A new ballpark stands beside San Francisco Bay. Everything about it works: its views, its layout, its food and most importantly, its restrooms. Yes, everything about PacBell Park says careful planning and attention to its patrons’ needs.

If only PacBell could do the same with its primary business, which I thought was providing telecommunications. Silly me.

Oh sure, I have a dial tone on my phone. But when it comes to its much-advertised Internet services, Pacific Bell is to quality Internet service as the Titanic is to pleasure cruising. Think I’m exaggerating? Let me take you to my own Seventh Circle of Hell: PacBell DSL.

Believing the hype and wanting to establish myself as one of the few gadget-heads with fabulous highlights, I signed up for Pac Bell DSL last October. Sadly, I ignored the dark rumblings from people like my friend Magnus, who warned me like some oracular Norse God that he’d heard nothing but bad things. But I was tired of fighting my dial-up account. I wanted fast, reliable Internet access. I had discovered jcrew.com and one-click buying just wasn’t cutting it on a modem.

And fast, reliable access is what I had for a while with DSL. In fact, in a stunning act of hubris, I even changed my e-mail address. But like Icarus, I’d flown too high.

First came the e-mail problems. I stopped being able to download e-mail for days at a time, which, I was to discover, was a common problem for those using PacBell for e-mail. When my e-mail finally came, like an errant husband stumbling in at 4 a.m. reeking of whiskey, I could never be sure that I’d received all of it. Yet my Internet access itself seemed to work fine.

Then, on Thursday, June 22, I turned on my computer and discovered I could no longer access the Internet through my DSL line. And so began a three-week nightmare.  Naturally, I called PacBell immediately, because naturally, these sorts of problems only happen when one is on deadline. The technician walked me through a few tests, and declared that the problem was with the network card that PacBell had installed in my computer. I knew very well that it wasn’t, as I couldn’t access get Internet access though my networked laptop, either.

So I called the next day, got a different technician who couldn’t solve my problem either, but said that he would “escalate” my problem and that I should expect a call in a few days. (I have since come to believe that “escalating” problems is a euphemism for “taking the elevator up a floor to my friend Joe’s cube and laughing at the gullibility of PacBell DSL customers.”)

I called back on Monday, and the chipper technician who answered told me that it takes 24 to 48 hours to escalate problems and that I should call back on Wednesday if no one had called me first. Of course, on Wednesday, no one had, and a woman named Gracie told me that I had been kicked off the router—for what offense, no one knew. But Gracie assured me that they would prorate my bill to adjust for my DSL-free time.

That night, I began to discover the brotherhood (or sisterhood) of PacBell victims. Over several glasses of Zinfandel, two of my best friends related how they had been able to solve their problems with PacBell only because they had “contacts.” In other words, someone in a totally unrelated PacBell department had had mercy on them. I had no such “contacts.” I felt very alone. “But they escalated my problem,” I told Pat. “It doesn’t matter,” she replied ominously. “They don’t care. They just don’t care.”

I rose early the next day and called PacBell again. And Pat’s words came back to haunt me: “Roger” (no doubt a pseudonym) told me that my problem had never been escalated at all. Yes, he would escalate it again, but now I should expect 72 hours to pass before someone called me. I pictured his co-workers sitting around him, laughing merrily at my distress. In the meantime, he ran me through all sorts of tests that involved me crawling on the floor around my modem reporting back to him on things like whether the “10BaseT light was on.” Again, I was sure that he was putting me on mute while he and his fellow technicians guffawed.

After hanging up with Roger, I e-mailed Dan Gillmor, the technology columnist at the San Jose Mercury News and suggested that perhaps submitting PacBell to public shame would get some action. He replied immediately. “We’ve done many articles on this, but it doesn’t seem to help,” he said. I had a sudden sense of what life must have been like under Communist rule.

At this point, I decided that the best strategy was to call PacBell daily. On Friday, June 30, more than a week after my Internet access had mysteriously stopped, I managed to reach a technician named Michael who spent nearly two hours on the phone with me trying a battery of tests that left me well prepared should I ever want to program a missile to hit Iraq, but failed to solve my DSL problem.

Poor Michael kept putting me on hold to speak to a “senior technician,” also known as a “STAQ” (Subvert Trust and Quality?), but the best they could do was tell me that the router I was on was “having problems” and that I was “breaking up at the redback.” This sounded suspiciously like what my ex-boyfriend Beelzebub had done to me several months before. Then I remembered that he was also a PacBell Internet subscriber—a problem-free one. In my delirous state, I began seeing a connection…Lack of a soul…lack of trouble with Pac Bell….

It was probably a line issue, Michael informed me, snapping me out of my reverie. And that meant he couldn’t help me, and that I had to call YET ANOTHER NUMBER. After six calls to PacBell Tech Support, I was told I had to call DSL maintenance. I heard Pat’s voice in my head… They don’t care… They don’t care … They don’t care…

I went on vacation for a week, and hoped that when I returned my DSL would be magically restored. Believe me, the odds were better on the slots at Vegas. I called DSL maintenance today. “Laura” asked me the same questions that every other technician thus far had asked me (“Is the 10BaseT light on?”) and then filed a trouble report. Someone would call me in 24-48 hours, she assured me. I felt my eyes roll back into my head.

In the meantime, I’d received my monthly PacBell bill. Sure enough, I was being charged for the DSL service I hadn’t been receiving. I called the oxymoronically named “PacBell Customer Support,” where a woman named “Tiara” (I’m not making this up) told me she could help me and transferred me before I could protest. The phone then rang for 10 minutes. I timed it.

Finally (and yes, this story is drawing to an end, for now), “Mike” answered. I explained in no uncertain terms how I did not want to pay for service I wasn’t receiving, and shut him down when he started to transfer me back to DSL Maintenance. He then put me on hold and when he came back, he told me that someone would call me back in two business days. I imagined posters all over the PacBell offices: “Two Business Days: Say it With a Straight Face.”

Then came the piece de resistance. He actually tried to sell me more PacBell services.

