Chapter 5 Duoverse
Duoverse
Gloria had described it as a city on a hill, but it turned out that San Francisco was a city on many: as soon as Laurel reached the bottom of one, she peered over the top of another.
No one else seemed to notice the constant feeling of precipice, hide-and-seek, the whole tableau laid out from one angle and obscured from the next.
Wisconsin, of course, was known for being horizontal: unending rows of soybeans and corn, highways carved through fields.
Now Laurel stood on a block so steep that stairs had been cut into the sidewalk.
A minivan zoomed cheerily downward, toddlers waving from their car seats.
The bay winked below her like a beacon. Laurel picked her way down the steps, carefully at first, then more quickly. She continued past Union Street and into the Marina. At Crissy Field, she left her shoes on the grass and ran into the water, the cold so shocking she laughed.
Laurel’s submission to Other Worlds had been accepted.
It was her first time in California—her first time west of the Mississippi—and she soon realized that her expectations did not apply to this part of the state.
The beach was veiled in fog. No one went into the ocean without a wet suit.
Microclimates cohabitated in seven square miles: the Richmond’s chilly damp, the Mission’s clear sun.
Homeless encampments stood mere blocks from mansions.
The entire city felt contradictory and vertiginous.
On the fourth night of her trip, Laurel walked through Nob Hill, holding a map that Gloria had drawn.
She emerged in front of a Queen Anne with a steep roof and an octagonal tower, the windows glowing Halloweenish orange.
Before she could lift the brass knocker, the door withdrew to reveal a trim, elderly man with a froth of white hair.
He said, “You must be Laurel.”
“How did you know?” she asked.
Seymour wore a pale blue suit. He nodded at the slip of paper in Laurel’s hand. “Gloria’s map. Many years ago, I drew the same one for her.”
“You drew her a map? But Gloria was from San Francisco.”
“One San Francisco. There are three dozen neighborhoods here, and at least as many versions of the city. Now, come inside and get warm—didn’t Gloria tell you the Twain quote?”
It was the beginning of September. Laurel had spent the afternoon at Dolores Park, eating a burrito in the sun. Four hours later and three neighborhoods north, the temperature was fifteen degrees cooler, mocking her slip dress and the thin purple cardigan she wore over it.
“ ‘The coldest winter I ever spent,’ ” she recited, “ ‘was the summer I spent in’—”
But she did not finish, for Seymour’s house was the kind she’d thought existed only in storybooks: curlicued crown molding, stained glass windows.
Brass lighting fixtures hung from ceiling medallions as intricate as snowflakes.
Every room seemed to have a fireplace, every fireplace surrounded by people who were eating candied nuts and drinking out of crystal tumblers.
As she passed a woman in a silver suit, Laurel thought she herself might as well have worn a sign that read WISCONSIN.
Seymour showed her to the kitchen, where she drained a glass of champagne.
“Who’s this?” asked another man, dapper, bald.
“Gloria’s duckling,” said Seymour, putting a hand around the man’s waist.
“Oh!” said the other man. “Laurel, isn’t it? I’m Julian. How is she?”
Laurel smiled. “Really well, for the most part. She wanted to come, but she’s not so mobile nowadays.”
Julian nodded sympathetically before he glanced at Seymour. “Do you know, the last time we saw her…”
“Yes, at the Fairmont!” Seymour said. “In the bar, which was filled with very official-looking people, businessmen and politicians—”
“And Gloria wore—would you call it a hat?” Julian asked.
“Of a fashion,” Seymour said.
“This great big bird on it. Black, of course—a crow, or a raven.”
“Wearing a necklace around its neck!”
“Well, a crow is rarely seen without its necklace.”
“And it had a crystal for an eye!”
Laurel was laughing. “That sounds like Gloria. I’ll have to see if she still has it.”
“She looked just like her mother. Walking through the bar with her head held high,” Seymour said. “We were so proud. She was our duckling, you know.”
The champagne was warming Laurel already. With Seymour and Julian at her side, she didn’t feel so out of place.
“Gloria said you lived together?” she asked.
Seymour and Julian nodded in unison. Then Julian turned to Seymour with a sadness Laurel hadn’t expected. “A different life,” he said.
“We were all so young,” said Seymour.
