The Broom of the System

by David Foster Wallace

“No pun intended.”

  Lang stared absently into Ginger’s décolletage. “So she’s hot, then, and things with her Daddy aren’t too good.”

  “My impression is they aren’t close at all.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Listen, you want to see a picture of her?” Obstat dug for his wallet in the back pocket of his Chinos.

  “I know what she looks like,” Lang said. Then he looked up at Obstat in surprise. “You carry her picture?”

  “The little lady has smitten me from afar, since way back who knows when,” Obstat said, shaking his head and flipping through his credit cards. “I admit it’s a pitiful situation.”

  “This an old picture you got?”

  “High school yearbook.”

  “Give it here, then.”

  Obstat handed over the little wallet photo. In the picture Lenore was sixteen. Her hair was very long. She was smiling broadly, looking off into the nothing reserved especially for yearbook photos.

  Lang stared down at the picture. He brushed away a bit of beer foam from the border with a thumb. Lenore smiled at him, through him.

  “Looks to be her, all right.”

  Obstat was bouncing up and down in his seat. “Listen, stay a few more minutes. It’ll be time for another gag in a while. And have a look at that one over there, at Mary-Ann, with the little guy in the beard and steamed glasses. Looks a little spacey, but talk about your basic gazongas.”

  Lang kept looking at the photo. He seemed to be about to say something.

  /e/

  “Maybe even inclined to say big mistake here, Rick.”

  “Don’t be silly. It’s an absolute inspiration. I was positively writhing with excitement at the prospect of telling you, last night. And then of course you conked out. Again.”

  “But I like the switchboard. You know that. And it even looks like the lines are going to get fixed soon. They’re going to do tests.”

  “Lenore, you are in a position to do me a favor. Actually to help both of us, I think. This will be deeply interesting, I promise. I’ve seen that you’re chafing, at the switchboard, deep down.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “You can save me valuable weeding-time.”

  “How can Norslan translations take so much time? That’s not a long thing.”

  “....”

  “And what’s with the light in here right now? This is creepy.”

  “Frigging shadow ...”

  “We need to have a serious talk about the windows in the lobby, too, mister. I’m starting not to care one bit for the way the—”

  “Come here a moment. See the way the lake looks like rotten mayonnaise in the shadow-half of the window? Doesn’t that look like rotten mayonnaise?”

  “Oh, that’s just sick.”

  “But doesn’t it?”

  “It really does.”

  “I thought so.”

  “OK, so what does this involve, then?”

  “What?”

  “This hopefully very temporary Review job.”

  “It simply involves screening a portion of the back submissions to the quarterly, for a time, the time I’m to be frantically busy with the herbicide thing. You’ll be weeding out the more obviously pathetic or inappropriate submissions, and putting asterisks on those that strike you as meriting particular attention and consideration on my part.”

  “Hmm.”

  “We’ll need to make sure your tastes are keened to the proper pitch for our particular publication, of course ...”

  “You’re going to keen the pitch of my tastes?”

  “Relax. I’m simply going to have you read briefly through a batch I’ve already exposed myself to, and we’ll just see what happens, taste-pitch-wise. You’ll be having a preliminary look at ... these.”

  “All those are submissions?”

  “I shall say that most are. Some few might for all you know have been sent to me by friends for scrutiny and criticism. But I’ve effaced all names.”

  “So it’s not all just troubled-college-student stuff?”

  “The bulk of it is, to my ever-increasing irritation and distress. But the average collegiate material you should be able to spot a mile off.”

  “How come?”

  “Oh, dear, many reasons.”

  “....“

  “What shall we say? Perhaps that it tends to be hideously self-conscious. Mordantly cynical. Or, if not mordantly cynical, then simperingly naive. Or at any rate consistently, off-puttingly pretentious. Not to mention abysmally typed, of course.”

  “....”

  “It tries too hard, is really all we can say about most of it. There is simply an overwhelming sense of trying too hard. My, you’re looking particularly lovely in this half of the light.”

  “Rick, how am I supposed to know if something’s mordant, or simpering? I don’t know anything about literature.”

