Impersonal Attractions

by Sarah Shankman

  “Anything else?”

  “Money wouldn’t hurt.”

  “All in one package? We’ve got a real problem here.”

  “Well, hell, you asked. Besides, it’s all just make-believe.”

  “No, it’s not,” Sam countered. “It’s just a challenge. Not that you don’t deserve him, my dear. I just think he’s going to be hell to find.” She read her notes back to Annie. “It’s all here. Just boil it down so it won’t cost you a fortune and get it in before deadline.”

  Annie could hear someone calling Sam’s name in the background.

  “Listen, something’s happening here. I’ve got to go.” And she hung up.

  Five minutes later, she called back. Her voice was strained and tight. Annie knew that voice of Sam’s, the one when the news was very bad.

  “There has been a really ugly murder,” she was saying, “in Noe Valley. Sondra Weinberg, Judge Weinberg’s niece. They just found her, but it probably happened a couple of days ago.”

  “How did she…”

  Sam interrupted. “Strangled. And a knife. You really don’t want to know. And you won’t read all the details in the paper.”

  “Rape too?”

  “Yep, rape and torture and disfigurement—and I’ve got to go down to the morgue.”

  “Oh, Sam.” Annie didn’t know how she could do it. “Could this be the Mt. Diablo killer—come to town?”

  “Don’t think so. A different style. Maybe a burglary, but it’s rare to see this kind of brutality. When you surprise a burglar he usually runs. Or if he kills, he just does it, grabs the stuff, and gets out. Maybe it was a lover.”

  Annie shuddered. The things people do in the name of love.

  Sam’s voice got even tighter. “I have a terrible feeling about this, A. It’s so sick. It terrifies me that the man who did this is out there. He’s going to do more.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “No, but I feel it in my bones.”

  There was a long silence on the line.

  Finally Sam spoke again, and some of the tension was gone. “I know we’re supposed to take Quynh to the park tomorrow. I think I can still make it. But if I can’t, apologize to her for me and have a good time. Okay?”

  “Right. We’ll wait for you at the Conservatory. If you’re not there by noon, we’ll assume you’re not coming.”

  “Good,” said Sam. “I hope to see you then. You have a good night. Sweet dreams.”

  “You too.”

  “And Annie,” she added softly, “make sure you double lock your door.”

  EIGHT

  Quynh Nguyen lived in Outer Richmond, or the Avenues as the neighborhood was called, with numbered north-south streets running from the western edge of Pacific

  Heights to the ocean. The real-estate values dropped as the street numbers grew larger and the intensity of the fog rolling in from the Pacific grew thicker. There were many days out in the Avenues that never saw the sun while downtown basked under blue skies.

  Trees were scarce here, stucco houses close together. Old Plymouths and Dodges parked in driveways blocked the sidewalks. Large families, many of them Chinese, were crowded into floor-through flats.

  One of the main east-west arteries was Clement, called Little Chinatown for the ever growing number and variety of Chinese restaurants. Mandarin, Szechuan, Hunan had been old hat in this neighborhood for a decade. Now San Francisco’s foodies, ever in search of new taste sensations, were trekking to Clement to dine on Shanghai Strange Flavor Eggplant, Peking-style Capital Sauce Pork Ribbons, and to shop for peony blossoms, tea melon, and water chestnut powder for their own kitchens.

  Annie had written a piece for Gourmet on the “new” Oriental food on Clement: Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese. Quynh’s Uncle Quan owned one of the avenue’s small Vietnamese restaurants she had reviewed. It was called Saigon.

  Quan thought of his ownership as a miracle. That was also the word he used to describe his having escaped Vietnam when the last American forces pulled out. As miraculous as the simple fact of his being alive.

  Quynh’s parents hadn’t been so lucky. Quynh didn’t know how they had died. They simply never came home again. A week after they disappeared their house did, too, its bomb-blasted pieces flying in orange and red arcs through the air. Quynh watched it go up from a neighbor’s house a block away while she was eating a bowl of fish and rice.

  Suddenly there was nothing. She wandered, crying, a little girl in a once-pink dress until, one day, an American soldier picked her up and took her to a Catholic orphanage. It was there that her Uncle Quan found her a year later.

  She had cried on the plane all the way across the Pacific. The orphanage was the only refuge she had ever known from the horror of the world outside. To her, airplanes were instruments of death, poised at any moment to spit destruction. She sat braced through the endless hours, waiting for the bombing to start.

  She had been told by the Red Cross worker holding her hand that her Uncle Quan would be waiting for her in San Francisco. But what was San Francisco?

  It was the gorgeous white city on the hills where her uncle had found a new home, where he took her and fed her and tucked her in bed in her very own room.

  It was where the bombs never fell.

