time and spins and tiresome movements on the board, square by square. Except there were chutes. Certain rolls of the dice got you into board positions where you fell into chutes and slid ass-over-teakettle all the way down to the bottom of the board, where the whole process started all over again. The chances of falling into chutes increased as you climbed more ladders and got higher and higher. A long and tedious climb up ladder after ladder until the End was in sight was usually nixed by a plummet down one of the seven chutes whose mouths yawned near the base of the golden ladder at the top. The children found this sudden dashing of hopes and return to the recreational drawing board unbelievably fun. The game made Lenore feel like throwing its board at the wall.

  “Super,” said Lenore.

  “Here’s that seltzer,” said Alvin.

  “Frozen pea?” asked Clarice.

  “Thanks.”

  “Treat you right around here or what?”

  Spatula accused Stoney of sneakily moving his game piece—a laughing little plastic Buddha of a baby with a pencil-sharpening hole in its head, given out by the gross at Stonecipheco stockholder meetings—from a position in which a chute-fall was imminent to a position in which a ladder-climb was imminent. There ensued unpleasantness, while Lenore ate some frozen peas. Clarice soothed Spatula while Alvin worked on the vertical hold of the giant-screen television.

  Order was restored, and the vertical hold was looking good. Alvin rubbed his hands together.

  “So how’s CabanaTan?” Lenore asked Clarice over her drink. Clarice owned and managed five Cleveland franchises of a tanning-parlor chain called CabanaTan. She had bought in originally by selling the Stonecipheco stock she’d gotten for a graduation present, something which had pissed Lenore and Clarice’s father off, a lot, at first, but he had calmed down when Clarice married Alvin Spaniard, whom Stonecipher Beadsman liked, and respected, and whose father had been at Stonecipheco all his life, too, and things were especially good now that Clarice, who obviously worked, and Alvin, who obviously also worked, had made an arrangement whereby they left the children during the day in the care of Nancy Malig, at the Beadsman home in Shaker Heights, the same Nancy Malig who had been Lenore and Clarice’s governess when they were children.

  “CabanaTan is thriving,” Clarice said. “It’s been a cloudy summer, you know, and people feel the need to supplement. We’re gearing up for the fall rush. There’s always a fall rush, as people start losing the summer tan and get tense. We should have most of Cleveland roasting nicely by November.”

  “And Misty Schwartz?”

  “Can’t talk about it. Legal stuff. Other than Schwartz problems, it looks like a banner fall coming up.”

  “Terrif.”

  “And how about you? How’s the switchboard? How’s the bird?” Clarice asked. Lenore saw that Alvin was holding Spatula high over his head in the center of the living room, while Spatula laughed and kicked her legs.

  “Sort of need to talk to you, for a bit, if we could break away, here, maybe Chutes and Ladders later...”

  “Family theater in ten minutes, is the thing.”

  “Maybe after, then, we could just sort of ...”

  On the big-screen television, shots of people running in slow motion ended. Stoney threw a Buddha-baby at Spatula. It missed, rang out against a bronze flowerpot. An announcer’s head filled the television.

  “We’ll be back with a look at ... gymnastics, and a live convers
ation with a ... certain someone,” the announcer grinned mysteriously.

  “Kopek Spasova,” said Lenore.

  Alvin looked up. “You sure?”

  “I feel in my marrow they’re going to have Kopek Spasova,” Lenore said.

  “Holy shit,” said Alvin, “I’ve got to get a notebook.”

  “Alvin, family theater in eight minutes.”

  “I have to take notes. This is supposed to be Gerber’s nuclear weapon.”

  “It is pineal-extract, you might say,” said Lenore.

  “Jesus,” said Alvin, rummaging through his briefcase. Stoney and Spatula had been sucked into the television’s intake; they sat, Indian-style, staring at the screen. Lenore nonchalantly nudged the Chutes and Ladders game under the sofa with her foot.

  “I’m going to go get the props, so we can start just the minute she’s done,” said Clarice. Lenore drank some seltzer and ate a bit of lime pulp floating on top.

  Ed McMahon came on the television, doing a commercial for a line of tiny vaccum cleaners that were alleged to suck even the stubbornest lint out of your navel. “Sell it, Ed!” yelled Alvin Spaniard, grinning admiringly at the television.

