Just This Once

by Judith Arnold

  “Mom. I’m at work.”

  “Right, right. I’m sorry, you’re busy. But how often is my daughter on TV? You looked very nice on the show, Loretta, but I think maybe you should have worn a dress.”

  “You and Deuce,” Loretta muttered.

  Her mother didn’t hear her. “Pants on a woman can look kind of masculine sometimes. You’re meeting a man for the first time, you don’t want to look masculine.”

  “Are you saying I looked masculine on TV?” Loretta asked. All conversation at the table ceased. She gritted her teeth, aware that the others found her half of this conversation more interesting than the fashion industry’s efforts to undermine the confidence of the average sized woman.

  “No, you looked lovely,” her mother assured her. “I’m just saying. So, when are you going to see this nice lawyer again?”

  “I don’t think we’re going to see each other again,” Loretta said. “It’s not going to work out.”

  “Loretta! Give it a chance. You’re twenty-nine years old. You can’t just toss this fellow aside because he happens to be Jewish.”

  “His religion has nothing to do with it, Mom.” His girlfriend, on the other hand, has plenty to do with it. “We had a pleasant evening, but there was no chemistry.” Except for that one kiss, which I’m not going to think about.

  “Big deal, chemistry. I’m not saying you should open a laboratory with him, Loretta. Just go out with him a couple of times. He dresses nice, he’s not a porcaccione, am I right? So you’d get to know him a little bit, it wouldn’t kill you.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t want to go out with me.” And if he does, he’s a son of a bitch and I don’t want to go out with him.

  “Why not? A beautiful girl like you? But you have a way of putting people off, you know that? Putting men off. You send out these waves, Loretta—are waves chemistry?”

  “Physics, I think.”

  “That’s what I like, a smart girl. You know your science. But you send out these waves of ‘Don’t come too close, I’m not interested,’ and it puts men off. This is why you’re twenty-nine and all alone.”

  “Maybe I’m twenty-nine and alone because I choose to be,” she snapped. A quick glance over her shoulder revealed that her colleagues were all leaning forward, captivated by her end of the conversation. “Mom, I’ve got to go. I’ve got work to do. I don’t expect to hear from him again, so there’s really no point in discussing it.”

  “If you’re not going to hear from him again, you ought to let Nicky set you up with his friend Marty. A nice Italian boy, a dentist, and you wouldn’t have to deal with the whole rabbi thing at the wedding.”

  “I’ve got to go, Mom,” she repeated. “Talk to you later. I love you. Good-bye.” She hung up before her mother could say anything more.

  “See?” Gilda said after a moment of silence. “She’s twenty-nine because she chooses to be. Lots of women are twenty-nine because they choose to be. There’s a potential show there.”

  “Please, no.” Loretta held up her hands, as if she could fend off Gilda’s suggestion with her palms. “I’ve already been a guinea pig for a show. I’m not doing it again unless Becky offers me a contract renewal chiseled in granite.”

  “With a raise,” Bob suggested.

  “Right. A huge raise.”

  “I’ve been married twice. I deserve two raises,” Kate declared. “Let’s get back to the business at hand: women’s apparel designed for toothpicks with tits.”

  “We could bring on a designer of plus-size fashions and a designer of toothpick fashions,” Loretta said, eager to immerse herself in work and eradicate all remnants of her conversation with her mother. “They could discuss their different theories of women and size, and then we could take questions from the audience.”

  “Why would anyone want to spend an hour talking about women’s apparel?” Bob asked.

  “Go get coffee, Bob,” Gilda ordered him.

  He was rolling his eyes and shoving away from the table when the phone rang again. “If it’s for me, I’m not here,” Loretta said, diving into her chair at the table and pressing her hands to her ears.

  Since Bob was already halfway to his feet, answering the phone became his task by default. “Hello?” He listened for a minute, his gaze zeroing in on Loretta. “She said to tell you she’s not here.”

