Oscar caught Nina’s attention as soon as he walked into the Savoy on a busy Saturday night in North Beach. Tall and thin, he wore tight black jeans and a maroon turtleneck. His shaved head and wide, focused eyes peering through black frame glasses gave him an intensity that she picked up on immediately as he moved across the room. Towering over most of the other customers, he walked up to the bar and quickly got the attention of the bartender, who nodded his head and reached for a single malt scotch. It looked like he poured a double. Oscar handed the bartender a couple of bills – she couldn’t see what they were, but the bartender acknowledged he had just received a generous tip.
Oscar turned and walked over to a table just as its occupants were leaving, sat down and pulled out his phone. Scrolling absentmindedly for a few moments, he eventually stopped and looked around. She caught his eye and he smiled.
Nina, sitting with friends, got up, walked over to his table and sat down. “I’ve never seen someone get served so quickly in here. What’s your secret?”
“The bartender and I go back a long way,” he replied.
“Howard’s the best – love that guy,” Nina responded, smiling.
Oscar exuded a sense of calm and she found that attractive. Perhaps he was a gym instructor or fitness trainer. Those people tended to be calm, she thought. Any sense of calm Nina felt tended to be fleeting these days. She was a painter, a few years out of an MFA program and the modicum of recognition she had received felt shaky. She had sold several paintings to big shots in LA, but when she was being honest with herself she knew her father’s fame as an actor had played a role.
“I’ve never seen you in here before,” she said. “I think I would have noticed you.”
“Not really my scene, but Howard and I occasionally touch base on stuff,” he replied ambiguously.
“Stuff?”
He ignored her question and scanned the crowd. “You don’t like direct questions I guess,” she said.
“Not from people I’ve just met, no.”
“Do you like white women?”
He looked at her with an amused smile and didn’t say anything for a moment.
“Sometimes – they can have a lot of attitude though.” It wasn’t clear whether he was referring to her or making a generalization.
“Well, Black women can have attitude too, right?” she said.
“That’s kind of a racist thing to say,” Oscar replied. She was surprised that he didn’t sound accusatory – more like he was just pointing out the obvious.
“But you just said white women can have attitude and isn’t that racist — and sexist?”
“You asked the question.”
She smiled at him, as if she knew he had her number. She tried to read the expression on his face but wasn’t sure what she was seeing. There was a lot of emotion underneath, but he was floating above it.
She asked if she could show him something on her phone and moved over to sit next to him. He didn’t seem uncomfortable with wisps of her red hair touching his shoulder, or her light green jeans rubbing against his black ones as she made herself comfortable in the booth.
It was an image of one her paintings, a portrait of a middle-aged Black woman on a park bench. It looked like late afternoon – the subject cast a long shadow on an asphalt walkway. The woman’s expression seemed to show both strength and sadness; weariness and defiance.
Oscar stared at the image and neither said anything for a few moments.
“I painted it last year. She’s a neighbor I met in the park, she said. “We became good friends.”
“So you like to paint,” he said, more as a statement than a question.
Nina told him that she’d been painting since she was 12. She got serious about it in college when an art professor encouraged her to enter a portrait of her best friend in a student show. It won first prize. It made her feel important in a way she never had growing up in LA surrounded by film industry types who were obsessed with their careers and their egos.
She watched Oscar as she spoke. He appeared to be curious about her story, though perhaps anticipating it could turn boring quickly.
“Let me show you another one,” she said. He handed the phone back to her and she swiped the screen a few times.
“This is a still life of my apartment.”
Oscar noticed warm, subtle, pastel colors in the image – a small kitchen table with a fruit bowl, a loaf of bread, and a vase of gladiolas.
He looked at it for a moment and slowly smiled. She didn’t like to show her work to strangers, but she sensed he was someone who would get it.
“You have an eye for beautiful things,” he said. Her eyes widened and she tilted her head to one side, hinting at a sense being seen.
She gestured for him to hand the phone back to her and she showed him a couple more images. He said he liked a landscape that seemed inspired by the French impressionists and another portrait she had done of a young Latinx girl in her neighborhood in the Mission.
Oscar finished his drink and flagged a waitress for another. He asked Nina if she wanted anything. She ordered the house red.
“I like this place – it attracts different kinds of people,” she said. “You never know who you’re going to meet. People like you. What do you do?”
He didn’t look at her but smiled in response to her question. He let it hang there in the air for a moment.
“A lot of different things. Mostly software.”
