Читать книгу You Can Say You Knew Me When - K.M. Soehnlein - Страница 13

I was so excited to see Woody again, to get away from New Jersey and that house crammed full of the past, the money talk and the old arguments. Riding to the airport I was giddy with anticipation, not to mention making choices based on my impending inheritance—springing for a seventy-dollar car service rather than a thirteen-dollar bus ride to Newark.

The flight was delayed because of winter weather. I called Woody to break the news, and then I did what I always did when stranded in airports: I cruised the restrooms. It’s an old habit left over from when I lived in Jersey City with my boyfriend Nathan. Back then—this was 1990 or ’91, and I was only a year out of college—I used to lurk in the men’s room in the underground transit station at the World Trade Center. The World of Trade Center, Nathan dubbed it, because of all the white businessmen in suits sucking off rough-trade Latinos wearing wife-beater tank tops. Nathan and I were nearly obsessed with one another, a love marked by demonstrative gestures (he was once arrested for spray painting NO ONE LOVES JAMIE MORE THAN NATHAN on a subway-platform billboard) and public displays of drama (the spray paint was to mark the spot where we’d had a screaming match a week earlier). But we were in our early twenties, so naturally we were always itching for sex with other people, too. Sometimes we granted each other permission slips for a night or a weekend. Young and queer, why should we limit ourselves? But inevitably one of us got jealous—usually Nathan, a brooding, wild-haired, motorcycle-riding college dropout with a Slavic gloominess—and we’d argue for a day, or two, or seven. I was proficient in foot-stomping retreats and door-slamming exits. He called me the Red Tornado. Détente would come in the form of sweaty makeup sex. Permission slips were revoked, new limitations imposed. Having strayed and reunited, fought and fucked, we’d sing our own praises, young enough to see our love as different than, better than, all other love. Nathan would write me a poem. Or seven.

And then it would start all over again.

After high school, after Eric, I had avoided the touch of men. College was relatively sexless for me—a couple of girlfriends, a couple of furtive liaisons with boys. By the time I got to New York, I was ready. I discovered that pale blue eyes, freckled shoulders and red hair were a currency with an appeal that ran deep, if not necessarily wide. I learned how to court admirers. I figured out how to work it. Nathan was less of a prowler than I, but not blameless. He preferred going home with someone he’d met at a bar, which I thought of as unnecessarily entangled—you had to converse, and spend money on alcohol, and exchange phone numbers, and in the end you were more likely to let emotions seep in, perhaps deciding this new someone was more interesting than your boyfriend. I preferred the quick and anonymous; no talking beyond Thanks a lot, man. That was hot. I wanted bodies, not biographies. For a while the World of Trade men’s room was unbelievably hopping, with sex acts so blatant you’d feel bad for the poor commuter who had stumbled in needing to pee.

The day I was flying back to San Francisco, I’d been coupled with Woody for over a year and a half, a year and a half of monogamous nesting. I’d been a model partner. Woody’s previous boyfriend had run around behind his back; cheating was the one thing Woody couldn’t abide. I didn’t even flirt with other men in front of him. Plus, having emerged from my slutty years without contracting HIV, it seemed ungracious to tempt fate.

So what was I doing in Newark Airport Terminal C, lingering a little too long at a urinal, looking over my shoulder at every guy who walked in, hoping one of them would make eye contact?

I zipped up and splashed cold water on my face. Before anything could happen, I got away from the temptation conjured up by the piss-and-ammonia stink of a public toilet.

In my carry-on luggage was my father’s copy of On the Road. Its cover was frayed, its pages jaundiced, but it was dated 1958—an original paperback edition. As Nana would say, it was the genuine article.

I’d read the book before, or rather I tried to read it, in college. I never finished; too rambling, too episodic, a self-indulgent string of adventures. Back then I was reading contemporary fiction—Bright Lights, Big City; Less Than Zero—the self-indulgent, episodic books of my own generation. And after college my reading list tended toward old-guard gays: James Baldwin, Frank O’Hara, Gore Vidal. With time to kill, and curious about what sent my father west, I decided Kerouac was worth a fresh look.