“I notice you don’t have any Custom Calling Features on this line,” Michael said. “Are you interested in—”

“No!”

“How about the Messaging—”

“Look, Michael,” I said, struggling to pick my jaw off my desk, “I am extremely unhappy with Pacific Bell at the moment, and I have a friend at a local TV station is planning to do a story on how bad your service is. I do NOT want to be sold more services.”

“Oh, OK,” he said, giggling.

I’m not alone in my pain, nor have I suffered the worst. My cousin’s wife was without DSL for over a month before she cancelled her service. Luckily, she didn’t have to pay a cancellation fee: PacBell forces you to commit to one year of DSL service—a sort of indentured servitude for the cyber-literate.

Someone from DSL maintenance did call me, the next day, and on Thursday, July 13—three weeks after I lost DSL access—two young men appeared at my door. Forty-five minutes later, I had DSL access once again. Just think of the time and money it would have saved all of us—me, Gracie, Roger, Michael and Mr. STAQ—if they’d sent me to DSL Maintenance in the first place. (I still haven’t heard from the billing office, of course; that should be my next battleground.)

One of PacBell’s many clever advertisements ends with the tagline “Once again, the phone is your friend.” Friend? More like a boyfriend who pursues you until you’re hooked in, at which point he avoids you, promises he’ll call and then doesn’t, lies to you and torments you until you break, all the while claiming he did nothing wrong. And you keep giving him one chance after another. Someone will call you in two business days. I did not know we were selling arms for hostages. I slept with you because I wanted to feel closer to you.

Well, kids, I’m done with the Bad Boyfriend School of Customer Service. I’m prepping for my TV appearance, and setting out to prove that the pen is mightier than the Endless Voicemail Jungle. Got a PacBell horror story? Send it to me. We’ll wrap them up in a bright Nordstrom bow and send it off the California Public Utilities Commission.

Anyone got Erin Brockovich’s number?

He begins referring to it as “when our problems began” or, alternately, as “when we started having trouble.” It is as though by using the passive voice he can blame their problems on something that has been visited upon them by Fate, instead of as the result of something that his wife has done.

He spends many of their sessions with the marriage counselor dissecting “how they got to this point,” as though a snail had slithered across their lives, leaving a poisonous silver trail of lies and resentments that lead irrevocably to where things are now. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he thinks that if he can pinpoint where the trail started, the troubles will end.
So, under the therapist’s owl like gaze, he carefully defends his position, examines his wife’s demands and moodiness and points to budgets ignored and too many hours spent at work. His wife fidgets during these sessions. She knows what they are not discussing.

Sometimes, in spite of himself, he remembers the day that he came home from work to find his wife in bed, eyes swollen shut from crying, the skin around her nostrils red and raw. He hung his shirt on a wire coat hanger and placed it on the doorknob so that he would not forget to take it to the cleaners’ the next day. When he turned she was sitting up, eyes brimming with a strange new meaning. He sat down next to his wife and asked her if she was OK and she said “No, I’m not,” and then she told him what she had done and that was when their troubles really began, although he would prefer to forget that.

Later, when the shock had worn off and he had begun sleeping again, he tried to reclaim her body. Their blood and skin understood that this was necessary to blot out the memory of the other man. But he sensed her recalcitrant heart hanging on to the past like a cat biting into an arm, and neither of them felt any pleasure.

There have been other changes. She no longer talks about summer parties and barbecues and planting a garden in a new home in a nice neighborhood. She no longer writes down the numbers on “For Sale” signs. She has stopped suggesting they go out to dinner, which is just as well, because when they do, she often gazes over his shoulder, past him. He wonders who she is looking for, and then he tries to think about something else.

In fact, she has begun asking him whether he wouldn’t like to move to another state and start over. We could have a nice home in Texas, she has pointed out. Sometimes she asks whether he wouldn’t like to start over without her. One night, he chuckles at this and tells her, a bit sharply, to stop it. She looks up from the kitchen counter where she is tearing up lettuce. She is tearing up much more than is needed for the two of them. She keeps tearing and he is afraid of what will happen when she stops. It is at this point that he brings up, for the first time, the subject of a new home, here, in this state, in this city.

“But why?” she says. “Why would we want to live here?”

Later he finds her sitting on the floor of their bedroom with old calendars spread out in front of her. Her hair falls like a shroud, obscuring her face.

“I just want to remember when things happened,” she says, without looking up. What things? he thinks, but does not ask.

Instead he feels once again the dread seeping in his heart. He had thought that the dark nights, with their tears and pills and her talk of a world that would be better off without her, had stopped, and that things might get back to how they had been before.

When they lie next to each other in bed that night, he feels a crispness in the bedroom, a chill. He knows a storm is about to start. He rolls onto his side and prays that she will fall asleep. Please God, he prays, please make her be OK.

After a while she gets quietly out of bed and creeps into the kitchen. He lies still, wondering whether he should follow. He doesn’t really want to.

He finds her with her head on her arms, sobbing. As he leads her back to bed, she apologizes over and over and he holds her and strokes her hair until the tears stop and she falls asleep.

He wakes up again in the middle of the night and slides his hand through the sheets to her body. He puts his hand on her hip and is surprised to feel something smooth and sharp under his fingers. He realizes that it is her hipbone, and he is startled to feel how much weight she has lost, the skin smooth and concave and falling away from the bone down the now slight curve of her stomach like a sand dune, like the curl of a wave. He wonders if the other man felt this hipbone. When did it all happen? The question he would not ask her–Is it over?–his mind asks him, a question he does not want answered.

She rolls on to her back to look at him, her face blue in the moonlight that seeps through the Venetian blinds.

“Don’t leave me,” he says to her.

He sees tears form in her eyes, trace down her cheeks. Is he dreaming?

“Oh,” she says. “I won’t. I promise.”

A few days later, he convinces her to go house hunting. He regards it as somewhat of victory.

