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Gloria did not see the humor in the situation.

The night before the raccoons had tipped over the garbage can and hurled barbecued chicken bones, apple cores, banana peels, used tissues and coffee grinds all along the side of the house, and in the morning Gloria was more annoyed at me for not securing the garbage can lid than she was at the raccoons that had created the mess. I told her I did my best. I told her the raccoons were smart, and it was true. They were intelligent creatures. I had used two bungee cords snapped around the handles of the garbage can, but the raccoons had figured out how to slip the cords to the sides of the can and then they had somehow raised and removed the lid. Gloria said my best obviously  wasn’t good enough.

I cleaned up the mess and showered and dressed and drove to Lombard’s Hardware to look at radial saws. I had been looking at saws for years, planning to commence my career as a maker of fine furniture. I had wanted to build a dining table and dressers and chairs and bookshelves. But I was also terribly afraid of the power tools. I’d worked with wood before, used table saws and planers and joiners and routers.  In college I built a large bookcase out of knotty pine. It served its purpose and it was a decent introduction to woodworking, but it wasn’t terribly stable and I left it behind when I graduated from college. As far as I know it’s still in the house I lived in.

I’d met too many people who had lost finger tips or cut their arms in shop accidents. Most were experienced carpenters who knew what they were doing and knew exactly how their machinery worked. Woodworking is like rock climbing. Every year some world renowned climbing expert plunges down a ravine and is never heard from again. If expertise is no safeguard, what would protect me?

I didn’t buy a saw. They weren’t expensive and I could have paid for one on a credit card. I studied the different horsepowers and features and touched the tips of the carbon blades. Then I studied the cans of tung oil and the stains and shellacs. Then I left the store.

I walked down the block and looked at the papers from around the country in the magazine shop. Only the local papers were current. The rest were from the day before. It was strange how they seemed so obsolete and useless, only one day old. I could only imagine those other cities as they were the day before, with yesterday’s news, not knowing that today it was all different, the death toll new, the stalemate a day older, the officials more concerned, the scandal more widespread, the preacher more promiscuous.

I didn’t want a newspaper. We had two delivered at the house we rented outside of town and I had seen them in the box as I drove out. I imagined Gloria waiting for me to come back into the house with the papers.

I looked at the foreign cigarettes and peered into the glassed-in room with the cigars. The pipe tobacco smelled delicious and I studied the corn-cob pipes. I rarely smoke and haven’t smoked a pipe since I was a kid when we tried smoking everything.

The magazines were the real attraction, my real weakness. Glossy and colorful and gossipy, I could easily buy them all, the travel magazines, the car magazines, the camera magazines, the art magazines. The architecture magazines were beautiful and no more expensive than the hot rod magazines. I loved the women’s magazines but was always embarrassed to look at them. I liked the pictures of the gorgeous women and I liked the articles. I liked the advice columns, about sex, makeup, clothes. I liked the letters to the editor.

I wanted to look at the pornography, but that was also too embarrassing. I started reading a story in a fiction magazine. It was too long. I priced software and hardware in a computer magazine and imagined how I could improve my computer system with a new hard drive and a CD-ROM and a color scanner and a 400 dot per inch laser printer. With the right system I could create my own magazine, right at home in my spare time after work. I calculated I needed about $40,000 in equipment.

I was leafing through a home decorating magazine when a stunning woman walked into the shop. It was as if she had emerged from one of the women’s magazines, her lips glossed and her hair unnaturally perfect. Like me she was browsing, picking up first a news weekly, then a European fashion magazine, then a glossy left-wing political magazine that I’d looked through myself. The magazine had a fancy thick cover, but inside the paper was thin and covered with columns of words. The articles were all wordy and pompous and analytical, as if the authors were letting the readers in on well-kept secrets when all they were writing was conjecture already proved wrong by the latest turn in events.

