Impersonal Attractions (2 page)

She was going to be late for this lunch with Sam if she didn’t hurry. She could have taken her car, an old yellow Volkswagen convertible named Agatha, but parking in the city was such an ordeal that it was quicker to walk the fifteen or so blocks. Up the hill she climbed, skirting the edge of Alta Plaza Park, bracing her knees for the torturously steep downhill slope, passing one gorgeous house after another until she reached the flatlands and the glitzy, boutiqued commercial strip of Union Street.

Samantha was waiting for Annie at The Deli, sipping bottled water and holding down the best table in the restaurant. The best table, the whitest teeth, the shiniest black curls—all seemed to be Samantha Storey’s birthright, along with her grandfather’s money. She was the kind of woman who entered a room and made you want to go home, lose five pounds, redo your hair, and get dressed all over again. You also might want to kill her, until, like Annie, you discovered that behind the
Vogue
cover was the best friend you could ever have.

Annie and Sam had met through a personal ad in the
Bay Guardian.
Annie had been “browsing,” she said, when she found an ad by a gay man looking for a lover who sounded just right for her friend Hoyt. Hoyt answered and found his true love, Emmett—whose old high-school chum was Samantha.

As Hoyt and Emmett were becoming lovers, Annie and Sam became the best of friends. For the past three years they had seen each other at least once a week and talked on the phone almost daily.

Sam’s sisters were in Southern California. Annie was an only child. They listened to one another through the little things (“Do you think I should shorten my gray skirt?”) and the big (“I think I have a lump in my left breast”). They were family.

“Would you look at this place?” Sam waved her beautifully manicured hand.

Annie looked. The restaurant was done in standard California: redwood, ferns, a sliding greenhouse roof, a carved, Art Nouveau bar.

“So?”

“Couldn’t you go blind from the glitter of gold chains?” Sam nodded in the direction of the stag line at the bar.

“I thought you meant interior decoration. I didn’t know we were window shopping. Aren’t we eating?” Annie reached for the menu.

“Since when can’t we do both at the same time?”

“Since there’s never anything here to choose from. Unless you’ve developed a sudden yen for coke dealers or twelve-year-olds.” Annie looked past the gold chains to a handsome, very young man sipping a beer at the end of the bar. “I’d rather choose from the menu.” She glanced down at it then closed it decisively. “I’ll have the cheese blintzes. You have the pastrami. We’ll share.”

“Why, Annie Tannenbaum! Dairy and meat!” Sam clucked.

“God, what would I do without you, the guardian of my Jewish soul? My mother thanks you, my grandmother thanks you, my Aunt Essie thanks you.”

It was an old joke. Samantha, with her dark curls, tawny complexion, and high cheekbones looked Sephardic—with a great nose job. She was as WASP as a Cabot. But in her soul sang the songs of the shtetl. She had always wanted to be Jewish and often talked about converting, which always made fair-haired, green-eyed Annie laugh.

“You want my guilt? My mother’s chicken soup? I’ll trade you even-steven for your grandfather.”

Sam’s mother’s father. The wily one who had come to California without a dime in his jeans and had parlayed the sale of pickups to Okies into the largest truck dealership in the state. Who had invested his profits in thousands of acres of the San Fernando Valley before anybody else could see which way the wind was blowing. By the time others figured it out, several pretty millions were permanently ensconced in Sam’s trust fund.

“No thanks. Why don’t I just buy lunch instead?” Sam caught the waitress’s eye and they ordered, including another Calistoga water for Sam.

Sam drank only coffee and water. On-again, off-again, a part-time Southern California rebel, part-time debutante, she had leap-frogged her way through Beverly Hills High, several medicine cabinets of recreational drugs, a society wedding to a stockbroker, with Alfred Hitchcock among the guests, a divorce, Stanford Law School, a hard-driving associateship, and full-blown alcoholism by the time she was twenty-six. With the help of a good shrink and AA, she had left the law, found herself, and had not touched liquor for the past ten years.

