Just This Once

by Judith Arnold

  Becky was reciting her introductory speech. He remembered hearing it through a speaker in the room where he’d been held until his entrance, a small, undecorated chamber with a counter, a couple of folding chairs, a ceiling speaker through which Becky’s voice emerged and the lingering scent of stale coffee and marijuana. He remembered thinking, as he was summoned from the room and led down a glaringly lit hall with cinderblock walls and linoleum floors that would have seemed appropriate in a medium-security prison, that TV was a lot less glamorous than most people realized.

  Now Loretta was on the screen. Solly let out a wolf-whistle, and Phyllis punched him in the arm. “What?” he asked innocently, rubbing the spot she’d pummeled.

  “You whistled at her.”

  “I know. I was here. I heard myself whistle.” Solly rolled his eyes at Josh. “She’s a good looking lady. A man is allowed to notice. What’s the big deal?”

  “Is that your friend?” one of the biddies on the couch squawked at Solly. “That girl? She’s your friend on the show?”

  “Meshugge,” Phyllis whispered, just loud enough for Solly and Josh to hear. “She talks to herself, that one. I’ve heard her.”

  Josh ignored Phyllis and focused on the broadcast. He’d set up his own DVR to record it, just in case he wanted to torture himself by watching it again, so there was no reason to concentrate so raptly on it now, as if he had to memorize it.

  No, there was a reason, an irrational one: by watching this show, watching Loretta and himself through the distance of time and the barrier of a glass screen, maybe he would be able to figure out what he wanted from her, and from Melanie. Maybe everything would start to make sense after a viewing of the broadcast.

  “I saw this show once,” the previously silent biddy suddenly piped up. “It had skinheads on it. Nazis.” She made a spitting noise. “They should die in horrible ways, those people shouting that this is a Christian nation and anyone who doesn’t like it should leave! Ach!” She made another spitting noise; fortunately, as best Josh could tell, nothing sprayed from her mouth when she did it. “Evil, those people.”

  “And the folks in the audience, shouting,” her friend recollected. “I remember that. Very noisy.”

  “This is a different episode,” Solly informed them.

  Phyllis drew a circle in the air next to her ear to indicate that the women on the couch were crazy.

  “It’s boring,” the first biddy said. “With all those Nazi skinheads shouting, it wasn’t boring.”

  “They’re very evil, those skinheads,” her friend observed.

  “Look, look!” Solly erupted. “There’s Josh!”

  Indeed, there was Josh on the small screen, entering the set. He looked more relaxed than he’d felt at the time, which wasn’t to say he looked particularly relaxed. His chin was raised defensively, and his fingers were curled halfway into fists. He’d been tense that morning, braced for disaster, for Loretta to double-cross him, for Becky Blake to trip him up, for—why not?—skinheads to burst out of the audience and shout obscenities.

  It had all gone smoothly and peacefully, though, and he could watch it without seizing up. He could watch Loretta smile and cross her legs, and smile even more when he launched into his speech about cell phones. He hadn’t planned to do that, but after a few minutes of the stilted chitchat and the blinding lights, he’d succumbed to a mischievous impulse. Becky appeared as nonplussed today as she’d appeared the day they’d taped it, but Loretta… He hadn’t noticed how much she was smiling then. He noticed now.

  He just wasn’t sure they could be friends. In theory it ought to work. They enjoyed each other. They had no trouble conversing. Cell phones exasperated and amused them in the same ways. Surely this was a valid definition of friendship.

  But could he be friends with a woman he’d kissed the way he’d kissed Loretta? He was a guy. Friendship shouldn’t include kissing like that. It shouldn’t even include thoughts about kissing like that.

  “So, did you go out with this woman, Josh?” Phyllis asked, leaning around Solly as if afraid he wouldn’t hear her otherwise. “You took her on a date? What was she like?”

  “She’s great,” he said. That misleading word again, not exactly dishonest in this case, but weasely. Loretta had been great, but she’d been better than great. Riskier than great. More threatening than great.

  “So what about Melanie?”