  “Is that regular, or cable?” Lenore asked.

  “I think it’s network. I think that’s Curt Gowdy, doing the recap. OK, all set.” Alvin sat with his glasses and a yellow legal pad and a pen.

  “You’ve sure got a lot of equipment on that television,” said Lenore.

  “We’re a family that takes its home entertainment very seriously,” Alvin said. Stoney looked up at Lenore and nodded, and Alvin ruffled his hair.

  “We’re back live,” said the announcer on television.

  “Hurry Mommy, we’re back live!” shouted Stoney.

  “Sshh,” Alvin said.

  “I’m standing here with the brilliant Soviet—former Soviet gymnastics coach Ruble Spasov,” said the announcer, “and with the equally brilliant former Soviet gymnast and certainly not former Olympic and World Championship gold medalist Kopek Spasova, Mr. Spasov’s daughter.” The camera panned down from the adults’ heads to their stomachs to get Kopek Spasova in the shot. She was a thin, blond-haired, hollow-cheeked girl with enormous black circles under her eyes.

  Clarice came in with a load of masks and cardboard cut-outs and some personal items in a box.

  “Well, at least she’s not pretty,” said Alvin.

  “Sshh,” said Spatula.

  “Ruble, Kopek, how did it feel to win all the big ones?” asked the announcer.

  “Who is this person?” asked Ruble Spasov, looking to someone behind and off to the side of the camera.

  “It felt good to win,” said Kopek Spasova.

  /b/

  3 September

  Monroe Fieldbinder, a successful six-foot estate attorney with a fine lawn and a two-hundred-pound body as fit and taut as it was exceptionally attractive, returned one Wednesday night from the home of his gorgeous Wednesday mistress to find his house in flames and his house surrounded by the pulsing lights of fire and police engines of fire engines and police cars and saw that his house was in flames on fire and that his bird, Richard the Lionhearted, who lived inside, was probably dead, in his iron cage.

  As Monroe Fieldbinder watched his house burn, he felt all the order and unity of his life melt away into chaos and disorder. He grinned wryly.

  How explicit need we make this burning? Need we a reference, or just a picture? “Grinned wryly” seems most potent when used in reference to a picture. Pictures do things. Show, don’t tell.

  Do pictures tell? I have a color Polaroid of Vance at seven and Veronica at twenty-nine traversing a rickety dry-gray dock in Nova Scotia to board a fishing boat. The water is a deep iron smeared with plates of foam; the sky is a thin iron smeared with same; the mass of white gulls around Vance’s outstretched bread-filled hand is a cloud of plunging white V’s. Vance Vigorous, as he holds out his white little child’s hand, is surrounded and obscured by a cloud of living, breathing, shrieking, shitting, plunging incarnations of the letter V; and I have it captured forever on quality film, giving me the right and power to cry whenever and wherever I please. What might that say about pictures.

  A truly, truly horrible dream, last night. Don’t even want to talk about it. I am fresh out of bed. Urinating. I look down. Just a lazy stream of early-morning maple-syrup urine. Suddenly the single stream is a doubled, forking stream. Then a tripled trident stream. Four, five, ten. Soon I am at the node of a fan of urine that sprays out in all directions, blasting the walls of the bathroom, plaster shooting everywhere, currents swirling at my feet. When I awoke—alone, Lenoreless, hence the dream—I was really afraid I had wet the bed, the windows, the ceiling. I may murder Jay over this one.

  /c/

  “... have asked Kopek to recreate that stunning uneven-parallel-bar routine that won her the all-around gold, and we’ll remind the audience that her performance is now made possible by the generosity of the folks over at Gerber’s Quality Brands, the infant food that helps your child chew.”

  “Yes,” said Ruble Spasov. He and the announcer, trailing a snake of black microphone cord, accompanied Kopek over to the bars as she mounted and began to twirl and spin and let the bars bend her into strange shapes.

  “Ruble, I notice you’ve got that cattle-prod, there, in your hand, while your brilliant daughter and pupil does her really superb routines,” said the announcer. “Any story behind that.”

