The Unexpected Salami: A Novel (19 page)

“Look, know-it-all, there’s a woman on the trial with morning sickness. The judge wouldn’t let her use pregnancy as an excuse—we might have to wait an hour every morning while she throws up.”

“I think it’s kind of a funny story,” Stuart said from the hallway. “Your mum’s going to help me get work this week. Don’t worry about me.”

Was Stuart to be trusted yet? The silverware, the computer, and the two expensive vases could be sold for cash. My parents had delayed their trip for another two weeks. God knows how long this trial would last. Frank was right: I should have been crazier during voir dire. I should have started quoting doctrine or taken my bra off and swung it like a flag. Wouldn’t I have done that if I wanted to take control again?

My father had been teaching Stuart how to play chess. Stuart was setting up the board for when my parents got back from their movie. He put the bishops where the rooks should be, and the black king on a white square, but I figured, Let Dad correct him. Next, I made an unconnected decision, like a decision to apply to a certain college while lacing up a new pair of boots. I was going to see Colin. That’s what I was going to do.

From my parents’ room, I called up the Garden box office. The INXS concert was sold out.

“Are you adding dates?”

“We’d love to, but it’s the end of their tour.”

How could I get backstage? I could track down the hotel he
was in. I called my old house in Australia to see if they had sublet the place. No one answered. I called EMI and asked for their publicity department. They couldn’t release information on the Poppies’ personal schedule. Shit, if I only knew an assistant or intern there. My five-star secretarial contacts were in radio and quantum mechanics, not record labels. Richard! I could call Richard.

Thank God for family apartments that are forts of time. On the refrigerator, next to an adopt-a-manatee sticker we had tried to soak off for years, was the unpublished studio number my parents insisted on having when I worked at the station.

A young female intern answered. “Studio.”

“Slick Rick, please.” That was Richard’s brilliant “secret password” to screen out fans who might have gotten ahold of the number.

“You’ll have to wait a few seconds, he’s still on the air,” the perky intern said. Had I sounded this chipper when I’d answered the studio phone?”

“Rick McDonald,” a familiar baritone voice said.

“Hi, Richard, it’s Rachel.”

“Rachel?”

“Ganelli. Your long lost intern? I’m despondent that my name hasn’t stayed on the tip of your tongue.”

“That Rachel?”

“That.”

“How the hell are you?”

I was determined to keep this short. “Great. I’m doing great. Yourself?”

“Wonderful. I got married. Two beautiful kids. I signed another three-year contract—can you hold a sec, Rachel, the promo’s about to end.”

I stared at my ceiling, waiting for the optical-illusion perception change. Eventually, the ceiling was the floor, and my furniture was hanging from the ceiling. “Hi again. Rachel, would you like to come visit at the station? I’d love to see you.”

“I’d love to see you, too, but I’m a juror on a trial starting Monday, and the hour I get off is when you go to sleep.”

“A trial? What kind of trial are you on?”

“The grandmother shot her grandson’s—”

“You’re on the De Meglio trial? I’ve been reading updates on jury selection!”

“I’m not even supposed to be saying anything. Richard, let me cut to the chase. I have to ask for a one-time-only favor from you.”

“From me? What can I do you?”

“I need INXS tickets and backstage passes, if you could swing that. I have a twelve-year-old cousin coming in from Michigan who cried when I told her they were sold out.”

“It’s always tickets when you’re in the radio business,” Richard joked. “I’ll help you out if I can. What’s your phone number?”

“Oh, you’re great! 555-2348.”

“Isn’t that your old number? You’re still there?”

“Still there.”

“I’ll speak to the programming director, Tony.”

“Tony’s still there?”

“Yes, we’re the dinosaurs of the station. That’s right—Tony always
liked you. I think he would’ve hit on you if you weren’t a baby—unlike me, huh?”

That was a pretty good joke. He seemed brighter than he had seven summers earlier.

An hour later the phone rang. I raced to answer it, a silly thing to do since Stuart was unlikely to pick it up.

“Rachel Ganelli? It’s Tony Fedele, remember me?”

“Tony!” I said, with false cheer.

“Rachel, I got the tickets you asked Ricky for. You could’ve come straight to me, doll—our interns since you have been morons. You were the best, doll.”

“Thanks, Tony, I can’t believe you got the tickets! Fantastic.”

