Impersonal Attractions (6 page)

*

Quynh and Hudson had been waiting on the front step of the Saigon for fifteen minutes when Annie drove up to pick her up for their picnic in Golden Gate Park.

“She works too hard,” Quynh said with disappointment when Annie told her that Sam might not be able to make it. Sam was among the child’s absolutely favorite people, along with her Uncle Quan, Annie, Miss Teagarden, her teacher, the poet/novelist Shel Silverstein, and Michael Jackson.

She was holding a lacquered basket in her lap along with Hudson, who was sniffing the cracks mightily.

“Ham or eggs?” Annie asked. Hudson was mad for both. Ham sent him into ecstasies of drooling.

“I’m not sure,” Quynh said innocently. As if she had had nothing to do with this picnic lunch, which Quan had prepared over Annie’s protestations.

“You do too much. Always,” he said. “You be American guide, auntie, teacher. I be restaurateur. I make picnic.”

They entered the park from the north at Park Presidio and turned onto J. F. Kennedy Drive. Quynh, who was not only a great navigator but also had the magic touch when it came to finding parking places, spotted one right across the street from the Conservatory.

They locked the picnic basket and Hudson inside the car, carefully left the windows open a crack, and trooped up the steps to the gigantic Victorian greenhouse called the Conservatory. It was one of Quynh’s prized places in the park, even if it didn’t allow cats.

The center of the greenhouse was a tall, peaked dome, containing jungle plants with elephantlike trunks that seemed to reach out to the sky. The air inside was thick, heavy, almost green with the warm breath of exuberantly happy vegetation. The long arm branching off to the right ended in a pool filled with lily pads and trout-sized goldfish.

“Shel would love it here. Do you think he’s ever been here?” Quynh tugged at Annie. Her hero, Shel Silverstein, had written a book called
Where the Sidewalk Ends,
whose animal characters fascinated Quynh. Silverstein had become a real presence in her life.

“Let’s go see what’s in the special room.” She pulled Annie back toward the other wing, at the end of which, just past the orchids, was always a particular show. Here were gathered hundreds of varieties of one flower, once azaleas, once cyclamen, at Christmas, poinsettias. This time it was begonias. Fleshy, bulbous, with their waxy leaves in every color and variety imaginable. Whatever flower it was, it always knocked Quynh out.

“This one,” she said, standing before a magnificent pale lilac variety, “this is it.” Then she wavered. “Or
this
one,” pointing at a bright orange and yellow beauty. “Or maybe…”

“Quynh, you don’t
have
to choose. You can love them all,” Annie told her.

“Oh, yes, you’re right!” she exclaimed. Five minutes later, when they were ready to leave, she turned and waved to the roomful of blossoms, bidding them all adieu, equally.

Sam didn’t meet them inside and they gave her another ten minutes while they inspected the handiwork of the Golden Gate gardeners, who that month had planted a perfect replica of the state seal of California in a circle before the Conservatory.

“I love your work,” Quynh said seriously to an old man in green overalls who was snipping at the edge of the circle.

“Why, thank you,” he said, a little taken aback.

“You’re welcome.” She nodded.

They finally gave up on Sam and walked back to Agatha to find Hudson glaring at them impatiently through the car’s front window. He didn’t give a fig about greenhouses, though he had been known to munch seriously on tulips. And he was more than frustrated at being locked up with a securely fastened picnic basket.

“Hudson, get in the back seat,” Quynh ordered sternly. He obeyed.

Annie had had many cats over the years and had made the acquaintance of several hundred others. She had never known one who listened. Except Hudson, to whom Quynh’s word was law. Whenever Annie made a request of him, he would look at her as if she were speaking Urdu.

Quynh considered all the possible picnicking spots and decided on the big recreation ground. They walked down Bowling Green past the tennis courts where the soft
thuck-thuck
of balls and groans of frustration echoed day and night, all year long. After serious deliberation Quynh chose a spot in the huge open field, where they could watch a soccer practice and a softball game simultaneously. They spread a red-and-blue tablecloth and settled down. Hudson sat at attention with his front paws on the edge of the cloth, never taking his eyes from the basket.

“Just wait.” Quynh waggled a cautionary finger.

She opened the basket and carefully arranged a small banquet of Vietnamese and Chinese cold dishes of rice, fish, meat, each delicacy wrapped in seaweed or encased in tea leaves. When the repast met her definition of symmetry, she took out a small red bowl and lifted its cover to reveal a hard boiled egg, coarsely chopped and garnished with slivers of fresh tuna, which she placed before Hudson.

He lunged at his lunch, ignoring Quynh’s reproving glare.

She passed chopsticks and vinegared dipping sauce to Annie, who laughed. “You didn’t expect him to wait until we started, did you?”

Annie could tell from Quynh’s expression that she had indeed. Poor Hudson. Annie thought that, for a cat with a basic linebacker’s personality, he had a heavy load to shoulder in the etiquette department.

After finishing lunch they walked back up the hill and paused behind the aquarium, another one of Quynh’s favorite haunts. She loved the circular walk inside, lined on both sides by thousands of fish at eye level. It was like walking on the floor of the ocean.

But there was Hudson, following at their heels. Cats were hardly welcome at the aquarium.

Annie scooped him up and hid him inside the almost empty picnic basket.

“We’ll be quick. Now, you be good,” Quynh cautioned him.

The woman in the blue uniform at the coat check smiled at the pretty little girl with the black ponytail who ever so seriously handed her a picnic basket and a tablecloth.

Skipping the snakes, which Quynh hated anyway, they were back to reclaim their belongings in half an hour flat. Hudson held his comments until the front steps.

The three of them ran most of the way back to the car, Quynh stopping a couple of times to demonstrate the backflips she had learned in gymnastics class. Hudson didn’t need a class to be a star in that department. Annie just tried to keep up.

*

Sam’s morning had been no picnic.

She’d spent most of it interviewing Judge and Mrs. Weinberg about their niece Sondra, who had lived with them since her parents had been killed in a plane crash when she was eleven years old. They had invited Sam into their spacious apartment not far from her own on Russian Hill. The views out across the Bay were spectacular, but no one could see them today. The Weinbergs’ eyes were red and blurred with tears, and Sam kept remembering the horror she had seen the night before in the morgue, their beautiful, beloved niece, disfigured beyond anyone’s worst nightmares.

“She finished at the top of her med-school class,” the kind-voiced, silver-haired judge was saying. “She was going to be a retinal surgeon.”

“We are so proud of her.” Mrs. Weinberg’s hand shook as she poured coffee from a silver Queen Anne pot. “I mean, we were.”

Sam got them through it as gently as she could, gathered her notes, once again expressed her sympathy, and left.

Threading her maroon BMW through the crowded streets toward her office, she thought about Sondra Weinberg. The face smiling out of all those happy photographs on the Weinbergs’ piano was an intelligent one. She’d had wonderful eyes. Wise, perceptive, kindly eyes, like her uncle’s. She was sure that, as Mrs. Weinberg said, she must have had a good heart.

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

An
nie 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.