“Hey!” Obstat said.
“Row!” yelled Lang. People in the other boats looked over. Lang squatted back in the bow. “Turn this fucker around and row back the way we came.” He looked through the binoculars again as Obstat muttered and picked up the heavy oars.
“And also start gettin’ us in closer to shore,‘” Lang said, pausing for just a moment to look back at what was undeniably a really unbelievable woman, in that swimsuit. “I want us a whole lot closer to shore.”
/f/
11 September
“So where do you get off, Fieldbinder?” Slotnik said, crossing and uncrossing his legs on the love seat.
The living room smetled vaguely of burn. Fieldbinder sat in wet clothes, shivering, the black wires of his burnt hair protruding up in a fan from his head, his hands full of stiff black feathers.
“What can I say, Don?” he said.
“An excellent question, Monroe, ” said Slotnik, glancing over at Evelyn, in a new dry robe and nothing else, looking at her reflection in the dark living room window and trying on wigs. Slotnik turned back. “]ust what can you say, my friend, with your wet wrinkled clothes and smelly, kinky head? What can the universe say, when my supposedly good and respectable neighbors worship my children on the sly, and my supposedly good friend and colleague balls my wife, pokes and punctures the object of my every non-professional thought, tries to take my wife away, from me, to whom she rightfully belongs. ” He stared at Fieldbinder. “What is to say, Monroe?”
“Don, you’ve raised a number of interesting points, ” said Fieldbinder. He glanced up at the staircase and saw two sets of pajama-feet, the children‘s, as the Slotnik children stood at the top of the case and listened, and perhaps sucked their thumbs.
“Just where do you get off, is what I want to know, ” said Slotnik, crossing and uncrossing his legs, jangling a pair of open handcuffs. “Because, for your own information and files, you’ve gotten off for the last time. This is the end. This is it. ”
Fieldbinder grinned coolly, then wryly. “Is it, ” he said. He slowly felt at the feathers with his good hand.
“Yes, ” said Slotnik, returning Fieldbinder’s smile with one equally wry. He went to Evelyn, at the window, and in a single motion calmly handcuffed her wrist to his wrist. Evelyn said nothing; she continued to put on wigs, making Slotnik’s arm rise and fall with her own. Slotnik stared past his wife at Fieldbinder’s tiny reflection in the dark window.
“Yes, ” he said again. “This is it. You’ve let yourself in for it, Monroe. ” He turned. “You’ve put your precious, prodigious self in connection with another. And now I’m taking the other back. Evelyn and I are now joined together, forever, in discipline and negatian. ”
“Discipline?” Fieldbinder said, removing some mud and a twig from the crease of his slacks.
“She is now gone, the connection severed, and so you are done, ” said Slotnik, holding up his handcuffed wrist for effect. Evelyn’s arm moved with his.
“I see, said Fieldbinder.
“Yes I’m sure you do, ” Slotnik said coolly. “The connection is severed, you are yourself punctured, you are done. You will bleed out of yourseif and rise like a husk on a dry wind. There will be less and less of you. You will grow smaller and smaller in your stylish clothes, until you disappear altogether. ” Slotnik grinned wryly. “You will return to the night sky with your satanic bird, and every dawn and dusk the horizon will run with your juices. ”
“What an interestingly absurd theory, Don, ” Fieldbinder said coolly.
“I’m afraid he means it, Monroe, ” said Evelyn into the window. “Don has always been a man of his word. ” She turned and cocked her head, modelling a blond wig. “What do you think of this one, before you have to go?”
Fieldbinder moved to look at his watch, but it had already slipped off his wrist onto the carpet without a sound.
/g/
“What’s this? Are we checking out today?”
“....”
“Is that what we’re doing, Mr. Beadsman? Checking out?”
“Yes.”
“Well I have a form for you to sign right here, and then I guess off you go into the blue.”
“... ”
“We usually don’t release on Saturday you know Mr. Beadsman. I had to get this form out of a locked drawer you know.”
“I apologize for any inconvenience.”
“Oh I was just joking with you. That was just a joke. There’s no inconvenience at all.”
“May I please leave, then?”
