Babycakes Page 11

“Well …”

  “Just for a jogging segment,” Mary Ann explained. “We needed footage for a voice-over.”

  Brian became her echo. “Footage for a voice-over. That makes sense. Well …” He backed away from the table. “I think they need me in the Back Forty.”

  Moments later, as he’d expected, she cornered him in the kitchen. “O.K. Why are you bent out of shape?”

  He stepped out of the way of another waiter. “It’ll have to wait. This is our busiest time.”

  “I did a little profile on the guy,” she whispered. “Why should that freak you out?”

  “It didn’t freak me out. It … surprised me, that’s all. You said he didn’t want to be on TV.”

  She shrugged. “So I talked him into it.”

  “Right. And made him a beefcake star in the bargain.”

  “Oh, c’mon, Brian.” She ducked as jerry sped by with a tray. “What if I did? Hey … I did that story on the Tom Selleck look-alike contest and you didn’t say a word.”

  He leaned forward and answered in an angry whisper. “The goddamn Tom Selleck look-alike wasn’t living in our fucking house!”

  She shook her head. “I can’t believe you’re threatened by this.”

  Her sanctimoniously modern tone annoyed the hell out of him. “I’d just like to know why you came here to celebrate your big media coup.”

  “Brian …”

  “just … go. It’s no big deal.”

  “Brian, listen to me. I brought him here because I want you guys to be friends. I want the three of us to be friends. I just thought it would be fun if …”

  “O.K., O.K.”

  She gave him a cautious smile, sensing the passage of his anger. “My timing was rotten, I guess, I’m sorry about that. Want me to pick up your laundry?”

  He shook his head.

  “I’ll be home packing, if you need me.” She kissed him on the cheek and walked out of the kitchen. When he returned to the front room three minutes later, she and Simon had already gone.

  Back in the kitchen, Jerry was waiting for him. “Your wife’s friend is a big tipper,”

  “He’s my friend too,” he answered.

  “Really?” Jerry’s lip curled.

  “Yes, really, asshole.”

  Jerry nodded slowly. “Well … it’s convenient, at least.”

  “What the hell do you mean by that?”

  A surly shrug. “Look, man … I only know what I saw.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Well … the guy bears a certain resemblance to you, that’s all.”

  “So?”

  “So … nothing.” He walked away muttering the rest of it. “If the lady wants a matched set, it’s none of my …”

  He was cut short when Brian grabbed him by his collar, spun him around and rammed him against the wall.

  “Watch it,” said Jerry. “You know what Perry said. Do that in here and you’re out on your ass.”

  Brian hesitated. “A very good point.”

  He secured a firmer hold on Jerry’s collar, dragged him into the restaurant, and let fly with a right hook that sent his tormentor hurtling backward into a table full of empty plastic hamburger baskets. The table overturned, dumping Jerry on the floor. Customers scattered. A woman screamed. The fat lady with the autographed menu stood slack-mouthed at the cash register. Brian strode up to her, took the menu from her hands, signed his name with the ballpoint in his pocket, returned the menu, and walked out the door without looking back.

  He didn’t break stride until he had reached the top of Russian Hill, six or seven blocks away. His heart was pounding like crazy as he stopped for a moment outside Swensen’s Ice Cream and considered his next move. He decided to maintain a normal pace for the last block or so. If his boss had already called, it would only increase his humiliation to arrive home out of breath.

  When he got there, ten minutes later, Mary Ann was preoccupied with their escape to the Claremont. She was on her hands and knees in the bathroom, combing the cabinet under the sink for last year’s Coppertone.

  “I’m sure we can buy some there,” he said.

  “I know, but this was my number and everything.”

  “They’ll have your number.”

  She stood up, brushing off her hands. “Aren’t you off work early?”

  He faked her with a smile. “They took mercy on me. I told them we needed to beat the Friday traffic.”

  “Perfect. Let’s do it.” She walked briskly into the bedroom; he followed. “You won’t believe it,” she said, “but I crammed us both into one suitcase.”

