Nathan in Spite of Himself

by Bernie Silver

  The real estate mogul’s response was a nasty grin, followed by, “You happy now, sonny? What say y’all run along afore I git angry.”

  He encouraged Higgins’s departure by shoving him backward into several onlookers, including me. I straightened the pugilist up and held on to him, making sure he could stand unassisted before letting him go. With Sanderson already out the door, Higgins shrugged me off and exited too.

  Once outside, the two councilmen ignored each other, no doubt disappointing those who’d trailed after them.

  As for me, I took a bow for guessing right. Tonight’s meeting had proved anything but dull.

  Chapter 54

  Although the Gazette’s reporters doubled as editors, Phil Doppler served as final judge and jury on almost all stories. So in late afternoon on the day following the contentious city council meeting, I handed him a piece on the session itself and a sidebar on the ensuing fisticuffs.

  At the ME’s invitation, I sat across from him while he read the two stories. Shortly into the second one his face began twitching and I grew concerned—for the story, not him. His punem returned to normal, meaning vapid, after he set the copy down.

  “This really happened?”

  No, I made it up.

  “Yes, it really happened.”

  “Because if you’re distorting anything, or exaggerating even a little bit, we’ll end up in a pile of you-know-what.”

  I knew what, all right, but managed to answer calmly. “No, I’m not distorting anything and I’m not exaggerating. That’s what happened. Really.”

  Doppler shook his head, as if still unable to believe what he’d read. I couldn’t blame him for that, since I barely believed what I’d seen with my own eyes.

  “Okay then.” He set the two stories atop a pile on his otherwise immaculate desk. “I’ll give the sidebar a page-one overline. That should sell some extra copies.”

  I didn’t give a fig about selling extra copies, though more newsstand sales might attract more advertising, which might generate more profits, which might lead to a bigger paycheck. So I wasn’t exactly opposed to the idea either. But the prospect of a front-page reference to one of my stories pleased me more than the possibility of additional income.

  Okay, maybe not more than, but I did leave Doppler’s office on a high without benefit of alcohol.

  Really.

  #

  Rachel propped the folded Gazette against the breadbasket resting mid-table and read, leaving her Cobb salad untouched. We were having lunch at Giselle’s, a Friday afternoon routine ostensibly meant to celebrate another issue hitting the stands, but for me these get-togethers were about being with Rachel, whose company I enjoyed more than any other woman’s, except of course Amanda Fontaine’s and maybe Jane Bartolo’s.

  Call it a three-way tie.

  One of the many things I enjoyed about Rachel was her uninhibited enthusiasm. While I usually held my emotions in check, she let hers fly at the slightest provocation. Take right now. Her eyes widened as she began the sidebar and were bulging by the time she finished. At which point she said, “Holy crap, are you kidding me?”

  I assured her I wasn’t.

  “I covered the Heights before the new section began,” she reminisced, “so I know how worked up they can get over there. But they never came close to this.”

  “You mean to city officials punching and shoving each other in public?”

  Rachel shook her head, causing her tresses to sway dreamily. “No, they never did that. But … well … they did get a little crazy.”

  She failed to elaborate so I prodded. “What do you mean, ‘a little crazy?’”

  Rachel chewed on this, as well as on a bite of salad, while I contemplated my tuna melt.

  Finally she put down her fork. “As you know, most Heights officials are Democrats, which is why I hesitate to criticize them or say anything that might make them look bad. That’s the Republicans’ job, and God knows they love their work.”

  She sipped her tea, obviously still stalling.

  I nudged again. “C’mon, Rachel, I couldn’t care less about politics. I just report on it while holding my nose. And no one’s recording this conversation.”

  More silence, after which she gave in. “Well, okay. The thing is, they threw a lot of parties, and by that I mean a lot. They used any excuse for one, including losing an election, for heaven’s sake. At the only two bashes I attended, they drank gallons of booze and got way beyond pickled, which soured me on going to any more … you know how I feel about drunks. How’s your drinking, by the way?”

