Broom of the System

1. 1981

Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden. They’re long and thin and splay-toed, with buttons of yellow callus on the little toes and a thick stair-step of it on the back of the heel, and a few long black hairs are curling out of the skin at the tops of the feet, and the red nail polish is cracking and peeling in curls and candy-striped with decay. Lenore only notices because Mindy’s bent over in the chair by the fridge picking at some of the polish on her toes; her bathrobe’s opening a little, so there’s some cleavage visible and everything, a lot more than Lenore’s got, and the thick white towel wrapped around Mindy’s wet washed shampooed head is coming undone and a wisp of dark shiny hair has slithered out of a crack in the folds and curled down all demurely past the side of Mindy’s face and under her chin. It smells like Flex shampoo in the room, and also pot, since Clarice and Sue Shaw are smoking a big thick j-bird Lenore got from Ed Creamer back at Shaker School and brought up with some other stuff for Clarice, here at school.

What’s going on is that Lenore Beadsman, who’s fifteen, has just come all the way from home in Shaker Heights, Ohio, right near Cleveland, to visit her big sister, Clarice Beadsman, who’s a freshman at this women’s college, called Mount Holyoke; and Lenore’s staying with her sleeping bag in this room on the second floor of Rumpus Hall that Clarice shares with her roommates, Mindy Metalman and Sue Shaw. Lenore’s also come to sort of check out this college, a little bit. This is because even though she’s just fifteen she’s supposedly quite intelligent and thus accelerated and already a junior at Shaker School and thus thinking about college, application-wise, for next year. So she’s visiting. Right now it’s a Friday night in March.

Sue Shaw, who’s not nearly as pretty as Mindy or Clarice, is bringing the joint over here to Mindy and Lenore, and Mindy takes it and lets her toe alone for a second and sucks the bird really hard, so it glows bright and a seed snaps loudly and bits of paper ash go flying and floating, which Clarice and Sue find super funny and start laughing at really hard, whooping and clutching at each other, and Mindy breathes it in really deep and holds it in and passes the bird to Lenore, but Lenore says no thank you.

“No thank you,” says Lenore.

“Go ahead, you brought it, why not…,” croaks Mindy Metalman, talking the way people talk without breathing, holding on to the smoke.

“I know, but it’s track season at school and I’m on the team and I don’t smoke during the season, I can‘t, it kills me,” Lenore says.

So Mindy shrugs and finally lets out a big breath of pale used-up smoke and coughs a deep little cough and gets up with the bird and takes it over across the room to Clarice and Sue Shaw, who are by a big wooden stereo speaker listening to this song, again, by Cat Stevens, for like the tenth time tonight. Mindy’s robe’s more or less open, now, and Lenore can see some pretty amazing stuff, but Mindy just walks across the room. Lenore can at this point divide all the girls she’s known neatly into girls who think deep down they’re pretty and girls who deep down think they’re really not. Girls who think they’re pretty don’t care much about their bathrobes being undone and are good at makeup and like to walk when people are watching, and they act different when there are boys around; and girls like Lenore, who don’t think they’re too pretty, tend not to wear makeup, and run track, and wear black Converse sneakers, and keep their bathrobes pretty well fastened at all times. Mindy sure is pretty, though, except for her feet.

The Cat Stevens song is over again, and the needle goes up by itself, and obviously none of these three feel like moving all the way to start it again, so they’re just sitting back in their hard wood desk chairs, Mindy in her faded pink terry robe with one shiny smooth leg all bare and sticking out; Clarice in her Desert boots and her dark blue jeans that Lenore calls her shoe-hom jeans, and that white western shirt she’d worn at the state fair the time she’d had her purse stolen, and her blond hair flooding all over the shirt, and her eyes very blue right now; Sue Shaw with her red hair and a green sweater and green tartan skirt and fat white legs with a bright red pimple just over one knee, legs crossed with one foot jiggling one of those boat shoes, with the sick white soles-Lenore dislikes that kind of shoe a lot.

Clarice after a quiet bit lets out a long sigh and says, in whispers, “Cat… is… God,” giggling a little at the end. The other two giggle too.

“God? How can Cat be God? Cat exists.” Mindy’s eyes are all red.

“That’s offensive and completely blaphemous,” says Sue Shaw, eyes wide and puffed and indignant.

“Blaphemous?” Clarice dies, looks at Lenore. “Blasphemous,” she says. Her eyes aren’t all that bad, really, just unusually cheerful, as if she’s got a joke she’s not telling.

“Blissphemous,” says Mindy.

“Blossphemous.”

“Blousephemous.”

“Bluesphemous.”

“Boisterous.”

“Boisteronahalfshell.”

“Bucephalus.”

“Barney Rubble.”

“Baba Yaga. ”

“Bolshevik.”

“Blaphemous!”

They’re dying, doubled over, and Lenore’s laughing that weird sympathetic laugh you laugh when everybody else is laughing so hard they make you laugh too. The noise of the big party downstairs is coming through the floor and vibrating in Lenore’s black sneakers and the arms of the chair. Now Mindy slides out of her desk chair all limp and shlomps down on Lenore’s sleeping bag on the floor next to Clarice’s pretend-Persian ruglet from Mooradian’s in Cleveland, and Mindy modestly covers her crotch with a comer of her robe, but Lenore still can’t help but see the way her breasts swell up into the worn pink towel cloth of the robe, all full and stuff, even lying down on her back, there, on the floor. Lenore uncon siously looks down a little at her own chest, under her flannel shirt.

“Hunger,” Sue Shaw says after a minute. “Massive, immense, uncontrollable, consuming, uncontrollable, hunger.”

“This is so,” says Mindy.

“We will wait”—Clarice looks at her watch on the underside of her wrist—“one, that is one hour, before eating anything what soentirelyever.”

“No we can’t possibly possibly do that.”

“But do it we shall. As per room discussions of not one week ago, when we explicitly agreed that we shall not gorge when utterly flapped, lest we get fat and repulsive, like Mindy, over there, you poor midge.”

“Fart-blossom,” Mindy says absently, she’s not fat and she knows it, Lenore knows it, they all know it.

“A lady at all times, that Metalman,” Clarice says. Then, after a minute, “Speaking of which, you might just maybe either fix your robe or get dressed or get up off your back in Lenore’s stuff, I’m not really all up for giving you a gynecological exam, which is sort of what you’re making us do, here, O Lesbia of Thebes.”

“Stuff and bother,” says Mindy, or rather, “Stuth and bozzer”; and she gets up swaying and reaching for solid things, goes over to the door that goes into her little single bedroom off the bathroom. She got there first in September and took it, Clarice had said in a letter, this Playboy-Playmatish JAP from Scarsdale, and she’s shedding what’s left of her bathrobe, battered into submission, leaving it all wet in Lenore’s lap in the chair by the door, and going through the door with her long legs, deliberate steps. Shuts the door.

Clarice looks after her when she’s gone and shakes her head a tiny bit and looks over at Lenore and smiles. There are sounds of laughter downstairs, and cattle-herd sounds of lots of people dancing. Lenore just loves to dance.

Sue Shaw takes a big noisy drink of water out of a big plastic Jetsons glass on her desk up by the front door. “Speaking of which, you didn’t by any chance happen to see Splittstoesser this morning?” she says.

“Nuh-uh,” says Clarice.

“She was with Proctor.”

“So?”

“At seven o‘clock? Both in nighties, all sleepy and googly, coming out of her room, together? Holding hands?”

“Hmmm.”

“Now if anybody ever told me that Spiittstoesser…”

“I thought she was engaged to some guy.”

“She is.”

They both laugh like hell.

“Awww.”

“Who’s Splittstoesser?” Lenore asks.

“Nancy Splittstoesser, at dinner? The girl in the red V-neck, with the earrings that were really little fists?”

“Oh. But what about her?”

Clarice and Sue look at each other and start to laugh again. Mindy Metalman comes back in, in gym shorts and an inside-out sweatshirt with the arms cut off. Lenore looks at her and smiles at the floor.

“What?” Mindy knows something’s up right away.

“Splittstoesser and Proctor,” Sue gets out.

“I meant to ask you.” Mindy’s eyes get all wide. “They’re in the bathroom this morning? In the same shower?”

“Ahh, no!” Sue’s going to die, Mindy starts to laugh too, that weird sympathetic laugh, looking around at them.

“They‘re, uh, together now? I thought Nancy was engaged.”

“She… is,” Clarice making Lenore laugh, too.

“Godfrey Jaysus.”

It settles down after a while. Sue does the “Twilight Zone” theme in a low voice. “Who… will be struck next…?”

“Not entirely sure I even understand what you guys are, uh…” Lenore is asking, looking around.

So Clarice tells Lenore all this business about how Pat Proctor’s a bull and what bulls are and how quite a few of the girls get pretty friendly and all, here at this women’s college.

“You’re kidding.”

“No.”

“That’s just incredibly gross.” And this sets Mindy and Sue off again. Lenore looks at them. “Well doesn’t that kind of thing sort of give you guys the creeps a little bit? I mean I—”

“Well it’s just part of life and everything, what people want to do is more or less their own…” Clarice is putting the needle on that song again.

There’s a silence for about half the song. Mindy’s at her toes, again, over at the bunkbeds. “The thing is, I don’t know if we should say,” says Sue Shaw, looking over at Clarice, “but Nancy Splittstoesser sort of got assaulted right before Thanksgiving, on the path out by the Widget House, and I think she—”

“Assaulted?” Lenore says.

“Well, raped, I guess, really.”

“I see.” Lenore looks up behind Sue at a poster over Clarice’s desk, which is of a really muscular guy, without a shirt on, making all his muscles from the back, his back all shiny and bulging every which way. The poster’s old and ripped at the edges from tape; it had been in Clarice’s room at home and their father had not been pleased, the light from the high ceiling makes a bright reflection at the back of the man’s head and hides it in white.

“I think it kind of messed her up,” says Sue.

“How hard to understand,” Lenore says softly. “Raped. So she just doesn’t like males now, because of that, or—?”

“Well I think it’s hard to say, Lenore,” Clarice with her eyes closed, playing with a button on her shirt pocket. She’s in front of their air vent, with her chair leaning back, and her hair’s all over, a yellow breeze around her cheeks. “Probably just safe to say she’s pretty confused and messed up temporarily, ‘ntcha think?”

“Sure, I guess.”

“You a virgin Lenore?” Mindy’s on the lower bunk, Sue’s bed, with her picked and flakey feet up and toes hooked into the springs on the underside of Clarice’s mattress.

“You bitch,” Clarice says to Mindy.

“I’m just asking,” says Mindy. “I doubt Lenore’s too hung up about what—”

“Yes I’m a virgin, I mean I’ve never had, you know, sexual intercourse with anybody,” Lenore says, smiling at Clarice that it’s OK, really. “Are you a virgin Mindy?”

Mindy laughs. “Oh very much so.”

Sue Shaw snorts into her water. “Mindy’s saving herself for the right marine battalion.” Clarice and Lenore laugh.

“Fuck you in the ear,” Mindy Metalman says mildly, she’s all relaxed, almost asleep. Her legs are all curved and faintly muscular and the skin’s so smooth it almost glows because she’d recently gotten “waxed” at home, she’d told Lenore, whatever that meant.

“This happen a lot?”

“What happen?”

“Rapes and assaults and stuff?”

Clarice and Sue look away, all calm. “Sometimes, probably, who knows, it’s hard to say, because it gets covered up or not reported or something a lot of the time, the College isn’t exactly nuts about—”

“Well how many times that you know of?”

“Idle know. About maybe, I guess I know of about ten women—”

“Ten?” “… ”

“How many women do you even know total, here?”

“Lenore, I don’t know,” Clarice says. “It’s just not… it’s just common sense, is what it is, really. If you’re careful, you know, and stay off the paths at night…”

“Security’s really good here, really,” says Sue Shaw. “They’ll give you rides just about anywhere on campus at night if it’s far, and there’s a shuttle bus that goes from the library and the labs back here to the rear dorms every hour, with an armed guard, and they’ll take you right up to the—”

“Armed guard?”

“Some of them are pretty cute, too.” Clarice winks at Lenore.

“You never told me about any of this stuff at Christmas, Clarice. Armed guards and stuff. Doesn’t it bother you? I mean back at home—”

“I don’t think it’s too different anywhere else, Lenore,” says Clarice. “I don’t think it is. You get used to it. It’s really just common sense.”

“Still, though.”

“There is of course the issue of the party,” says Mindy Metalman from the bunk, pretty obviously changing the subject. The noise is still loud from underneath their room.

What’s going on is that the dorm is giving a really big party, here, tonight, downstairs, with a bitching band called Spiro Agnew and the Armpits and dancing and men and beer with ID’s. It’s all really cute and clever, and at dinner downstairs Lenore saw them putting up plastic palm trees and strings of flowers, and some of the girls had plastic grass skirts, because tonight’s was a theme party, with the theme being Hawaiian: the name of the party on a big lipstick banner on a sheet out in front of Rumpus said it was the “Comonawannaleiya” party, which Lenore thought was really funny and clever, and they were going to give out leis, ha, to all the men who came from other schools and could get in with ID’s. They had a whole room full of leis, Lenore had seen after dinner.

“There is that,” says Clarice.

“Thus.”

“So.”

“Not me,” says Sue Shaw. “Nawmeboy, never again, I said it and I meant it. Pas moi.”

Clarice laughs and reaches over for the Jetsons glass.

“The issue, however,” says Mindy from the bed, her sweatshirt slipped all down at the shoulder and about ready to fall off, it looks like, “the issue is the fact that there is… food, food down in the dining room, spread under the laughing fingers of the plastic palms, that we all helped buy.”

“This is true,” Clarice sighs, hitting the repeat on the stereo. Her eyes are so blue they look hot, to Lenore.

“And all we’ve got is just those far too scrumptious mashed potatoes in the fridge,” Mindy says, which is true, just a clear Tup perware dish full of salty Play-Doh Rumpus mashed potatoes, which was all they could steal at dinner, seeing as how the kitchen ran out of cookies, then the bread…

“But you guys said no way you’d go down,” says Lenore. “ ‘Member you guys kept telling me how gross it was, these parties, mixers, and like a meat market, and how you could get sucked in, ’as it were,‘ you said, and how you just had to avoid going down at all costs, and how I shouldn’t, you know…” She looks around, she wants to go down, she loves to dance, she has a killer new dress she got at Tempo in East Corinth for just such a—

“She wants to go, Clarice,” Mindy says, throwing her legs over the side of the bunk and sitting up with a bounce, “and she is our guest, and there is the Dorito factor, and if we stayed for like six quick minutes…”

“So I see.” Clarice looks all droopy-lidded at Lenore and sees her eagerness and has to smile. Sue Shaw is at her desk with her back turned, her butt is really pretty fat and wide in the chair, pooching over the sides, Lenore sees.

Clarice sighs. “The thing is Lenore you just don’t know. These things are so unbelievably tiresome, unpleasant, we went all first semester and you just really literally get nauseated, physically ill after a while, ninety-nine point nine percent of the men who come are just lizards, reptiles, and it’s clear awfully fast that the whole thing is really just nothing more than a depressing ritual, a rite that we’re expected by God knows who to act out, over and over. You can’t even have conversations. It’s really repulsive.” And she drinks water out of the Jetsons glass. Sue Shaw is nodding her head at her desk.

“I say what we do,” Mindy Metalman hits the floor and claps her hands, “is Lenore goes and puts on that fabulous violet dress I saw you hang up, and we three stay and attend to the rest of this joint, for a second, and then we all just scamper down really quick, and Lenore gets a condensed liberal arts education and one or two dances while we steal about seven tons of food, then we come right back up, David Letterman’s on in less than an hour.”

“No,” says Sue Shaw.

“Well then you can stay here, nipplehead, we’ll get over it, if one semi-bad experience is going to make you hide away like a—”

“Fine, look, let’s just do that.” Clarice looks less than thrilled. They all look at each other. Lenore gets a nod from Clarice and jumps up and goes to Mindy’s little annex bedroom to put on her dress as Clarice starts glaring in earnest at Mindy and Mindy gives little stuff-it signals to Sue Shaw, over in the comer.

Lenore brushes her teeth in a tiny bathroom redolent of Metalman and Shaw, washes her face, dries it with a towel off the floor, puts Visine in, finds some of that bright wet-looking lipstick Mindy owns in an old Tampax box on the toilet, gets the lipstick out, knocks the Tampax box over, a compact falls in the toilet and she has to fish it out, her shirt’s wet, the arm’s soaked, she takes the shirt off and goes into Mindy’s bedroom. She has to get her bra, since the dress fabric is really thin, violet cotton, pretty as hell with her brown hair, which is luckily clean, and a bit of lipstick, she looks eighteen, very nearly, and her bra’s in the bottom of her bag on Mindy’s bed. Lenore rummages in her bag. Mindy’s room is really a sty, clothes all over, an Exercycle, big James Dean poster on the inside of the door, Richard Gere too oh of course, pictures of some nonfamous guy on a sailboat, Rolling Stone magazine covers, joumey concert poster, super-high ceiling like the other rooms, here with a bright blanket tacked one side on the ceiling and one on the wall and sagging, a becalmed candy sail. There’s a plastic thing on the dresser, and Lenore knows it’s a Pill-holder, for the Pill, because Clarice has got one and so does Karen Daughenbaugh, who’s more or less Lenore’s best friend at Shaker School. There’s the bra, Lenore puts it on. The dress. Combs her hair with a long red comb that has black hair in it and smells like Flex.

A scritch. The Cat Stevens goes off all of a sudden, in the main room. There’s loud knocking on the front door, Lenore can hear. She comes back in with the others with her white dress pumps in her hand as Sue Shaw opens the door and Mindy tries to disperse smoke with an album cover. There’s two guys outside, filling the doorway, grinning, in matching blue blazers and tartan ties and chinos and those shoes. There’s nobody with them.

“Hey and howdy, ma‘am,” says one of them, a big, tall, tan-in-the-spring-type guy with thick blond hair and a sculptured part and a cleft chin and bright green eyes. “Does Melinda Sue Metalman live here, by any chance at all?”

“How did you get up here,” says Sue Shaw. “No one gets upstairs here without an escort, see.” -

The one guy beams. “Please to meet you. Andy ‘Wang-Dang’ Lang; my colleague, Biff Diggerence.” And he not very subtly pushes the door open with one big hand, and Sue goes back a little on her heels, and the two just walk right in, all of a sudden, Wang-Dang and Biff. Biffs shorter than Lang, and broader, a rectangular person. They’ve both got Comonawannaleiya cups, with beer, in their hands. They’re a bit tight, apparently. Biff especially: his jaw is slack and eyes are dull and his cheeks are all red in hot patches.

Wang-Dang Lang finally says to Sue, while he’s looking at Clarice, “Well I’m just afraid your security personnel here are pretty trusting, ‘cause when I told them I was Father Mustafa Metalman, Miss Metalman’s second cousin and spiritchul advisor, and then gave them some spiritchul advice of their own, they just…” He stops and looks around and whistles. “Unbelievably nice room here. Biff you ever see ceilings so hah in a dorm?”

Lenore sits back down in her chair by the door to Mindy’s room, barefoot, watching. Mindy pulls up her sweatshirt. Clarice and Sue face the two men, their arms crossed.

“I’m Mindy Metalman,” says Mindy Metalman. The guys don’t even look over at her for a second, they’re still looking the room over, then the tall one looks at Mindy, and he starts nudging Biff, staring at her.

“Hi Mindy, I’m Wang-Dang Lang, Biff Diggerence on my right, here,” gesturing, looking at Mindy all wide-eyed still. Comes over and shakes her hand, Mindy sort of shakes it back, looking around at the others.

“Do I know you?”

Wang-Dang smiles. “Well now quite regrettably I must say no, but you do, if I’m not entirely mistaken, know Doug Dangler, over at Amherst College? He’s my roommate, or rather me and Biff’s roommate? And when we said how we were comin’ over here to the Comonolay party, the Dangle-man just said ‘Wanger,’ he said, he said Wanger, Melinda Metalman lives in Rumpus Hall, and I’d really be just ever so much more than obliged if you’d pay your respects, to her, for me,‘ and so I—”

“Doug Dangler?” Mindy’s eyes are mad eyes, Lenore sees, sort of. “Listen I do not know any Doug Dangler at Amherst, I think you’re mixed up, so maybe you just better go back downst—”

“Sure you know Doug, Doug’s a kick-ass guy,” the aforementioned Biff is heard from, short and broad with watery denim eyes dull and beady with party, and a little blond beardish thing sprouting from his chin, making it look a little like an armpit, Lenore thinks. His voice is low and rather engagingly grunty. Lang’s is soft and smooth and nice, although he does seem to fall in and out of some sort of accent, at times. He says:

“Ma‘am now I know for a fact you met Doug Dangler because he told me all about it, at length.” His bottle-green eyes fall on Lenore. “It was at a party at Femur Hall, right after Christmas break and Winterterm and all? You were standing talking to this guy, and y’all were more than a little taken with each other, when the guy very unfortunately got taken slightly under the weather and vomited a tiny bit in your purse? That was Doug Dangler.” Lang smiles triumphantly. Biff Diggerence laughs ogg-ogg, his shoulders go up and down together. Lang continues, “And he said how he was real sorry and could he pay to have your purse cleaned? And but you said no and were all… mind-bogglingly nice about it, and when you were rescuing items from your purse you on purpose dropped that piece of paper that had your name and box number and phone and all on it, that phone bill? Doug picked that sucker up, and that’s how you met him,” smiling, nodding.

“That was that guy?” Mindy says. “He said I gave him my name on purpose? That’s just a lie. That was utterly disgusting. I had to throw that purse away. He, I remember he came up to me” (to Clarice and Sue) “and put his hand on the hem of my sweater, and said how he had this hangnail that had got caught on my sweater, and how he couldn’t get away, it was stuck, ha ha, but he did it for like two hours, until finally he threw up on me.” To Wang-Dang Lang she says, “He was bombed out of his mind. He was so drunk he was actually drooling. I remember drool was coming out of his mouth.”

“Well now Melinda surely you know how we can all tend to get that way at certain times.” Lang nudges Biff Diggerence, who almost falls on Sue Shaw, who squeals and backs toward the door with her arms crossed.

“Look, I think you better leave,” Clarice says from now over by Lenore. “We’re all really tired and you’re really not supposed to be up here without—”

“But, now, we just got here, really,” Wang-Dang Lang smiles. He looks around again. “I couldn’t impose on you ladies for a small can of beer, could I, by any chance, if you maht possibly…?” gesturing over at Sue’s little fridgelette by the bunks. And then he sits down in Sue’s wooden desk chair by the door, by a speaker. Biff still stands by Sue, facing Clarice and Lenore. Sue looks at Clarice, Mindy at Biff, who grins yellowly, Wang-Dang Lang over at Lenore in her chair at the back by Mindy’s door, sitting watching. Lenore feels like a clot in her pretty violet dress and bit of lipstick and bare feet, wondering what to do with her shoes, if she should throw a shoe at Lang, it’s got a sharp heel, are the police on their way?

“Look, we don’t have any beer, and if we did it’s just rude for you guys to come in here uninvited and ask us for beer, and I don’t know Doug Dangler, and I think we’d really just appreciate it if you’d leave.”

“I’m sure there’s all the beer you could possibly want downstairs,” Clarice says.

Biff Diggerence now belches a huge belch, one of almost unbelievable duration, clearly a specialty, then he has another swallow out of his Comonawannaleiya cup. Lenore involuntarily mutters something about how disgusting this burp was; all eyes go to her. Lang smiles broadly:

“Well hi there. What’s your name?”

“Lenore Beadsman,” says Lenore.

“Whey you from, Lenore?”

“Lenore’s my sister,” Clarice says, moving toward the door and looking at Biff Diggerence. “She’s fifteen and she’s visiting and she’s invited, which I’m afraid you’re really not, so if you’ll just let me out for a quick second, here…”

Biff Diggerence steps over like a dancer, with a flourish, to block the door with his body.

“Hmmm,” says Clarice. She looks at Mindy Metalman. Mindy goes over to Lenore, gets her damp robe off the back of the chair, puts it on over her armless sweatshirt. Lang smiles warmly. Biff watches Mindy for a second, then turns around abruptly at the door, starts banging his head on the door, over and over, really hard. Wang-Dang Lang laughs. The banging isn’t all that loud compared with the noise of the party and all, though, suddenly, because the music’s now a lot louder, they must have opened the dining room doors at eleven.

“Thing about Biff,” Wang-Dang Lang shouts over the pounding to Clarice and Mindy Metalman, “beer does not entirely agree with him because he is, we’ve found, for some reason physically incapable of… um… emptying his stomach in crisis. As they say. Just can’t do it, ‘matter how much he drinks, which is often more than can be explained by known physical laws. It’s dangerous, right Digger?” Wang-Dang shouts over to the pounding Biff. “So instead of booting, the big fella here finds himself having recourse to…”

“… Pounding his head against the wall,” Clarice finishes for him with a little mouth-smile, she obviously remembers Creamer and Geralamo and company, Lenore can tell. Lang nods at Clarice with an engaging grin. Biff finally stops and turns back around, resting his back against the door, beaming, with a red forehead, a little cross-eyed. The muscles in his big neck are corded. He closes his eyes and leans back and breathes heavily.

“Well if we could just stay and rest up and catch our breaths for just a couple of seconds for the second half of the big luau, down there, we’ll be more than obliged to you,” says Lang. “And I’ll be giving old Doug the bad and from what I can see most unfortchinit news about your not remembering him, Melinda-Sue. He’ll be hurt, I’ll just tell you right now, in advance. He is a shy and sinsitive person.”

“Seems like a common problem over there at Amherst,” says Clarice. Lenore smiles at her.

Meanwhile Mindy has gone over to the ashtray to see about the corpse of the joint. Lenore can tell Mindy’s decided not to be intimidated, all of a sudden. Mindy’s shiny legs through the robe are now right by Wang-Dang Lang’s face, he’s still sitting in the chair, his nose about even with her waist. Lang looks down at his shoes, with the white soles, he’s shy, almost, Mindy makes even him shy, Lenore sees. Mindy resuscitates the joint with a big plastic lighter that says “When God Made Man She Was Only Joking.” She pauses, watches it. It glows, she takes it back with her to the edge of Sue Shaw’s bed, sits down, faces Lang off the end of the bunk. The room’s all quiet, except for party noise, underneath. Mindy concentrates on the j-bird, then pauses again, then looks at Lang and holds the joint out to him.

“Well now aren’t you kind,” Lang says softly. He takes a bit of a polite puff, smiles at Mindy.

“Who are you guys, anyway?” Mindy asks. Clarice and Sue are glaring at her.

Lang stops and smiles broadly, taken aback. Holds out his hand. “I personally am Andrew Sealander ‘Wang-Dang’ Lang, class of’83, from Nugget Bluff, Texas, residing now at 666 Psi Phi fraternity, Amherst College, Massachusetts, U. S. A.”

“A sophomore.”

“Affirmative. As is Bernard Wemer ‘Biff’ Diggerence, of Shil- lington, Pennsylvania.” A pause, all pregnant. Lang looks up at Biff, who seems still to be sleeping at the door.

“We’ve actually, I’ll tell you ladies in confidence, been sent out,” Wang-Dang leans all conspiratorially toward Mindy and Lenore. “We’ve actually been sent out for what could be termed our ‘nitia tion.”

“Oh, shit,” Clarice says, her arms crossed, leaning against the wall. Biff Diggerence is now showing signs of life; he’s to be seen stroking Sue Shaw’s hair with a hot-dog finger, and winking down at her, making clicking noises with the corner of his mouth, as Sue whimpers and gets set to cry.

“Initiation?” Mindy says.

“Affirmative. The High Demiurge and Poobah of the Psi Phi fraternal order of brothers himself has sent us out on a…,” a burp, here, “… a sort of quest, you might say. We find ourselves in search of personal decoration.”

“Decoration.”

“Auto… graphs,” Biff laughs ogg and gives a little pound on the wall with the back of his head, for emphasis.

“Autographs?”

“We need you girls to sign our asses,” says Biff, coming to the point, smiling down at Sue Shaw.

“Sign your asses?” says Mindy Metalman.

“That is unfortunately affirmative,” Lang says, flashing a smile full of bright teeth over at Lenore. “We are required…,” fishing for a piece of paper in the pocket of his blazer, perusing, “… we are requahred to secure the signatures of no fewer than fahv of Mount Holyoke’s loveliest before sunrise tomorrow. We figger of course we can sign each other, being friends and all, but that’s just one each.” He looks around significantly at each of the girls, gives Lenore a bit of a wink. “Means we need, according to my figures, four more.”.

Lenore notices Sue Shaw sitting there all quiet, looking at her leather shoes with the white soles. Biffs hands are in Sue’s bright red hair.

“So wait,” says Clarice. “You mean you want us to sign your bottoms?”

“Please.”

“Bare?”

“Well, clearly yes, that’s the whole—”

“Sweet shrieking mother of Christ what nerve.” Clarice says in amazement, staring at Lang. “And it just never occurred to you geniuses that we might say no? I’m saying no.”

“Your prerogative entirely,” says Wang-Dang Lang. “ ‘Course we very regrettably will find ourselves unable to leave until you do.” He now has his hand lightly on Mindy’s bare leg, Lenore notices. Lenore shivers a bit. Clarice makes a sudden move for the door, Biff moves in front of the knob, Clarice stops, Biff pounds the door with the back of his head again, a few times, emphasizing the general state of affairs.

Clarice stops, clearly now for a second just so mad she can’t really say or do anything at all. “You shiny bastards,” she finally gets out. “You. Amherst guys, U-Mass too, all of you. Just because you’re bigger, physically just take up more space, you think-do you think? — think you can rule everything, make women do whatever stupid rotten disgusting stuff you say you want just because you’re drunk? Well up yours, sideways.” She looks from Lang to Biff. “You come over to our parties, grinning like apes on the bus no doubt, you get smeared in about two minutes, trash us, act like we’re meat, or furniture, think you can just…,” looking around, “invade us, our room, for no other reason than that you’re just stronger, that you can block the door and pound your big greasy stupid heads on it? Screw you. Screw you.”

Lang laughs. “Regrettably an invitation extended in anger, I’m afraid.” He laughs again. Mindy smiles a bit, too. Lang’s hand is still on her leg.

But Biff is miffed, here, suddenly. “Well screw you right back Miss Rodeo Shirt,” he says to Clarice, obviously now in one of those alcoholically articulate periods. “Just come off it. This place is just the biggest…,” looking around, “the biggest giant joke!” He looks to Lang for support; Lang is whispering something to Mindy Metalman.

But Biff is pissed. “You have these parties that you advertise out our ears, all this cute teasing bullshit, ‘Come to the Comonawannaleiya party, get lei’d at the door,’ ha. ‘Win a trip to the hot tubs for two,’ blah-blah-blah. You’re just teases of the cockular sort, is what you are. So we come, like you ask and advertise for, and we put on ties, and we come over, and then we find you got security guards at the doors, with freaking guns, and we gotta have our hands stamped like fifth-graders for beer, and all the girls look at us like we’re rapists, and plus, besides, all the girls down there look like Richard Nixon, while all the real babes lock themselves up up here—”

“Like you lovely ladies, you must admit,” Wang-Dang Lang says with a smile.

Biff Diggerence whirls and whomps the door with his forehead a few times, really hard. He stays facing the door, his sails apparently windless, for a moment.

“I’m afraid he’s quite inebriated,” says Lang.

Lenore stands up, in her dress. “Please let me out.”

Lang and Mindy stand. Sue stands. Everyone’s standing with Lenore. Lang smiles and nods his head. “So if you’d just be kind enough to put your… Jocelyn Hancock on… my…,” struggling with the belt of his chinos. Mindy looks away. Biff, still breathing at the door, does his belt too. He even brought a pen; Lenore can see it sticking out of his pocket.

“No, I’m not going to touch you, much less sign you,” says Lenore.

Wang-Dang Lang looks at her, vaguely puzzled. “Well then we’re real unfortunately not going to be able to leave.”

“That’s fortunately of very little concern to me because I’m not going to be here because I’m leaving,” Lenore says.

“I’ll sign,” Sue Shaw says quietly.

Clarice stares at Sue. “What?”

“I want them out. I’ll sign.” She doesn’t look up. She looks at her shoes. Biffs pants drop with a heavy sound, he’s still facing the door. His bottom is big, broad, white, largely hairless. A vulnerable bottom, really. Lenore evaluates it calmly.

“Whuboutchoo, Melinda-Sue?” Lang asks Mindy. Lang’s in his underpants.

Mindy really looks at Lang, looks him in the eye. There’s no expression on her. After a moment she says, “Sure, why not.”

“You can sign the front if you want,” laughs Wang-Dang.

“This is disgusting. I’m leaving, let me leave, please,” says Lenore. She turns. “You’re a coward,” she says to Sue Shaw. “You have ugly feet,” she says to Mindy Metalman. “Look at her feet, Andy, before you do anything rash.” She turns to the door. “Get out of the way, Boof, or whatever your name is.”

Biff turns, the first time Lenore’s ever seen a man naked. “No.”

Lenore throws one of her spiky white high-heeled dress shoes, the kind with the metal straps, at Biff Diggerence’s head. It misses his head and hits the door above him and makes a loud sound and the heel sticks in the wood of the door. The white shoe hangs there. As if the noise of the shoe’s hitting the door were just the last straw, Sue Shaw gives a yelp and begins to cry a little, although she’s still a bit dry from being recently stoned. She has Biffs pen in her hand.

“Let me leave or I’ll put out your eye with my shoe,” Lenore says to Biff, hefting her other shoe. Wang-Dang Lang is holding Mindy Metalman’s hand.

“Let her out, she doesn’t even go here,” says Clarice. “I’ll sign too, you drips.”

“Let me out,” says Lenore.

Biff finally gets away from the door, still holding his empty Comonawannaleiya cup. He has to go over anyway, obviously, to present his bottom to Sue Shaw, there in the comer. He takes little comic steps because his pants are down around his ankles, and Lenore sees his genitals bob and waggle as he takes his tiny shuffles over to Sue. Lenore runs past in bare feet, gets her shoe out of the door. Pulls it out, the heel, looks back. Lang is kissing Mindy’s creamy cheek, with a faraway, laughing expression, in his underwear. Sue is kneeling, signing Biff. Clarice has her arms crossed. Tapping her fingers on her arms.

Lenore runs out into the tiled hall, away. Outside there will be air, Lenore wants out of Rumpus Hall very much, and gets out, finally she does, but only after negotiating a hall door, a stair door, a hall door, and a front door, all locked tight from the inside. Out in the crusty March lawn, by the wash of the well-lit street, amid crowds of boys in blue blazers going up the walk, putting Certs in their mouths, she enjoys a brief nosebleed.

2. 1990

“Is this cuddling? Is what we’re doing cuddling?”

“I think this satisfies standard cuddling criteria, yes.”

“I thought so.”

“….”

“You have a really bony pelvis, you know. See how it protrudes?”

“I do have a bony pelvis. My wife used to comment on my pelvis, sometimes.”

“I have a pretty bony pelvis, too, don’t you think? Feel.”

“It is bony. I think women are supposed to have bony pelvises.”

“I think it’s also in my case like a family thing. Both my brothers have bony pelvises. My younger brother has a really mammoth pelvis.”

“….”

“Mmmm.”

“….”

“A story, please.”

“You want a story.”

“Please.”

“Did get a rather interesting one today.”

“Go for it.”

“Depressing, though.”

“I want to hear it.”

“Concerned a man who suffered from second-order vanity.”

“Second-order vanity?”

“Yes.”

“What’s that?”

“You don’t know what second-order vanity is?”

“No.”

“How interesting.”

“So what is it?”

“Well, a second-order vain person is first of all a vain person. He’s vain about his intelligence, and wants people to think he’s smart. Or his appearance, and wants people to think he’s attractive. Or, say, his sense of humor, and wants people to think he’s amusing and witty. Or his talent, and wants people to think he’s talented. Et cetera. You know what a vain person is.”

“Right.”

“A vain person is concerned that people not perceive him as stupid, or dull, or ugly, et cetera et cetera.”

“Gotcha.”

“Now a second-order vain person is a vain person who’s also vain about appearing to have an utter lack of vanity. Who’s enormously afraid that other people will perceive him as vain. A second-order vain person will sit up late learning jokes in order to appear funny and charming, but will deny that he sits up late learning jokes. Or he’ll perhaps even try to give the impression that he doesn’t regard himself as funny at all.”

“….”

“A second-order vain person will be washing his hands in a public restroom, and will be unable to resist the temptation to admire himself in the mirror, to scrutinize himself, but he’ll pretend he’s fixing a contact lens or getting something out of his eye while he does so, so that people won’t perceive him as the sort of person who admires himself in mirrors, but rather as the sort of person who uses mirrors only to attend to reasonable, un-vain business.”

“Oh.”

“This story that came today concerned a man who was second-order vain about his appearance. Vain as hell about his appearance, obsessed with his body, but also obsessed with the desire that no one know of his obsession. He goes to simply enormous lengths to hide his vanity from his girlfriend. Did I mention he lives with a girl, an apparently ravingly beautiful and also very nice girl?”

“No.”

“Well he does, who loves him like mad, and he loves her. And they’re getting along fine, although the man is of course under quite a bit of strain, obsessed and also obsessed with hiding his obsession.”

“Gee.”

“Indeed. And one day in the bathtub the man notices something strange on his leg, a kind of a raised gray spot, and he goes to a doctor and is diagnosed as being in the first stages of a certain nonfatal but quite disfiguring disease, that will eventually leave this apparently very handsome man not a little disfigured.”

“….”

“Unless, that is, he consents to undergo a tremendously complicated and expensive treatment procedure, for which he has to fly all the way to Switzerland, and spend just about his whole life savings, which savings are in a joint bank account and require his lovely girlfriend’s cosignature to withdraw.”

“Wow.”

“….”

“Still, though, if he’s all that vain and anxious not to be disfigured.”

“Well, but you forget he’s also extremely anxious not to be perceived as the sort of man who’s anxious not to be disfigured. The thought of his girlfriend knowing that he is the sort of man who would spend his life savings and fly all the way to Switzerland just to keep from being disfigured horrifies him.”

“What is this disease? Is this supposed to be leprosy?”

“Something like leprosy, was my impression. Maybe not as bad. I think leprosy can kill you. Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that the idea of his girlfriend finding out he is vain so horrifies the man that he delays and delays making the decision to fly to Switzerland for the treatment, and in the meantime the spot is growing and the skin on his leg is getting grayer, and flaking off in sheets, and the bones are swelling and getting gnarled, which condition he tries to hide by buying a novelty cast and putting it on his leg and telling his girlfriend his leg’s mysteriously broken, but the condition is meanwhile spreading to his other leg, and up his stomach and back, and also by implication I think we’re to assume his genitals; and so he takes to his bed and keeps himself covered with blankets and tells his girlfriend he’s mysteriously sick, and he also by the way starts making an effort to be really cold and aloof to the girlfriend, to keep her at a distance, even though he really loves her to distraction. And he only gets out of bed when she’s off at work, she sells women’s clothes, and only when she’s gone will he get out of bed and stand in front of the full-length mirror in their bathroom, for hours, gazing at himself in horror, and gently sponging the gray flakes off his increasingly twisted body.”

“Lordy.”

“Yes and days go by and the disease continues to progress, spreading to the man’s upper body and arms and hands, which he tries to hide by claiming he’s mysteriously horribly cold, and wearing heavy sweaters and ski mittens, and he’s also being increasingly cruel and nasty and bitter toward his lovely roommate, and won’t let her come near him, and gives her to understand that she’s done something terrible, and made him angry, but won’t tell her what it is, and the girlfriend begins to sit up at night in the bathroom crying, and the man can hear her, and his heart is breaking because he loves her so, but he’s got this obsession about not being ugly, and of course now if he tells her the truth and shows her everything, not only will she see that he’s all of a sudden ugly, but it will also become clear to her that he has the original obsession about not being ugly, see for instance the cast, sweaters and mittens, and of course he’s doubly obsessed about not revealing that original obsession. So he gets meaner and meaner to this sweet beautiful girl who loves him, and eventually, even though she’s a wonderful girl and deeply in love with him, she’s also only human and eventually becomes pissed off, little by little, simply in self-defense, and starts being cold and distant back, and relations between the two get strained, which is breaking the man’s heart, deep down. And meanwhile of course the disease is still spreading, it’s on his neck, and almost to the height of his highest turtleneck sweater, and also one or two gray flaky gnarls are appearing on the man’s nose, previews of coming attractions, the man sees. And so one morning, on about the last day the man figures he can keep it all hidden from the girlfriend, and also the morning after a really major and disastrous fight that clearly almost broke the girl’s heart, the girl is sitting in the bathroom, crying, and the man quietly gets out of bed and bundles up and goes and takes a cab to see his doctor.”

“….”

“Well, and the doctor’s quite upset, understandably, at the man’s not having called him in so long, what was he to think? And the doctor’s also of course more than a little concerned about the spread of the disease, and he looks the man over and clucks his tongue and says that this is just about the latest the expensive Switzerland-treatment can start and still be effective, and that if they delay any longer the disease will swallow the man completely and become irreversible and he’ll be alive but gray and flaky and gnarled all over for all time. The doctor looks at the man and says he’s going to go out of the office and let him think it over. The doctor clearly thinks the guy’s out of his mind for not being in Switzerland already. And so the man sits in the office, alone, all bundled up, with his mittens on, and has a real crisis, and his heart is breaking, and he’s incredibly horrified, because of the obsession-obsession, but finally he has a breakthrough, which is not too subtly symbolized by a ray of sunlight breaking through the heavy clouds that are in the sky that day and coming through the window of the doctor’s office and hitting the man, but and anyway he sees in this breakthrough that the most important thing is really his wonderful, lovely girlfriend and their love, and that that’s what really matters, and so he decides to call her and tell her everything and get her to come down and co-sign the withdrawal slip for his life savings so he can hop a flight to Switzerland that very day, and to hell with the horror of telling her, even though it will be unbelievably horrifying.”

“Wow.”

“And the way the story ends is with the man sitting at the doctor’s desk, with the phone in his mitten, listening to the phone ring in the apartment, and it’s ringing quite a few times, though not yet a ridiculous number of times, but enough so it’s just becoming by implication unclear whether the girlfriend is even still there or not, whether she’s taken off, maybe for good. And that’s how it ends, with the man there and the phone ringing in his mitten and the patch of sun on him through the doctor’s window.”

“Good Lord. Are you going to use it?”

“No. Too long. It’s a long story, over forty pages. Also poorly typed.”

“….”

“Stop that.”

“….”

“Lenore, stop it. Not even remotely funny.”

“….”

“….”

“Except how did you know so much about it?”

“Know about what?”

“Second-order vanity. You were like really surprised I didn’t know about second-order vanity.”

“What shall I say? Shall I simply say I’m a man of the world?”

“….”

“….”

“Ginger ale?”

“Not right now, thank you though.”

3. 1990

/a/

A nurse’s aide threw the contents of a patient’s water glass out a window, the mass of water hitting the ground dislodging a pebble, which rolled across the angled pavement and fell with a click on a stone culvert in the ditch below, startling a squirrel having at some sort of nut right there on the concrete pipe, causing the squirrel to run up the nearest tree, in doing which it disturbed a slender brittle branch and surprised a few nervous morning birds, one of which, preparatory to flight, released a black-and-white glob of droppings, which glob fell neatly on the windshield of the tiny car of one Lenore Beadsman, just as she pulled into a parking space. Lenore got out of the car while the birds flew away, making sounds.

Flowerbeds of pretend marble, the plastic sagging and pouty-lipped in places from the heat of the last month, flanked the smooth concrete ramp that ran up from the edge of the parking lot to the Home’s front doors, the late-summer flowers dry and grizzled in the deep beds of dry dirt and soft plastic, a few brown vines running weakly up the supports of the handrails that went along the ramp above the flowerbeds, the paint of the handrails bright yellow and looking soft and sticky even this early in the day. Dew glittered low in the crunchy August grass; light from the sun moved in the lawn as Lenore went up the ramp. Outside the doors an old black woman stood motionless with her walker, her mouth open to the sun. Above the doors, along a narrow tympanum of sun-punched plastic again pretending to be igneous marble, ran the letters SHAKER HEIGHTS NURSING HOME. On either side of the doors, impressed into stone walls that reached curving away out of sight to become the building’s face, were entombed the likenesses of Tafts. Inside the doors, in the glass tank between outer and inner entries, languished three people in wheelchairs, blanket-lapped even in the greenhouse heat of the mid-moming glass, one with a neck drooping so badly to the side that her ear rested on her shoulder.

“Hi,” Lenore Beadsman said as she hurried through an inner glass door frosted in the sunlight with old fingerprints. Lenore knew the prints were from the wheelchair patients, for whom the metal bar with the PUSH sign on it was too high and too hard. Lenore had been here before.

The Shaker Heights Home had just one story to it. This level was broken into many sections and covered a lot of territory. Lenore came out of the hot tank and down the somewhat cooler hall toward this particular section’s receiving desk, with the tropical overhead fan rotating slowly over it. Inside the doughnut reception desk was a nurse Lenore hadn’t seen before, a dark-blue sweater caped over her shoulders and held with a metal clasp on which was embossed a profile of Lawrence Welk. People in wheelchairs were everywhere, lining all the walls. The noise was loud and incomprehensible, rising and falling, notched by nodes of laughter at nothing and cries of rage over who knew what.

The nurse looked up as Lenore got close.

“Hi, I’m Lenore Beadsman,” Lenore said, a little out of breath.

The nurse stared at her for a second. “Well that’s not terribly amusing, is it,” she said.

“Pardon me?” Lenore asked. The nurse gave her the fish-eye. “Oh,” Lenore said, “I think the thing is we’ve never met. Madge is usually here, where you are. I’m Lenore Beadsman, but I guess I’m here to see Lenore Beadsman, too. She’s my great-grandmother, and I—”

“Well, you just,” the nurse looked at something on the big desk, “you just let me ring Mr. Bloemker, hold on.”

“Is Gramma all right?” Lenore asked. “See I was just in—”

“Well I’ll just let you speak to Mr. Bloemker, hello Mr. Bloemker? A Lenore Beadsman here to see you in B? He’ll be right out to see you. Please hang on.”

“I guess I’d rather just go ahead and see Lenore. Is she OK?”

The nurse looked at her. “Your hair is wet.”

“I know.”

“And uncombed.”

“Yes, thank you, I know. See I was just in the shower when my landlady called up the stairs that I had a phone call from Mr. Bloemker.”

“How did your landlady know?”

“Pardon?”

“That you had a phone call from Mr. Bloemker.”

“Well it’s a neighbor’s phone, that I use, but she didn‘t—”

“You don’t have a phone?”

“What is this? No I don’t have a phone. Listen, I’m very sorry to keep asking, but is my Gramma all right or not? I mean Mr. Bloemker said to come right over. Should I call my family? Where’s Lenore?”

The nurse was staring at a point over Lenore’s left shoulder; her face had resolved into some kind of hard material. “I’m afraid I’m in no position to say anything about…,” looking down, “… Lenore Beadsman, area F. But now, if you’ll just be so kind as to wait a moment, we can—”

“Where’s the morning nurse who’s supposed to be here? Where’s Madge? Where’s Mr. Bloemker?”

Mr. Bloemker appeared in the dim recesses of a corridor, beyond the reach of light from the reception area.

“Ms. Beadsman!”

“Mr. Bloemker!”

“Shush,” said the nurse; Lenore’s shout had produced a ground-swell of sighs and moans and objectless shouts from the wheelchaired forms lining the perimeter of the circular reception station. A television went on in a lounge off the hall, and Lenore caught a glimpse of a brightly colored game show as she hurried down toward Mr. Bloemker.

“Mr. Bloemker.”

“Hello Ms. Beadsman, thank you so much for coming so quickly and so early. Were you to be at work soon?”

“Is my great-grandmother all right? Why did you call?”

“Why don’t we just nip over to my office.”

“Well but I don’t understand why I can’t just…” Lenore stopped. “Oh my Lord. She didn’t…?”

“Oh dear me no, please come with me. I-careful, watch the… good morning, Mrs. Feltner.” A woman careened past in a wheelchair.

“Who’s that nurse at the desk?”

“Just through this door, here.”

“This isn’t the way to Gramma’s room.”

“This way.”

/b/

Well, now, just imagine how you’d feel if your great-grandmother-great it could really probably be argued in more than one sense of the word, which is to say the supplier of your name, the person under whose aegis you’d first experienced chocolate, books, swing sets, antinomies, pencil games, contract bridge, the Desert, the person in whose presence you’d first bled into your underwear (at sixteen, now, late sixteen, grotesquely late as we seem to remember, in the east wing, during the closing theme of “My Three Sons,” when the animated loafers were tapping, with you and Lenore watching, the slipping, sick relief, laughter and scolding at once, Gramma used her left arm and there was her old hand in Lenore’s new oldness), the person through whose personal generosity and persuasiveness vis à vis certain fathers you’d been overseas, twice, albeit briefly, but still, your great-grandmother, who lived right near you — were just all of a sudden missing, altogether, and was for all you knew lying flat as a wet Saltine on some highway with a tire track in her forehead and her walker now a sort of large trivet, and you’ll have an idea of how Lenore Beadsman felt when she was informed that her great-grandmother, with whom all the above clauses did take place, was missing from the Shaker Heights Nursing Home, in Shaker Heights, right near Cleveland, Ohio, near which Lenore lived, in East Corinth.

/c/

Combination Embryonic Journal and Draft Space for Fieldbinder Collection

Richard Vigorous

62 Bombardini Building

Erieview Plaza

Cleveland, Ohio

Reasonable reward for proper and discreet return.

25 August

Lenore, come to work, where I am, remove yourself from the shower immediately and come to work now, I’ll not come down for my paper until you are here, Mandible is getting suspicious when I call.

/d/

The outside of a door, which like all the doors here looked like solid wood but was really hollow and light and rattled in its latch when the office window was open and the wind blew, said DAVID BLOEMKER, ADMINISTRATOR OF FACILITY. The office, like the rest of the Home, smelled faintly of urine.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t think I understand what you’re saying,” Lenore said.

Mr. Bloemker had sad wet brown eyes and blinked behind round glasses as he pulled and scratched at his beard, in the heat. “What I am saying, Ms. Beadsman, is that with all possible apologies and every assurance that we are doing everything within our power to resolve the situation, I must report to you that area F’s Lenore Beadsman is at this point in time missing.”

“I don’t think I understand what ‘missing’ means.”

“I am afraid that it means that we are unable to determine her present whereabouts.”

“You don’t know where she is.”

“That is unfortunately right.”

“What,” said Lenore, “you mean you don’t know where she is in the Home?”

“Oh my no, if she were on the grounds, there would be no situation of any significance. No, we have — those of us on hand at the moment have covered the entire facility.”

“So, what, she’s somewhere off the grounds?”

“That would seem to be so, to our extreme distress.” Mr. Bloemker’s fingers, with their long nails, sank into his beard.

“Well how may I ask did that happen?” said Lenore.

“This is not entirely clear to anyone,” looking off, out the win. dow, at the sun through the trees on a car right by the window. It was Lenore’s car, with the spot on the windshield.

“Well was she here last night?”

“We are at this time unable to determine that.”

“There must have been a nurse who looked in on her last night — what does she say?”

Mr. Bloemker looked at her sadly. “I’m afraid we are at present unable to contact the relevant nurse.”

“And why is that.”

“I am afraid we don’t know where she is.”

“Either?”

A sad smile. “Either.”

“Gee.”

Mr. Bloemker’s telephone buzzed. Lenore eyed it as he went to answer it. Not a Centrex, no crossbar. Something primitive, single-line unretrievable transfers, no hunters. “Yes,” Mr. Bloemker was saying. “Yes. Please.”

He hung up gently and went back to blinking moistly at Lenore. Lenore had a thought. “All right, but what about Mrs. Yingst, in the next room?” she said. “She and Lenore are like this. Mrs. Yingst is sure to know when she was last around. Have you talked to Mrs. Yingst?”

Mr. Bloemker looked at this thumb.

“Mrs. Yingst is… around, isn’t she?”

“Not at this time, unfortunately, no.”

“Meaning she’s missing too.”

“I am afraid I must say yes.” Mr. Bloemker’s eyes shone with regret. Lenore thought she saw a bit of egg in his beard.

“Well, listen, what exactly’s going on here, then? Is everybody gone and you have no idea where they are? I think I just don’t understand the situation, yet, completely.”

“Oh Ms. Beadsman, nor in truth do I, to my profound grief,” a, movement in one side of his face. “What I have been able to determine is that at some point in the last, shall we say, sixteen hours some number of residents and staff here at the facility have become… unavailable to access.”

“Meaning missing.”

“Yes.”

“Well how many is ‘some number’?”

“At this time it looks to be twenty-four.”

“Twenty-four. ”

“Yes.”

“How many of them are patients?”

“Twenty residents are at this time unavailable.”

“Meaning twenty patients.”

