The Unexpected Salami: A Novel (27 page)

“Oh yeah, getting on with your life?”

“I could use another yelling at.”

“Where are you?”

Harold is a motherfucker
was scraped in the metal on the phone. “On a street corner in Chinatown. I’ve lost my center again since you bought coffee—”

“You getting ready to off yourself from middle-class self pity?”

“Yeah. Lucky you. You get to be the white knight.”

“My armor’s at the dry cleaners. But come over to my place. I’ll happily shoot bullets through every pile of crap you put before me. Let me give you the address. One hundred Avenue C, between Sixth and Seventh Street. Buzzer seventeen.”

That was a block down from where Will and I had rented our studio apartment. Granted, Danny wasn’t exactly the Dalai Lama, but beggars can’t be choosers at eleven-thirty on a weekday morning. I’d take whatever guru figure I could get my hands on. There’d be a twenty-minute walk to his place. I mapped out the quickest route. Bowery to Sixth Street and across. Past CBGBs, where Danny and his circle had invented a new, angrier generation.

I counted on my crowded head to distract me from my growing litany of affliction. Wasn’t there anyone in there who could save the day? I tried hard to muster the four-eyed geek who had served me so well during the SATs. What could be more relaxing than a meander and a think about tomato varieties—beefsteak, and that new crossbred variety that’s long and slim and slices like a cucumber? When a gang of New York punks walked by as I passed Third Street, however, it was my third-rate Edith Wharton who took over the internal mic. Twenty years had passed since Danny Death and his intentional hair-botching took the stage. These were the punks guidebooks warned about? “Watch your purse in Alphabet City, an ominous, but colorful district of punks and drug addicts.” Ominous types who once played varsity lacrosse or field hockey: what Fodor’s never says is that half the black-walled rotting-couched apartments are graduation gifts from Connecticut
and Westchester parents. Like Will’s parents. Even Danny Death had told me that he was a lawyer’s kid from Scarsdale.

At Sixth Street between First Avenue and Avenue A, New York’s Little India, restaurant merchants hawked their lunch menus. A man in a turban was brazen enough to shove one into my clenched hand. I lifted a thumb for it out of reflex. The owners knew who they had to please to keep up their customer flow; the flyer had a Shiva above each section. Shiva picture, then the list of curries. Shiva, tandori selection.

Veemah had brought me back a Shiva when she returned from Agra. I’d asked her for a Taj Mahal snowglobe. Life becomes momentarily bearable with such an indulgent frosted–Pop Tart of a request. And people like to be asked to bring back an item from their enviable journeys, I’ve discovered: I have over two hundred.

“Suri couldn’t find one,” Veemah had apologized, crunching her toast.

“Who’s Suri?” Please don’t let this be another servant.

“He’s a family servant. I had him search for a snowglobe for two days.”

“Veemah! I didn’t want you to do that.”

“Oh, don’t worry, he got paid well for his troubles. Look, you don’t give money to the homeless anymore, right? You accept the New York status quo. So don’t judge the way things work back home. Anyhow, no more tangential rubbish, open it up, it’s a bit tacky, but—”

I had ripped the newspaper wrap open to find a tiny carved figurine with exotic white markings. “It’s a Shiva—actually it’s a mini-Shiva, a shivling. It represents the god of art and destruction.
Sometimes Shiva is a goddess though. There’s a huge Shiva cult in India.”

“Thanks, Veemah, it’s great.”

I crossed First Avenue and thought,
I should have tossed that bastard/bitch of a deity out my window.
My life was a sea of destruction all right. Now Shiva had Frank and Janet under command, too.

“C’mon up,” Danny said through the buzzer. “Fifth floor.” Was Danny’s building the only one in lower Manhattan to escape gentrification? Even my and Will’s old building down the block had lights at the top of every stairwell. When I reached the third floor a rat lumbered by en route to its destination, so jaded by rule of its kin over the building that a human ranked as mere scenery. I knocked on 17.

“Hey,” Danny said at the door, from behind mirrored sunglasses. Danny’s mop of graying black curls was tied back with a girl’s elastic hairband, the same Goody brand I used. The railroad flat was as stark as a Zen temple. I’d have expected celebrity punk furniture like bubble-shaped TVs, faux-leopard bath mats, or at least a poster or two from his past. I knew from articles that he’d spent his 1970s money, but wouldn’t there be a luxury or two from selling rights? All I could see was a pile of tapes near a foam mattress, a ridiculous number of cigarettes cases, and an old-style boom box from the days of afros and hustle lines.

