Just This Once

by Judith Arnold

  “No shit?” Donna guffawed. “Sorry, Loretta, but that sounds like fun. Especially given the present I got for you. You want me to give it to you now?”

  “I can’t see anything.”

  “When I take the cucumbers off. I gotta give it to you when the boys and Lou aren’t around. It’s a girl gift, you know? This pasta sure is taking its time. It’s a new brand—Gladys Caruso, I do her hair every Friday before she goes for confession because she likes to look good for the priest, go figure—anyway, she told me I should try this fancy imported pasta. It costs twice as much as Ronzoni. But it’s taking forever to cook.”

  “I’m in no hurry,” Loretta assured her.

  “It’s a school night. I hate when the kids eat so late. And after they eat some birthday cake, they’re gonna be bouncing off the walls from the sugar.”

  “Donna, your boys bounce off the walls from drinking milk. Breathing air makes them hyper.”

  “They are not hyper,” Donna defended her sons. “They’re normal boys. Better than your brothers or mine. I’m raising them to be feminists. Don’t tell Lou, okay?”

  “It’ll be our secret,” Loretta vowed, suppressing a smile.

  “All right, take the cukes off. I’ll give you your present.”

  Loretta removed the cucumber slices from her eyes and blinked a few times while her eyes adjusted to the light. Her lashes felt damp and strange. “You want me to toss these into the salad?” she joked.

  “Toss ’em in the trash.” Donna rose on tiptoe to pull a flat, square box from the top of the refrigerator. She was a good four inches shorter than Loretta, and as slim as a teenager. People often wondered out loud how someone like her could have carried two large babies to term, but after meeting Donna’s sons, they had proof that she was their natural mother. Both boys both looked exactly like her, with curly black hair, smoky eyes and pointy chins. Lou, of course, insisted that they both looked exactly like him. “From the waist down, honey, they look like you,” Donna would say, and that usually shut him up.

  She handed Loretta the box and grinned mischievously. “Go ahead, open it. Fast, before those jerks come in and start asking when dinner’s gonna be ready.”

  Loretta tugged the ribbon and lifted the lid. Buried within the folds of tissue paper was a lacy wine-red teddy. “It’ll fit you perfectly,” Donna promised. “I know how to size things. But you’re gonna have to shave the bikini area when you wear this, okay?”

  “Who am I going to wear it for?”

  “Your blind date. Why not?”

  “Oh. Of course. How silly of me not to think of that.” Hearing tromping feet in the hall outside the kitchen, Loretta tucked the teddy back into the box and shut the lid.

  “Wear it for yourself,” Donna urged her. “When you want to feel sexy. That’s the cool thing about underwear—you do it for yourself. No one else has to know.”

  “Thanks, Donna. It’s very pretty,” Loretta remembered to say. She couldn’t imagine wearing such a meager scrap of lingerie for herself. What did she care if her breasts were tantalizingly visible through the delicate lace of the cups? What did she care if she was properly shaved in the bikini area? The only times she wanted to feel sexy were when she was in a position to act on that feeling, and that generally involved the presence of a man.

  “Euww, Aunt Loretta, what’s that stuff on your face?” Deuce bellowed as he bounded into the room. His name was Louis Barone, Jr. but when he’d been younger Lou used to call him Lou the Second, and “Second” had somehow gotten shortened to “Deuce.” The nickname suited him.

  “That stuff is something so fancy, it would be a waste to use any on you,” Donna told her son.

  “Are you gonna wear it for Halloween? What’s it for? What’s it supposed to do?”

  “It’s supposed to make me feel better,” Loretta told him. “It’s supposed to make my skin all clean and smooth.”

  “It makes your skin look icky,” Deuce informed her.

  Donna broke in. “Where’s Daddy and your brother? We might as well eat. This pasta is never gonna be any more done than it already is. You like it al dente, Loretta?”

  “Better than al dentist,” Loretta joked.

  “What’s al dentist?” Deuce asked.

  “That’s when the pasta’s so hard you crack a tooth when you bite into it.”

