Impersonal Attractions Read online

  “Hey, Ms. Tannenbaum,” Cornell called back from the doorway. “You said you were gonna do these assignments with us. You gonna let us read your personal ad?”

  “Maybe you already did, Mr. Jones,” she answered. “And maybe you already wrote me an answer.”

  “You wish.” He winked at her and was gone.

  *

  Annie finished off her evening with a bit of high-stepping. She met Sam and Hoyt and Emmett at the I-Beam, their favorite dance bar on the edge of the Castro, the gay ghetto.

  This was one of the many places where the city’s pretty young men gathered to bump and sweat to a disco beat.

  But being gay was not a requirement for admission. Everyone in the city knew that the best music was in the gay discos, and more than one gray-suited lawyer or Montgomery Street stockbroker had been seen with his bespangled wife mixing it up under the mirrored ball of the I-Beam.

  They each grabbed a beer at the crowded bar in the front and then let 6′ 5″ Emmett blaze a trail through the crush. “This way,” he called, and they all fell into line.

  Annie could never get over it. “Have you ever seen so many good-looking men?” she whispered to Sam.

  “All 40 percent must be here tonight.”

  A recent survey had shown that to be the gays’ cut of the city’s single-male population. “And all smelling good.” Sam sniffed. “Better than me.”

  It took them almost five minutes to work their way to the dance floor. A very handsome, black DJ was programming the sound in a Plexiglas booth. He was dressed in a silver lamé cowboy shirt and pants, with gold and silver Lucchese boots to match. A virtuoso with the two spinning turntables before him, Sly held all the strings, winding the crowd up and letting the energy go. He nodded in recognition at Annie. Women who loved to dance to his music were always welcome, and she and Hoyt came here often.

  Hoyt grinned at her and wiped his brow. They had barely begun to move and he was sweating already. In ten minutes he would be soaking wet.

  They began to rock with the ease of a long-married couple who knew each other’s every move. But then, they had been dancing together for twenty years. Annie and Hoyt had grown up in adjacent Atlanta neighborhoods, but didn’t meet until a freshman English class at Emory. They quickly discovered they liked the same songs, the same movies, the same books and, sometimes, the same young men.

  “Flip you,” Hoyt said now, nodding at the model-perfect young man dancing beside them.

  “You can have him,” Annie replied. “I was just wondering who cuts his hair.”

  “You’re not!” Hoyt exclaimed. He, like most men, loved her long, thick tresses.

  “Someday, someday soon. Can’t do Rapunzel forever.”

  “Why not?” asked Emmett, who had maneuvered himself and Sam next to them. They changed partners: boy/girl, boy/girl. Then swapped again, and Annie and Sam danced together.

  “Just like in eighth grade,” Annie gasped as she whirled Sam around.

  “Get used to it, sweetheart. This is how it’s going to be at the Storey Old Folks’ Home.” Sam ran a continuing gag about buying a multi-bedroomed Victorian when she turned sixty that all her single friends could come and live in. A spry older ladies’ commune.

  “We’re going to dance all night long?”

  “In my house, toots, we’re gonna dance whenever we damn well please.”

  FIFTEEN

  He sat alone in his room drinking a beer. The only light came from the television screen, where the faces from “Dallas” flickered.

  He leaned over to switch the channel, then pushed his fair hair back out of his eyes. “Dallas”! What a joke. It sure wasn’t any Texas he’d ever known. But then, his accommodations hadn’t been private.

  There was nothing else he wanted to watch. He flipped on a gooseneck lamp. The harsh direct light glared into his eyes, emphasizing lines that hadn’t been etched by laughter.

  He reached under his bed for a magazine. He’d read them all many times before. He went through the pictures quickly, looking for an old favorite, and then there she was: a tall, big-breasted black woman with wide hips.

  Like Cindy’s. He ran his mind over her body as he had his hands a couple of nights ago. It was too bad he had to wear the gloves. He never got to actually touch her body with his hands. As he thought about her face and the fear in her eyes, he grew hard. He could hear her begging and her screaming. See her body jerking with panic. And then it was over. With Cindy Dunbar in his mind, he didn’t need dirty pictures.

