“Gage,” I said.
“All right, Gage,” he said. We shook hands. “Ken.”
“My mother’s idea,” I said preemptively; most people say something about how they haven’t ever met anybody named Gage. Ken cocked his head a little.
“Well, all right,” he said: he had a light tone to his voice, in which I thought I heard a note of correction. “Mom knows best, right?”
“Right, right,” I said.
“Mine still calls me ‘Kenny.’ Makes me feel like a little kid.”
“Whatever they call you for the first few years after you’re born probably sticks with them forever,” I said.
“Maybe that’s it,” he said. “Anyway, where were you before you got to Milpitas?”
“Oh, just up in San Francisco. You?”
Ken laughed; he looked down a little, toward the sidewalk. I wasn’t sure what was wrong with my question. “I’m from here,” he said when he found my face again. “Until pretty recently not a lot of people moved here.”
“Real estate agent says it’s coming up,” I said.
“Well, that’s true,” he said. “It’s growing. New people. Right here next to the freeway, though—don’t take this the wrong way, but most of the people moving here … they don’t move here.”
“Oh, I know,” I said, remembering my first visit to town. “Whitney tried to show me a place in—what was it called? The neighborhood had a name.”
“There’s a lot of that now,” said Ken. I was trying to guess his age without staring too hard: maybe thirty-seven, I figured. His clothes looked freshly laundered and his hair was neatly shaped. “Wolf Trail Crossing or whatever. I think they get to mark up the price if they give a block a name like that.”
“Well, anyway,” I said, “they were a good deal more expensive than this one.”
He looked at me a little sideways; he’d noticed I wasn’t volunteering much. “Yeah, I bet they were,” he said after a second. “Listen, I’m on my way to work, I better get going. You want to get a beer later?”
“Sure,” I said, a little surprised.
“Cool,” he said, with a friendly smile; I thought I heard a note of suspicion in it, but I’d hardly had any company at all since getting to town, and solitude can do strange things to your hearing. “I’m home after five. You’ll be around?”
“Haven’t really figured out many other places to go,” I said.
He laughed again. “I imagine you haven’t,” he said.
* * *
AT ABOUT FIVE-THIRTY that evening, my doorbell rang; it was a cheery two-note chime, and it had to be new—who puts a doorbell on the front of a porn store?—but it sounded, to my ears, like a relic of the 1970s: there was something aspirationally optimistic about it, as if it were trying to climb above its actual station.
Ken produced a six-pack of Tecate and set it down on the coffee table by the couch in the living room. I don’t think I’d seen a Tecate since college. We cracked our cans open simultaneously; the sound caromed off the walls with a weirdly metallic echo. Whoever’d done the refurb on the place hadn’t given much thought to the acoustics.
What’s your life like, where’s your family: we took care of the basics first. He’d been born at the hospital in San Jose; his parents still lived in the house he’d grown up in. He said the place had seemed palatial to him as a kid, but that he could see, now, with all the new construction, that it had been incredibly modest. I thought about how every town this near San Francisco must have experienced some measure of seismic change almost the minute the information economy cranked into high gear, and how this was still going on, my own lodgings being just a single example.
He had a sister at Mills, and both his parents were college graduates: but they cared more about their children’s happiness than about status, and he’d been good with tools since he was young, so he worked at an auto shop.
“I wouldn’t have guessed,” I said: leaving in the mornings, he looked like he was heading for a desk job.
“I only wear my uniform at the shop. Old habit. Leave my work at work, you know?” I cracked open a second beer; it was dark outside, but inside it felt hotter than it had in the daytime. “How about you?”
“I’m a writer,” I said. “Mainly books.”
“There you go,” he said, raising his can like a champagne glass. We toasted my profession. Then we sat quietly for several minutes, each of us sort of staring into space at the end of the day, beers in hand.