“You and everybody else in San Francisco.”
Nina wondered if she was talking to him because she was the one who was bored. One of her friends at the other table had called her earlier and asked her to go out. It was a Tuesday night and she figured she had nothing better to do. Her friends were now engaged in an animated conversation and Nina couldn’t even catch the eye of her friend. She liked them all, but sometimes it was too much art talk, which after a while was basically bullshit.
“Honestly, I thought you were some kind of yoga or fitness instructor. You have a presence about you.”
“Now you’re just trying to flatter me. I work out a lot but spend way too much time staring at computer screens.
“Tell me something else about yourself that I wouldn’t expect,” she said. “You don’t seem like a computer nerd.”
Oscar said he never finished high school and learned to write computer code from his uncle, who thought Oscar was headed for trouble living in the projects on Potrero Hill. His uncle thought Oscar had more street smarts than the other kids in the neighborhood and it was a matter of time before he started putting them to use unwisely. His uncle could also see he had a gift for math. They started to create simple video games together on weekends. They’d work together on a design, then build rudimentary programs. Oscar loved it. His father had left his mother when he was three and his uncle was his only male relative in the neighborhood. They became extremely close.
“He sounds like an amazing guy,” she said. “You were lucky to have someone like that.”
“He was kind and smart. Not a lot of kids in my neighborhood had that kind of influence in their lives.”
“Did Howard know him?” she asked.
He looked over at Howard, who was flirting with a female customer at least 20 years older than he was.
“Yeah, Howard knew him. My uncle didn’t like Howard. He thought he was a bad influence on me, which was basically true at the time.”
“I guess we all need someone like that in our lives like that too,” Nina said.
“Howard’s been through a lot, but I think he’s got his shit together, at least for now.”
Nina felt like she was missing something as she was tried to put together the pieces of Oscar’s story, but she didn’t really care. She guessed he was in his early thirties, and she liked looking at him. She felt good in his presence. She wanted to create a bubble around the two of them so that no one would notice or interrupt them.
“What about you – what’s your story?” he asked.
Nina wasn’t sure what she wanted to say, which was not unusual. In fact, since high school she’d never been sure how to tell her story. People tended to be impressed for the wrong reasons. Some friends had been her friends for the wrong reasons.
She wanted to tell him she grew up in LA in a privileged but shitty family, and that her father had been married four times. She had one sibling, an older half-brother from her father’s second marriage. She was the product of his third. Her father had been nominated twice for an Academy Award and her mother was a rising starlet when Nina was born. Then her father left and was off chasing another one of the same.
“It’s complicated,” she said, finally. “You could say I’m a struggling artist, but not for the usual reasons. I’m from LA and my parents are divorced. My dad works in Hollywood and my mom lives up near Tahoe. I work in a clothing store in the Castro and I’m getting ready for my first show.”
She looked over at him and tried to read his reaction. He didn’t seem to have one. She couldn’t tell if he didn’t care, was unimpressed, or wanted her to tell him more.
“It’s a gallery over near the Opera House. The owner likes to show promising young artists who he thinks will sell with the wealthy concert-going crowd. He’s been around a while, so he must know what he’s doing.”
She noticed Oscar’s body language was more relaxed and wondered why. After all, he was pretty calm when she started talking to him.
“I like the sound of your voice,” he said.
She smiled and blushed. She really didn’t know what more to say. She had an idea.
“Are you busy tomorrow afternoon? I want to show you some photographs at the Museum of Modern Art,” she said. “I want to know what you think of them.”
“Sure, I’d like that.”
***
They met at 4 o’clock the next day in front of the museum and entered the large central atrium. She loved this part of a museum visit – the anticipation, visitors checking each other out even when they pretended they weren’t, the sense of possibility and shared appreciation of the creative process. If she was feeling down, visiting the museum almost always renewed and inspired her.
She gave Oscar a big, effervescent smile and he smiled back, not quite sure what to think. He’d been to SFMOMA a few times over the years and even though the crowd was diverse, it felt far removed from his world. He’d seen exhibitions of art and photography he liked, but as an institution it seemed to him to be a reflection of white culture. Even when the artists were people of color, it just wasn’t his scene.
They took an elevator to the fourth floor and she led him down a long hallway. They turned the corner to an exhibition: “Women through time – portraits of youth and aging.”
“You probably think I’m crazy bringing you there,” she said. “But you seem like someone who would get it”
“Yeah, maybe to both of those.”
