The Matzo Ball Heiress (13 page)

The phone rings. I pull a wet piece of dust out of my mouth, and start without a pause: “No luck, Vondra. Haven’t heard from Jared. I called Mark Lander to see if he could send anyone our way before he left for France but his two-year-old was screaming like a banshee because she snuck a gob of wasabi out of his take-out sushi tray.”

“It’s Jared, Heather.”

“Oh, hi!” I lurch forward for the remote to mute the four nominees who have a shot for the grand prize $100,000 funniest video. Too late: “Kitty Pileup!” booms the announcer.

“So tell me about the shoot. I have Sunday free.”

“Terrific. I hear you do lighting, too.”

“Who told you that?”

“Steve,” I say.

“Yes. I was a gaffer for two years before I got into camera work. So, what are we filming?”

“It’s an HBO documentary about sex.”

“Let me chew on that for a minute,” Jared says dryly. “Uh, okay.”

“Don’t get too excited. The woman who’s talking about sex is a grandmother of three.”

“That still sounds more exciting than my typical
Secrets of a Super Soufflé
segment.”

“Whatever gets you to say yes. I can’t believe you’re available. Damn, that’s great. From your message, I thought you might be away on a shoot this weekend.”

“No, but I just had other plans Friday and earlier today.”

“Well, the pay is okay considering it’s a tiny shoot. We should be there no longer than an hour, and it’s two hundred bucks for the segment.”

“That’s pretty fair.”

“We don’t have a Betacam, but we do have an XL–2.”

“Bingo. That’s the one I use on my downtime.”

“There’s a tiny scratch on the viewfinder but it doesn’t affect the picture.”

“I’ll bring mine so you don’t have to bother getting it checked.”

“You’re my hero, Jared.”

“You have enough DV tapes?”

“Plenty.”

“Where should I meet you?”

“We’ll meet you at the American Museum of Natural History in the Hall of Human Biology and Evolution, 9:30 a.m. The woman we have scheduled coined the term
Elastic Marriage
and there are a couple of threesomes in the caveman dioramas.”

“Very clever.”

“Vondra’s idea.”

“How did you finagle the museum into letting you film? Steve wanted to use the Hall of Ocean Life for a fried-fish segment, but they told him no way very emphatically.”

“That section just reopened. Maybe they weren’t ready.”

“He knew one of the women on the design team who was going to let him in for a preview. Dated her, I think.”

That figures. “Really?” I ask as neutrally as possible.

“All the same, her boss knocked the idea back.”

“What can I say? I’m better on the phone than on the camera.” I’m pleased I outgunned Steve in one area. “They’re fine with it as long as we have the filming over by midmorning so it won’t interfere with the afternoon rush.”

“Can’t wait.”

The Hall of Human Biology and Evolution is on the ground floor of the American Museum of Natural History, just past the booth where volunteers give visitors the little metal admission buttons to stick on their shirts. Vondra wants to leave me with the equipment and the cavemen while she gets a sip of water from the fountain around the corner.

“Why are your lips purple?” I ask.

“Grape Pixie Stix. Mahmoud and I are giving up smoking, and I need something to get me through the day. They may not be good for your teeth but they’re very low in fat.”

“You like him enough to quit smoking? That’s incredible.”

“I like him enough to father my children. I’m on cloud nine.”

I shake my head in amusement. “Go get your water.”

Jared taps me on the shoulder, and I’m surprised by how happy I am to see him.

“Thanks for stepping in,” I say. He’d be so, so cute if he just shaved that beard.

“My pleasure.” Jared unzips his black nylon jacket. As he unhinges his hard camera case, Roswell arrives. We haven’t had the heart to fire him yet, and we can’t get perky Jacinta on the phone to do it for us.

“Hey,” our would-be Scorsese says with a big yawn.

“Roswell, this is Jared, our cameraman for the day.”

“Hey,” Jared says.

Roswell removes a tiny spiral notebook with Japanese Anime artwork on the cover from his military jacket. “That’s a cool-looking camera. What is it?”

“Canon XL–2. Nifty little thing, much easier to maneuver than a Beta camera, which is what they use on the networks. But it’s broadcast quality.”

“How much does that cost?”

“That’s the real beauty of it. About $3,500. Thousands of dollars cheaper than a Beta camera. They call this a prosumer model because it straddles the professional and amateur markets.”