Ten minutes later I had plowed through two chapters, utterly absorbed. The beginning of On the Road recounts the narrator’s introduction to Dean Moriarty, an ex-con who blazes into New York full of wild energy, charming the intellectuals and the junkies alike. I knew the basics of the Kerouac legend, knew that his books were thinly fictionalized versions of his real life, and that Dean was based on Neal Cassady, who’d been a muse to the young writer. But that summary only hinted at what Kerouac must have felt for Cassady. From the moment Dean answers the door “in his shorts,” rambling on about sex, “the one holy and important thing in his life,” one idealized, sensual description after another piles up: thin and trim hipped and blue eyed and golden, “a sideburned hero of the snowy West,” “a western kinsman of the sun.” Dean can’t even park a car without being described as a “wrangler.” The Kerouac stand-in who narrates the book goes on at length about his “heartbreaking new friend”—heartbreaking!— describing him as a long-lost brother with a “straining muscular sweaty neck” whose “dirty workclothes clung to him so gracefully.” I’d never heard anyone depict a kinsman so ecstatically. Sure, there are mentions of Dean’s wife, but she’s labeled a “whore” and dispatched pretty quickly. Sure, Dean and Sal make an attempt at a double date, but the girls never show and the guys don’t seem to care. Right there in the first few pages of Kerouac’s most famous book—the one that inspired a billion red-blooded boys, my father among them—an undeniable erotic current pulsed along the surface.

When I finally looked up from the book, my eyes landed on a guy staring at me from the next table. He was my age, maybe a couple years younger, dressed in an Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt and a baseball cap. His gaze was strong and direct as I took in his features—brown skin and black eyebrows, eyes a bit close together, big nose. Indian or Arab, perhaps. I looked away and then back. This time, he raised his eyebrows and pressed his lips into a smile. The nod I sent back to him was very cool, but inside, I was already percolating.

“Kerouac?” A Midwestern accent: care-whack.

“Yeah. On the Road. Just checking it out.” I heard the hint of apology in my voice, caught reading a book I’d once dismissed.

“I’ve read all his stuff.” He stood up and moved toward my table, lugging along an enormous backpack, a fleece pullover and the Lonely Planet guide to Nepal. He wore tan cargo pants with zippered pockets staggered down the legs and those newfangled hiking boots, the ones that look like basketball sneakers crossbred with the brown-suede Earth shoes of my childhood. So maybe this wasn’t a cruise. He was just one of those perennial backpackers, happy for the excuse to converse with a stranger.

He shook my hand firmly, asked my name, told me his. I wrote it down in my journal later, but I couldn’t quite make out my scrawl—it was either Rich or Rick. He asked if he could sit down, and I said yes, not sure it was such a good idea because as soon as he dropped himself into the seat across from me, he launched a monologue about his round-the-world exploits. He’d say, “Then I went to Micronesia. Have you been there? Jamie, you have to make a point to go. It’s unbelievable,” and continue on about a cavern, or a reef, or a ravine that was “the best example of its kind in the whole world.” Personal history came next. He’d been working on an MBA but ditched the program to create a business plan at a dot-com start-up, “installing servers for the B2B segment—that’s business-to-business?” I didn’t understand the specifics. Mention business and my brain shuts down. He said, “I saved a substantial amount of income, and then I said good-bye.”

“Cashed out your stock options?”

“No, I didn’t wait that long. The writing is on the wall. All those geeks will live to regret it, working sixty hours a week, waiting around for the big payoff. Get the money now, Jamie, ’cause the Internet honeymoon is quickly drawing to a close.”

“You sound pretty sure about that,” I said, thinking about Woody’s job at Digitent, a little San Francisco company also funded by venture capital, also providing B2B services I didn’t particularly understand. They were gearing up for their initial public offering. I hated the long hours that Woody spent at their chaotic, cubicle-pocked office, but he was firm in his plan to work hard now and cash in later.

“Jamie, I’m telling you—do you work for a pre-IPO?” There was something disconcerting about the way Rick kept using my name, all the while keeping his eyes intently locked onto mine. I decided to cast out a lead.

“No, but my boyfriend does.”

“Oh.” A pause. Something had registered. “Trust me, Jamie. Tell him don’t wait around. There’ll be a lot of disappointed wannabe millionaires any day now.” Then he leaned forward and lowered his voice. “You guys should just get out there and travel together. It’s better to travel with someone, anyway. It gets lonely. You can imagine.”

“It’s a lonely planet, right?”

He smiled at me. “You’re a fun guy.”

“But I’m not much of a traveler. I’ve been in San Francisco lockdown for years.”

“San Francisco’s a fun city.” His voice had now, most certainly, gotten flirtatious.

I responded in kind. “I have a lot of fun there.”

“Yeah? You like to have fun?”

