The Unexpected Salami: A Novel (2 page)

I got another good look at my seatmate. I spread marmalade on my roll. “I declare that you are very attractive,” I said finally. Francis raised an eyebrow, buttered my nose with his knife, and then wiped the gook off with his thumb. He grabbed my hand, and I let him hold it for ten minutes. He tickled the creases in my palm. It was easier to be horny than to process grief.

“Let’s go to the restroom,” he whispered in my ear, and we walked to the back of the plane, locking ourselves in the bathroom as inconspicuously as possible. I’d taken my travel-size Scope I had in my tote bag for two years; I took a swig. Francis rinsed, too, while using his other hand to cradle the back of my head. I bit his fingers
as he kissed my neck. Francis stuck the tip of his tongue in my mouth, kissing me ferociously, eyes closed. He was probably engrossed in some racy Madonna-whore fantasy. He wasn’t playful like Colin, or respectful like Will, but I was immersed in my own illusion: my ready-to-use lover was half Will, half Colin, and we were about to die in a plane crash. Francis and I kissed and fondled until there was a knock at the door; we threw our T-shirts back on.

An Aussie businessman winked at Francis as we emerged from the toilet. “Sorry about that, mate,” the man said, “but the other stall stinks to high heaven.”

Back in our seats,
Francis and I started talking again. When he was twelve, he won a science fair. When I was eleven, I won the class spelling bee. (And the sixth grade science fair, too, but I didn’t say that.)

The steward brought a final round of orange juice. I stared down the aisle. There could be a Mafia guy out there who had seen me lurking in the background at the video shoot. But then, Colin had said we weren’t the targets. If we weren’t gunned down on the spot, we were in the clear. The video camera didn’t catch faces, just Stuart lying on the ground after the act. What would the Mafia want with us? Colin had guessed that they would leave us alone. Stuart was the one who had owed them money for drugs. “The mob has their ethics,” Colin had said. I am a big Scorcese fan; I knew he was right.

I missed Colin terribly. Had I made a big mistake? We weren’t officially boyfriend and girlfriend, but we had spent the last four months in touchy-feely conversation, a trend that culminated in
our own session of bathroom erotica. That night we’d had too many African beers at the Ethiopian restaurant on Chapel Street.

“Hot day, one for the record books,” Phillip had said, driving us back from the Tukul Eating House, while Colin and I played footsie in the backseat. Phillip went up the road for a packet of Peter Stuyvesants. It was a day between shower curtains. (Phillip had thrown the old one away that morning in a panic; a glob of mold had fallen on his ankle. He promised to pick up a new one the next morning from Dimmeys.) I’d raced to the shower to cool off. Colin walked in for a pee.

“Oh, sorry, Rachel!” he said, and we both started laughing. We’d shared a house for almost two years, but the sexual tension had been unbearable of late, ever since I’d let him use me as a stand-in to show me, exactly, how he held his first girlfriend’s hand seconds before their earliest kiss.

“Why don’t you join me in the shower?” I asked. We spent all our time together, I adored him, so why not?

In a split second Colin jumped in, clothed. I peeled off his jeans. He rubbed soap over my breasts. “Got to get those really clean!” I reached for the Decoré conditioner and returned the favor. Will who?

We’d barely started a proper kiss when Phillip knocked on the door.

“Hurry up, Colin! I’m going to chuck from that safari food.”

“Just a tick,” Colin said. To avoid the clucking tongues, he gave me a boost through the bathroom window. In the dark I could easily escape and run naked around the house to my bedroom window.
The next morning Colin thought Stuart might be on to us: his window faced the yard. We didn’t want to face teasing from our group. That might jeopardize our friendship; what if we realized in a week that it had been only a carnal whim? So we cooled it until we knew what we were doing.