“That’s a good signature you’ve got there, Mr. Beadsman, isn’t it? Now is somebody meeting you, or what?”
“No.”
“Dr. Nelm told me to expect somebody to meet you, Mr. Beadsman. Are we being naughty?”
“I want to take a taxi to the airport.”
“Are we going home, Mr. Beadsman? Are we going home to see our family?”
“....”
“Well all I can say is you just get your mother to give you something to eat. You just don’t eat enough, is part of your problem, if you want my two cents’ worth. You just eat, you hear?”
“Can you please call me a taxi?”
“And your father’s been notified, Dr. Nelm told me.”
“I’ll notify everyone.”
“Looks like a beautiful day out there. I heard it was going to rain, but I’ll take sunshine bouncing off our lake any old day won’t you?”
“....”
“I wish I was going to the airport on such a beautiful day.”
“I’m afraid the sun will hurt my eyes, I’ve been inside so long.”
“Now don’t you worry. You can just squint until you get used to it. Your old eyes will adjust to the outside lickety-split, mine always do.”
....“
“This is just a bright town we live in Mr. Beadsman.”
/h/
“So this goes on, really for longer than is necessary in order to get the narrative job done, with scene after scene of the wife coming in, tapping some McTeague onto the theoretical dentist’s lip, the psychologist coming in and fondling the achingly lovely wife from behind, even as she taps the McTeague code, the wife finally unable to resist any longer and throwing herself into the arms of the psychologist, and their rutting like crazed weasels on the hospital room floor while the theoretical dentist lies helpless in his bed, drowning in numb blackness and despair, vividly imagining precisely the scene that is taking place on the floor below him.”
“Although I bet it’s at least ninety-eight point six out here right now, don’t you think? I don’t know about at night, but I think the Desert could maybe support Lenore during the day. But maybe I’m just grasping at straws. Do you think I’m just grasping?”
“But see, part of the theoretical dentist’s despair stems from the fact that he really doesn’t and can’t blame his achingly lovely wife for what is happening. He knows all about his wife’s being troubled. He knows that she needs something which he is now, through no fault of his own, unable to give her. So he doesn’t and cannot blame her. But imagine his despair, Lenore. In his numb helpless black isolation he needs the emotional center of his life, the object of his complete adoration, his fiancée, more than ever; and yet he knows that it is precisely his state of helpless, inefficacious isolation—a state he is in through exactly zero fault of his own—that is of necessity driving the lovely woman he adores farther and farther away. So he forgives, Lenore. He forgives. But he bums every minute in a cold flame of unimaginable torment.”
“What’s going on, Rick?”
“He forgives her, Lenore. From the icy depths of his helpless isolation and fierce and complete love, he extends a theoretical hand of forgiveness, like so ...”
“Ow!”
“Dear me, excuse us, please.”
“Watch where you’re waving your hands, buddy!”
“Terribly sorry.”
“Freaking crowds. Let’s get, Rick. We’re jus
t playing games. Lenore isn’t around here.”
“So on it goes. Finally the theoretical dentist’s brother, who is an estate attorney in Philadelphia, is able to break away from his incredibly successful practice and personal life to come see the withered husk of the theoretical dentist. Since the brother had gone through the Scouts right alongside the dentist, for him Morse code communication to the dentist is no problem, though communications from the dentist are still cumbersome as hell. Nevertheless we’re subjected to long and difficult coded conversations between the two in the hospital room, while the lovely wife, consumed with understandable self-loathing, and afraid that she would not be able to help making a pass at the devastatingly handsome estate-attorney brother, stays shacked up in the malevolent blond psychologist’s apartment, rutting, and also watching gymnastics on television, the symbolism of which doesn’t escape the reader, rest assured.”
“OK Rick, that’s it. Cut the story charade. We’re having a talk.”
“You bet your lovely bottom we are.”
“So why can’t we just have a talk without you pretending it’s something else, Rick? I find this pretty disturbing.”
