Just This Once

by Judith Arnold

  “As if there was a serious risk of that,” Bob deadpanned. Loretta threw her crumpled napkin at him. He caught it and rebounded it into the garbage pail. “All right, so how did I find out about this guy?” he asked. “How would I happen to suggest him?”

  “I don’t know.” The strands of dark hair at her ankle annoyed her. She swung her feet off the bench and stood. “Let’s walk. Maybe I’ll get inspired.”

  “God help us all. You’re dangerous when you’re inspired.” But Bob fell into step next to her. She held herself alert to the throngs filling the walkways, particularly the maniacs on skates, who moved fast but were less stable than pedestrians like her and Bob. She moved out of the way of parents power-walking while pushing three-wheeled speed strollers, people slobbering over drippy cups of Italian ice, and scruffy kids weaving among the crowds on skateboards. She tried to keep one eye peeled for dog droppings, too.

  “Could I say he’s a neighbor? Where does he live?”

  “West Twelfth Street.” Josh had supplied her with his address and phone number last night, scribbling the information on the back of a business card. “He’s a lawyer.”

  “Oh, a lawyer.” Bob curled his lip. “He’s not going to be any fun at all.”

  “Don’t be so negative.” She tucked her arm against her side after a roller-blader sped past her, brushing her elbow. “I bet some lawyers are fun sometimes.” Josh Kaplan might be fun. He had a nice laugh.

  “He’s going to be too careful while he’s on the show. He won’t dare to say anything that could lead to litigation.”

  “Isn’t that what Harold wants? A careful show.” Incredibly, the show had never yet been sued, not even by participants who’d been ambushed on the air. She remembered one fellow who’d threatened to sue after his wife announced on the air that she’d been born a boy and had transitioned several years before he’d met her. Loretta never figured out on what grounds could he have sued the show, though. He must never have figured that out, either, because he didn’t follow through on his threat.

  “It’s not as if Josh Kaplan is some sort of hotshot corporate consigliere,” she added. She had no proof of Josh’s lack of hotshot-ness, but he certainly seemed modest enough.

  “Okay. I don’t live near him so I can’t say he’s my neighbor. Maybe I could say he handled some legal work for me. How does that sound?”

  “Great.” Loretta allowed an elderly man, heading in the opposite direction and clutching the hands of two children, to pass between her and Bob. “Think of some legal work he might have done for you,” she suggested. “Kate’s so nosy, she’s going to ask.”

  “What kind of legal work does he do?”

  “How should I know? A lawyer is a lawyer. Maybe you were writing a will.”

  “Oh, right. Given the enormity of my estate, I really need a will.” Bob snorted.

  “You were having a problem with a neighbor,” Loretta suggested. “Too much noise at one in the morning.”

  “Yeah, right.” Bob grinned and shook his head. “I wish I had the kinds of neighbors who made noise at one in the morning. There’s never a party going on in my building. Never.”

  “Maybe there are parties going on but no one invites you,” Loretta teased.

  “Ah, that must be it.” He landed a playful punch on her shoulder.

  “Okay, so you went to him to discuss a neighbor problem and you thought, ‘Hey, he’d be a perfect blind date for Loretta.’” Walking had inspired her, after all.

  “Check it out.” Bob halted and stared at a couple standing behind a pretzel kiosk, their bodies entwined in what would have been an X-rated pose if they’d had a little less clothing on. Their lips were locked, their arms tight around each other, one of the woman’s legs wrapped around one of the man’s and their pelvises grinding. They were more thoroughly knotted than the pretzels being sold at the booth.

  “I guess seeing that must really make you miss your girlfriend,” Loretta muttered sarcastically.

  “Why can’t we do shows with people like that?” Bob complained. “‘I Like to Hump My Girlfriend In Public.’ It would make a great show. More people would watch that than some show about you hooking up with a lawyer.”

  “I’m not going to hook up with him.”

