The Unexpected Salami

by Laurie Gwen Shapiro

  “We’re not supposed to be discussing the trial yet,” Raj, the cute Nietzsche reader reminded us. He’d had a conjugal visit the previous evening from his pretty Columbia journalism school grad-student wife, at which time I reluctantly gave up on him as a distraction from my boredom and woe.

  Fred Kaluzny sipped his canned iced tea. “Isn’t it cruel,” Fred asked, to no one in particular, “how cats and dogs only live such short lives and then turtles get to live to a hundred and forty? Rats live for three years but they kind of deserve it.”

  Our foreperson Rockette knocked on the inside of the door, and Kevin answered with his usual cheery whine: “Is this a demanding jury or what?”

  “Our exhausted crew needs to go home,” Leslie said.

  “You have to write out your request,” Kevin said.

  Leslie asked for a reprieve in a tight one-room-schoolhouse handwriting that lacked modern curves and flourishes; she was a synchronized kicker in more ways than one. At least my writing worried people a little.

  A few minutes later the judge summoned us in and officially called it a day. We were escorted to Forlini’s on Baxter Street, one of the less touristy standby Little Italy restaurants I knew from childhood; Dad had his old reliables in Manhattan if our family was too tired to trek to Arthur Avenue in the Bronx for the real thing. The sixteen of us law-abiding jurors were given three huge platters of cold antipasto to share, a choice between pasta and a side salad, broiled sole, or veal parmigiana. Then, coffee and spumoni. After the lousy deli sandwiches and overcooked vegetables we’d stuffed down that week from the court cafeteria, we were most enthused. When everyone was through with the restrooms, for the third day in a row, we were escorted via minibus back to our motel rooms.

  13

  Colin: LURE

  With her day-old arrival and our new condom-free commitment, Hannah would never put up with an overnight visit to Rachel. But I’d resolved to see her. I opened the steaming door.

  “I’ll be back in a tick, I’m getting some fags down in the lobby.”

  “Say ‘cigarettes,’ Colin. If you don’t speak proper English no one’s ever going to respect you.”

  “Cigarettes.”

  I planned on ringing Phillip from the lobby phone to recruit him in my lie. This was getting to be as natural as shaving. I saw Kerri wearing her black vinyl cap. She was on the couch, eyes glued to the front door.

  I pulled the brim of her cap so she’d look up. “Kerri, is Phillip up in the room? I have to ring him.”

  “Phillip? He didn’t come home last night. They lost me yesterday at the Palladium.”

  “What? Who’s they?”

  “He phoned me this morning from an after-hours club. A pathetic excuse about Angus and him wandering around with too much vodka. He’s on his sorry way back now. How could he lose me? Is that the craziest thing you’ve ever heard? Is he rooting around on me again?”

  I answered her with my silence. Fucking clueless. I had always pitied her, but it wasn’t my place to give her the scoop on Phillip, an only slightly more discreet sex maniac than bloody Mick-O. Why did she put up with his bullshit? It was obvious that he didn’t give a toss. Kerri once told me that she grew up in Coober Pedy, the mining town in South Australia where to beat the heat everyone lives in deserted opal shafts. Now it’s a tourist trap; there’s a new hotel constructed around the abandoned shafts. Even before the tourist dollars though, residents learned how to compromise: blistering sun, but a steady wage. Perhaps bubblehead Kerri was a legend back home in the Outback, a brave girl who cut loose to Melbourne, and now the States. Maybe Phillip was another Coober Pedy–style compromise for her.

  “I’m going to give him a little slack for the tour. But, Colin, you tell me if anyone gets serious. I want to be the one to marry him. I put in my time all these years. I’ve earned the payoff. Will you promise to tell me?”

  I nodded and coughed. I couldn’t believe she still wanted him. “What did you think of our final gig?” I asked, to change subjects. Shit. I had to hurry this along. Hannah would be suspicious.

  “It wasn’t a gig, Colin—it was a stadium concert. You were on display to the major music journos and execs in the States, but you were prancing on stage like a kid to a record. I’m your friend, so I’m going to tell you this: during the concert, I overheard Marty, one of the A&R reps, complaining to the head of EMI about you as unnecessary overhead. And your good friend Angus was saying ‘I told him not to strut across stage like an idiot, but he wouldn’t listen.’ Angus said how great it was that Phillip held court center stage.”