“We prefer to call them residents, Ms. Beadsman, since as you know we try to offer an environment in which—”

“Fine, well, but don’t a lot of the missing ‘residents’ need IV’s to get fed and stuff? And little things like insulin, and antibiotics, and heart medicine, and help dressing and taking showers? Lenore can hardly even move her left arm this summer, and plus it’s pretty cold for her, outside, for very long, so I just don’t see how they could—”

“Ms. Beadsman, please rest assured that you and I are in more than complete agreement on this. That I am as confused and distraught as are you. As disoriented.” Mr. Bloemker’s cheeks yielded to the force of his beard-abuse, began to move around, so it looked like he was making faces at Lenore. “I find myself facing a situation I, believe me, never dreamt of possibly encountering, monstrous and disorienting.” He licked his lips. “As well, just allow me to say, one for which my training as facility administrator prepared me not at all, not at all.”

Lenore looked at her shoe. Mr. Bloemker’s phone buzzed and flashed again. He reached and listened. “Please,” he said into the phone. “Thank you.”

He hung up and then for some reason came around the desk, as if to take Lenore’s hand, to comfort. Lenore stared at him, and he stopped. “So have you called my father over at Stonecipheco?” she asked. “Should I call him? Clarice is just over in the city, my sister. Is she in on this news?”

Mr. Bloemker shook his head, his hand trailing. “We’ve contacted no one else at this time. Since you are Lenore’s only really regular visitor from among her family, I thought of you first.”

“What about the other patients’ families? If there’s like twenty gone, this place should be a madhouse.”

“There are very few visitors here as a rule, you would be surprised. In any event we have contacted no one else as yet.”

“And why haven’t you.”

Mr. Bloemker looked at the ceiling for a second. There was a really unattractive brown stain soaked into the soft white tile. Light from the sun was coming through the east windows and falling across the room, a good bit of it on Bloemker, making one of his eyes glow gold. He leveled it at Lenore. “The fact is that I have been instructed not to.”

“Instructed? By whom?”

“By the owners of the facility.”

Lenore looked up at him sharply. “Last I knew, the owner of the facility was Stonecipheco.”

“Correct.”

“Meaning basically my father.”

“Yes.”

“But I thought you said my father didn’t know anything about this.”

“No, I said I had not contacted anyone else as of yet, is what I said. As a matter of fact, it was I who was contacted early this morning at home and informed of the state of affairs by a…,” sifting through papers on his desk, “… a Mr. Rummage, who apparently serves Stonecipheco in some legal capacity. How he knew of the… situation is utterly beyond me.”

“Karl Rummage. He’s with the law firm my father uses for personal business. ”

“Yes.” He twisted some beard around a finger. “Well apparently it is… not wished to have the situation of cognizance to those other than the owners at this moment by the owners.”

“You want to run that by me again?”

“They don’t want anyone to know just yet.”

“Ah.”

“….”

“So then why did you call me? I mean thank you very much for doing so, obviously, but…”

Another sad smile. “Your thanks are without warrant, I’m afraid. I was instructed to do what 1 did.”

“Oh.”

“The obvious inference to draw here is that the fact that you are after all a Beadsman… and enjoy some connection to the ownership of the facility through Stonecipheco…”

“That’s just not true.”

“Oh really? In any event it’s clear that you can be relied on for a measure of discretion beyond that of the average relative-on-the-street.”

“I see.”

Bloemker took a deep breath and rubbed a gold eye with a white finger. In the air around him a whirlpool of dust motes was created. It whirled. “There is in addition the fact that the resident whose temporary unavailability is relevant to you, that is to say Lenore, enjoyed a status here — with the facility administration, the staff, and, through the force of her personality and her evident gifts, especially with the other residents — that leads one to believe that, were the mislocation a result of anything other than outright coercion on the part of some outside person or persons, which seems unlikely, it would not be improper to posit the location and retrieval of Lenore as near assurance of retrieving the other misplaced parties.”

“I didn’t understand any of that.”

“Your great-grandmother was more or less the ringleader around here.”

“Oh.”

“Surely you knew that.”

“Not really, no.”

“But you were here,” looking at a sheet on his desk, “often several times a week, sometimes for long periods. Of time.”

“We talked about other stuff. We sure never talked about any rings being led. And usually there wasn’t anybody else around, what with the heat of the room.” Lenore looked at her sneaker. “And also you know my just plain grandmother’s a… resident here, too, in area J. Lenore’s daughter-in-law.”

“Concamadine.”

“Yes. She… uh, she is here, isn’t she?”

“Oh yes,” said Bloemker. He looked at a sheet, then at Lenore. “As… far as I am aware. Perhaps you’ll excuse me for a moment.” He went to his phone. Lenore watched him dial in-house. A three-digit relay means no crossbar. Bloemker was asking someone something in an administrative undertone Lenore couldn’t hear. “Thank you,” she heard him say. “Yes.”

He smiled. “We’ll simply check to be sure.”

Lenore had had a thought. “Maybe it would be good if I had a look at Lenore’s room, took a look around, maybe see if I could notice something.”

“That’s just what I was going to suggest.”

“Is your beard OK?”

“I’m sorry? Oh, yes, nervous habit, I’m afraid, the state of affairs at the…” Mr. Bloemker pulled both hands out of his beard.

“So shall we go?”

“Certainly.”

“Or should I call my father from. here?”

“I cannot get an outside line on this phone, I’m sorry.”

“I didn’t think so.”

“After you.”

“Thank you.”

/e/

The Home was broken into ten sections, areas they were called, each roughly pentagonal in shape, housing who knows how many patients, the ten areas arranged in a circle, each area accessible by two and only two others, or via the center of the circle, a courtyard filled with chalky white gravel and heavy dark plants and a pool of concentric circles of colored water distributed and separated and kept unadulterated by a system of plastic sheeting and tubing, the tubing leading in toward the pool in the center from a perimeter of ten smooth, heavy wooden sculptures of jungle animals and Tafts and Stonecipher Beadsmans I, II, and III, with a translucent plastic roof high overhead that let in light for the plants but kept rain or falling dew from diluting the colors of the pool, the interior planes of each of the ten sections walled in glass and accessing into the courtyard, the yard itself off-limits to residents because the gravel was treacherous to walk in, swallowed canes and the legs of walkers, mired wheelchairs, and made people fall over — people with hips like spun glass, Lenore had once told Lenore.

Down a corridor, through a door, around the perimeter of one area, past a gauntlet of reaching wheelchaired figures, out a glass panel, through the steamy crunch of the courtyard gravel, through another panel and halfway around the perimeter of area F, Mr. Bloemker led Lenore to her great-grandmother’s room, put his key in the lock of another light, pretend-wood door. The room was round, looked with big windows into the east parking lots with a view at the comer of which glittered, spangled with light through the trees in the wind, Lenore’s little red car again. The room was unbelievably hot.

“You didn’t turn the heat down?” Lenore said.

Mr. Bloemker stayed in the doorway. “The owners had installed an automatic duct complex to this room that is as difficult to dismantle as it is resistant to malfunction. We are also of course expecting that Lenore will be back with us very soon.”

Steam hung in the air of the room, you could feel each breath on your lips, the windows sweated broadly, the movement of the sun through the trees made a dark green flutter on the white walls.

Lenore Beadsman, who was ninety-two, suffered no real physical disability save a certain lack of capacity on her left side, and the complete absence of any kind of body thermometer. She now depended for her body’s temperature on the temperature of the air around her. She had in effect become sort of cold-blooded. This had come to the attention of her family in 1986, after the death of her husband, Stonecipher Beadsman, when she began to take on a noticeable blue hue. The temperature in Lenore’s room here at the Home was 98.6 degrees. This simultaneously kept Gramma alive and comfortable and kept her visitors down to Lenore and a brief bare minimum of other patients and staff and very occasionally Lenore’s sister, Clarice.

The room contained a bed that was made, a desk and bedside table sheened with humidity, a water glass on the bedside table whose contents had almost evaporated, a bureau on which were ranged some jars of Stonecipheco baby food, some vaguely malevolent black cords snaking out from a wall, the remnants of a cable hookup to a television Gramma had caused to be removed, a chair, a closet door, a clotted shaker of salt, and on a black metal TV tray a little clay horse Lenore had gotten Gramma in Spain a long time ago. The walls were bare.

“OK,” Lenore said, looking around, “she pretty obviously took her walker.” She opened the closet door. “She couldn’t have taken very many clothes… here’s her suitcase… or taken much underwear,” looking in the bureau drawers. Lenore picked up one of the jars of Stonecipheco baby food, one with a red-ink drawing of a laughing baby on the label. Strained beef flavor. “She eats this stuff?” she asked, looking over at Mr. Bloemker, who stood with a sweat-shiny face in the doorway, massaging his chin.

“Not to my knowledge.”

“I’d bet money she doesn’t.” Lenore went to the desk. There were three light, empty drawers. One locked drawer.

“Did you open this drawer, here?”

“We were unable to locate the key.”

“Ah.” Lenore went to the TV table, took the little clay horse and popped its head off, and out fell a key and fluttered a tiny picture of Lenore, out of a locket. The picture was old and dull. The key made a sound on the metal table. Mr. Bloemker wiped at his forehead with the sleeve of his sportcoat.

Lenore opened the drawer. In it were Gramma’s notebooks, yellow and crispy, old, and her copy of the Investigations, and a small piece of fuzzy white paper, which actually turned out to be a tom-off label from another jar of Stonecipheco food. Creamed peach. On the white back of the label something was doodled. There was nothing else in the drawer. Which is to say there was no green book in the drawer.

“This is just weird,” Lenore was saying. She looked at Mr. Bloemker. “She didn’t take the Investigations, which is like her prize possession because it’s autographed, or her notebooks either. Except I guess she did take a book. She kept a book in here. Have you ever maybe seen a green book, pretty heavy, bound with a sort of greenish leather, with like a little decorative lock and clasp?”

Mr. Bloemker nodded at her. There was a drop of sweat hanging from his nose. “I do think I recall seeing Lenore with such a book. I had rather assumed it was her diary, or a record of her days at Cambridge, which I knew were immensely important to her.”

Lenore shook her head. “No, that’s more or less what these are,” indicating the yellowed notebooks in the open drawer. “No, I don’t know what this thing was, but she had it and the Investigations with her all the time. Remember how when she’d go out of her room here her nightgown would be all sagging down in front? She couldn’t carry the books and use her walker, so she had this big pocket on the front of her nightgown, and she’d put them in there, and it’d sag.” Lenore felt herself beginning to get upset, remembering. “Did she, had she gone out of the room much the last few days?”

There were wet sounds as Mr. Bloemker worked at his face. “I know for a fact that as a matter of established routine Lenore was out in the area F lounge for some period every afternoon. Holding forth. When were you last here, may I ask?”

“I think a week ago today.”

Mr. Bloemker’s eyebrows went up. Drops stopped and started on his forehead.

“The thing is that my brother was getting set to go back to college,” said Lenore. “I’ve been helping him buy stuff and arrange things and work out some things with my father, when I haven’t been working. There was a lot of stuff to arrange.”

“His college must begin terribly early. It’s not yet even September.”

“No, the place he goes — which is this place called Amherst College? In Massachusetts? — it doesn’t start for a couple weeks yet, but he wanted to go visit our mother before the year started and everything. ”

“Visit your mother?”

“She’s sort of resting, in Wisconsin.”

“Ah.”

“Listen, should I call her and tell her what’s going on? She’s Lenore’s relative too. I really think we better call the police.”

Mr. Bloemker’s glasses had slipped almost all the way down his nose. He pushed them up, and they immediately slid down again. “What I can do at this point is pass along to you the information and requests relayed to me very early by Mr. Rummage.” He tugged at his cuffs. “The police are not going to be contacted at this point in time. The owners are of the opinion, for reasons which I must in all honesty confess remain at this moment hazy to me, that this is an internal nursing-care-facility matter which can be brought to some quick resolution without resort to outside aid. If of course it be so, the advantages accruing in terms of minimal embarrassment and impediment to the facility are obvious. You are requested to inform no one of any details of the situation until you have spoken to your father. You are requested to contact your father at your very earliest opportunity.”

“Dad is really hard to contact, usually.”

“Nevertheless.”

Lenore looked back at the open desk drawer. “This is making very little sense to me. And what about the relatives of the staff who are… unavailable right now? Won’t their families find their unavailability a little out of the ordinary? They’re going to be apt to want to call the police, don’t you think? I don’t blame them. I’d like to call the police, too.”

Mr. Bloemker’s glasses suddenly fell off his nose and he caught them, barely, and wiped the bridge of his nose with his fingers. “It is at this point unclear whether the families of the unavailable staff are themselves unavailable because of normal extra-Home commitments, or whether they too have become unavailable in a manner similar to that of the staff, but the in a way fortuitous though of course also quite disquieting fact remains…”

“What was all that?” Lenore said from back at Gramma’s drawer.

“The families aren’t around, either.”

“Gosh.”

“What are you doing?” Bloemker asked. Lenore was looking at the ink drawing on the back of the Stonecipheco label that lay on top of the notebooks in the desk drawer. It featured a person, apparently in a smock. In one hand was a razor, in the other a can of shaving cream. Lenore could even see the word “Noxzema” on the can. The person’s head was an explosion of squiggles of ink.

“Looking at this thing,” she said.

Mr. Bloemker moved closer. He smelled like a wet diaper. “What is it,” he asked, looking over Lenore’s shoulder.

“If it’s what I think it is,” said Lenore, “it’s a sort of joke. A what do you call it. An antinomy.”

“An antinomy?”

Lenore nodded. “Gramma really likes antinomies. I think this guy here,” looking down at the drawing on the back of the label, “is the barber who shaves all and only those who do not shave themselves. ”

Mr. Bloemker looked at her. “A barber?”

“The big killer question,” Lenore said to the sheet of paper, “is supposed to be whether the barber shaves himself. I think that’s why his head’s exploded, here.”

“Beg pardon?”

“If he does, he doesri t, and if he doesn‘t, he does.”

Mr. Bloemker stared down at the drawing. Smoothed his beard.

“Look, can we leave?” Lenore asked. “It’s really hot. I want to leave.”

“By all means.”

Lenore put the Stonecipheco label in her purse and shut the drawer. “I’ll put the key here on the desk, but I don’t think anybody other than the police ought to go looking through Gramma’s stuff, assuming the police get called, which I really think they ought to.”

“I quite agree. You are taking the…?”

“Antinomy.”

“Yes.”

“Is that OK?”

“The person on the telephone said nothing indicating otherwise.”

“Thanks.”

There was a knock at the door. A staff member handed a note to Mr. Bloemker. Bloemker read the note. The staff member looked at Lenore’s dress and shoes for a moment and left.

“Well of course as I fully expected Concamadine Beadsman is still with us, over in J,” Mr. Bloemker said. “Would you perhaps care to see her before you—?”

“No thanks, really,” Lenore cut him off. “I really have to get to work. What time is it, by the way?”

“Almost noon.”

“God, I’m going to be really late. I’m going to get killed. I hope Candy isn’t mad about covering. Look, is there a phone where I can dial out to call and say I’ll be late? I really need to call.”

“There are dial-out phones at every reception station. I’ll show you.”

“I remember, come to think of it.”

“Of course.”

“Look, I’m going to be in touch, soon, obviously. I’m going to get hold of my father from work, and I’ll tell him he should call you.”

“That would be enormously helpful, thank you.” Mr. Bloemker’s shirt had soaked the outline of a thin V through his sportcoat.

“And of course please call me if anything happens, if you find anything out. Either at work or over at the Tissaws’ house.”

“Rest assured that I will. You are still employed at Frequent and Vigorous?”,

“Yes. Have you got the number?”

“Somewhere, I’m sure.”

“Really, let me give it to you to be sure. We get an incredible amount of wrong numbers.” Lenore wrote the number on a card from her purse and handed it to Mr. Bloemker. Mr. Bloemker looked at the front of the card.

“ ‘Rick Vigorous: Editor, Reader, Administrator, All-Around Literary Presence, Frequent and Vigorous Publishing, Inc.’?”

“Never mind, just there’s the number. Can we please go to the dial-out phone? I’m hideously late, and being here longer isn’t going to help get Lenore back, I can see.”

“Of course. Let me get the door.”

“Thank you.”

“Not at all.”

/f/

25 August

I have a truly horrible dream which invariably occurs on the nights I am Lenoreless in my bed. I am attempting to stimulate the clitoris of Queen Victoria with the back of a tortoise-shell hairbrush. Her voluminous skirts swirl around her waist and my head. Her enormous cottage-cheese thighs rest heavy on my shoulders, spill out in front of my sweating face. The clanking of pounds of jewelry is heard as she shifts to offer herself at best advantage. There are odors. The Queen’s impatient breathing is thunder above me as I kneel at the throne. Time passes. Finally her voice is heard, overhead, metalled with disgust and frustration: “We are not aroused.” I am punched in the arm by a guard and flung into a pit at the bottom of which boil the figures of countless mice. I awake with a mouth full of fur. Begging for more time. A ribbed brush.

/g/

One big problem with owning one of those new Mattel ultra rompact cars, which was what Lenore owned, was that the plastic car had a plastic choke which had to be engaged while the car warmed up for not fewer than five minutes, which was particularly irritating in‘the summer, because Lenore had to sit in the small oven that was the car for these five minutes, while the engine raced like mad and made a lot of unpleasant noise, before she could get going and have some cooler air blow on her. While she made the choke-wait in the Home’s parking lot, Lenore watched an ant nibble at something in the wad of bird droppings that lay near the top of her windshield.

The ant was torn off the windshield by the wind when Lenore hit the Inner Belt of I-271 and started going seriously fast. The offices of the publishing firm of Frequent and Vigorous were in that part of downtown Cleveland called Erieview Plaza, right near Lake Erie. Lenore took the Inner Belt south and west from Shaker Heights, preparatory to her being flung by I-271 northward into the city itself, which meant that she was for a while with her car tracing the outline of the city of East Corinth, Ohio, which was where she had her apartment, and which determined the luxuriant and not unpopular shape of the Inner Belt Section of I-271.

East Corinth had been founded and built in the 1960’s by Stonecipher Beadsman II, son of Lenore Beadsman, Lenore Beadsman’s grandfather, who was unfortunately killed at age sixty-five in 1975 in a vat accident during a brief and disastrous attempt on the part of Stonecipheco Baby Food Products to develop and market something that would compete with Jell-O. Stonecipher Beadsman II had been a man of many talents and even more interests. He had been a really fanatical moviegoer, as well as an amateur urban planner, and he had been particularly rabid in his attachment to a film star named Jayne Mansfield. East Corinth lay in the shape of a profile of Jayne Mansfield: leading down from Shaker Heights in a nimbus of winding road-networks, through delicate features of homes and small businesses, a button nose of a park and a full half-smiling section of rotary, through a sinuous swan-like curve of a highway extension and tract housing, before jutting precipitously westward in a huge, swollen development of factories and industrial parks, mammoth and bustling, the Belt curving back no less immoderately a couple miles south into a trim lower border of homes and stores and apartment buildings and some boarding houses, including that in which Lenore Beadsman herself lived and from which she had driven up over Jayne Mansfield to the Shaker Heights Home this morning. Families and firms owning property along the critical western boundary of the suburb were required by zoning code to paint their facilities in the most realistic colors possible, a condition to which property owners in the far westward section near Garfield Heights (where the industrial swelling was most pronounced) particularly objected, and as one can imagine the whole East Corinth area was immensely popular with airline pilots, who all tended to demand landing patterns into Cleveland-Hopkins Airport over East Corinth, and who made a constant racket, flying low and blinking their lights on and off and waggling their wings. The people of East Corinth, many of them unaware of the shape their town really lay in, a knowledge not exactly public, crawled and drove and walked over the form of Jayne Mansfield, shaking their fists at the bellies of planes. Lenore had lived in East Corinth only two years, ever since she had gotten out of college and decided she did not want to live at home or enter Stonecipheco, all at once. To the south, 271 gave way to 77, and 77 led down through Bedford, Tallmadge, Akron, and Canton before stretching into the Great Ohio Desert, with its miles of ash-fine black sand, and cacti and scorpions, and crowds of fishermen, and concession stands at the rim.

There were two reliable ways to identify the Bombardini Building, which was where the firm of Frequent and Vigorous made its home. A look from the south at Erieview Tower, high and rectangular not far from the Terminal section of Cleveland’s downtown, reveals that the sun, always at either a right or a left tangent to the placement of the Tower, casts a huge, dark shadow of the Building over the surrounding area — a deep, severely angled shadow that joins the bottom of the Tower in black union but then bends precipitously off to the side, as if the Erieview Plaza section of Cleveland were a still pool of water, into which the Tower had been dipped, the shadow its refracted submergence. In the morning, when the shadow casts from east to west, the Bombardini Building stands sliced by light, white and black, on the Tower’s northern side. As ‘the day swells and the shadow compacts and moves ponderously in and east, and as clouds begin to complicate the shapes of darknesses, the Bombardini Building is slowly eaten by black, the steady suck of the dark broken only by epileptic flashes of light caused by clouds with pollutant bases bending rays of sun as the Bombardini Building flirts ever more seriously with the border of the shadow. By mid-afternoon the Bombardini Building is in complete darkness, the windows glow yellow, cars go by with headlights. The Bombardini Building, then, is easy to find, occurring nowhere other than on the perimeter of the sweeping scythe of the Midwest’s very most spectacular shadow.

The other aforementioned identifying feature was the white skeleton of General Moses Cleaveland, which found itself in shallow repose in the cement of the sidewalk in front of the Bombardini Building, its outline clearly visible, of no little interest to passing pedestrians and the occasional foraging dog, the latter’s advances discouraged by a thin bit of electrified grillwork, the General’s rest thus largely untroubled save by the pole of a sign which jutted disrespectfully out of Cleaveland’s left eye socket, the sign itself referring to a hugely outlined parking space in front of the Building and reading: THIS SPACE RESERVED FOR NORMAN BOMBARDINI, WITH WHOM YOU DO NOT WANT TO MESS.

Frequent and Vigorous Publishing shared the Bombardini Building with the administrative facilities of the Bombardini Company, a firm involved in some vague genetic engineering enterprises about which Lenore in all honesty cared to know as little as possible. The Bombardini Company occupied most of the lower three floors and a single vertical line of offices up the six-story height of the Bombardini Building’s east side. Frequent and Vigorous took a vertical line of narrow space on the western side of the Building for three floors, then swelled out to take almost all the top three. The Frequent and Vigorous telephone switchboard, where Lenore worked, was in the western corner of the cavernous Bombardini Building lobby, across the huge back wall of which, cast through the giant windows in the front wall of the lobby, the Erieview shadow steadily and even measurably moved, eating the wall. Time could with reasonable accuracy be measured by the position of the shadow against the back wall, except when the black-and-white window-light flickered like a silent movie during the fickle shadow-period of mid-day.

Which it now was. Lenore was hideously late. She hadn’t been able to get through to Candy Mandible on the phone, either. The Shaker Heights Home’s phones were apparently on the fritz: F and V’s number had put Lenore in touch with Cleveland Towing.

“Frequent and Vigorous,” Candy Mandible was saying into the switchboard console phone. “Frequent and Vigorous,” she said. “No this is not Enrique’s House of Cheese. Shall I give you that number, even though it might not work? You’re welcome.”

“Candy God I’m so sorry, it was unavoidable, I couldn’t get through.” Lenore came back behind the counter and into the switchboard cubicle. The window high overhead flashed a cathedral spear of sun, then was dark.

“Lenore, you’re like three hours late. That’s just a little much.”

“My supervisor wouldn’t take it. I’d get fired if I pulled anything like what you guys pull,” Judith Prietht shot off between calls beeping at the Bombardini Company switchboard console a few feet away in the tiny cubicle.

Lenore put her purse by the Security phones. She came close to Candy Mandible. “I tried to call you. Mrs. Tissaw called me out of the shower at like nine-thirty because Schwartz had answered this call for me. I had to go to the nursing home right away.”

“Something’s wrong.”

“Yes.” Lenore saw that Judith Prietht’s ears were aprick. “Can I just talk to you later? Will you be home later on?”

“I’ll be off over at Allied at six,” Candy said. “I was supposed to be over there at freaking twelve — but it’s OK,” seeing Lenore’s expression. “Clint said he’d get somebody to cover for me as long as I wanted. Are you all right? Which one is it?”

“Lenore. ”

“She didn’t…?”

“It’s unclear.”

“Unclear?”

“My supervisor, you gotta have reasons for being late, and submit ‘em in advance, and they have to get signed by Mr. Bombardini,” Judith said amid beepings and rings. “But then we have a real business, we get real calls. Bombardini Company. Bombardini Company. One moment.”

“She’s being particularly pleasant today,” said Lenore. Candy made a strangle-motion at Judith, then started to get her stuff together.

Their console sounded. Lenore got it. “Frequent and Vigorous,” she said. She listened and looked up at Candy. “Bambi’s Den of Discipline?” she said. “No, this is most definitely not Bambi’s Den of Discipline… Candy, do you have the number of a Bambi’s Den of Discipline?” Candy gave her the number but said it probably wouldn’t make any difference. Lenore recited the number and released.

“Bambi’s Den of Discipline?” she said. “That’s a new one. What do you mean there’s probably no difference?”

“I can’t figure it out, I don’t see nothing wrong,” a voice came from under the console counter, under Lenore’s chair, by her legs. Lenore looked down. There were big boots protruding from under the counter. They began to jiggle; a figure struggled to emerge. Lenore shot her chair back.

“Lenore, there’s line trouble that I guess started last night, Vem said,” Candy said. “This is Peter Abbott. He’s with Interactive Cable. They’re trying to fix the problem. ”

“Interactive Cable?”

“Like the phone company, but not the phone company.”

“Oh.” Lenore looked listlessly at Peter Abbott. “Hi.”

“Well hello hello,” said Peter, winking furiously at Lenore and pulling up his collar. Lenore looked up at Candy as Peter played with something hanging from his tool belt.

“Peter is very friendly, it seems,” said Candy Mandible.

“Hmm.”

“Well I can’t see nothing wrong in there, I’m stumped,” Peter said.

“What’s the problem?” Lenore asked.

“It’s not good,” said Candy. “We I guess more or less don’t have a number anymore. Is that right?” She looked at Peter Abbott.

“Well, you got line trouble,” said Peter.

“Right, which apparently in this case means we don’t have a number anymore, or rather we do, but so does like the whole rest of Cleveland, in that we now all of a sudden share a single number with all these other places. All these places that share our line tunnel. You know all those numbers we were just one off of, and we’d just get the wrong numbers all the time — Steve’s Sub, Cleveland Towing, Big B.M. Cafe, Fuss ‘n’ Feathers Pets, Dial-a-Darling? Well now they’re like all the same number. You dial their numbers, and the F and V number rings. Plus a whole lot of new ones: a cheese shop, some Goodyear service office, that Bambi’s Den of Discipline, which by the way gets a disturbing number of calls. We’ve all got the same number now. It’s nuts. Is that right what I said?” she asked Peter Abbott. She got her stuff and got ready to leave, looking at her watch.

“Yeah, line trouble,” Peter Abbott said.

“At least now you’ll have calls. At least now you’ll have something to do for a change,” said Judith Prietht. “Bombardini Company. Bombardini Company.”

“How come she’s not messed up?” Lenore gestured at Judith.

“Different line tunnels,” Peter Abbott said. “Bombardini Inc.’s lines are actually it turns out in this tunnel pretty far away, a few blocks west of Erieview. The calls just get into here via a matrix sharing-thread transfer, which is a real complicated plus ancient thing. Your lines are in a tunnel right under this building, under the lobby, out under that guy’s skeleton.” Peter Abbott pointed at the floor.

“So then why are you up here instead of down with the lines?” Candy Mandible wanted to know.

“I’m not a tunnel man. I’m a console man. I don’t do tunnels. They sent some guy from Tunnels down there early this morning. It’s gotta be his problem. I can’t find nothing up here with what you girls got. This’s a twenty-eight, right? I haven’t lost my mind?”

“Right, Centrex twenty-eight.”

“I know it’s a Centrex, that’s all I do, I’m bored as shit with Centrexes, excuse my French.”

“Well what did the guy from the tunnel say?” Lenore asked. Candy was answering a phone.

“Dunno, ‘cause I haven’t talked to him. I sure can’t call him, am I right?”

“What, we can’t dial out on this, either?”

“I was just makin’ a joke. You can call out OK. Just try again if you get an automatic loop into one of the other in-tunnel points. No, I just hafta talk to the tunnel guy in person, back at the office. We hafta write up reports.” Peter looked at Lenore. “You married?”

“Oh, brother.”

“This one’s not married either, right?” Peter Abbott asked Candy, nodding over at Lenore. His hair wasn’t blond so much as just yellow, like a crayon. His face had the color of a kind of dark nut. Not the sort of tan that comes from the sun. Lenore sensed CabanaTan. The guy looked like a photographic negative, she decided.

He sighed. “Two unmarried girls, in distress, working in this tiny little office…”

“Women,” Candy Mandible corrected.

“I’m not married either,” Judith Prietht called over. Judith Prietht was about fifty.

“Groovy,” said Peter Abbott.

“So can Bambi and Big Bob and all the others even get any calls, now?” Lenore asked. “Do their phones ring at all?”

“Sometimes, sometimes not,” Peter Abbott said, jingling his belt. “The point is they can’t be sure where it’ll ring, and neither can you, which is obviously subpar service. Your number’s not picking you out of the network like it should, it’s as we say picking out a target set and not a target.”

“Lovely. ”

“At least now you’ll have some calls to answer,” said Judith Prietht. “All you ever get is wrong numbers anyway. You guys are going to go bankrupt. Who ever heard of a publishing house in Cleveland?”

“I like your shoes,” Peter Abbott said to Lenore. “I got some shoes just like that.”

“Does Rick know about all this?” Lenore asked Candy.

Candy stopped. “Rick. Lenore, call him right away.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Who knows what’s ever the matter. All I know is first he just had a complete spasm about your not being here. This was at like ten-o-one. And then now he keeps calling down all the time, to see if you’re here yet. He keeps pretending it’s different people asking for you, holding his nose, putting a hankie over the phone, trying this totally pitiful English accent, pretending it’s outside calls for you, which he should know I can tell it isn’t because he knows the way the console light flashes all fast when they’re in-house calls. God knows he spends enough time down here. And now he hasn’t come down for his paper, even, he’s just sitting up there brooding, playing with his hat.”

“What else does he have to do?” said Judith Prietht, who was unwrapping wax paper from a sandwich and blinking coquettishly at Peter Abbott, who was in turn trying to stare down over the counter into Lenore’s cleavage.

“God, well I really need to talk to him, too,” said Lenore.

“Sweetie, I forgot for a second. How just totally horrible. You must be out of your head. Are you sure you’re all right?”

“I think so. Vern’ll be in at six. I’ll call Rick as soon as I can. I have to call my father, too. And his lawyer.”

“I sense something in the wind,” said Peter Abbott.

“You hush,” said Candy Mandible. She squeezed Lenore’s arm as she passed. “I’m late. I have to go. You come home tonight, hear?”

“I’ll call and let you know,” Lenore said.

“What, you guys are roommates?” Peter Abbott asked.

“Partners in crime,” Judith Prietht snorted.

“Lucky room, is all I can say.”

“Let’s just have a universal dropping dead, except for Lenore,” said Candy. She walked off across the marble lobby floor into the moving blackness.

“She’s got another job?” Peter Abbott asked.

“Yes.” The console beeped. “Frequent and Vigorous.”

“Where at?”

Lenore held up a finger for him to wait while she dealt with somebody wanting to price a set of radials. “Over at Allied Sausage Casings, in East Corinth?” she said when she’d released.

“What a gnarly place to work. What does she do?”

“Product testing. Tasting Department.”

“What a disgusting job.”

“Somebody has to do it.”

“Glad it’s not me, boy.”

“But I do assume you have some kind of job to do? Like fixing our lines?”

“I’m off. I’ll be in touch — if possible.” Peter Abbott laughed and left, jingling. He walked into a moving patch of light in the middle of the lobby and the light disappeared, taking him with it.

The console began to beep.

“Frequent and Vigorous,” Lenore said. “Frequent and Vigorous.”

4. 1972

TRANSCRIPT OF MEETING BETWEEN THE HONORABLE RAYMOND ZUSATZ, GOVERNOR OF THE STATE OF OHIO; MR. JOSEPH LUNGBERG, GUBERNATORIAL AIDE; MR. NEIL OBSTAT, GUBERNATORIAL AIDE; AND MR. ED ROY YANCEY, VICE PRESIDENT, INDUSTRIAL DESERT DESIGN, INCORPORATED, DALLAS, TEXAS; 21 JUNE 1972.

OVERNOR: Gentlemen, something is not right.

MR. OBSTAT: What do you mean, Chief?

GOVERNOR: With the state, Neil. Something is not right with our state. MR. LUNGBERG: But Chief, unemployment is low, inflation is low, taxes haven’t been raised in two years, pollution is way down except for Cleveland and who the hell cares about Cleveland — just kidding, Neil — but Chief, the people love you, you’re unprecedentedly ahead in the polls, industrial investment and development in the state are at an all-time high….

GOVERNOR: Stop right there. There you go.

MR. OBSTAT: Can you expand on that, Chief?

GOVERNOR: Things are just too good, somehow. I suspect a trap.

MR. LUNGBERG: A trap?

GOVERNOR: Guys, the state is getting soft. I can feel softness out there. It’s getting to be one big suburb and industrial park and mall. Too much development. People are getting complacent. They’re forgetting the way this state was historically hewn out of the wilderness. There’s no more hewing.

MR. OBSTAT: You’ve got a point there, Chief.

GOVERNOR: We need a wasteland.

MR. LUNGBERG and MR. OBSTAT: A wasteland?

GOVERNOR: Gentlemen, we need a desert.

MR. LUNGBERG and MR. OBSTAT: A desert?

GOVERNOR: Gentlemen, a desert. A point of savage reference for the good people of Ohio. A place to fear and love. A blasted region. Something to remind us of what we hewed out of. A place without malls. An Other for Ohio’s Self. Cacti and scorpions and the sun beating down. Desolation. A place for people to wander alone. To reflect. Away from everything. Gentlemen, a desert.

MR. OBSTAT: Just a super idea, Chief.

GOVERNOR: Thanks, Neil. Gentlemen may I present Mr. Ed Roy Yancey, of Industrial Desert Design, Dallas. They did Kuwait.

MR. LUNGBERG: Hey, there’s apparently a lot of desert in Kuwait. MR. YANCEY: You bet, Joe, and we believe we can provide you folks with a really first-rate desert right here in Ohio.

MR. OBSTAT: What about the cost?

GOVERNOR: Manageable.

MR. LUNGBERG: Where would it be?

MR. YANCEY: Well gentlemen, the Governor and I have conferred, and if I could just direct your attention to this map, here…

MR. OBSTAT: That’s Ohio, all right.

MR. YANCEY: The spot we have in mind is in the south of your great state. Right about… here. Actually here to here. Hundred square miles.

MR. OBSTAT: Around Caldwell?

MR. YANCEY: Yup.

MR. LUNGBERG: Don’t quite a few people live around there? GOVERNOR: Relocation. Eminent domain. A desert respects no man. Fits with the whole concept.

MR. LUNGBERG: Isn’t that also pretty near Wayne National Forest? GOVERNOR: Not anymore. (Mr. Lungberg whistles.)

MR. OBSTAT: Hey, my mother lives right near Caldwell.

GOVERNOR: Hits home, eh Neil? Part of the whole concept. Concept has to hit home. Hewing is violence, Neil. We’re going to hew a wilderness out of the soft underbelly of this state. It’s going to hit home.

MR. LUNGBERG: You’re really sold on this, aren’t you, Chief?

GOVERNOR: Joe, I’ve never been more sold on anything. It’s what this state needs. I can feel it.

MR. OBSTAT: You’ll go down in history, Chief. You’ll be immortal.

GOVERNOR: Thanks, Neil. I just feel it’s right, and after conferring with Mr. Yancey, I’m just sold. A hundred miles of blinding white sandy nothingness. ‘Course there’ll be some fishing lakes, at the edges, for people to fish in…

MR. LUNGBERG: Why white sand, Chief? Why not, say, black sand?

GOVERNOR: Go with that, Joe.

MR. LUNGBERG: Well, really, if the whole idea is supposed to be contrast, otherness, blastedness, should I say sinistemess? Sinistemess is the sense I get.

GOVERNOR: Sinisterness fits, that’s good.

MR. LUNGBERG: Well, Ohio is a pretty white state: the roads are white, the people tend to be on the whole white, the sun’s pretty bright here…. What better contrast than a hundred miles of black sand? Talk about sinister. And the black would soak up the heat a lot better, too. Be really hot, enhance the blastedness aspect.

GOVERNOR: I like it. Ed Roy, what do you think? Can cacti and scorpions live in black sand?

MR. YANCEY: No problem I can see.

MR. OBSTAT: What about the cost of black sand?

MR. YANCEY: A little more expensive, probably. I’d have to talk to the boys in Sand. But I feel I can commit now to saying it’d be manageable in the context of the whole project.

GOVERNOR: Done.

MR. LUNGBERG: When do we start?

GOVERNOR: Immediately, Joe. Hewing is by nature a fast, violent thing. MR. OBSTAT: Chief, just let me say I’m excited. You have my congratulations, man to man and citizen to Governor.

GOVERNOR: Thanks, Neil. You better go call your Mom, big fella. MR. OBSTAT: Right.

MR. LUNGBERG: What about a name, Chief?

GOVERNOR: A name? That’s a typically excellent point, Joe. I never thought of the name issue.

MR. LUNGBERG: May I make a suggestion?

GOVERNOR: Go.

MR. LUNGBERG: The Great Ohio Desert.

GOVERNOR: The Great Ohio Desert.

MR. LUNGBERG: Yes.

GOVERNOR: Joe, a super name. I take my hat off to you. You’ve done it again. Great. It spells size, desolation, grandeur, and it says it’s in Ohio.

MR. LUNGBERG: Not too presumptuous?

GOVERNOR: Not at all. Fits the concept to a T.

MR. OBSTAT: I take my hat off to you too, Joe.

MR. YANCEY: Damn fine name, Joe.

GOVERNOR: So we’re all set. Concept. Desert. Color. Name. All that’s left is the hewing.

MR. YANCEY: Well let’s get down to it, then.

5. 1990

/a/

Suppose someone had said to me, ten years ago, in Scarsdale, or on the commuter train, suppose the person had been my next-door neighbor, Rex Metalman, the corporate accountant with the unbelievable undulating daughter, suppose this was back in the days before his lawn mania took truly serious hold and his nightly paramilitary sentry-duty with the illuminated riding mower and the weekly planeloads of DDT dropping from the sky in search of perhaps one sod webworm nest and his complete intransigence in the face of the reasonable and in the beginning polite requests of one or even all of the neighbors that hostilities against the range of potential lawn enemies that obsessed him be toned down, at least in scale, before all this drove a wedge the size of a bag of Scott’s into our tennis friendship, suppose Rex Metalman had speculated in my presence, then, that ten years later, which is to say now, I, Rick Vigorous, would be living in Cleveland, Ohio, between a biologically dead and completely offensive-smelling lake and a billion-dollar man-made desert, that I would be divorced from my wife and physically distanced from the growth of my son, that I would be operating a firm in partnership with an invisible person, little more, it seems clear now, than a corporate entity interested in failure for tax purposes, the firm publishing things perhaps even slightly more laughable than nothing at all, and that perched high atop this mountain of the unthinkable would be the fact that I was in love, grossly and pathetically and fiercely and completely in love with a person eighteen count them eighteen years younger than I, a woman from one of Cleveland’s first families, who lives in a city owned by her father but who works answering telephones for something like four dollars an hour, a woman whose uniform of white cotton dress and black Converse hightop sneakers is an unanalyzable and troubling constant, who takes somewhere, I suspect, between five and eight showers a day, who works in neurosis like a whaler in scrim shaw, who lives with a schizophrenically narcissistic bird and an almost certainly nymphomaniacal bitch of a roommate, and who finds in me, somewhere, who knows where, the complete lover… suppose all this were said to me by Rex Metalman, leaning conversationally with his flamethrower over the fence between our properties as I stood with a rake in my hand, suppose Rex had said all this to me, then I almost certainly would have replied that the likelihood of all that was roughly equal to the probability of young Vance Vigorous, then eight and at eight in certain respects already more of a man than I, that young Vance, even as we stood there to be seen kicking a football up into the cold autumn sky and down through a window, his laughter echoing forever off the closed colored suburban trees, of strapping Vance’s eventually turning out to be a… a homosexual, or something equally unlikely or preposterous or totally out of the question.

Now the heavens resound with unkind giggles. Now that it’s become undeniably apparent even to me that I have a son who lends to the expression “fruit of my loins” whole new vistas of meaning, that I am here and do do what I do when there is anything to do, when I feel an empty draft and look down and find a hole in my chest and spy, in the open polyurethane purse of Lenore Beadsman, among the aspirins and bars of hotel soap and lottery tickets and the ridiculous books that mean nothing at all, the clenched purple fist of my own particular heart, what am I to say to Rex Metalman and Scarsdale and the sod webworms and the past, except that it does not exist, that it has been obliterated, that footballs never climbed into crisp skies, that my support checks disappear into a black void, that a man can be and is and must be reborn, at some point, perhaps points? Rex would be confused and would, as whenever confused, hide his discomfort by dynamiting an area of his lawn. I would stand, cold rake in white hand, knowing what I know, in a rain of dirt and grass and worms, and shake my head at all around me.

Then who is this girl who owns me, whom I love? I refuse to ask or answer who she is. What is she? This is a thin-shouldered, thin-armed, big-breasted girl, a long-legged girl with feet larger than average, feet that tend to point out a bit when she walks… in her black basketball sneakers. Did I say troubling? These are shoes that I love. I will confess that I once in a moment of admittedly irresponsible degeneracy tried to make love to one of the shoes, a 1989 All-Star hightop, when Lenore was in the shower, but failed to be able to bring the thing off, for familiar reasons.

But what of Lenore, of Lenore’s hair? Here is hair that is clearly within and of itself every color — blond and red and jet-black-blue and honeynut — but which effects an outward optical compromise with possibility that consists of appearing simply dull brown, save for brief teasing glimpses out of the comer of one’s eye. The hair hangs in bangs, and the sides curve down past Lenore’s cheeks and nearly meet in points below her chin, like the brittle jaws of an insect of prey. Oh, the hair can bite. I’ve been bitten by the hair.

And her eyes. I cannot say what color Lenore Beadsman’s eyes are; I cannot look at them; they are the sun to me.

They are blue. Her lips are full and red and tend to wetness and do not ask but rather demand, in a pout of liquid silk, to be kissed. I kiss them often, I admit it, it is what I do, I am a kisser, and a kiss with Lenore is, if I may indulge a bit for a moment here, not so much a kiss as it is a dislocation, a removal and rude transportation of essence from self to lip, so that it is not so much two human bodies coming together and doing the usual things with their lips as it is two sets of lips spawned together and joined in kind from the beginning of post-Scarsdale time, achieving full ontological status only in subsequent union and trailing behind and below them, as they join and become whole, two now utterly superfluous fleshly bodies, drooping outward and downward from the kiss like the tired stems of overblossomed flora, trailing shoes on the ground, husks. A kiss with Lenore is a scenario in which I skate with buttered soles over the moist rink of lower lip, sheltered from weathers by the wet warm overhang of upper, finally to crawl between lip and gum and pull the lip to me like a child’s blanket and stare over it with beady, unfriendly eyes out at the world external to Lenore, of which I no longer wish to be part.

That I must in the final analysis remain part of the world that is external to and other from Lenore Beadsman is to me a source of profound grief. That others may dwell deep, deep within the ones they love, drink from the soft cup at the creamy lake at the center of the Object of Passion, while I am fated forever only to intuit the presence of deep recesses while I poke my nose, as it were, merely into the foyer of the Great House of Love, agitate briefly, and make a small mess on the doormat, pisses me off to no small degree. But that Lenore finds such tiny frenzies, such conversations just inside the Screen Door of Union, to be not only pleasant and briefly diverting but somehow apparently right, fulfilling, significant, in some sense wonderful, quite simply and not at all surprisingly makes me feel the same way, enlarges my sense of it and me, sends me hurrying up the walk to that Screen Door in my best sportjacket and flower in lapel as excited as any schoolboy, time after time, brings me charging to the cave entrance in leopardskin shirt, avec club, bellowing for admittance and promising general kickings of ass if I am impeded in any way.

We met, oddly enough, not at the Bombardini Building, but at the office of the counselor whose ear it turned out we shared, Dr. Curtis Jay, a good man but a strange and in general I’m coming to believe thoroughly poor psychologist, about whom I don’t wish to speak at the moment because I am more than a little incensed at his latest and completely preposterous interpretation of a certain dream that has recently been recurring and troubling me not a little, a dream having to do with Queen Victoria, manipulative prowess, and mice — obviously to any reasonable sensitivity a profoundly sexual dream, which Dr. Jay tiresomely insists is not sexually fixated but has rather to do with what he terms “hygiene anxiety,” which I simply and flatly reject, along with Jay’s whole Blentnerian hygiene-bent, which I believe he has at some level both pirated from and added to Lenore’s own private well of neurotic cathex; rather I know that that’s the case, because one of Dr. Jay’s redeeming qualities, and certainly the chief reason why I continue to see him in the face of mounting evidence of major incompetence, is the fact that he is also completely unethical and an incorrigible gossip who tells me all of what Lenore tells him. All of it.

Lenore and I met in Dr. Jay’s reception room, I clankily leaving his office, she waiting in the other fabric track-chair in flowing white gown and worn black Converses, reading, her legs crossed ankle on knee. I knew I had seen her at the firm’s switchboard, had in fact gotten my paper from her that very day, and what with the setting I was a little embarrassed, but Lenore, oh so very Lenorishly I know now, was not. She said hello, and called me Mr. Vigorous, and said she hoped we would have things to publish soon, she felt in her marrow we would. She said “marrow.” She said she was seeing Dr. Jay chiefly for help with feelings of disorientation and identity-confusion and lack of control, which I could to an extent understand, because I knew her to be the daughter of the proprietor of Stonecipheco Baby Food Products, one of Cleveland’s very leading and if I may say so in my perception evil industries, at any rate certain to be an oppressive and unignorable influence in the life of anyone in any way connected with its helm. I recall that at this point her mechanical chair on its track was caused to move toward the door of the inner office of Dr. Jay — whose fondness for useless gadgets would, I’m convinced, be-of significant interest to his colleagues — and we called goodbye. I looked at the back of her neck as she disappeared into Jay’s lair, undid the seat belt of my own ridiculous carnival appliance, and went out into the brown lake breezes with a lighter heart, somehow.

How did things progress, after that? I see for the most part not isolated events, not history, but a montage, to some sort of music, not any sort of brisk or invigorating The Fighter Gets Ready For The Big Fight montage, but rather a gauzy, tinkly thing, Rick Vigorous Fashions An Infatuation With Someone About The Same Age As His Own Child And Prepares To Make A Complete Ass Of Himself Over And Over, moving in watercolor, over which is imposed in even more liquid hues the ghostly scene of Lenore and me running toward each other in slow motion through the pale gelatin of our respective inhibitions and various troubles.

I see me getting my Plain Dealer every morning from Lenore over the switchboard counter, blushing and enduring the snorts of Candy Mandible or of Ms. Prietht, both of whom I loathe. I see me looking for Lenore in Dr. Jay’s waiting room, her time never again coinciding with mine, me slumped in my chair as it moves slowly, noisily, toward Jay’s inner office. I see me, at night, in my bed, in my apartment, performing my two-fingered Ritual of Solace, while over my head swim filmy visions in which a certain flowing, predatory-haired, black-shoed figure begins to predominate. I see me squirming in my chair in Dr. Jay’s office, wanting to ask him about Lenore Beadsman, to spill the emotional beans, but too embarrassed to do so yet, feeling like an idiot while Jay strokes his walrus mustache with his perfumed hankie and sagely interprets my discomfort and distraction as signs of an impending “breakthrough,” and urges me to double the number of my weekly visits.

Finally I see me, fed up with the whole business, unable to concentrate on my lack of work at the firm, unable to do any useful work on the Review, which really did, thank God, require real work. So I see me lurking one day like a ridiculous furtive spying child behind a marble pillar, within snapping reach of the jaws of the Erieview shadow, in the lobby of the Bombardini Building, waiting for Judith Prietht to hearken to one of the many daily calls of her impossibly small bladder. I see me accosting Lenore Beadsman in the claustrophobic cubicle after Prietht leaves. I see Lenore looking up to smile at my approach. I see me exhausting the subject of the weather, then asking Lenore if she might perhaps care to have a drink, with me, after work. I see one of the rare occasions I’ve encountered in which the word “nonplussed” might profitably be used in description. I see Lenore momentarily nonplussed.

“I don’t really drink,” she said, after a moment, looking back down at her book.

I felt a sinking. “You don’t drink liquid of any sort?” I asked her.

Lenore looked back up at me and gave a slow smile. Her moist lips curved up softly. They really did. I resisted the urge to lunge into disaster right there in the lobby. “I drink liquid,” she admitted, after a moment.

“Splendid. What sort of liquid do you prefer to drink?”

“Ginger ale’s an especially good liquid, I’ve always thought,” she said, laughing. We were both laughing. I had a fierce and painful erection, one which, thanks to one of the few advantages of my physical character, was not even a potential source of embarrassment.

“I know a wonderful place where they serve ginger ale in thin glasses, with tiny straws,” I said. I was referring to a bar.

“Sounds super.”

“Good.”

I see us in a bar, I hear a piano I did not hear, I feel me getting thinly intoxicated on perhaps half a weak Canadian Club and distilled water, having to urinate almost at once and coming back and having to urinate again right away. I see Lenore’s lips close around the tiny short straw of her ginger ale with a natural delicate ease that sent shivers through the large muscles of my legs. We were. made for each other. I see me learning all about Lenore, Lenore in one of her pricelessly rare unself-conscious moments telling me of a life she would, I can say now, come to believe was in some sense not hers.

Lenore had a sister and two brothers. Her sister was married to a rising executive at Stonecipheco and was in some vague way connected with the tanning-parlor industry. One brother was an academic in Chicago who was not well. One brother was on the last leg of his first year at Amherst College, in Amherst, Massachusetts. [I, Rick Vigorous, I insert here, had gone to Amherst.] What a coincidence, I said, I went to Amherst too. Gosh, said Lenore. I remember how the jaws of her hair caressed the straw as she drew the ginger ale out of the tall frosted glass. Yes, she said, her brother was at Amherst, her father had gone to Amherst, her sister had gone to Mount Holyoke, a few miles away [how well I knew], her grandfather had gone to Amherst, her great-grandfather had gone to Amherst, her grandmother and great-grandmother to Mount Holyoke, her great-grandmother on to Cambridge in the twenties, where she had been a student of Wittgenstein, she still had notes from his classes.

Which brother was at Amherst now?

Her brother LaVache.

Where had her other brother gone to school? What was her other brother’s name? Would she like another ginger ale, with a tiny straw?

Yes that would be fine, his name was John, her other brother’s name was really Stonecipher but he used LaVache which was his middle name and had been their mother’s maiden name. John, the oldest, hadn’t gone to college as such, he had a Ph.D. from U. Chicago, he had in junior high school proved certainly hitherto unprovable things, with a crayon from Lenore’s own crayon box, on a Batman writing tablet, and had shocked hell out of everyone, and had gotten a Ph.D. a few years later without really going to any classes.

This was the one who was now not well.

Yes.

It was hoped that it was nothing serious.

It was unfortunately very serious. He was in his room, in Chicago, unable to receive any but a very few visitors, having problems eating food. Lenore did not wish to talk about it, at that point, obviously.

So then, where had Lenore gone to school, had Lenore gone to Mount Holyoke?

No, Lenore had not liked Mount Holyoke very much, she had gone to Oberlin, a small coed college south of Cleveland. Her sister’s husband had gone there, too. Lenore had graduated two years ago next month. And I had gone to Amherst?

Yes, I had gone to Amherst, class of ‘69, had taken a quick Masters in English at Columbia, had gone to work at the publishing firm of Hunt and Peck, on Madison Avenue, in New York City.

That was a huge firm.

Yes. And for reasons that remain unclear, I was very successful there. I made obscene amounts of money for the House, rose to such dizzying editorial heights that my salary became almost enough to live on. I married Veronica Peck. I moved to Scarsdale, New York, a short distance from the City. I had a son. He was now, eighteen.

Eighteen?

Yes. I was forty-two, after all. I was divorced, too, by the way.

I sure didn’t look forty-two.

How sweet. I was squirming like this in my seat because I remembered a phone call I just had to make, for the firm.

I am back. I sure made a lot of really quick calls. Who was the Frequent in Frequent and Vigorous, anyway, could she ask.

This was to an extent unclear. Monroe Frequent, I knew, was a fabulously wealthy clothier and inventor. He had invented the beige leisure suit. He had invented the thing that buzzes when a car is started without the seat belts being fastened. He was now, understandably, a recluse. I had been approached by a representative in wrap-around sunglasses. Interest in publishing. Outside New York and environs. Bold, new. Huge amounts of capital to invest. Full partnership for me. A salary out of all proportion to industry norm. If it’s assumed, as is reasonable, that our Frequent is Monroe Frequent, then it’s becoming clear that Frequent and Vigorous is really just a crude tax dodge.

Golly.

Yes. The only real benefit for me was having the opportunity to start my own quarterly. A literary thing. Enthusiastic agreement to.the condition. An air of legitimacy lent to the whole enterprise right off the bat, on Frequent’s view.

