The Broom of the System

by David Foster Wallace

  Lang put some wine in his mouth and played with it. There was silence for a bit. Through Misty’s wood floor Lenore could hear faint sounds from the television in the Tissaws’ living room.

  Then Lang said, “You’re weird about words, aren’t you.” He looked at Lenore. “Are you weird about words?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You just seem weird about them. Or like you think they’re weird.”

  “In what way?”

  Lang felt his upper lip absently with a finger while he looked into the glass table. “Like you take them awful seriously,” he said. “Like they were a big sharp tool, or like a chainsaw, that could cut you up as easy as some tree. Something like that.” He looked up at her. “Is that from your education, in terms of college and your major and such?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Lenore. She shrugged her shoulders. “I think I just tend to be sort of quiet. I don’t think words are like chainsaws, that’s for sure.”

  “So was that really all just bullshit, what I said?”

  Lenore recrossed her legs and played with the wine in her glass. She looked down into her purse, with the tickets, next to her chair. “I think it’s just that my family tends to be kind of weird, and very ... verbal.” She looked into the table and sipped. “And it’s hard sometimes not being an especially verbal person in a family that tends to see life as more or less a verbal phenomenon.”

  “Sure enough.” Lang smiled. He looked at Lenore’s legs. “And now can I ask you how come you wear those Converse sneakers all over? Your legs are just way too nice to be doing that all the time. How come you do that?”

  Lenore shifted in her chair and looked up at Lang to make him stop looking at her legs. “They’re comfortable, is all, really,” she said. “Everybody likes different kinds of shoes, I guess.”

  “Takes all kinds of shoes to make up a world, am I right?” Lang laughed and drank.

  Lenore smiled. “My family really is funny about wordy things, though. I think you’re right about that. My great-grandmother especially, and she sort of dominated the family for a while.”

  “And your Daddy and your housekeeper-lady, too,” said Lang, nodding.

  Lenore looked up sharply. “How come you know about them?”

  Lang shrugged and then grinned at her. “Think R.V. mentioned something or other.”

  “Rick did?”

  “But funny how?” Lang said. “I mean it’s not too unusual just to get people who like to talk. World is full of dedicated and excellent talkers. My mother used to get talking, and my Daddy’d say only way to really get her to hush was to hit her with something blunt.”

  “Well but see, it wasn’t just talking a lot,” Lenore said, smoothing her hair. “Although everybody sure did. But it was as you said, the importance they attached to everything they said. They made just a huge deal out of what got said.” Lenore felt the rim of her glass for a second. She smiled. “Like to take an example I was just remembering this morning, my little brother Stoney had this stage of his childhood where he called everything brands of things. He’d say, ‘What brand of dog is that?’ or ‘That’s the brand of sunset where the sun makes the clouds all fiery,’ or ‘That brand of tree has edible leaves,’ et cetera.” She looked over at Lang, who was looking at her in the table. He looked up at her. Lenore cleared her throat. “Which obviously, you know, wasn’t all that big a deal,” she continued, “although it was kind of irritating, but still understandable, because Stoney watched television like all the time, back then.” Lenore recrossed her legs; Lang was still looking at her. “But my family was just having a complete spasm about it, after a while, and one time they even arranged to have Stoney out of the house so we could all supposedly sit down in the living room for like a summit meeting about how to get him to start saying ‘kind’ instead of’brand,‘ or whatever. It was a huge family deal, although my father I remember kept talking on the phone during the meeting, or going to get stuff to eat, or even reading, and not paying attention, because my great-grandmother was running the meeting, and they don’t get along too well. At least they didn’t.”

  “Now is this your Amherst brother you’re talking about?” said Lang. “LaVache, the one at Amherst now?”

  “Yes. LaVache is Stonecipher’s middle name. Stonecipher’s his real name.”

  “Then so how’d they break the little guy of the habit? He didn’t say ‘brand’ at dinner, at all, that one time—at least not to his leg, which was about all he was talking to.”