As he sits in the front seat of the real estate agent’s car, content, hopeful, he begins to relax. The agent is a petite, chipper woman in her late 40s, with perfect make-up and coiffed, short dark hair and a girlish, sweet voice. The big car she drives doesn’t suit her, and he imagines making fun of it with his wife later. They’ll have a good laugh over the overstuffed velour upholstery, the oak veneer dashboard.

To this other woman, his wife shows a different person. She asks the agent polite questions about houses and inspections and escrow and even about schools, which he interprets as a good sign, though he does not particularly want children. They have been through many houses so far today, and he has been surprised at her patience. You’d almost think she was excited about it, he thinks. He turns around and gives her what he assumes is a reassuring smile, as if to thank her for being a good sport.

“There’s one more house I just have to show you,” says the real estate agent, turning off Alma into a Palo Alto neighborhood of small, expensive homes.

He hears his wife shift her weight in the back seat, and he is surprised at the urgency in her voice.

“I don’t like the neighborhood,” she says.

“Why not?” he asks.

“I don’t think we can afford it.”

“Oh, you’d be surprised,” says the agent. “The prices have really come down a lot. You two really should see this one. I should have shown it to you earlier. But I wanted to see your reaction to some of the other places. I’m sure that this is what you two have had in mind. I can just visualize you in it.”

“It’s been a long day,” his wife says in the nice voice she uses when she’s trying to be assertive.  “Maybe next week.”

“One more won’t kill you,” he says.

She looks from him to the agent and then sits back and stares out the window. Oh no, he thinks. The car stops in front of a small, New England style house with grey walls and white trim and a door painted scarlet red. It reminds him of the type of home that she used to point out to him in catalogs.

“Fine,” she says, staring at the house. “Let’s take a look.” There is enough cheerfulness in her voice that he knows she doesn’t mean it. She gets out of the car and walks quickly up the front walk to the porch. She fixes her eyes on the ground as the real estate agent unlocks it.

They walk through the empty house as they would walk through a cathedral. His wife stays close to the agent while he wanders around on his own. As he walks through the living room she comes into view, framed by the kitchen doorway; his eye catches her like the camera in a silent movie. The living room is bright with late afternoon sun, and the sounds of his footsteps echo in it and bounce off the white, newly painted walls. He watches his wife, her calm face, her dark thoughts. Dust motes hang between them like tiny galaxies. He wants this house, he wants her in it, he wants her to be happy and to come back to life.

He looks out the picture window. This could be a starting over, he thinks. Maybe he can even forget and forgive and move on, just as he had told her he had already done.

He watches a car turn into the driveway of the house across the street.

“Hey, guess what?” he calls to his wife when he sees the man getting out of the car. “Jack Harwood just pulled up to the house across the street. Do you know if he lives there?”

“No,” she answers from the other room after a pause.

“I thought you said you’d been to his house.” He heads to the front door. “He must be doing pretty well to live in this neighborhood.”

She comes into the doorway of the living room and from there she peers out the window.

“He always gets everything he wants,” she says.

“Do you every talk to him anymore since he got his new job?”

“No.” She looks straight into his eyes. She puts a hand on the doorjamb. “He’s a big important person now. He doesn’t need me.”

“What do you think about this house? Do you like it?”

“Not really.”

Again, he feels the disappointment. “Well, do you want to go?”

“In a minute.” She doesn’t move. “I want to look around a little more.”
In her voice he hears a warning, a distant rumble that he cannot decipher and so ignores. “I think I’ll go say hello to Jack,” he says.

“Why?”

“I’ve seen the rest of the house. I’ll just be a second.”

He walks down the steps, pads across the lawn and into the street. He greets, shakes hands with Jack, a tall, well built man about his height, but bigger than him, stronger.

“I didn’t know you lived around here,” he says.

“Yeah, it’s a nice neighborhood.” Jack takes his glasses off and rubs the bridge of his nose with one hand, squeezing his eyes shut as if they hurt him.

“Are you feeling OK?”

“Oh yeah. Just a few too many beers last night.”

“We’re looking at the house. If we bought it we’d be neighbors.”

“Yeah, I guess we would.”

He looks at Jack and their eyes meet, and suddenly, he knows everything. It is inconceivable.

He doesn’t even have to look to know that his wife is standing on the porch. He turns to face her and feels that he is turning in slow motion, like that day, the day their troubles had started. His face had gone numb, just as it is now.

When he sees his wife’s face, he knows that she has kept the promise she made when she refused to reveal the other’s name. She has kept the promise never to see the other again, though, as she assured him, he didn’t have to worry. “I was a conquest,” she said, “that’s all I was.”

Her expression reminds him, suddenly, of a nature show they had watched on television on New Years’ Day, while recovering from particularly vicious hangovers. A nature show about lions. About what they do to female lions who bear the cubs of lions outside the pride. They banish them, is what they do, and the lionesses are left to roam the veldt with their cubs, unless the pride of the other lion, the father, the lover, takes them in. “That’s terrible,” he had said to her.

“Life is unfair,” she answered, her tone distracted. “You can’t trust anyone.”

He doesn’t know why he should think of a nature show. It is inconceivable, too. Inconceivable. A word that he would never use in conversation. But that is the word he thinks of, over and over, as he remembers the lions, as his wife continues to stare at the man next to him. The look on her face speaks of unrecoverable loss, of a thousand betrayals. He understands it all.

He turns to his wife’s lover. He is not sure what he will do. Then he hears her voice, clear above the ringing in his ears.

“We’ll take it,” she says to the real estate agent standing behind her, and something dark begins to whisper inside him.

I only remember being happy once in high school. It was the day that Steve Johnson kissed me out by the baseball diamond. I went all tingly. I honestly felt like I could float. Into math class I walked; even though I hated math, every thing, every sound, glistened pristine and bright. The scrape of chairs rang clear as violins. The equations on the blackboard rose out from the green field in which they stood and glowed, crystal and pure. Math, I suddenly realized, was the exact distillation of everything that was right. No longer mysterious, the letters and numbers hummed with truth. My gaze fell upon the poster of Albert Einstein that hung near the door. In his eyes, I saw and understood genius.

