by Lisa Cach
“That’s what I’m going to figure out.”
Three
Gypsy Scarf
“You keeping busy?” Robert asked, handing me the armload of pants and jackets that needed hemming. Robert was a salesclerk at Butler & Sons, an expensive sportswear shop where I got a lot of alterations work. He was six years older than me, tall and slightly overweight, with a fresh face that lit up whenever I came in. I suspected he had a crush on me, but I couldn’t quite come to grips with the idea of dating a guy in his mid-thirties who still worked retail. Ambition and confidence were attractive, and Robert had neither.
Or maybe he didn’t have a crush, and was just happy to see someone fairly near his own age. The clothes Butler & Sons sold looked as if they were meant for golfers and the country club set, or whatever passed for the country club set in Portland. The customers who came in for the taupe pants and boxy argyle sweaters were not likely to be young single women.
“Pretty busy,” I said, taking the clothes. “I’ve got three appointments lined up for this afternoon.”
“Have you had a chance to eat?” he asked.
I avoided his eyes. Any mention of food was a danger sign. It seemed to go back to some primitive time when Man bring Woman meat, good, eat, eat. Which was fine, if Woman want Man, Man kill many mammoth, make good fire. Not fine, if Man kill one old pigeon and have wet wood. I wanted a good provider.
“Joanne usually feeds me,” I said, which was pretty much the truth. She was my next appointment, and she usually did have muffins or coffee cake she encouraged me to eat. It wasn’t a meal in the traditional sense, but I’d been counting on it as lunch.
“Oh.” His face fell, and then he struggled to put the cheer back into his expression. “Maybe next week we can grab something to eat together. The food court has some pretty good stuff.”
I smiled, rather painfully. “We’ll see.”
It was as good as I could do, for a response. It was neither dashing nor encouraging his hopes, although dashing was what I knew I should do. “You have to be cruel to be kind,” and all that, which I think is almost harder on the dasher than on the dashee. But I got a lot of business at this store, and didn’t want to create bad feelings with an employee.
Maybe he’d get the hint when I was too busy next week, and the week after, and then we could both pretend he had never expressed anything but friendly interest.
Butler & Sons was in the lower level of Pioneer Place Two, the new addition to the upscale shopping center in the heart of downtown Portland. Pioneer Place Two was connected to its older twin by a sky bridge and an underground tunnel, and it was along this tunnel that I walked with my armload of sportswear, following the streamlike undulations of decorative blue glass under my feet. The stores on either side were mostly the same chains found in every other city: the Body Shop, Victoria’s Secret, the Gap, Banana Republic, Eddie Bauer. I much preferred to go to Saks to steal my ideas for clothes to make. Somehow everything looked just a little more beautiful there.
The tunnel came out in the lower level of the original Pioneer Place, in the atrium center where switchbacks of escalators rose up four floors to a skylight roof. Thirty-foot bamboo grew in enormous pots, and smooth oak benches curved around a fountain that bubbled from several spouts, the sound rebounding off the bare floors and the glass walls of the surrounding shops. For some inexplicable reason someone had thrown a bright red toothbrush into the fountain, to lie at the bottom amid the pennies and dimes.
I spotted a rack of Willamette Week, and lay the clothes over the back of a bench as I took a copy and sat to peruse the back pages. It’s a weekly paper, the main alternative to the more run-of-the-mill Oregonian. No one I knew actually read the articles: all we wanted was the entertainment section and the personal ads. What I wanted today was found in the last few pages: ads for singles’ activity clubs.
“Women Call Free! Meet Quality Singles Like Yourself!” This, written above a heart with a photo of a blond woman seductively talking into a phone.
What women are willing to call those numbers? And what men do they find on the line? It was hard to not think of the “slimers” Louise talked about, who called the crisis line: men who would call up and pretend to need counseling, but there was always a telltale hitch in their voices that said they were jacking off. Apparently all they needed was a woman’s voice to get them to blow weenie phlegm into their hankies.
