Cameron Salters hadn't always wanted to be an investment banker. In college he'd been a music major, and an emeritus professor had stopped him once and said, "Theory, technical precision, timing, notational literacy: the man who denigrates these is a fool and you must spurn him always. And yet my dear boy," the professor's arm found its way around Cameron's shoulders and his faint breath touched his neck, "by chance or design you were born with tremendously powerful lungs. I heard you in Dr. Lasky's class exhale for two and a half minutes without a moment's tremolo. Being so young you cannot appreciate this gift. It is beyond your powers of comprehension, but it is not beyond mine." The professor was Bavarian and mostly blind and too elderly to be a sexual threat, so Cameron accepted the praise and, had his father's health the following year not forced him to give up the French horn and study microeconomics, might have developed his gift further and become a musician.
Instead he got an MBA and earned more than his parents and suspected, when he woke up in the morning and went to work and negotiated client annuities and came home and went to bed, that he'd made a mistake in life. On foggy nights, parked at Pier 27 on the Embarcadero, staring across the bay at the aureole over Oakland and listening to the deep chord sidewinding of Bach's cello suites, Cameron sometimes thought, purely hypothetically, of sealing off his garage when he got home and letting the engine run. Watching a million city lights, in a luxury sedan that made less noise idling than it did turned off, he would imagine his own requiem and consider the irony of no longer being able to play it.
Since meeting her at a mutual friend's barbecue two years earlier, Cameron had dated Janet Quinn, a junior executive consultant at the city's premier branding company. Janet's clients included top apparel, appliance and e-commerce companies that wanted to know America's attitude toward their logos and niche appeal. Each company acted, Janet thought, like a nervous teenage boy uncertain if the girl he liked ever talked about him; he wouldn't make a move in her direction until he was sure she'd say yes. Companies were timorous. They were confused. Which was why Janet felt more like a therapist than a consultant, someone whose job was to talk the corporate world through its neuroses to a point where launching an ad campaign was unaccompanied by fear and trembling.
Not having to work Cameron's hours, Janet still had friends who weren't co-workers, although she'd lost two of them to marriage in April and ever since had been on the lookout for replacement friends who weren't picky about movies. Not that Janet wanted to dominate the decision-making process when going to see something, but rather she didn't need a high-brow companion for whom any suggestion of going to a multiplex raised concerns about America's cultural mores. Her friends in college and immediately afterward had been like this, but she was an adult now and didn't need disappointment and unhappy endings in her entertainment. She got enough of these in the course of an average month. Give her a romantic comedy and she'd give you gratitude.
Unknown to Cameron, Janet had a lover named Ryan Conlin whom everyone called Wry, because that's what he was, all the time, even when Janet was having a candid conversation with him about a client's preference for her rival's inane ad strategy over the brilliant one she'd spent a week of halogen midnights developing. Especially then. He didn't seem to care and would even mock her a little, yes, prop himself up on the couch and make fun of what she did and cared about professionally, which may not have been running a soup kitchen for the Tenderloin's downtrodden but at least wasn't dealing black tar heroin on the corner of Mission and 16th to low-profile celebrities' kids who sharked along in tinted-windowed sport utility vehicles. Which was to say that her life and priorities ought to have been kept in perspective, that in the rising tide of 21st century America there were always better and worse things one could be doing.
And what infuriated Janet about Wry's condescending attitude, as opposed to just hurting or humiliating her, was Wry's hypocrisy. What, after all, did he do besides temp work at a public interest law firm and study Butoh dancing with that bald contortionist Kirin Sortoga? When had he devoted even a single weekend afternoon to driving a van for Meals on Wheels or manning a phone at a suicide prevention hotline? Never, that's when. So Janet was content to let this affair play itself out while she spent more and more evenings in Café Abir, hoping to meet someone at the espresso counter who would notice her copy of "The French Lieutenant's Woman" and say, "That's funny, I was just in Lyme Regis." This hope sprang eternal.
Wry was grateful that Janet hadn't made any moves to increase their togetherness, because he took issue with sexual constancy. His issue was that he was incapable of it and had never been monogamous by choice. Generously he gave his romantic attention to anyone who needed it and even tried to give it to people whose demand was less overt, people who thought of it simply as a passable way to spend a few hours, a may-as-well sort of gift. Provided the woman didn't do it first, Wry would end these dalliances if and when a pattern developed like regular phone calls or questions about what he did when not with the person questioning him. He had been an eel in love and prided himself on his slick, oleaginous skin.