“Are you high?” my best friend whispered with concern as she sat down in the chair next to me. I simply gazed at her and smiled.

That night, Steve Johnson told me over the phone that he loved me. I almost missed it.

“I-love-you-Sarah-goodbye,” he blurted out.

“What?”

“I-love-you-Sarah-goodbye.”

I believed him, even though we’d only been out once.

A week later, I dumped Steve Johnson, though I could never figure out why he had ceased to interest me.

Math class also stands out in my mind as the place where I remember being the unhappiest, but not because of math. It had to do with a boy, a boy I’d made out with the night before, drunk on beer after a cast party. On my way to class, I saw him coming down the hall, and I began to smile. His eyes moved over me, blank. He grunted at me and slipped by, sideways, as if to avoid touching me. That feeling, that feeling that I was to have so often, swept over me. My face stung and the noise in the hallway screamed in my ears. The hall became a dark tunnel, and math class, when I walked into it, looked uglier and more bare than anything I had ever see, because everything about it told me that everything about me was wrong.

My mother sets the plate down in front of me, and I try to avoid her gaze, I know that she can see my puffy eyes, my drawn face. She wants to ask questions, but she can’t. She wants to know why her daughter appeared on her front porch, on a weekday, in a business suit, 500 miles from home. “I’ll tell you tomorrow,” I told her. Well, here it is, tomorrow, and I haven’t told her. I don’t know if I will.

I eat the scrambled eggs she’s fixed for me, even though the last time I ate scrambled eggs, I got sick (the result of a hangover, if I remember correctly). But as long as I’m eating, we won’t have to talk. And I’m content to sit here in the roominess of a pair of borrowed sweatpants and sweatshirt, retrieved from my brother’s closet. The sun shines in my eyes through a plate-glass window. For once, it is quiet in the house. No ringing phones, no brothers. It occurs to me that I might never move from this table.

If I tell her I came because I was worried about her, she wouldn’t believe me. She’s had cataract operations before, and she realizes, I think, that I don’t like to hear about them, to know about the eyepatch she has to wear, the troubles with her contact lenses. She knows that I don’t want to hear about the implant in her cornea. I suspect that she has heard me fidget over the phone.

I’ve had dreams where I have to put a contact lens in my eye, and it becomes, as I hold it, a large piece of glass, too large to fit. But if I don’t put it in, I won’t be able to see.

I don’t want to know that my mother’s eyes are dimming.

As I eat, my mother sits at her usual place at the table, eating a dry piece of toast. Allie, the cocker spaniel, sits patiently at her feet. It’s almost 11 in the morning, yet my mother is still in her black velour bathrobe, the one that I bought her for my father to give to her one Christmas. Soon, she’ll say to the dog, “Well, Allie, I guess I should take my shower before the entire day’s gone,” and then I’ll get to be alone.

She wants to ask, but she doesn’t. Instead she clears her throat and informs me from behind the newspaper, “Your friend Linda Thornton is getting married.”

This interests me. “Really,” I say. “Let me see.” Linda Thornton was the villain of my junior high school years, a skinny girl with bulging eyes whose prominent last name (her father owned the largest chain of paint stories in our town), earned her many more boyfriends than she, in my opinion, deserved.

My mother hands me the paper, watching me carefully.

“She looks the same,” I comment. “The article about me and John was bigger.”

As I had the paper back, I make a face, a fake-snotty, fake-triumphant smile. She chuckles. She is very proud that the engagement of a rich man’s daughter received fewer column inches in the local paper than that of her own daughter.
I like to make her laugh. I like it when I can make her laugh so hard that she has to wipe tears form her eyes.

I don’t have the heat to tell her what it is I’ve done. She wants to believe that my problems are over, and that I can still be the one to make her laugh.

By Cynthia W. Gentry, © 2001 by Cynthia W. Gentry, published in Area I, Spring/Summer 2001; www.geocities.com/areaizine.

Carrie has always been fascinated by maps. She likes finding places she’s been; she likes thinking about the places she might go. A map reduces a three-dimensional, living, breathing landscape to a pretty cartoon-color surface. Whole cities boil down to dots: bigger dots for bigger cities, pinpricks for towns. Hairpin roads become innocent wavy lines. Bad neighborhoods become orderly numbered blocks. She can look at a map for five minutes and know exactly where she is going.

Her husband, David, does not share her love of maps, nor does he appear to have any perceptible sense of direction. When she is in the car with him, he completely shuts off whatever internal compass he might have while alone and depends on her to lead them onto the freeway and deliver them from evil. This makes her very angry. At the moment, they are driving to her ten-year college reunion and are lost somewhere south of Market Street. Carrie thought she knew her way, but in San Francisco you always think you know where you are because all the streets sound familiar. Her husband tries to read the map as she heads further in what she is sure is the wrong direction. She snaps at him, which is a mistake, because their best friends are sitting in the back seat and she has thus broken a cardinal rule of marriage: never berate your spouse in front of other people. So he can’t read maps. Big deal. She is forced to apologize, and he gets back at her by chewing gum through the whole reunion.

What she is really mad about is that she has to drive at all. She had wanted about six more margaritas at dinner to prepare herself for this event. Last time she had seen most of these people, she was twenty pounds heavier. Now she is thin and blonde, which has changed her life in what she finds to be astonishing ways, such as, men now look at her, when she is the same person she always was, too tall and too smart and too sensitive (this according to most of her friends and family). To combat her astonishment and brace herself for this evening, she has donned fuck-me pumps and a tight black cocktail dress that actually makes her look like she has cleavage. She doesn’t want to be driving; she wants to be drinking. She needs a few belts of tequila, and now that she can’t have them, she roils with resentment and panic.

