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demanded they at least try this Malbec, Finch excused himself and walked outside. Sarah was leaning up against a bike rack, smoking a cigarette. Her hair was curlier back then and hung about her broad, octagonal head in those enviable clusters that arrange themselves, almost magnetically, with all the erratic grace of a morning glory vine.Finch, as he usually did in the presence of beautiful women, composed his face into its most bitter iteration and said hello. She asked him how long he had known those guys in the bar. He said they were friends from college. She frowned and said that she had been positive that they were cousins or something. Who but family could make a man as tanned as Finch look so miserable?
    He blushed, and in the rapid-fire, overcompensatory way shy men talk to girls who are slightly out of their league, Finch said that he couldn’t recognize the neighborhood anymore. She asked if he had grown up in San Francisco. Over the next half hour, they went through the entire litany of orienting questions: Did you know so-and-so from St. Ignatius? Remember when this corner sold real ice cream? What was up with that year all the kids at Lick started wearing leather jackets? You were on the swim team? Did you know that coach who slept with the fat Getty girl?
    Once the comparing of schools had exhausted its always reliable grab bag of insights, Finch found himself talking, for the first time in years, about the trips he and his mother would take down to a run-down textile store on 17th and Mission. It was the only time she held his hand, and although Finch knew, even at a young age, that the gesture shaded powerfully toward protection and almost none toward affection, he always imagined that his mother was proudly displaying their filial love to the itinerant drug addicts and prostitutes who roosted around the nearby BART station. The smell that rose up off those blocks—sun-dried piss and rotting vegetables mixed with McDonald’s inimitable version of French-fried exhaust and the sinus-scraping, pungent scent of dying people—those blackening smells were his ahh smell of San Francisco. Strangely, only the memories of squalor could bring forth everything else—the cool, well-lotioned texture of his mother’s palm, the sticky,hard seats of the family’s tastefully old Benz, the succession of Buddhist nannies, the parties in art galleries, the Clinton fund-raisers, the Nader fund-raisers, the faint smell of peanut oil carried in the fog rolling down from the Inner Richmond, the fall afternoons spent in Golden Gate Park in the company of homeless kids with dreamy, incandescent angst, the morning swim practices in the JCC’s chlorine-free pool, the endless games of Ping-Pong in the cramped student lounge at his neighborhood private school for the unmotivated children of San Francisco’s liberal elite.
    Sarah remembered all the same things, and although the intervening years would reveal just how differently she remembered them, at least the words used to describe those San Francisco things had matched up back then. Sometimes—most of the time—that’s all it takes.
    BEFORE WALKING THROUGH the front door, Finch stopped at Parea’s picture window and stared in at his wife. Through the window’s glare, partially obscured by the reflection of the pink and orange faces of the kooky Edwardians across the street, bathed in a synthesis of the vinegary murk that shone down from Parea’s artisan skylight and the blue glow of financial news, Sarah was still the main draw, El Greco’s girl in red. She leaned up against the bar, head cupped in her hands, evoking an old yet undoubtedly timeless coquettishness whose sole benefactor was the bar’s projection screen. At night, when the bar filled up with its healthy rotation of regulars, the manager played old movies off a refurbished 16-mm reel-to-reel. The nightly exposure to Ann-Margret, Kim Novak, Elizabeth Taylor, and Jayne Mansfield had filtered a series of