When the waiter bent over to serve soup to the next table, his aproned ass brushed the top of Melinda Fellows’ salade de haricots vert; that was how dense and cramped it was in the little greasy spoon, where the special of the day – and night - was raw horse with an egg on top. This was something Melinda would not allow her dining companion to order under any circumstances, whether it happened to be “his” night, “her” night or whatever. So what did Jimmy Gigante do but get himself some pied au porc, an animal foot for Christ’s sake, and she almost hurled when he inhaled it, even vacuuming up little bits from the toe part. “My fetish,” he said, in a Bela Lugosi voice. But Melinda soldiered on, picking her way through all three courses and avoiding contact with the disastrous unisex toilette. The evening bloated interminably when Jimmy fell into conversation with a ruddy French lawyer, who leaned so far onto their table Melinda could practically see his garlic breath disintegrating her gallette and darkening Jimmy’s tiramisu. (Made with a raw egg, by the way, so he still managed to ingest at least part of the cheval-avec-oeuf special of the day.)
The day college ended, Melinda had given up her native Utah to escape its patriarchies and harems – a move which put her light years from the clean, open spaces where she’d grown up. But she still liked those clean, open spaces; and just squeezing their way through the smoke and grime and sweat-odor of chez sinkhole pushed her need to pee into the torture category. At the doorway she muttered apologies to the baggy-eyed host – why should she be apologizing? - in Franglais; and forced the two of them to march back to the hotel through the cold Paris rain, fighting the flood in her bladder every step of the way. Effusive Jimmy would have had the waiter call a taxi but she wouldn’t hear of it. Not with that streamer of well-populated flypaper that had dangled over their every bite. However excruciating, the rain-walk was not an option but an essential sanitizing, a welcome torrent of disinfectant.
“Now that was luxury,” Jimmy proclaimed, high-fiving the speechless doorman as they crossed the threshold of the regal George V. She stared daggers at him and he countered, “I know just what you’re thinking. You like me better on crutches.”
“Well, if you were on crutches we couldn’t have dined in that cesspool tonight. We couldn’t have fit.”
“Right, yes, okay. You’re a three-star Michelin lady, all the way. Especially when the client is paying. But tonight – that was for old Jimmy. What a bon voyage. And I thank you for it. Can I borrow a fingernail to get some pigfoot out of my teeth? Mine are bitten to the bone.”
“That’s what you get for living with your girlfriend’s mother.”
They were in the elevator, soaring up to their separate rooms. In four months the closest they’d ever got to sleeping with each other was in the big reclining first-class chairs on long flights; when they actually did fall asleep together, sometimes to wake up in interesting positions, their two separate blankets conjoined over a mutually-made pocket of sultry air. What to do but ahem and finish composing the questionnaire on his or her laptop. They were professional colleagues, together for less than half a year, a team in a brand research boutique, and their assignment this time around was as plum as any they’d ever had. A deep-pocketed newcomer to the premium hotel world, a future rival to Ritz and Four Seasons and Mandarin and Peninsula – had asked them to round up well-heeled travelers in four cities: London, Tokyo, Frankfurt and Paris, in just that order, and probe what the word luxury really meant to them.
“Fuck what they tell us,” said Jimmy. “Luxury to me is anyone’s soul food. Tripe, kishka, chitlings, Stilton. If it stinks I’ll eat it.”
That’s when she made the promise, as the official project manager. On their last night in Paris they could go to the funkiest table he could find. No clients, no rich interviewees, no Alain Ducasse and no Michel Rostang. Tomorrow they were out of here on Air France, one seat back from the pilot, and they already knew they had gold for the big dog and pony show the client was expecting in New York, a mile high in the Sony Building. That Sony, they had a hand in everything, why not the hotel business? “Jeez Louise,” Jimmy had said the very first moment they got the job, “aren’t their TV sets already in every room?”
And that was why Jimmy was becoming to Melinda what the Coke recipe has become to Coke. He could look at a billion snowflakes falling and pick out the one with the coolest pattern. His weakness was he couldn’t make it snow. That Melinda could do. Making numbers by the blizzard was her stock in trade. Without Melinda, Jimmy was an answer wandering the world in search of a question.
“It’s simple,” he had said, on more than one occasion – and he said it again as they stalked the long carpeted corridor en route to their rooms. “You hide in numbers. I hide in food. But we’re together because we both hide.”
As he said this he poked her in the ribs.
“Don’t do that, Jimmy. I could pee right on the George V carpet.”
And as they reached the door of the room that came first – his – a funny thought popped into her head, dredged up by his numbers remark. Ages ago she had read a fat book on Stalin – because she didn’t just hide in numbers, she hid in books too - plowed her way like a steam-drill through eight hundred pages; yet all she remembered was that one quote, the one where Stalin says that the death of a single human being is a tragedy. But the death of a million human beings is a statistic.
Jimmy planted an aromatic good-night peck on her cheekbone, got the green light on his magnetic card and started to push through. But something – nothing esoteric, just her boiling bladder – made Melinda barge ahead of him, crying “I can’t freaking wait.”
“Hey, that’s my toilet seat.”
She slammed the bathroom door in his face, sat herself down and gushed.
“Make yourself at home,” he yelled from the outside. Melinda didn’t answer. She was too engrossed in the covers of the reading matter he had piled on the little rococo shelf just to her right. Real steamy material. Cookbooks, five of them.
She emerged from the bathroom to find him on the bench at the foot of the bed, untying his shoes. Instead of saying good night and leaving, she marched across the carpet and stood over him like a district attorney. “When do you not think about food, Jimmy?”
“When I’m having hot, wild sex with Stacy. So to answer you’re question, I’m always thinking about food.”
“Maybe she wants to get married, Jimmy. Ever think about that?”
Jimmy had moved to an easy chair and kicked back in that way that says you’re invited in, so stay awhile. Melinda stepped out of her shoes and sank into the big companion chair.
“You’re talking bigamy here, my friend. Stacy’s already married. To her mother. I’m just there to bring them things. You know…like the zookeeper who brings things to the crocodiles.”
Despite the dangerous territory he seemed to be entering, Jimmy looked supremely comfortable basking on the cushions. But without a further word, he abruptly rose and charged over to the mini bar. The way he threw open the door, the way he tore at it so hard the hinges rattled, made Melinda stop and wonder what was flying around in his head.
He came back toting Famous Amos cookies, a tin of George V madeleines, designer jelly beans, cashews, a half bottle of Beaujolais, two glasses and a corkscrew. When he had set everything out on the coffee table he found the chair too deep to let him nibble and sip with ease. So he abandoned the cushions and pulled over the hard-backed desk chair.
“You’re not really fat, Jimmy,” Melinda said. “You should be fat but your not.”
“Is the Michelin Man fat? Is the Pillsbury Doughboy fat?”
“Your not fat, Jimmy. Not that I’d think you’d even care.”
“I’m pudgy, is that what you’d say?”
“Pudgy is good in a man. A woman likes a man to have a little tummy. It makes her feel more svelte.”
Jimmy definitely did make her feel more svelte. Melinda’s best boyfriends had always had a little love around the handles. But this was history; increasingly becoming ancient history, not one of her favorite subjects.
“Here, have some of this.” He held out a big handful of assorted calories.
“Get that away from my lips.”
“One moment on your lips, a lifetime on your hips.” And he chugged half the jellybean jar. She had the sense for the thousandth time she was with a large, precocious child. Yet this time it was different, and not in a pleasant way at all. Sitting next to a raving Jimmy in a plane was one thing. Sitting next to him at midnight in his own room, five feet from his own bed was another. Watching him down the jellybeans like an animal made the little hairs on her arms prickle. She looked longingly at the door. And yet for some reason – cat-killing curiosity –Melinda kept on, kept on poking.
“Joy of Cooking in your bathroom, Jimmy?”
There were three little pieces of color left in the jellybean jar. He left the cookbook remark alone, totally, and continued foraging. He threw the three jellybeans a forlorn glance and tore open the Famous Amos bag.
“Did I ever tell you how I got my crutches? I want to tell you. But first, I want you to tell me something. You’re the numbers genius, so look at this jar.” He held it up to the light. “There are three jellybeans left. Even I can count that. So how many were there when the jar was full?”