“Summer Fun! Rafting! Hiking! All Singles!” another of the ads read, over a black-and-white photo of young, handsome people screaming in delight as they shot the rapids, water splashing up around their rubber raft, their paddles raised, their life jackets turning them into uniform human cubes of athletic enthusiasm.
This sounded much more like what I was looking for, but I had a feeling there was going to be a hefty membership fee. If I couldn’t afford health insurance, I couldn’t afford to fork over hundreds to go rafting with other desperate singles.
No, not “desperate,” I reminded myself. Organized.
But still, there was something I didn’t like about the idea of paying a membership fee. It seemed so…forced. I wanted to be organized, but I also wanted to preserve a bit of the illusion that I would meet Mr. One-in-a-Million by fortuitous chance.
I flipped back through the pages toward the Culture section, stopping briefly in the personals at Men Looking For Women, but then deciding to save that entertainment for later.
The Culture section had everything from music clubs to art gallery listings, and went on for pages and pages. I browsed through it and found a college production of Shakespeare’s “Cymbeline”, performed on the Reed College lawn; a jazz group scheduled for a night at Pioneer Courthouse Square; and myriad events that made me feel like I was getting old. They sounded so loud. And smoky. Ugh.
I bought an Oregonian for its Friday pull-out A&E section, and found a hike along a trail in the Columbia Gorge, organized by Portland Community College, to observe spring wildflowers and wildlife. Five dollars, bring your own lunch and water to the specified meeting point.
They all held possibilities for meeting a man, although you can’t talk during a play. I might be able to drag Louise or Cassie along with me to the jazz night at Pioneer Courthouse Square, but I didn’t really like jazz. But guys seemed to, so maybe. The hike—maybe, although my hunch was that guys would prefer to think of themselves as the type of outdoorsmen who didn’t need a guide.
On the other hand, wouldn’t it be nice to find someone who enjoyed nature for reasons other than shooting deer and drinking beer by the fire?
I’d always liked those naturalists on television, the men who talked with calm, knowledgeable assurance, and had the patience to wait for hours behind a bit of shrubbery for the chance of seeing an otter or black bear. Any guy who would go on a guided nature walk in the gorge had to be a nice guy.
Some instinct had me glance up from the paper, and there was Robert, not fifteen feet away, headed for the second tunnel that led to the food court. He turned his head and saw me, and I felt my cheeks heat. I smiled weakly at him, feeling like a dog caught eating the cat’s food, and he gave me an uncertain little wave and then kept going.
Damn. He probably thought I’d been lying about the appointments, to avoid eating with him. I folded up the Willamette Week and the A&E section, and picked up the clothes, feeling like a clod. I shouldn’t have dawdled here, when I knew there was the danger of his coming by and seeing me. Stupid, stupid.
Why did emotions have to create so many delicate webs of pain, so easy to blunder through? And how many would be destroyed, both my own and others, by the time I’d found my Mr. Right?
Maybe there was a reason love and war were so often mentioned together. In both cases, the casualties were legion.
“This is you, the Page of Wands,” Cassie said, pointing to the tarot card in the center of the layout. We were sitting on the floor of Louise’s eighth-floor apartment, later that same day. Louise had invited us over to dinner, a
nd Scott would be coming by in time for dessert. The apartment was filled with the scent of baking lasagne, likely made with five or six exotic cheeses and half a dozen vegetables I’d never heard of. Louise liked to try recipes from trendy cookbooks.
Louise was already looking more healthy now that she was working days: the shadows were gone from beneath her eyes, and her skin had a touch of color beneath her darkening freckles.
Louise’s apartment is in a new-ish building in the heart of downtown, the rent partially subsidized by her well-off parents, who slept better at night knowing that their daughter was in a safe place, with security cameras in the halls and a man at the desk in the lobby. Counselors at crisis lines did not make much money, and Louise would be living somewhere like I did if not for her parents. I envied her modern bathroom and the balcony with a view, but I liked where I lived with Cassie and wasn’t sure I’d trade.
