The Unexpected Salami: A Novel (24 page)

What to make of that? “Come get me when you’re, uh, through, and I’ll tell you what went down with Rachel.”

“Great!” He tilted an imaginary slouch hat towards me, the kind tourists think Aussie men wear to brush our teeth. “Remind me to shout you a beer when I’m down there for being such a cobber.”

Down in the empty lobby pub, I sat on a leather stool. The bartender was reading a paper and playing Supertramp’s “It’s Raining Again.” He looked peeved that I had interrupted his easy day.

You’re old enough some people say / To read the signs and walk away. / It’s only time that heals the pain / and makes the sun come out again. / It’s raining again … C’mon you little fighter / No need to get uptighter / C’mon you little fighter / And get back up again. / Oh get back up again. / Fill your heart again.…

Soppy pop songs like that make millions. Supertramp was an embarrassing seventies band, like the Alan Parsons Project, or even worse, Kansas. Shameless pop music, however, can be life-affirming in certain situations. It’s amazing how many epiphanies can come out of such a restricted format. Even Paul McCartney had inspiration to offer through pop music, although he’s such a disappointing person. I would never sit down and play a McCartney tune for anyone. I’d be afraid they would think I was a wuss. But there’s a post-Beatles song Paul McCartney wrote, “Single Pigeon,” that has one of the best melodies I’ve ever heard—even if the chorus almost ruins the whole thing. Unlike Rachel, though,
I’ve never dwelled on perfection. If there’s good in the offering, why look the gift horse in the mouth?

Mick-O, still slightly high, emerged from the lift, ordered himself a Heineken, and grabbed a stool next to me.

“You done fucking your brains out?” I asked.

“Hot and spicy Chinese platter, mate.”

“You’re a case and a half, Mick-O.”

“How’s Rachel? Hard to imagine her sitting for weeks, not making a peep. Does she still think I’m a waste of space?”

“I don’t know Mick-O, she didn’t mention you. But I asked her to marry me.”

He almost choked on his beer. “Aw, bullshit, Colin!” he laughed.

“Mick-O,” I said, “where can I start? I saw Rachel.”

“How is she?” Mick-O never liked her much. Then again, she hardly ever took anything he said seriously.

“We had a lot to talk about.”

“Oh shit, I smell a messy situation. I knew you missed her, but you seem rapt with Hannah, I mean what a body Hann—”

“Stuart’s not dead.”

“C’mon, Colin. Seriously.”

“Seriously. He’s living in Rachel’s apartment with her parents while she’s on jury duty. Phillip and I gave him $2000 to pretend to get shot and up himself to Buffalo, a place we idiotically thought was in Canada. There was no mob. Rachel found out about it a month or so back when she bumped into him on Fifth Avenue. I didn’t know she knew until yesterday. She’s kept it quiet, except to
her family, who have taken it upon themselves to help Stuart kick the habit.”

Mick-O looked pale. “I’ll bare my bum if you’re not totally shitting me,” he said.

“You’re gonna have a cold arse, mate. Stuart’s okay for now, but if I don’t marry Rachel and calm her down, she could get us all into jail. She wants me to get working papers, stay in the country, and help the Ganellis jumpstart Stuart’s life. The only others filled in are my friend Peter, who got him doctored papers, and a handful of Phillip’s mates from the Ambulance Corps and morgue.”

“Ambos? They pretended he was dead?”

“A grand hoax that’s greatly improved your love life.”

“What’s next? You fucked my mother? Jesus Christ, Colin. How could you and Phillip keep this from me? Who’s going to believe me that I had nothing to do with this if the shit hits the fan?”

“Rachel couldn’t understand why I’d keep it from her either. Phillip and I didn’t want to get you involved.”

“We are involved. Bloody cunt of a Christ. What were you thinking!? Not only did you put my arse out there without me knowing, now the best Chrissie pressies are being taken away before I can open them. If no one’s talking, let’s keep going and make our money. You can knock sense into Rachel.”

“Mick-O. It’s not going to matter—a source of mine told me that EMI is getting ready to give Phillip a solo contract. We’re ants to be squashed, you and me. I don’t know where to turn. I haven’t told Phillip yet that Stuart’s resurfaced. I’m sorry, Mick-O. Christ, I’m sorry.”

“Sounds like we need another beer.”

In Australia, a mate is a mate is a mate. I had often tried to convince Rachel that Mick-O is not a bad lot. I gave him the rest of the details and asked him what he thought I should or could do next.