  “Oh, God,” Loretta groaned. If it was anyone from her family, anyone, even her sweet little niece Alyssa who spent most of her time on the telephone nodding or shaking her head so the person on the other end had no idea if she was even there, Loretta was going to kill Bob. “Sure, I’ll get her,” he said generously, then extended the receiver toward Loretta. “It’s for you.”

  “I hate you.” She pushed herself out of her chair and trudged around the table. “I hope a pigeon dumps a load on your head the minute you leave the building today.”

  “You’re so cute when you’re angry,” he teased, handing her the receiver. “I’ll go get coffee.”

  “Spill it on yourself, why don’t you,” she snarled, then lifted the receiver to her ear, took a deep breath to brace herself and said, in a falsely cheery voice, “Hello?”

  “Loretta? It’s Josh Kaplan. Did you really not want to talk to me?”

  “No, I—” She took another deep breath, not to brace herself this time but to compose herself. Josh. Josh, who had kissed her. Josh, who her mother believed should convert to Catholicism, although they could work around that if necessary. “I’ve gotten other calls here this morning that I didn’t want to get,” she explained to him. “I just… If the call was from someone else, I wouldn’t want to talk to them. But you, I mean… You’re not someone I don’t want to talk to.” That didn’t sound right. In fact, nothing she’d just said sounded right. Nerves were making her babble, and she resented the fact that he could make her nervous. “So,” she said briskly. “So. How are you?”

  “I was wondering if you might be free for lunch today.”

  He was asking her out for lunch. Like a date. “What about your—” she cut herself off before saying “girlfriend.” If Gilda and Kate weren’t in the room, openly eavesdropping, she would have completed the question. “What’s going on?” she finally asked.

  “I want to talk to you. That’s all.”

  “None of that other stuff?”

  “You mean, like my kissing you?” Simply hearing him say it caused her toes to curl against the straps of her sandals. “No. I just need to talk.”

  “About what?”

  “I have a situation.”

  “A situation?”

  “Can we meet for lunch?”

  Loretta twirled her finger through the coils of the phone wire. That he wasn’t asking her out on a date should have relieved her, but it disappointed her. And it shouldn’t. She shouldn’t want to go out on a date with him.

  But her alternative would be to sit in one of the pocket parks and watch Kate eat something green—or not green, depending on her current weight-loss diet. And she had to admit she was a bit curious about what Josh’s “situation” might entail.

  “All right,” she said. “Why don’t you meet me downstairs in the lobby at noon?”

  “You don’t want me to come up to your office?”

  “No,” she said emphatically. If he came up, Gilda and Kate would fuss over him. So would Becky, if she found out he was in the vicinity. Bob might blow the fiction they’d concocted about how Josh had helped him with a legal dilemma. It wasn’t worth the risk. “I’ll meet you downstairs.”

  “All right. Noon.”

  “Fine.”

  “I appreciate this, Loretta,” he said before hanging up. His words whetted her curiosity. What did he appreciate? Why? Did his “situation” have something to do with her?

  Those questions continued to circulate through her gray matter as she resumed her place in the discussion on hefty women and skimpy fashion. She nodded when Bob suggested that women
dress to impress other women more than they dress to impress men, and called Kate a paranoid idiot when Kate insisted that most fashion designers were involved in some sort of a plot to make women hate themselves, and gave an impassioned defense of Versace, even though she’d never be able to afford anything with that label inside it, and all in all did a pretty good job of convincing her colleagues that her mind was a hundred percent on her job and not at least seventy percent on her impending lunch with Josh.

  At a few minutes to twelve, she bolted from the staff room. She stopped in the ladies’ room long enough to finger-comb her hair and make sure her bra straps hadn’t slid out from beneath the slightly wider straps of her tank top. She dabbed a layer of lipstick onto her lips, then scolded herself for caring how she looked. This wasn’t a date. He had a girlfriend. If she kept repeating these great truths often enough, she might accept them.

