Mary Ann in Autumn
MARY ANN IN AUTUMN
A TALE OF THE CITY NOVEL
ARMISTEAD MAUPIN
For Laura Linney
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
—T. S. ELIOT
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Epigraph
Chapter 1 - Single-Family Dwelling
Chapter 2 - The Politics of the Park
Chapter 3 - Solid Proof
Chapter 4 - The Puppy Stuff
Chapter 5 - The Truest Alarm
Chapter 6 - Not to Be Alone
Chapter 7 - Somebody to Hang With
Chapter 8 - Signing
Chapter 9 - Lady Parts
Chapter 10 - A Force for Good
Chapter 11 - An Underlying Agenda
Chapter 12 - The Elusive Leia
Chapter 13 - A Nibble on the Line
Chapter 14 - Dwelling on Things
Chapter 15 - To Save Some Guy
Chapter 16 - Like a Dog Before an Earthquake
Chapter 17 - A Thing About Cliffs
Chapter 18 - Unclean Urges
Chapter 19 - Refuge Once Removed
Chapter 20 - Look Again
Chapter 21 - An Old Familiar Impatience
Chapter 22 - Sacred Garments
Chapter 23 - Beauty Sleep
Chapter 24 - Personal Effects
Chapter 25 - Resident Darkness
Chapter 26 - A Grace Period
Chapter 27 - Waiting for Word
Chapter 28 - The Last Thing She Needed
Chapter 29 - The Way She Wanted It
Chapter 30 - The Anna She Remembered
Chapter 31 - Unscattered Ashes
Chapter 32 - Back Before Bedtime
Chapter 33 - Those Damn Tangerines
Chapter 34 - A Man on the Verge
Chapter 35 - All the Man Stuff
Chapter 36 - Bad Juju
Chapter 37 - Treat
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Armistead Maupin
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter 1
Single-Family Dwelling
There should be a rabbit hole was what she was thinking. There should be something about this hillside, some lingering sense memory—the view of Alcatraz, say, or the foghorns or the mossy smell of the planks beneath her feet—that would lead her back to her lost wonderland. Everything around her was familiar but somehow foreign to her own experience, like a place she had seen in a movie but had never actually visited. She had climbed these weathered steps—what?—thousands of times before, but there wasn’t a hint of homecoming, nothing to take her back to where she used to be.
The past doesn’t catch up with us, she thought. It escapes from us.
At the landing she stopped to catch her breath. Beneath her, the street intersecting with Barbary Lane tilted dizzily toward the bay, a collision of perspectives, like one of those wonky Escher prints that were everywhere in the seventies. The bay was bright blue today, the hard fierce blue of a gas flame. If there was fog rolling in—and there must be, given the insistence of those horns—she couldn’t see it from here.
When she reached the path at the top of the steps, one of her heels got stuck in the paving stones. Yanking it free with a grunt, she chided herself for not leaving her Ferragamos back at the Four Seasons. Those stones, if memory served, had been used as ballast on the sailing ships that came around the horn—or so her landlady Mrs. Madrigal had claimed, once upon a time. Twenty years later the chunky granite blocks looked suspiciously ordinary, like the pavers in her driveway back in Connecticut.
As soon as she caught sight of the lych-gate at Number 28, a flock of wild parrots swooped low over the lane, cackling like crones. Those birds—or ones just like them—had been here when she was here, long before they became global celebrities in a popular documentary. She remembered how proud she had felt when she saw that film in Darien, and how utterly irrational that feeling had been, as if she were claiming intimacy with someone she had known slightly in high school who had grown up to be famous.
Those birds did not belong to her anymore.
The lych-gate was the same, only new. The redwood shingles on its roof had been crumbly with dry rot when she moved to the East Coast in the late eighties. Now they were made of slate—or a good imitation thereof. The gate itself, once creaky but welcoming, had been fitted with a lock and a buzzer and something under the eaves that looked like a security camera. So much for a quick snoop around the garden.
She peered through a hole in the lattice at what she could see of the house. The shingle siding had been replaced, and fairly recently. The trim around the windows was painted a hard, glossy black. There were now French doors opening onto the courtyard in roughly the spot where Mrs. Madrigal’s front door had been. (Had anyone even thought to save that door with its wonderful stained-glass panels?) Most of the outside stairways, she noticed with a shiver, had been removed or modified to serve the transformation of an apartment house into—what was the official term?—a Single-Family Dwelling.
We had been a family, she thought. Even in our separate dwellings.
From this angle, of course, she couldn’t see the little house on the roof, the funky matchbox studio Mrs. Madrigal’s tenants had referred to as “the pentshack.” Her guess was it no longer existed, given the extensive nature of this remodeling. It had probably been replaced by a deck—or another floor entirely—and she wasn’t sure how to feel about that. Her memories of the place held both dread and delight.
