San Francisco

San Francisco is where a summer trip with Alex Nilsen becomes a private test of Poppy Wright’s relationship with Julian and of the intimacy she shares with Alex. A day of tourist landmarks, improvised conversation, and drinking ends with Poppy acknowledging that she is glad the trip belongs to just the two of them, while Alex asks whether she will break up with her boyfriend.

The trip to San Francisco

After Alex expressed doubt that he and Julian would become close, Poppy and Alex traveled to San Francisco on their own. Poppy used credit-card points for one round-trip plane ticket, and the two split the cost of the other. Their independent trip followed four days in Sonoma wine country, where a bed-and-breakfast had comped two nights in exchange for exposure to Poppy’s 25,000 followers. Alex had good-naturedly posed for her staged photographs there, an arrangement that placed the trip between work and friendship.

Poppy’s online life also shaped their arrival in the city. She had tried to keep Alex out of her blog, thinking of him as private in much the same way as the Blue Heron Inn, but accepted a free hotel room after a reader praised her writing and her recurring references to her “Particular Man Friend.” The hotel’s free parking mattered in a city where parking was expensive. Once they dropped their bags, they left the car behind and used cabs to make the most of their only day downtown.

The city as a shared experience

Their first stop was the Golden Gate Bridge. Poppy found the walk amazing, but colder and windier than she had expected; the gusts were so strong they could not hear one another. For roughly ten minutes, they acted out a conversation anyway, waving their arms dramatically and shouting nonsense as they power-walked across the crowded walkway. The failed conversation became a source of companionship rather than frustration.

The scene recalled a water-taxi ride in Vancouver, where a man Poppy called Buck had gestured and talked at an easy clip while she could not properly follow him. In San Francisco, the same gap between speech and understanding is transformed into a shared joke: Poppy and Alex know they are pretending, and their performance gives them something to do together. The city’s famous landmark thus becomes less important as a view than as the setting for their private play.

An evening of disclosure

Later, Poppy looped her arm through Alex’s elbow and told him she was glad she had not invited Julian, glad that it was just the two of them. Alex slowed beside her and asked whether she was going to break up with Julian. The question caught Poppy off guard; so did Alex’s pinched expression. Her immediate thought was yes, although she answered aloud that she did not know and perhaps would.

They continued walking and found a Hemingway-themed bar, decorated with dark wood, amber light, and actual fishing nets suspended from the ceiling. Its rum cocktails were named after Hemingway books and stories. Over two hours, Poppy and Alex each had three drinks and a shot. Poppy repeatedly framed the drinking as celebration, while recognizing that she was trying to forget something. By the time they stumbled back to the hotel, she could no longer remember what she had wanted to forget.

Narrative significance

San Francisco concentrates the contrast between a trip’s planned, visible pleasures and what emerges between its travelers. The bridge walk, hotel arrangements, and bar visit are ordinary vacation activities, yet each draws attention to the pair’s closeness: they can turn a conversation they cannot hear into a game, and Poppy’s casual declaration that she wants the trip to remain theirs leads directly to Alex’s question about Julian. The evening offers no resolution to that question, but it makes Poppy’s unspoken preference harder to ignore.