Charles Bock - Beautiful Children

“Score one for the good guys,” Lincoln said, calling from outside his office. Not only was the banquet on, but thanks to the Khan's largesse, every red cent that was raised would go directly toward the construction of a support center for homeless, runaway, and at-risk teenagers. Lorraine, for the first time in who knew how long, heard a hint of enthusiasm in her husband's voice. As if saying the details out loud confirmed them, as if sharing made each victory even more true, he went over the laundry list of what was being comped: the two-hundred-and-fifty-seat Oasis Banquet Hall, the four different types of appetizers for the reception, soup or salad at dinner, as well as a choice of three entrées, dessert, and coffee, all from the Khan's seventy-five-dollar-a-plate banquet menu, which wasn't the highest-end menu, Lincoln explained, but wasn't cheap, and certainly was more than they had any right to expect. “Catering staff. Even floral!”

The only problems were minor. Mainly, it was impossible to have the event on the one-year anniversary of the night Newell had not come home. That date was booked.

He said this knowing that when the proposal had been notecards and Post-it notes, Lorraine's primary organizing principle had been having the banquet on the one-year anniversary. He talked plainly, in that troubleshooting, preemptive way of his, moving smoothly into the list of perfectly agreeable days the Khan had offered. Lorraine said nothing. He moved to the next sticking point.

She listened, then repeated the next problem— “Cash bar?” —with a disbelief that suggested they might as well cancel the event. “Jesus Christ, Link, for five hundred dollars, people expect an open bar. You go help and get sloshed. That's the whole idea.”

His silence was every bit as loud as her rejoinder, and just like that, in the course of discussing the basic date and price of this fund-raiser, it was obvious that their relationship was not about to be repaired, but was at a much deeper impasse. In the following days, the price of the tickets became a wedge issue and a symbol and a Ping-Pong ball, volleyed and smashed back and forth, Lincoln arguing they should knock down the price a hundred or even two, maybe have the guests pay for their own booze. He had no problem asking clients to buy tickets, getting them to go to bat for the cause with their superiors, or even purchase corporate tables, he was just a little reluctant to look like he was putting the screws to anyone, especially anyone who had placed their trust in him. See, unlike in this house, at work there were actually people who cared what he said. To which Lorraine answered Mmm-hmm. With an exaggerated slowness, as if the person she was addressing were mildly retarded, she'd explained that the elite nature of their fund-raiser mattered at least as much as the goodness of the cause being championed. “Part of the way you make something elite is to charge a lot of money for it,” she said. “You get celebrities to endorse a good cause and then set a ridiculous price to get in. Anybody who's anyone in this town will want to be there, and anyone who thinks of themselves as on their way to being somebodies will be right behind, clamoring for a better view.”

It was one thing to be civil when you were polishing an outline. Quite another when you had a whole evening to put together. All of a sudden, Lincoln and Lorraine actually had tickets to sell, an entire banquet to plan, and all the problems this entailed. If Lorraine wasn't coming up with options for dealing with the cash bar, she was drawing up new schemes to maximize revenue, getting competitive estimates on invitations, playing phone tag with the Khan's banquet planner, going back and forth about just what the hotel florist was or was not capable of doing. After untold requests, she received a bunch of faxes with the floor plans of the Oasis Hall, as well as the dimensions of the different sizes of the various shapes of banquet tables. Calculating how many round tables could fit in the room, as compared to square or rectangular tables, Lorraine did more math than she'd imagined her brain could handle, and came up with a plan that would squeeze in twelve more tables of eight into the room, which would allow them to cut down on the ticket price and end up with the same take, or maybe keep tickets at their present cost and add fifty grand to the night's gross. The banquet planner left a perky answer on the machine, in which she explained that Lorraine also had to calculate chairs and bodies into the equation. Usually this added a ring of eighteen inches or so around each table. “But it was a super idea,” said the planner, her voice so insincere it was nauseating.

Time was a whip, lashing down, and meanwhile the tasks did not end. A connection in the Khan's community outreach department forwarded Lincoln the corporate mailing list for fund-raising/charitable activities. Soon, Lorraine had volunteers from the Nevada Child Search making calls and stuffing scented envelopes of heavy cardstock. A booking agency returned her call about a possible celebrity spokesman, informing Lorraine that the star of a highly rated prime-time family drama was a dream to work with, so long as he had an unlimited amount of methadone and hookers. Lorraine rolled with the punches and took her lumps. Every day stretched with dead space when nobody was calling her back and she was on hold with someone's secretary, and she filled the time by clicking back and forth between files and windows, making notes on stalled projects, revising lists with days of unreturned phone calls, and organizing priorities for things that, dammit, had to move forward. She could recite any of these lists by memory, explaining how things were progressing with ticket sales, which people she was still waiting on, and the history of negotiations with each of them. She clicked back and forth chronically, habitually. Getting things right meant more to her than to anyone else, so why should she delegate? Nobody else could do anything, least of all Lincoln. So what if he'd transferred a bunch of tapes onto discs? She had been the one who had been against Newell going out. From the beginning, she had known something was wrong with that Kenny. Newell had told her Kenny was a mutant sewer dweller, he'd told her that Kenny was a total perv. Cheeseburgers and then anal sodomy had been the plan for that night, and Lorraine had warned her husband that Newell would end up buried in the desert with Hoffa and then, against her gut instincts, she'd caved, agreed to let her son go out with his friend. And for what? So she could have an expensive dinner. So she could lie still while her husband fucked her. Lincoln was the one who had let her son go away and he could claim this was revisionist history until the sun jumped over the moon for all Lorraine cared. She had listened to him on that fateful Saturday night but she would not be so foolish again. Thus, she made sure the caterer understood there would be no ham on the menu. ( “Ham at a fund-raiser? Haven't you ever heard of Jews?” ) She engaged the banquet planner in deep, meaningful discussions as to whether white orchid centerpieces took up too much table space. Lorraine redrew the seating chart and put all the volunteers from Nevada Child Search near the doors to the kitchen; she knew she was being a ruthless bitch, but the fact remained, they would be getting their tickets for free; meanwhile some corporation shelling out five grand for a table couldn't be sitting in the back.

And still there was the nagging matter of putting fannies in the seats. Husbands who had long flirted with Lorraine at cocktails under the guise of social levity were more than happy to hear from her. Men she had condescended to, politely ignored, or otherwise considered out of her league, for the most part they took her calls as well. Lorraine listened patiently as Gail Deevers told her about her son's heroic return from overseas, and then the orders for his second deployment. She called friends whose lunch appointments she hadn't been strong enough to keep, this time offering to take them for a bite. Local politicians received visits, as did the rivals who Lorraine knew coveted their city council seats. She cajoled and schmoozed. When it became necessary, she even hounded Lincoln. Lorraine did not particularly care if he felt she had taken this over and turned it into another one of her crusades. She did not give a crap about all the time it took to get appointments with the different resorts up and down the Strip, did not believe him when he said the wheels were in motion, people were talking to people, he was just waiting on them to get back to him. Lorraine recognized there was truth in what he was saying, but time's lash was cracking down, taking big chunks out of her psyche, and no matter how much Lincoln explained that you had to know the way things worked, Lorraine could not just let everything take its course. Instead she placed calls to the few choreographers who were still around from back in the day, as well as girlfriends that, during the past year, she had fallen out of touch with.