Just This Once

by Judith Arnold

  His mother watched, her mouth pursed. She was taller than average but gave the impression of being small. Something about the way she held herself, her shoulders hunched inward, her ash-blond hair close-cropped, her face usually pulled into a slight scowl, diminished her. He would blame her forbidding expression on residual grief from her husband’s untimely death, but she’d been wearing that expression long before his father had died. She bore an attitude of chronic resentment, believing she’d been slighted by life, denied her full allotment of pleasure but making the best of it—reading the right books, listening to opera, raising her son to be obedient and respectful. Maybe, someday, the grand scales of destiny would recalibrate themselves and she would receive her due. God would make it up to her somehow.

  As far as Josh could see, she hadn’t been slighted, at least not financially. She lived in a lovely brick ranch house on a half-acre, fully paid for. She’d never had to work outside the house—his father, an economics professor at the state university at Stony Brook, had earned a good living—and she’d never lacked for the finer things. Her kitchen had granite counters and stainless-steel appliances. The diamond on a gold chain around her neck was a full carat. Careful investing, a solid pension and a whopping life insurance policy left her a comfortable widow. Yet she acted as if it was essential to wring every drop of value out of each penny that passed through her hands. She would never buy Diet Coke if Cheapo-Cola cost ten cents less. She would never hire a lawn service if Josh was available to cut her grass.

  “Listen, Mom, I’ve got to tell you something,” he said once he’d drained the can, a project that took less than ninety seconds.

  “Oh, my God.” His mother collapsed onto one of the captain’s chairs at the table. Josh leaned against the counter near the sink. The chairs had gingham seat cushions tied onto them, and he knew his mother would blow a gasket if he got sweat stains on the fabric. “What?” she asked. “It’s something horrible, right?”

  “No. I just wanted to warn you—”

  “Oh, my God. What? You’re in trouble?”

  “I’m going to be on television tomorrow.”

  “Why? What did you do?”

  He was beginning to think the worst thing he’d ever done was to launch into this conversation.

  “What I did,” he said, his patience straining, “was a favor for a friend. She works for a TV show called the Becky Blake Show. It’s a low-rent talk show. Anyway, she needed to pretend to meet a blind date on the show, and I agreed—as a favor to her—to pose as her blind date.”

  “What friend?” his mother asked.

  “Just a friend. I have friends.” He admitted privately that this was a slight exaggeration. He did have friends, of course, but most of them had been friends for years and his mother would be familiar with their names. Loretta was the first friend he’d made since Melanie’s departure.

  “And she works on that show? That schlock?”

  “You know about the Becky Blake Show?”

  “With people screaming at each other, throwing things, getting bleeped every other word? Of course I know about the Becky Blake Show. Everybody knows about the Becky Blake Show.”

  Josh hadn’t known about it until he’d met Loretta.

  “So you have a friend who works on this show? How did you ever meet her? You’re not going on the air and getting bleeped, are you?”

  “No. I didn’t say a single bleepable thing when they taped the show.” He wanted another soda, but the no-name brand had left a bitter aftertaste on his tongue. What he really wanted was a beer. And he wanted to be drinking it in his own apartment.

  Better yet, he wanted to be drinking it with his friend Loretta.

  She’d phoned him yesterday morning to tell him the show was going to be broadcast on Monday. He’d appreciated the heads-up, but more than that he’d appreciated her having phoned him at all. He hadn’t been sure she would.

  Not that he’d done such an unforgivable thing. One kiss. A small kiss. A kiss that could be overlooked if they stayed focused the friendship angle. A man couldn’t have too many friends, Josh always believed.

  So he’d asked if he could see her, as a friend.

  She’d said she would have to think about it.

  Okay, maybe the kiss hadn’t been that small. Maybe it couldn’t be overlooked. He knew—and no doubt she knew, too—that if they saw each other he might want to do a whole hell of a lot more than kiss her.