  “Great.” He edged closer to the telephone, ready to grab it.

  “I packed your sunglasses with the green lenses. I wasn’t sure if those were …”

  “They’ll do fine,” he said.

  “Well, if you want the others …”

  He hoisted the suitcase. “I want to go.”

  They had very little conversation until the Le Car reached the East Bay. “You know,” said Mary Ann, keeping her eyes on the freeway, “I think Simon was hurt by your abruptness this afternoon.”

  He hesitated before answering. “Then … I’ll apologize to him.”

  “Will you?” She glanced at him hopefully.

  He nodded. “The minute we get back.”

  “Well … whenever. He likes you a lot, Brian.”

  “Good. I’ve got nothing against him.”

  She reached over and rubbed his thigh. “Good.”

  Minutes later, the Claremont materialized on the green hillside above them. “Isn’t it wonderful?” gushed Mary Ann.

  “It turns seventy this year.”

  “It’s a little too white,” he replied.

  “Well … tough titty.”

  “You know what I mean.” He grinned. “It looks like a sanatorium in Switzerland. Sanitarium. Which is it?”

  “Huh?”

  “C’mon. One is for crazy people; the other is for face-lifts and stuff.”

  She shook her head. “They both mean the same thing.”

  “Nah.”

  She looked out the window. “Just drive,” she said.

  When they reached the hotel, they left the Le Car with the doorman and went straight to their room. It was sunny and spacious and overlooked the tennis courts. They smoked a joint and changed into their swimming suits, saying almost nothing for five minutes. Then they headed down to the Jacuzzi adjoining the swimming pool, where the sunshine and the dope and the jet of warm water pulsing at his back lulled him into the gentlest of reveries. The catastrophe at the restaurant seemed like a bad dream.

  Mary Ann submerged herself completely, then rose like a naiad and gazed up at the old hotel. “Pink,” she said finally. “No, peach.”

  He thought he had missed something. “What?”

  “The color they should paint it.”

  He looked up at the hotel before turning to smile at her. She returned the smile, then grazed his calf with the side of her foot.

  “You know what?” he said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t like anybody as much as I like you.”

  She skipped a beat before replying, “Then why don’t you tell me the truth?”

  The look on her face said it all. “You got a call?” he asked.

  She nodded. “From Perry?”

  Another nod.

  “Did he can me?”

  “Brian … you broke the guy’s jaw. They could just as easily have had you arrested.”

  He thought about that but said nothing.

  “They took him to St. Sebastian’s. They had to wire his jaw.”

  He nodded.

  “What was it this time?” she said.

  He had no intention of adding jealousy to his list of cardinal sins. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

  “Swell. Terrific.”

  “Look … he made another crack about a gay customer. He told an AIDS joke. I didn’t mean to hit him that hard. He’d been spoiling for
it all day….”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about it?”

  He shrugged. “I was going to. I didn’t want to fuck up our weekend before it started.”

  She stood there blinking at him.

  He still wasn’t sure, so he asked again: “They canned me, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry you had to be there to catch the flak.”

  “He was nice about it,” she said.

  A small boy and his father, both brilliantly redheaded, trotted past his field of vision on their way to the locker rooms. The boy tripped on the laces of his Keds, and the father stopped to tie them for him. The tableau cut Brian to the quick, underscoring everything that was missing from his life.

  “Earth to Brian, earth to Brian.” Mary Ann coaxed him back into the here and now with a bemused smile.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “What can I tell you?”

  “I don’t want you to be sorry. I want you to tell me the truth. Jesus, Brian … if we can’t talk to each other, who can we talk to?”

  “You’re right.” He nodded, feeling the weight of his guilt begin to lift.

  “It’s not just you,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well … I’m just as bad about that sometimes.”

  “About what?” he asked.

  “You know … telling the whole truth. I gloss over things because I’m afraid of … damaging what we have … because I don’t want to lose you.”

