Sweetie's Diamonds (14 page)

“I'm going to my room now,” he said.
 

“Okay.
 
I'll open up a couple of TV dinners for supper.”

David turned and went to his room, leaving her to clean up.
 

Dinner was another awkward affair.
 
This time Diane was the one who was quiet.
 
She played with her food and seemed distracted.
 
David figured that if she had burned those clippings, then she knew exactly what she had destroyed.
 
He was mature enough to appreciate that the clippings represented a part of her life that was perhaps painful.

They had to be related to the porno movie he had seen with Billy
.

“You okay, mom?” David asked after chewing a piece of rubbery fried shrimp from the microwaved frozen dinner.
 
They often lived off of TV dinners and take-out during the school week.
 

She looked up and smiled.
 
“Hmm?
 
Sure.
 
Why do you ask?”

“You're miles away.”

She nodded.
 
“I suppose I am.
 
I'm sorry.
 
I have a lot on my mind.
 
School and stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“Oh, just finances and things.
 
Never mind.
 
Nothing for you to worry about.”

David tilted his head slightly and squinted at her sideways, the way she sometimes eyed him when she didn't believe something he had said.
   

Diane laughed.
 
“No, really.
 
I was just in my own little world.
 
Tell me about your day.”
 

They spent the rest of the dinner talking as if nothing were the matter.
 

But David knew better.

T
onight while Mom was doing something else, I got on our computer to see if I could find out anything about what she used to do.
 
The computer is in the living room so both of us can use it.
 
We finally got cable today so both the TV and the computer are hooked up.
 

I'm not supposed to look at porn sites but we don't have any kind of parental control on the computer.
 
As long as Mom doesn't see, I guess I'm okay.
 
Anyway, I used Yahoo to search for “porn stars” and “pornstars” and came up with about a zillion websites.
 
I didn't know where to start.
 
I started clicking through the search results until I came across one that appeared to be something more than just pictures.
 
The site was called “Porn Star Legends” and it had a big database full of porn stars' biographies since the 1970s.
 
The problem was that I wasn't sure what name my Mom went under.
 
I couldn't remember all the names of the ladies who were in the video that Billy and I saw, but I remembered a couple.
 
One was Karen Klinger and the other was Lucy Luv.
 
I looked up Karen Klinger first.
 
There was a picture of her face and some bio information and I could see immediately that it wasn't my Mom.
 
There were other pictures of Karen too, if you know what I mean!

Then I looked up Lucy Luv and I hit the jackpot.
 
There she was.
 
My Mom, in all her GLORY.
 
It sure is weird for me, her SON, to be looking at this stuff.
 
I mean, I can sort of pretend that the lady on the website isn't my Mom because she doesn't really look like her now.
 
She was so young then.
 
It's like she's a different person, but I know it's her.
 

While I was looking at the site I heard Mom coming down the hall.
 
I quickly clicked the mouse to close the window.
 
The site disappeared and left a website about video games in its place.
 
I had set that up first so that it'd be on the screen underneath what I was really looking at.

Mom asked me what I was doing and I told her I was looking for game hints.
 
She went on about her business and I brought the porn site back up.
 

It said that Lucy Luv's real name was Dana Barnett.
 
But that's not my Mom's name.
 
My Mom's name is Diane and her maiden name was Wilson.
 
Did she use a different “real” name as well as her “porn star” name?
 
I don't know much about these things but it seems weird.
 

The website listed several movies she was in, produced by some company called Erotica Selecta Films.
 
I recognized
Blondes Have a Helluva Lot More Fun
on the list of about eight titles.
   

Lucy Luv arrived on the porn scene in Los Angeles in 1977, made a few movies, and then disappeared in 1980.
 
It said that there was talk in the industry that she had been murdered at the same time as another porn star named Angel Babe.
 
No one knows what happened to them.
 
There was very little investigation done because the police didn't care about porn stars and no family members came forward to make waves.
 
Lucy Luv and Angel Babe made a few films together and were apparently girlfriends.

Oh.
 
My.
 
God.
 
I don't know WHAT to think about that.
 
My Mom was a LESBIAN?
 
Could that be possible?

You know, maybe I've got it all wrong and this porn star is just someone who happens to look like my Mom.
 
Maybe Billy and I are wrong about the whole thing.
 

Of course, I'd like to believe that but something in my gut tells me that it's all true.
 

Yuck.

H
iram Rabinowitz sighed heavily as soon as the customer left the shop.
 
He had made only two sales and it was nearing closing time.
 
As he had already sent home the help, there was nothing else to do but begin shutting down the store.
 
