The Unexpected Salami Read online

  Frank spread out the Scrabble board on the far side of the loft. The two of us set up behind an old pale-blue sheet with blood stains from my first eighth-grade bungled tampon/Vaseline experiment. (I’d soaked that sucker for two hours, but it had been ruined and was used as a last resort back-up linen, never for company.) Frank had taken it from the back of the linen closet over at my folks’ place and thumbtacked it to his ceiling so Stuart could have a bit of privacy.

  “That sheet has stains, Frank. It’s gross. Why don’t you drape something else up?”

  “This isn’t the time to fret about interior decorating, Bozo.”

  “Fine,” I snapped. “Let me keep score.”

  Playing Scrabble without Aunt Virginia for competition felt odd. It was a pastime Frank and I had shared with her since the days when she’d picked us up from Sunday school. Frank treated the game as an extension of Dada: never mind the rules. Aunt Virginia, however, was a consistent true match. For a God-fearing Catholic, she was a board-game mercenary, having memorized every two- and three-letter word in the dictionary like ai, a three-toed sloth, and ich, the fish disease. I liked to win and had no problem putting down a mundane word if it gave me maximum points. The three of us played numerous matches the year before I left for Australia. (My Dad was in the hospital for a week with chest pain that later turned out to be gas. Every once in a while Will joined the game, but mostly he found the aunt/niece rivalry ugly. But Aunt Virginia and I valued the distraction of combat. Every clan has its rites, no matter how trivial.)

  For the previous seven years I almost always put down JEW for my first word. Even Aunt Virginia would laugh at this mysterious coincidence. If anything was ever going to get me back into a house of worship, it was my deific draws. It was as if fate had a trusty yellow highlighter and continuously underlined our family’s sore point.

  With Stuart chained to his post on the far side of the sheet, I looked over my current letters: W T O O O E J. I gasped. I lay JEW down across the middle pink star.

  “Get out of here! Again?”

  I wrote down “26” on the pad. Frank shook his head. “I’m calling fucking Ripley’s. Anyhow, isn’t Jew proper?”

  “I’ve told you ten times, Frank. You can use it as a verb—jew down. It’s in my regulation Scrabble dictionary.”

  “That’s awful. Mom would have you fucking re-bat-mitzvahed if she knew you use jew as a verb.”

  I checked on Stuart for a second while Frank contemplated his next draw. With his left arm raised and fastened to the head-board, Stuart looked the lost cause, nodding to the last traces of junk.

  “They’ve got to kill Michelle,” Stuart said. Kill Michelle? The withdrawal was no doubt kicking in, making deranged words flow out of his mouth—like the New Orleans junker without his H in the William Burroughs book Frank had facetiously suggested I reread. But then it struck me that Stuart was still in TV land. I left him alone.

  Janet rang the bell, dressed in a revealing black T-shirt and black leggings. I didn’t know “Muffy” owned anything black other than a proper little cocktail dress.

  “How is he?” she asked.

  “Right now,” Frank conceded, “he’s surprisingly okay.”

  “Oh, well, I brought some chocolate pâté,” Janet said, removing a small mason jar from her public television tote bag.

  Chocolate pâté?

  “Sounds delicious,” Frank said. “Is that the new Milan Kundera book?”

  She brought a book?

  “It’s a wonderful read.”

  “You read such interesting things, Janet. Let me get a pen, you might as well write down a few titles for me while we have the time.”

  Frank spooned out pâté for each of us. I gave her that fucking book. And before that, Frank had given it to me, when I first got back from Melbourne. My territory problem was flaring up again. “I think we’re forgetting our mission, guys.”

  “Of course. Can I meet him?”

  Frank handed me a scoop; I let it melt on my tongue as I pushed past the sheet to the bedside of our very own Elephant Man. “Stuart, you want to meet Janet?”

  He smelled my breath. “I think I’m going to sleep until the craving hits. Can I have some of that chocolate?”

  I went to get him a spoonful of Janet’s pâté. “He’s not too bad, really, he wants to sleep though. I’m going to give him some chocolate.”

  “Is that okay to give him?”

  “Let him have anything he wants,” Frank said. “Though I thought you can’t sleep when you’re going off heroin.”

