Just This Once

by Judith Arnold

  It wasn’t because he was “stepping out” on Melanie, as Anita would put it. He wasn’t cheating on her. He hadn’t arranged for this meeting hoping for love or sex.

  Nor was the tension in his gut a reaction to the possibility that he’d end up on Loretta’s TV program. He’d caught ten minutes of it that morning, after the court had gone into recess because Anita’s client suffered an asthma attack. Everyone had been cleared from the courtroom and sent down the hall to a musty waiting room where a TV set was tuned to the Becky Blake Show, of all things. Josh had stood at the rear of the waiting room, watching as a doll-like blond woman mediated a fierce dispute between two men who could have passed for professional wrestlers and who had a clear difference of opinion regarding a woman both were claiming as their wife. “Polyandry is not for Pollyannas,” Becky Blake had declared in a chipper voice, just before the commercial break.

  Josh was not going to contribute to that show. He was not going to allow himself to be beamed into living rooms around the country while he engaged in a shouting match with some goon with a neck thicker than Josh’s waist who believed Nostradamus had predicted that every person in the world was destined to own a portable communication device in the twenty-first century. Worrying about appearing on the show was unnecessary. It wasn’t going to happen.

  So what was he worried about?

  He drummed his fingers against the chilly marble surface of the table and watched the elevator doors, searching for Loretta D’Angelo. She was what he was worried about. For no good reason he could think of, waiting to see her was making him nervous.

  What if she didn’t show up? What if she showed up and was obnoxious? What if he had nothing to say to her? What if the sight of her long, luxuriant hair left him tongue-tied?

  He was used to being one half of a steady couple. He could converse with other women, relate to them, get friendly with them—but for the last two-plus years, all his encounters with women had occurred within the context of his being Melanie’s significant other. The thought of meeting a woman without that identity to protect him caused a muscle to twitch in his thigh. He felt the tiny spasms, invisible beneath the khaki fabric of his trousers, a ticking that made him want to pace, or maybe go outside and kick a fire hydrant.

  He saw her emerging from the elevator that linked the lobby to the street entrance, and his thigh suffered a final sharp twinge before relaxing. Damn. She was prettier than he’d remembered.

  He reminded himself that she produced an abysmally stupid show. He was a lawyer, and she worked backstage at a televised circus. Pollyanna polyandrists. How could he be daunted by someone like her, even if she was pretty?

  They’d have a drink, they’d talk, and then he’d tell her he wouldn’t appear on her show. They’d part ways, and he’d go home and think some more about Melanie and sex and obligations and loud parties on weeknights. And maybe he’d call another woman and meet her for drinks, and that time he’d be immune to anxiety because he’d have had this experience to season him.

  Loretta stood near the bell captain’s station for a moment, surveying the lobby. She wore a pair of loosely draped gray slacks that made her legs look thin, and a sleeveless peach-colored top that made her bosom look small. Her hair was bushy and her skin glistened from the heat outdoors. He wondered if she’d taken the subway or walked to Times Square. Either option on a hot June evening during rush hour was bound to make a person perspire.

  After scanning the concierge desk, the check-in counter and the bank of elevators leading to the guest rooms, she turned toward the lounge area, spotted him and smiled. The impact of her smile pressed him back into his chair like a gust of warm wind. He must have seen her smile on the train last Sunday, but he couldn’t recall responding the way he did now. Of course, last Sunday he’d been irritated by the dingbat with the cell phone and preoccupied by the Branford Arms depositions, and he hadn’t been aware that Melanie was hosting weeknight bacchanalias down in Opa-Locka.

  Loretta had quite a smile. It emphasized her nearly horizontal cheekbones and flashed a row of teeth as smooth and shiny as ceramic bathroom tiles. As she approached him, he stood and returned her smile. His thigh muscle began to flutter again.

  “Hi,” she said, extending her right hand. He shook it, grateful for the business-like greeting. Her palm felt damp, but he assumed that was due to the heat outside.