  “Melanie is Melanie,” Josh told her. “As for Loretta and me… We’re friends.” It felt good to say those words, even though he knew, as soon as he uttered them, that he and Loretta could not be friends. Not given the way he’d kissed her.

  ***

  Loretta joined Donna at the sink to offer her assistance with the dishes. Her thigh muscles were cramped because Andrew had insisted on sitting on her lap for the final ten minutes of dinner, and he was so adorable she couldn’t say no to him.

  Deuce was not quite so adorable. He’d spent most of the meal critiquing Loretta’s TV appearance in a much louder voice than necessary. “Why did you wear pants? Girls are supposed to wear dresses on dates. My friend Anthony told me, he knows about stuff and he said girls are supposed to wear dresses on dates. I thought the guy was weird. I think cell phones are cool. I want my own cell phone, but Mommy says I’m not old enough…” On and on he went, making Loretta wish her show had been broadcast a month ago so Deuce would have been in school during the broadcast hour and thus would have been unable to see it. With summer vacation in full swing, though, he’d been home—and apparently glued to the TV set.

  Lou said little during the meal. He rarely spoke. He was a smart man; he knew when to keep his mouth shut. He’d even kept his mouth shut when Andrew had asked if he could sit on Loretta’s lap. Donna had told Loretta she didn’t have to say yes, but Loretta was a sucker, especially when it came to four-year-old boys in cute little overalls.

  As soon as it was time to do the dishes, of course, Andrew didn’t want to sit on Loretta’s lap anymore. Nor did Deuce want to dissect the Becky Blake Show. The menfolk vanished at the first spurt of water into the sink, leaving Loretta and Donna to fend for themselves.

  “The osso buco was great,” Loretta remarked. “How do you find the time to cook stuff like this?”

  “I made the osso buco Friday,” Donna told her as she swabbed the dishes with a sudsy sponge. “We had a little then, but it didn’t taste as good as it did today. It needed to sit a couple of days. That’s the thing about osso buco—it’s got to sit. Three days is about right.”

  “So you made it Friday.” Loretta took the first clean plate from Donna and dried it. “My mother would freak out at the thought of serving veal for dinner on a Friday.”

  “Why, because it’s meat?” Donna snorted. “Hello? The pope did away with meatless Fridays before you and I were born.”

  “But not before my mother was born. She never accepted the change.”

  “Really? You never ate meat on Fridays?”

  “Not when I was growing up. We ate fish sticks with lots of ketchup on them. They were gross. You want to do penance? Go meatless. You want to really do penance? Eat my mother’s fish sticks.”

  Donna handed her another damp plate, then stared at her and frowned. “What’s that smile?”

  Loretta hadn’t realized she was smiling. “Just remembering my mother’s fish sticks,” she said.

  “No. It was a different smile,” Donna said, returning her gaze to the mounds of soap bubbles in the sink. “Definitely not a remembering-mom’s-fish-sticks smile.”

  Loretta’s brain seemed as foamy as the sink’s contents. Somewhere beneath the bubbles lurked something substantial—a bowl, a fork, an actual thought. “Oh, I know,” she said, then felt the smile spreading her lips. “I was thinking about how Josh told me eating a bacon cheeseburger was like a double sin.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s Jewish. So it’s doubly unkosher—meat and cheese, and then bacon. It’s lik
e an expressway to hell.”

  Donna laughed. “He’s Jewish, huh. What did your parents think of that?”

  “I don’t know if they figured it out. Josh Kaplan—it’s not exactly an Italian name, you know? Not that it matters.” She methodically dried a serving spoon, blinking as it reflected the overhead light into her eyes. “I didn’t talk to my parents after the show was aired. We were too busy at work, and I came straight here afterward.”

  “So you think there’s going to be messages from them?”

