“Holy shit,” I said.
“Well, I’ll be darned,” she replied.
“Rachel.”
“Nate.”
The ME seemed perplexed. “You two know each other?”
“Yes indeed,” Rachel Solomon said. “From the Post.”
Doppler wrinkled his forehead, then, in a crazed display of emotion, slapped it.
“Of course! I knew you were both on staff there, but I didn’t compare the dates on your résumés.” He seemed disappointed in himself.
“So how’ve you been?” Rachel asked.
“Good. Done with the Navy, ready to earn an honest living. How long you been here?”
“Three years. Give or—”
“I see you two have some catching up to do,” Doppler said. “And I’ve got a pile of work waiting on my desk.” To Rachel, “Why don’t you introduce him to Ellen. Wait, he probably knows her too. Anyway, send him back when you’re through.”
Ellen?
Nah, couldn’t be.
Then again, He probably knows her too.
“Sure,” Rachel said. “We won’t be long. I’m swamped as well.”
Doppler withdrew, leaving Rachel and me alone with our feelings. I wasn’t sure about hers, but mine were mixed. On the one hand, I wanted a clean slate, a fresh start, a new beginning and all that, with as few reminders of my former life as possible. On the other hand, I wanted Rachel Solomon.
I know, I know, meshugeh. I see her for the first time in four years and get a hard on. But what can I say? The pecker wants what the pecker wants. And Rachel Solomon was eminently wantable, now more than ever. Whereas in bygone days she’d been adorable, now she was—and I don’t think I’m exaggerating—stunning. A burnt-orange dress stressed how much she’d blossomed, and her chestnut tresses, grown long and plentiful, didn’t hurt either. I couldn’t help thinking maybe our working together again was meant to be. Maybe Rachel was part of my fresh start.
I’d no sooner entertained this thought than an unpleasant image popped up. Me sprawled on the newsroom floor, along with a note from Rachel. Maybe she’d forgotten the incident, as well as our—okay, my—disastrous night at Sal’s. Maybe we could start over, fresh. I glanced at her ring finger and there went my maybes, which became definitely-nots.
As usual, Rachel didn’t miss a thing. “Yep, been married a couple years. Hadn’t planned on it, but he came along and you know how that goes.”
I knew how wanting unattainable women went, if that’s what she meant. If she meant anything else related to women, I not only didn’t know how it went, I didn’t know how it was supposed to go.
“Anyway,” Rachel said, “let’s have lunch this week and you can tell me all about military life.”
Apparently she’d forgotten, or let go of, the past, which I might have appreciated if it weren’t for that ring.
“Sure,” I said, “and you can tell me all about married life.”
And how your husband is smart, handsome, talented and successful, which of course I’m eager to hear all about.
On our way to the religion editor next door, I felt like I’d lost a treasure I never had. I also saw trouble ahead in the form of an old nemesis who’d returned to haunt me. But maybe I was wrong. I mean, what were the chances of the Ellen I was about to meet being the Ellen? Pretty good, actually. Ellen Drury was someone I knew, plus she was a journalist and Rachel’s good friend, which made it quite possible, if not probable, the two would end up on the same team. If two and two turned out to be four, I’d end up on the same newspaper as a woman I wanted but couldn’t have, and a woman I didn’t want but couldn’t get rid of.
I’d never prayed, even on Yom Kippur, but this situation was my foxhole.
Dear whoever. Please don’t let this Ellen be that Ellen, even though there’s a good chance she is. If you grant me this one little wish, I promise never again to fart in a place of worship should I ever visit one again. I swear.
I could have prayed more persuasively, I suppose, but my feeble effort paid off. The woman standing behind her desk as we entered the office was—and I can’t think of a better word offhand—spectacular. Tall and slim with long raven hair and a rosy, unblemished complexion, she was so striking that if she weren’t a journal she might have been a model. Clearly this Ellen was not that Ellen.
“Nate Rubin,” Rachel said, “meet Ellen Drury. And vice versa.”
