*****
This was the Monday after we turned back the clocks; the sun had long since sunk below Twin Peaks and light was just about gone. Cars turning from Drumm onto California Street, anonymous gray, had their lights on. Just as I walked out of my office building, I saw the cable car clang to a stop on the turntable at the end of the block and Carlos jump down. He wouldn’t have heard me over the traffic noise if I hailed him, so I followed him, a hundred paces back, and walked into the bar a half minute after.
It’s not a bad bar, there are no bad vibes. It’s just not a very perky bar. It has a little history for me, for at one time a bartender presided there, one Molly Epstein, for whom I had the most irrational letch you can imagine. It was something a knight of old might have had for his liege’s lady, or a troubadour for his damsel. I wanted her in the worst way but at the same time I worshipped her like a goddess of femaleness, and the worship part of it always won out. I sat at her bar drinking too many manhattans—I loved to watch her heavy chest shiver when she used a shaker—until a lull in the action allowed her to come over and, with small talk and smiles, gave me the moral equivalent of a pat on the head and a ‘There, there.’
As I walked in, involuntarily glancing over where Molly used to work (Molly having moved on to Ashland, Oregon, which is yet another story) Carlos was heading for the table in the corner, where one might meet a lady no one was supposed to know about. He was piquing my interest, this need for actual privacy. Who expects anyone in a San Francisco pub to give a damn who anyone else is bedding?
—Or not bedding, as it turns out. Carlos’s usual problem was getting out of a relationship that was either being superseded or that he wanted to be superseded. Except that a couple of years ago he’d found what seemed to be the girl of his dreams, whom I’d love to enthuse about—she could have been the girl of my dreams just as well—except that’s not the point. Despite being bonkers over each other, the two continued to occupy separate quarters, though on any given night either one might be found camped out at the other’s place.
(As I am of the “no mentioning the lad’s name in the mess” school, I will not give this paragon’s real name, so let us call her Sally, since she reminds me in character of the young Sally Seton in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.)
“¿Qué tal, Carlito?” I asked as I sat down. This exhausted my idiomatic Spanish.
“No muy bien, amigo, no muy bien.”
At which point one of the tall, willowy waitresses—Molly was the only exception to that description that had ever worked there—came and took our order. When she left I said, “So shoot.”
“I have a dilemma,” he said, his eyes doing sad puppy dog things.
I waited.
“You remember the last time we played flag football on the Marina Green?”
“I sure as hell do,” I said. “I intercepted one of your passes and ran it back for a touchdown.”
He said, “If you recall, that was because I had sprained my ankle and couldn’t plant well.”
“Excuses, excuses.”
“No,” he said, “it’s precisely pertinent.” (Rolling the r’s that soft Scottish way and sounding his quaint self.)
“Go on.”
He didn’t go on. The waitress came with our drinks. As Carlos works on Montgomery Street and I work for a nonprofit corporation at about half the pay, he was quick to hand the waitress his credit card and tell her to run a tab.
Then he began again. His sprained ankle was actually worse than either of us thought at the time. It didn’t get better but he didn’t go to the doctor—too busy. And besides, it got a lot of sympathy from Sally, which had practical consequences, some of which he related to me and some of which, because he is a gentleman, he allowed me to imagine.
Meanwhile, he took lots of aspirin. Other than alcohol, aspirin is his favorite analgesic. Sometimes aspirin was his antidote for alcohol, too, so he was taking a lot of them.
“One day I realized I was getting tired a lot. I wasn’t as peppy around the office, not even around the bedroom. Finally, after I was having to feign passion, Sally couldn’t ignore it any more—I mean, she’s in her prime, you know, a hot lady—and made me go to the doctor.
“Of course I didn’t go to the emergency room, I wasn’t burned or bleeding, so I got a referral from Doc Jones and went to see an orthopedist over at Presbyterian Medical Center. That took some more time, with still no action in the bedroom. To be honest, getting up from my recliner was getting to be a big chore, making love had become impossible.”
“But seeing an orthopod wasn’t the answer to that problem, was it?”
“He put me in a walking cast and gave me a prescription for ibuprofen. I mentioned being tired, he said it was from being so sedentary, due to the ankle. ‘In six weeks you’ll be running marathons,’ he said, ‘just be patient.’”
“But that wasn’t it,” I conjectured.
“No. And I kept taking aspirin as well as the ibuprofen—not as much, but some.”
“Which,” I said, “were causing enough stomach bleeding to give you anemia.”
“How did you know?” Carlos asked.
“I had an uncle did the same thing. But what does this have to do with affairs of the heart?”
“I fiddled around so long, getting the anemia fixed, Sally and I kind of got out of the habit, you know.”
I said, “And she’s dumping you?”
“Let me finish.”
(Carlos, when he says ‘let me’ actually says ‘let me,’ not “lemme” like most US-born English speakers. He also pronounces ‘for’ as it’s supposed to be pronounced, not ‘fir’ or ‘fur.’ I enjoy listening to Carlos.)