  He had never known her to lie, and he was touched by this unlikely confession. She wasn’t explaining her own motivation so much as letting him know that she understood his. He cupped his hand against her wet cheek and smiled at her. She stuck her tongue out at him, ducked under the water, and goosed him. The crisis had passed.

  He noticed that Mary Ann drank a little more wine than usual at dinner, but he matched her glass for glass. By the time their raspberries and cream had arrived, they were both just a couple of silly grins hovering in the candlelight. A gut instinct told him this was the moment to open Topic A again.

  “I hated that job, you know.”

  She reached over and stroked the hair on the back of his hand. “I know.”

  “Sooner or later I would’ve quit anyway, and this way … wasn’t half bad.”

  She waited awhile before saying anything. “I’m kinda sorry I missed it, actually. It didn’t look dumb, did it?”

  He shook his head.

  “Heroic?”

  He tilted his hand from side to side to indicate something in between. She laughed. “And now,” he said softly, “I have all this time on my hands.”

  Her smile became a photograph of a smile. She knew exactly what he was saying.

  “You said to tell the truth,” he said.

  She nodded. Her smile had disappeared.

  “The way I see it, John Lennon was a househusband, and he did all right … and I bet he spent a lot more time with that kid than Yoko ever did….”

  “Brian …”

  “I’m not saying you wouldn’t love the kid or anything. I just mean you wouldn’t have to be as involved with it as I would be. Hell, women bore the brunt of that for centuries. There’s no reason we can’t make it work the other way around. Don’t you see? Wouldn’t it be great to have this little person around who’s … a mixture of you and me?”

  Her face was unreadable as she pushed back her chair and dropped her napkin on the table. Was she pissed? Did she think he had gotten himself fired to force her into this position? “What about our raspberries?” he asked.

  “I’m not hungry,” she replied.

  “Are you … upset?”

  “No.” She cast her eyes at the neighboring tables. “I brought us here to tell you something, but I don’t want to do it here.”

  “O.K. Fine.” He got up. “What about the check?”

  “It’s on the tab,” she said.

  They went back to their room, where she brushed her teeth and told him to put on his windbreaker.

  “Where are we going?” he asked.

  “You’ll see,” she said.

  After slipping into one of his old Pendleton shirts, she produced a large brass key and opened the door leading to the suite above theirs in the lower. They passed through this space, climbing still another stairway in the semidarkness.

  She flung open the last door with a flourish. They had reached a tiny, open-air observation deck at the summit of the tower. Before them stretched the entire Bay Area from San Mateo to Marin, ten thousand electric constellations glimmering beneath a purple sky.

  She moved to the edge of the parapet. “This should do nicely.”

  He joined her. “For what?”

  “Just be quiet now. You’ll screw up the ritual.” She unbuttoned the pocket of the Pendleton and removed a pink plastic case roughly the size of a compact. She held it up like a sacred talisman. “Farewell, little Ortho-Novums. Mama doesn’t want you anymore.”

  In a flash, he realized what she was doing. “Jesus, you dizzy …”

  “Shh …” Her arm swung forward in an arc, launching the pills into the night, a tiny pink spaceship bound for the stars. She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted: “Did you see that, God? Do you read me?”

  He threw back his head and roared with joy.

  “You approve?” She was smiling into the wind, looking more beautiful than he had ever seen her.

  “I don’t deserve you,” he said.

  “The hell you don’t.” She took his hand and pulled him toward the stairway. “C’mon, turkey, let’s go make babies.”

  Enter Miss Treves

  MICHAEL HAD ALWAYS REGARDED JET LAG AS AN affectation of the rich, but his first three days in London changed his mind about that forever. He awoke without fail at the magic hour of three o’clock—sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon. His disorientation was heightened by the fact that he found himself in a house where the telephone never rang and the drums never stopped.

