The Unexpected Salami: A Novel (12 page)

“Yes, don’t worry.” I tried to look nonchalant. “I’m a regular sex
shop customer,” I said, which, considering my recent purchase with Janet, was mildly true. Greta looked at me for a second like I was a flasher. She showed me the key for the restroom in the desk drawer, demonstrated the straightforward phone system, and gave me a list of the employees and the fake names they used on the job. Harry Dershowitz was “Moe Turner.” Sherri Ng was “Wendy Hurtz.”

“You might get heavy-breathing calls,” Greta warned, “but don’t worry, it’s horny teenagers who think there must be a naked woman on the other end of our subscription line.” She handed me an assortment of Taitler Inc.’s magazines—in case adult bookstores called with orders. I looked them over while waiting for the aroused teen brigade to ring. The publications were, in a word, smut. A mag for every special interest perversion, a concept not unlike Bell Press’s extremely specialized science journals.

For men obsessed with big butts, there was a periodical called
Cr-ASS
; women were still giving the standard blow-jobs and getting laid, but each photo was set up so that their behinds took up half the page. There was
Black Lesbo Pussy
, and
Shaved Pussy
. I gasped when I saw
Incest World
. One spread featured a bald middle-age man, with a nose discolored by either skin cancer or alcohol consumption, licking out a young girl’s vagina. I swear I saw him in the office heading toward the water fountain, a fortyish penny-loafered man who later introduced himself as the owner of the company.

“You’re doing a great job,” he said. “You’d be surprised how many girls can fuck up reception.” I’d gone low before, but this was touching the core of the earth.

Instead of calling the FBI Child Porn taskforce, I calculated thirteen by thirty-five hours, thirty-seven point five if I took a half-hour lunch for the week, and grit my teeth. The money wasn’t great, but I had Stuart to support for at least a little while. It wasn’t fair to ask Frank to lay out money.

An assistant art director I recognized from Bell Press (a dim and tan-in-February bull who had once asked me if Ganelli was a Swedish name) appeared in the late afternoon to drop off freelance mechanicals. We pretended not to know each other.

Nine hours had elapsed
back at the ranch; when I returned Stuart was sitting up. “Well, hi,” I said, surprised. He had showered, too. I had interrupted Stuart and Frank in an instructional game of two-up, an Australian coin-tossing game that World War I soldiers, the diggers, had played to pass time. I guess Stuart thought an American quarter was an okay substitution. Frank had ordered another pizza.

“Hi,” Stuart said, embarrassed. He was scratching himself on the arm.

I rested my butt near where they were sitting. Stuart still smelled metallic from withdrawal, with an extra whiff of apple pectin shampoo. “I didn’t expect to see you up yet. What have you been talking about?”

“I told Frank about me dog Sylvester.”

Stuart had a dog named Sylvester? In our two years as flatmates, he told me three intimate facts: an almost boastful claim that his father was killed in Vietnam picking up a dead baby stuffed with a grenade (which I didn’t believe); his heroin-teeth acknowledgment;
and that he’d do anything for Melissa, the girlfriend who’d started him on the downward spiral. It wasn’t the time for jealousy again, but did everyone always have to fall in love with Frank’s charm?

“I was about to tell Stu about your turtle,” Frank said, flipping the quarter—obviously not a good flip since Stuart took a handful of Frank’s jelly bean pile.

I tried to mimic Frank’s easy style. It sounded forced. “Frank convinced me that turtles like merry-go-rounds and got me to leave Mertle on our turntable for hours. He died of dizziness, I think. My mother found my dead turtle spinning round and round.”

Mom had made Frank explain to me that he had done a bad thing and that he was trying to fool me. She tried to follow the Quaker discipline model at our school—no corporal punishment, unlike Colin’s Catholic school with its ruler-wielding nuns.

(“They hit you for anything,” he’d once said, tying up the kitchen garbage—Stuart had long abandoned his job responsibilities. “Sister Patricia once slapped my wrist for my tic acting up.”)

When my Grandma Rosa insisted I go to Sunday school if I was going to go to Hebrew School, Mom made sure she found a class taught by a retired divinity professor who was too riddled with arthritis to hit us. Quakers want to be sure that their kids understand what they did wrong; Frank and I learned early on a good bullshit story could get us out of anything.

“I loved that turtle,” I said, and Stuart offered a sympathetic smile.