  “Hi,” he said, resuming his seat only after she’d settled into the chair across the table from him. She swept a thick, frizzy lock of hair back from her face and let out a breath. “Would you like a drink?” he asked.

  “I’d shoot my Nona for something cold and wet.” She closed her eyes for a minute, then let out another breath. “It’s brutal out there.”

  He caught the eye of a waitress near the bar and she came over. Loretta requested a gin and tonic with lime, and he settled for a Pete’s Wicked Ale when the waitress told him the bar didn’t carry Sam Adams. She disappeared, leaving him to face Loretta. Her cheeks were naturally flushed, and she had no lipstick on, no make-up at all. It made her seem naked in a way.

  Her feet were naked, too, he noticed as she crossed one long leg over the other. She wore sandals but no stockings. Sensible on such a hot day—but when he gazed at her bare pink toes, her sensibility was the last thing on his mind.

  “So,” she said when he failed to get a conversation going. “Have you assaulted any cell phone users lately?”

  “I didn’t assault that woman,” he defended himself, although her grin informed him she was teasing. “All I did was get her to stop babbling.”

  “It was the highlight of that day for me,” Loretta assured him. “The way you silenced her, no wasted motions, no apologies—it was a work of art.” She smiled fondly at the memory. “As far as the show—”

  “I’ve seen your show,” he said, allowing privately that that was an exaggeration. He’d seen ten minutes of one show. “The Becky Blake Show. It was—”

  “Which broadcast did you see?”

  “This morning’s. The woman with two husbands.”

  “Oh, gawd.” Loretta shook her head. “Not only did she have two husbands, but they were both assholes.”

  “She deserves points for consistency,” he said.

  Loretta laughed. “We taped that show three weeks ago. It seemed like a good idea then. But I don’t know if we’d do a show like that today.”

  “Why not?”

  Loretta leaned back in her chair, shook her foot to adjust her sandal over her instep and smiled wearily. “Ratings.”

  Before she could explain, the waitress returned with their drinks. While she arranged the cocktail napkins, beverages and a bowl of what resembled trail mix on their table, Josh kept his gaze on Loretta. For some reason, his tension was draining away. This get-together was fine. Everything was cool. He was a man meeting a woman for a drink at the end of a workday. No problem.

  As the waitress stepped away from their table, a couple emerged from the nearest elevator, the woman stalking ahead of the man, both of them glowering. “I told you never to touch me there when another man is in the room,” the man snarled.

  “That wasn’t another man. It was room service.”

  “Well, he sure as hell didn’t look like a maid from housekeeping.”

  “So next time, ask for the room service guy to wear a sheer black pinafore,” the woman snapped before storming into the hotel’s restaurant. The man tore a leaf off a potted plant near their table in an apparent fit of rage, then followed her into the dining room.

  Loretta observed the spat with the intensity of a scientist watching stem cells reproduce. Only when the couple was gone did she turn back to Josh. She lifted her drink and took a long sip through the straw.

  “I bet you’d like to get them on your show,” he said.

  “The thought crossed my mind.” Her eyes glowed. “I mean, consider the implications. They go to this hotel—a classy establishment right in the hear
t of Times Square—and if there’s a cleaning lady in the room, the woman touches him. But if it’s a room service guy, she’s not supposed to touch him.”

  “Not just touch him,” Josh noted. “She’s not supposed to touch him in a certain place.”

  “It’s almost more interesting when you don’t know the details.” Her eyes remained bright with both amusement and fascination. “Where doesn’t he want her to touch him? On his nose?”

  “I don’t like being touched on my nose,” Josh joked. “Especially in front of other men.”

  She laughed. “Great. We’ve got to get you on the show.”

  “You’d be better off using that couple,” he said, gesturing toward the restaurant. “They’re much more exciting than me.”