  What was that line from the “Three Dead Corpses” song about how being dead meant having no more sex? “I’ve lost my flesh, my fresh skin tones, and no one wants to jump my bones…” He wanted to see her not so he could jump her bones but so they could reminisce about that song, about the show. It was a significant part of their shared history.

  “So should I call your Aunt Rhea and Uncle Maury and tell them you’re going to be on this show?” his mother was asking. “Should I call Grandma Dodie? It’ll probably kill her, seeing you on a show like that.”

  Josh forced his attention back to his mother. Her eager tone implied that she wanted her mother-in-law dead. “The show was very civilized and pleasant. Nobody got bleeped or threw anything. I only pretend to be a single guy willing to go on a blind date with this friend of mine.”

  “You are single. Unless—oh, my God, you didn’t marry Melanie, did you? You didn’t marry her behind my back?” She clutched her chest.

  He was too exasperated to laugh. “When would I have married Melanie?”

  “Some morning when I wasn’t looking. How should I know? If you’re not married to her, then you’re single. This is very simple. Single—” she held out her right hand “—and married—” she held out her left. “Two separate things. You can’t be both.”

  “I’m not married, but I am…” He searched for words that wouldn’t cause her to clutch her chest again.

  “You’re what?”

  “In a relationship.”

  “But you’re not married. Until you’re married, you’re not married.”

  He hated to admit it, but she had a point.

  The aftertaste faded from his mouth. His mother’s face couldn’t have softened any in the past ten minutes, but his vision softened, making her appear almost maternal, the kind of mother who would defend her son, offer him guidance, and make him realize that he had no reason to feel guilty. In other words, the exact opposite of the kind of mother she actually was.

  He savored the moment, the sudden rush of gratitude he felt toward her. Any mother who could erase her son’s guilt deserved unlimited love.

  “You’ll have to set up the digital recorder for me,” she said, “so I can tape this show you’re going to be on, with all the bleeping. That Tivo thing.” She clicked her tongue and shook her head. “It’s too complicated. I don’t know how to program it.” She pushed away from the table, still shaking her head, obviously tormented by the existence of the her DVR. “Thank God I’ve got you to program it for me. Without you, what would I do?”

  Josh’s gratitude faded as quickly as the soda’s aftertaste. All right, he loved her. She was his mother. And sometimes she came through for him, however inadvertently.

  But she still was a pain in the ass.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Solly had invited Josh to meet him at the Senior Center early so they could watch the Becky Blake Show while they played chess. Josh could have stayed at his office and caught the show on the TV he and his partners kept in the conference room for reviewing videotaped depositions and the like. But he believed that sitting in the conference room with Anita, Peter and their glum-faced secretary, Ruth, and watching himself pretend to be an unsuspecting, unattached man about town would be more awkward than sitting with Solly in the Senior Center lounge and distracting himself from the broadcast with a challenging game of chess.

  A couple of silver-haired women occupied the sofa, working on elaborate needlepoint projects while the TV droned in front of them. “We’re
watching a special show,” Solly announced as he led Josh into the room. The women reacted with a flurry of coos and clucks and fussing with their fabric and colored threads. Solly had already dragged the chess table across the room to be closer to the screen. He bounced around on his sneakers, moving chairs, appropriating the remote control and setting up the chessboard as if he were Josh’s personal roadie. “This is so exciting,” he said. “I can’t believe it, our Josh on TV. It’s so exciting!”

  Josh didn’t think it was so exciting. He felt a little queasy, actually.

  He’d phoned Melanie yesterday evening, once he’d arrived home from his mother’s house after programming her DVR to record the show—and also fixing one of the glass sliders that led out from the den to the back patio; the door was sticking in the track, and he cleaned out the dirt and dead bugs and rubbed a little mineral oil on it to lubricate it—and replacing a dead bulb in the strip light above the mirror in her bathroom, and telling her that if the toilet in that bathroom kept running after it was flushed, she was going to have to bring in the plumber to repair it, because even Josh’s handyman skills had limits. He’d listened to his mother fume over the plumber’s hourly rate, but he’d refused to buckle. He was not going to fix her toilet. He did offer to pay the plumber’s bill, and she’d insisted that wouldn’t be necessary. “I can just jiggle it,” she’d said. “I don’t need the plumber. A little jiggling, and it stops running.”

