Just This Once

by Judith Arnold

  She gaped at him, her face clouding with shock and horror. He stared back. Greenish-gray, Loretta amended. His eyes were classic hazel, those two muted colors flecked with glints of silver and amber. He didn’t frown, didn’t apologize, didn’t explain. He just met the blond woman’s gaze, unflinching and defiant.

  She let out a small huff, slid the strap of her purse onto her shoulder, and rose from the seat. The train lurched and she bobbled slightly on her precarious platform sandals. As soon as she’d steadied herself, she shot the man a fierce look, then stormed through the door and out of the car, letting the door slam shut behind her.

  Loretta turned to the man. He shrugged.

  “You did what you had to do,” she reassured him, trying not to reveal how impressed she was by his gutsiness.

  “It was either that or throw her damned phone out the window.”

  “The windows on these trains are always sticky. You might not have been able to open it.” She gestured toward the drab suburban landscape rolling past the window that flanked their seats. “You don’t suppose she’s gone to find the conductor, do you?”

  He shrugged again. “Who knows?”

  “If they arrest you, I’ll testify on your behalf,” she promised.

  “If they arrest me, I’ll deal with it.”

  He sounded confident. Loretta wondered whether he was speaking from experience. Maybe he had an arrest record several pages long. Maybe he was an infamous criminal: the Cell Phone Bandit, a rogue who stole and silenced the mobile telephones of obnoxious users. Like Robin Hood, he might be the champion of common people everywhere, foiling cell-phoners not just on trains but in boutiques and restaurants, on city sidewalks and on roadways where idiots negotiated million-dollar deals or screeched at the baby-sitter or texted their best friends while barreling through rush-hour traffic in their unwieldy SUV’s.

  Loretta’s pulse picked up speed as she assessed him. This man—the Cell Phone Robin Hood—had definite possibilities. Not for herself, but for the show.

  He’d look great on TV, with those riveting eyes and that shadow of a beard. Maybe not Robin Hood—too medieval British. They could call him the Cell Phone Brigand. The Cell Phone Savior. The Cell Phone Superman. A touch of alliteration would sell the concept. Becky would adore it.

  “How would you like to be on TV?” she asked.

  His eyebrows shot up. “What?”

  “I work for Becky Blake.” At his blank expression, she added, “You know, The Becky Blake Show? On TV? A talk show?”

  He shook his head and smiled contritely. A dimple punctuated the corner of his mouth on one side. “I don’t watch talk shows.”

  The train chugged to a halt at the Westbury station. Loretta wondered whether Blondie and her cell phone would detrain here, so she could give whoever she’d been on the phone with an accurate report on her location. Or maybe so she could round up some police officers to storm the train and drag the Cell Phone Superman away in handcuffs for having interrupted the woman’s call.

  Only one person boarded their car—a teenager lugging a weighty backpack—and he slouched his way past their seats and flopped down a few rows back.

  “Becky Blake hosts a syndicated talk show,” Loretta explained once the train started moving again. “In New York, the show is on the air weekday mornings at eleven. I’m one of the producers.” Which was stretching the truth, but Becky always urged the staff to stretch the truth if it would benefit the show.

  The man eyed her with bemusement. “Why would I want to be on TV?”

  “Everybody wants to be on TV.” Well, maybe not everybody. But Loretta was astonished by how many people were willing to act like buffoons, display their neuroses and pretty much sell their souls for a few precious minutes of television fame. And God bless those neurotic buffoons. If it weren’t for them, she’d be out of a job.

  “What I meant…” He cocked his head slightly. His hair was long, brushing against the ribbed neckline of his shirt in back. He seemed to be searching for something in her face, but she couldn’t imagine what. “I guess what I’m really asking is, why would this show of yours want me to appear on it?”

  “Because you took on an obnoxious cell phone user. A lot of people would view you as a hero.” A lot of other people—cell phone addicts, for instance—would view him as a villain. Controversy would ensue, and controversy made for great television, especially on talk shows like Becky Blake’s.