  “A, the vast majority of the material that passes through here is not even potentially literature, and b, good!”

  “What’s good?”

  “That you ‘know nothing about literature,’ or at least believe that you don’t. It means you’re perfect: fresh, intuitive, shaking the aesthetic chaff out of your hair ...”

  “There’s something in my hair?”

  “It’s when people begin to fancy that they actually know something about literature that they cease to be literarily interesting, or even of any use to those who are. You’re perfect, take it from me.”

  “I don’t know ...”

  “Lenore, what’s with you? Isn’t this the person who sees herself as almost by definition a word person? Who snarls when her literary sensibility is even potentially impugned?”

  “I just want to try to keep my personal life and my job as separate as I can. I don’t need Walinda going around saying I got a cushy deal because of you.”

  “But here’s your chance to be out of Walinda-range for whole periods of time.”

  “And plus, Rick, I just have a bad feeling about the whole thing.”

  “Trust me. Help me. Look, let’s take a couple of examples. How about this pathetically typed little item right here? Why don’t you just read the very first bit of it, here, and we’ll ...”

  “This one?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s see: ‘Dr. Rudolph Carp, one of the world’s leading proc tologists, was doing a standard exam one warm July morning when he suddenly remembered that he had forgotten to put on an examination glove. He looked down with horror at ...’—oh, gak.”

  “Gak indeed. Material like this can simply immediately be put in the rejection pile, on Mavis’s desk, and she will Xerox a terse little rejection slip to go with the returned manuscript.”

  “What’s with these titles? ‘Dance of the Insecure’? ‘To the Mall’? ‘Threnody Jones and the Goat from Below’? ‘The Enema Bandit and the Cosmic Buzzer’? ‘Love’? ‘A Metamorphosis for the Eighties’?”

  “That last one is actually rather interesting. A Kafka parody, though sensitively done. Self-loathing-in-the-midst-of-adulation piece. Collegiate, but interesting.”

  “ ‘As Greg Sampson awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he discovered that he had been transformed into a rock star. He gazed down at his red, as it were leather-clad, chest, the top of which was sprinkled with sequins and covered with a Fender guitar strapped tightly across his leather shoulders. It was no dream.’ Hmmm.”

  “Read it over at your leisure. There are some interesting ones. There’s one about a family trying to decide whether to have the grandmother’s gangrenous feet amputated—you should vibrate sympathetically with that one. There’s one about a boy who puts himself through prep school selling copies of the Physicians’ Desk Reference in the halls. One about a woman who hires herself out at exorbitant rates as a professional worrier and griever for the sick and dying ...”

  “ ‘Elroy’s problem was that he had a tender pimple, on his forehead, right in the spot where his forehead creased when he loo
ked surprised, which was often.’ Gak. Rejection. ‘So it finally happened. Bob Kelly, busy checking out the rear end of his neighbor. Mrs. Ernst as she bent to retrieve a mitten, ran over his son, Miles, with the snowblower.’ Double gak. Double rejection.”

  “Like those instincts, kiddo.”

  “ ‘Santo Longine, having learned to shift with a cigarette in his hand, now smoked while he drove.’ ‘The morning that Monroe Fieldbinder came next door to the Slotniks’ to discuss Mr. Costigan was a soft warm Sunday morning in May.’ These seem prima facie OK.”

  “Why not start with those. Why not go ahead and start with those—start with that last one. Read through about half the stack ... like so. You can use Mavis’s desk until her return from lunch, then you can come in here. I have to run to the typesetter’s this afternoon, and I may be gone for some time. You can have free rein.”

  “This one looks sort of interesting, at least potentially. At least

  it’s not overtly sick.“

  “Which one?”

  “....”

  “Just see what you think. Go with your feelings, is the vital thing. ”

  “Do I get switchboard scale for this?”

  “Readers make ten dollars an hour.”

  “I’ll just be outside, reading.”

  “Have things reversed, Lenore?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “Nothing. Go. Have fun. Be intuitive.”

  “....”

  /f/

  “Come in. ”

  “Good heavens.”

