Impersonal Attractions (12 page)

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.

Miss Anne, you look like you’ve just seen the Big Bad Wolf.

EIGHTEEN

Lola Davis, the black lawyer who had answered Annie’s query ad, had called and agreed to see her later that night. Annie set off for her five o’clock exercise class filled with anticipation.

She’d been working out for a little over a year. The class combined aerobic running and jumping with slow stretches, lifts, and bends, all set to music.

The repetition and the oxygen coursing through her system both energized and relaxed her. For those three hours every week she thought about nothing. Exercise was a form of meditation. Body on, mind off.

And it worked. Finding new muscles every week, challenging herself to new heights, her body had grown strong. Some mornings, she’d told Sam, she looked at herself naked in the mirror and could hardly bear to put her clothes on.

Thinking about it made her laugh. Growing up as her mother’s southern flower, warned not to go out into the sun
for fear of ruining her complexion, Annie had never learned to ski, play tennis, or hit any kind of ball. When she’d first moved to California she took one look at all the physical activity around her and decided she’d moved into a gym.

At first she resisted, and then she gave it a try. But her tennis instructor made her cry. And, at a picnic, she’d embarrassed her jock date by striking out nine consecutive times at bat. When she passed thirty, and the holiday goodies seemed to hang around her tummy long into January, she’d begun to jog. She could soon do two miles, but she thought she’d die of boredom.

Finally she’d found her exercise class, with its sweet, smiling instructor, Mimi Trask, who regaled them with tales of her life as a beautiful divorcée in Sausalito while she worked their buns off.

Most of her classmates were female—of every size, race, and age. She’d become friendly with a few, had an occasional cup of coffee at Greens, the restaurant next door to class, and she had a nodding acquaintanceship with the other regulars. She was forever seeing women on the street, at the ballet, in a restaurant whom she couldn’t quite place until she realized she’d never seen them before with their clothes on.

Tonight Brian, one of the lone males in class, was there. Annie called him Byron, after the womanizing English poet.

Brian used the class like an ongoing Happy Hour. The policy was that any paying member could bring a guest once for free. So every time Brian picked up another woman, which seemed to be daily, he brought her to class for a no-expense date and also got a free look at her body gyrating in a leotard.

Or if he had had no luck out in the world that day, he would simply come to class alone and hope to find a fresh victim.

“You in the pink tights, be careful, Brian’s behind you,” a regular would call out.

And he almost always scored. Why wouldn’t he? He was tall, thin, well built, with classic mustachioed California good looks and a BMW. Granted, he hadn’t earned the red and white Stanford sweat suit he always wore, but in these times that didn’t seem like much of a flaw.

Her workout class was at Fort Mason, a jumble of reclaimed military warehouses on the Bay, across the street from the Marina Safeway. It took Annie about four minutes to get from there to her appointment with Lola Davis.

Like many San Francisco dwellings that look deceptively small from the street, Lola’s white-stuccoed, red-tiled building hid surprises. As did Lola herself.

A petite, slinky lady of about thirty-five, she was dressed in a white cashmere pullover and matching slacks, which offered a creamy contrast to her café au lait complexion. There was a wiry sensuality in her movement that reminded Annie of Eartha Kitt, as did the quality of her voice. There was also a hint of the South in her throaty “Welcome, come right in” at the door.

The apartment was huge, with heavily waxed, dark wood floors, elegant cornices, a blue-tiled fireplace in the long living room, and, off the formal dining room, a large, glass-roofed deck. Exotic flowering plants flourished there with the help of lots of Marina sunshine. They were bright spots of color around the sleek, white, Brown Jordan outdoor furniture. Lola Davis not only had taste but a law practice that must have been doing quite well. Annie wondered why a woman like this was looking for love in the personals.

Of course, she thought, so am I.

And then she decided to stop talking to herself and talk to Lola instead.

From the depths of a huge, overstuffed, blue tweed chair, Lola purred, “Before we start, there’s something I wanted to ask you. I almost did it on the phone, but thought I’d wait.”

“Shoot,” Annie replied, thinking oh hell, she’s going to chicken out on me.

The hint of a drawl that Annie had picked up earlier in Lola’s speech thickened, deepened in richness like a good gumbo after hours on the stove as she asked, “Honey, where in the South are you from?”

Annie looked her straight in the eye. “Hotlanta. Georgia, sugah, and wheah did you grow up?”

“Why, I was raised in Valdosta, Miss Anne.”

It wasn’t until Annie had left the South that she had learned that Miss Anne is the name blacks use for all white women. It conjures up crinolines, parasols, helplessness, and airs.

The two women threw back their heads and hooted long and loud, finally wiping tears from their eyes. They slapped their knees and laughed in the way that southerners do, born out of a tradition of storytelling and enjoying a good joke.

They got up from their chairs and hugged. It was a hug of recognition, of a knowing that exists between southern blacks and whites transplanted from home, grown out of shared roots, shared territory, and a mixture of love and hate for the land that spawned them and for what they represent to one another.

That settled, Lola began to tell Annie her story.

Her father had been that exceptional character, a black doctor in a small south Georgia town. His clientele had been his own people, of course, except for an occasional redneck who, having driven off drunk into a ditch, would allow the staunching of his life’s blood by a black. Lola’s mother had been a schoolteacher. They had tutored her at home, stuffing her shelves and mind with books to augment her education at the local colored schoolhouse.

