The Muffia (10 page)

Chapter 13

Quinn was going to be thrilled at the news that I’d gotten laid after all this time—so happy it might be like she’d gotten laid herself. Though given the state of her own unsatisfied libido, there was no telling how she’d react. It turned out she’d given Frank Lassiter, aka Orin Footlick, the benefit of a second date, but soon discovered he had some unspecified “issues” in the bedroom and was now railing against
all
men.

I’d tell everybody eventually, but Quinn was the one who’d made a mission out of finding me a guy when I was at my most discouraged, telling me, “Shut up with the ‘I’ll never meet anybody.’” I guess I felt I owed her the titillation.

“You wouldn’t believe how strong he is,” I told her. “He pushes me onto the bed, gently spreads my legs and goes at me so tenderly. It seems like the only thing on his mind is making me nuts, which he keeps on doing. Then after I come the first time, he puts one arm under my body and lifts me from the bottom of the bed all the way to the top in one smooth motion, laying my head on the pillow—I felt my hair feather out perfectly over the pillowcase—
then
he looks at me and says again, ‘Look at yourself. You’re so gorgeous,’ with this unreal sexy accent.”

“Wow, like the movies. I’m swooning.” She seemed genuinely happy for me.

“Big time swoon. After he says this he kisses me, another movie kiss—gentle, but firm, you know? Strong but soft, the kind of kiss you can’t explain. Then he pulls back and stares at me. It sounds funny, but he says, ‘You are the most beautiful woman in the world,’ and he makes me believe it. He’s either a great actor or . . .”

“Don’t start. Why wouldn’t he think that?"

“Well, the main reason is it’s not true.”

“You are a very well-preserved woman, Mad—Madelyn.”

“Yeah, for my age I’m OK, but he could have a twenty-year-old.”

“But he chose you, so shut up and enjoy it. Besides, he’s not American so he accepts what real women look like. Not to mention there aren’t many twenty-year-olds who have it goin’ on yet. That doesn’t usually happen ‘til a woman is thirty-five at the earliest.”

I sighed, ignoring the backhanded compliment. “I’m so thankful to you and Jelicka and everyone for getting me to choose an erotic book. That’s what started it. The whole process has done wonders for my outlook on life. I almost feel like if I never have sex again, I’m good.”

“Don’t say that!” she warned. “You’ve got lots of years left.”

“I live in hope.”

“So is he coming back?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. Next week,” I gushed.

“Lucky thing. Does he have a friend?”

Quinn was one thing, but I wasn’t sure how I would share the good news with the rest of the group. Ultimately I decided that since everyone else tooted their own horns, I’d give mine a honk, even if it meant discussing sex online:

[email protected]
: Ladies, I hope the reading is going well. I credit
Disturbed
with shaking up my life enough to get me laid for the first time in 22 months (not that I was keeping track). I am now officially more sexually satisfied than I have
ever
been. He’s the gift that keeps on giving, appearing to me in waves, leading me to conclude, it is
never
too late to change your life. And he’s coming back. Yeah!!!

[email protected]
: Go on Maddie! What kind of vibrator did you buy again? ~xo Lauren

[email protected]
: Rabbit and Aphroditty twat stimulator but I swear, it was the book that really got me going. Book Club’s next week and I’ll tell all then.

[email protected]
: Things shaking up here too, but will wait for Book Club to tell. Miss all your faces. What can I bring, Maddie?

[email protected]
: I’m the no potluck lady, remember? Just bring yourself, Sarah, along with the story. Am slightly concerned. Sure you want to wait to tell?

[email protected]
: How sexy, Mad. Can’t wait to hear about this guy. (hope you were careful) If he’s coming back, he must be more than a one-nighter, right? Hate to wait ‘til book club (which is what day again?)

[email protected]
: He’s sort of an enigma. I really don’t know much. He’s a friend of a friend of a close friend. Is that too many steps away from safety? I don’t care. He’s an Israeli sky marshal for El Al and 14 years younger than I am. He’s very dangerous and very sexy.

[email protected]
: Yeah. You gotta watch that and I hope you used a condom.

[email protected]
: Whooo-hooo. I bet he’s really a spy, Maddie. That sky Marshal stuff is probably just a cover. What does the friend do? Does he/she have more friends?

[email protected]
: The spy who loved me. I like that…

I didn’t need to tell them we used about twenty condoms. Not that leaving that out would increase the chances of Kiki contributing to the thread.