The Frequent Review?

Yes. Last year’s issues sold well.

It was a good quarterly.

How kind.

There was also the Norslan account, of course.

Yes, if publishing monosyllabic propaganda praising the virtues of a clearly ineffective and carcinogenic pesticide to be disseminated among the graft-softened bureaucracies of Third World countries could be considered an account, there was the Norslan account. Why on earth did she work as a telephone operator?

Well, she obviously needed money to buy food. Her best friend, Mandible, who had gone to Oberlin too for a while, worked as an operator. Et cetera.

Why didn’t she work at Stonecipheco for undoubtedly more money and thus more food?

Food was not the issue. She felt little enough control over her life as it was. A job at Stonecipheco, or a home with her father and her old governess in Shaker Heights, would only localize and intensify feelings of helplessness, loss of individual efficacy of will. I hear me hearing the voice of Dr. Jay. I see me pounding the drum of my courage with a swizzle stick and trying to press my knee against Lenore’s under the tiny plastic-wood table, and finding that her legs were not there. Me sweeping the area under the table with my leg, her not being there at all. Me being insanely curious about where her legs were.

I articulated my inability to understand this feeling of lack of control. Surely we all dealt with and reconciled ourselves to a life many of whose features were out of our control. It was part of living in a world full of other people with other interests. I was close to wetting my pants again.

No, that wasn’t it. Such a general feeling of dislocation would not be a problem. The problem was a localized feeling. An intuition that her own personal perceptions and actions and volitions were not under her control.

What did “control” mean?

Who knew.

Was this a religious thing? A deterministic crisis? I had had a friend…

No. Determinism would be fine if she were able to feel that what determined her was something objective, impersonal, that she were just a tiny part of a large mechanism. If she didn’t feel as though she were being used.

Used.

Yes. As if what she did and said and perceived and thought were having some sort of… function beyond herself.

Function. Alarm bells. Dr. Jay, after all. A plot thing?

No, not a plot thing, definitely not a plot thing, she wasn’t making herself understood. The points of her hair swung like pendula below her chin as she shook her head. My napkin had unfortunately fallen under the table. How clumsy of me. Her legs were there, but curled back, underneath her chair, ankles crossed. Alarm bells or no, I wanted first to reach for an ankle, then to pee.

No, she simply felt — at times, mind you, not all the time, but at sharp and distinct intuitive moments — as if she had no real existence, except for what she said and did and perceived and et cetera, and that these were, it seemed at such times, not really under her control. There was nothing pure.

Hmmm.

Could we talk about something else? Why for instance did I see Dr. Jay?

Oh, just some dream-orientation, general rapping. I had a sort of detached interest in the whole analysis scene, really. My problems were without exception very tiny. Hardly worth discussing at that point. I saw Jay in particular because I liked him least of any of the [very many] Cleveland clinicians with whom I’d rapped. I found an atmosphere of antagonism vital to the whole process, somehow. Lenore too? No, Lenore had been referred to Jay by a physician, friend of the family, old old crony of her great-grandmother, a physician to whom Lenore had gone with a persistent nosebleed problem. She’d stayed ever since. She found Jay irritating but fascinating. Did I find him fascinating? Actually, I went simply to ride the chairs; I found the chairs fun things. A release.

The chairs. She loved the heavy clanking pull as the chain drew her down the track to the Sanctum. She had gone to a fair once with her brother and her governess, and had ridden a rollercoaster that at the start had pulled and clanked like that. Sometimes she really almost expected a drastic rollercoaster plunge when she entered Jay’s inner office. [Give it time.] She had gone to the state fair in Columbus once with her sister Clarice and they had gotten lost in the House of Mirrors and Clarice’s purse had been stolen by a man who had pretended to be a reflection until the very last moment. It had been scary as hell.

What did her mother do?

She was hanging out, more or less, in Wisconsin.

Were her parents divorced?

Not exactly. Could we go. She had to be at work to give me my paper in the morning, after all. Very late all of a sudden. Had she eaten, would she like something to eat? Ginger ale was surprisingly filling. Her car was in the shop, choke trouble. She had taken the bus to work that day. Well then. She had one of those new cars made by Mattel, also the maker of Hot Wheels. Only slightly larger than same. Really more toy than car. And so on.

I see us driving down the insanely shaped Inner Belt of I-271 South, toward lower East Corinth. I see Lenore in the car keeping her knees together and swinging both legs over to the side, toward me, so that I touch her knee with the back of my hand as I shift.

With my stomach I see disaster. I see me dropping Lenore off at her place, us on the porch of a huge gray house that looked black in the soft darkness of the April night, the house Lenore in a small voice said belonged to an oral surgeon who lent out two rooms to her and Mandible and one to a girl who worked for her sister at CabanaTan. Lenore lived with Mandible. I see her thanking me for the ginger ale and the ride. I see me leaning, lunging over the rustle of the white collar of her dress and kissing her before she has finished saying thank you. I see her kicking me, in the knee, where the knee nerve is, with a sneaker that is revealed to be surprisingly heavy and hard. I see me squealing and holding my knee and sitting down heavily on a step of the porch bristling with nails. I see me howling and holding my knee with one hand and my ass with the other and pitching headlong into an empty flowerbed of soft spring earth. I see Lenore kneeling beside me — how sorry, she didn’t know what made her do that, I had surprised her, she had been taken by surprise, oh shit what had she done. I see me with dirt in my nose, I see lights going on in the gray house, in other houses. I am horribly sensitive to pain and almost begin to cry. I see Lenore run through the door of the oral surgeon’s house. I see my car tilting ever closer as I hop madly toward it on one leg. I am convinced that I heard the voice of Candy Mandible high overhead.

I knew that I loved Lenore Beadsman when she failed to appear for work the next day. Mandible informed me with wide eyes that Lenore had assumed she was fired. I called Lenore’s landlady, the surgeon’s wife, a two-hundred-pound Bible-thumping bom-again fanatic. I asked her to inform Lenore that she was in fact not fired. I apologized to Lenore. She was incredibly embarrassed. I was embarrassed. Her supervisor, the switchboard supervisor, Walinda Peahen, really did want to fire Lenore, ostensibly for not showing up for work. Walinda dislikes Lenore for her privileged background. I am Walinda’s supervisor. I soothed her. Lenore began to hand me my paper as before.

Where are you now?

For there was the magic night later, a magic night, untalka boutable, when my heart was full of heat and my bottom had healed and I left the office in a trance before six, descended, on wire, saw across the dark empty stone lobby Lenore in her cubicle, alone, for the moment Priethtless, reading, the switchboard mute as usual. I slipped across the blackly shadowed floor and melted into the white desk-lamp light of the tiny office, behind Lenore at her console. She looked up at me and smiled and looked back down at her book. She was not reading. Through the giant window high over the cubicle a thin spear of the orange-brown light of a Cleveland sunset, saved and bent for a moment by some kindly chemical cloud around the Erieview blackness, fell like a beacon on the soft patch of cream just below Lenore’s right ear, on her throat. I bent in my trance and pressed my lips gently to the spot. The sudden beeping of the switchboard mechanism was the beating of my heart, transported into Lenore’s purse.

And Lenore Beadsman slowly took her right hand and slid it back up my own neck, cradling with soft hesitant warmth the right side of my jaw and cheek, her long fingers with their dull bitten nails holding me in position against her throat, comforting, her head now tilted left so I could feel the tiny thunder of an artery against my lips. I lived, truly and completely and for the first time in a very long time, in that moment. Lenore said, “Frequent and Vigorous” into the phone she held with her left hand, looking out into the approaching black. The magic of the night was that the magic has lasted. Come to work.

/b/

— Frequent and Vigorous. Frequent and Vigorous.

— Ms. Beadsman?

— Yes?

— David Bloemker.

— Mr. Bloemker!

— Ms. Beadsman, you are at… Frequent and Vigorous Publishing, are you not?

— Yes, why do—?

— I’m afraid I just dialed your number and spoke to a young lady who proposed to have me pay her for hurting me.

— We’re having horrible mix-ups with our phone lines, is all. Have you—?

— No, unfortunately no. There are in addition, we find, one unfindable resident and one staff member.

— Pardon?

— Twenty-six missing, now.

— Sheesh.

— Have you been able to contact your father yet, Ms. Beadsman?

— His line’s been busy. He talks on the phone at the office a lot. I was just about to try again. I’ll have him call you, I promise.

— Thanks ever so. Again, please allow me to say just how sorry I am.

— OK, go ahead.

— Pardon me?

— Look, I’ve got a call waiting, I can see. I have to go. I’ll be in touch.

— Thank you.

— Frequent and Vigorous.

— What are you… wearing?

— Excuse me?

— Are you… warmer than average, shall we say?

— Sir, this is the publishing firm of Frequent and Vigorous. Are you trying to reach Cleveland Dial-a-Darling?

— Oh. Well, yes. How embarrassing.

— Not at all. Shall I give you that number, though it may not work?

— Wait a minute. What are your own thoughts on pudding?

— Goodbye.

— Click.

— What a day….

— Stonecipheco Baby Food Products.

— President’s office, please, Lenore Beadsman calling.

— One moment.

— … At least it’s not busy.

— President’s office, Foamwhistle.

— Sigurd. Lenore.

— Lenore. What’s goopin‘?

— May I please speak to my father?

— Impossible.

— Emergency.

— Not here.

— Shit on a twig.

— Sorry.

— Listen, big emergency. He had someone ask me to call him right away. Family emergency.

— He’s really unreachable right now, Lenore.

— Where is he?

— Annual summit with Gerber’s. It’s August, after all.

— Rats.

— Trying to mess with the old creamed-fruit demand curve.

— Sigurd, it could literally be life or death.

— Phoneless, sweet thing. You know the rules. You know how Gerber is.

— How long?

— Not sure. Not more than a couple, three days.

— Where are they?

— Not allowed to say.

— Sigurd.

— Corfu. Some dark and secluded spot on Corfu. All I know. I’ll be murdered if he knows I told. I’ll end up in a thousand jars of the whipped lamb, while the little Foamwhistles ironically starve.

— When did he leave?

— Yesterday, right after tennis with Spaniard, about eleven.

— How come you’re not with him, secretarying? Who’ll make his Manhattans?

— Roughing it. Didn’t want me. Just him and Gerber, he said. Man to man. They may arm-wrestle, who knows? Alternately poking each other in the ribs, singing Amherst songs, trying to sink knives in each other’s backs. A market-share struggle is not a pretty sight.

— Damn it, he told me to call him, and this was like this morning. He’s got to… hey, you haven’t heard from Dad’s grandmother, have you?

— Lenore? No, thank God. Is she OK?

— Yes. Listen, I’m desperate, here. When exactly do you think he’ll be back?

— There’s an enormous skull on my tentative calendar in the square marked three days from now. That can only mean one thing.

— Hot spit in a hole.

— Listen, seriously, if there’s anything I can do…

— Sweet Sigurd. My thing’s lighting. I have another call. I have to go.

— Stay in touch.

— Bye… wait!

— What?

— What about Rummage? Did he take Rummage?

— Hey now, I don’t know. That’s definitely a thought. Try over at Rummage and Naw. You have the number?

— Are you kidding? Numbers I’ve got.

— So long.

— Frequent and Vigorous.

/c/

Which is of course not and never to say that things have been unceasingly rosy. My inability to be truly inside of and surrounded by Lenore Beadsman arouses in me the purely natural reactive desire to have her inside of and contained by me. I am possessive. I want to own her, sometimes. And this of course does not sit well with a girl thoroughly frightened of the possibility that she does not own herself.

I am madly jealous. Lenore has a quality that attracts men. It is not a normal quality, or a quality that can be articulated. “…,” he said, about to try to articulate it. “Vulnerability” is of course a bad word. “Playfulness” will not do. These both denote, and so fail. Lenore has the quality of a sort of game about her. There. Since that makes very little sense it may be right. Lenore soundlessly invites one to play a game consisting of involved attempts to find out the game’s own rules. How about that. The rules of the game are Lenore, and to play is to be played. Find out the rules of my game, she laughs, with or at. Over the board fall shadows like the teeth of fences: the Erieview Tower, Lenore’s father, Dr. Jay, Lenore’s great-grandmother.

Lenore sometimes sings in the shower, loudly and well, Lord knows she gets enough practice, and I will hunch on the toilet or lean against the sink and read submissions and smoke clove cigarettes, a habit I appropriated from Lenore herself.

Lenore’s relationship with her great-grandmother is not a wholesome thing. I’ve met the woman once or twice, mercifully short appointments in a room so hot it was literally hard to breathe. She is a small, birdish, sharp-featured thing, desperately old. She is not spry. One is not even vaguely tempted ever to say “Bless her heart.” She is a hard woman, a cold woman, a querulous and thoroughly selfish woman, one with vast intellectual pretensions and, I suppose, probably commensurate gifts. She indoctrinates Lenore. She and Lenore “talk for hours.” Rather Lenore listens. There is something sour and unsavory about it. Lenore Beadsman will not tell me anything important about her relationship with Lenore Beadsman. She says nothing to Dr. Jay either, unless the little bastard is holding back one last card on me.

It’s clear, though, that this is a great-grandmother with Views. I believe she is harming Lenore, and I believe she knows that she is, and I believe she does not really care. She has, from what little I can gather, convinced Lenore that she is in possession of some words of tremendous power. No, really. Not things, or concepts. Words. The woman is apparently obsessed with words. I neither am nor wish to be entirely clear on the matter, but apparently she was some sort of phenomenon in college and won a place in graduate study at Cambridge, no small feat for a woman, in the twenties; but in any event, there she studied classics and philosophy and who knows what else under a mad crackpot genius named Wittgenstein, who believed that everything was words. Really. If your car would not start, it was apparently to be understood as a language problem. If you were unable to love, you were lost in language. Being constipated equalled being clogged with linguistic sediment. To me the whole thing smacks strongly of bullshit, but old Lenore Beadsman quite definitely bought it, and has had seventy years to simmer and distill the brew she pours in Lenore’s heat-softened porches every week. She teases Lenore with a certain strange book, the way an exceptionally cruel child might tease an animal with a bit of food, intimating that the book has some special significance for Lenore, but refusing to tell her what it is, “yet,” or to show her the book, “yet.” Words and a book and a belief that the world is words and Lenore’s conviction that her own intimate personal world is only of, neither by nor for, her. Something is not right. She is in pain. I would like the old lady to die in her sleep.

Her daughter is in the same Home, over twenty years younger, a beautiful old woman, I’ve seen her, clear brown eyes and soft cheeks the color of a gently blooming rose and hair like liquid silver. An absolute idiot with Alzheimer‘s, unaware of who or where she is, a drooler out of moist, beautiful, perfectly preserved lips. Lenore hates her; both Lenores hate her. I do not know why this is so.

Lenore’s great-grandmother’s hair is white as cotton and hangs in bangs and curls down on either side of her head nearly to meet in points below her chin, like the mandibles of an insect.

Often we’ll lie together and Lenore will ask me to tell her a story. “A story, please,” she’ll say. I will tell her what people tell to me, what people ask me to like and allow others to like, what they send me in their brown manilas and scrawled stamped return envelopes and cover-letters signed “Aspiringly Yours,” at the Frequent Review. Telling stories that are not my own is at this point what I do, after all. With Lenore I am completely and entirely myself.

But I get sad. I miss my son. I do not miss Veronica. Veronica was beautiful. Lenore is pretty, and she has a quality we’ve decided is game-related. Veronica was beautiful. But a beauty like a frozen dawn, dazzling and achingly remote. She was cool and firm and smooth to the touch, decorated with soft, chilly blond hair wherever appropriate, graceful but not delicate, pleasant but not kind. Veronica was a seamless and flawless joy to behold and hold… exactly up to the point where one’s interests conflicted with hers. Between Veronica and all others there lay the echoing chasm of Interest, a chasm impossible to bridge because it turned out to have only one side. The Veronica side. Which is, I have come to see, simply another way of saying that Veronica was incapable of love. At least of loving me.

Physically the marriage went from being a horror to being nothing at all. I cannot think, much less tell, of our wedding night, when all manner of shams were exposed. Finally Veronica came to accept and even appreciate the situation; it saved her effort and the tangy embarrassment of being embarrassed for me. To my knowledge she did not go elsewhere. Her existence, like her beauty and real worth, was intrinsically aesthetic, not physical or emotional. Veronica would be most comfortable, I remain convinced, as a human exhibit, motionless in the cool bright comer of a public hall, surrounded by a square of red velvet no-touch ropes, hearing only whispered voices and heels on tile. Veronica is now living on my support checks and preparing, I am told, to marry a quite old and thoroughly likeable man who owns a New York company involved in the manufacture of power-plant instrumentation. Go with God.

I miss my son, though. Which is not to say that I miss an eighteen-year-old Fordham aesthete whose long nails glitter with transparent polish and who wears pants without pockets. I miss my son. My child. He was a magical child, I’m thoroughly convinced. Special, special qualities. A special and hilarious infant. Veronica drew the first of many lines at changing diapers, so I would usually change our baby. I would change his diapers, and often as not, as he lay on his back, with little legs of dough kicking, as I removed soggy old hot or ominously heavy diaper and manipulated crinkly new plastic Pamper, he would urinate up onto my hanging necktie, a pale, sweetly thin jet, and there would be smells of powder, and my tie would be heavy at my throat, and would drip, and we would laugh together, toothless he and sad, sleepy I, at my urine-soaked tie. I still own some of these ties, stiff and hard and dull; they hang on little toothed racks and clunk against my closet door when the winds of memory blow through the dark places in my apartment.

This was a boy with an intimate but strange relation to the world around him, a dark-eyed silent boy who from the age of independent decision and movement reflected the world in his own special, wobbled mirror. Vance was for me a reflection. Vance would act out History and Event inside his own child’s world.

At a very young age, very young, Vance would choose dark clothes, tie string around his head, put candy cigarettes in his mouth, and launch sudden, stealthy raids into rooms of the house, breathing hard and whirling, beating the air with his fists, finally diving behind furniture, crawling on his belly, clawing the air with a hooked finger. A lightning raid on the kitchen — the cat’s food would disappear. A silent assault on my den — in the leg of my desk would appear the vertical scratch of a pin. A careless squad of patio ants would walk into ambush and be efficiently obliterated via tennis-ball bombardment as Veronica and I looked on and at each other over gin-and-tonics. We were puzzled and frightened, and Veronica suspected motor dysfunction, until we noticed Vance’s eyes one night during dinner as on the evening news, correspondents brought us another installment of the death throes of the war in Indochina. Vance’s unblinking eyes and soundless breathing. And as Kissinger left Paris triumphant, a home in Scarsdale demilitarized.

Sometimes in those days too we would find Vance alone in a room, facing the blank comer in which he stood, both arms stiffly upraised and two fingers of each hand out in Peace-signs. It began to become clear that, through the miracle of televsion, Vance Vigorous enjoyed a special relationship with Richard Nixon. As Wa tergate wore on in brilliant color, Vance took to furtive looks, pinched whiteness around the bridge of his nose, refusals to explain his whereabouts or give reasons for what he did. My tape recorder — admittedly tapeless and not even plugged in but nevertheless my tape recorder — began to appear places: under the dining room table at dinner, in the back seat of the car, under our bed, in the drawer of the mail table. Vance would, when confronted, look blankly at the tape recorder and at us. Then he would pretend to look at his watch. After the resignation, Vance was sick in bed for a week, with very real symptoms. We were frightened. There followed years in which he silently but with formal expression forgave every apparent wrong done him by us and the world; would fall and cover his chest with his hands at the slightest criticism; would flip backwards off the couch in the living room and land nicely on both feet, putting cracks in the ceiling each time; would wear his tiny suit to school and enlist a follower to carry the tiny briefcase he insisted we give him for Christmas; would walk blindfolded through rooms littered with torn drawings of the flag. Who knew what most of this was. This was the world the monadic Vance Vigorous received and mirrored through himself. I preferred him to the world, really.

He was a great athlete as a child, a maker of solid clanks with aluminum Little League baseball bats, heavy whumps with hard autumn footballs, gentle tissued whispers with the nets of basketball hoops. He could run sweeps in children’s football, could run so fast and with such liquidly curving, teasing grace that he could make other boys fall down just trying to touch him. Feel what I felt in my chest, the little man in the beret, long coat whipped by the wind, watching the fruit of my loins. Vance was a boy who could make touchdowns from far away, make PeeWee mothers yell shrilly and release plastic-wrapped hair to clap into my ear, small-sounding outdoor claps, away on the wind like tattered things, as were the thuds of my leather gloves. The one little boy in those games on whom the helmet did not seem huge and hilariously out of place. A gracious blond black-eyed boy who never bragged and always helped others to their feet and gave credit where credit was due, before returning home, silent in the car beside me, to play Iranian hostage in his bedroom.

His last great historical act came when he was eleven, as school was beginning. A jumbo jet was brought down over a sea by a Russian fighter, killing congressmen and nuns and children, sending shoes and shirtsleeves and paperbacks and eyeglass frames floating onto the northern shores of Japan. Vance would stare for hours at magazine pictures of the plane’s passengers, photos served up in large and vivid detail, family snapshots against green backyard colors, stiff yearbook photos, three-for-a-quarter shots of cheerleaders in Groucho noses; he looked at the eyes of the people in the pictures. One day soon after, he climbed onto the roof of the house and jumped off. All without a sound. Our house had only a basement and one story. The fall was twelve feet and sprained his ankle very thoroughly. Vance apologized. The next day he jumped off the roof again and broke a foot. He was taken to the hospital and moved from floor to floor, and was finally taken to a doctor off Central Park who somehow in one visit “cured” Vance of whatever ailed him. Vance never jumped or raided or fell or mimicked again. Veronica was very pleased. I had never thought there was anything particularly wrong with Vance at all, though of course jumping from high places was unacceptable. I was sad.

We entered a sad, sad time. As Vance grew older, I grew younger and sadder. Veronica retreated ever farther into her crystal case of polite indifference. Vance began, at her urging, listlessly to date girls, never went anywhere with one more than once, as far as I could tell. Vance waited silently for puberty and puberty waited until Vance was fifteen; he lost his size and strength advantage, and there were no more cold windy afternoons on crunchy sidelines. Only sounds of music from under Vance’s door, and colored chalk on his fingers, and black circles under his black eyes, and the beautiful, beautiful drawings — flat and clear and sad as our cement drive, smooth and clean and as devoid of interstices as his mother — and the softly persistent sweet smell of marijuana from my son’s basement room. Vance is now at Fordham, studying art. I have not talked to Vance in almost a year. I do not know why this is so.

I miss Vance with a fierceness we reserve for the absent who cannot return. Vance no longer exists. He was pithed in a Park Avenue office in 1983 by a man who charged us a hundred dollars for the procedure. Vance is, I happen to know for a fact, a homosexual, and probably a drug addict, washed and turning slowly in the odorless breezes of his mother’s cold Scarsdale breath, producing his flat and soulless perfect chalk drawings with greater and greater precision. I have received one: a startled me in the lawn with my rake, Veronica appearing incongruously over my shoulder, carrying something to drink on a black tray. The picture was sent me in a brown envelope, in care of the Frequent Review, and so not even opened for weeks.

I miss Lenore, sometimes. I miss everyone. I can remember being young and feeling a thing and identifying it as homesickness, and then thinking well now that’s odd, isn’t it, because I was home, all the time. What on earth are we to make of that?

I miss and love with all my purple fist a strange girl from a flamboyant and frightening family, in many ways a flamboyant and frightening girl, perched high in the crow’s nest of the Frequent and Vigorous vessel, scanning gray electrical expanses for the lonely spout of a legitimate telephone call. I am lately informed by Ms. Peahen that the possibility of such a call is, now, thanks to some malfunction in the phone system of which we are a part, even more remote than before. As I sit here, the block of the Erieview shadow slowly dips my office in liquid darkness. Halfway, now. It is one o‘clock. My lights turn the shadow half of the office to licorice, and make the half still under the influence of the sun a glinting yellow-white horror at which I may not look. Lenore, I shall try once more, and if you are not here I will assume the worst, and will succumb finally to the charms of Moses Cleaveland, who even now grins and beckons whitely from the pavement six floors below. This is our last chance.

/d/

As Lenore sifted through a tidal wave of misdirected calls and got ready to try to call Karl Rummage over at Rummage and Naw, Walinda Peahen appeared in the cubicle behind the switchboard counter.

“Hi Walinda,” Lenore said. Walinda ignored her and began to look through the Legitimate Call Log, a desperately thin notebook with one or two pages filled. Judith Prietht had hit her Position Busy button and was talking to a girlfriend on the private line.

“What these messages for you in the Log in Candy’s writing?” Walinda turned-and looked down at Lenore from under green eye shadow.

“I guess if they’re legitimate then they’re messages for me,” said Lenore.

“Girl I ain’t playin’ with you, so I wish you’d learn not to play. You supposed to be here at ten. There’s messages for you here at eleven and eleven-thirty.”

“I was unavoidably detained. Candy said she’d cover.”

“That flakey Frequent and Vigorous girl is getting chewed out by her supervisor,” Judith Prietht was saying into her phone, watching.

“Girl detained where? How do I look if I think somebody workin’ and they not?”

“I had to go to the nursing home.”

“What time she get here?” Walinda asked Judith Prietht.

“Look, I don’t want to say anything, I don’t want to get her in trouble,” Judith said to Walinda. Into the phone she said, “The supervisor wanted me to say when she got here, but I said I wouldn‘t, I didn’t want to get her in trouble.”

“I got here at like a little after twelve.”

“Like a little after twelve. Girl that’s over two hours late.”

“It was an emergency.”

“What kind of goddamn emergency?”

Judith Prietht had stopped talking into the phone and was watching intently.

“I can’t tell you right at the moment, Walinda,” Lenore said.

“Girl, you gone, you done, I don’t care who you doin’ up, you can’t play. You done played the last time.”

The console began to beep, the light with a quick, in-house flash.

“Don’t even get it, you gone,” Walinda said to Lenore. She reached for the phone and Accessed. “Operator…” Her eyebrows plunged. “Yes she is, Mr. Vigorous. Hold on one moment please.” She held her hand over the phone as she passed it to Lenore. “I don’t care what you get the little pecker to say, you gone,” she hissed.

“She’s really in trouble, it looks like, for a change,” said Judith into her phone.

“Hi Rick.”

6. 1990

/a/

“How are your steaks, tonight?”

“Our steaks, sir, are if I may say so quite simply superb. Only the choicest cuts of beef, carefully selected and even more carefully aged, cooked to perfection as perfection is defined by your instructions, served with your choice of potato and vegetable and richly delicious dessert.”

“Sounds scrumptious.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll have nine.”

“Pardon me?”

“Bring me nine steaks, please.”

“You want nine steak dinners?”

“Please.”

“And who, sir, may I ask is going to eat them?”

“You see anybody else sitting here? I’m going to eat them.”

“And how on earth are you going to do that, sir?”

“Well, gee, let’s see, I think I’ll use my right hand to cut, tonight. I’ll put pieces into my mouth, I’ll masticate, acidic elements in my saliva will begin breaking down the muscle fiber. I’ll swallow. Et cetera. Bring ‘em on!”

“Sir, nine steaks would make anyone sick.”

“Look at me. Look at this stomach. Do you think I’ll get sick? No way. Come here — no, really, come around and look at this stomach. Let me lift up my shirt… here. See how much I can grab with my hand? I can’t even sit close to the table. Have you ever seen anything so hugely disgusting in your whole life?”

“I’ve seen bigger stomachs.”

“You’re just being polite, you just want a tip. You’ll get your tip, after you’ve brought me nine steak dinners, with perfection being defined as medium-rare, which is to say pink yet firm. And don’t forget the rolls.”

“Sir, this is simply beyond my range of experience. I’ve never served any one individual nine simultaneous orders on my own authority. I could get in horrible trouble. What if, for example, you have an embolism, God forbid? You could rupture organs.”

“Didn’t I say to look at me? Can’t you tell what I am? Listen to me very carefully. I am an obese, grotesque, prodigal, greedy, gour mandizing, gluttonous pig. Is this not clear? I am more hog than human. There is room, physical room, for you in my stomach. Do you hear? You see before you a swine. An eating fiend of unlimited capacity. Bring me meat.”

“Have you not eaten in a very long time? Is that it?”

“Look, you’re beginning to bother me. I could bludgeon you with my belly. I am also, allow me to tell you, more than a little well-to-do. Do you see that Building over there, the one with the lit windows, in the shadow? I own that Building. I could buy this restaurant and have you terminated. I could and perhaps will buy this entire block, including that symbolically tiny Weight Watchers establishment across the street. See it? With the door and windows so positioned as to form a grinning, leering, hollow-cheeked face? It is within my financial power to buy that place, and to fill it with steaks, fill it with red steak, all of which I would and will eat. The door would under this scenario be jammed with a gnawed bone; not a single little smug psalm-singing baggy-skinned apostate from the cause of adiposity would be able to enter. They would pound on the door, pound. But the bone would hold. They’d lack the bulk to burst through. Their mouths and eyes would be wide as they pressed against the glass. I would demolish, physically crush the huge scale at the end of the brightly lit nave at the back of the place under a weight of food. The springs would jut out. Jut. What a delicious series of thoughts. May I see a wine list?”

“Weight Watchers?”

“Garçon, what you have before you is a dangerous thing, I warn you. Human beings act in their own interest. Huge, crazed swine do not. My wife informed me a certain time-interval ago that if I did not lose weight, she would leave me. I have not lost weight, as a matter of fact I have gained weight, and thus she is leaving. Q.E.D. And A-1, don’t forget the A-1.”

“But sir, surely with more time…”

“There is no more time. Time does not exist. I ate it. It’s in here, see? See the jiggle? That’s time, jiggling. Run, run away, fetch me my platter of fat, my nine cattle, or I’ll envelop you in a chin and fling you at the wall!”

“Shall I fetch the maître d‘, sir? To confer?”

“By all means, fetch him. But warn him against getting too close. He will be encompassed instantly, before he has time to squeak. Tonight I will eat. Hugely, and alone. For I am now hugely alone. I will eat, and juice might very well spurt into the air around me, and if anyone comes too near, I will snarl and jab at them with my fork — like this, see?”

“Sir, really!”

“Run for your very life. Fetch something to placate me. I’m going to grow and grow, and fill the absence that surrounds me with the horror of my own gelatinous presence. Yin and Yang. Ever growing, waiter. Run!”

“Right away, sir!”

“Some breadsticks might have been nice, too, do you hear? What kind of place is this, anyway?”

/b/

“I insist that you tell me.”

“Could you just possibly wait, for about nine tenths of a second, while I decide how to tell you?”

“What does deciding have to do with it? There’s a thing, and here am I, tell me the thing, voilà. Clearly there’s something bothering you.”

“Look, I’m obviously going to tell you, OK? Don’t have a spasm. It’s just that the thing I have to tell is, a, unbelievably weird, and I don’t even really understand it…”

“So let’s have both our powers of understanding leveled at the thing, together. Whose power of understanding and persuasion soothed a potentially disastrously pissed-off Walinda for you, after all?”

“… and b, is something I was told not to tell, so I have to figure out a way to tell you in a way that’s going to least compromise my promise not to tell, and least make anything bad happen to the person whom the thing concerns.”

“Clear as a bell. As clear as this water glass, Lenore.”

“Don’t flick your water glass. Look, you said this place had really great steaks, and you said you were starving, so why don’t you just concentrate on the impending arrival of your steak, which I sort of think is coming right now?”

“….”

“Looks super, thank you. Rick, would we care for wine?”

“Yes.”

“What kind?”

“… ”

“What kind?”

“…. ”

“We’ll maybe just have a bottle of your house red, if that’s OK…. You are a baby. You have the understanding and compassion of a very very small child, sometimes.”

“Lenore, it’s simply that I love you. You know that. Every fiber of your being is loved by every fiber of my being. The thought of things about you, concerning you, troubling you, that I don’t know about, makes blood run from my eyes, on the inside.”

“Interesting image. Look, try your steak. You said you were in a position to eat a horse.”

“…. ”

“Does that hit the spot?”

“My spot is reeling under the force of the blow. Now I insist that you tell me.”

“…. ”

“Does this have to do with your trying to call that Rummage person while I was busy keeping Walinda from forcing me to choose between her services and yours, even though she was hired by Frequent himself? Shall I simply get up and go call Rummage right now?”

“He’s not there. He’s not here.”

“…. ”

“He’s apparently out of the country, with my father.”

“Doing what?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Is this the same ‘I can’t tell you,’ or a different one?”

“Different. ”

“Deeply hurt and pissed off, now.”

“Look, can I just assure you that I’ll tell you later, and not tell you now, and think, and eat my salad? Would that be OK? I’ll stay at your place tonight, which I actually really want to do, even though I told Candy I’d be back home tonight, and we’ll talk. I really do need your advice. Yours especially, Rick. I just have to figure out what’s going on myself, first, for a second, OK?”

“It’s really quite bad, and it has to do with the nursing home, and no one has passed away.”

“Eat your steak.”

“I only—”

“Rick, who’s that?”

“Where?”

“Over there, by himself, at that table?”

“You don’t know who that is?”

“No.”

“That’s Norman Bombardini. Our landlord and Building-mate, of Bombardini Company and skeleton eye-socket fame.”

“He’s a large person.”

“He is large.”

“Gigantic, is more like it. Why’s he snarling and gnawing on the edge of the table?”

“Good Lord. My understanding, which I get mostly from War-shaver over at the club, is that these are just not good times for Norman. Problems with his wife. Problems with his health.”

“He looks like he really needs to lose some weight.”

“I guess he’s tried, off and on, for years. An interesting man. War-shaver hints around that his company is on the verge of a real—”

“Oh my God.”

“What?”

“Look at what the waiter’s bringing.”

“Good Lord.”

“There is just no way someone can eat all that.”

“Poor Norman.”

“Oh, that’s sick. He could at least wait till the waiter put it on the table.”

“Must be really hungry.”

“Nobody’s that hungry. And did he just try to bite the waiter? Was that an attempted bite?”

“Must be the light in here.”

“He’s really making a mess.”

“I’ve never seen him like this.”

“He’s getting juice on the people at the other tables. That lady just put her napkin on her head!”

“Is that a napkin? It’s really quite fetching.”

“You’re horrible. Look, they’re having to leave.”

“Well, it looked like they were almost done, anyway.”

“Well I’m not. I’m not going to look anymore.”

“Probably wise.”

“….”

“….”

“But I can’t really help hearing, now, can I?”

“Unfortunately not.”

“God, look at that, he’s almost done with all that. He has eaten a literal mountain of food in about two minutes.”

“Well, a lot of it’s on the floor, too, after all.”

“I think I’m going to be physically ill.”

“I’m frankly worried. This has almost taken my mind off your present lack of trust in me. Norman is not right.”

“How come I’ve never seen him? I see his car all the time, in that space.”

“I think there are size problems with the front door. He has a special entrance on the east side. Elevator. Reinforced cables.”

“Wow.”

“….”

“Did he finish all that? Is he finished?”

“He’s certainly slowing down. I sense something missing, though. See the way he’s looking around?”

“Dear God, Rick, look at the floor.”

“Dessert. That’s what’s missing. And here comes the waiter.”

“Laws of nature will be violated if he eats all that and doesn’t die.”

“Lenore, listen, I think we should go over and see if there’s anything we can do.”

“Are you joking? I think that’s an insane person, over there. I don’t think it was the light, I think he really tried to bite the waiter. See the way the waiter’s just sort of tossing the desserts onto the table from a safe distance?”

“Norman’s sated, though, you can tell. The desserts are going at a normal rate, more or less.”

“You’ve still got a lot of your own steak left, you know.”

“The steak will keep. I feel vicariously gorged, anyway.”

“What are you doing? Are you kidding? You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Come on.”

“Big mistake, Rick. Not something I wish to do.”

“Be a sport.”

“How are we going to get over there?”

“Serpentine. Follow me. Watch the—”

“I see it.”

“Norman?”

“Who’s that?”

“Rick Vigorous, Norman.”

“Not a good time, Vigorous. The beast is at trough, as you can see.”

“Norman, we were just at the other table, there, just beyond the vegetables, see?”

“….”

“… And thought we’d come over to see if anything in particular might be the tiniest bit wrong, and to introduce this young lady I’m with, who works in the Building, and whom you may or may not know.”

“I don’t think I know you, no.”

“Norman Bombardini may I present Ms. Lenore Beadsman, Lenore, Mr. Bombardini.”

“Pleased to meet you.”

“Beadsman. Not related to Stonecipher Beadsman, by any chance?”

“Lenore is Mr. Beadsman’s daughter.”

“Daughter. Interesting. Stonecipheco Baby Foods. Not a bad line of products, really. A bit soft and runny for my taste, of course….”

“Well, it’s infant food, really, Norman.”

“… but any port in the proverbial storm. Please feel free to sit down.”

“Shall we?”

“Ummm…”

“Let’s.”

“Just put the plates anywhere at all. You probably don’t want to sit in that chair, at all, Ms. Beadsman, I predict.”

“Not really.”

“Here’s another one.” “….”

“So, Norman.”

“I don’t suppose either of you would care for a bit of eclair?”

“No thank you.”

“No thanks, Norman, really. ”

“Well, it’s just as well, because you can’t have any. They’re mine. I paid for them and they’re mine.”

“No one disputes that.”

“Staked your claim pretty thoroughly, I’d say.”

“Ms. Beadsman, you’re not one of those spunky girls, are you? One of those girls with spunk? My wife has spunk. Or rather she had spunk. Or rather she was my wife. Spunk is apt to make me uncontrollably ravenous, thus representing not an insignificant hazard to the possessor thereof.”

“Lenore is comparatively devoid of spunk, really.”

“Thanks, Rick.”

“So, Norman. How are things?”

“Things are huge and grotesque and disgusting, Vigorous; surely you can see that.”

“Pretty keen analysis, really.”

“Careful, Ms. Beadsman. That was spunky, in my opinion.”

“Norman, I couldn’t help noticing that you’re having rather more for dinner than seems completely natural. Or healthy.”

“I’d go along with that, Vigorous.”

“So I presume something is the matter.”

“Astute as always.”

“….”

“You want to know the story? I’d be happy to tell you. I think I have just enough caloric energy stored up to make it through the telling of the tale. It’s short. I am monstrously fat. I am a glutton. My wife was disgusted and repulsed. She gave me six months to lose one hundred pounds. I joined Weight Watchers… see it there, right across the street, that gaunt storefront? This afternoon was the big six-month weigh-in. So to speak. I had gained almost seventy pounds in the six months. An errant Snickers bar fell out of the cuff of my pants and rolled against my wife’s foot as I stepped on the scale. The scale over there across the street is truly an ingenious device. One preprograms the desired new weight into it, and if one has achieved or gone below that new low weight, the scale bursts into recorded whistles and cheers and some lively marching-band tune. Apparently, tiny flags protrude from the top and wave mechanically back and forth. A failure — see for instance mine — results in a flatulent dirge of disappointed and contemptuous tuba. To the strains of the latter my wife left, the establishment, me, on the arm of a svelte yogurt distributor whom I am even now planning to crush, financially speaking, first thing tomorrow morning. Ms. Beadsman, you will find an eclair on the floor to the left of your chair. Could you perhaps manipulate it onto this plate with minimal chocolate loss and pass it to me.”

“….”

“Marvelous.”

“Still, though, Norman, I know you to be a highly intelligent man. Surely turbulence with the wife is no reason to eat like this. To self-destruct. A purported failure at Weight Watchers… to hell with Weight Watchers!”

“No, Vigorous; as usual, no. I have come to see this afternoon that Weight Watchers — and diet enterprises, diet books, diet personalities, and diet cults in general — that they are almost inconceivably deep and profound things. They have tapped into a universe-view with which I find myself in complete agreement.”

“A universe-view? Norman, I—”

“I see you’re interested, Ms. Beadsman. Have I interested you?”

“Sort of.”

“No small feat, I imagine, to interest a spunky, sharp-haired girl.”

“….”

“Yin and Yang, Vigorous. Yin and Yang. Self and Other.”

“….”

“Weight Watchers holds as a descriptive axiom the transparently true fact that for each of us the universe is deeply and sharply and completely divided into for example in my case, me, on one side, and everything else, on the other. This for each of us exhaustively defines the whole universe, Vigorous. The whole universe. Self and Other.”

“Sounds uncontroversial to me, Norman.”

“Yes and also not only that each of our universes has this feature, but that we are by nature without exception aware of the fact that the universe is so divided, into Self, on one hand, and Other, on the other. Exhaustively divided. It’s part of our consciousness.”

“Okey dokey. ”

“And then they hold as a prescriptive axiom the undoubtedly equally true and inarguable fact that we each ought to desire our own universe to be as full as possible, that the Great Horror consists in an empty, rattling personal universe, one where one finds oneself with Self, on one hand, and vast empty lonely spaces before Others begin to enter the picture at all, on the other. A non-full universe. Loneliness, Vigorous. Weight Watchers sees itself as a warrior in the great war against loneliness. Is that not noble? One moment. You, waiter! I wouldn’t say no to a mint, you know! Feel free to bring some mints! Excuse me. Loneliness. Balance. The emptier one’s universe is, the worse it is. This we all surely accept. Do either of you not accept this?”

“….”

“….”

“Now, Weight Watchers perceives the problem as one involving the need to have as much Other around as possible, so that the relation is one of minimum Self to maximum Other. This is a valid though, as I’ve seen this afternoon, by no means exclusive way to attack the problem. Are you getting my drift, Vigorous?”

“Well, a drift is such a—”

“It occurs to me that I couldn’t care less. A full universe, Vigorous, Ms. Beadsman. We each need a full universe. Weight Watchers and their allies would have us systematically decrease the Self-component of the universe, so that the great Other-set will be physically attracted to the now more physically attractive Self, and rush in to fill the void caused by that diminution of Self. Certainly not incorrect, but just as certainly only half of the range of valid solutions to the full-universe problem. Is my drift getting palpable? Just as in genetic engineering, Vigorous. There is always more than one solution.”

“I think I—”

“An autonomously full universe, Vigorous. An autonomously full universe, Ms. Beadsman.”

“What should I do with these mints, here?”

“I’ll just take the bowl, thank you. Rather than diminishing Self to entice Other to fill our universe, we may also of course obviously choose to fill the universe with Self.”

“You mean…?”

“Yes. I plan to grow to infinite size.”

“Do I recall saying big mistake? Did I mention decks not being completely full?”

“Lenore, please. Norman, friend, really. A universe-view is one thing. No one can grow to infinite size.”

“Has anyone ever tried?”

“Not to my knowledge, no, but…”

“Then do me the kindness not to shrilly monger finite failure until I’ve tried. No one had ever been able to give butter life, either, but…”

“What was that?”

“Nothing. To be ignored. A slip of the tongue.” “….”

“Yes and tonight Project Total Yang begins. I am going to grow and grow and grow. There will of course eventually cease to be room for anyone else in the universe at all, which I’m afraid will also mean the two of you, for which I apologize, but say also tough titty.”

“Really, enjoyed it a lot, we’ll have to do it again. We better go, my salad is attracting a fly, over there, I can see.”

“Looks yummy.”

“Unfortunately it’s mine and not yet part of your universe, at least temporarily. Rick, should we just wade on back over… ^?”

“Norman, I simply would not be honest if I didn’t say right up front that I’m worried about you, about your emotional outlook, given what you’ve told me of your day today, with its attendant strains.”

“Won’t be an outlook, eventually. Only an inlook. I just hope I can financially crush that yogurt distributor before there ceases to be any meaningful difference between him and me. The light green mints are particularly good here, I think. You may if you wish each have one.”

“…. ”

“…. ”

“Really quite good. Of course one other advantage of my approach to the Yin/Yang problem is that dieting becomes the worst possible thing to do. I find dieting makes me insanely angry at everything. Dieting makes me want to murder everyone around me.”

“Instead of merely appropriating their space.”

“You are not un-sharp, are you? Rather like your father. Your father whips a mean carrot. I could, of course, leave selected small comers of the universe unfilled for those who might arouse in me feelings of affection and attachment.”

“I’ll get back to you, probably, if things begin to crowd.”

“Norman, friend, simply know that I am around and available should you ever wish to talk, I’ll not say chew the fat, or perhaps should you simply wish to pal around. I am around for you, Norman.”

“Your crowning virtue, Vigorous. Your best feature. You are always around.”

“At least temporarily.”

“Lenore, please.”

“Ms. Beadsman, I am coming to like you, unless it’s simply the inevitably favorable comparison of anyone with Vigorous here. Have you ever had intercourse with someone soon to be of infinite size?”

“On that note, I think, I’ll just be going…. Rick?”

“Right. Norman?”

“Goodbye, Vigorous. Enjoy that Self while you can.”

“I think the same route back would be…”

“No problem.”

“Should we finish? Are you hungry?”

“Are you kidding? Let’s just go. Drop me off, and I’ll take a quick shower and grab some things and try to get Candy to drop me, and you can drive me back in the morning. I don’t feel like squeezing into my car tonight.”

“Right. There is of course still the issue of your not telling me an important thing.”

“Tell tell tell.”

“I could call Vern Raring at the switchboard and see if he knows.”

“Good luck getting him instead of like Enrique the cheesemaker.” “

“Lines. I forgot. Walinda was livid. I’m sure all that made for quite a day, what with you being worried about untellable matters, et cetera.”

“The badness of this day has been enormous.”

“As it were.”

“Not funny at all. That man has waddled around the bend.”

“Well, look, he’s trying to leave.”

“Don’t envy that busboy one bit.”

“Hell of a check, I’ll bet.”

“I’ll sure never park in his space.”

“Here, allow me.”

“…. ”

7. 1990

/a/

Lenore Beadsman was in possession of the following items. One of two square bedrooms with polished wood floors and inoperative fireplaces on the third floor of an enormous gray house belonging to a Cleveland oral surgeon, in East Corinth. Three large windows, two facing west, all so clean they squeaked, only one open, because only one had a screen. From the windows a view of the outside at the right-hand edge of which the tight seam of geometric suburban ground and dim sky was punctured by the far thin teeth of Cleveland. Windows through which late in the day came a sustained blast of pumpkin-colored Cleveland sunset. Windowsills that were really window shelves, and jutted out so far from the low window-bottoms they could be sat on, and were, although there were nails and sharp perpendicular paint chips, which problem was solved by the placement of black corduroy cushions, which Lenore also owned, on the sills.

A chest of drawers from Mooradian’s.in which were clothes and on top of which, leaning on a triangular cardboard support that folded out of its back, was a photo of Lenore, her sister, her two brothers, her great-grandmother, Lenore Beadsman, and her great-grandfather, Stonecipher Beadsman, grouped around a deep wooden globe of the earth in a pretend den in a photographer’s concrete studio. Taken in 1977, when Lenore was eleven and temporarily minus front teeth. There was also, leaning back against that picture, an unframed picture of Lenore’s mother, in her frilly white wedding dress, linen, next to a large window filled with filmy spring light, looking down and arranging some wedding-related items in her hands. The picture resting on a spread-out cotton handkerchief with “Midwestern Contract Bridge Championships, Des Moines, Iowa, 1971” embroidered onto one comer.

Three drawers of socks and panties and so on, and one drawer of soap. A bed, unfortunately at the moment unmade, with a shiny old heavy maple frame and a pillow with a pillowcase with a lion on it that Lenore had had for a very long time. A shelf in the refrigerator in the kitchen downstairs on which were crowded bottles of seltzer water and ginger ale, some dark old carrots with limp tops, some limes. An area of the freezer crammed full of plastic bags of frozen vegetables, frozen mixed vegetables, on which Lenore largely lived.

A soft easy chair, old, covered in thick brown pretend velvet, that could recline so far back one’s head almost touched the floor. A footstool with a woven straw top. A small black table that served poorly as a desk and was at the moment bare anyway. A black wooden chair that went with the table and was irritating because one of its legs was shorter than the others. An even more irritating, blindingly white-bright overhead light fixture. Two ceramic low-wattage soft-light lamps with painted nut-and-flower scenes on the bases, purchased as alternatives to the overhead light, lamps that threw huge praying-mantis-ish shadows of Lenore and Candy Mandible on the room’s cream walls after sunset.

Eleven boxes of books from college, most of them Stonecipheco boxes, with red-ink drawings of laughing babies on the cardboard sides. All the boxes unopened, the athletic tape wheedled from the college trainer on the pretext of a mysterious pre-graduation sore ankle not even cut off, yet, and turning yellow. The boxes piled on either side of the west windows and supporting a tape player and a case of tapes and a fuchsia depressed and budless from lack of water in the August heat. A popcorn popper that popped popcorn with hot air. A box of Kleenex. A pretend tortoise-shell hairbrush. An old walker in the east comer, with two aluminum parabolas joined by twin mahogany support bars with soft cloth handgrips and the name YINGST carved in the wood of a bar above a hanging Scotch-taped publicity photo of Gary, the especially smiley Lawrence Welk dancer. Half-access to a bathroom down the hall, meaning half-access to a sink, a commode, a medicine cabinet, a tub with a shower fixture, and a soap-crusted shower curtain covered. with profiles of yellow parrots.

A bird cage on an iron post in the northern comer of the room. A mat of spread newspapers, beaded with fallen seed, on the floor below it. A huge bag of birdseed to the right of the newspaper, leaning against the wall. A bird, in the cage, a cockatiel, the color of a pale fluorescent lemon, with a mohawk crown of spiked pink feathers of adjustable ‘height, two enormous hooked and scaly feet, and eyes so black they shone. A bird named Vlad the Impaler, who spent the bulk of his life hissing and looking at himself in a little mirror hanging by a string of Frequent and Vigorous paperclips in the iron cage, a mirror so dull and cloudy with Vlad the Impaler’s own bird-spit that Vlad the Impaler could not possibly have seen anything more than a vague yellowish blob behind a pane of mist. Nevertheless. A bird that very occasionally and for a disproportionate ration of seed could be induced to stop hissing and emit a weird, extraterrestrial “Pretty boy.” A bird that not infrequently literally bit the hand that fed it, before returning to dance in front of its own shapeless reflection, straining and contorting always for a better view of, itself. Lenore refused to clean the mirror anymore, because as soon as she did so it was, in about half an hour, covered with dried spit again. A Black and Decker hand vacuum to vacuum seeds and the odd fallen feather or guano bit lay on the floor to the right of the bag of seed, having fallen out of its wall mount a few nights before.

Some personal items in the bathroom. A closet full of white dresses. A shoe stand bulging like a raspberry with black canvas. A bookshelf over the desk table half full of books in Spanish. Also on the shelf an annoying clock that clicked and buzzed every minute on the minute, and a little clay Spanish horse with a removable head in which was Lenore’s spare key. Above the west windows, broken venetian blinds that fell on the head of whoever tried to let them down. A tiny frosting of cracks in the glass of the tops of the windows, from airplane noise.

A manual called Care for Your Exotic Bird. A patch of chewed wall behind Vlad the Impaler’s cage from where Vlad the Impaler had gnawed on the wall in the dark when the mirror-show had closed, a patch from which plaster protruded, and about which Mrs. Tissaw was not pleased, and in regard to which a bill was promised.

Rick dropped Lenore off and she ran upstairs and came into her room and took off her dress. There was music and clove smell from under Candy’s door. Lenore’s room was filled with sad hot orange sunset. Vlad the Impaler had his feet hooked into the bars at the top of his cage and was hanging upside down, trying to find some reflective purchase at the very bottom of his smeared mirror.

“Hi, Vlad the Impaler,” said Lenore in her bra and panties and shoes.

“Hello,” said Vlad the Impaler.

Lenore looked at the bird. “Pardon me?”

“I have to do what’s right for me as a person,” Vlad the Impaler said, righting himself and looking at Lenore.

“Holy cow.”

“Women need space, too.”

“Candy!” Lenore went and opened Candy Mandible’s door. Candy was stretching, on the floor, doing near-splits, in a silver leotard, with a clove cigarette in her mouth.

“Christ, sweetie, I’ve been waiting, how are you?” Candy got up and moved to turn off her stereo.

“Come here quick, listen to Vlad the Impaler,” Lenore said, pulling Candy by the hand.

“Nice outfit,” said Candy. “What about the unclear emergency? How’s Lenore and Concamadine?”

“You’re sweet, but that kind of talk can lead exactly nowhere,” said Vlad the Impaler, staring dumbly at himself in his cloudy mirror. “My feelings for you are deep. I’ve never claimed they’re not.”

“What the hell is going on with him?” Lenore asked Candy.

“Hey, that’s what I was just saying,” Candy said, looking at Vlad the Impaler.

“Pardon me?” said Vlad the Impaler.

“I was rehearsing what to say to Clint tonight, tonight I’m going to break up with him, I decided. I was in here practicing while I waited for you.”

“Hi, Vlad the Impaler,” said Vlad the Impaler. “Here’s some extra special-wecial food.”

“How can he talk like that all of a sudden?” asked Lenore. “He only used to say ‘Pretty boy,’ and I had to like pour tons of seed down him every time, to get him to.”

“There are lots of pretty girls in the world, Clinty, you’re just so incredibly serious,” Vlad the Impaler said.

“Clinty?” said Lenore.

“Clint Roxbee-Cox, the V.P. at Allied who drives the Mercedes? With the glasses and the sort of English accent?”

“Clint, Clint, Clint,” twittered Vlad the Impaler.

“Shut up,” said Candy Mandible.

