body: her height, her weight, the color of her skin, the curves of her legs, hips, breasts. Now, as Nick walks west through the Tenderloin, nearing the corner of Taylor and Eddy, he feels a prick of anxiety at the back of his throat. Brief but dispiriting—always causing him to second-guess himself—it’s a familiar sign that he’s doing something he knows is questionable. A cool breeze picks up, heralding the coming autumn, but Nick feels sweat surface on his forehead. He’s unsure if he should turn back or carry on. Each building he passes is a liquor store or a laundromat or a bedraggled old flophouse with a neon Vacancy sign. He hurries by them, late to meet My-Duyen, the Vietnamese masseuse he telephoned by way of the yellow pages, a call girl who refers to herself as the “Asian Sensation.”
The address is 155 Golden Gate Avenue, between Leavenworth and Jones. When he spoke to her earlier today, she told him to call her from the curbside pay phone at a quarter past eleven. “Generous men only,” she said, as if he weren’t aware that her repertoire extended beyond the domain of benign, legal massage. “Full service,” she added. He stared at her photoless ad in the fluorescent light of his kitchen. “I’m Jack,” he told her, giving her his father’s name, whispering into the receiver as though someone were around to hear him. “My-Duyen,” she replied. She mewled and moaned. When he asked her what her name meant, if anything at all, she paused before answering. “Beautiful,” she said, and Nick hoped the name was appropriate.
At the pay phone, he digs a scrap of paper from his back pocket, dials the number he copied from the telephone book. The building is a handsome brick Edwardian with a big stone portico—the kind of building normally found in the Western Addition or Pacific Heights—out of place in the Tenderloin, as though it’s lost or slumming. The block is alive with people walking in twos and threes, loitering in doorways, slinking in and out of a corner bar down the street whose windows have been painted black. After several rings, My-Duyen picks up. “You’re late,” she says. It’s eleven-twenty-five. “Second floor, apartment seven. I’ll buzz you in.”
Ascending the stairs, he finds it difficult to lift his feet, his legs solid with apprehension, and the climb to the second floor seems to take an eternity. For all his unease, Nick is shuddering with excitement, hardly able to believe that he’s finally going to lose his virginity. At twenty-three, he considers himself a misfit—an anomaly. Most people spend their college years partying, having sex. Nick spent his reading books in the university library, or else playing Tetris, or The Legend of Zelda, or Dragon Warrior, adrift in the fictive worlds of novels and video games. He reads less these days but plays Nintendo more than ever, an hour or two every night. Of his small group of friends, he’s the sole virgin, a word he repeats so often in his mind that it sometimes bears no meaning, the two syllables bouncing hollowly off the walls of his consciousness, morphing into other, similar-sounding words: burgeon, sturgeon, Virginia. It’s a Saturday, and most of the people he knows are out on dates, spending time with boyfriends and girlfriends. Nick himself has had only one girlfriend—the German exchange student he took to his high-school prom, a thick-ankled Protestant who was saving herself for marriage—and despite his every attempt to negotiate at least a one-night stand, he wakes each morning alone. That he’s resolved to pay for sex only magnifies his long-established feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing.
The door is ajar, a black number seven hanging upside down above the peephole. He steps into the apartment, clears his throat.
“Close it behind you,” My-Duyen says, drawing curtains across a giant bay window. Music is playing softly on a stereo, a jazz composition he doesn’t recognize. She turns to face him. “You must be Jack.”
He left home after high school, vowing never to return, not even to visit. Growing up in Las Vegas, he used to envision the day he would board a plane as an adult and fly off to some better city, escaping forever that place of false hopes and ever-changing luck—a place with more churches per capita than any other city in the United States and a suicide rate twice the national average. During Nick’s first semesters at USC those two statistics would interlace in his mind, relevant in some way to his newfound freedom. He moved to San Francisco a little over a year ago, after graduating with a degree in comparative literature, and has decided that no place is without the potential to let you down.
His apartment, a small studio, is on the top floor of an old white-brick building that overlooks the Powell Street cable-car line, a twenty-minute walk from the converted carriage house in Cow Hollow where he works as a copy editor for a weekly trade magazine called Footwear Today. Every so often he has a beer or two at Salty’s, a seafood restaurant around the corner from his apartment building. Down the hall from the dining area, the restaurant’s bar stands at the back of a large wood-paneled room that’s always darkly lit, its low ceiling supported by four rectangular pillars that make you feel as though you’re sitting below a pier. The walls are hung with fishnets, anchors, and oars, with mounted marlin and tarnished brass astrolabes, and at the end of the bar a model lighthouse stands beside an aquarium that showcases an assortment of sad-looking lobsters, piled against the foggy glass. He likes the kitschy maritime atmosphere, and has taken an interest in the new bartender there, Annie Peterson. She’s blonde and tan, and her face glows in a corner of Nick’s mind (big blue eyes, a full-lipped mouth, a tiny knob of a nose), hurtling to the fore like a shooting star when he least expects it. Though he’s only known her a short time—two, three months—he thinks he might love her.
The other night, Nick was sipping a Redhook when Annie asked him, “What happens if you’re in a car going the speed of light and you turn the headlights on?”
“No idea,” he said, and shrugged.
“Stumped again,” Annie said, slicing lemon wedges on a plastic cutting board. She wore faded blue jeans and a white oxford shirt, her shoulder-length hair sticking out from beneath a purple wool beret. It was eleven o’clock, and Salty’s had emptied out for the night. Roy Orbison sang “Blue Bayou” on the jukebox.
“Lay another one on me,” he told her. “Scramble my brain.”
Annie looked up at the ceiling, set the knife down on the cutting board. “Let me see,” she said. “Let me think.”
She has a fondness for paradoxical questions—owns a small book of them that she keeps beneath the bar—and Nick finds it both puerile and endearing that she’s committed so many to memory. She never tires of watching him labor to assemble a response, narrowing her eyes, placing a slender finger to her lips. Annie’s favorite question of all time: Can a person drown in the Fountain of Eternal Life? Her second favorite: Can God create an object so heavy that even He is unable to lift it? Nick likes obliging her with his earnest attempts at reason, though as often as not he capitulates with a shrug.
“I think I’ve already asked you all the ones I know,” she said, then reached down and pulled the book out from under the bar: Persistently Pesky Paradoxes.
“That alliterative title might have you thinking it’s a book of tongue twisters,” he said, trying to sound smart—trying to impress her—but Annie said nothing in return. She closed her eyes, opened the book to a spot somewhere near the middle. “Bop-bop-bop,” she said, scanning a page. “Here’s one. ‘In order to travel a certain distance, a moving object must travel half that distance. But before it can travel half the distance, it must travel one-fourth the distance, et cetera, et cetera. The sequence never ends. It seems, therefore, that the original distance cannot be traveled. How, then, is motion possible?’”
“That’s an oldie,” Nick said, finishing off his beer. “Even I’ve heard that one before. Where’d you get that book, anyway?”
“Ricky gave it to me. A long time ago, when we first met. It was a gift.”
It’s been six weeks since Annie broke