[email protected]
: I thought you were only with him one night.

[email protected]
: She was. She’s gloating. But maybe she deserves it since she hadn’t been gettin’ any in so long.

[email protected]
: Don’t mean to gloat but the dearth of sex up to meeting him kind of warrants gloating over the plethora that night. The whole last two years confirms the title of my autobiography, “The Plethora and the Dearth: The Sex Life of the LA Woman.”

[email protected]
: If you moved closer, you’d get more plethora ;). Anyway, happy for you, Maddie. Really. Wish I didn’t have to bust the love-bubble, but I have some bad news that can’t wait. The book drove me to a sexual frustration I couldn’t handle so I confronted Roscoe about the whole going off Viagra issue. I told him I needed sex and wanted his input on how I was supposed to do that, considering I’m married to him and he isn’t interested. Well… shocker… Ready? Turns out he
is
interested in sex… just not with me. He’s been having an affair with a more age-appropriate 60 year-old woman in his firm. Am devastated. Love you all.

After Jelicka’s email, there was a flurry of phone calling. She sobbed to each of us in turn. She told me she wasn’t going to mediate her divorce, not that I could have helped her since I had intimate knowledge of her life—both their lives actually, all the way down to their desire to sear food.

What struck me as particularly sad, though, was that she admitted one of the reasons she’d married an older guy in the first place was because she thought she’d always look pretty good next to him. And she did. So it was a shock to her that Roscoe would now choose to be with someone closer to his own age. But I guess it proves that age is one of those relative things and not every older man wants a younger woman. After all, sexual thrills only last so long and take up a tiny portion of each twenty-four-hour period—that is, if you’re lucky to have sex that often. At the end of the day, you gotta like each other and I suspected Jelicka and Roscoe just didn’t have a lot to talk about. He and his secretary were the same age and had a lot in common. Why wouldn’t they choose each other?

Then there was Udi and me. Rules didn’t apply. Young Israeli, older shiksa. What did we have in common other than the need to put our bodies together? It might be a fantasy to think it could be more, but it was a fantasy I was willing to indulge, even if he broke my heart in the end. The sex was just too good not to.

Chapter 14

I opened the door and there he stood—my God of Eros. Even after sixteen hours in the air, which in another century would be akin to killing a buffalo or scaling a low mountain range to get to me, he lifted me into his arms and planted kisses all over my face, head and neck. 

“Baby, Baby,” he whispered, warm and urgent.

I glimpsed us bound to each other in the hall mirror, the arrangement of white tulips he’d sent on the table underneath. We looked like a greeting card.

Holding onto each other, it was as if we were lovers of years standing, reuniting after a divisive civil war that had torn us apart. Or, perhaps, as in a soap opera storyline when one of our so-called “friends” leads one of us to believe the other has cheated; then, upon learning the truth, we rush into each others’ arms begging forgiveness. In other words, we clung to each other desperately. We stood in the foyer, hugging for a long time, taking in as much of each other as we could with our clothes on.

“I kept looking out the window,” I said, “willing you to drive down the street. I even went outside a few times, watering plants that are set to automatic sprinkler and to the mailbox, which probably looked really ridiculous to anyone watching, considering the mail doesn’t come until four.”

“Shhh, I’m here now. I missed you so much.” He kissed me passionately, then leaned down and gently parted my lips but held his tongue back, withholding it, teasing me, making me want it more. I
loved
that.

He’d been halfway around the world and back since we’d met, keeping the skies safe, and now I was holding him, my big, strong, gun-toting sky marshal with the beautiful bod. How odd and miraculous that we would meet the way we did and connect on this deep physical level—and at Berggren’s of all places. Couldn’t I have found anyone else to connect with who was a bit more geographically available? Or was Udi attractive and safe precisely
because
he didn’t live anywhere near me? What would have happened with Book Soup Steve or Cullen of Babeland if I’d given
them
a chance?

I sighed those thoughts out of my head and came back to Udi. I would have gone for this guy no matter where I’d met him, no matter who he was. He was so
there
. And he was so there
for me
.

The way he smelled…the same cologne, I remembered, I was smelling now. He must have showered somewhere, somehow. He smelled delicious. He tasted delectable. Better than my fantasies. And he was here . . . and holding me. It was overwhelming. My heart—

“Your heart…it is pounding so strong,” he said, pulling away gently and placing his hand over the place where my heart beat wildly.