A week after the reunion (where people looked at her as if she was a stranger while her husband sat in a corner), she has dinner with Carl, the man she is considering taking as her lover. It turns out that Carl has no more sense of direction than her husband. She has to tell him how to get to the restaurant where they are having dinner, and tell him which way to turn at every stoplight. This annoys her. She wants him to know where they are going: she wants to be driven. She wants to sit back and let someone else make the turns, for God’s sake. Carl wears a red t-shirt and blue jeans and has adopted the mannerisms of a man twenty years younger. Every other word is “cool.” At dinner, she thinks she will have to explain to him which fork to use.

But then Carl returns home in Colorado Springs and seems to change his mind about her, rendering the question of whether or not Carrie wants him to be her lover a moot point. Before he’d come to see her, he sent her daily e-mails asking her what she would do if he fell in love with her and whether she would run away with him. I don’t know, she replied; and then amended it: don’t, and no. He answered that he liked her first reply better.

Now that he is back in Colorado, his e-mails to her announce that his firm-butted 23-year-old physical therapist girlfriend has moved in with him and that they’ll be married within a year because she’s agreed to have an open marriage. Carrie couldn’t compete with that even if she were free. She has never had a firm butt, even when she was 23. And she thinks the idea of an open marriage is pretty damn loony, especially coming from a man who got suicidal when his last “open” marriage broke up after his wife fell in love with another man.

To hell with him. She has already forgotten his voice, she can’t remember the color of his eyes, and before long she’ll forget what it felt like when he pulled her into his hotel room and kissed her. (OK: it felt weird and too fast and she made him stop.) She’ll forget that when she hugged him she noticed he had love handles; she’ll forget his smooth flushed skin and how he didn’t have any lines around his eyes, and she’ll forget that he wouldn’t make love to her.

She knows that she looks for clues about people: the little twists that will give her some direction, that will show her where to turn. But it seems that other people read her first. When Carl and she sat on the balcony of his hotel room, smoking a joint before dinner, he asked to look at her class ring, and as his fingers touched her hand, she wondered how they’d feel on her body. She noticed that his fingernails were wide and wedge-shaped, pink, and the ends looked ragged, as though he chewed them. And he took her other hand in his and turned it over and caressed the ring on that hand, until finally she told him, That’s a wedding ring. And he said, I know, although she couldn’t see his eyes behind his aviator sunglasses. But she saw his smile, and his teeth, and she knew he knew he had her. Until, of course, she found her way out.
What would a map of her heart look like? she wonders now. Would the big events show up in color, a big circle with maybe another circle inside it, like a state capital? Would the insignificant bits be barely visible, but connected to the big dots by a wavy line? At the moment, she thinks it would look like a war zone: normal and pretty on paper, but fucked up when you got down to reality.
This is how it will be for her, she thinks. Life, reduced.

It’s winter, and you can hear a mountain with fresh powder calling your name. There’s just one problem: your budget is smaller than a lift line in July. How can you hit the slopes without wiping yourself out financially?

Gear Up for Less

If you’re an avid skier, think seriously about investing in your own skis, poles and boots. In the long run, you’ll save much more money compared to renting. But you don’t have to buy brand-new, top-of-the line gear. You can find great used equipment at flea markets, ski trade shows and swap meets. Or watch your paper for end-of-season store liquidations.

Online auction sites like eBay are another way to score ski gear. If you have questions about the product, email the seller and ask for photos. Check the seller’s ratings, especially negative ones. Think about using a payment service like PayPal: qualified purchases paid for through PayPal are eligible for up to https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_pbp-info-outside$500.00 coverage at no additional cost.

Rent Equipment on a Shoestring

Not ready to take the plunge and buy your own equipment? You still have several options when renting. If you’re spending a weekend on the slopes, you can save money (and hassles) by renting your equipment for several days or even a week. Some resorts offer you discounts on equipment rentals if you buy a season pass. Call and ask.

When you’re renting, know the difference between packages. A “basic” package is usually the cheapest, and the equipment will usually be comfortable (although not high performance) and good enough for most beginners-and even some intermediates. “Performance” packages feature better gear, while “demo” packages offer new high-performance skis and boots.

Here’s another tip for saving money: don’t rent at the ski resort. Their equipment is, sadly, the most expensive. Rent your stuff in town. The downside is that if something breaks or needs adjusting, you’ll have to come off the mountain to get it fixed.

If you’re a novice skier, think seriously about signing up for a beginner package. These often include a half-day of instruction, rental equipment and free use of beginner lifts. You’ll not only save money; you’ll also save the nerves of the friend who would otherwise be trying to teach you.

Get a Lift

When it comes to skiing, one of the biggest expenses is simply getting up the mountain. But with a little planning ahead, you can save big on lift tickets. Buy discounted tickets through rental shops in town (not at the resort), or buy them online. Ski midweek, instead of on the weekends when it’s more crowded. If you know you’re going to ski a lot, you can also get discounts on multi-day passes.

Or buy an early season pass. For example, a midweek season pass to Alpine Meadows near Lake Tahoe is $549 if you buy it between July 12 and October 1; that price jumps to $825 when the season starts. A full pass goes for $929 until October 1. After that, it’s $1240. Another advantage of having a season pass is that some resorts give you discounts on equipment rentals if you have one.

You can also sometimes get discounts if you buy your tickets online or if you’re a club member of a specialty sporting goods store like REI. Skiers who fall into certain age brackets-like if you’re under 22 or over 65-often get discounts. Groups sometimes qualify for discounted rates, too. If you work for a large corporation, check to see if you fall into this category. Call the ticket office of the ski resort and ask about group discounts.

And if you’re really a ski fanatic, consider getting a job at a resort. Benefits can include free skiing and snowboarding, discounted food purchases, discounts on skis and clothing, discounted lift tickets and free ski and snowboarding lessons.

Lodging on a Budget

You’ve had a full day on the slopes, and exhaustion is taking over. How can you get a good night’s sleep without paying outrageous resort prices? Well, the more the merrier (and cheaper). Get together with a group of friends and rent a condo, or join your company’s ski club. Note that the closer you stay to the resort, the more expensive lodging will be (with lodging at the resort being the most expensive of all.

