If he’d told her he loved her, would he have been manipulating her into staying in New York? Probably.
He understood ambition. He himself brimmed with ambition—not to make a lot of money, but to accomplish things in the world, to change people’s lives for the better. Melanie had that kind of ambition. It was one of the things he admired about her. If her ambition was luring her twelve hundred miles away, how could he stand in her way?
So there she was in southern Florida, bitching about the oppressive heat, and here he was in New York City, still making regular visits to the West Side Senior Center. Never in his wildest imaginings had he thought that a year after she’d asked him to sacrifice a couple of hours at lunchtime and do a good deed for a group of retired elders in a social club on the Upper West Side, she’d be gone and he’d still be hanging around.
Of course, there was nothing charitable about playing chess with Solly. Josh had no other time for chess in his life, and if it weren’t for these weekly contests, he’d never get to play. Besides, Solly played tough. Josh considered their games cerebral aerobics.
“Melanie is fine,” he told Phyllis.
“She likes it down there?” Phyllis sounded dubious. Her geometrical upper lip curved in a sneer. “Florida is like a death sentence. It’s where people go to die.”
“She isn’t dying,” Josh assured her, not adding that Melanie’s emails were full of ominous predictions about the killer heat and how she was doomed to perish from the humidity.
“She wasn’t satisfied up here? What, she didn’t like us?”
“She liked you a lot,” Josh assured her, wondering how much she’d liked him. She’d left him, after all. She’d accepted the damned job.
“Because the new director, Francine, she’s nice enough,” Phyllis said, “but it’s three months now and she’s still messing up.”
“Don’t be so impatient,” Solly scolded. “Give the girl a chance.”
“All I’m saying is, she’s no Melanie.”
“She’ll learn.”
“Hosting a speech by that nudnik from Columbia University, the symbiotic expert—”
“Semiotics,” Solly corrected her. “I thought he was interesting.”
“He was full of crap. Melanie would never have asked a symbiotic expert to give a Friday afternoon talk. She used to bring in art experts, that fellow from the Museum of Modern Art, remember him?”
“The Modigliani guy?”
“Right. With the paintings of the lounging nude ladies. Now, that was interesting. Semiotics, what was he talking about? Here’s a word but it’s not really a word, it’s a picture that means a word… What a load of crap, forgive me. Thank God my granddaughter didn’t get into Columbia, if that’s the kind of cockamamie professors they’ve got teaching there.”
“It was very interesting,” Solly whispered to Josh.
“Who besides you knew what that man was talking about?”
“I think Francine did.” Solly shrugged with feigned modesty. “What can I say? It took a higher level of intelligence to follow his arguments.”
“Oh, excuse me,” Phyllis said with a huff. Then she cracked a grin. “All right, so I don’t understand a picture is a word. Common sense I’ve got plenty of. And I know good art. That Modigliani—now that was a great lecture. One of his pictures is worth a thousand words.”
“And a million bucks,” Solly muttered.
Phyllis ignored him. “Francine needs to bring in more speakers like that. Speakers like Melanie used to bring us.” She gave Josh’s shoulder an affectionate squeeze that felt like a nutcracker crunching his bones. Rubbing the bruised area, he wondered what sort of megavitamins she was taking. “Of course, you miss Melanie for other reasons, poor bubby,” she continued. “Don’t you worry. She’ll come back. She’ll get sick of all that sun and the gorgeous beaches and those guys who wear the skimpy little swimsuits with their tushes hanging out, and she’ll come home.”
“Thanks.” Whether or not Melanie came home wasn’t keeping Josh up nights. Maybe it should have been, but it wasn’t. He was usually so tired by the end of the day that nothing could keep him up, with the possible exception of a late Yankees game.
Solly drove his bishop forward, a move Josh had failed to anticipate. Phyllis had distracted him. Maybe having her hovering at their table and babbling about Melanie was some well-planned strategy on Solly’s part.
