The Broom Of The System Part 40

"Anyhow," Fieldbinder said, "I'm off. I hope I did the right thing, coming over. And I'm sorry if this upset you. I just thought you ought to know the story."

"Monroe," Slotnik said, "you're a good friend. We appreciate it. You did the right thing. We appreciate it more than we can say." He extended a sticky hand, which Fieldbinder shook, smelling syrup. Slotnik whirled on his slippers and headed for the stairs.

Evelyn showed Fieldbinder to the door. She didn't say anything.

At the door Fieldbinder turned to her. "Listen," he said. He looked up the staircase. "I'll understand if this isn't the right time." He smiled warmly. "But I'd like to see you, and I'll just tell you that I'll actually be next door all day. I've got to get it all finished today, I'm so behind. But all day, is the thing. Although the crew's coming at three. So I'm just telling you. Do what you want, of course. But if you get a chance, feel like it, while they're at baseball ..."

Evelyn didn't say anything. She had opened the front door for Fieldbinder. She was seeing something past him, in the lawn. Fieldbinder turned to look.

"Well there's Scott!" he said. "h.e.l.lo, Scott! Remember me?"

Scott Slotnik was bouncing a tennis ball on the bricks of the front walk, out by the street. The ball made a dull sound as it bounced off the lawn clippings that lay on the walk. At Fieldbinder's call, Scott looked up.

There was a silence, except for the chatter of a hedge trimmer across the street. Evelyn stared at Scott, past Scott. Then she seemed to give a start. "Scott!" she called sharply. "Please come in here right now!"

Fieldbinder turned back to look at Evelyn. He smiled and put a soft hand on the arm of her robe. "Hey," he said gently. "Come on."

Evelyn looked at Fieldbinder's hand, there on her arm, for a moment. Scott had begun coming toward the door. She looked back out at him. "It's all right, sweetie," she called. She made a smile. "Stay and play, if you want."

Scott looked at Fieldbinder and his mother and then at the ball in his hand. .

"Anyhow, the point is just know I'm here, is all; I'm there, all day, till three," Fieldbinder was saying.

"Yes," Evelyn said. She went back in from the door, leaving it open.

Fieldbinder moved down the rough brick walk toward Scott Slotnik.

Through the living room window, Evelyn watched Fieldbinder stop and smile and kneel down to say a few words to Scott Slotnik. Something he said made Scott smile shyly and nod. Fieldbinder laughed. Evelyn tried to smooth her morning hair back over her ears. Her sticky thumbs pulled at her hair.

16.

1990.

9 September

A dream so completely frightening, disorienting, and ominous that Fieldbinder awoke streaming.

"Dr. J__ is in significant personal danger, " he thought wryly, is in significant personal danger, " he thought wryly,

Lang and I are in my office, in our respective chairs, the translation between us. We are both mysteriously and troublingly nude. It is noon; the shadow is moving. I look down and cover myself with a tea bag, but there is Lang in all his horror. Lang is drawing a picture of Lenore on the back of the final page of "Love." It is a stunning, lifelike drawing of an unclothed Lenore. I begin to have an erection behind my tea bag. Lang's pen is in the shape of a beer bottle; Lang sucks at the pen, periodically. Lenore is there on the page, on her back, a Vargas girl, a V. Lang puts his initials in the side of Lenore's long, curving leg: a deep, wicked W.D.L.

As the initials go down, hands and hair begin to protrude from the page; b.r.e.a.s.t.s swell, a tummy heaves, knees rise and part, feet stroke demurely at the edges of the page. Lang works his pen. Lenore emerges from the page and circles the room.

Fingernails click on the window. Outside the window is a young Mindy Metalman, very young, perhaps thirteen, with bright lipstick on her tiny bruised mouth. She holds hedge trimmers, points at the tea bag. I am sucked back into the shadow as it spreads like ink across the white wall. When I look away from the window, Lenore is kneeling, with the beer-bottle pen, signing Lang's rear end, signing her name with long slow curves, in violet ink, while her other hand finds what purchase it can on Lang's heroic front.

I scream an airless scream and begin explosively to urinate. The stream is upward, a fan of uncountably many lines, which lines are razor-thin and so hot that I am burned when I try to cross them. I am trapped behind my fan. Hot currents swirl on the office carpet, climbing to lap hollow white at Lenore's b.r.e.a.s.t.s as they tremble with her efforts. The tea bag bleeds into the hot spray. Tea is being made. "Tea symptosis," says Lang, laughing.

Lenore is drowning; Lang holds her head beneath the surface of the ocean of burnt-yellow tea with his rear end. She continues to sign. Mice boil in the hot currents, their tails wriggling. I am suffocating. It is Salada tea. On the tea bag is written a pithy "It takes a big man to laugh at himself, but it takes an even bigger man to laugh at that man."

Lang looks down at himself and begins ponderously to stir. I surrender myself to the horror. My diploma is washed from the wall and borne away in a rush of foam.

Fieldbinder awoke streaming, to find that he had actually wet the bed, but fortunately that the stained area was no bigger than a spot of ink, which he rubbed away with his handkerchief.

