The Invisible Hand

Stripping the bottom plate from a Hoover WindTunnel II, Claudia Lanni glanced up as a customer stepped over the threshold of Vacuum World. The man dangled a smallish rubber belt between a thumb and indexed finger. The band had ripped apart in a jagged line with a shiny black burn mark where it had run off the metal shaft.

She took the belt, turning it over in her hands. “Orek XL two-thousand?”

The fellow nodded. Claudia rose from where she was hunkered down with the various parts of the vacuum cleaner splayed out across the rug and went to a display near the cash register. At six foot one, her torso wasn’t fat so much as doughy. A person standing in front of her didn’t see hips, breasts, shoulders or thighs. Rather, they saw a bleary-eyed, thoroughly unremarkable woman with a weak chin and flaccid lips that lacked contour or definition. Makeup might have helped, but she never bothered with any – not even a hint of blush to brighten her pallid skin tones. She wore lumpy corduroy pants that hung shapelessly on her skinny waist and flannel shirts that were always clean but seldom ironed. The unfashionable, wire-rimmed granny glasses were a throwback to the hippy-dippy psychedelic sixties.

“Give me two,” the man said.

“Need bags?”

He shook his head. “No, I got plenty, thanks.”

She rang up the sale and made change. The customer was almost to the door when she spoke again. “What are you reading?”

He pulled a tattered paperback from a back pocket, waving it in the air. “The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith.”

Having just separated the bristly rug beater from the undercarriage, Claudia put the Phillips head screwdriver aside. “Most economists consider that more influential, but I always preferred Theory of Moral Sentiments.”

The middle-aged man balked, stood frozen in space. Then he closed the door and came back to where she was sitting on the floor. His dark hair was thinning at the temples; the nose was rather long with a pronounced hump. “You studied economics?”

“No, not really. I’m a bit of an academic dilettante.” In college Claudia studied philosophy and business theory. She got a degree in neither. Nothing of a useful nature held her interest for more than two seconds back-to-back. As far back as elementary school, she had always been an odd duck. The middle-aged woman came at the universe from her own quirky perspective, which is why she never accomplished a solitary thing with her education. She wrote a master’s thesis on some abstruse concept in Keynesian economic theory, but eventually bought a vacuum cleaner franchise rather than pursue her intellectual gift.

“Theory of Moral Sentiments was where Smith first referred to the ‘invisible hand’.” Claudia, was digging a clot of hairballs, yarn and crumpled paper from the intake hose in the bottom of the machine.

“And what exactly is the invisible hand?”

“The benefits to society of people behaving in their own interest.”

“That’s strange! A passage describing a similar concept appears in the editor’s preface.” The man thumbed through the first few pages of the paperback until he found the paragraph he was looking for.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

“The invisible hand—yes, that’s it!” Claudia reached out with a taut index finger and repositioned the wire-rimmed glasses which had slid down on the bridge of her slender nose. Without bothering to look up from her work, she added “Conscience arises from social relationships.”

The customer pursed his lips and seemed lost in thought for a brief moment. “Which is to say that mankind can still form moral judgments, in spite of a natural inclination toward selfishness.”

Only now did she bother to look him full in the face. A wan smile creased her lips. Claudia began reassembling the scattered pieces that lay on the floor. The customer with the broken drive belt sat down on a folding chair alongside a Hoover top-of the-line Platinum Collection Cyclonic bagless. "Society, according to Adam Smith,” Claudia picked up on the thread of his previous remark, “is the mirror in which one catches sight of oneself, morally speaking."

“Yes, that’s vintage Adam Smith,” He rose from the chair and rubbed his face distractedly with the palm of a hand. “Are you doing anything later tonight?”

Having finished the repairs, all that remained was to stretch the decorative rubber molding around the base of the machine. Claudia’s unlovely face betrayed no emotion. “What exactly did you have in mind?”

*****

Lawrence Lanni took the call from his mother in his office at Brandenburg Mental Health Services. She was crying – blubbering hysterically – and making little to no sense. Claudia had gone mental – had a nervous breakdown or some similar form of acute psychological derangement. Could Lawrence stop by the house after work and please not to tell anyone about his sister’s emotional collapse? “You’re going to have to set things right,” his mother sobbed. “Put things back the way they were.”