  Shit.

  She hadn’t forgotten.

  Caught off guard, I shrugged and rushed ahead before she probed further. “Okay, they threw a lot of parties and got very drunk. What other, um, crazy things did they do?”

  Now her cheeks reddened, a sure sign the answer was sex-related (I found Rachel’s shyness on the subject very sexy).

  “Well,” she said, “they … I mean … they slept around a lot, married people included.” Her face flushed again. “I don’t know about such things firsthand, of course, but I’ve got my sources.”

  Rachel picked up her fork and poked at her salad.

  I let a moment pass before asking, “Anything else?”

  She sipped her tea, then said, “Some strange things happened, and when I say strange I mean strange. One incident in particular you won’t believe.”

  “Yes I will.”

  “No you won’t.”

  “Yes, I promise, I will.”

  “No. You think you will, but you won’t. Anyway, at least you’ve been warned.”

  With that she recited a story I tried to believe, since I’d promised, but it was a struggle. The tale involved another councilmember, Antonio Mancuso, whose marriage to Rosalie Mancuso was extremely volatile, meaning it generated a lot of screaming and shouting. So incendiary was the union that the lovebirds’ neighbors often thought the two were trying to kill each other. So they’d call the cops, who always arrived before either of them succeeded. Then late one night Antonio Mancuso wound up in the hospital with three stab wounds to the chest. He refused to name his assailant, but friends and family members suspected that Rosalie Mancuso had gone from yelling at her husband to stabbing him.

  “Jesus,” was all I could say.

  Rachel waved away my response. “Wait, you haven’t heard the weirdest part yet.”

  The following week Antonio Mancuso called a midday press conference to quash all the rumors flying around. But, much to the reporters’ puzzlement, he asked them to gather in his Dearborn Heights home instead of at city hall or even at his Ford dealership.

  Rachel barely suppressed a laugh. “Guess where he held the conference?”

  Eager to hear the answer, I gave up right away.

  “He asked us to gather in his kitchen.”

  “His kitchen,” I repeated.

  “His kitchen. Wanna know why?”

  Of course I did, and said so.

  Mancuso explained to reporters that on the night in question he and his wife had gone to one of those beloved parties. Upon returning, she went to bed and he to the kitchen for a late-night snack. While making a prosciutto-and-mozzarella sandwich, he dropped the kitchen knife. And fell on it.

  I recalled the number of stab wounds. “Three times?”

  “Three. He claimed the floor was slippery because the maid had waxed it that day.”

  “And the knife stood on end, three times, in all that wax.”

  Rachel shrugged, calling attention, unintentionally I’m sure, to the modest amount of cleavage visible in the V of her blouse. “What I told you is what he told us. I still giggle just thinking about it.” She supported this claim by giggling.

  I took a bite of sandwich while Rachel bit into a tomato and seemed to relish the flavor. Of a tomato, mind you. Was there anything this woman didn’t enjoy? Sex maybe. No, I’ll bet she relished that most of all, despite her diffidence on the subject. She was a
passionate woman, so why wouldn’t she be impassioned in bed? I envied her jockstrap husband, the beneficiary of all that zeal. Hell, I envied anyone who benefited from sex, passionate or otherwise.

  Admittedly, though, I was insane when it came to Rachel Solomon. And I mean insane. For example, I’d convinced myself I had a chance with her because she’d retained her maiden name. I conveniently interpreted this to mean she’d wed The Jockstrap reluctantly, so their marriage had been shaky from the start and would inevitably end in divorce. I had no real evidence for this theory, but I wanted it to be true so my mind, a perverse thing at best, insisted it was.

  “Calling Nate Rubin, calling Nate Rubin. Please report to Earth.”

  I emerged from my trance to find Rachel grinning like a Cheshire and snapping her fingers.

  “Where’d you go?” she asked.

  “Nowhere.”

  “Oh c’mon, one minute you were here and the next you were gone. You must’ve been somewhere, probably thinking about something.”

  “Trust me, you don’t want to know where I went or what I was thinking.”