“Anger is natural,” said Vlad the Impaler. “Anger is a natural release, let it out.”

“He could never talk like this before,” Lenore said.

The orange light on the shiny wood floor began to have slender black columns in it as the sun started to dip behind downtown Cleveland.

“Weird as hell. I was in here at like six-thirty, and he just hissed and writhed. And I went for a run, and I came back, and I rehearsed what to say to Clint, and then I went to stretch out, and then you came,” Candy said, tapping her cigarette ashes into Vlad the Impaler’s cage.

“Of course you satisfy me, Clinty. Don’t think you don‘t,” said Vlad the Impaler.

“Did you feed him?” Lenore asked Candy.

“No way. I’ve still got that scar on my thumb,” Candy said. “You said you’d do it all the time.”

“Then how come his dish is full, here?”

“Women need space, too.”

“He must not have eaten from it this morning,” said Candy. “Is that a new bra?”

Vlad the Impaler began to peck at his seed; his pink mohawk rose spikily and fell.

“This is just like the bizarrest day of all time,” Lenore said, untying her shoes. “Rick and I had dinner with Mr. Bombardini? Of Bombardini Company and skeleton eye-socket fame?”

“You met Norman Bombardini?” Candy said.

“I just don’t know what you mean by love. Tell me what you mean by that word,” Vlad the Impaler said.

“You’re going to have to buy a very small gag,” said Candy.

“Candy, the guy is trying to eat himself to death because his wife left him. He already weighs about a thousand pounds. He was eating eclairs off the floor.” Lenore took her bathrobe from the bedpost and undid her bra in the sun and headed for the bathroom. Candy followed her down the hall.

“You can’t hold me to promises I didn’t make!” Vlad the Impaler called after them.

/b/

Lenore took her shower while Candy Mandible leaned against the sink and smoked a clove cigarette in the steam.

“I don’t get it,” Candy said. “How can they just let twenty patients walk out and not see them or stop them?”

“Hobble out, is more like it,” Lenore said from the shower.

“Right.”

“I’m just going to assume, I guess, that if my father knows about it, Lenore’s OK. I’m going to assume that he took her to Corfu with him for this summit meeting with the president of this other baby food company. Except Gramma’s always had about zero interest in the Company. Except Dad and Gramma more or less hate each other. Except Gramma really has to have things ninety-eight point six or she gets blue. Except there’s like twenty-five other people gone too. Corfu would have to be pretty crowded. But I’m going to assume Dad took them somewhere. Except God I didn’t even think he knew where the Home was, anymore. Even though he owns it. He always handles it through Rummage and Naw.” The shower hissed on the curtain for a moment. “I don’t know if I should wait till Dad comes back or not. I can’t just fly to Corfu. I don’t have any money. And plus who knows where they are in Corfu.”

“Rick could lend you money. God knows Rick’s got money.”

“I haven’t even told Rick about it yet. He’s hurt.” Lenore turned off the shower and stepped out.

“I think Rick sort of flipped out, a little bit, up there, today.” Candy threw her cigarette in the toilet. It hissed for a second. She began to brush her teeth.

“He seemed OK at dinner. He just wants to know where I am all the time. The one who’s flipped and landed heavily is that Norman Bombardini. He was talking about infinity, and living butter?”

“What?”

“My robe smells like the bottom of a rug,” Lenore said, sniffing at her brown robe. “It’s all mildewy.”

“You could see if Lenore’s maybe staying with anybody else in your family,” said Candy.

“And what the hell is with Vlad the Impaler?”

“You could see if Lenore’s with anybody else in your family.”

“What? Yes. That’s a good idea. Except no way she’s with John, he can’t even be reached, and neither can LaVache, because Dad told me he doesn’t even have a phone. And why would Gramma go all the way to Amherst? Maybe Clarice, I guess. Except if Gramma was still around here, which Clarice obviously is, she’d have called to at least let me know she was OK.”

“Maybe she tried and could only get Steve’s Sub.”

“God, that’s another thing, what a rotten day at work. That Peter guy who looks like a negative never came back, and we sure didn’t hear from any tunnel guy.” Lenore tried to get steam off the mirror. Candy dried Lenore’s back with a towel and took off her silver leotard and stepped into the shower. Lenore stuck her arm in behind the plastic curtain and Candy handed her the soap and Lenore gently soaped Candy’s back, the way Candy liked. “And we get call after call at the board, almost all wrong, and Prietht was laughing.”

“I’m really going to kill her. I’m going to murder her, soon. A negative?”

“And Walinda was just unbelievably mad that I was late. She was really going to fire me. She kept saying, ‘Don’t play.’ ”

“When she says ‘Don’t play,’ you know she’s really mad,” Candy said, stepping out of the shower. The steam in the bathroom was now so thick Lenore could hardly see to open the door. She opened the door. A rush of cool hall air came in and cut the steam. Lenore began to brush her teeth.

“I should shave my legs,” she said. “My legs are making that sound when I rub them.”

“So shave.”

“And then Candy what’s with Vlad the Impaler? I think he must be sick. Rick said the lady in the store said cockatiels didn’t really even talk that much, as a rule. Maybe he’s dying, and this is like the huge burst of fireworks at the end, right before the fireworks are over.”

“Clinty, the sex is great, you know the sex is great, I’ve told you how you fill me up, but sex is only like a few hours a day, you can’t let it totally rule your life,” said a raspy bird voice from down the hall.

“Little fucker sounds pretty healthy to me,” Candy Mandible said, walking naked down the hall, Lenore in the bathrobe behind her. “If Mrs. Tissaw hears this stuff, we’re really up the old fecal creek. We better start teaching him some Psalms or something.”

Candy went into her room and Lenore into hers. In Lenore’s room it was very pretty now. The floor and lower walls were liquid black, and dark tree shadows moved in the orange bath of sunset on the upper walls and ceiling.

“Sex is a few hours a day?” Lenore called to Candy.

“Clint, Clint, Clint, special-wecial,” Vlad the Impaler crooned into his mirror.

“Jesus wept,” Lenore said into Vlad the Impaler’s cage. “The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.”

Vlad the Impaler cocked his head and looked at her.

“Lenore, Clint is just something else, I have to tell you. He’s super. He turns me inside out. He’s a horse, a camel, a brontosaurus,” Candy said from her door, demonstrating with her hands. “Like this.”

“Yes, well, ummm,” said Lenore.

“Inside out! Like this!” shrieked Vlad the Impaler.

“Shit on a twig,” Lenore said.

“But he’s so possessive,” Candy continued. “He keeps asking me to marry him, and getting mad when I laugh. He thinks making me come gives him the right to my heart. How can such a big boy be such a little boy? My eye’s on the president of the whole company, Mr. Allied.” Candy stood on dancer’s point in Lenore’s doorway and let the last orange bits of sunset fall on her cheeks. She was a really pretty girl, all curves and ovals and soft milky shine, with thick dark hair, even darker now when wet. It lay like a blanket of chocolate over her breasts and back. A plane flew over, low, rattling the windows in their frames for a moment.

“Now let’s have a night to remember, and remember each other always,” Vlad the Impaler said to his reflection.

Lenore slipped a clean dress over her head. “When does this night to remember begin?”

Candy looked at the clock just as it clicked and buzzed a new minute. “Any time now. I’m just going to go over to his place for dinner, then I imagine we’ll mate like animals for hours and hours and hours.”

“A real romantic,” said Lenore. “Jesus wept, Vlad the Impaler. The sins of the fathers. I shall not want.”

“Jesus shall not want.”

“Attaboy.”

“I’m still waiting to hear about Rick, you know, mating-wise.” Candy called from back in her room. “It’s been months, after all, and if he’s as super as you say… I’m waiting for minute anatomical tale-telling. Otherwise you’ll just force me to find out for myself.”

“Yes, well, ummm.” Lenore put on clean socks.

“Just kidding. But really, we are partners in crime after all. And describing one can make you feel closer to it. I mean him. Really. Angles and bends and birthmarks and everything. It makes you intimater.” Candy came in, in a pale old violet cotton dress that had been Lenore’s for a long time, and was just perfectly too small for Candy, and clung to the not insignificant swell of her hips. She knelt at the window in the shadow and put mascara on, looking at her reflection in the black lower rectangle of the clear glass pane. Outside, crickets were starting.

“Making me come. Me as a person,” said Vlad the Impaler. “Where is that ditzy bitch?”

“Sorry about that.”

“May I please have a ride to Rick’s? I left my car at the Building.” Lenore finished tying her shoes and brushed out the curves of her hair. “I think Vlad the Impaler’s going to be OK food-wise. He must not be eating much.”

“Yes you may have a ride. Listen, you going to water that plant, or what?”

“It’s like an experiment.”

“The sins of the feathers!” screamed Vlad the Impaler. “Who has the book?”

“What book?” Lenore asked Candy.

“Search moi. Listen, I’m late. Shall we.”

“Yes. Good night, Vlad the Impaler.”

“Love has no meaning. Love is a meaningless word to me.”

“Maybe we could get him on ‘Real People.’ ”

“ ‘Real Birds.’ ”

“Thanks again for this dress. It may get tom, I’m warning you now.”

“People should have wedding nights like your breakups.”

“Women need space, need space!”

/c/

“Are you bothered by speculations about whether it bothers me that you never tell me you love me?”

“Maybe sometimes.”

“Well you shouldn’t be. I know you do, deep down. Deep down I know it. And I love you, fiercely and completely — you do believe that.”

“Yes.”

“And you love me.”

“…. ”

“It’s not a problem. I know you do. Please don’t let it bother you.”

“….”

“Thank you for telling me the Grandmother news. I apologize for being a pain in the ass at dinner. I apologize for Norman.”

“Well, God, I wanted to tell you. Except I don’t really even feel like it’s telling. You tell facts, you tell things. These weren’t things, they’re just a collection of weirdnesses.”

“Even so. Are you bothered by the book being gone, too?”

“…. ”

“The book is a problem, Lenore. The book is your problem, in my opinion. Hasn’t Jay said you’re simply investing an outside thing with an efficacy to hurt and help and possess meaning that can really come only from inside you? That your life is inside you, not in some book that makes an old woman’s nightie sag?”

“How do you know what Jay’s told me?”

“I know what I’d tell you in his place.”

“…. ”

“Be legitimately concerned about a relative who’ll turn up with a Mediterranean tan and a terse explanation from your father, Lenore. Is all.”

“You fill me up, Rick, you know. You turn me inside out.”

“Pardon me?”

“You turn me inside out. When we.. you know. What we just did.”

“I fill you up?”

“You do.”

“Well thank you.”

“A story, please.”

“A story.”

“Please. Did you get any today?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Good.”

“I actually began a journal today, too, really. Just jottings. Random, et cetera. It was interesting. I had wanted to ever since I was young.”

“Well good. Can I read it, ever?”

“You most certainly cannot. A journal is almost by definition something no one else reads.”

“I guess I’ll just settle for a story, then, please.”

“Got another interesting one today.”

“Goody.”

“Sad, though, again. Do you know where all the really sad stories I’m getting are coming from? They’re coming, it turns out, from kids. Kids in college. I’m starting to think something is just deeply wrong with the youth of America. First of all, a truly disturbing number of them are interested in writing fiction. Truly disturbing. And more than interested, actually. You don’t get the sorts of things I’ve been getting from people who are merely… interested. And sad, sad stories. Whatever happened to happy stories, Lenore? Or at least morals? I’d fall ravenously on one of the sort of didactic Salingerian solace-found-in-the-unlikeliest-place pieces I was getting by the gross at Hunt and Peck. I’m concerned about today’s kids. These kids should be out drinking beer and seeing films and having panty raids and losing virginities and writhing to suggestive music, not making up long, sad, convoluted stories. And they are as an invariable rule simply atrocious typists. They should be out having fun and learning to type. I’m not a little worried. Really.”

“So let’s hear it.”

“A man and a woman meet and fall in love at a group-therapy session. The man is handsome and jutting-jawed, and also as a rule very nice, but he has a problem with incredible flashes of temper that he can’t control. His emotions get hold of him and he can’t control them, and he gets insanely and irrationally angry, sometimes. The woman is achingly lovely and as sweet and kind a person as one could ever hope to imagine, but she suffers from horrible periods of melancholy which can be held at bay only by massive overeating and excessive sleep, and so she eats Fritos and Hostess Cupcakes all the time, and sleeps far too much, and weighs a lot, although she’s still very pretty anyway.”

“Can you please move your arm a little?”

“And the two meet at the group-therapy sessions, and fall madly in love, and stare dreamily at each other across the therapy room every week while the psychologist, who acts very laid-back and nice and wears a flannel poncho, leads the therapy sessions. The psychologist by the way it’s important to know seems on the outside to be very nice and very compassionate, but actually it turns out we find out thanks to the omniscient narrator he’s the only real villain in the story, a man who as a college student had had a nervous breakdown during the GRE’s and hadn’t done well and hadn’t gotten into Harvard Graduate School and had had to go to N.Y.U. and had had horrible experiences and several breakdowns in New York City, and as a result just hates cities, and collective societal units in general, a really pathological hatred, and thinks society and group pressures are at the root of all the problems of everybody who comes to see him, and he tries unceasingly but subtly to get all his patients to leave the city and move out into this series of isolated cabins deep in the woods of whatever state the story takes place in, I get the feeling New Jersey, which cabins he by some strange coincidence owns and sells to his patients at a slimy profit.”

“….”

“And the man and the woman fall madly in love, and start hanging around together, and the man’s temper begins miraculously to moderate, and the woman’s melancholy begins to moderate also and she stops sleeping all the time and also stops eating junk food and slims down and becomes so incredibly beautiful it makes your eyes water, and they decide to get married, and they go and tell the psychologist, who rejoices with them and for them, as he puts it, but he tells them that their respective emotional troubles are really just on the back burner for a brief period, because of the distraction of their new love, and that if they really want to get cured for all time so they can concentrate on loving each other for ever and ever what they need to do is move away together from the city, I get the feeling Newark, into a cabin deep in the woods away from everything having to do with collective society, and he shows them some cabin-in-the-woods brochures, and suddenly the psychologist is here revealed to have tiny green dollar signs in the centers of his eyes, in a moment of surrealistic description I didn’t really care for.”

“Man oh man.”

“Yes but the man and the woman are by now pretty much completely under the psychologist’s clinical spell, after just a year of therapy, and also they’re understandably emotionally soft and punchy from being so much in love, and so they take the psychologist’s advice and buy a cabin way out in the woods several hours’ drive from anything, and the man quits his job as an architect, at which he’d been enormously brilliant and successful when he wasn’t having temper problems, and the woman quits her job designing clothes for full-figured women, and they get married and move out to their cabin and live alone, and, it’s not too subtly implied, have simply incredible sex all the time, in the cabin and the woods and the trees, and for a living they begin to write collaborative novels about the triumph of strong pure human emotion over the evil group-pressures of contemporary collective society. And they almost instantly, because of all the unbelievable though emotionally innocent sex, have a child, and they have a close call at labor time because they barely get to the tiny, faraway hospital in their four-wheel wilderness Jeep, which the psychologist also sold them, they barely get to the hospital in time, but everything’s ultimately OK and the child’s a healthy boy and on the way back from the tiny hospital deep in the woods, though still very far from their even deeper and more secluded cabin, they stop in and have a talk with a retired nun who lives in a cabin in a deep valley by the highway and spends her life selflessly nursing retarded people who are so retarded even institutions don’t want them, and the man and the woman and the retired nun dandle the baby on their knees and talk about how love can triumph over everything in general, and collective societal pressures in particular, all in some long but really quite beautiful passages of dialogue.”

“Killer story, so far.”

“Just wait. And they go back into the woods as before, and for a few years everything is great, unbelievably great. But then, like tiny cracks in a beautiful sculpture, little by little, their old emotional troubles begin to manifest themselves in tiny ways. The man sometimes gets unreasonably angry at meaningless things, and this sometimes makes the woman melancholy, and an ominous empty Frito bag or two begin to appear in the wastebasket, and she puts on a little weight. And right about then their child, who’s about six, now, begins to have a horrible medical problem in which whenever he cries — which little children are obviously wont to do, they’re always falling down and bumping into things and banging themselves up — in which whenever he cries, the child goes into something like an epileptic fit; his limbs thrash around and flail uncontrollably and he almost swallows his tongue, and it’s just very scary, obviously, and the parents are extremely worried, even though they think and hope that it might be just a phase, but still they love the child so fiercely and completely that they’re frantic. And the woman is now pregnant again. And all these little ominous things go on until, months later, they’ve gone in the Jeep all the way to the tiny far-off hospital for the woman to have the second baby, and as the baby’s being delivered the older child happens to slip on a wet patch in the hall and falls and bangs his head, and he naturally begins to cry, and he immediately starts to flop around in a convulsive fit, and meanwhile the baby is being bom, a girl, and when the kindly old country doctor slaps her bottom to get her to breathe she of course starts to cry, and she right away goes into a miniature epileptic convulsive fit of her own, so both children are at the same time having fits, and the quiet little backwoods hospital is suddenly a madhouse. But the kindly old country doctor quickly gets things back under control and examines both children on the spot and diagnoses them as suffering from an extremely rare neurological condition in which crying for some reason decimates their nervous systems, it harms their hearts and brains by making those organs disposed to swell and bleed, and he says that every time the children cry, as of course normal children can be counted on to do quite a bit, the fits will get worse and worse, and that more and more damage will be done, and that they will be in danger of dying, eventually — especially the older child, in whom the condition is more advanced and serious — unless, that is, treatment is administered to keep them really ever from crying.”

“Wow.”

“And the kindly old country doctor hands the man and the woman roughly a hundred little bottles of a certain special very rare and hard-to-make anticrying medicine, since it’s such a prohibitively long and difficult trip from their secluded cabin to the tiny hospital, and he promises that as long as the children have a dose of the medicine whenever they look as if they might start to cry, to nip the crying in the bud and so prevent fits, they’ll definitely be fine, and the parents are of course frantically worried but also relieved that it’s at least a treatable condition, but also the strain is making their old emotional problems a little worse, and the man is ominously unreasonably angry at the universe for making his children have epileptic fits when they cry, and at the really unavoidably exorbitant bill for all the rare and hard-to-make anticrying medicine, and the woman is ominously yawning, and she makes them stop at the tiny deep-woods grocery store and buy virtually every junk-food item in the place, which clearly pisses the man off, because she’s already put on some weight, even though she’s still very pretty, and his being pissed off makes the woman even more sad and sleepy and hungry, and so on in what we can see has the potential to be a vicious circle.”

“Would you like some of this ginger ale?”

“Thank you.”

“….”

“And so they get back to the cabin, and things are more or less as they were before, although the woman is eating and sleeping a lot and gaining weight fast, and the man is so angry at the exorbitant price of the anticrying medicine that he vows to make a special effort to control his temper and be extremely nice to both children so they’ll cry as little as possible. But of course meanwhile his old emotional temper problem is little by little getting worse and worse, and the strain of being artificially nice to the children is really telling on him, and at ever more frequent intervals he has to run deep into the woods to yell and punch trees with his fists, and he becomes involuntarily cruel to the sweet sad woman, and hisses at her about her steadily increasing weight late at night when the children are asleep at the other side of the tiny cabin, which hissing of course only makes the woman more melancholy and sleepy and hungry, and she quickly shoots up to her old pre-love weight, and then some. And this goes on for roughly a year, with some potentially really terrifying epileptic crying fits from the children, especially the older one, being averted only by administering the special medicine just in time.”

“I’m engrossed, I admit it.”

“Well, and now on the disastrous and climactic night of the story, symbolized by a really unbelievable rainstorm outside, with the wind screaming and big gelatinous globs of rain pelting the cabin, the four are sitting at dinner, and the woman’s plate is piled almost to the ceiling with Hostess Cupcakes, and she’s yawning, and the man, who is under enormous strain, is unbelievably pissed off, and struggling every moment to control his temper, and the older child, who’s now about seven, whines a little bit about not wanting to eat his peas, which the woman had been too sleepy and gorged even to bother to unfreeze and cook, and the whine on top of everything else so angers the man that he involuntarily fetches the child a tremendous slap, purely involuntarily, and the child flies out of his chair, and falls, and knocks over a little table, on which are kept, in a place of honor, on a purple felt pad, all the precious bottles of the rare and hard-to-make anticrying medicine, and all the bottles are broken, and all the medicine in an instant ruined, and of course the child naturally starts crying from the tremendous slap and goes right away into a severe epileptic fit, and the baby, at all the negative commotion, begins to cry, too, and goes into a little fit of its own, and so suddenly the man and the woman have both children having epileptic crying fits, and no medicine to keep the fits from grievously harming the childrens’ hearts and brains and maybe killing them. And they’re frantic, and the kids are flopping around, and the woman finally manages to get the baby semi-calmed down by holding it and bouncing it and crooning to it, but the older child is in a very bad way indeed.”

“Good God.”

“So both parents are completely frantic, and they decide all they can do is for the man to take the older child in the Jeep and try to get to the tiny far-off hospital just as quickly as possible, while the woman calls ahead and gets them to make up an emergency batch of anticrying medicine right away, and that thus the woman should stay and try to call and keep the baby, who is now more or less stable in the mother’s arms but who hates to ride in the Jeep and would certainly cry disastrously on the way to the tiny hospital, from crying and convulsing any more, until the father can get back with the medicine and the also hopefully saved older child. And so the man carries the flopping boy out to the Jeep in the gelatinously heavy rain and off they go, and the woman begins to try to call the tiny far-off hospital but can’t get through because, as the narrator tells us, the hospital’s lines have been hit by lightning, and so in desperation the woman finally calls their old psychologist in the city, because he’d told them when he’d sold them their cabin that if they ever needed anything not to hesitate to call, and she gets hold of him at his downtown penthouse and begs him to drive to the tiny far-off hospital and get some anticrying medicine for the baby and bring it down to the cabin right away. And the psychologist, after he’s reminded of who the woman is — he’d forgotten — reluctantly says OK, he’ll do it, even though it’s raining gelatinously, and says he’ll be right there, but as soon as he hangs up, who should stop by but a current patient, whom the psychologist had been trying to convince to buy a cabin and live out in seclusion, and so the psychologist delays for a bit while he stays and shows the patient brochures and tries to convince him to buy a cabin, and we’re again rather irritatingly reminded that there are tiny green dollar signs in the centers of the psychologist’s eyes.”

“Bastard, though.”

“No lie. And meanwhile the man is driving like mad in the Jeep toward the tiny far-off hospital, with the boy, who’s no longer convulsing but now is sort of autistic and slack-jawed and still obviously in a very bad way indeed, and the man’s driving like mad, but it’s very slow going, in the dark and the gelatinous rain and the mud of the deep-woods roads, and the man is so incredibly angry at the universe for putting his family in this position he feels as if he’s about to explode, but through enormous strength of will he keeps the lid on, and keeps driving, and eventually gets off the muddy deep-woods roads and onto the highway, where the going is at least a little faster. And the woman is meanwhile back at the cabin, waiting for the psychologist to arrive with the anticrying medicine, and she’s so full and so upset and depressed at everything, that’s happened that she’s yawning all the time, she’s unbelievably sleepy, and it gets still worse as the hours go by and it gets late and the gelatinous rain drums rhythmically on the cabin roof, but the baby is meanwhile having small but severe convulsive attacks whenever it cries, and the only way the woman finds she can keep it from crying is to hold it against her enormous Frito-crumbed breast; whenever she puts the baby down, it cries and begins to have an epileptic fit. So she’s staggering back and forth with the baby. And this goes on, some switching from scene to scene, the psychologist finally makes his sale and gets going, and he has an.incredibly fast and expensive car, paid for out of cabin profits, and he gets to the tiny backwoods hospital in no time flat, and he talks to the kindly old country doctor, and after a brief wait while the kindly old country doctor practically kills himself making the anticrying medicine in almost no time, the psychologist gets the medicine, and says the man will pay for it, and starts jetting down the highway toward the deep woods and the far-off cabin, at incredible speed, and in an ironic and ominous twist he goes right by the Jeep, for obvious reasons headed in the other direction, while the Jeep is pulled over in the dark with a flat, which the man is in a rage in the storm fixing, while the child slumps in the front seat in a bad way, and the psychologist’s incredibly fast car splashes a huge wave of rainwater on the man from clear across the highway and knocks the jack handle out, of the man’s hand, and the jack handle hits something small but vital on the axle of the Jeep, and partially breaks it, which the man doesn’t notice, because he’s so pissed off at the psychologist’s car for splashing water on him that he’s jumping up and down and screaming and giving the receding car the finger, and just temporarily out of control.”

“Jesus.”

“And meanwhile back at the cabin the woman is almost passing out, she’s so melancholy and worried and sleepy, but she can’t let go of the baby or it will begin to cry and flop epileptically. And the woman heroically and movingly holds out against sleepiness for just as long as she can, waiting for the psychologist, but finally she’s simply physically unable to stay awake any longer, being awake is just no longer an option, and so, as the only possible compromise with circumstance, she lies down on her bed, still holding the baby against her breast to keep it from crying and convulsing.”

“Oh, no.”

“And she falls asleep and rolls over on the baby and crushes it and kills it.”

“Oh, God.”

“And she wakes up and sees what’s happened and falls into an irreversible coma-like sleep from grief.”

“OK, that’s enough.”

“And the psychologist pulls up about ten minutes later and enters, in his poncho, and he sees what’s happened, and he calls the police to report it. And the only police in such a remote area is the state highway patrol, and the psychologist gives the patrol dispatcher a description of the man and the Jeep, which he is of course familiar with but just hadn’t seen when he splashed it, and he tells the dispatcher to have the patrol cars on the highway look for the Jeep and give the man and the boy a fast ride to the tiny far-off hospital if they’re found, and meanwhile also to get over to the cabin and have a look at the crushed baby and the comatose mother. And the dispatcher relays all the psychologist’s remarks to the troopers by radio, and a cruiser starts speeding down the highway on the way to the cabin, and on the highway it encounters the Jeep, and does a fast U and pulls it over, and the officer in the cruiser gets out and goes to the Jeep in the gelatinous rain and offers to give the man and the boy a fast ride to the tiny far-off hospital, and the man accepts, and as he’s getting the boy ready to be carried from the Jeep to the cruiser he asks the officer if it was his wife who had called the police, and the officer says no and then completely disastrously tells the man what he’s heard has happened back at the cabin, and to the accompaniment of a huge ripping clap of thunder the man flips out completely with uncontrollable anger at the news, and starts involuntarily flailing around with his arms, and one of his elbows, by accident, hits the boy, slumped in the seat beside him, in the nose, and the boy starts to scream and cry again and immediately flops onto the floor of the Jeep and begins to convulse, and his head first knocks the gearshift out of neutral, then his head gets wedged next to the accelerator, and the accelerator gets floored, and the Jeep takes off, with the officer caught and holding on and riding along the side because he’d been reaching in the window trying to calm the flailingly angry man, and the Jeep starts heading for the edge of the highway, beyond which lies a deep valley, a cliff, really, and the man is so angry he can’t see to steer, and the officer tries to grab the steering wheel from outside and steer away from the cliff, but the sudden tension on the wheel completely snaps the small but vital thing on the axle that had been broken by the jack handle’s flying out of the man’s hand earlier, and the steering fails completely, and the Jeep with the man, the boy, and the officer plunges over the cliff and falls several hundred feet onto the cabin where the old retired nun, you may remember, was nursing the prohibitively retarded people, and the Jeep falls onto the cabin and explodes in flames, and everyone involved is horribly killed.”

“Holy shit.”

“Indeed.”

“…. ”

“A thoroughly, thoroughly troubled story. The product of a nastily troubled little collegiate mind. And there were about twenty more pages in which the huge beautiful woman lay in a pathetic fetal position in an irreversible coma while the psychologist rationalized the whole thing as due to collective-societal pressures too deep and insidious even to be avoided by flight to the woods, and tried to milk the comatose woman’s dead family’s remaining assets through legal maneuvers.”

“Mother of God.”

“Quite.”

“Are you going to use it?”

“Are you joking? It’s staggeringly long, longer than the whole next issue will be. And ridiculously sad.”

“….”

“And atrociously typed. That bothers me too. An unbelievably involved story that some sad kid must have spent months dreaming up and working out, and then he types it with his elbows. I’m going to send a personal rejection slip in which I advise the kid first to learn to type and then to go writhe to some suggestive music.”

“I liked it. I thought it was a killer story.”

“Yours is not a literary sensibility, Lenore.”

“Gee, thanks a lot. Spunkless and non-literary.”

“That’s not what I meant at all.”

“….”

“Come here. Come on.”

“Go peddle your papers.”

“Oh for Christ’s sake, Lenore.”

“….”

/d/

“Frequent and Vigorous.”

“Fnoof fnoof.”

“Frequent and Vigorous.”

“What?”

“Operator. Frequent and Vigorous.”

“Lenore.”

“Gasp a similar ladder. Operator. Special-wecial food.”

“Lenore! You’re talking in your sleep! You’re being incoherent!”

“What?”

“You’re being incoherent.”

“Fnoof.”

“That’s better.”

/e/

“Holy cow!”

“Fnoof fnoof.”

“What the hell!”

“Fnoof. What?”

“Rick, I don’t own a walker.”

“What?”

“I don’t own a walker. I especially don’t own Mrs. Yingst’s walker, with that Lawrence Welk guy’s picture on it. What was it doing in my room?”

“What walker?”

“And what did Vlad the Impaler mean special-wecial food, who’s got the book?”

“What? That bird should be killed, Lenore. I’ll kill it for you.”

“Nobody’s in Corfu, at all. I’m being messed with.”

“Fnoof.”

“Jesus.”

8. 1990

/a/

PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT OF RAP SESSION, THURSDAY, 26 AUGUST 1990, IN THE OFFICE OF DR. CURTIS JAY, PH.D. PARTICIPANTS: DR. CURTIS JAY AND MS. LENORE BEADSMAN, AGE 24, FILE NUMBER 770-01-4266.

DR. JAY: So it would be safe to characterize yesterday as just not a good day at all, then.

MS. LENORE BEADSMAN: I think that would be a safe assessment, yes.

JAY: And how does that make you feel?

LENORE: Well, I think sort of by definition a day that isn’t good at all makes you feel pretty shitty, right?

JAY: Do you feel pressured into feeling shitty?

LENORE: What?

JAY: If a bad day is by definition one that makes you feel shitty, do you feel pressured to feel shitty about a bad day, or do you feel natural about it?

LENORE: What the hell does that have to do with anything?

JAY: The question makes you uncomfortable.

LENORE: No, it makes me feel like I just listened to a pretty meaningless and dumb question, which I’m afraid I think that was.

JAY: I don’t think it’s dumb at all. Aren’t you the one who complains of feeling pressured and coerced into feeling and doing the things you feel and do? Or do I have you confused with some other long/time client and friend?

LENORE: Look, maybe it’s just safe to say that I feel shitty because bad things are happening, OK? Lenore acts incredibly weird and melodramatic for about a month, then just decides to leave the place where she’s supposed to live as a cold-blooded semi-invalid, and to take people with her, even though she’s ninety-two, and she doesn’t bother to call to say what’s going on, even though they’re obviously still in Cleveland, see for instance Mrs. Yingst’s walker, which could only have gotten in my room at about six-thirty last night, and my father clearly knows what’s up, see for instance having Karl Rummage tell Mr. Bloemker all this stuff yesterday morning before anybody knew, and he doesn’t bother to let me know either, and takes off for Corfu, and I think someone may have given my bird Vlad the Impaler LSD because he’s now blabbering all the time, which he never did before, and it’s conveniently mostly obscene stuff that Mrs. Tissaw’s going to flip about and evict me for if she hears it, and my job really bites the big kielbasa right now because there are like massive mess-ups in the phone lines and we don’t have our number anymore and people keep calling for all sorts of bizarre other things, and of course no sign of anybody from Interactive Cable today, this morning, and then at the switchboard I get a lot of flowers and some supposedly humorously nearly empty boxes of candy, and it turns out they’re from Mr. Bombardini…

JAY: Norman Bombardini?

LENORE:… Yes, who’s our landlord, at Frequent and Vigorous, and who’s unbelievably fat and hostile, and as a fringe benefit also clearly insane, and thinks he’s doing me a huge favor, pardon the pun, by promising me a comer of a soon-to-be-full universe all for myself, and he claims he’s infatuated with me.

JAY: And then there is of course Rick.

LENORE: Rick is Rick. Rick is a constant in every equation. Let’s leave Rick out of this.

JAY: You feel uncomfortable talking about Rick in this context.

LENORE: What context? There’s no context. A context implies something that hangs together. All that’s happening now is that a thoroughly screwed-up life that’s barely hung together is now even less well hung together.

JAY: So the woman is worried that her life is not “well hung.”

LENORE: Go suck a rock.

Dr. Jay pauses. Lenore Beadsman pauses.

JAY: Interesting, though.

LENORE: What?

JAY: Don’t you think? Don’t you think it’s rather an interesting situation? Set of situations?

LENORE: Meaning what?

JAY: Meaning very little. Only that if one is going to feel shitty, to continue your use of the adjective, about not having enough “control” over things, and we of course admit freely that we still haven’t been able satisfactorily to articulate what we mean by that, yet, have we…?

LENORE: God, the plural tense, now.

JAY:… that it’s at least comparatively desirable to be impotently involved in an interesting situation, rather than a dull one, is that not so?

LENORE: Interesting to whom?

JAY: Ah. That matters to you.

LENORE: It matters to me a lot.

JAY: I smell breakthrough, I don’t mind telling you. There’s a scent of breakthrough in the air.

LENORE: I think it’s my armpit. I think I need a shower.

JAY: Hiding behind symptomatic skirts is not fair. If I say I smell breakthrough, I smell breakthrough.

LENORE: You always say you smell breakthrough. You say you smell breakthrough almost every time I’m here. I think you must coat your nostrils with breakthrough first thing every morning. What does that mean, anyway, “breakthrough”?

JAY: You tell me.

LENORE: These seat belts on the chair aren’t really for the patients’ safety on the track, are they? They’re to keep your jugular from being lunged for about thirty times a day, right?

JAY: You feel anger.

LENORE: I feel shitty. Pure, uncoerced shitty. Interesting for whom? JAY: Whom might there be to interest?

LENORE: Now what the hell does that mean?

JAY: The smell of breakthrough is getting weaker.

LENORE: Well, look.

JAY: Yes?

LENORE: Suppose Gramma tells me really convincingly that all that really exists of my life is what can be said about it?

JAY: What the hell does that mean?

LENORE: You feel anger.

JAY: I have an ejection button, you know. I can press a button on the underside of this drawer, here, and send you screaming out into the lake.

LENORE: You must be about the worst psychologist of all time. Why won’t you ever let me go with my thoughts?

JAY: I’m sorry.

LENORE: That’s why I’m here, right? That’s why I pay you roughly two-thirds of everything I make, right?

JAY: I’m honored and ashamed, all at once. Back to the Grandmother, and a life that’s told, not lived.

LENORE: Right.

JAY: Right.

LENORE: So what would that mean?

JAY: In all earnestness I say you tell me.

LENORE: Well see, it seems like it’s not really like a life that’s told, not lived; it’s just that the living is the telling, that there’s nothing going on with me that isn’t either told or tellable, and if so, what’s the difference, why live at all?

JAY: I really don’t understand.

LENORE: Maybe it just makes no sense. Maybe it’s just completely irrational and dumb.

JAY: But obviously it bothers you.

LENORE: Pretty keen perception. If there’s nothing about me but what can be said about me, what separates me from this lady in this story Rick got who eats junk food and gains weight and squashes her child in her sleep? She’s exactly what’s said about her, right? Nothing more at all. And same with me, seems like. Gramma says she’s going to show me how a life is words and nothing else. Gramma says words can kill and create. Everything.

JAY: Sounds like Gramma is maybe half a bubble off plumb, to me. LENORE: Well, just no. She’s not crazy and she’s sure not stupid. You should know that. And see, the thing is, if she can do all this to me with words, if she can make me feel this way, and perceive my life as screwed way up and not hung together, and question whether I’m really even me, if there is a me, crazy as that sounds, if she can do all that just by talking to me, with just words, then what does that say about words?

JAY: “… she said, using words.”

LENORE: Well exactly. There it is. Lenore would totally agree. Which is why it sometimes just drives me nuts that Rick wants to talk all the time. Talk talk talk. Tell tell tell. At least when he tells me stories, it’s up-front and clear what’s story and what isn‘t, right?

JAY: I’m getting a scent.

LENORE: I don’t think the armpit theory should be rejected out of hand.

JAY: Why is a story more up-front than a life?

LENORE: It just seems more honest, somehow.

JAY: Honest meaning closer to the truth?

LENORE: I smell trap.

JAY: I smell breakthrough. The truth is that there’s no difference between a life and a story? But a life pretends to be something more? But it really isn’t more?

LENORE: I would kill for a shower.

JAY: What have I said? What have I said? I’ve said that hygiene anxiety is what?

LENORE: According to whom?

JAY: Ejection remains an option. Don’t misdirect so transparently. According to me and to my truly great teacher, Olaf Blentner, the pioneer of hygiene anxiety research….

LENORE: Hygiene anxiety is identity anxiety.

JAY: I am gagging on the stench of breakthrough.

LENORE: I’ve been having digestive trouble, too, really, so don’t…. JAY: Shut up. So comparisons between real life and story make you feel hygiene anxiety, a.k.a. identity anxiety. Plus the fact that delightfully nice and helpful Lenore Senior, whose temporary little junket I must say does not exactly fill me with grief, indoctrinates you on the subject of words and their extra-linguistic efficacy. Do some math for me, here, Lenore.

LENORE: Wrongo. First of all, Gramma’s whole thing is that there’s no such thing as extra-linguistic efficacy, extra-linguistic anything. And also, what’s with this throwing around words like “indoctrinates” and “efficacy”? Which Rick uses on me all the time, too? How come you and Rick not only always say the same things to me, but the same words? Are you a team? Do you fill him in on this stuff? Is this why he’s so completely uncharacteristically cool about not asking me what goes on in here? Are you an unethical psychologist? Do you tell?

JAY: Listen to this will you. Aside from the me-being-terribly-hurt issue, why this obsession with whether people are telling all the time? Why is telling robbing control?

LENORE: I don’t know. What time is it?

JAY: Don’t you feel a difference between your life and a telling? LENORE: Maybe just a little water out of that pitcher, there, in either armpit….

JAY: Well?

LENORE: No, I guess not really.

JAY: How come? How come?

Lenore Beadsman pauses.

JAY: How come?

LENORE: What would the difference be?

JAY: Speak up, please.

LENORE: What would the difference be?

JAY: What?

LENORE: What would the difference be?

JAY: I don’t believe this. Blentner would twirl. You don’t feel a difference?

LENORE: OK, exactly, but what’s “feeling,” then?

JAY: The smell is overpowering. I can’t stand it. Just let me tie this hankie over my nose, here.

LENORE: Flake.

JAY: (muffled) Who cares about defining it? Can’t you feel it? You can feel the way your life is; who can feel the life of the junk-food lady in Rick’s story?

LENORE: She can! She can!

JAY: Are you nuts?

LENORE: She can if it’s in the story that she can. Right? It says she feels such incredible grief over squashing her baby that she lapses into a coma, so she does and does.

JAY: But that’s not real.

LENORE: It seems to be exactly as real as it’s said to be.

JAY: Maybe it is your armpit, after all.

LENORE: I’m outta here.

JAY: Wait.

LENORE: Hit the chair-start button, Dr. Jay.

JAY: Jesus.

LENORE: The lady’s life is the story, and if the story says, “The fat pretty woman was convinced her life was real,” then she is. Except what she doesn’t know is that her life isn’t hers. It’s there for a reason. To make a point or give a smile, whatever. She’s not even produced, she’s educed. She’s there for a reason.

JAY: Whose reasons? Reason as in a person’s reason? She owes her existence to whoever tells?

LENORE: But not necessarily even a person, is the thing. The telling makes its own reasons. Gramma says any telling automatically becomes a kind of system, that controls everybody involved.

JAY: And how is that?

LENORE: By simple definition. Every telling creates and limits and defines.

JAY: Bullshit has its own unique scent, have you noticed?

LENORE: The fat lady’s not really real, and to the extent that she’s real she’s just used, and if she thinks she’s real and not being used, it’s only because the system that educes her and uses her makes her by definition feel real and non-educed and non-used.

JAY: And you’re telling me that’s the way you feel?

LENORE: You’re dumb. Is that really a Harvard diploma? I have to leave. Let me leave, please. I have to go to the ladies’ room.

JAY: Come see me tomorrow.

LENORE: I don’t have any money left.

JAY: Come see me the minute you have money. I’m here for you. Get Rick to give you money.

LENORE: Set my chair in motion, please.

JAY: We’ve made enormous strides, today.

LENORE: In your ear.

/b/

26 August

Monroe Fieldbinder Collection: “Fire.”

Monroe Fieldbinder drew his white fedora over his eyes and grinned wryly at the scene of chaos all around him.

Monroe Fieldbinder drew his fedora over his eyes and grinned wryly at the chaos that surrounded him. The flames of the burning house leaped into the night air and cast long, spindly shadows of Fieldbinder and the firemen and the gawkers down the rough new concrete suburban street. Undulating shrouds of sparks whirled and glowed in the spring wind. As he stood on the running board of a fire engine, yelling instructions to his men, the fire chief spotted Fieldbinder.

“Thought you’d be here, Fieldbinder,” said the chief, a grizzled old white-haired man with a rubicund face. “What took you so long?”

“Traffic.” Fieldbinder grinned wryly at the chief. “Looks like a bit of a mess, here, Chief”

/c/

A Phase III Centrex 28 console with a number 5 Crossbar has features which greatly aid the console operator in the efficient performance of his or her duties. Six receiving trunks correspond to six Source Receiving Call lamps, which flash at 60 Illuminations Per Minute for Out-House calls and 120 Illuminations Per Minute for In-House calls, and which emit at 60 Signals Per Minute a pleasant yet attention-getting tone. Calls can be transferred in-house via the Start In button, the individual extension code, and the Release Destination button, with the Ready lamp and an audible “access-established” dial tone assisting the operator in a smooth transfer. A completed transfer circuit will occupy a trunk until one or both parties terminate the circuit. As in all fixed-loop operations, the Source- and Destination lamps will remain lit until appropriate parties disconnect. As in all fixed-loop operations, simultaneous occupation of all six trunks will result in an All Paths Busy signal and a 120 IPM flash in the console’s Position Release button. The Position Release button allows the operator to exit all completed transfer circuits, and to abort any transfer circuit not yet completed. Other features include a HOLD option to be used when service-area conditions render its use appropriate, and a Position Busy button, an automatic all-trunk feed-lock that renders the console inaccessible from standard trunk circuits, and allows the operator to attend to urgent extra-console business when such arises.

Lunchtime, Bombardini Company and Frequent and Vigorous employees herding through the marble lobby and out the revolving door to lunch, the lobby a big box of noise for a few moments, Judith Prietht had depressed her Position Busy button and was reading a People magazine. Lenore Beadsman sat with wet hair over the Frequent and Vigorous console, answering calls.

“Frequent and Vigorous,” she said.

“Fucking car won’t start,” said a voice.

“Sir, I’m afraid this is not Cleveland Towing, this is Frequent and Vigorous Publishing, Inc., shall I give you the correct number, though it may not work? You’re very welcome.” Lenore Released and then Accessed. “Frequent and Vigorous. Hi Mr. Roxbee-Cox, this is Lenore Beadsman, her roommate. She’s supposed to be in again at six. I will. OK. Frequent and Vigorous.”

The Position Release button gives the console operator a significant amount of control over any and all communication circuits of which he or she is a part. Depression of the button will immediately terminate any given active console circuit. Like hanging up, only faster and better and more satisfying. An additional and not explicitly authorized feature, introduced by Vem Raring, the night operator, with a trash-bag twistie and his son’s Cub Scout knife, allows any and all abusive parties to be put in a HOLD mode unre leasable from that party’s end and so rendering that party’s telephone service inoperative until such time as the console operator decides to let him or her off the hook, so to speak. Exceptionally abusive calls placed in this mode can also, again thanks to Vern Raring, with the help of the Start Out button and a twelve-digit intertrunk reroute code and long-distance service number, be transferred to any extremely expensive long-distance service point in the world, with Australia and the People’s Republic of China being particular favorites of operators inclined to exercise this option.

“I’m going insane,” Lenore said. “This is nuts. This thing has hardly stopped beeping and ringing and shrieking once, and there’s been like one semi-legitimate call all day.”

“Now you know what it’s like to work for a change,” said Judith Prietht, thumbing through her magazine.

“Was it like this for Candy on my lunch hour?”

“How should I know, I’d like to know? I had affairs to attend to myself.” Judith wet a finger and turned a page. A Tab can with red-orange lipstick around the hole and a bag of dull-colored knitting sat on the white counter next to Judith’s console. Lenore had a ginger ale and four books, none of which she’d even gotten to open.

There was jingling and whistling out there. Out of the black line of shadow in front of the switchboard cubicle stepped Peter Abbott.

“Hola, ” said Peter Abbott.

“You,” “ Lenore said over the beeping of the console, ”you fix our lines this minute.“

“An unbelievably nasty problem,” Peter Abbott said, coming around the side of the counter and into the cubicle. Judith Prietht plumped up both sides of her hairdo with her hands. “The office is frantic,” Peter said. “You might be interested to know that this is the worst problem since ‘81 and the ice storm in March and the all-Cleveland-numbers-mysteriously-busy-all-the-time problem, and the worst non-storm-related problem of all time, in Cleveland.”

“What an honor.”

“Pain in the ass, I’m sure, is more like it,” Peter Abbott said.

Judith Prietht was looking up at Peter. “How are you today?”

Peter gave her the fish eye. “Bueno,”

“So is it the console?” Lenore asked, looking down at the console as if it might be diseased. “Is that why you’re here, and not the tunnel man?”

“I’m here for P.R.,” said Peter, eyeing Lenore’s cleavage again. “I was just over at Big B.M. Cafe, and before that Bambi’s Den, which by the way holy cow. And you should see Big Bob Martinez over at the cafe. He’s so pissed. And I just now got done talking to your head guy upstairs, just now, Mr. Vigorous, the little fruit fly in the beret and double chin?”

“Ixnay,” said Judith Prietht.

“So is it the console,” said Lenore.

“We’re assuming not,” Peter Abbott said. “We’re still assuming it’s the tunnels. Otherwise why would targets outside your console-access field be affected?”

“Assuming? You’re assuming?”

“Oh, an extra-special look back at the Olympics!” Judith Prietht said into her People.

“Well, yes,” said Peter Abbott. He fingered a wire-stripper uncomfortably.

“The tunnel guy hasn’t found anything?”

“Well, Tunnels is just having some problems of its own, really, that aren’t helping Interactive Cable’s ability to deal effectively with this service problem at all,” said Peter Abbott.

“Problems.”

“Tunnel men are flakey. Tunnel men tend to be drips. It looks like the tunnel guys have decided to just take off for a while, go fishing or whore-chasing or something. They even like haven’t told their wives where they’re going, and Mr. Sludgeman, who’s the Tunnel Supervisor, is understandably really pissed off, also.”

“So wait. We have a hideous tunnel problem that totally impedes our ability to conduct business….”

Judith Prietht snorted.

“… and Interactive Cable all of a sudden, whom we pay for service, doesn’t have the staff needed to restore our service? Is that it?”

“P.R. isn’t really my specialty, you know,” said Peter Abbott.

“That really sucks,” Lenore said.

“Could I just say in passing that you have incredibly beautiful legs?” said Peter Abbott.

“Fresh,” said Judith Prietht.

“Fresh?”

“Go into our tunnel,” Lenore said to Peter Abbott. The console was beeping insanely. Lenore had only recently gotten the hang of ignoring the console when she really had to. “Go and restore our service this instant. I’m sure everyone would be grateful, especially the apparently very busy girls over at Bambi‘s, if you get my drift.” Or get Mr. Sledgeman to go fix them.“

Sludgeman.“

“Sludgeman.”

“Mr. Sludgeman can’t go, he’s in a wheelchair. He broke his spine in the ice-storm crisis of ‘81. And I can’t go down. You can’t mess with the tunnels, they’re real delicate. Think of them like nerves, and the city’s a body, with a nervous system. I go in and clunk around, and mess things up even more, and then where are we? Nerves cannot be messed with by the untrained. A tunnel man needs incredible finesse.”

“Even though they’re drips.”

“Right.”

“Holy cow,” Judith Prietht said into her magazine. “Holy cow. Kid, listen to this.”

“I’m sure Mr. Vigorous went on record as saying that Frequent and Vigorous is collectively really ticked off about this,” said Lenore.

“Kid, listen. Kopek Spasova. Kopek Spasova,” Judith said. “The superstar. ”

“Who?” said Peter Abbott.

“Kopek Spasova, the little kid from Russia that wins all the gold medals all over the place in gymnastics. She’s coming to Cleveland next Friday, it says. She’s going to exhibit.”

“May I please see that?” Lenore said. The console was hushed for a moment. “Holy mackerel,” said Lenore. In People there was a picture of Kopek Spasova, at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, spinning around the uneven parallel bars, holding on only by her toes. “She was really great,” Lenore said. “I watched that on television.”

“It said she’s coming to an exhibition sponsored by Gerber’s Baby Food in the lobby of Erieview Tower,” Judith said.

“ ‘Kicking off a promotional campaign for the infant-food giant will be hot gymnastic commodity Kopek Spasova,’ ” Lenore read out loud, “ ‘whose father and coach, Ruble Spasov, just signed a purportedly mammoth promotional and endorsement contract with the firm.’ That’s just in few days.”

“Endorsing baby food?” said Peter Abbott.

“Well, she’s only something like eight, and really small,” said Lenore. She looked back down at the magazine. “ Dad’s not going to be pleased at all. Gerber’s done it again. And right here in Cleveland.”

“How can a communist do endorsements in the U.S. of A., anyway?” asked Judith Prietht. “There are death-penalty rules against that, in Russia, I thought.”

“She’s not Russian anymore,” said Lenore.

“Oh, right, she’s the one whose father just defecated.”

“Defected.”

“That’s the one!”

“Right.”

“I gotta go. I gotta go do P.R. at Fuss ‘n’ Feathers Pets,” Peter Abbott said. “The minute we get competent access to the tunnels, you’re going to get satisfaction, I’m telling you straight out right now. ”

“How comforting.”

“Take care.”

“Kopek Spasova… goodbye!” called Judith Prietht.

“Adios.”

“I’d like to see that,” said Lenore. “Frequent and Vigorous.”

/d/

Every year in August Monroe Fieldbinder took a vacation and took his family deep into the woods to a lake in the Adirondacks. On this particular day Monroe Fieldbinder stood alone at the edge of the clear clean cold Adirondack lake, his fishing line limp in the clear water, and stared across the lake at a vacation house burning in the woods above the opposite shore. Fieldbinder listened to the distant crackle and watched the black plume of smoke spiral up into the crisp blue sky. He saw shrouds of twirling sparks and the tiny figures of the house’s occupants running around yelling and throwing buckets of water onto the edge of the inferno. Fieldbinder pulled his white fishing hat over his eyes and grinned wryly at the chaotic scene. and grinned ryly at the scene.

/e/

“Get him down! Get him down!”

“Got him.”

“Get him down, Shorlit!”

“I gotcha.”

“God, what a racket.”

“God.”

“We need Wetzel. Ring Wetzel.”

“He’s out of his mind.”

“Just hold him, Wetzel’ll be here.”

“We’re gonna have to wrap him.”

“He’s right, go get a wrap. Wetzel, go get a wrap, run!”

“jesus.”

“It’s OK, it’s OK.”

“Is he gonna be OK?”

“Can you just stand back, please?”

“Got in the cab, wanted to go to the Loop, I says OK, I’m doin’ like he asks me, I get to Wacker and LaSalle and he starts screaming like that. I didn’t know what the hell to do.”

“You did the right thing. Please go stand over there. Shorlit, how you doing? You got him?”

“Barely. Shit.”

“Strong little guy.”

“Out of his mind.”

“He flipped. He just totally fucking flipped out. Thought I was gonna have an accident getting him here.”

“It’s OK, it’s OK.”

“He’s gonna tear his throat out.”

“Let’s just get the wrap on him.”

“Roll him over.”

“Ow! Little bastard.”

“Sshh, it’s OK.”

“Get the arm.”

“Ow!”

“Roll him back. Wetzel, roll him back.”

“I got him.”

“Tighten it. Careful, his ribs. One more.”

“Gotcha.”

“Jesus God will you listen to that.”

“Get him in. Wetzel, carry him. Shorlit, get a gumey with leg straps. ”

“I gotcha.”

“Christ, he weighs about ninety pounds. He’s a skeleton.”

“Can’t you make him stop?”

“You’re going to have to get back out of the way.”

“Thorazine?”

“I want Thorazine, 250 c.c.’s. Get a rubber, he may swallow his tongue. Shorlit, get the door.”

“It’s OK, sshh, listen we’re here to help.”

“How can he keep it up? He’s gonna stroke.”

“Get a rubber.”

“Put him down.”

“Jesus.”

“Straps.”

“Thorazine.”

“Give me access to an arm, Shorlit.”

“Come on.”

“Forget the rubber till we get him out. He’ll bite your finger.”

“People are gonna think we’re killing somebody down here.”

“Been drivin’ a cab seventeen years.”

