The Muffia (13 page)

Chapter 19

“OK, Maddie’s turn. Oops,” Paige said, catching herself. "I mean Madelyn."

"Never mind," I sighed.

Lauren was trying to get comfortable while wearing a miniskirt and balancing a cup of tea. “Why do I keep getting this feeling we should have started with you?”

“Oh, no,” I said. “That would have put a damper on the rest of the evening, trust me.” I’d postponed it as long as I could. It was my turn for the roundy-round.

Everyone but Quinn turned toward me with anticipation.

Oh boy, where to start . . .

We’d moved into the solarium where we always conduct a portion of our meetings whenever I host. The solarium was also where
it
had happened—only yesterday. On this early May evening the sky was clear, the temperature warm and the day lengthening, but I couldn’t stop visualizing Udi lying on the day bed where Jelicka and Lauren were now sitting.

“Rolling,” Vicki said. “And action.”

“Well,” I began uncomfortably, not looking at the camera, “I met a guy.” For a second I had the thought that it might not be smart to record what Nissim made clear should be kept hush-hush, but I determined that it was too ridiculous a scenario to be believable so I dropped the thought.

“We all know you met a guy,” said Sarah. “Give us the good stuff.”

A couple of the Muffs nodded, tittered a little at what they hoped might be the upcoming sexy tale, then got silent with anticipation.

“You emailed us about him,” Kiki said. “He’s from Israel right?”

Was
from Israel, I thought. I don’t consider myself an incredible actress able to bury the secrets of her soul, but I thought at least one of my friends would see that something deeper was going on with me. Paige had, sort of, but now the Muffs beamed at me with unequivocal joy in my apparent good fortune. I remember being very impressed with Quinn for not having told anyone that Udi had come and gone so quickly from my life. Funny that this one time—when I almost wished she had told them so I didn’t have to—she’d been able to keep a secret.

“We are all ecstatic for you,” Jelicka said, her happiness for me sincere. But it felt a little over the top, as if she never thought I’d actually meet a guy I wanted who also wanted me and now had to eat humble pie. “Tell us, tell us,” she squealed.

“
Shhhh
,” said Quinn. “Let her talk.”

“So,” I said. “I met a guy. A
real
guy.”

“I can’t believe what a good idea this book was, Maddie,” Vicki said, her eye glued to the camera’s eyepiece. “And I’m particularly happy for you. You more than anyone needed to get laid.”

I’m glad they all agreed on that point.

“I’ll say,” said Jelicka. “And she didn’t even need to move.”

“Would you let her talk?” said Paige.

“Were you one of the Muffs in on the vibrator exchange?” Lauren asked, tossing an apologetic look to Kiki.

“I
read
it with interest,” I replied. “But I didn’t have anything to add.”

“Because that was one of the things that got me going,” Lauren went on. “I mean in addition to the book. I just had a feeling that sharing all that vibrator information was going to be good for all of us.”

“Good for online vibrator sales, too,” Jelicka said. “Not that the Muffs are a critical mass.”

“Did you get the Hitachi magic wand?” Rachel, who’d arrived late, was looking at Lauren expectantly.

“No. I mean, it sounded great but I realized I needed more interior work than exterior. I mean—you heard . . . No, I guess—I’ll tell you later.”

A little flicker of disappointment moved over Rachel’s face.

“Can we move on?” Quinn asked.

“Turn your face to me a little.” Vicki was speaking, but all I could see was the video camera pointed at me. “So where’d you meet?”

I’m a little camera shy, anyway, and my inclination was to tell her to put the thing away, but we’d apparently agreed at some point, because Vicki needed a creative outlet, that we were going to let her document our meetings—
all
our meetings, every moment of them—which in the case of what I was about to say might be very stupid if Udi’s death were to come back to haunt me.

I was aware of music playing from my iPod, lilting in from the kitchen into the solarium. It was set to shuffle and at the moment was finishing up a free download of Imogen Heap.

“Yeah, tell us,” Sarah said. “And juice it up. I’ll be doing a lot of vicarious living for awhile.”

Even Vicki’s camera panned to look at Sarah.

“Awhile?” said Kiki with a certain reprimanding tone.

“All right, then,
forever
as far as I know. What’s his name?”

The camera panned back to me.

“His name is Udi. He was from Israel.”

“We know all that already!” Jelicka exclaimed. “Stop teasing us.”

“Was?” I thought I heard Paige say, but I wasn’t going to stop at that point. They wanted it? They were going to get it.

“OK…” I looked at each of them before continuing. “Well, we met at a dinner party. We had amazing sex a total of two times—actually, several times on two occasions, the second of which was right there on that day bed where you’re sitting—when during our second or third shared orgasm, he died on top of me, after which it took me half an hour of pushing and pulling to get out from under him. And as I was trying to decide what to do, three guys from El Al showed up and took him away.”

The members of the Muffia stared at me like they didn’t know me. Mouths agape, stunned to silence, all except Quinn, who was watching them watch me, her right leg crossed over her left, swinging to the beat of Pink Martini, which had shuffled into the iTunes playlist. She uncrossed then recrossed her legs in rhythm.

I realize now that I’d kind of blurted out the sequence of events without embellishing them for their listening pleasure, but I hadn’t wanted to draw it out. The point was that the wonderful Udi was dead and nothing was going to bring him back. Why prolong the torture?

“You’re joking right?” Jelicka finally asked.

“No, I’m not joking.”

“He’s dead?”

“Yup.”

“Mito-cardial infarction?” asked Kiki, the soon-to-be nurse practitioner.

I nodded. “I guess so.”

“You’re not sure?”

“I’ve never been with anyone having a heart attack. I’m not sure what it looks like.”

“Did he clutch his chest?”