My Lou Costello imitation was perfect, if I had to say so myself. I opened my mouth to speak, and out came gasps instead of words. Meanwhile, Rachel’s face turned crimson as she began laughing that lovely butt of hers off. She tried to stem the tide by covering her mouth, but that was like sticking her finger in a dike.
“I’m sorry,” she said after calming down. “I always lose it when one of the old gang sees Ellen. We bumped into Gustav at a German deli in Oak Park, and I swear he almost fainted.”
I kept staring, trying to detect any similarity between the Ellen standing before me and the one I’d known. I finally saw it in the face, mainly because I’d imagined a downsized version of it when I had nothing better to do at the Post. I’d pictured the long lashes, sensuous lips and flawless complexion on a narrower punem, and what I saw now was what I’d imagined then, and come to think of it, what I’d noticed blossoming before I left the paper.
“It’s me, Nate. Good to see you.” Ellen extended her hand.
I stared at that too.
“C’mon,” Rachel said, “don’t be rude.”
Belatedly we shook while I noted the near-stranger’s hand was ringless.
Handshake accomplished, I finally spoke, for better or worse. “Do you mind if I say Jesus Christ almighty?”
“Not at all,” Ellen replied, “since he’s my Savior.”
#
It was true. The revised Ellen Drury had gone on a religious trip, with God supposedly at the steering wheel. Rachel told me all about it during a midweek lunch at Giselle’s Café, down the block from the Gazette. The place compensated for a boozeless menu with the sweet smell of grease.
My lunchmate smelled good too, her perfume redolent of roses, or some other flower. And of course she looked eminently desirable in a light spring dress that stressed her new zaftig figure. I tried, somewhat successfully, not to get distracted while she described Ellen’s transformation.
Some months before I joined the Navy, a friend of Miss Drury’s mother, knowing a troubled soul when she saw one, dragged Ellen to the Church of the Holy Spirit on Detroit’s south side, Rev. Billy Crocker presiding. After several such visits, the skeptic became a believer and opened her heart to the Lord.
Following her conversion, Ellen realized God disapproved of gluttony, so she reduced her food intake, thus melting those excess pounds while scoring points with the Deity. Then, to please God even more, a svelter Ellen began curbing her tongue, which proved even more difficult than reining in her appetite. But she gradually managed, and now a thinner, gentler Ellen loved her neighbor, turned the other cheek and did unto others as she would have them do her, or something like that.
Rachel, meanwhile, cheered her friend on from the sidelines, applauding even after Ellen shifted her politics from left to right. “She’s a God-fearing Republican now,” Rachel said, sipping her lemonade to get rid of the bad taste this second conversion left (just guessing). “But I love her too much to let a little insanity ruin our friendship.”
I figured the time was ripe to solve an ancient riddle, so I asked Rachel how she and Ellen had become friends in the first place. She smiled, seemingly at the memory.
“Ellen couldn’t intimidate me because I saw the self-loathing beneath all that vitriol,” Rachel said, then caught herself. “Sorry, my younger brother’s a psych major and I help him prep for exams.”
I waited while she took a bite of salad, chewed vigorously, then swallowed.
“Ellen appreciated that I didn’t react to her like most people,” Rachel said. “Meaning I didn’t try to wring her neck.
So after a while she began treating me civilly and, before we knew it, we’d become friends.”
The old Ellen and I could never be friends, given my tissue-thin skin, but I admired Rachel’s thick epidermis in addition to everything else about her.
I asked how she and Ellen wound up at the Gazette and she smiled again, this time more broadly.
“Doppler is a hard-ass and a perfectionist,” she said. “Three years ago he fired the entire staff and wrote and edited the paper himself until he hired three new people. I was the first, then came my future husband, Aaron, and, at my recommendation, Ellen.”
“So you met your hubby at the Gazette?”
“Yes indeed. He was sports editor, but he left last year to become assistant sports editor at the News.”
Aha. A jockstrap.