  Ruble Spasov pulled his eyebrows up. “Is what you call a blanket of security. Kapelika feels more secure and confident and happy to know that when she performs routines cattle-prod is always nearby her.”

  “And what a performer she is,” said the announcer.

  “Guy’s nuts,” Alvin Spaniard said. “Guy’s a fascist.”

  “She’s just super, though,” said Lenore. “Watch her do the thing with her toes ... there. Wow.”

  “So she’s got prehensile toes, big deal,” said Alvin. “Take you to a zoo, show you cages full of prehensile toes.”

  “I smell sour grapes,” said Clarice.

  Lenore sniffed at her armpit.

  “Family theater in one and a half minutes,” Clarice said.

  “She’s almost done anyway,” said Lenore. “It’s the dismount where she lands on just one finger that’s the killer ... right there. Believe that? And she’s coming to Erieview in like a week.”

  “Tell me about it,” said Alvin.

  “I’m anxious to go,” said Lenore.

  “Spatula sweetie, you want to get the audience-disc? Any questions from anybody about any lines? Alvin, think about your job on your own time.” Clarice moved the coffee table out of the center of the living room.

  “Ruble and Kopek Spasov and Spasova: quite a team, and just if I may interject a personal note a fine addition to this great country,” said the announcer. “Ruble and Kopek Spasova.”

  “Please go away now,” Ruble Spasov said. Ed McMahon reappeared. Stoney got up and switched the television controls to Laserdisc input.

  Clarice distributed masks. There was a Clarice-mask for Clarice, an Alvin-mask for Alvin, a Stonecipher-mask for Stonecipher, a Spatula-mask for Spatula. The masks were very good and very lifelike. Clarice made them out of plaster molds and papier-mâché and Reynolds Wrap, in a workshop in the basement. Clarice was in many ways an artist, Lenore thought, CabanaTan notwithstanding. She was particularly good at making things with people’s faces on them. Every year she gave her father, Lenore’s father, cans of tennis balls in which each ball was an eerie likeness of the head of Bob Gerber or Erv Beechnut. Stonecipher Beadsman III loved to play tennis with these balls. Clarice also on the sly made some Stonecipher-Beadsman-III-head balls that she and Alvin batted around from time to time. During a dark period, about a year before, there had appeared a can of Alvin-head balls.

  The audience-disc was inserted, and on the huge television screen there appeared a view, as that from a stage, of rows of theater seats, being
filled by people dressed to the nines, with programs. As the house filled up on the screen, Clarice got masks on the children. Life-size cardboard cut-outs of Alvin, Clarice, Stoney, and Spatula were positioned on either side of the television, so as to form part of the audience.

  “Is this the last time we’re going to do this one, Mom?” Stoney asked, his voice a bit muffled. “We’ve done this one five times in a row.”

  There was pleasant pre-performance mood music playing for the audience on the television screen. The house was now nearly full. The cardboard cut-outs were the standing room.

  “Last time. Next week a new thing.”

  The rubber band that attached Spatula’s Spatula-mask to her head got twisted and snagged in her hair, and she began to cry. Alvin soothed her from behind his Alvin-mask. The audience on the television made murmured noises; according to Laserdisc timing, family theater had already started. Clarice reinserted the disc and got an earlier point, in which the theater seats were just filling up. She distributed a Spiro Agnew watch to Alvin, a Richard Scarry cut-out book to Stoney, English Muffin the teddy bear to Spatula, and Clarice herself brandished a Visa Gold Card. Lenore took her seltzer and peas to an easy chair next to the television and sat down beside the Alvin cut-out.

  Clarice checked the watch on the underside of her wrist. “Go ahead, babe,” she said to Stoney. Stoney moved closer to the television as Clarice and Alvin and Spatula grouped in close tight behind him.

  The audience stopped coughing and looked on attentively. Clarice prodded Stoney in the back with her finger.

  “There once existed,” Stoney recited behind his mask, “a unit called the Snapiard family. The family was close and very tightly bound together by feelings of family love.” All four Spaniards now kissed each other through their masks and hugged each other. “What is more,” Stoney continued to the television screen, “the people who were in the family thought of themselves more as ... more as...”