“Please wait outside.”

“Never seen any shit like that.”

“Wetzel.”

“Let’s go, pal. You can wait out here.”

“Go with the orderly, please.”

“It’ll kick, wait a second.”

“Jesus.”

“Look at the eyes. They roll over. They’ll roll back when it kicks.”

“It’s kicking.”

“Thank God.”

“My ears are ringing.”

“Holy shit.”

“You better get a drip ready. Call up on five and fill them in, Cathy, OK? First get the drip.”

“Shit.”

“Thanks, you guys. Shorlit, you want to see if he’s got ID?”

“I’ll roll him over.”

“It’s pretty much kicked.”

“Christ, he wet his pants.”

“I’m going to call up and let Golden know we didn’t murder anybody.”

“No ID.”

“Check his chest. A necklace, tags.”

“Umm…”

“Undo him. It’s OK, it kicked.”

“I’m gonna go call. Try to find ID, then take him over to Series Start.”

“Jesus.”

“Hell of a start to the night.”

“Here’s a necklace.”

“Pretty nice one.”

“ ‘To JB From LB.’ ”

“His eyes are back, anyway.”

“It’s OK.”

/f/

Just a troubling flash of the Queen Victoria dream, last night. Just a strobe of a florid patch of red dough, curled in scorn. A new one, though. Sinister. Lenore is not unresponsible. This one should make Jay’s day.

I am driving in Mexico, in a Lincoln. The air conditioner is broken. It is unbearably hot. I am wearing a wool suit. The suit is soaked with perspiration. The sand of the desert is black. I have reservations at a motel. I pull up to the motel and park by a cactus. There are scorpions. The motel sign says NO VACANCY, even though it’s in Mexico. But I have a reservation, and I assert that I do to the desk clerk standing behind the counter in a lobby that smells like a burp. The desk clerk is an enormous mouse, with a huge handlebar mustache. The mouse is wearing a faded woolen Mexican poncho.

“I have a reservation,” I say.

“Sí,” says the mouse.

The mouse leads me through a hole in the wall (eat it, Jay, I defy you not to eat it up) to a room that is lovely and air-conditioned and perfect and complete in every way except that it has no sheets on the bed.

“Gee,” I say, “there are no sheets on this bed.”

The mouse looks at me. “Seor,” he says, “if you sheet on my bed, I will keel you.”

We both laugh, and the mouse punches me in the arm.

/g/

“Good moming.”

“Good morning. How are you this morning?”

“I’m just fine, thanks, Patrice. Shall we begin?”

“Oh, please.”

“Are you being sarcastic?”

“Oh, no.”

“What is your name?”

“My name is Patrice LaVache.”

“What is your married name?”

“My married name is Patrice Beadsman.”

“How old are you?”

“I am fifty years old.”

“Where are you?”

“I am at a sanitarium in Madison, Wisconsin.”

“What is the name of the sanitarium?”

“….”

“Whom do you look like?”

“I look like John Lennon.”

“Why?”

“I am sharp-featured and wear round John Lennon glasses and have brown hair in a ponytail.”

“Why are you here?”

….“

“Why are you here?”

“Because I want to be.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Years and years.”

“What do you see?”

“I see a trellis I have to climb.”

“Why do you have to climb the trellis?”

“Because I am at the top of the trellis and I have to climb it.”

“What is wrong with the trellis?”

“West bids four hearts.”

“What is wrong with the trellis?”

“The trellis is white, with vines with thorns. They scratch my stomach my stomach is fat.”

“What is wrong with the trellis.”

“The trellis has a crack at the top near the window and it pulls away from the wall and breaks off, the trellis breaks off, with vines that bleed when they break.”

“How high.”

“May I please breathe?”

“Yes.”

“….”

“How high?”

“Around… the sun. It’s a doozy.”

“Where are you hurt.”

“My back is hurt. My collarbone is hurt. Like a blister I popped open. I gave birth to a blister in the flowers.”

“How far did you fall?” “….”

“I fell for years.”

“Were you hurt.”

“I am.”

“What do you want.”

“Punish me, please.”

“Please tell me what you want to be punished for.”

“For climbing, and falling, and breathing.”

“Who was at the top of the trellis?”

“May I please breathe?”

“Yes.”

“….”

“Who was at the top of the trellis.”

“Nobody.”

“Who was at the top of the trellis.”

“A window.”

“Whose window.”

“John and Lenore’s. Clarice’s. Lenore’s window.”

“Lenore was in the window.”

“It cracked.”

“The trellis.”

“Yes.”

“Who was with Lenore?”

“I need to breathe.”

“Breathe. Here, breathe. Let me wipe off your lip.”

“Thank you. Lenore’s governess was with Lenore.”

“What was her name?”

“I don’t know the name of Lenore’s governess.”

“Who was a prisoner?”

“Punish me, please.”

“Was Lenore a prisoner?”

“It would be so fun to breathe.”

“Was Lenore a prisoner?”

“My son is in horrible trouble, in the south. Higher than the trellis in the south. Smitten from afar. My son is burning in a white place. My son’s eyes are white now. Needs something to make himself dark, in the game. Cut.”

“Patrice. Breathe.”

“I can’t.”

“Yes you can. You are. Watch yourself breathe, Patrice.” “….”

“Was Lenore a prisoner?”

“No she was not a… prisoner.”

“Why not?”

“God.”

“Why not?”

“My son.”

“Who was the prisoner, Patrice?”

“….”

“Who was the prisoner, Patrice?”

….“

….“

“Good morning how are you this morning.”

/h/

PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT OF RAP SESSION, THURSDAY, 26 AUGUST 1990, IN THE OFFICE OF DR. CURTIS JAY, PH.D. PARTICIPANTS: DR. CURTIS JAY AND MR. RICK

VIGOROUS, AGE 42, FILE NUMBER 744-25-4291.

DR. JAY: Hell of a dream.

RICK VIGOROUS: Bet your ass.

JAY: Mice, again.

RICK: Hate mice.

JAY: Yes?

RICK: Yes.

JAY: Can we possibly articulate why?

RICK: Mice are small, soft, and weak. Mice scuttle. Mice get inside things and gnaw. Mice tickle.

JAY: Pretty unclean animals, too, aren’t they?

RICK: Dr. Jay, I swear to God, mention hygiene anxiety just once, here, and I’m going to lunge.

JAY: The prospect of discussing hygiene anxiety makes you uncomfortable.

RICK: Lunge-alert.

JAY: Fine. Your comfort is after all our number one priority, here. RICK: Damn well ought to be.

JAY: What would you like to talk about, then?

RICK: Lenore.

JAY: I rather think not, today, if you don’t mind.

RICK: Pardon me?

JAY: It just so happens Lenore and I made enormous strides today. I smelled breakthrough, big time.

RICK: Christ, breakthrough again.

JAY: I’d just rather sit on the Lenore thing and see what comes out. RICK: As it were.

JAY: The jealousy thing, still. You still think I’m sexually interested in Lenore Beadsman.

RICK: I—

JAY: When will you emotionally digest the information that jealousy is simply the stupid man’s misdirected projection of insecurity? Of identity troubles? Of hygiene anxiety?

RICK: I am just so tired of you.

JAY: Sometimes you’re such a clod, Rick. Think about last night’s dream. After what I understand to be fulfilling coitus, then a story, then a fight. Then a dream. The dream. Let’s do the dream. Black sand and scorpions. Where does that put us, now?

Rick Vigorous pauses.

JAY: Awfully tough to figure out. The G.O.D., where else? But Mexico, too. Which is to say here but not here. Which is to say the here of the dreaming unconscious. A luxurious Lincoln in the midst of a blasted region. Self and Other. Difference. Inside-Outside. Except the air conditioner is broken. The Outside is getting in. The heat is the Outside. It’s getting in, because the Inside’s broken. The Inside doesn’t keep the distinction going. The Inside lets the Outside in. And what does it make you do? You sweat. You’re hot and you sweat. What does the Outside do? It makes you unclean. It coats Self with Other. It pokes at the membrane. And if the membrane is what makes you you and the not-you not you, what does that say about you, when the not-you begins to poke through the membrane?

RICK: Look at this, you’re drooling. I can see saliva on your lips. JAY: It makes you insecure, is what it does. It makes you, the “you,” nonsecure, not tightly fastened into your side of the membrane. So what happens? Communications break down. You get confused, cautious. Things don’t mean what they mean. A Mexican motel sign that should be in Spanish says NO VACANCY. Another person, an Other, becomes a threatening animal, a kind that gets inside things and gnaws, to quote. The lobby smells like the nasty dross of digestion. There are language problems.

RICK: Christ, you can tell Lenore was here. How can you let patients dominate you?

JAY: Come on, Lenore and her particular troubles have nothing to do with it. What’s the whole problem? The request you make for a clean, natural thing is interpreted by the Other/foreigner/threatening animal as a threat to soil, to dirty. The disturbance of your security on your interior side of the Self-Other membrane makes you an erratic and dangerous component of everyone else’s Other-set. Your insecurity bleeds out into and contaminates the identities and hygiene networks of Others. Which again simply reinforces the idea of the hygiene-identity-distinction membrane being permeable—permeable via uncleanness, permeable via misunderstanding—which are ultimately, according to Blentner, not coherently distinguishable.

RICK: Blentner, Blentner. Is this all Blentner?

JAY: To a certain extent. So what? Most of what I’ve said comes out of the seminal Heidelberg Hygiene Lectures of 1962. I’d let you look at them, but they‘re—

RICK: I am so tired. You are deliberately unhelpful. I have a freakishly small penis. Attendant self-esteem and security problems. I want help with them. I want to hear about Lenore and her secrets. Instead I hear Olaf Blentner and membranes. Help me with my penis, Jay. Do something useful and help me with my penis.

JAY: Penis, shmenis. What can I do about your penis? You are not your penis. It’s you I’m interested in.

RICK: Christ.

JAY: Are things so bad? You’ve got Lenore, a beautiful, bright, witty, largely joyful albeit troubled and anyway interestingly troubled girl, and she loves you.

RICK: But I don’t have her. I can’t. I never will.

JAY: The Screen Door of the Great House of Love, et cetera et cetera. RICK: Christ.

JAY: Well, Rick, really, get mad if you want and no doubt will, but I think à la Blentner it all comes back to the membrane. I think the membrane is the breakthrough you want. I think it’s membrane we’re both smelling here. You want to use your penis to put what’s inside of you inside an Other, to tear down distinctions the way you want them torn down. You want to have your membrane and eat it too, so to speak. Your desire to bring the Inside out is just an image of your fear of the Outside getting in… in short, hygiene anxiety.

RICK: Fuck this. Start the chair.

JAY: I’m your friend.

RICK: I have to go to the bathroom in the worst way.

JAY: We’re making strides. You don’t think we’re striding? I insist that we’re striding.

RICK: Schmuck.

JAY: The scent is everywhere.

RICK: You know who you’d get along with really well, is Norman Bombardini.

JAY: You know Norman?

RICK: Good God. I should have known. Let me out of here.

JAY: Come back on Monday. Give Lenore money so she can come back, too.

RICK: Schnook.

JAY: I’m here for you.

/i/

Lenore saw Mr. Bloemker through the window of Gilligan’s Isle as she was passing by after work on her way to the bus stop. Gilligan’s Isle was a little ways down from the Weight Watchers facility Norman Bombardini had pointed out from the restaurant the night before. In Lenore’s purse was a note from Mr. Bombardini, with a smeared chocolate thumbprint in one comer, that had come with an almost empty box of candy to the Frequent and Vigorous switchboard today. The note said “Be my tiny Yin.”

Gilligan’s Isle was a very popular bar. The inside of the place was round, the walls were painted to look like the filmy blue horizon of the ocean, and the floors were painted and textured to resemble beach. There were palm trees all over, fronds hanging down tick lishly over the patrons. Sprouting from the floor of the bar were huge statued likenesses of the whole cast: the Skipper, the Howells, Ginger, and the rest, painted in bright castaway colors and all with uncannily characteristic facial expressions. The huge castaways were sunk into the floor at about chest level; their heads, arms, shoulders, and outstretched upturned hands were all tables for patrons. There was a certain amount of intertwining: Mr. Howell’s arm was wrapped part way around Mrs. Howell’s waist, Mary-Ann’s long hair brushed the plastic top of Mr. Howell’s forearm, the Professor’s thumb hovered achingly close to Ginger’s décolletage. The bar itself was made of that vaguely straw-like material that huts on the show were made of. Behind the bar at all times was one of a number of bartenders, all of whom resembled, to a greater or lesser degree, Gilligan. Once an hour the bartender would be required to do something blatantly cloddish and stupid — a standard favorite had the bartender slipping on a bit of spilled banana daiquiri and falling and acting as if he had driven his thumb into his eye — and the patrons would, if they were hip and in the know, say with one voice, “Aww, Gilligan,” and laugh, and clap.

Mr. Bloemker was sitting at the back, at Mary-Ann’s left hand, facing the front window. With him was a very beautiful woman in a shiny dress who stared blankly straight in front of her. Lenore saw them and came inside and went over to their table.

“Hi Mr. Bloemker,” she said.

Mr. Bloemker looked up with a start. “Ms. Beadsman.”

“Hi.”

“Hello. Fancy meeting…” Mr. Bloemker looked strange and scooted a tiny bit toward Mary-Ann’s wrist, away from the beautiful woman he had been sitting right next to.

“Well Frequent and Vigorous is just over in the Bombardini Building, over there,” said Lenore, “which you can probably see, if you look over in the comer of the window, over there, with the lights on?”

“Well well.”

“Hi, I’m Lenore Beadsman, I know Mr. Bloemker,” Lenore said to the beautiful woman.

The beautiful woman didn’t say anything; she stared straight ahead.

“Lenore Beadsman, this is Brenda, Brenda, may I present Ms. Lenore Beadsman,” said Mr. Bloemker, his fingers in his beard. In front of both Mr. Bloemker and Brenda were drinks in plastic jugs shaped like pineapples, with straws coming out of holes in the top.

“Hi,” Lenore said to Brenda. “….”

“Please sit down,” said Mr. Bloemker.

Lenore sat. “Is Brenda OK?”

“Please don’t mind Brenda. Brenda is very shy,” Mr. Bloemker said. He was slurring a tiny bit. He was apparently a bit tight. His cheeks were lit up above the tendrils of the top of his beard, his nose shone, his glasses were a little steamed, and he was uncombed, a huge, obscene Superman-curl of hair lying like a giant comma across his forehead.

“I tried to call you today,” said Lenore, “except you weren’t there, and then I could only try once, because we were incredibly busy, what with horrible line trouble and everything.”

“Yes. It was a busy day.”

“I couldn’t have my father call you because he wasn’t in. He’s out for a couple of days, and apparently unreachable.”

“Yes.”

“But the minute he gets back.”

“Fine.”

“And the really big except also troubling news is that I think for sure Lenore and Mrs. Yingst and the other patients are at least still around, in Cleveland, because Mrs. Yingst’s walker was in my apartment last night, and it wasn’t before, and she left a message for me with my bird, who can suddenly talk.”

“Your bird can suddenly talk?”

“Yes. Unfortunately mostly obscenely.”

“I see.”

“To be honest, it’s not inconceivable that Mrs. Yingst gave him LSD.”

“Oh, now, I don’t think Mrs. Yingst would do something like that.”

“But then what’s going on, all these old patients just hanging around Cleveland, and not telling anybody, and staff and staff’s families hanging around, too?”

“Residents.”

“Residents, sorry.” Lenore looked at Brenda. “Listen, are you sure Brenda’s OK? Brenda like hasn’t moved once, that I’ve been able to see, since I got here.” Brenda stared straight ahead out of her beautiful eyes.

Mr. Bloemker looked blankly at Lenore. “Please,” he said, “give Brenda not a thought. It takes Brenda a while to loosen up around strangers.” He looked back down at his pineapple with bleary eyes and played with his straw. “Residents. We call them residents, you know, actually it’s at my insistence that we not call them patients, we call them residents because we try very hard at Shaker Heights to minimize the medical implications of their being with the facility. We try to minimize the appearance of illness, the importance of illness. Without much success, really, I’m afraid.”

“I understand,” said Lenore.

There was a yelp and a crash and tinkle; the bartender lay sprawled over the bar with his head in a palm-tree pot, his legs in white cotton pants waving, beer on the floor. “Aww, Gilligan,” everyone yelled and laughed, except Lenore and Mr. Bloemker and Brenda. Mr. Bloemker scratched under his beard with his straw.

“A troubling and disorienting position at the facility, mine,” he said. He looked up at Lenore. “Why don’t you help yourself to some of Brenda’s Twizzler? Brenda’s not drinking it, I see.”

Brenda stared.

“Well, I don’t really drink alcoholic stuff much,” Lenore said. “It makes me cough.”

“Here.”

“Thanks.”

“Troubling.”

“I can imagine.”

“The old… the old are not like you and I, Ms. Beadsman. As you no doubt know, having spent so much time around… at the facility.”

“They’re different, I agree.”

“Yes.”

“Yes.” Lenore tried a bit of Twizzler, got a strong taste of gin and Hawaiian Punch, closed her eyes, discreetly spat the bit of Twizzler back out of the straw into the plastic pineapple jug.

“They are also Midwesterners,” continued Mr. Bloemker. “As a rule, almost all of them are Midwesterners.” He stared off. “This area of the country, what are we to say of this area of the country, Ms. Beadsman?”

“Search me.”

“Both in the middle and on the fringe. The physical heart, and the cultural extremity. Com, a steadily waning complex of heavy industry, and sports. What are we to say? We feed and stoke and supply a nation much of which doesn’t know we exist. A nation we tend to be decades behind, culturally and intellectually. What are we to say about it?”

“Well, you’re saying pretty good things, really; I sense some interest on Brenda’s part, too, I think.”

“This area makes for truly bizarre people. Troubled people. As past historians have noted and future historians will note.”

“Yup.”

“And when the people in question then become old, when they must not only come to terms with and recognize the implications of their consciousness of themselves as parts of this strange, occluded place… when they must incorporate and manage memory, as well, past perceptions and feelings. Perceptions of the past. Memories: things that both are and aren’t. The Midwest: a place that both is and isn’t. A volatile mixture. I have sensed volatileness at the facility for some time.”

“Does this explain anything, do you think? Disappearance-wise?”

“I think it explains very little.”

“I’m going to give Brenda back her Twizzler. Brenda, here’s your Twizzler back, thanks a lot, I’m just not in the mood. Are you sure she’s OK? Have I offended her somehow?”

“Brenda, don’t be a stick in the mud.”

Brenda was silent.

Mr. Bloemker massaged his chin. “The average age of the residents at the facility — I did some research today at the request of the owners — the average age of the residents at the facility is eighty-seven. Eighty-seven years of age. How old are you, Ms. Beadsman?”

“I’m twenty-four.”

“So you were born in 1966. I was born in 1957. The average resident was born in 1903. Think of that.”

“Boy.”

“These people, think of the worlds they’ve been part of. The worlds. They’ve literally gone from horse and buggy to moonshot. The technological changes alone that they have stood witness to are staggering. How might one even begin to orient oneself with respect to such a series of changes in the fundamental features of the world? How to begin to come to some understanding of one’s place in a system, when one is a part of an area that exists in such a troubling relation to the rest of the world, a world that is itself stripped of any static, understandable character by the fact that it changes, radically, all the time?”

“System?”

Mr. Bloemker looked at his thumb. “Have you ever been to the Desert, Ms. Beadsman? The G.O.D.?”

“Not for quite a while, like ten years. Lenore and I actually used to go. She had a Volvo that we’d take down, do a little fishing at the edge, do the wander-thing.”

“Yes. I would like to go down and wander.”

“Well it’s easy. You can just buy a Wander Pass at any gate. They’re only about five dollars. The really desolate areas can get pretty crowded, of course, sometimes, so it’s good to get there early, get as much wandering as you can in before noon. ”

“Brenda and I may go down soon. I feel a need for… for sinistemess. I sense Brenda does, too. Am I right, plum petal?” Bloemker carelessly chucked Brenda’s chin with his hand. Brenda tilted way back on the bench, beside Mary-Ann’s hand, until her legs hit the bottom of the table, then sat rapidly up again, vibrating a little. Lenore narrowed her eyes.

“Hmmm.”

“Another thing I must in all frankness admit to finding… amusing,” Mr. Bloemker said, sucking for a moment on the straw in his jug, drinking at something that smelled to Lenore like another Twizzler, “although I hesitate to use that term, because it sounds as if I mean to be derogatory, which I do not. Our residents, the people who are very old now, have really made our culture what it is. And now by culture I mean this country’s culture, not Ohio’s culture, which I do not profess even to begin to understand. Particularly the women, it seems to me. We like to think the sexual revolution is a creation of our generation. That’s a crock, pardon my language. The women who are now old invented it all. Everything we profess to enjoy. The women who reside in facilities now were the first American women to cut their hair short. The first to drink. To smoke. To dance in public. Shall we discuss voting? Making money? Being economic entities? They were pioneers, these people in wheelchairs with blanketed laps.”

“Listen, are you absolutely sure Brenda’s OK?” Lenore asked. “Because the thing is I haven’t really seen Brenda move once on her own, which it occurs to me now includes seeing her chest move to breathe, or seeing her blink. What’s with Brenda?”

“The cutting of hair. That particularly fascinates me. It freed these women from a prison. An aesthetic prison. It freed them from the one-hundred-brushstrokes-a-night tyranny of the culture that… obtained.”

“The not blinking really bothers me, I’ve got to tell you. And what’s this on her neck, here? On Brenda’s neck?”

“Birthmark. Pimple.”

“Is this an air-valve? This is an air-valve! See, here’s the cap. Are you sitting with an inflatable doll?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“You’re sitting with an inflatable doll! This isn’t even a person.”

“Brenda, this isn’t funny, show Ms. Beadsman you’re a person.”

“My God. See, she weighs about one pound. I can lift her up.” Lenore lifted Brenda way up by the thigh. Brenda suddenly fell out of Lenore’s hand and her head got wedged between the bench and Mary-Ann’s hand, and she was upside down. Her dress fell up.

“Good heavens,” said Mr. Bloemker.

“One of those dolls. That’s just sick. How can you sit in public with an anatomically correct doll?”

“I must confess, the wool seems to have been completely pulled over my eyes. I thought she was simply extremely shy. A troubled Midwestemer, in an ambivalent relation…”

“Nice doll,” remarked another patron, at Mrs. Howell’s elbow.

“I think Brenda and I should be going,” Mr. Bloemker said. He struggled with Brenda’s plastic legs. Brenda was wedged. Lenore helped Mr. Bloemker pull. Brenda came out, but her dress got caught on Mary-Ann’s thumbnail and ripped and fell off.

“Holy shit,” said Lenore.

“Holy cow,” said the patron at Mrs. Howell’s elbow. “Where’d you get that? Are those expensive?” Other people at different tables turned to look. Things got quiet.

“How excruciatingly…,” Bloemker muttered.

“Probably wise to go now,” Lenore said.

“Certainly nice to have seen you, anxiously await your father’s…” Mr. Bloemker covered Brenda as best he could with his sportcoat and made for the door. There were whistles and claps. Bloemker broke into a run and ran suddenly into the bartender, who was coming around the side of the bar with a tray of creamy White Russians. There was an enormous crash and tinkle, and the bartender flipped over backwards and drove his thumb into his eye, and White Russian went everywhere, and a shard of broken White-Russian glass hit Brenda and punctured her and she flew out of Mr. Bloemker’s arms and went whizzing around the room, twirling, losing air, finally to land limply but beautifully in a palm-tree pot, with one leg wrapped around her neck. Mr. Bloemker flew out the door. Lenore sniffed at his Twizzler. The patrons laughed and clapped,

“Aww, Gilligan.”

9. 1990

/a/

“Come in. Waiting long? Busy day. I get back, am unable even to see my desk, for all the messages. Foamwhistle, leave. Remember Pupik, in Lids, and Goggins, in Jars, have to be brought to see me at the same time. Attend to it. I’ve asked you repeatedly before. A company that cannot coordinate its lids and its jars is a bad company. I do not run a bad company. Go now. Come in. Don’t jump at her, Foamwhistle, you can whisper and giggle together later. This is my time. Come in. For whatever part of your wait was my fault I apologize, although none of it was my fault. You like this? You don’t like this? I caught it. I had it stuffed. Still looks wet, to me. You? I caught it in Canada. Went up to Canada, with Gerber. Did a little fishing. Little fishing with Gerber up in Canada. Got a tan, a natural one, tell your sister that. Not there, up here, closer. Light’s terrible in here today. Why Foamwhistle can’t arrange an office that doesn’t have to depend for its light on a window is beyond me. At least I can see you up here. Are you really gray, or is it just the light? Although I like the rain on the window, I like to look out, when I find myself with a second, which is of course never. Lake looks good in the rain. Rain cleans the lake up. The sound of the rain on the window… You like it? No? Yes? Down to business. Stonecipher got off to Amherst satisfactorily, I assume. How long has it been, three weeks? You can’t spare an hour in three weeks? I know what you’re going to say, but the Canada thing just came up. Gerber just came up with the idea. We can’t plan these things, or it looks as if we’re price-fixing or something. You, on the other hand, you have no free time? This is not simply one indefinitely broad interval of free time? How is your job? How much money do you have? Do you have money? If you do not say anything, I automatically assume you have money. Further thoughts on the issue we discussed at length the last time I saw you? No? No further thoughts? Planless, still? Distinguished graduate of Oberlin? Most highly educated receptionist and telephone operator in Cleveland history? And the firm. I anxiously await the appearance of the firm’s first book. Has the firm published a book yet? Norslan? That’s not a book, that’s advertising. Still, production is production, as I well know. Up to four-ten yet? Still four big dollars an hour? How long? No. Perfectly natural to want some sort of interval without school, without a real job or any responsibilities, I won’t even say marriage because my glasses will break, but how long? The reasonable question. Followed by the reasonable point. Wait. Wait. To love a non-nuclear relative is a good thing. To be connected… excuse me, to be connected is good. But to imitate that relative… in all facets… is not good. To try to be that relative is unnatural. Thus bad. Not fair? Not true? Then, really, why purposely invite comparison, accusation? Is that the appropriate question? Why the hair, which you must know I loathe that way? The ancient dresses? What is the function of those shoes? Yes, function. I know. Wait a moment. The aimlessness after a self-consciously dazzling college career. Gramma Lenore leaves her child, my father, your grandfather, at Shaker School and flies off to England. England. Yes, I know where function comes from, after all. Yes. The irreponsibility. Your refusal, a, to go to school; your refusal, b, to put your expensive degree to renumerative use. Your refusal even to live at home. No, not really, of course there is understanding, but perceive simply that on my end too there is embarrassment and sadness. Except in the daytime… excuse me… except in the daytime there are only Miss Malig and myself, in that huge house. Why that look? I seethe with anger at that look, and will not even condescend to deny anymore. Your mother’s child. The aimlessness. A mindless job, punching numbers and making connections for other people. Still no romantic involvement? No? No, that doesn’t point up an important difference. Aimlessness and irresponsibility simply take on new forms as time goes by. Besides, there is Mr. Vigorous. No, don’t bother to deny involvement, bother to deny extent. I see. No real point in discussing it, is there? So then, Lenore. Right. With regard to the issue I strongly suspect has understandably brought you here, just let me say everything’s largely under control and thoroughly explainable. The thing with Gerber was incidental. The thing with Gerber just came up. Rummage did call Bloomfield. Bloemker. At my instructions. Yes. Not at all. Your not knowing what’s going on was purely accidental. The big picture and so on. I’d assumed Gramma, not to mention very probably Foamwhistle, had been keeping you filled quietly in, all along. What was going on was that some time ago Gramma Lenore summoned me to her greenhouse of a room to discuss a project. A project. A business project. Just wait. She had concepts she wanted to bounce off me. They bounced, and I was intrigued. I brought in one of our men, one of our researchers, one of our chemists, the Obstat kid? Neil Obstat, Jr.? I know you went to Shaker with him. The little lizard still has your picture in his wallet, apparently. In any event, he was intrigued, too. Gramma Lenore’s friend, the Yingst woman? Had had a husband who had done research. Pineal research. The pineal gland? No? A little round gland at the base of the brain? P-i-n-e-a- 1? Remember Descartes thought it was where mind met body, way back when, the point of mediation, where the body’s hydraulics were adjusted and operated according to the…? Right. Certain you must have done it in class. Yingst had theories, certain theories, in which Gramma Lenore was not uninterested, for predictably self-oriented reasons. A mutually beneficial transaction was proposed.”

/b/

From Advertising Age, 28 August 1990, “Ear to the Ground” Column, pp. 31–32:

INFANT-FOOD MARKET HEATS UP THANKS TO UNPRECEDENTED PROMOTIONAL AGGRESSIVENESS, ENTREPRENEURIAL CAJONES.

Cleveland, Ohio, is the unlikely site for what insiders say is the next real industry battle in the production of infant food, with giants Gerber’s Quality Brands and Stonecipheco Baby Food Products lining up toe to toe for a market-share struggle that could very well leave third-place Beech-Nut Infant Division out in the cold.

As Gerber’s ties up loose ends and prepares to mount an unprecedented pan-media advertising and consumer-good-will operation, featuring the highly prized and high-priced services of ex-Soviet hot commodity Kopek Spasova, Stonecipheco, say A.A. sources and analysts, is preparing to announce and capitalize quickly on the market implications of a research advance unprecedented in food service history, a cattle-endocrine derivative that, when added to an infant’s (Stonecipheco!!!) food on a regular basis, can significantly speed up the development of powers of speech and comprehension. “Kids are talking months, maybe years before they normally would have, in limited tests,” whispered an inside Stonecipheco source. “We’re talking not only eventual market domination, but a potentially really significant insight into the relation between nutrition and mental development, between what the body needs and the mind can do.”

Is Gerber’s in on the research? No one’s saying, but the coincidence of Gerber’s opening its promotional bonanza in downtown Cleveland, a stone’s throw from Stonecipheco’s main facility and headquarters, has been noted. The plot also thickens when we recall that company chiefs Robert Gerber and Stonecipher Beadsman III are old school chums, both attending tiny highbrow Amherst College in Massachusetts in the fifties.

The interest of nutrition-market enthusiasts in the whole downtown Cleveland scene heightens when we take note again of last week’s E.T.G. item concerning genetic-engineering giant Norman Bombardini’s wild and apparently successful forays into… (continued on page 55)

/c/

“… that, to repeat what I heard for years and years and suspect you’ve been hearing over and over, yourself, something’s meaning is nothing more or less than its function. Et cetera et cetera et cetera. Has she done the thing with the broom with you? No? What does she use now? No. What she did with me — I must have been eight, or twelve, who remembers — was to sit me down in the kitchen and take a straw broom and start furiously sweeping the floor, and she asked me which part of the broom was more elemental, more fundamental, in my opinion, the bristles or the handle. The bristles or the handle. And I hemmed and hawed, and she swept more and more violently, and I got nervous, and finally when I said I supposed the bristles, because you could after a fashion sweep without the handle, by just holding on to the bristles, but couldn’t sweep with just the handle, she tackled me, and knocked me out of my chair, and yelled into my ear something like, ‘Aha, that’s because you want to sweep with the broom, isn’t it? It’s because of what you want the broom for, isn’t it?’ Et cetera. And that if what we wanted a broom for was to break windows, then the handle was clearly the fundamental essence of the broom, and she illustrated with the kitchen window, and a crowd of domestics gathered; but that if we wanted the broom to sweep with, see for example the broken glass, sweep sweep, the bristles were the thing’s essence. No? What now, then? With pencils? No matter. Meaning as fundamentalness. Fundamentalness as use. Meaning as use. Meaning as use. Excuse me? You’re asking me why? Lenore, please. What do you talk about all the time, then, ‘why’? She feels useless. She feels, felt, as if she had no function, over there, in the nursing home. Wait, I’ll get to that. Uselessness is the key, here. Well now Lenore of course she had to be there, nursing care, ninety-eight point six, and she wasn’t happy in the house, which she said if you remember dripped with memories of lost capacity. No, there was no choice, and we did buy the Shaker Heights facility, even though it was a poor investment. If that’s not love, what is? But for someone who feels that meaning is use then to feel that she has no use, well then. She told me she was unhappy. She came to me and told me that. Didn’t tell you all this? I find that passing strange. Recall appropriately now when I refer to my own mother’s section, for those with Alzheimer’s. This bothered Gramma Lenore deeply. How Bloomfield noticed that the patients there couldn’t remember the names for things, televisions, water, doors… and so under Gramma Lenore’s influence he had them identified with their function? With the gilt letters, the little use-vocabulary handbook, with Lawrence Welk on the cover? So the door is ‘What we go from room to room though’? Water is ‘What we drink, without color’? Television is ‘What we watch Lawrence Welk on’—Lawrence Welk being primitive, undefined, even in syndication, no problem with Lawrence Welk. How my mother and all the rest came after a fashion to relearn the words they needed, via function, via what the things named were good for? And then Gramma Lenore noticing that the one component of the facility this method couldn’t be applied to was the patients themselves, because they had no function, no use, weren’t good for anything really at all? No? She told me this drove her up the wall. They had no use at all. What? No, the derivative comes from the pineals of cattle. We use cattle pineals. Rather we would if we could. Now, just wait, please. So Gramma Lenore perceived loss of identity without function. She wanted to be useful, she said to me. As did Gretchen Yingst, of course, and that Mr. Etvos, the whole pseudo-Wittgensteinian mafia over there. Mrs. Yingst had results from her late husband’s projects — the really interesting ones, by the way, done on his own, not for his company. Consolidated Gland Derivatives, in Akron? Now C.E.O.’d by Dick Lipp, best serve on the corporate tennis circuit? On his own, though. Took much of it to his grave, apparently, but left some pineal results written down… on Batman tablets, the coincidentality of which I don’t care to comment on, right now, for reasons that you’ll hear in approximately six minutes. Now just wait. There is of course too the fact that pineal-efficacy in nutrition is, it’s turning out, verifiably mostly linguistic, as I mentioned, speech understanding et cetera, the dreary and tiresome importance of which to certain parties I won’t even bother to allude to, but the understandable importance of which to potentially proud and ambitious parents I both understand and rub my hands over, not to mention the importance in all sorts of general scientific areas from which benefits should begin to accrue in no small measure, should things get on track…. So that Gramma Lenore, Mrs. Yingst, and Mr. Etvos agreed to turn over results from Mr. Yingst’s work to me, and I bounced them off Obstat, a pain in the rear but a fine chemist, and Obstat’s eyes bugged out, and away we went. Or rather now away they’ve gone, which is to say they’ve apparently decided to withdraw their support from the project, and to take back the Yingst Batman tablets, which is regrettable though OK, but also to filch all of Obstat’s samples and results and notes, which he in an attempt to be clever was keeping in Batman folders and Batman lunchboxes in the laboratory fridge, and apparently the day before I left for Canada to do some fishing with Bob Gerber Mrs. Yingst and Etvos got in here and got to Obstat, and Etvos amused Obstat with card tricks, which is unfortunately not hard to do, while Mrs. Yingst put the fruits of many many dollars of research into that kangaroo-pouch pocket of her nightie, under her robe, which Obstat helpfully remembers as being pink terry cloth. Obstat, why don’t you just come out. Why don’t you just come on out, Obstat. Why don’t you just come out from behind the curtain. Lenore could see your shoes, anyway, couldn’t you? Come out, Obstat. Obstat is here representing the technical angle on the whole problem. Neil you remember my daughter, Lenore, Neil. Yes. And they’ve made off with the all-important Batman items, which includes the only existing jars of the prototype food mentioned in this Advertising Age, here, and if I ever find out who leaked to that magazine I will kill, kill. Are you listening on the intercom, Foamwhistle? If you’re listening make no sign that you’re doing so. I thought so. And they have it all. And who knows what they’re doing, who really knows what the food can do. Cattle pineal derivative is phenomenally if mysteriously powerful, we’re finding out. Isn’t that right Obstat., And they have seen fit to leave the nursing home, and have others join them, one shudders at the persuasive force probably brought to bear, to leave the nursing home, on who knows what sort of quest for function, or symbolic rejection of their life as they’ve come to understand it, who knows? Worried? Am I worried? What kind of worry? In all honesty not particularly. She’s surrounded by followers, which is of course her favorite sort of situation. Warmth must have been arranged somehow. They could be at anyone’s home, some nursing home janitor…. Yes, we have checked. Still, though. At the house? You thought she might be at the house? You didn’t call Miss Malig to see? I see. I’m seething. Let’s not discuss it. She’s not at the house, rest assured. Frankly I’m more worried, and here I apologize not a whit, frankly I’m more worried about the pineal-derivative situation, the potential embarrassment and revenue-loss of not following through with the product for the market year, especially now that that bastard Gerber is starting his ridiculously expensive attack, with the gymnast, et cetera, I’m sure you’ve heard. Yes, I’d like to go too, actually, but appearances…. You and that Vigorous person go and report. No that will not make you an employee. So who knows where they are, who knows what they’re doing. No. I do not think the police need to be involved. Especially at this point. Police mean press means publicity about missing material means Gerber and Beechnut. No. Look, I rationalize it this way, and invite you to do the same. Their leaving is connected with a project connected with the Company. The Company owns the Home. Therefore their leaving is connected with the ownership of the Home, which makes their leaving almost like a nursing-home field trip. Unless of course they don’t come back with the pineal material pretty soon. Or unless they give it to Gerber, or to Erv Beechnut, the thought of which deeply chills me, especially with Gerber’s being in Cleveland next week, knowing Gramma Lenore’s long antipathy for the Company that’s given her everything she has and enjoys. No, that’s beside the point. Although it really, I hope, doesn’t ultimately matter, because Neil here feels he can reconstruct the relevant research and follow through with the delivered goods, eventually, even without the filched material. Eventually, though, and meanwhile there’s Gerber, drooling over the aforementioned material. But we can do it, and hopefully, barring Obstat’s being wrong which is scarcely possible in such an important regard is it Neil, or lid-and-jar screw-ups which are as of today unthinkable are you listening Foamwhistle, to be ready to run market-tests by Thanksgiving. Test small bits of the potential global market. We’re thinking Corfu. Corfu is what we’re thinking, for the first distribution, right now. Small, isolated, contained. Corfusians breed like hell, infants crawling all over. We hope to be ready to hit Corfu with Stonecipheco Infant Accelerant by November. Care for a Corfu nut, by the way? No? They’re quite good. I got them in Canada, fishing. Eat a nut, Obstat.”

/d/

FROM THE RECORDS OF THE FIRST UNITED CHURCH OF ONE GOD FOR ALL MEN, CHAGRIN FALLS, OHIO: PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT OF WEDDING OF MR. STONECIPHER BEADSMAN III, OF SHAKER HEIGHTS, OHIO, AND MISS PATRICE ANDLEMOTH LAVACHE, OF MADISON, WISCONSIN, 26 MAY 1961.

MINISTER: Where is everyone?

PATRICE LAVACHE: Here I am, your honor.

MINISTER: And where is the groom?

STONECIPHER BEADSMAN III: We are here.

ROBERT GERBER, BEST MAN: Here we are!

MINISTER: Are we all here?

MRS. LAVACHE: What’s that on his tuxedo?

STONECIPHER BEADSMAN III: Can we get on with this? We have a reception to go to, after all.

MRS. LAVACHE: There is a lady’s undergarment fastened to that man’s tuxedo.

ROBERT GERBER: “O, first she gave me whiskey, then she gave me gin, then she gave me crème de menthe for kissing her on the chin.” MINISTER: This man is intoxicated.

PATRICE LAVACHE: Oh, Stone.

STONECIPHER BEADSMAN III: Shut up, Patrice. Father I personally am not intoxicated, Mr. Gerber is here for ring-duty only, all pertinent parties are functional, let’s do the thing.

MRS. LAVACHE: I insist that that man remove the underwear from his tuxedo.

MINISTER: We really must insist, sir.

ROBERT GERBER: You have any idea, any idea, what this panty signifies? MRS. LAVACHE: I shudder to think. I’m shuddering, Edmund.

MRS. LENORE BEADSMAN: Get on with it!

ROBERT GERBER: “O, first she gave me whiskey, then she gave me scotch, then she gave me crème de menthe for kissing her…” MRS. LAVACHE: Oh, Edmund.

MR. LAVACHE: There there. The family’s loaded.

MRS. LENORE BEADSMAN: This is ridiculous, get on with it. Stonecipher, what are you doing?

STONECIPHER BEADSMAN III: Shall we, Father?

MINISTER: Ahem. Miss LaVache, I understand you have composed your own vows, to be read to Mr. Beadsman.

PATRICE LAVACHE: Yes, Sir.

MINISTER: And Mr. Beadsman?

STONECIPHER BEADSMAN III: I’ll just be going with the standard. If the standard’s good enough for the rest of the Judeo-Christian world, it’s good enough for me.

PATRICE LAVACHE: Oh, Stone.

MINISTER: Is that man going to be all right?

MRS. LAVACHE: He doesn’t look well at all.

MINISTER: What’s that ring he’s holding? Is that supposed to be the wedding ring?

STONECIPHER BEADSMAN III: Of course not. Bob, show the minister the monstrously expensive ring I’ve purchased.

ROBERT GERBER: Here it is.

PATRICE LAVACHE: But that’s a Lone Ranger decoder ring!

ROBERT GERBER: Surprise!

STONECIPHER BEADSMAN III: Where is the monstrously expensive ring I’ve purchased?

ROBERT GERBER: I lost my head. I gave it to Paquita, to my little Amazon flower. A madness, last night, in the fulgent bath of the Midwestern moon. The night air, spring in Cleveland. And she in return… oh Paquita, my little Amazon flower!

MR. LAVACHE: So that’s where that came from.

STONECIPHER BEADSMAN in: This is beyond unforgivable.

ROBERT GERBER: “O, first she gave me whiskey, then she gave me grass…”

MRS. LENORE BEADSMAN: God damn it.

MINISTER: Ahem. Most dearly beloved, we are… sight of God… union, spiritual… speak now or…

Miss LaVache… lovely vows… commit…

Mr. Beadsman… forever…?

STONECIPHER BEADSMAN III: Of course I do.

MINISTER: I now pronounce you man and wife. You may kiss the bride.

STONECIPHER BEADSMAN III: Come here, Patrice. Are you ready to be kissed?

PATRICE BEADSMAN: Yes.

STONECIPHER BEADSMAN III: Good.

ROBERT GERBER: Yay!

MRS. LENORE BEADSMAN: About time.

STONECIPHER BEADSMAN III: We’re going to be late for the reception. Please go to the car immediately, Patrice.

ROBERT GERBER: Hell of a deal, guy. Congratulations.

STONECIPHER BEADSMAN III: You bastard. You wore a panty to my wedding, and I had to use a ring out of a box of Ralston. I’ll get even with you in corporate struggle.

ROBERT GERBER: Oh, yeah?

STONECIPHER BEADSMAN III: Damn fine ceremony, Father. Rewards will accrue. I must go. Goodbye, everyone!

EVERYONE: Goodbye!

MRS. LENORE BEADSMAN: Officious little pissant.

/e/

“… that at this point who Bloomfield chooses to spend his time with is of less than no concern to me. Bloemker. Dolls might be the very best thing for him, nervous little moth of a man, always scratching at his beard, makes me itchy. Obstat, sit down, you’re getting on my nerves. Other item, yes. Disturbing, too, so brace. Your brother is apparently temporarily missing. John. John is, missing, in Chicago. Just wait. What would have been the point of telling you right away? It would have served no purpose. I found out just this morning, just two hours ago. Beal called me from Chicago. Seems there was a lecture John had wanted to go to, so he called a taxi from his office. A friend talked to him immediately before he called the taxi, but that’s the last…. No, not at the lecture. Apparently not seen since. Now, really. I am inclined to think John simply elected to drop out of sight for a while. He’s dropped before, God knows. Holiday Inn, anywhere, what difference would it make? I could call Steve Holiday, yes, but that’s not the point, that was just an example. Calm down. I’m also inclined to suspect that it is not impossible that John is somehow privy to, maybe even involved in, Gramma Lenore’s whole little adventure. No, not really. But he’s always been against the Company, we both know that, and there was the constant doting. His sentiments, her sentiments. It’s not inconceivable. No, I called Wisconsin, not a peep, and your mother is in a not-well period right now. Even more not-well. No, but just not in a position to be useful to anyone. So wait. What could I do? I’m prepared to give him a few weeks, and if he still hasn’t turned up, at least to teach his classes, to begin worrying in earnest. Yes, his colleagues did call the police. No, I’ve not called Clarice, who knows which of her… places she’s at today. I did call Al in here, and I told Al, and he’ll tell Clarice. Alvin is part of the family, too, Lenore. Stonecipher is not reachable, as I’ve said. Stonecipher, no doubt following your personal lead, has opted not to have a telephone. The best and brightest of my children cannot be reached by me. Interpret that in whatever way you wish. Obstat, if you want another nut, take one, do not play with the jar. Go see Clarice if you wish; obviously your sister can be seen by you. Discuss whatever you wish. No? I’m ignoring everything you imply. Go to her. I am also now going to ask you for a favor. Go to Stonecipher and speak to him and see if he has been communicated with in any way. By either of them. Very possibly, I think. You’ll have to see him personally. It’s now become clear that he represents the future of the family, of the Company, that it is he on whom the mantle of power and control will devolve. Gramma Lenore knows this, she has been a witness to, if not even more likely a cause of, John’s default and then your default. All the tests for nothing. No, I never see irony, Lenore. Irony is a meaningless word to me. The point here is that Stonecipher must and will know that he is connected to this family, which is to say the Company. Not at all. Go, see him, autumn in New England. Take a vacation from your vacation, some time off from your time off. Tell him what obtains here, including the story of Gramma Lenore, et cetera, and be told of any and all involvement on his part. No. That’s ridiculous. You cannot possibly be fired for taking one or two days off for a family emergency. Who? Peahen? No. I am prepared to allow you, to insist that you take the Company jet, to minimize the time factor. A friend could be taken along. You see what you can do. In the next three or four days. Yes. I am prepared to wait and do more or less… nothing. My worry is present but manageable. Do this for me. Help the family, Lenore. See what you can do about getting off. Obstat, perhaps you’d better be getting back to the lab. I… heavens, I have a tennis date. Did you bus over? I more than understand. I’ve always hated your car, as you should recall vividly. Did I or did I not try to give you a car? But no. Let Foamwhistle drive you back. Oh come now… Foamwhistle, come in here at once. Think about what I’ve said. Please be in touch. Foamwhistle, drive Lenore to Erieview Plaza. Pardon me? What do you mean Pupik refuses to be in the same room with Goggins? Get me Pupik. You two may go free. Please call me soon. Hello, Pupik?”

/f/

Ideas for Monroe Fieldbinder Story Collection, 27 August 1. Monroe watches a house burn down. Or Monroe’s house burns down, symbolizing destruction of the structure of his life as estate attorney, a plunging into chaos and disorientation, etc. 2. Monroe has enormous sex organ — the adoration of women only sharpens and defines by opposition his sense of self-loathing and disgust. 3. Monroe Fieldbinder sees psychologist to bounce ideas off him. One of Fieldbinder’s ideas is that the phenomenon of modem party-dance is incompatible with self-consciousness, makes for staggeringly unpleasant situations (obvious resource: Amherst/Mt. Holyoke mixer ‘68) for the at all self-conscious person. Modem party-dance is simply writhing to suggestive music. It is ridiculous, silly to watch and excruciatingly embarrassing to perform. It is ridiculous, and yet absolutely everyone does it, so that it is the person who does not want to do the ridiculous thing who feels out of place and uncomfortable and self-conscious… in a word, ridiculous. Right out of Kafka: the person who does not want to do the ridiculous thing is the person who is ridiculous. (Idea: Kafka at an AmherstlMt. Holyoke mixer, never referred to by name, only as “F.K.,” only one not dancing…) Modern party-dance an evil thing. 4. Monroe Fieldbinder’s psychologist has movable chair like that idiot Jay. Lampoon Jay unmercifully in Fieldbinder collection. Make Jay look like an idiot.

10. 1990

/a/

The reason Lenore Beadsman’s red toy car had a spidery network of scratches in the paint on the right side was that by the driveway of the home of Alvin and Clarice Spaniard, in Cleveland Heights, lived a large, hostile brown shrub, bristling with really thorny branches. The bush hung out practically halfway across the drive, and scratched hell out of whatever or whoever came up. “Scritch,” was the noise Lenore heard as the thorns squeaked in their metal grooves in the side of her car, or rather “Scriiiiitch,” a sound like fingernails on aluminum siding, a tooth-shiver for Lenore.

The only other thing even remotely irritating about the Spaniard home was the fact that the front doorknob was right in the middle of the door, rather than over on the right or left side, where door-knobs really should be, and so the door never seemed to swing open so much as just fall back, when someone opened it. There was also the very incidental fact that the house had a funny smell about it, on the inside, as if something not quite right were growing on the underside of some of the carpets in some of the rooms.

But it was on the whole a very nice home, a two-story brick home with a huge elaborate antenna on the roof, a home in which lived Alvin Spaniard, Clarice Spaniard, Stonecipher Spaniard, and Spatula Spaniard (the latter named for Ruth Spatula Spaniard, Alvin Spaniard’s mother).

Alvin Spaniard, Vice President of Advertising in Charge of Gauging Product-Perception, Stonecipheco Baby Food Products, opened the door to Lenore’s ring and stepped nimbly aside as the door seemed to fall back at him, and asked Lenore in, calling to Clarice and the kids that Lenore was here. Alvin immediately offered Lenore gin.

“No thank you,” Lenore said. “Gin makes me cough.”

Alvin Spaniard liked gin a lot. Lenore asked for a seltzer-and-lime. “You do know it’s family theater night,” Alvin said quietly as they moved in the direction of the living room.

“Clarice told me on the phone. I really need to talk to her, though. I sort of hoped I could grab her during intermission or something.”

In the living room, under hanging Mexican Aztec woven tapestries featuring suns and bird-gods with their heads at angles inappropriate with respect to their necks, Stonecipher, who was five, and Spatula, who was four, were playing Chutes and Ladders with Clarice, who was twenty-six, and who was only ostensibly playing Chutes and Ladders, while really watching an Olympic recap on television, in preparation for family theater, with a gin-and-tonic. It was quarter of eight.

“Hey guys, here’s Aunt Lenore to play Chutes and Ladders with you;” said Clarice. She winked at Lenore.

“Super,” said Lenore.

Chutes and Ladders was perhaps the most sadistic board game ever invented. Adults loathed the game; children loved it. The universe thus dictated that an adult invariably got snookered into playing the game with a child. Certain rolls of the dice entitled you to certain movements on the board, some of which movements entitled you to move up ladders toward the base of the golden ladder at the top of the board (the climbing of which ladder represented the ultimate telos and reward-in-itself of the whole game). Moving up ladders was desirable because it saved time and spins and tiresome movements on the board, square by square. Except there were chutes. Certain rolls of the dice got you into board positions where you fell into chutes and slid ass-over-teakettle all the way down to the bottom of the board, where the whole process started all over again. The chances of falling into chutes increased as you climbed more ladders and got higher and higher. A long and tedious climb up ladder after ladder until the End was in sight was usually nixed by a plummet down one of the seven chutes whose mouths yawned near the base of the golden ladder at the top. The children found this sudden dashing of hopes and return to the recreational drawing board unbelievably fun. The game made Lenore feel like throwing its board at the wall.

“Super,” said Lenore.

“Here’s that seltzer,” said Alvin.

“Frozen pea?” asked Clarice.

“Thanks.”

“Treat you right around here or what?”

Spatula accused Stoney of sneakily moving his game piece — a laughing little plastic Buddha of a baby with a pencil-sharpening hole in its head, given out by the gross at Stonecipheco stockholder meetings — from a position in which a chute-fall was imminent to a position in which a ladder-climb was imminent. There ensued unpleasantness, while Lenore ate some frozen peas. Clarice soothed Spatula while Alvin worked on the vertical hold of the giant-screen television.

Order was restored, and the vertical hold was looking good. Alvin rubbed his hands together.

“So how’s CabanaTan?” Lenore asked Clarice over her drink. Clarice owned and managed five Cleveland franchises of a tanning-parlor chain called CabanaTan. She had bought in originally by selling the Stonecipheco stock she’d gotten for a graduation present, something which had pissed Lenore and Clarice’s father off, a lot, at first, but he had calmed down when Clarice married Alvin Spaniard, whom Stonecipher Beadsman liked, and respected, and whose father had been at Stonecipheco all his life, too, and things were especially good now that Clarice, who obviously worked, and Alvin, who obviously also worked, had made an arrangement whereby they left the children during the day in the care of Nancy Malig, at the Beadsman home in Shaker Heights, the same Nancy Malig who had been Lenore and Clarice’s governess when they were children.

“CabanaTan is thriving,” Clarice said. “It’s been a cloudy summer, you know, and people feel the need to supplement. We’re gearing up for the fall rush. There’s always a fall rush, as people start losing the summer tan and get tense. We should have most of Cleveland roasting nicely by November.”

“And Misty Schwartz?”

“Can’t talk about it. Legal stuff. Other than Schwartz problems, it looks like a banner fall coming up.”

“Terrif.”

“And how about you? How’s the switchboard? How’s the bird?” Clarice asked. Lenore saw that Alvin was holding Spatula high over his head in the center of the living room, while Spatula laughed and kicked her legs.