In my book, anyone who had anything to do with sports was a jock. And hadn’t I explained to Rachel, that time at Sal’s, how all of them were dickwads? Even if she’d forgotten, which wouldn’t surprise me given the events of that night, how could an intelligent woman like her marry one?
I was on the verge of posing the question (I’m kidding) when she asked me what military life was like. I gave her an expurgated version of my stay in the Navy, omitting the parts about drinking and whoring.
That information was classified.
Chapter 53
Tuesday evening and time for another city council meeting. Normally I’d shudder at the mere thought of attending another one of those mind-numbing sessions, during which dull people discussed dull subjects in an obscure language that some called legalese and others Jabberwocky. I called it unintelligible, and horseshit for short.
But tonight’s meeting promised to be far from normal. So abnormal was it expected to be, in fact, I might even stay awake for part of it, specifically for the portion during which the council was set to vote on a proposed shopping center.
I’m not joking.
In a sleepy little town like Dearborn Heights, such a proposal could lead to warfare, and in fact it did last December when Raskin and Company, Commercial Developers, submitted its plans for a new shopping center to the city council. After word of the proposal spread, residents divided into two enemy camps. Call them the Hatfields and McCoys.
The former consisted mostly of émigrés from Dearborn, Detroit and other cities who’d relocated to escape the noise and congestion of larger metropolises, and viewed a full-fledged shopping center as a threat to their tranquility. Such an enterprise, they claimed, would draw people from surrounding areas and create the very conditions they’d fled.
The McCoys were primarily residents who worked in Dearborn or Detroit but couldn’t afford either city so they lived in Dearborn Heights. These people welcomed the prospect of a bank, supermarket and department store located close by.
On this issue I was Sweden, meaning neutral, as long as the shopping center left local bars intact. But if construction flattened even one of them, as similar ventures had done elsewhere, I’d join the Hatfields.
Since the proposed site was a vacant lot on Beech Daily Road, the flattening of anything but weeds and shrubs seemed unlikely.
#
Anticipating a standing-room-only crowd, I arrived at council chambers a half-hour early and grabbed a metal folding chair, third row center, with apologies to my rump in advance. I shared the worm with three other early birds, a gabby older couple in the front row and a glum-looking bearded guy behind me. By 6:55 p.m., the expected throng had arrived and at seven o’clock sharp the five councilmembers, consisting of four men and a woman, marched to the front of the room and seated themselves at a long, narrow table. Chairman Herb Jennings called the meeting to order and we were off and running.
Or rather crawling.
The quintet droned on about a courthouse roofing project, a commercial easement request, a residential sewer installation and several other stimulating topics before they arrived at the one for which the SRO crowd had sacrificed a night of TV-watching. Jennings, a long sausage of a man dressed in a mustard-colored suit and dark-brown shirt, read the item off using language so arcane the audience remained stone-faced until he translated. “We’re talking about the shopping center here, folks.”
Which is when the assemblage snapped to attention. My pen, however, remained inert for most of the opening exchange, during which councilmembers discussed issues revolving around rezoning, permitting, easement-granting and other heart-stopping issues. Both my pen and I became alert when Jennings called for comments from those present, at which point hands shot up throughout the packed house. The chairman selected a dozen people, evenly divided between yeas and nays, who offered impassioned pleas on behalf of their positions. They kept their arguments brief, thank God, except for one longwinded naysayer whom Jennings had to gavel into silence.
Once the oratory was over, the chairman expressed his gratitude to the two groups and then addressed his fellow councilmembers. “Anyone got something to say before we vote?”
“I do. I got something.”
For better or worse, Hal Sanderson, sitting to Jennings’ left, always had something. Hulking, flat-nosed, and florid, he obviously spent long hours in the sun, on a bar stool or both. When he wasn’t playing councilman, he ran Sanderson Realty, Commercial Brokerage, though tonight, in a western shirt, string tie and cowboy boots, he appeared ready to ride the range.
“Go ahead, Hal,” Jennings said.