  In any case, he hadn’t been in the best mood to call Melanie and rehash the whole blind date thing with her. But he’d had to alert her that the show was going to be broadcast tomorrow. He probably should have phoned her earlier in the week, or sent her an email, but he’d been procrastinating.

  She hadn’t been home late Sunday afternoon. He’d left a message on her machine, mentioning the show and feeling as if he’d dodged a bullet.

  The bullet must have been a smart bomb, because it had circled back and found him later that evening. “Josh? I got your message,” she’d said, her voice fighting through a faint hiss on the line. “Am I going to be upset when I watch this show?”

  “I don’t see why you should be.” Bullshit. Of course he’d seen why she should be upset: she was going to watch her boyfriend hook up with an attractive young woman on a nationally syndicated television show. “It was just a favor I was doing for Loretta,” he’d reminded her.

  “I understand that, Josh. I just wish I knew who this Loretta person was.”

  “If you watch the show tomorrow, you’ll see her,” Josh had said, and then had sworn under his breath. Why encourage her to watch the show? If she did watch it, she’d see Loretta, all right. She’d see that Loretta was a leggy, dark-eyed beauty with incredible hair.

  On the other hand, suggesting that Melanie watch the show proved he had nothing to hide. If he’d urged her not to tune in, she would have had grounds for suspicion. But he was being open about the whole thing, totally above-board.

  “It’s just—hard,” she’d said, a tiny whimper rippling through her voice. “You’re so far away from me…”

  No, you’re so far away from me, he’d wanted to argue. She was the one who’d moved to Opa-Locka, after all. He was exactly where they’d both been until a few months ago.

  “And you’ve got friends I’ve never even met—”

  “So do you,” he’d pointed out. She had friends who crowded into her apartment on weekday evenings and shouted to be heard above the strains of loud salsa music. “We can’t stop living just because I’m in New York and you’re in Florida. It doesn’t mean anything’s changed between us, but…”

  “Of course things have changed between us. I’m always hot. You’re not hot.”

  “I’m very hot,” he’d argued. Especially after mowing his mother’s lawn that afternoon. Just remembering how hot he’d been had caused a fresh layer of sweat to glaze his skin. “We do have summer in New York. Surely you haven’t been gone long enough to forget that.”

  “I know you have summer, but it’s nothing like what we have here, Josh. You’re in another world. You’re living a life that has nothing to do with me. You have friends I’ve never met. I have no idea what you eat for dinner anymore.”

  That last comment had taken him aback. “I eat the same stuff I used to eat on the nights we weren’t together when you lived here,” he’d said, recalling that when she’d lived in New York, they’d been together nearly every night. She used to come to his apartment because it was bigger than hers, and prepare chicken a dozen different ways, only all the preparations had tasted the same. She’d experiment with her grandmother’s recipes: latkes, kugel, chopped liver that he would still be digesting days later. She’d been a lousy cook, as he’d recalled. His microwave meals were a culinary step up.

  Maybe she’d cooked for him because she’d been vying for a marriage proposal. And maybe she’d abandoned him for Florida because that marriage proposal hadn’t been forthcoming. Maybe it was his fault she was so far away.

  And maybe he was sliding back into the guilt trap again.

  “Look, Melanie, the show was just a gag. It doesn’t mean anything. Loretta needed to go through with it for the sake of her job, and I helped her out. I’m only mentioning it to you in case you want to watch it. But it’s stupid. It’s a very stupid show.”

  “You didn’t use to do stupid things when we were together.”

  “We still are together,” he’d insisted, then sunk back into the pillows on his bed, pondering what he’d just said. Were they still together? Did he want to still be together with her?

