At the top of the vista point, a man sits on the sole bench, a paperback on his lap. He takes a moment to look up at Foley, a gesture of his harmlessness, and she nods in recognition as she catches her breath.
The man leans forward over his knees, a cigarette between his fingers. “Do you have a light?”
Foley shakes her head, apologizes.
“Of course,” he gestures toward her clothes. “You don’t smoke.”
“No.”
“That’s good.”
Foley turns back to the view. Then, the man asks, quietly, politely, with a hint of an accent she can’t yet place, which way the ocean is. She points toward the Pacific. “There, past Golden Gate Park. It’s sort of foggy today, so you can’t really see . . .” The man is not following her finger, but reading the text on the back of her sweatshirt. It’s blue, hooded, from Paul’s medical school softball league. He shrank it accidentally, and protested when Foley cut off most of the sleeves so it wouldn’t weigh her down. He wanted her to wear it like a cheerleader would wear a boyfriend’s letter jacket; she wanted to run in it.
“The Hustler?” the man asks. Paul’s nickname, given to him for his enthusiasm for sliding into base, is just discernible under the hood.
“Oh, it’s my boyfriend’s . . . my . . .” She turns to look at him, noticing the sharp symmetry of his jaw, the tight curl of his hair, a little gray at his temples, his mahogany leather knapsack, from which he has triumphantly dug out some matches. He lays the book on his neatly folded jacket. The book’s title is in French. “Where are you visiting from?” she asks as he lights his cigarette.
He says he’s in town for a set of interviews at “the university.” She doesn’t ask which one. “I’ve never imagined myself in California,” he says, “but who knows?”
“Yeah, well, me either,” she says.
Six years ago, she moved from Saint Louis to San Francisco to live with a friend; the friend left after four months, but Foley was apprenticing with an artist and stayed. The artist needed her less and less, and she took the museum job a few months later. She met Paul a year after that. As a teenager, when she still believed she would be a painter, she assumed her adult life would be in New York, a city that, when she visited Paul earlier this year, seemed not beautiful enough for her and she not for it, an opportunity that belonged to an earlier version of herself.
“Where are you living now?” she asks him.
“Paris,” the man says. “You’ve been?”
Foley spent her junior year of college at the American university there. There were strikes in the Metro that year, and she walked the city nearly end to end, often missing classes when she’d realize how far she was from where she needed to be. She got to know the streets of Paris rather well, but her mental maps of the city are faded now. Still, she asks him where, and they begin to talk about how he taught architecture and history at the same school she studied at, about how much he likes teaching American students, their curiosity. He’s ready for a change, he tells her.
Foley is sitting down on the wall by the man’s feet when the weather really worsens, a low sweeping of clouds and fog they can see moving toward them. Her runner’s body is no use against the wind. Goose bumps rise on her shins; her sweat feels cold underneath her armpits.
When the man asks her to grab a cup of coffee, it seems entirely logical, a way to keep talking and get warm. She has tried to forget how lonely these past five months have felt while Paul has been in New York.
Foley looks down at her running shoes. She says she doesn’t have any money on her, and he laughs, jingling some change in his pocket. The gesture is both crude and inviting, and she likes the way his face lights up as he does this.
He has lit a second cigarette in the time they have been talking. She reaches out in an offer to hold it while he gathers his things. Foley has never been a smoker herself, but she grips his cigarette between her fingers as if it’s her own. She flicks an ash, remembering a boyfriend in college she used to do this for while he closed his coat or put on a hat. When she hands the cigarette back to the man, she tells him her name, and he tells her his before putting the cigarette back in his mouth. Stefan.
• • •
They take the shorter paths through the trees. She walks ahead of him, but he keeps up with her on the unevenly spaced steps, even in his wingtips. When they reach the larger paved walkways, Foley points out the headstones used to make the park’s gutters, thinking it is the type of thing, like her knowledge of the jazz clubs in the 19th arrondissement, that will impress him.
“Here, look,” she says, crouching down to push back the dead leaves and tree skins, showing him the pieces of marble with numbers and letters still visible. Paul taught her these facts she’s now telling Stefan, that the stones are leftovers of unclaimed graves from when the city moved the cemeteries to Daly City. Paul learned it as a teenager, volunteering for the parks service. Nearly every place she knows in the city is a spot from Paul’s youth, or a place they discovered together. She understands why the living wouldn’t want to sleep near the dead.
Stefan bends at his knees to run his fingertips over the etchings in the marble. The slabs, cut into neat octagons, are laid in tight like puzzle pieces. His head close to hers, he smells only faintly of nicotine, and mostly of a kind of musk, a hair product or an aftershave. “The French did that, long ago, pushed the bodies outside the city walls. You know, like Père Lachaise, where Morrison is,” Stefan says as he straightens up. He uses a blue lighter from the inside pocket of his jacket to start another cigarette.
