Further Tales of the City Read online

  “ ‘This morning, while talking to the charming and delightful black man who parks cars in the garage next to L’Etoile, it occurred to me how truly blessed we are to live in a town that’s just chock full of so many interesting races, creeds and colors.’ ”

  Tony Hughes moaned and rolled his eyes. “The stupid twat thinks she’s Eleanor Roosevelt now.”

  Arch continued: “‘As a simple country girl from Grass Valley…’”

  More groans from everyone.

  “‘As a simple country girl from Grass Valley, it gives me such joy and fulfillment to count myself among the friends of such well-known black people as Kathleen Cleaver, wife of the noted militant, and such distinguished Jewish persons as Dr. Heinrich Viertel (author of Probing the Id) and Ethel Merman, whom I met when she came through The City plugging her fabulous new disco album.’”

  This time there were shrieks. Tony jerked the magazine out of Arch’s hands. “She didn’t say that! You made that up!” Arch yielded the floor to Tony, who obviously wanted to continue the reading.

  Almost unnoticed, Arch slipped away from the table to deal with a situation which may have reached crisis proportions: Cleavon had not shown up with the coffee. And Chuck Lord had not returned from the bathroom.

  Purple with rage, Arch listened outside the bathroom door, then flung it open ingloriously.

  Cleavon was seated on the black onyx sink, holding one nostril shut while Chuck Lord spaded cocaine into the other. Showing not the slightest trace of remorse, Chuck smirked and returned the paraphernalia to the pocket of his Alexander Julian jacket.

  Arch eyed his guest murderously. “Come back to de raft, Huck honey. You are missed.”

  When Chuck was gone, Cleavon climbed down from the sink and sucked the crystals noisily into his sinuses. His employer was livid but controlled. “We are ready for coffee now, Cleavon.”

  “Yo,” said the servant.

  Out in the dining room, Peter Cipriani brayed a drunken riddle to the returning Chuck Lord: “Hey, Chuckie! What’s twelve inches and white?”

  “What?” came the wary reply.

  “Nothing,” shrieked Peter. “Absolutely nothing!”

  Arch Gidde could have died.

  True Prue

  PEOPLE SAID THE MEANEST THINGS ABOUT PRUE GIROUX.

  Her willowy good looks, they said, had gotten her everything she had ever wanted but respect. When people spoke of her divorce from Reg Giroux, it was Reg who had always been “the nice one.” He had also, by the strangest coincidence, been the one with the forty million dollars.

  Prue had some of that now, thank God. Plus a Tony Hail townhouse on Nob Hill. Plus enough Galanos gowns to last her through all of the Nancy Reagan Administration, even if—knock on wood—it lasted eight years.

  The real secret of her power, however, lay in her column in Western Gentry magazine. It didn’t matter, Prue had discovered, if your blood wasn’t blue and your wealth was all alimony. So what if you slipped up and pronounced Thaïs “Thayz” or applauded after the first movement or held a black tie function in midafternoon? If you wrote a social column, the bastards would always let you in.

  Not all of them, of course. Some of the old-line San Mateo types (she had taught herself not to say Hillsborough) still regarded Prue from a chilly distance. The young lionesses, however, seemed grimly aware that their niches would never be secure without at least nominal recognition by the society press.

  So they invited her to lunch.

  Not to dinner usually, just to lunch. When, for instance, Ann Getty threw her February soiree for Baryshnikov at Bali’s, it wasn’t really necessary to include Prue in the proceedings; the guests simply phoned her the juicy particulars the morning after.

  Prue didn’t mind, really. She’d come a long way, and she knew it. Her penchant for dubbing herself “a simple country girl from Grass Valley” was no affectation. She was a simple country girl from Grass Valley—one of seven children raised by a tractor salesman and his Seventh Day Adventist wife.

  When she met Reg Giroux, then president of a medium-sized aeronautical engineering firm, Prue was still a fledgling dental hygienist; she was, in fact, flossing his teeth at the time. Reg’s friends were horrified when he announced their engagement at the Bohemian Grove summer encampment.