“Want some iced tea?”

“That would be great.”

“Love those shorts by the way.” There was a cracked mirror propped up against the door. I took a look at myself as Danny ran the tap over his ice-cube tray. My make-up was smeared. My ass
was peeking out of the denim. Colin was right. They were too short; I looked like a slut.

“Enjoying your rights money?”

“Is that what you need, money?”

“No, no—please don’t think that. I didn’t come here for money. I came, God help me, for your company.”

Danny winked. “Good. There isn’t any. I prepaid my rent for two years, and bought a few hundred cases of cigarettes.” He gestured to the far end of the room toward a hill of Lucky Strikes and Camels. He put down my glass of iced tea. “I was afraid I’d put it all in my arm.”

“Didn’t you kick the habit a year ago?”

“Twenty thousand to an ex-junkie is like an alcoholic winning a stash of scotch.”

Above his head was the apartment’s sole decoration: an odd painting on rice paper. A couple floated in midair, needles stuck in their arms. The colors were more intense than watercolors but equally delicate, as if they had been breathed on by a smack-addicted angel.

“Food dye. Nice effect, don’t you think? I painted it last year, when I had five dollars to my name. So what’s new with you?”

“Two hours ago, I was released from the De Meglio trial. I was a sequestered juror.”

“Don’t have a TV.”

“The killer grandma?”

No response.

“Trust me. It’s the biggest trial in the city.”

“Means nada to me. What else have you been up to?”

“Remember my roommate that was murdered? It was a scam. He’s living with me. I found him alive in a sandwich shop. The semi-boyfriend I had was in on it, and then my boyfriend’s band got famous, and they showed up in New York for a Madison Square Garden appearance—and then my parents came home when my semi-boyfriend’s song got on the radio—and then my brother and one of my closest friends were fucking while I was in sequestration.”

Danny shrugged his shoulders at my rambling words. “So?”

Didn’t anything faze Danny Death? “Maybe I wasn’t clear about everything that’s happened. Let me start again. The dead guy’s
alive
—”

Danny wasn’t flinching.

“Look, Danny, this is amazing stuff—”

“Is it? You haven’t answered my question. “What have you been doing? To get on with your own life?”

“I thought about religion during the trial, and how it’s a crutch.”

“That’s a start—isn’t that a bit simplistic though?”

“Don’t tell me you go to church?”

“Why are you here, Rachel?”

“I have nowhere else to go.”

“Go inward.” He offered me a familiar white bag. “Goldfish?”

I took a handful. “Yeah, well, I’m afraid inward is an ugly place.”

“I suspect deeper down it isn’t. There’ll be a garden of Eden if you go inside. And I’m an atheist, in answer to your question. But I believe in humanity.”

I sipped my tea, served in one of those horrible “witty” mall mugs from the eighties.
Life’s a Bitch, Then You Die.

“Like my mug? It kind of embarrasses me. My aunt gave it to me.”

Here in Danny’s house, I loved that mug.

“Do you want to be married to Colin?”

I laughed tensely. “Fuck, how did you know his name?”

“I remembered it from Coffee Bar. I listen.”

“Evidently.”

“So do you?”

“I want to be grounded. Colin concocted that crazy murder-to-recording-contract plan. A totally fucked thing to do. But even so, the second I saw him, I felt better. He’s like a walking cup of chamomile tea for me. But I’m twisting his arm to stay with me. I know that on some level.”

“The way you overanalyze, you know that on all levels.”

Danny wasn’t so scary. He was a sweet puppy dog. I put my finger on his scar, and followed the jagged line with my finger. “What’s that scar from?”

“It was after my drummer OD’d on the shit I gave him. I tried to kill myself. Guess I wasn’t trying too hard. Hard to die from a cheek wound.” He took a lime out of the filthy fridge and squeezed it in his own mug of iced tea.

There were lighter scars along his neck. When I leaned forward to touch them too, my thighs stuck to the vinyl red seat, jiggling like giant gummy bears.

“What are these?”

“Nothing too exotic. Acne loves those lymph nodes. I was an ugly child, and an even uglier James Dean wanna-be.”

