Wandering San Francisco with Paul Auster, plus Love in a Ten-Year Key

Has it really been ten years since I walked down the aisle at the little chapel in Yosemite, tripped on my dress, married that boy I met in Arkansas, went a bit too far with the tequila, and spent all night in our room at the Wawona Hotel searching for ghosts in the closet? It has!

Tonight, to celebrate, we’ll spend the night in the city and have dinner at Fleur de Lys. The last time we were at Fleur de Lys was a warm September evening a little more than two years ago, right after I’d interviewed Paul Auster at the Herbst Theatre for City Arts and Lectures. It was a rather surreal evening, as I have long been an achingly devoted fan of Mr. Auster, author of The New York Trilogy and many other wonderful works of fiction. The Gracious Author and I drank single-malt Scotch well into the wee hours, while my husband drank his usual, a single Bailey’s with milk, because my husband prefers his cocktails the way he prefers his entrees: as close to dessert as possible. Mr. Auster told some amazing stories. Some of them, I thought I might have read before in his books, but then I wondered if perhaps his books were so infused with his voice, his own voice so inseparable from his books, that I only felt I’d heard the stories before, when in fact I was hearing them for the first time.

We also talked politics for much of the evening, as the economy seemed on the brink of utter collapse and the presidential election was only a couple of months away. We talked a bit about movies, and houses, and Brooklyn, and Curious George, and an obscure Nathaniel Hawthorne journal entitled “Twenty Days With Julian and Little Bunny Papa.” I believe Slovenia might have been mentioned, for reasons I can’t recall.

Afterward, we went off in search of my Jeep, which I had characteristically misplaced. We walked many blocks and kept doubling back, over and over again, an endless loop. As we were wandering the deserted streets, I kept thinking of that book by Ian McEwan, The Comfort of Strangers, or more precisely the film version of the book, adapted by Harold Pinter, in which Mary (Natasha Richardson) and Colin (Rupert Everett) get lost in Venice, and are rescued by an enigmatic and charming gentleman named Robert (Christopher Walken), who takes them back to his home and tells them some brilliant and terrifying stories. In Pinter’s film, as in McEwan’s novel, things do not end well for the tourists. Of course, this was San Francisco, not Venice, and I was not a tourist but a resident, and I should not have been so hopelessly lost.

Eventually we found the Jeep. It is now, as it was then, an old car, and a beloved one, and it had spent a great many days at the beach with me and my toddler, and it smelled accordingly, as if someone might have put a bucket of seaweed and sand crabs in there at some point and sort of forgotten about it. In such a state we transported Mr. Auster back to the hotel, and he, in his graciousness, swore that he could not smell a thing. And on the way home my husband and I remembered a story of a smelly car, in which the smell turns out to be blood, a story set in Albania. The story was written by my husband long before he was my husband, and I happened to have read it in a small literary magazine several months before he walked into a dismal University of Arkansas classroom in his furry Giraudon boots and changed my mind (I was, at the time, otherwise betrothed) and my life. Amen.

Time. I can’t believe it was fifteen years ago that I met that guy with a curl smack dab in the middle of his forehead. Ten years ago that I tripped gracelessly down the aisle at the chapel in Yosemite, to be wedded by one kindly Reverend John Paris, who, for reasons I have yet to comprehend, kept saying that Jesus was like a fizzy tablet, and marriage was a glass of water, and you just had to drop that tablet in the water and see what happened. I know I remember it right, because when he was saying all that stuff I had not yet had any tequila. My husband had not yet had a Baileys with milk, and he remembers it the same way.

Not long ago I found a piece of notebook paper on which I had written our wedding budget. We paid $150 to rent the Yosemite Community Church from 4:00 to 5:30 p.m. on January 5; $50 for Reverend Paris; $500 to reserve the reception room at the Wawona Hotel. It was a very cheap wedding, as weddings go. We didn’t have much in material terms; we didn’t think we needed it. We were kids and now we’re not. Now we have more stuff, and more responsibility, and a kid of our own, and the man I married still has a curl smack dab in the middle of his forehead.

He is to this day the funniest guy I’ve ever met, with (hands down) the best hair. Happy Anniversary, Kevin. Here’s to ten more years.

Below: apartment in the Marais district of Paris, 2008, on a trip to meet my French editor and translator.