Further Tales of the City Page 3

  She tried another tack. “But I wouldn’t have to be on camera all the time. I could research things, investigate. There are lots of subjects that the regular reporters don’t have the time or the inclination to cover.”

  Larry’s lip curled. “Like what?”

  “Well, like …” Think, she commanded herself, think! “Well, the gay community, for instance.”

  “Oh really?” he said, arching an eyebrow. “You know all about that, huh?”

  Mary Ann puzzled at his inflection. Did he think she was a lesbian? Or was he just toying with her again? “I have lots of … contacts there,” she said. A lie. but what-the-hell. Michael had lots of contacts there; it was practically the same thing.

  He smiled at her as a policeman would smile at a runaway child.

  “I’ll tell you the honest-to-God truth,” he said. “The public is sick of hearing about faggots.”

  The Man in Her Life

  IF LARRY KENAN WAS AN ASSHOLE—FOR THERE WAS NO LONGER any doubt about that—Mary Ann’s paycheck at least provided certain amenities that made life in the city considerably more graceful: She ate at Ciao now.

  She drove a Le Car.

  She wore velvet blazers and button-down shirts over her Calvins—a look which Michael persisted in labeling as “Ivy Lesbian.”

  She had stripped her apartment of all furnishings that were either yellow or wicker and installed gun-metal gray industrial carpeting and high-tech steel factory shelving.

  She had canceled her subscription to San Francisco magazine and started reading Interview.

  She had abandoned Cost Plus forever.

  Still, she couldn’t help but feel a certain frustration over the progress of her career.

  That frustration was only heightened later that night when she watched a particularly compelling episode of Lou Grant, one featuring a scrappy woman journalist in her struggle to uncover the truth.

  It was almost too painful to endure, so Mary Ann turned off the set and marched into the bathroom to Sassoon her hair. Sometimes a shower was the best of all possible sedatives.

  Her hair was shorter now than it had been in years. Waifish and sort of Leslie Caron-like with just the vaguest hint of New Wave. Anything more pronounced would have been pressing her luck with the management of the station.

  As she towel-dried her new do into place, she found it extraordinary that she had ever endured the rigors of long hair in the first place. (“You kept trying for a French twist,” Michael was fond of recalling, “but it kept going Connie Stevens on you.”)

  After searching in vain for her rabbit slippers, Mary Ann knotted herself into an oversized white terrycloth robe and climbed the stairs to the little house on the roof of 28 Barbary Lane.

  She paused for a moment outside the familiar orange door, peering out through an ivy-choked window at a night full of stars. An ocean liner slid past aglitter with lights, like a huge chandelier being dragged out to sea.

  Mary Ann heard herself sigh. Partly for the view. Partly for the man who waited inside.

  She entered without knocking, knowing he was already asleep. He had worked a double shift that day, and the crowd at Perry’s had been more boisterous and demanding than usual. As she expected, he was sprawled face down on the bed in his boxer shorts.

  She sat on the edge of the bed and laid her hand gently on the small of his back.

  The most beautiful part of a man, she thought. That warm little valley just before the butt begins. Well, maybe the second most beautiful.

  Brian stirred, then rolled over and rubbed his eyes with his fists the way that little boys do. “Hey,” he said throatily.

  “Hey,” she replied.

  She leaned over and lay against his chest, enjoying the heat of his body. When her mouth sought his, Brian turned his head away and mumbled a warning: “Moose breath, sweetheart.”

  She took his chin in her hand and kissed him anyway. “So?” she said. “What if the moose is cute?”

  Chuckling, he wrapped his arms around her. “So how was your day?”

  “Shitty,” she said, speaking directly into his ear.

  “You spoke to Larry Kenan?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And?”

  “He still wants nookie before he’ll negotiate.”

  Brian jerked away from her. “He said that?”

  “No.” Mary Ann smiled at his alarm. “Not in so many words. I just know how he operates. Bambi Kanetaka is living proof of that.”

  Brian pretended not to understand. “I find her most incisive myself.”

  Mary Ann goosed him.

  “Incisive and perky. A winning combination.”

  “I’ll do it again,” warned Mary Ann.

  “I was hoping you’d say that,” grinned Brian. “Only slower this time, O.K.?”

  Remembering Lennon

  THE BEAUTY OF BEING A WAITER, BRIAN USED TO THINK, was that you could dump the whole damn thing tomorrow.

  There were no pension plans to haunt you, no digital watches after fifty years of service, no soul-robbing demands for corporate loyalty and long-term commitment. It was a living, in short, but never, ever a career.

  He used to think.

  Now, after six years of working at Perry’s, he’d begun to wonder about that. If it wasn’t a career now, when would it be? After ten years? Fifteen? Is that what he wanted? Is that what she wanted?

  He rolled away from her and stared at the ceiling in silence.

  “O.K.,” said Mary Ann. “Out with it.”

  “Again?”