  “It’s not that hard,” Donna assured her son, then turned to Loretta. “Go rinse off your face. Take a washcloth from the linen closet.”

  “I know where you keep them.” Loretta ducked out of the kitchen before she had to come up with more answers for Deuce. He was seven, an age when children still believed there was an answer for every question if you asked it loudly enough.

  She pulled a washcloth from a shelf of the linen closet, then shut herself inside the bathroom. A glance into the mirror above the sink caused her to shudder. Her face was slathered with peach-hued gunk, leaving only her eyes, nostrils and her lips exposed. Deuce was right. She looked icky.

  She twisted the X-shaped faucets on the old porcelain sink, soaked the washcloth and washed away the mask. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but she was vaguely disappointed to discover her usual face under all that cream. After sitting for fifteen minutes with pink goop on her, cleansing her pores, tightening her connective tissues, rejuvenating her cells and all the other miracles facials promised, she ought to have emerged from the mask looking cleansed, tightened and rejuvenated, at the very least.

  But she looked like Loretta D’Angelo. No different. Just Loretta, with a too-square jaw, too-thin lips, too-wide eyes and a few fledgling crow’s-feet. She looked like a woman about to prove she was as big a failure as her family already believed she was. It was only a matter of time before she’d be lacking both a husband and a career. She’d be a nearly-thirty-year-old woman teetering on a tightrope, without a safety net beneath her.

  The prospect was so depressing, she lowered the lid of the toilet—after making sure it had, indeed, been flushed—and sat on it. The bathroom revealed the apartment’s prewar charm: besides the pedestal sink, it featured black and white ceramic tiles on the walls, built-in soap and cup trays, a bulky tub with a curtain featuring playful bubbles all over it, and a floor of white and black hexagonal tiles that made Loretta think of soccer balls. The tub held so many plastic tugboats, cups, balls and watering cans, Loretta wasn’t sure if there was enough room for the boys to take baths in it, and the cup tray held an assortment of toothbrushes featuring cartoon characters. Loretta imagined that brushing her teeth with Daffy Duck staring at her from the tip of the toothbrush handle would be an unnerving experience. But Deuce and Andrew were no doubt heavily schooled in proper toothbrush techniques. Donna was a D’Angelo by birth, after all.

  Loretta didn’t want to think about her family. She didn’t want to think about her age—which she’d never had any qualms about. She didn’t want to think about her marital status, which was her parents’ hang-up, not hers.

  But her job. Her career. She loved that part of her life. She loved working at the studio, wearing funky clothes if she wanted, following up on audience suggestions, flying to Louisville, Kentucky or Omaha, Nebraska to interview two sisters who were having affairs with each other’s husbands or a lesbian dominatrix who could speak authoritatively about the subtext of leather, and deciding whether they’d make interesting guests for the show. She loved trading banter with Bob and Kate and Gilda. She loved the fact that, armed with a useless degree from a mid-tier state university, she was earning a good salary, and she wasn’t even thirty.

  She loved her apartment, even if it could fit entirely inside Donna’s living room with a few square feet to spare. She loved being able to go out for drinks with friends without worrying about maxing out her credit card, and shopping at Bloomingdale’s without having to limit herself to the clearance racks. She wasn’t extravagant, but she loved being solvent.

  If she lost her job, she’d receive une
mployment for a while, but it wouldn’t cover her expenses and it wouldn’t last forever. What would she do when she ran out of money? She couldn’t ask her family for help. They’d tell her being broke was what happened to women who remained single too long.

  Would accepting a blind date on the show spare her from such a dismal fate? Or at least forestall that fate? Would it really be fun, as Donna said?

  Now wasn’t the time for pride, Loretta thought, standing and crossing to the sink again. She studied her reflection closely. No, she didn’t want Donna to shape her hair. No, the facial hadn’t miraculously made her gorgeous. Hell, maybe the real loser in this blind-date show would be not her but the poor sucker they lined up to meet her.

