The Unexpected Salami: A Novel (28 page)

“That’s how I got talking to Hannah. I hate that country with a passion. It represents all that is sad to me. I saw this pretty face and heard her speak and asked her to tell me three wonderful things about Australia.”

“The smell of eucalyptus, filigree latticework, and ferns,” Hannah repeated for my benefit.

“You were engaged to Rachel Ganelli?”

Will looked at me in horror.
Confirmed
, as Rachel would say. “How would you know that?”

“I know her. She’s my friend. I just saw her today in a hotel room. Rachel Ganelli.”

“The one who hated Rilke!” Hannah said. “You just saw her today in a hotel room? I knew she was a vile creature.”

“She’s back in New York?” Will said, his face pained, his voice wavering.

“You seem so different from Rachel.”

“How’s that?” he managed to pipe out.

“For one thing you’re not wearing purple and red.”

“She only started going overboard with the colors those last few months before she left.”

“Why did you love her?”

“This is so appalling,” Hannah said.

“I can answer that.” He looked right at me. His eyes were bluer than mine. Rachel had said we had about the same color. “Because every pore of Rachel was alive.” He gave me his business card. “Tell her I’d like to hear from her. That I hold no malice, and that I’d love
to take her out to lunch. Would you do that? Would you tell her I said hello?”

“Like hell you do,” Hannah muttered.

“Sure,” I said.

“And what are you going to do today, Colin?” Hannah said, in a sudden recovery.

“Actually, Rachel and I are getting hitched. She’s been sequestered on a trial and I got to visit her as her fake fiancé. But we decided under the covers that we really do want to get married.”

Will looked like he was going to croak from apoplexy. Supposedly, that happened to my granduncle, who lost his muscle control in a shock.

“You son of a bitch!” Hannah said. She pulled Will’s arm before he could respond, and grabbed a cab.

In my room I looked at his card.

William Reynolds
Vice President
Peterson & Smith Corporate Communications

I ripped it up. I didn’t know what I wanted from Rachel, but I didn’t want Will back on the scene.

Phillip, Angus, and Marty,
who turned out to be the executive with the waxy forehead I recognized from backstage at Madison Square Garden, were disemboweling me in the EMI office in one guiltless motion, like a butcher. I was in quicksand, except I could only register that the arsehole firing me looked like Hardy
out of Laurel and Hardy. My friends and housemates were on the opposite side. Phillip and Mick-O sat still as a blackboard as Marty fed me his horseshit.

“It’s not you, personally,” Marty said. “It’s hard enough to cross over one artist. But three men over thirty? Impossible. The company wants Phillip. He’s tested well with the audience. With the girls, and with young men who don’t view him as a teenybopper. I don’t have to tell you it’s a youth market. We need to put a young thing on bass. Michael here is going to do drums for a few more months, until we find a good young drummer.”

“Sorry it didn’t work out, mate,” Angus said, clenching his thumb with his other hand.

Mick-O couldn’t look at me. So I had him all wrong. If he’d been kicked out, I would have quit. He didn’t give a shit about playing, like I did. He wanted the money. Even if he knew they were giving him the boot as soon as they found his replacement. Stuart was more loyal than this friend-turned-cunt. Rachel would’ve gloated, if she was there. She maintained from the first month she met him that Mick-O was as loyal as whoever’s buying the next round.

“Here’s my bottom offer: a $25,000 check. You walk off with more than most musicians make in a lifetime of gigs. And you get the memories of touring.”

“I’m going to check it out with a lawyer.” I’d signed a contract. I didn’t actually have a lawyer. But Hannah’s brother was a lawyer, maybe he could speak to me. I could bring everything down with a few choice words: Phillip and I staged Stuart’s murder. I’m telling the cops that’s how we got the fame.

Phillip shifted uncomfortably. He couldn’t even look at me. Sure, mate, say a little prayer. What’s keeping me from mangling your bones with the same knife you bloodied?

I’d said I get back to them the next day. “Mate,” Phillip said, as I headed for the door with the gut-wrenching question mark hovering above me. I knew they’d broken my contract. But was I up for suing?

“Mate? You listening? Try to understand …” I glared at him. I had other places to go. I was supposed to meet Rachel. Having been kicked out of the most unlikely Australian crossover band ever, I now had to deal with my equally unlikely impending marriage. Just like Hannah, Rachel had called and said that she wanted “to talk” and to meet at a place near her called Coffee Bar.