Lola had easily gained admittance to Atlanta University and then had won a scholarship to Georgetown, where she made Law Review. For graduation, her parents had given her a trip to Hawaii. On her way she stopped over in San Francisco and, like so many others before her, couldn’t wait to get back. Passing the California boards had been no problem, nor was finding a job. San Francisco liberalism, Affirmative Action, the quota system all stood in her favor. She was brilliant and beautiful and black. Everything was going her way—until her workday ended and playtime began.

“If you think you have problems in this town, try putting yourself in my shoes,” snorted Lola. “How many attractive, successful, intelligent, sophisticated
single
black men do you know, right off hand?”

Annie frowned, thinking. “None, but,” she hesitated, “do you date only blacks?”

“No, but I want to marry black. I’ll go to dinner, parties, dancing with anybody who’s fun, but when it comes to serious romance, the children I want to have, it’s different. And it’s tough.”

Annie agreed and encouraged Lola to go on.

“Oh, Lawsy mercy, honey,” Lola joked as she settled back into her chair. “There are tales I could tell.

“Some friends fixed me up with a blind date. A doctor. A rarity, a black gynecologist. My friends had given Howard a great build up. Fantastic credentials, tennis player, divorced, no children, anxious to settle down again. But I thought to myself, ‘Lola, a doctor who’s available for a blind date, there is something wrong here.’

“When I opened the door, I knew what it was.” She drew herself up to her full height. “How tall would you say I am?”

“Five three?”

“Close. Try five two. I was wearing sandals that were maybe two inches. But when I opened the door, I looked
down
into his eyes. I have never looked down at a full-grown man in my life.

“Hell, he doesn’t even have to bend over at the end of the examining table.”

Annie rocked with laughter.

“Oh, Lola! But was he nice?”

“Sure, he was nice, but what did I care? I know it’s silly, but I made him take me to a little French place way out in the Avenues where I knew we wouldn’t see anyone I knew. I just felt dumb. When he called again I’d suddenly become engaged. My friends will never forgive me and certainly never fix me up again.”

“How else do you meet men? Bars? Business contacts?”

“I used to do bars. Perry’s, MacArthur Park, you know. But something happened to a friend in Henry Africa’s and I got spooked with that whole scene.”

“Tell me about it.”

“My friend Lillie hadn’t been in town very long and didn’t know many people. One night she stopped for a drink and began talking with a man who said he was a computer engineer in Palo Alto. The next thing she knew was when she woke up the next day in a hotel room, alone, with a body like a used car. He had definitely run up some miles on her engine and put a few dents in her too. No broken bones, but lots of big purple bruises and belt marks across her back. She didn’t remember a thing. Sounds trite, but it must have been the classic Mickey Finn in her drink.”

“Jesus. What did she do?”

“First she had herself a good cry. Then she pulled herself together, called a taxi and went home. Filled her tub with bubble bath and soaked. The next day she went to her doctor and had herself checked for about forty-two kinds of VD and decided to try and forget about it.”

“She didn’t report it?”

“Why? What are the cops going to do? She didn’t know his real name, where he lived or worked. And she was a black woman who allowed herself to be picked up. You pays your money and you takes your chances, you know. Most folks think a woman in a bar is Goodbarring, looking for trouble, anyway.”

“And you think the personals are safer? You can ask for photos, but you really don’t even know what the guys look like until they show up.”

“Yes, but you can screen them. If you place the ad, you have their letters, photos, and you decide whether to call them. You can tell an awful lot on the phone. You don’t have to give them your name unless you feel good about them. And then you always set up the meeting in a café—for a cup of coffee—no booze, and you can get away quick.”

“How many responses did you get?”

“An even dozen. And some of those weren’t even in the ballpark. Four prisoners. Ha! I work the other side of that street.

“One’s a dentist who sounds nice, if a bit stuffy. And a salesman I’m meeting next weekend.”

“I wish you luck. And me too.”

“I’ll drink to that.” Lola raised her glass. “We’ll keep each other posted. Okay?”

The time had slipped by. It was getting late.

They walked down the stairs together. At the bottom Lola turned, gave her a quick hug, and said, “Ya’ll come back, y’hear?”

It was the standard southern parting line, often a pleasantry, signifying nothing, but Annie knew that in Lola she had a newfound friend. She would be coming back, soon.

NINETEEN

The steps of the Jewish Community Center were humming. Small boys in short pants scampered up and down, yelling. Several gray-haired ladies waited for the bus. A friendly black Labrador was searching for a tossed ball.

He leaned against the building, watching the scene on the steps while keeping one eye on the door.

He had only recently discovered the center at the corner of California and Presidio in Pacific Heights, far from his home. In the past few days he had spent several hours here, watching.

A class let out. Ten or fifteen women exited, cheeks glowing, talking in twos and threes. A few were alone. He noted the time, six-thirty. They were right on schedule, chattering, gold earrings flashing, bursts of red and purple dresses. Their perfume and conversation filled the air.

A short woman with masses of dark curls caught his eye. She carried a large sketch pad in one hand, a straw tote slung over a shoulder. Her free hand smoothed her full black cotton skirt over her hips.