“Why the Page of Wands?” I asked Cassie.
“Pages are for young women with lots of creative energy. They tend to be action-oriented.”
“Okay.” I shuffled the deck, the oversize cards awkward in my hands, and then Cassie laid them out in what she called the “gypsy spread.” My question for the cards was what my love life would be like in the next four months.
“These cards on either side of you represent aspects of yourself,” she said. “Seven of Swords—you have plans, but don’t know how to put them into effect, or whether they will succeed or fail. The Emperor—you are taking action in the real world.”
“That fits well enough.”
Cassie looked up at me with a grin, henna-red hair loose and slightly tangled, that and her elflike eyes making her look very much the part of the fortune-teller. Louise sat to one side, arms crossed over her chest, observing with a half smile on her lips. She claimed to not believe in spirits or supernatural forces, and said that the only useful thing about tarot cards was that they served as a good projective test for people’s psyches. You saw in the pictures what your personality allowed you to see, and nothing more.
Me, I chose to believe the cards only when they told me what I wanted to hear.
Cassie went through the aspects of the past that had brought me to the present situation, and then the “forces beyond my control.” Among them was a card with an angel standing with one foot on the ground, one in the water.
“Temperance,” Cassie said. “Sometimes this means that your angel is near, helping to guide you.”
“She is?”
Cassie shrugged. “You would know better than I. The interpretation of the cards is more for you to figure out than me.”
“Do you believe in guardian angels?” I asked, curious. I didn’t, but why then did I always get teary-eyed when I watched Touched by an Angel on Sunday nights? That I liked that show was one of my most closely guarded secrets.
“Sometimes I can feel my grandmother watching over me,” Cassie said.
“Really?”
“Yes, really. She talks to me in my dreams, too.”
“Huh.” I didn’t know quite what to say to that. I turned to the psychological expert. “What do you think, Louise?”
She shrugged. “If it is comforting and does no harm, there’s no reason a person cannot believe what they wish.”
“I thought counselors referred to that type of thinking as delusional,” I said.
“In psychology, we say that no personality trait or behavior is a problem unless it causes problems for the client.”
I chewed that over for a minute. “I guess that makes sense.”
“Then again, some people are just plain nuts.”
“That’s very helpful, Ms. Counselor.” I turned my attention back to the cards.
“These here represent the natural course of future events,” Cassie said. “There is friendship and merriment, and learning to feel your emotions. Next are scattered energies, struggles. And here, the final card, the Ace of Swords. Change. Major change.”
The Ace of Swords was a picture of a fist holding up a silvery-blue blade, with a crown and greenery circling the tip. “What type of change?”
“Could be good or bad. It’s a card of new force, new energy, new direction. It’s something dramatic, either positive or negative, and could be either love or hatred.”
“But which is it?”
Cassie just looked at me, letting me flail about, looking for my own interpretation.
“Well, what are these other cards, then?” I asked impatiently, pointing to the three in the upper left-hand corner of the layout.
“Those represent other possible futures.” She described the first two, then stopped at the third and gave me a meaningful look. “The Magician. He brings messages from the realms of the gods, often in the form of synchronicity. Watch for coincidences in your life, for there will be valuable information hidden therein.”
“I don’t know what any of that means,” I said. “None of it sounds like a possible future.” I was still feeling disgruntled about that Ace of Swords, and disinclined to give a generous interpretation to the cards. Hatred or love, change for the positive or change for the negative—huh! Very helpful, thanks so much!
“It is for you to decide what they mean,” she said.
I continued to study the cards, unhappy that some of them seemed to fit my situation so well, while others did not. I wanted it all to be garbage, or all to be true. I don’t enjoy ambiguity.
