The Unexpected Salami

by Laurie Gwen Shapiro

  “Rachel, don’t worry. We’re not buying the saintly grandmother act. She’ll get life.” Fourteen jurors nodded.

  “Not if I have anything to do with it,” Raj said.

  “But you know she’s guilty,” someone behind me said.

  “I believe in fucking up the American jury system,” Raj said. Raj sing-songed every word, even his personal manifesto. Raj, our most unanticipated anarchist.

  “Bullshit, College Boy. I work hard every day,” Greg said from the other side of the room. “My brother dealt crack so he landed in jail. I love him, but he should be there. If we don’t punish those who take God’s name in vain, how can the system work?”

  Fifteen minutes of bickering turned into forty-five. What was keeping Berliner?

  Kevin knocked on our door and led us back to our seats. Rougeless Battle-ax and her hunky assistant were smiling. They smelled victory. Presticastro looked over at me, too. And Judge Berliner. Then I noticed that Maria De Meglio was gone.

  Over the bench: IN GOD WE TRUST. “Jurors—during the break, a plea bargain was entered. The District Attorney’s office has accepted it, as it will save New York State thousands of dollars. The clerk will come into the jury room in a few minutes to arrange a time for a court officer to deliver your personal items. Ladies and Gentlemen—I thank you for your time. You are dismissed.”

  Berliner and the attorneys from each side came over to shake our hands. I noticed Assistant Hunk had a ring on now. He had played my singleness like a book. What were the targeted weak spots of the other jurors? The lawyers had done their jobs. Their scientific tactics had broken through New York cynicism, the tire-thick coating over our rawest fear.

  17

  Rachel: OF FLUKES AND FLOUNDERS

  It wasn’t noon yet and I was out on the street. Three weeks in a hellhole and I couldn’t even deliver a verdict.

  About now, Colin would be telling my parents that I wanted him to move in with Stuart and me when they finally left for Paris. Should I race home and stop him? Oh, by the way, Colin, I had an epiphany on the courtroom floor; I’m going to let you go, you lucky lab rat. Maybe I could begin to deal with my unexpected reentry into everyday living in a few hours, but not now. I started walking toward the Bowery and Grand where Frank’s loft was. I needed to cool my head, let Frank joke about my courtroom crack-up.

  It was only a few blocks from the Centre Street courthouse to the Bowery. Tar droplets were scattered over the asphalt from the searing sun. If it was this hot mid-June, God save us from August.

  Frank didn’t answer the doorbell. I still had a set of his keys from our time with Stuart. I figured I’d help myself to ice cubes to rub on my neck and wrists. I climbed the five flights of the former flophouse-turned-artists’-lofts, panting from lack of exercise. The Elizabeth Motor Lodge didn’t exactly have a four-star nautilus room. And there was that delightful extra poundage from three weeks of waist-slimming treats like meatball heroes and the unlimited supply of Entenmann’s boxed cakes. In sequestration, as on a long plane ride, each course of food is high entertainment.

  Puffing, I opened the door, raced for the freezer, and plopped a cube in my mouth to suck on. The shower was at full blast; an ancient plumbing structure in the middle of the kitchen area. Frank was home. Good. The shower curtain—black vinyl with the international male and female symbols you see at bus terminals—was a cheap find from some East Village boutique. I’d bought it with the remnants of my temp check, a thank you for my brother for helping me dedrug Stuart, even if Mom and Dad thought we were well-intentioned simpletons.

  “Frank! I let myself in. I’m going make some iced tea, want some?”

  “Rachel?” the shower curtain said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Haven’t you been watching TV? The trial was dismissed. Grandma plea-bargained.”

  “You couldn’t call?”

  “I’ve been in sequestration for three weeks. Aren’t you thrilled to hear my whine? I’m in another of my trademark funks, and your place is closer than Mom and Dad’s.”

  “I have company here—”

  “Where?”

  “In the shower. A friend is here with me.” He turned the water off.

  For the first time I noticed that there was a tidy pile of pastel clothes on the sofa. As square a package as the bundle of six starched shirts you’d get back from a Chinese hand laundry.

  “Janet?!”

  “Oh, Frank, how could she know?”