Put things back the way they were. Lawrence didn’t know if that was such a great idea. As he understood his mother’s account, his sister, who had led a morbidly safe and predictable existence over the past twenty years, went out for drinks with a customer and spent the night at the man’s apartment. “Where is Claudia now?”

There was a brief pause as though his mother didn’t understand the question. “She’s where she always is – at the vacuum cleaner store.”

“So she didn’t really fall apart?”

“No, she’s at work, fixing broken motors and selling Hoover vacuum cleaners.”

Lawrence glanced up at the clock. His ten-thirty appointment, a paranoid schizophrenic with a Jesus complex would be waiting downstairs in the lobby collecting faults and injustices. “So she’s not in any immediate distress.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Mrs. Lanni hedged.

“Besides the sexual escapade, what other crimes did Claudia commit?”

His mother’s voice trailed away to an embarrassed whisper. “Nothing I care to discuss over the phone.” The line went dead. A moment later the intercom buzzed. Lawrence’s next appointment was waiting impatiently for his fifty-minute counseling session.”

*****

Lawrence arrived at his parent’s house shortly after seven. His father, who looked haggard, opened the door and ushered him into the living room where his mother was curled up on the sofa clutching a box of Kleenex in her lap. “Where’s Claudia?” Lawrence asked.

“Gone out,” his father said in a flat monotone.

Claudia seldom went anywhere after work. She watched the evening news, read or did needlepoint. Outside the immediate family, she had no personal life. “Gone where?”

“That’s what we need to discuss,” Mrs. Lanni replied, dabbing her swollen eyes with a tissue. As his mother explained things, Claudia went to work Tuesday morning but never showed up for supper. She came home the following morning and then only to take a quick shower and change her ratty clothes. “I asked her,” Mrs. Lanni continued, ‘Where were you all night?’ and she says, ‘I spent the night with a customer catching up on lost time.’”

“That’s a euphemism,” Mr. Lanni picked up the thread of his wife’s conversation, “a polite way of saying that Claudia - ”

“I understand,” Lawrence interrupted, “perfectly well what you’re saying.” In his practice as a clinical psychologist, Lawrence met woman who were pathologically promiscuous, hedonistic in the extreme. Some tried to pass their sexual gluttony off as a form of enlightened, libertarian fervor. This is the way I choose to live my life, and it’s none of your goddamn business! That was all well and good as long as carnage and collateral damage were minimal.

But of course, none of this applied to Claudia. She had always lived a reclusive, staid, stolid and utterly prudish existence. For the past fifteen years she went to work every day at Vacuum World. She attended Mass with her parents on Sundays; she subscribed to the Atlantic and the New York Times Review of Books. Claudia played on the tennis team in college. A few years back she joined a tennis club but after injuring her groin attempting an overhand lob, that, too, fell by the wayside. “Who is this guy she slept with?”

“That’s the problem,” his father said. “We know nothing about him.”

“Claudia and the man who took advantage of her naiveté—apparently they share a common interest in economics.” Mrs. Lanni seemed frightened dazed. The older woman tapped her forehead with a taut index finger as though trying to recall some tidbit of incidental trivia. “Your sister was prattling on and on - some crazy nonsense about invisible hands and eighteenth-century, English mercantilism.”

Yes, that would be vintage Claudia! Lawrence massaged his eyes and stared out the window. Across the street, the Hispanic neighbor was running a noisy riding lawnmower along the perimeter of his property. The Morales family – they emigrated originally from Guatemala. Nice people. Very sedate and proper. Not like the Lannis, whose nymphomaniacal daughter was whoring herself out to every Tom, Dick and Harry needing a replacement belt for their vacuum cleaner.

“I’m going to fix myself a cup of tea.” Mr. Lanni edged toward the kitchen and, with a flick of his eyes, indicated that Lawrence should join him. When they were safely out of earshot, the older man said, “Your sister’s always been a frugal sort.” He put the water on to boil and setting a teabag in a cup alongside the sugar bowl. “Less than ten years after buying the Vacuum World franchise, she squirreled away enough savings to take out a mortgage on the building outright.” Mr. Lanni removed a spoon from the drawer and laid it next to the teacup. “Since no one’s ever shown any romantic interest in Claudia, a parent can’t help but worry that this fellow – whoever the hell he is – might be some conniving gold digger taking unfair advantage of your sister’s loneliness and emotional vulnerability.”