“Hi,” I said, kissing
Rachel on the cheek. I wanted to hold on to her for my life. “You order the silver pattern yet?”

“Colin! You look like you’re about to cry!”

“Do you have any allergies?” I asked. “That’s the kind of thing fiancés are supposed to know, right? I’m allergic to penicillin.”

“Let me get this out right away. I think we should call off the marriage. Stuart will be okay somehow. I’m going to temp some more and start looking for a real job. I called around. There aren’t many editing jobs going, but I’ll even take administrative assistant work if it can get me back in the market.”

“What’s gotten into you? I’ve met your mother. I was getting used to the idea. Now suddenly I’m not good enough?”

“Death,” she said, sucking salt off a sunflower seed.

“Isn’t that a smidge depressing?”

“No. Danny Death.”

Here we go. Drama Queen has her crown on. She liked to reveal words sometimes, then you had to ask her questions. “You’ve been listening to your punk albums again?”

“No, I know him now. I met him when I came back. He sat next to me in this same coffeehouse. He ordered me a blueberry slice.”

“You’re kidding? I thought he OD’d years ago with the rest of those phonies.”

“He thinks I should let you go. And stop obsessing on Stuart.”

“You told
Danny Death
about Stuart?”

“Calm down. He’s the only one I’ve told. Except my parents and Frank.”

“Jesus.”

“And Janet.”

“Janet? Who the hell is Janet?”

“She’s the woman who helped save Stuart’s life for me while you were waltzing around our country. Remember? My family talks loud, but we keep it to ourselves. We’re breaking the law, too. And Danny and Janet are cool. Janet’s pissed me off royally this week, but she doesn’t pop a secret. Danny doesn’t even know the band’s name. He doesn’t care. He’s very Zen—”

“Danny Death is very Zen?”

“I’m trying to say everything’s okay.”

“Fine.”

“Fine.”

Looking at a picture of the Mona Lisa or listening to “Hey Jude” you think how corny it is because of the over-bombardment
of images and associations you already have. So you forget the original power. Rachel’s irritating habits clouded her core. When she was in a bad mood, she’d yammer. Even in a peachy mood she’d talk too much until you forget how special she was. Rachel looked pretty standing there, annoyed as shit with me. She seemed to have racked into focus, when I’d gotten even fuzzier.

I didn’t want to lose her. “Rachel, really. I’ll do my bit for Stuart. I was getting used to the marriage idea. It’ll be an adventure.”

“No, it’s okay. I have myself.”

“I’ve been offered $25,000 to opt out of the band voluntarily. They want Phillip to go solo.”

“Phillip? Are they out of their minds?”

“Is it okay to talk to you about this? I’m sure you think this is just punishment.”

“I told you, I’ve moved on. Listen, are you taking it? Why don’t you stay around for a few months?”

“How can I do that without getting married? I’m illegal.”

“I’ve never heard of the Immigration Bureau hunting down Australians. They’re racist. If you had brown skin they’d give you hell. My friend Veemah immigrated here. Her family has about five trillion dollars from financing Indian movies. She went to a Swiss finishing school. And they still gave her hell because she has an Indian passport. You have enough money to sublet. I’ll help you find an apartment.”

“Who says I’m taking the money?”

“Take the money! I don’t see that you have a choice. A band needs trust to succeed. And it wouldn’t do any good turning in Phillip on a scam you cowrote the script for, now would it? Maybe
you can waiter or something so you don’t use up your money.” She sipped her tea.

“Waitering seems like a big fall from Madison Square Garden.”

“Then use the money to intern a bit. Try out jingle writing. I think my friend Frieda could help. She knows people. Everyone wants a free manservant.”

“I’m a little old for interning.”

“I’m a little old for temping. You try that out and I promise I’ll hunt for a real job in a few weeks. We’ll attack our goals in tandem. I have to temp to get some pocket money.”

I frowned at her.

“I might have to send you over to Danny’s for a yelling. The worst that would happen is that you’d hate jingle writing—but at least you’ll make the decision to avoid penning tunes for potato chips and tire companies based on first-hand experience. The way I look at it, jingle finger sure beats taxi neck. What else can you do? Maybe you can try out for a new band, but you’re kind of old for that, too.”

