The Matzo Ball Heiress (8 page)

“Could be,” I say, stirred and damp.

He slips his hand into my gray cotton Calvins and with one-handed dexterity slides two callused fingers between my legs. He works his long fingers so fast it feels like a hummingbird is inside me. He’s already a champ in my book, but he ups the ante by sucking my right breast until my nipple is rock hard.

I come with a yelp.

When’s the last time I did that? Steve holds me until my pulse lowers. Nina Simone finishes her last note and Steve bites his lip in triumph.

Steve guides my hand to his fly. He’s hard and hot. I smile knowingly and guide him to my bedroom and work open the buttons of his shirt. A three-inch silver cross is draped around his neck. Whoa. Not that I have a
Jews Only
policy—but man that cross is intimidating straight out of the gate.

“You must be German-American?” I whisper nervously as I caress his light chest hair.

“Why do you ask that?” He smiles.

“That cross. With your last name I wasn’t sure you if you were Jewish.”

He smiles again even more enigmatically. “I believe in time. Time is infinite—if you imagine it, it will occur.”

“What? Why the cross?”

“Why do you think it’s there?”

“Uh—you’ve got me stumped.”

“Maybe it’s an amulet. Maybe it’s a shield.”

Okay. What’s going on here? Why is my sexy romp turning into a cloying Hal Hartley art-house film?

He kisses my nose, his cock still fat with expectation. “I’m so excited by the special,” he coos.

I’m considerably less hot and bothered. “What special?”

He kisses my ear. “I thought I mentioned it.”

“No—”

He strokes my cheek and mutters, “We’ll talk later. I can’t wait to hear your family’s reaction.”

My family? The idiot should have waited for the blow job.

“Tell me now,” I insist.

“I’m sure you’ll love it,” he says nervously. “We’d like to broadcast your family Passover celebration. Live. Great press for the Food Channel, great press for you, right?”

I sit straight up. Was this date on a tactic list to get my family to allow a live broadcast? “Is
that
what this night is about?”

Despite being stared at by an angry half-clothed woman he has just finger fucked, Steve anxiously plows on with his brainstorm: “No, of course not.”

“What the hell are you talking about then?”

“I ran the idea by our vice president of Original Programming and he loved it. I showed him the footage from our food pioneers special. You’re very photogenic.”

I fake a hacking cough for the moment’s camouflage it offers.

“You okay there?” I can see him thinking:
the girl or the hosting gig.
The gig apparently wins. “I know you might think our target audience would be eating their own meal at that time, but I assure you the show would get repeated later in the week for those other folks. And many Christians are curious about Jewish customs, especially Passover because of the Last Supper. I think it would be a history lesson for America. My boss loved it, thought it was a solid idea for ratings, and good PR for your family, too.”

“I have to talk to the family. We make group decisions.” My voice needs defrosting.

“I understand. I’m sure they’ll love the idea. After all, your family will be immortalized! If it goes well, we can show the program every year.”

“Gee.” Minutes ago I saw an Adonis on my sheets. Now I want to crush a bedbug.

“You’ll consider it then?”

“Promise.” As in,
no fucking way.

“Could you tell me tomorrow if possible? I want to map out the rest of my shooting schedule.”

“I said I promise. But right now I think you need to go.” I’m having a hard time masking my anger.

“I hope I haven’t insulted you, because I’d love to continue where we left off, if you know what I mean. I hope I haven’t muffed it up.” He smiles, kisses the front of my thong and says, “Perhaps muffed is a poor choice of word.”

I may have laughed at bawdy humor an hour ago, but now I feel as if I’ve been intimate with a sicko.

“Listen, chickie, can we rewind to five minutes ago? I just thought you might be thrilled that my boss was behind my idea.”

My arms hang limply as I search his face for any sort of understanding. Is he mean or merely a dim bull? I gird myself for the massive low that’s sure to come. I feel like a
chorus girl,
my grandma Lainie’s vintage term for an easy woman. “It’s time for you to go.
Really
.”

“Heather, I was only kidd—I honestly didn’t mean to insult—”

He gets the message and rebuttons his dress shirt.

“Can I call you tomorrow?”

“Maybe,” I say.

After I lock the door, I stare out my window until enough time passes that Steve emerges onto the dark street. He flags down a cab. As it rides off in the dark, I feel like turning a deadly ray gun on anyone in range.

I pull out the Nina Simone CD and shove it out of view. I press play on my favorite Aretha.

If I have to wait any longer for someone to love me I’ll sprout old-lady chin hairs. The phone rings. I look at my watch. Half past eleven. Is it Steve on his cell, with genuine regret over his amazing lack of tact?