Being Friday, and Shabbat, it was the one day that A-1 Fine Jewelry closed early.

Summer had come early to New York.
 
It was blazing hot outside and Rabinowitz didn't look forward to walking to the subway.
 
It was worse underground, waiting in the crowded station on the platform was more like standing in a sauna.
 
Hopefully he would get a train that was air-conditioned.
 
Most of them were, but every now and then you got an old one and the A/C was faulty.
 
That was murder, especially when the train was packed like sardines.
 
Rabinowitz didn't like crowded trains.
 
It reminded him of that terrible day a week after he had turned six years old.
 
He and his family were herded out of their Berlin home by the Nazis and forced to stand in a smelly, crowded train.
 
The ride to the death camp had been long and torturous.
 
Rabinowitz and his brother Moses miraculously survived the ordeal because they were strong, healthy boys who could work, but their parents were not so fortunate.
 

Hiram Rabinowitz surely hated crowded trains but it was the only way to get home to Queens.
 

At four o'clock he finished unloading the display windows and securely locked the merchandise away in the safe.
 
He stepped out the front door, locked it behind him, and then pulled down the flexible metal security wall.
 
It was painful to bend over and lock the padlock.
 
It wasn't much fun being seventy-two years old and still having to work.
 
Sometimes he envied his brother for moving west to Chicago for a change of pace but the winters there were deadly.
 
Winters in New York were bad enough.

The sun was still shining brightly and he would make it home in plenty of time before dusk.
 
He ceased being religious years ago but there were certain traditions that were difficult to get out of his blood.
 
One of those was observing Shabbat by closing early and having a nice dinner at home with candles, challah bread, and prayers.
 
It reminded him of happier times when his late wife and his three children, now grown, were still around.

The jewelry store was located in a prime location and had been since he and his brother started the business in the fifties.
 
Forty-seventh Street was known as “Diamond Row” and it was lined with nothing but jewelry shops and diamond brokers.
 
Most of them were Jewish, not that it mattered, but Rabinowitz felt at home on the street and that was important.
 
His routine after closing was to walk east to 5
^th
Avenue and then downtown to 42
^nd
Street so that he could catch the number 7 train.
 
By doing so, he avoided changing trains to get home.
 
It was a bit more walking but anything was better than standing body-to-body with some stranger in a moving subway car.
 

As expected, the station underground was blisteringly hot and Rabinowitz was sweating before he had completed descending the stairs.
 
Luckily, the train was pulling into the station just as he swiped his Metro card and went through the turnstile.
 
He stepped through the open doors and squeezed in, careful not to look anyone in the eye or improperly rub against a woman.
 

The ride took about fifteen minutes and thankfully there were no delays.
 
He got off at the 61
^st
Street/Woodside stop, ascended the stairs, and was happy to be in the open air again.
 
Oddly, it felt cooler outside of Manhattan.
 
He walked north, crossed Broadway, and within minutes was standing outside his apartment building.
 

He didn't notice the stranger lurking a few feet away.
 

Rabinowitz opened the outer door and entered the lobby.
 
He used a key to open his mailbox and found nothing but bills.
 
He then used a different key to unlock the security door and as he did so, the stranger stepped inside the building and held the door open.

“Here you are, sir,” the man said.

“Thank you,” Rabinowitz said as he turned to see who the gentleman was.
 
The sight of the tall man with shoulder-length blonde hair and an eye patch startled him so badly that he gasped.

“Take it easy, Mister Rabinowitz,” the man whispered.
 
“I have a knife.
 
Don't say a word, just take me up to your apartment like we're old friends.”

Rabinowitz felt his heart flutter.
 
“I… I don't have any money with me…” he stammered.

“Shhh,” the man with the eye patch said.
 
“We'll talk about that upstairs.”

The two men walked through the empty lobby to the elevator.
 
The man with the blonde hair put his arm around Rabinowitz as if the old man were his grandfather.
 
When the elevator door opened, an elderly couple stepped out and recognized Rabinowitz.

“Hello Hiram,” the man said.
 
“How are you?”
 
They looked at the intimidating figure with his arm around their friend.

“Hello Abe,” Rabinowitz managed to say.
 
“Ida.”
 
He could see that they were expecting him to introduce them to the younger man.
 
“Uh, this is… uh…”

The man with the eye patch held out his hand and said, “John Hancock.
 
I'm Mister Rabinowitz's nephew.”

The couple cheerfully went “Oh!” and the man called Abe shook hands.
 
“Are you here visiting?” the woman named Ida asked.

“Yes.
 
I'm here from Cincinnati.
 
Great city, New York,” the blonde man answered.