“While Hannah’s still out in the Hamptons, he said “Go talk to Rachel’s mum. See that Stuart doesn’t get mad. Or we’re going to end up in the slammer. We’ll work out the Phillip crisis tonight.”

You don’t smell the
urine in the movies. Holding my nose down the subway stairwell, I looked for the platform Rachel had told me to find. The F train.

I took an orange seat. A pretty girl in a hot miniskirt outfit complete with white go-go boots smiled at me. Her big, necky grin revealed an Adam’s apple; she was a cross-dresser. I kept a straight face and stared above her at an odd advertisement for “torn earlobe” repair. What the hell was I going to say to Stuart? A man with terrible BO squeezed in next to me on my left. And what about Rachel’s mum?

Once out of the subway, I wandered around the neighborhood in procrastination. There were a few benches on the corner of Bleecker Street and Avenue of the Americas. Sixth Avenue to the natives, Beth had said. I sat down: a breather before the unpleasant encounter that lay ahead. A chance to reflect.

“Jesus loves you,” the woman on the next bench said to me. “You look like you need Jesus.”

“I just have indigestion, ta,” I said so she’d leave me alone, but really I wanted to think through my worries without purple Marys
and turquoise Jesuses in stained glass above me, reminding me that rock and roll and a long, hard kiss are sins.

I had despised Catholic school. My parents weren’t particularly religious—Dad wasn’t anything—but Aunty Grace and Mum had wanted Liam and me to go for Nanna. Rachel had three-hour doses of Sunday school; I got the full-week war scars. During Rachel’s first Christmas in Melbourne, we agreed: the best part of religion was the stories.

I was getting myself riled up, and I didn’t need that with my task ahead. I took a breath and sat back and listened for a while to the rolling Rs of conversing passersby.

My thoughts drifted to Seaford again, to Liam and Aunty Grace.

Liam and I were inseparable for years. We even co-owned two cats we found; during a cold weather snap, they’d crawled into an empty box my mum put out. “Colin! Look in your box—it’s moving!” Liam had called. When I poked my favorite stick into the box, out came a stereo meow. Four eyes blinked, and a tabby and a pearl-white kitty emerged. We named them Sylvester and Casper; they were more like puppies or ducks than cats, the way they followed us around.

Liam and I would go poking around with our sticks near Aunty Grace’s Niagara Falls, that open drain a few blocks from our houses. We were careful. Nearby there were heaps of dandelions, which were magnets for bees. Liam would hold our triangular sippies, glugs we called them, as I would lift up the rock slabs. We would find snakes and mammoth centipedes and earthworms. Our teacher once told us that a few hours west there were worms
we could be proud of, for they were the biggest in the world. “In Gippsland,” she’d said, “the worms are so big that you can hear them under the street. The residents even have a special giant-worm day when they wrap worms around themselves. In Gippsland, they are proud of their worms.”

We were after frogs though, and different kinds of toads. We were frog and toad obsessed. Brown tree frogs were common, but still a treat. I found a warty black toad with three red stripes down its back. Roo lived in Liam’s house, in a pot under his bed, until Aunty Grace was changing linen and heard him croak.

Less than a decade later every household had a lawn, and there was middle-class development stretching even further down the peninsula, towards Mount Elisa and Mornington. When I lifted up the slabs for old times’ sake, I couldn’t find the frogs—only sugar ants, and their big ugly cousin the bull ant, a hilarious creature who doesn’t fear man and looks like a brawling pub drunk: C’mon, I’ll have you. By now, however, Liam and I were more interested in the beach than the dirt. We would grab two towels and kick around a Champion Nerf ball in front of the Seaford girls, who had taken on a scary significance. From puberty, we attended the same all-boys Catholic school.

In 1977, during a total solar eclipse, I remembered telling Rachel, we got our first kisses. Glenda, the girl Liam liked, had a beachside house and invited us in to watch the eclipse on telly. Outside the window, and on the screen, the sky turned pitch black. The Indian myners, chocolate brown with bright yellow beaks, thought it was twilight and started to sing. So did the starlings.
Why could we could hear the singing birds that on a normal sunny day were quiet? Because of the eclipse, Glenda guessed. She had a cardboard viewer from her school, which we took turns looking through. You’d go blind otherwise.

Glenda turned the dimmer switch to a brighter setting. She slid up next to Liam on the couch and tugged the gray streak he’d had in one section near his temple since he was a kid. Shortly thereafter her friend Jane stroked my pants’ leg. Magically, we now had girlfriends. We had no idea what to do, except suck face like on soap operas. But the girls seemed pleased with our inexperienced kisses. Ten minutes later, the eclipse cleared and the four of us went for a stroll on the sand.