  “I think it just stopped,” Lenore said. “I think it just petered out. Unless Miss Malig started hitting him with blunt things on the sly.” She laughed. “I guess anything’s possible.”

  “Miss Malig, your nanny, with legs like churns and all?”

  At this, Lenore stayed looking into the table for some time, while Lang watched the side of her face. Finally she said, “Look, how do you know all this stuff, Andy?” She put her glass down in its circle of moisture on the table and looked calmly at Lang. “Are you trying to freak me out? Is that it? I think I need to know what exactly Rick told you.”

  Lang shook his head seriously. “Freaking you out never even crossed my mind,” he said. He popped the tab on another can of wine. “This was just on the plane, coming on out here, while you were sleeping your pretty head off. We didn’t have nobody to talk to except us.” He tossed off some wine and smiled. “R. V. I remember was telling me about how he was going to promote you up from the phone board up to reader and weeder, and how you’d really get fulfilled by that.”

  “Rick told you then that he was going to do that? That’s like two days before he told me he was going to do that.”

  “But are you getting fulfilled? Is it rewarding like he said?”

  Lenore looked for sarcasm in Lang’s face. She could never tell whether Lang was being sarcastic or not. Her neck really hurt, now. “It’s at least rewarding to the tune of ten smackers an hour,” she said slowly. “And some of the stories are really good.”

  “R.V. says you really get into stories. He says you understand yourself as a literary sensibility.”

  “He said that?”

  “He did.”

  Lenore looked back into the table. “Well I do like stories. And Rick likes them too. I think that’s one reason we seem to get along so well. Except what Rick really likes to do is tell them. Sometimes when we’re together he’ll just tell me stories, the whole time. From what gets submitted to him.”

  Lang put his shoe out onto the glass tabletop, twisted it back and forth. “He does like to spin, doesn’t he,” he said absently. He paused and looked over at Lenore. Lenore looked down at her shoe. Lang cleared his throat. “I probably shouldn’t do this, but I’ve been wanting to ask you about this one whopper R.V. told me about your brother, with his leg: how the little sucker lost his leg when your mother fell off the side of your house trying to get away from her bridge coach and break into your nursery. Or some such. Now just how much of that is true, and how much was my own personal leg getting pulled, on that plane?”

  A lot of little lines seemed to come out of the lines of heat in Lenore’s body. She stared at Lang’s shoe on the table. She closed her eyes and felt her neck. Lang watched her. “Let me get this straight,” she said finally. “Rick told you personal stuff about my family? On the plane? While I was right there, asleep?”

  “Was that a mistake, telling you what he told me? Lenore, hurt me with something hot if I just screwed up in any way. Just forget I said anything.”

  Lenore kept looking at the glass table, and Lang’s shoe, and Lang’s shoe’s reflection, and Lang’s reflection. “He told you all that while I was asleep,” she said. In the table it looked as though Lang was looking away from her, because the real Lang was looking at her. When he finally looked down at the table, Lenore stared at him.

  “Well he said you were his fiancée,” Lang said, “and how he was just passionately and totally interested in everything about his fia
ncée. It all seemed real innocent to me. Not to mention just articulate as ell.”

  Lenore had looked up. “He told you I was his fiancée? As in soon-to-be-married fiancée?”

  “Oh shit.” Lang hit his forehead with the heel of his palm. “Oh shit, did I just do it again? Oh Lord. Just forget what I said. Just forget I said anything.”

  “Rick said we were engaged? He just said that to you, unsolicited, out of the blue?”

  “He probably just didn’t mean it the way he said it.”

  “Shit on a twig.”

  “Now Lenore I sure don’t want to come between two people who—”

  “What the hell did he say there even was to come between?”

  “Jesus H.,” Lang said, massaging his jaw. His reflection in the glass looked away from Lenore. Then it looked down, and seemed actually almost to wink, in the glass, all of a sudden. Lenore looked up, but the real Lang was looking at his hands.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” he was saying to himself. He drank some wine. Lenore smoothed her hair back with hot fingers.