“I know. I’ve been pacing the house, waiting for you.”

He smiled, his eyes looking at me with the same desire I’d felt before. He placed my palm on his own chest and grinned. I felt a beat that matched my own beating heart. “You are so beautiful.”

I know I blushed. I wanted to disagree. I just felt embarrassed. It’s my own shit, I know. Eighty-year-old women can be beautiful. But I guess I just felt like I couldn’t possibly be that most superlative of descriptions when there were so many younger, more “beautiful” women to compare me to. But the way he was looking at me somehow made me believe him.

“Do other men not tell you that?” His hand felt divine on my cheek. “You have so much power, you do not know. You make me weak and I love it.”

Did it matter in the big scheme of things if I had power or if I was or wasn’t beautiful? No. Did it matter to me that he felt this way and was confident enough to tell me so without fearing I’d use it against him? Absolutely. I started to cry. I felt like he “got” me. And that was all I had ever wanted. I know our love affair was very new—we were still pre-honeymoon phase—but I couldn’t recall any man, in the beginning of any relationship I’d ever had, speaking to me so ingenuously, with what seemed to be absolutely no guile.

He glanced around the living room then lifted me up. “Where do you want to go?”

“Oh my God, anywhere,” I moaned. “There.” I pointed toward the solarium, which was close, didn’t involve stairs and provided privacy, a day bed, beanbag chair and lush light for hours of uninterrupted love-making. He carried me effortlessly and lay me down on the day bed.

I’d worn clothes that could be easily removed, but they just seemed to fall off me.  Udi’s clothes also seemed to vanish. Or did I rip them off? I can’t say for sure, but soon he, too, was naked…moving inside me, answering my every need before I could ask.

I screamed so loud, anyone walking by would surely hear me, but I didn’t care. Our fucking transcended all bounds of propriety and we couldn’t stop ourselves until, of course, his body stopped.

So this is where you came in. Or, I should say we’ve caught up to the beginning, where Udi and I were having fantastic sex on the day bed in my solarium. Then he collapsed on top of me, dead as dust. Poor Udi. Poor me.

PART II

Chapter 15

Udi’s body was still lying peacefully on the day bed, an angelic expression on his face. I seemed to have lost some time in there somewhere, but I did finally manage to get out from under him, using the “push, shift an inch, lift, scooch” method, and to keep myself together long enough to close his beautiful eyes and make a phone call.

I still couldn’t get over the fact that we’d been going at each other with wild abandon only a couple of hours before. I’d never had sex like that, except, of course, the first time he and I had sex, and now we’d never have sex like that again. My wonderful new lover was dead. It was horrible. I’d already had one round of crying and I was poised for another.

Over my shoulder, Quinn was staring down at Udi. She’d been the Muff I’d called for assistance because she knew more about him than the others, and she was also the one with the fewest personal responsibilities after four PM.

“Wow,” she said. “That must be
some kinda sex
when the guy dies coming.”

“Yeah. Some kinda sex,” I sighed, my eyes filling.

“I’m really sorry, Maddie. What do you want me to do? Should we call the police?”

“I don’t know. Probably. Help me brainstorm first. I don’t understand how this whole thing happened so I’m not sure what to do. He must have had a heart attack. That’s sort of how it happens, right? Maybe he had a congenital heart defect or something.”

“Yeah, maybe. But he’s pretty young,” Quinn said.

“Maybe he wasn’t as healthy as he looks. The sex
was
great and very athletic but I swear, he just died. I mean, he came and then he just . . .
went
.” There was so little one could say.

“I don’t want to be unsympathetic, but he sure is a lot better looking than you led me to believe.”

“I showed you his picture,” I protested, referring to a shot Berggren had forwarded to me from the dinner party, in which Berggren was also featured, and which I had then forwarded to Quinn.

“Pictures lie. His didn’t.” She took a step closer to him. “And nice…you know,
thing
, too—cock, penis, pink prober.”

“That’s enough.” I blew my nose.

“Sorry. What’s his name again?”

“Udi. Udi Hamoudi.”

“Udi— he looks really peaceful,” she said.

“Hopefully he is. Hopefully he died happy.”

“What about Udi’s booty? As nice as his fruity?”

“Would you
stop
. I finally find a guy I like and now he’s dead. You could be more, I don’t know . . .
aware
.”

That’s when I started crying again.