Until now. Now he felt something unusual and didn't know how to proceed in the matter of Tsitsi Mbogomi and his growing feelings for her. He felt more boyish than he had as a child and thought dizzily about their first meeting, when she'd spilled a Big Gulp soda on his sun-bleached mohair coat while standing in line to see a triple-feature Satyajit Ray retrospective at the Red Vic Theatre. He knew that they were destined for each other and had been waiting their entire lives for that bitter evening of Pacific-sprung winds and everyone in line huddling as close together as at an airport departure gate, talking about parkside sublets and digital poetry.
Tsitsi, tall and black and with microdot freckles running from cheek to cheek across her broad, flat nose, had been telling a story to her Zimbabwean friends before she sneezed, her left arm jerked slightly, and she said, "Shit!" She and her friends and Wry stared at Wry's dripping coat and the long strip of cilia smoothed down and darkened by her cola. "I'm so sorry," she said, blowing her nose into a Calamity Jane handkerchief with authentically tattered selvage.
Wry stared for a moment at his ruined coat before looking up at her indignantly for a second too long that became hey-wait-a-minute. The spiller appeared as contrite and breathed as heavily as if she'd just set off an avalanche. She made a hesitant gesture to daub the coat with the clean part of her handkerchief but instead held back, clearly afraid that by touching it she'd make it worse. Wry felt then just how inconsequential his coat was, how vainglorious he'd been to own anything sun-bleached and mohair, so he took it off and dropped it into a streetlamp-chained garbage can. In the same motion he took her hand in his, squeezed it softly, and said his full name, Ryan Hanlon Conlin. He shivered to the point where he squinted his eyes.
"I feel awful," Tsitsi said. "And that's a beautiful coat. Do you really have to throw it away? I can give you money to have it dry cleaned."
"That old thing?" answered Wry, his arms aflame with goosepimples. "I've been wanting to get rid of it for a long time." He ignored the throat-clearing that came at his side from Lynn, the coworker with whom he had flirted for several weeks and come to the theatre. Lynn, his date. Running a hand over his short magenta hair, he focused on the spiller.
But after Tsitsi didn't give her name in return for Wry's and the balance spiked in her favor and he grew frantic about how to prolong this meeting, especially given Lynn's continued, you-asshole coughing, the line lurched forward into the theatre and Wry found himself in a seat three rows and seven columns down from where Tsitsi sat between the Zimbabweans. He craned his neck in Tsitsi's direction while Lynn reminded him of how proud he'd been of his mohair coat, of how that very afternoon he'd spoken to fellow paralegal Pat Hitsatsu about its inimitable blend of style and comfort. Wry absently agreed to being stupid as he tried to see around the porkpie hat of a grizzled old hipster sitting to his left and directly in his eyepath to Tsitsi. If he hadn't caught a glimpse of her exiting figure after the first movie and leapt up to overtake her in the lobby, he'd never have discovered her name or where she lived or her phone number, and he'd never have extracted her reluctant permission to call.
Despite the city's steady demand for string quartets to play at charity fundraisers, all-denominational weddings, birthday parties, career retrospectives, and funerals, Tsitsi's group, the Peony Quartet, didn't secure enough gigs to pay for their all-black performance outfits or meet their monthly rents. After promoting the group through canvassing and poster postings and arts agency affiliation, Tsitsi still had to supplement her income by working from six in the morning to three in the afternoon, Monday through Thursday, at Specialty's Bakery in the financial district. Although bored and depressed by the work, she'd become an expert at anything to do with lemon poppyseed, and her potato cheddar muffins were considered nonpareil by people who'd had them everywhere.
Customers and co-workers approached her about catering their get-togethers. She would accept on the condition that they let her quartet provide the music. "A quartet," they'd say with deliberate slowness. "That's an interesting idea, except that my friends are more into electro-blues." Or big band swing. Or country hip-hop klezmer waltzes. So Tsitsi would decline the catering job and feel prematurely old for her twenty-five years, discouraged that classical music was such an untenable pursuit outside of graduate school or nepotistic urban orchestras. She'd begun to take seriously the fear that she was practicing a dead art.