“Sort of need to talk to you, for a bit, if we could break away, here, maybe Chutes and Ladders later…”

“Family theater in ten minutes, is the thing.”

“Maybe after, then, we could just sort of…”

On the big-screen television, shots of people running in slow motion ended. Stoney threw a Buddha-baby at Spatula. It missed, rang out against a bronze flowerpot. An announcer’s head filled the television.

“We’ll be back with a look at… gymnastics, and a live conversation with a… certain someone,” the announcer grinned mysteriously.

“Kopek Spasova,” said Lenore.

Alvin looked up. “You sure?”

“I feel in my marrow they’re going to have Kopek Spasova,” Lenore said.

“Holy shit,” said Alvin, “I’ve got to get a notebook.”

“Alvin, family theater in eight minutes.”

“I have to take notes. This is supposed to be Gerber’s nuclear weapon.”

“It is pineal-extract, you might say,” said Lenore.

“Jesus,” said Alvin, rummaging through his briefcase. Stoney and Spatula had been sucked into the television’s intake; they sat, Indian-style, staring at the screen. Lenore nonchalantly nudged the Chutes and Ladders game under the sofa with her foot.

“I’m going to go get the props, so we can start just the minute she’s done,” said Clarice. Lenore drank some seltzer and ate a bit of lime pulp floating on top.

Ed McMahon came on the television, doing a commercial for a line of tiny vaccum cleaners that were alleged to suck even the stubbornest lint out of your navel. “Sell it, Ed!” yelled Alvin Spaniard, grinning admiringly at the television.

“Is that regular, or cable?” Lenore asked.

“I think it’s network. I think that’s Curt Gowdy, doing the recap. OK, all set.” Alvin sat with his glasses and a yellow legal pad and a pen.

“You’ve sure got a lot of equipment on that television,” said Lenore.

“We’re a family that takes its home entertainment very seriously,” Alvin said. Stoney looked up at Lenore and nodded, and Alvin ruffled his hair.

“We’re back live,” said the announcer on television.

“Hurry Mommy, we’re back live!” shouted Stoney.

“Sshh,” Alvin said.

“I’m standing here with the brilliant Soviet — former Soviet gymnastics coach Ruble Spasov,” said the announcer, “and with the equally brilliant former Soviet gymnast and certainly not former Olympic and World Championship gold medalist Kopek Spasova, Mr. Spasov’s daughter.” The camera panned down from the adults’ heads to their stomachs to get Kopek Spasova in the shot. She was a thin, blond-haired, hollow-cheeked girl with enormous black circles under her eyes.

Clarice came in with a load of masks and cardboard cut-outs and some personal items in a box.

“Well, at least she’s not pretty,” said Alvin.

“Sshh,” said Spatula.

“Ruble, Kopek, how did it feel to win all the big ones?” asked the announcer.

“Who is this person?” asked Ruble Spasov, looking to someone behind and off to the side of the camera.

“It felt good to win,” said Kopek Spasova.

/b/

3 September

Monroe Fieldbinder, a successful six-foot estate attorney with a fine lawn and a two-hundred-pound body as fit and taut as it was exceptionally attractive, returned one Wednesday night from the home of his gorgeous Wednesday mistress to find his house in flames and his house surrounded by the pulsing lights of fire and police engines of fire engines and police cars and saw that his house was in flames on fire and that his bird, Richard the Lionhearted, who lived inside, was probably dead, in his iron cage.

As Monroe Fieldbinder watched his house burn, he felt all the order and unity of his life melt away into chaos and disorder. He grinned wryly.

How explicit need we make this burning? Need we a reference, or just a picture? “Grinned wryly” seems most potent when used in reference to a picture. Pictures do things. Show, don’t tell.

Do pictures tell? I have a color Polaroid of Vance at seven and Veronica at twenty-nine traversing a rickety dry-gray dock in Nova Scotia to board a fishing boat. The water is a deep iron smeared with plates of foam; the sky is a thin iron smeared with same; the mass of white gulls around Vance’s outstretched bread-filled hand is a cloud of plunging white V’s. Vance Vigorous, as he holds out his white little child’s hand, is surrounded and obscured by a cloud of living, breathing, shrieking, shitting, plunging incarnations of the letter V; and I have it captured forever on quality film, giving me the right and power to cry whenever and wherever I please. What might that say about pictures.

A truly, truly horrible dream, last night. Don’t even want to talk about it. I am fresh out of bed. Urinating. I look down. Just a lazy stream of early-morning maple-syrup urine. Suddenly the single stream is a doubled, forking stream. Then a tripled trident stream. Four, five, ten. Soon I am at the node of a fan of urine that sprays out in all directions, blasting the walls of the bathroom, plaster shooting everywhere, currents swirling at my feet. When I awoke — alone, Lenoreless, hence the dream — I was really afraid I had wet the bed, the windows, the ceiling. I may murder Jay over this one.

/c/

“… have asked Kopek to recreate that stunning uneven-parallel-bar routine that won her the all-around gold, and we’ll remind the audience that her performance is now made possible by the generosity of the folks over at Gerber’s Quality Brands, the infant food that helps your child chew.”

“Yes,” said Ruble Spasov. He and the announcer, trailing a snake of black microphone cord, accompanied Kopek over to the bars as she mounted and began to twirl and spin and let the bars bend her into strange shapes.

“Ruble, I notice you’ve got that cattle-prod, there, in your hand, while your brilliant daughter and pupil does her really superb routines,” said the announcer. “Any story behind that.”

Ruble Spasov pulled his eyebrows up. “Is what you call a blanket of security. Kapelika feels more secure and confident and happy to know that when she performs routines cattle-prod is always nearby her.”

“And what a performer she is,” said the announcer.

“Guy’s nuts,” Alvin Spaniard said. “Guy’s a fascist.”

“She’s just super, though,” said Lenore. “Watch her do the thing with her toes… there. Wow.”

“So she’s got prehensile toes, big deal,” said Alvin. “Take you to a zoo, show you cages full of prehensile toes.”

“I smell sour grapes,” said Clarice.

Lenore sniffed at her armpit.

“Family theater in one and a half minutes,” Clarice said.

“She’s almost done anyway,” said Lenore. “It’s the dismount where she lands on just one finger that’s the killer… right there. Believe that? And she’s coming to Erieview in like a week.”

“Tell me about it,” said Alvin.

“I’m anxious to go,” said Lenore.

“Spatula sweetie, you want to get the audience-disc? Any questions from anybody about any lines? Alvin, think about your job on your own time.” Clarice moved the coffee table out of the center of the living room.

“Ruble and Kopek Spasov and Spasova: quite a team, and just if I may interject a personal note a fine addition to this great country,” said the announcer. “Ruble and Kopek Spasova.”

“Please go away now,” Ruble Spasov said. Ed McMahon reappeared. Stoney got up and switched the television controls to Laserdisc input.

Clarice distributed masks. There was a Clarice-mask for Clarice, an Alvin-mask for Alvin, a Stonecipher-mask for Stonecipher, a Spatula-mask for Spatula. The masks were very good and very lifelike. Clarice made them out of plaster molds and papier-mâché and Reynolds Wrap, in a workshop in the basement. Clarice was in many ways an artist, Lenore thought, CabanaTan notwithstanding. She was particularly good at making things with people’s faces on them. Every year she gave her father, Lenore’s father, cans of tennis balls in which each ball was an eerie likeness of the head of Bob Gerber or Erv Beechnut. Stonecipher Beadsman III loved to play tennis with these balls. Clarice also on the sly made some Stonecipher-Beadsman-III-head balls that she and Alvin batted around from time to time. During a dark period, about a year before, there had appeared a can of Alvin-head balls.

The audience-disc was inserted, and on the huge television screen there appeared a view, as that from a stage, of rows of theater seats, being filled by people dressed to the nines, with programs. As the house filled up on the screen, Clarice got masks on the children. Life-size cardboard cut-outs of Alvin, Clarice, Stoney, and Spatula were positioned on either side of the television, so as to form part of the audience.

“Is this the last time we’re going to do this one, Mom?” Stoney asked, his voice a bit muffled. “We’ve done this one five times in a row.”

There was pleasant pre-performance mood music playing for the audience on the television screen. The house was now nearly full. The cardboard cut-outs were the standing room.

“Last time. Next week a new thing.”

The rubber band that attached Spatula’s Spatula-mask to her head got twisted and snagged in her hair, and she began to cry. Alvin soothed her from behind his Alvin-mask. The audience on the television made murmured noises; according to Laserdisc timing, family theater had already started. Clarice reinserted the disc and got an earlier point, in which the theater seats were just filling up. She distributed a Spiro Agnew watch to Alvin, a Richard Scarry cut-out book to Stoney, English Muffin the teddy bear to Spatula, and Clarice herself brandished a Visa Gold Card. Lenore took her seltzer and peas to an easy chair next to the television and sat down beside the Alvin cut-out.

Clarice checked the watch on the underside of her wrist. “Go ahead, babe,” she said to Stoney. Stoney moved closer to the television as Clarice and Alvin and Spatula grouped in close tight behind him.

The audience stopped coughing and looked on attentively. Clarice prodded Stoney in the back with her finger.

“There once existed,” Stoney recited behind his mask, “a unit called the Snapiard family. The family was close and very tightly bound together by feelings of family love.” All four Spaniards now kissed each other through their masks and hugged each other. “What is more,” Stoney continued to the television screen, “the people who were in the family thought of themselves more as… more as…”

“Members of the family,” Clarice whispered behind him.

“More as members of the family than as real people who were special individual people. All they thought about was the family, and all they thought of themselves as was family-parts.”

Clarice picked up from the floor four red masks that had just generic features and the words FAMILY-MEMBER stamped in white across the forehead, and the Spaniards all put one of the masks on, which was cumbersome, given the presence of the original masks, too.

Stoney stepped back and Alvin stepped to the television. “This was both a good thing and a bad thing, apparently. It was a good thing because each family member felt a strong and secure sense of identity and identification with a unit larger than he. Or she. His or her concerns were not his or her concerns alone, and he or she could count on the things and ideas and feelings he or she valued as having value not merely for him or her, but also for the whole organic/emotional unit of which he or she was a part. There was sense of identification, of unaloneness, in short one of security and warmth, emotional shelter. Four individual people were a unit.” The audience applauded warmly.

Spatula stepped forward. “But it was a bad thing, too. Because everybody in the… family felt like all they were were parts of the family. So in case anything bad happened that was bad and made the family not as much a family anymore, it also made the people in the family not as much people anymore, and then they were alone and invisible and unhappy, and things exploded very fast in bad ways.” The Spaniards took off the FAMILY-MEMBER masks and put on plain white featureless masks with red cracks down the middle, and very tiny holes for breathing, and they all took three steps away from each other and turned their backs. The audience whispered. Lenore began to eat her lime. She could see Stoney discreetly picking his nose under his mask.

/d/

I am in receipt of the following communication, dated 1 September 1990, from a Mr. Karl Rummage, of the legal firm of Rummage and Naw, Cleveland, acting at the corporate behest of Mr. Stonecipher Beadsman III, President and Chief Executive Officer of Stonecipheco Baby Food Products:

Dear Mr. Vigorous:

Having been exposed to and in admiration of Frequent and Vigorous Publishing Inc.’s performance with respect to the publications “Norslan, Big Iron, and You” and “Norslan: The Third-World Herbicide That Likes People,” etc., for some time, Mr. Stonecipher Beadsman III, President and Chief Executive Officer of Stonecipheco Baby Food Products, Cleveland, Ohio, has authorized me to extend to you an offer to undertake for us the publication of three product-information packages concerning a new infant benefit service currently in the final stages of development at Stonecipheco Baby Food Products. Initial drafts of said informational packages have been composed and compiled by Stonecipheco’s Division of Advertising and Product-Perception-Gauging, and are enclosed under separate cover.

Mr. Beadsman has authorized me to extend to you an offer of significantly generous compensation for the firm of Frequent and Vigorous, and an even more significantly generous personal bonus for you, Richard Vigorous, for the acceptance of and satisfactory realization of the goals set forth under the proposed contract (see also enclosure).

Stipulations attached to the tender of such an offer include, but are not necessarily exhausted by, the following: (1.) The retention by the firm of Frequent and Vigorous of some personnel familiar with the culture and language of the inhabitants of the island of Corfu (see enclosure); (2.) The withholding of information concerning the tendering of and details concerning any part of the proposed contract from Ms. Lenore Beadsman, East Corinth, Ohio, with whom you are known to enjoy some personal connection, until such time as such withholding is deemed inadvisable by Mr. Stonecipher Beadsman III; (3.) The firm of Frequent and Vigorous’s granting Ms. Lenore Beadsman a leave of absence of two (2) days from switchboard duties, for a trip to see her brother, Mr. Stonecipher Beadsman IV, on Beadsman family business at Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts, an institution of which I am given to understand you are an alumnus. Your accompanying Ms. Beadsman on this trip, with travel accommodations provided and all legitimately incurred expenses absorbed by Stonecipheco, Inc., would be welcome, but should not be regarded as a stipulation attached to the tendering of the original contract offer. Etc. etc. etc. etc.

What are we to make of this? I have yet to open the enclosure. I can feel the Erieview shadow creeping over and through the lamps behind me, at the licorice window. It is noon. Today Lenore and I do not lunch. Tonight she goes to visit her sister. Another day of missing.

/e/

Stoney was addressing the television audience. “Since every member of the Snapiard family thought of themselves just as family-members, it meant that if there was less of a family, they were less people, and if there wasn’t a family, they weren’t people.”

“… in the full sense.”

“Weren’t people in the full sense.”

Alvin stepped to the television. “Each family-member, then, in a natural and understandable attempt to preserve individual identity and efficacy of will…”

Spatula made knee-motions indicating that she needed to go potty. Lenore continued eating her now not quite so frozen peas.

“… sought to restore identity, and a sense of belonging, by attaching themselves to things in the world, extrafamilial objects and pursuits; they sought identity and shelter in things. Alvin held up his Spiro Agnew watch; Spatula hugged English Muffin the teddy bear to her chest as she bobbed; Stoney made motions as if to kiss his Richard Scarry cut-out book, while Clarice made as if to tango with her Visa Gold Card. The cracked white faceless masks came off, and so everyone was back to his or her original mask. The audience made soft sounds. And now extremely tiny but still accurate Clarice-, Alvin-, Stoney-, and Spatula-masks were affixed to the objects by their owners.

“Hell of a lot of masks, here,” Lenore muttered.

“The problem, again, however,” Alvin continued, “was that in making their own sense of self and rightness-with-themselves-as-people depend on things outside them, the family-members were letting themselves in for riskiness and trouble. Things couldn’t be people, not even the people they belonged to.” The tiny masks on the objects were taken off and discarded with wide arm-motions. Alvin said, “And now a lost or a misplaced thing meant what, for the Snapiard family?”

“What?” shouted the audience on the television.

There was silence. Alvin took Clarice’s Visa Gold Card, and she the watch, and they traded masks. Alvin’s nose had been sweating heavily, and Clarice was clearly less than pleased about putting his mask on. Clarice took English Muffin and gave Spatula the Alvin-mask. Soon each member of the family was wearing an incorrect mask and was twirling around, symbolizing disorientation and despair, although the despair-effect was compromised somewhat by the fact that Spatula really liked to twirl, and was giggling.

/f/

Lenore’s sister is ravingly lovely, if one likes the ravingly lovely type, with soft honey hair and dark blue eyes and breasts like artillery; but she is cocky and serious and dull and utterly (and un-attractively unaware that she is utterly) dependent on the Latest Thing for her sense of direction and worth. Her husband is a civil man, though that he lusts after Lenore I do not for one second doubt. Alvin Spaniard is randy. My understanding — which is arrived at via Lenore and so is of course vague — is that on four occasions early last year Alvin Spaniard had sexual intercourse with his Georgia peach of a receptionist. Clarice Spaniard found out about the incidents from Sigurd Foamwhistle, Stonecipher Beadsman III’s executive aide and possibly the half brother of Lenore’s younger brother, and in any event a man about whose unsavory desires with respect to Clarice and Lenore both I am in no doubt whatsoever. So Clarice found out, and there were, for a while, various kickings of emotional ass. They subsided, and Alvin and Clarice finally sat down and conferred, and it was decided marriage therapy was needed, Alvin agreeing vigorously, obviously — loving his wife, also liking his job. Marriage therapy degenerated into family therapy. God knows what all went on. I know there were stages concerned with human sculpture, in which each member of the family molded the others into those positions reflecting perceived relationships, etc. There were fights involving toy clubs made of Nerf material. The Spaniard vogue now is apparently drama, carried on in front of a fabricated audience; rather, at least tonight, at least one real person — regardless of what that person herself may happen to think. Lenore and Clarice are not close. As are not Monroe and I. She says she avoids going over. But where does she go, then?

A bad day. The urine dream has so upset me that I find it hard to function. As it were. I miss Lenore. I feel physical pain, now, when I am absent or apart from Lenore Beadsman. Which is, of course, always. Too bad a day to think actively of what her father might be trying to do. On the face of it I must say that it seems to me that whatever I can do to establish connections with Lenore’s family, to deepen and strengthen the personal bonds that join Lenore and me, can only hasten that day when I am able truly and completely and finally to take Lenore Beadsman inside myself.

A bad, bad day. Dark, soaring feelings of important tasks yet undone. Yet unknown. I am afraid to go to the bathroom.

/g/

All the excitement of the twirling and giggling, and the tension of live performance, but especially the twirling, had been responsible for a slight crisis with respect to Spatula. Things were quickly put right again, though, with Lenore helping with paper towels, and the audience was put in a FREEZE mode, and finally unfrozen, and things got back underway.

Stoney: “Disorientation and sadness resulted when the family-members tried to depend on things that weren’t them and weren’t the family for their own happiness and being-themselves-ness.”

“Sense of self.”

“Sense of self. So they… they…”

Clarice stepped forward and gently pushed Stonecipher out of the way:

“So they did what any smart family-members would do. They talked with one another, and aired the things they weren’t comfortable with as people right then, and meaningful dialogue and personal interaction was established, and the family-members began to grow emotionally both as individuals and as members of an emotional network of shared interests and values and emotional commitments, and then the growth and development and dialogue was facilitated by their going and seeing an outside party whose whole life was directed toward helping family-members grow and see themselves clearly both as selves and members, and so come to a fuller and happier sense of self.”

The invisible orchestra on the television now struck up a tune, and in the living room in Cleveland Heights there took place a sort of dance, with involved connections and motions and gestures, each directed by family-members at other family-members, while the audience clapped its hands. The dance would have been better, except Alvin wasn’t participating with full enthusiasm, and kept gravitating back to the sofa and looking down through his mask at his notes from the Kopek Spasova interview.

The dance ended. Lenore looked at the clock on the mantel. Spatula, damp but cheerful, stepped forward.

“And after a long time of trying, the Snapiards…,” she giggled, “… discovered the easiest thing in the whole world. They all discovered that they couldn’t try to depend for their feelings of being themselves on just the whole family, because they each weren’t the whole family.” The Spaniards all went and stomped on their FAMILY-MEMBER masks. “And they couldn’t get their feelings of themselves from things, because they weren’t things.” They all pretended to stomp on their things, but didn’t really, especially Alvin and his Spiro Agnew watch. “They found out that what they needed to get their feelings of being themselves from was, themselves…,” Spatula smiled wonderfully at the television as a murmur went through the crowd, “… because that’s what they were. The easiest thing in the world is what they saw.” And Alvin, Clarice, Stoney, and Spatula took off their Alvin-, Clarice-, Stoney-, and Spatula-masks, and stared deeply into the empty eyeholes of their own faces. Through one of her eyeholes Spatula said to the television, “The End.” The television audience rose as one.

/h/

“Dum de dum de dum de dum.”

“La de da de da de da.”

“Jesus shall not want.”

“ ”

“Jesus shall not want.”

“What?”

“Pardon me?”

“What in the Lord’s name?”

“The Lord is my supper. Jesus shall not want.”

“Sweet Mother McCree.”

“You fill me up.”

“It’s a miracle.”

“Lay your sleeping head, my love.”

“Dear Father in heaven.”

“Human on my faithless arm.”

“The bird has been touched by God.”

“The bird has been touched by God.”

“Yes.”

“I have to do what’s right for me as a person.”

“Thank you Lord. Thank you for touching this house. Oral, I did, I expected a miracle.”

“The sins of the fathers.”

“Charlotte’s Web. It’s like Charlotte’s Web.”

“A camel, like this.”

“Dare I touch you?”

“Women need space, too.”

“Ow! Well, the dear little thing still bites.”

“Clint Clint Clint. It’s like Charlotte’s Web.”

“Oh Martin Tissaw, why aren’t you here?”

“Maybe we could get him on ‘Real People.’ ”

“What?”

“Maybe we could get him on ‘Real People.’ ”

“Is that what You direct me to do, God? To get this bird, this animal through which You have chosen to make Yourself heard, on ‘Real People’?”

“Anger is natural, let it out.”

“To deliver Your message of anger and love?”

“Human on my faithless arm.”

“Then that is what I shall do. Get up off your knees, woman!”

“Get up off your knees, woman!”

“Go forth and do the work directed.”

“ ‘Real People.’ ”

“Yes, ‘Real People.’ Disgusting mirror and all. But first I call Martin.”

“ ‘Real Birds.’ It may get torn, I’m warning you. Care for a mint?”

“Forget dusting.”

“What’s with Vlad the Impaler?”

“I’ve been called.”

“Make me come.”

“Come you shall. We shall go together, but first let me call ‘Real People,’ ”

“Goodbye.”

“Thank you, Lord.”

11. 1990

/a/

“I think maybe it’s time for me to just hop on my horse and git.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means I feel like I need to get the fuck out.”

“Out of what?”

“How much time we got here, Melinda-Sue?”

“You said you loved Scarsdale. You said you loved me.”

“I think it’s turning out there’s problems with that analysis. I think what I unfortunately meant is that I loved fucking you, is basically all. And I just don’t think I love fucking you anymore.”

“….”

“… my razor…”

“Why not?”

“….”

“How come?”

“I’m not sure I really know. I’m hopin’ to give it some more thought. It’s just not wonderful anymore. Nothing personal. It’s just not wonderful.”

“Not wonderful? What do you mean, not wonderful?”

“Well, look at your leg.”

“What’s the matter with my leg? I’m only twenty-seven. I’ve got nice legs. I happen to know for a fact they’re nice.”

“You irritate all kinds of hell out of me when you don’t listen to what I say, Melinda-Sue. I never said you didn’t have nice legs. All I said was to just look at your goddamn leg.”

“….”

“We’re just missing the wonderfulness. Your leg, for an example. It’s all smooth and firm and shapely and all. It looks good and it feels good and it smells good. God knows you keep it real well shaved. It’s all beautiful and artistic and all that shit. But see, it’s just a leg. That’s all it is for me, now, is a fucking leg. It could be my leg, if I shaved my leg.”

“What difference does that make?”

“It makes all kinds of difference, honeypot. You put your thinkin’ cap on about it for a while.”

“You’re being immature. You’re being totally unrealistic. You’re deliberately trying to hurt me.”

“No, what I’m deliberately trying to do is say fuck off, is what I’m deliberately trying to do.”

“Well then what am I supposed to do?”

“It’s weird how I’m not at all worried about that. You got your work, if I get to use loose terms. You got your goddamned voice, still. I know that for a undeniable fact. It comes at me forty times a day. I can’t get the fuck away from you. I get in the car and there you are. I feel like all the air I breathe you’ve already breathed.”

“….”

“Is cryin’ supposed to make me feel bad? ‘Cause it don’t. I don’t feel bad. I just feel like I need to get the fuck out, still.”

“You’re just drunk.”

“I’m a tinch drunk. No bones about it. But I’m sincere, here, ma‘am. No more fucking, no more love.”

“….”

“Take your robe off a second.”

“….”

“Take it off please I said.”

“Ow! God, what are—?”

“Thank you. Don’t worry, no rape on the horizon this morning, ma‘am. Look, mine comes off too, to be fair. Let’s just have us an objective look at the situation, here.”

“The curtains are open.”

“My analysis of the problem, if you want my analysis of the problem, is that you’ve just run out of holes in your pretty body, and I’ve run out of things to stick in them. My pecker, my fingers, my tongue, my toes…”

“Oh, God.”

“… my hair, my nose. My wallet. My car keys. So on. I’ve just run the fuck out of ideas. And this crying shit is starting to piss me off. I’m askin’ you right now to stop crying, ‘cause it’s not working, and it only pisses me off.”

“….”

“I’m getting pissed off.”

“Daddy…”

“Well there we go. Daddy. I think maybe he’s just what you need right now. You can help him fuck his lawn.”

“I hate you.”

“All I’m tryin’ to do is say fuck off.”

“I love you. Please. Here… see?”

“Now let’s don’t be misled here. What we got here is just purely perverse excitement at seein’ you upset. It’s just the reaction of a bored old soldier in the game of love. It’s not wonderfulness. And if we did do it, it’d be like two animals in the fucking forest.”

“….”

“You care to hear how many women I’ve blasted since we got married?”

“….”

“I’ve personally blasted over a dozen women since I married you. Since I committed to you forever and ever, I have fucking betrayed you, hundreds of times. There’s been times in the last year when I haven’t with you, ‘cause I was savin’ it up for somebody else. That ought to make you feel better about me taking a indefinite vacation.”

“Oh, God.”

“Have a Kleenex.”

….“

“And please don’t think I don’t know you’ve fucked around too. I know about you and Gluskoter. The only reason I haven’t kicked his ass is that it would just be too fucking boring. I know you’re not any better than me, don’t worry. But I’m talking about doing it on a grand, grand fucking scale.”

“How can you be so ugly to me?”

“ ‘Cause I’m bored, and when a man gets bored enough he gets like an animal. I’m an animal now, feels like. I’m sick of this shit, your work, my work, worryin’ about other people’s taxes, hearing about your Daddy’s fucking fertilizer strategies every day. I got to get out. When animals get so they feel trapped, they get ugly. You want to watch out for trapped animals, Melinda-Sue, I’m tellin’ you that for future reference.”

“I can’t take this. I don’t know what’s come over you.”

“It sure ain’t you, don’t you worry.”

“I think I want a divorce.”

“Christ, even my clothes smell like you.”

“There’s no way you can hate me the way you’re trying to convince me you hate me.”

“….”

“Oh, God.”

“… car keys…”

“….”

“One drink for the road and I’m gone, like a desert breeze.”

“You’re contemptible.”

“We out of ice again? Shit on fire. You eat ice, or what? Do you go around takin’ the ice out of here after I make it? If you do, just admit it.”

“Just leave, if you’re going to leave.”

“Let me just take a quick squirt, if I may. One for the road.”

“Wait. I think you shouldn’t go.”

“Say please.”

“Please.”

“Too bad. Fooled you.”

“You’re drunk.”

“….”

“Where are you going to go?”

“I think first I’m gonna go home.”

“You’re going to drive to Texas? Now?”

“No, you very very dumb woman. I said I’m going the fuck home. Home.”

“I love you.”

“Then you’re a confused little specimen.”

“And you love me.”

“You are an amazing woman if you think that’s today’s message. You amaze me, Melinda-Sue. I’d take my hat off to you, except I think I left it next door. And hey, you should probably either get out of the window, or else put something on.”

“….”

“No sense givin’ it away.”

/b/

A bright day, in very early September, everything dry, the sun an explicit thing, up there, with heat coming right off it, but a flat edge of cool running down the middle of the day. A jet airplane stood at lunchtime on Runway 1 at CHA, pointed west to go east, a red-ink drawing of a laughing baby on its side, guys with earmuffs and orange plastic flags torn at by the wind off the flatness taking iron prisms out from under the airplane’s wheels, the air behind the engines hot and melting the pale green fields through it, the engines hissing through the dry wind like torches, fuel-shimmers. The guys slowly waving the orange flags. The sun glinting off the slanted glass of the windshield, behind which there are sunglasses and thumbs-ups. One of the flag-guys is wearing a Walkman, instead of earmuffs, and he twirls with his flag.

/c/

“There is an ominous rumbling in my ears.”

“That’s the engine, right outside the window.”

“No, the engine is a piercing, nerve-jangling, screaming whine. I’m talking about an ominous rumbling.”

“….”

“My ears are going to hurt horribly on this flight, I know. The change in pressure is going to make my ears hurt like hell.”

“Rick, in my purse are like fifty packs of gum. I’ll keep shoving gum in your mouth, and you’ll chew, and swallow your saliva, and your ears will be OK. We’ve discussed this already.”

“Maybe I’d better have a piece now, all unwrapped and ready to go in my hand.”

“Here, then.”

“Bless you, Lenore.”

“A story, please.”

“A story? Here?”

“I’m really in the mood for a story. Maybe a story will take your mind off your ears.”

“My ears, God. I’d almost begun to have hopes of forgetting, what with the gum in my hand, and you go and mention my ears.”

“Let’s just have a minimum of spasms, here in public, on the plane, with a pilot and stewardess who’re probably going to tell my father everything we do and say.”

“How comforting.”

“Just no spasms, please.”

“But a story.”

“Please.”

“….”

“I know you’ve got some. I saw manila envelopes in your suitcase when I put stuff in.”

“Lord, they’re getting ready to take off. We’re moving. My ears are rumbling like mad.”

“….”

“Ironically enough, a man, in whom the instinct to love is as strong and natural and instinctive as can possibly be, is unable to find someone really to love.”

“We’re starting the story? Or is this just a Vigorous pithy?”

“The story is underway. The aforementioned pre-sarcastic-interruption fact is because this man, in whom the instincts and inclinations are so strong and pure, is completely unable to control these strong and pure instincts and inclinations. What invariably happens is that the man meets a halfway or even quarterway desirable woman, and he immediately falls head over heels in love with her, right there, first thing, on the spot, and blurts out ‘I love you’ as practically the first thing he says, because he can’t control the intensely warm feelings of love, and not just lust, now, it’s made clear, but deep, emotionally intricate, passionate love, the feelings that wash over him, and so immediately at the first opportunity he says ’I love you,‘ and his pupils dilate until they fill practically his whole eyes, and he moves unself-consciously toward the woman in question as if to touch her in a sexual way, and the women he does this to, which is more or less every woman he meets, quite understandably don’t react positively to this, a man who says ’I love you’ right away, and makes a bid for closeness right away, and so the women as an invariable rule reject him verbally on the spot, or hit him with their purse, or worst of all run away, screaming screams only he and they can hear.”

“Look down a second, Rick. Out the window.”

“Where?”

“Right down there.”

“Heavens, I know her! That’s…”

“Jayne Mansfield.”

“Jayne Mansfield, right. What’s she doing as a town? Is that East Corinth?”

“I’ll explain later.”

“My God, will you look at that west border. That 271. That’s the Inner Belt. I’ve driven over that.”

“Meanwhile, back with the lover whose love drives the lovee away with silent screams.”

“Right. So the man is understandably not too happy. Not only is he denied the opportunity to love, but it’s the very strength and intensity of his own love-urge that denies him the opportunity, which denial thus understandably causes him exponentially more sadness and depression and frustration than it would you or me, in whom the instincts are semi-under-control, and so semi-satisfiable.”

“More gum?”

“And so the man is in a bad way, and he loses his job at the New York State Department of Weights and Measures, at which he’d been incredibly successful before the love-intensity problem got really bad, and now he wanders the streets of New York City, living off the bank account he’d built up during his days as a brilliant weights-and-measures man, wandering the streets, stopping only when he falls in love, getting slapped or laughed at or hearing silent screams. And this goes on, for months, until one day in Times Square he sees a discreet little Xeroxed ad on a notice board, an ad for a doctor who claims to be a love therapist, one who can treat disorders stemming from and connected to the emotion of love.”

“What, like a sex therapist?”

“No, as a matter of fact it says ‘Not A Sex Therapist’ in italics at the bottom of the ad, and it gives an address, and so the man, who is neither overjoyed with his life nor overwhelmed with alternatives for working out his problems, hops the subway and starts heading across town to the love therapist’s office. And in his car on the subway there are four women, three of them reasonably desirable, and he falls in love in about two seconds with each of the three in turn, and gets hit, laughed at, and subjected to a silent scream, respectively, and then eventually he looks over at the fourth woman, who’s conspicuously fat, and has stringy hair, and Coke-bottle glasses, and an incredibly weak chin, weaker even than mine, and so the fourth woman is prohibitively undesirable, even for the man, and besides she’s very hard to see because she’s pressed back into the shadow of the rear of the car, with her coat collar pulled up around her neck, which neck is also encased in a thick scarf. Did I mention it was March in New York City?”

“No.”

“Well it is, and she’s in a scarf, pressed back into the shadow, with her cheek pressed against the grimy graffiti-spattered wall of the subway car, clutching an old Thermos bottle that’s jutting halfway out of her coat pocket, and she just basically looks like one of those troubled cases you don’t want to mess with, which cases New York City does not exactly have a scarcity of.”

“You’re telling me.”

“And then on top of everything else the fat stringy-haired woman with the Thermos has been watching the man telling the other three women that he loves them, and making bids for closeness, out of the comer of her eye, as she hugs the wall of the car in shadow, and then so when she sees the man even look at her, at all, she obviously flips out, it really bothers her, and she bolts for the door of the subway car, as fast as she can bolt, which isn’t too fast, because now it becomes clear that one of her legs is roughly one half the length of the other, but still she bolts, and the car is just pulling into a station, and the door opens, and out she flies, and in her excessive haste she drops the old Thermos she’d been clutching, and it rolls down the floor of the subway, and it finally clunks against the man’s shoe, and he picks it up, and it’s just an old black metal Thermos, but on the bottom is a piece of masking tape on which is written in a tiny faint hand a name and an address, which he and we assume to be the woman‘s, in Brooklyn, and so the man resolves to give the woman back her Thermos, since it was probably he and his inappropriate emotional behavior that had caused her to drop it in the first place. Besides, the love therapist’s office is in Brooklyn, too.

“And so the man arrives at the love therapist’s office, and actually wouldn’t ordinarily have gotten in to see the love therapist at all, because she’s apparently a truly great and respected love therapist, and incredibly busy, and her appointment calendar is booked up months in advance, but, as it happens, the love therapist’s receptionist is a ravingly desirable woman, and the man immediately and involuntarily falls head over heels in love with her, and actually begins involuntarily reciting love poems to her, then eventually sort of passes out, swoons from the intensity of his love, and falls to the carpeted floor, and so the receptionist runs in and tells the love therapist what’s happened, that this is obviously a guy who really needs to be seen right away, out here, on the rug, and so the love therapist skips her lunch hour, which she was just about to take, and they pick the man up off the reception-area rug and carry him into the office and revive him with cold water, and he gets an appointment right away.

“And it turns out that one of the reasons why this love therapist is so great is that she can usually hew to the bone of someone’s love-problem in one appointment, and doesn’t keep the patient stringing along month after expensive month with vague predictions of breakthrough, which we are both in a position to appreciate the desirability of, I think, and so the love therapist hews to the bone of the man’s problem, and tells the man that surprisingly enough it’s not that his emotional love-mechanism is too strong, but rather that some of its important features are actually too weak, because one of the big things about real love is the power to discriminate and decide whom and on the basis of what criteria to love, which the man is very obviously unable to do — witness the fact that the man fell deeply and intricately for the receptionist without even knowing her, and has already said ‘I love you’ to the love therapist, herself, about ten times, involuntarily. What the man needs to do, the love therapist says, is to strengthen his love-discrimination mechanism by being around women and trying not to fall in love with them. Since this obviously will be hard for the man to do at the start, the love therapist suggests that he begin by finding some woman so completely and entirely undesirable, looks-wise and personality-wise, that it won’t be all that hard to keep from falling in love with her right away, and then proceeding to hang around her as much as he can, to begin to strengthen the mechanism that lets men hang around with women without necessarily falling in love with them. And the man is dazed from the one-two punch of the ravingly desirable receptionist and the wise and kind and obviously exceedingly competent and also not unerotic love therapist, but the back part of his brain, the part that deals with basic self-preservation, knows that things cannot keep going as they have been, and he resolves to give the love therapist’s advice a try, and then he happens to look down at the Thermos he’s still holding, and he sees the piece of masking tape with the name and address of the Thermos woman on it, and he has an epiphany-ish flashback to the subway, and sees that the Thermos woman is just a prime candidate for non-love, stringy-hair-and-uneven-leg-wise, and clearly-troubled-personality-wise, and as the scene ends we see him looking speculatively at the Thermos and then at the love therapist.”

“How’s the gum doing?”

“New piece, please.”

“Here.”

“….”

“Is the gum working?”

“Do you hear me complaining yet?”

“Good point.”

“And so as the next scene opens it’s a few days later, and the man and the Thermos woman are walking in Central Park, or rather walking and limping, respectively, and they’re holding hands, although for the man it’s just a friendly platonic hand-holding, although we’re not sure what it is for the Thermos woman, and it’s made clear that the man had gone to the Thermos address and had talked to the woman and had, after a reasonably long time and many visits, broken down some of her really pathological shyness and introversion, though only some. And they’re walking hand in hand, although it’s inconvenient, because the woman clearly has a pathological need always to be in shadow, and so they keep having to veer all over Central Park to find shadow that she’ll be able to walk in, and she also has a pathological need to keep her neck covered, and keeps fingering at one of the seemingly uncountable number of scarves she owns, and she also strangely always seems to want to have only her right side facing the man, she keeps her left side turned away at all times, so all the man ever sees of her is her right profile, and as he turns from time to time and moves relative to her she keeps moving and positioning herself like mad to keep only her right side facing him.”

“….”

“And she also seems really aloof and not emotionally connected with anyone outside herself at all, except her family, who live in Yonkers, but as the man works to exercise his love-discrimination mechanism and starts hanging around the woman and beginning to get to know her better, it seems clear to him that she actually wants to be connected with people outside herself, very much, but can‘t, for some strange reason that he can’t figure out, but knows has something to do with the shadows, the scarves, and the profiles.”

“ ”

“And a funny thing happens. The man begins to like the Thermos woman. Not love, but like, which is something the man has never experienced before, and finds different, because it involves directing a lot more emotional attention to the actual other person than the old uncontrollable passionate love had involved, involves caring about the whole other person, including the facets and features that have nothing whatsoever to do with the man. And now it’s implied that what has happened is that the man has for the first time become really connected to a person other than himself, that he had not really ever been connected before, that his intense-love tendency, which might at first glance have seemed like the ultimate way to connect, has really been a way not to connect, at all, both in its results and, really, as a little psychological analysis is by implication indulged in, in its subconscious intent. The inability to bring the discriminating faculty of love to bear on the world outside him has been what has kept the man from connecting with that world outside him, the same way the Thermos woman has been kept from connecting by the mysterious shadow-scarf-and-profile thing.

“Which thing, by the way, really begins to bother the man, and makes him intensely curious, especially as he begins to feel more and more connected to the woman, though not exactly in a passionate-love way, and thinks he feels her yearning to connect, too. And so he gradually wins her trust and affection, and she responds by starting to wash her hair, and dieting, and buying an extra thick shoe for her obscenely short leg, and things progress, although the Thermos woman is still clearly pathologically hung up about something. And then one night in very early April, after a walk all around the quainter parts of Brooklyn, the man takes the Thermos woman back to her apartment and has sex with her, seduces her, gets her all undressed — except, compassionately, for her scarf — and he makes love to her, and it’s at first surprisingly, but then when we think about it not all that surprisingly, revealed that this is the first time this incredibly passionate, love-oriented man, who’s about thirty, has ever had sex with anybody, at all.”

“….”

“Um, first time for the Thermos woman, too.”

“….”

“….”

“What’s the matter?”

“My ear! Shit! God!”

“Try to swallow.”

“….”

“Try to yawn.”

“….”

“….”

“Good God. I so hate airplanes, Lenore. I can think of no more convincing demonstration of my devotion to you than my coming on this trip. I am flying for you.”

“You’re going to get to see Amherst in the very early fall. You said early fall in Amherst used to make you weep with joy.”

“….”

“You’re less pale. Can we assume the ear is better?”

“Jesus.”

“….”

“So they have sex, and the man is able to be gentle and caring, which we can safely intuit he couldn’t have been, passion-wise, if he’d really been hopelessly in love in his old way with the Thermos woman, and the Thermos woman weeps tears of joy, at all the gentleness and caring, and we can practically hear the thud as she falls in love with the man, and she really begins to think it’s possible to connect with someone in the world outside her. And they’re lying in bed, and their limbs are unevenly intertwined, and the man is resting his head on the little shelf of the Thermos woman’s weak chin, and he’s playing idly with the scarf around her neck, which playing pathologically bothers the woman, which the man notices, and curiosity and concern wash over him, and he tries tentatively and experimentally slowly to undo the scarf and take it off, and the Thermos woman tenses all her muscles but through what is obviously great strength of will doesn’t stop him, although she’s weeping for real, now, and the man gently, and with kisses and reassurances, removes the scarf, throws it aside, and in the dimness of the bedroom sees something more than a little weird on the woman’s neck, and he goes and turns on the light, and in the light of the bedroom it’s revealed that the woman has a pale-green tree toad living in a pit at the base of her neck, on the left side.”

“Pardon me?”

“In a perfectly formed and non-woundish pit on the left side of the Thermos woman’s neck is a tiny tree toad, pale green, with a white throat that puffs rhythmically out and in. The toad stares up at the man from the woman’s neck with sad wise clear reptilian eyes, the clear and delicate lower lids of which blink upward, in reverse. And the woman is weeping, her secret is out, she has a tree toad living in her neck.”

“Is it my imagination, or did this story just get really weird all of a sudden?”

“Well, the context is supposed to explain and so minimize the weirdness. The tree toad in the pit in her neck is the thing that has kept the Thermos woman from connecting emotionally with the world outside her: it has been what has kept her in sadness and confusion, see also darkness and shadow, what has bound and constrained her, see also being wrapped in a scarf, what has kept her from facing the external world, see also staying in profile all the time. The tree toad is the mechanism of nonconnection and alienation, the symbol and cause of the Thermos woman’s isolation; yet it also becomes clear after a while that she is emotionally attached to the tree toad in a very big way, and cares more for it and gives it more attention than she gives herself, there in the privacy of her apartment. And the man also discovers that all the scarves the woman wears to cover up and hide the tree toad are full of tiny holes, air holes for the toad, holes that are practically invisible and that the woman herself makes via millions of tiny punctures of the cloth with a pin, late at night.”

“My ear even hurts a little. We must be really high.”

“So that the very thing that has made the woman unconnected when she wants to be connected and so has made her extremely unhappy is also the center of her life, a thing she cares a lot about, and is even, in certain ways the man can’t quite comprehend, proud of, and proud of the fact that she can feed the pale-green tree toad bits of food off her finger, and that it will let her scratch its white throat with a letter opener. So now things are understandably ambiguous, and it’s not clear whether deep down at the core of her being the Thermos woman really wants to connect, after all, at all. Except as time goes by and the man continues to hang around, exercising his non-love love-mechanism, being gentle and caring, the woman falls more and more for him, and clearly wants to connect, and her relation with the tree toad in the pit in her neck gets ambiguous, and at times she’s hostile toward it and flicks at it cruelly with her fingernail, except at other times she falls back into not wanting to connect, and so dotes on the tree toad, and scratches it with the letter opener, and is aloof toward the man. And this goes on and on, and she falls for the man on the whole more and more. And the man begins to be unsure about his formerly definitely non-love feelings for this strange and not too pretty but still quite complex and in many ways brave and in all ways certainly very interesting Thermos woman, and so his whole love-situation gets vastly more complicated than it’s ever been before.”

“Listen, would you like a Canadian Club? I can get Jennifer to bring you a Canadian Club.”

“Not too tasty with gum, I’m afraid, of which I would however like another piece.”

“Coming right up.”

“And so things are complicated, and the man earns the Thermos woman’s trust more and more, and finally one night she brings him to her family’s home in Yonkers, for a family get-together and dinner, and the man meets her whole family, and he knows right away something’s up, because they all have scarves around their necks, and they’re clearly extremely on edge about there being an outsider in their midst, but anyway they all sit around the living room for a while, in uncomfortable silence, with cocktails, and Cokes for the little kids, and then they sit down to dinner, and right before they all sit down, the Thermos woman looks significantly at the man, and then at her father, and then in a gesture of letting the family know she’s clued the man into her secret condition and initiated some kind of nascent emotional connection, she undoes her scarf and throws it aside, and her tree toad gives a little chirrup, and there’s a moment of incredibly tense silence, and then the father slowly undoes and discards his scarf, too, and in the pit in the left side of his neck there’s a mottle-throated fan-wing moth, and then the whole rest of the family undo their scarves, too, and they all have little animals living in pits in their necks: the mother has a narrow-tailed salamander, one brother has a driver ant, one sister has a wolf spider, another brother has an axolotl, one of the little children has a sod webworm. Et cetera et cetera.”

“I think I feel the need for context again.”

“Well, the father explains to the man, as the family is sitting around the table, eating, and also feeding their respective neck-tenants little morsels off the tips of their fingers, that their family is from an ancient and narratively unspecified area in Eastern Europe, in which area the people have always stood in really ambiguous relations to the world outside them, and that the area’s families were internally fiercely loyal, and their members were intimately and thoroughly connected with one another, but that the family units themselves were fiercely independent, and tended to view just about all non-family-members as outsiders, and didn’t connect with them, and that the tiny animals in their necks, which specific animal-types used to be unique to each family and the same for each member of a particular family, in the old days, were symbols of this difference from and non-connection with the rest of the outside world. But then the father goes on to say that these days inbreeding and the passage of time were making the animal-types in the necks of the family-members different, and that also, regrettably, some younger members of the fiercely loyal families were now inclined to resent the secrecy and non-connection with the world that having animals in their necks required and entitled them to, and that some members of his own family had unfortunately given him to understand that they weren’t entirely happy about the situation. And here he and all the other members of the family stop eating and glare at the Thermos woman, there in her glasses, who is silently trying to feed her tree toad a bit of pot roast off the tip of her finger. And the man’s heart just about breaks with pity for the Thermos woman, who so clearly now stands in such an ambiguous relation to everything and everyone around her, and his heart almost breaks, and he also realizes in an epiphany-ish flash that he has sort of fallen in love with the Thermos woman, in a way, though not in the way he’d fallen for any of the uncountable number of women he’d fallen in love with before.”

“Look down a second, if it doesn’t hurt your ear. I think we’re over Pennsylvania. I thought I saw a hex sign on a barn roof. We’re past Lake Erie, at least.”

“Thank God. Drowning in sludge is one of my special horrors.”

“….”

“And so things are complicated, enormously complicated, and the man feels he’s now experiencing the kind of strong discriminating love the love therapist had been recommending, so he’s pleased, and also maybe I neglected to mention he’s long since toned down his head-over-heels-in-love-in-public inclinations, things are now much more under control, and with all his professional weight-measure experience, plus his new-found amorous restraint, he manages to land a fairly good job with a company that makes scales, and he’s doing pretty well, although he does miss that exciting head-busting rush of hot feeling he used to get from being madly, passionately, non-discriminatingly in love. But the Thermos woman is clearly undergoing even more complicated changes and feelings than the man; she’s obviously fallen in love with him, and her nascent connection with him is obviously arousing in her a desire to begin to connect emotionally with the entire outside world, and she gets more concerned with and attentive to her own appearance; she loses more weight, and buys contact lenses to replace the Coke-bottle glasses, and gets a perm, and there’s still of course the problem of chinlessness and leg-length, but still. But most of all she now noticeably begins to perceive the green tree toad in the pit in her neck as a definite problem, and ceases to identify herelf with it and non-connection, and begins instead to identify herself with herself and connection. But now her perception of the tiny toad as a definite problem, which is, remember, a function of her new world view and desire to connect, now paradoxically causes her enormous grief and distress, because, now that she feels a bit connected to the world, she no longer feels that she wants to stay in shadow and present only profiles — so far so good — but that now even though she doesn’t want to hide away she feels more than ever as though she ought to, because she’s got a reptile living in a pit in her neck, after all, and is to that extent alienated and different and comparatively disgusting, with respect to the world she now wants to connect with.”

“Aren’t tree toads amphibians, really?”

“Wise-ass. Amphibian in a pit in her neck. But she suddenly and ominously gets even more fanatical about being in shadow and wearing the scarves, even though these are obviously alienating things: the more she wants to be accepted by the world, the more she’s beaten back by her heightened perception of her own difference, amphibian-tenant-wise. She becomes absolutely obsessed with the green tree toad, and gives it a really hard time with her fingernail, and cries, and tells the man she hates the toad, and the man tries to cheer her up by taking her out dancing at a nightclub that has lots of shadows. Gum, please.”

“…”

“And things get worse, and the Thermos woman is now drinking a lot, sitting in her apartment, and as she’s drinking, the man will look at her sadly, as he sits nearby working on the design for a scale; and the tree toad, when it’s not busy getting flicked by a fingernail, will look at the man and blink sadly, from the lower lid up, there in the pit in the Thermos woman’s neck.”

“….”

“And now, disastrously, it’s late April. It’s the height of spring, almost. Have you ever been around someplace that has tree toads, in the spring, Lenore?”

“Oh, no. ”

“They sing. It’s involuntary. It’s instinctive. They sing and chirrup like mad. And this, I rather like to think, is why the tree toad looked sadly at the man as the man was looking sadly at the drinking Thermos woman: the tree toad has its own nature to be true to, too. The toad’s maybe aware that its singing will have a disastrous effect on the Thermos woman, right now, because whereas in the past she always just used to keep herself hidden away, in the spring, in the singing season, now she’s clearly torn by strong desires to connect, to be a part of the world. And so maybe the tree toad knows it’s hurting the Thermos woman, maybe irreparably, by chirruping like mad, but what can it do? And the singing clearly drives the Thermos woman absolutely insane with frustration and horror, and her urges both to connect and to hide away in shadow are tearing at her like hell, and it’s all pathetic, and also, as should by now be apparent, more than a little ominous.”

“Oh, God.”

“And one day, not long after the toad began singing in the apartment, as the air is described as getting soft and sweet and tinged with gentle promises of warmth, with a flowery smell all around, even in New York City, the man gets a call at work from the Thermos woman’s father, in Yonkers: it seems that the Thermos woman had thrown herself in front of the subway and killed herself that morning in a truly horrible way.”

“Sweet Jesus.”

“And the man is obviously incredibly upset, and doesn’t even thank the father for calling him, even though it was quite a thing for the Eastern European father to do, what with the man being an outsider, et cetera, and so but the man is incredibly upset, and doesn’t even go to the funeral, he’s so frantic, and he discovers now — the hard way — that he really was connected to the Thermos woman, really and truly, deeply and significantly, and that the severing of an established connection is exponentially more painful than the rejection of an attempted connection, and he wallows in grief, and also disastrously his old love problem immediately comes roaring back stronger than ever, and the man is falling passionately in love with anything with a pulse, practically, and now, disastrously, men as well as women, and he’s perceived as a homosexual, and starts getting regularly beaten up at work, and then he loses his job when he tells his supervisor he’s in love with him, and he’s back out wandering the streets, and now he starts falling in love with children, too, which is obviously frowned upon by society, and he commits some gross though of course involuntary indiscretions, and gets arrested, and thrown in jail overnight, and he’s in a truly horrible way, and he curses the love therapist for even suggesting that he try to love with his discriminating-love-faculty.”

“May I please ask a question?”

“Yes. ”

“Why didn’t the Thermos woman just take the tree toad out of her neck and put it in a coffee can or something?”

“A, the implication is that the only way the animal-in-neck people can rid themselves of the animals in their necks is to die, see for instance the subway, and b, you’re totally, completely missing what I at any rate perceive to be the point of the story.”

“….”

“And the man is in a horrible way, and his old love problem is raging, together with and compounded by his continued grief at the severed Thermos-woman-connection, and his desire never ever to connect again, which desire itself stands in a troublingly ambiguous and bad-way-producing relation to the original love problem. And so things are just horrible. And they go on this way for about a week, and then one night in May the man is lying totally overcome by grief and by his roughly twenty-five fallings in love and run-ins with the police that day, and he’s almost out of his mind, lying in a very bad way there on the rug of his apartment, and suddenly there’s an impossibly tiny knock at the apartment door.”

“Oh, no.”

“What do you mean, ‘Oh, no’?”

“….”

“Well he opens the door, and there on the floor of the hall outside his apartment is the Thermos woman’s tiny delicate pale-green tree toad, blinking up at him, from the lower eyelid up, with its left rear foot flattened and trailing way behind it and obviously hurt, no doubt we’re to assume from the subway episode, which episode however the toad at least seemed to have survived.”

“Wow.”

“And the story ends with the man, bleary-eyed and punchy from grief and love and connection-ambiguity, at the door, staring down at the tiny pale-green tree toad, which is still simply looking up at him, blinking sadly in reverse, and giving a few tentative little chirrups. And they’re just there in the hall looking at each other as the story ends.”

“Wow.”

“I think I’d like to try two pieces of gum at once, please.”

“….”

“It’s clearly not right for the Frequent Review, but I’m going to write a personal rejection note in which I say that I personally liked it, and thought it had possibilities, though it was not as yet a finished piece. ”

“Another troubled-collegiate-mind submission?”

“That’s the very strong sense I get, although the kid tried to pass himself off as much older in his cover letter, and included what I have now determined to be a phony bibliography of published material. ”

“Lordy.”