  Quynh already knew some English, in addition to her Vietnamese and French. Her language skills pyramided with the help of her American schoolmates and the staff of Uncle Quan’s restaurant, where he insisted on English being used.

  “You must practice,” he said. “This is your country now. You must learn to speak its language if you want to get ahead.” The rule went for Quynh, too, whether she was simply sitting on a stool chopping vegetables, running errands, or occasionally taking orders in the dining room when Uncle Quan was shorthanded.

  It was there that Annie had first seen Quynh, serious and businesslike, and had fallen in love with her.

  She wasn’t a child to be approached with “Aren’t you a cute little waitress?” Not that that would have been Annie’s style. After all, she herself had been an only child born to older parents, and had stood on a stool behind the counter of their small neighborhood grocery store when she was six, ringing up cash sales on the register and writing up charges in little account books with customers’ names penciled across the top.

  She and Quynh discussed the menu seriously. Annie explained that she wrote about food for magazines. Quynh said matter-of-factly that she was a writer too. A poet. Annie asked if she might see some of her work the next time she came in and they made a date for dinner the following week.

  Quynh’s poetry was lovely, spare and lyrical. It was wise way beyond her ten years, but then, so was she. Soon Annie was dining with Quan and Quynh three and four times a week—with a good deal more frequency than her enthusiasm for Vietnamese food warranted.

  One day she asked Quan if she might take Quynh to the zoo. He hesitated a moment, and she could see him battling demons in his mind.

  “Only for a couple of hours, Quan,” she reassured him. “I’ll bring her back by three.”

  They fed peanuts to the monkeys, the elephants, and themselves. Quynh somberly considered her first chili dog and pronounced it terrific. She stood entranced before the cages of lions and tigers. Annie had to tear her away from the snow leopard to get her home on time as promised. But she knew that it was a very important promise and she was nervous as a boy on his first date about the 3 P.M. deadline. She knew that each second past that would be a horror for Quynh’s uncle.

  At ten minutes before three, they swept through the door of Saigon to meet Quan’s broad smile, matched by one on Quynh’s oval face, the first Annie had ever seen.

  The little girl raced into Quan’s arms and jumped headlong into a recital of her adventure. Annie couldn’t understand a word.

  “English, English, Quynh,” Quan reminded her. He tousled her long, black ponytail with a gentleness that made Annie look away.

  “The monkeys were so silly,” Q
uynh was saying. “They were like the boys in my class at school.” She made a face. “And the very best were the cats, the lions.” Her eyes grew large. “The cougars, the panthers, but the very very best was the snow leopard. It was absolutely…” she searched for the word, “absolutely mythical.”

  Quan and Annie laughed with one another over the little girl’s head, but not aloud.

  “Now I must go and write a poem about the leopard,” she said, scampering down from Quan’s lap.

  She turned toward Annie and said with a slight bow of her head, “Thank you for the monkeys and the scrumptious chili dog and the absolutely, perfectly mythical snow leopard.” Then she stepped forward a little. “Could you please lean down?” Annie did and Quynh threw her thin arms around her neck. “Thank you for an absolutely, perfectly mythical day, Tante Annie,” she said, and kissed her on the cheek.

  Annie barely had time to hug her back before Quynh disappeared through the kitchen door to tell the staff about her day.

  That had settled it. Quan and Annie shared a pot of tea and he told her Quynh’s history and she told him her own—her life as an only child in Atlanta, her marriage to Bert, and her feelings about his children from his first marriage, whom she no longer saw. She talked about the thoughts she’d entertained of having a child herself or adopting one, but how both those choices had seemed so hard, especially for a woman who also wanted to write.

  How recently she’d been thinking of calling Big Sisters to find a child to whom she could be friend, godmother, aunt.

  “I think you’ve found her,” said Quan.

  “I think you’re right,” she answered, then she leaned across the table and kissed him on the cheek.

  A few days later Quynh presented Annie with a poem about the snow leopard artfully quilled on a piece of handmade paper. With Quan’s permission, Annie had given Quynh the eight-week-old male Abyssinian kitten, whom she promptly named Hudson.

  “Why Hudson?”

  “After Henry Hudson,” Quynh answered. “He was a great explorer, like cats are. We’re studying him in school.”

  “Why not Henry?”

  Quynh gave Annie the patient deadpan and shrug all kids use when adults say something unutterably stupid.

  “They didn’t name it the Henry River. Or the George Monument. Or the Abraham…”

  “Okay, okay,” Annie interrupted. “I get it. Do you like him?”

  “I love him.” Quynh squeezed the kitten’s small body and he scrambled straight up her front and licked her nose. Obviously the feeling was mutual.

  *

  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 aqu
arium, 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.