Portland Noir

I sat there, breathless, waiting for Mark Aikens to come down. But he didn’t. My eyes shot to the bedroom window. Also dark. That meant she was… they were…

I tooled around the Pearl having conversations with her in my head, begging, yelling, until finally I crossed the bridge and drove toward my father’s little duplex in Northeast. I parked on the dirt strip in front and beat on his door. I could hear him clumping around inside. My dad had lost a leg to diabetes. It took him awhile to get his prosthetic on.

When he finally answered, I said: “Tanya threw me out. She’s seeing her old boyfriend. She said living with me was like living with a stalker.”

“You always did make people nervous,” my father said. Dad was a big sloppy man, awful at giving advice. Since my mother’s death, he’d been even less helpful in these father-son moments. He sniffed the air. “Have you been drinking?”

“No,” I said.

“Christ, Trent.” And he invited me inside. “Why the hell not?”

Before all of this, I loved my job. And I’m not talking about the job as portrayed in my five-year-old performance evaluation, the low point of which (one flimsy charge of harassment stemming from an honest misunderstanding involving the women’s restroom) the newspaper found a way to dredge up in its apology to readers. No. What I loved was the work. As a features copy editor, I pulled national stories off the wire, proofread local copy, and wrote headlines for as many as five pages a day, but my favorite (because it was Tanya’s favorite) was “Inside Living”-page two of the features section, the best-read page in the O-with syndicated features like the crossword puzzle, the word jumble, celebrity birthdays, and Tanya’s favorite, the daily horoscope. That’s how we’d met, in fact, four months earlier, in a coffee shop where I saw her reading her horoscope. I launched our romance with the simple statement: “I edit that page.” Within a week we were dating, and a month later, in late July, when I was asked to leave my apartment because the paranoid woman across the courtyard objected to my having a telescope, Tanya said I could move in with her until I found a place.

Now, to some, I may indeed be-as the newspaper’s one-sided apology to readers characterized me- strangely quiet and intense, practically a nonpresence, but to loyal readers like Tanya, I was something of an unsung hero.

Each morning during those three glorious months, she would pour herself a cup of coffee, toast a bagel, and browse the newspaper, spending mere seconds on each page, until she arrived at “Inside Living,” her newspaper home. I couldn’t wait for her to get there. She’d make a careful fold and crease, set the page down, and study it as if it contained holy secrets. And only then would she speak to me. “Eleven down: ‘Film’s blank Peak’?”

“Dante’s.”

“Are you sure you don’t see the answers the day before?”

“I told you, no.” Of course, I did see the answers the day before. But who could blame me for a little dishonesty? I was courting.

“Hey, it’s Kirk Cameron’s birthday. Guess how old he is.”

“Twelve? Six hundred? Who’s Kirk Cameron?”

“Come on. You edited this page yesterday. Now you’re going to pretend you don’t know who Kirk Cameron is?”

“That celebrity stuff comes in over the wire. I just shovel it in without reading it. You know I hate celebrities.”

“I think you pretend not to like celebrities to make yourself appear smarter.”

This was true. I do love celebrities.

“Hey, look,” she’d say finally. “I’m having a five-star day. If I relax, the answers will all come to me.”

It’s painful now to recall those sweet mornings, the two of us bantering over our page of the newspaper, with no hint that it was about to end. And this is the strange part, the mystical part, some might say: on those days Tanya read that she was to have a five-star day… she actually had five-star days. Now, I don’t believe in such mumbo-jumbo; it was likely just the power of suggestion. But I did begin to notice (in the journals in which I record such things) that Tanya was more open to my amorous advances when she got five stars. In fact, after our first month together, I began to notice that the only time Tanya seemed at all interested in being intimate, the only time she wanted to… you know, get busy, bump uglies, bury the dog in the yard… was when she got five stars on her horoscope.

Then one day in early October, when we’d stopped having sex altogether, I did it. I goosed her horoscope. Virgo was supposed to have three stars and I changed it to five.

So sue me. It didn’t even work.

Obviously, though, that’s where the idea came from. And yet I might have simply moved on and not launched my horoscope warfare had Tanya not fired the first shot at me by filing a no-contact order a mere two weeks after throwing me out. A no-contact order! Based on what, I wanted to know.

“Well, you do drive over there every night after work and park outside her place,” my dad said as he nursed a tumbler of rum.

“Yeah, but eight hundred feet? What kind of arbitrary number is that? Shall I carry a tape measure? How do you know if you’re eight hundred feet away from someone? There’s a tapas place around the corner from her condo. Am I just supposed to stop eating tapas?”

“There’s a Taco Bell over on M.L. King.”

“Tapas, Dad. Not tacos.”

Dad poured us a drink, then turned on the TV. “Look, I don’t know what to tell you, Trent. You make people uncomfortable. When you were a kid I thought something was wrong with your eyelids, the way you never blinked. I used to ask your mom if maybe there wasn’t some surgery we could try.”

This was my father. A woman breaks my heart and his answer is to sew my eyelids shut. But I suppose he tried. I suppose we all try.

“Life just isn’t fair,” I said as the old widower hobbled away on his prosthetic leg to get another drink.

“Yeah, well,” he replied, “I hope I’m not the asshole who told you it would be.”

The very next day, November 17, Virgo got the first of thirteen straight one-star days. “Four stars: your creativity surges. Keep an eye on the big picture,” Virgo was supposed to read that day. I changed it to: “One star: watch your back.” It was glorious, imagining her read that.

Horoscopes are cryptic and open-ended: “You’ll encounter an obstacle but you are up to the task. A Capricorn may help.” In fact, I could argue that what clearly began as a way to spoil my girlfriend’s day became a campaign to make horoscopes more useful. And I won’t pretend that I didn’t like the voice, the power that changing horoscopes gave me. In the office, I kept my own counsel, going days without speaking sometimes, but with these horoscopes I could finally say the things I’d been holding inside all those years. For our new drama critic Sharon Gleason, I wrote, “Libra. Three stars: those pants make you look fat.” For the arrogant sports columnist Mike Dunne, “Taurus. Two stars: I hope your wife’s cheating on you.” For the icy young records clerk Laura: “Cancer. Four stars: would it kill you to smile at your coworkers?”

Of course, there were complaints about the late-November horoscopes (thankfully, they were all routed to the “Inside Living” page editor… me.) In my defense, some people actually preferred the new horoscopes. Not Virgos, of course, since they were treated to day after day of stunning disappointment-“One star: you should try to be less vindictive and disloyal… One star: hope your new boyfriend doesn’t mind your bad breath… One star: you’re not even good at sex.”

I’m the first to admit that I went a little far on November 24, the day I read in the crossword puzzle that the clue to 9-Across was a Jamaican spice, saw that the answer was Jerk and changed the clue to Mark Aikins, e.g. Yes, it was petty, but I was being forced to wage a war without getting within eight hundred feet of my enemy.

Yet, despite my constant barrage of single-star Virgo days and crossword puzzle salvos, I got no response from either of them. Tanya knew this was my page. She had to know I was behind her run of bad horoscopes. But I heard nothing. Some days I thought she was taunting me by not responding; other days I imagined she was so deeply mired in one-star hassles (traffic snarls and Internet outages) that she was incapable of responding.

Another possibility arose on the last day of November. I had just called in another phony customer complaint