“Nothing too personal, I hope,” I say.
“Oh, she just says you’re madly in love,” Victoria says, drawing out the last three words wickedly. I dodge the topic with an embarrassed shrug, out of fear that my filial affection will seem inadequate by comparison. If it were Maya’s birthday I’d have made sure there was a cake.
After another hour the shadows of the hills outside begin to spread, and the guests take this as permission to leave. On her way out, Stacey says, “I’ll get your email from your mom and give it to the kids. I’m sure they’d love to know what you’re up to.” Finally Mom and I are alone.
“So that was nice,” she says.
“I’m sorry I didn’t plan better,” I say.
“Oh no, well, no, don’t worry about it,” she says. “I don’t think anyone really likes birthday cake anyway, do they? And this,” touching the brooch, “is really special.”
Soon the central heating shudders on, and we order Domino’s and watch the news: two kids are dead in a house fire in Colorado Springs, and someone forged the evidence that Saddam Hussein tried to buy uranium from Niger. I try to come up with things to say about the stories, but I keep thinking about my mother sitting here alone, with a frozen dinner instead of a pizza. Tomorrow she will drive me to the airport. I had imagined some kind of dull social calendar revolving around book group and NA meetings, but there is no evidence that any such events have been skipped or rescheduled on account of my visit. The house: I thought it was the right thing but it’s too big, too empty, a consolation prize. Mom watches TV while I stare out at the last traces of light, barely enough to distinguish the hills from the sky.
Maya comes downstairs in her jacket. I am carrying plastic bags containing a six-pack of beer, a loaf of French bread, and two different kinds of cheese. When she appears in the doorway I quash the impulse to pick her up and spin her around because many small people dislike being picked up, even affectionately, and this probably goes double for small people who have been sexually abused. I’ve advised her to snack, since Cynthia has a weird metabolism and no sense of ordinary physical appetites; she once served six people a dinner consisting of nothing but roasted yams. As we walk over there I try to tell Maya about my mom’s birthday party. It’s a delicate task, because I don’t want to pierce the bubble of sadness that’s been sitting on my chest ever since. The cake debacle I omit entirely.
“It’s as if she’s on the moon out there,” I say. “A hundred identical houses, just far enough apart that you never see another human being.”
She stops to push a piece of sidewalk jetsam to the curb with her foot, with a care that seems protective of both the trash and the foot. “That’s not how I think of the moon,” she says.
Cynthia and Maya were introduced at the party, but this is their first meeting with me in common. As they greet each other at the door, they project the knowingness one uses with friends of friends, to announce I’ve heard good things about you. Cynthia leads us up the stairs and into the kitchen, where Sam is sitting at the table, slouched low in her chair. She doesn’t stand when we come in. I recognize her as the sartorially butch/physically femme half of that couple at the party: slight and pretty, with a thin, unformed face and tight black curls. She could almost pass as a boy but for her creamy skin and the platinum stud like a mole in her upper lip. The trend among San Francisco lesbians is to stake out a position on the border between butchdom and transgenderhood, where pronoun choices are fraught and unpredictable. (Cynthia has explained this to me with the earnest pedantry of someone displaying recently acquired knowledge.) For a straight man, lesbianism is like communism: utopian in theory, disappointing in practice. Maya and I sit down and open beers as Cynthia pushes some kale around on the stove.
“So how did you guys meet?” Maya asks Sam.
“Mutual friends,” says Sam with a self-deprecating roll of the eyes, as though this were universally agreed to be the dullest and least promising way to meet.
“And you guys met here!” Cynthia says. “I’m so proud!” She turns and holds out her beer for us to clink. I would toast more enthusiastically were it not for the botched nature of that meeting. It was here that I was introduced to her, fixed her a cocktail, failed to speak to her. This is where the whole thing started, and now it’s where the end is about to begin.
When Cynthia sets down the plates of kale and green beans, I try to catch Maya’s eye so we can share a humorous look, but she’s too polite for that. We start to eat, and there’s a little pause in which we savor our food and wonder what we’re going to talk about. Maya, who is professionally skilled at meeting people, begins questioning Cynthia, starting with her job but probing backward into her childhood and forward into her ambitions. I remember having that intense, benevolent scrutiny trained on me, and I miss being the object of her curiosity. Maya’s skill at interrogation gets results, as usuaclass="underline" I didn’t know Cynthia was thinking about training to be a nurse practitioner, or that she sometimes considers moving back to Denver. In anticipation of this evening I’ve nurtured a fantasy in which Maya and Cynthia become friends and the three of us form a group with me at the center. In reality, though, their obvious amity threatens to unstop and blend separate vats of emotion in me, a disconcerting prospect. I tear off some French bread and spread a dollop of soft cheese over it.
As she fetches a second round of beers, Cynthia announces that armed National Guard troops are posted at either end of the Bay Bridge again. They come and go according to geopolitical weather patterns indecipherable to civilians.
“So now we’re going to invade Iraq,” Sam says. Her tone is jaded, almost bored. At some point an invasion has become inevitable.
“I keep thinking I missed something,” says Cynthia. “Like, didn’t some other people just attack us? And so now we’re going to invade a completely different country, just because they’ve got nuclear weapons? I mean, Canada’s got nuclear weapons, right? Are we going to invade Canada?”
“Yeah, but they don’t have oil,” Sam says. Her arm rests on the back of Cynthia’s chair, and she strokes the back of Cynthia’s neck while she talks.
Maya is knowledgeable and eloquent on the subject of the looming war, and Cynthia and Sam are soon reduced to echoes. I’m the least politically astute person at the table: I’ve just spent two and a half years preoccupied with the challenges of personalized online marketing. I didn’t vote in the 2000 election — Bill and I were too busy to register, and California was a lock anyway, and neither of the candidates seemed especially inspiring or scary. What interested me most was that the election was essentially a tie, and that the balance was tipped by poor interface design. Bill and I laughed about it for thirty seconds and then went back to work. As the conversation becomes an exercise in emphatic agreement — the invasion is a done deal, an oil grab, a sop to the energy services companies, a fuck-you to international opinion, a narcissistic projection of imperial power, an Oedipal acting-out — I find myself missing Demographic of One. For thirty-five months Bill and I made two dozen decisions every day: which protocols to use, which features to build, what to do first, what to skip. (Bill usually deferred to me on design and won the technical arguments on the merits. I changed his mind exactly twice, and in fifty years I’ll still remember how.) A discussion like this one, that gets its strength from the fact that everyone shares a position, would have been an unthinkable waste of resources. All I wanted during that time was a girlfriend, and now, in a striking proof of the ineradicability of human loneliness, I’ve got this great girlfriend and I miss working sixteen hours a day with Bill Fleig.