“Sort of but he was mostly clutching me.”

“A heart attack—that was always my biggest fear with Roscoe,” said Jelicka. “I mean, given our age difference—not that I have to worry anymore now that he’s fucking his secretary.”

“Saul’s older so I worry about that, too,” Kiki added. “But did you know that heart attacks kill more women than cancer?”

“Good to know,” said Vicki. “My heart’s always been much stronger than my breasts.”

“The thing is, Udi was only thirty-six,” I said.

“Thirty-six? Go on, girl.” Jelicka seemed to forget that, despite his youthful vigor, Udi was dead.

“Did he . . . how long did the whole thing take?” Kiki asked.

“How long did what take?” Jelicka was being deliberately obtuse.

“Seconds. Maybe thirty seconds.”

“Hmmm. I’m really not sure what the norm is. We haven’t studied heart presentations yet.”

“And he died on top of you?” Paige asked. “How did you know when it was over?”

I shrugged. “He wasn’t breathing?”

“This is shocking and truly amazing,” said Rachel in the pause that followed, when no one knew what to say. “I mean . . . life, sex, death—and we just ate. That’s all there is, ladies.”

It’s true, these are life’s biggest events and we were sharing them all together. But then, you’ve probably already figured out this is one hell of a book club.

“I got here just after it happened. It
was
pretty shocking,” Quinn said, her jaw dropping in an expression of disbelief just as she said it. But the damage was done. Everyone turned to look at her. She and I had agreed she wouldn’t say anything to the Muffs about her knowing for fear someone else in the group would feel slighted, though feeling slighted about not being invited to see a dead body was really kind of silly.

“Well,” Quinn went on, glancing at me unsurely, “I sensed something was wrong and I decided to come—”

“To Agoura?” Jelicka asked, stunned. “You usually need a bribe to drive out here.”

“No I don’t,” she protested. “I like it here. It’s…” She drifted off, searching for the right word. “Remote.”

“Look…I called her,” I said, hoping to put the subject of where I lived to bed permanently. “Quinn was the one who’d been pressuring me to get laid and she knew all the details of how Udi and I met. I’m sorry if I didn’t tell all of you, but it wasn’t really a group event, if you know what I mean. It was my choice to wait until tonight to tell you and I swore Quinn to secrecy.”

“He was gorgeous,” Quinn said. “You would have loved painting him, Rachel. His body was beautiful.”

“You saw him
naked
?” asked Paige.

“Yup.”

Vicki was panning the camera back and forth, not wanting to miss anything.

“Oh, Madelyn,” Lauren began, “I think I can speak for all of us when I say we’re really sorry. We all know how long it’s been since you had a man you were attracted to, and then to have this happen? There’s really no justice.”

“Well,
that’s
certainly true. But I didn’t really
have
him, you know. I guess I had him once or twice for a few hours, but basically it was just nice to find someone I liked.” I felt tears starting to form. “And it took so long to find him.”

“That’s what we mean.” Lauren put her arm around me.

“And then this had to happen,” Sarah said, trying to be sympathetic. “Some of us have multiple lovers and then this has to happen to
you
. It’s just not fair.”

“Since when is fairness a reason for anything?” I asked, without a hope of any response that would be satisfying.

And I didn’t get one. I remember I just wanted to let myself be sad, morose really, hoping the footage would be too awful for Vicki to ever use in whatever little video she was trying to make. Life just isn’t fair. And I hadn’t even read
When Bad Things Happen to Good People
. I don’t think any of us can explain why things happen most of the time, despite our noble attempts to do so. I mean— life’s not a toaster where you put in your piece of bread, press
on
, and then a little while later you get browned bread. That would be direct cause and effect. But most of the things that happen to us—car accidents, friends getting cancer—have no explicable reasons for them, no matter how hard we look.

“I can’t and won’t live my life thinking that there’s anything different I could have done to prevent this from happening.”

“I’m not saying you could have,” said Sarah. “It just that it’s so…”

“I know,” I said. “Unfair. Well, I’m not going to let this affect what I do. I’m not going to start thinking that if I do a bad thing I should be prepared for something bad to happen; or that I could win the lottery the day I let an old lady go ahead of me in the check out line.”

“I know you’re upset, but I have to say, Maddie,” Kiki said after I’d stopped crying, “that it might not have been a good idea to bring him to your house.”

“Shut up, Keek,” Quinn said. “Why not have him come here? She’s a grown-up and it’s a beautiful place to make love.”

“What’s the beauty of the place got to do with it?”

“Sex in this house would be far nicer than hotel sex.”

“Depends on the hotel,” Paige offered.

“They hadn’t even made it to the bedroom,” Kiki said. “That’s not really utilizing the house.”

“They hadn’t gotten there yet!” Quinn was getting emotional. “And they were attracted to each other, so they didn’t have
time
to get to the bedroom. The solarium was closer. They
would
have gotten to the bedroom later on if . . .”

I remember being aware of a pain, right where I thought my heart was. This was a different kind of heart attack.

“I’m saying she didn’t know him well enough to bring him here,” Kiki went on after a beat. “He could have been a nut job and she was alone with him.”

“I did think of that,” I said. “But he
was
a sky marshal. It’s like if he were a cop. I felt safe.”

Kiki
harrumphed
. "Remember the cop in
Pulp Fiction
who raped Ving Rhames?"

“Are you sure he was a sky marshal?” Jelicka asked, suspiciously.

I hesitated. “Yes.”

“You must never have seen
The Departed,”
Vicki said, from the other side of the camera that was focused on me. “Or the one with Alec Baldwin where he’s a crooked cop. Nah, that’s a bad example—he’s nasty enough in real life.” Southern Cal gals all, the Muffs knew their movies.