  She’d do it, because she had to. She’d go on the blind date—not with her brother’s dentist buddy but with someone the show set her up with. It that was what it took to save her job—because she loved that job, damn it, and she was good at it, and Becky was crazy if she thought the show could survive without Loretta’s contributions, so for Becky’s sake, to spare her from a disaster of her own making, Loretta had to keep this job—she’d go on the damned blind date.

  But she sure as hell wouldn’t wear her new birthday teddy for the occasion.

  Chapter Five

  Three days later, her card was still in Josh’s wallet.

  He wasn’t a pack rat. He was in the habit of discarding whatever he didn’t need. It kept clutter to a minimum and simplified his life.

  But he hadn’t thrown Loretta D’Angelo’s card away. That had to mean something.

  Seated at his desk, he let his gaze wander around his cramped but tidy office. He would have liked a more spacious workplace, but his law firm specialized in the kind of law that didn’t earn huge fees, and a big, fancy suite would cost him and his partners more than they brought in. They represented tenants against landlords, consumers against chain stores, lowly citizens against vast, bureaucratic city agencies. Their client list didn’t include society matrons from the Upper East Side, Hollywood escapees inhabiting million-dollar lofts in SoHo, Wall Street execs who knew what zero-load meant or the denizens of trendy cafés where glasses of bottled water went for five bucks a pop. Rather, Josh and his partners served the strap-hangers, the broom-pushers, the office workers who could juggle four incoming calls without disconnecting anyone, and the food service workers who remained on their feet for hours at a stretch while they dispensed everything from hot pretzels at sidewalk stands to five-buck glasses of bottled water at those trendy cafés—in other words, the people who made New York City the amazing place it was.

  If Josh believed in schlock TV, he’d convince his partners to run cheap television ads in which they’d shout at the viewer, “Are you at the bottom of heap? Can’t get a fair shake? Let the attorneys of Finn, Kaplan & Reyes represent you!” But Josh didn’t believe in schlock TV.

  So why hadn’t he gotten rid of that damned business card?

  Everything else in his office had a justification for being there: the hissing computer, the chairs for his unfairly shaken, bottom-of-the-heap clients to sit on, the utilitarian carpet, the mahogany pen stand his father had given him when he’d quit his position at the city’s Department of Consumer Affairs to form this partnership with Peter Finn and Anita Reyes. The move had been risky and had involved a drop in salary that had fortunately proved to be only temporary—since the Department of Consumer Affairs hadn’t paid much, either—but his father had been proud of him. “It’s good to get out of the bureaucracy and go where you can do people some good,” his father had said. “It’s always beneficial to work for yourself, Josh. That’s the best way to live—as your own boss.” Josh’s father had nursed some romantic notions about self-employment, and Josh suspected he’d been a little disappointed when he’d seen the small, drab office suite the newly created firm had rented near Union Square, in a soot-caked building with plenty of age but no particular history. Josh’s father had probably expected the office to contain white carpets, leather furniture and a squad of secretaries who looked like high school cheerleaders instead of a single secretary who looked like Howard Stern’s older sister.

  Ruth did her job well, and Josh had never found high school cheerleaders all that exciting, anyway. But given that space was at a premium, Josh limited what he kept in his office only to those things that served a purpose. Even the philodendron occupying his windowsill served the purpose of putting clients at ease. Ruth assured him it was impossible to kill philodendrons—“they’re the hepatitis-C of the potted plant world,” she’d explained—and many of his clients were people who’d never even talked to a lawyer before, so it was important for them to feel comfortable rather than intimidated when they entered his office.

  All right. What was his justification for having Loretta D’Angelo’s card? Why hadn’t he thrown it out?

  He was honest enough to know the answer. And it made him edgy.

  Exactly how had he left things with Melanie? They were still a couple. “Our relationship can survive this,” she’d insisted, and of course he’d agreed. What was twelve hundred miles between friends? She would have her wonderful professional experience, suffer from the heat for a while and come back to New York, and then they’d pick up where they’d left off.

  Anita poked her head through his open doorway. “You’re sitting second chair with me tomorrow, right?”

  He slapped his wallet shut around the business card and blinked at her. “Refresh my memory.”

