San Francisco

Last day for the Rivera mural; we can see a narrow section from over the near rail. Against a ribbon of hills and low sky one man swings a hammer, another an axe.

It’s Monday, and mostly we are alone. She doesn’t ask about my brother, and I don’t ask about the apartment above Café Leon. We’d shared a cigarette in the window there.

In a month, from London, she’ll send a photo. Grass against a stone fence. Steam. Orange sky behind three-day clouds. The path will be hard mud and the photo will come with no caption.

We go between the two Richter galleries, abstract then figural, the rooms separated by a narrow wall. The docent slips into the hall, so we are alone on a bench, looking together at a piece called Fenster, German for “window.”

Light from the city hits Judd’s boxes; she checks the time on her phone. She calls me Danny. To confer importance, is what Sontag said—to photograph is to confer importance.

She holds a table for us, a spot by the window. There is white graffiti on the adjacent building, though I cannot make out what it says.

She drinks the last of my tea and we sit awhile. Again the Rivera, a group of middle schoolers on a tour. I part a curtain of gold beads to ask the docent for a water fountain, and she tells me I’ve entered through the exit of an installation.