Roswell writes down some notes in his spiral book. “Where do you buy it from?”

“I picked it up from B & H.”

“What’s that?”

Jared smiles. “B & H? A New York institution. It should have its own documentary—picture a hundred ultraorthodox Jews in waist-length nineteenth-century black coats selling state-of-the-art electronics.”

“Cool. What kind of light is that?” Roswell continues to write down every item of equipment Jared says in his notebook. Maybe he is interested in what we do, after all.

“Heather, do I have time to make a quick phone call?”

Roswell shirking set-up responsibilities? Shocker. Our interviewee, Rina O’Riley, is not here yet. I’m never comfortable being a ballbreaker. “A quick one, Roswell. On and off.”

“Gotcha!” Roswell presses a stored number in his cell phone. “Listen, Dad, you have a pen? Great, for my Albert Maysles film, I’m going to need these things at home. You can get them ordered from this kosher camera store—”

“He’s seventeen,” I explain to Jared. “Our intern.”

“Gotcha, dude,” Jared says.

After Roswell is finished placing his order with his father, he takes a whiff of the immediate vicinity. “You guys smell that stink?”

“No,” I say.

Roswell wrinkles his nose. “It’s like the fucking ocean around here.”

Jared stiffens, and smells his open jacket. “Is this it? We did a calamari shoot Wednesday. I thought I got the squid smell out.”

“Yo, you didn’t,” Roswell says with another nose wrinkle.

Jared’s face is grave. “That awful?”

Now that it’s been brought to my attention; it
is
rather pongy in the immediate vicinity. “It’s not that bad,” I assure him as the stench vines up my nostrils and my fingers fiddle with the button on my blouse. “But maybe you should keep the jacket in the corner if you’re going to be self-conscious about it.”

“Burn it, dude,” Roswell says.

Turning to Roswell, I say, “I see Vondra coming in with Rina O’Riley. Could you go over and see if there’s anything Vondra needs you to do?”

When Roswell walks far enough away, I whisper, “He’s also passive-aggressive. But we don’t have the heart to let him go. He won’t graduate if we let him go. No other suckers will sign him up.”

Jared nods. As he unpacks his microphones, Vondra escorts Rina O’Riley to our little area. Rina is an attractive woman in her seventies who still clings to the pink head-band and girlie Izod Lacoste clothes of a preppie youth. Around her neck is a huge white orthopedic neck brace. Is she keeping that thing on when she goes on camera?

“This is Heather,” Vondra says. “She’s my business partner and she’ll be doing the questioning today.”

“Nice to meet you,” says Rina. “Gorgeous sweater. Brings out your gorgeous blue eyes.”

“Thank you.”

“Greenblotz Blue,” Jared says, straight-faced.

“Anything special I need to know?”

“Just remember to rephrase my questions. It’s easier for editing. If I say, ‘What’s your name?’ you should say, ‘My name is Rina’ rather than ‘Rina.’ You’ve probably done this before.”

“Oh yes. I’ve been selling sex since before Dr. Ruth. I did
David Susskind
at least eight times, and
Dinah!
about a half-dozen times and Johnny twice. “

“Great. We’ll have to look into those archival appearances for our documentary. Especially
The Tonight Show
.”

“If they have it at NBC, could you dub me a copy? The first time I was on with the animal expert from Mutual of Omaha and I remember Johnny made me hold the world’s tiniest mouse.”

Roswell is big-eyed. “How small is it?”

“About one inch,” Rina informs him. “Its heart beats at some ridiculous beats per minute and they often die of heart attacks. At first we thought it was having a heart attack in Johnny’s hand, but then we realized it was taking a mouse poop.”

Roswell breaks up laughing but Rina laughs harder, with her stomach as well as her mouth. She’s a delight and happily I realize she’s going to add to our documentary tremendously, neck brace or not.

“Rina, this is Jared, our cameraman.”

“Howdy,” Jared says. “Do you mind if I creep up your sweater with the mic?”

“Not at all. I might enjoy it.”

“What’s with the brace?” I ask Vondra quietly as Jared and Rina make small talk.

“I asked her on the way in,” Vondra says. “The right muscles on her neck disintegrated after radiation therapy. She beat the cancer. She says she can take the brace off for the shoot.”