• • •
Foley leads Stefan the few blocks to the Hungry Dog, a café where she and Paul often had brunch. They are offered a seat by the window, but remembering Paul’s friends who share an apartment around the corner, she asks for a table closer to the bar. “Warmer back there,” she explains.
Stefan motions for her to sit before he does. She doesn’t recognize the waitress, who smells of a peachy perfume, the kind that makes Foley think of teenagers, though this woman is about her own age. Stefan says he thinks he has been here before, with the friend whose apartment he is staying at, friends of his brother who are in France for a while. The street he’s told her it’s on is higher even than the lookout at Buena Vista. They talk about these friends, the neighborhood, about the job Stefan is considering, about his American mother and Moroccan father. Foley tells him about the collections at the museum, about how, on stressful days, she wishes she could run home from work rather than be packed against everyone else on the Muni. She misses walking Paris.
“You and your boyfriend live close by?”
“Fiancé,” she says, the lie falling from her mouth as easily as the one she told her mother earlier. This, too, was a possible version of events: There had been a ring in Paul’s suitcase last summer on a visit they made to Saint Louis. She saw the unmistakable outline of the box between his summer-weight shirts when she was looking for his dopp kit so she could borrow a razor. She slid her fingers between the shirts and rubbed the velvet cover but didn’t open it. They were in town for a high school friend’s wedding. That night at the reception she drank too much, flirted with the boys she’d grown up with, who had become men she still wasn’t interested in. When she dropped her drink at the edge of the dance floor, its thick glass bouncing off the reception hall’s carpet, Paul crouched down with her to retrieve it, a napkin already in his hand to wipe their shoes, and suggested quietly that she skip a refill. She told him to relax as she stood back up, her fingers sticky with tonic.
“Just thinking about how you’re going to feel in the morning,” he said, slipping an arm around her waist.
“You don’t have to be the fucking doctor all the time,” she said before walking to the bar on the other side of the floor. Paul stood with the wet napkin next to an old friend of hers she’d led him to believe was an ex, when she’d only kissed
him once or twice, a scrambling of hormones and boredom. “Are you still doing that art thing?” the fake ex had asked her at the cocktail hour earlier. Paul had never even seen one of her paintings; she’d left them in her parents’ attic in Saint Louis, assured she’d come back for them once she settled into a place she could paint in. “Foley is going to run the SFMOMA one day,” Paul had said, and Foley changed the subject. She spent the rest of the night moving out of whatever circle of her old friends Paul was standing in.
She knew her behavior toward Paul was cruel and juvenile, but after three days of her family fawning over his accomplishments and California good looks, after seeing that ring that he was so sure he could convince her she wanted, though they’d never even discussed the possibility, she had felt relieved to put this distance between them, even if only for the night.
By the time they boarded the plane back to California, she had apologized to him, joking that now they’d be banned from the Saint Louis wedding circuit forever and that he was very welcome.
“I liked it,” he said, lifting the shade on Foley’s window seat. “I like where you’re from.”
Her head already throbbing, Foley found her sunglasses in her bag and put them on without a word to Paul. He left for New York the following month. She wonders now, in the café, whatever happened to the ring, if it’s in her apartment somewhere, still in its velvet box.
The busboy brings them water in glasses that are still warm from the dishwasher. Foley puts her hands to the heat of hers.
When the coffee arrives shortly after, Foley thanks Stefan. “My pleasure,” he says. Then, after a few sips, he says, “I thought American girls liked big diamond rings,” indicating her bare hands.
“It slipped once, so I don’t run with it on,” she lies. “And you?” she asks. “Married?”
Stefan holds up his left hand, which she already knows is without a ring. “I also leave my diamonds at home.” She laughs, which pleases him. “No, not anymore,” he says. “Once. We are still good friends. She remarried. But it’s not for me,” he says, waving the idea of marriage away like it’s a plate he’s finished with. He shifts the canister of sugar to the side of the table. “But maybe it’s for you—for you and . . . ?”
“Paul.”
“For you and Paul.”
“Maybe.”
“You’re young; you will see.”
“I’m twenty-eight.”
“Young,” he repeats, smiling.
She thinks of her cousins, years younger, who have houses and babies, to whom she seems old, or at least foolishly slow.
“And he doesn’t mind, your fiancé, you having coffee with me?”
“He’s in New York.”
She tells him about Paul’s research fellowship, how competitive the program is, about his work on early-onset dementia.
“Sounds like a smart young man.”
“He is.”
“You don’t worry about him, in New York? All those beautiful women.”
“He’s not the cheating type.”
Stefan shrugs. “Everyone is the cheating type, don’t you think? When presented with the right opportunity?”
“Maybe,” she says. It hasn’t occurred to her, what motivated Paul’s question about her faithfulness.
“Is that what happened,” she asks, “with your ex?”
Stefan shakes his head. “No, nothing so dramatic.”
“You just weren’t right for each other?”
He waves this away, too. “The only place a man and a woman are right for each other is in bed. And that has nothing to do with anything else.”