“Gloria especially,” Julian said. “I can still see her at sixteen, with all that red hair. And we weren’t much older. We felt like children with a child.”
“Sixteen?” asked Laurel.
Before UW–Madison lured Gloria to the Midwest, she had studied at UC Berkeley. Laurel had assumed that this was when she lived with Seymour and Julian.
“After her parents died,” said Seymour, nodding. “It was just awful. They were our closest friends.”
Laurel thought of the photographs that lined Gloria’s hallway.
Most of them featured the same two people.
The first was a man with a high forehead, a ready grin, and an air of youthful enthusiasm, at least when he was young.
In later pictures, his expression was guarded, and he turned his face to the left so that only the right side was visible.
The second person was a dark-haired woman with a mole below her right eye.
Her expression conveyed shrewdness and amusement, even merry provocation.
Although Gloria never spoke of them, it was clear to Laurel that these were her parents: she had the man’s smile and the woman’s eyes.
“Oh,” said Laurel now. She was horrified, and somehow embarrassed. “Gloria didn’t tell me about that.”
Julian and Seymour glanced at each other.
“I’m sure she doesn’t like to talk about it,” Seymour said.
“Shall we go upstairs?” asked Julian. “You’ll want to meet the young people.”
—
Laurel followed Julian to a curved staircase with a carved wooden banister.
The walls were hung with paintings, nearly life-sized: a Black ballet dancer in a printed headscarf, a pianist with a parrot on his shoulder.
One young man stood in front of an easel scattered with color.
There were blots of purple on his chest.
“Did you make these?” Laurel asked. Gloria had told her that Seymour’s partner was an artist.
“Oh, yes. Friends, every one—most no longer earthside.”
“They’re beautiful.”
“I think so, too. The people, I mean. When Gloria lived here, the house was full of artists. Seymour inherited it from a madcap uncle who liked to upset the apple cart. All of Seymour’s siblings were straitlaced people with families, and Uncle Morty signed it away to two childless men!
It’s inexcusably large, as you can see”—Laurel peered down a many-doored hallway—“so we filled it with a different kind of family. The neighbors have never liked us. Nob Hill has a lot of old money, you know. Well, here we are.”
He had stopped in front of the octagonal turret.
Each window framed a different vision of the city.
A man in a checkered bow tie offered Laurel another drink.
When Julian left, she felt shy, still troubled by what she’d learned about Gloria.
But he had been right—this did seem to be where the younger people were congregating—and Laurel soon worked up the courage to introduce herself.
Slowly, her self-consciousness eased; she wove in and out of conversation, feeling grown-up and emboldened.
At one point, two new people entered the room: a man and a woman, who stopped just inside the door. The woman was striking, with a Crawford mole and a single wave of sleek dark hair. The man was dark-haired, too, and tall, with full lips and a distinctive nose.
Adrenaline sobered Laurel immediately. She refocused on the person in front of her, a mathematician who was interrogating her about psychedelics, but it was no use: she barely heard him.
It would not have mattered if she had been facing the opposite direction. Laurel would have known Eli’s voice; she would have felt his presence. And though she tried not to look, he must have felt the force of her attention.
“Laurel?” he asked.
Her throat seized. The woman next to Eli glanced at him inquiringly, and Laurel understood that they were a couple.
“It’s Eli. We went to high school together,” he said. He had mistaken Laurel’s paralysis for confusion.
“I remember,” said Laurel, an understatement so prodigious that it might have been a lie.
Eli was six years older and twice as handsome as he’d been in August of 1998: grown into his features and relaxed in his body. He wore his height with graceful command.
“I can’t believe this. Are you here for the conference?” he asked. When Laurel nodded, he added: “Botany?”
She smiled. “Mycology.”
“Mycology,” said Eli. The richness of his interest made her heady.
“Fungi,” she translated.
“Not a straight line from apple trees.”
“It’s a long story.”
“I’d like to hear it.”
The mathematician blew his nose emphatically, and Laurel emerged as if from underwater.
“I’m sorry. Eli Rosen, physics, Stanford,” Eli said, offering his hand to the mathematician. “And this is Angela, my fiancée.”
“Also physics.” Angela shook hands with the mathematician, and then with Laurel. “Also Stanford.”
Laurel set her martini glass down beneath a Tiffany lamp and said, “Would you excuse me?”