THE UNEXPECTED SALAMI
A NOVEL
BY
LAURIE GWEN SHAPIRO
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill 1999
For my parents, Jeanette and Julius Shapiro, who offer wisdom and love at every bend.
When luck calls, offer it a seat.
—Yiddish proverb
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
1. Rachel: FLIGHT
2. Colin: HOUSESHARE
3. Rachel: THE UNEXPECTED SALAMI
4. Colin: CATALYST
5. Rachel: BATHOS
6. Rachel: LOW
7. Colin: TRAVEL
8. Rachel: THE HUMP
9. Colin: SALT CITY AND THE BIG APPLE
10. Rachel: STORIES FOR GRANDCHILDREN
11. Colin: CENTER STAGE
12. Rachel: THE HALFIES
13. Colin: LURE
14. Rachel: HAILSTONES
15. Colin: C’MON YOU LITTLE FIGHTER
16. Rachel: THE BLOOD-BRAIN BARRIER
17. Rachel: OF FLUKES AND FLOUNDERS
18. Colin: THE GOLDEN HANDSHAKE
19. Rachel: THE MEAT OF CHOICE
Prologue
The assistant director called “Roll it” and Phillip—done up in lime-green makeup and a pointy cap—began slinking toward the camera for the umpteenth time. “I’m bent and distorted,” he sang, “Like a gnome I’m contorted, Time beats the soles of my feet, Like the canvas of a drum …”
Then we heard the gunfire.
“Did it hit the lens?!” the record label’s bottom-line rep screamed. Phillip’s ditzy girlfriend, Kerri, vomited. Meanwhile, Doug Lang, the cinematographer and an old friend of Phillip’s, kept the camera rolling, catching footage of my insufferable roommate Stuart face down on the floor, blood gushing from his neck and chest, splattered on his dirty jeans and worn-out Nikes. Phillip tore across the street to a milk bar (the Aussie equivalent of a New York bodega) to call the cops. My mouth was frozen in an oval. Colin slipped his arm around me; it took me awhile to grasp that he was talking to me amid the mayhem.
“I said your visa’s a year expired, right? Get out of here!”
“What?”
“The police will want to talk to you. Go back to the house! Your visa!” It was Sunday—the next tram might have been an hour away. We heard the sirens coming, and Colin handed me the keys to his panel van. I’m a native New Yorker; I can hardly drive from the left side of a car, let alone the right side of this bizarre vehicle. My heart raced as I merged on to Nepean Highway. The car was a sweatbox from the scorching February sun, but who was going to search for an air-conditioning button when it was hard enough to remember which pedal was the brake and which was the petrol? A lane of cars honked at my lack of road skill.
1
Rachel: FLIGHT
I could have had third-tier fame if I’d stayed in Melbourne—Rachel Ganelli, the Yank band moll who saw it all when the hit went down. When the media started zooming in on our St. Kilda house, I knew on the most instinctive level that leaving Australia was the right thing to do.
Stuart had been pleasant enough when I’d first met him two years earlier. He’d showed me how to make a warm German potato salad, and how the juice from the lemons in our yard could keep an avocado from turning brown. By the time of the filming, however, he was a strung out, fast-talking drummer who had long ago sold his set for cash; Phillip had already replaced Stuart with a new drummer, beer-guzzling Mick-O, who shared a house with his sisters in Spotswood. But then junked-out Stuart still lived with Phillip, Colin, and me in St. Kilda. I’d pleaded with the guys to kick Stuart off the lease before one of his ratbag friends smashed our windows. The original laid-back enchantment of the household, the perfect foil to my overachieving New York circle, was gone. I was bitching day and night about Stuart. Phillip was hostile toward the obvious attraction developing between Colin and me. And I no longer found Phillip’s fatuous personality amusing. I was getting the urge to flee again, anywhere, possibly with Colin in my suitcase.
Phillip and Colin were the ones who wanted the fame: what perfect timing for an aging band. How convenient for Stuart to get shot in the middle of the Tall Poppies’ video shoot. He’d dropped by the video shoot to bum twenty dollars from Colin. Stuart’s habit gave him a funny odor; he smelled off, like old hand lotion. The day of the shooting I could hear him wheedling Colin even from where I stood in the back of the deserted sugar warehouse where they were taping the video.
