The Unexpected Salami

by Laurie Gwen Shapiro

  “Where are you working today?”

  “Still at the fire extinguisher joint.”

  “Keep your chin up. We won the Gulf War. The economy picks up after a war.”

  “It was a week-long war, Mom.”

  “You watch. How’s Frieda? Wasn’t she having a party?”

  “Yes, and she’s fine—”

  “Were the other girls there?”

  “Janet, but Veemah was in India. She flew in on Monday.”

  Veemah had asked me about the party at brunch, as she ordered a Western omelet.

  “You’re back from a month in India and you’re worried about Frieda’s party?” I’d said.

  “What do you think I do in Agra? Ride a tiger in the yard?” Veemah had said. “My grandmother spent my entire visit telling me that if I don’t stop dating white boys and wearing jeans I’m going to be labeled a whore. I’ll be worse than an untouchable.”

  “Are the girls happy to have you back in New York?” Mom said.

  “Probably.”

  “Did Frank tell you that Noreen had the baby?”

  Noreen is my unbelievably dull cousin. “No?”

  “Yes. Lydia Sue. Seven pounds, two ounces. You should give Noreen a call.”

  “Okay.” I picked up the pack of processed cheese from the Formica kitchen table and started scanning the ingredients. When I had interned at an adult-contemporary radio station the summer after my sophomore year of college, a DJ I’d had a clandestine something with would play the “ingredient game” to pass time on his shift. He wasn’t sharp enough to spout acerbic commentary on the day’s events. He’d read the label of an everyday product with heaps of twentieth-century additives and have listeners call to guess what they thought the mystery product was for a prize of concert tickets. I thought the game was bullshit. I was supposed to take the ninety-seventh caller, but I’d wait a few minutes and pick up the phone. He kissed great though.

  “I see you’re as talkative as usual,” my mother said.

  “Mom—don’t start—”

  “Start what? You never finish a sentence with me. Have you heard more about the murder case?”

  “No, I got rid of the cable. I can’t afford it.” Would she offer to pay for it?

  Nope. “Well, I haven’t seen anything more either.” My mother sighed. “You seem too blasé about that murder, Rachel. My God. A roommate of yours was murdered! And you were there! Help me. I’m feeling a generation gap.”

  I deflected the scrutiny. “You still sweeping those frogs out the condo door?”

  “No, we hardly see them anymore.”

  There was an excruciatingly long pause. “So how are you?” I asked. This was extortion.

  “You finally asked!” My mom meant it lovingly, but still it annoyed me.

  Back to Coffee Bar again: my new center of gravity. The man across from me at my long “antichic” linoleum table looked interesting, though a bit seedy, grinding numerous cigarettes into the ashtray as he sipped from his herbal tea. He had a zigzagging scar over his eyebrow; gray sideburns. I caught him ogling the two seventeen-ish girls in baby-doll dresses, braided pigtails, and patent leather shoes, particularly the girl with the D-cup chest. He saw me staring and probably thought I was coming on to him. He flashed his rotting teeth.

  I’d learned about rotting teeth from Stuart. I’d had it to here with him and had wanted the guys to show him the door. But they said that it wasn’t fair, he was paying his share: mateship bullshit going strong. I’m not saying all Aussie men wear slouched hats and burp their days away, but even the most sensitive Melbourne University philosophy major partakes in testosterone bonding; for a white male Australian to go against the two hundred-year strong societal grain is as inconceivable as a Savannah gent not opening a car door for a woman. My silver drop earrings went missing. Then my zoom-lens camera, my biggest purchase of the previous five years. I’d wanted the fucker out, but Colin and Phillip had tried to calm me down, suggesting that we try locking our individual doors. Then Stuart couldn’t steal money or sell our valuables.

  Ironically, I had to ask Stuart to pick my lock two weeks later when I dropped my keys on the St. Kilda pier, right into Port Phillip Bay. I couldn’t afford a locksmith and Stuart was most obliging, completing the job in ten seconds. I offered him a chunk of the Katz’s salami in the fridge as a thank you; my brother had sent the salami to me from the famous New York deli, subverting strict Aussie customs regulations by filling in “Restaurant Souvenir” on the official green form taped to the box.