  If this wasn’t spongecake Kerri I was talking to, I would have been devastated. She had it wrong. “Angus and Phillip want me to strut,” I explained.

  “Rubbish. Fucking Angus’s setting you up. Marty’s his partner in crime. Truth is, since Buffalo, Angus’s been hinting to Phillip that he thinks he’d be better off solo. Phillip’s been knocking the idea back, but his ego might not hold out. If I were a fan of Angus, I wouldn’t be telling you this. Phillip needs to be punished, too. He thinks he’s such hot shit now. I drove him out to the Bendigo gig when his car was unroadworthy and in the panelbeater. Every week I do his bloody laundry. If he can’t keep his peter in his pants, he better know where he came from. Be aware, Colin. You’re the nicest guy in the band. You don’t deserve the lying shit I get. But please, don’t dob me in as the source.”

  “Of course not,” I said, trying not to let my voice crack.

  “Marty had Phillip try out for a soap opera role as an Aussie detective. He thinks he can launch his career with tie-in ballads—like his friend did for Rick Springfield years back on General Hospital.”

  What was left of my own ego toppled onto the floor. Between my visit from Hannah the day before I was supposed to see Rachel, and now the news that my risky claim to fame had merely been a launching pad for Phillip’s pedestrian career, a wondrous week was tinged blue, like rancid fruit. Which fat-arsed cunt was Marty, and why did he have it in for me? The A&R reps were difficult to distinguish by either name or importance, like Greenland and Iceland.

  “Why don’t you go back up?” I asked with tremendously false composure. “Take a bath before Phillip comes back, so you can be calm and have the upper hand.”

  “I’ll sharpen my knife. When he walks through that door, I’m going to take him to the forest and chop his head off.”

  “Before you do that, can you get my new shirt back from him? I don’t want it to be bloodied.”

  “Talk to you later, Colin. Watch your back.”

  I took her seat on the couch, waiting for Phillip. What could I say to Hannah? A bellboy asked me if I wanted anything from the bar. I gave him a dollar to go away. “Thanks for asking,” I said.

  Only two minutes had gone by when I saw Phillip walk into the lobby without Angus.

  “Hey, mate,” he said, when he’d reached my square of lobby carpet. His eyes were red, and his pupils giant black circles. “You missed a real scene last night.”

  “They’ll be a real scene for you, upstairs. I rang for the hearse and arranged the plot. Kerri’s mentioned something about a knife and the forest and your head.”

  “I wish she’d get off my back. I didn’t invite her to America.”

  “But she came. Look, I’ll leave that to you lovebirds to work out. I have my own problems. I have to spend a night at Rachel’s motel, and Hannah would never let that happen.”

  Phillip grinned. He was not alone in Kingdom Slimedom. “How should I cover?”

  “I told her I was getting a packet of fags. Can you knock on my door in fifteen minutes and say I need to do a sleep-over TV interview in New Jersey? Tell her you have to do a bigger one for Musician.”

  “That’s ridiculous. She can check it out with Kerri.”

  “Kerri hates Hannah, you know that. She once told me that she wants to pull the rod from her bum. After you calm her down, she’ll be into it.”

  “You are one evil bastard, Colin. All
these years I thought you were an angel. But that’s silly. Who sleeps over in New Jersey for an interview? It’s half-baked.”

  “Make it Boston then. I’ll get some facts about Boston from Rachel.”

  “Hannah might want to go along on your trip.”

  “I’ll cover that.”

  “So you’re not going to tell Rachel about Hannah?”

  “I’m not sure about that yet.” I wanted to ask him about the back-stabbing nonsense Kerri was on about, but it was easier to keep to one mess at a time. “See you soon,” I said, heading for the lift.

  “That was a long five minutes,” Hannah said.

  “Sorry, I had to take a crap in the lobby.”

  She cringed her nose. “Disgusting.”

  “I’m going to take a shower now.”

  “I certainly hope so,” Hannah said.

  I had a head full of suds when I realized that I’d left the note Rachel’s mum brought me in my jeans. I should have given the court address to Phillip and binned the note in the lobby along with my cigarette stubs. Hannah might see a corner of the letter peeking out of the back pocket. But nothing seemed strange when I got out of the shower.