  He chuckled and shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “You commandeered her phone and shut her up. Don’t you think that’s heroic?”

  “Just a few minutes ago, we were hypothesizing about what we’d do if they arrested me.”

  Hypothesizing was a big word for a guy who looked as if he yanked weeds for a living. Then again, he had that fancy leather bag propped between his legs. If he was a gardener, he was a well-accessorized one. “You risked arrest to save us from the idiot cell phone yakker,” she explained. “That would make you pretty freaking heroic in a lot of people’s eyes.”

  He didn’t appear convinced.

  She dug through her cruise-liner bag for her purse, and groped inside it for her business cards. Actually, they were “Becky Blake” business cards. Becky’s name sprawled diagonally across each cream-hued rectangle in embossed violet. Loretta’s name was cramped into the lower right-hand corner, along with the phone number she shared with the rest of the show’s production team. “Here,” she said, thrusting the card at him. “Think about it, okay? We’d really love to have you on the show.”

  He accepted the card, squinted at it and said, “You’re Loretta D’Angelo?”

  “That’s right.” She realized that nowhere on her card was she identified as a producer. But then, she wasn’t identified as a hack staff member, either. He could assume whatever he wanted.

  The train slowed down, and the conductor poked his head into the car and shouted, “Carle Place!”

  The man pulled his wallet from his hip pocket and tucked the card inside. Then he gave her another dimpled smile. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I want to be on your show.”

  She smiled back, refusing to accept defeat. “Think about it anyway. Maybe you’ll change your mind.”

  He laughed, and tiny creases spread from the corners of his eyes. How old was he? From the neck down, he was dressed like a college kid. And his hair wasn’t just long—it was unkempt. But his face… She couldn’t tell.

  Not that it mattered. The show had no age restrictions when it came to guests. This guy would look good on camera. That was the important thing.

  And if he didn’t agree to appear on the show, Loretta would survive. She’d come up with other ideas. She always did; that was why they paid her the not-so-big bucks.

  Her smile relaxing, she settled back in her seat. Talking to this man had liberated her from the pall of having spent too many hours in the company of her family, whose idea of celebrating her birthday was to make sure she knew how disappointed they were in her.

  The miles between her and her parents’ house were multiplying, and the miles between her and her studio apartment on East 100th Street were decreasing. She was twenty-nine years old, and the closer she got to New York, the more grown up she felt. By tomorrow, she would forget that her family viewed her as a pathetic spinster. She would forget her family altogether. She’d be who she was, only a year older, a year tougher, a professional who could converse with a good-looking stranger on a train without thinking, even for a moment, that he had the sexiest eyes she’d ever seen.

  Chapter Two

  Twenty minutes after stepping off the train in Penn Station, Josh Kaplan unlocked the door of his apartment on the northern edge of Greenwich Village. He flicked the wall switch that turned on a lamp in the living room, swung his briefcase onto the table in the dining area, and pulled his wallet out of his hip pocket.

  There it was: her card. Loretta D’Angelo.

  As if h
e’d get in touch with her. Participating in a verbal slugfest on a trash-TV show was just his kind of thing. And gee, after he did his star turn on Loretta’s show, maybe he could wrestle an alligator, rob a bank and swim across the ocean to Portugal.

  Who the hell was Becky Blake, anyway? If she was inane enough to think that a guy taking action against an irritating cell phone user was an interesting topic for a television show, he didn’t want anything to do with her. Or her show’s producer.

  Granted, Loretta D’Angelo had been a pleasant sight—a lot more appealing than the brief he’d pretended to read while he was in fact stealing glimpses of her. The Branford Arms Tenants Association deserved his full attention while he was working on their claim. But they didn’t deserve every flipping minute of his life. He was allowed to put their suit against their landlord aside for a few minutes while he was seated across from a slim, wide-eyed woman with hair like a black waterfall, long and rippling, the sort of natural wonder a man could drown in.