  Our sibling mega-joke, the unexpected salami. I’d wrapped one up in a Saks Fifth Avenue box for Frank’s graduation from the Rhode Island School of Design. Tit for tat, he’d managed to have room service deliver a half pound one to me while I attended a vacuum physics conference in Chicago, the week after Will and I announced our engagement.

  Stuart had eaten half the salami while I was at the pier. I could tell by his breath and the missing meat. But since he’d opened my door, I pretended I didn’t notice and made him salami and eggs the way my Uncle Barry had shown me years ago. “The Jewish bachelor’s caviar,” Uncle Barry always said. Stuart and I got to talking, and he acknowledged his heroin addiction indirectly, commenting on a funky street-type who was being interviewed about the Australian recession on the news.

  Stuart looking straight at me: “He’s skint ’cause he’s been shooting up for a year I’d say. My teeth looked liked that a year ago. You can tell by the teeth.” That’s how I came to learn that rotting teeth on a person dressed in cool-as-shit black is almost certainly a sign of heroin.

  Traveling for two years had wised me up a bit, though not in the way the Ganellis and the Levines viewed growth: i.e., a masters degree, professional job, good solid man, things to have nachus over, bragging rights, as Grandma Chaika would have said. And it wasn’t just heroin teeth. I knew tons of new stuff I couldn’t put on a résumé, tidbits like the names of three men at the helm of the Australian Government who routinely received blow jobs at an upscale Melbourne brothel called The Planet. My former neighbor was their whore: a transplanted Perth blueblood who studied Japanese at Melbourne University. A simple act, like catching a glimpse of a man across the table of a coffee bar with brown teeth, brought out fractal memories that at some future time could be pieced together authoritatively, like a geometry proof.

  I ignored the sleazy Coffee Bar patron, instead burying myself behind a literary ’zine from a neighboring table. On the back cover, some hapless soul had started listing the states: “Alab. Ariz., Dela., Calif.” I searched my blue Danish schoolbag for a pencil and started to finish them. At least this I could do. I had memorized the states when I was seven and recited them to my eight-year-old cousin, Tony, at the Ganelli Easter Sunday Dinner. Aunt Virginia took me aside and whispered, “No one likes a show-off, Rachel.” In Coffee Bar, a few centuries later, clenching my pencil, I wrote them fast, but only managed forty-seven. It didn’t matter of course, not being able to complete what had once been child’s play. But I wanted to finish my list. My mind canvassed about: I tried to imagine the states as jigsaw pieces, and I remembered the boxing glove, Michigan, and even caught myself smiling a bit.

  The tooth guy kept looking at my paper. “New Hampshire,” he said.

  “I would’ve gotten that.” I said, trying to remember the last one.

  “Are you afraid of me?”

  “I’m in a solo kind of mood, you know?”

  “Look, I noticed your body language—you seem in need of company.” The weirdo offered me a cigarette. I shook my head no. In another time I’d have been sane and moved away. But for some reason—okay loneliness—I gave in. I half smiled.

  “You down?” he asked, swinging his chair around to my side of the table.

  “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity,” I said. The acid New York reply to everything, even when it’s thirty-five degrees outside.

  “Want coffee and a slice of blueberry pie? On me. My life story
sold today for $20,000.”

  “And so who are you?” I asked, more than somewhat obnoxiously, as the sleazoid flagged the waitress and ordered.

  “A fading icon.” He dragged a new cigarette. “You might not’ve even heard of me.”

  “Oh c’mon, don’t taunt like that. Who are you?”

  “Who are you?”

  “A woman at a coffee shop asking you a question—”

  “Danny Death,” the man said. Danny Death? One of the founding fathers of punk rock. Danny Death, damn. We got our food and got to talking.

  “I read that article about you in the seventies-nostalgia issue of Rolling Stone. The reporter didn’t like you much.” Nastiness is my adorable side effect to nervousness. I couldn’t believe I said that.

  “You’re a sweetheart,” Danny said with exaggerated anger, forking his pie.

  “I don’t know what to say to you—that I once carved a line from one of your songs into my desk during algebra? Sounds too much like fawning.”

  “Which line?”

  “‘Man is in transit between brute and God.’”

  “Stole that from Norman Mailer. The Naked and the Dead.”