“Who doesn’t?”

“I bet you and I could have some fun, Jamie.”

I cleared my throat. “Planning on visiting?”

“Yeah, actually. In a few months.” He leaned in even closer. “But we could seize the moment.”

“This moment?”

“What do you say?” He looked around, lowered his voice. “I need to use the bathroom. How about you?”

Bingo.

We stood at side-by-side urinals, blocked by a metal divider, though I knew he was pulling on his cock just like I was. As soon as the room cleared, we both stepped back and showed each other what we had. His was longer than mine, skinnier, uncut. He looked at me through narrowed eyes, nodded his head slowly and mouthed “Nice,” no longer the conversationalist, suddenly Mr. Sex. It seemed funny that I’d ever thought him to be straight. He had the gay-pornspeak down pat. He stopped stroking for a moment and let his cock lay swollen on his open palm to be examined like something on a deli scale. “I’d sure love for you to take care of this,” he whispered. “I’m going to be traveling for a long time.”

“Sounds good, buddy,” I said, speaking the ’speak, too.

He quickly checked over his shoulder, then motioned me into a stall. We squeezed in and locked the door and were immediately upon each other—no kissing, just a lot of groping. Frenzied and clumsy. Beyond the metal stall door I heard footsteps and voices. I thought about my bags, unattended out by the sink, with my father’s keepsakes inside. I imagined a quick-handed thief making off with them, or an anxious airport security guard calling in the bomb squad.

Rick stepped onto the toilet seat so that only one pair of our legs would be visible—a ploy I remembered well from my World of Trade days. He crouched and leaned forward, sucking my dick into his mouth with an audible slurp, one hand on my ass, the other on his own cock, which he was pumping madly. I shoved from my hips, hoping to get hard again in his mouth, which was dripping saliva into my pubic hair. I thought about the time my friend Ian got gonorrhea in his cock, transmitted from the back of someone’s throat. I thought about having to sit through a six-hour plane ride with a damp crotch. I wondered if Rick’s flight was delayed, too, or if he was in a rush, needing to finish this off quickly. Voices shot over from the urinals, two men speaking in an Asian tongue, Vietnamese maybe. I wondered if they could hear the slurping and heavy breathing. I wondered if Rick had ever been to Vietnam.

A wave of regret hit me, and I gasped for air. If I was going to cheat on Woody, couldn’t I summon up some pleasure, make this worth the guilt? But the guilt was in charge, a hidden overseer keeping my mind full of chatter and my dick at half mast. Rick finally pulled away from me, letting my cock—fluffed, but definitely not hard—bob out of his mouth. He looked up at me, his too-close-together eyes questioning, and I shrugged my shoulders. He pointed at his hard-on, and then back at me, mouthing, “You suck me?”

I shrugged again. “Okay. Sure.”

What I should have done was leave, get out while I could still salvage some sense of having resisted, but that didn’t seem fair to Rick. Of course, staying and continuing wasn’t fair to Woody, but there you have it: the inverse logic of infidelity.

So I crouched on the toilet seat, positioned as if taking a crap in the woods, and I let Rick guide his skinny brown cock down my throat. Out by the urinals it was silent again, and I guess Rick felt safe enough to speak. He said, “Jamie, this might be the last blow job I get for months,” and there was something so earnest, so grateful, in his voice that, unexpectedly, I was galvanized. I stopped thinking about confiscated luggage and delayed flights and STDs, and I stopped worrying about whether or not I was going to tell Woody about this, and I gave Rick some grade-A head, something he could remember when he was jacking off in Nepal a month from now, a lonesome traveler out on the road.

“Here it comes,” he hissed.

I pulled my mouth away, but not quick enough. My lower lip took the first big blast, my shoulder the second. I managed to redirect the rest toward the floor. I threw my attention to my own hard-on, which somewhere along the line had decided to join the party, and finished myself off. Sploop, sploop, sploop onto the tile. When I looked up, Rick’s eyes were full of admiration. He leaned down and sucked his cum right off my shirt, then off my chin. Without warning he kissed me on the lips, and I tasted his spooge on my tongue, viscous. I’d be worrying about STDs after all. But the kiss felt good, and I let it linger.

“Thanks, buddy,” he said.

“Happy trails,” I said.

Alone again, I wanted a cigarette. Or a sleeping pill. I wanted to call Woody and confess, I wanted him to absolve me. But that was as ridiculous as hoping the clock would spin backwards so I could rewrite the last hour.

