The night before, we walked up a hill in San Francisco into an apartment that wasn't hers. Inside, there was a spiral staircase and a perfect book case.
She was from Providence, she said. I don't know why I didn't believe her. She had my initials. She read the books I recommended.
I had traveled to San Francisco from Los Angeles on Friday afternoon. I saw her that night. We ate competing stir fry bowls on a rotted wooden table in a dimly lit room. The food was great, the restaurant decrepit and perfect.
There was more rotted wood later that night, in the old movie theater with benches for seats and a rickety sound system. I loved the movie. The movie holds no regrets.
The woman who actually lived in the apartment paid April to watch her place and walk her dog. The woman was in Italy. The dog was white and beautiful. I wanted to live in that apartment. When April walked away, I wondered about the owner.
I wanted to damage the spiral staircase. I wanted to read the books.
I wanted to speak to April more about infrequent luxuries and her trip to London. But, as I mentioned, she got up and left me alone in that noisy Taqueria in the Mission District. It was 24 hours after the first date.
Minutes before I met her there, I saw her walking on the street as I drove past. She looked preoccupied. She was wearing a long black wool coat. She seemed overdressed, even for a cool San Francisco late September night. I called to her. But I said her name like it was the month and not the name. My voice sounded awkward in its lift over the traffic noise. I knew I had made a mistake.
She picked at her food like a surgeon over a dead man. There was no point anymore. I know now that my shouting from my car made no difference. She had made the decision to walk away long before. Given that the first two sentences of this paragraph contain an extremely strained metaphor, April may have been prescient.
I drove around the city for a while. It got colder. April wore the right coat. I arrived at my friend Audrey's house, the place where I was sleeping, in time to sit on the couch with her and her roommate and his girlfriend. The four of us sat side by side and watched John Cusack match wits with Billy Bob Thornton.
I fell asleep before the movie ended. I woke up. I fell asleep again. I went to my guest room and slept until Audrey's damn bird woke me up at dawn. I vowed to forget about April.
Audrey and I had breakfast in the financial district. It was formal and sleek. It was all I needed. I drove back to Los Angeles, listening to big and small songs, making phone calls I'd later regret. I forgot about April.
But then I had the feverish dream last night in which she reappeared. To explain the sins of my ways. To salute the goodness of my sins. She took on the form of a wise deity and every word she said spoke truth. She roll-called my vices. She charted their costs. She dared me to drive far away again. She put away the easel and the whiteboard. She exorcised my cats and laid waste to my debts. Then she exploded herself, sending her spirit up that staircase, tossing pages from The Fortress of Solitude on the too-white carpet in the apartment that wasn't hers. The dog chased after her. Then, she was gone and I was driving back home, along the ocean but in more darkness than this picture.
After April walked away from our date - 15 minutes into it! - I made a phone call that I didn't exactly regret. The person on the other end told me I wanted too much, too soon. I said I like to aim high. Then my friend said no one knows that quickly. I said I'm usually right about these things. Sometimes I guess wrong.
It's better to remember the times I strove for meaning last fall than the nights I flailed and latched onto the wrong person, the wrong place (though I could tell stories about that too). On one of those phone calls that I do regret, the person on the other end - 28 years old and smart as a whip - told me I seemed bored. I never told her I was leaving town, just that I couldn't see her Friday. She told me she didn't like that I wrote a song about myself. I haven't seen her since.
For a minute - and I knew it would only last a minute - I thought April was my last chance, that if my charms didn't work on a strange loner girl with black hair and a spiral staircase on the top of a hill, then I might as well retreat into the mountains for a spell, like Leonard Cohen. Then the minute ended, right about the time I found my car, parked on a side street that I'd find myself right back on two months later.
I never wanted to simply be a romantic. Words just came out easier that way. I wanted to yield to the darkness too. It's better to wake up from the darkness than never to fall out of the light.
Walking to my car in San Francisco, a city where I've never lived: it's something I always remember. I could make lists of my walks to cars there. Slow walks uphill. A walk with a Walkman. A walk through the torn-up Tenderloin with $1200 in cash in my back pocket (long story). The walk to the block behind the Holiday Inn with the talking elevator, with two friends who no longer speak to each other. A New Years Eve walk - again slow, again uphill.
The appreciation wasn't mutual. The girl from Rhode Island got to keep her secrets.
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