  “The Brunswick case. LaToya Brunswick is suing Equity Insurance Corporation for refusing to cover her medical costs after she was hit by a car. I want a white man sitting next to me, okay? From what I’ve picked up during the depositions, Equity’s the kind of outfit that doesn’t tremble in its boots in the presence of women of color.”

  “Everybody trembles in their boots in the presence of you, Anita,” Josh told her. She laughed, even though he hadn’t entirely been joking. Anita was short and voluptuous, with an infectious smile that made her appear harmless. But her staccato, slightly accented speech and her long fingernails, which were usually painted an aggressive shade of red, tended to put her opponents on the defensive. He couldn’t believe she really needed him sitting at her side in court.

  But she knew the case better than he did. He clicked the icon on his computer to call up his schedule for tomorrow. Sure enough, he’d marked off three hours of court time for her. “I’m on,” he told her. “You want me to wear my white sheet and pointy cap?”

  “Nah. But don’t wear your ‘South Park’ tie, either, okay? Dress like a Republican.”

  “The things I do for you,” Josh muttered with mock annoyance.

  “How’s it going with the Branford Arms tenants?”

  “We’ve got a hearing slated for next week. The bastard landlord keeps postponing, though. This is the third hearing we’ve set up. Thank God the court froze his assets. If they hadn’t, he would have shipped them all off-shore by now.”

  “He’s got assets?”

  “Millions of dollars. And he won’t sink a penny into the building. The plumbing leaks in four units. All the units have electrical sockets that routinely cause short-circuits, and other sockets that are completely dead. The radiators are sporadic, the stairwell lights aren’t up to code, and he keeps sobbing that he can’t afford to make the repairs because of rent control. He knows he’s going to lose if we ever get him into a hearing room, so he’s stalling.”

  “Asshole,” Anita muttered. “So what’s up with you? You look worried.”

  He shrugged. “I’m fine.”

  “Women trouble,” she deduced, stalking into the room, her hips shimmying in her snug-fitting skirt. “What’sa matter, Melanie’s giving you a hard time?”

  “No,” Josh said, which of course was part of the problem. If Melanie were giving him a hard time, he wouldn’t feel guilty about his current obsession with Loretta D’Angelo’s business card.

  He
wasn’t neurotic or given to self-hatred. Thinking about the dark-haired, dark-eyed woman on the train wasn’t evil. It wasn’t even that disloyal, as long as he was only thinking about her. And if he called her, it would only be to discuss her TV show, so the whole issue of cheating was irrelevant.

  “You wanna date someone else?” Anita guessed.

  “No.” Of course he wanted to date someone else. He was lonely and horny, and Melanie was too far away, and Loretta had all that incredible dark hair.

  “Okay, here’s what I got to say to you.” Anita leaned forward, her expression hardening as she assessed him. “You’re a man. You think with your cojones, right? No, don’t apologize,” she said, although he’d had no intention of apologizing. “You can’t help yourself. It’s the way you’re wired. I know these things. I’ve been married, and now I’m single, and there’s a reason for that, right? I know the way men’s minds work.”

  “Your husband was a head case,” Josh reminded her.

  “He was a nut case,” Anita corrected him. “And that’s what I’m talking about, okay? Men think with their nuts.”

  “Your powers of logic astonish me,” Josh said dryly.

  “So, you want to be a man? Come clean with Melanie. Tell her your poor little nuts are going to shrivel up and die if they don’t get the proper attention immediately. Maybe she’ll come back.”

  Josh laughed. “Doubtful.”

  “Okay, then, take a long shower.”

  “A cold shower?”

  “Cold, hot, what do I care? God gave you two hands, Joshua. Use them. This is what I tell my son. I tell him God gave him two hands so that he can stay a virgin until he’s twenty.”

  “Your son is seven years old,” Josh reminded her.

  “It’s never too late. You know what the Jesuits say, right? Give us a child for the first six years and he’s ours forever? What I say is, give me my son for the first ten years, and he’s not gonna knock up some girl in high school and ruin his life.”