  He wondered how long it would be until next time. He could never tell. She had to be just right. He had a couple of prospects in mind. It was just a matter of choosing.

  He realized the dull throbbing behind his eyes that had been bothering him all day was getting worse. The beer wasn’t doing it any good. He slapped it down on top of the TV and went outside.

  That was better. A walk would be better yet.

  When he reached the park nearby he stopped and stretched out on a bench. The air smelled so good. It was a black night with stars blazing. If he were out in the country, he would be able to see all the constellations. But he could make out the Big Dipper now. He followed the Milky Way across the autumn sky.

  He used to lie out in the grass when he was a kid and look up at the stars, trying to find the constellations that looked like pictures in his science book. He leaned over and grabbed a handful of the park’s evening-damp grass and pressed it to his nose. The smell took him home.

  Back to Louisiana and a night when he was a teenager, standing at the edge of a grassy field, smelling the damp cold earth, cow shit, and the odor of gasoline burning as torches lit the night.

  Oh yes, he remembered that night.

  He and his brother Lem had heard there was going to be some excitement over in Liggett’s pasture. He’d brought it up at the supper table, and his mother shook her head while Pa growled, “You boys stay away from there. Don’t go mixing in no nigger trouble.”

  They hadn’t stayed away. When they could hear their pa snoring they’d crawled out from the midst of the four other kids asleep in the room and snuck out, their boots in their hands.

  They’d scooted down the dirt roads as fast as they could go, jumping into bushes when a truck came up on them from behind. They didn’t want to take the chance that somebody would tell Pa what they’d done. It never crossed their minds that someone at the meeting would snitch on them. They figured that once there, they were all in it together.

  They saw a glow in the sky and heard the low hum of male voices as they came out of the woods at the edge of Liggett’s land.

  There it was. A bonfire blazing orange, yellow, crimson in the middle of the pasture. Circling around, waving their torches and chanting something that he couldn’t make out, were ten men robed in white, with the tall, pointed hoods he’d heard about but never seen before. Their faces were covered. But around the edges of the field he recognized the Ledbetter brothers from up a ways, Mr. Squires, who ran the little store down on Bottoms Road, and old Mr. Jackson, his friend Bobbie June’s uncle.

  Suddenly Lem gasped beside him and he jumped back, thinking that Lem had stepped on a snake. Then he followed where Lem’s finger was pointing and he almost wet his pants.

  Hanging from a big oak tree, off a low limb, was a rope, and from that rope, turning slowly like meat on a spit, was a colored man. As his body turned once again, he could see the man’s tongue sticking out. A red stain spread across the front of the man’s khaki work pants.

  “Lem, do you think they…” he whispered to his brother.

  Lem’s eyes shimmied with excitement and fear as he nodded his head.

  He stared from the dead man to the bonfire and back again. The circling of the robed men stopped and then it became very still. One of the men stepped out of the circle and began to talk as he uncovered his face.

  Talked about the niggers getting uppity and the feds coming in and trying to tell people how to live.

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bsp; “Niggers like this one here,” he said as he waved his torch at the tree. “We got to show them they can’t go around talking trash in the Quarters, organizing, without getting in trouble. Deep trouble. I reckon this here was one nigger who got himself in trouble right over his head.”

  The man laughed and the boy realized he’d heard that laugh and the singsong rhythm of the man’s speech before. He focused on the man’s face and knew that he was preaching the word now as he did three times a week in church: Sunday morning, Sunday night, and prayer meeting on Wednesdays. He was the minister of the Mt. Zion Primitive Baptist Church, Mr. Willard Lee Jones.

  As he turned to share his astonishment with Lem, he felt someone approach from behind, and before he could see who it was, he felt the wind whistle and the sharp slap to his ear, and he knew. He didn’t have to see to recognize the source of that kind of lick. It had to be Pa.

  When they got back home, after he’d dragged them to the truck and kicked them into its open bed, Pa did what they knew he would do.

