The Unexpected Salami: A Novel (23 page)

“Are you toying with me? I’m saying I love you, that I’d destroy an EMI contract to make it up to you. Isn’t there a moment in your life you can let the last word slide?”

“I’ve missed you, Colin.”

I didn’t answer for a while. She pushed the hairs on the back of my neck up, then smoothed them down again. “Rachel, I’ve missed you like hell, too. This is the one horrible thing I’ve ever done. You have to believe me! Listen. You’re scaring me with your mood swings.”

“I’m scaring
me
with my mood swings.”

“Rachel, I’ve been seeing this girl Hannah since you left. I was besotted with her at first, but now I’m pretty sure I can’t stand her anymore. She just arrived in New York to surprise me.”

“You’re dating someone?” she said, suddenly sharply attentive.
“Where is she now?” It was a comic site, like seeing a baby stop crying when she sees a ring of keys. I couldn’t tell her that, of course, so I kissed her on her crown. Jesus, Rachel, I almost said, what have I done?

“At the beach with Phillip and Kerri. I’ll ring her right now to break it off if you want me to.”

“You can do that tomorrow,” she said. “I can’t imagine you with anyone. Is she pretty?”

“Yeah.”

“Brunette?”

“Redhead, like Fergie.”

“Oh.”

“You’d hate her. She loves Rilke and Verlaine.”

“She reads?”

“What, I’m supposed to be with a beautician?”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“You meant, she’s smart like you, right? Believe me, she’s bright, but she’s no Rachel Ganelli.” Her anger over Stuart pushed to the back for the moment while she contemplated this new information.

“Shit. I didn’t think you had a girlfriend.”

“You didn’t write back.”

“I was going to eventually. I was flat from everything: leaving you, Stuart’s death. But then I found out what a scummy thing you did.”

“I didn’t set about destroying your peace. You have to understand that. If anything I wanted to impress you.”

“By staging a murder?”

“By getting a better contract. You
are
my best friend. I tried to keep you out of it. You went away before we could get anything going. I really wanted to have you as my legitimate girlfriend.”

“You did?” She twisted a strand of hair.

“And furthermore, what were the chances of you ever bumping into Stuart eating a tuna fish sandwich?”

Unexpectedly then, Rachel started to laugh.

I reached for her hand. “Rachel, what do you want me to do?”

“I want to order room service. I have a twenty-dollar court allowance for snacks.” She sat down by the phone, recovering from laughter- and cry-induced sniffles. I handed her the box of tissues from the bedside table. She lifted up her mouth to meet my lips, and we had a sad passionate kiss.

I admit it. Even with our kiss, Rachel had me spooked. Back in Australia, she’d boasted that she was exactly the wrong person to cross, that she’d often inflicted comeuppance in unexpected ways, like her sweet note about paying her a visit her in sequestration. She’d once admitted that her boyfriend before Will, her college boyfriend, had dumped her in total bastard mode, and she’d ingratiated herself among his friends until he suffocated in his own support system. Rachel never needed a long list of reasons to justify her decisions; and it was obvious I gave her more than enough she deemed valid. At that moment, I wanted to be a rock star, and I sure as hell didn’t want to be thrown in jail. I was scared shitless: Rachel had me fenced in.

True, it was not an entirely horrible circumstance. My marriage offer could be reneged at some later time, when she was
calmed down. I rather liked the idea of marriage to Rachel, even if it was only a temporary fantasy that she’d bought into. I needed Rachel on some level in my life. But at this point my heart wasn’t jumping through hoops of relief and love. What about Hannah? I couldn’t just drop her like that, could I? Plain and simple, I was saving my hide. We all have our tactics.

After our kiss, we
stripped to our underwear, tacitly agreeing not to take it further. Colin spooned me with his downy knees. His scent—a natural musk, a few too many cigarettes, and the papaya conditioner he used to keep life in his many-years-peroxided hair—startled me with soothing memories of watching late-night Australian TV under the living room doona, the Australian word for comforter. Before I fell asleep, I looked at the palm he had swung around mine in his sleep. For a second I was sure that I could see our hands stripped of their layers of skin, like in the illustrations for “X-ray specs” in the old Johnson Smith novelty catalogue.

Colin had salvaged his life. No one in the end got hurt. What the hell did I have to show for my advanced test scores? Fuck-all. What would I do if I was still driftwood in hyperachievement circles in a few years? Since graduation, God was it six years now?, living my life felt like eating white chocolate: everything good was there, but it never truly satisfied.

Around two
A.M.
, large pellets of hail started hitting the window pane. I sat in my red bra and panties mesmerized by their random rhythms and sizes. I had once commissioned a journal article
on hail from a meteorologist. The earth sciences acquisitions editor at Bell Press had been fired for hauling publicity copies of new Bell titles to the Strand and other used bookstores for cash. Gordon made me meet the fired editor’s appointments at a conference in Atlanta. Earth sciences never clicked with me the way physics did. I had to give myself a crash course on hail in the hotel room—with xeroxed pages from our firm’s tiny library. Hailstones form in spring or early summer mostly between latitudes of thirty and sixty degrees, slices of the earth that include New Jersey. They are associated with thunderstorms; the stone’s nuclei need to be carried by turbulent winds to ever germinate. Super-cooled water, still liquid at a freezing temperature, hits the icy atmosphere and the nuclei freeze over, melt and freeze again, thaw and ice over once more. A hailstone grows with each pass through the atmosphere. At a certain weight, the updraft can no longer support the stones.

I had goosebumps from the air-conditioning; I shut it off. I tried to imagine this redhead reading poetry to Colin during sex. From the curtains, I stared over at him and tried to imagine marriage.

A relationship is so much like a hailstone. If you could carve through either one, a cross section would be layered like an onion or a tree trunk.

The motel room smelled
of perfume and summer morning sweat. Rachel lay diagonally over me—not a good thing, as I’d woken up with a morning tent and above all I needed to take a horse piss. Answering nature’s call at six
A.M.
, I wrestled free from the sheet and her legs. The shock of the previous evening came back to me as I returned to bed. I lay there with harsh-angled light on my eyes, panicking. Rachel, sound asleep, stretched an arm over her pillow. With this new view of her armpit, I saw that she had bothered to shave—even though she had baited me to her motel room to chew me out. And of course!—the perfume—in the Siberia of jury sequestration, she had bothered to scent herself. These revelations hit me like blocked-sinus spray, and I instantly felt a notch or two better. She hadn’t lied. She honestly had sought an explanation, not blood. Had she brought perfume or borrowed it from one of her fellow hostages? I grazed the bumpy texture of the not-quite-surfaced hair growth under her arm. My finger must have tickled, because she smiled in her sleep. Safe, on another plane: the old Rachel who relished life. Hannah never smiled in her sleep.

My offer to marry Rachel had been a rash one, but even more
disturbing, she’d gobbled it right up. To take back the proposal hours later would be insulting and foolish. Hannah’s reaction worried me, too: Would she rage or beg when I cut the cord? Another solution was needed, one where I wouldn’t risk losing Rachel’s friendship. After all, Rachel was still in the driver’s seat, and Phillip and I
had
committed fraud. She could flatten us. The alarmed reactions of the others if I left the band—Phillip, Mick-O, Angus (who would no doubt breathe a sigh of relief as well), the boiled suits at EMI—was stomach-churning to think about. It was easier to shut down again than to face my uncertain future.

Two and a half hours later, I woke up once more with a spanking headache. As per my usual cure, I reached for my fags. Rachel stared at me from a chair as she towel-dried her hair. She was dressed in her high-tops (were those bloody things a part of her body?), her cut-offs, and a tit-revealing pink T-shirt. Everyone loved Rachel’s tits, most of all Rachel. She called them her “grandmother’s gift.” Stuart had once declared that they were the size of two big juicy oranges, while Phillip had thought they might even be as large as grapefruits.

“Gross,” Rachel said, making a very Hannah-like face. “A Marlboro’s the first thing you grab for when you wake up? I was going to leave you a note—I have to get on the minibus in twenty minutes. The guard down the hall’s arranged for you to get back to the city in about an hour. No one else had a conjugal visit yesterday.”

“Good morning to you, too. And Jesus, that’s quite the court outfit.”

“Don’t start on what I wear again, you’re not my husb—” Her voice softened. “I called my mom while you were sleeping. A guard
monitored me—half my sentences didn’t make sense. I told her that you had come back from visiting your mother in Melbourne for a conjugal visit—that we talked it over, and you want to make amends to Stuart while I’m on the jury—and that you were going to be a financial help toward getting him a new life.”