  “Maybe you should. Maybe you should neck a little on the show, just for the sake of ratings.” The couple continued to paw each other, and Loretta resumed walking. After lingering a moment longer, Bob caught up to her. “I think that’s a good idea, Loretta—you and this lawyer sending some steamy signals back and forth on the show. You should imply that something’s ready to explode between you.”

  “Nothing’s ready to explode,” Loretta insisted.

  “Why? Is the guy a loser?”

  “No. He’s nice.”

  “And he looks good?”

  “He looks fine.”

  “So why no explosion?”

  “Because we have an understanding. We’re keeping our emotions out of it. I wouldn’t go through with this stupid blind date if there were any chance of someone getting hurt.” She smiled. “Kind of like the schlocky shows, you know? The guests might throw tantrums and pull each other’s hair, but no one ever really gets hurt. They do their bit, enjoy their fifteen minutes and then go back home to Woonsocket, Rhode Island or Ypsilanti, Michigan and resume their lives as incestuous cousins or philanderers or strippers.” She ducked to avoid getting beheaded by an errant Frisbee. “Anyway, he’s a lawyer. I’d never get anything going with a lawyer. They’re almost as bad as dentists.”

  “Too safe? Too successful?”

  “Too close to a profession my parents might approve of.” She realized that probably made her sound adolescent—still rebelling against her parents—but what she was really rebelling against was her parents’ insistence that due to her desperately advanced age, she needed to get married as soon as possible. She honestly didn’t want to get married, though. She’d been much happier during the past few months since Gary ended their engagement than she’d been when her life had been so overwhelmed with wedding preparations that she hadn’t had a spare minute to breathe, let alone listen to her heart.

  So she’d be a rebel. She’d fake a blind date to get everyone off her back. And when she was ready to take the plunge—and really, getting married seemed to her about as healthy as jumping off a very, very high cliff—it would be on her own terms and no one else’s.

  Chapter Nine

  Josh didn’t want to make this call. But the day was already shot—he’d had to mow his mother’s yard in a drizzle, and the dampness had turned the grass slippery and limp. His mother had spent half the afternoon bitching about the plumber overcharging her when her powder room sink had gotten backed up, and Josh had tried to explain to her that plumbers weren’t cheap and her bill didn’t seem out of line. His father used to take care of paying the plumber, so she’d had no way of knowing what a reasonable fee might amount to. Josh sympathized. But he could have done with a little less whining from her.

  He’d caught a mid-afternoon train back to Manhattan, and if the stout old woman seated next to him had had a cell phone in any of her four shopping bags, she hadn’t used it. But no one with long, rippling hair, wide, dark eyes and sleek legs sat across from him, so the trip was a wash.

  He’d already phoned Solly to cancel tomorrow’s chess game. Solly had sounded upset until Josh had explained the reason: he was going to be taping a TV show tomorrow. “It’s a favor for a friend,” he’d said.

  “Friends I understand,” Solly assured him. “Favors I understand. What kind of TV show? Something to do with tenants’ rights?”

  “It’s a talk show,” Josh had said vaguely. “When I know more about it, I’ll tell you.”

  “So, maybe later this week if you’ve got a spare half-hour, we can play chess.”

  “I’ll have to get back to you, Solly. I’m taking the morning off from work to appear on the show. My partners aren’
t going to want me taking more time off for a chess game.”

  At least his partners didn’t seem to mind his appearing on the show. Peter thought the idea was hilarious. Anita said, “Nobody watches daytime TV anymore, anyway. It’s junk. Is this show you’re doing junk?”

  “It might be. I don’t know. I’m doing a favor for a friend.”

  “What friend?” Sometimes Anita treated him as if he were her son. He expected her to grill him on who was going to be there, when he’d get home, and whether chaperones would be present.

  “Just a friend. I have to pretend to be her blind date.”

  “You’re kidding.” Anita pondered, then said, “That sounds like junk.”

  “I guess it does.” Josh shrugged, hoping she’d take the hint and let the subject drop.

