Impersonal Attractions (5 page)

“Okay, okay.” Annie sighed. It was so much easier
answering
ads. She’d done that lots of times. It was like window shopping. This had the potential of being real life. She pursed her lips.

“Well, you know I’m a sucker for a pretty face, but that’s not number one. Tall. Healthy. Athletic, or at least not fat. Some hair, maybe curly. Reasonably good-looking. I’d settle for interesting-looking, if he’s sexy, if the magic’s there.”

“You’re too good-looking to settle, babe. There must be something else you want.”

Annie smiled at Sam’s compliment and thought about her ex-husband Bert’s warning when she had walked out the door six years before.

“It’s going to be tough out there,” he’d said. “You’re no spring chicken anymore.”

He was wrong. Her looks had more than held—she’d gotten better with age. Now, at thirty-seven, Annie was tall, lean, and small-breasted, with what lovers and men friends always called a great ass. She had her Grandmother Rose’s wonderful green eyes and slender, almost perfect hands. Her long, thick, dark blonde hair glinted here and there with a touch of silver. Smile lines at the corners of her eyes and the crook of her mouth had just begun. But Annie felt secure that regardless of age, despite the fact that she was not, had never been, a classically pretty woman, she was a very handsome one.

“So he doesn’t have to be Robert Redford,” Sam was saying. “What else?”

Annie took a deep breath. “Well educated, intelligent, traveled, urbane, mad about me, and funny. Mostly funny.”

“You don’t want much, do you, lady?” Sam laughed.

“Why should I be looking for somebody whose idea of a good wine is Budweiser and lusts after football and Big Macs?”

“Come on, lighten up. I’m teasing.” Sam cleared her throat. “More. I’m beginning to like this. What about,” she paused, “values?” Her voice grew mock serious on the last word.

They laughed together. Annie knew that Sam was thinking of Mario.

Morose Mario, they’d nicknamed him, one of Annie’s ex-lovers. He was a short, intense Marxist, who took all the fun out of everything except sex by worrying about the masses. Annie used to complain to Sam. “Every time we go out to dinner we have to feel guilty. I can always sense the hot breath of three imaginary starving Indians in the backseat.”

“No, I don’t want another Mario,” she said, laughing. “Not that I could ever sleep with anyone who voted for Nixon. But you know, even if old Moroseness’s politics were a pain, he was great in bed. Though I’d like a lot more affection there if I could get it. A hell of a lot more. Some continuing romance would be real nice.”

“Anything else?”

“Money wouldn’t hurt.”

“All in one package? We’ve got a real problem here.”

“Well, hell, you asked. Besides, it’s all just make-believe.”

“No, it’s not,” Sam countered. “It’s just a challenge. Not that you don’t deserve him, my dear. I just think he’s going to be hell to find.” She read her notes back to Annie. “It’s all here. Just boil it down so it won’t cost you a fortune and get it in before deadline.”

Annie could hear someone calling Sam’s name in the background.

“Listen, something’s happening here. I’ve got to go.” And she hung up.

Five minutes later, she called back. Her voice was strained and tight. Annie knew that voice of Sam’s, the one when the news was very bad.

“There has been a really ugly murder,” she was saying, “in Noe Valley. Sondra Weinberg, Judge Weinberg’s niece. They just found her, but it probably happened a couple of days ago.”

“How did she…”

Sam interrupted. “Strangled. And a knife. You really don’t want to know. And you won’t read all the details in the paper.”

“Rape too?”

“Yep, rape and torture and disfigurement—and I’ve got to go down to the morgue.”

“Oh, Sam.” Annie didn’t know how she could do it. “Could this be the Mt. Diablo killer—come to town?”

“Don’t think so. A different style. Maybe a burglary, but it’s rare to see this kind of brutality. When you surprise a burglar he usually runs. Or if he kills, he just does it, grabs the stuff, and gets out. Maybe it was a lover.”