  “Come down.”

  “Dear me.”

  “This way.”

  “I’ve got to confess, I thought this was some sort of joke at—”

  “It wasn’t. It isn’t.”

  “My God, it’s boiling in here. How do you people live? And how am I to walk?”

  “Bent over. This way. Hunch your shoulders.”

  “Lord.”

  “You notice I’m not complaining. We all bend this way naturally. Mrs. Beadsman told me to tell you that as space is bending you now, so time has bent us.”

  “....”

  “The pain of which you have no idea, God willing. God forbid you should ever be in our state.”

  “Rather hope to be in just your state, actually, at some point in the very distant future. Otherwise I ... Ow! Otherwise I expect I’ll be even worse off—specifically dead.”

  “Well now that’s a very interesting point, which you can take up with Mrs. Beadsman.”

  “Am I perhaps going to have a chance to speak to Mrs. Beadsman, then?”

  “No.”

  “Mrs. Yingst!”

  “Hello, Dr. Jay.”

  “Well, I must say it seemed difficult to conceive of, but this is—”

  “Cut the guano.”

  “... cozy, I must—”

  “Here are the sessions’ transcripts back. Here is your money. Lenore instructs me to tell you you’re doing a competent job.”

  “Competent?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “And how long is this to go on? This is eventually going to kill her. You people and I are killing a person from the inside out.”

  “That’s exactly wrong. It’s we who are keeping her alive. Can’t you read? You’re even more of an idiot than Lenore maintains.”

  “I refuse to submit to this sort of abuse, madam. I am a distinguished professional, a graduate of Harvard University, a respected member of—”

  “You’re a pathetic phobic neurotic whom Lenore used her influence to rescue from institutional commitment by your wife, who if you recall objected to being scrubbed with antiseptic every night before bed. We set you up and keep you in soap and peroxide and deodorant. You’ll do what Lenore tells you to do for precisely as long as you’re needed.”

  “But this simply cannot keep on indefinitely. The Vigorous aspect, especially. He’s the real problem. Spoken things anger him beyond belief, and I know he’s eventually—”

  “Lenore instructs me to instruct you simply to take care of Mr. Vigorous vis à vis Lenore. He’s getting on everyone’s nerves. Do it. You’ll find some material here on a person who—”

  “Listen, though. This will only make it worse. He’s going to want to read something by Blentner. He’s a reader. He’s going to want to lay eyes on Blentner’s actual texts. And he’ll ask me for them, and he’ll find out that there is no Blentner, and then what am I to say?”

  “There can be a Blentner if you want there to be, if you need there to be.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You’ll write something, you ninny. You’ll make something up and attach a name to it. What could be simpler? Are you completely dense?”

  “Really, I see no need for this sort of—”

  “Take your money and go. Here is the material on Vigorous. Go away.”

  “Do you two notice anything smelling the tiniest bit peculiar down here? I—”

  “Take your nostrils and go.”

  “How am I to turn around? It’s too cramped to turn around.”

  “Back up. Go backwards. Mrs. Lindenbaum will help you.”

  “This way, dear.”

  “Good God.”

  15

  1990

  LOVE

  The morning that Monroe Fieldbinder came next door to the Slotniks’ to discuss Mr. Costigan was a soft warm Sunday morning in May. Fieldbinder moved up the Slotniks’ rough red brick front walk, through some damp unraked clippings from yesterday’s first-of-the-season bagless mow, and prepared to press their lighted doorbell, one with a “Full Housepower” decal beneath it, just like the former decal on Fieldbinder’s former home, and then paused for just a moment to extract a bit of grass from his pant cuff.

  The Slotniks sat in their dining room, in robes and leather slippers and woolly footmuffs, amid plates with bits of French-toast scraps loose and heavy with absorbed syrup, reading the Sunday paper, with maple stickiness at thumbs and mouth-corners.

  The melody of the Slotniks’ doorbell took time. It was still playing when Evelyn Slotnik opened the front door. Fieldbinder stood on the stoop. Evelyn’s hands went involuntarily to her hair, her eyes to her feet, in woolly footmuffs, beneath unshaved ankles. And then context came in, and she looked away from herself, at Fieldbinder.

