“I think maybe we’re better off as friends,” she says quietly.
This time I don’t feel anything except a sense of futility. Maybe the end is inevitable. I say, “I don’t think I can go back to being friends with you again.”
“You don’t?” she asks. I turn my head to look at her. Her eyes seem very black, very wet. It’s the first time tonight I’ve been sure I have hurt her. I don’t feel proud of my accomplishment.
“There’s nothing in it for me, trying to be friends again. We’ve gone too far. I want to be your lover, Min. Don’t you understand that?” I want to shake her. Has she never understood the price of this relationship before now?
She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath and lets it go. I can tell she is holding herself back from crying. I watch her, worried for her and at the same time staggered that all this time she has taken me for granted. Something inside me loosens and is set free, and like a leaf it is swept downstream.
I drag myself out of the tightly wrapped covers and reach up along the wall for the light switch, then bundle myself back up. “Min,” I say in the dark, and I touch her arm. I feel her hand on my hip. We inch ourselves together. We hold each other until we fall asleep.
It’s evening two days later, and I miss her. We don’t have a plan to get together until tomorrow. Even though we talk on the phone every day, I hate not being with Min this long. I start to feel jumpy, nervous. It’s no good trying to distract myself with my job or my few friends. I don’t care about them. I run five miles every day, but it doesn’t calm me down. Tonight I’m hanging out watching TV with my roommates, Sally and Denise. I know Min has massage appointments. While Denise and Sally laugh at the sitcom jokes, I can’t help wondering what she is doing right at this moment. Is she thinking of me? Does she miss me too?
I decide to go out for a walk to clear my head. I wrap a cotton scarf around my neck, pull on my field coat, and head out. The street is awash in fog. Stoplights loom, red and green, disembodied. I walk over the hill toward the Castro, taking unfamiliar streets. Off to my right, the lights of Sutro Tower flash, warning planes away. The damp of the fog wets my cheeks. I keep walking, down tiny streets with houses painted so elaborately they remind me of the animals on the merry-go-round in the park, and up streets so steep they have steps carved into the sidewalk. On a corner somewhere near upper Market, I stop and look down at the lights of the city glowing in the white mist. The fog is thinner here, trailing off as it descends the hill. Out over the bay, lights outline the bridge. I’m surprised by the number of windows in the office buildings downtown that are still lit up. I wonder how many people are working late tonight. It’s after nine.
From where I stand, the valley where Min lives looks far away. I can see the dark square of Dolores Park, three blocks from her house. I’ve tried to get her to play tennis there with me, offering to teach her. She says she’s not interested. When I sometimes walk to Min’s instead of taking the bus, I like to stop up here before the long trek down, measuring, in a way, the distance between her house and mine. I especially love looking out over San Francisco at night, when the city looks like a cluster of individual lights spread wide into a net. Their reassurance of civilization (other people, warm rooms) keeps away the encroaching darkness.
Min would love this view tonight. I push up the sleeve of my coat and hold my watch to the blaze of a streetlight. She should be finished with her last massage. It takes me some time to find a phone, several streets away. I’m excited now, thinking of Min trudging up the hill toward me, our standing together hand in hand with the city in a web of light at our feet.
Her phone rings once, again. A man passes me, muttering under his breath. The street is pretty deserted. I shift my weight from one foot to the other, willing her to pick up.
On the third ring, somebody answers. I hear laughter, then Min’s voice. “Hello?” I can imagine her, happy, the bright, warm walls of her kitchen behind her.
“Hey. It’s me.”
“Hey, you.” Her voice is low, intimate. That private tone always thrills me. “What’s up?”
“I can see your neighborhood. I was hoping you’d come up and look at the fog with me, it’s amazing.”
“Mmm, I can’t. I’m not finished here.”
“I could call you back in a while.”
“No, this isn’t a good time. I’ll give you a call tomorrow.”
“Can’t I call you later tonight?” I ask, annoyed that she’s putting me off.
