by Jane Haddam
“It is,” Joey said brightly. “And Sofie—”
“Let me go find Father Tibor,” Gregor said again. “Package me up and I’ll get moving.”
“Sure. But you know, Mr. Demarkian, if you want to find Father Tibor, you shouldn’t go over to his place. He’s at Bennis Hannaford’s, too.”
“Watching a sex show?”
“Old George Tekamanian couldn’t get up the stairs without help and Mrs. Arkmanian called him an old goat and said she wouldn’t be party to raising his blood pressure and what would his grandson Martin say if he got overexcited and died at something like this and then Old George said—”
“Never mind,” Gregor said desperately. “I get the picture. I’m in a little bit of a rush.”
“If you really hurry, you’ll get there just in time,” Joey told him. “The show is due to start in two minutes.”
2
THE TALL BROWNSTONE WHERE Gregor Demarkian now had the third-floor floor-through apartment had once been a tenement, but it had been gutted and remodeled and turned into condominiums long before Gregor had come back to Cavanaugh Street to live. As a symbol of the transformation of the neighborhood, however, it was fairly weak, and that in spite of the fact that each of the four apartments had its own marble fireplace. Many of the other tenements on the street had been gutted and turned into single-family townhouses, like Lida Arkmanian’s. Lida Arkmanian’s upstairs living room window looked directly into Gregor’s living room window. Lida Arkmanian also had a downstairs living room window (and, therefore, a downstairs living room), but that was the kind of thing that made Gregor feel a little dizzy. Lida Arkmanian with two living rooms and eight thousand square feet. Old George Tekamanian with a closet full of shirts from Ralph Lauren Polo. Sheila Kashinian with three mink coats. They had all been so poor growing up, and so isolated. They had all been so convinced that nothing much was ever going to change.
Gregor left Ohanian’s and walked up the street, stepping carefully because the pavement was beginning to ice up. All around him were signs that Donna Moradanyan had been at work. The front of his own building was wrapped in green and red ribbons with a glowing menorah in every window that faced the street. The front of Lida Arkmanian’s building—which Donna would have decorated—was more deliberately Christmassy, with bells and angels and cherubs nestled into clouds that seemed to be attached to the brownstone facing a fairy wish. Up the street a little farther, Donna had gone more deliberately Jewish, with glowing menorahs everywhere and a few Stars of David thrown in for good measure. Judaism being a religion that placed a great deal of stress on the commandment Thou shall not make unto thee a graven image, there weren’t a lot of symbols for Donna to use, but she had done her best. Gregor saw the set of open scrolls one of the yeshivas downtown used to symbolize the Torah and a couple of Israeli flags. Donna was one of those young women young men of Gregor’s day would have called “a game girl.” He stopped at the steps to his building’s front door and contemplated the multicolored tinsel with which she had hung the scraggly evergreen bush that grew against the banister. She had topped it off with another Star of David.
Gregor went up the steps and let himself into the foyer of the building, not even bothering to reach for his key chain. There was a lock on this door. All four of them had keys to it. Gregor was the only one who thought they should be using those keys. The rest of them—even Bennis, who was a sophisticated woman and ought to know better—just left the door unlocked and went in and out as if they were living in the crime-free pastures of an Iowa farm. Gregor checked out the wreath on old George Tekamanian’s door—evergreen and holly berry and a lot of shiny tinsel—and then looked over at the mail table. It was empty, meaning that Bennis had picked up his mail along with her own and taken it upstairs. Gregor sometimes wondered if she steamed open the envelopes with official-sounding return addresses on the envelopes—Federal Bureau of Investigation, Archdiocese of Colchester, New York State Department of Corrections—but he’d never had the nerve to ask her.
He climbed the stairs to the second-floor landing, shifted his grocery bags from his right arm to his left, and knocked on Bennis’s door. Old George Tekamanian had the apartment on the ground floor of this building. Bennis had the apartment on the second floor. Gregor had the apartment on the third floor. And Donna Moradanyan and her two-year-old son, Tommy, had the apartment on the fourth. Donna decorated the doors to all of them. Bennis’s door had a big silver bell with red metallic ribbon tied into a bow on the top. Donna knew better than to stick Bennis with anything religious.