“What became of
Liam?” Rachel had asked, after we’d fooled around in the shower. We’d dressed and gone to the Galleon for a coffee. No one else ever thought much of my family’s stories—like the rise and fall of Ace O’Malley, Mum’s dad, who I never met and who’d been the defending bantam-weight boxer in Victoria before World War II. Or my father’s days as a jazz singer in the fifties, trying to learn the black American sound from a record, before he threw in the towel at the lack of money in the local industry, and learned how to fold and sell chemises and boatneck jumpers.

“Liam’s a brickie,” I’d said.

“A what?”

“A bricklayer.”

“Oh,” Rachel said, raising an eyebrow like she was embarrassed for me.

She offended me every now and then, with replies like that. Liam wasn’t a surgeon or a psychiatrist like her cousins, but he did okay. He still lived out near his mum in Seaford, because Uncle Patrick had died, his sister Anna had moved to Sydney, and my parents had moved back to the city when I started my courses at uni. Liam loves brickwork, I wanted to tell her. He supervised a staff of ten and could call out the different masonry styles like top-forty hits—Flemish, American, and English, where on every other row the bricks are mortared with the smaller sides exposed. Liam worked hard. Harder than Rachel. His wife, Dolly, bought him a wooden-bead massage seat cover for his sore shoulders, the kind the taxi drivers use in Melbourne. His hands were big and muscled from manual labor. Mine remained small. I’d only managed the card factory and then the print shop. The closest I came to putting in a hard day’s work, Liam liked to rib me, was carrying my amp and guitar (or bass) to my gigs. In his crowd, big hands were a badge.

It wasn’t worth getting defensive about. We had our own situation to work through. I was afraid of naming our current state, so I’d bided more time by sharing the animals I, too, took for granted. I told her about the bull ants and the missing frogs. “Frogs are the first to go; their skins are porous,” Rachel had rattled off in explanation at the Galleon, picking at her shepherd’s pie. “They’re sponges for impurities in water and mud,” she said. “Maybe humans will have more time to adapt.”

Rachel’s mind always amused me, the way she knew that Pluto was discovered in 1930 and that whole frog species were preserved only in formaldehyde, while, in a much sillier mind sector,
were stored the phone numbers of TV sitcom families. Even among the amazing Yanks I met over the past weeks—fast talkers who threw names and concepts around like Frisbees—Rachel still stood out as a true original. But, like I tried to tell her back in the New Jersey motel room, she was judgmental and at times, spoiled. I got up from the bench. How did I get here in front of her family’s white, American-brick building, attempting to untangle the stickiest wicket of my life? With all her intellect, and even after what I’d done, Rachel wanted to marry me, a flattering and confusing scenario.

In a shop across the street from Rachel’s building, I further stalled, buying Kudos, a chocolate bar I had never seen in Australia. Kudos was one of Rachel’s favorite Scrabble words. She was never content to win by a million points. Getting creamed got boring after a while; after the first year she lived with us, Phillip and I would call her on American spellings, which weren’t in the
Macquarie Australian Dictionary
. That put us in stitches. She fumed if she racked up a seven-letter word like
colored
without a
u
. At game’s end, Phillip and I would have a smoke, or click on the footy. If the losing side was St. Kilda, the team we barracked for, we would call the winners cunts, a word that disgusted Rachel: “You’re worse than NFL moron fans.” Apparently no one used the word cunt in America, except in porno movies.

“It doesn’t have the same weight in Australia,” I’d say. “House-wives use it.” She’d roll her eyes and clean up the Scrabble board, making sentences with the words we had used and calling out the best ones.

I rang the Ganellis’ downstairs buzzer.

“Who is it?”

“Colin. Rachel’s friend.” Her mum buzzed me in. I nervously headed for the lift, thinking of Rachel’s favorite Scrabble sentence—
What silly dooms await us as we vie for zippy lives?

“Hello, Colin, we’ve been expecting you,” said the same tall woman who’d visited me backstage. Mrs. Ganelli was still more than okay-looking for a woman her age. She looked like Rachel except that her eyes were a light, not dark brown, and her forehead was a bit higher. “I’ll get you an iced coffee, Colin. You are going to need it. You can sit over on the couch.” Standing near the couch was a tall and slickly dressed bloke with a funky haircut. Her brother, I guessed to myself. Rachel had always skited about how
cool
he was.