  About twenty minutes later, Phillip and Kerri knocked on the door. He had his arm around her. They had patched things up. Poor Kerri.

  “Bass Player magazine rang,” Phillip said. “You’re going to have to do that interview in Boston for this afternoon. The car’s coming in an hour.”

  “What interview is that?” Hannah said.

  “It was supposed to be in two days. It’s my only solo interview. I have to do it.”

  “So what am I supposed to do?”

  “I thought you might like to spend the day with us,” Kerri said. I was right. She was going along with us; she hated Hannah that much. “An EMI executive’s taking us in a helicopter to the Hamptons. He told us that’s where New York’s beautiful people go for the summer. They don’t have to work during the week. Phillip has his interview at seven tonight, and then maybe we can go see a show on Broadway.”

  “Actually, that sounds fun. I got a new bikini.” Mentioning the upper classes to Hannah is like putting out sugar water for a fly. She was happy. But although they were carrying out our lie perfectly, I was a tad miffed that I hadn’t heard about this helicopter earlier. Did this support Kerri’s conspiracy theory? And I was nervous about Hannah in a bikini surrounded by rich New York men. When she left with Kerri and Phillip a half hour later, I grabbed a cab to the court address where Rachel had promised transportation to her motel would be waiting.

  Walking down the blue carpeted halls of Rachel’s New Jersey motel, I had a gratifying shock. Even if INXS’s entourage didn’t treat me like a first-class citizen, and there were rumblings of a rocky path ahead orchestrated by Marty and Angus, I was—at that precise moment—a successful rock musician. And while I wasn’t sure what lay ahead sexwise, I was about to spend the night with the woman I most wanted to be proud of me. My mum would accept me no matter what I did. Even Hannah would be pleased if I read enough and tried my hardest to be genteel. But not Rachel; she expected perfection of everyone around her, even though she admitted she in no way held taut reins on her own life. That is Rachel’s ultimate charm. You can spend your life with people who will let you relax in mediocrity, like Mick-O and even Hannah. You’d have a pleasant, stress-free existence, and maybe that’s the way to go—die among the salt of the earth. Or you can surround yourself with exasperating friends and lovers who respect your intellect and demand that you use it. Rachel could see through an idle bastard quicker than anyone, having dabbled a bit too much with lack of direction herself. But as I neared the end of the corridor, I knew she had to respect me more than when I’d last seen her. Having performed in front of a sold-out Madison Square Garden was pretty bloody close to perfection.

  “Wendell,” the guard at the door told another blue-clothed guard, “let Rachel Ganelli know her fiancé’s back from Australia.”

  “She the pretty one?”

  “Yeah.”

  She’d eat up that compliment if I repeated it. Rachel never thought of herself as pretty. She wasn’t conceited in that way, which is what made her pretty. She was conceited about her brain, which is what made her, if you weren’t in the mood for her, annoying.

  “Rachel!” I called. The guard let me through to a lobby. I spotted her black hair. Was it combed out for me? She always wore it in a ponytail, and I used to tell her in Melbourne she should wear it down. “Rachel!” I called.

  “Sweetheart, you’re dripping!” She kissed me with closed lips. Outside, it poured relentlessly and the wind whistled, amplifying my Heathcliff-arrival effect. My mother used to joke over rainy breakfasts that she was waiting for Heathcliff to ride up our driveway in hot pursuit of his destined Cathy so Dad would have to fight for her affections. I could tell the others in the lounge were dying to be introduced, but Rachel used the thunderstorm to rush me down the hall into her room.

  “Let me get you towels, honey!” she said, as we were leaving the lobby. It felt great to be near a real friend. I liked our little engagement play. In her room I plopped down on the hideous bedspread with my jeaned legs spread open. “Come on, Sheila,” I continued the game, “I came here for me conjugal visit. Woman, you ready for your root?”

  “Sorry, Bruce,” she said, in equally put-on lower-class Australian. “I haven’t seen you in so long, I’ve gone lesso with the other bird jurors.”

  “Right, there’s my sarcastic wench,” I laughed. “Pretty good. You’re not emphasizing the first syllable anymore. Been practicing?”

