Shel’s party was on Saturday night. Shel has moved to New York and is now living in the East Village, but his landlord doesn’t know that. Mark is living in his place now, and Shel had returned to pack a few more boxes before driving back to New York. I’m sure Shel felt odd that night, as one always does when you return to an old home.

Shel’s a thin, dark, rather good-looking man in his late thirties, always a bit tense and watchful, fond of Frank Sinatra and martinis. The apartment is on Russian Hill. Technically, I suppose, it’s a single bedroom, though it consits mainly of a long hall with a kitchen at one end, a medium sized room at the other, and a bathroom and large closet in between. It’s a standard San Francisco apartment with hardwood floors, high ceilings, and anachronisms like a phone nook and an ironing closet. The room at the end of the hall has a futon where I suppose Shel once slept and Mark now sleeps. The little kitchen, with a tiny four-burner range cowering behind the refrigerator, has a shelf of cookbooks now, and spices and bottles of exotic liquors, where before it had mainly breakfast cereal and martini fixings.

It was a mix of Mark and Shel’s friends, which meant a lot of filmmakers and people from the magazine where Mark works. Bluff, talkative family men, skinny women writers, a Korean girl I’d talked to at Shel’s going-away party in January, Karla and Larry, a British couple, both of them working class vegetarians and leftists, Milford and Donna, a couple we had frequently encountered at Mark’s dinner parties. Mark, energetic and serious, danced with a tall, laughing woman in the parlor. Milford talked in the kitchen, Donna sitting nearby. Michael drank wine and grew very redfaced and hilarious. After my own glass of wine, I sat on Michael’s lap, no longer hearing most of what was being said and wondering, after looking around later, where Donna had disappeared to. Milford was still holding court beside the refrigerator, emphatic, almost belligerent.

Finally, after almost everyone else had gone home, we got up to leave, but on our way out Michael got snagged on Shel, who was standing near the door, and I was stranded out in the hall for fifteen minutes before giving up and coming back in. Found Donna sleeping peacefully on the parlor futon while Mark and his lady continued their dance a few feet away.

I have changed the names to protect the innocent. I’ll only say that “Mark” had a food column and “Shel” is a fairly well-known indie filmmaker, still living in New York, still slender and good-looking but gray, with a wife and a teenage daughter. The other partiers are still part of the San Francisco film community and occasionally their faces, altered by time, resurface in our lives in indie features and docs. “OMG! That guy being interviewed is LARRY! “