One day when three suited men entered Specialty's during the pre-lunch lull, Tsitsi was bent down behind the display counter, rearranging the muffin tray in a sweet to savory direction so that it progressed from blueberry to wheat germ. Standing up and seeing the men study the menu, she looked around for her co-workers and saw none who could take their order while she went to the bathroom.
So she waited impatiently, squirming. One of the men was tall, wore a navy blue pinstripe suit, and had thinning hair grown long for one last glory run. His four-day beard was patchy and sculpted to reinforce his slight jawline. Another, similarly dressed but in gray, was smaller and hairier, with two diamond earrings and a stud in his tragus. The third was of average height and build, and he had, while regarding the pastries, the most intense look of concentration Tsitsi had ever seen on a customer, as though he were examining children at an adoption center rather than choosing between strawberry and plain cheese danishes. Finally he ordered a croissant and cup of coffee with an added espresso shot.
Tsitsi assembled the man's order and was counting out his change when she heard him whistle Henryk Mikolaj Górecki's "Arioso." She almost dropped a handful of shiny new dimes. Giving him a shriveling receipt and a shy smile, she said, "Quasi una Fantasia."
"Si," he said, evidently surprised, and then he took the coffee cup by its cardboard, heat-diffusing handle and withdrew to an island counter on which was a row of thermoses.
"The middle one's half and half," Tsitsi called out, seeing him hesitate. "The label rubbed off and I haven't replaced it yet."
"Thanks." He topped up his coffee with cream and waited for his friends to join him.
The next day Tsitsi was in the kitchen letting 144 snickerdoodles cool when Gypsy Kate opened the door to tell her that some guy was looking for her out front.
"What does he want?" Tsitsi asked, prying up the cookies from a nonstick baking pan the size of a truck windshield.
"What does every guy want?" Gypsy Kate said.
"Are you serious?"
"Who knows?"
After sliding the cookies onto four serving plates, Tsitsi went out to the front and saw the Górecki man. She retied her apron and stepped aside for a deliverywoman pushing a dolly loaded with pasteurized fruit juices. The plangent whistle of an espresso machine's steaming lever. The rattle of soup lids. A wrong-number phone call.
"Are you looking for me?" she asked, brushing tight black curls out of her eyes and feeling sweaty and gross, like she should not see anyone today except for the flour wholesaler.
"Yeah." The man's short brown hair, previously sprayed into an everyman side-part, stuck out in ladyfinger clumps. Wearing a misbuttoned argyle sweater and wrinkled chinos, he had bruise-colored bags under his eyes and the sallow complexion of a scurvy victim. He swayed a little on his feet between the order counter and the condiment island. "My name is Cameron Salters," he said, "and I got coffee from you yesterday."
"I remember."
"It's probably not your fault, but I think there was something wrong with the cream in this, um..." He weakly tapped a big round gray thing with a sort of nozzle dispenser at the top.
"Thermos."
"Right." He smiled thankfully. "Thermos. I drank it and threw up all night. Then I threw up all morning. The worst is probably over but the point is that I think the cream is what made me sick. It tasted funny."
Tsitsi walked to the island, unscrewed the top of the middle thermos, and smelled the fatty cream swishing thickly inside. She stared at the collagen film left on the curved steel wall when the liquid settled, and said, "I'm sorry about that. I'd be happy to give you some complimentary coupons if you want, or you could talk to the manager to lodge a formal complaint."
Cameron shook his head. "That's okay. I just wanted to let you know so that no one else gets sick."
"Definitely," Tsitsi said. "Sometimes we get in a rush and forget to look at carton dates when we're refilling the thermoses, but usually our dairy products are fresh enough to not worry. We get them from over there." She pointed to the door and the culture clash of a hundred people passing by outside.
"From where?"
"From Berkeley."
"Oh," Cameron said, "well, all right. Thanks."
He left and Tsitsi sighed. Seemed like a nice guy who might have been more receptive to hiring the Peony Quartet than most people she met. Certainly complained in a considerate way. As recently as Monday, a stooped, caftan-hooded woman set aside a half-hour of her day to complain to Tsitsi for giving her a sandwich with cilantro. Although the sandwich's menu description listed cilantro, the woman pointed to faint red spots on her hand that she claimed were the beginning of "a terrible allergic ravishing," and that with an ingredient as hateful as cilantro, a dozen bolded warnings were the least a bakery could provide. Not to be placated by Tsitsi's offer of complimentary coupons, the woman left with the threat-promise never to return.