“It’s me,” Jake says, only slightly apologetically. “I know you stay up late.”

“Is there something wrong?” I sniffle.

“No, but there’s something important I forgot to ask you when we spoke last.”

“Yes?” I barely manage to say.
Don’t tell me. A busload of Jews from Liechtenstein is in town.

“How did the Food Channel thing go?”

This is what’s so important? I’m not going to make a laughingstock of myself with my cousin who loves to laugh. I force back the tears. “The filming went fine, but—Steve Meyers from the show called me for a follow-up.”

“Want me to handle it?”

“I’ve taken care of it. I met him for dinner.”

“That was his follow-up?”

“Well, he wants our family on TV celebrating Passover. And get this,
live!
”

“Ooh,” Jake says, as if he’s been punched in the groin. “What did you say? And who’d watch anyway?”

“He says curious Christians would tune in live, and ‘those other folks’ a few days later. Then I think they want to make it a holiday perennial like The Grinch or
It’s a Wonderful Life
.”

“That’s just nuts. What did
you
say?”

“Well
of course
we’re not going to do the
seder
, but I said I’d get back to him. I figure you’d help me out with an excuse. I’m rather pissed off, to tell the truth. I thought he was interested in me. I was sorely mistaken.”

“You’re
gorgeous
, don’t worry. And you know—I’m just thinking out loud here—maybe we should consider the broadcast, Heath.”

“It’s unpleasant to even joke about such a foul idea.”

“Seriously.”

“Seriously, what? We don’t have a family celebration, remember? No one in our family even knows how to read Hebrew.”

“Except your father.”

“Lot of good that does us. Jake, let’s get this over with. What should I say to Meyers?” I’ve demoted the dipstick to a last name.

“No, let’s talk this out. Maybe we should do this. I’m thinking like a businessman here.” There is a long pause before Jake picks up again. I can hear him breathing as he collects his words. “I don’t want to getcha upset, but our market share is going way downhill this year.”

This
is out of left field. “We’re the bestselling brand. Recession-proof, in the Bible, remember?”

“See, Heath, the other brands spend big bucks on advertising now that they’re out of family ownership and in big conglomerates. They have corporate muscle behind them. We rely on word of mouth for our sales. Advertising is hardly budgeted. And you may not have registered this fully, but our profits have been sinking steadily.”

“Well, you didn’t exactly highlight this before.”

“I didn’t want to alarm you.”

“You’re alarming me now.” My turn to pause. I’m somewhere between shocked and furious. “Think it through, Jake. Where are we going to get the family? There’s you, Siobhan and me. God knows I’m not dating anyone. Greg’s reeling in the marlin and chasing tail come Passover. And your appalling other cousins, what are you going to do—send them an invite through their lawyer? This is a deranged plan. This is not the way to address an emergency. We could hire a real advert—”

“Maybe if I asked Marcy and Rebecca straight out, gave them the truth, they’d say yes. If I tell them we need to get out there to avoid being eaten by the competition, they’d have to help us out. They want to keep this company profitable as much as we do.”

“You want our nasty relatives who abhor us on television with us? That’s a great image to get out there. And who the hell would lead the
seder?
It would be a group humiliation. We’d have to use English
Haggadahs
to read from, because no one will pull off the Hebrew prayers. This is the traditional family picture you want to put forth?”

“You’re probably right about Marcy and Rebecca. On second thought, I don’t think they’ll come.”

“If you’re drumming up fake family members,” I practically yell, “then I might ask my mailman. He’s from Russia, studying Hebrew, now that he can. Has a wife and a toddler here. He can be our dear uncle Oleg. You’d like that?”

“How old is he?”

“Jake,” I hiss, “I’m not inviting my mailman. That was sarcasm.”

“Why don’t you ask him anyway? An accent sounds authentic in a Jewish setting. And mailmen deliver thousands of porn magazines to their residents. They know how to keep a secret.”

“Jake—”

“Siobhan will be Shoshanna, of course. We’ll get books out of the library to prep her. I’m sure we have one or two others who might want to come.”

Yeah, Sukie from Upsy Daisy would, she was that adamant about wanting to attend a
seder
, but I’m not giving this harebrained plan any more ammunition.

“Look,” Jake says after considerable silence on my part. “The Food Channel gets great ratings. This is free national television advertising. Advertising we couldn’t afford, and here’s someone who wants to give it to us.”

“Jake, can’t we drum up some cyberbusiness? What about a snappy Web site like Matzo.com?”

“I looked into it already. Somebody already has it.”