“A gold digger is a treacherous woman who flimflams men.” Lawrence stared at his father in mild disbelief. “You’re using the term incorrectly.”

Mr. Lawrence waved both hands over his head in exasperation. “You know perfectly well what I mean!” The water had come to a boil and he removed the kettle from the heat. “Claudia’s got a small fortune salted away. She’s acting out of character. Something has to be done to protect her.”

Put. Put. Put. Put. Through the side window Lawrence could see Mr. Morales puttering along the portion of his property that bordered the street. His youngest daughter, a chubby, chocolate-skinned girl with Mayan features, was sitting on his lap, clutching a doll. “And what the hell am I suppose to do?” he fumed.

“Go visit Claudia. See out what the hell is going on with this shady character. Get a handle on his modus operandi.”

“In addition to mental health,” Lawrence groused, “now I’m a private investigator?”

Mr. Lawrence patted his son on the shoulder. “Do it for your mother’s sake.”

Lawrence was tired. After listening to other people’s problems for eight solid hours the last thing he wanted was this. He often thought of Brandenburg Mental Health as a veritable Pandora’s Box of human anguish and nuttiness. Many of the clients, like the paranoid fellow zonked out on stelazine he counseled after his mother’s phone call, were incorrigible. No, that was a poor choice of words. Crooks and pathological liars were incorrigible. The mental patients reminded Lawrence of characters in a Greek tragedy where their miserable fate was preordained.

Claudia had made a life – a life apart – and who was to judge the intrinsic worth of the decisions and choices she had made along the way. By comparison with the rogue’s gallery of personality disorders and mental defectives who plodded through the mental health Clinic on any given day, Claudia Lanni could serve as poster child for a healthy and mature lifestyle.

Mr. Lanni removed the unused teabag from the cup. He put the spoon, cup and saucer away. He hadn’t wanted anything to drink. It was just a ruse to get Lawrence alone, subterfuge of a benign sort. “I saw your sister for a few brief minutes earlier tonight before she ran off to spend quality time with her mystery man.”

“And how did she seem?” Lawrence asked.

“Like a completely different woman. Grotesquely happy! Her eyes sparkled and cheeks were flushed. She was brimming over with ...”

“Passion?”

Mr. Lawrence grimaced. “Not necessarily my first choice of words but, yes, that too.”

*****

When the children were young, Lawrence’s eighty-year-old maternal grandmother came to live with the family. Grandma Sylvester hated her son-in-law. She always felt that her daughter could have done infinitely better and told anyone who cared to listen that the marriage was an unfortunate lapse of judgment that could only be rectified by divorce. No matter that Lawrence’s parents got along splendidly and had a marriage better than most.

Knowing how she felt, Mr. Lanni ignored his mother-in-law. When the incessant nagging got unbearable, Mrs. Lanni would shout, “Shut up you insufferable witch!” But the woman, who was crippled with rheumatoid arthritis and navigated the house in a motorized wheelchair, courtesy of her hated son-in-law, was fearlessly outspoken. She actually relished the strife.

“Every time she does something hateful, Grandma acts like she’s having multiple orgasms,” Claudia observed mirthlessly. After each spiteful harangue, the girl noted how the elderly woman smiled gleefully, seemed more physically animated.

“What’s an orgasm?” Lawrence asked.

“You’ll find out soon enough.”

Grandma Sylvester viewed Claudia as a major disappointment. “It’s a shame you’re not pretty like your mother.”

Claudia winced but caught her emotional second wind and replied, “You say something wickedly cruel and then you smile at the victim of your abuse. That’s sadistic.”

“Well it’s perfectly true. Just look in the living room mirror if you have any doubts.”

“I have no illusions about either one of us,” the young girl shot back. The old woman stared at her with unbridled malice.

One day Grandma Sylvester was badmouthing Mr. Lanni in front of the children when Claudia muttered, “We’re going for a little ride.” The girl was thirteen years old at the time, Lawrence two years younger. She wheeled her grandmother out to the curb next to the trash barrels and pulled up the rubber brake pads firmly against the wheels. Claudia dropped down on her haunches and stuck her nose in front of the decrepit woman’s wrinkled face. “I dragged the trash barrels out to the street earlier this morning.” She pointed to a green container resting no more than a foot from the woman’s right elbow. “Some animal must have ripped the bag apart, because there’s about a million and a half maggots crawling around under the lid.”