“I don’t know if I’ll be here. I’ll call you tomorrow.” I’m trying very hard not to jump to the conclusion that she wants to make love with somebody else tonight. The suspicion is so automatic, even I’m getting tired of it. She said she isn’t sleeping with other women. I have to believe her. If I can trust her, she might be able to give me what I want.
“I love you,” I say, wanting to hear it back.
“Me too,” she answers and hangs up.
As soon as I hear the dial tone, I’m pissed. She can’t treat me like this anymore. I’m sick of being pushed aside when it’s convenient for her. I’ve had it with running to see her when she wants me and waiting around when she doesn’t. I start walking down toward the Mission, my breath coming in short bursts. I have the feeling everything would still be in shades of gray even if there were no fog. I march down the streets, zigzagging diagonally, homing in on Min’s building.
I slow down a couple of blocks away, out of breath and sweating inside my lined coat. The streets are crowded now. There seems to be a bar on every corner. The fog has cleared too, sweeping back up the hill where it came from. What do I want to say to her, now that I’m here? Maybe she’ll be glad to see me, and my fury will have nowhere to turn. Or maybe she has already left the apartment, and I’ll have wasted my energy coming down here. I could go to the women’s clubs she hangs out at and look for her there. Somebody whistles at me as I pass him on the street. I glare at him. I could call Min’s friends, see if she’s with one of them. Her building is in the middle of the next street. I try to stay focused, calm. Upstairs in the building I am passing, a party is going full blast, the rhythm of salsa drifting down from the windows. I don’t know what I want from Min right now, what I can demand. I stay on the other side of the street, approaching slowly, stuck somewhere between anger and embarrassment.
I look up at the second floor. She’s got the curtains pulled over her bedroom windows, but they are a light material. In the middle of the lit room, I can see a figure bending, straightening. Maybe Min is folding up her massage table now that her client has left. Adrenalin starts zipping around inside me again because I’m watching my lover up there, only a few dozen yards away. I always feel this rush of anticipation when I am about to see Min. I don’t think that will ever stop.
As I’m crossing the street, I see another figure come into her room and move toward the first. The two of them meld into one deformed shape. I stop and stare as it moves first to the left, then out of my sight to the right, where I know the bed is. I close my eyes. I’m afraid I might throw up. Then some tidal wave slams down inside me, and I am crushed beneath it and then rolled and dragged along with it, the roar of its fury in my ears. Deafened, I stumble into the street, half-aware of searching through the garbage by the curb. I find an empty beer bottle and bend down to pick it up. The headlights of a car blind me as I turn around, then the car slides past. Everything is moving slowly. I look up at the lighted windows. At my very center I am a thin, white-hot wire, vibrating and razor-sharp. I bring my arm back and then forward, hurling the bottle, and the roar in my ears sounds like a scream of outrage as the bottle shatters the glass of one of her windows and the curtain billows back into the room and then settles again, peaceful. Somebody comes to the other window to look out. She holds the curtain against her bare breasts. It’s Min. We stare at each other until I turn away. I think I hear her calling my name, but it’s faint, an echo of a sound, washed away by the rushing of the sea in my head.
&nb
sp; I can’t stop crying. We haven’t talked to each other for almost two weeks. I leak onto the pizza my roommates had delivered, or as I stand in line waiting for an ATM. Whether I’m sitting in my room alone or out walking or on a crowded streetcar, the tears are always sudden. I feel like I’m going crazy. It’s worst lying awake at night, when the hours are the longest. I can’t stop thinking about Min, going over and over the details of every fight we ever had, revising them in my head, trying to make it all come out differently.
The temp agency fired me a week ago. At Crocker I couldn’t concentrate. Even stuff I already knew how to do flew out of my head as soon as I sat down at the computer. Then I didn’t show up at the bank at all one morning. I couldn’t even get out of bed to call in sick. I haven’t told anybody I lost my job except Sally and Denise. I can’t let my parents know. They’d go ballistic. I can’t even tell them why I’m so upset, because they never knew about Min and me in the first place.
