“Tonight Andrew S. Lang is taking Lenore Beadsman to some gymnastics show.”
“No.”
“The symbolism of which doesn’t escape me, rest assured.”
“I think there’s been some kind of mistake. I think you maybe misheard him.”
“We’ll see.”
/e/
“This is suck!” said a small oriental man ahead of Lenore in the line.
He turned to her and said it again. “This is suck!”
With him was another man and two women, all in leatherish jackets. They were all nodding, agreeing that it was suck. Lenore thought they were maybe Vietnamese. She knew Vietnamese people tend to have really high cheekbones. Lenore’s junior roommate at Oberlin had been a Vietnamese woman.
“Pardon me?” Lenore said to the man.
The man took his hands out of his jacket pockets. “This is suck, that we must wait like this. We have been this line for a long time.”
“Pretty decent little old crowd, all right,” said Wang-Dang Lang. He jingled his car keys.
Lenore turned from the man and looked behind her in line. There she could see two girls, from maybe about high school, with short hair Lenore could tell was a very strange color, even between the lights of the Building and the marquee. They both had on big winter coats that looked like some shiny quilts sewn together. Whatever they were talking about they couldn’t believe.
“I just could not believe it,” said one of the girls, who, Lenore saw, had paper clips hanging from her ears.
“What an asshole,” said the other girl.
“No, I mean I could not believe it. When he said it to me, I just totally freaked out. I totally freaked. I was like:” the girl gestured.
“What a gleet.”
It was cold for September, tonight. Lenore had on her gray cloth coat. Lang had on a sheepskin jacket with some false wool fluff around the collar. They were now near the ticket window, after about half an hour.
“Very nice of you to take me, Andy,” Lenore said. “On such short notice, what with Mindy in town, work, et cetera.”
Lang smiled down at her and played with his keys.
“Rick just pretty clearly didn’t feel like going,” Lenore went on, “and he more or less told me to ask you to go.”
“Well shoot, that makes it a bit like an order, then.”
“Candy has to work tonight over at Allied, is the thing.”
“I don’t look at it like a job, Lenore,” Lang said. “I’m looking forward to it.”
“Kopek Spasova’s really supposed to be great.”
“And your Daddy told you to go?”
“Dad doesn’t tell me to do anything. He said he’d appreciate it, is all. If I didn’t want to go, I wouldn’t go.”
Lang grinned. “You sure about that, now.”
“Of course I’m sure. If I thought this was going to be suck, to coin a phrase, I wouldn’t do it.”
“My own personal Daddy tells me to do something, I as a rule do it.”
Lenore looked at him. Her breath went up toward him a little before it disappeared. “Except he told you not to marry Mindy Metalman, you said in the car.”
Lang laughed. “OK, usually I do what he says.” He looked serious. “Sometimes me and Daddy just take a while to see eye to eye.”
Erieview Plaza was all lit up. A marquee had been set up in front of the Erieview Tower lobby, by the ticket window. On the marquee a little electric girl was pulsing around a bar, connected to it by her feet. Beside her throbbed the bright-white perimeter of a baby, with a spoon in its hand. Yellow light from the windows of the Bombardini Building across the Plaza illuminated the rear of the line for the tower lobby.
“So let me get this totally straight, for the record and all,” said Lang, watching his own breath. “You’re just here ‘cause you want to be. In toto. ”
“I like gymnastics. I was totally glued to the TV for the World Championships, last month.”
“But what I understand, this little girl’s helping these Gerbers launch a kind of a Tet Offensive against your Daddy’s company. That’s what Neil said.”
“That’s beside the point. I’m not Dad, or Dad’s company.”
“So what’re we doing here, then? I can think of a thousand funner places for us to be.”
“You’re no joke, brother,” the Vietnamese man in front of them said as his group got to the ticket window. He and one of the women began to talk very fast at the man behind the window.
“Good God, that’s Mr. Beeberling, selling tickets,” said Lenore.
Lang looked briefly at the ticket window before returning to scanning the line.
“He’s really Bob Gerber’s right hand man,” Lenore said. “He’s the one who supposedly came up with this ingredient in Gerber baby food that’s supposed to help babies chew.”
“Instead of singing like birds?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
There was definitely some sort of controversy at the window. The Vietnamese man was jabbing his finger toward the doors to the Erieview lobby. Mr. Beeberling was being told that he was suck.
“Look here,” Lang said, leaning way over to make himself heard in Lenore’s ear above the din around the window. The side of his jaw was smooth and smelled sweet, even in the cold air.
“Look here,” he said. “If we just go on back right now, ‘Dallas’ is on. We can watch ’Dallas.‘ It’s a show that kicks ass. I just got a new TV, a big sucker. I got wine. We’ll have more fun than a whole barrel full of prehensile-toed little tumblers.” He stopped and looked at Lenore. “Of course I guess that’s assuming you’re only doing what you want to do, not what your Daddy or anybody else tells you to do.”
“Hey, look…,” Lenore was saying up to Lang when they were pushed by the force of the line behind them into the glass of the ticket window. Lang lost his cowboy hat. Lenore dropped her purse, and lottery tickets spilled out and went everywhere. She bent and started picking them up. Some blew away.
“Hold your horses God damn it!” Lang shouted back at the line. The two girls, orange and pink hair in the light of the marquee, gestured.
“Hi Mr. Beeberling,” Lenore said, stuffing the last of the bright tickets into her purse. “Two, I guess, please.”
“Lenore,” said Mr. Beeberling. “Lenore Beadsman.”
“Andrew Sealander Lang, here,” Lang said absently, looking around for his hat.
“Two coming up,” smiled Mr. Beeberling. He opened a drawer and began to rummage. He was wearing a porkpie hat that said GERBER’S across the brim. “Just missed Foamwhistle and your Jars guy, Goggins, you know,” he said. “Just came through.”
“Blanchard, or Sigurd?” said Lang.
Lenore turned and stared at Lang.
“Well now here we go,” said Mr. Beeberling. He pushed back his hat and smiled. “That’ll be four hundred dollars, please.”
“Pardon?”
“Special Stonecipheco rate,” Mr. Beeberling said. “If you’re going to scout us out, you can at least help to defray costs.”
“But except I’m not here for Stonecipheco,” Lenore said as Lang fought off another surge of the line behind them. “I’m just here because I really like Kopek Spasova.”
“Well certainly,” said Mr. Beeberling. “So you can be thoroughly entertained, and help defray, all at once.” He gestured back at the long line and the circle of pale breath that wove into itself and vanished above it. “You see what the fray is like. Surely you want to help defray.”
“There’s just no way you can tell me two tickets can cost four hundred dollars,” Lenore said.
“Well, these’re really big tickets, as you can see for yourself,” Mr. Beeberling said, holding up two large black tickets behind the window and sizing them up suggestively with a thumb and forefinger.