  “Look,” said Lang. “I’m just real sorry. How about if I just tell you everything, everything that’s been making me feel all terribly guilty around you, and then we can just go ahead and—”

  “Why on earth should you feel guilty because of Rick?” Lenore said tiredly, massaging her neck with her eyes closed again. “That he told you stuff is no reason for you to feel bad, Andy. I’m not mad at you about it.”

  “Except there’s a few sort of sizable items R.V. doesn’t feel inclined to tell, it looks like,” said Lang. He took a very deep breath and looked at his hands again. “Like I’m not in actual fact translating any herbicide or pesticide crap into idiomatic Greek for you.” He looked at her. “Like I’m really working on a pamphlet for your own personal Daddy’s company, and its wild-ass new food that makes kids supposedly talk, like your bird can do.”

  Lenore looked into the table. There was silence. “You’re really working for Stonecipheco,” she said.

  Lang didn’t say anything.

  “Which means Rick is, too. And Rick didn’t tell me.”

  “I’m afraid that’s right. Except like I say I’m sure there was a good reason for his not.”

  Lenore slowly reached for the open can and poured some more wine into her Road Runner glass. She hunched forward in the white burlap chair until her face was right over the table. She could see some of Lang in the top of her wine, erratic and shimmery, with mint eyes, in the yellow.

  “And for his more or less ordering me not to tell you, either,” Lang was saying. He looked at the side of Lenore’s face. “The thing is, Lenore, he more or less ordered me not to tell you, which is why I didn’t tell you.”

  Lenore shook the glass a little, rattled the bottom against the tabletop. The wine in the glass sloshed; Lang was broken into pieces that didn’t fit.

  “Which means I’m afraid I need to ask you maybe to promise not to tell R.V. I told you, for fear of my job and all,” he said.

  “Just like you yourself apparently promised Rick not to tell.”

  Lang took his shoe off the table and leaned forward too, so his head was alongside Lenore‘s, a big curl of her hair hanging in the air between them. Lang looked at the curl. “I guess that promise has to get chalked up to what you might call strategic misrepresentation,” he said, very quietly.

  “Strategic misrepresentation.”

  “Yes. ‘Cause I made it before I ever got exposed to your good qualities and began to care about you as a person.” Lang set his glass of wine down and slowly took hold of some of Lenore’s curl and twisted it this way and that, all very gently.

  “I see.”

  “Not entirely sure you do, here, Lenore.”

  “Oh, I think I do,” Lenore said, getting up and gently getting her hair out of the reach of Lang’s fingers. She walked over to the window and looked out at the houses across the Tissaws’ dark street. All the houses seemed to have their lights on.

  “Well then maybe I should ask what do you think,” Lang said from back at the couch, where Lenore could see in the window he’d recrossed his legs and picked up his wine again. “What do you think about it, then,” he said.

  “I don’t know,” Lenore said after a minute, breathing on the cold window. She watched how what she said made it hard to see out. “I don’t know what to think, old Wang-Dang Lang. Tell me what to think, please, and then I’ll think that way about it.”

  “Well now that’s no way to talk, Lenore.”

  Lenore didn’t say anything.

  “And you should call me Andy,” said Lang. “You shouldn’t call me anything but Andy, I don’t think.”

  “There, that’s what we need,” Lenore said, nodding, with her eyes closed. “We need it explicit. We need this control thing made explicit. No more games. People tell me what to do and think and say and call them, and I do it. It’ll all be simple. Then everybody can stop whispering when I’m asleep, and hiring each other behind my back, and wearing gas masks. They can just start making sense.” Lenore turned around. “So let’s really do it, OK? How are you supposed to be mixed up with my great-grandmother?”

  “Now let’s just hold up here a second, Lenore,” said Lang. He put down his glass and came over to within a few feet of where Lenore was standing, at the window. On one side of them was the television screen; behind Lang was the way to the door. “Whoa there,” Lang was saying. “I don’t know anything about any great-grandmother mix-ups. And all‘I got to do with your family is basically you.” He shook his head. “Far as I know there’s nobody sneaking around about you and me.”