Josh knew his theory was wrong when Solly glanced up, gave her a honey-sweet smile and said, “You’re still kibitzing.”
“I’m not kibitzing!” She held up her hands, as if she’d just had a gun pointed at her, and backed away. “Excuse me! I’m leaving!” She made it as far as the door before hesitating. “You need anything, just give a holler. I’ll be next door in the music room.”
“Great,” Solly muttered under his breath. “Go play music.”
Josh waited until she’d vanished before he spoke. “I thought you liked Phyllis.”
“I like her very much. Only not when I’m playing chess.”
“And here I thought you wanted her to stick around and distract me.” Josh captured Solly’s rook. Solly let out a howl. “I know, Solly. It hurts me more than it hurts you.”
“Bullfeathers.” Solly ground a fist into his chin and scrutinized the board.
Another peal of laughter arose from the television set. Josh glanced toward it. He didn’t expect to see a young woman with a Long Island accent and rippling black hair on the screen, but he still felt a twinge of disappointment at the sight of a blond woman in a spotless apron, aiming a hand-held mixer at a nondescript man and turning it on, making the whisks spin. Was Loretta D’Angelo’s show as stupid as that? he wondered. Wasn’t all daytime television stupid?
Swiveling back toward the table, he saw a newcomer enter the room. She was round, her heavy bosom sloping down to her waist, and her hair was a cottony cloud of white framing her face, which was dominated by pudgy pink cheeks. Solly winced. “Oy,” he whispered.
She approached the table, carrying a paper plate. Josh was relieved that no aroma of pot roast arose from it. “Hello, Solly,” she said, balancing the plate on the edge of the table. “I won’t bother you. I just thought I’d leave these here for you.”
The plate was filled with tawny cookies, irregular in shape and obviously homemade. Solly sighed, a sound both exasperated and blissful. “Dora Lee, you’re going to make me fat.”
“You’re not fat. You’re not even close. I was doing a little baking, and I thought, Solly likes molasses. So—enjoy. I won’t bother you. I’ll just leave these and go.” She didn’t go, though. She loomed above Solly, smiling expectantly.
“Dora Lee, this is very sweet of you, but—”
“Not so sweet. Hardly any sugar. I use molasses, a bissel honey, a bissel ginger. They’re very healthy cookies. Just say thank you and I’ll disappear.”
“Thank you,” Josh said, not because he wanted her to disappear but because he was helping himself to one of the cookies. It was delicious, soft and velvety in texture and just sweet enough.
“Thank you, Dora Lee,” Solly said, taking his cue from Josh. “You’re too good to me, you know that?”
“It brings me pleasure.” With a final, almost otherworldly smile, she turned and left the room, her large body swaying back and forth as she walked.
“That woman is spoiling me rotten,” Solly confided, helping himself to a cookie as he pondered the game. “She does this all the time, Josh. She bakes these treats for me.”
“You might try being gracious about it.”
“I am gracious. I love Dora Lee. She’s so generous.” He chewed, swallowed and apparently realized that his knight was in harm’s way. Moving the piece, he added, “She scares me a little.”
“You mean, because she acts like she’s a visitor from an alternate universe?” Josh had met Dora Lee several times before—usually when she was presenting Solly with a homemade confe
ction. She always seemed to float a few inches above the ground, even though Josh had peeked and seen her feet in contact with the floor.
Solly chuckled. “She doesn’t do this for any of the other members here,” he confided as he helped himself to a second cookie. “Just for me she does it.”
“Maybe she does it for me,” Josh teased, taking another cookie, too.
“I wish. No, I take that back,” Solly contradicted himself. “Dora Lee is a sweetheart, and generous to a fault. If she wants to be in love with me, that’s all right, I don’t mind.”
“You’ve already got Phyllis in love with you,” Josh reminded him. As a matter of fact, Solly had more women panting over him than Josh did. He was probably getting more action, too. Even if Josh weren’t stuck in a long-distance situation with Melanie, he wouldn’t have the time to meet as many women as Solly seemed to attract.