  “Oh. Well, you stole it well.” I couldn’t look him in the face. I didn’t want him to gather how pathetic I was, sitting there stuck in a depressed late-twenties state, like caught fabric.

  “Why don’t you tell me what has you in your obvious rut?” he asked.

  “Long or the short version?”

  “Short will do. I’m a famous guy.”

  “A celebrity might be pushing it,” I said, with an unsuccessful straight face.

  “Fuck you.” I knew by Danny’s steady glare that he actually wanted to know.

  “Let’s see. I fled my boring job and my oh-so-perfect fiancé to live in Australia. While there I lived with three musicians, one of whom got killed by the mob during my new quasi-boyfriend’s video shoot. My mother, with whom I have poor communication, lured me back to my family apartment with the bait that my parents would move permanently to their condo in Florida. Now I’m back on the road to nowhere—instead of having a plethora of middle management editing jobs in the offering, I’ve returned to a job market where the only ads are for situations wanted—I can only temp. I desperately miss my quasi-boyfriend, Colin, who’s fifteen thousand miles away working in a copy shop, and I hate myself and my friends, although they think I’m as adorably sardonic and top-of-the-world as always. My mother thinks I’m a freak for not having an ounce of concern for the murder of my roommate, which by the way, I witnessed. He was a pig though. A fucked-up pig heroin addict thief asshole. And I’m at a loss about where I can go. I’m fucking around again with every Joe, Dick, or Harry I meet on a plane or at a party—I can’t make a decision about grad school, let alone what to do to make hours go faster—”

  “I see,” Danny said, signaling for our check.

  “That’s it? That’s what you say after devouring my miserable life story? You pump it out of me and then that’s it?”

  “Whoa!” the legendary Danny Death said, looking like he didn’t have time for whiners. “You need to get some fucking perspective. Decisions don’t mean shit. Once you’ve made one, ride it for its dimensions. So you’ve cut your first tooth. Why should I feel sorry for you? You speak well, you have great tits, you’ve had high adventure. You’re able to live in another country for two years without mention of a serious job—”

  “I had savings from my New York editing job, plus I waitressed—that’s not fair.”

  “But you knew you could wire home to Mommy and Daddy if you needed to. True?”

  “True.” Fuck him, the bastard.

  “So, you had a place to come home to, and it wasn’t a hick-town hell in West Virginia. And as for the murder, it sounds like you got a kick out of it. If the guy was an asshole, he deserved it.”

  “Fuck you,” I squeaked, my eyes steady on the table’s yellow polka-dotted contact paper that would make a homemaker scream in horror if she’d bought an old house and opened her cabinets. “What right do you have to say that to me?” Sometimes it takes a nihilist to really shape you up.

  • • •

  My life wasn’t blueberry pie, but over the next week, I felt more grounded. I called my mother to say hi, and she sounded delighted at this unforced cheer. I even managed a trip to the Forty-second Street library’s map room to look at the newest acquisitions.

  “Haven’t seen you in years,” Jorge, the map librarian, said. On a shelf behind his desk was a bumper sticker that said Happiness is knowing how to read a road map. “Rachel, right? I have great scarves to show you. Soldiers secured them around their necks in World War Two. The scarves had maps on them in case they got lost in the jungle.”

  I spread out the silky samples he brought me on the table and entered their space. I imagined myself as a pilot lost in the jungles of the Philippines with only a map of Luzon to guide me. Colin had known what I meant by my map space: he’d said that as a child he’d gone with his cousin to the beach, and as each boat passed, they’d enter a fantasy of journey.

  The librarian came over to retrieve the scarves. I asked him to bring out an 1890s map of Melbourne the way one would order an after-dinner sherry. Nepean Highway, the expressway where I drove Colin’s panel van on the day Stuart was shot, was marked Nepean Road. The hallmarks of the gentrified inner suburbs were lifetimes away—Fitzroy’s artist cafés and tapas bars, St. Kilda’s pastel art deco homes, and the outdoor Sunday thrift market at Camberwell, where Colin scooped up a ketchup-stained cookbook for me. (It was inscribed “the kitchen of Mrs. Newton-John”; a chocolate walnut cake was marked “Olivia’s favorite” in red pencil.)

