Charles Bock - Beautiful Children

The scene: Lorraine rising neatly from a waiting room chair, smoothing out her little gray business skirt, approaching on her three-inch heels; Lorraine smiling wide, maintaining eye contact — be it with the oversize gray and wheezing executive vice president in the cheap suit, the slick-haired associate with the pockmarked skin and nicotine fingers, or the friend of a friend whose laser-white teeth gleamed even brighter than his pinky ring. They never resembled anything close to what she expected power brokers to look like, yet Lorraine effusively thanked one man after another, saying I can't tell you how much I appreciate you taking the time from your busy schedule to meet with me on short notice. She was equally businesslike in acknowledging each apology for having kept her waiting so long, brushing aside the delays as if forty-five minutes were nothing more than an overheard sneeze. Chuckling at anything resembling a joke, throwing tasteful compliments around as if they were pennies, Lorraine made the requisite amount of small talk and headed into each man's office, all the while waiting for that telltale sigh, Okay, her signal to get down to business. More than half the meetings took place around one p.m., because the guy she was meeting with had a full schedule. Instead of leading her back into an office, he'd want to know if they could do this over lunch. On a crowded elevator she'd receive her signal— So, Miss, ah, Mrs. Ewing, what can I do you for? And then, while trailing the huffing fat man — who himself was negotiating his way through slot players — Lorraine would start talking. Yes, she thought it was unusual for power brokers to act this way, but Lorraine did not ask questions. Rather, she put up with their idiosyncrasies, even the buffets, those god-awful things, Lorraine following her erstwhile dining partner while he flashed his VIP employee card to the hostess and bypassed the line of waiting tourists, Lorraine sliding her tray down the long metal rows as if she were back in a grade-school cafeteria, doing her best not to gag when steam rose from the mounds of glazed food.

Her dining partners filled out keno slips for a dollar, Just to have some action going. They kept an eye out for the ticket girl. They called Lorraine and the ticket girl and the waitress darling. Still, Lorraine didn't lose her cool. Not when she got asked to stop her presentation so they could take phone calls. Not when they kept jabbering and she could feel her own phone in her purse, vibrating with the announcement of what could only be the return call of someone she'd been trying to reach for a week. Lorraine stayed controlled and picked at her salad and waited patiently. At the proper moment, with a grace that seemed offhanded, she resumed her pitch, picking up with exactly what needed to be known about her son.

These men had gold watchbands thick as bicycle chains. They had hairpieces that looked like roadkill, tie clips with boyhood vulgarities engraved into them, manners that would make inbreds blush. However, it also must be said that these men were shrewd enough to notice the undercurrents of discomfort that rippled from Lorraine when a guiding hand was placed on the small of her back. Her dining companions inevitably would look across the table and see the damage the year had done to her. Without question she remained in the higher echelon of females. She wore expensive lines of makeup that accentuated every drop of the beauty that for so long she had taken for granted. Nevertheless, the signs were there, appearing at select moments — as she was listening to reasons it was tough for that particular resort to commit revenue for the banquet, for example: or, right when the executive was shoveling another spoon of macaroni and cheese into his mouth, and kept talking, exposing a mouth of yellow goop. The days of slights would take their mounting toll, and it would become impossible for Lorraine to contemplate a next step, and if her dining companion happened to look up from his trough, he would see sockets hollow and deep in her face, cheeks no longer carrying a downy blush of life: he would see slight creases carved into the corners of her mouth, her face hard and rigid, its skin stretching tightly like a thin spray of paint. He would see Lorraine's determination flagging, her beauty fading. Composure that was an imitation of composure. Revealed in her eyes, a pain that would not end.

With less than three weeks before the event, Lorraine received a call from one of the city's beloved figures, an elderly man reputed to have been a minor member of the Rat Pack. His impish grin commonly popped up on television whenever a news magazine needed a quote about the Vegas of old. One of Lincoln's contacts had put Lorraine in touch with the guy, and though Lincoln had been dubious— I don't know how much pull that old man has anymore, I mean, does he even have a job? — nonetheless, Lorraine met with him, twice, both times at one of the oldest casinos on the Strip, a resort that was perpetually switching owners and being renovated. In a wood-paneled steak house overlooking the breadth of the Strip, Lorraine, each time, was taken to the same table — a corner in the back, next to a massive window where you could look down at the neon marquees. There, the old man was entrenched, his table a bevy of activity: waiters and medium-level hotel employees delivering hushed messages, his bookie dropping off handfuls of betting slips. Throughout the meal, diners left other tables to stop by and glad-hand. The old man thanked them and made sure to introduce Lorraine, saying that she was having a banquet for what was it — right, kids that run away. He told the visitors they should call her and get involved. He chewed on his dentures and followed Lorraine's talking points, at key moments putting his hand on her wrist and letting it sit there, as if to say I am with you. His wrist had a jewel-encrusted Rolex around it. His fingers were thick with chunky gold. Long after her presentation, the old man kept Lorraine at the table, entertaining her with ribald stories — about walking into his office one day to find Dean Martin taking Lola Falana frombehind; about Sinatra ordering him to steal Sammy Davis Jr.'s glass eye and the subsequent hijinks. Lorraine laughed hard enough that she became embarrassed. During their second meeting, the old man repeated each story, verbatim, and Lorraine giggled anyway. They sat and talked well beyond the lunch hour and deep into the afternoon, until the restaurant was empty of customers and the waiters were eating their own meals, and each time Lorraine had left the steak house feeling a bit sorry for the sweet lonely man. At the same time, memos from the department of self-interest said this was a good development, if he was going to add his clout, the banquet could really take off.

For a week she did not hear from him, and her calls consistently ended up routed to an answering machine, where she had to wait through a backlog of beeps. Lorraine didn't hold it against him, as she didn't exactly have time for his dissembling, anyway. Charity fund-raisers weren't like baseball games or movie theaters, you didn't have walk-up crowds lining up at a ticket booth. According to the latest figures, it was going to take a minor miracle to get the room beyond 60 percent capacity. Lorraine hustled to come up with ways to sell seats at discount prices, even as she worked to reel in corporate clients, while at the same time feuding with the Banquet Bitch over appetizers. The head chef was after her to turn in a final menu and a definite number for the dinners. There also were brush fires with the florist, with a pair of rival politicians, even the valet parking union, which Lorraine did not even understand because why should parking a car for the banquet be different from parking any other car? Lorraine had to get fitted for her gown. She had to come up with matching shoes. There were complimentary goodie bags to assemble for the celebrities, and she hadn't thought about how to get whatever was supposed to go in them, wasn't even sure what she'd promised the booking agency anymore. Her plate was overflowing and the old guy was about last in the line of her priorities, and so when the call came in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon, it took Lorraine a few moments to realize whose squeaky voice was asking her to stop by his office. It took a few more seconds to make the connection between his office and the restaurant table, and when Lorraine did this, she felt a spasm of hope. “Give me a half hour,” she told the old man.