Til the Real Thing Comes Along (33 page)

“Never mind,” R.J. had said. “I don’t want the number anymore.” Ten minutes later she sat on the bus, on the way to her interview.

“Daddy,” she said now, holding his lifeless hand. “I love you so much.” Surely she had overstayed her five-minute visit. She
wanted to put her head down on his chest and beg him to stay alive, and to tell him she would somehow find a way to make up
for all the disappointments he’d had, but instead she said, “I’ll be back,” and walked to the waiting room, where someone
had covered the now sound-asleep Rifke with a yellow blanket and had left another for R.J. She took the blanket, curled up
on another plastic sofa across the room, and fell asleep.

She was awakened by a powerful breeze of Old Spice that wafted into the waiting room, followed by Uncle Shulke, looking tan
and harassed at having to return early from “My Yama.” Rifke let out a wail and fell into his arms.

“Don’t let him die,” she cried. But this was not a cry to
God. This was a cry to someone who, if not quite as powerful, was certainly a lot more accessible and far more reliable. Someone
who could not only fix a parking ticket for anyone in the family, but someone who personally knew a pharmacist who would give
him paregoric without a prescription when Aunt Malke was sick; someone whose name alone would provide discounts in most of
Squirrel Hill’s stores.

“No one’s dying so fast,” Shulke assured her with as much confidence as if he really had the final say, and Rifke sighed a
comforted sigh, as if to prove that she believed he did.

Now that Shulke was here to take over, R.J. excused herself and walked into the little bathroom next to the waiting room.
She turned on the water and waited for it to get warm, splashed her face, and dried it with a scratchy paper towel from the
metal holder on the wall. Then she rinsed out her mouth and ran a comb through her long straight black hair and pinched her
cheeks to put some color in her olive skin. She looked into her eyes in the mirror, and shook her head sadly. I’m too young
to have a father die, she thought. And then nodded at her reflection in sad agreement.

When she turned off the water she could hear her mother’s screams from the waiting room. And when she opened the door from
the bathroom she could see her mother tearing at the lapels of Shulke’s coat as the screams ripped at her throat, then beating
at his chest, then pulling again at him, railing against the news she’d just received from the poor young doctor who stood
nervously by.

“Dead, dead, dead,” her mother screamed, pounding harder and harder on Shulke’s chest. And Uncle Shulke, who had once been
beaten nearly to death by the men with bayonets who broke into his family’s home in Russia, didn’t move, just stood stoically
and let his sister react to her loss. Unlike the doctor, who looked as if he was just an intern or a resident, and was flushed
and nervous and clearly unequipped to handle the display of raw emotion he was seeing. “I’m sorry,” R.J. heard the young man
repeat over and over softly. “Gee, I mean I’m sorry.”

R.J. wasn’t crying. Couldn’t cry. It was as if her mother’s screams, which finally began to decrease in volume as her voice
gave out, were pained enough for both of them.

Her father, dead.

The door to the waiting room opened and a nurse came in carrying a pill in a little cup which she gave to Rifke with another
cup of water. The pill must have been a tranquilizer because Rifke took it and after a few minutes she was very quiet. Standing,
still hanging on to her brother. Her mouth was limp, her eyelids bloated into puffy red awnings that half concealed her bloodshot
dark-brown eyes. Then she turned to R.J.

“He loved you,” she said.

“I know, Ma,” R.J. said, and when she walked to her mother and held her, she could still smell Shulke’s Old Spice on her.

“Let’s go home,” Shulke said, and moved the two distraught women toward the door.

“I’m sorry”—R.J. thought she heard the young doctor say it again as they walked into the corridor to collect her father’s
belongings and go home.

Rifke had forgotten to close the apartment door, and it was still open when Shulke pulled up outside the store. Even from
outside they could hear the telephone ringing, but R.J. didn’t rush to answer it. Instead, she helped her mother out of Shulke’s
Cadillac, put an arm around her, and walked her slowly upstairs. The phone rang again and again while she walked with her
into the familiar front bedroom and helped her off with her shoes, and to lie down, and covered her with the afghan Bubbe
had crocheted for the double bed where Rifke had slept for more than thirty-five years with her beloved Louie. The tranquilizer
she had swallowed at the hospital was taking over completely now, and Rifke was asleep before R.J. got to the bedroom door
and closed it behind her.

