The next day, we each had a massage and a facial at Re:fresh spa. The masseuse was brilliant, and as she kneaded me under that soft light with New Age music tinkling in the background, expertly banishing my aches, subtly sparking my imagination, I wondered how many men fell in love with her. All of them, possibly. I did, certainly – though I later left her for the esthetician, who massaged my face very gently and gave me a soothing treatment of Hungarian chocolate, paprika and sweet red rose moisturizer. My wife and I left the spa two hours later, glowing, refreshed, more peaceful than Gandhi. We had a glass of wine and took a nap.

On Sunday, our last day, we rented bicycles and rode across the Golden Gate Bridge and back, then down along the coast through the Presidio, past the stunning views and lush vegetation, the weather and landscape changing every kilometre. We had lunch at Cliff House, perched on the hills, a former entertainment palace that survived the 1906 earthquake only to succumb to fire the following year. We ate crab and lobster cakes and drank a glass of pinot grigio. So much in San Francisco revolves around food. In four days, we ate Asian-Cuban fusion, California-Thai fusion and Cal-Ital. We drank Bordeaux, local pinot noirs and champagne. We burned through menus and wine lists like God’s avenging army and told ourselves, as we laboured up hills, that we were burning it all off.

Cycling through Golden Gate Park, we ran into a bluegrass festival where thousands of people milled along the roads toward four different stages. There were hillbillies, hippies who had kept their Haight-Ashbury look intact and young families. Every kind of romantic permutation was on display: a prep and a goth; an elegantly dressed silver-haired man with a Cyndi Lauper-looking girl in red sneakers; a couple who had matching tattoos of scenic landscapes covering much of their bodies. Moving through this crowd was a black man with a shaved head and a feathered boa. He was wearing heels and sheer, lightly brocaded gaucho pants with a loose black chiffon blouse and was twirling in the autumn sun, singing Dolly Parton’s “Jolene”: “Jolene... I’m begging of you please don’t take my man / Jolene... Please don’t take him just because you can...”

Later I spent a patient hour in a shoe store with my wife, itself a silent declaration of undying love. In the freight-size elevator to Nordstrom’s department store, a teenager was describing his date. “I show up, looking good, smelling good. She a alcoholic, she got a kid. And she dissing me.” Like W.H. Auden before him, this young man, with his throwback New York Giants jersey, his baseball hat turned sideways, his loose pants pooling around his huge sneakers, wanted someone to tell him the truth about love. (“Will it come like a change in the weather? / Will its greeting be courteous or rough? / Will it alter my life altogether? / O tell me the truth about love.”)

In the twilight, we went to the 46th floor of the Hilton to the Cityscape bar, where we drank martinis and stared at the fog coming over the hills, a sensual shroud that hugged the landscape like a lover. Lights flickered on the hillside, a trick of perspective, my wife said, though she was hazy on the physics. Love is a trick of perspective. That bubbly girl in homeroom with the pleated skirt who rested her hand on my arm during study period. (Surely, this is love.) The Sylvia Plath girl-in-black who wrote depressing poetry that rhymed. (Had I ever felt like this?) The Athlete, the Head Case, the Mistake, the One My Mother Liked. (Were these not destiny?)

We tried to get tickets to the opera to watch those actors live and die for love. At the War Memorial Opera House, there was a new play with a libretto by the famed Peter Sellars. It was titled Doctor Atomic and was about the Manhattan Project and the making of the atom bomb. The main character was J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Faustian genius who ran the program, whose alcoholic wife, Kitty, numbed herself with gin as she realized she was losing her husband to the seductions of history. It was sold out.

Instead we went to the Asia de Cuba restaurant and ordered champagne and ate tuna carpaccio and listened to the couple beside us. A man in his 30s was listing the mundane elements of his life: his workout routine, why the Raiders sucked on defence, what a guy in his office who’s a total dork did to screw up the Ziegfield account. Was this a legitimate terrible date? Or was she an escort? And which would be worse for her?

We wondered how the kids were doing. It was too late to phone. My wife was wearing the new clothes she had bought that day, a look she had entertained almost 20 years ago that had come roaring back. In a store window that morning, I had seen a mannequin in a specific pose, the exact posture my wife had affected when I met her for the first time in a Toronto restaurant. I stood in front of the window in the brilliant California sunshine and recalled the body language that had originally bewitched me.

Was this not love? 

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