The Broom Of The System Part 48

"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 relations.h.i.+ps go through bad periods. There are bad times in all relations.h.i.+ps. 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 relations.h.i.+p-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 G.o.d Club' right now."

" 'The Partners With G.o.d 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 h.e.l.lo, 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 s.h.i.+t 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 c.o.c.katiel 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."

"G.o.d, 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 a.s.sured."

"I think there's been some kind of mistake. I think you maybe misheard him."

"We'll see."

"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 long time." time."

"Pretty decent little old crowd, all right," said w.a.n.g-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 s.h.i.+ny 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 a.s.shole," 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."