Annie picked up the thread of their conversation. “What if you did meet somebody in a place like this? How could you ever tell anyone that you met in a singles bar?”

“This isn’t a singles bar. This is a restaurant,” Sam replied.

“It’s a fine line, a very fine line,” Annie muttered around a mouthful of blintz. “But I did talk with a woman the other day who met her husband next door.”

Next door was Perry’s, the original and most famous of the fern bars along Union Street, where beautiful bodies were a dime a dozen and the fine line among restaurants, boutiques, and pick-up bars was hazy. A nearby intersection with watering holes on three of its corners was so infamous for hearts and bodies colliding amid the tinkle of ice and crystal that it was nicknamed the “Bermuda Triangle.”

Annie continued, “This woman had stopped in Perry’s one night for a quick drink with a girl friend from out of town who wanted to see the six-deep ultimate singles bar. When this long, tall Texan walked in complete with ten-gallon hat and boots, she turned to her friend and laughed, ‘Now there’s the man I’ve been waiting for all my life.’ Turned out he was. Also turned out he was an oil millionaire.”

Sam groaned.

“I know. It’s not fair, is it? Well, it’s not fair to me. After all, Sam, you don’t need a millionaire.”

Complaining about the paucity of good men in their lives was a frequent theme of their conversations.

“Want to hear another one that’ll make you sick?”

“Shoot.”

“Okay, this one’s a friend of a friend of a friend.”

“Just tell it.”

“Who’s the writer here?”

“You’re the writer, I’m the reporter. Who, what, where, when, why?”

Annie ignored her and went ahead in her own style. “Anyway, this Frenchwoman answered her phone in Paris. Wrong number. But a charming man. They started talking. One thing led to another and now they’re married. He’s Greek, a shipping tycoon, no less. In addition to lovely, sweet, handsome, gentle—”

Sam interrupted. “This could drive me back to booze.”

“Wait. I have another one.”

“One more and that’s it.”

“Okay. My friend Jane—you remember Jane—anyway, she has a friend, Estelle, who’s lived over by Grace Cathedral for ten years. Knew practically no one in her building. Anyway, she got a home computer. One day there was a notice in the elevator. Seemed as though someone else in the building was getting her computer stuff on his TV screen.”

“Just a minute,” Sam protested.

“I don’t understand the complexities of computers. This is a true story. You want to hear the end of it?”

“I think I know it.”

“Of course you do. Estelle responded to the note in the elevator with an apology and an offer to meet with whoever it was to talk about the problem. Turned out to be the man who’d lived directly above her for five years, whom she’d never met. They worked out the crossed signals, and now they’re a two-computer family.”

“Is there a moral to these stories?”

“Sure. You want to meet a nice man? Hang out in Perry’s, talk to wrong numbers, get a computer. What do I know? Am I married? Am I an expert?”

“No, but as they say, sweetheart, you’re writing the book.”

Annie laughed. She was indeed. It was called
Meeting Cute.
The book was a collection of anecdotes about how people met. It began as notes in her journal—her own adventures and tales people told her. As the notes grew, the idea for the book began to take shape.

Millie, the New York literary agent who had sold her collection of restaurant reviews, thought it was a great idea. Singles were a hot market, Millie thought. Tell me about it, said Annie.

She’d been single again for six years since her divorce from Bert. And though she hadn’t run across Prince Charming, she’d sure met her share of frogs.

For example, the tall, Christlike young man playing Frisbee in Golden Gate Park. He’d asked her to hold his shopping bag, then treated her to garlic pizza. On their second date she’d held the same shopping bag while he played karate with strong, young Japanese men in white jackets belted in bright colors. On their third date she learned that the bag held five thousand Quaaludes.

But whether the meetings took or not, the possibilities of who might be around that next corner continued to fascinate her.

One of the things about being married was that when the phone rang she knew it was never going to be someone she had just met in a grocery checkout line asking her to a ball.