TWO BLOCKS AWAY, WHILE LOOKING for lunch, she found the corner mom-and-pop still intact, still called the Searchlight Market. Next door her old Laundromat had been stylishly renovated and a little too cutely renamed “The Missing Sock.” It pleased her to find the original thirties’ lettering still silvering the plate glass at Woo’s Cleaners, though the place was obviously empty. The windows were blocked by pale blue wrapping paper, the very paper her laundry had once been wrapped in. Across the street, a pristine gallery of tiny objets had sprouted next to what had once been Marcel & Henri, the butcher shop where she had sometimes splurged on pâté, just to keep from feeling like a secretary.
And there was Swensen’s, the ice cream shop at Hyde and Union that had been her consolation on more than one Saturday night when she had stayed in with Mary Tyler Moore. This was the original Swensen’s, the one Mr. Swensen himself had opened in the late forties, and he had still been running it when she was here. She was about to stop in for a cone, just for old times’ sake, when she spotted the fire trucks parked on Union.
Rounding the corner, she found dozens of onlookers assembled beneath a big sooty hole on the second floor of a house. The crisis seemed to have passed; the air was pungent with the smell of wet embers, and the firemen, though obviously weary, were business-as-usual as they tugged at a serpentine tangle of hoses. One of the younger ones, a frisky Prince Harry redhead, seemed aware of his lingering audience and played to the balcony with every manly move.
We do love our firefighters, she thought, though she had long ago forfeited her right to the Municipal We. She was no more a San Franciscan now than the doughy woman in a SUPPORT OUR TROOPS sweatshirt climbing off the cable car at the intersection. She herself hadn’t used a cable car for years, yet every handrail and plank was as vividly familiar as her first bicycle. This one had a light blue panel along the side, marking it as a Bicentennial model. They were built the year she’d arrived in the city.
She waited for the cable car to pass, considering something that eventually sent her into Swensen’s to address the middle-aged white man behind the counter.
“I used to order something here,” she said, as winsomely as possible, “but I can’t remember the name of it. It was thirty years ago, so you may not . . .”
“Swiss Orange Chip.”
“Excuse me?”
“Chocolate with orange bits, right?”
“Yes!”
“That’s Swiss Orange Chip.”
She gaped at him. “How on earth did you do that?”
He shrugged. “It’s the flavor people can never remember the name of.”
“Oh . . . right.” She gave him a curdled smile, feeling irredeemably average. “It’s really good, at any rate.”
He made her a sugar cone with a single scoop. Without tasting it, she carried it half a block to Russell Street, the little alley off Hyde where Jack Kerouac had been holed up for six months in the early fifties, working on a draft of On the Road. Her first husband, Brian, had brought her here when they started dating, since the place held great significance for him. Standing before the A-frame cottage like a pilgrim at Lourdes, he had told her only that Neal Cassady had lived there, and she, God help her Cleveland soul, had asked if that was one of David Cassidy’s brothers. He was gentle about it at the time—he wanted to get laid, after all—but he wouldn’t let her forget it for years. Had she paid more attention to that moment and what it said about both of them, she might have saved them from a marriage that was pretty much doomed from the start.
Now, according to the daughter they had adopted, Brian was out living his own version of On the Road, driving his beloved Winnebago from one national park to another, apparently more at ease with life than he had ever been. He was seven years older than she, which made him sixty-fo
ur now, an age that could only be darkly ironic to a boomer who was finally facing it. Will you still need me? Will you still feed me?
Leaving the Cassady cottage, she headed down the street with her ice cream, finally reuniting with the dark citrus tang of Swiss Orange Chip. The taste of it, as she had suspected, swept her back on a tide of subliminal memory to a much younger self.
It was the taste of a lonely Saturday night.
BACK AT THE SEARCHLIGHT SHE bought a turkey sandwich and ate it by the tennis courts in the leafy little park at the crest of Russian Hill. For a moment she considered taking the cable car to the Wharf for an Irish coffee at the Buena Vista, but that would only delay the deeply unpleasant mission at hand. She had told her Mouse she’d explain everything as soon as she hit town, and since she’d been sobbing the last time they talked, postponement was no longer an option. But how she dreaded putting it into words.
She dug her iPhone out of her shoulder bag and dialed his number. It rang six or seven times before he picked up: “Mary Ann?”
“Yeah.”
“Thank God. I was starting to worry.”
“Sorry . . . I just needed . . .” She let the thought trail off. She had no earthly idea what she had needed.
“Are you at the Four Seasons?”
“No. Russian Hill.”
“Why’d you go there?”
“I don’t know. Dumb idea.”
“Do you wanna come here?”
“You’re at home?”
“Yeah. Ben’s at the dog park. We’ll have the place to ourselves.”
That was something of a relief. Ben was a lovely guy, but what she had to say would be hard enough to share with one person.
Chapter 2
The Politics of the Park
The dog park was a fenced-in parcel of packed sand next to the Eureka Valley Recreation Center on Collingwood Street. When Ben reached the gate, Roman was already straining on his leash in anticipation of the free-for-all awaiting him. There were at least a dozen dogs today, among them two of Roman’s favorites: a frisky ridgeback named Brokeback and a Portuguese water dog who, except for a smudge of white on his chest, was almost Roman’s double. Ben often had to explain to strangers that Roman wasn’t a Portie but a black Labradoodle, one of a growing number of poodle hybrids (golden doodles, schnoodles, even Saint Berdoodles) to be found around the Castro these days. But he hated it when people called them “designer dogs.” He liked to think of Roman as a mutt—a term the president-elect had recently used to describe himself.
