Impersonal Attractions (7 page)

Tall, attractive, UC professor who likes sailing, great restaurants, and fine wines seeks Modiglianiesque woman for good times and laughter. Late 30’s, East Coast bkgrnd preferred.

It had been just after her divorce. She had run her mind over what she remembered of Art History 101 and envisioned a long, thin Modigliani lady done in blue. She dropped the professor a note.

He called and asked her to meet him at his place in Berkeley on Tuesday at seven.

She was a little apprehensive about the setup. She preferred meeting in a public place for coffee or a drink. Then she could make a quick getaway. But it would probably be okay. At seven, at least she’d get dinner.

Wrong. It was dinnertime for Bruce, but not for her. She had stumbled up the dark back steps of his apartment near the university campus on a miserable, cold, rainy night to find him frying a single pork chop. He was leaning over his grimy stove in an old, dark brown, wool bathrobe that did nothing to glamorize his thin, hairless chest.

He did ask if she’d eaten and he offered her something out of a crusty saucepan that looked like Chinese cabbage and tofu with snake sauce. No thank you.

They talked about books, degrees earned, credentials for ten long minutes. The desultory conversation hung around the kitchen like an old fart.

Whenever she was uncomfortable Annie would grow stiffer and stiffer, jaw locked. What little she said on this occasion plopped through clenched teeth like cold molasses.

She kept thinking, “Why are you asking me these dumb questions? What right do you have to know about my life, you cheap creep?”

But she didn’t say it. She smiled as nicely as she could and said she really didn’t think this was going anywhere. She wished him well, but thought that she would be on her way.

“Fine with me,” Bruce said. “I don’t know why you wasted my time. You’re not a Modigliani, too skinny and flat-chested.”

She didn’t need to hear this from a man with greasy lips dressed in an ugly brown bathrobe.

“What exactly do you mean?” Her enunciation could have drilled a hole in his kitchen wall.

“You’re not buxom, big, round.” His hand drew circles in front of his chest. “You know, Rubenesque.”

“Can’t you keep your artists straight?” Her voice was low and soft, the way it got when she was very, very angry. “If you wanted Rubenesque, why the hell didn’t you say Rubenesque, idiot?” And she slammed out the door.

Driving through the pouring rain, she decided she was still too mad to go straight home. She stopped in a neighborhood bar out on Clement, where the men tended to be young, bearded types in jeans. They drank beer, wore flannel shirts, and were more likely to be lumberjacks visiting from the northwest than professors.

She found a bar stool next to a tall curly-haired Idaho cowboy nicknamed Bugs. He didn’t know Rubens or Modigliani from a hole in the ground, but he did know an awful lot about smiling and buying a lady a cognac while complimenting her pretty green eyes. She had ended the evening with Bugs, dancing to the jukebox and laughing.

*

She had read almost all the way to the end of the last column and was beginning to think they’d left it out when she spotted it, right there with the other Ws.

What I’d really like is a funny, tall, attractive, maybe Jewish, successful, articulate, sexy, 35-45, honest man, ready to consider life with me, a woman of similar description. 8 out of 10 will do. Photo appreciated/returned. Box 42S.

Well, there it was. Right out there for the whole world to see. What kind of doors was that going to open? She’d just have to wait for Box 42S to fill and she’d see.

TEN

An
nie started poring through interview notes and kept at it for hours. Finally taking a break, she yawned and stretched, then rotated her neck in a circle. The popping and crunching sounded like gravel. Maybe she would see Sam’s chiropractor after all. She decided it was time to read the morning paper, which she hadn’t had time to look at since she’d picked it up outside her apartment door.

Where had she put it? She glanced around her living room, then paused to
really
look at it. She often thought how lucky she was to have found this place, this apartment she loved.

She adored the thick-walled twenties architecture, large rooms, tall ceilings, rich moldings, hardwood floors, and the bay windows in the living room. She had more closet space than friends of hers in New York City had apartment. French doors separated the small dining room from the living room. From the large entry way left to the living room was an arch, partially filled by a ceiling-sweeping broadleaved corn plant that seemed to thrive on her rules.

She watered her plants once a week, fed them fertilizer once a month. If they wanted a new pot, they could go out and get one.

To the right off the entryway was the rose-colored bathroom with its original cabinetry, including a built-in
dressing table on top of which rested a gold-and-black celluloid Deco vanity set: brush and comb, mirror, and a bevy of little boxes for pins, powder, pretties. Silver beads, ribbons, and pearls draped the frame of a large, speckled mirror. The original tub stretched the width of the unusually large room.

She had furnished the rose, white, and blue apartment with the few good pieces of furniture that had survived her marriage: a tapestried Jacobean Revival chair, a Queen Anne dining table and chairs, a small golden-oak Mission table. A stained-glass lampshade on a Deco base stood in one corner. An antique rosewood clock perpetually claimed it to be 4:10. Her home was feminine, comfortable, eclectic.

Scattered about, tucked into the wall of white bookcases, were a multitude of small objects—photographs, remembrances of good times past. Red leather boxes from a trip long ago to Florence. A tiny metal alligator whose head and tail had moved very slowly since her childhood. Photos of Quynh and Hudson, her mother and father, herself in second grade, Sam wearing a beekeeper’s hat, smiling through the green gauze.

Annie was a nester. And this fifth-floor corner aerie was a most comfortable nest.

She finally found the newspaper under the coffee table. Sam’s byline jumped out at her from page one.

The story was about the Mt. Diablo killer.

Just after the third murder there an elderly couple had been shot to death in Diablo Valley, a nearby hamlet. Their son, the suspected murderer, had been on the run for a week, writing letters to the police, the paper, and to Sam, until he had finally turned himself in. The police found him patiently waiting for them at a telephone booth with a small arsenal in his blood-smeared trunk.