She told him the question was ridiculous… it was a wild guess, even for a Nobel prizewinner in mathematics.
“When I asked you how many rich Brits had villas in Provence it took you maybe three minutes to give me a number. These are only jellybeans. They lived in a jar, now they’re living in me.”
“Jellybeans are not what I do, Jimmy. And stop guzzling that Beaujolais. It wasn’t meant to go with chocolate chip cookies.”
“If jellybeans aren’t what you do, then what do you do? You aren’t married. You live alone. Do you have a boyfriend? A girlfriend? An inflatable?”
“None of the above.”
“Then you must be horny as a toad.”
Melinda knew she could be killing a good thing, the goose that laid the golden egg, a work synergy she could ride all the way through six-figure land. Jimmy was a dream work partner; but horrible with his shoes off, blathering in his own hotel room, half-drunk and way overfed. She wanted an exit line. Yet the truth was she didn’t want an exit line – precisely because there was no boyfriend, no girlfriend, no pet even. And tomorrow they’d be out of here anyway. Strapped in seat belts and watched by people in uniform.
“If I’m horny as a toad,” she said, “it’s not caused by reading a recipe for apple crumble.”
Were he an over-pumped balloon – which surely he was at this point – and were she searching for a needle to pop the balloon, Melinda had indeed found it. Her comment stopped him and dropped him. He returned to the easy chair, threw himself in it and became stone silent.
Quite unlike Jimmy, Melinda was not one to blab every thought that flew into her head. For instance, she could have told him what she really did to relieve tension, horny and otherwise. It was to torture her bathtub, to clean it until it screamed. To scrub every inch of the porcelain so violently her whole apartment reeked of bleach and sweat. And were she a tell-all like Jimmy she could have added a startling truth – that she’d secretly elbow-greased tubs in some of the finest hotels in the world. Just to work out the furies so she could sleep.
But instead, she sat in the deep-freeze of mutual silence, a protracted spell of dueling icicles. Until she found herself all but begging him to tell her how he’d managed to get on crutches. Maybe this was just what he intended, his strategy – who knew? Jimmy had hobbled around the midtown office on them for weeks. First with a cast and then with a splint. Three days before they left the City on their junket he ventured upon a slow, crutchless trip to the coffee machine and found there was no pain. He acted so deliriously happy he mounted one of the crutches on his office wall, as if it were a snowshoe he had used to conquer the Arctic Circle.
“We Jersey people,” he began pontifically. “We have lawns and driveways. We don’t have weird, black water tanks and vegetable gardens on our roofs. So it was a frozen night and the driveway was like a skating rink. The two of them sent me out for Chinese food. Even the kid, her kid, sent me out for Chinese food. I skidded away and I skidded back. I was starving – big surprise. When I don’t cook in my house nobody cooks, and there’s no food. The hot and sour soup smelled so good; it defrosted my windshield. Being inside the car was like being inside one of those steaming pork buns; I was in Chinese heaven. Then I hugged my big takeout bag and disembarked. The bag with the food went one way and my feet went another. I remember it to this day; I had a split-second choice. Go with the food or go with my feet. I chose the food. When I belly-flopped on the ice the food was intact. I didn’t lose a spring roll. My left tibio-fibula, however, had two fractures.”
Melinda was getting the picture he was painting. The theme was Cinderella, the Guy. But what was he doing – telling her the whole truth, half the truth or just putting on a show? He was into his second bottle of mini bar Beaujolais. But while he was getting sauced, it was her head that was starting to spin. She might as well have been sitting in the George V talking to a Martian.
“So don’t tell me, Jimmy. While you lay there on the ice with the broken leg, they took the Chinese food and went inside and ate it. Right?”
“Well you said it. I didn’t. Just let the record show that Stacy takes inordinately good care of her mother. Now you want to see fat, that’s fat. And she’s not very well either, the old pelican-neck. She has more pills on the shelf than a WalMart pharmacy – not that it’s spoiled her appetite. You ought to see her wolf down my mocha cheesecake. In her rotten housecoat it’s not a pretty sight.”