  Still, the marriage seemed to work for a while. Prue and Reg built a sprawling vacation home in the Mother Lode country which became the site of many lavish, theme-oriented costume galas. At her Pink-and-Green Ball Prue played hostess to Erica Jong, Tony Orlando and Joan Baez, all in the same afternoon. She could scarcely contain herself.

  That, eventually, became the problem. Complacent in his aristocracy, Reg Giroux did not share or comprehend his wife’s seemingly insatiable appetite for celebrities. Prue’s weekly Nob Hill star luncheon, which she had grandly labeled “The Forum,” was so universally scorned by the old-liners that even her husband had begun to feel the sting.

  So he had bailed out.

  Luckily for Prue, the divorce coincided conveniently with the arrest and conviction (on indecent exposure charges) of Western Gentry society columnist Carson Callas. So Prue invited the magazine’s editor to lunch and made her pitch. The editor, a country boy himself, mistook Prue’s studied elegance for patrician grace and hired her on the spot.

  She was her own woman now.

  Prue’s three-year-old Russian wolfhound, Vuitton, had been missing for nearly a week. Prue was frantic. To make matters worse, the man at Park & Rec was being annoyingly vague about the crisis.

  “Yes ma’am, I seem to remember that report. Where did you say you lost him again?”

  Prue heaved a weary sigh. “In the tree ferns. Across from the conservatory. He was with me one moment, and the next he was …”

  “Last week?”

  “Yes. Saturday.”

  “One moment, please.” She heard him rifling through files. The jerk was whistling “Oh Where Oh Where Has My Little Dog Gone.” Several minutes passed before he returned to the phone. “No ma’am. Zilch. I checked twice. Nobody’s reported a Russian wolfhound in the last …”

  “You haven’t seen any suspicious Cambodians?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Cambodians. Refugees. You know.”

  “Yes ma’am, but I don’t see what …”

  “Do I have to spell it out? They eat dogs, you know. They’ve been eating people’s dogs!”

  Silence.

  “I read it in the Chronicle,” Prue added.

  Another pause, and then: “Look, ma’am. How ‘bout I ask the mounted patrol to keep their eyes open, O.K.? With a dog like that, though, the chances of dognapping are pretty high. I wish I could be more helpful, but I can’t.”

  Prue thanked him and hung up. Poor Vuitton. His fate lay in the hands of incompetents. Somewhere in the Tenderloin the Boat People could be eating sweet-and-sour wolfhound, and Prue was helpless. Helpless.

  She took a ten minute walk in Huntington Park to calm her nerves before writing the column. When she returned, her secretary reported that Frannie Halcyon had called to invite Prue to lunch tomorrow “to discuss a matter of utmost urgency.”

  Frannie Halcyon was the reigning Grande Dame of Hillsborough. She had never even communicated with the likes of Prue Giroux, much less summoned her to the family estate for lunch.

  “A matter of utmost urgency.”

  What on earth could that be?

  The Matriarch

  SOMETIMES FRANNIE COULDN’T HELP WONDERING whether there was a curse on Halcyon Hill. It made as much sense as anything when she stopped to consider the horrid consequences that had befallen the members of her family. At sixty-four, she was the sole surviving Halcyon, the last frayed remnant of a dynasty that had all but capitulated to death, disease and destruction.

  Edgar, her husband, succumbed to “bum kidneys” (his term) on Christmas Eve, 1976.

  Beauchamp, her son-in-law, perished the following year in a fiery crash in the Broadway tunnel. />
  Faust, her beloved Great Dane, passed away shortly thereafter.

  DeDe, her daughter and Beauchamp’s estranged wife, gave birth to half-Chinese twins in late 1977 and fled to Guyana with a woman friend of questionable origin.

  The Jonestown Massacre. Even now, three years after the event, those words could pounce on Frannie from a page of newsprint, prickly and poisonous as the fangs of a viper.

  Edgar, Beauchamp, Faust and DeDe. Horror upon horror. Indignity upon indignity.

  And now, the ultimate humiliation.

  She had finally been forced to invite Prue Giroux to lunch.

  Emma appeared on the sunporch with a tray of Mai Tais.