  Fieldbinder was dressed to harm, in a light English raincoat and razor slacks, black shoes, subway shine. There was a briefcase. Evelyn Slotnik stared at him. All this took only a second. There was a sound of the newspaper from back in the dining room.

  “Good morning Evelyn,” Fieldbinder said cheerily.

  “Monroe,” said Evelyn.

  When some more seconds passed during which Fieldbinder still stood outside, smelling the inside of the Slotniks’ home, he smiled again and repeated, louder, “Good morning, Evelyn. Hope I’m not...”

  “Well come in,” Evelyn said, ailittle loud. She opened the door wider and stepped back. Fieldbinder wiped off the last of the dewy lawn clippings onto Donald Slotnik’s joke of a welcome mat, that read GO AWAY, and came in.

  “Come on in, Monroe,” Evelyn was babbling, even louder. Her puffy eyes were wide and confused on Fieldbinder’s. “He’s home,” she mouthed.

  Fieldbinder smiled and nodded at Evelyn. “By any chance is Donald home,” he said loudly. “I’m sorry to intrude. I need to speak to you and Donald.”

  From farther in, there was a chair-sound. Donald Slotnik came into the living room, where Evelyn and Fieldbinder stood, looking past each other. Evelyn manipulated the belt of her robe. Donald Slotnik wore some sort of shiny oriental wrap over his pajamas. He had leather slippers, and the sports page, and a cowlick. From the dining room came the rustle of funnies, to which Scott Slotnik was applying Silly Putty.

  “Monroe,” said Slotnik.

  “Hello Donald,” said Fieldbinder.

  “Well hello,” Slotnik said. He looked at Evelyn, then back at Fieldbinder, then at the easy chair Fieldbinder stood next to. “Please, have
a seat, I suppose. You’ll have to excuse us, as you can see we weren’t really expecting anyone.”

  Fieldbinder shook his head and raised a stop-palm at Slotnik. “Not at all. I’m the one who should apologize. Here I am, barging on a Sunday morning. I apologize.”

  “Not at all,” Slotnik said, looking at Evelyn, who had her hands in the pockets of her robe.

  “I’m here only because I really felt I should talk to you,” Fieldbinder said. “I felt a need to talk to you both. Now.” One of Evelyn’s hands was now at her collar.

  “Well all right then, sure,” said Slotnik. “Let’s all have a seat. Honey, maybe Monroe would like some coffee.”

  “No thanks, no coffee for me,” said Fieldbinder, taking off his coat, which Slotnik didn’t offer to hang up for him, and folding it onto the arm of his chair.

  “Well I’d like some more,” Slotnik said to Evelyn. She went into the dining room. Fieldbinder heard Scott say something to her.

  Slotnik sat on the love seat across from the living room window and Fieldbinder’s chair and crossed his legs, so that one leather slipper threatened to fall off. Fieldbinder refused to believe he saw tiny ducks on Slotnik’s pajamas.

  “So,” Slotnik said. “How are Estates?”

  “Estates are fine. How are Taxes?”

  “Taxes are one hell of a lot better than they were two months ago. Returns are all in, the worst of the post-deadline bitching is petering out ... thanks, honey.” Slotnik took a sip from a mug of coffee and put it on the coffee table in front of him. Evelyn sank into the little gap next to Slotnik on the love seat, opposite Fieldbinder. “You remember how seasonal Taxes tends to be,” Slotnik continued, smacking his lips a little over the coffee in his mouth. Slotnik had always struck Fieldbinder as the sort of man who enjoyed the taste of his own saliva.

  “I remember all too well.” Fieldbinder smiled at Slotnik. “Fred’s not riding you too hard over there, is he?”

  “Not at all. Not at all. Fred and I get along well. We played tennis just yesterday. Fred’s a fine man.”

  “Fred rode us hard.”

  “Maybe he’s mellowing.”

  “Could be.”

  The silence that followed was broken only by the sound of Scott doing something to a dish in the kitchen sink.