  “I’m sure.” Nicky or Kathy would call to extol the virtues of Marty the dentist. Al might call if he could fit a call into the twins’ schedule. And her mother…no question. Her mother would want to discuss her outfit with her: “That jacket, where did you get it? I hope you didn’t pay full retail price for it. You know, you should do your shopping out here on the island, the sales tax is cheaper.” She’d want to discuss Loretta’s hair—Donna had wanted to discuss that, too, but Loretta had silenced her—and then, most importantly, she’d want to discuss Josh. “Nicky told me he talked to you after the date, but he didn’t ask you the important questions. So I’ve got to ask, Loretta: was this person a gentleman? Did he treat you with courtesy? Did he show respect? Did he see you home?”

  Oh, yes, he’d seen her home. She cut off her roving mind before it could amble too far in that direction.

  She wasn’t going to think about kissing him. She was going to think only about how much she’d enjoyed talking to him. She and Gary never talked about bacon cheeseburgers. She couldn’t actually remember what they had talked about. Wedding plans, for one thing. Whether her brothers should be Gary’s ushers. Whether they should go for a buffet dinner or a sit-down meal—prime rib, Gary wanted, although Loretta argued for the buffet so vegetarians and people who wanted traditional Italian fare could find something to eat. They’d talked about the damned dinner a lot, as she recalled. And the flowers. She’d wanted lots of flowers, and he was appalled at the thought of spending so much money on something that would be dead in two days.

  “You know,” Donna remarked, “Josh Kaplan was cute. I saw him live, and then I saw him again on TV today. So what if he can’t eat bacon cheeseburgers? No one says you have to marry him. You ought to try out that teddy with him. He’s cute and you’re single, am I right?”

  He’s not single, Loretta almost blurted out.

  “I mean, I’m married—I love Lou with my heart and soul, you know that—but if I had a friend who looked like Josh Kaplan, I’d wear a teddy.”

  Deuce chose that moment to barrel through the kitchen. He probably didn’t know what a teddy was, though, other than a stuffed bear. “We need cookies!” he shouted, as if racing from a fire and announcing that he needed a ladder and hose.

  “You don’t need cookies,” Donna corrected him. “You want cookies.”

  “That’s what I said. We want cookies!”

  “There’s a package of chocolate chip cookies in the cabinet. Loretta will open the package for you. My hands are all wet.”

  Deuce located the bag and handed it to Loretta. “What do you want the cookies for?” she asked.

  “We’re watching this cool show,” Deuce reported. “These robots are beating each other up. There’s collisions and explosions and everything. It’s so cool. It’s makin’ us hungry. This show… It’s more interesting than the show you were on”

  Loretta didn’t take his criticism personally. Until recently, the Becky Blake Show had featured collisions and explosions, too. Deuce probably would have loved the vulgar scream-fests that used to be a staple on the show. He probably wouldn’t have understood what the scream-fests were about— infidelity, polygamy, kinky sex, suburban sluts—but he would have adored the level of violence.

  She eased apart the seal of the cookie bag without ripping it, then handed it to Deuce, who grabbed it and charged across the room. At the doorway he caught himself and spun around. “Thanks!” he yelled in the general direction of the sink before he vanished.

  “What an obnoxious child,” Donna muttered. “If I were his mother, I’d tell him to shape up fast.”

  “He’s a terrific kid.”

  “He thought you should have worn a dress.”

  “And you thought I should have worn the teddy.” I did, Loretta thought. I wore it on the date. Maybe if I hadn’t, that kiss wouldn’t have happened.

  “So, are you going to see him again?” Donna asked. “Josh, I mean. Not Deuce.”

  “I don’t know.” She dried another serving spoon. In its shiny bowl, she saw a distorted reflection of herself. “We might have to go back on the show another time to describe our date.”

  “Oh, God. You can’t talk about that play on TV, what was it? ‘Two Dead Bodies?’ The way you described it to me—if you talked about it that way on TV, you might get sued for slander or something.”

  “Josh is a lawyer. He wouldn’t let me say anything libelous.”

  “So, besides the show, are you going to see him again?”

  No. She couldn’t see him again. Maybe she wanted to—the way Deuce wanted cookies. It wasn’t necessary, it wouldn’t make the robots collide and explode any more effectively, but Loretta would like to keep her friendship with Josh going. She’d like to introduce him to other Italian treats—had he ever had zabaglione? Or tiramisu—the good stuff, not the fluffy, booze-free pastry every third restaurant was offering these days, but dense, one-hundred-proof tiramisu. The hell with the Charter Beef House; she wanted to take him down to Little Italy and let him discover what real food was all about. If he was going to sin, it shouldn’t be with a bacon cheeseburger.