“Who snagged it? Streit’s? Manischewitz?”

“Not sure. Just says
Under Construction
. Could be either of them. Another nail in our coffin because our Web site is hard to load—”

“Since when do we have a Web site? What’s the URL?”

“Greenblotz.com.”

Despite my Level-Ten Misery, I can’t help an unlikely burst of laughter.

Jake joins in with a loud hoot. “Not quite Amazon or Yahoo!, let me tell you. A lousy money waster that some shyster talked me into. I don’t have time to overhaul that piece of crap right now. Not until after Passover.”

The world is starting to look more crazy than evil. “There must be other ways to save the day than by airing our dirty laundry.”

“If people see our family they’ll think of us as an extension of theirs. We need this edge in the market. And if the show gets repeated every year, listen, I’m not sure this is an opportunity we can pass up. Hey! Maybe if you get to your mother now, before she makes her plans—”

“My mother? Not going there. Out of the question.”

My date with Steve, momentarily forgotten, comes back in a flash. I hurry the call to the end, and when I hang up with Jake, I moan like a goalie who failed to stop a puck in a championship match.

Getting Off My Bum

A
t the stiflingly awkward dinner with my parents at the Russian Tea Room that followed my college graduation, the topic mercifully turned to professional mental help. Shrinks have always been a common denominator in my immediate family. Relieved at this bright turn of conversation, my parents waxed nostalgic about the multitude of analysts, psychiatrists, psychologists and certified social workers they’d seen. I chimed in with: “I can remember all the way back to Dr. Schwartz.”

“You’re kidding?” Dad laughed, after a quick look at Mom.

Dr. Schwartz was a kiddie shrink. I was dragged to his office after I wrapped myself in our curtains for a day after witnessing my parents fighting in our kitchen with large and dangerous kitchen utensils. Going to Dr. Schwartz’s candy-colored office usually meant me playing with Barbies and Kens under his watchful eye. At my graduation dinner, neither of my parents believed that I could remember that far back until a cross-examination in which I mentioned his drippy nose and huge poster of the Eiffel Tower. Dad stole another glance at Mom and laughed. Apparently Dr. Schwartz’s final analysis was that they were the ones who should seek therapy.

Maybe my parents should have listened and left me alone with my garden-variety angst. But when you have money, surely a little of it thrown someone’s way could fix things. You keep spending and hoping. So I’m just past thirty and I’ve sampled the entire smorgasbord of neurotic Rx. There are, for example, the ultraprofessionals like my college psychologist, Myrna Bernstein Callahan, who play anthropologist and never cross the line of distanced observer. This cold fish silently listened to my New York rants like I was explaining tribal rituals in Vanuatu. If I’d told her that I was addicted to Dial-a-Prayer or that my grandmother bought panties from Victoria’s Secret, she wouldn’t have batted an eyelash. No matter how great my pain she would stare at me, neutral as Switzerland.

The flipside, equally distasteful, is the overly sympathetic therapist, like Patty Zipsky, the one I fired eighteen months ago when I was truly out of control. I was missing important work meetings, I was eating everything in sight, and instead of crying just at Passover, I was crying myself to sleep every single night. Patty was useless during this crisis. She is too soft for her profession. She said, “I know, I know” every few seconds, and never let me cry without wiping my tears with her thumb and stopping the session to sprint to the kitchen for a glass of water. She’s the kind of woman whose kid falls at a picnic and she’s still comforting the child on her lap two hours later. I knew I needed a hard-ass who would scare me into a respectable life. I wanted someone who would talk back to me. It took me six months after I let Patty go to find my current therapist, Bettina Henderson, who I first laid eyes on when I had a nasty flu and was watching
Oprah
.

The topic that day was “Therapy of the Stars,” and the second guest after a sinister-looking hypnotist was Bettina, a long lean Aussie with a clear voice and a mass of coiled brown hair. Oprah gave a brief introduction to Bettina Henderson’s
“Get Off Your Bum”
approach to the woes of the famous. Then Bettina read from her book,
Get Off Your Bum Therapy.
She dropped huge hints about who made up her clientele. “A household-name cover girl—whose weight has caused heaps of controversy—came to see me. We tackled her fear of losing her modeling contract if she ate a full meal. You might have noticed her healthy weight gain lately—”

“Kate Moss?” Oprah asked waggishly.

“Oh, I can’t tell.” Bettina said, smiling. “Anyhow, I could’ve just listened to this model explain why she shouldn’t eat. But I walked her out of my office and down to the nearest restaurant. I talked her through a serving of chocolate cake forkful by forkful. I insist she has one treat a day. Life is not worth living without chocolate cake, right, girls?”