“Now listen, Rachel, I got you a limited backstage pass that everyone at the radio station has, you and your cousin won’t be able to get into INXS’s dressing rooms—but pretty close. You can try. Flash those legs of yours to the guard is my advice, if I don’t sound like too much of a sexist pig. But hell, you know, this is the industry. It’s not me, you know? It’s the way everyone in the industry is—”

“The passes will be fine. You’re the best, Tony.”

“How old are you now, Rachel?”

“Twenty-seven.”

“Funny thing, I broke up with my girl last month. Perfect timing, don’t you think? Can I take you to dinner? You still have that great smile? You were so funny, I still tell people how funny you were. After you get out of the trial, doll, let me take you to dinner—Ricky says you’re on the De Meglio trial—you’re going to let
that lady free, right? Poor old woman. I say shoot all pushers. String ’em by the balls. She’s a heroine—disgraceful that she’s locked in a cold cell. Good thing a smart girl like you got on the trial—the Italians got to stick together, right?”

Tony had the tickets messengered to me.

On Tuesday, we had
a four-hour delay. The morning-sickness woman had the head of gynecology from her hospital come in to get her off the trial, and for once Judge Berliner was impelled to back off from his hard-boiled approach to the American judicial system. I pondered if I could risk getting a note from Beth Israel. Now that the case had started, reporters raced to look into everything. No, it would be safer to ride this out, was my unhappy conclusion. One of the four alternates took the expectant woman’s chair: a Rockette at Radio City Music Hall who had protested at the stand that she was part of a dance formation and couldn’t possibly serve. Then the assistant district attorney began the outline of her case.

“Good morning—or should I say, good afternoon? Over the next several weeks, I will attempt to prove to you that the defendant, Maria De Meglio, purposely took a man’s life. The defense will no doubt want you to sympathize with her story, but you are legally bound to examine whether or not a crime was committed. I will present irrefutable evidence that Mrs. De Meglio is guilty beyond the benefit of a doubt. Despite how we feel about drugs, vigilantism is not legal, and as jurors that is what you are bound by law to do—that is, determine if an action was illegal. I will show that Mrs. De Meglio understood what she did, even if she did it in the name of love …”

After her statement we
were allowed to go to lunch. I wandered over to Chinatown, two blocks north on Canal, and bought a red satin notebook at Pearl River, a Chinese department store. I wolfed down an egg roll from a street cart and raced back to the courtroom. I could have taken my time. A reporter had spotted a rival journalist slipping a hundred-dollar bill to the Norwegian-descent book editor.

Judge Berliner decreed that since it was the beginning of the trial he was going to dismiss the juror, and we would now be sequestered at a motel. So much for Colin and my tickets. All jurors were going to be accompanied to their homes by court officers to pick up clothes. We were given instructions for conjugal visits.

My mother and father
and Stuart were watching TV when I got home. Stuart fled for the bathroom when he saw the officer’s uniform.

“We heard,” Dad said. “You’re going to be sequestered.”

“Can you believe this? Mom, can you come into your bedroom? I need your help packing.”

Dad offered a soda to the officer. Mom followed me into her bedroom and put on the light. “What a mess. You’ll have to survive this. Good thing we came, huh? We’ve been looking after Stuart. Daddy and I took him to see the new Harold Pinter play. Stuart was great—he stood on the half-price tickets line while we parked our tuchases in a pizza parlor. He said he had never seen a play before, can you imagine? I’m not sure he got the references, but he seemed to love the atmosphere.”

“You’re great, what can I say? But listen—I need an even bigger
favor. I need to give you these tickets for the Tall Poppies and INXS concert later this week. I want to talk to Colin. Please don’t judge me. Please go to the concert and give him a note for me. You can take Frank or Dad. But you have to go backstage, and you have to get a note to Colin. The pass should get you to in front of their door. I know you could talk your way back. I got them from the station I used to work for. I need to talk to him. I’m falling apart. I have to know why he didn’t tell me. He has to know what’s happened to me. I can’t believe he wouldn’t care.” I was squeaking again.

“I don’t want my baby to get hurt.”

“Colin’s not going to hurt me. He’ll be mortified when he finds out, but he’s not going to hurt me. I want him to visit me at the motel. I think I can get him permission. It’ll make me feel better.”

“What does he look like?”

