Last Night at the Telegraph Club(93)

She had completely forgotten about that scrap of paper with Kath’s address, but she remembered the details: 453 Union Street. It couldn’t be far.



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Kath’s house was a three-story building with a central entrance and bay windows stacked up on either side. In the cloudy afternoon, a lamp glowed in a first floor window, but the top two floors were dark. She went up the stairs to the entryway and looked at the three doors, examining the nameplates beside each buzzer. There it was on the right: MILLER. She raised her finger to press the button.

It sounded distantly inside the building—too distantly to be attached to the first floor with its lighted window.

No one answered the door.

She pressed the buzzer again, and leaned forward to listen carefully, but no one was coming.

She retreated down the steps and stared fiercely at Kath’s building, as if that would conjure her out of thin air, but of course it did not. In the first floor window she saw an old woman looking out at her suspiciously. She couldn’t stand here forever. The woman would call the police.

Lily turned her back on the building and continued downhill, walking aimlessly into the heart of North Beach. The neighborhood was a maze to her; some of the streets turned into dead ends, while others culminated in steep wooden steps climbing up the side of Telegraph Hill. Eventually she went all the way up to Coit Tower, joining the tourists who gathered at the overlook to gaze out at the misty city. She lingered there for some time, her mind going as numb as her feet, and then she went into the gift shop to lurk in the warmth. She used the public restroom and pretended to consider buying a miniature Coit Tower, but when the clerk started walking past her repeatedly, she left.

Maybe you should go home, she thought, but immediately recoiled from the idea. She couldn’t face her mother—her father—the entire family. There are no homosexuals in this family.

She headed downhill, taking random streets, until she emerged in Washington Square Park. She remembered that sunny September afternoon again: Kath’s legs stretched out on the grass; the cold sweet sorbetto; the wooden spoon scraping against her tongue.

The memory hurt almost physically. She went to the nearest bench on the edge of the park and sat down.

She felt hopelessness creeping upon her. The fog was rolling in; it seeped through her thin cardigan and blouse and crawled beneath her cotton skirt to settle on her skin. No matter how much she rubbed her hands along her upper arms, she was still cold. Washington Square Park was quiet. The afternoon was darkening into dusk, and few people were out, but she gradually became aware of the presence of others. There was the lumpy shape of someone stretched out on a bench not so far from her; it had been motionless when she arrived, but after some time it twitched, startling her. Then the shape seemed to ripple and roll, and she realized it was a man shifting over onto his back. He was sleeping there, exposed to the chilly air. He didn’t even have a blanket.

The sound of glass rattling against metal caused her to look to her right. Someone was rooting through the trash can. They were wearing a long woolen coat beneath a blanket that kept slipping, its ragged edges trailing on the damp ground.

She crossed her arms and legs, hugging herself closer, trying to ignore the fear that was rising inside her. She called up the memory of Kath’s mouth against hers as they kissed beneath the stairs at the club. Last night. If she closed her eyes, she could still feel Kath there.

She heard footsteps coming from her left. They slowed down, and then someone sat on the bench beside her. She blinked her eyes open as a man said, “Nay ho, little girl.”

He was lanky and scraggly looking, with an unshaven chin and a stink about him, and she realized he was trying to speak to her in Chinese.

The fear she had been trying to keep at bay flooded through her. She jumped up and ran, and she heard him calling after her, laughingly, “I’m not gonna hurt you, China doll. Just saying hello. Nay ho, nay ho!”

Her skin crawled and she ran faster, leaving the park behind as she fled uphill. Coit Tower loomed in the distance. She remembered leaving Tommy’s party with Kath that night, Coit Tower a candle behind them as they emerged from Castle Street.

Castle Street. Lana and Tommy lived there at number forty-something.

The idea was so startling, and it felt so right that she almost laughed out loud. But her relief was short-lived; she suddenly remembered that the Chronicle had said Tommy had been arrested. She was probably in jail.

But Lana might be there, and Lana would know what to do.

Lily glanced up at Coit Tower, trying to remember where it had been in relation to Lana’s apartment. North Beach wasn’t that large, but it wasn’t her neighborhood. At the next corner store, she went inside and asked the man behind the counter where Castle Street was. He gave her a funny look, but he also gave her directions, and then she headed up the steepest part of Green Street, passing slivers of dark alleys on her left—one of them might have been the one that Kath had pulled her into—and then there it was.

She turned onto the block and started studying the building numbers. She was afraid she wouldn’t recognize Lana’s building, but when she came to it, she was certain. She remembered the front stoop and the way the curtains hung over the window. Light shone through a crack in the curtains. Someone was home.

She hesitated. There were plenty of reasons she shouldn’t knock on the door. Lana barely knew her. She would be a virtual stranger showing up like a beggar on her front step. And if Tommy was in jail, this had to be a terrible time for Lana. The wind whipped around her, plastering her fog-dampened hair across her eyes so that she had to scrape it aside with freezing fingers.