Rebecca Schwartz 05 - Other People's Skeletons

in the Eastern religions. We hung out a lot this summer and Roger got it into his head to go to a psychic— being in Berkeley and all. And the psychic told him he’d meet a dark-haired woman in a pink suit with whom he’d have— get this— an ‘important’ relationship.”
    I was starting to be amused. “Oh, no. Not another learning experience.”
    “The psychic said her name would be either Rosalind or Ruth, something like that. Well, he kind of got into it and went to another psychic and that one saw a woman in his life too, but all she said was that she was named Rebecca. So he asked what she looked like and sure enough, she was dark and wearing pink. So you know what he did?”
    “Placed an ad in the East Bay Express .”
    “No, he went to a third psychic. That one only said she’d be dark and about five-feet-five— how tall are you, Rebecca?”
    “About that.”
    Exactly that. I’d gone from amused to intrigued. “But the only thing was, he looked all over Berkeley and couldn’t find her. Then when I saw you, you so perfectly answered the description.”
    Was this some kind of setup? Were these people trying to pull something? They could have been except for one thing— the business trip to Seattle had come up at the last moment. No one but my law partner and my travel agent even knew I was going.
    Lorraine said, “Why don’t you give Rebecca Roger’s phone number? What do you think, Rebecca? Would you want to call him?”
    “Well, I don’t know anything about him.”
    They spent the next ten minutes singing the praises of their friend, who, aside from having a sterling character and all that, was lots of fun, “especially for a professor,” they said.
    The upshot was, I said they could give him my number. I was listed, anyhow, and the whole thing was starting to look larkish. I was quite giddy with the encounter, shaking my head on the walk home and murmuring, “Only in San Francisco.”
    When I walked in, my phone was ringing. “Rebecca. Roger DeCampo in Seattle.” He had a rich, deep voice that I liked at once.
    He was divorced, had a kid— pretty generally sounded like an eligible man. I wasn’t especially in the market for one; I was dating a very nice marine biologist.
    But Julio lived in another town, and we weren’t seeing each other exclusively. Since the cosmos had apparently gone to all the trouble of arranging a blind date especially for me, it was the least I could do to accept. I said I’d stay overnight in Seattle and have dinner with him.
    It was a lark and it made me giggle, but I certainly wasn’t going to meet a strange man at a strange restaurant in a strange city without telling Chris where I was going and with whom.
    And far from advising caution, she got right in the spirit of it. “Let’s see, you met the friend in the post office, right? So if you marry this dude does that make you a mail-order bride?”
    “Listen, do you think it’s weird about the three psychics? It kind of gives me the willies.”
    “Why?”
    “Well, three out of three. It’s just strange.”
    “It’s strange, all right. They don’t call it Berzerkley for nothing.”
    Roger was about five-nine, skinny, brown hair, brown eyes— nobody’s dreamboat but certainly not repulsive. And he was interesting. He knew a whole lot about pop culture as well as the more serious subject of Eastern religion, which I’ve always found fascinating; and he knew about western religion as well. And he was a movie fan who liked country music. A curious combination. A great talker. A good first date.
    We got to talking so hard and fast they closed the restaurant down and started stacking chairs before we took the hint and left. And all the time I kept wondering: What are we really doing here? What could possibly be ‘important’ about the two of us meeting?
    Nothing, I thought— just a cute meet, a pleasant time, that was the end of it. But then Roger called and said he’d like to come see me in San Francisco.
    What was the harm, I thought?
    He took me to Tadich’s, an old-fashioned restaurant he’d liked when he visited before. I liked it too, and thought there was a lot to be said for continuity in a city where the half-life of a restaurant is about the time it takes to read the menu.
    Roger had by this time become so convinced we were going to be important together that he’d decided to tell me his secrets. He said some things about “new paradigms,” for instance, that I didn’t