The exhibition comprised a series of portraits of a dozen women over 30 years of their lives – with an image of each woman taken three or four years apart sequentially over time. Most of the early photographs were taken while the subjects were in their mid-to-late 20s, though several began later in their lives; In most of the final photographs, the women were in their late 50s.
To Nina, they were powerful portraits of the changing nature of perseverance and courage, as well as vulnerability and loss. Each subject in the series revealed her own life experience through her eyes. She thought that for some viewers, these were images of beauty fading and time’s unyielding power to erode youth. For others, they were perhaps proof of the spirit than burns in each of us until our last breath, and possibly beyond.
“It’s my mother, as I remember her, turning into my grandmother, as I remember her,” Oscar said, looking at one of several Black women in the series. “They’re both gone now, but I see something of both of them here.”
He walked slowly, pacing along the gallery wall.
“They were very different women and I miss them in different ways,” he said as Nina followed him. “My mother was a lot tougher and more resilient than my grandmother, but my grandmother had a bigger heart. If only one of them had raised me, I’d be a different man than I am today.”
Nina warmed to see that he was responding to the photographs. His eyes became moist and he turned away from her. She wasn’t sure whether he wanted to be consoled or touched, and he stood there a few more minutes before turning back toward her, though he continued to gaze at the photographs.
“You can see people age in family photographs, but they rarely look intently into the camera like this,” she said. He nodded in agreement.
“It’s like having a time machine,” he said.
She thought it was weird to feel a connection like this with someone she had met only once before. She didn’t know anything about him beyond what he told her the previous night and now. Why was she doing this? It felt like an experiment in a way, but since seeing the photographs for the first time a week earlier, she couldn’t get them out of her head. She knew how most of her friends would probably react to them – basically say something artsy and sophisticated, but blow them off. She wanted to share them with someone more deeply than that. Creativity comes in many forms – maybe sharing them with Oscar was a form of creativity, she thought. She wasn’t playing him. She’d wondered if she was as she walked to the museum. But she wasn’t. She was sure of that. At least she thought she was. Or maybe, in her attraction to him, she had it all wrong – he was playing her.
“A few of these photos in the series make me think of my mother,” Nina said. “The world tried to define her by her beauty, and she let that happen for a while – probably too long. After my father divorced her when she was 27, she still got by on her looks.”
Oscar turned toward her. She was speaking to him as if they had been friends for a long time.
“But she eventually figured that out and began to teach acting classes. She was smarter and more intuitive than those asshole producers in LA gave her credit for. She developed a lot of great talent over the years. By the time she was 50, she was able to retire in Tahoe. She’s got a boyfriend who is ten years younger and they love each other. She’s doing great.”
“You sound very happy for her.”
“Yes,” she said. “I feel like she’s my only real parent.”
Oscar knew he had a love/hate relationship with the white world and wasn’t sure what to think when Nina talked about her family. It all sounded like a lot of privilege to him, and that made him want to dismiss it.
But he was intrigued by her talent, her energy, and the fact that she was responding to something in him that most other women missed. She seemed to be seeing him without judgement and without wanting to be impressed by anything other than who he was. It was like she could see the package and see through it at the same time.
They texted each other over the next few days. She reached out to him a few times, maybe too much she thought. He replied right away a couple of times, and then other times would come back several hours later. They both were playing it cool. Nina thought she was really into him until she could feel her cold feet and thought maybe she wasn’t.
They went for a long walk a week later at Crissy Field near the Golden Gate Bridge. It was late August, a time of year when the fog drifts in from the Pacific, enveloping the bridge under otherwise blue skies and then stretching like long strands of cotton across the bay to Berkeley.
Watching other couples walk along the path toward the bridge made her feel like they were a couple, even if they weren’t. Oscar was talking about an eco-friendly video game for young kids he was working on with his team.
“The heroine has the power to bring back extinct species, kind of like Jurassic Park, but only those made extinct by human activity,” he told her, one arm resting across her shoulder. “Gamers have to figure out how to alter the environment so the species won’t become extinct again. We’re debating whether humans can become extinct.”
“We’re headed that way anyway,” she said. “What is there to debate?’
Oscar rolled his eyes. He was pleased that she wanted to understand, but realized she knew next to nothing about creating a game for young children. Dead air for a few minutes.
She reached over and held his hand. He smiled at her and they walked quietly along the beach. For the first time in a long time, she didn’t feel alone.