I try to keep busy. On sunny days I take the N-Judah out to the ocean and count each of the times Min and I walked there, setting our footprints in the sand as the sun went down into the ocean or was hidden by clouds or shared the sky with the moon rising over the windmill in the park. I walk through the Arboretum, torturing myself with memories of picnics and naps on the grass with our heads resting in each other’s laps. Even the memories of our friendship are painful, because I can’t ever have it back. I’m afraid to go to the women’s clubs she took me to or anywhere near her house. On the streets sometimes in my neighborhood I think I see her. I start to follow, walking faster to catch up, calling out her name, but it’s never her. That’s when I feel my pathetic hope for even a glimpse of her, for the simple knowledge that she’s still somewhere out there, nearby. There might still be a chance. I never make it home before I start crying again.
It has rained for the past three days in a row, but I’ve gone out anyway with my umbrella, setting off in any direction except toward the Mission, letting the cogs of my brain spin while my legs carry me to every corner of the city. I won’t call her or go over to her house. She might refuse to speak to me. At the same time, I don’t want to see her. I finally accept that she didn’t want to share her life with me. She kept pulling herself away and going to other people. What that left between us would look to anybody else like friendship. Maybe that was enough for her. It’s worthless to me.
That’s not even it. I can’t forgive her for being willing to let me go.
One afternoon I wander around North Beach in the rain, buying fresh ravioli and stopping in bookstores and postcard shops. I’m soaking wet from the waist down and sneezing, afraid that I might be catching a cold but not really caring that much. Finally, hungry, I shake out my umbrella and go into a café with a long pastry counter and tiny marble-topped tables. It’s crowded, but I find a table in the back, near the bathroom. The café is overheated, its wide windows opaque with condensation. I strip off the layers (my jacket and sweater and sweatshirt), leaving on my t-shirt, piling them on the chair across from me. As I am waiting for somebody to come and take my order, I look around at the tourist families and the writers scribbling in their notebooks and the carefully made-up women sitting with the grayer, older men they may be married to, and I wonder what I’m doing here. Not just here in this café but in San Francisco, where in eight months I have not made a dent. Then a waiter comes, and I order cappuccino and a slice of cake called chocolate raspberry decadence, and he leaves me alone again with myself.
I don’t know if I will ever talk to Min again. I don’t know if I will ever see her. It seems to me most likely we will let this two-week silence lengthen into months, and then into years, until we have the awkward, half-ashamed sense that something we should have figured out how to finish has instead been ended for us. I know that I’m capable of letting this happen. Already our not speaking has taken on a life of its own. I am small in comparison and much less sure of myself. I try to imagine my life here without Min in it, but it is much too painful to think about for more than a second or two. The best I can do is think of an alternate life, one at graduate school or in another city. There, as I did at Kenyon, I might be able to reinvent myself.
The waiter brings my order. I plow through the cake, afraid of tasting it because enjoying its excessive flavors would remind me of Min. Even so, I remember her sitting across from me at a Dairy Queen in Salt Lake City last summer, offering me hot fudge and a maraschino cherry from her spoon. The muscles in my thighs clench, and I cover my face with my hand and try as hard as I can not to cry. The summer seems so long ago, out of reach. How did this chasm open up, which neither of us will cross? I know she blames me. She says I’m too dependent on her, too demanding. I’m starting to think she’s right. I don’t know how to be myself without her.
Maybe, years from now, I could manage to forget her, or at least put somebody else in the place she holds in my heart. But I know this is impossible. She has been too great a presence for too many years. She has left her indelible mark. She has changed me in irreversible ways. If I ever love anybody else, it will be with the bittersweet awareness that everything I know about loving I learned from Min. She will always have her own corner inside me, whether or not I come to remember her with regret or affection or anger or a vague nostalgia.