  Josh loitered near the newsstand by the main door; she spotted him among the throngs of workers teeming in the lobby almost as soon as she stepped off the elevator. He looked hot—not hot like the kind of guy who could make a woman’s toes curl merely by mentioning a kiss they’d shared, but hot like the kind of guy who’d been trudging through a muggy summer day in the big city. His hair was limp, his tie loose, his jacket draped over one shoulder and his shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows.

  Actually, he looked the other kind of hot, too. Which was really a shame, because Loretta was never going to curl her toes over him again.

  He noticed her just seconds after she noticed him, and his face brightened. That was bad. She didn’t want him to be happy to see her.

  But he obviously was. Wending his way through the crowd, he shoved his hair back from his face. “Where can we go?” he asked once they were close enough to hear each other over the echoing din of conversation in the vaulted lobby.

  “There’s an okay place around the corner,” she suggested, leading him toward the door. The restaurant she had in mind was actually a bit nicer than okay. Not that she was turning this into a date, but if they were going to discuss his situation, they might as well do so in pleasant surroundings, eating food a step above.

  He willingly followed her out into the steamy air, down the sidewalk to the corner and into the shade of the side street. Droplets of water flicked onto her head from the air conditioners above her, and the pavement baked the soles of her feet through her sandals. How did men survive in suits during the summer? How did women survive in stockings? Her first job after college had required “office attire”—dresses, sleeves, pantyhose—and she’d been miserable. Today, clad in a short skirt and no stockings, she could just about bear the heat.

  Cool air blasted them as they entered the restaurant. It was already pretty full, but the hostess found them a table in a dim corner near the kitchen. They sat and Josh gazed around, taking in the tasteful green wallpaper, the black lacquered tables, the genuine cloth napkins. “This looks more promising than the Charter Beef House,” he said.

  “It smells more promising, too.”

  “Yeah. Remember that greasy aroma?” He grinned and skimmed the menu.

  She felt her resistance eroding a little. The truth was, they did have a date in their shared history. She saw no point pretending that date—the mediocre dinner, the ghastly musical, the espresso and cannolis, the kiss—had never happened. If she could learn to laugh about it, his kiss would lose its power over her, and she could probably be friends with him.

  They ordered—a turkey sandwich for him, a tuna wrap for her and iced tea for both. The waitress vanished, leaving them at their dark little table. Josh studied her for a long moment, then said, “This is going to sound strange, Loretta, but…as I said, I’ve got this situation, and I needed to talk to someone about it. And the person I thought of, the person I wanted to talk to, was you.”

  “Okay.” She tried not to feel flattered.

  “It’s about my friend Solly,” he said. “I mentioned him to you the other day, remember?”

  “He wanted you to walk me home,” she recalled. Perhaps she ought to blame this Solly character for Josh’s having kissed her.

  “Solly is in his seventies, a great guy, smart and in excellent physical shape.”

  “Uh-huh.” Josh had a friend in his seventies? Why was he telling her this?

  “Solly’s got a few girlfriends,” Josh continued.

  Fortunately, the waitress arrived with their drinks, sparing Loretta the need to respond. A seventy-something friend of Josh’s with a few girlfriends. At least Josh had only one girlfriend. Or so he’d told Loretta. Maybe he and Solly were good friends because they both believed in having more than one girlfriend at a time. Maybe they went cruising together and covered for each other.

  “Solly phoned me last night and asked for my legal expertise,” he said.

  She struggled to figure out why she was the someone he wanted to talk to about his old friend’s legal difficulties. “Is he having a problem with his landlord?”

  “No. It seems one of his girlfriends attacked another one. Physically.”

  Whoa. They’d veered into strange territory here. “How old are his girlfriends?”

  “Around his age, I’d guess. I don’t know exactly, but we’re not talking about bimbos and trophies. The two girlfriends I know—the ones involved in this mess—are both members of Solly’s senior center.”

  Two old women beating up on each other over an old man. This went way beyond strange. Loretta ought to be horrified, but she’d been working on for the Becky Blake Show too long. This was right up her alley.

