waterbar
Since the table is not quite ready the host offers them champagne, compliments of the house. The boy says yes thank you. The girl looks at him, her cheeks flushed with surprise. They have been offered champagne. They are mistaken for adults here. He worries that if she declines the night will fall into splinters.
The boy takes both glasses from the tray, the host smiles and nods, departs. The boy clinks his glass with hers. Her lipstick prints the rim.
He can draw her face from memory so long as he starts with her beauty mark. It is a dimple, actually a scar (she told him as they drove here), from a horse-riding incident when she was seven. He has drawn her face in class, at home, on long bus rides to tournament soccer games. He could never show her. Not yet, at least. Maybe after tonight.
He is finished with his champagne. He does not know what to say so he peers into the glass. The residue of wine sits whitely, its fizziness exhausted. They are here because he asked her out. They are here and he does not know what to say.
Her earrings are silver. “I like your earrings. They remind me of a cello’s neck.” It took him many minutes to put the compliment together, and when it comes he wonders if it’s too contrived. It sounds contrived.
“They were my great grandmother’s. She was from a wealthy family. Tobacco, I think. Or was it paper?”
What can he possibly say about tobacco, or paper? What can she? Where is their table? He is terrified of being found out. He wants to kiss her but he has nowhere to take her. After dinner seems impossibly distant. He will kiss her, he will say “love,” he might say “I love you.” If he says it, will it be true? He agonizes, standing in the entrance, shifting from foot to foot, holding his empty champagne flute like evidence.
Waterbar
399 The Embarcadero South
San Francisco
(415) 284-9922
lucky 13
Vince covers his bad hand with his good hand. It’s the bad hand, more than anything else, that makes him feel old. The girl next to him is in her twenties, easily half his age. Her phone keeps lighting up with messages. She’s waiting for someone. He can tell by the way she fidgets and pokes at her phone that she’s not comfortable sitting by herself in a bar.
He shouldn’t say anything.
He wants to say something.
She should say something to him.
She won’t.
“That, ah, it’s a nice bracelet you have.” He used to be so smooth.
“That’s a nice bracelet, yourself,” she says, pointing at his own tarnished band.
He’s not expecting that. Her smile is nice and not quite symmetrical. She’s not mocking him. Her lopsided smile puts him at ease.
He forgets his bad hand for a moment and with it he touches his bracelet. It’s sterling silver, from a claptrap shop in New Mexico or Texas or Nebraska. He can’t even remember. He was on one of his sprees—the one that finally landed him here in San Francisco—and when he came to he had the bracelet, and two fingers less than ten.
When she sees his hand her smile tightens.
“Oh,” she says. “Oh.”
“I got it in the southwest.”
“The injury?”
“The bracelet.”
“What happened to your fingers?”
“Just lost’em.”
“Just lost them? How do you just lose fingers?” Her eyes widen in puzzlement. They’re set a little too close together. She’s all kinds of imperfect.
“Sometimes you just lose things. That’s why they call it lost. Cause you don’t know where it went.”
“Oh.”
He sips his bourbon. The ice has melted and the liquor has thinned. He should have never started with her. He’s just depressing himself.
“Can I feel it?” she asks.
“The bracelet?”
“Your injury.”
He looks at her. Her skin is smooth and powdered. She’s looking right at him but still she fidgets with her phone.
He slides his bad hand towards her, keeping it flat on the bar, palm down. The small bumps at his knuckles look polished and pink. When she touches them he knows he can’t really feel her—the nerves have all been ruined—but the way she touches them, with curious caresses, he imagines that he can.
Lucky 13
2140 Market Street (b/t Church & Sanchez)
(415) 487-1313
shotwells
It’s been a day with too many hours, in a year with too many days. His eyes, red-rimmed and cooked, make the room look fuzzy. She isn’t here yet. She is never on time.
He takes the last open barstool and looks at himself in the mirror, where the scribbled-on menu graffities his face with the names of foreign breweries, ales and lagers. Someone has queued up Stone Temple Pilots on the juke box and the music takes him back to high school, to Jolt Cola binges and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence running all night on his computer.
Never enough hours in the day.
Pool balls cracking make him jump. His beer glass is already empty, coral patterns of foam slip down the inside, pooling caramel-colored in the bottom. He orders another. Where is she?
His phone vibrates on the bar with an incoming text.
<<Stuck at work. Can’t make it.>>
The Search. The idea was if you got everyone in the country to leave their computers on at night, while they were sleeping, running algorithms to decode SETI data, you’d quadruple the processing power of the SETI lab. Even though home computers were relatively simple, linked together in a continental network they could perform some serious analysis.
Individuals, all linked together, becoming greater than their simple sum. It was an elegant plan.
“Ritchie!”
He’s mid-order for his third beer. It’s Moses yelling at him. His name isn’t really Moses, but that’s what everyone calls him ever since he came up with the network commandments that catapulted them all into the big time. Moses strolls over from the pool table, heavy slap on Ritchie’s back, Ritchie thinking of Moses’ dark arm hairs, mildly grossed but grateful for the contact.
“Ritchie, cutthroat. You me and Gray. Basta!”
The pool balls collide together. Another text.
<<Brunch this weekend. I’m slammed through Friday.>>
Ritchie sinks the four, then the two. He’s on fire. Gray and Moses, whistling, banging the butts of their cues on the floor.
“Low roller!”
“Been practicing with your balls at home?”
“He’s always been good at playing with his balls.”
The three of them hit it big two years ago. Life-changing big. Streamlining the way computers talked. Still they jab each other the same as they did in college.
“You guys remember the SETI program?” asks Ritchie. “Back when we were in high school?”
“Never heard of it.”
“ET shit?”
“Yeah,” says Ritchie. “ET shit. All the computers in the country, parsing data while we slept.”
“Nothing new.”
“It was then.”
“So did they find ET or what?” asks Gray, lining up his shot.
“No. Not enough hours. Too much data, not enough time.”
Gray misses. The balls bounce around and he says, “So he’s still out there?”
Ritchie’s phone vibrates again. He ignores it. He sinks the one-ball (Gray’s last). Then he runs Moses’ final two.
Ritchie says, “Well maybe. Or maybe we just need another go at it. Rack’em up.”
Shotwells
3349 20th Street (at Shotwell)
(415) 648-4104
