In Over Her Head by Elsie Russell - Parnasse.com

chicken with her fingers. Even Sandro had difficulty with the utensils.
Ula got around all of this with miso soup in a porcelain bowl and flat
bottomed porcelain spoon accompanied by a dry rice cake. Dick sliced
away at his breast piece like a surgeon, having mastered his own
inventions.
"Don't you love my Golden Showerware? Patent pending."
"What's so special it can get a patent?" Penny asked between
mouthfuls, then stopped. It couldn't be.
Sandro, stared at his plate and swallowed hard. "Penny and I are
going to a concert tonight, to hear Jonchaies by Iannis Xenakis, whose
book you have, you remember?"
"Yes, yes, I'll return it, just remind me after lunch."
Sandro brushed the hair out of his face. "Xenakis and I share
certain physical similarities, although his were the result of truly heroic
actions, and mine are the result of blind stupidity."
"And what do you mean by that obscure remark, dear boy?"
"Dick, Sandro's trying to tell a joke? Xenakis had half his face
blown off in the war," Ula said.
"Hangh, Hangh, Hangh! How lucky for our little Penny! This
must be a dream come true, then! Hangh, hangh, hangh. Half a face for
the smartass little halfpint, she couldn't deal with a whole one. Didn't
think I'd noticed? And how about two of them? Just do the math, girl!
One plus one…come on, you can do it! Hangh, hangh." Dick honked
at Penny from his place at the head of the table. Ula slurped her soup,
ignoring the whole thing.
Sandro solemnly pulled strips of white breast meat off the bone
with the narrow fork and piled them on top of his untouched salad,
without eating them or looking up.
Brandishing her drumstick, Penny avoided Dick's bright
pinched face and countered."Yeah man, this guy got sick of designing
buildings, with Corbusier, that is, and that's buildings, not friggin' forks
and piss plates, so he went to the Paris conservatory to learn music and
studied with Olivier Messiaen, also Boulot's teacher, by the way.
"Blaise Boulot, you must know him, right, don't you, um, move
around in the same circles? Anyway, X pretty much invented modern
music as we know it, as well as electronic-acoustical music. The music
blows the buildings away totally! His greatest discoveries involved his
combining, one, the theory of probability, with, two, classical and
modern metaphysics. You do the math. One plus one does not equal
two. Hey, got any more chicken?" She looked around. "In the hall?"
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