Depending on where your nearest ski resort is, you may not need to pay for lodging at all. For example, if you live in the San Francisco Bay area, there are numerous resorts within a days drive. Get an early start, and you can make a full day of it.

Fuel Up

A skier’s gotta eat, but what do you do when a couple of burgers and Gatorades will set you back $30 at the ski resort cafeteria? At the risk of sound like a broken record, plan ahead, plan ahead, plan ahead. Don’t eat at the resort, where the food is expensive and the quality questionable. Pack a sack lunch, and be sure to take along lots of water. If you’re staying in a condo, cook at home. A big spaghetti dinner in front of your condo’s fireplace might be a lot more satisfying than fighting the crowds at an overpriced restaurant.

Package Shopping

True powder hounds may want to consider ski packages that include your flight, hotel, lift tickets and ski rentals. You’ll save time and most likely, money. Some packages even include free nights of lodging and lift tickets. Check out Expedia.com and airline Web sites early for the best bargains, or consider an all-inclusive resort like Club Med.

Cool Clothes, Cool Prices

No matter what your budget, here’s a short list of the clothes you’ll need on the slopes:

• Ski jacket. The single most important piece of apparel. Look for one that’s waterproof and windproof while allowing a degree of breathability. Invest in one that allows you to layer in a fleece liner.
• Ski pants. No matter how tempted you are, do not-I repeat, do not-wear jeans on the slopes. They’ll get wet, and you’ll be miserable.
• Gloves. You don’t have to buy top-of-the-line gloves, but make sure they’re sturdy and can repel water.
• Hat. You lose 30% of your body heat through your head. Don’t forget a nice fleece hat. Even a baseball cap will do on warm days.
• Socks. Look for non-cotton thermal socks that whisk moisture away from your feet and keep them warm. (Cotton keeps moisture in.)
• Long underwear. A light silk set may be all you’ll need, but you’ll be glad you made the investment.
• Goggles. If you don’t protect your eyes, the intensity of light reflected of the snow can actually sunburn your eyes. So look for good UVA and UVB protection; your goggles should block at least 95% of these rays. And as usual, for the best prices, shop before you get to the mountain.

Cynthia Gentry, 41, writes erotica, as well as mainstream fiction, and is the co-author of “Red Hot Tantra” and “The Bedside Orgasm Book: 365 Days of Sexual Ecstasy,” to be published next year. The Menlo Park resident has degrees from Stanford University, UC Berkeley and is completing a graduate creative-writing degree at San Francisco State University. She talked recently with staff writer Emily Fancher.

Q. Define erotica.

A. It’s all subjective. I would define it personally as writing about sex with some sort of literary intent. A lot of contemporary mainstream novels have sex in them, but are not considered erotica. Erotica is designed to arouse, but in literary ways.

Q. Why did you decide to start writing erotica?

A. It’s funny. A couple of years ago, probably around ‘95 or ‘97, I had discovered erotica and enjoyed it, and was having writer’s block with some of my other projects. Spur-of-the-moment, I thought I’d try my hand at this. Until then, I’d never written anything I’d consider erotica.

Q. How did your friends and family react?

A. Well, I kind of kept it to myself, I guess. I certainly didn’t show it to my family. This current book is probably the first time I shared this side of myself with my family. The first story I shared with friends, and they really liked it. Publications like “Libido” and “Paramour” liked it, but passed on it, because it was a long story.

Q. Are there mainstream writers who write about sex in a way you admire?

A. Nicholson Baker wrote a book called “The Fermata” that’s about a guy who can stop time, and in those little time periods, he goes around and does things like leave erotic stories for women to find. It’s very funny and very sexy.

Q. How has this career affected your romantic relationships?

A. With the current books, it’s been a positive. People think my boyfriend and I must have this charmed sex life, but it’s probably no different from anybody else’s. The drawback is, sometimes you’re writing about that topic so much you get kind of sick of it.

Q. Do other people romanticize your job?

A. When I tell people I’m a writer, I would say they romanticize it. They think being a writer is so much fun, but really it’s so much agony and staring at the screen. I’m careful about whom I tell that I write erotica, although with the publication of this book, the cat’s out of the bag.

Q. Do you do research for your books?

A. For this book, I did do a lot of research. There’s one story where a woman finds a diary of one of her ancestors who lived in the Old West, so I did research into that era and women who lived in that era and, for my last book, research into Tantra.

Q. What’s the most difficult part of writing erotica?

A. The most difficult part is not being repetitive and finding new and interesting ways to talk about sex without getting boring or trite or clichéd, and keeping it fresh and interesting.

Q. Where’s the fine line between bad and good erotica?

A. There are a lot of erotica anthologies, and I read some stories and think they’re great, and others leave me completely cold. I think a good story might be sexy and arousing, and also makes you feel like you’re there, and the quality of the writing is good and fresh. Not a recitation of who did what to whom, with generic faceless characters.

Q. Why do you think the market for erotica has grown so much over the years?

A. I think it’s a great thing. I think especially women are becoming more comfortable with their sexuality and talking about their sexuality. They’re more interested in reading stories that are more explicit than a Harlequin romance novel.

Before I launch into my listing of the best and worst movies of 2000, I need to make a confession. I didn’t see most of the flicks released in the Christmas pre-Oscar rush. That’s a list that includes “Cast Away,” “Traffic,” and “House of Mirth.” Instead, I went to visit family in the Deep South (i.e., San Diego) over the holidays.

Yes, kids, instead of sitting in a darkened movie forming opinions for your benefit, I was writing Christmas cards, making forays into Mexico to eat lobster, ducking into Nordstrom to buy Mac lipstick and, most recently, popping Benadryl caplets like they were M&Ms thanks to a nasty little cold I seem to have developed just in time for New Year’s.