Quinn put her arm around my shoulder and leaned into me, brushing the tears from my cheek. I know she was
trying
to make me feel better, but she didn’t appreciate the depth of my pain. I was a bit alarmed by the depth of my pain, to tell the truth.

“Maddie, listen to me. He’s just the one who reawakened you. You said yourself you didn’t think it would last with the guy.”

“I know what I
said
. But maybe I didn’t really mean it.”

I flopped down onto Lila’s beanbag chair and got my heel caught on the cream-colored, loosely woven chenille throw I’d bought on sale at Crate & Barrel, suddenly realizing why it had been on sale—it was actually a web. And I was stuck in it.

“Oh, sweetheart, you’ll find someone else. You’ve been meeting a lot of guys lately. There was that bookstore guy and the one you met in Babeland sounded promising, too—even if it is a slightly odd place to meet someone. Then there was Udi and, even though he’s no longer with us, things were looking up.”

“But I killed him. You said so yourself.” By this point I was really sobbing.  Luckily Lila had called to ask if she could go home with a friend, so I was free to let the emotions, along with any fluids, rip.

“You didn’t kill him, Maddie. He died. He would have died no matter who he was having sex with.”

“Thanks,” I said as insincerely as I could.

“On the other hand, you shouldn’t sell yourself short,” she went on. “
You
ended up being the one who fucked him to death. I’ve never had that kind of sex.”

Clearly, she was being insensitive. But I know she was just trying to be practical. After all, he did look like he’d died happy. And it wasn’t as if, now that he was dead, I needed to pretend we’d shared an intimate, longtime relationship that demanded a lot of morbid carrying on, as in the ritual people usually act out for dead friends and relatives.

“Did you love him?” she asked me. “You’re acting like you loved him. I thought he was just a new friend with excellent benefits.”

“Well, he was… but you know, you have great sex with someone and the mind… extrapolates.”

“What does the mind do?” Quinn’s face twisted into a puzzled frown.

“Sometimes lust starts merging with love. It’s unavoidable.”

“Tell me again where you met him?”

“At one of Berggren’s dinner parties,” I replied.

“Right, hence that picture with Berggren and the late great Udi. Does that woman have a dinner party every week?”

I was suddenly reminded that she and Berggren didn’t really like each other.

“Just about,” I said. “I thought he was vetted because he came with the fiancé of Berggren’s producing partner. Yesterday I called to tell her I was seeing him a second time and she got all excited and told me she’d do some snooping for me. But her partner, ZsaZsi, who’s engaged to Udi’s friend, Nissim, didn’t know much about him and Nissim wasn’t around to talk to. He was supposed to call back but he didn’t, which I took to mean that maybe Udi was one of those guys with a woman in every city El Al flies to. Maybe Nissim didn’t think he’d be able to hide that and thought I’d figure it out if we talked, but I truthfully didn’t care if there were other women because, I mean, I didn’t really want a relationship—I don’t think.” Tears started forming in my eyes again.

Quinn squished in next to me on the beanbag and took my hand. “Are you listening to yourself? You really didn’t want a relationship… That’s what you said.”

“Not knowing if I’m ready for another serious, committed relationship and having your new lover die on top of you are two very different things, Quinn. I wish you would stop treating this so cavalierly.”

“It could have been drugs,” she suggested. “Or—and I might have just read this—air quality? I think the air in Israel causes health problems.”

“No, it doesn't; no more than anywhere else. Plus he said he didn’t take drugs because of his job. I thought about asking you for some pot but he told me he gets tested all the time and can’t smoke it.”

"Too bad," said Quinn, who is the Muffia's connection to premiere Humboldt County Pot. She's always looking to hook people up. “What kind of job does he have?”

“He’s a sky marshal for El Al.”

She looked stumped. “Did you tell me that?”

“I emailed everyone.”

“I guess I just read the word Israeli and thought—
macho, arrogant
. But now I can see how he lifted you into all those positions you were talking about. Did you know El Al is the safest airline in the world?”

“No. I did not know that.”

“Jelicka told me that. She’s also the one who told me Israeli men have a terrible reputation.”

“How would she know?”

“She went to a kibbutz when she was twenty and got date-raped.”

“You can get date-raped anywhere.”

“Who said you couldn’t?”