“I’m suddenly monstrously hungry, Lenore.”

“I know for a fact there are sandwiches. Let me buzz Jennifer.”

“….”

“Well, it’s about time somebody wanted something around here.”

“Hi Jennifer. I think Mr. Vigorous would like a sandwich.”

“Well, sure. Sir, what would you like?”

“What sorts of sandwiches do you have, please?”

“We have ham, today, and also turkey.”

“Does the turkey have mayonnaise?”

“I think so, sir.”

“Miracle Whip, or Hellman’s?”

“Sir, I’m afraid I’m not sure. Lenore, I’m sorry.” “That’s OK, Jennifer. Hellman’s makes Rick’s throat itch, is the thing.”

“How perfectly awful!”

“Perhaps I’ll have the ham, provided it’s mayonnaiseless, with the crusts removed from what I’ll naturally assume to be rye bread.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Please, and understandably again given the above it’s vital that there be no mayonnaise, though I would like a smidgeon of mustard, and also a Canadian Club with a spash of distilled water.”

“Lenore?”

“May I please have a ginger ale?”

“I’ll be right back.”

“Thanks, Jennifer.”

“Beautiful girl.”

“Trying to make me jealous?”

“Don’t I wish.”

“….”

“Speaking of which… I saw Norman, yesterday, Lenore. He asked about you.”

“Really? I think we’re getting close to Bradley Field. I know we’re over New York state, anyway. See the traffic?”

“Norman asked about you.”

“Really.”

“Norman claims to be in love with you.”

“Why that tone, Rick?”

“What tone?”

“An obese, hideous, insane, aspirations-to-be-infinite person, who’s off his rocker, expresses a necessarily-given-his-universe-view temporary interest in someone who made every effort to be explicitly rude to him, and who clearly has no interest in him, and you get that tone.”

“I almost attacked him on the spot. I just had no idea where to begin hitting. He’s much larger than he was a week ago.”

“That seems longer ago than a week, doesn’t it?”

“Besides, his palanquin carriers were all quite burly. Otherwise I really would have lunged.”

“….”

“Norman hasn’t communicated with you directly, has he? Expressed things to you?”

“I’ll handle it, Rick.”

“Handle what?”

“Whatever needs to be handled.”

“….”

“I get to handle things too, you know. I’m a person.”

“What has he said?”

“Nothing even the tiniest bit interesting, and nothing that’s really any of your business.”

“None of my business?”

“….”

“None of my business?” “….”

“Aren’t you my—? Thank you. Thanks.”

“Looks super, Jennifer, thanks. Are we getting close?”

“I know we’re over New York. Captain says about half an hour.”

“Thanks.”

“Just buzz if there’s anything at all, you two.”

“She didn’t take the crusts off.”

“Give me your knife. I’ll do it.”

“We’re her only responsibility, the one thing she has to do, and she doesn’t take the crusts off.”

“….”

“You’re not my business? I’m confused about what’s my business and what isn’t?”

“Got a knife, here, remember.”

“….”

“I’m your friend. Your girlfriend. I’m not your business.”

“My girlfriend?”

“Whatever you want to call it. May I please eat these crusts, or do you want them for some reason?”

“The things I love are my business.”

“That’s just untrue. The things you love and the people you love are the things and people you love. Your business is you.”

“….”

“Just like my business is me.”

“….”

“Which I’ll handle, Rick.”

“My, aren’t we assertive and confident and sure of ourselves all of a sudden.”

“I don’t think this is the place for this. When you start using the plural tense, I sense spasm-potential.”

“This ham is far too salty.”

“You did take your gum out, right?”

“I’m losing you, Lenore. My ears were rumbling ominously at impending loss. That’s what that rumbling really was.”

“Why do you perceive everything in terms of having and losing? Have you ever for about one second thought of how that makes me feel? You haven’t ‘lost me,’ whatever on God’s green earth that means. I’ll handle the people who might happen to be temporarily infatuated with me on my own, is all.”

“People?”

“Sweet shrieking mother of God! Listen to yourself! You’re not even insanely jealous, you’re just… pathetically jealous.”

“So now I’m pathetic.”

“No more. I’m going to sleep. May I please put my ginger ale on your tray?”

“You may not go to sleep, Lenore.”

“….”

“At least have the decency to give me some gum, to have, for the landing, which I might tell you I’m not looking forward to one bit.”

“Here.”

“….”

“….”

“You are too my business.”

“Fnoof. ”

“Christ.”

/d/

EXCERPT FROM DUTY LOG OF DR. DANIEL JOY, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR FOR EMERGENCY SERVICES, CHICAGO DEPARTMENT OF MENTAL HEALTH, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, FRIDAY, 3 SEPTEMBER 1990.

10:40 a.m. Arrive Lake Lady Medical Center, Chicago.

10:42 Arrive Floor 5. ID check complete. Station log verifies assignment to observe patient “JB, ” Room 573, admitted p.m. of Thursday, 26 August.

10:45 Arrive Room 573. ID check complete. Occupants of 573 as of 10:45: Joy; patient “JB”; Dr. Robert Golden, Supervisor Emotional/Psychological Services, Lake Lady Center; Dr. Daniel Nelm, Staff Physician, /P S, L.L.C. Observe patient “JB.” Patient male, Caucasian, fair, dark hair, height appr. 5’ 9”, weight appr. 100 lbs. Prominent features: eyes. Exceptionally large, black. Condition skin around eyes indicates lack of/difficulties connected with sleep. Patient conscious but sedated. Medication indicated Golden to be 110 Thor. Pcm #7 drip ver. saline x 2 hrs.; increased to 220 Thor. Pcm #7 post shift #3 (11 p.m.-7 a.m.).Observe filming apparatus on tripod at foot of patient’s bed. Observe director’s chair. Observe sunglasses worn by Drs. Golden, Nelm. N explains patient delusion e.g. admittance, believes he is contestant on television “quiz-” or “game-show, ” refuses/unable to give correct name, refers to himself only as “The Contestant, ” variously under heavy post-#3 sedation “He Who Smites From Afar” (per report Golden, Nelm). Patient “JB” refuses to speak unless believes being filmed, recorded; refuses to acknowledge questions posed by any but those representing selves as “game-show” personnel (per G, N). Food refused 27 August, thereafter; Drip Class 7 initiated 27 August, thereafter.Malnutrition advanced but not sufficient for exhaustive explanation condition (Golden, concurrence Joy).Nelm explains camera is Motorola home-movie outfit owned by Mrs. Nelm. Patient appears to ignore. Patient stares into camera. Am handed by Nelm pair sunglasses, director’s bullhorn. Am instructed to address patient as “Contestant, Baby. ” Sit in director’s chair. (Here see E/ P S L.L.C. reports 8-28, 8-29, 8-30, 8-31, tag 573, L.L.M.C.) Am introduced as “Mr. Barris of Screen Gems, nc. Patient response noticeable. Difficulty observing patient from behind sunglasses judged acceptable, offset by desirability patient response. Delusion observed. Delusion constant only with respect to television. Patient appears confused as to whether appearing on game show or being interviewed for/about appearance game show. Nelm suggestion (positive impression Nelm, unorthodox vs. highly competent, formally noted 9–3) Mr. ”Barris“ ask ”prospective contestant“ for previous ”game-show experience. “ Patient’s voice exceptionally raw, scratchy; intelligibility inconstant. Hoarseness see admission report JB-L.L.M.C. 8-26, Nelm report 8-27 tag 573. Patient responds request ”experience“ (from tape, N):“The experience I have had was onthe… (unintelligible)… In the Desert? And I was… where we were I was contestant. I am the contestant. The host opened the showcase and from where / was the audience screamed. It was the most desirable prize imaginable. The prize impossible to conceive of a more desirable prize. The totally desirable prize. And the audience had to be restrained with electrified wire mesh. And where / was I was not restrained. And… “ (unintelligible). ”And the host in the robe set the clock and shots of Dad and…“ ” (unintelligible) “and wires affixed. Host in robe says…” (here patient adopts different voice, possibly one of game-show quizmaster [N], pain at vocal effort obvious): “ ‘And the contestant will of course receive in which he receives the most widely desirable prize imaginable, on the condition that he, here we are, not want it, for the next 60 seconds.’“Contestant, where I was, did not receive prize. Shouts from audience: ‘Don’t think about it. ’ ‘Renounce all desire.’ Shouts from audience behind electrified wire mesh. To receive totally desirable prize by not desiring prize I did not receive prize. Failure occurred at 50 seconds. Per the rules of the game received the electric shocks, on the tip? Every 2 seconds? For the 50? And the audience completely howled, threw water from behind the wire mesh, were thrown back…”Patient emits screams, rhythm appr. every 2 seconds, over 20 seconds, throat condition prohibits excessive noise or potential for harm (G, N). Dosage increased Nelm x 1.5; patient now conscious but heavily sedated. Eyes roll white.Here c. f. formal report Joy CDMH 9-3-90 tag L.L.M.C. #573: identity patient sought via standard police, media procedure. Initials J.B., relative (?) L.B., established by jewelry worn date admittance. Nelm emphasis mention “Dad.” Reference to Desert, together with accent, establishes experience (residence?) in Ohio post-1972. Directive Nelm; proceed through all missing persons reports male Caucasion — Illinois, Ohio — past 30 days. Observation assignment Nelm. Observation continued through 9-10 authorized (see Joy, 9–3 tag 573 L.L.M.C.). Follow-up assignment Nelm authorized. Use of equipment authorized through 9-10. For following refer Joy formal 9–3 tag 573 L.L.M.C.Overrall impressions none. Parallel/Precedent impression none.

11:30 Leave Lake Lady Medical Center, Chicago. dj/hvs

/e/

“It sure is weird having it be Monday and no telephones. You were awesome with Walinda, Rick. I never would have believed it.”

“My ears still hurt like hell. It was as if the takeoff merely softened my ears up for the landing. It was beyond belief, Lenore.”

“I’m so sorry. What can I do?”

“Oh, Route 9. Here it is. We’re on Route 9. God, the memories I have of Route 9. Good Lord, the Coolidge Bridge.”

“Haven’t you ever been back here, for reunions or stuff like that?”

“You must be joking.”

“….”

“The plane isn’t simply going to idle and wait for us at Bradley Field, Lenore, is it?”

“No way. That’s Stonecipheco’s one jet.”

“How thrifty.”

“I think it took off again almost right away. I think it had to get back home.”

“Places to go and people to see.”

“I’m not even sure. You hustled us into this limo in like four seconds.”

“The law of the East Coast. You see available transportation, you grab it immediately.”

“The plane’s supposed to be back for us by lunchtime tomorrow… eleven-thirty.”

“Plenty of time to talk to LaVache.”

“Which is obviously going to be a waste of time, in terms of Dad, I predict. There’s no way Lenore’s talking to LaVache if she hasn’t talked to me. LaVache and Lenore hate each other. And he doesn’t even have a phone. And he and John hate each other, too. Or rather at least he hates John.”

“So much hating.”

“Well, it’s just family hating. It’s not like real hating.”

“My God. The Aqua Vitae restaurant. I thought that had been tom down. I haven’t thought of the Aqua Vitae in years. Good God. We used to pile in the car and go on down to the Aqua Vitae for monstrously huge hamburg pizzas.”

“Hamburger.”

“Ah, regional linguistic clash. I love it. It all comes flooding back.”

“….”

“I really do have to pee, though.”

“Should we pull over? We can pull in really quick at this mall, here.”

“God, no, not a mall. We’re nearly there. We’re nearly here. I think perhaps it’s just excitement. Amherst is rife with restroom facilities, anyway. At least it used to be. I knew them all.”

“Hang in there, soldier.”

“At least you can watch the putative future of Stonecipheco in academic action. You can issue a full report to your father, back at his lair.”

“I’m not going to tell Dad anything except what I want to tell him. Dad told me like ninety lies in his office. I’m beginning to think Dad is maybe a compulsive liar. He lies pathologically, even sort of pathetically, when it comes to Miss Malig. And he had this guy who works for him, who I used to go to school with, spying on us. And he didn’t even tell him to come out until it was obvious that I’d seen his shoes under the window curtain.”

“Who is this person you went to school with? Have I been told about him before?”

“Look, an absolute moratorium on spasms is declared, here, Rick, OK? I’m just not in the mood at all.”

“….”

“And you should know I’m not my father’s messenger, or spy.”

“Relax. You’re among friends. You’re with the one person who places your interests above his own. Remember that.”

“Oh Rick.”

“I love you, Lenore.”

“But I have to admit I am sort of anxious to see what LaVache is like at school. He’s really smarter than John, I think. In terms of pure smarts, he’s the one person in the family who’s smarter than John. He never had to work a bit at Shaker School, I know. And at home in the summer he’s just a waste-product. He just sits around all day in the east wing, getting flapped and watching soap operas, and stuff like ‘The Flintstones,’ and carving designs in his leg.”

“ ”

“And at night, every night, he just goes out drinking with his spooky buddies, in their cars where the back is higher off the ground than the front.”

“Jacked-up.”

“Jacked-up cars. And Dad never knows what he’s doing, because Dad’s hardly ever around, or when he is he’s like tiptoeing around ever so discreetly with Miss Malig. Dad thinks LaVache works. He thinks LaVache is another him.”

“We’re almost there. This hill. We’re going to crest this hill, and we’ll be there.”

“I’m sure he must work, now, in college. I know I sure did.”

“And… ahh, there it is. Good heavens.”

“Your eyes are misting.”

“Bet your ass. I make no bones about it. I haven’t been back here in exactly twenty years. This is my alma mater.”

“Well, of course it is, you silly.”

“Alma mater.”

“….”

“Shall we just proceed right to Stone, Lenore? That is where LaVache lives, correct?”

“Right.”

“Driver, please take us directly to Stone Dormitory, Amherst College. You are, I’m afraid, on your own in terms of finding it. It’s one of the new ones, with which I’m not familiar, not having—”

“No problem, buddy.”

“How nice. Good heavens. How truly eerie, seeing all this. The trees are just barely hinting at beginning to turn, see? You can see it in some more than in others. Look there, for instance.”

“Pretty, all right.”

“Have you ever been here?”

“I’ve been to Mount Holyoke. I went there once, when Clarice was there.”

“Did you find it pretty?”

“It was March, but it was pretty. The campus was really pretty.”

“I’ve always liked Mount Holyoke, in a general sort of way.”

“What does that mean?”

“God, I really must pee, Lenore.”

“You can pee in LaVache’s room.”

“….”

“Oh, God, no! Rick, those shoes, still.”

“Pardon?”

“Those shoes. See those shoes, on those people? The boat shoes? With the leather shoe and white plastic sole?”

“Well, yes.”

“See those two girls and that guy? God, everybody’s still wearing them out here. Boy do I hate those shoes.”

“They, umm, seem all right to me. They seem harmless enough.”

“I have what I’m sure is this totally irrational hatred for those shoes. I think a big reason is that everyone at school wore them with no socks.”

“….”

“Which meant that they weren’t just wearing sneakers without socks, which would have been plenty repulsive enough, they were wearing nonsneakers without socks. Which is just incredibly…”

“Unhygienic?”

“Make fun if you want, smart guy. You’re the one who’s dumb if you pay Dr. Jay all that money and then don’t even listen to him. It’s not just that it’s unhygienic, it’s downright sick. It stinks. At school, I can remember, I’d be sitting in my carrel, in the library, doing homework or something, minding my own business, and somebody would sit down in the next carrel, with those shoes, and then they’d take them off, and I’d all of a sudden be smelling somebody else’s feet.”

“….”

“Which did not smell good, let me tell you, from constantly being in shoes without socks. I mean I really think foot-smell should be a private thing, don’t you?”

“….”

“What are you grinning at? Are those ridiculous feelings? Does that make no sense at all?”

“Lenore, it makes perfect sense. It’s just that I’d never given the matter that much thought. Never much thought to the… socio-ethics of foot-smell.”

“Now I can tell you’re being sarcastic.”

“You completely misread me.”

“….”

“Is that why you always wear two pairs of socks? Under constant and invariable sneakers?”

“Partly. Partly because it’s comfortable, too.”

“Stone Dorm, pal.”

“Which one of these is Stone?”

“The one we’re right in front of, pal.”

“I see…. Lord am I stiff.”

“You want to just bolt right in and pee?”

“….”

“Rick?”

“I rather think not, now that the moment has arrived.”

“What does that mean? You did nothing but talk pee, in the car.”

“Have you the bags?”

“You know perfectly well they’re in the trunk.”

“The question really meant, do you suppose you could manage getting them inside yourself, making absolutely sure to take my bag in, too, with my underwear and toothbrush and Old Spice and all essentials?”

“I suppose so, but I don’t get it.”

“Meter’s still running, ace.”

“I think with your permission I will simply leave you, here, for a bit. I feel emotions and feelings washing over me that are perhaps best confronted alone.”

“What?”

“I’m going to go wander among the blasted crags of memory, for a while.”

“Pardon me?”

“I’m going to go take a look around.”

“Oh. Well, OK.”

“Till later, then.”

“You want to just come back here and meet me? We can check in at Howard Johnson’s at five and then go to dinner?”

“Fine. Goodbye.”

“It’s room 101, remember.”

“Righto. See you soon.”

“Are you OK?”

“Yes. Goodbye. Thank you ever so much, driver.”

“….”

“Can you please help me with the bags?”

“I guess so, lady. What’s with him?”

“He gets this way, sometimes, when he has to go to the bathroom.”

/f/

6 September

The sudden strength with which the desire to go see whether the initials I’d carved so long ago in the wood of the stall in the men’s room of the Art Building were still there, the sudden and unexpected and overwhelming strength with which these feelings had washed over me, there at the dormitory, with Lenore, was a frightening thing. As I joined the serpentine line of students walking up the ungentle hill to the Art and Science Buildings, all of us falling into the vaguely floppy, seal-like gait of the hurried hill-climber, most of us seals apparently late for class, one of us late for an appointment with a tiny ocean of his own past, stretching away and down beside the carved dock of his childhood, an ocean into which this particular seal was going to pour a strong (hopefully unitary) stream of his own presence, to prove that he still is, and so was — that is, provided of course the bathroom and toilet and stall were still there — as I joined the line of seals in short pants and loose short-sleeved shirts and boat shoes and backpacks, and as I felt the fear that accompanied and was in a way caused by the intensity of the wash of feelings and desires and so on that accompanied even the thought of a silly men’s room in a silly building at a silly college where a sad silly boy had spent four years twenty years ago, as I felt all these things, there occurred to me a fact which I think now as I sit up in bed in our motel room, writing, the television softly on, the sharp-haired object of my adoration and absolute center of my entire existence asleep and snoring softly in the bed beside me, a fact which I think now is undeniably true, the truth being that Amherst College in the 1960’s was for me a devourer of the emotional middle, a maker of psychic canyons, a whacker of the pendulum of Mood with the paddle of Immoderation.

That is, it occurs to me now in force that in college things were never, not ever, at no single point, simply all right. Things were never just OK. I was never just getting by. Never. I can remember I was always horribly afraid. Or, if not horribly afraid, horribly angry. I was always desperately tense. Or, if not tense, then in an odd hot euphoria that made me walk with the water-jointed jaunt of the person who truly does not give a shit one way or the other. I was always either so unreasonably and pointlessly happy that no one place could seem to contain me, or so melancholy, so sick and silly with sadness that there was no place I could stomach the thought of entering. I hated it here. And I have never been as happy as when I was here. And these two things together confront me with the beak and claws of the True.

One of the trees at the top of the hill, which I stopped to look at as I played with my hat and recovered from the climb, the line of students forking past either side of me and disappearing into buildings to the sound of bells, one of the trees was just beginning to bum, a bit, with color, a flush of hesitant red suffusing the outline of the tree against the southerly sun, the tree’s blood draining out of those leaves most distant from the heart first; and I looked at the flush of crinkled red crowning a body of soft green, with the sunlight winking through the branches as they moved and creaked in the breeze, until I was drawn away by the twin urges to remember and to pee.

And the initials were still there, the tiny carved “R.V.,” near the bottom of the stall. Someone had filled in the carving with ballpoint pen. Near the initials were another set of initials, “S.U.X.,” which I come to see now were to be a joke at my expense. And, near the joke-at-my-expense initials, someone, some tiny soul, probably during exam time, in a gesture the emotion behind which I could completely understand, had put the single word, “Mommy”—which predictably, someone else, a mean person, had altered in a slightly different color to become “Your Mommy hates you.”

“She does not,” I put — still being a really incorrigible graffiti man, I’m afraid — under the cruel alteration, although I had to get on hands and knees in the scum-laden stall to do it, and managed to dip my tie neatly in the toilet bowl in the process; let Jay and Blentner have a look at this. And my present bubbled and frothed in my past, and was borne naturally away.

Out the door of the Art Building and through the courtyard I pass into a quad, the quad, where loosely clothed barefoot boys with liquid wrists are playing Frisbee under the lying leaves, running like deer, throwing the plastic plate every which way. We dinosaurs used to play a similar game here, with trays taken from the dining hall, metal trays back then, with sharp digit-removing edges, so that, I remember, the trays had to be caught in midair by the tweezer of finger and thumb…. We would play and bleed. Now they are only high-tech and beautiful, and the bright disc hangs motionless in the air while earth and trees and lithe slippery boys slide underneath as if on oil to receive it again. I clap my hands a bit, hem and haw, throw my cap into the air, practice some motions, make it clear that I want to be invited to play, but I am ignored.

I walk around the quad, kicking at exposed tree roots, listening to snatches of conversation in languages with which I am unfamiliar. I stay well clear of North Dormitory, to be sure. I make a giant detour around it. Out of the comer of my eye I can see its win dowshades fluttering. I can see its tree-fingers pointing. North Dormitory. Scene of perhaps the single most disastrous, unthinkable moment of my life, thus far.

Actually probably second to my wedding night.

Whom do I see, here, in the quad? Can the present of a past fail to be ugly? But it isn’t so. As I really should have remembered, ugliness is absent from the College. I have visions of it, bound and muffled, its walleyes rolling helplessly, stuffed into the darkest closets and boiler rooms in the deepest basements of the thickest buildings. I think I can hear its soft cries for help. The crazy relative everyone ignores, and denies, and feeds. Ugliness is absent from the quad.

Whom do I see, here? I see students and adults. I see parents, obvious parents, the ones with name tags. I watch the students, and they watch back. Ability To Handle Oneself, elaborate defense structures, exit their eyes and begin to assemble on the ground before them. But the eyes and faces are as always left bare. In the girls’ faces I see softness, beauty, the shiny and relaxed eyes of wealth, and the vital capacity for creating problems where none exist. For some reason I see these girls also older, pale television ghosts flickering beside the originals: middle-aged women, with bright-red fin gemails and deeply tanned, hard, seamed faces, sprayed hair shaped by the professional fingers of men with French names; and eyes, eyes that will stare without pity or doubt over salted tequila rims at the glare of the summer sun off the country club pool. The structures spread out, grow, wave at me with the epileptic flutter of the film-in-reverse. The boys are different, appropriately, from the girls. From each other. I see blond heads and lean jaws and bow-legged swaggers and biceps with veins in them. I see so many calm, impassive, or cheerful faces, faces at peace, for now and always, with the context of their own appearance and being, that sort of long-term peace and smooth acquaintance with invariable destiny that renders the faces bloodlessly pastable onto cut-outs of corporate directors in oak-lined boardrooms, professors with plaid ties and leather patches at the elbows of their sport jackets, doctors on bright putting greens with heavy gold shock-resistant watches at their wrists and tiny beepers at their belts, black-jacketed soldiers efficiently bayoneting the infirm. I see Best faces, faces I remember well. Faces whose owners are going to be the Very Best.

I see the faces of those who belong and those who do not belong. The belonging faces appear in rows, like belts of coins. The coins bob up and down, because belongers swagger. The belonging faces are tiringly complex, the expression of each created and propped up, through processes obscure, by the faces on either side of it. These structures intertwine and mesh, have not yet begun to tear at one another. And the nonbelongers. Of course the faces of those who do not belong are the adjustable dark-eyed faces of Vance Vigorous. Many of these faces are tilted downward, for fear of tripping on a root, for fear of being seen tripping on a root. These are the ones who do not sleep, sleep badly, sleep alone, and think of other things when they hear the sounds through the walls of their rooms. I intuit that the Frisbee players, whom I continue to watch, are nonbelongers. The Frisbee traces faint lines between them, strands that are swept and snapped like spidersilk by the wind off the Memorial Hill and athletic fields to the south. The nonbelongers’ faces are the unfirm faces that are really firm, the self-defined faces, the faces defined by not belonging in a place defined by belonging. These alone are the faces that stare out, protected and imprisoned, from behind the barbed borders of their own structures, the faces that know that, but for the grace of a God distinguished for the arbitrariness of his grace, it is they who would be bound and muffled in the College closets. The faces that are unreachable from this far away, and that look through you and digest you in a moment, against everyone’s will.

Who knows how long I watch. My pantcuffs fill with leaf bits and clippings of hollow-stemmed grass. Parents go by with their name tags. Older men, for whom bellies are burdens wrapped and hefted in checked sportcoats. Older women I have already seen and known in the faces of their daughters. Seals on hills, bright discs in the air. Lovers on stomachs, legs up, ankles lazily crossed against the fluttering approach of the odd falling leaf. The sun moves out over the mountains. I am able to feel it. The ellipse of my quad-orbit absorbs the indentation of North Dormitory.

Oh, why the hate? Why, when a horrible, worse-than-worst thing happens to you, when in all honesty you do something horrible, why is it the situation in the context of which the thing happens, the physical place where it happens, the other people whom it involves, that you hate, the thought of which and whom sends organs leaping inside you and corridors in your brain clanging shut against the assault? Why is it not yourself whom you hate, the mirror away from which you reel in horror? Can Jay explain this? What an entirely inappropriate question. How very far I’ve come.

On 2, soon to be 3, March 1968, North Dormitory, of which I was a resident, sponsored a mixer for the junior class, of which I was a member, and for the residents of our sister dormitory at Mount Holyoke College, an all-women’s institution ten miles away, the institution Lenore’s sister and grandmother — mother, too, I think — had all passed through. In attendance at this mixer was a Mount Holyoke sophomore named Janet Dibdin, a small, quiet, curved girl, straight red hair and blue eyes with tiny, fluffy white diamonds in the irises. Really. A girl about whom I was privately wild. A girl I met at another mixer, another of the year’s endless string, this one at Mount Holyoke; and at this mixer I had met her, and had survived the agony of dancing with her. And so. And so this was a girl in whose presence I was stupid, damp, tongue-tied, and comparatively huge. One of the three females in my life to whom I have been overwhelmingly sexually attracted, the others being Lenore Beadsman and the daughter of my next-door neighbor in Scarsdale, Rex Metalman’s daughter, an objectively erotic young thing who undulated her way into my heart in the summer of her thirteenth year while ostensibly playing with the sprinkler in the lawn.

In any event, there were we, grouped in blue suits and gray suits and slicked-back hair and shiny nervous noses, and there were they, a sweet shifting miasma of wool, shaped hair, cashmere, eyes, cotton, calves and pearls, in the midst of which she stood, by the hors d‘oeuvre bar, in a skirt and monogrammed sweater, talking quietly with friends, conspicuously danceless all night, and it was close to twelve, and there were we, in suits, gathering our saliva for the final assault. And there we were, moving through geologic time, impossibly slowly, imperceptibly, across the cedar floor, the fire in the fireplace doubtless and not inappropriately reflected and dancing in the centers of our eyes. We moved, and I was suddenly beside her, talking to her, good heavens hello, pretending it be by accident lest all dissolve, one or two of her friends standing with towering hairdos off to the side, wary lest they be caught in the ropes of sexual tension that snapped and crackled in the air between Janet and me, the friends watching us, me, for the tiniest error, the Beatles on the record player playing “Eight Days a Week,” and my hands prepared some sort of hors d’oeuvre, what do I mean some sort, a fastened cylinder of bologna on a Ritz cracker, and she declined it, and stared at me kindly, telling me with her eyes that she was willing to play the elaborate and exhausting game, that it was all right, and I put the hors d‘oeuvre into my mouth, and the cracker seemed to explode into deserts of dust, and there was meat, and I recall she was talking about the upcoming election, and the unavoidable and untalkaboutably horrible invitation to dance began its salmon’s migration from my intestine up toward my brain, and my hand was in the pocket of my slacks, soaking through the wool, and in a disastrous flash I thought of something witty to say, to delay the invitation, and my heart leapt, and my throat constricted, and I turned convulsively from myself to say the thing to Janet Dibdin, as she stared with undeserved trust into my eyes, and I tried to say the thing, and as I opened my mouth there somehow flew out of my mouth an enormous glob of the chewed hors d’oeuvre, the Ritz cracker and bologna, chewed, with saliva in it, with shocking force, and it flew out and landed on the fleshy part of Janet Dibdin’s nose, and stayed there. And the friends were blasted into silence, and the rest of the hors d‘oeuvre in my mouth turned to ice, adhered forever to my palate, and the Beatles sang, “Guess you know it’s true,” and Janet stopped all life processes, virtually killed with horror, which she out of a compassion not of this earth tried to hide by smiling, and she began to look in her purse for a Kleenex, with the obscenely flesh-and-bone-colored glob of chewed food on the end of her nose, and I watched it all through the large end of a telescope, and then the world ceased mercifully to be, and I became infinitely small and infinitely dense, a tiny black star twinkling negatively amid a crumple of empty suit and shoes. This was my taste of hell at twenty. The month following that night is an irretrievable blank in my memory, an expletive deleted. That portion of my brain is cooked smooth.

An unprecedentedly enormous veer around North Dormitory, effected with hands over ears, flings me out past Memorial Hill and into the bleeding forests south of the campus, and I wander, crunching needles and the weak leaves already down, as I used to wander alone for hours as a student, elbowing through the throngs of other students wandering alone, as I elbow students and parents aside now and head for the really isolated, natural part of the New England forest, beyond the road, past dry fields of baking, screaming crickets, out through the wind, elbowing, to find the really secluded places already full, lines of belongers cracking like whips around the sap-sprung trees, sending nonbelongers spinning into the brush. I am outside. And I wait my turn for admission, and smoke two clove cigarettes under the angry eye of a blue-haired mother in a yellow Bonwit pantsuit unfortunately right downwind from me, hissing into the ear of a son with a note concerning laundry pinned to the sleeve of his brand new AMHERST jacket. I buy a hot dog from a vendor and watch the sun glitter faraway against the windows of the buildings on the southern face of the broad ridge, the southern wall of the citadel. One of my R. V. ‘s“ was still here, and I had, in the back of my mind, one other place where I might still be, and these things somehow made me unreasonably happy — as happy as seeing the immoderate curve of Lenore’s hip under her scratchy Howard Johnson’s blanket, here, next to me. I love you, Lenore. There is no hatred in my love for you. Only a sadness I feel all the more strongly for my inability to explain or describe it. My ears rumble still.

/g/

There was simply no getting around the fact that Stonecipher LaVache Beadsman looked satanic. His skin was a dark, glossy red, his hair an oily black and swept back without care over a deep widow’s peak, his eyebrows Brezhnevian in thickness and starting up high off to the side to slant down evilly over his eyes, his head small and smooth and oval and not too securely attached to his neck and tending to flop, like the head of a shoe tree. An OBERLIN sweatshirt and corduroy shorts and a hurricane of hair on his foot, beside his black hightops. A clipboard with a pen hanging by a string was attached to his leg as he sat in an easy chair, watching television, his profile to Lenore, at the door. On television was “The Bob Newhart Show.” In the big social room with LaVache were three boys who all seemed to look precisely alike, although Lenore wasn’t completely sure about this, because the heavy window curtains were drawn against the afternoon sun and the room was dim. The room smelled of, in descending order, pot, Mennen Speed Stick, hot alcohol, feet. The three identical guys all sat sockless beside tumbled empty pairs of those shoes.

“Lenore, this is Cat, this is Heat, this is the Breather,” LaVache said from his chair in front of the television. “My sister Lenore, guys.”

“Hi,” said Cat.

“Hello,” said Heat.

“Hi,” said the Breather.

Heat and the Breather were on a spring-sprung sofa, sharing what was obviously a joint. Cat was on the floor, sitting, a bottle of vodka before him, and he clutched it with his bare toes, staring anxiously at the television screen.

“Hi Bob,” Suzanne Pleshette said to Bob Newhart on the screen.

“Merde du temps,” Cat said. He took a swig from the bottle.

LaVache looked up from his clipboard at Lenore. “We’re playing Hi Bob. You want to play Hi Bob with us?” He spoke sort of slowly.

Lenore made a place to sit on the luggage. “What’s Hi Bob?”

The Breather grinned at her from the sofa, where he now held the bottle of vodka. “Hi Bob is where, when somebody on ‘The Bob Newhart Show’ says ’Hi Bob,‘ you have to take a drink.”

“And but if Bill Dailey says, ‘Hi Bob,” said Cat, tending to the joint with a wet finger, “that is to say, if the character Howard Borden on the show says ’Hi Bob,‘ it’s death, you have to chug the whole bottle.”

“Hi Bob,” said Bill Dailey, on the screen.

“Death!” yelled Cat.

The Breather drained the bottle of vodka without hesitation. “Lucky it was almost empty,” he said.

“Guess I’ll probably pass,” said Lenore. “You’re out of vodka, anyway.”

“The duration of a game of Hi Bob is according to the rules determined by the show, not the vodka,” the Breather said, getting another bottle of vodka from a rack behind the sofa and breaking the seal. The liquor-rack was a glitter of glass and labels in the sun through a gap in the curtains. “The serious Hi Bob player makes it his business never to run out of vodka.”

LaVache drummed idly on his leg with his pen. “Vodka gives Lenore lung-troubles, anyway, as I recall.” He looked at Lenore. “Lenore, baby, sweetheart, how are you? What are you doing here?”

The Breather leaned close to Lenore and told her in a hot sweet whisper, “It’s a Quaalude day, so we all have to be accommodating.”

Lenore looked at LaVache’s lolling head. “Didn’t you get my message? I left this detailed message about how I was coming today. I left it with one of your neighbors, next door, a guy from New Jersey. The college operator connected me to him.”

“Wood, yes,” LaVache said. “He’s actually coming by real soon. He and the leg have an appointment. Yes, I got the message, but why didn’t you just call me?”

“You told Dad you didn’t have a phone, Dad told me.”

“I don’t have a phone. This isn’t a phone, this is a lymph node,” LaVache said, gesturing at a phone next to the television. “I call this a lymph node, not a phone. So when Dad asks me do I have a phone, I can in all good conscience say no. I do, however, have a lymph node.”

“You’re horrible,” said Lenore.

“Hi Bob,” said someone on the screen.

“Zango,” said LaVache, and took a big drink.

“Dead bird, here, A.C.,” Heat said to LaVache.

LaVache detached the clipboard and slid out a drawer in the plastic of his artificial leg and tossed a white new joint to Heat.

“You have a drawer?” said Lenore.

“I’ve had a drawer since high school,” said LaVache. “ I just wear long pants, at home, as a rule. Come on, you knew I had a drawer all the time.”

“No I didn‘t,” said Lenore.

“Crafty girl.”

There was a knock at the outside door.

“Entrez!” Cat yelled.

In came a tall thin guy with glasses and an adam’s apple and a notebook and a baggie.

“Clint Wood,” Heat said from over the bottle, which he was blowing into like a jug, sounding a deep note.

“Guys,” said Clint Wood. “Antichrist.”

“What can we do for you, big guy?” LaVache said, slapping the leg affectionately.

“Introductory Economics. Second quiz. Bonds.”

“Feed the leg,” said LaVache.

LaVache opened the drawer in his leg and Clint Wood put the baggie inside. LaVache slapped the drawer shut and patted it. “Professor?”

“Fursich.”

“All you need to remember for Fursich is, when the interest rate goes up, the price of any bond already issued goes down.”

“Interest rate… up, price… bond… down.” Clint Wood wrote it down.

“And when the rate goes down, the price goes up.”

“Down… up.” Clint Wood looked up. “That’s it?”

“Trust me,” said LaVache.

“What a guy,” said the Breather. “A little Hi Bob, Wood?”

Clint Wood shook his head regretfully. “Can’t. I got class in like ten minutes. I gotta go memorize what the Antichrist told me.” He looked over at Lenore and smiled.

“Well, hey, good luck,” Cat said.

“Thank you very much for taking my message, if you were the person who took my message,” said Lenore.

“Oh, OK, you’re the Antichrist’s sister,” said Clint Wood, sizing Lenore up. “Can’t do enough for the Antichrist, no problem. Thanks again, guys.” He left.

“Hi Bob.”

“Oomph. ”

“This is a deadly one. There’ve been like twenty ‘Hi Bobs’ in this one.”

“What’s the leg got there?”

“Looks to be three j-birds. Poorly rolled.”

“None of you guys have classes?” Lenore asked. Ed McMahon came on the television.

“I have classes,” LaVache said. “I know I do, because it says on my schedule I do.” He cleaned under his fingernail with the corner of his clipboard clasp.

“He’s going to go to a class this semester, he told me,” Heat said to Lenore, doing a handstand in the middle of the floor, so that his shirt fell over his face. “He’s determined to go to at least one class.”

“Well I’m disabled,” LaVache said. “They can’t expect a disabled person to hobble to every faraway, top-of-the-hill class of the semester.”

Lenore looked at LaVache. “You don’t work, here, do you?”

LaVache smiled at her. “That was just work, what I did. I do lots of work.”

“He literally does the work of like forty or fifty guys, and even more girls,” said Heat. “He does all our work, the big lug.”

“What about your own work?” Lenore said to LaVache.

“What can I tell you? I’ve got a leg to support, after all.”

“Dad thinks you work.”

“Surely you of all people didn’t come all the way out here after seeing me only a few weeks ago to tell me what Dad thinks. Or to find out what I think and do and then scuttle back to Dad.”

“Not exactly,” Lenore said, shifting because her suitcase handle was digging into her bottom. “There’s stuff we need to talk about, that’s sort of come up.” She looked around at Cat, Heat, and the Breather.

“Well goody. Stuff.” LaVache looked back at the television. “We have a game of Hi Bob to finish, and then there’s an episode of ‘The Munsters’ on Channel 22 I particularly want to see, and then we can go conversationally wild.”

“He’ll be asleep by then, though, I predict,” the Breather whispered into Lenore’s ear as his elbow brushed her chest.

“Hi Bob,” said Bill Dailey, the character Howard Borden, on the screen.

“Death, big time,” said LaVache, looking at Cat and the nearly full bottle of vodka on the floor in front of him. “See you tomorrow, Cat.”

“A l‘enfer, ” Cat muttered. He began sucking on the bottle. He had to stop almost immediately.

“You’ve got five minutes to finish that,” LaVache said to Cat.

“He’s going to be really sick,” said Lenore.

“We don’t get sick here anymore,” said LaVache. “This Amherst guy, this legendary guy a few years back started this tradition where, instead of getting sick, we pound our heads against the wall.”

“You pound your heads?”

“Really hard.”

“I see.”

The phone rang. “Breather, you want to get the lymph node?” LaVache said, returning to writing on his clipboard. The Breather stepped over Cat, who was crawling on the gray carpet, and got the phone. The Antichrist was writing something.

“Antichrist, it’s Snadgener,” the Breather said after a bit, putting his hand over the phone. “Evolution as Cultural Phenomenon Paper Number One. Were Darwin’s critics right about the theory of natural selection being deeply dangerous to Christianity.”

“Tell Snadge the leg is wondering what he has for it,” said LaVache.

“Mushrooms, he says.”

“Professor?”

“Summerville.”

“Tell Snadge the interesting answer for Summerville is yes,” LaVache said. The Breather whispered into the phone. LaVache continued, “After the Origin, the Bible has to retreat, he thinks. The Bible ceases to be a historical record of actual events and instead becomes a piece of moral fiction, useful only as a guide for making decisions about how to live. No longer purporting to tell what was and is, but only what ought to be.” LaVache opened his eyes. “Summerville’ll lap it up.”

The Breather talked into the phone. Cat had a third of the bottle to go and was green and moist. Heat sat cross-legged with the joint on the sofa.

“Snadge says it sounds kick-ass,” the Breather said. “Snadge says thanks, Antichrist.”

“Tell Snadge the leg and I look forward to seeing him and his fungal fee sometime tonight,” said LaVache.

Lenore leaned as far as she could over toward LaVache. “Antichrist?” she said.

“What can I tell you?” said the Antichrist. “We can’t deny I look satanic. Heat, you want to clear a space on the wall for Cat?”

Heat got up slowly and began to move posters.

“Mother,” moaned Cat.

“The really sadistic aspect of this game,” the Breather whispered to Lenore, leaning over her so she had to lean way back and almost fell off her suitcase, “is that if someone else on the show says ‘Hi Bob’ before Cat has discharged his vodka-responsibility, Cat has to drink a whole ’nother bottle in another five minutes.”

“Does Cat know that?” Lenore asked, looking at Cat. Cat sat slumped on the floor, the back of his head resting and intermittently pounding weakly on the wall behind him, the bottle of vodka in his lap and a thin rope of spittle joining his lip and the lip of the bottle.

“I think at this point Cat knows what’s up in a sort of ganglial sense,” the Antichrist said, “although he’d have a hard time actually articulating the rule if you asked him to.”

“Mommy,” Cat squeaked faintly.

“You can do it, you great big enormous guy,” the Breather said, massaging Cat’s shoulders.

Ed McMahon came on the television screen. “Sell it, Ed!” yelled the Antichrist.

Heat put aside the corpse of the joint and sipped thoughtfully at a beer. He turned dense red eyes and looked at Lenore for so long that Lenore felt uncomfortable. Heat then looked at LaVache, who ignored him. Then back at Lenore. “Hey Antichrist,” he said. “You care if I ask your sister a question?”

“Be my guest,” the Antichrist said, alternately watching the screen and Cat’s attempts to finish the bottle, attempts that were at this point pretty pathetic, because there was just a little bit of vodka left, and Cat kept trying to get it in his mouth, but it kept somehow bouncing off, or at any rate not staying in, and sliding back inside the bottle and down the outside and onto the rug and his shirt.

Heat looked at Lenore as the Breather massaged his shoulders, now, from behind. “Lenore, how did the Antichrist lose his leg?”

“Well, now, hey, that’s not fair, because it’s not a question, because I’ve already answered it,” the Antichrist said. Lenore looked at him. His head rested on his shoulder. “I’ve already told you it was a dancing accident. I had such an unreasonably happy childhood that I simply danced, all the time, for joy, and one day the dancing just got to be too much, and I had an accident. Quod est demon stratum.”

Lenore laughed.

“Is that true?” Heat said to Lenore. “Are you going to back him up?”

“By all means,” Lenore said, not looking at LaVache, who was not looking at her.

LaVache turned to Heat. “And don’t you know disability etiquette? You don’t discuss a disability in the presence of a disabled person unless the disabled person brings up the disability. For all you know I could be reeling, from hurt, on the inside. How’d you like to do your own Calculus homework for a while?”

“Antichrist,” Heat said with an easy grin, “I hereby tender a sincere apology for my gaucheness, and also take the opportunity to point out that another joint seems to have expired, here.”

“Harumph,” the Antichrist said, sliding open his drawer. “Clint Wood and bonds to the rescue.”

“Five minutes is up, Antichrist,” said the Breather.

Cat’s chin was resting on his chest. One of his arms was incongruously outstretched, with a finger pointing at the stairs leading up to the social room’s bathroom.

“Has he done it?” asked LaVache.

The Breather held up the bottle. “The merest smidgeon left.”

“More than a smidgeon on his shirt, though, I see,” Heat said, lifting up Cat’s head to have a look at the dark field of vodka-soaked shirt on his chest.

The Antichrist rubbed the leg thoughtfully. “I say if Cat consents to suck on his shirt for the rest of the show, which is about five more minutes, he’ll have acquitted himself in his usual thoroughly admirable way.”

“Congratulations, big kitty,” the Breather said softly, tucking part of Cat’s shirt in Cat’s mouth, caressing a cheek under fluttering eyelids. “Still the undisputed prince of Hi Bob.”

“Did you come alone?” LaVache asked Lenore. “Did you come by plane, or by toy?”

“I came via the Company jet,” said Lenore.

The Antichrist’s eyebrows went up, so it looked like he had more hair.

Lenore continued, “I came with a friend, who’s also sort of my boss at Frequent and Vigorous.”

“Mr. Vigorous.” The Antichrist nodded his head. “The one Candy told me about.”

“What did Candy tell you, when?” asked Lenore.

The Antichrist looked away, drew a smile-face on the plastic of his leg with his pen, wiped it away with a moist finger. “That your boss was also your friend, so you were lucky. In July. Please don’t have a spasm; I sense Cat really not feeling well at all.”

“Is Candy the Mandible babe you blasted?” Heat asked the Antichrist with a grin.

Lenore looked at her brother with wide eyes. “You and Candy? Blasting?”

LaVache turned slowly and rested absolutely icy eyes on Heat. Heat’s clothes seemed suddenly to get roomier, as if he’d developed a slow leak. “Sorry,” he muttered. He closed his eyes.

The Antichrist looked at Lenore. “Heat knows not whereof he speaks, as I will no doubt be explaining at considerable length later. Heat, don’t you have some math you better do?”

“Shit,” Heat whispered. He sucked on the Antichrist’s joint.

Lenore stood up. “May I please ask a favor?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sure it’s an imposition, but Rick and I don’t get to check in at the motel till five, and it’s been a really long day, and also sort of a dirty one, what with travel….”

“I understand entirely,” the Antichrist said soothingly. The “Bob Newhart Show” credits came on. The Breather went to the television and changed the channel. LaVache beamed at Lenore. “There is a clean, neatly folded towel for you in the bathroom, a bathroom which you’ll be happy to know you can secure for a brief period with the hanger on the door, although in a crisis Cat may find himself forced to impose, and there is on the towel, for your personal use, a crisp new bar of soap.”

“What, is she going to take a shower?” the Breather asked from the television, where he was twidgeling the vertical-hold controls.

“If it’s OK,” said Lenore.

“Hubba-hubba,” said the Breather.

“Steady, big guy,” said the Antichrist. “Lenore’s traveling companion is, I understand, fanatically jealous.”

Lenore looked at her brother.

“Where is this Mr. Vigorous, anyway,” LaVache asked quietly, looking back down at the leg.

The phone rang. The Breather reached over and picked it up. “It’s Nervous Roy Keller for you, A.C.,” he said to LaVache.

The Antichrist’s eyes lit up. “May I please have the lymph node?” The Breather handed him the phone. Lenore, not sure if she should stay around to explain where Rick Vigorous was, stood awkwardly, hefting her suitcase, hurting for a shower. Heat lay curled up on the sofa, apparently alseep. The Breather quietly went over and removed the red eye of the burning nubbin of the joint from between Heat’s fingers. Cat lay crumpled against the wall under the window, his shirt in his mouth.

“Nervous Roy Keller,” the Antichrist said into the phone. “Is it possible that I have not yet seen you this year? Are you spending all your time in the library again? In spite of what we talked about last spring?”

Nervous Roy Keller said something.

“Nervous, Nervous Roy,” laughed LaVache. “OK. I sense that a certain limb and I can do something for you. Right. You’re what? You’re taking Hegel? With Professor Huffman? I thought that got canceled for lack. He turned it into a tutorial? Just you and Huffman, and Hegel? That’s going to be death and destruction, you huge guy you. Well I’m sure sorry, is all. Uh-huh. Obliteration of Nature by Spirit? That’s the first assignment? What’s he going to do for an encore I wonder.” The Antichrist looked up at the Breather from the phone. “Breather, you want to be a good Sancho and go get me my Phenomenology of Spirit?”

The Breather went up the little set of stairs from the social room into the bedroom/bathroom area. On the television, marred only by a few vertical flutters, Marilyn Munster was bringing a date home, and the date saw her father, Herman, and ran away and climbed a telephone pole in sped-up motion, which Herman and Lily interpreted as a reflection on Marilyn’s seductive charms, and the audience laughed. The Breather reappeared and handed the Antichrist the book.

“Obliteration N by S, let’s see,” LaVache said, thumbing through. He stopped. “Bingo. Let’s see…. OK, look, N.R., why don’t you come by the room right before dinner, and we’ll talk Sublation Through Concepts. OK? Right. The leg will of course be positively growling with hunger by that time. Verstehen Sie? Right. See you then, then.”

The Antichrist hung up the phone and put it on the floor. “A tutorial on Hegel with Huffman,” he said to the Breather. “The leg likes that.”

The Breather grinned and manipulated his eyebrows at Lenore.

“Rick’s taking… walk around… alumnus… intense emotions washing…,” Lenore was muttering.

The Antichrist looked at her. “Why aren’t you in the shower this very moment?” he asked. “Take until four, and ‘The Munsters’ will be over, and my catharsis will be effected, and away we’ll go, leaving Heat to his homework.”

“Right,” said Lenore. She undid the straps of a suitcase and dug through Rick’s underwear and got her washcloth and toothbrush, and headed for the stairs.

“Need any help, don’t hesitate to call,” said the Breather.

“Thanks,” Lenore said. She shivered.

“Guess I might as well have a Quaalude, too, A.C., since there’s going to be no one left to play with,” the Breather said to LaVache.

Lenore unhooked the wire hanger bent and fastened to keep the bathroom door open and closed the door against the noise of the television and low voices and the sliding of the drawer.

/h/

I’m not exactly sure how I arrived at the Flange, at three o‘clock, and I really have no idea when the Flange became a gay bar, although I do know it was sometime after 1968, during which year a group of marginal Psi Phi fraternity brothers — including myself — would come every Wednesday to hoist a few and play pool and try, in our tweed jackets and white socks and Weejun loafers, to blend in with the public-university- and townie-crowd. A crowd that I can say with all confidence was at this point not the least bit gay.

But the bead curtain at the inner room clicketed and in I came, feeling warm from my walking and with a sneezy, burning afterdust of dry leaves in my nose. The place was relatively empty on this Monday, apart from some couples dancing and a group sitting at one end of the bar watching an episode of “The Bob Newhart Show,” a program I’d always enjoyed. The place did not scream gay bar, as so many gay bars seem to, not of course that I’ve personally been to many. In any event, here the choice and placement of posters and mirrors, the planty, velvety decor, the male bartender with orange mascara, the dancer-gender situation, told me all I needed to know. I didn’t care. My plans were simple. I wanted a Canadian Club with distilled water, then I would go initial-hunting in the restroom. I was sure I had left myself here. I sat on a stool, away from the television crowd, feeling a bit childish. Barstools make me feel a bit childish, because my feet do not quite reach the supports; they dangle, and sometimes swing, and my thighs plump out from the weight of the dangling and swinging legs, and my feet sometimes go to sleep.

I slipped unconsciously into my bar mode. I looked at people. The people at the actual bar were easy, because of the huge mirror we were all looking into. The mirror revealed that the young bartender’s hair became a mohawk in back. I was given the Canadian Club and immediately tasted tapwater, to which I am acutely sensitive.

The man nearest me, a few stools away, even farther than I from the “Bob Newhart” audience, was the best-looking man in the room. He had a strong face, a chin I admired wistfully over my whiskey, his high features stronger for the fact that he was engagingly in need of a shave. Hair a kind of deep, dark blond, cut short and almost brushed up. The muscles of his jaw worked as he chewed peanuts. He drank beer; he had a small brown forest of bottles around him. The eyes were bright green, but bright and still soft, somehow, plant-green as opposed to emerald-green, so that he still looked like a human being, and not a product of technology, as so many green-eyed people in my opinion do. Look like products of technology. His chin, his generous chin was cleft. Enough about chins. I’m certain this person felt the stares of all the men in the room, but he didn’t seem to notice, simply sat hunched on his stool, legs reaching the supports and then some, in designer jeans and sportcoat and dress shirt opened at the neck, eating nuts and drinking beer at an impressive rate. I somehow smelled Amherst College.

The only Approach I had the misfortune to witness personally came from a big, sleek, blue-eyed man in a rugby shirt and white cotton pants. How he slid in between the man and myself, then slid the upper part of his body down the bar toward the man, hiding him a bit, so that I had to make exclusive use of the angle of the mirror above the glitter of the bar’s arsenal of bottles to watch. I shivered. I shivered only because the Approach looked so troublingly familiar. I had seen it at every single one of the singles bars, heterosexual singles bars I’d attended during the first desolate Lenoreless year after my hegira to Cleveland. It was indeed an Approach.

“Hi there,” said the Approacher to the man, in the mirror. “Do you come here often?”

I shivered.

“Nope,” said the man, popping a handful of nuts in his mouth. His eye caught mine in the mirror.

“No, I didn’t think so,” said the Approacher, gauging the man’s bicep under his sportcoat. “I come here fairly regularly, and I certainly would have noticed you, but I haven’t noticed you here before.” He played with his daiquiri glass.

The man looked the Approacher in the eye through the mirror, considering something. His green eyes grew liddy, sleepy, amused. “I think you’re probably barking up the wrong tree, here, guy,” he said to the Approacher. “I’m here as a rememberer, not a patron.”

The Approacher looked down at the man’s hands, around his beer glass, on the bar. “A rememberer?”

“Yup,” said the man. “I used to go to school around here. A few years ago.” A nut, into his mouth. “I used to come to this bar, a lot, before it changed.”

