“Money isn’t even an issue. I’m on vacation. I have unlimited vacation time, nearly, in my career. Retail food prices aren’t expected to change in the next few weeks.”
“What a job. I couldn’t believe it. I can’t believe you do that.”
“....”
“Hey, do it again.”
“Not here, Candy.”
“Come on. It’s noisy, no one’ll hear. Please.”
“Honestly.”
“Please.”
“Total: seventeen-fifty. Cash: twenty dollars. Change due: two-fifty.”
“That’s just too super.”
“It gets less super as time goes on, believe me.”
“But so you’d only work at F and V to be near Andy.”
“Maybe in a way.”
“What way is that, if you don’t mind my asking? And why do you want another version of this dress? I don’t get it.”
“You are an inquisitive little thing.”
“You and I look enough alike as it is. Why do you want my dress?”
“That was the point, a minute ago. As you pointed out, it’s Lenore’s dress, not your dress.”
“All right, this is technically Lenore’s dress, if you want to get technical. And this is the dress she wore the time you met her.”
And the time Andy met her.“
“Right.”
“Right.”
“So what?”
“I know what I know.”
“How about letting me know a little of what you know, then?”
“Look, I know all about Andy and Lenore Beadsman. I know you’re her friend, and you can go ahead and tell her I know all about it.”
“What do you know?”
“Everything.”
“I mean what is there to know?”
“Listen, I know you two are friends, but if I’m going to be honest with you you can at least not insult my intelligence.”
“I’m not insulting anything, Mindy.”
“See, I can not only see what’s going on, but I have the advantage that I can also see why it’s going on.”
“Hey, Lenore doesn’t even like Andy very much, to tell the truth.”
“Frankly Lenore does not interest me. My husband, he interests me. And I can see why he’s doing what he’s doing.”
“What’s he doing?”
“Don’t you see why? Yes we’ve had a bad period, but you know all relationships go through bad periods. There are bad times in all relationships. But yes this was a bad period. And now Andy sees your little friend Lenore, in the middle of this admittedly bad period, and suddenly he feels he’s able to go back to a branch in the tree of his life, the branch nine years ago, when he met me and fell in love with me and started a relationship with me, but also, see, the exact same branch he met Lenore at, sitting in her little violet dress and being antisocial and throwing shoes at people, and so suddenly Andy feels as if maybe he can go back and just take a different path from the same branch, to—”
“She threw shoes?”
“Andy sees in this Lenore person a chance to change the past. Andy is always trying to change what he can’t change. He’s a silly. And remember there are two sides to every coin.”
“....”
“Always lots of branches in the same relationship-tree.”
“I don’t think this branch stuff is right, Mindy.”
“You’ve made that perfectly clear.”
“Lenore is pretty heavily involved with Mr. Vigorous, is the thing.”
“Ah, Mr. Vigorous.”
“Who was really your neighbor, in New York City, when he was married?”
“In Scarsdale he was, yes.”
“This whole thing is making me feel a little eerie.”
“Branches and trees, darling.”
“But they’re involved, Mindy. They have been for like a year and a half. Really involved.”
“Andy sometimes likes to hurt, too, when he’s not himself.”
“But I mean they’re really close. Lenore more or less lives over there with him a lot of the time. Mr. Vigorous is incredibly jealous.”
“Poor thing.”
“He even bought the bird for Lenore that’s on ‘The Partners With God Club’ right now.”
“ ‘The Partners With God Club’? On the evangelist network?”
“Didn’t you even see it when you went over to Gilligan’s Isle to see Andy?”
“I only saw him. I was only there to say hello, it turned out. I was only there a moment or two.”
“What did he say?”
“He said, I remember this, he said, ‘Guess how much shit I want out of you right now, Melinda-Sue.’ He says that sometimes.”
“Sheesh.”
“He calls me Melinda Sue.”
“....”
“But you say her bird is on the show?”
“Her bird more or less is the show right now. The bird, Vlad the Impaler, except on the show he’s got some weird Italian name that Reverend Sykes said Vlad the Impaler chose in a moment of ecstasy ...”
“Hart Lee Sykes?”
“Yes. Vlad the Impaler is a cockatiel who can sort of talk, or at least repeat things so convincingly it’s apt to seem.like he’s talking, and the Reverend gets him to ask people in pathetic-Christian-TV- viewer-land to send money, and they do. Our landlady is with him in Atlanta, and our landlord says she says the money is supposedly tidal-waving in, right now.”
“I’ll have to watch this.”
“It’s on every night on cable at eight, on I think like channel ninety, one of those cable channels.”
“Hmmm.”
“Except now Rick’s being all spastic and weird about the bird, Lenore says. He has the receipt from Fuss ‘n’ Feathers pet shop, which if you do any time at the F and V board you’ll get to know really well, because our lines are like super fouled up and we get a lot of their calls, but anyway he has the receipt, and he says because Lenore didn’t give him this certain gift at Christmas, Vlad the Impaler is legally and emotionally his. That’s what Lenore says he says.”
“....”