  I went back to hand him the pâté, which he ate in a drowsy state. I quietly left the room. Frank had resumed our game, with Janet as scoremaster, and vertically laid down E-S-S for JEWESS.

  “Excellent, Frank,” Janet said.

  “That’s such a waste of your esses,” I jeered.

  “But it’s a cool word. It looks good,” Frank said.

  “It’s proper anyway,” I said. Frank removed the letters and put down SKID.

  When the game was over, I went to check on the patient, who had finally fallen asleep. Live at Five was on, the gossipy news with Sue Simmons. Jimmy Stewart was promoting a book of poems, and Sue had allergies.

  “Gazun-tight,” Jimmy Stewart said after his introduction.

  I sat down for a moment in a chair splattered with dried blue paint drips. I twirled the handcuff key ring like a top. I wasn’t sure what was coming next. Why wasn’t anything climatic happening? Wasn’t Stuart supposed to twist and moan and attempt to scrape his eyes out?

  I heard the phone ring. “Oh hi, Virginia.” Frank calls my aunts by their first names only. He finds the word aunt embarrassing.

  “No, Rachel went away to her friend’s weekend house. No, don’t worry—she’s fine—a little blue, she’s looking for a job. I’ll tell her you asked after her.”

  “Anything new in there?” Frank called.

  “Not yet.”

  Frank insisted that Janet should stay. I went back to the smackhead-saver part of the loft again and could tell in a glance that Janet was pleased with Frank’s extra attention. Take a number, girl.

  After an hour, Janet offered to check up on Stuart—we hadn’t heard a sound. “Oh shit!” she screamed from the other side of the blood-stained sheet.

  6

  Rachel: LOW

  The first month after I had joined Bell Press, Gordon Christopher, the President, called me to his office and handed me airline tickets for a conference in Pittsburgh. I was expected to convince Benno Heilbronn, a Nobel-laureate physics pioneer, to put his name atop the masthead of an embryonic academic journal. Gordon didn’t wanted Heilbronn to edit Particle Accelerator Quarterly, he only wanted Heilbronn’s name there and was willing to pay $10,000 a year for it. The journal was going to a handful of universities—because this was rare and knotty technical knowledge, my company had felt it was fair for a four-issue subscription to cost $15,000. It cost a few thousand dollars to print and mail the issues, so Bell was aiming to make $75,000 a year on only five subscriptions. They had almost 200 journals set up with those kinds of ridiculous subscription rates. The Journal of Vacuum Physics—eighty-five libraries at $8,000 per year; The Journal of Neuralphysical Electrodynamics—thirteen subscriptions at $11,000 a pop. These journals paid the bills for the book division. And the science-center librarians fell in line; the campus research teams knew they would be up shit creek if they missed scholastic developments. If that meant the slashed-budget library had to forgo a new copier or three work-study students, so be it. And Bell annually increased the rate by ten percent; we had them all by the balls. Keisha, my lunchmate from accounting who had secretively lined up another job, gave me the lowdown when I bitched to her about Will’s considering a major PR job offer at a tobacco company. Even so, I failed to ride off into the sunset on my high horse: I kept my mouth shut and didn’t leave Hades on Third Avenue for two more years. Will never took the cigarette job, God bless his sanctified soul.


  “It would be an honor to have you listed,” I’d said to Heilbronn. “You’re the inspiration to so many young physicists.” I followed that up with more sticky-sweet praise.

  He kept switching topics from my flattery to physic theories. He was amazed that I double-majored in physics and film/television.

  “But you really know the theories?” he pressed, ignoring the contract still unsigned by the water glass. While I wasn’t ever going to get a medal draped around my neck in Stockholm, I could hold my own with sound bites.

  To hawk the new journal, I had worn a low-cut dress to lunch—which Heilbronn wasn’t ignoring as he ascertained how much I knew about alternative universes. (My boss had confided in a barely-shy-of-a-sexual-harassment voice that the seventy-five-year-old physics star was a notorious chest man.) Heilbronn was a firm believer in what is called the Many Worlds Interpretation, an idea first put forth in the 1950s. In every situation, the choices you face offer roads into infinite universes. Every universe that can exist, the theory goes, does exist.