Annie shuddered. The things people do in the name of love.

Sam’s voice got even tighter. “I have a terrible feeling about this, A. It’s so sick. It terrifies me that the man who did this is out there. He’s going to do more.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No, but I feel it in my bones.”

There was a long silence on the line.

Finally Sam spoke again, and some of the tension was gone. “I know we’re supposed to take Quynh to the park tomorrow. I think I can still make it. But if I can’t, apologize to her for me and have a good time. Okay?”

“Right. We’ll wait for you at the Conservatory. If you’re not there by noon, we’ll assume you’re not coming.”

“Good,” said Sam. “I hope to see you then. You have a good night. Sweet dreams.”

“You too.”

“And Annie,” she added softly, “make sure you double lock your door.”

EIGHT

Qu
ynh Nguyen lived in Outer Richmond, or the Avenues as the neighborhood was called, with numbered north-south streets running from the western edge of Pacific

Heights to the ocean. The real-estate values dropped as the street numbers grew larger and the intensity of the fog rolling in from the Pacific grew thicker. There were many days out in the Avenues that never saw the sun while downtown basked under blue skies.

Trees were scarce here, stucco houses close together. Old Plymouths and Dodges parked in driveways blocked the sidewalks. Large families, many of them Chinese, were crowded into floor-through flats.

One of the main east-west arteries was Clement, called Little Chinatown for the ever growing number and variety of Chinese restaurants. Mandarin, Szechuan, Hunan had been old hat in this neighborhood for a decade. Now San Francisco’s foodies, ever in search of new taste sensations, were trekking to Clement to dine on Shanghai Strange Flavor Eggplant, Peking-style Capital Sauce Pork Ribbons, and to shop for peony blossoms, tea melon, and water chestnut powder for their own kitchens.

Annie had written a piece for
Gourmet
on the “new” Oriental food on Clement: Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese. Quynh’s Uncle Quan owned one of the avenue’s small Vietnamese restaurants she had reviewed. It was called Saigon.

Quan thought of his ownership as a miracle. That was also the word he used to describe his having escaped Vietnam when the last American forces pulled out. As miraculous as the simple fact of his being alive.

Quynh’s parents hadn’t been so lucky. Quynh didn’t know how they had died. They simply never came home again. A week after they disappeared their house did, too, its bomb-blasted pieces flying in orange and red arcs through the air. Quynh watched it go up from a neighbor’s house a block away while she was eating a bowl of fish and rice.

Suddenly there was nothing. She wandered, crying, a little girl in a once-pink
dress
until, one day, an American soldier picked her up and took her to a Catholic orphanage. It was there that her Uncle Quan found her a year later.

She had cried on the plane all the way across the Pacific. The orphanage was the only refuge she had ever known from the horror of the world outside. To her, airplanes were instruments of death, poised at any moment to spit destruction. She sat braced through the endless hours, waiting for the bombing to start.

She had been told by the Red Cross worker holding her hand that her Uncle Quan would be waiting for her in San Francisco. But what was San Francisco?

It was the gorgeous white city on the hills where her uncle had found a new home, where he took her and fed her and tucked her in bed in her very own room.

It was where the bombs never fell.

Quynh already knew some English, in addition to her Vietnamese and French. Her language skills pyramided with the help of her American schoolmates and the staff of Uncle Quan’s restaurant, where he insisted on English being used.

“You must practice,” he said. “This is your country now. You must learn to speak its language if you want to get ahead.” The rule went for Quynh, too, whether she was simply sitting on a stool chopping vegetables, running errands, or occasionally taking orders in the dining room when Uncle Quan was shorthanded.

It was there that Annie had first seen Quynh, serious and businesslike, and had fallen in love with her.

She wasn’t a child to be approached with “Aren’t you a cute little waitress?” Not that that would have been Annie’s style. After all, she herself had been an only child born to older parents, and had stood on a stool behind the counter of their small neighborhood grocery store when she was six, ringing up cash sales on the register and writing up charges in little account books with customers’ names penciled across the top.