“But not as much as Brice loved Cookie,” Frank added.

“Cookie?” Stuart asked.

“A fuzzy yellow chick my friend Brice took home from school when I was nine.”

I hadn’t thought of this in years.

“Cookie was hatched in our classroom incubator,” Frank continued. “Everyone got to take a chick home for a few days, but Brice refused to bring his bird back. His divorced mother indulged him, and let Cookie grow into a chicken in their apartment. Cookie shit on everything and pecked holes in their couch until one of Brice’s aunts made his mom send it away to a farm upstate.”

“Did Brice see Cookie again?” Stuart asked, a three year old distracted from a bleeding knee.

“I don’t think so. Anyway, chickens make lousy pets,” Frank finished. “There’s a reason you break their necks and fry them.”

Stuart laughed out loud. His whole face lit up; he could have been a cousin from Odessa, who emigrated the previous week into our kooky, capitalist family. Frank and I knew this story cold, even though years had passed since one of us had retold it. Stuart came from a childhood without narrative. He was taking sanctuary in ours.

“So, hey,” Frank said, “how’s the new temp job?”

“Okay. It’s a magazine company.” I sat down on the mattress. I smiled at Stuart. Maybe he wasn’t such a sore on humanity. “You can come back to my apartment tomorrow, and I’ll help you look for work. We’ll put our brains together, okay?”

“Jesus, Rachel,” Frank said, “Stu’s barely back from the dead. Getting over the need for the Man is hard shit.”

A need for the Man? Stu? Please. “I’m saying it’s okay if you
want to move back into the apartment. I took a job this week. You don’t have to worry about money for a week or so. You can watch TV or something. And Frank has a shower stall, I have a bath.”

“Whatever,” Stuart said. I gave Stuart an uncomfortable “you survived” hug and left them alone for a few minutes while I chilled out by the radio.

No one had moved the dial since Frank last turned it on. It was the top of the hour. Richard, the ingredient-reading DJ I’d bonked during my internship summer, played the station ID audio cart. He announced the time and the weather. Then he popped in the contest cart from the promotions department. Oh, sloppy, Richard. I could hear him putting in the cart.

The promo featured Richard’s voice over an old INXS hit, “What You Need.”

“Give us watcha need, watcha need,” cooed lead singer Michael Hutchence.

“I know watcha need,” Richard said, “two tickets to Madison Square Garden for the June sixteenth Foster’s Down Under Tour featuring INXS. Opening act is the Tall Poppies, who’ll perform their hot new hit ‘Gnome.’ Listen for your chance to win.” A second of Phillip’s chorus kicked in, “Like a Gnome I’m contorted. I’m a Gnome”—, and then the climax of the promo, a final “watcha need!”

I clenched the armrest of my chair in disbelief.

Richard went back live to the mic. “On your mark, listeners, the ninety-seventh caller gets a stuffed koala from the Steiff Toys World Heritage animal collection, and a chance to enter our grand prize drawing. Five grand prize winners and their guests will be
driven to the INXS concert in a stretch limo, and escorted to their front row seats. Up next is Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, with one of my favorites, ‘Young Girl.’”

I heard Frank asking Stuart about the best pizza slice in Melbourne. They had not heard a word of the promo. I kept my mouth shut about this sudden development, a new concept for a Ganelli. I shut off the radio and put up the kettle. I looked for the bible Aunt Virginia gave me for Communion but settled on Frank’s new copy of
Halliwell’s Film Guide
. I put my finger on
Citizen Kane
. Let the wild Indians storm the cabin; I had strength in my heart. Frank moved past turtles and chicks, and was on to describing his first two-wheeler to Stuart. I was not having fun.

Phillip’s crazy call came
the night Hannah started converting her cats to vegetarianism. She was propped up on a neckroll and pillows, poring over recipes from a vegetarian pet cookbook. I couldn’t believe it. I told her that animals shouldn’t be subject to human morality, and she insisted that I was forcing
my
steak-and-eggs Australian morality on them. “It’s okay to determine what kids eat,” she’d said, “so why not cats, as long as it’s good for them?”

“One of my old schoolmates back in Seaford was so attached to his dog that he’d share turns having licks on an ice-cream cone. They both came down with the flu.”

“Your story has nothing to do with our argument.”