I had a window seat and a pillow, but even after two cocktails I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t get back into Kerouac, either. The book felt tainted by its association with Rick. So I pulled my father’s San Francisco souvenirs out of my bag.

Among the items I’d salvaged was a slim, hardback book called How to Enjoy 1 to 10 Perfect Days in San Francisco. I found an inscription from Aunt Katie inside the front cover:

December 1960

Dear Rusty,

I am sending this book in case there are some corners of the city, you haven’t discovered yet, and as well, it is a Christmas gift. Plus, the writer is from New York, so, you can trust him! With this $5.00, I suggest, an all you can eat prime rib dinner at House of Prime Rib, which you can read about, on page 30. Or use it for a long distance phone call, or two! Mother says don’t spend it on liquor! Thanks for writing, because we miss you, and everyone wants to be sure you are well. (Even Papa.)

Love,

Your sister, Katie

Squeezed into the space at the bottom of the page was another note:

If you hear from that brother of mine tell him if he don’t want a good swift kick in the keester tell him he better write soon, before Mama has a heart attack from worrying.

From,

Angelo

I turned to page thirty to confirm the House of Prime Rib description, but what caught my attention was a description of the city’s nightlife on the facing page:

If you have ever visited New York’s Greenwich Village, you will take San Francisco’s Beatnik Land in your stride. One suspects that the bohemians of the Village in the ’30s produced more genuine talent and creative accomplishments than today’s beatnik community. This is probably because the really creative beatniks have long since disassociated themselves from the over-organized movement. In fact, by the time you visit San Francisco, Beatnik Land might be completely relocated in Venice, California.

In the margin, my father had written defiantly, “Says You, Square!”

Clearly this was not a book of any use to a twenty-year-old with hepcat ambitions of his own. (Poor Aunt Katie, all good intentions and misplaced commas.) I was touched by this youthful defensiveness—no, touched isn’t strong enough. It was remarkable to me: my father as defender of the San Francisco underground.

After flipping through the book, I discovered, wedged inside the back cover, an unmarked, sealed envelope. It was literally stuck there, as if the binding glue had softened and then reset around it. I tugged it free and sliced it open.

It was a letter, written in my father’s hand.

November 1, 1960

Dear Danny,

Or should I say, “Dear Incredible Vanishing Friend?” Just pulling your leg, but I sure hope this letter gets forwarded to wherever you are, otherwise I won’t get to say Happy Birthday, pal!

The news here is good-bye “Rusty.” See, nobody calls me Rusty here. They call me “Teddy.” It just happened, when I first met Don Drebinski, the guy who runs the Hideaway, I said my name was Edward and he said, How about Teddy? And that’s how he introduces me to everyone. Guess I’m ready to be “a new man.” You should be here instead of mopping floors in Los Angeles. You could be anyone you want to.

I have it in mind that I’ll be a painter. But not as they say a “Sunday Painter” which is what a fellow called me at a party. I went with Ray, remember I wrote about her, the Jewish brunette with the Natalie Wood face and the damn husband. I thought about keeping away in case the old guy shows up with a shotgun, but she’s irresistible! I could eat her for breakfast, lunch and midnight snack. She’s a painter, and planted the bug in me, having seen my sketches and knowing I was very moved by the Richard Diebenkorn paintings last year. She showed up at my door Saturday to lure me out into the night and I said, “I got to fix my hair first,” and she said, “No, don’t, you look funk.” Which melted me like wax. Funk being hep language for what we would call “cool” on the West Side. We got a lift in Mike Kelsey’s T-bird convertible. This is reason for jealousy, because he’s another young fool like myself under the spell of the married beauty, but a heck of a nice guy so as its hard to feel meanness and rivalry toward him, and who can resist the convertible? It is a glorious way to travel under the Frisco night sky, where the fog turns orange from city light reflecting up.

In the car we drank whiskey and drove all the way from my place near the ocean to North Beach (which isn’t a beach at all, or anywhere near the beach). Ray is between us on the seat and telling stories of all the great characters we will meet tonight, possibly some Negro musicians fond of that smokable tea. But wouldn’t you know when we get there Ray disappears with her gang of lady painters which includes the supposedly famous Jane Chase, a tough broad never seen without her own jug of liquid brown poison. My rival Kelsey is smoking a damn pipe which smells like Irish Uncles sitting around telling stories and stinking up the house. I’m eventually drunker than a Roman at an orgy, except alone, when some creep says, “Ray claims you’re a Sunday Painter.” And the one next to him says, “A real plain air type.” I know an insult when I hear one so I tell him “Watch it, I can knock you on your behind.” One of them called me “Bruiser” and the other one nearly died laughing. So I swung at them. More like I stood up and fell onto them. I was damned drunk and bang, down I went.