Wishing I could pull off my wet sneakers and socks and dry my feet by the radiator along the wall, I push the empty plate away and take a sip of my cappuccino. Something has to shift, because I can’t go on living like this. I consider my options. There aren’t many that I can see. Sneezing, I pull my sweatshirt and sweater back on. The cappuccino has gotten cold in its cup. It’s mostly froth anyway. I leave money on the table, grab my jacket and dripping umbrella, and walk back out into the rain. As I trudge up another hill, a cable car goes clacking past, its bell ringing. I watch it pass me, only half full. In the back, a man sitting with two children takes a picture of the tip of the TransAmerica Pyramid. I always felt like a tourist in this city. Min is the one who lives here.
I find a bus and then wait a long time for another bus to take me back to the Haight. Sitting next to the window, I watch the rain slide down the glass in long streaks and listen to the exhausted hissing of the bus’s windshield wipers. It’s almost dark by the time I get off, stepping down into a large puddle on the street. It’s windier here, but the rain is starting to ease. I don’t bother opening my umbrella. I glance inside the Achilles Heel, a bar my ex-boyfriend Al took me to when I turned eighteen. A few couples are in there now. I wonder what Al is up to these days. I turn off Haight. I still have to climb about five blocks uphill. By the time I reach my building and take out my keys to open the wrought-iron security gate, I have made a decision. I feel relieved, almost hopeful. There is something I can do. I will move to Washington, DC, where my friend Nancy lives and has been urging me to come since graduation.
Three days later, I’m lying in bed with the flu feeling very sorry for myself. Everything aches, and my head feels stuffed full of wet cotton. There are Kleenexes all over the floor. Sally and Denise were sweet this morning, bringing me herbal tea and toast with jam before they left. But I wasn’t hungry. I’ve spent the day sleeping on and off, half-waking from weird dreams to roll over, looking for a more comfortable position, before I drop off again.
Now it’s early evening and already dark out. I’m trying to decide whether to get out of bed and look in the kitchen for something to eat when the doorbell rings, a long, insistent buzz. My first thought is that it’s Min. I can’t help hoping. I throw off the covers, pull my bathrobe over my nightgown, and kneel on the floor to reach for my slippers under the bed. The bell rings again as I go out the apartment door, remembering to leave it unlocked behind me. I realize I must be feeling a little better if I’m able to pay attention to those kinds of details.
At the bottom of the stairs, I can see Min looking up at me from the street through the bars of the gate. Her face is open, questioning. I walk through the lobby toward her, tr
ying to control my facial muscles. I don’t even know myself if I want to laugh or cry or yell at her to go away. I really believed I would never see her again. Now that she is here in front of me, the moment seems unreal.
I open the heavy front door and stand there, looking down at her. Neither of us seems to know what to say.
“Can I talk to you?” she asks at last.
I feel a heaviness inside me, which I recognize as dread. I think I know why she is here, and I wish she had just stayed away. I don’t want to go through the motions of breaking up. The processing, the wishing each other well, the leave-taking. Min likes to know she has done the right thing. She hates feeling guilty. I don’t want everything to be tied up neatly for her, with no loose ends. But I nod. I prop the door open with a wedge of wood lying by the wall and come down the steps. Turning the knob and pushing open the gate, I say, “Let’s sit in here.” I don’t want her coming up to my room. She nods. She climbs the steps, and I let the gate clang shut.
We sit side by side on the cold stone steps. She touches the material of my bathrobe without creating any pressure against my leg. “Are you going to sleep early tonight?” she asks.
“I’m sick,” I say. I can’t quite manage to look at her fully. Two women walk by and peer at us. I pull my nightgown further down over my legs.
“Are you taking echinacea and goldenseal?”
“No.”
“I can recommend a good acupuncturist if you want.”
“Why did you come over?” My voice sounds raspy. I try to clear my clotted throat.
She doesn’t answer for a long time. I’m afraid that whatever she says, I won’t believe it. Either that or it will hurt too much.
I say, “Min, I’m moving to DC.” I hadn’t meant to tell her, but I don’t know how else to get to the point. Suddenly her face seems very close to mine. I can feel heat emanating from her body, but that might be my own fever.
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