  The drums were actually next door, but their basic rhythms were easily audible at dawn, when he invariably lay in four inches of lukewarm water and watched the cold, gray light of another rainy day creep across the bogus blue sky of his bathroom ceiling.

  In search of a routine, he touched base with his launderette, his post office, his nearest market. Then he trekked into other parts of town to check out familiar haunts from bygone limes: a rowdy pub in Wapping called the Prospect of Whitby (more touristy than he had remembered), Carnaby Street (once mod and cheesy, now punk and cheesy), the charming old cemetery in Highgate where Karl Marx was buried (still charming, still buried).

  When the skies cleared on the third afternoon, he ambled through Kensington and Chelsea to the river, then followed the Embankment to Cleopatra’s Needle. As a sixteen-year-old, he had been intrigued by the Egyptian obelisk because the bronze lions flanking it—when viewed from a certain angle—had strongly suggested erect cocks. True, almost everything had suggested that when he was sixteen.

  He left the river, mildly disenchanted by his reunion with the lions, and threaded his way through the streets in the general direction of Trafalgar Square. For reasons of economy, or so he told himself, he ate lunch at a McDonald’s near the Charing Cross tube station, feeling wretchedly American about it until the man in front of him ordered “a strawbry shike to tike awy.”

  Arriving in Piccadilly Circus, he bought a copy of Gay News and perused it amidst a crowd of German backpackers assembled at the foot of the Eros statue. Judging from the classified ads, gay Englishmen were perpetually searching for attractive “uncles” (daddies) with “stashes” (mustaches), who were “non-scene” (never in bars) and “non-camp” (butch). A surprisingly large number of advertisers made a point of saying that they owned homes and cars. On the women’s news front, a group of North London lesbians was organizing a Saturday jog to the tomb of Radclyffe Hall, and everyone was looking forward to Sappho Disco Night at the Goat in Boots, Drummo
nd Street.

  Back at Colville Crescent, he did his best to rid the bathroom of its stench by anointing the ratty carpet with a concentrated room deodorant he had found at Boots the Chemist. (In some ways, English drugstores were the most unsettling institutions of all. The boxes and bottles looked pretty much like the ones in the States, but the names had been changed to protect God-knows-whom. Was Anadin the same thing as Anacin? Did it matter?) He shook the little amber bottle vigorously, releasing a few drops of the pungent liquid. It merged instantly with the pee smell, eliminating nothing. He flung the bottle into the wastebasket and stormed into the bedroom, where he searched his suitcase for the last of the joints Mrs. Madrigal had rolled for him.

  He was on the verge of lighting it when a rude noise startled him. It took him several seconds to realize that he had just heard his door buzzer for the first time. Returning the joint to its hiding place, he left the apartment, walked down the dark corridor and opened the front door.

  The woman who stood before him was about sixty. Her hair was gray and framed her face nicely with Imogene Coca bangs. She wore a brown tweed suit and sensible brown shoes. And that, as Simon had put it, was everything but the obvious. She was also no taller than the doorknob.

  “Oh,” she said in a startled chipmunk voice. “I saw the lights. I thought it best to ring first.”

  He sought to reassure her. “You must be Miss Treves. I’m a friend of Simon’s, Michael Tolliver.”

  “Oh … an American.”

  He laughed nervously. “Right. We swapped apartments, in fact. Simon’s in San Francisco.”

  She grunted. “I know all about the naughty lad.”

  “He’s fine,” he said. “He asked me to give you his love and tell you he’s coming back right after Easter.”

  This news provoked another grunt.

  “He just sort of … fell in love with San Francisco.”

  “That’s what he told you, did he?”

  “Well … more or less. Look, I’m not very settled in, but … can I offer you a cup of coffee? Or tea?”

  She thought for a moment, then nodded. “Don’t mind if I do.”

  “Good.”

  She led the way back to the living room and took a seat—her feet dangling just above the floor—in a low-slung chintz armchair. The slightly underscaled proportions of the chair seemed to suggest it had been provided specifically for her use.