Monday night we went to a party in Bernal Heights. A friend drove us, parking the car on a sloped little street near a seedy grocery store. The hill we were on offered a panoramic view of a tangle of highways and roads about as pleasant to survey as basement pipework.

Bernal Heights retains the appearance of being low rent, but I suspect proeprty values there are just as outrageous as anywhere else in San Francisco. The house we were visiting was one of those hillside places that seems almost built into the surrounding slopes and foliage. Just walking up the steps to the door, I saw a beautiful mossy brick path leading into a shady green garden.

The house itself was the kind of place I dreamed about having when I was a teenager. Cozy, dark, idosyncratic, with roughly-hewn walls and beams, exotic carvings and dcecorations, and worn looking furniture. The hostess was slender, blonde, very serious, the host a squarjawed, dark man with a ponytail. He was overseing the cooking in the kitchen space, which had jars adn jars of wonderful looking spices. She saw to the guests in a vaguely, anxious, uncheerful manner that left me feeling as though I’d been briefly examined and found wanting. There were already about nine people there, most of them about a decade younger than me and almost all with the enviable ease and charm of people who are doing exactly what they want with their lives. Michael and I each picked up a glass of red wine and walked out onto the narrow, planklike back porch. It was high up, but offered little view other than trees and rooftops, so we went back in.