  He never said a word. He bludgeoned them with the handle of an old broken ax that he kept just inside the shed door, first one, then the other, while they dodged and tried to cover their faces.

  Finally their mother came to the back door and wailed, “Jesus, Jesse, that’s enough.” But it wasn’t until Pa had grown tired and his rage had abated that he stopped. He walked back over to the shed, put the ax handle behind the door, and went into the house, letting the screen door slap shut slowly, as calmly and deliberately as if he’d just come home from a day of chopping cotton.

  The next day, after church, the boy had waited around till practically everybody else had filed out, shaking hands with the preacher at the door. Offering Reverend Jones his left hand, because two fingers in his right one were broken, he whispered, “I want to talk with you about last night, sir.”

  Jones’s eyebrows had shot up, and he’d hesitated for a moment, but then he’d said to come by his house that afternoon about three. That was the time after dinner and before evening service when most everybody else would be taking their naps, the principal Sunday afternoon activity in those parts for children, adults, and dogs alike.

  They’d sat out talking on the preacher’s front porch for a long spell, their rocking chairs pulled close together. When they finished the boy left with glowing eyes. He’d found something he could believe in, a home at last.

  A dog barked and wakened him from his reverie. The man started up, rubbed his eyes, and walked back through the park toward his house.

  He felt much better now. The night air had done him good. His headache was gone.

  He stopped in front of his house for a moment and ran a hand along the roof of his car. It was wet with the damp air, but it was clean. He always kept it that way. But he’d forgotten to lower the radio antenna. That was asking for trouble. You couldn’t be too careful these days.

  SIXTEEN

  Sam dropped her keys in the silver basket on the cherry sideboard just inside the door. She ran her hand along its polished surface. Her houseman, Jim, took such good care of her things, she thought.

  She flipped through the pile of mail he had left neatly stacked for her, personal correspondence in one pile, bills in the other, so she could just add the latter to the collection on her desk in the study if she didn’t want to deal with them now. Which she didn’t.

  There was a reminder from the benefit committee of the de Young Museum that she had to let them know how large a table she wanted to sponsor for the upcoming dance, a thank-you note from her mother for the flowers she had sent for her birthday, and a note on heavy, cream-colored vellum with Sean O’Reilly’s name engraved at the top.

  It read, “What a lovely evening. Almost as lovely as you. Let’s do it again soon. Very soon.”

  Indeed.

  If she didn’t believe it possible anymore, she’d think that the gentlemanly detective was courting her.

  He’d called the day after they’d had dinner at the Square and had invited her for a sail the next weekend. It had been a lovely day. After fighting their way through the gales around the back side of Angel Island, they had tacked slowly over to Tiburon, where they’d sat out on the deck of a restaurant and devoured hamburgers and huge slabs of French fries. They’d exchanged a few stories about their pasts, but had talked mostly in the present, of their jobs, the people they knew in common. They’d kept it light, simple. When he’d dropped her off at her door, exhausted from the day of sunshine and sea spray, he leaned down and kissed her on the cheek and then was gone before she had time to decide if she wanted to invite him in or not.

  Since then there’d been a movie, a lunch. They’d joked about going bowling sometime. He was warm, intelligent, caring. He made her laugh. But he didn’t press her. He didn’t ask about her drinking, or not drinking. He didn’t pry. He was giving her so much rope, she knew she was going to hang herself.

  Then one night, he asked her to join him and two old friends for dinner. They’d gone to a Russian restaurant off Union that had no sign outside—a well-kept secret with wonderful blini, and scrumptious caviar and borscht. Sam found herself holding Sean’s hand under the table. She realized she suddenly wanted this man very much.

  As they were leaving the restaurant, a few steps ahead of his friends, Sean swept her into the small entryway, where he enveloped her in kisses and whispered in a fake Eastern-European accent, “Katerina, Katerina, the soldiers, they are close behind. I do not think we can make it to the border, my love.”

  As his friends caught up to them, Sean and Samantha lost their footing and toppled to the floor, Sean landing on top of her.