  He wandered into the kitchen to check if he’d missed any calls on his landline. Just one message, Solly reminding him of their weekly chess date tomorrow at noon. They’d been meeting every Monday at lunchtime for almost a year, and it was so much a part of Josh’s routine he didn’t even bother to make a note of it in his calendar. But Solly lived for their chess games, and if leaving Josh a reminder on the answering machine put his mind at ease, Josh couldn’t object to the old man’s nagging.

  He pulled a Sam Adams out of the fridge, popped off the cap and returned to the living room. Sprawling out on the couch, he punched the remote’s power button and surfed to CNN to find out if the world had ended while he’d been out on the island, mowing his mother’s lawn. Apparently, it hadn’t. He clicked the guide button and scrolled to the weekday listings.

  There it was: eleven a.m. Monday through Friday. The Becky Blake Show.

  He had better things to do than watch television on weekday mornings. Eleven a.m. usually found him at his desk, meeting with clients, wolfing down a sandwich, or heading over to the West Side Senior Center to play chess with Solly. Yet he stared at the listing for a surprisingly long time.

  Loretta D’Angelo hadn’t lied to him about her show. Even though she’d given him her business card, he hadn’t been sure he believed she was actually a TV producer. She’d looked too young, and her hair, spilling wildly down her back, had seemed too unfashionable. Clad in dark blue jeans and a knit shirt, she could have passed for a college kid, certainly not someone with a high-powered job in the Big City.

  Of course, it was possible that the card she’d given him wasn’t hers. She could have stolen it, or had a few fake cards printed up so she could impress strangers on commuter trains. She could be delusional. Compared to her, the blond dimwit with the cell phone who didn’t know where she was might be the epitome of sanity.

  New York teemed with crackpots and whack jobs. Josh had surely met more than his share of them. His neighbor down the hall, Minka Colvitas, swore that in a former life she’d been married to Chester Alan Arthur. If she was going to allege that she was a reincarnated First Lady, Josh wondered why she didn’t claim a more highly esteemed president as her erstwhile husband, but he supposed she knew her past lives better than he did. His neighbor down the hall in the other direction, Colin Witt, bred and sold guppies as a hobby. He convinced guppy aficionados to spend hundreds of dollars on breeding pairs that were supposedly genetically elite. It boggled Josh’s mind that people actually got excited about the pedigrees of guppies.

  All right, so the city was filled with lunatics. Maybe Colin and Minka would like to appear as guests on the Becky Blake Show. They’d be more entertaining than Josh, who considered himself far from scintillating talk-show material.

  Clicking back to CNN, he sank into the couch’s overstuffed cushions, propped his feet on the coffee table and took a long drink of beer. His mother never offered him a beer when he mowed her lawn. She didn’t even offer him iced tea or lemonade. “I read in an article, it said the best thing to drink when you’re exerting yourself is water,” she lectured him every time he told her he was thirsty. Perhaps if he exerted himself less, she’d supply him with better beverages.

  He really hated mowing her lawn, but he’d gotten sucked into the chore and couldn’t seem to extricate himself. When he’d offered to pay a service to mow her lawn for her, she’d acted as if he’d suggested hiring an auto mechanic to remove her appendix. “They don’t know what they’re doing, those lawn services,” she’d declared.

  “They know more about lawns than I do,” he’d pointed out.

  “They’re total strangers. You want me to trust my lawn to a total stranger?”

  That was exactly what Josh wanted, but his mother had guilt-tripped him into schlepping out to Huntington every Sunday to cut her grass. “Your father would roll over in his grave if he knew I was letting a total stranger mow the lawn,” she’d declared. Josh had considered arguing that his father would probably have been thrilled to hire a lawn service years ago, which would have allowed him to spend his Sundays watching football games in his air-conditioned den instead of shoving a sputtering lawn mower back and forth across the yard. Josh knew why his father had never hired a service: because Josh’s mother would never have parted with the money to pay for one. Now that Josh’s father was dead, she was refusing to let Josh part with his own money. “Those lawn services cost an arm and a leg,” she’d complained.

  Instead of an arm and a leg, keeping his mother’s yard neat was costing Josh his Sundays.

