changed lanes. The cab driver changed lanes with it.

“You’re from L.A.,” Mr. Natural said. He had his window down, too, enjoying the sea stink, too, the cool air. The cab was an excellent old Checker, with wing vents, as God intended, so there wasn’t a roar that had to be shouted over.

“Yeah,” Jimmy admitted.

“I can read people.”

“So what was it? What said L.A.?”

“The suit, I guess. The extra button undone on your shirt. Your shoes. A little showbizzy but not executive suite. But not actor, either.”

“You’ve been reading my mail,” Jimmy said.

“I used to be a haberdasher. Eleven years.”

“Do they really call them haberdashers?”

“They did when I was doing it.”

“Here? San Francisco?”

“Right on Union Square,” the cabby said.

Jimmy tried to do the math. The driver looked late thirties at the most.

“You ever see that movie The Conversation?” the cabby-haberdasher said, taking one hand off the wheel, turning, looking back, getting eye to eye.

“Yeah,” Jimmy said. “Gene Hackman.” He waited.

“I love that movie,” the other said.

The Sausalito bus blew by the toll booths in the far right lane and pulled over. There was a plaza at the head of the bridge and a small commuter parking lot.

There wasn’t any chance of the bus pulling out anytime soon, so the cabby just slowed and picked a lane and waited through the minute that it took to come up to the toll booth.

“Be here now!” he said to the toll taker, a gruff-looking 1950s-looking man, probably Italian, as he handed over five bucks.

“Baba Ram Dass,” the toll man said. “He’s sick, you know. And broke.” Mr. Natural just shook his head sadly.

He held up his right hand so you could see it in the rear window and started across three lanes to the outside. Remarkably, people yielded. He left a car’s length between him and the bus, so they had a clear view.

When the bus’s door opened, the first one off was a leathery little man in his sixties in a serious bike rider’s frog suit. He went around to the front of the bus and started unhitching his lean red-and-green Euro bike off the rack.

“Some don’t like to ride across the bridge,” the cabby said, narrating. “Guy that size, he might be right.”

“When I was here before, they didn’t used to let you ride across,” Jimmy said.

Mr. Natural shook his head. “You got it wrong,” he said. He turned around to look at Jimmy. “Unless you haven’t been here in twenty years and you’re a whole lot older than you look. They put the bike lane in, in 1992.”

Lean Man mounted up, headed on south into the city.

“They used to be worried about jumpers,” the cabby said. “Stupid. No bike rider is going to jump. Think about it.”

“I was always surprised they let you walk across,” Jimmy said.

“They couldn’t stop people from walking,” the cabby said. “It would be admitting something they’re unable to admit.”

Lucy and Les Paul got off the bus. Jimmy dug into his pocket for his sheaf of bills.

“I heard something on the radio this morning,” the cabby said. “They said new figures show that the cost of living now outweighs the benefits.”

Lucy and Les just stood in the sunlight a moment next to the bus. They looked like they were coming this way, coming back across the bridge. They’d walk right by him if Jimmy stayed in the cab. He got out.

He leaned in through the open passenger window, handed Mr. Natural two twenties. “Thanks,” he said.

“It’s a joke. Think about it.”

“I’m laughing on the inside,” Jimmy said.

But Lucy and Les didn’t come back across the bridge. Not yet anyway. Instead, they found the stairs that led down to the Golden Gate Bridge observation area and gift shop, a round building with glass sides and an iron skeleton, probably the same iron from the bridge. Below the shop, down through the tops of the dark green trees, was brick Fort Point, built around the massive foot of the southern base of the bridge.

The shop was crowded. The “gifts” were grouped by languages. You couldn’t call them trinkets. The “lap throws,” whatever they were, were 129 U.S. dollars, which apparently was a sensational bargain if you were Japanese. Lucy and Les Paul stayed by themselves, as much as it was possible in the packed room.

She dug in her purse and came out with coins for Les for one odd hand-cranked vending machine. A penny and three quarters. The low-tech machine smashed an elongated image of the Golden Gate onto