Which was always a possibility now. Especially with the Marina Safeway so close at hand.

The Safeway was just across the street from the Marina Green, where the city’s most beautiful bodies ran against the backdrop of Alcatraz, the Golden Gate, the hills of Marin County. Scenery and cruising just didn’t get much better than that.

After running off a pound or two the pretty people in Adidas and running shorts would jam the Safeway. Cheeks flushed, bathed in a light glow of perspiration, they would cool down while wheeling their baskets around, picking up an artichoke here, a yogurt there, and, with any luck, another trim body to take home. Who knew how many of San Francisco’s healthiest couples had met over a half gallon of chocolate chip wearing little more than their underwear?

It was as good a way as any. Better than some.

A woman she knew named Trudy swore by puppies. “It’s simple,” Trudy had said. “Who can resist a darling puppy? I just get one and walk it at six o’clock when everyone’s coming home from work. You’d be amazed how many men I’ve met when they stopped to pet a cute little cocker.”

Annie had never wanted to know what she did with the puppies when they got too big to help her meet cute.

“Meeting cute” was movie talk for the serendipitous coming together of couples like Tracy and Hepburn, Stewart and Kelly. A dropped glove, a mistaken room assignment—it was a phrase Annie had always liked, and so it became her title.

When dessert was suggested Sam and Annie both protested. The waitress just patted her rubber-soled foot. She’d heard this a thousand times before. They looked like chocolate cheesecake to her.

She was right.

“Two forks,” Annie said.

“You’re going to have to take your fanny to exercise five times a week if you keep this up,” said Sam, who never put an ounce on her curvy but slender 5′ 7″ frame. Not that Annie was ever anything but thin. But to her mind, the whole point of exercise was cheesecake without guilt.

“Can’t go any more often,” said Annie, adding saccharin to her coffee. She was addicted to the stuff in the pink envelopes. “Three workouts a week is the limit. No time. My classes started again last week, remember?”

“Right. How’re they going?”

“Okay.” She shrugged. “It’s too early to tell. But I hope I have some live wires. I want to use them as guinea pigs.”

“What do you mean?” Sam asked through a mouthful of dessert.

“Not exactly guinea pigs. ‘Contributors’ would be more like it. More stories for the book. Their first writing assignment is a piece on the most interesting way they ever met anyone. Better than ‘How I Spent My Summer Vacation,’ don’t you think?”

A couple of years earlier Annie had escaped from full-time teaching for almost full-time at her typewriter. A regular food and restaurant column in a city magazine plus free-lance assignments had brought in enough cash to keep her in a state of ecstatic poverty, delighted to be doing what she’d always wanted. She didn’t mind supplementing her income with a couple of evening classes in creative writing. San Francisco State was a far cry from a high-school English classroom, and it was nice to keep her hand in.

Sam’s writing was of a different sort. In the process of saving her life from the bottle she’d discovered that she’d gone to law school only to impress her father, the attorney. The things she really liked about law were the writing of briefs and murder. She was a real bloodhound when it came to gore.

So she put it all together and became Samantha Storey, Girl Reporter, Cops and Courts Beat,
San Francisco Chronicle.
It didn’t hurt that one of her uncles owned a big chunk of the paper.

Not that Sam didn’t earn both her stripes and her keep. She could live for weeks on coffee and adrenaline when a story was hot. And there had been a lot of opportunity for a reporter with a specialty in murder during the past few years in the Bay Area.

For a while, Santa Cruz County, fifty miles south of the city, had been dubbed the “U.S. Murder Capital.” Three separate maniacs, John Linley Frazier, Herbert Mullin, and Edmund Kemper had been killing people wholesale. They were all behind bars, and the Santa Cruz Mountains were open to hikers and picnickers once again.

But now Mt. Diablo wasn’t. In the past year three women hikers had been brutally murdered on its sunny slopes in the country just east of Oakland. Having proved her mettle as a cub in Santa Cruz, Sam was the
Chronicle
’s
principal reporter on the story.