  She gave me one of those soulful looks that usually reduced me to putty but this time I refused to budge. Finally she gave up.

  “We’d better head back,” she said. “I’ve got some loose ends to tie up before the weekend.”

  Next we went through our post-prandial routine. I offered to pay for her lunch and she insisted we go Dutch, because, she said, she’d feel funny if a man other than her husband picked up the tab. Now here’s another example of my lunacy. I construed this to mean she had feelings for me, felt guilty about them and coped by paying for her own lunch.

  Clearly my madness knew no bounds.

  Chapter 55

  Shortly after meeting the slimmer, more benign Ellen Drury I thought of asking her out. Now, two months later, I still hadn’t popped the question. Why? Because, as usual, I’d let a woman’s looks intimidate me. As with most lookers, I’d asked myself: why would she go out with me when she could have any man she wanted? That question alone kept me immobile, but with Ellen I posed an additional stickler: why would I go out with her, seeing as she was a religious fanatic?

  I hadn’t witnessed the woman’s piety firsthand, at least not since she revealed that Christ was her savior. But I’d caught glimpses of it in the silver cross dangling from her neck and in the mournful painting of a crucified Jesus on the wall opposite her desk. And of course Rachel Solomon often kvetched about something or other Ellen had said regarding God or religion. She was never specific about the offense, leaving the details to my imagination, which of course conjured up the worst.

  And for the record, I had nothing against Christianity, or at least no more against it than any other religion, including the one in which I was raised. A Star of David pendant or a Moses on the Mount painting would have bothered me too. In fact, it was in a Jewish synagogue and my Semitic home that I first became disenchanted with religion. My earliest instruction in the ways of God came at the B’Nai Something-or-Other shul in the old neighborhood, back when Mom and Dad attended Sabbath services and forced me to go with them. Every Saturday the rabbi warned that God would punish me if I disobeyed Him, while back home Dad promised me every day that God would punish me if I disobeyed him. The unspecified nature of these punishments made them all the more frightening and placed me in a constant state of fear. Finally, out of sheer dread-induced fatigue, I said to hell with God. Eventually, though, my quarrel with the Deity and religion became less visceral and more intellectual, meaning I doubted God even existed.

  All this added up to Ellen and I being light-years apart on an issue over which wars had been fought and friendships rent asunder. So dating her might be a problem. I was still trying to work all this out in my head when Rachel brought my dithering to a halt.

  One Wednesday afternoon she marched into my office, plopped herself down and said, “So what’re you waiting for?”

  I answered with a question of my own. “Huh?”

  “Why don’t you ask her out, for God’s sake?”

  “Could you be more specific? Ask who out?”

  She gave me a withering look. “Who? I’ll tell you who. Who is the woman who’s been waiting for you to make a move for months now and refuses to give up even though I told her you’re very slow on the uptake. That’s who.”

  Well that explained everything.

  Not really. But this being deadline day a late-night siege loomed ahead, so I had no time to play guessing games with Rachel even though on any other day I’d play whatever she wanted for as long as she wanted.

  “Look,” I said, “just tell me instead of making me guess.”

  “Don’t you get huffy with me, mister. Both of us are upset with you.” She gave me another look, this one so penetrating I had to avert my eyes. “Ellen Drury, that’s who wants to go out with you. You ever hear of her? She’s the woman a couple doors down who gets hit on all the time, mainly by morons, but who for some reason thinks you’re different.”

  Ellen wants to go out with me? She thinks I’m different?

  “But she doesn’t even know me,” I said. “We exchange greetings in the hallway occasionally, maybe at the water cooler, and that’s it. Why would she want to go out with me? Why does she think I’m different?”

  “All I know is that for some reason she’s got it in her head that you’re a good person. And talented.”

  “But why? She—”

  “How do I know where she gets her illusions? She reads your stories. She remembers you from the Post. She’s got a vivid imagination. What difference does it make? I tell you an attractive woman wants to go on a date with you and you’d rather have a debate.” Rachel got to her feet. “I think I’ll tell her you’re just another moron.”