  “Perhaps,” Heilbronn said, “in a distant era, mankind will laugh at theories like isolating alternative universes and harnessing cosmic strings for time travel—like we scoff at chariots holding up the world.” I copied his poetic words in my confidence-prop notebook. Heilbronn turned his head ninety degrees to read his words on the page, and smiled at me.

  “In another universe, Rachel, I’d sign that contract and not worry about screwing over the libraries. Listen, sweetheart, I’m a righteous old man with arthritis and a bit of fame, and I’m not going to sign that paper. I have to wake up every morning as a righteous old man with arthritis and a bit of fame. But that’s the world I accept to be true. I get up, look in the mirror, and seem to think I was there before.”

  I thought Heilbronn remarkable. But when I had told this story to Colin, early on in our friendship, before we ever rubbed toiletries on each other’s body parts, he’d said, “Yeah, but how come the righteous bastard didn’t tell you not to waste your humiliating pitch before lunch? I’d say he wanted a longer peek at those New York knockers.” At that, he’d leaned over the Safeway shopping cart to leer down my shirt, and I retaliated with a grab at his crotch.

  That night I dreamed Alternate Universe #87239: I’d carelessly left the handcuff key ring near the floor by the chair. Stuart eyed it when he woke up, and released himself. He’d filched Frank’s wallet out of a pocket of my brother’s bad-ass seventies-style quilted leather jacket draped over a chair. We attempted to track Stuart down through the seediest streets of New York, with an obligatory stop at Clinton Street, the area where Frank had taken Stuart for his final score. No one remembered Stuart crawling back to the site, but one of the dealers asked Frank if he wanted his regular nose candy, and it now made sense how he knew to take Stuart down there in the first place. The dealer’s question would taint my respect for Frank for many years to come. But Stuart the drug addict, that fuck of a puck, had disappeared into the night. Over time my whole foray to Australia was erased, like a stray mark on a sheet of Corrasable typing paper, and with it my memories of a far-off mysterious place brimming with glorious horrors and marvels. Like Alice and Dorothy, I moved on. I married an architect and lived by the sea.

  But in the universe I accepted to be real (because the next day I knew I was there before), the reason Frank knew about the methadone clinic on East Broadway, and Clinton Street’s menu of goodies, is because he was and always will be the self-appointed King of Things I Know That You Don’t Know. And Stuart was still an illiterate heroin addict chained to the King’s bed. I’d left the key ring on the floor, but Stuart didn’t see anyone or anything when he’d woken up except Lucifer and his horned buddies. There’s a gun under the mattress, quick—rewind and shoot the bored girl waiting for something to happen.

  When Frank and I raced to see why Janet had screamed, we saw behind the sheet a feverish, shivering, terrified young man, gnawing his cheeks, choking on chocolate pâté vomit. My one comfort as I think back to that horrifying afternoon, is that Sy Cooper, my Cinema in the Age of Television professor, would have loved this universe. Sy would have had his other class (Frieda’s Tuesday video-production seminar) re-create it with the slow 360-degree pan. Instead of callow mafioso dons-in-training, however, the filmgoer would see three cocky kids of privilege, the sort of kids who studied Film Noir’s and Cinema Verite’s shadows and angles, shocked out of their cocooned, referenced existence.

  Janet had crouched on the floor; the two of us were paralyzed, deer in headlights. Frank’s olive complexion, from the Ganelli side of the family, looked greener. He recovered quickest (of course) and found rubber gloves by the sink with which to clear Stuart’s face and throat of his possibly HIV-infected, fudge-colored vomit. I cleaned the floor near the bed with a squeegee mop and rinsed it out by the shower stall. The mop was propped up in a bucket of dirty water for a month afterward, a cat-o’-nine stalk emerging from the millpond.

  “You’re going to pull through this, man,” Frank said. He didn’t look so sure. Stuart was oblivious with withdrawal. Janet looked like she wanted to go home. She asked Frank if he thought it was okay to unchain Stuart. Frank nodded. We knew he wasn’t going anywhere, and he was in enough pain.

  I answered the ringing phone. Was it the Chinese food delivery guy, lost? It was my mother. Shit!