Here is the gist of his story, for the sake of brevity: Carlos had become friends (not a euphemism) with a woman at work. Nothing steamy, coffee breaks together, taking the same cable car to the Marina the nights he wasn’t working late. She wasn’t as pretty or as chic as Sally, but she was chipper and open and friendly. They would meet in neighborhood establishments, sometimes, by accident, and later, Sally spending more and more time traveling, being a management consultant and in demand other places besides San Francisco, he and this friend would watch rented movies at his place, so that he could prop up his ailing ankle.
One night, by accident (no, Carlos isn’t accident prone, but maybe his subconscious is, as a person’s subconscious tends to be) he tripped and fell, she helped him up, and they sort of simultaneously realized they were embracing and that they liked it. Carlos was in enough pain to preclude (maybe in a conflicted subconscious, no?) leaping to some ultimate climax, but after she had his leg propped on a pillow, there followed many soothing words, interspersed with kissing and petting.
“Does she know about Sally?”
Carlos gave a Latin shrug. “I’ve referred to Sally kind of tangentially. Like saying, ‘My friend is out of town, I must go feed her cat.’”
“That’s tangential, all right. The friend didn’t have to be female; we don’t have feminine endings, like amiga, as you know better than I.”
“But I said, ‘her cat,’ see. I didn’t hide that I had a female friend. In fact, I told her once that most of my friends were women.”
“Except me.”
He said, “And a couple of other guys, enough to make a flag football side.”
“So, you’re over your anemia, I surmise, and you could get down to business with either of these women. And shall I guess that the dilemma is, you’re getting down to business with neither?”
“Claro. I can’t seem to muster the enthusiasm with Sally any more. She’s changed; lately she’s been doing a lot of business—and I mean business business—with a bunch of ardent feminists over in Berkeley. I think the hiatus in our love making, due to my unfortunate condition, along with heavy doses of feminist propaganda, has convinced her she could be happy living without a man in her life.”
“So, hasn’t that solved the dilemma?”
Our glasses drained,
the waitress reappeared. She did that circling the finger thing, a silent question whether we wanted another round. Carlos nodded. Ambiance music had started up in the background, a draggy version of “Moonlight in Vermont” on an electronic piano.
“I still want Sally in my life. She’s the most interesting woman I’ve ever known. But . . .”
“—But what?”
“I’m sure if Sally knew I was, you know, making horizontal nothings with another woman, she would end our relationship muy pronto.”
“So, keep them separate.”
“In spite of everything, San Francisco is a small town in some ways. You go to the Buena Vista for an eye opener Sunday morning, you run into one of Sally’s friends. What are you going to do? It will get back to her, sooner or later.”
“And you really think she’d be jealous.”
Carlos nodded a solemn kind of Latin nod.
I raised my eyebrows, asking why, as the waitress brought the second round. She smiled at us, as if she had an inkling of what we were talking about.
After she left Carlos said, “I know. I know women. Besides, when I was in the worst of my anemia, but neither of us knew it was anemia yet, she accused me of not loving her any more. She was quite upset, more than you’d expect.”
“Because you couldn’t get it up.”
“That’s close enough to the truth.”
“And you don’t think you could say to Sally—I mean, she’s such a rational lady—that your relationship has evolved, you want to be friends and you love her dearly, but not that way any more.”
He took a long drink and sighed. “See, we shared everything—a nearly complete relationship. I even asked her to marry me, but that was too much man in her life just then. ‘Maybe in ten years,’ she said.”
“Rock and a hard place,” I offered.
“Devil and the deep blue sea,” Carlos rebutted.
I said, “Your real problem is, you want your cake and eat it, too.”
“Can we skip the clichés?” he said.
“No; try this: a sports car to tear around in, an SUV for camping and fishing, but not all in one.”
He said “Yes, one can own two vehicles, it’s logical—”
“—But women aren’t vehicles, as much as we treat our vehicles like women,” I finished for him.
“What shall I do, Federico?”
“Suck it up. Give yourself permission to lay this new lady. If she likes you enough, she’ll settle for being the sports car—or the SUV, as the case may be.”
He shook his head slowly, indicating he wasn’t ready to do that.
I said, “Your pecker’s going to do the deciding, you know. An up and down vote for the sports car or the SUV.”
“Right now it’s not an up vote, no way.” And then, after a sigh-filled pause he added, “If only I had anemia again.”
“That,” I said, “would be paying too much for scruples.”
*****
Carlos still limped a little, I noticed as we walked out into an Embarcadero night that was getting chilly. I left him at the California Street cable car. He’d transfer to either of the north-south lines, and if the Hyde St. car came first, two-to-one he’d drop in at the Buena Vista for a bracer. Maybe he’d meet the new woman there, call her up and ask her over. Or maybe he’d start ducking her, to avoid the goring the dilemma was giving him.
Hands in my pocket and collar turned up, I walked over to BART’s Embarcadero Station and caught the train to Emeryville, to my cozy and unpretentious apartment that cost me half what Carlos’s Marina District apartment cost. I was glad I wasn’t in his shoes; in fact, I was glad I wasn’t a woman magnet.
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