She let me stare at the cards a little longer, then scooped them up and put them back in the deck, wrapping the deck in a blue silk scarf. “You can make of it what you will,” she said, “but at least look for synchronicities in your life. Whenever I get The Magician, strange things seem to happen, and I usually learn something from them.”
“What types of strange things?”
“Oh, like maybe I’ve chosen five books at random from the fiction shelves at the library, and when I take them home and read them I discover that they all have a villain who looks and acts like Teddy Roosevelt.”
“What on earth could you possibly learn from that?”
“It’s like the cards. You can find the parallel in your own life, if you look for it. Maybe I’m dating a guy who reminds me of Teddy Roosevelt in some way, and the synchronicity is telling me that he is bad for me, that he’s a villain. I don’t know. It depends.”
“Cassie, sometimes you’re a very weird chick, you know that?”
“Am I?” she asked, sounding pleased.
“Definitely.”
Louise got up and went to the refrigerator, returning with a two-liter bottle of Diet Pepsi. She refilled our glasses. “Have you outlined a plan of attack for finding Mr. One-in-a-Million?” she asked, capping the bottle and setting it on the coffee table, then sinking cross-legged onto the carpet.
“Somewhat.” I told her about the events I’d found in the papers, and asked if she’d want to go to the free concert in Pioneer Courthouse Square.
“Jazz? I don’t know,” Louise said. “Maybe Cass will go with you.”
“No way,” Cassie said. “Guys who like jazz take themselves way too seriously.”
“Or you might be able to get Scott to go,” Louise said.
“What would be the point of going to a concert to meet guys, if I’m with a guy already? No one would approach me.”
“Oh. That’s right.”
“Maybe I’ll just do the gorge hike. Even if I did find a single guy at the jazz concert, he’d probably make me a tape of his favorite music, and then be all disappointed when I didn’t like it.”
“They’re so cute when they try to share,” Cassie said.
“I was also thinking of trying Internet dating. It seems like an efficient way to look for what you want. Sort of like shopping.”
Louise made a face. “Are you sure about that? It’s kind of dangerous, isn’t it?”
“I shouldn’t think it was any more so than meeting someone at a dance club.”
“But people can lie when they’re hidden behind
their computers,” Louise said.
“They can lie in real life, too. I’ve looked at a couple of the sites, and they seem pretty safe. You get a code name, and they give you a mailbox on the site, so no one has your real e-mail address.”
“I don’t know, Hannah, you hear all sorts of stories…”
“You hear good stories, too.” I lowered my voice to a confidential, persuasive level. “Aren’t you even a little bit curious about it? There might be a college professor or an artist on there right now, just the type you’re looking for.”
“You don’t want me to try it, do you?” she asked.
“Why not? We all could, you, me, Cassie and Scott. You’d do it, wouldn’t you, Cassie?”
“Yeah, sure, for a lark. Why not? I see plenty that goes on at the pub, and I wouldn’t mind having a computer screen between me and some of the snakes out there while I’m looking for a date.”
“Some of the sites are free,” I continued, “and others give you a trial membership. Think of how many ‘possibles’ we could sort through, from the comfort of our own homes! And if they’re all weirdos, we don’t have to meet any of them in person.”
“I don’t know…”
“Come on, it’ll be fun.”
“If you can get Scott to do it, too, then maybe I will.” She sounded far more reluctant than enthusiastic.
I grinned, victory within my grasp. “This is going to be great.”
“Is it?” Louise asked weakly, and reached for the bottle of Diet Pepsi.
“It’ll be an adventure!”
“Wonderful.”
Four
Black Leather
“Hey, Hannah, you should have stopped by my office today,” Scott said, closing our front door behind him. It was three days after our dinner at the restaurant. “This woman came in with an abscess under one of her molars. The infection went all the way down into the jaw, where it had eaten out a pocket of bone—”
“Oh, God, Scott, shut up!” I said, covering my ears and ducking my head toward my lap in an effort to shut out the image he was conjuring.