“Really, I don’t think you’re the one to get on a soapbox about someone else’s appetite. Come on. So what does Stacy do, besides wash her mother’s bedsores and slap you around?”
“When they’re not going for chemo or hip replacement therapy, the two of them sit around designing this unbelievably trashy jewelry. They have a whole line of this tourmaline stuff. It’s worse than what you see on the shopping channel. Sometimes I think I should put arsenic in the mocha cheesecakes and just end the whole business. Or I could put in some parasite eggs. Tapeworm larvae. Wouldn’t that be a hoot. A fifteen foot tapeworm living inside Stacy’s mother. They say parasites make wonderful pets. They go where you go, eat what you eat…”
Suddenly Jimmy stopped short, like a cartoon character running on a tree limb that ends in thin air over a deep chasm. He had gone too far, and maybe he even knew it. Melinda was no longer curious and eager. She had found out more than she ever wanted to know. And she had entered a state of terminal, irreversible disgust.
“Hey, hey,” he said. “Don’t give up on me so fast. You think I’m a sicko but I like my life. To me it’s normal. I come from a large Italian family. Nine kids; I was the ninth. I’m used to this. I’m telling you, it’s made me tough. Tougher than you think. Tougher than they think.”
Melinda was on her feet, ready to sail out, change her flight and ask to never work with Jimmy again. But then the fax machine started up. Out of nowhere it began sounding its unearthly knell, clattering and moaning and shaking, like a Frankensteinian robot risen from a long sleep. So she sat down again, not unlike an automaton herself, somehow mesmerized by the spasms of the emerging fax paper. Seeing his audience come back from the exits, Jimmy began motor-mouthing yet another piece of confessional crap she didn’t want to hear.
“So there I am with my broken leg up on the ottoman, and Stacy’s on the couch. She’s been watching Access Hollywood for an hour. The clicker is right on the floor near her, so I say, ‘hey, Stace, can I have the clicker.’ And she says, ‘get it yourself.’ My leg is smashed in two places; even the Percoset won’t stop the pain, and she says, ‘what do you want to do, watch the Food Channel?’ Finally I reach for my crutches and she gives in. You want to know how she gives in? She kicks the clicker over to me. Doesn’t move a finger. Only her foot.”
So Jimmy was one sick human being, a loser of losers. Or else a con artist of con artists. Or both. But his live-in, Stacy - Melinda concluded she was one piece of work too. And this not even Jimmy could have been making up, because Melinda saw it herself. Saw him pull it right from the whining mouth of the fax machine. It was just as he took off on another rant – about the time he took Stacy to an Asian food mall in Canada and got food poisoning from chicken sashimi. “No lie. They have that there. Raw chicken. It’s such an Asian thing, they have this amazingly wide range of edibles. Well, there I was – vomiting, throwing my guts up; and you know what she did ? She sat there laughing at me. Every time I blew lunch in the sink she laughed her ass off.”
Melinda remembered reading some article in Psychology Today, in which seemingly cruel laughter in a crisis was described as not cruel at all, but a stressed-out person’s manifestation of helpless anxiety. She opened her mouth to mention it to him, but the words never got out. Jimmy had the fax paper in his hands, and his fingers seemed frozen to it. He sat down so heavily the paper he was holding could have been another substance entirely. A solid block of lead.
“Well, it’s happened,” he said, in a tone she had never heard from him before – it was so chilled and metallic. A bloodless voice, more like the robotic fax machine than the normally operatic Jimmy. “Stacy’s mother’s up and died.”
Limply, he handed her the fax. She read the sender name first. Stacy. The message had been typed on a keyboard, terse and to the point. To Melinda it seemed so impersonal it could have been a document from a city morgue.
The words Melinda’s lips annunciated were, “I’m sorry.” But what her brain wanted to proclaim was, Stacy’s telling you this by fax?
Jimmy made no reply to “I’m sorry,” but the silent question he answered exactly. “Stacy wasn’t talking to me when I left. I guess she’s still not talking to me.”
And then Jimmy stepped completely out of character. In his new bloodless voice he asked Melinda to leave his room.