I think it did, but in any case, you can’t tell me it’s right to make a cat eat tofu.

There was another reason I was sulking. We hadn’t had sex since the week we’d met after the gig at Lounge. I didn’t want to be a brute, like her last boyfriend, the conductor, who she claimed forced sex on her. But I lay there, lusting for her great cheekbones and her unbelievable spine that flowed through her petite body. Not to mention those perky white norgs.

Hannah had on peach satin underwear from Georges, one of a whole drawerful of horny, not-too-revealing underwear. Hannah never put it all out there; that’s what got me barred up the second she got undressed. Lately, she limited my advances to letting me feel her groin through her panties with my feet, which she thought were beautiful and graceful. (I secretly think my feet are pretty great, too. They’re among the few parts of my body I don’t have complaints about. Even the little toes are in perfect proportion. I could be a male foot model.) Hannah’s eyes were a glassy gray; they set off her red hair. A frigid stunner who I wanted to fuck about every five seconds.

Lying there with nothing to do but watch her read, scrape my heel on her body, or otherwise mark time, I started comparing her to Rachel. I hadn’t thought about not hearing from New York in a while.

Rachel’s eyes were more startling than beautiful, those deep-set brown circles that chased you everywhere. And she was much taller than Hannah, five eight or so; the crown of her head came up to my forehead. Despite her model height, she was not what you’d call a graceful girl. She knocked over our standing lamp near the TV at least once a week, or her black tights often had a ladder that ran down to her calf. And despite the fact that she was urbangothic white, as she called it, even in the summer, Rachel insisted on wearing black basketball runners everywhere; high-tops, she called them. She could have bowled everyone over with her knockout legs if she wore silk stockings and European high heels like Hannah, but she didn’t give a shit. “It’s a look sure, but high-tops without socks doesn’t look good on your pale skin,” I’d say.

“Dress yourself,” she’d say.

“As your closest friend in the Southern Hemisphere,” I once said, “I’m telling you that you could tone it down more.” She was headed out the door for her shift, in her purple American bowling shirt embroidered with the name
Susie
, tucked into her bright red miniskirt. And those fucking high-tops.

“Will you chill out? Is there a law against color? The world is drab enough.” Rachel had a name and an answer for everything.

Phillip once said it best: “She’s great, but sometimes I wish she’d shut the fuck up.” I didn’t know how Rachel was in bed; I imagined full-on sex with her would be fun, but wordy.

A sound like feet trudging through mud came from the corner. Marjoram and Smudgeface were devouring their Happy Cat liver and bacon. Poor suckers had no idea of the meatless fate that awaited them. I was bored. Hannah had a book by Rilke on her Art Deco dresser.

“My old flatmate Rachel read Rilke. But she thought his writing was ‘pompous male poet sentimental mush, like Rimbaud’s and Verlaine’s.’” Rachel was always going off into tirades like that, even when she didn’t mean it; she made me write down those two writers’ names to force me to check them out of the library and see if what she said was true. I have to confess I never did. I could tell that once again she was thinking midair. Like that time I drew a caricature of her from a bad angle and she acted like I was her executioner for fifteen minutes, and I felt like utter shit for it, like a boar, and then a second later she asked if there was milk left in the fridge.

“Rachel is not a delicate woman,” Hannah sniffed, “Rilke is sublime.” I tried to kiss Hannah’s sublime little breast, but she said,
“I’m reading now, Colin. Why don’t we do that stuff when we’re in Mount Buller?” Her sister had a share at Mount Buller for the ski season.

So, we were lying there, frustrated bastard and bombshell Kelvinator on the coldest setting, when Phillip rang with the news. “Can you get that, honey?” she asked, without looking up from her cookbook.

“Leser residence, Colin speaking,” I said, like Hannah had told me to—she didn’t approve of my standard “Yeah?”

“Mate!” Phillip said, “Wait until you hear this! Angus rang the house. That Aboriginal pop band Yothu Yindi, you know them?”

“Of course—”

“Well, the lead singer’s developed nodes on his vocal chords from having one too many global gigs during the official United Nations’ Year of the Indigenous People—”

“And you’re excited by this?” I asked.

“Hold on. They’re in the middle of a tour with INXS, and the promoters needed another opening Australian band since it was a Foster’s tour, and guess who that band is? I’ll give you a hint: you’re right, Angus is one cluey bastard of a manager.”