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Maude Oswego, with her back to her daughter and her head in the refrigerator door, asked the girl to call pops up from hell and drag him kicking and screaming to dinner. She was looking for the Fresca cans she had asked Luigo to chill.
Hours ago, Luigo had put the fresca in the freezer. The cans had exploded--frozen sludge over everything, like something out of Ghostbusters--and Zed, with the amp up to nine, nearly, by the sound of it--would protest to have heard nothing. When Maude turned around from the scene of the bombing, she saw her daughter sitting at the countertop, swaying lightly from side to side--left to right, left to right. The girl was highlighting, in broad sweeps of lemon yellow, whatever thick book she was posing with that day. Extracting a shrapnel chunk of can with one hand, Maude slammed the freezer drawer with the other. Her daughter did not look up.
"Get Jareth to do it," the girl said.
"Jareth is studying."
Leona raised the book so that its spine was made visible to her mother, who leant contraposto on the sub-zero. The spine read, in gilt letters, "Constitutional Law, Vol. II."
"How was Volume One?" Maude said.
The girl shrugged as if to say that the book had been pretty awful but she had endured. "Ask Celia to do it," she said.
"Celia is out."
"Can I be out? Just pretend I"m out." She looked faux-dotingly at her mother. Maude had tied a muslin apron over a kimono-like wrap-dress of flowing, alarming fuschia-hued silk. Did microwaving tupperware really neccessitate an apron?
"The goddamn soda exploded and I'm all in a tizzy," Maude said. "Just do it,"
Maude had a habit of tapping her nails when she was waiting, and she was doing that now, as if to enforce via an imitation of water torture's slow pulse how much she was really suffering. Here, now.
And so Leona, with a slam of Con Law part deux, loped out of the room with an exaggerrated sense of duty in every step, though her footfalls, falling as they did on the plush wall-to-wall white carpet Maude had newly installed, barely resounded.

To get to the basement Leona walked through the dining room, where the table was set, to the den, where an L-shaped leather couch faced a console of white wicker on whose top shelf sat a television. The set was on, playing The Simpsons. The show was on mute, with subtitles for the hearing impaired, in Espanol. A single shoulder enwrapped in gritty hemp poncho rose above the seabed of leatherette like a volcanic island. Within the poncho was Leona's brother, Jareth.
"Studying?" she said swayingly.
"Spanish," Jareth grunted.
As she cut, in scissored steps, toward the basement door, Leona happened to glance outward through the sliding glass doors to the pool, where lollygagging in a chaise lounge, one thin arm folded over the pits of her eyes as though to block out a sun which had long ago lowed, lay Celia.
"She's out alright," Leona yelled back through the complex of rooms toward her unhearing mother. "Out." Pause. "Side." And with that, she threw open the door to the basement and flung herself down the dark triangle of steps toward the room, which bayed warmly below like a sleeping dog.
Paul was down there, his two wiry feet planted parallel in flip-flops. He was sitting on the red sofa holding the blue guitar and playing over and over again a chord which appeared to be broken. Only at the very bottom step did Leona locate her father. Zed Oswego lay prostate on the studio carpet, one long monkeyish arm folded over his paunch, the other reaching up and over the mixing board on the desk above, where ever so gently he was twisting and untwisting a dial. His eyes were closed. They opened only after he looked up for the reason as to why Paul had stopped playing the E-minor chord; There was a 21-year-old girl standing in the center of the room, arms-crossed like an angry teacher, waiting to speak. "Mom says dinner." She let out a breath. "What're you working on?"
"The Opera," Paul said.
"What part?"
"The prodigal son returns to find the Casino."
"His house is a Casino?"
"NO!" Zed said, ignoring his daughter as he sat upright in lotus position and turned toward Paul , nearly blacking out with the speed of that effort after the hour spent lying on the ground. "That's what Genius Paul wants."
"Is it?" Paul said.
"It's just between. The little part of reality between two behemoths from the Devil."
"Dense," Leona said, and headed up the stairs two-at-a-time, veering in a bee-line toward the chocolate brick of Con Law, a sort of Bible that promised to regulate the insane.

When Jareth, aged fifteen and dopey in his affections, saw Paul at the dinner table, he smiled sheepishly and pulled out the chair beside him. A gaunt man with a stooped posture, Paul's hair--long, grey, wiry and crimped--mimicked his form. He was never without his flip flops--"my havaianas," he called them, as in "Has anyone seen my havaianas?" He even drove in the things, drove a powder-blue Volvo sedan whose backseat folded down for "equipment" or a mattress. Paul might as well have been a boarder--the car was a permanent fixture on DePauw street, never parking in the driveway--out of courtesy he said, but really out of a deep fear of having his car blocked--a tragedy which too often befell him out in LA. He lived in a rat-trap apartment in Mar Vista, payed for by steady royalties, but slept most nights on the basement's red velour pullout couch--one of the few pieces of furniture that was a holdover from Mr. and Mrs. Oswego's first East Village apartment, and he liked it for its location--in the studio--as much as he liked it for its scent, a nostalgic perfume of pot, sage, sex and the strange reek of bitter carrots. Still, Paul rarely ate dinner with the family. Jareth understood. Paul, as did he, preferred three-dollar buckets of Popeye's fried chicken to what his mother put on the table. He had explained to Maude that Chef Luigo's cooking "didn't agree with him" as he had been "raised differently." But tonight, he was slathering ketchup over a slice of low-fat cottage-cheese shrimp quiche and telling Maude a story.
"...And I had been seeing you around with your Diet sodas, and you're a lovely lady--"
.........PART MISSING FROM NOTEBOOK.......

... both of them lacking the spark of Zed, whose dumb prattle and doting questions needled him toward the center of conversations. Paul was alight now, with Zed at his side, asking "Jareth, honey, could you pass the ketchup? That looks marvelous--what Paul is doing."
"Tastes like a shrimp french fry!" Jareth said, for he had done already, as usual, what Uncle Paul had done.
"And so I was saying," Paul continued, "We became the major shareholder." He shoveled a forkful into his mouth and chewed, smiling.
"That's marvelous!" Maude said, clapping a single clap like a monkey alarm clock.
At this Leona perked up. "Major shareholder of what?"
Aside from Celia, who on her cell phone held below the table's ledge was furiously typing texts to the disadvantage of her as-yet untouched dinner, Leona was the only Oswego whose plate remained undampened by ketchup.
"What are you the major shareholder of?" Leona asked again.
For a former cokehead, Paul's talk was remarkably smooth, as though he'd been the son of a salesman--which, in fact--he had been.
SALESMAN SPEECH in other notebook.


..........................................

There were several valuable things in the Oswego household, none of which--thank the Lord!--the thieves had bothered taking. When Maude awoke from beauty rest to her brisk morning walk, she turned on the television. The voices of the people on screen helped wake her up, and the sight of all the thin Midwestern bitches whose clear enunciations showed in the shadowed pits of their cheekbones was a kind of kick in the ass to exercise. This morning there was the usual remote, and the usual red "ON" button, but in lieu of the television--a gaping maw of dust and fuscillating wires, a kind of pothole in the room in which her eyes remained sunk.
"JARETH" she yelled, not toward her son's room--three doors down--but to the absence of the set. The effect was such that her son remained asleep while Zed, who had hit the hay only three hours earlier and consistently dreamt peacefully through the snozzy reverb of the midwestern announcers to rise at the decent hour of noon thirty, was at 6.45 a.m. awakened by his wife's shrill death rattle.