An out-of-work child actor that I’d never heard of before came out to join Bettina on the set sofa. His father invested wisely, and now the former child actor had tons of money but nothing to do since the phone stopped ringing. He had no sense of self. The actor explained to Oprah how Bettina sat him down, talked through options with him and helped him translate his acting experience into new skills. “Now,” he said, “I head a volunteer agency for new immigrants, and have my
soul
back.”

There were so many hoots and hollers that Oprah had to call for quiet.

“You probably can’t afford me,” Bettina announced, proudly beaming to the viewers at home, “but maybe you have a friend who can play the role of taskmaster. Ask yourself when you’re down and out not who’s the most comforting to call for help, but who’ll be harder on you, to command you to ‘get off your bum.’”

Bettina Henderson sounded like a royal pain in the ass, but with my temperature rising and my sinuses congested, I seethed about the ineffective Patty Zipsky years. Bettina’s forceful methodology of pop psychology sounded like a godsend. When Oprah said Bettina was New York–based I felt a jolt of excitement:
I
certainly would be able to pay her fee, and why get a substitute taskmaster when you can have the real thing? That’s one of the nicer aspects of having money. You want, you get.

Using skills I’ve gleaned from ten years of finding the right people to appear on camera, I tracked Bettina Henderson down. Like an exclusive new nightclub, her office was unlisted. Still, she made me wait more than two weeks for a callback. “You sound like a very lovely young lady. But I’m
terribly
expensive.”

When I insisted it was not a problem, she was thrilled to fit me in. She charges $450 an “hour,” the steepest fee a therapist has ever suckered me out of, and she insists all of her clients pay up front. I wouldn’t dare tell anyone how much I pay. I know it’s recycled self-help claptrap, but Bettina’s encouragement has done me some good in the past year. When I was bitching about gaining weight and feeling isolated except for my work encounters, she reached over, handed me the Yellow Pages and commanded me to call her health club. I countered that I was too dumpy to exercise in front of the svelte set, and maybe plastic surgery is the only way, even though I have no tolerance for physical pain except for my yearly blood donation. (My dad and I have rare blood, B-Rh negative, which only two percent of the population has, and ever since I turned twenty-one I’ve followed his example in generosity to the Red Cross. But even this good deed always gives me the things-entering-my-flesh willies. My mother is exactly the same when it comes to pain. As a result, she may be the only Park Avenue bitch with wrinkles.)

Bettina assured me surgery wouldn’t give me the self-respect that exercise would. I insisted no coed workouts for flabby me, so she called the Lotte Berk studio, an establishment that caters to Upper East Side women, and handed me the phone. The program there stresses movement and strength via an exercise program like Pilates, and costs a fortune if you stick to it as religiously as the trainers recommend. But I stuck to it, and I took those inches off. Bettina sometimes verges on Quack City, but at least I have a rudimentary control of my life now, like a songwriter who has a chorus going but the verses are still in temporary bullshit form. My professional life is good, and I’ve kept off those twenty-plus pounds I’d packed on after I gave Daniel Popper the heave-ho. For a while there it was open slather on the buttered bagels, the home-delivered pizza and, of course, the glutton’s ice cream of choice: Häagen Dazs Dulce de Leche. God. How many halves of grapefruit have I eaten this year alone? Grapefruit is punishment food. It’s like taking pills. But I get a lot more wolf whistles these days than I did pre-Bettina. My pricey Medicine Lady has fixed my tush and flabby arms but, alas, not my self-loathing and loneliness.

I am so rattled by my slutty night with Steve and the seder dilemma that I ignore the onslaught of traffic when I’m crossing First Avenue at Eighty-sixth Street, headed for my therapy appointment. I make it a third of the way across when a taxi comes flying at me, and just misses knocking me down. At the other curb is an Asian teenager wearing a baseball mitt on his head like a hat, and an elderly nun in her habit, sporting white tennis socks and black Reeboks over her hosiery, pushing a blue metal shopping cart full of groceries. The nun wags her finger at me for crossing too soon.

The never-ending Gotham obstacle course: now a BBC documentary production, one with a sizable budget by the looks of things, is blocking my path. As a seasoned producer I can approximate budget size in a glance. The giveaway on this film is the permit to stop traffic, and the “B” cameraman focused on pick-up shots of passersby. A tall, thin producer with a pale face stops me with his hand until the reporter is done grilling a hip-hopper perched atop a homemade motorized scooter fitted with a milk-crate seat. Next in line for the reporter is a man in a chicken suit that has become a fixture of the neighborhood: he hands out samples for the Ranch 1 franchise on Eighty-sixth Street.

