Best to Laugh: A Novel by Lorna Landvik

. . . Frank.”
    Solange pushed aside the curtain behind my desk and entered the room.
    “Solange,” I began, “this is—”
    “—I’m sorry,” she said, crossing her arms as she regarded the interloper. “I told you before: Beat Street isn’t interested in punk rock at this time.”
    “Yeah, but you’ll change your mind if you listen to this,” said Blank Frank, digging a cassette tape out of his pocket.
    “Look,” said Solange, “right now we’re just not—”
    The musician darted toward my desk and set the cassette on it.
    “Take a listen, okay? That’s all I’m asking.” Backing toward the door, he looked at Solange, palms out. “It won’t make your ears bleed or anything.”
    “It’s the ‘anything’ I’m worried about.”
    Before pushing through the door, Blank Frank smiled at me. “Just let me know what you think, uh—”
    “—Candy. It’s Candy.”
    I ’D SEEN B LANK F RANK a few times on the grounds of Peyton Hall, in the company of a man so textbook dapper in his dress that he should have been twirling a walking stick.
    “Who’s that?” I had asked the first time I saw him. Having accompanied Ed to Limelight Liquors where he’d bought a bottle of wine for another date, we were coming up the Boulevard when I noticed the slim, silver-haired man in a suit and bowtie climbing the steps of the four-plex next to mine.
    “Francis Flover,” said Ed. “He used to own the Bel Mondo, this nightclub on Sunset that was really famous in the ’40s and ’50s. He and Robert X. Roberts hate each other.”
    “Why?”
    Ed shrugged. “Some Hollywood slight—who knows? Maybe he didn’t like the way Robert X. tipped his hatcheck girls.”
    “Look at that ascot! He’s so—” I searched for an expression I rarely had occasion to use—“natty.”
    Days later, I ran into Francis—almost literally—as I was coming out of my apartment and he was coming out of my neighbor’s.
    “Candy, meet one of my oldest pals,” Melvin Slyke said, and with great courtliness Francis Flover executed a snappy little bow before taking my hand and telling me he was “enchanted.”
    Another time, on the way to the pool, I saw him walking with someone whose sartorial tastes lay on the opposite pole from his own; where Mr. Flover wore a bowler hat, this guy wore a blue mohawk, where a fob watch might be tucked into Mr. Flover’s vest pocket, thick chains hungin heavy loops from the skinny kid’s belt—so much metal he could have outfitted his own private chain gang.
    “Candy!” said the older gentleman. He doffed his hat. “Meet my son, Francis Jr.”
    The younger man ducked his head in greeting, and I saw that he wore a small silver hoop through his eyebrow. It was the first time I’d ever seen a facial piercing and I tried not to stare.
    Now at my desk, after reading the label of the tape Blank Frank had given me, I put it into the cassette player and said, “And for all you listeners out there, here’s something from a new band called United States of Despair.”
    I pressed play, and an assault of guitar chords filled the room like the angry voices of a mob.
    Solange’s reaction was not favorable.
    “Turn it down! Better yet, turn it off!”
    I half-obliged her by doing the former, and we listened to a voice belonging to a lead screamer shouting over the guitar, bass, and drums. I couldn’t make out many of the lyrics, but I did recognize the phrases “death sentence,” “shock the septic system,” and “annihilation-celebration,” which were repeated in a chant.
    After we listened to the cassette’s three songs, Solange replaced it with one of her own, and the twangy strains of some cowboy band filled the air.
    “Ahh,” said my coworker, her hand to her chest. “Yodel me back to civility, Otto Gray.”
    A LTHOUGH I MISSED THE ENTERTAINING DRIVER who announced my stop as Bronson, Charlie Charlie Bronson, I hardly took the bus to work anymore. It was only about a mile and a half from