He was one of those crazy geniuses, frustrated by his inability to communicate his visions to others. No one understood what he was trying to say, including his parents. Sam’s profile of him was masterful. But, she asked, was this the Mt. Diablo murderer? The proximity made one think so—but then, one wanted to think so. To think that the brutal killings that kept away the weekend hikers were now over.

Annie called to congratulate Sam on the piece, but got her answering machine.

“Nice going, Sherlock,” she said after the beep.

Everybody she knew had a machine or a beeper or a service. Sometimes it was like a long tennis volley, messages left back and forth with no human contact. One of these days, she thought, the machines are going to start calling each other without us.

As if on cue, her phone rang. She started. It was David, her sometime lover. She pictured his wide mouth clenching a cigarette. He liked to pretend he was Humphrey Bogart, talking while smoke curled up through his fair hair.

“Hi, Annie, whatcha doing?” he purred. No matter what time it was, David’s voice always sounded as if it were 2 A
.
M
.
and he had just rolled over in bed.

“Working. What’s on your mind?”

“A movie.”

Annie’s eyes narrowed.
“
What
movie?” David had been trying to get her to go to a porno flick with him for months. She had seen a couple with Bert when they were married and found them unutterably boring and depressing.

“No, this isn’t what you think. It’s starring this really gorgeous girl, Marilyn Chambers.”

“Don’t you Marilyn Chambers me, David. I know exactly who she is. It’s
Behind the Green Door,
isn’t it?”

He laughed. “Loosen up, Annie, it’ll do you good.”

She didn’t think so.

“Is that your best offer?”

“Of course not.” His voice was low and insinuating. “We could always stay home and find something to do.”

They made a date to do just that. After she hung up Annie went to the bathroom and took a long look at herself in the mirror.

You always think you can get by with that, don’t you? she asked herself. Someone to fill in the gaps, to get you through until Rich Right shows up. But it never feels good enough, does it? That cold, in the meantime, in between time, comfort.

*

Later Sam returned her call.

“I loved the story, Sammie. Page one! Is this going to make you rich and famous?”

“Jealousy will get you nowhere, my dear.” Annie could hear the happy excitement in her voice. They chatted for a few minutes about her scoop. Sam had received rare praise indeed, a complimentary call from the oak-paneled office of the publisher.

“You want to hear something really strange?” Sam continued. “Some man I never heard of called me at home this morning.”

“And? Did he want to sell you a magazine subscription?”

“No, I’m serious, A. I mean, at first I thought I just couldn’t place him. He was so friendly, so familiar.”

“An old flame you’d forgotten?”

“Well, that’s what I thought. But he wasn’t. He knew my name, my number, where I lived. And I didn’t know him from Adam. Turned out he was a guy driving a white Porsche I smiled at on the freeway coming from Mill Valley a couple of weeks ago. I just smiled, you know, the way you do when you realize someone’s looking at you. Somehow he found me, maybe through the Department of Motor Vehicles. Hell, I don’t know. Jesus, he
must
be lonely. Or nuts. Probably both.”

“What did he want?”

“To meet me for a drink.”

“You hung up, I hope.”

There was a long pause.

“No.” Sam hesitated. “I agreed to one drink at the Square.” The Washington Square Bar & Grill was the hangout of the newspaper crowd.

“Are you crazy? Why on earth did you do that?”

“I’m curious,” she mumbled. “And it shows some ingenuity, you have to admit.”

“Sammie.” Annie’s tone had a lot of schoolteacher in it.

“I don’t know. He didn’t look nuts.”

“You could judge that on the freeway?”

“He
was
kind of cute. But I guess I just want to get it over with. He sounded very persistent. We’ll be on my turf in a public place. What’s he going to do? Pull out a gun and kill me over a glass of Perrier?”

“Don’t even joke about it.”

“Look, one drink, I’ll tell him how charming he is, and isn’t it too bad that I have a steady beau. Would that I did, but what’s he to know?”

“For a hard-boiled reporter you are really naive, my friend.”

“Are we still on for Woody Allen?” When Sam didn’t want to be pushed on something, she had a way of simply changing the subject.

Annie allowed it to drop. “Couldn’t keep me away. Want to grab a bite at the Chestnut first?”

“Sure. Maybe since I’m so rich and famous, I’ll even treat. See you at the bar at five-thirty.” She rang off. Annie had meant to ask her how the other investigation
was going, the murder of Judge Weinberg’s niece. But if Sam were going to be meeting a stranger from the freeway for drinks, she probably didn’t want to be reminded.

*

A little business for Annie to take care of and she could get back to her work. First a call to the
Bay Guardian
to check on the responses to her ads. Then she needed to return a call to her friend Tom Albano.

The young man on the phone sounded like an 18-year-old Miss Lonely Hearts. Was he this enthusiastic over every call?

“Box Thirty-two-X, that’s the one in the query column, has about ten letters. And Box Forty-two-S, that’s the personal, wow! You hit the jackpot. Must have been a good ad. Looks like about fifty pieces. Do you want us to go ahead and mail them to you?”

Fifty responses to her personal! Mail them? Was he crazy? Tom could wait. She’d be right down.

When she did get around to calling Tom she couldn’t resist telling him her news.

Tom was one of her oldest California friends. He and his wife Clara had lived and fought in the apartment next door when she’d first moved to the city. Clara was long gone and Tom had moved down the Peninsula to open his own architectural office in Palo Alto. As the electronics business boomed in the Silicon Valley, so did his practice. Tom was a good buddy, a supportive friend. He always loved hearing about her exploits, which he called “The Perils of Annie.” Something in his voice told her he wasn’t so thrilled with the latest chapter.