San Francisco

San Francisco is the imagined next stage of Harry Goldfarb and Marion Silver’s plan to build a creative life together. They picture opening a café-theater there after establishing their first venue in New York, making the city a marker of possibility in a future that the novel never brings to pass.

The Planned Café-Theater

Harry describes a prospective café serving food, pastries, and drinks from around the world, with evening performances and occasional mime acts. Marion expands the idea into a gallery displaying young painters’ work and sculpture, and proposes poetry readings. Their concept joins commercial survival to cultural activity: Harry hopes to leave street hustling behind, while Marion imagines drawing on her connections with painters and performers.

The plan has a deliberate order. They must first raise money and make the New York venue work; only then, Harry says, could they open another in San Francisco. Marion believes she knows enough mimes, poets, and painters there to help get the enterprise started. The city is therefore not merely a distant setting in their conversation but a possible extension of their shared project, dependent on a first success that has yet to occur.

A Larger Shared Future

San Francisco belongs to a widening chain of plans. While discussing the money they hope to make, Harry and Marion imagine listening to music downtown, moving out, setting up the café, and eventually traveling abroad. Marion pictures showing Harry paintings in the Louvre and finding him a studio where he can return to painting and sculpture. Their ambitions combine a business venture with a life shaped by art, travel, and companionship.

The emotional force of the city rests on that shared imagining. As they discuss the café and its possible expansion, their plans make a precarious future feel briefly tangible: each contributes ideas, and each treats the other’s hopes as part of a common life. San Francisco remains prospective, however; the conversation records an aspiration, not a move or an opening.

Imagined Destination and Actual Trajectory

The novel sets this westward prospect against the direction Harry and Tyrone C. Love actually take when their circumstances deteriorate. Their journey carries them south, where hostility and arrest replace the freedom of movement suggested by the café plans. San Francisco consequently remains outside the characters’ lived plot: its significance lies in the distance between the creative future Harry and Marion envision and the increasingly constrained course of events.