Despite the early hour, we find ourselves at the middle of a loud and inquisitive horseshoe-shaped throng of museum guests. “What are you filming?” asks the boldest, a heavily made-up middle-aged peroxide blonde wearing a sweatshirt appliquéd with a pig being lifted up by balloons.

“A segment of a documentary.”

“On what?”

“On sexual partners.”

“Oh, you should put me in. I’ve been married to everyone. I never give up on the institution of marriage. I’m the world’s number-one optimist.”

“Heather, can I get a white-balance read?” Jared interrupts the optimist.

“Roswell!” I call out gratefully. “Come and get the white poster board off the floor.” Roswell’s chatting to one of the younger members of the crowd, a pretty teen with long curly black hair, urchin eyes and high-in-the-sky breasts that would make a middle-aged woman weep. “Jared has to check the colors on his camera. Can you hold this in front of him?”

The buxom girl looks at Roswell admiringly as he stands with the poster board. “Okay, we’re cool,” Jared says to Roswell.

“Are you ready, Rina?” I ask.

“As I’ll ever be.”

“Then let’s warm up with your basics, please tell me who you are.”

“My name is Rina O’Riley. I guess I could be considered one of the Grand Ladies of Sex. With my husband, Frank O’Riley, I coined the term
Elastic Marriage
back in the 1960s. It was the end of the era when men could socialize after work and their wives slaved over the washing and cleaning like dray horses. Women wanted more, and enlightened men wanted more. We needed a new name for the options available to modern families. We publicly advocated that as long as there are two consenting adults and there is complete communication between them, anything goes. This sounds like common sense now, but in 1960 it was considered
scandalous
.”

“Did you get hate mail?”

A diminutive Mexican man enters the wing on what first appears to be a tractor but is in fact a museum floor buffer, one that produces a waxy stink and a noise as loud as a John Sousa march.

“Stop the camera, please,” I say to Jared.

Vondra rushes to the scene, has a few words with the driver, and he tractors off.

“Where were we?” I say.

“Hate mail,” Jared says from the camera.

“Yes,” Rina says. “Did we get hate mail? We had hate mail in which we were called everything under the sun. Heretics. Devil worshipers. We even had death threats, particularly after one television appearance where my husband said that, as anthropologists, we felt exploration was the way nature intended us to be.” Rina glances at a caveman and his wife in the museum diorama, and I motion to Jared to focus in on her eyes taking in the scene.

“So everybody should have as many possible partners as they want?”

“Do I feel everyone should have as many partners as they want? I feel it should be a consenting decision. Perhaps the husband wants to be monogamous and the wife wants to explore, that would be fine, as long as they know what is going on.”

“Does that happen too often?”

“It doesn’t usually happen that way, of course,” Rina says after a silent smile. “Usually it’s the other way around.”

Vondra scribbles me a question to ask. “What about sexually transmitted diseases?” I read off her note.

“I’m not advocating a secretive liaison—”

“I’m sorry, could you repeat the question for editing purposes?”

“Oh dear, I was being so good. Okay—ready?”

“Ready,” I say.

“You may ask but what about sexually transmitted diseases? I say, you can’t go about an Elastic Marriage in a willy-nilly way. Lying and mistrust breed like kudzu. There would be a lot less victims of AIDS if husbands and wives talked openly and took protective measures together. If you want to explore the perimeters of marriage, do be brainy about it. Elastic Marriage does not mean do as you please. It means do as
we
please.”

“Why bother being married at all?”

“Why bother being married at all?” Rina dutifully repeats. “So many reasons. Primarily, because we want to be. In my experience, individuals who love each other want to publicly celebrate their union. For some people, there is safety in marriage—psychological constancy, but also life insurance, benefits. Look how hard it was for same-sex partners to get benefits after the Pentagon and World Trade Center attacks. Heterosexual couples take the rights of marriage for granted.”

“Did you have an Elastic Marriage?”

“Did I have an Elastic Marriage? Let’s just say that whatever the agreement we had, we also agreed to keep it private. That’s what worked for us.”

After I wrap up with the remaining questions, Rina excuses herself to the “powder room.” Roswell returns to his doting high-breasted fan, and Jared packs up his audio equipment.

“You’re a terrific interviewer,” Jared says. “She was relaxed around you, even when you pushed her with some of the hard questions.”