  Confirmed. I leaned back into the couch, my mouth slack-jawed. How could they? I’m in the middle of sequestration, and she’s having the time of her life porking my brother? After everything we went through?

  Janet grabbed a towel off of the peg and emerged, her evenly-tanned legs dripping. Her blond hair was brown with water. “Rachel. This is not about you. We love you. Our relationship is about us.”

  “We? Since when are you a we?”

  In the background I saw a hand reach for another towel from the peg. Moments later Frank emerged too, bright red and wet. He’d obviously just gotten some sun with Janet, probably at Jones Beach or Sheep Meadow.

  “God—I’m having a nervous breakdown and you two are getting it on? How long has this been going on?”

  “Since you started jury duty,” Janet said, embarrassed.

  The ice cube was melting in my palm.

  “Rachel,” Frank said, desperately looking for his jeans. “This is not about you.”

  Janet retrieved the jeans from her pile, and Frank slipped them on under his towel.

  “Don’t ‘Rachel’ me. Unreal. All I wanted to tell you is that I’ve decided not to get married. Jesus Christ, I can’t believe you back-stabbers.”

  “Married?” Frank asked, my hateful words hitting Teflon. “Who were you getting married to?”

  “I’m out of here. Have a nice relationship, kids. Happy to provide my meaningless existence as a stepping stone for your rapture.”

  I headed for the door. “Please,” Janet called after me. “Stop being selfish. Calm down. This is a good thing. This isn’t a bad thing. Don’t you want us to be happy?”

  I flung the remaining chunk of ice back toward the sink and hit a hook-shot. I raced down the stairs. I hated feeling sorry for myself. In my zero-competition elementary school, students received comments instead of grades. Mine had been virtual clones from year to year. “Sunny and smart.” “Laughs at everything.” “Always a smile on her face.” What had become of the sweet, optimistic child? When had I become such a lemonball? I reached into my knapsack for a tissue—and pulled out the napkin Danny Death had given me with his phone number, back at Coffee Bar. I found a quarter. So I rang him.

  “Hello?”

  “Danny?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Rachel Ganelli. I met you in Coffee Bar about two months ago? You bought me the slice of blueberry pie and told me what a selfish person I was?”

  “Oh yeah, getting on with your life?”

  “I could use another yelling at.”

  “Where are you?”

  Harold is a motherfucker was scraped in the metal on the phone. “On a street corner in Chinatown. I’ve lost my center again since you bought coffee—”

  “You getting ready to off yourself from middle-class self pity?”

  “Yeah. Lucky you. You get to be the white knight.”

  “My armor’s at the dry cleaners. But come over to my place. I’ll happily shoot bullets through every pile of crap you put before me. Let me give you the address. One hundred Avenue C, between Sixth and Seventh Street. Buzzer seventeen.”

  That was a block down from where Will and I had rented our studio apartment. Granted, Danny wasn’t exactly the Dalai Lama, but beggars can’t be choosers at eleven-thirty on a weekday morning. I’d take whatever guru figure I could get my hands on. There’d be a twenty-minute walk to his place. I mapped out the quickest route. Bowery to Sixth Street and across. Past CBGBs, where Danny and his circle had invented a new,
angrier generation.

  I counted on my crowded head to distract me from my growing litany of affliction. Wasn’t there anyone in there who could save the day? I tried hard to muster the four-eyed geek who had served me so well during the SATs. What could be more relaxing than a meander and a think about tomato varieties—beefsteak, and that new crossbred variety that’s long and slim and slices like a cucumber? When a gang of New York punks walked by as I passed Third Street, however, it was my third-rate Edith Wharton who took over the internal mic. Twenty years had passed since Danny Death and his intentional hair-botching took the stage. These were the punks guidebooks warned about? “Watch your purse in Alphabet City, an ominous, but colorful district of punks and drug addicts.” Ominous types who once played varsity lacrosse or field hockey: what Fodor’s never says is that half the black-walled rotting-couched apartments are graduation gifts from Connecticut and Westchester parents. Like Will’s parents. Even Danny Death had told me that he was a lawyer’s kid from Scarsdale.