Two days later, I overheard Phillip and Colin talking about how
gorgeous
some girl at a gig was. I’m not Medusa, but I wouldn’t call myself gorgeous. Will had admired my sass, my encyclopedic film facts, and my boobs, but mostly he loved that I was the only one who didn’t take shit from his WASP-y mother, Amanda. Rarely did she step forward into our studio. The one time she climbed the four flights, wary of the gluey substances that tugged at her heel, she said in front of me that it was a disgrace that he lived like a goddamn “Ellis Island ethnic.” They finally tracked me down in Kim’s Video, and Amanda begrudgingly apologized to me in front of the horror section. She offered to pay for my video rental and I handed her a case with Linda Blair spitting green vomit. I think that’s Will’s favorite story about me. But my fiancé never called me beautiful, not once, and that ate at me. As vain as it sounds, I wanted to overhear Colin calling me drop-dead gorgeous like that bimbo at the gig, one person in the world, once please!—And I couldn’t see that coming, ever. I started to get particularly neurotic about it, backing off a bit from the romantic path, but I was convinced Colin seemed relieved. Why would he want good old Rachel when he had those saucy nineteen year olds hanging on to him every Thursday night?

And then, with Stuart’s sudden death, we never got the chance
to have the heart-to-heart we’d been avoiding for a month. I wished we could kiss in a Byzantine way. But our nineties sensibility would never allow it—shtick superballed from our mouths.

It was a darn shame about Colin, I thought, watching the clouds below the plane. What a sweet guy he was: free of the New York paranoia attached to my hometown friends like an exclamation mark. He had laid-back solutions for everything, ingenious really, on how to live. His entire wardrobe was black jeans and black T-shirts so he’d never make a fashion gaffe. And there was that time the manager of Gaslight Records, a schoolmate of Phillip’s, offered the Poppies the window display for their first single. The Poppies’ label, alas, had run out of promotion money. Colin had calmed a crazed Phillip, xeroxing a publicity still in his friend’s office, blowing each portion up on a grid until he had a Chuck Close–style representation that filled the entire window and made it to “The Good Weekend” section of
The Age.

Although Colin had five years on me, he reminded me of the young reindeer bull that we’d seen on the Australian equivalent of PBS. “Still grazing in velvet: tender, maturing, vulnerable,” the narrator had declared. “Rather like you,” I’d leaned over to tease Colin, pushing a peroxide-blond strand behind his ear. He blushed when I did that. It was right after the curtainless shower incident, and Stuart was in the back of the living room, changing a CD.

I didn’t think much about Stuart’s death. In hindsight, it was a sad but apt conclusion for his lifestyle.

But Colin was different. He was my closest friend overseas. Colin looked mighty hurt when I said I was leaving for New York. I tried to imagine the reaction if I had dragged Colin back home to
the States. What if I brought him to the Levine Passover Seder or the Ganelli Easter Sunday Dinner?
He’s thirty-two, works in a copy shop, and is a fine bass player. We have a lot in common; for example, our flatmate was murdered! And Colin gives an excellent back massage.
Yeah, right. Like we would have lasted a day outside of our Melbourne bubble.

Francis started cradling my hand and I felt a tad sick. I’d forgotten about him.

“Rachel, I will be in Manhattan for a wedding in two months,” Francis smiled. “Can I stay with you?”

“Sure, give me a call a couple of weeks before you leave Montreal.” I wrote my number, with a digit changed, on a napkin.

“Please adjust your seats back up,” the steward said, collecting the last of the juice tumblers.

We began our descent.

Like a moron, I’d
forgotten about the reversed seasons. It was thirty-six degrees Celsius when I left Melbourne, a scorcher of a departure day, and nearly as toasty when I poked my head out the sliding doors into the palm-treed LAX grounds during the four-hour wait for my connecting flight. At LaGuardia it was two inches of snow and counting. In my thigh-high cut-off jeans, I dashed down the airport loop to the shuttle bus, and then at Grand Central to a cab destined for my empty family apartment. The building, constructed on an angle, fills and towers over the block’s slender pie wedge of Greenwich Village. The lower-floor windows look directly into the stores across the street.

“Your building looks paranoid,” the driver said with perfect
diction. “That’s what they used to do. Buildings were designed to make tenants feel safe.” He stopped talking when I handed him a quarter for a tip.

“You’re joking,” he said.

“I’m sorry. I was living overseas and I’m out of money and I thought I’d have two dollars for you and taxi fares have gone up since I left.” I quickly closed the door in shame.

My parents, true to
their word, had left two days earlier for their Florida condo. There were messages blinking on the answering machine.

