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right here in Edna, did you?”
    â€œI guess not.”
    â€œA lot’s changed here in Edna. A lot’s changed. For the better! Let me buy you something. A corunda, Mexican wedding cookies.” He enunciated coo-roon-dah. “You can’t get those in San Francisco, can you?”
    â€œActually—”
    â€œYou know what mistake they made out there? Putting everything in the dot-com bubble. Here in Edna we never had a bubble. That’s why we’re still thriving. We’re going to be thriving, too. As long as people eat bacon we will be okay.”
    His boosterism exhausted me. The hand on the neck felt good, though. It hit me how many weeks it had been since a man’s fingers had been wrapped around my neck.
    To be honest, I’d had a girlhood crush on Charlie Burt. Who didn’t? Charlie talked slow but clever circles around management, Charlie faced down the cops, Charlie chatted on the phone with Bruce Springsteen. I’ve been tainted by San Francisco, though, where a guy as ungroomed as Charlie would be mistaken for an old roadie who would pin you to a barstool with his tedious tales about touring with the Dead.
    Still I went out for coffee with Charlie Burt, for a drink at the Lion’s Den. For dinner. Jean Seberg had instilled in me early the thirst to go out with a variety of men: young/old, cute/ugly, married or not. I wanted to be that girl in the Citroën pulling away from the curb.
    I guess I am not the best person in the world to tell Jean’s story. But what the fuck, nobody else is doing it. Her evaporation from the landscape depresses me; there are mornings I don’t want to inhabit a world that fails to imagine Jean Seberg. Before I left San Francisco I had a long talk with a girl who made me believe, fleetingly, the city still could be young and hip: she was a collagist who procured police reports of rapes, scissored them up, and reassembled them as poetry. I thought she would be interested in Jean Seberg, and I rambled, the way my mother used to ramble to my friends about having once seen Patricia McBride dance (her fondest moment!), ignoring the polite, indifferent coughs. I heard myself tell the girl all about Hakim and his wife, about the Panthers, about J. Edgar Hoover’s vow to neutralize her, and when I paused the girl said, “I hate it when people racialize everything. I just don’t see people in terms of skin color.” Which made me want to go to bed. Forever.
    But instead of honoring Jean’s story, weaving the threads that resist any pattern, I ordered a floral dress and T-strapped sandals. I got a thrill when the UPS box arrived, and I ordered more: a book about the FBI, an espresso maker, garnet earrings. I dedicated a corner of my kitchen to flattened cartons. I picked a fight on Facebook with a Bay Area friend about how the anti–Prop 8 campaign went wrong. I saw in my newsfeed a group of women celebrating a birthday and I was haunted, throughout the day, by the certainty that, even if I had been in California, I wouldn’t have been invited. I came to think of Edna as a deeply earned jail term.
    â€œThat’s why I try not to get involved with the so-called social media,” Charlie Burt said, as we sat in a booth at Esquivel’s. “Now, don’t get me wrong: I tweet. But only in the name of the city of Edna.”
    â€œYou tweet?” I helped myself to the tomatillo salsa.
    â€œOnly as the city of Edna. I sing its praises. Of course, people know it’s me behind the avatar, judging from the comments I get. Not all of them kind, mind you.”
    â€œHow could anyone not be kind to you?” I asked. I wasn’t flattering. Charlie created a circle of calm around him, a fortress. I had been trying to be unkind for days to no avail.
    â€œOh, well, you’d be surprised.” He sliced his enchiladas with his knife. “Now, usually, what they have to say is not very original. But