  “Rachel? Didn’t I call Frank? I’m getting ditzy these days. Better start looking into those nursing homes—”

  “Not yet Mom, you did dial Frank. I’m hanging out with him this afternoon.” Mom called over to Dad. “He’s eating an orange on the porch. I have to send you and Frank a box. The honeybells from Spike’s Grove are beautiful this year—here he comes—I have your daughter on the phone—can you believe it, Joe? The kids are ‘hanging out.’” She got back on the phone. “That’s great, honey. You two have had such rotten years. Family is important. But it’s funny, Frank and Brice used to torture you, remember? Sticking bits of Slim Jim beef jerky in your after-school doughnuts. Those two were quite the brats. But you used to get your revenge. You’d bite your arm and say Frank did it.”

  “You knew?” I forced a little laugh, acknowledging with a tilt of my head the note Frank had slipped under my nose: “Don’t Tell Her.”

  “I’m a woman. We have to stick together sometimes. Men are fucks.”

  “Thanks, belatedly.”

  “Anytime,” she said, lowering her voice. “Do me a favor and don’t tell Daddy that I sent you that extra $200. You’re okay for money, right?”

  “Yeah,” I lied.

  “Good.” Her normal speaking voice resumed. “You’re still sending your résumé out? Why don’t you swallow your pride and call Bell Press?”

  “I really don’t want to work there again, Mom.”

  “Well you should be able to get a meaningful job when you put your mind to it. You always have. You’re going to have to start paying the maintenance soon, kiddo. I’d be a bad mother if I didn’t cut off the charity before you get lazy. Three more months, right?”

  “Yep. A deal’s a deal.”

  “Let’s talk before Daddy and I leave for France. I’m letting Frank know which bank has the safe deposit box—in case anything bad happens—you’d forget.”

  “Don’t talk like that.” In the background, Stuart was spewing again.

  “Better to be safe. When you’re a mom you’ll understand. Can you put Frank on? Daddy and I haven’t heard from him for ages.”

  Six hours later, Frank made us pancakes from an all-in-one mix, while Janet held Stuart’s hand. Janet had led him to the bathroom; he had peed in the shower, the toilet too small a target. He looked a millishade better, but in no condition to be left alone. Frank had been right after all; we had to take turns working and sleeping, like Grandpa Ganelli and the men of his immigrant mettle had.

  “To earn money to send for their wives,” Aunt Virginia once explained, “three men would sign one lease and sleep in eight hour shifts.” The pre
vious time she’d babysat for me and Frank, she’d told us about the buckets of tomato skins Grandpa had fed hogs back in Italy.

  I stared at Frank’s cutlery as he ate his stack of Aunt Jemimas. His fork and knife had once been part of our everyday dinner set. There were black bas-relief circles on their stems, a stainless design to accompany our childhood 1970s orange-and-tan wallpaper. When Frank was done eating, he put on the radio, pricking three holes at a time into the empty blue Styrofoam plate with his fork. The weak-signaled, cutting-edge station WFMU in East Orange, New Jersey, was static hell to listen to; Frank’s loft was less than a mile from the World Trade Center’s master antenna. I tuned the radio to ninety-seven, which I knew would come in loud and clear. The only reason either one of us listened to mainstream radio was for its nonthreatening distraction from crisis. The New York market is too big for the alternative music we otherwise craved.

  “In New York, it’s more lucrative to be number four in the baby-boom market than number one for the post–Baby Boomers,” a station sales executive had explained to me during my summer internship interview. Tony Fedele, the program director, wanted me to meet the whole staff; he was excited to have attracted such an overqualified candidate, the current president of a major university’s school union, to fetch sandwiches for DJs. I even got to meet the infamous shock jock Howard Stern at the sister station across the hall, and he commented on-air that the new intern by the other elevator bank looked like Valerie Bertinelli, but with better bazoombies, and Gary his sidekick hummed the theme song from her old sitcom, One Day at a Time. The Adult Contemporary station had a clear-as-a-bell signal. It was owned by one of the Big Three networks, who probably acquired the license soon after Marconi put in his patent. The chief engineer said the two mega-stations could reach Florida under the right weather conditions.