I agreed, and we chuckled a little, and the waitress brought more coffee and he excused himself to use the men’s room. I sat, stirring sugar and creamer into my coffee, and wondering if it wouldn’t be wiser to skip out now, just leave a little note that I had discovered it was later than I thought and I had to hurry home but that I’d had a lovely time and thank-you. But that seemed like a pretty snakey thing to do to him. It wasn’t like he was repulsive or anything, actually he was pretty nice and had very good eyes, dark brown, and a shy way of looking aside when he smiled and a wonderful voice that reminded me of cello strings. I suppose it was that he was fortyish and balding and had a pot-belly. If that makes me sound shallow, well, I’m sorry. If he’d been a little younger, I could probably have warmed up to him. If I’d been a little younger, too, maybe I would even have gone to his apartment to be de-skepticised. But he wasn’t and I wasn’t and I wouldn’t. But I wasn’t going to be rude to him, either. He didn’t deserve that. So I sat, toughing it out.

He’d left his packages of tea on the table and I picked one up and read it. I had to smile. Magic Carpet Tea. It smelled like orange spice to me. Earl Grey tea had been re-named Misplaced Dreams Tea. The scent of the third was unfamiliar to me, maybe one of those pale green ones, but it was labeled Dragon’s Breath Tea. The fortyish man was really into this psychic-magic thing, I could tell, and in a way I felt a little sorry for him. A grown man, on the slippery-slide down side of his fortieth birthday, clinging to fairy-tales and magic, still hoping something would happen in his life, some miracle more wondrous than financing a new car or finding out the leaky hot-water heater is still under warranty. It wasn’t going to happen, not to him, not to me, and I felt a little more gentle toward him as I leaned back in my chair and waited for him to return.

He didn’t. You found that out a lot faster than I did. I sat and waited and drank coffee, and it was only when the waitress re-filled my cup that I realized how long it had been. His coffee was cold by then, and so was my stomach. I knew he’d stuck me with the check and why. I could almost hear him telling one of his buddies, “Hey, if the chick’s not going to come across, why waste the bread, man?” Body slammed by humiliation that I’d been so gullible, I wondered if the whole magic thing was something he just used as a lure for women. Probably. And here I’d been preening myself, just a little, all through dinner, thinking that he was still seeing in me the possibility of magic and enchantment, that for him I had some special fey glow.

Well, my credit cards were bottomed out, I had less than two bucks in cash, and my check book was at home. In the end, the restaurant manager reluctantly cashed my paycheck for me, probably only because he knew Sears wouldn’t write a rubber check and I could show him my employee badge. Towards the end he was even sympathetic about the fortyish man treating me so badly, which was even worse, because he acted like my poor little heart was broken instead of me just being damn mad and embarrassed. As I was leaving, finally, let me get out of here, the waitress handed me the three little paper bags of tea with such a condescending “poor baby” look that I wanted to spit at her. And I went home.

The strange part is that I actually cried after I got home, more out of frustration and anger than any hurt, though. I wished that I knew his real name, so I could call him up and let him know what I thought of such a cheap trick. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, looking at my red eyes and swollen runny nose, and I suddenly knew that the restaurant people had been seeing me more clearly than I or the fortyish man did. Not Silver Lady or even mud duck, but plain middle-aged woman in a blue-collar job with no prospects at all. For a moment it got to me, but then I stood up straight and glared at the mirror. I felt the silver ladies swinging from my ears, and as I looked at them, it occurred to me that they were probably worth a lot more than the meal I had just paid for, and that I had his tea, to boot. So, maybe he hadn’t come out of it any better than I had, these earrings hadn’t gotten him laid, and if he had skipped out without paying for the meal, he’d left his tea as well, and those specialty shop teas don’t come cheap. For the first time, it occurred to me that things didn’t add up, quite. But I put it out of my mind, fixed myself a cup of Misplaced Dreams Tea, read for a little while, and then went to bed.

I dreamed about him. Not surprising, considering what he’d put me through. I was in a garden, standing by a silver bench shaded by an arching trellis heavy with a dark green vine full of fragrant pink flowers. The fortyish man was standing before me, and I could see him, but I had the sense that he was disembodied, not really there at all. “I want to apologize,” he said, quite seriously. “I never would have left you that way voluntarily. I’m afraid I was magicked away by one of my archrivals. The same one who has created the evil spell that distresses you. He’s imprisoned me in a crystal, so I’m afraid I won’t be seeing you for a while.”

In this dream, I was clad in a gown made of peacock feathers, and I had silver rings on all my fingers. Little silver bells were on fine chains around my ankles. They tinkled as I stepped closer to him. “Isn’t there anything I can do to help you?” my dream-self asked.

“Oh, I think not,” he replied. “I just didn’t want you to think badly of me.” Then he smiled. “Silver Lady, you are one of the few who would worry first about breaking the enchantment that binds me, rather than plotting how to break your own curse. I cannot help but believe that the forces that balance all magic will find a way to free us both.”

“May you be right, my friend,” I replied.

And that was the end of the dream, or the end of as much as I can remember. I awoke in the morning with vague memories of a cat batting at tinkling silver chimes swinging in a perfumed wind. I had a splitting headache. I got out of bed, got dressed, and went to work at Sears.

For a couple of days, I kept expecting him to turn up again, but he didn’t. I just kept going along. I told Felicia that I couldn’t live on the hours and pay I was getting, and she told me that she was very disappointed with the number of credit applications I was turning in, and that full-time people were only chosen from the most dedicated and enthusiastic part-timers. I said I’d have to start looking for work elsewhere, and she said she understood. We both knew there wasn’t much work of any kind to be had, and that I could be replaced with a bored house-wife or a desperate community college student at a moment’s notice. It was not reassuring.

In the next three weeks, I passed out twenty-seven copies of my resume to various bored people at desks. I interviewed for two jobs that were just as low-paying as the one I already had. I found a fantastic job that would have loved to hire me, but its funding called for it to be given to a displaced homemaker or a disadvantaged worker. Then I called on a telephone interviewing position ad in the paper. They liked my voice and asked me to come in. After a lot of pussyfooting, it turned out to be a job where you answered toll calls from heavy breathers and conversed animatedly about their sexual fantasies. “Sort of an improvisational theater of the erotic,” said my interviewer. She had some tapes of some sample calls, and I found myself listening to them and admitting, yes, it sounded easy. Best of all, the interviewer told me, I could work from my own home, doing the dishes or sorting laundry while telling some man how much I’d like to run a warm sponge over his body, slathering every nook and cranny of his flesh with soapsuds until he gleamed, and then, when he was hard and warm and wet, I’d take him and… for six to seven dollars an hour. They even had pamphlets that explained sexual practices I might not be familiar with and gave the correct jargon to use when chatting about them. Six to seven dollars an hour. I told the interviewer I’d have to think about it, and went home.