The April morning in Studio City was warm, promising an afternoon in the mid-80s. Sally and I were killing time at a sidewalk table of the Coffee Bean on Ventura Boulevard. The majority of the clientele were single Gen-Xers doing what Gen-Xers do in the Starbucks, Peets, and lesser-known coffee houses that proliferate on the thoroughfares of California. There was a lot of chit-chat between tables. One not especially attractive girl was getting a great deal of attention since the puppy she had on a leash was irresistibly cute and cuddly and every new arrival came to pay some attention to it and question the dog's mistress about age and breed.

Though old enough to have parented most of the clientele and garbed more conservatively, we were tolerated as we threaded through tables, carrying lidded grande coffees with those little brown heat shields that slide up the paper cups, to find our niche in the shade. Sally had her monumental best-seller biography of Alexander Hamilton in her shoulder bag and I was equipped with the LA Times Sunday magazine crossword to be mastered using the ball point pen lodged between ear and scalp. Both reading material and puzzle were methods of disguising the fact that we were tuning in on the conversations and mating games of the habitus, most of whom were in small same-sex groups looking to chat with their gender opposites. It's healthier than what I went through in singles bars as a bachelor, I thought, recalling all the lame conversational gambits I had tried out on women who caught my interest. The Irish coffees I swilled at the Buena Vista in San Francisco back then were cheaper than the nonalcoholic brews of today's coffee houses, but I shudder to think of what the whipped cream and sugar were doing to my body - not to mention the Bushmill's or Jameson's.

I pretended intense concentration, gazing above my crossword with a thousand-yard stare, but actually ogling the display of mammalian cleavage, studded navels, tattooed shoulders, arms, and lumbar spines exposed by low-riding pants and shirt tops that provided minimum coverage.

Sally nudged me with her foot under the table as I was inking in twelve down on my puzzleThe opening word of the Aeneidfour letters beginning and ending with "a."

"Don't be obvious about it," she said, "but look to your right at the woman in white standing under the big clock between this place and the dress shop next door." I did as I was asked, disguising the move by stretching

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