“… You don’t reckon you could—I need, mate—I need—I need …”
“Get off my back, Stuart,” Colin said. All week Colin had been tense about the shoot. He was sure that the lighting on the Tall Poppies’ last video, Red Rope Principle, made his face look fat. “Why did you come here? We’re shooting the fucking film clip.”
“Come on. Give us a twenty. Just ’til Monday week.”
Colin sought refuge in the far corner of the set where Phillip and the director were talking about the next few frames of Gnome. Stuart stood in pitiful strung out desperation in the center of the warehouse. Kerri sat cross-legged near the catering table. Her coarse blond hair, that Phillip valued so highly, looked particularly lustrous under the rented lights, like shellacked wood. She was laughing. You knew where Kerri was at every moment; her raucous laugh was the North Star of every Poppies’ get-together. I waved but Kerri didn’t see me.
• • •
Hours later back on Robe Street, after the cold-blooded mob hit, Phillip burst through our front door. “Rachel, turn the tube on—you can’t believe what’s happened!” Confirmed. No one had seen me except Colin. I’d momentarily stopped by to give Colin my beige cover stick, to hide the stress-induced circles under his eyes for the video. Who would want to be a material witness?
Burglaries plague Melbourne, but gun crime, not to mention underworld crime, is hot copy. None of the locals could recall a death so gorgeously evil. Doug Lang’s footage opened the evening news. The day I left, two weeks later, a hastily edited version of Gnome played in heavy rotation on Australian MTV.
My mother heard about the murder on a CNN segment, “An Extraordinary Murder Down Under,” and recognized the band’s name from my scarce letters. Luck has no logic. She treated the situation with downright sagacity. She didn’t harp on my lack of judgment in shifting continents to live with sexy guys I had found through the classifieds: three musicians in a house with a rehearsal studio in the garage. The phone fights about my running away and humiliating Will and his family, the deposit on the National Arts Club (a venue we scored through Will’s ancient Grandaunt Helen who painted still lifes of wheat and oranges), the flowers, and the booze were, thankfully, history. Mom promised that I could stay in our family apartment for six months free if I immediately came back to New York. She and Dad were willing to move down to their retirement condo in Florida, if that would get me home: “Get on that plane now before things get worse.”
The police had no idea that there were any witnesses other than the film crew, the band, and flaky Kerri. Colin had promised to keep his mouth shut. The others still didn’t know that I had been in the back of the room. If I slipped away now, I could escape the limelight and keep my dignity. Escape to Manhattan, where no one cares who you are. There, everybody is a walking time bomb; it’s part of the city’s charm.
“And don’t worry about bumping into Will,” my mother assured me. “He called us a few months ago to see how Daddy and I were and to let us know he’d moved on. He’s okay with it now.” Of course he was. Will had been a perfect gentleman even when I blathered some incoherent excuse for my absence from across the equator. In my previous incarnation—science textbook harlot—Will had always insisted that he was
“okay” with it, no matter what it was. He claimed he wasn’t even uncomfortable with my wearing super-sheer black stockings to acquisition meetings with physicists who could pass for my grandfather.
On my flight home from Australia, I watched a love story set in the Brooklyn Hasidic community across the Williamsburg Bridge from my native Manhattan. Generations ago, men from half my bloodline davened, rocked and prayed, in pais, traditional ringlets of hair that run along ears.
A neurotic extra from a Woody Allen film, I struggled to open my airline peanuts, trying to divine if I was agnostic or atheist. After the closing credits, a Qantas video informed us that we were over Hawaii and had another nine hours to go.
My nose started to bleed from the dry air. “The perils of travel,” I weakly joked to the grandmotherly type next to me as she searched for tissues in her purse. The cute French-Canadian guy on my other side found one in his back pocket. While my blood congealed, grandma told me that she was from Adelaide, the Australian “City of Churches.” Her name was Judith; she was an English teacher and a gambler en route to Vegas.
“Are you lucky?” I asked Judith, with a tissue wad in one nostril. “No one I know is very lucky.”