Two days after Cameron came in sick, when Tsitsi had essentially forgotten him and was counting money from the closed express line till, he came back and ordered a croissant and espresso-laced coffee from Gypsy Kate. It was 11:17 a.m., and although the night crew traditionally refilled the bulk bins of coffee beans at the end of the day, Tsitsi thought the bins looked low.
"You whistle very well," she said when standing next to Cameron and struggling to open a 50-lb. canvas bag of Ethiopian dark roast. The knotted string at the bag's opening was in a hopeless skein.
"Do you need help with that?" he asked.
"I've got it." But she didn't have it and so turned her attention to straightening the nearby shelves of for-sale travel mugs. "Really, you got every note of Górecki right. That's amazing."
Cameron stirred his coffee. "I used to play the cornet in my high school marching band."
"Really? And you got Górecki from that?"
"In college I played the French horn. I started as a music major and wanted to go to Julliard and then set up a private tutoring practice in Sebastopol. I was going to build a little army of horn players."
The mugs were perfect, but Tsitsi kept eyeballing them. "That didn't happen?"
"My dad had a stroke when I was a sophomore, and afterward I had to pay my own way through college, so I became an economics major."
"I'm sorry."
"I think about going back to it sometimes." He fitted a flimsy lid on his to-go coffee cup and took a sip, turning to face the door. "I'd be terrible, though. It's been a long time since I played regularly."
Tsitsi felt the pinpricks of something that she tried to eliminate by thinking about her baking schedule for that afternoon, hoping to control the sensation in the same way that imagining warmth can sometimes overcome feeling cold. She watched Cameron leave and thought very, very hard about the muffins she'd later make.
Janet had never known jealousy because she'd never been in a have-hold relationship with someone whose fidelity was worth worrying about.
"I'd encourage him to have an affair," she told Barb, her manicurist, "him" being Cameron, during a full treatment at You've Got Nails, "except that it takes him so long to get comfortable enough for sex that most women would get bored and give up.
"The first time we kissed -- this was on our fourth date -- he looked away afterward all ashamed, as if I were his sister, and said that he was sorry for rushing things, that we were practically strangers and how would I think of him now other than 'that libertine' or something, and what could he do to make amends? I said, 'I was the one who kissed you.' But then he went on about how he appreciates my taking the blame but that he knows he's responsible because he hasn't thought of anything but kissing me from the moment we met."
Janet stared at the tiny fake pearls that Barb lacquered onto her nails. "And you know what's weird? At first I was mad at him for being such a dumb pig and implying that I don't have sexual urges or am too ladylike to do anything as gutsy as instigate a kiss, and I was about to say fuck this, I don't need a guy who in a lot of ways is attractive and likeable but who for all I know four dates later is impotent or gay or sworn to chastity. But then just as I opened my mouth it was like someone played harp scales and I thought that this was the sweetest moment I'd ever experienced, a guy saying that all he's wanted to do for the past four dates is kiss me, but has restrained himself on account of Old World decorum. And he's even rewritten events in his head to imagine that he had finally snapped and kissed me due to his sheer inability to control himself any longer! I thought, This is stupendously romantic, and I felt a flutter in my chest not to mention between my legs. It was only later that it occurred to me that he had not in reality been unable to control himself any longer, and that if I hadn't done anything he certainly wouldn't have, either, and that as far as bed tricks went he could probably muster the self-restraint not to try any until we were both six feet under."
Barb nodded and said the same thing had happened to her once, but when she looked at her watch she saw that it was the end of Janet's half-hour appointment, so she folded up her kit and told Janet not to put her hands in her pockets for at least fifteen minutes.
"As if I didn't know that," Janet thought and overturned her purse for a five-dollar tip in coins.
The San Francisco Ballet was performing "Giselle." Janet had seen it at least once when she was a child and would have declined Cameron's invitation if he hadn't been so excited on the phone about getting the last two available seats, and with the world-famous Finnish conductor Lasse Lidstrom at the orchestra's helm. Well, stop the presses and ring the Liberty Bell. It turned out that a coworker of Cameron's had come down with bronchitis that morning and given him two seats in balcony section G with the caveat that they might be obstructed viewing behind support columns. There was nothing "might" about it; they were obstructed viewing. Janet's nose practically nuzzled marble as she refused Cameron's offers of the binoculars, thinking that it was for boring times like this that she should develop a good meditation practice -- either concentrating on her chakra points or on a distant light bulb or on her respiration. She needed a clock-accelerating technique to fix delayed buses, hair drying and nights at the ballet.
