Sometimes you feel like your love affair with this city is turning into a bad marriage. It was so wonderful at first, so promising. You chose San Francisco 15 years ago on a whim, because it is a city full of people with whims. You had been traveling for a year after college, and when your money ran out you knew you had to land someplace where there was a real city with real nature nearby. You were lured by San Francisco's improbable terrain, its old-worldish charm and its history of bemused tolerance for all kinds of misfits. You figured it was a place where you could settle and still have the sense of traveling, of wandering well-known streets and always being surprised. So you drove someone's else's big Buick Riviera all the way west, and when you finally saw the Golden Gate Bridge you had a giddy sense of amazement that you had found what you were looking for. That you were finally home.

The first phase of romance ended with a series of little disappointments -- bad public transportation, crazed roommates, high rents, low pay, impossible parking. Your affection for the city became more complicated, but your struggles made you that much more loyal. Every so often -- walking in the arboretum in Golden Gate Park where the irises and poppies spread like common grass, watching a parade of ornery bicyclists -- you'd be amazed all over again at the city. You remember the day after the big earthquake in 1989, a warm blue day, when everything in the city was shut down but its beauty. Everybody was walking around outside, happy to be alive in such a splendid, sometimes terrible city. A city worth all the risks.

But in the past few years, you've watched the character of the city changing, with baby-faced Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and Lexus-driving lawyers pushing the artists, dreamers and immigrants into tighter and tighter corners. You married a delightful man who loved exploring the city as much as you do, and you saw him change, too, from a scruffy public defender who followed the Grateful Dead into a highly paid attorney who wore Italian suits, drank single-malt scotch and cheated on his wife.

The city you knew so well together stopped sparkling. After you got divorced, everything became dull. The romance left San Francisco the way the youth and attractiveness drained out of your face. You became invisible on the streets and only saw the cracked and dirty sidewalks. Walking outside your Haight-Ashbury flat, you saw more and more homeless people every day, sleeping under cardboard, using their dirty bags of possessions as pillows. You tried to avoid them, but they were too familiar, every year a little more raw. Now you sometimes wonder if it would just be better to leave.

Then one day a postcard of a silver propeller plane lands on your doorstep from the French professor you last saw in Milan for a weekend in spring. He had casually mentioned that he'd like to visit you in San Francisco sometime, and you said sure, knowing it would never happen. Now he writes in his poor English that he is "very exciting to come," and he has already bought his ticket to San Francisco, departing 12 days after he arrives. During this time, he says, he will be entirely under your responsibility. He is leaving you to decide everything for your amorous trip since you know his tastes: big, comfy beds.

You drop the postcard because it is impossible. How can you spend almost two weeks on your own turf with a man you have known for only a few days in a fantasy world of islands and antique hotels? You won't be able to sustain the romance. He will become bored with you and your mundane little world. He will sneer at your shabby flat and think the art is bad and that you have way too many shoes hidden under the bed. He'll be appalled at how often you check your messages and e-mail. He'll realize that you aren't sexy and voluptuous, you're fat. After believing for a few short days in Italy that you are a lively, amusing, well-read woman of the world, he will leave understanding that you are just another ugly American. And you will never see him again.

Not knowing what else to do, you find a postcard of a couple driving a 1950s convertible on the beach and write that you can't wait to see him, but you leave the card in your bag for days, finally remembering to drop it, dog-eared, into the mailbox. He sends back a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge disappearing into the fog and says he's very excited, more and more. You realize he really has his sights set on San Francisco. He has spent only three days in the United States in his life, in New York 15 years ago, and now you are responsible for his once-in-a-lifetime trip to California.

Well, you say to yourself, he's a lucky guy. And then you get out the maps. You come up with a plan for 10 perfect days in California, your California, and you send him a postcard promising him an island, too.

The day finally comes when the professor is supposed to arrive. You spend the whole morning taking down all the art in the house, rearranging it and then putting it back where it was in the first place. You change your clothes several times, too, and eventually just put on your worn jeans and cowboy boots because you figure he might as well know right off the bat that you are not even trying to impersonate a European intellectual or a delicate French beauty. You are a big American blond.

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