LITMIR.BIZ

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His face fell, and then he struggled to put the cheer back into his expression. “Maybe next week we can grab something to eat together. The food court has some pretty good stuff.”

      I smiled, rather painfully. “We’ll see.”

      It was as good as I could do, for a response. It was neither dashing nor encouraging his hopes, although dashing was what I knew I should do. “You have to be cruel to be kind,” and all that, which I think is almost harder on the dasher than on the dashee. But I got a lot of business at this store, and didn’t want to create bad feelings with an employee.

      Maybe he’d get the hint when I was too busy next week, and the week after, and then we could both pretend he had never expressed anything but friendly interest.

      Butler & Sons was in the lower level of Pioneer Place Two, the new addition to the upscale shopping center in the heart of downtown Portland. Pioneer Place Two was connected to its older twin by a sky bridge and an underground tunnel, and it was along this tunnel that I walked with my armload of sportswear, following the streamlike undulations of decorative blue glass under my feet. The stores on either side were mostly the same chains found in every other city: the Body Shop, Victoria’s Secret, the Gap, Banana Republic, Eddie Bauer. I much preferred to go to Saks to steal my ideas for clothes to make. Somehow everything looked just a little more beautiful there.

      The tunnel came out in the lower level of the original Pioneer Place, in the atrium center where switchbacks of escalators rose up four floors to a skylight roof. Thirty-foot bamboo grew in enormous pots, and smooth oak benches curved around a fountain that bubbled from several spouts, the sound rebounding off the bare floors and the glass walls of the surrounding shops. For some inexplicable reason someone had thrown a bright red toothbrush into the fountain, to lie at the bottom amid the pennies and dimes.

      I spotted a rack of Willamette Week, and lay the clothes over the back of a bench as I took a copy and sat to peruse the back pages. It’s a weekly paper, the main alternative to the more run-of-the-mill Oregonian. No one I knew actually read the articles: all we wanted was the entertainment section and the personal ads. What I wanted today was found in the last few pages: ads for singles’ activity clubs.

      “Women Call Free! Meet Quality Singles Like Yourself!” This, written above a heart with a photo of a blond woman seductively talking into a phone.

      What women are willing to call those numbers? And what men do they find on the line? It was hard to not think of the “slimers” Louise talked about, who called the crisis line: men who would call up and pretend to need counseling, but there was always a telltale hitch in their voices that said they were jacking off. Apparently all they needed was a woman’s voice to get them to blow weenie phlegm into their hankies.

      “Summer Fun! Rafting! Hiking! All Singles!” another of the ads read, over a black-and-white photo of young, handsome people screaming in delight as they shot the rapids, water splashing up around their rubber raft, their paddles raised, their life jackets turning them into uniform human cubes of athletic enthusiasm.

      This sounded much more like what I was looking for, but I had a feeling there was going to be a hefty membership fee. If I couldn’t afford health insurance, I couldn’t afford to fork over hundreds to go rafting with other desperate singles.

      No, not “desperate,” I reminded myself. Organized.

      But still, there was something I didn’t like about the idea of paying a membership fee. It seemed so…forced. I wanted to be organized, but I also wanted to preserve a bit of the illusion that I would meet Mr. One-in-a-Million by fortuitous chance.

      I flipped back through the pages toward the Culture section, stopping briefly in the personals at Men Looking For Women, but then deciding to save that entertainment for later.

      The Culture section had everything from music clubs to art gallery listings, and went on for pages and pages. I browsed through it and found a college production of Shakespeare’s “Cymbeline”, performed on the Reed College lawn; a jazz group scheduled for a night at Pioneer Courthouse Square; and myriad events that made me feel like I was getting old. They sounded so loud. And smoky. Ugh.

      I bought an Oregonian for its Friday pull-out A&E section, and found a hike along a trail in the Columbia Gorge, organized by Portland Community College, to observe spring wildflowers and wildlife. Five dollars, bring your own lunch and water to the specified meeting point.

      They all held possibilities for meeting a man, although you can’t talk during a play. I might be able to drag Louise or Cassie along with me to the jazz night at Pioneer Courthouse Square, but I didn’t really like jazz. But guys seemed to, so maybe. The hike—maybe, although my hunch was that guys would prefer to think of themselves as the type of outdoorsmen who didn’t need a guide.

      On the other hand, wouldn’t it be nice to find someone who enjoyed nature for reasons other than shooting deer and drinking beer by the fire?

      I’d always liked those naturalists on television, the men who talked with calm, knowledgeable assurance, and had the patience to wait for hours behind a bit of shrubbery for the chance of seeing an otter or black bear. Any guy who would go on a guided nature walk in the gorge had to be a nice guy.

      Some instinct had me glance up from the paper, and there was Robert, not fifteen feet away, headed for the second tunnel that led to the food court. He turned his head and saw me, and I felt my cheeks heat. I smiled weakly at him, feeling like a dog caught eating the cat’s food, and he gave me an uncertain little wave and then kept going.

      Damn. He probably thought I’d been lying about the appointments, to avoid eating with him. I folded up the Willamette Week and the A&E section, and picked up the clothes, feeling like a clod. I shouldn’t have dawdled here, when I knew there was the danger of his coming by and seeing me. Stupid, stupid.

      Why did emotions have to create so many delicate webs of pain, so easy to blunder through? And how many would be destroyed, both my own and others, by the time I’d found my Mr. Right?

      Maybe there was a reason love and war were so often mentioned together. In both cases, the casualties were legion.

      “This is you, the Page of Wands,” Cassie said, pointing to the tarot card in the center of the layout. We were sitting on the floor of Louise’s eighth-floor apartment, later that same day. Louise had invited us over to dinner, and Scott would be coming by in time for dessert. The apartment was filled with the scent of baking lasagne, likely made with five or six exotic cheeses and half a dozen vegetables I’d never heard of. Louise liked to try recipes from trendy cookbooks.

      Louise was already looking more healthy now that she was working days: the shadows were gone from beneath her eyes, and her skin had a touch of color beneath her darkening freckles.

      Louise’s apartment is in a new-ish building in the heart of downtown, the rent partially subsidized by her well-off parents, who slept better at night knowing that their daughter was in a safe place, with security cameras in the halls and a man at the desk in the lobby. Counselors at crisis lines did not make much money, and Louise would be living somewhere like I did if not for her parents. I envied her modern bathroom and the balcony with a view, but I liked where I lived with Cassie and wasn’t sure I’d trade.

      “Why the Page of Wands?” I asked Cassie.

      “Pages are for young women with lots of creative energy. They tend to be action-oriented.”

      “Okay.” I shuffled the deck, the oversize cards awkward in my hands, and then Cassie laid them out in what she called the “gypsy spread.” My question for the cards was what my love life would be like in the next four months.

      “These cards on either side of you represent aspects of yourself,” she said. “Seven of Swords—you have plans, but don’t know how to put them into effect, or whether they will succeed or fail. The Emperor—you are taking action in the real world.”

      “That fits well enough.”

      Cassie looked up at me with a grin, henna-red hair loose and slightly

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