“And a sex-symbol rock star. The world copied your style. Richard Hell. Sid Vicious. They took your sound, not to mention your hairdo. How did you spike those curls anyhow?”

He took a cigarette pack off the hill and tore off the plastic. “Many worlds away.”

I leaned over to kiss him, but he pulled his face away.

“Save it for Colin. You’ll feel better about yourself. There’s a tape on the mattress. John Coltrane. Pop it in the cassette player.”

Nicotine-stained middle-age pudge-fest has-been rejects desperate girl and then orders her around like a domestic. Whose jerky idea was coming here?

I didn’t know this tape. A live performance. Coltrane’s first notes were hesitant, a worm crawling out into light. A few shrill Cs and Es. Then ordered chaos ensued. Free jazz. No rules or regulations. Coltrane playing from the insides. Eventually the music’s gospel hit, a tree falling on a toe.

Danny smiled at me. “You know the difference between a fluke and a flounder?” It was an enviable ferocious smile of gray teeth and kindness.

“I think so.”

“Tell me then.”

“They’re salt-water flatfish, with two eyes on one side of their—”

“Not getting my drift. See, Rachel, you’re a kook like me. A fluke’s eyes are in a different place than a flounder’s. We’re like Picasso
people. Both eyes on the side of our heads, when most of the world has them staring down the straight and narrow. You know, as a fluke gets older, its eyes start to move closer to the top of its head.”

“Really? I’ve never read that—” Come to think of it, wasn’t a fluke a type of flounder?

“Okay. Shh. Listen up—no more floundering, okay? That’s the wrong fish. You’re going to be a fluke from here on in. Author yourself a crazy benevolent life, and who the fuck cares if there’s a God? Call your brother and your friend. What do you want? Confirmation from me that they’re assholes? Okay, they’re assholes, but all brothers and friends are assholes. I’m an asshole. You’re an asshole. Everywhere an asshole. Go easy on people, Rachel, or you’ll start to clear rooms.”

“Coltrane’s in our church, Danny, isn’t he?”

“What is this, the 700 Club? What the fuck are you on about,
our church
?”

“Jesus, sorry for asking.”

Danny smiled, went over to the old-style boom box, pulled out the Coltrane tape, and handed it to me.

“Here’s your wafer, missy. Bite in. Remember, it’s a leap year.”

Hannah was just back
from the Hamptons. She had things to tell me, she said, sitting on the hotel bed. I was sure that she was on to me about my overnight with Rachel.

“I met someone.”

“You met who?” This I hadn’t seen coming.

“At the Hamptons. At the party Kerri and Phillip took me to, I got into a conversation about Australia and one thing—”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. I want to be up front about this. If we were lovers for a long time, I would feel torn up, but even you would have to admit we hardly know each other. We hardly have sex.”

Not for the want of trying.

“And frankly, I never really respected the music industry. It was an exciting few weeks, but I think I need a man of higher surroundings to be my partner.”

You social-climbing bitch. “What does he do?” I said, trying to look indifferent.

“Public relations.”

“And you respect that?”

“He writes pages and pages a year. He practically writes three novels a year if you add up his press releases.”

“So what are you going to do, drag him back to Melbourne?”

“No, actually, I’m going to move in with him. He’s an Ivy Leaguer. He has connections. I think he can help me get a spot teaching ceramics in Manhattan.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Please don’t make a scene, Colin. Let’s be nineties about it. Let’s be adult. This is what I want. He’s wealthy. He can provide some stability for my art. He fly-fishes and luges.”

She started to pack her suitcase.

“Look, I’ll help you with that.”

“He’s downstairs. I just need to take it to the elevator.”

“No, why don’t I take them down to the lobby. I want to meet the luger.”

“That’s a little weird, don’t you think?”

“This situation is a little weird, don’t
you
think?”

Her Hamptons friend was big but not fat, like a swimmer. He had a square head and had on brown shorts and white socks.

“Will, this is Colin.”

“Oh. Nice to meet you,” he said, raising a confused eyebrow to Hannah.

“Look. No hard feelings. I wanted to talk to you in person.”

“I’m so sorry about this situation. I know what it feels like to get the knife put in you. My fiancée left me a month before our wedding. For Australia, as a matter of fact.”

I had a bolt of recognition, the Hamptons had sounded familiar: Rachel had told me how Will loved the Hamptons and how
she’d sulk in the group van they took out there. What a fluke. I tried to control my smirk.