She and Quynh discussed the menu seriously. Annie explained that she wrote about food for magazines. Quynh said matter-of-factly that she was a writer too. A poet. Annie asked if she might see some of her work the next time she came in and they made a date for dinner the following week.

Quynh’s poetry was lovely, spare and lyrical. It was wise way beyond her ten years, but then, so was she. Soon Annie was dining with Quan and Quynh three and four times a week—with a good deal more frequency than her enthusiasm for Vietnamese food warranted.

One day she asked Quan if she might take Quynh to the zoo. He hesitated a moment, and she could see him battling demons in his mind.

“Only for a couple of hours, Quan,” she reassured him. “I’ll bring her back by three.”

They fed peanuts to the monkeys, the elephants, and themselves. Quynh somberly considered her first chili dog and pronounced it terrific. She stood entranced before the cages of lions and tigers. Annie had to tear her away from the snow leopard to get her home on time as promised. But she knew that it was a very important promise and she was nervous as a boy on his first date about the 3 P
.
M
.
deadline. She knew that each second past that would be a horror for Quynh’s uncle.

At ten minutes before three, they swept through the door of Saigon to meet Quan’s broad smile, matched by one on Quynh’s oval face, the first Annie had ever seen.

The little girl raced into Quan’s arms and jumped headlong into a recital of her adventure. Annie couldn’t understand a word.

“English, English, Quynh,” Quan reminded her. He tousled her long, black ponytail with a gentleness that made Annie look away.

“The monkeys were so silly,” Quynh was saying. “They were like the boys in my class at school.” She made a face. “And the very best were the cats, the lions.” Her eyes grew large. “The cougars, the panthers, but the very very best was the snow leopard. It was absolutely…” she searched for the word, “absolutely
mythical
.”

Quan and Annie laughed with one another over the little girl’s head, but not aloud.

“Now I must go and write a poem about the leopard,” she said, scampering down from Quan’s lap.

She turned toward Annie and said with a slight bow of her head, “Thank you for the monkeys and the scrumptious chili dog and the absolutely, perfectly mythical snow leopard.” Then she stepped forward a little. “Could you please lean down?” Annie did and Quynh threw her thin arms around her neck. “Thank you for an absolutely, perfectly mythical day, Tante Annie,” she said, and kissed her on the cheek.

Annie barely had time to hug her back before Quynh disappeared through the kitchen door to tell the staff about her day.

That had settled it. Quan and Annie shared a pot of tea and he told her Quynh’s history and she told him her own—her life as an only child in Atlanta, her marriage to Bert, and her feelings about his children from his first marriage, whom she no longer saw. She talked about the thoughts she’d entertained of having a child herself or adopting one, but how both those choices had seemed so hard, especially for a woman who also wanted to write.

How recently she’d been thinking of calling Big Sisters to find a child to whom she could be friend, godmother, aunt.

“I think you’ve found her,” said Quan.

“I think you’re right,” she answered, then she leaned across the table and kissed him on the cheek.

A few days later Quynh presented Annie with a poem about the snow leopard artfully quilled on a piece of handmade paper. With Quan’s permission, Annie had given Quynh the eight-week-old male Abyssinian kitten, whom she promptly named Hudson.

“Why Hudson?”

“After Henry Hudson,” Quynh answered. “He was a great explorer, like cats are. We’re studying him in school.”

“Why not Henry?”

Quynh gave Annie the patient deadpan and shrug all kids use when adults say something unutterably stupid.

“They didn’t name it the Henry River. Or the George Monument. Or the Abraham…”

“Okay, okay,” Annie interrupted. “I get it. Do you like him?”

“I
love
him.” Quynh squeezed the kitten’s small body and he scrambled straight up her front and licked her nose. Obviously the feeling was mutual.