  She took another sip of her drink. “Actually, the sad fact is, we’re not doing shows like that anymore. Our boss wants us to tone it down.”

  “Tone it down?”

  “No more polyandrists for a while. No more wife swappers, no more teenage tartlets, no more men who like their lovers to touch their noses in front of other women but not in front of other men.”

  “So…the show is completely changing?”

  “I don’t know about completely.” She lowered her drink and shrugged. “The thing about daytime TV—everything is cyclical. Whenever there’s a terrorist attack somewhere, we do only uplifting shows about heroes and survivors. We’ll do some absolutely gorgeous shows about firefighters, about ETM’s, about some couple who survived and it took them a week before they could return to their home, and when they got there their springer spaniel was waiting for them in the foyer with his leash in his mouth—and he’d made all his poops on the kitchen floor because he’d remembered that he wasn’t supposed to mess on the rug. One smart dog, I’m telling you. But eventually people want to go back to watching shows about incest and breast implants. Now I guess the pendulum is swinging again. Word from above is they want kinder, gentler shows.”

  “I see.” He drank some beer and tried to figure out what the Becky Blake Show’s version of kinder and gentler would be. Women who divorced the first asshole before marrying the second? Breast implants that enlarged a woman to a C cup but not a D? A toy poodle instead of a springer spaniel?

  “In fact,” Loretta continued, “I’m not sure the cell phone concept is going to make the cut.”

  He experienced an inexplicable pang of disappointment. Not that he’d ever intended to appear on her show, but he’d assumed that would be his choice, not Loretta’s. “You don’t think a cell phone show could be gentle?”

  “It could be, but I’m not sure I can sell it to my boss that way. People get pretty emotional about cell phones, don’t you think?”

  “Some people, maybe.” Josh thought he’d been pretty unemotional in his handling of the cell phone user on the train.

  “No decision has been made yet,” she told him. “I mean, nothing is black and white here. There’s talk, but I don’t know how serious it is. We’re tossing around other concepts for shows, but there’s nothing to say we couldn’t do a kind and gentle cell phone show, right? Personally, I think a cell phone show would work. Others on the staff…” She shrugged. “Who the hell knows?”

  “But you’re the producer,” he pointed out. “Doesn’t that give you the final say?”

  She smiled sheepishly. “I’m on the production staff,” she confessed. “There are four of us. And of course Becky gets a vote. Actually, she gets five votes. And Harold—the president of the company that owns the show—gets ten.”

  That she’d overstated her professional status when she’d given him her card pleased him. It meant she’d wanted to impress him. It had worked—he’d been impressed—but he was gratified that she’d viewed him as someone worth impressing.

  So she was one-fourth of a staff, and she’d floated the idea of a Becky Blake Show about cell phones to the rest of the staff, and although she hadn’t quite come out and said so, he assumed her idea had been shot down. But she hadn’t bothered to mention that when he’d phoned her earlier that day. She’d agreed to meet him, knowing a cell phone show wasn’t likely to occur.

  Maybe she wanted to size him up, to see if he could be kind and gentle, on the slim chance that she could push her idea past all those votes that were stacked against her. Or maybe…maybe she’d wanted to see him for some other reason.

  He was getting ahead of himself, imagining this meeting was about something other than cell phones. His thigh muscle started to flutter again. He drank some beer.

  “There’s this other idea for the show that everyone is freaking out about,” she said. “In a positive way, I mean. They love this concept, for some reason.” She uncrossed her legs and leaned forward to scoop a handful of the pretzel-peanut-Goldfish mix into her palm. “Blind dates.”

  He rubbed his thigh and waited for her to elaborate.