She appeared tall, but was actually no taller than I, and I’m not tall. She had long brown hair, a white short sleeved blouse and a long skirt with tiny little white monkey silhouettes clinging to the dark green fabric. She wore simple open black leather shoes without heals that exposed an oval patch on top of her foot. The open shoe tops were like a plunging neckline, an inviting tease that announced to the world that there was so much more beneath the covering. My eyes darted from her face to her neck to her hips to the ends of her long legs that emerged from beneath the skirt, and then to her partially exposed feet. I wanted to see her toes wriggle, but they were hidden.

She had a gold bracelet on one arm and her lips were covered in a purplish red lipstick that contrasted wonderfully with her angular chin and cheek bones.

She glanced up at me and I looked back down at a white living room with a blue and gold rug. I could tell she was back to her own magazine and I put mine down to find another. I wanted to buy them all.

I picked up an oversized pop music-art-fashion magazine. It was one of those magazines good only for the advertisements. I couldn’t even follow the articles. Some were completely unintelligible. Just words splayed across a page in no order at all. The most stunning advertisements were in black and white and prominently displayed the name of the photographer who took the picture. One advertisement was for perfume named after the photographer who took the picture.

I wanted to say something to her, but I didn’t. I strolled further away to hide my curiosity and she strolled in the opposite direction, no doubt oblivious to my bulging eyeballs.

The bell at the shop entrance jingled. It was her. She had left the store. I wanted to buy something, at least a peppermint candy, but something came over me and I  put the magazine back on the rack and followed the woman out the store.

She was young, somewhere close to my own age, maybe a little older, maybe a little younger. I wanted to see where such a glamorous woman went, what she did.

When I got out onto the sidewalk she was halfway down the block and across the street. This was perfect because I could follow from a distance and she would never know. The street by now was crowded with Saturday morning shoppers and I would not even be a face or even a body in the crowd. I would be nothing.

She glanced in the window of a lingerie shop. I’d done this too, but more discretely. She walked on and looked at the huge floral vases in the antique shop. Then she looked at an oak rolltop desk that must have cost a fortune. Of course I’d looked at all this before without any thought of buying anything. But I imagined she could buy it all if she wanted, just pull her checkbook out of the pocket in her skirt and pay for a two thousand dollar desk and have it delivered that afternoon.

She stood in front of a bakery and read the menu and glanced at her watch. It was nine thirty in the morning.

She moved on and stopped at the corner and again she glanced at her watch and I knew our time together was almost over. She was meeting someone. I stood at a bus stop a careful distance away and kept my eye on her. Sometimes I would pace or look down the street in the opposite direction just in case she was looking in my direction. I wanted to see who it was she was waiting for. I knew it was a man, an incredibly fortunate man who must have known all her secrets and shared her passions and desires and tastes. An old friend? A lover? A husband?

Or perhaps a first or second date, and he was only discovering her joys and sorrows and misgivings about love and relationships and her past mistakes and triumphs and what she wanted to do, where she wanted to go, the grand adventures she expected, with or without him.

Another woman  approached and I saw them wave and embrace. The new woman seemed also to be about my age, also tall and beautiful, even from a distance. She was blond and they were both very happy to see each other.

I turned around quickly because I think my staring had become obvious. I pretended to read the posters stapled to a telephone pole. The posters announced protest marches and punk rock concerts, some of them months in the past.

I looked back down the street to where the two women stood, but they were gone. My heart missed a beat in that moment of sudden departure, and in the next moment I was grieving over the loss. I sped quickly down to the end of the street and scanned in all directions for them. I turned around and looked to see if they had doubled back toward the bakery and the antique shop. But they were gone. She was gone.

I walked back to the bakery and bought two chocolate eclairs and a loaf of fresh bread and I stopped in the fancy grocery store and bought some sausage and fresh tomato pasta and two green peppers and an onion. I picked up the papers at the end of our long driveway and waved to the neighbor.

I walked into the kitchen and Gloria was drinking a glass of orange juice and reading a magazine that had arrived in the mail the day before. I’m sorry, she said. She had tied her hazelnut hair back in a pony tail and had tried to wash the tears out of her eyes. Her face was still flushed red, but she was more beautiful than any women I had ever seen or imagined. We kissed and hugged and then we ate the most delicious toast in the world.