  Lenore looked at the floor and put one of her curls behind her ear and crossed her arms. Lang was between her and the door. Her eyes began to get big and hot, and she felt as if there was wood in her voice box. She looked at Lang, who had his thumbs hooked into the pockets of his pants.

  “Then how come I feel like the whole universe is playing pimp for me with you?” she said quietly. She thought she felt herself beginning to cry.

  Lang looked at her. “Hey now please don’t cry,” he said.

  “When I didn’t ask for it at all?” Lenore said. “When I didn’t even like you? I didn’t want you.” She looked past Lang at the door and began to sob, felt her shoulders curl down over her chest.

  Then there was Lang, and her face was in Lang’s shirt, and a Kleenex got pressed into her hand from out of nowhere, and the wood in her throat seemed to break apart and go in all different directions, hurting.

  Lang was making a soft rhythmic sound with his mouth into Lenore’s hair.

  “I hated you,” Lenore said into his shirt, talking to his chest. “You came in that time, and terrorized us, and were drunk, and that guy’s stupid bottom, and Sue Shaw was so scared. ”

  “It’s OK,” Lang was saying softly. “It’s OK. We were all just kids. We were just kids. That’s all it was.”

  “And I say I don’t want you, that I’m mad, and have a right to be, and everybody just winks, and nudges, and gets a tone, and pushes, pushes, pushes.” Lang’s shirt was getting wet. “I’ve just felt so dirty. So out of control.”

  Lang pushed her away a bit and dried her eyes with his sleeve. Lenore looked into his eyes for a second and thought for no reason of mint, lima beans, tired grass. His eyes were totally unbloodshot. “Lenore,” he was saying, “it’s OK. Just believe I don’t want to push you, OK? Just believe it,” he said, “OK? You can believe that, ‘cause it’s true. I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you, one bit.” He rubbed at his perfect eye and Lenore went back to smelling his chest. It was true that even while she was crying she had been able to feel him through his clothes, and her clothes.

  “Lenore?” Lang said after he’d let her breathe into his shirt for a while. “Hey, Lenore?” He bent and cupped his hands around her ear and made as if he were talking into a bullhorn. “Lenore Beadsman.”

  Lenore laughed a convulsive laugh and brought the Kleenex up to her
face. It was hot, and wet, and little bits of it were all over her hand.

  “I’ll just say it, Lenore,” Lang said. “I sure don’t want to control you at all. Believe that. But I’ll just go ahead and say that I think the one’s maybe trying to do more controlling than’s good for anybody is old R.V.”

  For no reason Lenore looked up past Lang at Misty’s ceiling, her own floor.

  “Lenore,” said Lang. He stroked the white sleeve of Lenore’s dress with a big warm hand, and through Lenore’s body from the hand went heat.

  “Lenore,” he said quietly, “R.V. sat there in that plane, with his little feet dangling and all, sweating like a freaking pig”—he put his hand through his hair—“and just flat out told me you were his, and said I had to promise not to even try to take you away from him.” He looked down at her. “I just thought you should know that.”

  Lenore took Lang’s hand from her sleeve and held it while her eyes dried. She could smell herself.

  “Like you were his car, or a TV,” Lang was saying, shaking his head. “He wanted me to promise to like respect his ownership of you, or some such.”

  His arm brought Lenore into his chest again. She felt something pressing against her stomach, and didn’t even think what it was until later.

  “How does he think something like that’s going to make us feel?” Lang was saying into her hair. “Where’s what’s fair in that?”

  /h/

  “Just sorry, is all.”

  “....”

  “If such is appropriate.”

  “....”

  “Which I rather think it is.”

  “Ricky that’s silly, don’t be sorry. There’s no need to be sorry.”

  “....”

  “The situation, the way it turns out we are, sorry doesn’t enter into it at all.”

  “As it were.”

  “What?”

  “....”

  “You’re probably just all tense and worried, Rick. Being tense and worried is world-famous for doing this.”

  “Look, even if I weren’t tense and worried, you wouldn’t have been able to tell. Is that not clear?”