"I promise not to bother you," he said, and his face was doing the dangerous thing it did, the grin that assumed you were in on the joke.
"You already have," said Mina Prokop, and took his hand, and climbed up, and sat down anyway, on the front bench, right behind the gripman, where the view was best.
He reached down and closed the grip on the cable, and the car jerked and moved, and they climbed Powell Street into the fog, past the Sir Francis Drake, where there was no doorman to wave at, and he rang the bell anyway. At the top of Nob Hill, at California, he let go of the cable, and the car rolled free over the crossing under nobody's power, and in the middle of that, in the four seconds when nobody was holding on to anything, he turned around and bent down and kissed her, and she kissed him back, and Manny on the rear brake said, "Oh, for crying out loud," and somewhere under the street the cable ran on, nine and a half miles an hour, the way it had run for a hundred years, never stopping, pulling the whole lit city up its hills.
When he straightened up and took hold of the cable again, she was laughing. She could not remember the last time she had laughed out loud in public.
"Where does this go?" she said. "After the top?"
"Down to the Wharf, and then the barn on Washington Street. They put her to bed. I could show you the wheels. Fourteen feet across, turning in the dark, they never stop. It's the best thing in the city and nobody's ever seen it at one in the morning." He glanced back at her. "After that, I don't know. That's the honest answer. I don't know what comes after that."
"Neither do I."
"Doesn't that bother you? You like to get every word."
Mina thought about it, holding on to the brass pole with one hand, the fog wet on her face and the Bay somewhere out ahead of them in the dark, invisible, waiting at the corner of Hyde and Chestnut to have the sheet pulled off it.
"Talk," she said. "I'll listen. I'm not writing any of this down."
And he did, and she did, and the car went over the crest of the hill.