Melinda took it crisply, even gratefully, without a word of protest. She stood up, pivoted, and marched off at double-speed. But as she approached the door she realized he hadn’t budged from his chair. She looked back, and he seemed so deeply immobile it gave her a de ja vu flash, very bittersweet, in which she thought, of course he can’t get up. He doesn’t have his crutches.
The Air France flight was eerie. Jimmy’s attempts at conversation didn’t even reach laconic. Mostly he sat silent as a tomb, disheveled and disconsolate. He sipped tea and refused wine. He even spurned the gallant male flight attendant when he descended on them with a waiter’s flourish and offered a plate of three cheeses.
But four days later, way up in the Sony Building – where it was reputed they had a secret dining room with the best sushi in New York – Melinda did her quantitative Power Point, then introduced Jimmy to the assembled hotel executives and their staffs. He walked smoothly to the podium, crisp and upbeat in a suit you might have seen on a younger Jacques Chirac, double-breasted to slim and dignify.
“Our search for the meaning of luxury,” he said, “convinced us there are as many meanings as there are flags on the United Nations building. To a German, luxury is something to hide from the world. No wonder they buy more insurance than any other people on earth. But to an Englishman, luxury is freely roaming the entire planet, because his heart still says he’s backed by an Empire on which the sun never sets. And for a Japanese, let me just tell you that one gentleman informed us that for him, the greatest luxury is standing on a beach, watching the ocean and forgetting he exists…”
Jimmy’s conclusion, received with frenetic applause, was that the only common thread in each nation’s perception was that a life of luxury is a life of priceless moments. “This is what they spend when they come to a great hotel,” he said, “and what they expect in return. It can’t be expressed in dollars. Call it the currency of moments. Something worth more than gold.”
Melinda had seen Jimmy receive standing ovations before, but this was the most thunderous of all. When the clapping and handshaking subsided and the room finally emptied, she took the plunge and inquired about the obvious, girding herself for the inevitable explosion of nauseating narcissism.
“How are things with Stacy?’
But all he said in reply was, “I don’t want to talk about home. I want to talk about Rome.”
The morning e-mail had announced a new project, and they were slated to fly Al Italia in two weeks. If Melinda was ever going to split with Jimmy it was now or never. She had the seniority, the momentum - there was no question she could get her way. So she gravely thought about it for several moments - and then she found herself blurting out, “No horsemeat and no raw eggs. No pigfoot either. Those are my conditions.”
“Let me think about that,” he said, glinting at her so voraciously she wondered if he might be a cannibal on top of his other foul traits. He even rubbed his stomach, making circles around the center button of the double-breasted suit. “Say, have you ever eaten calf’s brains, Italian style? The jelly, it’s a beautiful thing.”
A too-familiar grossed-out feeling swam over Melinda. She felt it head to toe. But then it vanished - and the aftermath wasn’t all that bad. It was though she had conquered seasickness and wanted to stay on the boat.
But when they were riding back in the cab, the old gut-spilling Jimmy reared its ugly head. And opened its mouth.
“You’d think with her mother gone she’d want to get closer to me. But no - listen to this. I make the two of them, Stacy and the kid, some real old-fashioned comfort food. Welsh Rarebit, ever hear of that? We ate in front of the TV, and a report came on about undernourished American children. Thousands of them, all over the country. Rich and poor. So I said what I thought. ‘Asshole mothers,’ I said. ‘It’s just not fair.’ It was the wrong choice of words, I know, but it didn’t justify what she did. She grabbed her plate and the kid’s and dumped them in the garbage. ‘Asshole mothers?’ she said. ‘Well, you like to cook, Jimmy. Why don’t you go all over the country and cook them breakfast?’ The kid was screaming. She threw him in his room and let him scream.”
It was then Melinda understood, or believed she understood, that she was indeed alone in life, a solo act, but it was Jimmy who was truly lonely – even though he had a home and a family. And it was probably better to have her predicament than his. For both of them, the answer, as usual, was no answer at all. Just to keep working, keep flying all over the world. They could be good at that – no, a lot better than good. And if they were sitting very close in the cab – which they were – well, there was a whole world of bathtubs to scour and scrub.