Alyce Miller
                     

About three weeks into the whole business, in which none of the women panned out, Hooper's sagging spirits were lifted by a cheerful message on his answering machine at home: the caller identified herself as Louise.  "Hi, Hooper?  I'm the divorced physical therapist with a strong interest in sports and holistic medicine you wrote to last week."

He rewound the message and listened to it several times, marking each nuance in Louise's tone, detecting a solidity in the flatness of her vowels.  Dark, he thought, she's dark-skinned, dark-haired, with curly hair and long limbs.  Louise left her number, asked him to call after five. 

Hooper took a client to Enrico's, got home around eight, and showered.  Then he gave Louise a try.  A small child answered on the other end and it was only with difficulty that Hooper made it clear he wanted to speak to Louise.  The child didn't seem to know what he meant until Hooper finally said, "May I please speak to Mommy?"

"MO-mmy!" the child roared in his ear.  Hooper held the phone at arm's length to give his eardrum a chance to recover.

A moment later, when he replaced the phone against his ear, he heard Louise's gentle purr.  "Hello?"

"Hi, Louise?  It's Hooper."

"Oh, hi!" She sounded ecstatic.  "Thank you for calling. Is your name really Hooper?  It sounds like that old Paul Newman private eye film, oh, no, that was Harper." Then she laughed.

Hooper didn't know if she was criticizing or not.  "Hooper's my middle name actually, but I use it as both surname and informal first name.  My real last name is unpronounceable."

"Oh, something incredibly ethnic, I suppose, with a lot of z's and w's smooshed together?"

"Something like that," said Hooper.

"Ethnic's in these days. Why not flaunt it?"

Hooper didn't know what to say.

 "Well, I have a confession. My first name is actually Myrtle, after my maternal grandmother, but thank God for Louise, it saved me from total ostracization! Close friends call me Lou."

The child could be heard in the background, sustaining one, long breathless scream.

"Well, I guess this is our introduction," said Hooper in what he hoped was a light, but enthusiastic voice.  Even after practicing, he still found these conversations awkward.

"So, you're an attorney.  Downtown?"

"Embarcadero.  And you?"

"My office is near Russian Hill.  I work along with a chiropractor and a masseuse--Jonah, please, don't pull on Mommy's phone cord like that, it's going to snap.  Take the bear and go up to bed.  No!  Put the scissors DOWN. The bear needs both ears.  (Exasperated sigh)  Jonah, am I going to have to give you time out? --  Sorry, Hooper, my son has had a long day.  Anyway, I'm going to be downtown tomorrow for a meeting and I thought if you were free ..."

"Lunch?" said Hooper, then wished he hadn't interrupted.  It might be misunderstood as desperation.

"Sure, okay," said Louise.  "But I thought it might make sense, you know, be practical, if we talked for a few minutes on the phone.  Before we waste too much time meeting in person."

"Oh?" said Hooper.  He was not fond of phones, and Jonah's second long scream began to soar into the range of glass-breaking decibels.

Louise's vowels flattened.  "Yes, I thought maybe I could ask you a few questions and you could ask me a few questions, you know, to see if we had compatibility potential."

Hooper felt his heart sink.  "You mean like an interview, over the telephone?"

"Just preliminaries," said Louise in a brisk, practiced voice.   Hooper heard Louise cover the mouthpiece, her voice rose in muffled annoyance.  He heard the words "one, two, three" and "no Pocahontas for you tonight if you keep this up."

"Sure," said Hooper.  "What would you like to ask?"

"Question number one," said Louise," do you like children?"

Hooper took a deep breath. In the background Jonah shrieked.  "Well, yes, sure, yes, I do.  I like children ... some children.  What I mean is, I have two nieces and a nephew I'm very fond of."

"Do you ever want children of your own?" asked Louise.  There was an odd scratching noise in the background and Hooper realized it was the sound of pen on paper. Louise was taking notes.