I could hang my highlighted head in shame at letting you down, or I could reserve the right to update this list at a later date. I choose the latter. Thankfully, my editor, the illustrious DavidK, has limited me for now to five Best and three Worst. So here they are, in no particular order:

Best

1. “You Can Count on Me”: This quiet story about two adult siblings, played by Laura Linney and Mark Rufalo, was the best thing to hit the screen this year. Brilliant acting, brilliant script.
2. “Croupier”: Dark, intelligent and full of surprising twists, this British noir about a writer-turned-casino-dealer should have had a much wider release than it did. Worth repeated viewings.
3. “Quills”: I’m still agog over Geoffrey Rush’s amazing performance as the Marquis de Sade. Joaquin Phoenix, whose performance was the best thing about “Gladiator,” proves again that he’s got star power.
4. “The Tao of Steve”: Donal Logue shined in this smart little indie about an overweight Casanova whose philosophy of romance falls apart in the face of true love.
5. “State and Main”: David Mamet’s new film skewers the moviemaking industry in this hilarious story of a film crew that descends upon a small New England town. With a cast that includes William H. Macy, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Alec Baldwin, Sarah Jessica Parker and David Paymer, how can you miss?

Honorable Mention

Were DavidK to allow me more than five top movies, these also would make the cut:

1. “Panic”: William H. Macy wants to get out of the family business, which just happens to be killing people for pay. Sadly, this intelligent, surprisingly moving film, which also stars Donald Sutherland, Barbara Bain, Neve Campbell and Tracy Ullman, was in the theaters for about two weeks. If you see it on video, rent it immediately.
2. “Boiler Room”: Giovanni Ribisi is drawn into a shady brokerage firm in this smart, hip film that should be required viewing for anyone thinking of investing in the stock market. I should have paid attention (ask me about my one dot-com investment).
3. “Erin Brockovich”: It’s fashionable to dis Julia Roberts, but there’s no arguing the fact that she turned in an amazing performance in Steven Soderburgh’s portrayal of a crusading legal assistant. Albert Finney almost stole the show.
4. “Best in Show”: Although Guest’s improvisational technique lags occasionally, this send-up of the dog show circuit manages to engage your sympathy for the motley assortment of dog fanciers even as it pokes gentle fun at them.
5. “Me Myself I”: In this Australian (and no doubt much better) precursor to “The Family Man,” Rachel Griffiths plays a successful-but-lonely career gal who gets a chance to see what her life would been had she married the man of her dreams. With the deft comic timing of a Lucille Ball, Griffiths shows she can carry a movie—and then some.

Worst

And now for the fun part: the turkeys of 2000. The competition for these slots was fiercer than finding a parking space at Stanford Shopping Center during the Nordstrom Half-Yearly Sale, but here are my top three:

1. “The Next Best Thing”: I’d excerpt from my review of this Madonna-Rupert Everett debacle, but my therapist has forbidden me to relive the two hours of my life I lost to this piece of trash. Madonna, I love you, but could you please stick to singing?
2. “Up at the Villa”: Kirsten Scott Thomas appears to know just how bad things are in this wretched adaptation of the W. Somerset Maugham novel. Sean Penn tries valiantly to generate some chemistry with Thomas.
3. “Autumn in New York”: Although one reader soundly chastised me for my lack of romantic feeling, I stand by my original opinion about this turkey. It did for screen romance what the 2000 Presidential Election did for democracy. Winona Ryder makes you want to throw sharp objects at the screen.

So there you have it. I know it’s trendy to say that 2000 was a bad year for movies. It could be the Benadryl talking, but I found lots to be happy about.

For the true movie lover, film festivals present a problem. You’re confronted with a dizzying smorgasbord of independent movies, so you’re tempted to stick with the tried and true. The reasoning goes something like this: “If it’s got Parker Posey, it must be halfway good—remember ‘House of Yes’?” I face a similar conundrum when confronted with my closet each morning, which is why I usually dress in black. Not creative or daring, but safe, always in style and most importantly, slimming.

But to make safe choices invokes a particular psychological syndrome called Film Festival Guilt. Those that suffer from it torture themselves with questions like: “Can I skip that new release filmed on Super-8 by feminist liberation theologists from Uzbekistan and not be part of the male patriarchial system?” and “If I see ‘Billy Elliott’ instead of that this obscure Greek film, will I miss this year’s ‘Il Postino’?”

Take it from me: you won’t. Because chances are, that obscure Greek film will be so bad you’ll be able to see the screen stink. This is what I discovered recently at the Austin Film Festival, where I suffered through a godawful mess called, for reasons I dare not imagine, “Black Milk.” I don’t want to start an international incident, but my guess is that the title lost something in the translation.

Stumbling out of “Black Milk,” I realized that I would never get those two hours of my life back. So I decided to abandon my usual festival-viewing strategy of giving the little guy a chance. I went to see the new David Mamet film “State and Main.” It proved to be an ever better decision than last-year’s purchase of knee-high black leather boots, especially when I discovered that the Paramount Theater in Austin serves a decent chardonnay.

“State and Main” is a joy from beginning to end, and when it opens later this year—or for the majority of us, in January 2001—you’ll be doing yourself a big disservice if you miss it. The story of a movie crew that invades a small town and gets more than they bargained for, “State and Main” has the look of a film that the cast and crew just had a hell of a good time making.

It helps to have David Mamet as your screenwriter and director. The dialogue in “State and Main” is sheer genius; I’ll have to see the film again just to catch the lines that were drowned out by laughter. Yes, we’ve all seen films before that lampoon Hollywood types, but Mamet takes those stereotypes, pushes them a degree further, adds a dark edge, and then throws them up against a slice of small-town Americana. Or at least what we think is small-town Americana. In “State and Main,” everyone has an agenda.

William H. Macy shines as Walt Price, the film-within-a-film’s director. (“Like I would ever eat carbs,” is one of the many memorable lines Macy gets to deliver with relish; I won’t tell you the situation.) Alec Baldwin and Sarah Jessica Parker riff on their own celebrity personas, and the ever-omnipresent and ever-brilliant Philip Seymour Hoffman gets to play a romantic lead as Joseph Turner White, the beleaguered writer who’s struggling to re-write his script. White finds himself attracted to bookstore owner and town drama coach Annie Black, played with quirky straightforwardness by Mamet’s wife Rebecca Pidgeon. Add Charles Durning as the town’s mayor and David Paymer as studio executive Marty Rossen, and you’ve got an embarrassment of riches.

