Impersonal Attractions

by Sarah Shankman

  But she didn’t anymore. Her murderer had deprived her of her heart with a surgical skill that might have rivaled Sondra’s own. The implications were terrifying. A crazed doctor at work? An amateur with lots of practice?

  But she wouldn’t write any of that. Nor about the swastika he’d painted with Sondra’s blood on her forehead.

  Her profile on Sondra Weinberg would be about her brave soul, her trained eyes, her steady hands, her kind deeds, her aspirations for the future, all gone.

  NINE

  Annie ran her finger down the column. There was her query ad—one of only four under the heading AUTHORS/RESEARCHERS. Hers was the second, just under a request for interviewees to talk about the heartbreak of herpes.

  Her personal ad was more difficult to find. She scanned through hundreds with the dispatch born of practice. Annie had answered a few dozen herself and was a pro at ad language.

  “Distinguished looks” meant gray hair and probably not much of it. “Entrepreneur” meant he owned his own business, could be a gas station, could be oil wells. “Humorous” was often a joke-a-minute. And there are no men 5′ 10″, a euphemism for 5′ 8″ and wishing. She’d found that ad copy was frequently what people wanted the truth to be, rather than the real thing.

  But still, occasionally, struck by a burst of optimism or a particularly well-written string of adjectives, she would fire a letter into the void. Prince Charming could just as well be a Bay Guardian box number as a stranger on the street, she reasoned.

  She remembered the last man she had met through the Guardian.

  His ad had been very, very clever. However, as she waited for him in a bar in Berkeley, glancing up at each man who came in the door, she wondered about truth in advertising.

  At least the bar was a pleasant place to wait. White plaster walls, leaded glass windows, a handsome old carved cherry bar. Ornate gold-framed mirrors mixed with blowups of Gold Rush working girls. It was on College Avenue, a strip of pricey boutique shopping for Berkeley and Oakland professionals, but more casual than its Union Street counterpart in the city. Everything in Berkeley was more casual. It was filled with men who proudly announced that they hadn’t worn a suit since they’d moved out from New York six, eight, ten, twelve years ago.

  Annie’s date was late. She twiddled with the bowl of pretzels in front of her and ordered another Campari from the bartender, who at least wore a tie. But then, the bartender was a woman—probably.

  Just as San Francisco was Nirvana for the country’s gay males, the lesbians had claimed Berkeley as their own. There seemed to be a tacit agreement that the Bay, which separated the two geographically, was the gender DMZ.

  Her thoughts ended abruptly as her date walked in through the swinging doors. It was obvious he was the one from the way he scanned the bar. He was blond, as advertised. But this was no Robert Redford. He bore a stronger resemblance to Peter Rabbit.

  His prominent, pink nose twitched. This man, as advertised, was a psychologist who specialized in stress-related physical disorders. She timed his nose at every seven seconds.

  One went through the motions.

  “What kind of music do you like?”

  “What do you do on weekends?”

  “Do you ski?”

  After one drink, she mumbled something about an errand of mercy for a sick friend and shook his hand.

  Don’t call us, we’ll call you.

  That’s how most of them went, though occasionally there was a happy surprise.

  What were the possibilities today, she thought, still scanning the ads as she poured herself another cup of coffee and lit a cigarette.

  The week’s potpourri of wishes, dreams, and lies—20 cents per word, $2 minimum.

  What was this?

  Gentle, innocent, powerful, highly conscious, laughing, spiritual man embracing the child within himself and committed to truth more than to ego seeks similar, sweet, fine, natural, sensitive, shapely lady. I live in a secluded cabin, run a successful business part-time, and hope to build a wilderness home; 6′, 150+ , Harvard. Counselor, inventor, astrologer, poet, dancer. Send photo, birthdate, time, place.

  What was the part-time business? Leather sandals, macramé, or perhaps he was a marijuana grower. She read on.

  SAN FRANCISCO COUPLE SEEKING high energy and sensual meetings with other couples and women. Through Tai Chi, education, and meditation, we are balancing our lives. We also laugh and play through life. We are attractive, athletic, and open-minded.

  Not that she hadn’t ever fantasized about a couple. But Tai Chi? Meditation? She’d rather try her first threesie without the granola.

  Her friend Hoyt would love this one, Huck and Tom tilling the land. She clipped it for him.

  GAY FARMER Long-hair-beard-Jewish-Aries-sensual needs lover who is hirsute-tall-mellow-28-43.

  Ads written by men seemed to outnumber the women’s by about ten to one. The ratio was backward, since San Francisco women outnumbered straight men about five to one. Maybe, like herself (until now), most women drew the line at advertising.

  Annie was growing impatient and her coffee cold. Where was her ad? Then her eye fell upon a listing that almost made her choke. She stubbed out her cigarette. Talk about bad memories…she had met this one about six years ago.

  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

  Annie 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.