Beatrice

Beatrice is the absent center of Edward T. Nad’s opening story: his former girlfriend, his original two-person bandmate, and the person whose departure leaves him stranded between relationships, careers, and versions of himself. She matters not only because she leaves, but because Edward cannot tell his own story without repeatedly circling back to her. Her absence turns a failed band breakup into a crisis of identity, while her remembered voice supplies some of the narrative’s most unconventional ideas about color, energy, and perception.

Identity and Creative Partnership

Beatrice played guitar and sang lead vocals in Edward’s original two-person rock band, while Edward played drums and took over the singing when her voice had been exhausted. Edward presents that vocal strain as a recurring feature of their performances and remembers it with an embarrassed, admiring enthusiasm, calling the situation sexy rather than treating it simply as a professional inconvenience. The division of labor gives the pair a recognizable musical complementarity: Beatrice supplies guitar and the principal shrieked vocals, while Edward supports the sound on drums and serves as a substitute singer when necessary.

Their partnership was also bound to Edward’s sense of artistic legitimacy. The band was intended to become a world-conquering rock act, and its collapse therefore threatens more than a romance. Edward’s complaints about his ordinary name, his uncertainty over what to call the band, and his insistence that he is a rockstar rather than a novelist all emerge in a narrative shaped by the loss of the person who shared that ambition. Even when he discusses possible band names such as “Grain of Sand and the Clams” and “The Beelzebubbas,” the vanished two-person structure remains the implied standard against which every later musical arrangement is measured.

Departure and the Breakup

Beatrice leaves their small town for Europe and goes to Venice, breaking up the original two-person band in the process. Edward describes the emotional result as making him feel middle aged despite being only twenty-one. That contrast captures the disproportion between his age and his sense of exhaustion: a young performer experiences the end of the relationship and the band as though it had prematurely closed an entire life.

Edward’s account of the breakup is deliberately unstable. In one imagined version, Beatrice has dumped him, while he has secretly dumped her without her knowledge. He then pictures himself flying from New York to Venice, kneeling to plead for her return so that the pair can rule the world and rock for all eternity. He immediately rejects this scenario as the plot of a novel, insisting that he is not a novelist and has hardly read any books. The denial does not remove the fantasy; it exposes how strongly the fantasy governs his thinking. Beatrice’s departure is simultaneously a real wound, a source of self-dramatization, and the premise of an adventure he claims could belong only to fiction.

The practical consequences are equally plain. Edward says there is no way he will ever go to Venice to get his girl back, even though he repeatedly frames the story around that impossible return. He is left “between girls and bands,” with time on his hands and a “rotten story” to tell. The language makes his romantic and professional losses mirror each other: the girl and the band have departed together, leaving him without the partnership that organized both his private life and his public persona.

Edward’s Recollection of Beatrice

Although Beatrice does not appear directly in the opening chase through the dark wood, Edward invokes her constantly while he is being pursued in a bunny costume by his new band members. He says that the heart of all his problems always reverts to her, then tries to interrupt himself by announcing that he will write an anthem called “Anarchy for Me” if he were not always talking about her. His repeated command to stop asking about Beatrice has the opposite effect: it confirms that she is the subject he cannot stop supplying.

His recollection includes details of her appearance and self-presentation, including a tattoo on her shoulder that he imagines a Venetian man observing from the back of a gondola. The image intensifies his jealousy and distance without establishing a completed new romance. Edward speculates that she is being serenaded by a gondolier singing bad Italian love songs, turning Venice into a stage for his own anxious projection. Beatrice is therefore mediated through Edward’s imagination: she is abroad, watched by others, and unavailable, while he remains in the woods attempting to escape the consequences of his new band’s quarrels.

The contrast between her composure in memory and Edward’s comic physical predicament is important. While he runs, hides in a wet culvert, struggles to breathe inside the bewhiskered head of his costume, and eventually discovers that his tail is on fire, Beatrice remains the absent figure who gives his suffering an emotional explanation. The chase is ridiculous, but the feeling beneath it is persistent. His theatrical self-presentation as a rockstar repeatedly collapses into the vulnerability of someone abandoned by the partner whose judgment still structures his thoughts.

Beatrice’s Theory of Color

Beatrice’s intellectual presence appears most clearly in her theory of autumn color. She argues that fall colors drain tones from other colors throughout the world: when oak leaves change in Berlin, yellow is removed from an Iowa sweater or from curry powder in Bangladesh; when Japanese maples turn in Fukuoka, burgundy darkens in New York knapsacks. Edward recalls her using this theory to explain why all his black T-shirts fade.

For Beatrice, color behaves like energy: it is neither created nor destroyed, but fades in one place and brightens in another. She calls this movement the yin and yang of hue. Edward objects that there is no scientific proof for her ideas, yet he concedes that they make considerable sense when considered closely. Beatrice answers his skepticism by pointing out that nothing disproves them either. Their exchange defines a relationship in miniature. Edward adopts the role of practical doubter, while Beatrice advances an eccentric hypothesis whose imaginative coherence unsettles his demand for proof.

The theory also gives Beatrice a way of perceiving connection across distance. Berlin, Iowa, Bangladesh, Fukuoka, and New York become parts of one circulating system rather than isolated places. That global imaginative reach contrasts with Edward’s immediate confinement in the woods and with his insistence that Venice is inaccessible. Her thought travels more freely than he does, making her absent presence feel expansive even while Edward experiences it as loss.

Domestic Memory and Narrative Role

Edward remembers making a compost bin with Beatrice behind their apartment the previous fall. Before filling it with leaves, they had a huge leaf fight, which Edward claims to have won. He then tried to fold the activity into his environmental reasoning by telling her that they were saving the environment and that several baseball caps in Memphis had turned light green. Beatrice laughed and corrected him: her color law applied only when colors were created and others destroyed, not when leaves were merely gathered into compost.

This small domestic scene gives the relationship a texture different from the grand fantasy of ruling the world through rock music. Their shared life includes environmental projects, playful physical conflict, argument, correction, and laughter. Beatrice’s theories are not presented only as abstract eccentricities; they are part of the couple’s ordinary conversation and a recurring source of friction that remains affectionate even when Edward pretends to be exasperated. His inability to stop recounting these exchanges shows that recollection itself has become a substitute for her presence.

Beatrice’s narrative function is consequently double. She is an objective of Edward’s romantic regret, but she is also the absent interlocutor who keeps his narration alive. Every attempt to move away from her returns to another memory of her music, her body, her departure, or her theories. The book’s opening thus makes her departure the initiating rupture while allowing her remembered voice to complicate Edward’s comic, self-protective account. Beatrice is not simply the person who left; she is the standard of intimacy, creativity, and imaginative freedom against which Edward continues to measure the life he is trying to narrate.