“Oh?” The Approacher cupped his chin in his hand, looked at the side of the man’s chewing face. “The Flange changed? I never heard about any change.”

“Sure enough.” The man looked levelly at the Approacher through the mirror. “Now, I’m sorry to say, it looks to be a place for faggots.” He said this slowly and distinctly. I looked down at my drink and my handkerchief. When I looked up the Approacher was gone, back at the television, and the man was placidly ordering what appeared to be his tenth beer, patiently repeating the order until the bartender could no longer pretend to ignore him.

Careful to make it in no way resemble an Approach, I came over to the man and sat on the stool beside him, my feet dangling.

“Look, I’m not a homosexual either,” I found myself saying, though thank God quietly. “In fact I too am here as a… rememberer and not a patron. But I think if one comes to a place like this, for whatever reason, it behooves one not to be overtly rude to the people for whom coming here is… entirely appropriate.” My ice snapped suddenly in my drink.

The man looked at me in the mirror, chewing. We waited while his mouth cleared of peanuts. “I got nothing against homosexuals,” he said. “They can go around being homosexuals amongst themselves all they want, far as I’m concerned. It’s just when it’s my own personal ass that they start sniffin’ after and checkin’ out, I find my tolerance level really plummets, for some reason.” He took some beer. “As for coming into this place, I was coming into this place when these old boys were all out kneeling in alleys in the rain.” He gestured slightly through the mirror at the Approacher and his friends. “This is more my place than theirs. I used to spend hours here, when it was a real bar. I used to talk to the whores here. They were real nice. I got educated here. My house used to come down here, en-fucking-masse, on Wednesday nights.”

“Wednesdays?” I asked. Wednesdays. “House as in… fraternity house?”

His green eyes were on mine in the mirror. I thought I could see something, in those eyes. “Yeah,” he said. “Why?”

“Not… Amherst College fraternity house.”

“Yeah, I went to Amherst,” he said.

“Not… Psi Phi fraternity at Amherst,” I said.

He swiveled on his stool to face me. “Yeah.” I felt the jealous stares of the “Bob Newhart” crowd.

“My Lord,” I said. “Myself as well. Psi Phi. Class of ‘69.”

The man grinned widely. “ ‘83 here,” he said. Then his eyes narrowed; he held out his hand, each finger pointing in a different direction. Testing me, I knew. After only the briefest hesitation, I joined him in the Psi Phi handshake. I had not done it in so, so long. My throat ached a little bit. I found my arm tingling. “Quaaaango!” we yelled in unison at the end, and grabbed each other’s wrists, and tapped elbows. I felt eyes.

“Sheeit.”

“Heavens.”

I held out my hand in the conventional way. “I am Richard Vigorous of Cleveland, Ohio.”

The man took it. “Andrew Sealander Lang,” he said, “of Nugget Bluff, which is to say really Dallas, Texas, and lately of Scarsdale, New York.”

“Scarsdale, Andrew?” I said. “I lived in Scarsdale, myself, for a good while. Mostly in the seventies.”

“But you moved,” Andrew Lang said, smiling. “I can understand, completely and entirely. Yes.”

What am I to say, retrospectively, here? Perhaps that I felt myself in the presence of a kinsman. Not simply a fraternity brother: I had been a completely marginal Psi Phi, and had actually moved out of the place in some haste in the middle of my sophomore year, when the House upperclassmen cut our stairs off halfway and fashioned a crude diving board and cut open the House’s living-room floor and filled the basement with beer and called the entire creation a swimming pool, into which it was dictated that all sophomores were to be required to dive and then drink themselves to safety. I was marginal. And I sensed in Lang a really hard-core Psi Phi: he had had at least ten beers, was entering into negotiations for the eleventh, and didn’t seem the slightest bit tipsy; nor, even more important, had he been to the restroom once since I arrived. This was collegiate manhood as I had come to know it.

No, but still I felt affinities, elective or otherwise. I sensed somehow in Lang another inside outsider, another lonely alumnus here at an alumniless time. Surrounded by insiders, now: children, swaggering and belonging, with their complicated eyes. Lang’s eyes, eyes the color of plants, were not complicated. I looked at them in the mirror. They were like my eyes. They were the eyes of a man gone back to the house where he grew up, to watch new children play in his yard, a new Rawlings Everbounce pass through a new basketball hoop over his garage, a new dog diddle on his mother’s rhododendrons. Sad, sad. Perhaps it was only the whiskey, and the beer, but I sensed sadness in Lang. His bar was my college. They were the same. And we simply no longer belonged, now.

“Why are you in town?” I asked Lang. “Is ‘83 having some function?”

“Naw,” said the Texan. “ ‘83 never has functions. I just felt like I had to… to get the heck out of Scarsdale. Just get out for a while. Plus I really like it up here in the fall. ’Course it’s not really fall yet. Too goddamned hot.”

“Still, though.”

“Right. Exactly. Now but I bet you didn’t come all the way out here from Ohio just to get out, though, right?”

“No, you’re right.” I shook my head. I asked the now explicitly hostile bartender for another drink. The bartender glared at Lang. Lang ignored him. “No,” I said, “my fiancée is here visiting her brother, ‘93, and I just came along on a bit of a lark. I hadn’t even been back before.”

Lang stared into the mirror. “Naw, I haven’t been back much either. ‘Course I only been out a few years. And I’ve come back for a couple Homecomings. Those kick ass.”

“I remember they were fun.”

“You bet.”

“Are you married, in Scarsdale?” I asked. I must here confess that I asked the question for an admittedly immature and selfish reason. I instinctively and involuntarily regard all other men as potential threats to my relationship with Lenore. One more married man was one fewer member of the great threat-set.

“Yeah, I’m married.” Lang looked at his reflection in the mirror.

I giggled sympathetically.

“Is the wife up with you?” I asked.

“No she is not,” said Lang. He paused to belch. “The wife…,” he looked at his watch, “… the wife is at this second indubitably out in the back yard, on the lawn chair, with a martini and a Cosmopolitan, reinforcin’ the old tan.”

“I see,” I said.

Lang looked at me. “I really don’t know why the hell I came up here, to tell the truth. I just… felt like I needed to come home, somehow.” He drummed his knuckle on the bar.

“Yes, yes.” I almost clutched at his arm. “I understand completely. Trying to come back inside…”

“What?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing. What do you do, Andrew? May I call you Andrew?”

“Sure you can, Dick,” he said. He turned back toward me, and there was peanut-smell. His eyes went dull. “Right now I’m in accounting. My wife’s Daddy’s an accountant and all, and so I do some work for him. I mostly fuck off, though. I’m gonna quit. I think I in effect quit today, by not showing up.” He gulped beer and wiped his lip, looking faraway. “When I got out of school, I worked overseas for a while, for my Daddy. My Daddy owns this company, in Texas, and I worked for them overseas, for a couple years. That was the balls.”

“But then you got married.”

“Yup.” Peanuts. “You married, Dick? That’s right, you said you’re engaged. ”

“I… I am engaged. To a wonderful, wonderful girl.” He was married, after all. “I was married before. I got divorced.”

“And engaged again now. Whooee. A glutton for punishment, Dick.”

“Please call me Rick,” I said. “My friends call me Rick. And an entirely different situation, this time, fortunately.” I felt a bit uncomfortable. Lenore and I were, after all, not explicitly engaged, although it was only a matter of waiting for the combination of the right moment and sufficient saliva.

“Well good for you. What’s the lucky little lady’s name?”

“Ms. Lenore Beadsman, of East Corinth, which is to say Cleveland, Ohio,” I said.

Lang speculatively sucked the salt off a peanut. He looked in the mirror and removed something from his lip. “Beadsman. Beadsman.” He looked at me. “Hmmm. She didn’t go to school around here, did she? Or more exactly Mount Holyoke?”

“No, no,” I said, excited, feeling connection potential—‘83, after all. “But her sister did. Ms. Clarice Beadsman. Now Mrs. Alvin Spaniard, Cleveland Heights, Ohio.”

“Well I will be goddamned,” said Lang. “Clarice Beadsman was one of my wife’s roommates, one year. My sophomore year. I knew her. Christ in a camper, that seems like just too goddamned long ago. My wife and her didn’t get along too good.”

“But they knew each other. Really. Really.” I squirmed with excitement and a full bladder. No possible way I was going to the men’s room before Lang, though. “What is your wife’s name, pray, so I can tell it to Lenore and she to Clarice?”

“My wife’s maiden name was Miss Melinda Metalman,” said Andrew Lang to the mirror.

The earth tipped on its axis. The spit was vacuumed from my mouth and disappeared out the back of my head. Melinda Metalman. Mindy Metalman, perhaps the most erotic girl I have ever seen in person. Rex Metalman’s daughter, who had done things around a lawn sprinkler no thirteen-year-old should be able to do. Sweat leapt to my brow.

“Mindy Metalman?” I croaked.

Lang turned again. “Yeah.” His eyes were old, dull.

I looked at my whiskey. “You don’t perhaps know whether her father might by any chance live on… Vine Street, in Scarsdale,” I said.

Lang grinned to himself. “Yeah, you’re from Scarsdale, that’s right. Well, yup. 14 Vine Street. Except he don’t anymore, ‘cause he gave the house to me and Mindy last year. He lives in an apartment now. One supposedly without a lawn. Having a lawn fucked with old Rex’s mind. But except now he’s starting a lawn at his building, he says. Just a real tiny one. Hardly a lawn at all, he says. Who the hell knows.” Lang looked at the mirror. “I live at 14 Vine now, more or less.”

“I used to live at 16 Vine,” I said quietly. Lang turned to me. The “Bob Newhart” crowd must have thought we were in love. Our eyes shone with the thrill of apparent connection. It was something of a thrill, given the context. I tingle a bit even now, in the motel. “My ex-wife still lives there, though I’ve been led to believe she’s preparing to sell,” I said.

“Mrs. Peck?” Lang’s eyes opened wide. “Veronica?”

“Ms. Peck,” I said, clutching for real now at Lang’s sportcoat sleeve. “Peck was her maiden name. And I used to play tennis with Rex Metalman, long ago. I used to watch Rex go at his lawn almost every day. It was a neighborhood event.”

“I will be dipped and fried and completely goddamned,” said Lang. “I just had no idea Ronnie’d been married to an Amherst alum. Sheeit.” He thumped the bar with his hand again. I noticed his hand, suddenly. It was heavy, and brown, and strong. A hard hand.

“Ronnie?” I said.

“Well, I know her pretty good, her living next door and all.” Lang looked down to play with the ring of moisture his beer glass had made on the dark wood of the bar.

“I see,” I said. “How is Ronnie?”

We looked at each other in the mirror. “Last time I saw her, she was just fine,” Lang said. He poured more beer into the suds at the bottom of the glass. I saw salt, from the peanuts, on the rim. “What exactly do you do, Rick? In Cleveland.”

“Publishing,” I said. “I manage a publishing firm in Cleveland. Frequent and Vigorous, Publishing, Inc.”

“Hmmm,” Lang said.

“What about Mindy?” I asked. “I knew her, slightly, as a girl. Is Mindy well? Does Mindy have a career of her own?”

“Mindy does have a career,” Lang said after a moment. “Mindy is a voice.”

“A voice?” I said. My head was filled with visions of Mindy Metalman. Her bedroom had been directly across the fence from my den.

“A voice,” said Lang. He played with a cocktail napkin decorated with a huge lipstick-kiss design. “You ever been in a grocery? And when you pay for your items and all at the cash register, the girl pushes the items over the scanner thing, that beeps, and then this voice in the register says the price? Or do you have one of them late-model cars that says to please fasten seat belts when you didn’t fasten your seat belts? Melinda Sue is the voice in things.”

“That’s Mindy Metalman?” I shopped. I drove a late-model car.

“Mrs. A. S. Lang herself, now,” said Lang. “The big voice used to be this lady in Centerport, on Long Island? But she’s getting old, scratchy. Melinda Sue’s pretty much pushin’ her out of the business. ”

“Heavens,” I said, “That certainly sounds like an enormously interesting career. Does Mindy enjoy it?”

“Sure she enjoys it. It’s easy as shit. She just sits around like once a week, with a drink and a million-dollar tape recorder and a script with lines like ‘Change due, four dollars.’ It’s easy as hell. But she’s ambitious now, all of a sudden. Her and her manager.” Lang swallowed half his beer. “Alan Gluskoter, her manager. Ambitious Al. They’re ambitious, now.” More beer. “She wants television.”

“Television?”

Lang stared at himself. “You know the voice that says ‘This is CBS,’ or ‘This is ABC,’ or ‘Stay tuned to CBS, please’? She wants to be that voice. That’s her great aspiration.”

“Good heavens.”

“Yeah.”

I was about to wet my pants. The only pair of pants I’d brought on the trip.

I slid off my stool, stretched, pretended to yawn. “Think I’ll just dash into the men’s room,” I said. “I want to see something. I think I may have left my initials in the wood of the stall here.”

Lang smiled at both of us. “I know I did. I carved hell out of everything when I was a student here.” He stood. “Hell, I’ll go with you. Could use a squirt myself.”

“Quite,” I said.

In the men’s room Lang ranged expertly over the urinal, aiming for the deodorant disc. “Room for two, here, big guy,” he said.

I muttered something and hurried into the stall, ostensibly to hunt for initials, really so that I could shut the door. I tried to last just as long as I could. Long after my last tinkle had ceased to sound, I could still hear the roar of Lang’s jet. This was an Amherst man.

I looked for my initials. All I can say at this point is that I must have been confused. I was sure I’d left another R.V. in the Flange’s stall, up over the door latch, to the left, actually I even thought I could remember the occasion of the carving, but here in the spot I remembered was, instead of an R.V., a deep, wickedly sharp set of W.D.L., long since filled in with violet pen. I pored over the wooden surfaces of the stall until I saw Lang’s boat shoes under the door.

“Not there,” I said, opening the door. “My initials don’t seem to be there.”

“Maybe they went ahead and changed the door sometime since ‘69,” said Lang, coming into the stall with me and swinging the door shut, so that I had to sit on the toilet to give him room to look at the door.

“Same door as ‘83, though, ’cause here are mine, still,” he said, pointing at the deep W.D.L. over the latch. He brushed at the letters with a big thumb, removing a smidgeon of God knows what.

“W.D.L. for Andrew Sealander Lang?” I said.

“I got called Wang-Dang Lang all through school,” said Lang, grinning. “Actually I still get called Wang-Dang Lang, by my real good friends. You can call me Wang-Dang, if you want.” He stared lovingly at his initials.

“Thank you,” I said. I had to pee again, already, I felt.

There were sounds of the restroom door opening. Snickering. I thought I recognized the Approacher’s voice. They must have been looking at our four shoes in the crowded stall. The group attended to business, noisily, and eventually left, after teasing us by flicking the lights off and on several times. I was lost in thought, for the most part, trying to account for my memory of my initials in the Flange’s door, which memory was clear and distinct, in the face of the evidence. It certainly looked like the same door. Lang studied the door with me, thinking.

“Is your girlfriend Clarice’s younger sister?” he suddenly asked.

I looked up at him from the toilet. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, Lenore is two years younger than Clarice.”

“You know, I’m pretty sure I’ve met her, then,” said Lang, absently digging with his finger at some peanut in a molar, extracting some beige material. He looked at it. “ ‘Cause Clarice had a sister visiting her the night I met my wife. Or was it that other girl had a sister up?” He scratched. “No, I’m real sure it was Beadsman. I think I remember for sure she said her name was Lenore Beadsman.” He looked faraway.

“So you probably met my fiancée before I did,” I said.

Lang grinned down at me. “And you knew my wife before I even met her, when she was a little girl.”

I grinned back. “Not all that little.”

“I know what you mean,” Lang laughed. Spontaneously, out of the sheer odd warmth of the moment, we did the Psi Phi handshake again. “Quaaaango!” We laughed.

I got off the toilet. We left the restroom and went back into the bar. There were stage titters from the Approacher’s little television coterie. Wang-Dang Lang ignored them and clapped his arm around my shoulders.

“Ah, Rick, Rick,” he said. “I just don’t know what the hell to do.” He looked around. “I just feel like I need to…”

“Get outside,” I said. For us inside outsiders, the only real place to go was outside.

“Well, yeah. Exactly.” He looked me in the eye. “I feel like I need to get out. Just… out, for a while.” He ordered another beer as I chewed the whiskey out of my ice.

“Are things not well with you and the wife?”

In the mirror Lang said, “Things are the same as ever, fine and Daddy — excuse — fine and dandy as ever. I just feel… constricted, like I can’t breathe. Like I’m breathin’ used-up air. I’m living in the bitch’s town, in her house, working for her Daddy, hearing her voice when I get in my freaking car. I think we need a slight vacation from each other. Things are just less than wonderful right now. I think I just need to get out, for a period of time.”

“Establish other connections,” I said. “Hence the utter appropriateness of your little trip up here. It’ll do you a world of good.” God, there was a time when I would have given limbs to be constricted by Mindy Metalman.

“Eggzackly,” Lang said. He punched me affectionately in the arm. I struggled not to rub my shoulder.

“And so just one hell of a buzz, meetin’ you,” Land said to me in the mirror. “A House brother, a neighbor, damn near a relative. Like an uncle or something. Shit on fire. Ti symptosis.”

“What was that?” I asked.

“What was what?”

“ ‘Tea’ something,” I said.

“Ti symptosis?” said Lang. “It’s just this expression. ‘Ti symptosis’ is idiomatic modern Greek for, like, ’What a hell of a coincidence.‘ Which this is, sure enough, let me tell you.”

“Greek?” I said. “You speak modem Greek?”

Lang laughed loudly. “Does a bear make skata in the woods?” I intuited that even such as he was beginning to feel the lake of beer inside him. “Yeah,” he said, “I picked up Greek real well after college. I told you I was overseas? I was working for my Daddy’s company? This really kick-ass company called Industrial Desert Design, Dallas?”

I stared at Lang. “Your father owns Industrial Desert Design?”

“You know Industrial Desert Design?” said Lang.

“Jesus Christ,” I said, “I live in Ohio. Just north of your magnum opus.”

“I will be slapped, pinched, and rolled,” Lang said, pounding the bar with his fist. “This is just too goddamned great. Is that thing great or what? I worked on the crew for that, in the summer, when I was just eleven, twelve years old. I planted cactuses. That was a fucking blast.”

“So then you travelled for I.D.D. after college?” I said.

“Yeah,” said Lang. “Best couple years of this little life, so far. I more or less oversaw this one whole project, this real tasteful little desert — nothing fancy, mind you, but small, solid, tasteful, and sinister. This really kick-ass desert project on the west side of Kerkira, near Italy.”

“Kerkira?” I said.

“Yeah. Beautifulest goddamn place I ever seen. This island. I loved it there. I was all over it, did all kinds of wild shit. Why, one time, me and Ed Roy Yancey, Jr., who was more or less my right hand, we took this goat, and about ten pounds of butter, and we…”

“Kerkira?” I said.

“Y‘all probably know it as Corfu,” said Lang. “Kerkira is the Greek name for Corfu. Corfusian, too, since Greek is their language, too, over there.”

I stared at the mirror. The bartender was fingering his mohawk and looking at Lang. On the television some sort of obscene Fran kenstein figure was lumbering around to the accompaniment of canned laughter.

“Let me review this for a moment,” I said, trying to collect my thoughts. “You, who were in my fraternity, at college, and are married to my former next-door neighbor, who was roommates in college with the sister of my fiancée, whom you have met, are intimately familiar with the culture and language of the inhabitants of the island of Corfu, and are furthermore as of now probably unemployed, and chafing for some sort of at least temporary change in your geographical, professional, and personal circumstances right now. Is all that correct?”

Lang looked at me in the mirror. His eyes were sleepy again. But simple. He was knocking at the door. Our houses, our rhododendrons were fundamentally the same. “Not at all sure what it is you’re tryin’ to drive at, Dick,” he said. The jukebox broke suddenly into “Eight Days a Week”; I fancied I saw the Approacher grinning at me from the machine. I felt an overwhelming urge to wander, to take Lang with me back to the admission line for the forests, as the sun began to die.

“Ti symptosis,” I said.

Lenore is sleeping, unusually soundly tonight, under her scratchy Howard Johnson’s blanket. Her breath as it comes up to me is soft and sweet; I feed on it. Her lips are moist, with the tiniest bits of the white paste of sleep at the comers.

I do not know a horizontal Lenore. Lenore in her bed is an otherworldly, protean thing. Lying on her side, defined by the swell of a breast and the curve of a hip, she is an S. A chance curl around the pillow she holds to her stomach, and she becomes variously a question mark, a comma, a parenthesis. And then spread out before me, open, wet, completely and rarely vulnerable, her eyes looking into mine, she is a V. I will confess that her shoe is in my lap as I write this. The soft light of the lamp bolted into the wall over my shoulder blends with the inconstant grainy gray of the television’s cold flicker to cast for me a shadow of Lenore’s chin, down her throat, to cover her tiny adam’s grape, just caressed by the razor point of a hair-mandible, in a soft black various as breath. Who knows how long I watch. The whine of an Indian-head test pattern brings me around. I find that sitting up in bed for any length of time makes my bottom terrifically numb.

/i/

Cat, Heat, and the Breather all lay around the room they shared with the Antichrist, in various states of distress, in the sun, which now came through the big windows in the west wall, because the Antichrist had opened the curtains at four, at Lenore’s suggestion, and the sun washed the room in late heat, and lit up the systems of dust moving in the air. The sun itself, in the sky, slowly lowered on its wire, swelling and getting inflamed, soon to drop behind the Art Building and leave the room in cool black again. Cat’s preemp tive head banging had unfortunately not been able to keep things from becoming very unpleasant indeed in his comer.

While all this happened, Lenore and the Antichrist walked outside, and Lenore let the warmth of the big sun and the motion of the breeze dry her hair, and LaVache got some badly needed exercise. They talked while they walked, some. It took a long time for Lenore and LaVache, with Lenore helping LaVache, to get up to the Art Building, orbit the quad, amid tree roots and Frisbee players, and come out on Memorial Hill, to look south at the forests and the bird sanctuary behind the sprawling space of the athletic fields, the fields themselves covered with writhing wind-influenced jets of water from the industrial sprinklers, the mist from the sprinklers’ plumes hanging low over the wet fields and breaking into color as the sun lowered to touch it, some tiny fine wind-blown water bits migrating north and gently dotting Lenore’s eyelids and lips as she and the Antichrist settled on the hump of the hill, as she helped the Antichrist lower himself to the ground and stretch the leg out before him in the curve of the grass. They looked out at the fields, and the forests, and the mountains beyond that, purple and vaguely gauzy in the faraway heat.

With Lenore and the Antichrist on the crest of the hill, nearby, was a family: a father in checked sportcoat and white leather loafers, a mother with a red cotton skirt and high hair and blue broken veins in her calves, a tiny red-haired girl, maybe five, with great green eyes and shiny black shoes and silky white socks, beneath a tiny white dress, and also two older children of indeterminate gender who were struggling and wrestling on the curve, trying to shove each other down the hill. While the father and mother worked with their camera to take a picture of the view off the hill, really stunning in the strange light of late afternoon, with the wash of watery red mixed with gymnasium shadows spilling in like ink from the right, the west, and while the two older children struggled, the little girl watched LaVache, who noticed her and detached the leg and played with it, a bit, to amuse the girl, who stared with huge eyes, and tugged at the hem of the mother’s red skirt, and was ignored.

Lenore watched LaVache lean back and put the foot of the leg on his nose and balance the leg with no hands. The little girl, who had come closer, sat down heavily with her legs out in front of her, staring at Lenore and the Antichrist and the leg. The Antichrist took the leg off his nose and manipulated his heavy eyebrows at the little girl, grinning. The little girl rolled up to her feet and ran to her mother’s hem, hiding behind a calf.

Lenore laughed. “You’re horrible,” she said.

LaVache removed some grass from between the toes of the leg. “Yes.” Lenore’s hair felt lovely and light and soft, clean, dried by the hot wind off the fields. The two older children suddenly shrieked in unison and rolled away down the hill, becoming small.

“Did Candy really seduce you?” Lenore asked her brother.

The Antichrist scratched at his hip. “No, Lenore, she didn’t. I lied to Heat and the Breather.” He looked at the leg. “A really important part of being here is learning how to lie. ‘Strategic misrepresentation,’ we call it. I’ve been wildly infatuated with Candy for a long time. To be honest with you, it was really her breasts that launched me into puberty, that time she came home with you for spring break, I think four years ago. Last summer was just particularly bad, in terms of the infatuation. I simply presented fantasy as fact to Heat and the Breather. Heat has a huge mouth. My latest theory is that Heat isn’t busy enough with homework, a situation you can be quite sure I’ll be remedying.”

“Oh,” Lenore said. She felt the grass. “You know, to be honest, I don’t much like the Breather, either, I’m afraid. The Breather seems awfully touchy-feely to me.”

The Antichrist didn’t say anything.

“What’s his name, anyway?” said Lenore.

“His name’s the Breather.”

“I mean his real name.”

“Who cares. Mike something.”

“Hmmm.”

The Antichrist was staring out into the thin twisting fountains in the fields, and the forests, all in the reddening shadowy light. “Do you still drink a lot of Tab?” he said, out of the blue.

Lenore looked at him. She decided he was high. “I don’t drink Tab much anymore,” she said. “I mostly drink seltzer water now. Tab tastes to me like some little kid made it with his chemistry set.”

The Antichrist laughed and hefted the leg. His hightop was with Lenore’s hightops, out in front of them in the grass. The little girl was peering around her mother’s leg at the Antichrist, who pretended to ignore her.

“Where’s your friend Mr. Vigorous? What’s he supposed to be doing?”

“I don’t really know. I think he’s wandering around. I think he sort of has some internal catching up to do. He hasn’t been back here, ever, since he graduated.”

“I see.”

The two older children had stopped rolling and now started to trudge heavily back up the steep hill. The father and mother hissed at each other over the camera’s light meter. Around the woman’s calf were green eyes and wisps of red hair. The Antichrist put part of the leg inside his shirt.

“Are you pretty sleepy?” Lenore asked. “From the Quaaludes, I mean?”

LaVache looked at the trees. “The Breather told you this was a Quaalude day? What a garrulous room-group, today. It was a very small Quaalude. And no, not really, Quaaludes don’t make me sleepy, anymore, really.”

“How do they make you feel?”

The Antichrist looked at his ankle. “Like I’m elsewhere.”

Lenore looked at the little girl.

“Elseone,” LaVache said to his ankle. “Besides,” he looked up, “the old cortex is a flurry of activity now, because I have to get all prepared to talk Hegelian sublation with Nervous Roy Keller, which will be a bitch, because Nervous Roy is far too nervous to assimilate any but the most clearly presented information. Clear presentation is not Hegel’s strength.”

Lenore tugged at a blade of grass. It came out of the ground with a faint squeak. “How come you do everybody else’s work for them, Stoney?”

“Where do you think Lenore is?” the Antichrist asked the leg.

“Why do you do other people’s work and not your own?” said Lenore. “You’re the smartest person I’ve ever met. John included.”

“Speaking of which…”

“How come you’re doing this? You’re flapped here all the time, aren’t you?”

The Antichrist brought a joint out of the drawer. “I have a leg to support.”

“How come?”

The Antichrist lit up with practiced ease in the wind and looked at his sister from behind his cloud. “It’s my thing,” he said. “Everybody here has a thing. You have to have a thing here. My thing is being the Antichrist, more or less being a waste-product and supporting my leg. A tragically wasted intellect. So to speak. You can’t be thingless, Lenore. Mr. Vigorous notwithstanding.”

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

LaVache looked over Lenore’s head, at the sun. “Let’s pause for just a moment to let me try to get all this straight.” He scratched at an eyebrow. “You came all the way out here, to the very most tangential of Beadsmans, to inform me that you don’t know where certain people are, and to ask me whether I know where certain people are. And you did so at Dad’s request.”

“What Dad wants me to find out is whether you’ve heard or have any idea where exactly Lenore or John are. Is. Especially Gramma, for Dad.”

“Of course.”

“And you say you have no idea.”

“Right.”

“Did you know about the stuff Gramma was doing with Dad?” Lenore asked. “The nursing home stuff?”

“More or less. More less than more.”

The little green-eyed girl was cautiously approaching Lenore and LaVache, moving inside her mother’s long late shadow. The Antichrist, still pretending to ignore her, nevertheless enticed her with the leg.

“How come?” Lenore said.

“How come what?”

“How come you knew?”

“I believe Lenore told me, in her own unique epigrammatic way.”

“Well, when?”

“A while ago. Actually I did some math for her and Mrs. Kling.”

“Yingst.”

“Yingst. Some multiple regression. Last Christmas. Really more John’s area than mine, but since dear John is, or was, busy starving himself, and the leg quite obviously isn‘t, it cheerfully gobbled up the hundred clams with nary a qualm.”

“Have any thoughts of how come Lenore told me exactly nothing about any of this, by any chance?”

“Nothing even remotely resembling a thought,” LaVache said. When Lenore looked up from her blade of grass, she saw that the little girl was now sitting next to the Antichrist, her small soft legs with shiny black shoes out in front of her. The Antichrist was letting her touch the leg. To Lenore he said, “I really must confess to wondering, in the dark part of the night, what you and Lenore actually talk about all the time. You were over there constantly, this past summer.”

“Well, I was reading to Concamadine, some of the time, too.”

“I’m glad someone can stand to see her.”

“Who says I can stand to see her?”

“She still likes Old Mother West Wind? Ollie the otter and Sergio the snake and all that?”

“I really haven’t seen her in a while. She liked it the last time I read it to her. At least she made what I interpreted as liking-sounds.”

“How lovely,” LaVache said. “You better go see her. She must get really lonely. You think?”

The little girl was looking at the side of the Antichrist’s dark shiny face, Lenore could see. The girl tugged on the sleeve of his sweatshirt.

“Are you the devil?” she asked in a loud voice. Her parents didn’t seem to hear her.

“Not right at the moment,” the Antichrist said to the little girl, turning the leg over to her completely, for a bit.

“I don’t want to go there anymore, at least until Lenore gets back,” Lenore said softly, shaping a hooked curve of hair under her chin. “I’m afraid I really and truly hate Concamadine. I don’t know if your theory is right, but I’m afraid I do. And that Mr. Bloemker who’s constantly around gives me even more big-time creeps than he did before, for reasons I don’t feel like going into right at the moment. And plus of course now Lenore’s just gone, for over a week, and after working awfully hard to make really sure I’d care about her, she now doesn’t even bother to say where she is. She should know I’m not Dad. Just like you, of all people, should know I’m not Dad.”

The Antichrist played with the floppy empty leg of his corduroy shorts.

“I’m beginning to think Lenore’s dead,” said Lenore. “It’s horrible to think that and still not be able to really grieve. I think she maybe even died in the nursing home, and Mrs. Yingst did something to her, when she wasn’t busy giving innocent animals LSD or pineal-food.”

“You know, in my opinion, if you want my off the-top-of-my-head opinion, I think Lenore’s maybe dead, too,” the Antichrist said, amusing the little girl by guiding her hands so as to make the leg dance on the ground, his joint held easily between two fingers. “She’s about a hundred, after all, isn’t she? I think she’s just gone off somewhere to die. Somewhere where no one could see her being for the briefest second defenseless. I think that would be her style. Either that or she’s down at Gerber’s right now, preparing to give Dad an incredible kick in the corporate groin. To which I say go for it.”

The little red-haired girl laughed loudly as the leg performed a particularly tricky dance step. The man in white loafers and the woman with veins turned from the field.

“Brenda!” the mother yelled. The little girl looked up from the leg at her mother. “Come away from there right this minute!” The mother bore down.

“Just a quick anatomy lesson, here, ma‘am,” said the Antichrist.

“Come away from there I said.” The little girl was lifted away by a wrist. The leg lay in the grass. The two older children were struggling on the curve again. A shadow in a sportcoat fell over Lenore and LaVache. Lenore made a visor out of her hand. The father stared down, his complicated camera obviously really heavy around his neck. Lenore looked at his shoes. They had networks of tiny black cracks in the white leather.

The father sniffed the air, his hands on his hips. “Is that one of those funny cigarettes?”

LaVache held up the nubbin of joint and looked at it reflectively. “Sir,” he said, “this is a deadly serious cigarette.”

“You ought to be ashamed, using drugs in a public place, around little children, who are impressionable,” the mother said. Lenore resisted the impulse to touch the mother’s stockingless calf. She considered the fact that the veins in some older women’s calves are a blue found nowhere else in nature. A nicotine blue, almost.

“I think I’m so ashamed I suddenly don’t feel like being around people, right now,” the Antichrist said slowly, squinting up into the two shadows. There were “Hmmphs,” and the parents came away, calling to the struggling children to come this instant. Lenore heard Brenda’s tiny shoes on the cement of the War Memorial, above them, a moment later. They were alone on the curve of the hill. The Antichrist was scratching at his hip, Lenore saw. No he wasn’t: he was reaching into his pocket. He pulled something out. It was a Stonecipheco label. Veal purée. He finished unfolding it and turned it over and smoothed it against his hip, then gave it to Lenore. Lenore noticed that LaVache’s nails really needed cutting.

On the white, slightly fuzzy back of the label was an ink drawing of a man walking up a hill, as seen from the side. The man’s profile was smiling. The hill looked sandy. It was the same sort of doodle Lenore had found in Lenore’s room at the Shaker Heights Nursing Home.

“Hmmm,” she said. She looked at the Antichrist. She took out of the zippered compartment at the side of her vinyl purse the drawing of the barber with the exploded head. She gave it to LaVache. LaVache laughed.

“Ah, the barber,” he said. “Boy, she may be a ring-tailed bitch, but I do get a kick out of Lenore. I really sort of hope she isn’t dead, after all, to tell the truth.”

Lenore looked at the Antichrist. “How unbelievably decent of you, seeing she’s your relative.” She reached way out with her foot into the grass and gave the leg an angry little kick.

“Ow,” said LaVache.

Lenore wiped a couple of tiny sprinkler-droplets from the skin under her eyes. “When did you get this?” she asked. “I thought you said you had no ideas about Gramma. Or does ‘idea’ mean ’toenail,‘ for you, or something?”

The Antichrist tore at some grass, looked at his sister. “No, ‘idea’ means ’idea,‘ but that, you may have noticed, is not an idea, but rather a sort of drawing. An infamous Lenore Beadsman drawing, right out of her infamous school of stick-figure symbolist art.” He smiled, did something to his hair. “You remember the drawing of John and Dad, that one Christmas? The time John had said something about Miss Malig, something pretty funny, and Dad had said that if you can’t say anything nice, you shouldn’t say anything at all, and John pointed out that that thing itself that Dad had just said to him really wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination ’nice,‘ and so shouldn’t itself have been said, and so was, interestingly, internally contradictory? And Lenore gave us that drawing of John and Dad, and Dad’s exploded head, and the corn-cob suppository? A really deadly drawing, I thought.”

“But when did you get this one?” Lenore asked, looking at the veal label. She thought she could make out a cactus in the splatter of ink surrounding the incline of the hill in the drawing.

“It was waiting in my p. o. box when I got here,” LaVache said. “Return-address-less, I might add, and interestingly not in Lenore’s distinctive indecipherable hand. That was ten… eleven days ago. I got it eleven days ago, Lenore.” The Antichrist suddenly hawked and spat white.

Lenore ignored the spitting, and the fact that the Antichrist’s head was lolling quite a bit now. “Do you know what it is?” she asked.

“Oh, very much so, don’t we, precious,” the Antichrist hissed to his leg.

“Then maybe you’ll be good enough to tell me, because I’m afraid I seem to be clueless on this one,” Lenore said, staring at the label.

The Antichrist sucked at the red eye of the corpse of his joint. Lenore saw that he held the nubbin delicately in his very long fingernails, avoided getting burned. He grinned at Lenore. “What would you do if I demanded that you first feed the leg?” he asked.

Lenore looked at her brother, then at the leg. She said, “I’d propose a deal. You tell me the thing you know, the thing that clearly bears on the well-being of a relative we’re both supposed to love, the thing that it looks like I came all the way out here to find out; you tell me, and in return I don’t throw the leg all the way down to the bottom of the hill, leaving you with a long and possibly dangerous and certainly very embarrassing retrieval-hop.”

“Oh, now, don’t be that way,” smiled the Antichrist, casually reattaching and strapping the leg, which took a minute. When he was attached, he said, “The drawing is of a sort referred to in the Investigations, as I’m sure you, the hotshot major, would remember a lot better than I, if you thought about it for about three seconds. I seem to recollect the reference being page fifty-four, note b, of the Geach and Anscombe translation. We’re presented with a picture of a man climbing a slope, in profile, one leg in front of the other as he progresses, marking motion, walking up the incline, facing the top, eyes directed at the top, all the standard climbing-association stuff. Et cetera et cetera. So it’s a picture of a man walking up a hill. But then remember Gramma Lenore’s own Dr. Wittgenstein says hold on now, pardner, because the picture could just as clearly and exactly and easily represent the man sliding down the slope, with one leg higher than the other, backwards, et cetera. Just as exactly.”

“Shit,” said Lenore.

“And then we’re invited to draw all these totally fecal conclusions about why we just automatically assume from just looking at the picture that the guy’s climbing and not sliding. Going up instead of coming down. Complete and total dribble, and really actually heart-rending psychological innocence, as far as I’m concerned, which you should remember, given this certain conversation we all had in the Volvo when you were in school, when Gramma decided I was evil and said I needed to be ‘stamped out,’ declared her intention to stop giving me Christmas presents. Anyway…”

“Well and then here, on the other hand, we’ve got this antinomy,” Lenore said, looking at the barber drawing.

“Right,” the Antichrist said, throwing away the tiny dot of black joint. He paused for a moment, looking out into nothing. Lenore looked at him. “Brenda,” she heard him say loudly, “you should go back to your parents immediately. Try not to be at all impressionable, at least while you’re around here.”

Lenore twisted around and looked. The little girl with green eyes was standing behind them, above them, on the cement rim of the Memorial, looking down at their heads. The wind ruffled her silky socks. She stared at the Antichrist.

“Shoo, love of mine,” LaVache said.

The girl turned and fled. Her shoes clicked on the cement, fading.

Lenore looked at her brother. More grass squeaked in his hands. The sprinklers suddenly all went off, stopped hissing, the water sucked back inside itself, in the pipes, down in the fields. The fields looked great. They shone fire in the red light, deepened to twinkle in the glossy black of the gym shadows. “So then here I guess I’m supposed to ask what you think the two together might be supposed to mean,” Lenore said.

LaVache laughed like a seal. His head lolled. “Gramma would be disappointed in her minion,” he said. “They obviously… mean whatever you want them to mean. Whatever you want to use them for. Ms. Beadsman…,” he pretended to hold a microphone under Lenore’s nose, “… how would you like the drawings to function? Audience, please just hold off on that input…” The Antichrist made tick-tock noises with his tongue. “Function,” he said. “The extreme unction of function. Function. From the Latin ‘func,’ meaning foul-smelling due to persistent overuse. She has crawled off. She is either dead, or functioning furiously. Speaking of functioning furiously, you might help me up, here, for a moment, please.”

Lenore helped her brother up. He limped behind a bush at the side of the hill. Lenore heard sounds of him going to the bathroom into the dry bush.

“I have an idea,” the Antichrist’s voice came over the bush to Lenore. “Let’s do the natural Beadsman thing. Let’s play a game. Let’s pretend just for fun that Lenore hasn’t expired, that Mrs. Yingst hasn’t chopped her up and fed her to Vlad the Impaler, that Gramma actually does give a hoot about your being potentially worried, and might actually be trying to use that worry in some nefarious way.” He came back over, slowly, keeping his balance on the incline. “Now, under this game-scenario, how might we wish to see the drawings as functioning, here?” He settled back down with Lenore’s help, looked at her. “The sliding-man drawing, under this scenario, might say, hey, ho, watch how you go. Perceive how you — we — perceive Lenore’s being… ‘missing.’ Don’t just look at it; think about how to look at it. Maybe it… means the opposite of what you think it does, of the way it… looks.” LaVache was having leg trouble, on the hump of the hill. Lenore helped him get more comfortable. She held the baby food labels in her hand.

LaVache continued, “See, maybe Lenore isn’t gone at all. Maybe you’re who’s gone, when all is said and done. Maybe… this one I particularly like… maybe Dad’s gone, spiralled into the industrial void. Maybe he’s taken us with him. Maybe Lenore’s found. Maybe instead of her sliding away from you, you’ve slid away from her. Or climbed away from her. Maybe it’s all a sliding-and-climbing game! Chutes and Ladders, risen from the dead!” The Antichrist was having trouble talking, because his mouth was all dry from the joint. He got the last of Clint Wood’s fee from his drawer and lit it.

“Hmmm,” Lenore was saying.

“Except don’t think about yourself, in this game, at all,” said the Antichrist. “Because in this game, the way we’re playing, the barber drawing means don’t think about yourself, in the context of the game, or your head explodes into art deco. Just think about other people, if you want to play. Which means that family-members have to be treated as explicitly Other, which I must say I find attractively refreshing.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Lenore said.

The Antichrist exhaled. “Let’s pretend just for fun that it’s the late seventies, and Lenore is in her blue period, and is still keeping exclusively to her study, and snapping at anyone who comes near, including poor old Grampa, who was getting ready to die, and being generally pathetic…”

“Get on with it. My bottom hurts.”

“And anyway, in this game-context, that Lenore is still Skeptical as hell, or at least strenuously adopting the pose, and ostensibly convinced that all she is is the act of her thinking, à la the French-man, although Lenore would say all she is is the act of speaking and telling, but that’s so bullshitty it makes my tongue hurt, and anyway luckily unnecessary, and so we say that all she is is the act of her thinking; that’s the only thing she can be sure of, is just her being her thinking.”

“Is this real, or are you saying all this because you’re flapped?” asked Lenore.

“Please hush,” LaVache said. “I’m hard at play. So all Lenore is is her act of thought, nothing else can be ‘assumed.’ ” He lay back and looked at the reddening sky, the joint resting in a carved initial in the leg. “So she’s her thinking. And, as we know, all thinking requires an object, something to think of or about. And the only things that can be thought about are the things that are not that act of thought, that are Other, right? You can’t think of your own act of thinking-of, any more than a blade can cut itself, right? Unless you’re the guy who’s significantly lowering Nervous Roy Keller’s quality of life, but I refuse to think about that until the leg demands that I do so. So, we can’t think ourselves, if all we are is the act of thinking. So we’re like the barber. The barber, if I recall, shaves all and only those who don’t shave themselves. Here Lenore thinks we think all and only those things which do not think themselves, which aren’t the act of our thought, which are Other.”

“Hell of a game,” Lenore muttered.

“But then we remember that all we are is our act of thought, in the game, for Lenore,” LaVache said, fast, now, and slightly slurry. “So if we think about ourselves with respect to the game, we’re thinking about our thinking. And we decided the one thing we couldn’t think about was our thinking, because the object has to be Other. We can think only the things that can’t think themselves. So if we think ourselves, see for instance conceiving ourselves as thought, we can’t ourselves be the object of our thinking. Q.E.D.”

Lenore cleared her throat.

“But if we can’t think ourselves,” the Antichrist continued to the sky, trying to lick his lips, “that means we, ourselves, are things that can’t think themselves, and so are the proper objects for our thought; we fulfill the game’s condition, we are ourselves Other. So if we can think ourselves, we can’t; and if we can‘t, we can. KA-BLAM,” LaVache gestured broadly. “There go the old crania.”

“Dumb game,” said Lenore. “I can think of myself any time I want. Here, watch.” Lenore thought of herself sitting in the Spaniard home in Cleveland Heights, eating a frozen pea.

“Dumb objection, especially from you,” the Antichrist said to the sky. “ ‘Cause do you really think of yourself? What do you think of yourself as? Shall I recall some of our more interesting and to me more than a little disturbing conversations of the last two years? If you don’t think of yourself as real, then you’re cheating, you’re not playing fair, you’re chute-hopping, you’re not thinking of yourself.”

“Who says I don’t think of myself as real?” Lenore said, looking past the Antichrist at the bush he’d gone to the bathroom in.

“I’d be inclined to say you say so, from your general attitude, unless that little guy with the big mustache and the movable chairs has conked you on the head or something,” said the Antichrist. “It’s my clinical opinion that you, in a perfectly natural defensive reaction to your circumstances, have decided you’re not real — of course with Gramma’s help.” LaVache looked at her. “Why is this all so, you ask?”

“I haven’t asked anything, you might have noticed.”

“It’s because you’re the one on whom the real brunt of the evil — shall I say ‘evil’?—the brunt of the evil of this family has fallen. Evil in the form of these little indoctrination sessions with Lenore, which I’ve got to tell you I’ve always regarded as pathetic in the extremus. Evil in the form of Dad, who, having totally fucked with our mother’s life, for all time, is trying to fuck with your life in all kinds of ways I bet you don’t even know about, or want to know about. Think now of the circumstances leading up to my own particular birth. The same way Dad’s tried to fuck with my life, everybody’s. Just as he was fucked with in his turn, by fools in old-style hats and coats.” The Antichrist laughed. “That’s a poem. Anyway, you’ve borne the brunt. John was off to Chicago with his slide rule and a whole lot of masochistic baggage by the time he would have been any use to Dad or Lenore; I’ve had a limb and a thing to fall back on; Clarice was clearly inappropriate in terms of disposition — we needn’t discuss all that. But so you’re it. You are the family, Lenore. And in Dad’s case, go ahead and substitute ‘Company’ in the obvious place in the above sentence.”

Lenore reached under and removed a bit of stick she’d been sitting on.

“But Lenore has fucked up your life even further, sweetness,” the Antichrist said, sitting back up with the joint and looking at Lenore. “Lenore has you believing — stop me if I’m wrong — Lenore has you believing, with your complicity, circumstantially speaking, that you’re not really real, or that you’re only real insofar as you’re told about, so that to the extent that you’re real you’re controlled, and thus not in control, so that you’re more like a sort of character than a person, really — and of course Lenore would say the two are the same, now, wouldn’t she?”

“I wish it would rain,” Lenore said.

“You just had a shower a little while ago,” LaVache laughed. “You’re a nervous wreck, sis. Don’t be so nervous. Here. Kiss the bird for a second.” The Antichrist was holding up the joint, which Lenore saw was burning down one side much faster than the other.

“I don’t want any,” Lenore said. She glanced at the sun, which was now sticking Kilroyishly over the top of the gymnasium. “How about if we just spontaneously abort this line of conversation, Stoney, OK? Since, if I were maybe to ask you to help me out with respect to this supposed evil-and-reality-as-opposed-to-telling problem, what you’d do is obviously just tell me something, so that the whole thing would—”

“Don’t call me Stoney,” said LaVache. “Call me LaVache, or the Antichrist, but no more Stoney.”

“You don’t mind Antichrist, which I have to say is just about the most disturbing nickname I’ve ever heard? But you mind Stoney?”

“Stoney is everybody’s name,” the Antichrist said. He spat white again. “Everybody in the family with male genitals is Stoney. Stoney reminds me I’m probably just a part in a machine I wish I wasn’t part of. Stoney reminds me of deeply annoying expectations. Stoney reminds me of Dad. As Stoney I’m more or less just educed…”

“What?”

“… but as the Antichrist I just am, ” said the Antichrist, waving the joint grandly at the red and black horizon. “As the Antichrist I have a thing, and it’s gloriously clear where I leave off and others start, and no one expects me to be anything other than what I am, which is a waste-product, slaving endlessly to support his leg. I’ve also just sort of helped you, here, I think, if you bothered to notice.” With his finger the Antichrist wet the side of the joint that was burning too fast, to make it bum slower.

Lenore wasn’t looking at her brother, but at the gym shadows, which were visibly moving across the fields. A shadow from a different part of the gym began to edge up the west side of the hill, to their right.

“Do you hate Dad?” Lenore asked. “Do you think I hate Dad?”

“Well, now, seeing as how you’re you…,” the Antichrist playfully pretended to punch Lenore in the arm, “I can’t speak for you, but only for me, regardless of what I might say about you. Verstehen?”

“Pain in the ass.”

“I don’t hate Dad,” said the Antichrist. “Dad just makes me millenially weary. I find Dad exhausting. The stump aches, horribly, whenever I’m around Dad.”

Lenore hugged a knee to her chest.

“The one who hates Dad is Mom,” LaVache continued, “or, that is, she would if she were Mom. The person I saw last month resembled a mom in no way whatsoever. John Lennon, yes. A mom, no.”

“You miss Mom.”

“I miss a mom. Mom’s been in that place practically my whole life. Certainly at the beginning. My whole life is to an extent why she’s in there, right? Although I do remember that one year when I was nine. And then Dad and Miss Malig sent her right back again.”

“Well, she was trying to climb again. You can’t just have somebody trying to climb up the side of your house all the time.”

LaVache didn’t say anything.

“But it’s a shame you never got to really know her. I thought she was a good person. Really good.” Lenore moved her head to make the fields sparkle in the half-light.

“I just feel an affinity, is all, probably,” LaVache said. “No, for sure I do. Mom’s head and my leg were taken out in the same dancing accident, after all. At least I got left with a thing. Mom’s thingless.” He picked the sliding-man label up from where it lay on Lenore’s leg near the lacy hem of her white dress. “Interesting thing here is that it looks like this guy is climbing up dash sliding down a sort of sand dune. See the way his feet sink? And see this sort of cactus? I feel the implication of Desert, Lenore. Food for thought, in my opinion — no pun intended.”

“But since his feet sink in the sand, then we know for sure he’s climbing and not sliding,” Lenore said, taking the drawing. “ ‘Cause if he had slid, there would have to be slide tracks all the way down from the top.”

LaVache looked at the label and fingered his red chin. “But if he’s climbing, then there ought to be footprints leading up from the bottom, in the sand, which there aren’t.”

“Hmmm.”

“Looks like Gramma screwed up, unless perhaps the guy was dropped from a helicopter into this exact position; that’s one possibility Dr. W. never fathomed. I guess there were no helicopters back in his day. Technology does affect interpretation, after all, doesn’t it?”

“Hmmm.”

The Antichrist gave Lenore the drawing back. “Can Vlad the Impaler really talk now?”

“You should hear it. His language was getting worse, too, over the last week or so, although I haven’t been home in a couple days. ” Lenore saw that the man in the drawing was smiling broadly, in profile, and had what seemed to be a shadow, unless it was just the sand.

“What does he say?”

“Unfortunately mostly really obscene stuff, because he’s around Candy all the time.”

The Antichrist groaned. “I’m tingling all over. The leg may spontaneously detach.”

“Except we’ve been teaching him stuff out of the Bible, so Mrs. Tissaw hopefully won’t evict me if she hears him,” Lenore said. “She’s already ticked off because Vlad tends to chew the wall.”

“Can’t wait to hear him.”

“My bottom really hurts,” Lenore said. “I think I’d like to go back. Rick might be back at your dorm and wondering where we are. Would you like to come to dinner with us? I predict Rick’s going to want to go to the Aqua Vitae.”

“Let me just gather my resources for the trip back, for a second,” said LaVache. He massaged the leg with a hand. “If I can drive a stake through the heart of Nervous Roy’s Hegel problem without making you guys wait too long, I’ll gladly come.”

“Look, by the way, do you mind if I tell Dad you have a phone?” Lenore said. “Dad is crazy about you.”

“All sorts of different truths in that statement.”

“He’s pinned all his hopes on you, he says.”

“Pins tend to smart, I’ve found,” LaVache said.

“At least you should tell him you call a phone a lymph node.”

“Well, gee, then I might as well call it a phone,” the Antichrist said sulkily.

They both looked at the athletic fields and the forests behind them. Long spears of shadow were moving across the breadth of the grass. Shadow-gaps sparkled with sprinkler-dew. Two very tiny figures emerged from the edge of the trees of the bird sanctuary, far away, and started walking across the wet fields toward the hill. One of the figures, the shorter one, wore a brown beret.

“Hey,” Lenore said quietly.

She saw the two figures stop. The taller one, whose hair looked red in the red sun between the gym-shadows, bent over and felt the wet grass with his hand. The two figures slipped off their shoes and socks — the taller one merely his shoes, because he wore no socks underneath — and continued walking. They got to the bottom of the hill.

“Well that’s Rick right there,” Lenore said to the Antichrist, pointing to the man in the beret. She waved. Rick looked up at her for a bit, his hand to his hat, confused, then finally smiled broadly and waved back. He said something to the other man, pointing at Lenore.

“Who’s that other guy?” asked LaVache. He tossed away his roach and struggled to get to his feet.

“I don’t think I know,” Lenore said. She stared at the taller man, who walked the hill well, one hand holding boat shoes, the other helping Rick Vigorous, who was having trouble, sliding back in his bare feet in the wet grass of the bottom of the steep hill. The taller man grinned at his efforts, and some of the last bits of fiery sunset over the gym hit his teeth, which shone red.

“Do I look all right?” Lenore said to LaVache.

“Nut,” LaVache said. “Help me up, please.”

Lenore helped her brother up. The two men got close to the curve of the top of the hill, where the grass became dry and brown. Rick no longer needed help. There were voices, back and forth. The Antichrist was having balance problems. The very last of the sun sucked itself down behind the gymnasium, to the west. A cool shadow filled up the field, then climbed the hill all the way to the Memorial. The shadow covered the four figures, as they came together, and they were gone.