It was simply a matter of demographics. The city probably had ten widows for every widower in Solly’s age bracket, and of those widowers, few were as “all there” as he was. Add to that the fact that Solly was retired, with plenty of free time and disposable income. He could go where he wanted, do what he wanted, linger as long at it as he wanted. For Josh, taking two hours away from his office for a chess game was an indulgence he paid for by working into the evening.
“So, what do you think of Modigliani?” Solly asked him.
Modigliani painted nude ladies. How could Josh not like him? “He’s good,” Josh answered, then sighed. “I can’t remember the last time I went to a museum, Solly.”
“Shame on you! You live in the greatest city on earth, it’s full of museums, full of culture. The Met. The Frick. The Guggenheim. The Whitney. And what do you do all day? Defend tenants against their landlords?”
“Sometimes I defend tenants against developers or insurance companies,” Josh said. “And sometimes I play chess with you.”
“Maybe next week we should go to a museum instead of this.”
“No. I like chess.” He liked paintings of nude women, too, but if Solly took him to a museum, for every painting of a nude woman he viewed he’d have to view a dozen paintings of ink splotches or dowdy, pasty-faced dukes or soup cans. “Tell me, Solly, how many girlfriends are you juggling these days?”
“Who knows? I can’t help it, Josh—they throw themselves at me.”
“I can see that.”
“I wouldn’t mind, except it gets awkward when Phyllis and Dora Lee are in a room together. Or Phyllis and anyone. She’s very possessive.”
“Have you talked to her about that?”
“I don’t want to hurt her feelings,” Solly said, sliding his bishop across the board. “Check.”
Josh scowled. He’d bet the reason Solly didn’t want to hurt Phyllis’s feelings was that she was the best-looking of all the women throwing themselves at him. For a seventy-something lady she was in damned good shape. She had a lot of energy and an infectious laugh.
But Dora Lee was sweeter, mellower, easier to take. And Dora Lee baked molasses cookies.
Josh got himself out of check easily enough. He ought to concentrate more on the game, but he found his mind drifting. Thoughts of women should have led to Melanie, but they led, inexplicably, to Loretta D’Angelo. He might not have time to meet women, but he’d met her, hadn’t he? And Melanie was melting in the hot Florida sun, far, far away. If Solly could handle more than one woman, why couldn’t Josh?
One reason was that he’d be cheating on Melanie. Another was that he had no idea who Loretta D’Angelo was, what she was like, whether she’d been interested in pursuing anything more from him than an appearance on her TV show. She hadn’t provided him with her home number, he recalled. Just her work number. Surely that meant she wasn’t looking for anything personal with him.
Since when had he become such a wimp, worrying about a long-distance girlfriend and struggling to interpret the signals of a pretty stranger on a train? He definitely needed to recharge himself. He needed sex, laughter, female companionship. He probably also needed a trip to a museum.
One thing he didn’t need was help playing chess. “Mate,” he said as he slid his deadly queen into place.
Chapter Four
“Are these really cucumbers?” Loretta asked. Her eyes were closed; she could only go by feel.
“Of course they’re really cucumbers,” Donna retorted. “Whaddya think, I’d use onions?”
Loretta supposed that if Donna had put slices of onion on her eyes instead of cucumbers, she’d be weeping uncontrollably. Plus, the smell would overpower her. Right now she smelled only the garlic, tomatoes and pepper in the marinara sauce simmering on the stove.
She was seated in one of the ladder-back chairs in Donna’s compact kitchen in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn, within shouting distance of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge that connected Brooklyn to Staten Island. Loretta had no idea who Verrazano was, but her family had always taken inordinate pride in the fact that this very important bridge—not only the starting point of the New York Marathon but also the route that enabled people to drive from Long Island to New Jersey without having to go through Manhattan—was named after someone Italian.
Loretta’s cheeks felt stiff and tingly from the creamy facial mask Donna had applied to her skin. “Trust me,” Donna had said. “Nothing makes you feel better like a good facial.”