  Just for this year, he promised himself. Just for this summer, because his father had died last September and his mother was still pulling herself together. Next year she wouldn’t have that excuse, and Josh wouldn’t accept any other. Either she’d hire a service or he would.

  He tapped the volume button so the TV would drown out the muffled din of traffic noises seeping through his window. Even when he could hear the broadcast, CNN had nothing exciting to tell him. The world was still intact. No one of note had been assassinated or indicted. Nothing had blown up or blown down. A teenager from Vancouver had set some sort of record in a hotdog-eating contest, and the Yankees had won.

  Josh lowered the volume, closed his eyes, and took another long swallow of beer. A vision of a woman with long, dark, wavy hair filled his mind.

  He wasn’t in the market for a woman. He already had one—even if she was currently living in Opa-Locka. He probably had a text message from Melanie waiting for him in his inbox, an update on her current job along with her usual plaintive whines about how hot Florida was. If he weren’t so damned tired, he’d pull out his phone and check. But right now he wanted the drone of the TV, the fizz of a high-quality lager on his tongue...and another minute or two to think about the Long Island woman with the cruise-ship bag and the Italian last name and the utterly goofy idea that his lack of tolerance for obnoxious Long Island Railroad passengers was a suitable subject for a TV talk show.

  Just one more minute to think about Loretta D’Angelo, and then he’d check his inbox.

  ***

  Becky swept into the staff room Monday morning, carrying a plastic plate containing what appeared to be a brownie with a lit white candle protruding from it. “Happy birthday, Loretta,” she sang out in her trademark lilt. “They charge eight bucks an ounce for this stuff at La Patisserie Rondeau. I swear, illegal drugs are cheaper. Savor each bite.” She set the morsel down at the center of the circular table around which the production team was gathered, then retreated to the sagging couch against the wall and reclined across it like a Victorian noblewoman enjoying a swoon.

  “Aren’t you going to have some?” Loretta asked.

  “Are you kidding? It’s fattening.” With that, Becky became absorbed in the condition of her manicure.

  Loretta sighed. It was probably just as well that Becky wasn’t going to partake of the birthday cake, because there was hardly enough to share with her three col
leagues on the production team. Even at eight dollars an ounce, Becky could have afforded a larger piece if she’d cared about making her staff happy. But making them happy had never been high on her list of priorities.

  Loretta blew out the candle and bowed with phony modesty as she accepted the applause of the others at the table, which sat at the center of a small, windowless cell down the hall from Becky’s much larger office and the studio where the show was taped. The room was drab—yet another indication of Becky’s refusal to cater to her staff. Its décor featured the seedy plaid sofa where Becky currently lolled, a couple of travel posters featuring Athens’ Parthenon and Rome’s Colosseum, both photographed against an unnaturally blue sky, a telephone on a table beside the sofa and a large white board with different colored markers resting in its tray. But the three people sharing the table with Loretta made the room welcoming. They were her partners, her office family—and generally easier to take than her real family.

  “Dig in, folks,” she said, gesturing toward the precious little pastry.

  “Dig into what?” Bob asked, leaning over the table and squinting at the cake. “I can’t see it.”

  “Eight bucks an ounce, huh.” Gilda peered at the cake and shook her head. “Becky, you’re insane. No one should ever pay that much money for a cake. I mean, what? Flour is flour. Sugar is sugar. Chocolate is—”

  “Manna from heaven,” Kate declared, breaking off a corner of the cake and popping it into her mouth. Kate abandoned diets the way most people abandoned trash on the sidewalk. She had quit diets no one had ever heard of: the snake meat diet, the lotus diet, the Mt. Katahdin diet, the eggplant and egg yolk diet. She wasn’t even fat, no more than ten or twelve pounds overweight. But dieting was her religion and she was clearly on a mission from God.

  Once Kate had assaulted the puny birthday cake, the rest of them dove in, scrambling for morsels and stray crumbs. The cake was obscenely rich. Loretta managed to devour three moist, fudgy bites, which might have seemed greedy except that she was the birthday girl and deserved the largest portion.