  But there was sin and there was sin. Food was one thing, but seeing a man—even if he was only a friend—and wishing he would kiss you the way he’d kissed you once before, knowing full well he had a girlfriend…

  In Loretta’s book, that was a sin.

  “No,” she answered Donna. “It was just a put-on for the show, you know? Just so maybe they won’t fire me. There’s no reason for me and Josh to see each other again.”

  No reason at all.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Mom, I’m at work,” Loretta grumbled into the phone.

  The rest of the production team were gathered around the table in their windowless cell, bickering about whether to pitch Becky a show on fashion faux pas. Gilda thought the topic was kind and gentle; Bob thought it was dumb-assed beyond belief. His use of the term “ass” had inspired Kate to propose a variation: bringing a fashion designer and several normal women—women who wore size twelve—onto the show and having the women interrogate the designer on why designers always designed clothes that looked good only on anorexics with silicone-enhanced breasts and no asses whatsoever.

  Loretta had liked Kate’s concept. But while she’d brainstormed with Kate on the possibilities of a face-off between the fashion industry and real women, the office phone had rung. Loretta had been seated closest to it, so she’d leaned back on the rear legs of her chair, tilting the seat until she could snag the receiver.

  Hearing her mother’s voice, she’d suffered a twinge of dread and leaped to her feet. Her mother never phoned her at work, and not on the office phone. “Oh, my God. What happened?”

  “Nothing happened. Everything’s fine. You think I only call you when something is wrong?”

  Releasing her breath, Loretta had reminded her mother of where she was.

  “I know you’re at work,” her mother said. “You think I don’t know what number I dialed? I knew if I called your cell number, you would have seen the call was from me and not answered.”

  “That’s because I’m working,” Loretta emphasized. “This isn’t a good time to talk.”

  “Last night would have been a good time to talk,” her mother noted. “Last night I called and left a message. You never called back.”

  “I was at Donna’s,” Loretta explained. Just as she’d predicted, a message from her
mother had been awaiting her when she’d arrived back at her apartment last night and checked her cell, her stomach lazily digesting osso buco and her mind shaping certain vows about the extremely limited conditions under which she would ever again wear the wine-red teddy. “I got home late and I was exhausted.” It hadn’t been that late, and she hadn’t been so exhausted she couldn’t have returned a phone call. But a phone conversation with her mother would have exhausted her even more than she’d already felt. Especially a phone conversation on the subject of Josh Kaplan and the blind date.

  Apparently, that particular phone conversation was going to take place now, while she was staring at the Colosseum poster and trying not to be distracted by the quarrel behind her—“The fashionistas have made life unbearable for every realistically proportioned woman in America, and that would include Becky’s prime demographic,” Kate was lecturing in a clarion voice.

  Gilda whispered something in response, but Loretta couldn’t make out the words above her mother’s: “He was a nice-looking young man. What kind of name is that, Kaplan?”

  “Jewish,” Loretta said.

  “Oh.” A long pause as her mother regrouped. “Well, that’s okay. He could always convert.”

  “Mom—”

  “I’m just saying, if there’s going to be a wedding, it should be in the church.”

  “I’m not going to marry him.”

  “He’s nice-looking. And a lawyer, that’s not so bad. A dentist would be better, but lawyers make good money.”

  “How much money he makes is irrelevant. I’m not going to marry him.”

  “Why not? Other than the religion problem—which you could work out, we could talk to Father Joseph about it, he’d know what to do. They even have these weddings, my friend Sonia went to a wedding for her niece who married a Jewish man and they had both a priest and one of his people, a rabbi. They did the service together. Sonia said it took a little longer, all those extra prayers, but she said it was a very nice service. And the reception afterwards was stunning, she said. Flowers everywhere, the air so thick with the smell of blossoms, and the table settings—”