“Hello?” she said into the phone. R.J. wanted just to shout into the receiver to whoever it was: “How can you call here today?
My father is dead.”

“Is this Lois Rabinowitz?” a man’s voice asked. “Because if you
are,
today is your lucky day.”

“Who is this?” R.J. said.

“If Lois is there, it’s time to tell her that today, she’s a lucky winner.”

This was a joke. Had to be some kind of a joke. Some crackpot calling.

“There is nobody here by the name of Lois,” R.J. said
carefully, and already had the phone away from her ear and about to hang up in the cradle, when she heard the man on the phone
shout, “Maybe it’s Louis. That’s it. Louie. Louis. That’s it. Sony.”

R.J. put the phone back to her ear.

“It doesn’t say Lois at all. It says Louis. Is he there? Is he?”

“He’s dead,” R.J. yelled into the phone, not believing it was true and not believing that now, finally, she was crying, and
it was to some stranger on the telephone.

“No,” the voice said. “Dead? Hey, I’m sorry. I’m Yossie Hoberman over at HoBros department store and he just won our contest,
and if it’ll make you feel better, lady—and I mean this with all due respect—he just won fifteen hundred dollars.”

R.J. didn’t say anything, just cried a quiet little cry.

“Geez, geez, I’m really sorry.” The man on the phone said in a very quiet voice. “I mean, this is really a sad set of circumstances
here. Would you mind very much if I asked you how he died?”

“A heart attack,” R.J. sniffed.

“Izzat right? Boy, I never heard of that before. You’re tellin’ me your kid had a heart attack?”

“He wasn’t a kid. He was my father. He was sixty-four years old.”

“No. What? Oh, wait a second. Oh boy, this is funny. I mean the Louis Rabinowitz I’m lookin’ for is a kid. I mean… I think
he’s a kid. Oh, shit, Tubby,” R.J. heard him call out. “Didn’t it say in the friggin’ rules that the people who colored the
friggin’ Easter Bunnies had to be kids? Lemme see the rules. They’re sittin’ right on your desk, you fat shmuck. Oh, Christ.
Some good publicity in the neighborhood. Not only is the guy who won the contest sixty-four… but he also happens to be dead.
Hey,” the man said to R.J. “Urn, I got to hang up and call you back.”

R.J. was still sitting by the phone when, having parked the car, Uncle Shulke came upstairs to make sure that Rifke was all
right and to tell R.J. he was going over to Burton Hirsch’s Funeral Home to make the arrangements for Louie.

“Uncle Shulke, wait,” R.J. said, and then she told him every word of the phone call from Mr. Hoberman.

“Yossie Hoberman, that
shmmdrkk,”
Uncle Shulke said. Then, smiling a jaunty little smile, he picked up the phone
and dialed. R.J. went to her room, but she heard him on the phone for a very long time. Talking quietly but firmly.

By the next morning, R.J. had enough money to pay for her tuition, and two weeks later she was accepted to the drama department
at Carnegie Tech.

R.J.

1981

B
eth Berger had hair that was so blue-black that behind her back some people referred to her as Elvis. And she dressed like
a man. Not just tailored blazers and pleated pants and shirts with cuff links. She also wore ties every day. And to dressy
parties she wore a tuxedo. More than anything she wanted to be thought of as eccentric, to be thought of as unique, just to
be thought of, because for years she had lived in the shadow of her handsome film director husband, Larry Wayne. Finally,
after job after low-level job at the studios and networks, she had made her way to her current position at Meteor Productions.
And now, at least in her mind, she had a little bit of power.

R.J. sat in the chair across from Beth Berger’s desk, to which Beth Berger’s secretary had shown her ten minutes earlier.
Beth Berger sat behind the desk. Her chair was tipped against the wall, and her feet, dad in black boots, were propped on
the desk at a diagonal from her body. Her tight hand was holding the telephone and her left hand was fiddling with the knot
in her tie. R.J. had been waiting for ten minutes and Beth Berger hadn’t looked at her once.

“Yes, me too,” Beth Berger said into the phone, and there was something about the way she said it that made R.J. certain that
the person on the other end of the phone was saying something sexy to her. R.J. looked down at the blank note pad on her lap,
took a pencil she’d been using to doodle and wrote what she was thinking:
HBLP GET ME OUT OF HERE
Oh, God, if she didn’t need this job so badly she would have stood indignantly and marched out of there at least seven minutes
ago.

“I do too,” Beth Berger whispered into the mouthpiece of the phone, “I swear I do, but someone’s in my office so I have to…
Yes, me too.” She hung up the phone and finally turned her eyes in R.J.’s direction, but R.J. could tell that she wasn’t really
seeing her.

“I’m R.J. Misner,” R.J. said, as if to an amnesiac.

“I know who you are,” Beth Berger said, and then just sat there with the glow of the phone call still in her eyes.

’I’m here to discuss the pilot about the nurses,” R.J. tried.

“Nurses,” Beth Berger said, jogging her mind back into place. “Oh, that’s such a great idea, if I have to say so myself. It
was my idea, and Jake loves it.”

Jake must mean Jake Howard. Her boss. “A bunch of nurses live together in an apartment. One is a psychiatric nurse, one is
a surgical nurse, and one is whatever else kind of nurse there is. And we get to know them at the hospital and at home. It’s
funny. Don’t you think?”

Before R.J. could say that there wasn’t even enough of an idea even to call it an idea yet, let alone to know if it was funny,
the buzzer buzzed and Beth Berger swung her feet down from the desk and grabbed the phone nervously.

“Who is it?” she said to the person who had buzzed her. Then she turned to R.J. “I have to take this call,” she said and pushed
a button on the phone. “Hi, babe,” she said into the mouthpiece. She picked up a pen and tapped it on the desk repeatedly
as she spoke. “I’ve got a huge meeting with Jake at the network tonight—you should probably not wait for me. Just have a bite
with the kids and I’ll get there when I get there. Okay? Yeah. Love you. Bye.” She hung up the phone, took a deep breath,
and instead of looking at R.J., she put her face down on her desk, wrapped her arms around the back of her head as if she
were protecting herself from something about to fall on her, and after a minute she said, “Oh God, oh God, oh God.” Then she
looked up at R.J. and sighed.

“I am so in love,” she said. “So madly in love I can’t see straight, can’t think, can’t work, don’t care about anyone or anything
but this man. It’s just unbelievable.”

“Isn’t that nice?” R.J. said, hoping she could change
the subject back to the nurses as soon as possible. She wanted to talk about the project. Comment intelligently. Get the job.
Start working and make a few dollars. She did not want to hear this woman’s personal story.

“He is so sexy and beautiful I can’t stand it,” Beth Berger said, wriggling girlishly in her big leather chair.

It was true. Beth’s husband, Larry Wayne, was a very attractive man, R.J. thought. She had seen his picture in the
L.A. Times
just a few weeks before.

“But, oh, God. It’s so insane. I don’t know how much longer I can go on lying to my husband.”

Oy vey, R.J.
thought No. She’d now known this woman less than five minutes and suddenly she was becoming her confidante. Spare me, she
thought. Beth Berger could obviously tell what R.J. was thinking because she raised a hand as if asking R.J. to indulge her
and said, “Please. It’s just that in my twelve years of marriage to Larry, and you’re not going to believe this, I’ve never
had an orgasm.”

The nurses, R.J. thought. I want to talk about the nurses. One is psychiatric. One is surgical, and one is…

“But this man—and mind you, he’s very ordinary looking, not gorgeous like Larry—but he makes me so crazy that I can’t stop
screaming and begging for more.”

“Uh, Beth,” R.J. said, “I think that’s great, but.. ,”

“He’s staying at an apartment in North Hollywood. A little tiny nothing apartment, and I tell my husband I have network meetings,
and I go to North Hollywood every night and we get into bed the minute I walk in and it is so incredible. Last night I made
him dinner.. ,”