Eddie simply shakes Max’s hand, but I take hold of it with both of mine, because this is apparently one more thing I have forgotten how to do. Max cocks his head and eyes me appraisingly, seeming to decide only now to let us in. He stands back from the door and motions us up the stairs.
“You may ignore the skinny brunette if you’d like. She hasn’t had her pill yet this morning.”
The “skinny brunette” is indeed both of those things, but with his fine, longish hair and horn-rimmed glasses, he looks, in comparison and just in general, totally unastonishing. Eddie, I’m sure, doesn’t differentiate one way or the other. Boys. The more the merrier.
Christopher says, “He made that up, about the pill. In case you were wondering.”
“Oh no,” I say. “I wasn’t wondering.”
Eddie says, “Yes she was. I was too. I was wondering if you’d share.”
Everyone laughs, except Max, who is only halfway up the stairs. “Don’t start the party without me, wenches.” He sounds serious.
In the living room are a leather sofa, a huge TV, two brocaded armchairs by the window, a coffee table made of a four-inch-thick slab of what looks to be polished concrete, and the biggest cat I have ever seen. Big and fat. Black and white and enormous.
I say, “That must weigh a ton.”
“That is Annabelle,” Max says. “Don’t hurt her feelings. She has a thyroid problem.”
“No. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean her. I meant the table.”
I bend down and knock on it. It’s embedded with hundreds of tiny multicolored pebbles, and is indeed made of cement somehow buffed to glossy smoothness.
“Wow. I’ve never seen anything like that.”
“No one has,” Christopher says. “It’s Max’s only family heirloom. His father made it. Allegedly.”
“Nothing alleged about it.” Max sits down on the couch, runs his fingers admiringly along one polished edge of the table, and crosses one bunny-slippered foot over his knee. “My father had a very unique sense of style.”
Christopher squeezes Max’s knee and smiles at Eddie and me. “Runs in the family,” he says. “You may have gathered.”
We talk about Montana, as the boys seem fascinated by what little they’ve heard of it, and have it in their heads that all the sidewalks are still wooden there, and people get from place to place on horseback. I feel strangely at ease, drugged almost, but still able to hold up my side of a conversation. I write it off to jet lag and go with it.
“Some do,” I tell them, “But in the cities, they’ve graduated to buggies. They still need horses to pull them though.”
Max slits his eyes at me and cocks his head. “They have cities?”
“Oh, yeah. Huge. Four-story buildings and everything.”
Max presses a manicured index finger to the hollow below one sharp cheekbone. “You are completely full of shit, aren’t you?”
“Sort of,” I say. “Sometimes.”
Eddie leans in. “Always.”
“Not always.”
Max says, “I vote for always.”
No one is the least bit interested in Vietnam, or why I went there, and that is fine with me.
The boys converse for a while about new bars in the Castro and the Fillmore district, and when that topic is played out, Max offers a proclamation.
“I like this one,” he says, motioning toward me but speaking to the cat, who by now is draped upside down over his lap, belly flapping out to either side, love-child composite of cat and manta ray. She peers up at Max and does not protest. Christopher’s smile is sweet and guileless, and I am blown away. Honored. Dizzy as we head for the car.
“Welcome home,” Eddie says.
“Home,” I repeat after him, as if it is some kind of incantation that will eventually take.
• • •
The house is a typical, semi-run-down Victorian, ivory white with barely visible traces of rose and turquoise trim. Our flat is on the second level, above the downstairs apartment and the garage. The hardwood floors still shine in places, and the ceilings are twelve feet high. In the living room, along with the leather sofa and the huge TV, is a fireplace with two mantels, one below a large mirror and one above it. My bedroom is already fitted out with lace curtains over an entire wall of windows, and through them I can just see a few blocks up the street to the iron picket fence bordering SF General.
The eighties, blessedly, took with them the carnage of boys dying by the thousands on Ward 5B. Some nights, though, I can’t help picturing the white coroner’s vans making their way from the hospital to the morgue downtown, past this very block. I imagine processions, van after van, each containing one body only, though back then they could probably have — and maybe sometimes needed to — fit three to a gurney. I see tiny gold hoop earrings, meticulously placed and unostentatious in right ears. Hair perfect, streaked, coiffed, still. Things my unruly hair has never been. Of course Christopher and Max are okay, and Eddie, by some miracle. This generation of boys has surely learned how to play it safe, not kill themselves and each other in the name of love, or its likeness.
They have taken me back at the bar, again, so there is that familiarity; something of a comfort. I go in four days a week, on the bus, which lets me off on Bayshore at the bottom of Cortland. From there I can walk, or wait for a different bus, but it hardly ever seems to come. The hill is steep and long, and after I climb it, most days, I am light-headed but clear. A fancy coffee shop has just opened where Ellsworth comes down off the heights, and if I am not running late, I’ll stop in for a cup and a bagel or a scone, pretend I am one of those self-possessed San Franciscans not paralyzed by a simple question like “Room for cream?” The first time someone asked me that, I had no idea what she was talking about.
The bar feels both cozy and cavernous before I open, before I turn up all the lights and open the front door, and I like it quite a lot that way. Many days I catch myself wishing there was some way to actually avoid opening, because if I could do that, people wouldn’t come in and want things, even though wanting things is fine, but they also want to talk, and that part really isn’t. The problem is, I have forgotten how to chat up the clientele. My mouth simply doesn’t work that way anymore.
Before I left, I was good at it. Now it is a shock every time my mouth opens to let out something resembling coherent English. I have to believe that eventually I will stop hearing everything I say echo back, strange and brittle, but, for now, it is almost as if someone else is talking, using my voice without permission.
“What can I get you? Anchor Steam? Sure. That’ll be three dollars, please.”
“I’m sorry, you can’t play your guitar in here, but there’s a garden out back where you can, if no one objects.”
“Nope, no babies allowed. Twenty-one and over. Twenty-one years.”
One day a customer drops to the floor after she’s had a couple of beers, starts doing push-ups and accompanying herself loudly: “You had a good home, but you left. You’re right! Jody was there when you left. You’re right! Your baby was there when you left. You’re right!”
For a minute I am so stunned I don’t know what to do, until a beer glass I’m holding breaks from being held too tightly. I lean over the bar.
“Hey. Hey! Get off the floor. Stop that. Now!” A handful of customers have been standing around staring; they all step back when I raise my voice. The girl pauses, resting on her forearms, and looks up.
“What’s your problem?”
“I,” I tell her, “do not have a problem. You, on the other hand, have five seconds to sit your ass on a bar stool, quietly, or you’re out of here. Got it?” I see her think about arguing. “Now. Time’s up.”
She removes herself from the floor, drains her beer, scowls briefly at me, and slams out into the cold. I wash the blood off my hand and bandage it. I have to wear gloves, now, to wash glasses. I hate those gloves — that rubbery, confined feeling.