  “A little refreshment?” asked Frannie.

  The columnist flashed her syrupy little-girl smile. “It’s a teensy bit early for me, thanks.”

  Frannie wanted to kick her. Instead, she accepted a drink from Emma with a gracious nod, sipped it daintily, and smiled right back at this hopelessly common woman. “By the way,” she said, “I find your column … most amusing.”

  Prue beamed. “I’m so glad, Frannie. I do my best to keep it light.”

  “Yes. It’s very light.” Inside, Frannie was raging. How dare this creature address her by her first name?

  “As far as I’m concerned,” Prue continued, obviously developing a familiar theme, “there is far too much ugliness in this world, and if each of us lit just one little candle … well, you know.”

  Frannie saw the opening she needed. “I suppose you know about my daughter.”

  “Yes.” The columnist’s face became a mask of tragedy. “It must have been awful for you.”

  “It was. It is.”

  “I can’t even imagine what it must have been like.”

  “Most people can’t.” Frannie took another sip of her Mai Tai. “Except maybe Catherine Hearst. She comes to visit sometimes. She’s been terribly sweet. Uh … do you mind if I show you something?”

  “Of course not.”

  The matriarch excused herself, returning moments later with the evidence, now tattered almost beyond recognition. “These used to be DeDe’s,” she said.

  The columnist smiled. “Pompons. I was a cheerleader, too.”

  “DeDe sent for them,” Frannie continued, “when she was in Jonestown. She used them when she was at Sacred Heart, and she thought it would be cute if she had them in Guyana for the basketball games.” She fidgeted with her cocktail napkin. “They found them with her things … afterwards.”

  “She … uh … led cheers in Guyana?”

  The matriarch nodded. “Just as a lark. They had a basketball team, you know.”

  “No,” said Prue carefully. “Actually, I didn’t.”

  “DeDe was a doer, Prue. She loved life more than anything. I have verified for certain that she and the children weren’t among the dead in Jonestown … and in my heart, my most basic instincts tell me that they made it out of there alive.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know. Earlier. Whenever.”

  “But didn’t the authorities presume …?”

  “They presumed a lot of things, the fools! They told me she was dead, before they even checked to see if her body was there.” Frannie leaned forward and looked at Prue imploringly. “I know you’ve probably heard all this before. I called you here, because I need you to help me publicize a new development.”

  “Please,” said the columnist, “go ahead.”

  “I spoke to a psychic this week. A very reliable one. She says that DeDe and her friend and the twins are alive and living in a small village in South America.”

  Silence.

  “I’m not a hysterical woman, Prue. I don’t normally subscribe to that sort of thing. It’s just that this woman was so sure. She saw everything: the hut, the mats they sleep on, the villagers in the marketplace, those precious little twins running naked in the …” Frannie’s voice broke; she felt herself coming apart. “Please help me,” she pleaded. “I don’t know who else to turn to.”

  Prue reached over and squeezed her hand. “You know I would, Frannie, if there was any way to … well, surely the newspapers or the TV stations would be better equipped to handle this sort of thing.”

  The matriarch stiffened. “I’ve talked to them already. You don’t think I would call you first?”

  What was the use? This ridiculous woman was like all the rest, humoring her as if she were some sort of senile old biddy. Frannie dropped the matter altogether, hastening her guest through lunch and out of her house without further ado.

  By three o’clock, she was back in bed, drinking Mai Tais and watching the little “belly telly” that DeDe and Beauchamp had given her after Edgar’s death. The afternoon movie was Summertime with Katharine Hepburn, one of Frannie’s favorites.

  During the “intermission,” a pretty young woman offered shopping tips to viewers: where to find good factory seconds in the Walnut Creek-Lafayette area. Frannie turned off the sound and poured another Mai Tai.

  When her gaze returned to the television, she nearly dropped her drink.

  That face! Of course! It was Edgar’s old secretary. Frannie hadn’t laid eyes on her for at least four years. Since Beauchamp’s funeral, probably.

  What was her name, anyway? Mary Jane something. No … Mary Lou?