Ray came running over and I said “What’s the idea talking bad about me to those jokers” but she just gave me a kiss and said forget about them. She made Kelsey drive me home, and he practically killed us driving in the wrong lane on California Street and making some poor stiff swerve spectacularly to avoid death for all concerned. We cursed Ray and every woman to ever tempt a guy and leave him loveless, then he got me up the stairs and we drank some more booze and had a swell time, just a couple of fellows. After he left I took a shower to cool off. (First I got hot and bothered by thoughts of Ray, her helping me off the floor and holding my head so sweetly as she passed me over to Kelsey, so I had to Take Care of That Need, which I’m sure you know what I’m referring to, my oldest true friend.)

I couldn’t sleep so I told myself, Write it down for Danny. Because you’re the only one who would live the whole thing out with me if you could. That’s why these sentences are a bit wobbly though I hope it all makes sense. The truth is, I like painting out in the plain air but I don’t only paint on Sundays, so those guys can kiss my Irish ass.

A long dumb story of your friend in Frisco, hopefully entertaining for you on your birthday because you deserve a good laugh and more than that too. Send the new postal address and news of yourself.

Your friend, Teddy

(Though still Rusty if that’s the way you want it)

There was almost nothing about this letter that didn’t astonish me, starting with its imitation Kerouac veneer. Phrases like I could eat her for breakfast, lunch, midnight snack sounded like my father, the kind of goofy-embarrassing Dad I remembered from long ago—long ago being shorthand for before Mom died. But could I remember him ever saying that he was moved by anything, much less a Diebenkorn painting? Had he ever mentioned that he’d once aspired to be a painter? Was this just folly, nurtured by his lust for a beautiful woman, or did he actually take a stab at painting plein air? And what about Ray, this married woman luring younger guys out into the night to parties marked by drunken brawls and pot smoke?

The letter had never been sent, perhaps because it had gotten stuck in the binding and forgotten. Or maybe because Danny was already out of touch, not only with his brother back home but with his old pal Rusty up in San Francisco, too. I felt a rare stab of empathy for my father, or at least for this younger version of him: his obvious affection for Danny, the nearly desperate need to pour his heart out, his drunken humiliation, his late-night masturbation. Was there more of this kind of thing back in the attic in Greenlawn? Would Deirdre find it, and if she found it, would she know to save it? Or would it get thrown away, just another bit of ancient history best forgotten?

As soon as I spotted Woody’s smiling face above the crowd and heard him call my name, the guilt-stricken drama I’d set myself up for faded away. He hadn’t even told me he would be here. Now I was getting a strong hug, a public kiss, a ready arm to relieve me of an overstuffed carry-on.

“Careful with that,” I told him. “There’s Garner family treasure in there.”

“You brought the family fortune with you?”

“The family baggage, so to speak.”

In his other hand he dangled keys to a car borrowed from his friend Annie for the night. My hero. Neither of us owned a car, and the airport was chaotic because of winter-storm delays. Somewhere in that moment I let go of the notion that I would confess my men’s-room misadventure. I’d write it off as a slip and move on.

“I’m still half asleep,” I told him. “You talk first.”

He got me up to speed on our friends: Ian’s computer crashed while he was uploading his webzine, and Woody spent two nights restoring his hard drive; Brady was informed that the warehouse where he lived had been sold and would be refurbished as an office park; Colleen attempted to dye her hair pink and was flipping out at the results. They’d all been leaving messages with Woody, asking if he’d heard from me, though he hadn’t called any of them back because he’d been so busy at work. He had the usual dot-com sweatshop complaints—the extra-long hours, the urgent projects foisted on him without advance notice; the daily meetings that amounted to little more than jargony pep talks; a constantly shifting corporate mission. (Digitent had started out as an e-commerce website, but was now defining itself as something called a wireless service portal.) Worst of all was what he’d dubbed “digital daycare”: supervising a stable of young programmer-dudes who had no clue how to function in an office. Woody, at thirty-one, was one of the oldest of the bunch. He’d been hired as a web designer but was quickly shifted to management because unlike everyone else, he had real work history.

