The Grapefruit in the Apartment

She pitied me, as only friends can. Or perhaps she needed me after all. Maria worked as a technical writer (she may have moved beyond that position) in San Francisco’s financial district and rented an apartment in Lower Russian Hill, back when that remained thinkable, and we had been friends since meeting in a Hemingway and Fitzgerald literature undergraduate seminar in at Sacramento State. I was renting a living space off a kitchen in Berkeley, but commuting by walking to BART, training to MUNI, finally arriving to the misty outer borough of San Francisco State for graduate school classes, and the return slog, became a pricey, time-consuming, and dreary affair. In May 1989, one week before Finals and three months after my father died, my girlfriend of three years suddenly and with little explanation cast this true love to the Emeryville mudflats and leave the body to the tides and foraging gulls. Maria’s fiancee had recently moved out, and with a few suitcases and a standing lamp carried away their engagement with him. As the summer months relieved me of academic readings and research, my soul, unburdened, opened to wrenching heartbreak and pathetic phone calls. One terribly bright sunny July 4th afternoon, while I blackly feared the long hours alone, Maria called with an invitation to a rooftop party at her Lower Russian Hill apartment, offering that other tenets had also gathered. Saved. And then she proposed: she needed a housemate.

Maria was a dark-haired woman, passionate, generous, with comic timing and a charitable devotion to both the madcap and ironic. Years before she’d been honored Miss Sacramento, an event reluctantly if rarely mentioned, and then only brushed away like dust falling on a table. This pageant crowning never dulled her edge of wit or the genuineness of warmth. I was delighted with the proposed change. Her upstairs studio apartment on Van Ness and Green divided itself by French doors into two areas, one with bookshelves, a single bed, and a piano, and lavished with morning light when the sun eased over the Hill; the other shadowed, smaller, room enough for a bed and dresser, sporting a narrow window looking with dull brownish hues out between apartments and down into an empty cement walkway, untrodden but littered with pottery shards of fallen plants. In this delicately given space we cooked and kept safe company, letting the healing come in shifts.

You don’t dress for the position you currently hold in the dark and cold shadowed towers of downtown San Francisco, but for the upper slot you desire: Maria’s rule. I’d wander down on a day off to have lunch with her, and we’d eat our cellophane wrapped sandwich sitting on cold gray stone, and while the workers passed she’d point out by their dress their position in the company: entry level secretary, junior executive, mailroom, assistant manager resentfully waiting for his inattentive boss to die, corporate lawyer, executive out of his league, green-eared graduate springy in his step... Once as a joke I’d dressed (as best I could) as a homeless man, soiled baseball cap, unshaven, gardening pants, she a spry investment bank lawyer, and we walked together down the dark and wind chilly streets, California, Pine, Sutter, beneath the foreboding towers of sterling Capitalism. We chatted amiably like old friends in a John Cheever story, beauty and her beast, amidst sidelong suspicious glares of passersby defensive and correct.

And old friends we remain.