“Sylvia? Virginia. I want to wish you and Joe a safe trip to Miami. I’ll check in on my niece, don’t you worry.” “Mom, it’s Frank—when is she coming? I think I’m not going to be able to meet her.” “Welcome back, baby—sorry the house is a sty—we’ll need you to ship the rest of the boxes UPS when you’re settled. Call me.” “Hi, Mrs. Ganelli—it’s Janet. Frieda told me that when she called Rachel a few days ago, Rachel said she was coming home—is this true? Could you call me at the Mayor’s Office for Film? 555-4641. They’ll page me. Thanks.” “Hiya Rachel, it’s Mom. Calling again to see if you’re back. Give us a call!”

The family apartment reminded me of the cluttered Peabody Museum I’d visited in grade school as part of an overnight field trip to Boston. Mom and Dad had papers stacked on magazines stacked on mystery boxes—an abode where only a lifelong curator could have found a particular item in less than a day. The last time the apartment was my permanent address was when I was seventeen, ten years earlier.

After staring out my parents’ sixth-floor kitchen window onto King Street, I entered the old room that I’d shared with my brother. When Frank’s voice started to change, the room had been cleaved down the middle by a metal room divider. My parents apparently had the divider removed while I was in Australia. It disoriented me to see that room opened up once more. I could see fragments of the masking tape we were never able to scrape off, browning on the floor. Until my mother found out about it, Frank charged me ten cents for each crossing over his tape line, even though the door was on his side of this first unofficial room divider.

I started to pull boxes out of the closet and discovered a cache of comics remarkably well preserved in Zip-loc bags, each treasure documented on an enclosed index card. Frank had been brutal about what was drivel and what wasn’t. He spent his entire weekly five-dollar allowance on issues of
Fantastic Four,
Jack Kirby’s
Forever People, Conan the Barbarian, Powerman,
and
Marvel Team-ups.
“In Zip-locs, they’ll age better,” he’d said. With my three-dollar allowance, I bought
Archie
and
Richie Rich
comics, despite Frank’s moans of disbelief, and what’s more, stored them in an old pink doll box, sans Zip-loc. True to Frank’s prediction, they had yellowed in cruel air.

An envelope taped to the back of the closet wall read, “Do not open until the year 2000.” The envelope glue was barely sticking; I extracted a slip of paper dated January 1, 1974. “I bet $10,000 that Frank Evan Ganelli will not shave his head bald on New Year’s, 2000.” I tried to recall the sincerity of an eight-year-old girl and her ten-year-old big brother. I put the envelope back in its sacred site with fresh Scotch tape. There were another eight years to forget about it.

I rummaged a bit through the master bedroom, a not small thrill. I couldn’t recall a previous occasion affording such unchecked nosiness. Opening my parents’ file cabinet, I examined my birth certificate and my grandparents’ death certificates. I was really born and they were really dead. I fished out a manila envelope from the deepest recess of the cabinet, stuffed with Marilyn Monroe articles and the very first
Playboy,
with Marilyn Monroe on the cover. I tried to imagine my famously reserved father harboring a celebrity crush, fantasizing about the ultimate Other.

I clicked on
Geraldo.
The change in accent shocked me. Americans seemed earnest and loud.

Frank, who’d traveled throughout Europe after college, had warned me against condemning the United States when I returned. “Everyone,” he’d said, “goes through that stage, and it’s boring.” Still, there were no crass confession shows in privacy-conscious Australia, where the government doesn’t even release census records to genealogists.

I didn’t feel like calling my parents yet. Jet-lagged, I succumbed to the couch in the living room.

My mother woke me up around six
P.M.
“Rachel! Ah, baby, now I can sleep. Why didn’t you call? You’re home, away from that rock murder mishegoss. I’ve never heard of anything that crazy!”

“Hi, Mom.”

“Kiddo, we love you so much. You’re too smart a girl to get caught up with that scary element. Tell me about your flight.”

The more a guitar
gets played the better it sounds. I don’t know the scientific reasons for this. The sound gets in the wood. Say you had a hundred new Fords from a factory. After ten years, each would have its problems—some in the boot, some on the axle. Same with a guitar. Every time the string vibrates, the wood vibrates. But the beauty of a guitar is that over the years it develops a warmth to it that a new guitar doesn’t have. Andy Summers always used a ’63 Telecaster, even when he was at the height of his career with the Police. I saw a photo of it in
Musician
. The paint’s chipped off, but he said in the interview that it sounds better every day. The only trouble is that you have to keep getting it fixed.