“He has a rough, chiseled face,” I sniffed. “He looks like he’s from the Outback, except he hates horses. He’s as venturous as a stuffed bear.” I smiled inside for a second, remembering when we went to Phillip’s uncle’s cattle station together in the movie-famous Snowy Mountains, and Phillip, Kerri, and I were trotting ahead before we realized that Colin had refused to get on a horse, more of a city sissy than me. He later made up some ridiculous excuse about a hammertoe.

“What color hair?”

“Bottle blond, nice and tall, and amazing light blue eyes, ethereal almost—”

“Not Jewish.”

“Neither is Daddy.”

“That’s why I’m going easy on you. I’m a sucker for a great goyisha face. I’ll pack your bag. You write that note. Let me give you something that Colin slipped under our door today with these tickets.”

“Colin was here? Mom!”

“He left messages on the machine a few times this week. I erased them. I’m sorry, Rachel, but I thought you needed him like a hole in the head.”

“MOM!”

“I wasn’t going to tell you about it. I was protecting my little girl. Mrs. Frino said she spoke to an Aussie friend of yours today through her chain, that’s undoubtedly your Colin. She said she didn’t know we were in town, and she told him she hadn’t seen you.”

I couldn’t even yell. Mom believed she had done the right thing, and I had a court officer waiting in my living room.

I grabbed the note and read it. In his boxy capitals Colin told me all about how life is wonderful. I wanted to be near him so badly, but it made me furious that he would casually seek me out like this without admitting his slimy actions. How dare he. How dare he screw my life up like this.

Here’s where things get really debauched: my eyebrows knitted like Wile E. Coyote’s, I grabbed a pen and a manila pad off the desk.

Colin,
I’ve been out of town, sorry I didn’t get your note in time to meet with you. Congrats on your concert. I’m proud of you.
You may be wondering why I am sending this with my mother. I’m a juror on a crazy trial. This crazy old grandmother shot her grandson’s dealer. You can read about this in the paper or watch the news. I’m not kidding! I have to stay at a hotel room for the duration of the trial. I’m not supposed to be talking to anyone about this trial. I’m breaking the law right now! We can only have conjugal visits, i.e., sex visits (!!!) from our fiancés and husbands. When you get this note, I’m afraid I will have already missed the concert. But I do want to see you. Please contact the bailiff at New York State Supreme Court, Courtroom 12, 100 Centre Street. You must tell them that you are my fiancé and that you have arrived from visiting your sick mother in Australia. And they will make arrangements for you to be bussed to my secret location in New Jersey. We’re both famous this week, in a strange way. But you’re more famous, or will be! I want to catch up on everything. Congrats again on the big news. OOOXXX, Rachel

Mom didn’t ask to read it, she’d packed my clothes for me as I wrote out the note. She handed me an envelope, and I made her promise him she’d leave as soon as she got it in his hands.

“Kiss?” she asked with a guilty lilt. She knew full well how angry she’d made me. At the elevator, my mother yelled, “Wait, Rachel!” and the court officer pressed the open button. She handed me a red velvet pouch.

When I’d been almost four, my parents had taken Frank and
me by subway to a nursing home in a far-off land called Brooklyn—to visit my Grandpa Ganelli, who Mom had said was not going to be able to be visited anymore. I didn’t remember ever meeting him in the first place, and this greatly upset Dad. “Sure you have, Rachel, he has that big funny beard, like Santa Claus? We brought him turkey and stuffing at Thanksgiving?” When Dad gave up on jogging my memory, I heard him say to Mom, “At least he’s going with all his marbles.” When the subway emerged from the tunnel for elevated track, it was snowing. The car twisted and bent like a snake, and then there was this magnificent white vista of the Manhattan skyline in front of us, perfect, like in a picture book.

Later, in Grandpa Ganelli’s room, Frank gave him a Polaroid that my father had taken of Frank and me on the subway car. The coughing old man got misty-eyed at the gesture. Grandma Rosa was there; her presence confused me since Frank had told me that because Grandpa Ganelli refused to go to church, he and Grandma Rosa were
annoyed
, which meant they didn’t live together. Aunt Virginia was there, too, holding my father’s hand and praying, and these people called
relatives
were in a room down the hall. “I’ll have something to remember you by when I’m far away,” Grandpa Ganelli said. He was hard to hear, so I went right near his mouth.