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restaurant and sit there all by yourself, just eating, far too depressing. They want gaiety and the possibility of romance and a mention of the wine list.
    Rennie gives up anyway when the roast beef arrives, leathery and khaki and covered with a gravy that tastes like mix. It’s garnished with a cube of yam and something light green that has been boiled too long. This is the kind of food you eat only when very hungry.
    Rennie is reminded of the put-on piece she did, months ago, on fast-food outlets. It was for
Pandora’s
“Swinging Toronto” section. She’d once done a piece for them on how to pick men up in laundromats, unobtrusively and safely, with addresses of the good laundromats.
Check their socks. If they ask to borrow your soap flakes, forget it
. The food franchise piece was called “Sawdust Yummies” and the subtitle (not hers) read, “You better take a good thou, ’cause the bread and the wine are nowhere.”
    She’d covered every McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken spot in the downtown core for it, dutifully taking one bite of everything.
My companion had the Egg McMuffin, which he found a trifle runny. My buns were chilly
.
    Rennie picks at the alien vegetables on her plate, gazing around the room. There’s only one other diner, a man, who’s sitting on the far side of the room reading a paper. In front of him is a dish of what looks like whipped lime Jello. If this were a laundromat, would she pick him up? He turns the page of his newspaper and smiles at her, a half-smile of complicity, and Rennie looks down at her plate. She likes to stare but she doesn’t like to be caught doing it.
    Eye contact, that was one hint. She’s not surprised when he folds the paper, gets up, and heads towards her table.
    “It’s kind of dumb, sitting across the room from each other like that,” he says. “I think this place is empty except for us. Mind if I join you?”
    Rennie says no. She has no intention of picking this man up. She never actually picked men up in laundromats, she just went through the preliminaries and then explained that she was doing research. That’s what she can always say if necessary. Meanwhile, there’s no reason not to be polite.
    He goes to the kitchen door and asks for another cup of coffee, and one of the waitresses brings it. She also brings a dish of the green substance for Rennie, and then, instead of returning to the kitchen, sits down at the man’s vacated place and finishes off his dessert, staring balefully at him as she does so. The man has his back to her and can’t see.
    “I wouldn’t eat that if I were you,” he says.
    Rennie laughs and looks at him more carefully. Before the operation, there was a game she used to play with Jocasta, on the street and in restaurants. Pick a man, any man, and find the distinguishing features. The eyebrows? The nose? The body? If this man wereyours, how would you do him over? A brush cut, a wet suit? It was a rude game and Rennie knew it. Jocasta, for some reason, didn’t. Listen, she’d say. You’d be doing them a favour.
    Rennie thinks this man would resist being done over. For one thing, he’s too old: he’s past the Silly Putty stage. Rennie decides he must be at least forty. His tan is leathery, there are permanent white creases around his eyes. He has a light moustache and post-hippie-length hair, bottom of the earlobes in front, top of the collar in back; it’s a little ragged, as if he does it himself with kitchen scissors. He’s wearing shorts and a yellow T-shirt without anything written on it. Rennie approves of this. She liked T-shirts with mottoes on them when they first came out, but now she thinks they’re jejune.
    Rennie introduces herself and mentions that she’s a journalist. She always likes to get that in first, before people mistake her for a secretary. The man says his name is Paul and he’s from Iowa. “Originally,” he says, implying travel. He’s not staying at the hotel, he says, just eating