Gregor knocked again, louder this time. The door opened and Sheila Kashinian stuck her bleached-blonde head through the crack.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said, when she saw Gregor. “We were wondering where you were. We were only doing all this for your sake.”
“Doing all what for my sake?”
But Sheila had already retreated into the apartment. Gregor left his grocery bags on Bennis’s hall table and went straight into the living room. The living room was crammed full of what had to be all the women and half of everybody else in the neighborhood. Lida Arkmanian and Hannah Krekorian took up the couch, and Sheila in her high stiletto heels and overwhelming jewelry took a perch on one of the couch arms. Old George Tekamanian had the club chair. Father Tibor Kasparian had the red canvas director’s chair Bennis usually used for work. Bennis and Donna were sitting cross-legged on the floor. There were other people there, too—Gregor saw June and Mary Ohanian crammed together into a kitchen chair pushed off to one side—but Gregor was already tired of taking inventory. He got the point. He stood at the back of the room and watched while Bennis’s oversize television screen went from temporarily black to brilliant blue, showcasing a sprightly older woman in a tweed skirt and pearls.
“Help! He’s killing me,” the old woman said chirpily. “Women who say their husbands have penises that are just too big to handle. Next, on The Lotte Goldman Show.”
“Penises,” Hannah Krekorian said thoughtfully. “Do you think that’s possible? That one could be too big?”
“I’ve heard of women being too big,” Lida Arkmanian said. “But maybe that’s more of that chauvinism they’re always talking about. I mean, that you hear the bad things about women but you never hear the bad things about men.”
“If that’s chauvinism, there was none of it in my mother’s house,” Sheila Kashinian said. “You should have heard her and my aunts go at it.”
“We did,” Lida Arkmanian said. “We used to hide under the table and listen to all the old ladies talk.”
“Those old ladies were younger than we are now,” Hannah Krekorian said.
“Oh, do you remember the story about the woman who took a lover and then when she went to bed with her husband her husband could see her lover’s image in her eyes?” Sheila Kashinian was practically squealing. “And first he killed her and then he killed her lover and it was a big mess but it was in Armenia—”
“I think your Aunt Helena used to make those stories up,” Lida said.
“Maybe she did,” Sheila said. “But they were good.”
“I remember the story about the woman who had sex with her donkey,” Hannah Krekorian said.
Gregor didn’t want to hear the story about the woman who had had sex with her donkey. He didn’t want to watch the commercial for designer perfume that was now flashing across the screen. He moved farther into the room and asked them, “What is it you think you’re doing here? What is that thing?”
Bennis Hannaford stood up. “It’s The Lotte Goldman Show. You know, the one you’re supposed to be on next week.”
“I can’t be on a show about—about—”
“Well, you won’t be, will you?” Donna Moradanyan asked him. “You’ll be on one about serial killers.”
“What’s a show like this going to say about serial killers?” Gregor demanded. “Ted Bundy’s ten favorite sexual fantasies? Richard Speck’s—”
“That’s the ph
one,” Bennis said, jumping up. She raced into the kitchen, picked up, and pulled the cord as tight as it would go, so that she could stand in the doorway to the living room and watch what was happening on the television screen. The commercial was over and The Lotte Goldman Show had come back. The chirpy older woman was sitting in an artfully arranged crowd of middle-aged people, not one of whom looked to Gregor like he or she could manage to get excited enough to produce a heartbeat, never mind a sex life.
“We’ve got it on right now,” Bennis said into the phone. “The production values are marvelous. I had no idea it was such a class act.”