“Nonsense,” she smiled. “The ultimate win is that from millions of sperm, we have been born at all.” Her words had that distinct Australian cadence: the syllables had bumps in unexpected places, like homemade taffy. Non-sense. Ul-ti-mate.
Judith asked if I had enjoyed the film about the Jews. She wanted to know if I would like to read a newspaper clipping that she’d removed from her carry-on luggage. It was a book review of a top Christ scholar’s new tome.
“In ancient Hebrew,” the review began, “the word for carpenter was barely demarcated from the word for a learned man.”
“A comedy of errors!” Judith said after I handed back her clipping. “Christ never held a hammer in his life. He was a Rabbi.”
The steward asked us to close our window shades, and the aisle lighting was shut off. My row of four fell asleep for the night. I woke up in the morning leaning on the shoulder of Francis, the beefy, blue-eyed, black-haired Canadian. He’d earlier told me that, like myself, he’d returned from several nomadic years Down Under. He lived up in Brisbane, working at a pancake restaurant in the Canadian Pavilion of the World Expo, and then picked mangoes on a Queensland orchard.
Francis smiled when he saw me open my eyes. “Bonjour.” I removed my drooling chin from his sleeve. I apologized profusely, which he waved off with “Ce n’est rien,” it is nothing. There were three hours to go before we would land at LAX. Judith and the bearded man to her left were still asleep, wrapped up in their fuzzy gray airline blankets. Our steward served us breakfast and handed us customs declarations.
“Can you hand one to your girlfriend?” the steward asked, and Francis conspiratorially grinned at me. I felt altitudes above my two immediate pasts.
“And what do you have to declare?” Francis asked. I could smell the mint Chapstick he’d coated on his lips during the night. The scent reminded me of Will, who’d apply Chapstick in the air-conditioned jitney when he dragged me out to our Hamptons’ share, his antidote to our East Village studio on Avenue B. “I won’t live on the Upper East Side,” I’d insisted, although Will could well afford it. “Please, Will! Not where men wear green slickers with whale linings.”
I got another good look at my seatmate. I spread marmalade on my roll. “I declare that you are very attractive,” I said finally. Francis raised an eyebrow, buttered my nose with his knife, and then wiped the gook off with his thumb. He grabbed my hand, and I let him hold it for ten minutes. He tickled the creases in my palm. It was easier to be horny than to process grief.
“Let’s go to the restroom,” he whispered in my ear, and we walked to the back of the plane, locking ourselves in the bathroom as inconspicuously as possible. I’d taken my travel-size Scope I had in my tote bag for two years; I took a swig. Francis rinsed, too, while using his other hand to cradle the back of my head. I bit his fingers as he kissed my neck. Francis stuck the tip of his tongue in my mouth, kissing me ferociously, eyes closed. He was probably engrossed in some racy Madonna-whore fantasy. He wasn’t playful like Colin, or respectful like Will, but I was immersed in my own illusion: my ready-to-use lover was half Will, half Colin, and we were about to die in a plane crash. Francis and I kissed and fondled until there was a knock at the door; we threw our T-shirts back on.
An Aussie businessman winked at Francis as we emerged from the toilet. “Sorry about that, mate,” the man said, “but the other stall stinks to high heaven.”
Back in our seats, Francis and I started talking again. When he was twelve, he won a science fair. When I was eleven, I won the class spelling bee. (And the sixth grade science fair, too, but I didn’t say that.)
The steward brought a final round of orange juice. I stared down the aisle. There could be a Mafia guy out there who had seen me lurking in the background at the video shoot. But then, Colin had said we weren’t the targets. If we weren’t gunned down on the spot, we were in the clear. The video camera didn’t catch faces, just Stuart lying on the ground after the act. What would the Mafia want with us? Colin had guessed that they would leave us alone. Stuart was the one who had owed them money for drugs. “The mob has their ethics,” Colin had said. I am a big Scorcese fan; I knew he was right.
I missed Colin terribly. Had I made a big mistake? We weren’t officially boyfriend and girlfriend, but we had spent the last four months in touchy-feely conversation, a trend that culminated in our own session of bathroom erotica. That night we’d had too many African beers at the Ethiopian restaurant on Chapel Street.