Foley thinks back to sex with Paul this weekend, recalling the force with which he entered her just yesterday morning; she thought his uncharacteristic fumbling was a product of jet lag and pent-up desire, but their compatibility in bed was likely the last item on the list he’d been desperate to check off. Paul had always been systematic, a planner.
“I mean, think of the best sex you’ve ever had. Not your fiancé, right?” Stefan asks.
“A Frenchman, actually.” Henri was Belgian, really, a friend of a friend on her study abroad year in college. “In Paris.”
“And what was so great about it? Were you in love?”
Foley laughs, though she doesn’t mean to. “No, we were most definitely not.” Henri had a girlfriend, a beautiful German girl she didn’t like very much, an excellent painter who was enrolled in the same studio art program as Foley. She doesn’t know if he ever told her, and while Foley liked to imagine the girlfriend’s coldness to her in their shared studio all year was because of Henri, it was, she thinks, because Foley was a far inferior painter, not as serious as Claudine, not as committed to her art.
“He belonged to someone else,” she tells Stefan. “It felt won.”
“Ah,” he says. “That.”
Foley notices a slight tremor in her hands. It’s the coffee, she tells herself, hitting her system all at once. She tries to remember what she has eaten since this morning. Half an apple after she made a pile of Paul’s books on the bedroom floor; later, cold noodles over the sink, throwing the pieces of shrimp into the trash can. She excuses herself, hoping she appears steady as she walks past Stefan toward the restrooms in the back.
In the tiny bathroom, she assesses herself in the mirror. Her face is flushed from the run and the cold—healthy, her grandfather would say. She cannot do anything about her running clothes, about the way she is sure she has the faint smell of sweat on her, but she can do something about her hair, which she has been growing long since Paul left for New York. She undoes her ponytail, combing her hair with her fingers, putting the elastic in the trash can. She takes a squirt of hand lotion by the sink to smooth back the wild hairs, a trick a friend taught her. She recognizes the peachy scent of the waitress. She removes Paul’s sweatshirt. Underneath, she wears a slim-fitting running top that shows what few curves a sports bra offers. She puts lotion on the cracked skin of her hands, on her chest, where she lowers the zipper of her running shirt.
When she returns to the table, Stefan is laughing with the same waitress, his lips curled invitingly. Foley tucks her hair behind her ear as she sits down again, giving the waitress her own smile, one that sends her back to the coffee station with the now-empty pot.
“You came back,” he says.
“Well, the back fence is very high. Even in these shoes.”
“I’m glad for that.”
“I’m glad, too.”
“And you’re warmed up,” he says. She’s hung the sweatshirt by its hood on the back of her chair.
“Yes, thank you. The coffee helps.”
Her cup has also been refilled by the waitress, and although she does not think she can stomach any more, Foley pours in the milk and stirs her sugar while Stefan watches her.
“Tell me something,” he says, leaning in, his palms flat on the table.
“About what?”
“Anything: music, books, where you like to walk in the city, where you like to eat. Tell me why I should stay.”
She used to like these conversations with men who wanted to know so much about her; she used to like to figure out how much to give them and what, exactly, would keep them asking for more. But today, she just feels tired.
“You first.”
He takes her hand across the tabletop, lacing his fingers with hers. She hoped that when they first touched it would be more urgent—a two-handed grab of her waist—but the way he reaches for her is gentle, nearly clumsy. “Okay. This one,” he says, tugging on her empty ring finger, “is connected to your heart. Goes right to it. Not your brain, but your heart.”
“Who told you that, a fortune-teller?”
“My ex-wife, actually.” As suddenly as he first took them, he’s let go of her fingers, and as immediately, she wants to stay in his hands, to
be touched again.
“Same difference then, yes?”
He lifts up his hands in a gesture of defeat.
“Look, I loved my ex-wife, very much. Some others as well, of course. But you know how it is—with Paul. You’re in love; it’s special; it’s very, very beautiful, for however long it lasts.”
“So you’re an optimist.”
“Marriage was not for me and Joelle, not then. But love is something else. And sex, well . . . But you are young, and smart, and very beautiful,” he says, “and you will be fine. Do not listen to a bitter unemployed Frenchman.”
When Foley looks out the restaurant’s windows, she can see the streetlights have come on. It will be a cold walk home; she is too wired on the wrong kinds of energy to run. The dinner crowd has started to come in, couples meeting for the first time or the tenth at the restaurant bar, husbands and wives and partners who’ve said yes to one another for a night or a year or decades, who keep saying yes in a way she doesn’t know how. She imagines that they are happy, but who can say? Aren’t they imagining the same about her and Stefan, justifying the fifteen-year age gap between them, finding charm in the contrast of his neatly rolled shirtsleeves and expensive jacket with her faded running clothes? Did it seem to everyone else that when he held her hand in his a minute ago, he was affirming their intertwined purpose, that he was delivering her a promise? Could anyone tell that they’ve spent the past three hours feeding each other lies?
Back Talk Page 13