“Look,” I said, getting annoyed at how little progress we were making. “I don’t care about Israeli men’s reputations. As I’ve pointed out a couple of times, we weren’t having a
relationship
. It was purely physical. So whatever the elements were that went into making him the man he is, or was, don’t matter. He treated me like a goddess.”

By this point I’d reined myself back from the abyss of tears and was trying to regroup. “So what should I do?”

“First you need to find out more about this fiancé. And then next of kin and stuff like that. I’d start there.”

“You wouldn’t call the cops.”

“Not yet. It’s too impersonal. Do you know the friend’s—I mean the fiancé’s number?”

“I could get it.”

Quinn got up and started pacing the length of the solarium. “Have you looked in his pockets?”

“No. I’m sort of afraid to. Aren’t you supposed to leave the scene as untouched as possible?” I asked rhetorically.

“You’re right. Do you have any gloves?”

“Gloves?” It should have been a clue.

She gave me a dead serious expression. “CSI: Special Victims Unit: Agoura Hills.”

I had to smile. “Under the sink.”

She headed into the kitchen and returned with pink rubber up to her elbows. I knew exactly what she was onto now. As she picked Udi’s pants off the floor, she asked, “Can you think of anything else he might have told you about himself?”

It was then that I truly realized that the only thing, or things, I knew about Udi were the things he’d told me, which amounted to almost nothing. He’d told me his name, his age, that he lived in Tel Aviv and what he did for a living. That’s it. And I had no way of knowing if what he’d told me had been the truth.

As a practicing mediator and occasional lawyer, I pride myself on my ability to detect deception—something that doesn’t always follow—but I’d been so attracted to this guy that my radar for bullshit got turned off.

“His name’s not Udi,” Quinn said.

“What? Of course his name’s Udi.”

“Maybe it’s a nickname but this El Al I.D. card says his name is Yehl—Yehlehc—I have no idea how you say this name.”

“Let me see,” I demanded, extricating myself from the chenille and pulling myself up off the beanbag.

“Yeah—you’re right. It’s different. But let’s call him Udi.”

Quinn took a few steps toward Udi then turned back to me with a conspiratorial look on her face. “Did you ever see
Weekend at Bernie’s
?”

As it happened, I had seen the movie, but I didn’t want to encourage a train of thought that could lead to any more bizarre behavior. “I realize you’re a talent agent for a lot of famous movie stars, but life is not a movie.”

“No?” she countered. “
Saving Private Ryan
—life and movie,
Sound of Music
— life and movie.”

“
Pirates of the Caribbean
?” I said. “Not life. And even though it was based on life, I don’t recall anything like this happening in
The Sound of Music
.”

“People died,” she said, totally straight-faced. “Movies inspire life, just like life inspires movies. Remember
Natural Born Killers
?”

“I hope killing is not the kind of behavior filmmakers want to inspire.”

“You keep missing the point,” she insisted.

“Well, what is the point?”

“The point is, we don’t need to come forward right away to tell the police there’s a dead guy in your house.”

“Isn’t that sort of prolonging the inevitable? Won’t I increase my trouble by waiting?”

“If you didn’t have doubts of your own, you would have already called the police. Now you have to explain why you didn’t immediately call nine-one-one.”

“There was no emergency. He was already dead.”

“You don’t need to convince
me
,” Quinn said.

“I can’t call the police.”

“Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. Why can’t you call the police, Madelyn?”

“Because I’m finally close to landing my dream job and I don’t want to jeopardize it.”

“How would it be jeopardized?” she asked. “You didn’t kill him. He just died.”

“Yeah, but this doesn’t look good. Plus Udi’s Israeli, and the job I’m up for is international. They’re not going to hire me if there’s anything like this on my record. I won't be viewed as unbiased when it comes to, say, mediating with the Israeli rowing team."

"How many Israelis row sculls?"

"The point is, some people will always wonder if I killed him.”

That’s when the doorbell rang.

Quinn looked at me. I was pretty sure it wasn’t Lila or the mother of her playdate. As far as I knew, they were on their way to the movies.

“I have no idea.”

“What do you want to do?”

I wanted to crawl away. The whole thing was unbelievably awful. “I thought you were here to help me,” I said. “Muffs together through thick and thin.”

“I
am
here to help you. You just don’t like what I’m offering in the way of help.”

The doorbell rang again.

“Should we answer it?”

I had to think. It seemed obvious that whoever was at the door would know that someone was inside. “Tell them I’ll be out in a minute, and I’ll put his clothes on,” I said, springing to action.