  “The idea would be to have people meet a blind date on the show, go out with the date, and then report back. It sounds kind of corny—but there’s as much potential that the blind date would end in disaster as that it would lead to romance. The premise has an element of suspense, which of course is very important for the Becky Blake Show. I don’t know.” She shrugged again. Her shoulders were broad and slightly bony. She was just this side of skinny. He’d never been a big fan of women who counted calories and went into a panic if they gained an ounce. But she was eating the cocktail snack mix, popping nibble after nibble into her mouth, so he assumed she wasn’t hung up on food. “To tell you the truth, the whole blind date thing is not my idea, but Becky loves it, and she’s got five votes.”

  “I see.” Actually, he didn’t. If Loretta wasn’t aiming for him to go on the show and complain about stupid cell phone users, why had she agreed to meet with him?

  She traced the rim of her glass with an unpolished nail, then smiled again. It was a different smile from her earlier ones, more hesitant, more questioning. “So anyway, the production team thought it would be fun for some of the blind dates to involve people who work on the show.”

  “Is Becky Blake going to go on a blind date?” He recalled the pert little blonde he’d seen refereeing the rival husbands on that morning’s show. He wouldn’t want to be her blind date. Everything about her had been too…pink.

  Loretta shrugged again, her smile growing even more enigmatic. “As a matter of fact, the staff member they have in mind is me.”

  “You?”

  “They think it would be great TV to set me up with a blind date on the air. Can you believe it?”

  He drank some beer, buying time to sort his thoughts. Why was she telling him this? It wasn’t about cell phones, but it was about him in some way. His inability to figure out where she was going with it vexed him. He prided himself on being an intelligent man—he could see through scumbag landlords and venal housing authority drones without having to squint—but he couldn’t seem to get a clear picture of this conversation.

  His leg muscle relented, and he lost track of the hubbub around them, the clink of glassware at the bar, the people swarming through the lobby, the potted plant from which that angry man had torn a leaf on his way to the restaurant. His mind filled with only one notion, one question: why was Loretta D’Angelo telling him about blind dates?

  “So anyway, the thing is, I was thinking, assuming I’m stuck with this situation for the sake of my job and so on, you could come on the show as my blind date. And before you say no—” she held up her hand in anticipation “—you should hear me out.”

  Her blind date. Loretta’s blind date on a nationally syndicated television show.

  No.

  But as requested, he would hear her out—because her smile was so plaintive and her eyes were so luminous, and what would he be doing that evening if he weren’t sitting in a hotel lounge, enjoying a drink with her? He’d be home, eating something he’d zapped in his microwave and watching CNN. Listening to Loretta present a crackpot idea was
more fun than that.

  “See, the thing is, I don’t want to go out on a blind date. I hate blind dates. Blind dates are the pits. I’ve never had a good time on one in my life. I don’t know about you, but my experience with blind dates has been uniformly sucky. My brother Nicky is driving me crazy, trying to set me up with this dentist named Marty Calabrese. I mean, I hate blind dates.”

  “Yes, well—”

  She held up her hand again. “Just give me a minute, okay?” She waited until he’d subsided, then went on. “So anyway, I’m under a lot of pressure to do this blind date show. I’ve got bills to pay, right? And it’s not like they’re asking me to exchange vows with a guy or anything, so I’m figuring, let me just get through it, be a good sport about it, and I’ll win points with Becky and Harold. But as a member of the production team, I’m supposed to find guests for the show. That’s part of my job. So why shouldn’t I stack the deck a little? Why not make sure the blind date is someone who’s personable, who shares my values—at least when it comes to cell phones—and who isn’t going to expect this thing to end in a marriage proposal? You understand what I’m saying?”

  “You don’t want to fall in love with your blind date?” Josh had always assumed the object of dating—even blind dating—was to find true love.

  “Hell, no. And it’s not as if I think I’m irresistible and whoever the show digs up to be my blind date is going to fall in love with me or something. But what if they find some man who takes the whole thing seriously? The way my family takes it seriously. My brother Nicky, with his buddy Marty—he’s looking for a husband for me. My whole family is. But I don’t want a husband. I like being single. All I want is to keep my job.”

  “I’m still not clear how I enter into it.”