“How’d she take that?”

“She was confused and insisted that she was in control—‘I don’t need his money.’ I also told her to forewarn ‘Cousin Stuart’ that my ‘fiancé’ is moving into my room, and that it’s still a secret. It’s hard to talk cryptically—the guard gave me suspicious looks. I left it that you’d come over around noon, and the two of you could work it out. She agreed to at least talk to you this afternoon at the apartment—my dad has a date with his old work cronies, and you don’t want him calling the shots—he’s too righteous. Mom’s a bit much, but she won’t bite.”

“Did you tell her about the rest of the conversation?” I asked cagily.

“No. Are you kidding? With the guard listening? We’re already supposed to be engaged. Besides, she was freaked out enough on the other end, and I don’t think she’s going to understand the marriage part of our solution.”

Mayday, oxygen needed! I hadn’t imagined it; she’d taken my offer to heart. I wasn’t going to change her mind in twenty minutes.

“Please don’t tell her we’re getting hitched,” she added. “I’ll ask Judge Berliner about getting permission for tomorrow—I’ll need an escort to the marriage license office during lunch. I’ll tell the judge we want to speed the date up for your working papers, and
that we’ll have a blow-out ceremony in a few months. He thinks we’re engaged, so it’s a plausible story. Hopefully it won’t leak into the news, but the reporters can’t print my name even if it did. Why don’t you come back tonight and tell me how the talk with your manager went? And with that woman you’re seeing.”

I fidgeted with a filter inside the ciggie packet. “Rachel, I’d thought I’d wait a bit on that until everything is sorted out with the band.”

“But, we agreed last night—”

“I’m going to do it,” I said, calming her down but at the same time practically sealing my escape hatch.

She kissed my neck. “I hated having you as an enemy. You’re doing the right thing now. We might even like being married. I can’t go this alone.”

“Rachel—”

“Rachel Ganelli, into the minibus please!” one of the guards called.

“Bye!” she said, running down the hall. “Come back tonight.”

“You’re from Australia, right?” the guard asked. “Out of town this week, I heard. Marrying that tall girl that got on the bus, right? You two must’ve been at it all night!” My nuts burned as he spoke. To keep them from sweating in the unreal heat, I’d sprinkled them with quite a bit of the powder Rachel had in the bathroom. I’d thought it was baby powder, but it was some kind of medicinal powder for heat rash. Like putting hot sauce on your balls. “Always wanted to go to Australia,” the guard said as we headed for the highway.

The guard dropped me off in the front of the hotel. I heard a
creaking noise and thought the maid had plugged in the vacuum. I turned my key and Beth, the backstage Garden manager, was, in
Penthouse
letter terms, “banging her shapely Oriental rump against the up-thrusting rod of my grateful bandmate.” Got himself “wonton love” after all, the bastard. The room reeked of weed.

“God, I’m so embarrassed,” Beth cried, as she ran straight into the bathroom, bare arse and all. I didn’t get a look at the front.

“Oh shit, mate,” Mick-O said with a sheepish grin, “back so soon? How’s Rachel?” He leaned over to the floor. “By the way you two-timing bastard, Kerri clued me in on your lie to Hannah. Mum’s the word.”

“Ta.”

“Fancy a choof?” he asked, offering me a bong hit from an enormous blue contraption. Mick-O liked to push the pot-impunity clause in the Poppies’ no-drugs agreement to its absolute limit.

“Where the hell did you get that monstrosity?”

He lowered his voice to a whisper. “At a shop on Eighth Street. With another girl who I’m going to ring tonight when Beth’s back at the Garden. I met her at a pub the other day when you went to Café Wha? A Puerto Rican bird with a tight arse. But first you got to leave. I have to finish up—” He gestured towards the bathroom. “She’s a wild fuck.”

To Mick-O, America was the great provider, a country abundant in wheat and naked ethnic girls. “Yeah, uh, mate,” I said, too self-pitying to be disgusted. “I think I’ll go down to the lobby pub.

“Where’s Hannah?”

“She left a message that she stayed overnight in the Hamptons. She made some friends and will be back tomorrow.”