He cleared his throat.  "Well, I'm pretty much a product of my generation, I guess, prolonged adolescence, years in law school, working on my career.  But of course I've thought a lot about children, it's just that I suppose I've gone this long without them, I must not be rabid to have them."  He'd meant to be humorous, but feared his words had the opposite effect: a stuffed shirt, a prig, or worse yet, a child-hater.

"So you don't want children?" Louise clarified.

"I didn't say that exactly," said Hooper.  "I think it's hard to visualize something like children theoretically without someone in the flesh to attach the children to. I'd like to think I had a partner in mind first."

"Oh, so if you were in love with someone, you'd consider having children."

Hooper cleared his throat again.  "Something like that," he said.  "Look, Louise, don't you think we're heading into deep waters here?  How about if we meet first, you know, see if we like each other, get our toes wet, before we plunge in over our heads."  Hooper was pleased with the metaphor.

Louise's tone tightened severely. "I guess you don't see the point here.  I received twenty-three letters last week, and yours was just one of them.  I've narrowed it down to ten, but you're only the second person I've contacted.  That gives me eight more people to meet.  That's a lot of coffee and lunch and parking, and parking in San Francisco is not cheap. I think we can save ourselves a lot of wasted time and energy if we get some things straight right off the bat."

"Okay," said Hooper. "You have a point."

"Do you want to get married?" asked Louise.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Do you want to get married?"

"I don't even know you."

"That's true, but I believe it's important to know certain things about a person before you go out.  I've dated a lot of men in my time and I'm sick of bullshit!" Louise sounded very angry.

"We were just going to have lunch, Louise," Hooper reminded her uneasily.

"I'm still open," said Louise, "but you've got to be able to deal with all of me. I want you to know who I am."

"I don't know," said Hooper in a dull voice.  Louise was beginning to sound like a tall order. 

After a pause, Louise said, "So I take it you're not really looking for a serious relationship."

"That's not true," Hooper defended himself.  "I just think this interrogation is a little premature."

"Interrogation.  Hmmmm, I see," said Louise. "You perceive that I'm interrogating you?  Aren't you being just a little paranoid?"

"Look, Louise, I think we're after different things."

The child began to wail, a slow, lugubrious unwinding of despair.  "You know," said Louise, "I'm a single mother and I've got a very busy schedule.  My work and my kid come first.  I've survived without a man for some time now and I've done quite well.  I don't need to make any quick decisions until all the cards are on the table." 

"Yes, it would seem so," agreed Hooper.  "I'm sorry to have taken up your time.  Good luck with the other nine."

He hung up.

***  

In the morning Myrna insisted that Hooper was much too easily discouraged.

"These things take time," she said, "they have a life of their own.  So Louise was a jerk, get over it.  Probably bitter and hostile.  A lot of women like that nowadays given circumstances.  Well, we all need to let  go of the past. Sounds like she's still collecting her brown stamps, and you, my friend, don't  need a grudge-filled, resentful date. You're a great guy. If I didn't have my hands so full with men, I'd snatch you up myself."

"Maybe arranged marriages are the best way to go," mused Hooper. "No fuss, no muss.  Your family selects a bride, you go to the altar with your eyes closed, you make it work out."

Myrna raised her eyebrows.  "And burn your wife for the dowry, too? Hooper, you're treading on thin ice." 

"Jesus, I don't really believe in arranged marriages," Hooper defended himself.  "I'm just joking."

"Then why bring it up?" Myrna was looking at him with grave suspicion.  "I certainly hope you don't convey that kind of attitude to these women you're meeting. It is not attractive."     That afternoon, he threw himself into his work.  He was working on a case for a client who was suing a drugstore because one of their chaise lounge chairs, on special for $22.99, involuntarily unfolded and fell off the top shelf onto her head.  She now suffered from terrible migraine headaches, as well as an unreasonable fear of chaise lounges. "It's interfering with my life in ways you can't even imagine," she told Hooper.  "It's awful. I go to a friend's house and see a lounging chair and it's like this post-traumatic stress syndrome kicks in."

Go to part:  1,  2,  3,  4,  5

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Copyright 2002, Alyce Miller

nidus is an online publication supported by the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh's English Department.