His eyes were bright and active while he talked. He had beautifully shaped eyebrows that wiggled like inchworms when his speech got animated. Woody was the first fair-haired, fair-skinned guy I’d been involved with. If I have a type at all it’s on the Danny Ficchino end of the spectrum, dark and Mediterranean, a clear contrast to what I see in the mirror. Woody comes from the neighboring Northern European gene pools, Scandinavian-Dutch-Scottish: light brown eyes shot with gold, fair cheeks that pinken when he exerts himself, thin lips made thinner by his wide smile. Since I first saw him I’d adored his ringlet curls, which in the sunshine seemed to be woven from straw and in dim light became mutt-brown, so much so that it seemed a lie that he’d labeled himself blonde on his driver’s license.

He was two years younger than me, but I often responded to him as someone older. His therapeutic mindset made him deliberative about plans, levelheaded with problems. I had always charged heedlessly into my life. My career started off as a lark in college; my move to San Francisco was an impulsive attempt to escape Nathan; plans I’d once made to leave were aborted after I met Woody; my close friendships all grew out of infatuation, a pursuit of those who sparkled. There was a trend swelling right around then among Christian teenagers, the wearing of little bracelets marked WWJD: What would Jesus do? Answer that question and you would walk the righteous path. Those days, I often asked myself, What would Woody do? He wasn’t my messiah, but I looked up to him.

Oh, and the most obvious way I looked up to him: with my eyes. He’s six-foot-four, almost six inches taller than me, all limbs, with the forward-curving shoulders typical of the tallest guy in the room. Strangers were forever asking him if he played basketball. (The answer: No, tennis. When he stretched up to serve it was like a swan craning its neck before flight.) To me he was adorable as only a gangly guy who takes himself a bit too seriously can be. He was my golden, gawky, smiling swan.

While we waited at the baggage claim, I rushed through a description of what I’d found in the attic, what I’d read on the plane. I told him how eager I was to know more about my father’s year in San Francisco and his friendship with Danny Ficchino, to satisfy my curiosity, but also because there might be something here for a radio project. I told him I’d have to visit New Jersey again, this time talking to my grandmother, and maybe even Aunt Katie, with my tape recorder in tow.

“Hey, I just got you back,” Woody said, resting a hand on my shoulder. “Why don’t you just take a deep breath. You’ve got a lot of important stuff waiting for you here.”

“But this is the top priority now.”

“Okay, okay.” He patted my shoulder where his hand had been resting, attempting to impart some calm. I have an easy-to-read face, I’m told—my moods are obvious even when I think I’m displaying neutrality. This must have been one of those moments, because Woody was responding to me the way I imagined him talking to the frazzled dudes at Digitent when they were in their twelfth hour of being radiated by their computer monitors. Then his gaze focused on my shoulder. “What is that?”

I peered down at a streak of encrusted spooge. “Fucking clumsy stewardess,” I hissed, trying to rub it out. “Great, now my shirt is stained.”

“It’s not that noticeable,” he offered. “I shouldn’t have even mentioned it.”

“Yeah, well, you did.”

I was overdoing it—the culprit’s attempt to deflect the evidence—and feeling hot in the face, on the spot. I took off on a lap around the baggage carousel, trying to regulate my breathing as Woody had suggested, trying to will myself a clear conscience. When I got back to his side, I mumbled an apology.

San Francisco’s airport was in the middle of an enormous construction project, building a new international terminal: scaffolding, cranes, dismantled concrete, big signs with yellow flip-letters redirecting traffic, all of it disorienting for a travel-addled brain. On this night the upper roadway had been closed to drivers. Curbside was pure chaos—no lines, just masses of people jostling wheeled suitcases past each other, competing for taxis. If Woody hadn’t shown up with transportation, I’d have been fending for myself. Once inside the car, I leaned over and kissed him on the lips, grateful. When I pulled back I was rewarded with one of his winning smiles.

“I really am sorry for acting like a maniac,” I said. “I’m just fried by the trip.”

“Not to mention that your father just died.”

“Yeah. That.”

He reached over and rested his hand on my thigh. “Whenever you want to talk about it.”

I nodded and put my hand on his.

We drove the freeway into San Francisco. Tendrils of fog moved across the night sky, made orange and spooky from city light reflecting up. It was the same wide sky Teddy Garner had witnessed forty years ago, drunken and lovelorn in the passenger seat of a convertible, at the start of an adventure that wouldn’t last.