The thing is that they are at the Tissaws', and I am here. There is an unimaginable thickness thickness about Cleveland after one has had a bad night, alone. One I am powerless even to hope to begin to describe. Really. about Cleveland after one has had a bad night, alone. One I am powerless even to hope to begin to describe. Really.

PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT OF RAP SESSION IN THE OFFICE OF DR. CURTIS JAY, PH.D., THURSDAY, 9 SEPTEMBER 1990.

PARTIc.i.p.aNTS: DR. CURTIS JAY AND MS. LENORE BEADSMAN, AGE 24, FILE NUMBER 770-01-4266.

DR. JAY: And so how does that make you feel?

MS. LENORE BEADSMAN: How does what make me feel?

JAY: The state of affairs we were just trying to articulate, in which your grandmother's separation from and silence toward you paradoxically evokes in you a feeling of greater closeness to and communication with the rest of your family.

LENORE: Well, except there's the John thing, in Chicago or wherever. JAY: Let's leave him out of the picture, for the nonce.

LENORE: For the what?

JAY: Go, go with your thoughts.

LENORE: What thoughts?

JAY: The thoughts we just characterized together.

LENORE : Well, I think in a certain way it's true. Clarice was clueless, she really doesn't click with the whole Lenore thing, she never has, but still I felt like when I went over there to tell her this troubling family stuff, and then watched her and her own family go through that whole little skit that in a way had to do with exactly what I needed to talk to her about-I felt good, somehow. It felt secure. Is it dumb to say it felt secure?

JAY: You felt connected.

LENORE: Connected and non-connected, too.

JAY: But all in the appropriate ways.

LENORE: Boy, you're really hot, today.

JAY: There's a ticklish, stimulating hint of breakthrough-odor. LENORE: And then there's my other brother ... that's the first time I've actually talked to LaVache about anything important in a really long time. He might have been flapped, but still. I just felt somehow like we were really ...

JAY: Communicating?

LENORE: I guess so.

JAY: And how long had it been since you two had had a meaningful dialogue? Communicated?

LENORE: Oh, gee, quite a while.

JAY: I see. And how long, just to play a bit of a scent-hunch, here, had your great-grandmother been ensconced in the Shaker Heights Home?

LENORE: Umm, quite a while.

JAY: Would this make you uncomfortable?

LENORE: What is that? Is that a gas mask?

JAY: (m.u.f.fled) Purely precautionary.

LENORE: Why do I pay money to somebody to make me less flakey when that person is flakier than I am?

JAY: Than I.

LENORE: Good thing I'm strapped in again.

JAY: And then of course you've implied that your brother had insights on the whole grandmother-disappearance problem.

LENORE: Not really what you'd call insights. He'd gotten a drawing, too, a different one, of some guy on a dune in the Desert, and he played some flap-games with it, and ended up telling me never to think about myself. It wasn't super helpful. And also it was pretty depressing to see that he's still got this schizophrenic thing about his leg, and that he probably personally accounts for about half the drug consumption in New England.

JAY: It's you I'm interested in, though.

LENORE: Well, sorry, but I tend to be concerned about my brother. Part of the me you're so interested in is brother-concern.

JAY: The Desert?

LENORE: Pardon?

JAY: You mentioned Desert, in the context of the drawing in question. Do you mean the Desert?

LENORE: Well, the sand was black, and LaVache mentioned sinisterness.

JAY: So the G.O.D., then.

LENORE: Who knows.

JAY: But there's at least a possibility that the Great Ohio Desert bears on the whereabouts of the nursing home people.

LENORE: What's going on here?

JAY: Where?

LENORE: Don't look around, in your stupid mask. Are you trying to put words in my mouth?

JAY: This guy? Me?

LENORE: Why do I get the feeling people are trying to push me out into the Desert? Which for me has all these really far less than pleasant memories of when I was a kid, and Gramma would take me out wandering, and I'd have to hear her go on and on about Auden and Wittgenstein, who she thinks are like jointly G.o.d, and we'd fish at the Desert's edge, and look into the blackness ...

JAY: A conspicuous hmmm, here.

LENORE: In your ear. And how come you're all trying to get me back out there? You, my brother, Rick's mentioned Desert, Vlad quotes Auden to me, that Gramma used to read in the sand ...

JAY: A morsel for thought, if I may be so- LENORE: And Mr. el creepo Bloemker was acting like some sort of Desert salesman with me before his girlfriend lost her dress and sprung a leak ...

JAY: Excuse me?

LENORE: And then also out of the unwelcome blue comes this guy, who I unfortunately met, when I was a kid, and is married to my sister's old roommate, and it turns out his father more or less built the G.O. D., apparently. His father owns Industrial Desert Design. Dad was unbelievably interested in that. A lot more interested than in any stick-figure drawings, that's for- JAY: What guy?

LENORE: Andrew Sealander Lang, who's doing obscure translation stuff at Frequent and Vigorous, whom Rick met in a bar in Amherst.

JAY: And you'd met him personally before.

LENORE: Why do you ask?

JAY: Why that face?

LENORE: What face?

JAY: You just got a dreamy, faraway expression on your face. LENORE: I did not.

JAY: You're attracted to this man?

LENORE: Are you out of your mind? What's with you today? Is air getting through the air-hole in that thing?