  An afternoon of geographical escape and pleasure; I was in a bona fide good mood. I left the library and started to walk home down Fifth Avenue, admiring, as an incalculable number of people had before me, the beauty of the Flatiron Building in sunset. Finally, a day in which I didn’t mind that I was part of a continuum. Saved in the nick of time by Danny Death.

  On Fifth Avenue and Twenty-second Street, Eisenberg’s Sandwich Shop beckoned me inside. The Eisenberg tuna sandwich (Bumble Bee fancy white albacore moistened by just the right amount of Hellmann’s mayo, a pickle, and a sprig of parsley) would be a perfect cap to the day—a treat I’d missed while in Australia.

  Aunt Virginia had taken Frank and me to Eisenberg’s whenever my parents went on their “romantic getaway” weekend bus trips to places like Cape May, New Jersey, or Brandywine Valley, Delaware. Aunt Virginia was, and is, a no-nonsense woman. Everything about Eisenberg’s suited her “just fine”—the Old New York narrow room with the faux-marble counter, zero-pretense red vinyl stools, and water served in promotional cups bought in bulk—in recent times, last summer’s Disney tie-in.

  “Your Grandpa Ganelli ate soup here,” she’d remind us if we lobbied for McDonald’s (at the time, the early seventies, the golden arches had but one outlet on East Twenty-third Street, a destination as exotic and inviting as the only intimate café in drive-in suburbia).

  I smiled in relief as I took my stool. Some things are constants. Three hand-painted wooden signs were tacked onto the walls, plaques from opening day in 1929:

  SALAMI

  BACON & TOMATO

  PEANUT BUTTER

  ROAST BEEF

  BACON & EGG

  SWISS CHEESE

  BOLOGNA

  TUNA FISH

  HAM & CHEESE

  LIVERWURST

  HAM & EGG

  COTTAGE CHEESE

  HOT PASTRAMI

  SALAMI & EGG

  SLICED HAM

  CHICKEN SALAD

  CORNED BEEF

  And a plastic fourth menu from the fifties over to the side:

  STEWED PEACHES

  JELL-O

  PINEAPPLE

  GRAPEFRUIT JUICE

  TOMATO JUICE

  FRUIT SALAD

  I greedily accepted my tuna fish sandwich and savored each
bite. I imagined Grandpa Ganelli, who I hardly remember, eating sliced meatloaf on a roll, perhaps crossing paths with Mom’s socialist father, Murray Levine, who was probably the first in his five-thousand-year-old line to abandon kosher laws to the temptation of a yummy BLT.

  I daydreamed about enrolling in Columbia’s film school, persuading Frieda and Janet to get me into their production assistant circle. Mom had those great PR contacts she was always offering to call. If I borrowed her old Rolodex I could set up some interviews for steady, non–fire extinguisher money. I had a pulse again.

  The guy at the far end of the counter wanted to pay his bill. “I had a tuna salad sandwich, mate,” he said, in a distinct Aussie accent.

  I knew that voice. I leaned in close to pinpoint who it was. One of my Dog’s Bar customers?

  I dropped a sandwich half in my lap. I went over to the end of the room to get a better look. It couldn’t be. I’ve been told by my friends and family that I amplify my details, but that moment I almost had a seizure of glacial proportions. At the very least, I could feel hot color blitzing my cheeks.

  Stuart looked like he was the one seeing a ghost. “Shit, Rachel!”

  “My God, Stuart!” I spit a large chunk of tuna onto his shirt. “What the fuck is fucking going on here?”

  He stared at me, frightened.

  “What the fuck?” My hand quivered. “I saw you dead. They pronounced you dead on arrival—there was blood—you were dead!”

  “I thought you’d be cozy in Oz with Colin,” he said shakily. He had a bit of lettuce on his lower lip.

  “What is going on?”

  “You have a light?”

  “WHY AREN’T YOU FUCKING ANSWERING ME?”

  “Some things you are better off not knowing about. I don’t think you should go telling anyone you saw me.”

  “Like fucking hell.”

  One of the two women at the far side of the counter called for her check, and the waiter reluctantly left our part of the counter space. Stuart leaned over; he smelled of pickle and drugs. “Let’s say I needed to be dead fast. And I reckon Colin and Phillip needed the fame. Simple as that. You got a place for me to stay? I just got here from Buffalo. Fucking oath, I came to this coffee shop because I’d heard you telling Phillip and Colin about it.”