  At Sixth Street between First Avenue and Avenue A, New York’s Little India, restaurant merchants hawked their lunch menus. A man in a turban was brazen enough to shove one into my clenched hand. I lifted a thumb for it out of reflex. The owners knew who they had to please to keep up their customer flow; the flyer had a Shiva above each section. Shiva picture, then the list of curries. Shiva, tandori selection.

  Veemah had brought me back a Shiva when she returned from Agra. I’d asked her for a Taj Mahal snowglobe. Life becomes momentarily bearable with such an indulgent frosted–Pop Tart of a request. And people like to be asked to bring back an item from their enviable journeys, I’ve discovered: I have over two hundred.

  “Suri couldn’t find one,” Veemah had apologized, crunching her toast.

  “Who’s Suri?” Please don’t let this be another servant.

  “He’s a family servant. I had him search for a snowglobe for two days.”

  “Veemah! I didn’t want you to do that.”

  “Oh, don’t worry, he got paid well for his troubles. Look, you don’t give money to the homeless anymore, right? You accept the New York status quo. So don’t judge the way things work back home. Anyhow, no more tangential rubbish, open it up, it’s a bit tacky, but—”

  I had ripped the newspaper wrap open to find a tiny carved figurine with exotic white markings. “It’s a Shiva—actually it’s a mini-Shiva, a shivling. It represents the god of art and destruction. Sometimes Shiva is a goddess though. There’s a huge Shiva cult in India.”

  “Thanks, Veemah, it’s great.”

  I crossed First Avenue and thought, I should have tossed that bastard/bitch of a deity out my window. My life was a sea of destruction all right. Now Shiva had Frank and Janet under command, too.

  “C’mon up,” Danny said through the buzzer. “Fifth floor.” Was Danny’s building the only one in lower Manhattan to escape gentrification? Even my and Will’s old building down the block had lights at the top of every stairwell. When I reached the third floor a rat lumbered by en route to its destination, so jaded by rule of its kin over the building that a human ranked as mere scenery. I knocked on 17.

  “Hey,” Danny said at the door, from behind mirrored sunglasses. Danny’s mop of graying black curls was tied back with a girl’s elastic hairband, the same Goody brand I used. The railroad flat was as stark as a Zen temple. I’d have expected celebrity punk furniture like bubble-shaped TVs, faux-leopard bath mats, or at least a poster or two from his past. I knew from articles that he’d spent his 1970s money, but wouldn’t there be a luxury or two from selling rights? All I could see was a pile of tapes near a foam mattress, a ridiculous number of cigarettes cases, and an old-style boom box from the days of afros and hustle lines.

  “Want some iced tea?”

  “That would be great.”

  “Love those shorts by the way.” There was a cracked mirror propped up against the door. I took a look at myself as Danny ran the tap over his ice-cube tray. My make-up was smeared. My ass was peeking out of the denim. Colin was right. They were too short; I looked like a slut.

  “Enjoying your rights money?”

  “Is that what you need, money?”

  “No, no—please don’t think that. I didn’t come here for money. I came, God help me, for your company.”

  Danny winked. “Good. There isn’t any. I prepaid my rent for two years, and bought a few hundred cases of cigarettes.” He gestured to the far end of the room toward a hill of Lucky Strikes and Camels. He put down my glass of iced tea. “I was afraid I’d put it all in my arm.”

  “Didn’t you kick the habit a year ago?”

  “Twenty thousand to an ex-junkie is like an alcoholic winning a stash of scotch.”

  Above his head was the apartment’s sole decoration: an odd painting on rice paper. A couple floated in midair, needles stuck in their arms. The colors were more intense than watercolors but equally delicate, as if they had been breathed on by a smack-addicted angel.

  “Food dye. Nice effect, don’t you think? I painted it last year, when I had five dollars to my name. So what’s new with you?”

  “Two hours ago, I was released from the De Meglio trial. I was a sequestered juror.”

  “Don’t have a TV.”

  “The killer grandma?”

  No response.

  “Trust me. It’s the biggest trial in the city.”

  “Means nada to me. What else have you been up to?”