  “My darling Katerina, let me make wild passionate love to you, just one time, here in the drifting snow, before the soldiers take me away.”

  “Sean hasn’t changed at all since high school,” his friend Bob observed as he stepped over the snowbound lovers into the street.

  When he’d pulled his car into her driveway that night and turned off the ignition she turned to him and simply said, “Yes.”

  “Good,” he responded.

  It had been. Very, very good. Better than she could remember in years. Maybe the all-time best.

  The next morning he’d sent her a single stem of tiny orchids with a card on which he’d simply signed his name. It still lived in a crystal vase beside her bed.

  She found herself stroking Sean’s note. She tossed it aside and walked over to the expanse of windows that looked out toward the Golden Gate. The bridge lights twinkled like a Tiffany window in the dark. Below, the foghorns at the Presidio honked their familiar cry, which had kept her company through many a night.

  Yes, Sean was great. She hadn’t figured out what was wrong with him yet. But she was sure she would. She always did.

  She kept herself very well protected in this elegant setting of glass, brass, and crystal. The walls of her apartment were thick and its doors secure. It was filled with her music and her books and her thoughts, and no one hurt her here. She wasn’t so sure she wanted to give anyone the chance.

  SEVENTEEN

  Annie hummed as she carefully sprinkled parsley around the cold salmon. Next there was the mayonnaise to do in the processor and she was through. She checked to make sure the white wine was in the refrigerator, tidied up the kitchen, and put out ashtrays. She was ready to receive her guest.

  Slim was a character she’d been told about by her good friends and neighbors across the hall, Angie and Frank. Frank had met Slim playing sandlot basketball.

  “Slim has met everybody,” Frank had said. “The man was a pro-ball player. He traveled with the Globetrotters for a while. Now he’s a MUNI cop. There’s nobody in this city he doesn’t know. Even if you don’t put him in your book, you ought to talk to my man Slim.” Annie had let herself be persuaded. A cooking mood had struck her, so she’d invited him to lunch.

  The radio was playing “Love the One You’re With” as she opened the door to his buzz.

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p; She had read once that people size one another up within seven seconds. Slim took her about two.

  He was a moderately tall, well-built black man with a half-gray, shaggy Afro. Around his neck was a thick gold chain from which hung a wiggly Italian symbol that always reminded Annie of sperm. His pale blue shirt, with three buttons open, and his slightly soiled, light gray pants were made of the fabric she and Sam called Polly & Esther. But it was his slack-jawed smile, as he crooned, “Hello, baby,” and his drugged-out eyes that made her feel creepy. Was she in trouble here? Could Frank have been mistaken?

  Slim was barely coherent and had a single track playing in his head. While he didn’t push himself on her, he kept invading Annie’s space as she moved around the table and opened the wine.

  The kitchen seemed smaller than it ever had before. She was aware of his breath, watchful of his body. As she sighed over the wasted effort of the mayonnaise, she ran a quick eye over her countertop. She knew she wouldn’t need it, but there it was, a ten-inch French chef’s knife close at hand.

  Slim didn’t want to talk about playing basketball, pro players he had met, or basketball groupies. He didn’t want to talk about being a MUNI cop, weird passengers he had known and loved, fun and games on the #22 Fillmore line, nothing.

  Slim wanted to mutter, “Thass cool, momma. Do you have a boyfriend, a lover? What do you do for fun?” She made a mental note for the future that an interview lunch was not necessarily a good idea.

  He wanted to peer soulfully into her eyes, his own heavy-lidded ones weighed down with whatever drug he had snorted, swallowed, inhaled, injected. He wanted to hold her hand with his dry, cold one across her dining table. And as she edged him toward the door, excusing herself with an imaginary midafternoon appointment a bare hour after his arrival, he wanted to lay on a big, juicy kiss. Annie turned her head and got it in the ear.

  She double-locked the door behind him and bolted into the bathroom, where she scrubbed her ear and her face, and brushed her teeth. She laughed as she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror.