Til the Real Thing Comes Along Read Free Page B

her,
     recited a litany of thank-you’s for her patience, kindness, thoughtfulness, charm, sense of humor, and grace under pressure.
     She responded with all she had left. A numb half-smile. Then she watched him walk to his car and get in, find his dark glasses
     in the spot where he always kept them, tucked up behind the visor, and put them on. Even from just inside her front door where
     she stood, she could see him turn the rearview mirror so he could look at himself, and then push the bridge of the glasses
     down to the middle of his nose, which is how he always wore them. Then he started the car. As he backed out down the driveway
     he glanced at R.J. over the top of the glasses, puckered his lips, made what she was certain would have been a little smacking
     kiss if she had been able to hear it, and was gone.
    When Jeffie came home she would tell him the bad news. Oh, God. Poor baby. Or maybe not such a poor baby this time.
Bad news
was what she’d told him when Arthur was murdered.
A terrible thing happened last night. A robber came into the house to steal some money and then he killed your daddy.
Is that how she’d said it? She knew she hadn’t said
shot him in the stomach.
Killed. Murdered. Words coming out of her mouth that sounded as though they were from some horrible movie or television show.
     Words that a nice Jewish girl never even imagined she would ever hear someone else say, let alone say herself. Guns, robbery,
     murder. Those were things they talked about on
Adam 12
or
Quincy,
or in newspaper articles she’d skimmed, shaking her head while she did, with pity for the poor sad people in the crime-filled
     ghettos.
    Now she remembered. “It’s okay to cry and scream and fall on the bed and hate everybody,” she had told her son, certain from
     the even look he gave her that he wasn’t reallysure what she was saying. “You’re allowed to be furious and tell the whole world how full of anger you are.” Her cousin Mimi’s
     husband, Jack, the psychiatrist, had told her to say that. R.J. and Jeffie were sitting on the flowered bedspreads on the
     twin beds the morning she told him, in the guest room of Mimi and Jack’s apartment in New York. She held her little boy’s
     left hand with her right hand while his right hand played with the fingers of her left, tapping on each of her polished fingernails.
     She ached, watching his sweet little face as he slowly absorbed what he had just heard. Eventually he sighed a tiny sigh;
     then he stood, walked out of the bedroom, down the hallway and into the living room. R.J. followed him feverishly, and saw
     him sit down at Mimi’s upright piano, think for a moment, as if to review his repertoire, and then pound out a violent rendition
     of “Chopsticks”… over and over and again. R.J. knew she would never hear “Chopsticks” again without feeling sick to her stomach.
     For the rest of her life when she heard it, she would remember every detail of those few days. Like the smell of formaldehyde
     in the morgue, where she had gone to identify the body. A drawer. The body of the man she loved in a drawer.
    No. Michael Rappaport’s change of heart was not such bad news. This was not like losing Arthur. Nothing. This was nothing.
     It was simply the loss of a relationship she hadn’t even been sure she’d wanted. One she’d been involved in for all the wrong
     reasons. She would go back to work in two weeks, as planned. She and Jeffie would go back to their lives as usual. It would
     help when she had to get up early, get dressed, go into the office, think, be funny, be productive, turn out pages, get the
     show on the air. Maybe she’d even try to find an exercise class to go to every now and then. She hadn’t been to one since
     she couldn’t remember when, and her legs were turning to Jell-O. No, they weren’t. She still had great legs.
    “Are these the legs of a comedy writer?” Harry Elfand would joke on the rare days that R.J. came to work