“Today, we are going to investigate one of the most explosive secret sexual dysfunctions of our, or any other, age,” Lotte Goldman said. “We’re going to look into the trials and tribulations of men who have been just too well endowed by nature, and the trials and tribulations of their wives and lovers. I want to warn you right now that some of the things you are going to hear on this program will be painful to listen to. I want to warn you as well that some of the language will be explicit. This program is not for the squeamish. And that said, I would like to introduce you now to our guests, who have each and every one of them courageously agreed to come here today and discuss this problem publicly, to bring it out of the dark closet in which it had been hiding and expose it to the light of day.”
“I wonder if they’ll have pictures,” Sheila Kashinian said.
Bennis Hannaford waved the phone receiver in the air. “Lida, come here, it’s for you. It’s Rebekkah Goldman.”
“She wants the address of the place with the kosher filo,” Lida said, standing up. “I’ll be right there. I don’t want to miss any of this.”
“You won’t have to, Bekkah has it on too.”
Lida stepped over Donna Moradanyan’s shoulder and reached for the phone. “We are out of kimionov keufteh,” she said. “There’s another bowl I left in your refrigerator. Put them in the microwave and heat them up.”
“I was a virgin when I was married,” one of the women on television was saying. “I never saw one before I saw his. But when I did see his I had sense enough to be terrified.”
Bennis disappeared into the kitchen.
Gregor decided to disappear into the kitchen after her.
He had to do something, because he didn’t want to listen to what was going on on the television any longer. He looked at Tibor and old George Tekamanian, and saw that they both looked a little sick. All the women looked fascinated.
Gregor went around through the foyer again and got into the kitchen through that door. He found Bennis pulling bowls out of her refrigerator and tasting the contents of each one. She seemed to have enough bowls to throw a party for forty people. He pulled out one of her kitchen chairs and sat down.
“Bennis,” he said. “What’s going on out there?”
“Nobody wanted to watch their first Lotte Goldman show alone,” Bennis said. “They said they were afraid of what it would be like.”
“They said?”
“It’s the kind of thing you do in college,” Bennis explained. “I mean, what’s the point in watching something like that alone? You want to talk about it. You want to get embarrassed in public.”
“Right,” Gregor said.
“You can serve the enguinar chilled,” Bennis said, “in fact, I think you’re supposed to. Honestly, they should know better than to leave me alone with the food. Stop looking so green. You’ll do fine.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“On the show,” Bennis said. “You’ll do fine. You give great television. I’ve seen you.”
If anyone in this crowd was going to see reason, Bennis was. What that said about the crowd, Gregor wasn’t willing to contemplate.
“Bennis,” he tried, in his best-modulated, most rational voice, “I can’t possibly go on a show like that. I can’t possibly. You must see that.”
“Why?”
Bennis Hannaford was five feet four inches tall and weighed about a hundred pounds. She had thick black hair that floated like a cloud around her head, features so perfectly even and so well defined they could have been drawn by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and not a wrinkle on her face in spite of the fact that she was thirty-six (no, almost thirty-seven) years old. She looked like an angel, even in worn jeans, a long-gone-shapeless turtleneck, and one of her brother’s ancient flannel shirts. Only Gregor knew how truly implacable she was.
“Bennis,” he said. “I have a reputation to consider. I make the newspapers a lot.”
“I know.”
“What will they say if I go on a show like that?”
“That you kept your dignity the whole time.”
“I won’t keep my dignity the whole time. I’ll shout at somebody.”
“Don’t.”
“How could I help it?”
“Gregor, everybody on Cavanaugh Street is counting on you. It’s going to be only the second excuse they’ve ever had to watch that thing. And this Lotte Goldman person is going to be counting on you, too. Bekkah Goldman told Lida Arkmanian that Tibor told David that you said you would—”
“Think about it,” Gregor said. “That’s all I promised to do. Think about it.”
“Well, then just think yes. Really. It’ll be easier than you think. And you won’t have to disappoint anybody.”
“Bennis—”
The kitchen door on the living room side swung open and Lida came through, carrying the phone away from her ear.