“Hot day, one for the record books,” Phillip had said, driving us back from the Tukul Eating House, while Colin and I played footsie in the backseat. Phillip went up the road for a packet of Peter Stuyvesants. It was a day between shower curtains. (Phillip had thrown the old one away that morning in a panic; a glob of mold had fallen on his ankle. He promised to pick up a new one the next morning from Dimmeys.) I’d raced to the shower to cool off. Colin walked in for a pee.
“Oh, sorry, Rachel!” he said, and we both started laughing. We’d shared a house for almost two years, but the sexual tension had been unbearable of late, ever since I’d let him use me as a stand-in to show me, exactly, how he held his first girlfriend’s hand seconds before their earliest kiss.
“Why don’t you join me in the shower?” I asked. We spent all our time together, I adored him, so why not?
In a split second Colin jumped in, clothed. I peeled off his jeans. He rubbed soap over my breasts. “Got to get those really clean!” I reached for the Decoré conditioner and returned the favor. Will who?
We’d barely started a proper kiss when Phillip knocked on the door.
“Hurry up, Colin! I’m going to chuck from that safari food.”
“Just a tick,” Colin said. To avoid the clucking tongues, he gave me a boost through the bathroom window. In the dark I could easily escape and run naked around the house to my bedroom window. The next morning Colin thought Stuart might be on to us: his window faced the yard. We didn’t want to face teasing from our group. That might jeopardize our friendship; what if we realized in a week that it had been only a carnal whim? So we cooled it until we knew what we were doing.
Two days later, I overheard Phillip and Colin talking about how gorgeous some girl at a gig was. I’m not Medusa, but I wouldn’t call myself gorgeous. Will had admired my sass, my encyclopedic film facts, and my boobs, but mostly he loved that I was the only one who didn’t take shit from his WASP-y mother, Amanda. Rarely did she step forward into our studio. The one time she climbed the four flights, wary of the gluey substances that tugged at her heel, she said in front of me that it was a disgrace that he lived like a goddamn “Ellis Island ethnic.” They finally tracked me down in Kim’s Video, and Amanda begrudgingly apologized to me in front of the horror section. She offered to pay for my video rental and I han
ded her a case with Linda Blair spitting green vomit. I think that’s Will’s favorite story about me. But my fiancé never called me beautiful, not once, and that ate at me. As vain as it sounds, I wanted to overhear Colin calling me drop-dead gorgeous like that bimbo at the gig, one person in the world, once please!—And I couldn’t see that coming, ever. I started to get particularly neurotic about it, backing off a bit from the romantic path, but I was convinced Colin seemed relieved. Why would he want good old Rachel when he had those saucy nineteen year olds hanging on to him every Thursday night?
And then, with Stuart’s sudden death, we never got the chance to have the heart-to-heart we’d been avoiding for a month. I wished we could kiss in a Byzantine way. But our nineties sensibility would never allow it—shtick superballed from our mouths.
It was a darn shame about Colin, I thought, watching the clouds below the plane. What a sweet guy he was: free of the New York paranoia attached to my hometown friends like an exclamation mark. He had laid-back solutions for everything, ingenious really, on how to live. His entire wardrobe was black jeans and black T-shirts so he’d never make a fashion gaffe. And there was that time the manager of Gaslight Records, a schoolmate of Phillip’s, offered the Poppies the window display for their first single. The Poppies’ label, alas, had run out of promotion money. Colin had calmed a crazed Phillip, xeroxing a publicity still in his friend’s office, blowing each portion up on a grid until he had a Chuck Close–style representation that filled the entire window and made it to “The Good Weekend” section of The Age.
Although Colin had five years on me, he reminded me of the young reindeer bull that we’d seen on the Australian equivalent of PBS. “Still grazing in velvet: tender, maturing, vulnerable,” the narrator had declared. “Rather like you,” I’d leaned over to tease Colin, pushing a peroxide-blond strand behind his ear. He blushed when I did that. It was right after the curtainless shower incident, and Stuart was in the back of the living room, changing a CD.
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