“And maybe he’s really trying to get ahold of the royalties, because Vlad is apparently raking in a lot of royalties, from the tidal wave of money, but that just wouldn’t be like Rick. Rick is intensely weird, but he’s not weird about money. Money just isn’t very important to him.”
“But he legally owns the bird because Lenore didn’t give him something?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“I really shouldn’t say.”
“I’ll pay for lunch. Including dessert.”
“A spanking. Rick supposedly wanted a spanking.”
“A spanking?”
“That’s really all I should say.”
“And he owns the bird, on the show.”
“Kind of hard to take a man seriously who wants a spanking for Christmas.”
“That doesn’t match my memory. My memory is of a nice man in a beret who spent a lot of time at his den window and helped get Daddy out of the lawn, sometimes. I guess we’ll see.”
“Your Daddy was in the lawn?”
“....”
“I think you’ve misjudged Lenore.”
“So I gather.”
“I think you’ve misjudged Andy, too, if you excuse my saying so. I don’t think you can expect to get him back by pretending to be a different violet branch of the same tree.”
“Shall we go?”
“Here’s the check, thanks a lot, Mooradian’s tends to get a little expensive.”
“God, you’re not kidding. This bill is obscene.”
“I think you and Andy just need to sit down and rap. You should try to go out of your way to see him tonight, straighten things out.”
“Tonight Andrew S. Lang is taking Lenore Beadsman to some gymnastics show.”
“No.”
“The symbolism of which doesn’t escape me, rest assured.”
“I th
ink there’s been some kind of mistake. I think you maybe misheard him.”
“We’ll see.”
/e/
“This is suck!” said a small oriental man ahead of Lenore in the line.
He turned to her and said it again. “This is suck!”
With him was another man and two women, all in leatherish jackets. They were all nodding, agreeing that it was suck. Lenore thought they were maybe Vietnamese. She knew Vietnamese people tend to have really high cheekbones. Lenore’s junior roommate at Oberlin had been a Vietnamese woman.
“Pardon me?” Lenore said to the man.
The man took his hands out of his jacket pockets. “This is suck, that we must wait like this. We have been this line for a long time.”
“Pretty decent little old crowd, all right,” said Wang-Dang Lang. He jingled his car keys.
Lenore turned from the man and looked behind her in line. There she could see two girls, from maybe about high school, with short hair Lenore could tell was a very strange color, even between the lights of the Building and the marquee. They both had on big winter coats that looked like some shiny quilts sewn together. Whatever they were talking about they couldn’t believe.
“I just could not believe it,” said one of the girls, who, Lenore saw, had paper clips hanging from her ears.
“What an asshole,” said the other girl.
“No, I mean I could not believe it. When he said it to me, I just totally freaked out. I totally freaked. I was like:” the girl gestured.
“What a gleet.”
It was cold for September, tonight. Lenore had on her gray cloth coat. Lang had on a sheepskin jacket with some false wool fluff around the collar. They were now near the ticket window, after about half an hour.
“Very nice of you to take me, Andy,” Lenore said. “On such short notice, what with Mindy in town, work, et cetera.”
Lang smiled down at her and played with his keys.
“Rick just pretty clearly didn’t feel like going,” Lenore went on, “and he more or less told me to ask you to go.”
“Well shoot, that makes it a bit like an order, then.”
“Candy has to work tonight over at Allied, is the thing.”
“I don’t look at it like a job, Lenore,” Lang said. “I’m looking forward to it.”
“Kopek Spasova’s really supposed to be great.”
“And your Daddy told you to go?”
“Dad doesn’t tell me to do anything. He said he’d appreciate it, is all. If I didn’t want to go, I wouldn’t go.”
Lang grinned. “You sure about that, now.”
“Of course I’m sure. If I thought this was going to be suck, to coin a phrase, I wouldn’t do it.”
“My own personal Daddy tells me to do something, I as a rule do it.”
Lenore looked at him. Her breath went up toward him a little before it disappeared. “Except he told you not to marry Mindy Metalman, you said in the car.”
Lang laughed. “OK, usually I do what he says.” He looked serious. “Sometimes me and Daddy just take a while to see eye to eye.”
Erieview Plaza was all lit up. A marquee had been set up in front of the Erieview Tower lobby, by the ticket window. On the marquee a little electric girl was pulsing around a bar, connected to it by her feet. Beside her throbbed the bright-white perimeter of a baby, with a spoon in its hand. Yellow light from the windows of the Bombardini Building across the Plaza illuminated the rear of the line for the tower lobby.
“So let me get this totally straight, for the record and all,” said Lang, watching his own breath. “You’re just here ‘cause you want to be. In toto. ”
“I like gymnastics. I was totally glued to the TV for the World Championships, last month.”
“But what I understand, this little girl’s helping these Gerbers launch a kind of a Tet Offensive against your Daddy’s company. That’s what Neil said.”
“That’s beside the point. I’m not Dad, or Dad’s company.”
“So what’re we doing here, then? I can think of a thousand funner places for us to be.”
“You’re no joke, brother,” the Vietnamese man in front of them said as his group got to the ticket window. He and one of the women began to talk very fast at the man behind the window.
“Good God, that’s Mr. Beeberling, selling tickets,” said Lenore.
