Mama, Mama

In the summer of 2001, when I lived in San Francisco, I thought I was in love with a man named Paul. He had a son. One time, when we were in Paul’s car, I found an unopened pack of baseball cards. I said, “Do people even collect these anymore?” He said, “My son is into them.” At first, that was the only way we spoke of his son: carefully, as if the boy had died.

We worked together at a restaurant off the Embarcadero. The food was sculptural, precise, and I remember being astonished by its smallness. Paul sold it well. He was good at his job. I was terrible at mine. I was forgetful and unfocused and I didn’t try. I had just finished my junior year of college and I had a shameful sort of pride about being bad at service, as if to prove I was capable of some other, better work.

We connected after the restaurant closed down one night. We had a drink together at the bar, and he asked me what I knew about California wine. “Nothing,” I said. “Tell me.” Paul had spent a year working at a winery in Sonoma, and he knew quite a bit about the grapes, the kind of care they needed, the way the wine tasted depending on the growing season, the peculiarities of aging. I thought this all wonderful and romantic and, most of all, real. He reminded me, in his own way, of men I’d been around growing up, the ones who could fix their own cars, name all the trees. I knew I’d probably never live at home again, but I was always turning corners in the city and finding little things—a battered stop sign, a porch with an American flag, a leaking garden hose—that looked like my childhood, that carried me across space and time to a version of my life, maybe, in which I’d never gone away to college, never come to this coast, this city. I would see these things and feel a terrible, specific yearning, but I also had the frightful sense of being watched, as if tiny fissures had opened in the surface of my existence and that other, alternate life was peeking through.

________

Our second date was a walk through the Presidio, then down into Pacific Heights. I liked the old houses and their turrets, the furniture inside the lit windows. I wanted the polished lamps, the fluffy sofas, the bright, unguarded rooms.

“Do you want Mr. Capitalism too?” Paul asked, pointing to a man pacing around his living room in a suit. “Because he comes with the house.”

I was surprised and a little embarrassed. I laughed. Of course I didn’t want that man, but what did I really know about what I wanted? I mostly listened while Paul talked about politics, art, America. He had specific, incisive ideas. If we watched a film, for example: he might object to a director’s stylistic decision; he might have a comment on the texture of the editing. I had studied film the previous semester and I didn’t have opinions like this.

Most of our evenings, in the beginning, were spent talking this way, which is to say that he talked and I listened. He knew exactly enough about everything, including what he wanted and didn’t. He thought I was beautiful and told me so often. I liked the person he thought I was.

I never used the word love, with Paul. I thought it was love, but I didn’t know for certain. I was content to let it exist, unnamed and enigmatic, like a rumored continent. In the simplest terms, we had a physical connection. He was tall and lean, with hair that tucked permanently behind his ears. His eyes changed color. Sometimes they looked like the bay water when the sun was on it. Sometimes they looked like the inner bark of a tree. When I was working at the restaurant, I’d catch him watching me, and I’d feel a sudden lurch in my...