SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, 1981
Wright’s life in San Francisco revealed itself in a matter of forty-eight hours, coming to him like he’d called it by its name. He saw a boy in a crisp white shirt and apron and wanted to be him, so he forged a food service résumé, naming nonexistent restaurants and responsibilities with a certain pleasure, Debbi’s Late Nite, oversight of the midnight rush, Alliman’s Bistro, knowledge of a diverse wine list. He removed the wrinkles from his clothes by hanging them in the shower of the gym that had offered a free trial membership.
The second restaurant he wandered into offered him a position. It was a wine bar with a small menu where people ate on a slanted, triangular patio, the servers always placing wadded linen napkins under the tables to keep glasses of coastal pinot gris from sliding off them. The manager, Judy, was first a cigarette and then the body that needed it, and she spent ten seconds on the piece of paper bearing his name but a minute on his jawline and deltoids.
“Fucking Anthony with the legs just quit,” she said. “Could you come back for the dinner rush? We have an opener but need a backup.”
“Tonight?”
“No, babe, in the year 2020. Wear some silver leggings. I’ll be the head in a jar, okay?” She immobilized her neck and deadened her eyes and began to speak in a kind of mechanized chirp. “This body was no temple.”
Judy, the other waiter explained as the sun went down on Market, was a mostly lovable figurehead, there primarily to fill the duty of tasting the wines. He was sleek and compact, Braden, originally from Ohio, which he revealed in a whisper, and he did a practiced impression of her at the bar, the wobble of her fingers with the Camel Light, Is it corked, I dunno, lips smacking, I have a feeling it must be corked but I need another sip to know for sure. They were standing in the hall between the kitchen and the dining room, rolling silverware into napkins, the knives’ blades slipped between the tines of forks and then swaddled in an elaborate fold Wright could not get the hang of.
“Congratulations on the nomination,” he said. Wright took a breath and a quick survey of Braden’s face and another set of steaming silverware from the plastic bucket.
“What?”
“Your résumé. It’s up for the Nobel Prize in literature. A rich, devastating fiction, they’re calling it.”
“You’ll laugh, you’ll cry.”
“Mostly the latter.”
He was in Wright’s ear the whole night, issuing an instruction, averting catastrophe, handing him the tapenade or soup spoon he’d forgotten, calling Wright honey in a way that humiliated him. Later he remembered only this, the voice coming to his rescue under the strings of lights that laced the wild-vined terrace, how natural Braden looked, making his body small and light to land an entrée at a far table, then dense and thick to demand some missing order in the narrow window that led to the kitchen.
Sitting at the bar afterward, in the shadow of the chairs piled on tables, Wright kissed him. In the long second before, when he was leaning in and taking Braden’s face in his hands, he told himself he would have kissed anyone who had shown him a kindness.
Braden put a hand on each shoulder and pushed him away, humming a terse note like a machine malfunctioning.
“Nothankyou,” he said. “I don’t kiss boys who are pretending to be straight.”
Wright stood and untied the apron from around his waist, removing the Bic and the steno pad, and he rolled it on the bar and then made a gesture to indicate his departure.
“Did you just salute me?”
He laughed, though his lungs felt wet and nothing was funny, certainly not the way he was living his life, following any impulse and then balking when it would not embrace him. Braden patted the stool.
“Planning on living in your car, babe?” he said.
Braden pointed at his clavicle, circling his index finger in a tight clockwise rotation.
“Oh god.” The little laminate ID necklace from the gym hung on its fluorescent green lanyard, showing through at his top buttons. “It was there all night? You knew just from that?”
“Not quite. That and your Ford, which I saw you sleeping in on my way in this morning. I don’t know, it broke my heart. I couldn’t say anything. I had a feeling you’d walk off midshift anyway, especially after you almost spilled scalding consommé on that fairly charismatic baby.”
He laid his head on the bar and Braden gave it a paternal ruffle. After they finished a bottle Judy had opened but forgotten, he offered Wright the room, walking distance if you could stand the hills, there was a reason men in San Francisco had such beautiful asses, rent he could make easily from a few weekend rushes, enough sunlight that it changed the feeling of the room, charged it. Like the presence of someone you loved sleeping in it, Wright thought, when he walked in, pulling loose cash for the deposit from his pocket right then.