  No such luck. “What about Melanie? Does she know you’re pretending to be a blind date for this friend on junk TV?”

  “I haven’t told her yet.”

  “You haven’t told her yet? What are you waiting for? You’ve got to tell her!”

  “I know.” He’d considered sending her an explanatory email, but the trouble with email was that, if she reacted badly, he’d have no way of knowing. With a phone call, he’d hear her reaction immediately and initiate countermeasures if necessary.

  She had no reason to react badly, though. All he was doing was a favor for a friend.

  How Loretta had evolved into a friend, he wasn’t sure. But thinking of her as a friend made him smile. He had friends—a few old friends from high school still floating around the greater New York area, friends from college and law school, friends from work, friends like Solly. But he hadn’t made any new friends in a while—especially new female friends. Once he’d started dating Melanie, women related to him not as himself but as an adjunct of her. He met people not as an individual but as one half of a couple. A new friend would say, “Let’s get together,” and Josh would say, “Sure, Melanie and I would love to make a plan with you,” and it would turn into a couples thing.

  Even Solly had gotten to know him as Melanie’s boyfriend. That their friendship had developed on its own amazed him—but then, Josh couldn’t imagine double-dating with Solly and Phyllis. Or Solly and Dora Lee. Or Solly and whoever else he was juggling these days.

  He had no reason to feel guilty or apologetic about having made a new friend since Melanie had left town. From the sound of things, she’d made new friends in Opa-Locka. A huge number of new friends, folks who listened to Gloria Estefan and crowded her apartment on a weeknight. He wondered if her new friends even knew of his existence. At least he’d told Loretta he had a girlfriend. He was already ahead on the honesty scale.

  Armed with a Sam Adams, he trudged to the bedroom, kicked off his grass-stained sneakers, sprawled out on his bed and pressed Melanie’s speed-dial button on his phone. When she answered, he heard no jumble of loud voices, no raging salsa beat in the background. “Hi,” he said. “It’s me.”

  “Oh—hi, Josh. Hang on a second….” She shouted away from the mouthpiece, “I’m on the phone.”

  “You’ve got company?”

  “A couple of friends over for dinner. It’s okay. Do I owe you an email?”

  “No.” He stretched out his legs and tested the damp patches the drizzle had left on his jeans. Maybe he should have changed into something dry before he’d called. “I’m glad you’re making friends down there,” he said.

  “Well, I’d be pretty lonely if I didn’t make friends here. There are some very nice people in Opa-Locka. The place is crawling with displaced New Yorkers, so we have that in common.”

  “That’s good.” He drank a little beer for fortitude. “Listen, Melanie, I wanted to give you some warning. I’m taping a TV show tomorrow.”

  “Oh, wow! Really? Josh, that’s so cool! What kind of TV show? Something about tenants’ rights?”

  Guilt gnawed at him. If he was going to be on TV, it ought to be a show about tenants’ rights, not a cheesy charade about blind dates. “It’s a favor for a friend,” he explained. “It’s a talk show. I’m supposed to pose as her blind date.”

  Melanie didn’t say anything for a minute. Then, “Her blind date? Whose blind date?”

  “A friend. Loretta D’Angelo.”

  “I don’t remember any friend of yours named Loretta D—what?”

  “D’Angelo. She needs to pretend she’s going on a blind date for this TV show. I agreed to help her out. It doesn’t mean anything. I just wanted you to know.”

  “If it doesn’t mean anything, why did you want me to know?” Her voice sounded cold and brittle, like icicles snapping.

  “Well, in case you turned on the TV and there I was on the show, pretending to go on this blind date.”

  “What are you talking about? What show?”

  “It’s called the Becky Blake Show. It’s one of those daytime scream-fests—I think. I’ve only seen about ten minutes of one broadcast, so I don’t know that much about it.”

  “And you’re going to appear on it? Why?”

  “As I said, it’s a favor for a friend.” A friend with onyx-dark eyes and amazingly long legs—but mentioning that wouldn’t improve the comfort level of the conversation.