  “Remember my roommate that was murdered? It was a scam. He’s living with me. I found him alive in a sandwich shop. The semi-boyfriend I had was in on it, and then my boyfriend’s band got famous, and they showed up in New York for a Madison Square Garden appearance—and then my parents came home when my semi-boyfriend’s song got on the radio—and then my brother and one of my closest friends were fucking while I was in sequestration.”

  Danny shrugged his shoulders at my rambling words. “So?”

  Didn’t anything faze Danny Death? “Maybe I wasn’t clear about everything that’s happened. Let me start again. The dead guy’s alive—”

  Danny wasn’t flinching.

  “Look, Danny, this is amazing stuff—”

  “Is it? You haven’t answered my question. “What have you been doing? To get on with your own life?”

  “I thought about religion during the trial, and how it’s a crutch.”

  “That’s a start—isn’t that a bit simplistic though?”

  “Don’t tell me you go to church?”

  “Why are you here, Rachel?”

  “I have nowhere else to go.”

  “Go inward.” He offered me a familiar white bag. “Goldfish?”

  I took a handful. “Yeah, well, I’m afraid inward is an ugly place.”

  “I suspect deeper down it isn’t. There’ll be a garden of Eden if you go inside. And I’m an atheist, in answer to your question. But I believe in humanity.”

  I sipped my tea, served in one of those horrible “witty” mall mugs from the eighties. Life’s a Bitch, Then You Die.

  “Like my mug? It kind of embarrasses me. My aunt gave it to me.”

  Here in Danny’s house, I loved that mug.

  “Do you want to be married to Colin?”

  I laughed tensely. “Fuck, how did you know his name?”

  “I remembered it from Coffee Bar. I listen.”

  “Evidently.”

  “So do you?”

  “I want to be grounded. Colin concocted that crazy murder-to-recording-contract plan. A totally fucked thing to do. But even so, the second I saw him, I felt better. He’s like a walking cup of chamomile tea for me. But I’m twisting his arm to stay with me. I know that on some level.”

  “The way you overanalyze, you know that on all levels.”

  Danny wasn’t so scary. He was a sweet puppy dog. I put my finger on his scar, and followed the jagged line with my finger. “What’s that scar from?”

  “It was after my drummer OD’d on the shit I gave hi
m. I tried to kill myself. Guess I wasn’t trying too hard. Hard to die from a cheek wound.” He took a lime out of the filthy fridge and squeezed it in his own mug of iced tea.

  There were lighter scars along his neck. When I leaned forward to touch them too, my thighs stuck to the vinyl red seat, jiggling like giant gummy bears.

  “What are these?”

  “Nothing too exotic. Acne loves those lymph nodes. I was an ugly child, and an even uglier James Dean wanna-be.”

  “And a sex-symbol rock star. The world copied your style. Richard Hell. Sid Vicious. They took your sound, not to mention your hairdo. How did you spike those curls anyhow?”

  He took a cigarette pack off the hill and tore off the plastic. “Many worlds away.”

  I leaned over to kiss him, but he pulled his face away.

  “Save it for Colin. You’ll feel better about yourself. There’s a tape on the mattress. John Coltrane. Pop it in the cassette player.”

  Nicotine-stained middle-age pudge-fest has-been rejects desperate girl and then orders her around like a domestic. Whose jerky idea was coming here?

  I didn’t know this tape. A live performance. Coltrane’s first notes were hesitant, a worm crawling out into light. A few shrill Cs and Es. Then ordered chaos ensued. Free jazz. No rules or regulations. Coltrane playing from the insides. Eventually the music’s gospel hit, a tree falling on a toe.

  Danny smiled at me. “You know the difference between a fluke and a flounder?” It was an enviable ferocious smile of gray teeth and kindness.

  “I think so.”

  “Tell me then.”

  “They’re salt-water flatfish, with two eyes on one side of their—”

  “Not getting my drift. See, Rachel, you’re a kook like me. A fluke’s eyes are in a different place than a flounder’s. We’re like Picasso people. Both eyes on the side of our heads, when most of the world has them staring down the straight and narrow. You know, as a fluke gets older, its eyes start to move closer to the top of its head.”

  “Really? I’ve never read that—” Come to think of it, wasn’t a fluke a type of flounder?