“Here,” she said, thrusting the receiver at Bennis, “hang this up. I have to get back out there. The woman in the pink dress was just describing the way her husband was so big, he punctured the inflatable doll they got him to relieve his stress.”
“I’ll be right there,” Bennis said.
“Bennis,” Gregor said.
But Bennis was gone, out there with the rest of them, thinking God only knew what, and Gregor knew it was no use.
That was his biggest problem on Cavanaugh Street.
He didn’t know how to turn anyone in the neighborhood down.
He didn’t know how to say no to women he had known as girls and old men he had known as strapping, bass-voiced pillars of the church.
He didn’t know how to say no to much of anybody.
At least they fed him right.
He got a stuffed artichoke out of the bowl of enguinar and munched on it, imagining what he was going to do if Lotte Goldman asked him to describe the sexual practices of John Wayne Gacy.
A chorus of excited squeals rose out of the crowd in the living room. Gregor Demarkian winced.
THREE
1
FOR LOTTE GOLDMAN, THE ten weeks the show spent touring America, taping in two-week sprints in five different cities, were an adventure. The first two weeks were always spent in Philadelphia, so she and anyone else from the show who wanted to could celebrate the first night of Hanukkah at David and Rebekkah’s. After that, the migration might be for anywhere. In past years, Lotte had gone to Seattle and San Francisco, Phoenix and Tulsa, St. Augustine and St. Louis. She had found a good kosher restaurant in each one and lots of little things to bring home to her niece and nephews. Lotte got tired of being cooped up in New York. She got especially tired of doing nothing but going from her apartment to the studio and back again. When she had been younger, it had been different. Newly arrived in the city, Lotte had claimed every spare moment for discovery. She had gone to the Empire State Building and the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and the zoo. Even once she’d started her long climb to what would turn out to be success, she made time for herself. In those days, she would survive on two hours of sleep just to make sure she had time to hear Aida performed by Maria Callas or see the El Greco exhibit sent over by the government of Spain. It was after Lotte got successful that she got dull. Taping, researching, interviewing, talking to the press: it didn’t sound like it should take so much time, but it did. The week after the show got its first forty
share, Lotte went out and bought a Filofax, and she’d been addicted to it ever since. Things to do. Places to be. Phone numbers to remember. Lotte seemed to be busy all the time at the same time she seemed to be doing nothing at all.
“So take an afternoon off every once in a while,” DeAnna Kroll was always telling her. “I would if I could.”
Actually, DeAnna wouldn’t and couldn’t any more than Lotte wouldn’t and couldn’t. The real difference between DeAnna and Lotte was in how much Lotte loved leaving time. Part of that was temperament—DeAnna liked where she was now; she was suspicious of change of principle—but part of it was the nature of traveling reality for The Lotte Goldman Show. In that reality, Lotte rode to Philadelphia in the very front seat of whatever vehicle they were using to get there, and DeAnna did all the work.
The work DeAnna was doing this morning was the work she usually did just before they left for Philadelphia: supervising the loading of eight sofas, fifteen armchairs, twenty straight-backed chairs, twelve carpets, and ten coffee tables onto a moving van. The moving van was necessary because Shelley Feldstein refused to go anywhere without her back-up sets. “What if they don’t have anything suitable?” Shelley demanded, every time DeAnna suggested that there were plenty of furniture stores in every town they were scheduled to stop in. “What if Lotte has to tape a show on suburban prostitution with her set all in red?”
As a rationale for dragging the volumic equivalent of the contents of a small house all the way across the country and back again, this didn’t make much sense, but no one could talk to Shelley about it. Shelley got hysterical. Lotte didn’t remember when she and DeAnna had finally given in. Getting out of the cab now in the crisp December air, feeling the little rush she always felt being out in the city at night, it seemed to Lotte that they had been leaving this way forever. She knew it couldn’t be true. Shelley hadn’t been with them forever. Lotte couldn’t remember what it had been like before. DeAnna probably could. She could probably remember the year, day, hour, and minute when Shelley had insisted on taking the furniture for the first time.