Some movie critics seems to believe that reviewing a film means simply recounting the plot, like a grown-up version of a junior high book report. Not me, which is why I won’t tell you much about “State and Main.” I don’t want to take even the slightest chance or ruining the fun for you. The plot twists in this film are all foreshadowed, yet each turns out to be a surprise.

Now kids, don’t take my earlier comments to mean that you should avoid film festivals, even though they’re sprouting up faster than Britney Spears wannabes. If it weren’t for Cinequest, San Jose’s film festival, I would have never had the chance to enjoy the work of a pre-“Sopranos” Edie Falco in “Cost of Living,” nor would I have had the chance to hear Alec Baldwin talk about making “State and Main” in the oh-so-hot flesh. (I still haven’t washed the shoulder Alec touched when he leaned in discuss voter registration with me, but this is not a column about personal hygiene.)

Just give yourself enough time to enjoy the whole spectrum of festival experiences, from those little movies shot on digital video by the next Steven Soderbergh to the “big” films that festival programmers have to put on the schedule to sell tickets. There’s no better way to experience, as my fellow columnist and bon vivante ChristopherG describes it, the dream that is cinema. A dream that in “State and Main,” with all its self-referential jokes, comes true.

Darlings, I’m simply exhausted. What a whirlwind weekend! I’m awfully, awfully behind, even with the help of my long-suffering assistant Troy Everhard, C.P.A., C.F.N., C.M.T., L.C.S.W., so I’ll just give you some of the highlights of the last few days. And where I have I been, you ask? The fabulous Cinequest San Jose Film Festival (www.cinequest.org), reviewing some of the latest indie flicks for your viewing benefit and hobnobbing with the stars like Peter Fonda and Alec Baldwin.

Where to begin? Let’s start with the name-dropping first, and then I’ll let you in on what new movies you should be watching out for. Friday night was impromptu drinks with Peter Fonda and Cinequest executive staff at the San Jose Fairmont Hotel’s Grill. Darlings, Peter is just a kick in the pants. It’s hard to believe he turned 61 on February 23 (yes, we had birthday cake for him, although yours truly opted out of the singing). I hope I have that much energy in 40 years when I’m that age. Peter and I had an intense discussion about stocks, sailing, and his penchant for fast cars.

But it was on Saturday that the real star watching took place, and the glare was so bright I was in my Donna Karan sunglasses all day. Headed to the airport with a group picking up Alec Baldwin and Screw magazine publisher and First Amendment rights activist Al Goldstein (who was there to appear at the Cinequest press conference with Cass Paley, director of WADD: The Life and Times of John C. Holmes). Al was resplendent in a bright blue lizard-skin blazer and a screwmag.com T-shirt.

Alec was…resplendent. Darlings, I don’t want to make my beau Tommy Texas jealous, so I won’t can’t tell you what it was like to shake his hand, look into his eyes (or at least what I assumed were his eyes behind those sunglasses) and hear him say “Hi, I’m Alec.”

My boy Alec then proceeded to wow a sold-out event at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose. What can I say? He’s charming, intelligent, extremely funny and politically active. Women with much less decorum than moi squealed with delight when he entered the room. I bided my time and was rewarded. He and I had a little tete-a-tete about voter registration on the way to one of his interviews; when he took my arm to listen to what I was saying, all thoughts promptly disappeared from my head. Thank God for Troy and his triceps regimen.

Afterward, I dispensed with my usual sense of propriety and asked him for a picture. Just was we were cozying up for the camera, who should run up but Al Goldstein, who dropped to his knees, wrapped himself around me and begged me to drop Tommy and marry him. (Needless to say, Alec found this more than a little amusing; the expression some onlookers used was “peeing in his pants he was laughing so hard.”) Finally I got Al off the floor and got my picture with Al and Alec.

As for the films…
Suffice today, I’m still recovering from this weekend’s events, including last night’s Latino Celebration at the Tech Museum of Innovation, featuring the IMAX film Mexico, by Lorena Parlee. Lorena, who’s one of the only women directing in the IMAX format, is an absolutely delightful woman with whom I’d be glad to get a manicure any day. And Mexico is absolutely amazing. Its opening shot, featuring 2 million extras on Mexico’s Independence Day, gave me goosebumps. It should have: Lorena told me it took them six days just to set the shot up.

I also mentioned the documentary WADD: The Life and Times of John C. Holmes. Yes, the porn star. Go ahead and snicker, darlings, but this is a fascinating, troubling portrait of a human car wreck.

Another documentary in Cinequest that I just adored was Six Days in Roswell, which follows a nerdy guy named Richard Kronfeld as he journeys to Roswell, N.M., to witness the 50th anniversary celebration of the alleged “UFO crash.” (No comment.) It’s been a while since I laughed out loud at a documentary. Showing with it is X-Philes, another documentary that takes a look at fans of “The X-Files.” Darlings, I don’t believe in UFOs but I DO believe in the vision of male pulchritude that is David Duchovny.

Another Cinequest film that I hope makes it to the States is Janice Beard: 45 WPM, a hilarious British import featuring Rhys Ifans (Notting Hill), Patsy Kensit (Angels & Insects), and newcomer Eileen Walsh, who shines in the title role of a temp with a fanciful imagination.
Darlings, I must run to the airport to retrieve my dear Tommy, who’s returning to me (laden with gifts, one hopes) from a brief-yet-seemingly-endless sojourn in the Big Apple. But I’ll be back soon with more tidbits of gossip and film lore from Cinequest. You folks in the Bay Area, don’t miss it. And the rest of you…keep your eyes peeled. I’ll tell you want to look for. I haven’t let you down yet, have I?