A college friend of my father’s picked me up at the airport. It was my first time ever riding in a convertible and although Anne—that was her name—kept the top up, it still felt like an important milestone for me. I’d never met Anne before but I knew she was a lesbian. I knew Anne and her ex-wife, now estranged, had been among the first gay couples in the U.S. ever allowed to have their own baby, using fertility. Also, I knew Anne to be extremely affluent. 

In transit all these facts became somehow conflated, so by the time we finally reached the Castro, I genuinely believed Anne had gotten rich off being gay alone. This seemed possible. Hers was the same house she’d rented when she arrived in the city, then bought cheap a decade later after her landlord died from AIDS. 

“Technically,” Anne said, stopping at a red light on a steep hill, “it was complications.” Her short haircut made her look like a male pilot. She rested her hand on the hand brake between us, holding it loosely and tapping her thumb against the button on the tip. 

“This launches the missiles,” Anne said, looking at me looking at her hand. “Pew pew. Pew pew.” When the light changed, the small car ahead of us shuddered backward, then lurched up and away. Expertly, Anne accelerated through the crest of the hill before signaling to pull left into a driveway, where she parked behind a charging hybrid.

The house was huge and it was orange. It had recently been granted an important historical status. 

“We’re so honored, obviously,” Anne’s fiancée told me halfway through something she kept calling the grand tour. “Obviously, it’s such an honor. But between you and me”—and here, she lowered her voice—“it’s making this kitchen reno way harder than it has to be.” 

Anne’s fiancée was younger than Anne but much taller. She reminded me of a teacher who is also a coach—not a specific person, I mean like an archetype. As it happened, Anne’s fiancée really did play basketball; she’d made varsity as a freshman. When she said that, I knew she meant college freshman, both because she was an adult and also because, in my experience, adults who went to college liked to talk about it all the time, even decades after the fact, even if they never graduated. Best years of your life! My dad was always saying stuff like that. But if that was true I thought it must mean less about college than whatever happened after. 

“Varsity basketball,” Anne’s fiancée mused as we climbed the stairs to the part of the house that had at one time been the servants’ quarters. “I mean, can you believe I didn’t know?” She turned to wink at me, adding, almost apologetically, “Of course, it was a different time.” I felt unsure as to whether she meant about being gay or having servants, so I just winked back. Or, I closed both eyes and turned my head sharply to the side to give the impression of having winked.

In the attic, we stood together in front of a small circular window Anne’s fiancée called an oeil-de-boeuf. I listened while she described the location of various San Francisco landmarks relative to the view from the oeil-de-boeuf.

“And the Bay Bridge...” she said, trailing off as she turned to point at the blank wall opposite the oeil-de-boeuf, “is right there. You’ll see that tomorrow.” And then we went back downstairs.

There was a water feature in the backyard with one massive koi fish named Clever Girl and a tiny house that had been Anne’s daughter’s playroom before it was Anne’s estranged ex-wife’s fiber art studio. Now it was something of a multiuse space. Above the desk across from the Pilates machine there was a lofted bed made up just for me. Lying in bed, I could look out the window and into the kitchen. Anne, illuminated from above with one sleeve rolled all the way up, appeared to be fishing something out of the garbage disposal, her arm pumping in and out and in and out of a void I could not see. 

“How’s that feel?” Anne’s fiancée asked. She was standing with one bare foot inside the tiny house and the other on the slate path that led to the regular-size one. I felt confused until Anne’s fiancée asked me how it smelled and I knew she was asking about the mattress, which had been purchased from the internet and come in a box. I said it smelled great.

On the walk to dinner, people waved at Anne and called her name across the street. A woman with lank hair drinking wine alone inside an expensive-looking restaurant tapped on the inside of
the window as we passed and when Anne tapped back, the pretty waitress’s face inverted itself into a gracious smile. 

“That’s Valentina,” said Anne, meaningfully. I wasn’t sure if she meant the waitress or the woman but Anne’s fiancée nodded and said ohhh.

We went to a restaurant that Anne’s fiancée kept calling a jewel box and sat for several hours at a corner table, eating clams and bread. I realized then that although my parents were perfectly nice, they were neither smart nor interesting. Whereas Anne—Anne could really talk. And her fiancée, she really knew how to ask questions. Occasionally, abruptly, the dynamic would reverse itself and Anne’s eyes would focus so hard on her fiancée’s mouth as it moved that I’d have to look, too. They were like two symbiotic organisms of different sizes but equal consequence and I was like a barnacle. Basically, I didn’t have to do anything at all and everyone was happy. 

Mussels arrived with an extra bowl for shells and Anne poured a very small amount of wine into the glass by my right hand. The sophistication conferred upon me by this gesture seemed somehow related to my ability to drink the wine very, very slowly. The wine was clear and so cold at first I almost couldn’t taste it. I tried to drink it at the rate that would make it the perfect amount but the food just kept coming and neither Anne nor her fiancée refilled my glass although it’s possible they didn’t notice when it was empty.