Ben found something reassuring in the anonymous fellowship of the dog park. Most of the people who brought their dogs here didn’t know each other on the outside, yet he had seen them hug each other when someone left for vacation. Their offhanded intimacy defied boundaries of race, gender, age, sexual orientation, and—every now and then—mental health. And even the serious crazies somehow seemed less so when immersed in the loving lunacy of dogs. It was a temporary cure for everything.
Ben sat down on a bench that would not have looked out of place in a formal English garden. There were half a dozen of these along the perimeter fence, the result of a beautification effort led by Sister Chastity Boner, a dog-loving member of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Winter had been a long time coming this year—not to mention the rain—so he settled against the bench and gorged on the remains of autumn. There was a bolster of fog already rolling over Twin Peaks, but it had yet to smother the sun. The abstract mural on the south wall of the rec center was still ablaze with color, and the frolicking dogs were still casting long shadows on the sand.
A heavyset old man in a navy blue parka sat down next to Ben on the bench. “Roman’s had a haircut,” he said.
Ben nodded sheepishly. “We let him get too rasta. The groomer had to take him down a lot more than usual.”
“Looks good,” said the old man. “Very sporty.”
“Thanks, Cliff.” He knew the guy’s name because Cliff was often here with his dog, a shivery little piebald terrier named Blossom, who, for some peculiar reason, fascinated Roman more than most of the other dogs in the park. “I think he’s a little embarrassed about the haircut,” Ben added. “He’d rather be shaggy.”
“Aw, look. He’s forgiven you already.”
Roman had his nose wedged in Blossom’s butt.
“That’s what I like about ’em,” said Cliff. “They get on with things and don’t hold a grudge. They don’t dwell on the past.”
“No, I know. He ate my Sonicare this morning and hasn’t given it a second thought.”
“Your what?”
“My electric toothbrush.”
The old man smiled, exposing a row of teeth that could have used a toothbrush some time ago. “Our unit had a dog in ’Nam. Little brown mutt the mamasan brought to our hooch one day. Plannin’ on eatin’ it, I guess. Sweet little guy. We made him our mascot for a coupla months, until they transferred us.”
“What do you think happened to him?”
“I know what happened to him. Chief petty officer shot him.”
“Shit.”
“Had to. We couldn’t take him with us. He woulda starved. Or got eaten.”
Ben sighed. “I guess so.”
“Did you notice our latest addition?” Cliff asked.
Ben followed the old man’s wobbly finger to a glossy red fire hydrant sitting squarely in the middle of the sandy plain. “What’s it doing there?”
Cliff shrugged. “For the dogs to pee on, I guess.”
“It’s a joke then.”
“Maybe, but it’s a real fire hydrant. Bolted right into the ground. It was here when I came in this morning.”
“It’s fucking dangerous,” said a woman who’d been eavesdropping on their conversation. She was roughly Ben’s age—certainly no older than forty—with garish Amy Winehouse eye makeup to compensate for her skeletal Amy Winehouse limbs. “Karma is clinically blind, you know. She could knock the shit out of herself.”
Ben didn’t know which of these dogs was Karma, but he saw the woman’s point. The hydrant was an immoveable iron stump, and these dogs yielded to nothing once they got going. Why compromise their safety for some kitschy human effort at witticism?
“Anybody know who did it?” Ben asked.
“Not me,” said Cliff, almost as though he were a grade-schooler who’d been asked to snitch on a friend. Cliff kept his profile low when it came to the politics of the park. He was friendly enough, but usually limited his talk to the dogs themselves, avoiding all discussion of their owners. Ben sometimes thought of him as “Mr. Cellophane” from Chicago. ’Cause you can look right through me, walk right by me, and never know I’m there.
“I have my suspicions,” said Amy Winehouse, persisting in her investigation of the Great Fire Hydrant Mystery. Now she was aiming her caked turquoise lids toward a cluster of dog owners chatting in the middle of the park.
The group included a chubby Asian teenager, a middle-aged white woman in an Obama sweatshirt and a pair of look-alike ginger bears dispensing treats to their Jack Russell. Ben felt a peculiar sympathy for the culprit, whoever it was. He (or she or they) must have believed that the others would be deeply amused by the fire hydrant.
But this was the wrong crowd to be second-guessing. The hardcore regulars saw the park as an extension of their homes, fiercely debating every change that came along. When, for instance, the new redwood planters were installed along the fence, there were those who fretted that smaller dogs might get cornered there by the larger ones. The exact distance between the planters and the fence was a subject of grave deliberation for weeks. Ditto the contents of the planters, since some of the prettiest flowering trees dropped blossoms that were potentially poisonous. (“But only if eaten in large quantities or boiled into a tea,” Ben’s husband had explained—and Michael, after all, was a gardener. “There’s nothing to sweat until you see a Doberman with a teapot.”)