  “How come I’ve never heard of this person, Loretta D—whatever? This friend of yours.”

  “I know her from Long Island.” It wasn’t a lie.

  “Oh, she’s an old high school friend?”

  ‘Something like that.” Not a complete lie. Teetering above the line, perhaps, but not an outright falsehood.

  ‘When is the show going to air?” She sounded less shrill now.

  “I don’t know. Maybe never.” If I’m lucky, he thought. For some perverse, inexplicable reason, he wanted to do it. Perhaps he was looking for a little excitement, a change of pace, a morning of make-believe. But he wasn’t sure he wanted every television viewer in the United States to witness him changing pace and making believe.

  “And if people who know us see it and phone me and ask, ‘How come Josh is going on a blind date with someone on TV?’ what am I supposed to tell them?”

  “That I’m doing a favor for a friend,” he repeated.

  “So it has nothing to do with us?”

  “Nothing at all.” No more than her having cacophonous parties and dinner guests had to do with them.

  “It sounds like a silly thing,” she commented. “You never do silly things, Josh.”

  He smothered his reflexive defensiveness. “Maybe I decided it was time for me to do something silly,” he said calmly.

  “Well.” She said nothing for a minute. He pictured her, one hand holding the receiver to her ear and the other arm crossing her chest, her hand hooked in the bend of her elbow. He pictured her strawberry-blond hair—had it gotten lighter from all the Florida sunshine? Or had she perhaps changed the color? Did she still wear it in a chin-length pageboy? She’d been gone more than three months; maybe she looked completely different. Maybe she’d gained a little weight, or lost a couple of pounds. Maybe every gram of excess fat beneath her skin had melted in the excruciating heat. Was she wearing the same style clothes she used to wear in Manhattan—unremarkable knee-length shorts and sleeveless tops that always seemed about to slide off her sloping shoulders—or had she traded in her old New York wardrobe for sparkly Latina threads in bright colors, with feathers and ruffles?

  Three months. She’d been gone three months, and while he had no difficulty visualizing her stance, her posture, the prim disapproval in her attitude, he was having a little trouble conjuring her face.

  “Go ahead and open the wine,” she called to someone in her apartment. It dawned on Josh that he ought to schedule a trip down to Florida to see her. Soon. Just so he could check out her new friends, friends around whom she felt comfortable enough to let them open her bottles of wine. For the sake of their relationship, they really needed to see each other.

  But he’d rather do somet
hing silly. He’d rather go on TV and pretend to be Loretta D’Angelo’s blind date.

  He could visit Melanie later.

  Chapter Ten

  Donna arrived at the studio armed with a latched metal container that reminded Loretta of those tool boxes that hardware stores always advertised for sale before Christmas, filled with every tool you could possibly need to build a bookcase, a space shuttle or a suburban middle school.

  Building Loretta’s face into a thing of striking beauty was a project at least as challenging, but Donna seemed eager to tackle it, and she’d arrived at the production team’s windowless room equipped with her own supply of tools. “You can’t go on TV without proper make-up,” she lectured as she escorted Loretta to the third-floor ladies’ room, just down the hall from the studio, and dragged a folding metal chair toward the sink counter, above which stretched a glaring fluorescent ceiling light. “Jesus. Your hair. What did you do to it?”

  “I washed it,” Loretta said. Her hair looked the way it always did: dark, shiny, and chaotic. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “You really should let me shape it a little.” Standing behind the chair where Loretta sat, Donna dug her fingers into Loretta’s hair and lifted it. “See?”

  “See what? I’m not one of your clients who wants to look pretty for confession, okay? My hair is fine.”

  Donna sighed. “You used to let me style it when we were kids.”

  “You were bigger than me then.”

  “All right. We’d better get started. I had to reschedule Annamarie Nardella’s three-process highlighting and Mrs. Donofrio’s perm so I could schlep into the city and fix you up. And your hair…”

  “Just do my face,” Loretta insisted. “And don’t make me look like a clown, okay?”