I’d go backward and cross Eighty-fifth Street to get to Bettina on time, but a young production assistant who is probably being paid peanuts while scoring a free flight to New York from London has crept up behind me. He’s on the use-it-when-you-have-it power trip of the low-paid in the entertainment industry, and theatrically stops anyone with the misfortune to get somewhere in a hurry. “Miss, we’re shooting a film for the BBC,” and “Sir, I’m with the BBC. You can’t walk yet.” I’m not claustrophobic, but today I’m almost as tense as the time I tried to get out of a packed Aretha concert at Madison Square Garden with an iffy stomach. “I have to get to an appointment,” I plead to the older producer who first spoke to me.

“Won’t be a second,” he says with a plum-in-mouth accent. “We have a permit.”

“For what? Disruption?” I say.

“We’re making a film about average people during an average day in post-9/11 New York.”

“In March? Wouldn’t September make more sense?”

“We want an average day, not one with ceremony. You look like you might have some interesting things to say—”

“As opposed to the chicken?” I say.

The producer smiles. “Brilliant. Keep the chitchat up and you’ll get right into the film. So would you like to tell us your thoughts?”

My wavy hair is out of control from the humidity that’s been plaguing the city; it’s almost in fright-wig territory. “Please don’t film me. I’m having a bad day. I just want to keep walking.”

“But we’re from the BBC,” the pretty, redheaded female interviewer cuts in, finished with the chicken. Her accent is the uppitiest of Upper Class, just like the producer’s.

I shake my head no. “My hair’s too messy to be on air.”

The interviewer sneers. “A great tragedy like 9/11 occurred and you’re worried about your hair?”

“Yes,” I hurl back.

“You’re as indifferent as those barracudas that sell souvenirs down by Ground Zero,” she sniffs.

“Francesca,” the producer hushes her.

“And you’re not?” I spit right back at her. Normally I would’ve just walked on, but lucky for Francesca, she cornered a woman who was just duped by an asshole.

“And how is that?” Francesca says with a start.

“You make documentaries. I do, too. We try and make a buck or two off other people’s ideas and emotions.”

The veteran producer can’t help himself. “If you’re so concerned about hair, what did you make a film on—how to shampoo?” He has a good chuckle with Francesca while I gather my thoughts, knife-faced.

Memories of September 11 flash through my brain. I could say a hundred different things. But what I actually say to the BBC crew is: “I’m damn glad someone’s down there selling souvenirs.”

“You’re glad?” the talent, Francesca, says after a sharp click of her tongue.

“Glad. New York is functioning when there’s a buck being made. If we think too much about danger and tragedy we’d never get out of bed. I saw Tower Two explode. But what am I supposed to do with that hideous memory? I just don’t want to talk about it anymore, okay? And by the way, if someone doesn’t want to be on camera whether their mother just died or they are having a bad hair day, I respect their individual right to say no. That’s what a release form is for, mutual consent. Making a film is a privilege, not a badge.”

Francesca quails at my reproach, turning slightly pink.

“And p.s.,” I spit out, “the only shampoo in my films were in the shower room at Riker’s Island. I have two News and Documentary Emmys for my frivolity.”

The producer turns to the main cameraman. “Did you get all that?”

“No,” he apologizes.

“I did,” calls camera B.

The producer touches his anemic face nervously, and turns to me with new determination. “Brilliant. One hundred percent heartfelt. Darling, will you fill out a release form?”

“In your dreams.”

“Please—” Francesca begs me with her eyes “—it’s so hard to get real emotion on film. If you make documentaries you understand.”

“Sorry,” the producer adds. “We all have our methods.”

Now I get it. They were deliberately trying to provoke a reaction from me. I angrily snatch the paper on the clipboard and the producer hands me a pen. I am their peer after all, and I
do
know damn well how hard it is to get a release.

“Greenblotz?” he says when I hand it back to him.

“Yes.”

“Like the matzo company?”

“Yes.”

The producer looks at me in such a way that I can tell: one more
in the tribe
. Funny, the producer looks about as Jewish as Christopher Robin. But as my father has always pointed out, there are Jews of all skin tones and eye colors. My blue eyes and my cousin Greg’s blond hair are proof enough. “Didn’t you just give the Food Channel a tour of your factory?” the producer says.

“Yes,” I say, confused and still cooling down. Do they know about my sordid night with Steve? Does word spread that fast in this town?

“Jared filmed you,” he says. “We went to film school in London together. He was very impressed with you. Do you know your prison film aired on the BBC?”