  “I had an Australian houseguest before I got sequestered.”

  “Yeah? One of your friends from Dog’s Bar?”

  “No—”

  “Wait, before I forget,” I said, unzipping my duffel and handing her a Safeway shopping bag. “Australian goodies. As promised, bikkies and coffee-in-a-tube. And I got you a snowglobe from guess where?”

  She picked up the Niagara Falls snowglobe, shook it, and put it down again on the night table. “Thanks. I don’t have this one.”

  “So who’s your guest?”

  “Someone you probably don’t remember. So, Mr. Rock Star, how was Madison Square Garden?”

  “Amazing. It’s crazy that we got these opportunities after Stuart’s death.” How easy it was to lie now. But this wasn’t hurting anyone. “I wish there was another way, but I’m not taking this trip to mourn too much. We might be back in the States in a few months if the record sells here. It was intense to be on stage, Rachel, to feel accomplishment. We went to a pub near the Garden afterwards, and a girl asked me for my autograph, can you imagine?”

  “That’s great.”

  “I’ll shut up for a bit. I’m sure you have heaps to tell me. Like how the hell you got on this trial?”

  “I’ve been trying to figure that out.”

  “Bet you have a mega-job you’re on leave from.”

  “In a way you can say that.”

  “Tell me about it then.”

  “A little later,” she said.

  “I heard on one of your news programs that there was a grandmother involved.”

  “Yeah, Grandma Rambo blasted a fourteen-year-old’s head open.”

  “Keeping an open mind?” I teased. “Wasn’t he a dealer?”

  “I haven’t discussed it with anyone in detail, but I don’t need to fuck up six weeks of my life to know she’s guilty as hell.”

  “Poor Grandma. If I know you, you’re the jury ringleader, and she doesn’t have a chance.”

  “You’re off. I’m the outcast. They think I’m an oddball.”

  “It’s like calling Kojak bald.”

  She did this weird fake giggle.

  “Hey, another thing I almost forgot—we were in Buffalo and Syracuse—I saw your old uni, we played the Carrier Dome. I talked a bit with the current work-student security—”

  “Work-study.”

  “Work-stud
y girl—”

  “Person.”

  “Rachel, she’s a girl, she’s nineteen.” I threw a pillow at her. She didn’t throw it back.

  “What have you done in New York City?”

  “Mick-O and I went to Bloomingdale’s,” I said.

  “Together? That’s somewhat a gay male stomping ground in the city.”

  “Now you tell me. I could’ve scored.”

  It looked like Rachel’s mouth was stuck.

  “The trial’s giving you the shits, isn’t it? Talking to you today is like getting ink from a dried-up well.”

  “Colin!” she said suddenly. “How could you?”

  “What? I was kidding—”

  “Colin—I know—I know about the murder you concocted with Phillip.”

  I could have slit my wrist that second, but I said nothing.

  “I ran into Stuart in a luncheonette on Fifth Avenue—he was eating a tuna fish sandwich. A dead man in a coffee shop eating a tuna fish sandwich!—what’s the matter, Stone Fucking Face, aren’t you going to scream ‘Mercy me, Stuart’s alive’? Or is it not such a surprise after all?”

  My face must have been stiff and white. (I’ve blotted out those first few seconds.)

  “Not like I ever loved the guy, but by your standards I’m his new patron saint. My brother and I took him in, and he’s pretty much off the kick, for now at least. Right now he’s at my folks’ place reaping the rewards of overprotective parents. He had no more money and no home—he was going to sleep on a fucking park bench! While the two of you concocted that horrible plan to get yourselves into fucking Madison Square Garden! You were my best friend. How could you of all people lie to me? Why would you lie to me?” Rachel’s hands were shaking.

  When she told me that she knew about the murder scheme, I think maybe I thought she was kidding, that she would say, “I know you got him shot, didn’t you,” the way I’d say “C’mon! You bribed the examiner!” if a brilliant mate came in dux of the class when final exams were posted. But then I saw her lower lip quivering and realized she was furious and, more than anything, disillusioned—that she did know. I had failed her, a fact that felt worse than lying to my parents and sixteen million Australians, minus the handful of others in on the scam. Rachel had me terrified. I didn’t know what to say or do. I do remember eventually lashing out at her.