  Of course he did…but he couldn’t stop thinking about Loretta, and her legs and her eyes and her hair, her throaty laugh, her concept of sin, her strength and humor even after having been jilted a mere four months before her wedding. And her soft, sweet lips.

  “I’ll be at work tomorrow,” Melanie had broken into his thoughts. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to catch the show. I guess I should record it, just in case.”

  “It ought to be good for a laugh,” he’d said, hoping to communicate that she shouldn’t take it seriously. “You can tell me if you think my nose looks big on TV.”

  “Why should your nose look big? It doesn’t look big in real life.”

  “I’m just saying,” he’d emphasized, “that the show is a joke. It’s nothing you need to take seriously. I don’t take it seriously.”

  “Okay, well, maybe I’ll watch it.”

  “Great.” Once he’d said good-bye and hung up, he’d closed his eyes and concluded that “great” was the most dishonest word he could have come up with. What about this was great? His girlfriend distrusted him, Loretta didn’t want him, he hadn’t done anything and he felt guilty as hell.

  Solly found the right channel and stepped back to assess the reception. Because the set was connected to cable the reception was fine, but he was of the generation that used to fine-tune every show and manipulate the dials with each channel change. Cable couldn’t alter certain habits.

  “Nu, what is this?” one of the needle-pointing biddies on the sofa asked.

  “A very special show,” Solly announced, then indicated Josh with a flourish of his hand. “My friend Josh Kaplan is starring in it.”

  “What kind of show? With song and dance?”

  “Just talk,” Josh said modestly. “It’s a talk show.”

  “Has it started yet?” a familiar voice bleated from the doorway. In hurried Phyllis, her gait as bouncy as Solly’s, her sneakers as thickly treaded. She was wearing athletic shorts, and Josh was surprised by the muscle tone in her legs. He wondered if she’d been a gym teacher in her youth. She had that bulldog personality he always associated with girls’ gym teachers. Also the short hair, the pugnacious chin and the assertive personality. “Josh! Bubbela! This is so exciting, you being on TV!”

  He cringed. Maybe watching the show at the Senior Center hadn’t been such a wise idea. Of course Anita, Peter and Ruth would have give
n him a hard time if he’d watched it at the firm—but they wouldn’t have called him bubbela.

  “It’s not on yet,” Solly said, checking his watch. “Five minutes. We can get in a few moves, Josh. You want to be white?”

  Josh settled at the table. Solly took his seat across from him and Phyllis planted herself on the arm of the sofa behind him. She gazed over his shoulder to study the board. “Such a complicated game,” she murmured. “I like checkers. Every piece moves the same way. Are you boys hungry? I don’t think they’re serving lunch yet. It’s early.”

  “I’m fine,” Josh said, sliding his queen’s pawn forward.

  “It’s too early for food,” Solly added. “Besides, Dora Lee will probably have some goodies for us.”

  “Dora Lee,” Phyllis muttered, as if the name were a curse. “All that noshy stuff she bakes, Solly, it’s full of fat. It’s no good for you. She’s going to kill you.”

  “Then I’ll die happy. Have you ever tasted her peanut butter cookies? Next time she bakes them, make sure you try one. They’re magnificent.”

  “How can a cookie be magnificent? A cookie is a cookie.”

  “Shh,” Solly silenced her, turning his chair toward the television. “Look—it’s starting!”

  Josh rotated his chair for a better view. He wished he could shift it back a few inches, or a few feet, or perhaps into another room. He probably should have gone home to watch the damned show, so he could have wallowed in his embarrassment alone, not surrounded by the beaming smiles of enthusiastic friends.

  The screen filled with a montage of photos of Becky Blake, all pink and perky, against a flat blue background. The photos dissolved as the words “The Becky Blake Show” materialized on the screen, and then the words dissolved into a shot of the set. He remembered that arrangement of chairs, the table, the vase filled with fake roses, the thin, putty-colored carpet. It all appeared much larger and grander on the television than it had looked in person.