Loretta had been trusting Donna pretty much from the day she was born. Two years her senior, Donna was her only female cousin, and at every family gathering, they’d stuck together, allies surrounded by a sea of testosterone. The boys—her brothers and Donna’s—used to run around, behaving loud and obnoxious, knocking things over and devouring food like locusts gorging their way through a field of alfalfa. Donna and Loretta used to escape. When they were younger, they’d retreat to one or the other’s bedroom to play with their Barbies, and later they’d retreat to one or the other’s bedroom to listen to music while experimenting with makeup and discussing what creeps boys were. Donna had never outgrown her love of makeup. She was a beautician, majority-owner of a salon three blocks away from the two-bedroom apartment she shared with her husband Lou and their sons.
Loretta trusted Donna not only with her complexion but with her life. Perhaps she shouldn’t. Donna had always demonstrated a wild streak. When they were in their early teens, she used to sneak Loretta cigarettes which Loretta hated, thank God, because if her father had ever noticed a nicotine stain on her teeth—and he would have, given the close attention he paid to that part of her body—she would have been grounded for life. When they were in their later teens, Donna had introduced Loretta to bourbon, which she hadn’t been crazy about but had felt extremely cool drinking, since she’d been way below the legal drinking age. Donna had taught Loretta to stand up to people, not to let her family bully her, and never to settle down with a man unless the sex was phenomenal. “Trust me,” Donna used to whisper, the voice of experience when she was all of eighteen. “There’s such a thing as bad sex. And it’s really bad.”
No one else had ever told Loretta such a profound and irrefutable truth. How could she not trust Donna?
“Okay, so explain this again—you’re gonna lose your job?” Donna asked.
Loretta caught a whiff of cigarette smoke mingling with the spicy aroma of the pasta sauce. “I don’t know, but it looks that way.”
“What’s wrong with that bitch, anyway? She wants to fire someone—what’sa matter, honey?” Donna suddenly asked in a sweet, light voice.
With her eyes closed, Loretta couldn’t see who’d entered the room. She imagined it was Andrew, Donna’s younger son. Her guess was confirmed when he announced, in his piping four-year-old voice, “I can’t flush the toilet.”
“Where’s Daddy? Tell him to flush it for you.”
“Okay!”
Loretta heard Andrew’s footsteps scrambling against the tile floor. Donna sighed. “What, am I the only person in this family who k
nows how to flush a toilet? Okay, Loretta, so that little blond bitch is gonna lay you off. You think. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if she did. You’ll get a better job. You’re very qualified.”
“Oh, yeah,” Loretta groaned. “I’m very qualified. I’m qualified to be a toll taker—no, too much arithmetic. I’m qualified to be a bagger in the supermarket. Not a cashier—too much arithmetic. I’m qualified to marry a dentist, according to my family.”
“You’re a college graduate,” Donna reminded her.
Her eyes felt sticky under the cucumbers, and the cream was growing heavy on her cheeks. “Big deal. I’ve got a degree in English from New Paltz. What good is that?”
“It was good enough to get you a hotsy-totsy job with that little blond bitch. Trust me, Loretta—something else’ll come through. Something always does. Every time a door slams shut a window opens.”
“But wait, it gets worse,” Loretta warned. “Before they fire me, they want to publicly humiliate me. Like during the French Revolution. They used to shave off a woman’s hair and truck her around the public square in a dog cart before they cut off her head. It wasn’t enough to decapitate her. They had to make her last minutes on earth miserable.”
“So...what? They’re gonna shave your hair off? I wish you’d let me do something with your hair, Loretta. I could take off a few inches, give it a little shape. Ten minutes. I could give you a new birthday coiffure.”
“No, thanks. A birthday facial is plenty.”
“So, what’s the public humiliation they’ve got planned for you?”
“They want to do a show where they set me up with a blind date, right there in the studio.”
Just This Once Page 5