“OK by me.”
“Andrew, listen, may I ask a question?”
“Shoot.”
“Will Mindy be coming out to join you? You have told her the developments — she does know where you’re going to be, doesn’t she? What exactly is the Mindy situation?”
“R.V., look and listen. It’s like I told you, I just felt like I had to get out for a while. Breathe some temporarily Melinda-Sue-free air. She and I had a bit of a tiff before I drove up to school, I make no bones. But it’s more’n that. To my mind there’s just this temporary lack of wonderfulness about our whole relationship.”
“….”
“So things are just temporarily up in the air.”
“….”
“And no, I didn’t exactly call her from school, I didn’t tell her I’d run into y‘all and was coming out here to do some work. But she’ll be able to find out when she wants. I had to leave my car with Coach Zandagnio, who was my lacrosse coach, and sort of my mentor, at school, and I told him the whole story. And Melinda-Sue knows that if anybody knows where I would have gone from school, it’s old Stenetore, ’cause she knew him too, he went to our wedding when she got out of school; he gave us a gravy boat.”
“You played lacrosse at Amherst?”
“I was a lacrosse-playing fool.”
“Always struck me as a staggeringly savage game.”
“A truly and completely kick-ass game. A game that kicks ass.”
“I see.”
“….”
“Lenore darling, are you awake?”
“Fnoof.”
“Girl can do some serious sleeping.”
“May I be explicit, here, for a moment, Wang-Dang?”
“Draw and fire, R. V.”
“I am passionately, fiercely, and completely in love with Lenore. She is not quite as explicitly my fiancée as I may have inadvertently led you to believe in the Flange, but she is nevertheless mine. I have a bit of a jealousy problem, I’m told. My setting in motion the process of your possibly temporarily sharing a building with Lenore, actually, to be honest, my inviting you to come and temporarily enter our lives and work for Frequent and Vigorous, at all, was predicated on the understandable assumption that you were emotionally involved with and attached to Mindy Metalman, a woman who, just let me say in all candor, strikes me as the sort of woman an attachment to whom on, for example, my part would leave me completely uninterested in any and all of the world’s other females. Do you get my drift?”
“Go on.”
“Then the drift now becomes a tide, and I say that, in light of what I now know, given what seems to be at least a partial and temporary unattachment to your wife, Mindy, a past that includes an acquaintance with Lenore, under whatever circumstances, prior to my own, and at least clear verbal evidence of vigorous hormonal activity on your part, I feel I can be truly comfortable only in the context of an explicit recognition on your part of the fact that Lenore is mine, and thus out of bounds, that as I am to be regarded as a sort of brother, or uncle, whatever you will, so Lenore is to be regarded by you as a sort of sister, or aunt, with whom any sort of attempted romantic involvement is and would be entirely unthinkable.”
“….”
“There.”
“Damned if you’re not the most articulate little rooster I ever heard crow.”
“….”
“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a tiny bit hurt by the idea that I might do something like what you’re afraid of to a Psi Phi brother, to an Amherst uncle. But to put your mind at rest… your mind isn’t quite at rest, here, is it?”
“It can be put so with utter ease, by you.”
“OK, then let me just say, right here, that I give you my word of honor as an alumni of the single finest undergraduate institution in the land that I will not harbor any but the most honorable of thoughts toward your woman.”
“I’m all too aware that it’s silly, but could you promise not to take her away?”
“R.V., I promise not to take her away.”
“Thank you. Well there. That’s out of the way.”
“You all right? Your forehead’s wet as hell. You want to use my hankie?”
“No thank you. I have my own.”
“Gentlemen, the captain asks that you please refasten your seat belts for landing.”
“My ears are rumbling like mad.”
“You wouldn’t by any chance want to help me with my particular belt, here, ma‘am, would you?”
“Ixnay — ilotpay.”
“….”
“Fnoof.”
“Lenore.”
“Fnoof. What?”
“Damned if you can’t sleep up a storm, Lenore.”
“What time is it?”
“We’re apparently preparing to land.”
“Boy am I tired.”
“Sweet dreams?”
“I’m not sure. My mouth tastes like a barn. I would kill for a shower. ”
“Have some gum.”
“Want to try some Skoal?”
“Not for anything in the world.”
“Lenore, my ears are in their own private hell.”
“Poor Rick. What can I do to help?”
“Perhaps a bit of a temple massage…”
“Let me just get my big old carcass out of the way, here…”
/b/
By the time Rick dropped Lenore and Wang-Dang Lang off near the Tissaws’ it was almost four, and beginning to mist a little, so that even though it wasn’t very cold Lenore could see her breath, and Lang’s. Rick dashed off to attend to some affairs at Frequent and Vigorous, but promised, as he dropped them a few hundred yards from the oral surgeon’s big gray house, to be back as soon as possible to take them both to dinner.
“Super,” said Lenore.
“Straight up,” said Lang.
The reason Rick had to drop Lenore and Lang off near, rather than at, the Tissaws’ was that the street all around the house was totally clogged with cars, and especially vans. A lot of the vans were white, with the ornate letters P.W.G. on the sides, in red. Lenore had never seen the street so crowded.
“I’ve just never seen the street so crowded,” Lenore said.
“Don’t suppose all these folks are here to try to sublet Misty Schwartz’s room, do you?” said Lang.
“Not a chance.”
“Must be a really bitching party going on around here, then,” said Lang.
“On a Tuesday afternoon?”
“My kind of neighborhood.”
As they went up the walk, Lenore saw that the Tissaws’ front door was propped partly open by a network of thick black cables that led out from the backs of two of the white P.W.G. vans — vans parked halfway onto the grass of the Tissaws’ lawn — and disappeared into the house. Lenore all of a sudden heard what was unmistakably Candy Mandible shout something from her third-story window, a window that looked strangely lit up, right now, and actually had a bit of a tiny rainbow-doughnut around it in the cool wet air, and then from the front porch Lenore heard Candy running down the stairs of the house to meet them at the door.
“Lenore I swear to God you will just not believe it,” said Candy.
“What the heck is going on here?” Lenore said, looking around. “Are we having sewer trouble?”
“Not exactly, come on, it’s Vlad the Impaler,” Candy said, starting to try to pull Lenore toward the stairs, up which the black cables from the vans ran and disappeared from sight. Candy was wearing that violet dress.
“Hey, ho, and hello,” Lang said to Candy. He hefted the suitcases.
“Hi,” said Candy, barely looking at Lang. “Lenore, come on. You’ll flip and die!”
“What can Vlad the Impaler have to do with vans and letters and cables?”