“Well, okay then. I juss wanna em-phasize one thing. You cain’t stop progress and you cain’t halt growth. This city, as y’all know, started out small, but it’s grown mighty big in juss ten years and there ain’t no reason it won’t keep on agrowin’, ’specially if them Mustangs keep asellin’ and Ford keeps ahirin’, which they will ’cause them fine machines—”
“Hal, please keep it short,” the chairman said. “We got ourselves a vote to take here and I’m sure these folks—”
“I’ll take alla time I need,” Sanderson shot back. “This is a ’portant issue, mebbe the most im-por-tant we’ll face all year, as you kin tell from how many folks showed up tonight even though they got other things to do, I’m sure. This is the city’s future we’re talkin’ ’bout here, and we got us a choice to make. Either we stay small potatoes in a meat-eatin’ world, or we join the banquet.” Faced with a sea of knitted brows, Sanderson hastened to clarify. “What I’m sayin’ is, either we pre-pare for progress, or we fall on our asses when it gets here.”
The room fell into another awkward silence, which Jennings relieved with, “Thanks, Hal, for those, uh, thoughts. Anyone else?”
“Yes, I’d like to say something.”
All eyes turned toward Councilman Raymond Higgins, sitting to Jennings’ right. A short, bespectacled English teacher with thinning hair and a slight lisp, he wore a brown tweed jacket, naturally, and a bright yellow bow tie.
“There’s no law saying we have to grow,” he observed. “And I, along with many others here tonight, think we shouldn’t. Like them, my wife Karen and I moved to Dearborn Heights because it was a small, civilized town. But a monstrous shopping center would spoil, if not destroy, that atmosphere, while offering items available only a short distance away. Those who wish to live in a large city, such as Dearborn or Detroit, are free to do so. But as long as they remain here they should respect those of us who appreciate Dearborn Heights the way it is, peaceful and quiet. And that’s all I have to say.”
Chairman Jennings seemed relieved. “Well, okay then—”
“I beg your pardon.” Higgins again. “There’s something else I wish to point out. Among those promoting this … this … monstrosity, are people who stand to benefit financially from its development, and from the unbridled growth that undoubtedly will follow. For example, real estate brokers.”
Sanderson turned to his right. “What’re you tryin’ to imply there, fella?”
Higgins kept his eyes on the audience. “I’m not trying to imply anything. I believe I’ve made myself perfectly
clear.”
“Not to me you haven’t. Say it. I wanna hear you say what you mean.”
“Surely you’re not that obtuse, Hal. I—”
“Besides attackin’ my char’cter you’re callin’ me names? Why I—”
“Gentlemen, gentlemen, please.” Jennings offered a smile of dubious sincerity. “Obviously temperatures are running a little high on this subject. But that’s good, that’s good. Lively debate is what democracy is all about. The thing is, it’s time to take a vote so these folks can go home and get a good night’s rest.” The smile widened but remained unconvincing.
In less time than it took for a seventh-inning stretch, the council approved the shopping center by a voice vote of three to two. A mixture of catcalls and applause greeted the decision, at which point Jennings thanked the citizenry for attending and adjourned the meeting.
As the crowd and council filed out, I followed Raymond Higgins, who appeared to be dogging Hal Sanderson. When the big man reached the exit to the building, Higgins, almost on tiptoes, tapped him on the shoulder.
“Hey.”
Sanderson spun around. “Yeah?”
“You happy now?” Higgins’ tone implied that he, for one, wasn’t.
“Yeah, I’m happy now, and I know that makes you happy.” Sanderson smiled happily.
“That doesn’t make me happy at all, you Philistine. In fact, I’m furious.”
“Well, ain’t that too damned bad. Now why don’t y’all go home and play with your teddy bear, or whatever you queers play with in your spare time.”
“What did you call me?”
“You heard me.”
“Take it back.”
“If the shoe fits …”
“Take it back.”
“Why should I? I heard it direct from your wife, and she oughta know, right?”
In response, Higgins jumped a foot or so off the ground and punched Sanderson in the nose. Or rather grazed it. Barely.
Nathan in Spite of Himself Page 26