Lang looked briefly at the ticket window before returning to scanning the line.
“He’s really Bob Gerber’s right hand man,” Lenore said. “He’s the one who supposedly came up with this ingredient in Gerber baby food that’s supposed to help babies chew.”
“Instead of singing like birds?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
There was definitely some sort of controversy at the window. The Vietnamese man was jabbing his finger toward the doors to the Erieview lobby. Mr. Beeberling was being told that he was suck.
“Look here,” Lang said, leaning way over to make himself heard in Lenore’s ear above the din around the window. The side of his jaw was smooth and smelled sweet, even in the cold air.
“Look here,” he said. “If we just go on back right now, ‘Dallas’ is on. We can watch ’Dallas.‘ It’s a show that kicks ass. I just got a new TV, a big sucker. I got wine. We’ll have more fun than a whole barrel full of prehensile-toed little tumblers.” He stopped and looked at Lenore. “Of course I guess that’s assuming you’re only doing what you want to do, not what your Daddy or anybody else tells you to do.”
“Hey, look ...,” Lenore was saying up to Lang when they were pushed by the force of the line behind them into the glass of the ticket window. Lang lost his cowboy hat. Lenore dropped her purse, and lottery tickets spilled out and went everywhere. She bent and started picking them up. Some blew away.
“Hold your horses God damn it!” Lang shouted back at the line. The two girls, orange and pink hair in the light of the marquee, gestured.
“Hi Mr. Beeberling,” Lenore said, stuffing the last of the bright tickets into her purse. “Two, I guess, please.”
“Lenore,” said Mr. Beeberling. “Lenore Beadsman.”
“Andrew Sealander Lang, here,” Lang said absently, looking around for his hat.
“Two coming up,” smiled Mr. Beeberling. He opened a drawer and began to rummage. He was wearing a porkpie hat that said GERBER’S across the brim. “Just missed Foamwhistle and your Jars guy, Goggins, you know,” he said. “Just came through.”
“Blanchard, or Sigurd?” said Lang.
Lenore turned and stared at Lang.
“Well now here we go,” said Mr. Beeberling. He pushed back his hat and smiled. “That’ll be four hundred dollars, please.”
“Pardon?”
“Special Stonecipheco rate,” Mr. Beeberling said. “If you’re going to scout us out, you can at least help to defray costs.”
“But except I’m not here for Stonecipheco,” Lenore said as Lang fought off another surge of the line behind them. “I’m just here because I really like Kopek Spasova.”
“Well certainly,” said Mr. Beeberling. “So you can be thoroughly entertained, and help defray, all at once.” He gestured back at the long line and the circle of pale breath that wove into itself and vanished above it. “You see what the fray is like. Surely you want to help defray.”
“There’s just no way you can tell me two tickets can cost four hundred dollars,” Lenore said.
“Well, these’re really big tickets, as you can see for yourself,” Mr. Beeberling said, holding up two large black tickets behind the window and sizing them up suggestively with a thumb and forefinger.
“You dung beetle,” Lang said to Beeberling, who smiled and made a little bow.
“I don’t have near that much on me,” said Lenore.
“What an arse!” the two girls were yelling in unison at Lang’s back.
“Lenore, let’s just git. Who needs this, if we’re just doin’ what we want?”
“Mr. Beeberling I�
��m not here for Stonecipheco.”
Mr. Beeberling grinned and scratched his head under his hat. The electronic image of Kopek Spasova kept lightening and darkening sections of the street.
“This is suck, isn’t it,” said Lenore.
“You can’t get pushed around like this, Lenore. Screw him. Let’s git.” Lang twirled his car keys on a bandaged finger.
“Shit on a twig.”
lfl
“I think you should. I hope you shall.”
“Should I, Rick? Oops, may I call you Rick?”
“Of course. We’re both adults, now. Call me anything.”
“Should I, Rick?”
“As I see it, you would be doing everyone a favor. We need the help. We’re marginally frantic right now, though of course not unpleasantly so. It would be an enjoyable, brief taste of college memories for you, apparently. And I-thank you, waiter.”
“Sure thing.”
“We need some more vino.”
“More wine, please.”
“Right away sir.”
“I should like to be able to see you around, every day, working. It would be nice. And you would of course have the opportunity to spend time around ... those Frequent and Vigorous personnel whom you wished to be near.”
“Whoever I wanted to be near?”
“What does that mean?”
“Hey, this is yummy.”
“The eclairs are good here, I’ve found. Lenore and I sampled the eclairs here, not too far back, with Norman Bombardini, our Building-mate, and—”
“It’s really good.”
“I think you should. I so hope you will, Mindy. May I call you Mindy?”
“You silly.”
“Mindy, it would simply be fun. That’s all I’m saying. And how long could it be?”
“Good question.”
“What?”
“Can I have some more of that vino?”
“....”
“And then but what will Lenore think?”
“....”
“Rick, what about Lenore?”
“What about Lenore?”
“How will she feel about me taking her place at the switchboard, however temporarily? I saw that she still has a lot of her personal items scattered around in there. How will she feel about me being in the middle of her personal items?”
The Broom of the System Page 42