“You’re full of shit up to your eyebrows,” The grandmother hissed.

“Really?” Claudia removed the plastic lid. She grabbed the handle and tipped the barrel at a forty-five degree angle. A swarm of white, frothy worms were writhing along the inner surface of the putrid container. “I’m going to leave you here so the sanitation engineers can haul you away with the smelly garbage.”

Mrs. Sylvester began to cry. She whimpered and moaned and made queer, animalistic sounds that were painful for Lawrence to hear. “This isn’t funny, Claudia,” Lawrence cautioned. “I don’t like what you’re doing.”

She grabbed her brother by the shirt collar and dragged him back in the house. “It’s June... seventy degrees with bright sunshine. The old coot isn’t going to shrivel up and die.”

Lawrence began to cry. He went and looked out the window at his grandmother slumped over, her scrawny shoulders heaving up and down with despair. His father was at work. Mrs. Lanni had gone to Stop & Shop for groceries and wasn’t due back for another half hour. “You can’t just leave her out there.”

“Shut up!”

A blue Toyota cruised by and the driver waved at Mrs. Sylvester. At the far end of the street the car pulled up at the stop sign before continuing on its way. “What if a neighbor sees her and calls the police?”

“For as long as I can remember, that horrid woman has been saying hurtful things. Now she gets a dose of her own medicine.”

Five minutes passed. Claudia went out to the curb and retrieved her grandmother. “If you say a word about this to anyone,” the girl announced in a perfunctory, offhand manner, “I’ll come into your room late at night and hold a pillow over your pus-ugly mug until all the hatefulness is choked out of you.” The woman who had a vindictive rebuttal for every occasion, seemed in a fog. “I’m only ugly on the outside,” Claudia added as an afterthought. “But you wouldn’t know anything about that.”

Thirty-five minutes later Mrs. Lanni returned home. “Children, go get the groceries from the car.” She turned to the listless, subdued woman in the wheelchair. “You seem a bit peaked.”
Mrs. Sylvester wet her lips. She crooked her neck to one side and stared pensively out the bay window toward the curb where the noisy diesel-engine garbage truck had just pulled up alongside their house. A dark-skinned man deftly lifted the thirty-gallon, plastic barrel dumping the contents – maggots and all - into the rear. “I’m fine,” she croaked. “Everything’s just swell!”

Later that night, Lawrence shuffled into his sister’s bedroom and stood by the night table. “I don’t think you’re ugly.”

His sister reached out and grabbed his slender wrist. Pulling it close, she planted a wet kiss in the palm then closed the fingers one-by-one in a loose fist. “I am rather homely,” Claudia said, “but there’s infinitely more to life than fashion and glamour.”

“I wouldn’t love you a tiny bit more even if you looked, danced and sang like Hannah Montana,” the boy said haltingly. There was no reply. “Would you have suffocated Grandma Sylvester if she told on us?”

“For all her hatefulness the woman is basically a coward.” She came at the question obliquely. “After that business with the maggots, she would never risk finding out how psychotically demented I am.” A moment passed and Claudia began to giggle.

*****

The next day, Lawrence stopped by Vacuum World in the early afternoon just as a UPS truck was pulling away from the curb. “What’s that?” He asked, indicating a small cardboard box with a bright red label.

“Electrical components for small motors.” His sister cracked opens the lid and took visual inventory . The box contained an assortment of cylindrical brushes, tiny springs, armatures, circuit breakers, and field coils. Lawrence had watched his sister strip motors, hunting down pesky, electrical problems. By process of elimination she discovered what was wrong, then repaired or replaced it. More recently, Claudia taught herself to clean and polish commutators using fine-grade sandpaper. She could inspect pitted or discolored bars - an indication of open circuits in the field coil. She could even check internal brushes and spring pressure to ensure solid contact and knew how to use a voltmeter by touching the electric probe to adjacent bars. If the reading was a low, Claudia replaced a damaged coil then rebuilt the unit.

“I met this guy, an economics professor at Brown.”

“Okay.”

“We’re in love.”

“So I heard. Does Mr. Wonderful have a name?”

“Marty... Martin Zuckerman, and I need a small favor. I want to bring Marty by the house this weekend to meet the folks, and I figured with your expertise in mental health...”