The Unexpected Salami: A Novel (10 page)

“A nice addition,” the saleswoman suggested, “might be Emotion Lotion. Rub it in, blow on it—it makes your partner’s skin hot and tingly.” The biker put a drop on his inner arm and blew.

“Great,” he agreed, choosing a lime rickey flavor. She added it to his bill.

“And what can I do for you girls?” the saleswoman asked.

“We’d like handcuffs,” I said.

“We have a selection over in the counter. The more expensive ones are stronger.”

“We’ll need strong ones,” I said. She slid open the counter
glass and pulled out a red metal pair. She reached for my wrists and locked me in, passing Janet the key to undo me. “Fine. How much?”

“Those are $39.99.”

“Okay, we’ll take them.” Janet wasn’t saying a word, she was fidgeting with a lipstick molded to resemble a penis tip.

“Would you like anything else?”

“No.”

“You girls might like a strap-on. The Boss is on sale.”

“No, thank you,” I said.

“Very well. Enjoy yourselves, girls.”

“A strap-on?” Janet said a few minutes later, on the corner of Seventh Avenue South.

“A cock on a belt.”

“Why would you want that?”

I laughed and licked her ear puppy-style. Through college, I’d liked to shock her with my bravado—she’d been an easy target to unnerve. The passing mailman didn’t even flinch. “She thought we were dykes.”

Janet grimaced as she wiped her ear with her finger, but she started smirking about a block later.

“What?” I asked.

“You’d be on top, you know.”

“Duh—like that’s why she was asking me about the Boss,” I said, in perfect Valley Girlese. We snickered most un-PC-ly until we got to the corner and I extracted the handcuffs from the pull-string bag.

“He’s going to lock himself in?” Janet asked to the ground. “And then what happens?”

That sobered us up.

After Frank had secured
Stuart’s left arm to the bedpost, I handed over the universal remote. Stuart decided on the
Young and the Restless
. Not a mystery there: Phillip and Stuart had been out-and-out
Y & R
addicts back in Australia. Australian episodes were four years behind. (It would have spoiled the fun for them if I’d revealed the fate of a villain, so I’d kept quiet.) Stuart’s eyes were glued to the Olympic-spaced time warp as we locked him in. “Wait? Lauren’s kidnapped? Bloody hell.”

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.

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.