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.