  She leaned forward, intrigued. “Was anyone hurt?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes. Dora Lee was pushed—or else she fell—into the path of a moving car. Fortunately, it was travelling very slowly. She suffered a broken leg and a chipped tooth. She’s in the hospital, but it could have been worse.”

  “Jesus.” Loretta tried to look stricken. But honest to God, two elderly ladies beating each other up? One of them landing in the hospital? Damn, this would make a great show. Septuagenarian warrior women entering into battle over a septuagenarian stud! If only Harold wasn’t stuck on his kinder, gentler concept.

  “Phyllis—the girlfriend who allegedly pushed Dora Lee—was arrested and charged with assault,” Josh continued. “I spent last night at the precinct house, helping Solly to arrange her bail. She claims she’s innocent. She says Dora Lee tripped on the curb and fell. According to her, the whole thing was an accident.” He shook his head, obviously dismayed. The waitress appeared with their sandwiches, and he acknowledged her with a nod. Once she was gone, he murmured, “The whole thing is just so…so…”

  “Strange,” Loretta supplied, pleased by how concerned she sounded.

  “Yeah. Strange.” He lifted the top slice of whole wheat bread from his sandwich to inspect the filling, evidently liked what he saw, and lowered the bread into place before lifting the sandwich to take a bite. Loretta tasted her wrap. It was cold and moist, as refreshing as her iced tea. “It’s just so…strange. I saw them all yesterday morning. Solly, Phyllis and Dora Lee. I watched our blind-date show with Solly at the Senior Center, and Phyllis was with us for the entire broadcast. Dora Lee showed up about twenty minutes into it. She had cookies.”

  “Cookies.”

  “She’s a phenomenal cook. She bakes cookies for Solly all the time.”

  “So Phyllis felt threatened by Dora Lee’s domestic talents and decided to do her in.”

  “I don’t know if Phyllis pushed her,” Josh argued. “Dora Lee might have tripped and fallen. It could happen. She isn’t exactly light on her feet.” He sipped his tea. “On the other hand, Phyllis can be kind of bitchy, so I wouldn’t put it past her.”

  “Which one is Solly’s favorite?”

  “He likes them both. He’s got at least one other girlfriend I know of, Olga, but she doesn’t go to the Senior Center. She’s a former ballet dancer. I wouldn’t believe a story abou
t her tripping on the curb. But Doris is kind of—I don’t know, lumbering.”

  “Why were you at the Senior Center?” she asked. “Isn’t that an odd place for you to watch the show?”

  “I meet Solly every Monday to play chess,” Josh explained. “It’s a longstanding tradition. Yesterday was a Monday, so we decided to play and watch the show at the same time. Phyllis was there, kibitzing and gossiping, and then Dora Lee lumbered in with her cookies. They were wonderful. They tasted like hamentaschen.”

  “Like what?”

  “The Jewish answer to cannolis.”

  A giggle bubbled up from her throat. She tried to swallow it down. A woman was laid up with a broken leg in the hospital, possibly put there by her romantic rival. Loretta should be ashamed for finding anything amusing in this.

  But she was amused. Okay, so she was a terrible person, unforgivable, shameful, but the thought of two women—two old ladies with coarse features and odd hairs sprouting from their faces like Nona and Cousin Carlotta, and shrieky, raspy voices, and cardigans with pills all over them, and orthopedic shoes—engaging in a geriatric wrestling match over a seventy-year-old guy—how could she not be a little amused? “Josh, why are you sharing this with me?” she asked.

  “I needed someone to talk to,” he said bluntly.

  “Why me? I mean, okay, you didn’t want to discuss it with your friend Solly—he’s already living it. But you’ve got other friends.” You’ve got a girlfriend, she thought. Why not tell her about it?

  “You’re easy to talk to,” he said. “I feel good talking to you. I trust you. I couldn’t just talk to anyone about this. It’s so…”

  “Strange.”

  He nodded. “These are people I care about. Solly and I have known each other more than a year. I know Phyllis and Dora Lee, too. The whole thing is tragic.”

  “No it’s not,” she assured him. “No one’s dead. You need someone dead for it to be tragic.”