“But see finally the wife can no longer stay away, she realizes that whatever physical connection she may crave because of her disastrously weak self-network, she and the dentist are connected in a much deeper and more profound and yes in some sense even more fulfilling and three-dimensional way, namely an emotional way, and so she rushes to the hospital, brushes aside nurses and orderlies, and bursts into the theoretical dentist’s room, only to see to her horror the dentist’s brother, leaning over the prone dentist, beginning to remove the dentist’s upper lip with a Boy Scout knife.”
“Oh, really, come on.”
“As the dentist, it turns out, had requested. Which, given the context, the sensitive reader of course regards as food for thought. But and so the wife screams, and the previously brushed-aside nurses and orderlies rush in, and they restrain the estate-attorney brother, and he is carried off, and the achingly lovely woman positively falls on the dentist’s mangled upper lip, trying to stop the bleeding and save the lip, lashing out at doctors who come near, tapping over and over into the gore that she loves the dentist, that she is sorry, please to forgive her. And through his pain the helpless dentist feels her tap, and his heart almost breaks, and though he knows it will do no good, because her pathetic neurosis will, he knows, soon drive the wife into outside connections again, he does forgive her, he does, and he moves his lip in his pathetically tiny way, to let her know he forgives her, but the heart-tweakingly tiny familiar movement of the lip is here of course obscured by the flow of blood from the attempted lip-removal, and so the wife just cannot see the movement, no matter how frantically the helpless dentist tries to move his lip, and so the wife, getting no visible results, finally reels from the dentist’s room in despair and horror and guilt, and immediately goes shopping.”
“Shopping?”
“....”
“Shopping?”
“Lenore, look out there. What is that flash, out on the water? Is that a sunlight-off-binoculars flash?”
“....”
“Good Lord it is. Lenore, what’s going on?”
“ ”
“It is. It’s Lang, in a boat. They’re rowing this way. They’ve been watching. Lenore, what is Lang shouting? Is that Lang, shouting?”
“Rick, I can explain ...”
“No problem at all. Let me just ... I have to hurry.”
“What are those?”
“These are our connection, Lenore. I forgive you.”
“Handcuffs? You’re going to forgive me with handcuffs that say ‘Bambi’s Den of Discipline’ on them?”
“The ... achingly lovely woman returns that night to the dentist’s hospital room with her copy of McTeague. She comes in the night to the numb dentist and taps to him. She taps the conclusion of McTeague. The book’s climax. Have you ever experienced the climax of McTeague?”
“Rick, you just take it easy.”
“The climax consists of McTeague, the dentist, handcuffed to the corpse of his malevolent foe, Marcus Schouler, in the middle of a desert.”
“Desert? Handcuffs? Corpses? Oh shit. Andy! Andy!”
“Andy? No, Schouler.”
“Rick ...”
“And as she taps it, ever so gently, taking care not to hurt him any more than she has already, she looks at the dentist’s motionless face and sees a single tear emerge from one partly sedated eye and course down his cheek until it is silently absorbed by a cotton bandage. She, too, weeps, with no sound.... And she produces a pair of handcuffs, which she had gone to enormous expense and embarrassment to buy ... and ... joins herself ... to the wrist of the theoretical dentist, his inefficacious wrist ...”
“What are you doing? Let me go!”
“... with the deep oiled ... click of the handcuffs.”
“Jesus, Rick. This is it. You get these off right now. You get me out. I’ve told you I hate this torture and pain stuff, and you just don’t care! You’re a sick man!”
“Torture and pain? Lenore, I forgive you.”
“Forgive what, for Christ’s sake? Help! Andy! Neil!”
“Lenore!”
“God damn it, Rick, this is it. No talking, even. I wanted to talk, I said let’s talk Rick, but no, so now forget it, I’m sorry but that’s it.”
“We are now joined, my center and reference! In negation and discipline! Our bodies are husks!”
“You just better have the key. God, Andy, see if he’s got the key. ”
“What the fuck’s going on here?”
“Can’t you see? He’s locked us together!”
“Look you little wiener, cough up the key to these things or your ass is grass.”
“You are fired, Lang! You are dismissed!”
“Fuck being dismissed. You let this little lady go.”
“Lenore, we will shrink into husks together. We will bleed in the sky. See it?”
“Wanger, is he crying? Is the little sucker crying?”