  The matriarch turned the sound up again. “This is Mary Ann Singleton,” chirped the young woman, “wishing you bargains galore!”

  Mary Ann Singleton.

  Maybe, thought Frannie. Just maybe …

  A Daytime Face

  AFTER ALMOST TWO YEARS OF BEING A WOMAN IN television, Mary Ann Singleton was finally a woman on television.

  Her show, Bargain Matinee, attempted to update the old Dialing for Dollars afternoon movie format by offering inflation-fighting consumer tips to Bay Area viewers. This was, after all, The Eighties.

  The movies, on the other hand, were firmly grounded in The Fifties: comfy old chestnuts like Splendor in the Grass and The Secret of Santa Vittoria and today’s feature, Summertime. Movies that used to be called women’s movies in the days before ERA.

  Mary Ann’s shining hour was a five minute spot interrupting the movie at midpoint.

  The formula was fairly consistent: dented cans, factory seconds, Chinese umbrellas that made nifty lampshades, perfume you could brew at home, places you could shop for pasta, new uses for old coffee cans. Stuff that Michael persisted in calling “Hints from Heloise.”

  Mary Ann was faintly embarrassed by the homebody image this format compelled her to project, but she couldn’t deny the delicious exhilaration of the stardom it brought her. Strangers stared at her on the Muni; neighbors asked her to autograph their grocery bags at the Searchlight Market.

  Still, something was wrong, something that hadn’t been cured by becoming a Woman on Television.

  A real Woman on Television, Mary Ann felt, was a glamorous hellraiser, a feminine feminist like Jane Fonda in The China Syndrome or Sigourney Weaver in Eyewitness. A real Woman on Television was invariably an investigative reporter.

  And Mary Ann would settle for nothing less.

  Immediately after the sign-off she left Studio B and hurried back to her cubbyhole without stopping in the dressing room to remove her makeup.

  It was five o’clock. She could still catch the news director before he mobilized for the evening newscast.

  There was a note on her desk: MRS. HARRISON CALLED.

  “Did you take this?” she asked an associate producer at the next desk.

  “Denny did. He’s in the snack bar.”

  Denny, another associate producer, was eating a microwaved patty melt. “Who’s Mrs. Harrison?” asked Mary Ann.

  “She said you knew her.”

  “Harrison?”

  “That’s what it sounded like. She was shitfaced.”

  “Great.”

  “She called right after your show-and-tell. Said it was ‘mosht urgent.’”

  “It’s Summertime
is what it is. The drunks always call during the tearjerkers. No number, huh?”

  Denny shrugged. “She said you knew her.”

  Larry Kenan, the news director, lounged back in his swivel chair, locked his fingers behind his blow-dried head, and smirked wearily at the Bo Derek poster he had pasted on the ceiling above his desk. Its inscription, also his doing, was burned indelibly on Mary Ann’s consciousness: FOR LARRY WITH LUST—NOBODY DOES IT BETTER. BO.

  “You wanna know the honest-to-God truth?” he said.

  Mary Ann waited. He was always disguising his goddamned opinion as the honest-to-God truth.

  “The honest-to-God truth is you’re a daytime face and the public doesn’t wanna see a daytime face on the six o’clock news. Period, end of sentence. I mean, hey, what can I say, lady? It ain’t pretty, but it’s the honest-to-God truth.” He tore his gaze from Bo Derek long enough to flash her his “that’s the breaks, kid” grin.

  “What about Bambi Kanetaka?”

  “What about her?”

  Mary Ann knew she had to tread softly here. “Well … she had a daytime show, and you let her do the …”

  “Bambi’s different,” glared Larry.

  I know, thought Mary Ann. She gives head on command.

  “Her GSR’s were dynamite,” added Larry, almost daring Mary Ann to continue.

  “Then test me,” said Mary Ann. “I don’t mind being …”

  “We have tested you, O.K.? We tested you two months ago and your GSR’s sucked. All right?”

  It stung more than she wanted it to. She had never really believed in Galvanic Skin Response. What could you prove for certain, anyway, by attaching electrodes to a guinea pig audience? Just that some performers made some viewers sweat more than others. Big fucking deal.