When it ended Janet yawned so wide she felt like a hippopotamus. Slow-building applause in the auditorium became as thick as a monsoon, mist sprinkle rain downpour deluge downpour rain sprinkle mist. Janet and Cameron rose and held hands while walking up the baby steps of section G, away from their sightless seats. The hand was so she didn't lose him, not because she loved him. No, the no-love thought coursed through her like a rush of anxiety; she absolutely didn't love this man whose hand now slipped out of hers to position his binoculars perfectly in the mold of a velveteen carrying case. He fell back but she kept going. First one bejeweled gentleman separated them on the andante stampede out, then another. When Janet reached the elevator going down she couldn't see Cameron at all in the mass of lined foreheads and low necklines. The doors parted and a woman standing inside with powerfully straight gray hair raised her eyebrows questioningly. Janet stepped in alone and felt her heart go up.
Wry's attempts to woo Tsitsi hit a snag. Specifically, she ignored his six most recent phone calls and sent only one response to his emails: "It was nice to see you last week, and I hope you don't regret the coat too much. Take care, Tsitsi." It didn't brim with innuendo. He came to the conclusion that after their single date, on which they'd eaten at the Stinking Rose, been to four different bars, and wound up having nothing to say to one another at the Golden Gate Bridge Visitor Center after his disastrously long monologue on Butoh dancing and the charismatic power of Kirin Sortoga, she was uninterested in him and wished to be left alone. Yet how could he know that Tsitsi wasn't mistakenly turning her back on lifelong happiness? How could he in good conscience let it go without one final effort?
With the Yuletide season approaching, Wry persuaded the law office where he worked, Morrison & Foerster, to hire the Peony Quartet for its holiday party. The theme was Louis XIV's France, so Tsitsi's group could do an evening of Baroque standards. Securing her this gig, he hoped, would demonstrate his good faith in their relationship and make her beholden to him so that he could someday make an honest woman of her and an honest man of himself.
With the ready commitment of the other Peonies and an acceptance tendered, Tsitsi talked about the party performance to Cameron the next time he was at Specialty's, and in a roundabout manner invited him to come if he didn't have anything else to do that night and didn't mind making small talk with some low-powered attorneys who, at least, had placed a huge hors d'oeuvres order with her.
"Does your girlfriend like classical music?" she asked him while wiping off a few clumps of brown sugar from the counter, hoping he'd laugh off the notion of his having a girlfriend and say with unmistakable gravitas that while he hadn't found her yet, he thought he was getting close.
Instead he shook his head and said, "She'll tolerate it, but she's more into contemporary pop music. You know, the Forgive-Me-Nots and Entropy Now."
Tsitsi said brokenly, "I don't know them."
"Me neither," he said.
She kept wiping the spot where once there'd been a few sugar granules but which now was clean enough to reflect objects placed on it, and she suggested that he bring his girlfriend anyway, that maybe she could arrange for some Enemy Now to be played during the intermission.
"All right," he said, ruffling the part out of his hair and picking up his coffee. "I'd love to come. I mean, we'd love to come."
Tsitsi said nothing and fought back a lump at the back of her throat that made her breathing catch on something unlocatable as she watched Cameron leaving and knew that as surely as she was born alone, she would die alone.
The city's Soma district was all gala as limos and box cabs released festive digerati and their significant others into its space shuttle warehouses and lantern-lit clubs. Dozens of billboards shone down like so many scenes from heaven. Although normally tolerant of the city's jobless people, Soma wasn't happy this evening about its street corners where they were standing around with brown paper bags and pocketsful of fingers, talking about the flotsam they'd picked up during the day and stored in whichever dumpster they called home. Hence the police leaf-blowing derelicts to less photographed alleyways and arresting more than a night's quota of graffiti artists and leather exhibitionists. Who wanted to have their holiday party besmirched by a lot of les misérables who couldn't sing or dance or disappear in the billowy smoke of a dry-ice machine?