She was so fucking blunt. I didn’t think she ever intended to hurt anyone. She’d chat chat chat, and go too far. Rachel could be cruel without being mean.

“What are three things you love about Australia?”

“Three things?” Rachel said. “I couldn’t answer that.”

“Please.”

“I like the way it’s so big but unpeopled that I can get lost in my mind and work things out slowly without pressure.”

“And two?”

“I guess I love Iced Vo-Vos. You can’t find strawberry and coconut
cookies in New York. They are so good! But you already know that, you brought me a bag.”

“And three?

“Well there’s the trams, and the pubs on every street corner and the way everyone says ‘right’ instead of ‘okay’—”

“You have to pick a third.”

“You. I guess you’re the third reason. That’s why I see now that we can’t get married. You need to live your life, not mine. You have a lot of achieving to do, and I’m just going to ruin it for you.”

I was the worm
trapped in the jumping bean, hopping around in blind determination to get anywhere. But I took Danny’s advice, for the second time. I called it off with Colin, and we were both relieved. I phoned Frank, and Janet answered, which annoyed me to no end, but outwardly I accepted their budding relationship. I needed to repaginate my life, to move on from self-loathing, the most boring neurosis.

On the Stuart front, my mother came through on her hospital promise to him. Stuart’s second cousin in Buffalo, Leigh Ann Harmond, was here in New York. Mom found her by placing a Desperately-Seeking-Susan ad in a Buffalo newspaper, and had four calls with the news that Leigh Ann had left Buffalo a week before Stuart’s drugged arrival in town. Her husband, a spokesman for the Buffalo bus system, was hired away by the New York Port Authority, headquartered in the World Trade Center. They were living in Independence Plaza near Battery Park.

Mom, Stuart, and I took a cab downtown to see her.

Stuart was squashed between us on the middle hump of the backseat. “What should I say?” He’d been apprehensive ever since Mom broke the good news. He was a fixture on our sofa bed, a second
son. Did he secretly hope that the eccentric Ganellis of Greenwich Village were his long lost relatives, instead of Leigh Ann Harmond formerly of Buffalo?

“The truth,” Mom said.

“Maybe not quite the truth,” I said. I didn’t want Colin getting in new trouble. Who knew if this woman was a churchgoer and would feel it was her duty to go to Australian authorities about his scam?

The middle-age woman who answered the door wore a long-sleeved dress with felt trim. Blizzard living habits must be hard to break; it was an odd first impression on a summer’s day. I was sweating in my gauze skirt and cotton tank top. “Mrs. Ganelli? I’m Leigh Ann.”

“Please—Sylvia. This is my daughter Rachel, Stuart’s friend, and this is your cousin Stuart. How kind of you to see us.”

“Come in! I have some lemonade waiting.”

“That would be great,” I said.

“Stuart, this is a pleasure. I never knew you existed until Sylvia called. I understand you missed us by a week in February.”

Stuart nodded.

“We knew we had your mother in Australia,” Leigh Ann continued “but Margaret never wrote us that she had children. How old are you, darling?”

Margaret Gibbs. Learning his dead mother’s name was more intimate than watching him vomit in Frank’s bucket during withdrawal. It would be cruel to ask more, but I wanted it. What was her maiden name? How did she get from Buffalo to Australia? Did Stuart’s father really die picking up a baby stuffed with a grenade? Or did he die from an alcoholic liver?

“Twenty-eight.”

How ridiculous this was. I glared over to Mom. Were we trying to pawn this ex-junkie off on Leigh Ann? She didn’t know him from a can of Foster’s, and he was an adult.

“You got your grandmother’s eyes.”

Stuart perked up. “I never met me grandmother.”

“She had those big roundeyes eyes and light brown hair.”

“Like me,” Stuart said.

“Like you.”

Mom saw her emotional window of opportunity, earlier than expected, but she knew it was there. That’s why she was the New York chapter of Women in Public Relations’ Woman of the Year three times in ten years. “Leigh Ann—Stuart has no living relatives, and I thought as his only family link, and as a mother, that you would want to meet him.”

“How long are you in town, Stuart?” Leigh Ann asked softly.

“I’m afraid he can’t go back to Australia,” Mom answered for him.