“Shut up, Neil.”
“Rick, please don’t. Let’s just talk about it. Don’t sit in the sand and cry. Everybody can see. Let’s stand up.”
“We’ll be joined in the light of the sky, Lenore. See the light of the sky? The dawn and sunset will be fed from our veins. We’ll be spread all over. We’ll be everything. We’ll be gigantic.”
“How fucking pathetic.”
“Shut up, Neil.”
“Larger than life.”
“Look here, R.V., let’s just stand on up and talk this over, and unlock all this shit.”
“She is handcuffed. to a corpse, in the Desert. Don’t you see the ... irony?”
“Want me to just get a cop, here, Wanger?”
“If she weren’t three-dimensional, she wouldn’t be caught! Don’t you see? A three-dimensional husk!”
“I think old R.V.’s just lost a few cards out of a certain deck, Lenore. ”
“Rick.”
“That’s where we’ll be. We’ll be prodigious enough to feed the whole sky! Don’t you see? And whose fault is it, after all?”
“Aw, Rick, don’t you see? Fault just doesn’t enter into it at all.”
“Exactly. Exactly. It’s no one’s fault. We all agree.”
“Rick ...”
“Lenore sugar doll I care about you. I do. I don’t care who knows it. I care about you as a person. R. V. can put all the shit on you he wants. You’re mine now. I don’t care if the whole world knows it. Hey y‘all! I care about this little lady right here!”
“We’re in the sky. We can’t hear you.”
“Fuck off, R. V. Look, Lenore, I’m gonna go ahead and just break the chain on these things. OK? I think I can break ‘em. I’ve broke shit like this before.”
“Go ahead and try, Lang. You just go ahead and try it, and see what happens!”
“Is that OK, Lenore?”
“....”
“You ready?”
19
1990
The time last night when Lenore Beadsman cried in front of Andrew Sealander Lang was the first time she had ever cried in front of anybody else, at all.
Rick Vigorous has cried in front of lots of people.
20
1990
Disorder asserted itself in the lobby of the Bombardini Building soon after Lenore Beadsman arrived, in a nearly unprecedented state of piss-off, to clear her personal items out of the Frequent and Vigorous/Bombardini Company switchboard cubicle.
Candy Mandible was at the board, filling in briefly for Mindy Metalman, who’d been installed as a temporary at the say-so of Rick Vigorous, and who was for starters supposed to work the day shift today, Saturday, but who had, this morning, finally been able to get hold of Dr. Martin Tissaw, the oral surgeon, Lenore’s landlord, at home, in East Corinth, and had dashed over at lunchtime to see him, to talk about “birds, miracles, dreams and professionalism, not necessarily in that order,” as she’d said to Candy when Candy came in to relieve her. Mindy’s call had awakened Candy at Nick Allied’s Shaker Heights home, where Candy had spent an unhappy night waiting for Allied, who was supposed to return from a product-evaluation trip with his stenographer around midnight, but never had, and hadn’t even called.
The thing is that even before Lenore and Lang arrived, Candy Mandible was getting a hard time of it from any number of sources. There was, for example, Judith Prietht, who had weekends off because the Bombardini Company switchboard was down from Friday night to Monday morning, but who usually came on into the lobby on Saturday anyway, to knit shapeless sweaters and listen to her radio and watch the Erieview shadow move along the lobby walls, and who had today actually brought in her cat, which, when Judith saw that it was Candy at the console, she was for obvious reasons very anxious to introduce to her. And so Judith was hanging around the outside of the cubicle, hefting the cat, being bothersome and artificially nice, and dropping all sorts of heavy hints about blessings and autographs and partnership. Her new idea was to have the Reverend Hart Lee Sykes deliver a personal blessing to the cat, whose name was apparently Champ, and who was the single most obese cat Candy had ever seen, anywhere, but anyway who was supposed to receive the blessing, personally, while he placed a chubby paw on Judith’s television screen. Judith told Candy that Reverend Sykes made time for a viewer-touching-the-screen moment in every installment of ‘The Partners With God Club,’ believing that theologically and economically important Sykes/viewer communications could be established this way.
The Broom of the System Page 48