Cameron and Janet found a tight parking spot on 10th and Howard so close to where they were going that they'd be able talk about their good parking karma for a week. When they stepped out of the car an aging black man who'd been leaning against a chain fence stumbled over and began to describe his night watchman services, saying that for a mere three dollars he'd protect their car until dawn, and couldn't they help him out on account of times was hard? But before he could finish, two boys in blue arrived to detain him and nod apologetically at Cameron and Janet, who would be three dollars richer and a veil of security lighter, and who watched as the man yelled something incomprehensible while struggling to walk fast enough for the rangy-limbed officers gamboling back to their squad car.
At the Crumbling Empire, a double-decker bar on 9th Street rented for the evening's celebration by Morrison & Foerster, the Peony Quartet unfolded their chairs and screwed together music stands. From next door a bass line infiltrated the walls as loudly as the stethoscoped heartbeat of a first-time skydiver. Tsitsi suggested that she and her fellow musicians hook up their instruments to the amplifiers they'd brought, that otherwise it'd be impossible to compete with the low-rumbling thumps.
While she looked for an electrical outlet near enough to the performance stage for all four amps to reach, Wry, wearing a wig of six-inch-high white curls, crushed velvet knee-length pants, white stockings, and an all-frills hemp shirt, approached her.
"Hey, Tsitsi," he said, "you look great. Very professional."
"Thanks," Tsitsi replied, her conservative black dress cloaking her body in the dark. "And you look very authentic."
"It's the dauphin in me."
Tsitsi smiled and shook Wry's hand as though meeting him for the first time, then got back to squinting at the wall's floor line and pushing back tables to get a better view. Giving up, she turned around and saw Wry still standing there, now almost too close for comfort. "I'm looking for electrical outlets," she said.
"Absolutely," answered Wry, steeling himself for what he needed to say. But she was already turning away and had a foot on the steps leading up to the stage, so he shouted quickly, "Hey! I was wondering, because I know you're only supposed to play until midnight, if you'd be into grabbing a drink later?"
Tsitsi took her foot off the stair and faced him. "I'm, well," she began, her eyes on Wry's plumage, not rising to meet his, because this was a difficult moment that she knew had been coming and kicked herself for not preparing for better.
"I think you're a really nice guy," she said in a downward declension, as if instead of complimenting him she was telling him he had stomach cancer. She knew that this was the wrong tone considering her neutral-to-good thoughts about him, her belief that he was perfectly smart and attractive albeit self-absorbed to a degree that was unattractive to her. She said, significantly, "Do you know what I mean?"
Wry was not an idiot, but he wished he was now in this wretched moment when Tsitsi's feelings toward him so obviously hadn't improved. He'd secured this performance for her and nothing for himself. A love arrow overshooting its mark. On the surface it was nothing worse than a hundred other non-affairs in which someone had been uninterested in him, but this drilled below surfaces and struck a real sentiment rather than the standard there's-always-plenty-more attitude that had propelled him through so many years without experiencing heartbreak. He felt like a fool in these clothes, in this position, in this tale. He had become the wrong person.
All around, lawyers, secretaries and paralegals were walking uncertainly in their aristocratic outfits, bumping into chairs as they trailed after the plates of hors d'oeuvres. Accustomed to dealing with each other solely in terms of business, they weren't sure how loudly to laugh at the spectacle of each other's outfits, or how boisterous to make their toasts, or how candid to be about cases officially off-limits to outside conversations. So when Cameron and Janet walked in and quietly became aware that they were the only people who didn't look personally opposed to liberté, fraternité and egalité, their discomfort wasn't out of place.
"Who are these people, again?" Janet asked as they ordered drinks at the bar. A woman with blood red cheeks and an overemphasized mole painted on her upper lip stepped between them and grabbed two pre-poured white wines. Janet gave her a do-you-mind look, which the woman disregarded before walking away. Janet immediately forgot her annoyance when she saw Wry, topping her list of people she didn't expect or want to see this evening, take the woman's place and stand there for a moment contemplating the liquor shelf.
"Wry?" Janet said.
"Janet?" Wry said.
"You two know each other?" asked Cameron, flipping his pointer finger between them eeny-meeny-miny-moe.
Tsitsi joined them at the wet bar, having come to ask if there was an extension cord lying around behind it. Her reaction upon seeing Cameron with the woman she assumed was his girlfriend, was one of confirmed regret. She'd held out, in the wee small hours of her subconscious, for the possibility that Cameron and this woman would break up before tonight or that the girlfriend would move away or have a regrettable accident. Tsitsi had fed herself these dream candies and now had to face an empty box.