***
The next day, Nina had a breakthrough in her painting. She had been working on a portrait of her brother based on several recent photographs. It had been feeling lifeless and stale to her. Now all of a sudden she could sense his intelligence and humor, and captured that on the canvas in a way that had eluded her. She didn’t get to see him very often these days – he was a filmmaker in New York. She missed him. The portrait was a way of keeping him close.
When she saw Oscar again they spent the night together. It wasn’t something she had expected. They had gone to dinner at an Italian place around the corner from the Savoy. The ambience had somehow energized Oscar and made Nina chill out and relax, almost like they had reversed roles from when they first met. It was kind of strange. But they talked non-stop for a couple of hours about pretty much everything. The meal had created a new chemistry and by the end of it her imagination had run away with itself thinking about what he would be like in bed. When they walked out the door, Oscar asked if she wanted to come back to his place.
The next morning when she woke up, she felt disoriented. It was like she had been in a crazy and luxurious dream that she wished would not end. It took her a moment to recognize the new surroundings in daylight. Oscar’s apartment was much bigger than hers and the sense of space felt breathtaking. It was a quieter neighborhood. It felt more like a weekend.
Oscar was in the kitchen making coffee and she heard a phone buzzing. Still drowsy with sleep, she reached over toward her bag and saw it was Oscar’s phone on the nightstand. The text was from Howard: “Missing you – free tonight?”
She got up to use the bathroom and tried to sort out her confusion. How could she have missed it if indeed she had missed anything? Howard didn’t necessarily seem gay and Oscar definitely came across as straight from the moment she met him. It didn’t even occur to her during all the time they has spent together from that first night at the Savoy to this morning. How the fuck did I miss that? she thought. Maybe it was all in her head.
They sat at his kitchen table and he reached out and held her hand. If anything, she felt more attracted to him in that moment, though her mind was spinning. She tried to stay present and let all the thoughts just run wherever they wanted. It was a quiet morning after a great night. She wanted to leave it there. They picked up on a conversation from dinner about how your perspective on life changes over time.
“So what do you know now that you didn’t know in your early 20s?” she asked.
“That it’s ok to forgive yourself.”
“For what?”
“For anything that happens.”
“You make it sound easy,” she said.
“I think that’s how you’re hearing it.”
The following Saturday they went for a walk in Golden Gate Park, watching bison graze in the park’s paddock and strolling by a pond where fishermen practiced fly casting. They talked about friends and music, and concerts they’d been to. Nina didn’t know how to bring it up, so finally she just said it.
“What’s up with Howard? None of my business but do you guys have a thing?”
She couldn’t see any reaction, except that he looked up as an egret landed near the pond.
“It’s something we fell into after high school,” Oscar said finally. “There was loneliness and attraction and alcohol. We were close for so many years as kids and then it just happened one night. I love the guy but we both know we could never get along together, so it’s something we do every now and then.”
Nina felt numb and for a few minutes couldn’t think of a thing to say. They just walked.
“So why did you sleep with me?” she asked.
“I’ve never met anyone who gets me the way you do – even though on the outside we have so little in common. I wanted to know what that was about. I find it confusing, actually.
“Have you slept with other men?”
“Haven’t in a long time.” He looked at her. “Not planning to either.”
She wasn’t sure why, but it reminded her of friends she had for the wrong reasons in LA. She couldn’t explain it, other than it could take too long to find out whether she could trust them.
A few months later they ran into each other outside a jazz club south of Market. Nina was with a friend and Oscar was with a woman who looked to be about his age, maybe older. Her skin was light brown and Nina thought she was beautiful. Seeing the relaxed way she looked at Oscar and he at her, it was clear they were a couple.
Nina felt a longing she hadn’t known since she and Oscar were in the park. Actually, it felt more like pain. She introduced herself and her friend to Oscar and the woman, whose name was Maya.
“The band was amazing,” Nina said. “The music lifted the whole crowd almost into the sky, don’t you think?” she said.
“I do,” Oscar replied. “I knew I’d see you here tonight.”
Nina smiled. She thought the same thing – that she’d see him tonight. She flashed on the night she met him at the Savoy. She reached over and hugged him, and Oscar embraced her tightly – she could feel his arms holding her entire chest. She said she had to go, and with all the willpower she could summon did not turn to look back.
*****
David Harris lives in the Bay Area. His first published work of fiction, Matagorda, appeared in the Spring 2022 edition of The Concho River Review. He is a former journalist for Reuters News Agency and has worked as communications consultant in technology and financial services.
