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here she was with something on her mind. She sat
down on the sofa, stiffened her arms against the armrests, and surprised me by
skipping the Brian topic. Instead, her eyes watered up and she said, “I can’t
get a job.”
    She
definitely had had a few drinks. I wondered if she wanted something chemical
from me, which I wasn’t about to give her, and which I didn’t have. “I thought
you just finished a job, that show The Lawyers.”
    “I did,”
she said. “I played a sandwich girl, delivering lunches to the law office. I
was happy to get it. I poured my heart into it. I tried to be a sexy sandwich
girl, a memorable sandwich girl, but they asked me to tone it down. So I was
just a delivery girl. My line was ‘Mr. Anderson, same as yesterday?’ I did it
perfectly, too, in one take, and then it was over. I look at the star, Cathy
Merlot— can you believe how stupid that name is? Merlot? Why not Susie
Cabernet?—and I know I’m as good as she is, but she’s the centre of attention,
she’s the one getting fluffed and powder-puffed and…”
    Philipa
kept talking but I stopped listening. By now her body was folded in the chair
like an origami stork, her elbows, forearms, calves, and thighs going every
which-a-way. She didn’t even finish her last sentence; it just trailed off. I
think the subject had changed in her head while her mouth had continued on the
old topic, not realizing it was out of supplies. She asked me how old I was.
    “Thirty-three,”
I said. “I thought you were late twenties,” she said. I explained, “I never go
out in the sun.” She said, “Must be hard to avoid.” I thought, Oh goody,
repartee. But Philipa quieted. It seemed—oddly—that she had become distracted
by my presence, the very person she was talking to. Her eyes, previously
darting and straying, fell on me and held. She adjusted her body in the sofa
and turned her knees squarely toward me, foreshortening her thighs, which
disappeared into the shadows of her skirt. This made me uncomfortable and at
the same time gave me a hint of an erection.
    “When’s
your birthday?” she asked.
    “January
twenty-third.”
    “You’re
an Aquarius,” she said.
    “I
guess. What’s yours?” I asked.
    “Scorpio.”
    “I mean
your birth date.”
    “November
fifteenth.”
    I said,
“What year?”
    She
said, “Nineteen seventy-four.”
    “A
Friday,” I said.
    “Yes,”
she said, not recognizing my sleight of hand. “Do you date anyone?”
    “Oh
yeah,” I said. “I’m dating a realtor.”
    “Are
you exclusive?”
    “No,” I
said. “But she wants me to be.”
    Then
she paused. Cocked her head like Tiger. “Wait a minute. How did you know it was
a Friday?” she finally asked.
    How do
I explain to her what I can’t explain to myself? “It’s something I can do,” I
said.
    “What
do you mean?”
    “I mean
I don’t know, I can just do it.”
    “What’s
April 8, 1978?”
    “It’s a
Saturday,” I said.
    “Jeez,
that’s freaky. You’re right; it’s my brother’s birthday; he was born on
Saturday. What’s January 6, 1280?”
    “Tuesday,”
I said.
    “Are
you lying?” she asked.
    “No.”
    “What
do you do for a living, and do you have any wine?”
    “No
wine,” I said, answering one question and skirting the other.
    “So you
want some wine? I’ve got some upstairs,” she said. Open, I’ll bet, too, I
thought. “Okay,” I said, knowing I wasn’t going to have any. Philipa excused
herself and ran up to her apartment with a “be right back.” I stayed in my
chair, scratching around the outline of its paisley pattern with my fingernail.
Soon she was back with a bottle of red wine. “Fuck,” she said. “All I had was
Merlot.”
    Philipa
poured herself a tankard full and slewed around toward me, saying, “So what did
you say you do?”
    I
wanted to seem as if I were currently employed, so I had to change a few
tenses. Mostly “was” to “am.” “I encode corporate messages. Important