"Hi, Cameron," she said. "Thanks for coming. We're about to begin, just as soon as I can get our instruments plugged in. Do you know Ryan?"
"We were about to meet," Cameron said. "He knows my friend Janet. Janet, this is Tsitsi."
A round robin of hi's. Some mortification. Some guilt. Some innocence. Some intuition of what was really going on, some repression thereof. The cool, agony-soothing effect of a respectably aged and drier-than-cork cabernet sauvignon. An order for Bombay Sapphire and tonic upgraded to a triple. The erratic thud of next door's music. And some of us were meant to find that one person, that fabled corollary who'd make the inadequacy we feel vanish due to the profusion that would be us, but there was to be no guarantee that the timing would be right or the foreknowledge reciprocated or the luck ours to do anything about it. What a piece of work is woman, the future of man.
Beginning with a selection from Couperin's "Les Nations," the Peony Quartet worked its way through an hour of baroque quadrilles that endowed the Morrison & Foerster employees with a delicate lightness of step on the dance floor. Couples improvised elaborate pavanes that segued into galliards and arced into circular branles that moved into progressive longways whenever people got excited enough to collectivize their pleasure. Tsitsi glanced up from her score and was overwhelmed by the grace of her audience. Her strings had never felt so pliant nor her fingerboard so steady. The notes she played bound her, one by one, to the moving bodies on the floor below, like a miracle that everyone's witnessed and that seems to be the most natural of phenomena, like water into wine, like forty loaves.
Except that for Cameron it was more akin to the burning bush; he was transfixed in his seat at an empty booth next to an unplugged jukebox, watching Tsitsi's fingers slide and bend and stop firm while her bow seesawed up and down and side to side. He had sat alone since Janet excused herself to go to the bathroom and on her way back stopped to talk to Ryan near the side exit. An untouched drink in front of Cameron slowly leaked condensation down its sides, flooding an illegible coaster. He folded his hands and entered the rapture, at last, of knowing what had to be done.
In the rubicund glow of the Crumbling Empire's exit sign, Janet and Wry figured it out. The idea that they could have an affair dissociated from mutual respect and efforts at consistency and the smallest, most rudimentary attentions paid to one another's true selves, whatever those were, struck them now as absurd. Wry knew that he couldn't play Russian Roulette forever, that it must end badly. "Did you know that once I stopped by your apartment to pick up a coat I'd left there, and I heard spanking and giggling from inside?" Janet asked. "I could have been alone," Wry said. And they laughed. And they said goodbye. And they both knew that they were better off alone and free to devote themselves to something real, when and if it at last came. One could be a peripheral figure in one's own life for only so long.
"Cameron," Janet said, as she slid onto the booth's puffy vinyl seat opposite him.
Cameron came to attention and looked at her.
"I should tell you something but not for the reason you're going to think at first."
"Okay."
"You know that guy you met earlier, Ryan?"
"I do."
"I've been having an affair with him for the past year. Not regular like twice a week, but enough so that I have to tell you to be honest."
"I see."
"I'm not just trying to clear my conscience here; it's more that I think you and I have come to a crossroads. And the only solution I see us finding is to split up. There's a better way to say this but I don't know how to do it."
Cameron was silent for a long time. "You're right," he said. "I was actually going to tell you that I'm leaving San Francisco."
"You are?"
"I'm moving to Sebastopol."
"When did you decide this?"
"I've been meaning to do it forever."
"So there's no better time than the present," Janet said.
"It's all we ever have."
The Peony Quartet played long after its prearranged midnight finish, and at 2 a.m., when Tsitsi had packed up her things and drunk a congratulatory beer with the other quartet members, she was very tired and very committed to getting home and then very startled to find a man she'd once mistaken as average standing alone outside the doorway to the Crumbling Empire. The bassline from next door thumped its last, and with a great intake of breath Cameron stepped forward to place his hand over hers for a second that was no more an instant than it was an eternity, and with twining fingers that would grow stronger over subsequent years of trumpeting and violining and snickerdoodling and handymanning, they touched until that touch became a kiss and that kiss became a declaration, for here and now, of two peoples' escape, however narrow, from the din of silence.