  “No!” The exclamation surprised even me. “All right, I’ll ask her out.”

  “My hero.” Rachel even smiled sarcastically. Then flounced out.

  Had she always been this way, or was The Jockstrap finally getting to her?

  I brushed aside these questions in favor of taking action, because, knowing me, if I didn’t act now I never would. Yes, I still had misgivings about Ellen, but they didn’t seem as compelling now that I knew she wanted me to ask her out. So I walked briskly over to her office and barged in, barely catching the door before it slammed into the wall. She stood at the open window behind her desk looking out at the city. I remained just inside the doorway enjoying the soft summer breeze, the symphonic sounds of traffic and the sight of Ellen Drury in a clingy mint dress. Was I procrastinating again? Probably.

  I finally got down to business by clearing my throat.

  Ellen turned and said, “Nate!” as if she’d been expecting me and now here I was, to her everlasting joy.

  I managed a hi.

  Her lips curved in a smile. “The answer is yes.”

  “What? I …”

  “You’re here to ask me out, right?”

  What the hell?

  “Well, I accept your invitation.” Ellen lowered the window and leaned back against it. “When, what time, where we going?”

  “But how did … I mean, how could …”

  She smiled again, this time mischievously. “I have my sources.”

  No doubt. But in this case, who? After a second’s thought I placed my bet on Rachel Solomon, who probably called after returning to her office. If Rachel were anyone else, I’d call her a yenta.

  I approached Ellen while glancing at the photo of Senator Goldwater hanging on the wall to the right of her desk. The former presidential candidate looked glum, perhaps still suffering from last year’s drubbing. Or maybe he was tired of being called a lunatic.

  I turned from thoughts of politics back to Ellen. “Where would you like to go? I mean, what would you like to do?”

  “You decide.”

  “Okay, yeah, sure. Can I have your, um …”

  She moved behind her desk. “If you don’t mind my saying so, Nate, you ne
ed to ask for what you want. Now, what is it you want?”

  I wanted what most men wanted from a supremely attractive woman, and to hell with her religiosity. But I doubted Ellen would go for that answer so I went with, “Your number?”

  “You sure?”

  I nodded. Twice, to show her how sure I was.

  “See, that wasn’t so hard.” She scribbled on a scratch pad, tore off the sheet and handed it to me along with a grin.

  I couldn’t help but wonder, again, how this could be the same woman I’d known at the Post. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe Ellen Drury had joined a coven and this was her doppelgänger. Or maybe this was the real Ellen Drury and she hadn’t changed at all, but was setting me up for a fall.

  Or maybe I should just shut up.

  Chapter 56

  I awoke the next day after three hours’ sleep and for a moment felt good about the prospect of dating Ellen Drury. Hell, I felt good about the prospect of a date, considering how much time had elapsed since my last one (don’t ask). But during my morning caffeine fix the old doubts returned, along with some new ones. For instance, not only did Ellen’s piety run contrary to my own religious temperament, it surely reduced, if not doomed, my chances of getting her into bed, since devoutly religious women were known to resist premarital sex, maybe even premarital necking or petting. So why date a pseudo-Jewish woman? Why suffer all that anxiety without a payoff?

  Some may call this attitude shallow or callow or whatever, but what did they know about being a near-virgin at age twenty-four? And if they didn’t know how that felt, how incredibly humiliating it was, they couldn’t understand why getting laid ranked so high on my list of priorities. Maybe number one.

  Anyway, my feelings toward Ellen remained mixed. And they got even more muddled on my way to work, when I asked myself the eternal question: what if I was full of shit? I knew nothing about Ellen except that she’d found God, lost weight and learned to smile. I was also aware she wore her religion on her sleeve, but that was during the day. What if she took it off, along with her clothes, at night? She was a shikseh, after all. Hell, before learning that pious Ann McCory was engaged, I’d assumed she was available for a romp. Why didn’t I make the same assumption about devout Ellen Drury?