  She laughed at his joke, then snuggled up against his shoulder. “I know pensive when I see it. So what are you pensing about?”

  “Oh … the bar, I guess. I think it may be time for that.”

  “I thought you hated tending bar.”

  He winced. “The state bar, Mary Ann. As in lawyer?”

  “Oh.” She glanced over at him. “I thought you hated that, too.”

  There was no quick answer for that one. He had hated it, in fact, hated every boring, nerve-grinding minute he had ever been Brian Hawkins, Attorney-at-Law. He had sublimated his hatred in the pursuit of causes—blacks, Native Americans, oil slicks—but the “old ennui,” as he had come to call it, proved as persistent and deep-rooted as the law itself.

  He still cringed at the thought of the singing fluorescent bulb that had tormented him for hours on end in the grass-cloth-and-walnut conference room of his last law firm. That fixture came to symbolize all that was petty and poisonous about life—if you could call it that—in the Financial District.

  So he had fled his profession and become a waiter.

  He had also become a rogue, terrorizing singles bars and laundromats in a frenzied and relentless search for “foxes.” He had simplified his life, streamlined his body and subjugated the “old ennui.”

  But now something different was happening. The woman he had once described as “that uptight airhead from Cleveland” was easily the love of his life.

  And she was the one with the career.

  “I have to do something,” he told Mary Ann.

  “About what?”

  “Work,” said Brian. “My job.”

  “You mean your tips aren’t …?”

  “It isn’t the money.” His voice had an edge to it. His flagging pride was making him cranky. Don’t take it out on her, he warned himself. “I just can’t go on like this,” he added in a gentler tone.

  “Like what?” she asked cautiously.

  “Like your dependent or something. I can’t hack it, Mary Ann.”

  She studied him soberly. “It is the money, then.”

  “It’s one thing to go dutch. It’s another to be … I don’t know … kept or something.” His face was aflame with self-contempt and embarrassment.

  Mary Ann laughed openly. “Kept? Gimme a break, Brian! I paid for a weekend shack-up in Sierra City. I wanted to do that, you turkey. It was as much for me as it was … oh, Brian.” She reached over
and took his hand. “I thought we’d gotten over all that macho stuff.”

  He aped her mincingly. “I thought we’d gotten over all that macho stuff.” It was so petty and cruel that he was instantly sorry. Examining her face for signs of hurt, he made the maddening discovery that she had already forgiven him.

  “What about John?” she asked.

  “John who?”

  “Lennon. I thought you admired him for becoming a househusband when Yoko …”

  Brian snorted. “It was John’s money, for Christ’s sake! You can do anything you goddamn want when you’re the richest man in New York!”

  Mary Ann stared at him incredulously. Now she really was wounded. “How could you do that?” she asked quietly. “How could you cheapen the thing that we shared?”

  She was talking about the Memorial Vigil on the Marina Green. She and Brian had spent six hours there mourning Lennon’s death. They had cried themselves dry, clutching strawberry-scented candles, singing “Hey Jude” and smoking a new crop of Hawaiian grass that Mrs. Madrigal had named in honor of the deceased.

  Brian had never before—and never since—made himself so vulnerable in Mary Ann’s presence.

  Afterwards, he had tacked this note to her door: HELP ME, IF YOU CAN, I’M FEELING DOWN, AND I DO APPRECIATE YOUR BEING ‘ROUND. I LOVE YOU—BRIAN.

  He was feeling down all right, but it had more to do with mid-life crisis than with the passing of a Beatle.

  For, on the day that John Lennon died, everyone in Brian Hawkins’ generation instantly and irrevocably turned forty.

  “I’m sorry,” he said at last.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said, leaning over to kiss his shoulder.

  “I’m just … edgy right now.”

  “I could sleep at my place tonight, if you need the …”

  “No. Stay. Please.”

  She answered with another peck on the shoulder. “Do me a favor,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Don’t become a lawyer on my account. I’m a big girl now. I don’t need any dragons slain on my behalf.”

  He looked into her radiant face. Sometimes she understood him better than anyone. “Right,” he murmured. “I’ll get by with a little help from my friends.”

  And sometimes she made him say the corniest things.

  Cowpokes

  ACROSS TOWN ON VALENCIA STREET, MICHAEL AND Ned were sharing a Calistoga at Devil’s Herd, the city’s most popular gay country-western bar.

  What Michael liked most about the saloon was its authenticity: the twangy down-home band (Western Electric), the horse collars dangling from the ceiling, the folksy Annie Oakley dykes shouting “yahoo” from the bar.

  If he squinted his eyes just so, the dudes doing cowboy dancing could be grizzled buckeroos, horny claim-jumpers who were simply making do until the next shipment of saloon girls came in from the East.

  True, the beefcake cowboy murals struck a somewhat citified note in the overall scheme of things, but Michael didn’t mind. Someday, he believed, the homoerotic cave drawings in San Francisco’s gay bars would be afforded the same sort of reverence that is currently heaped upon WPA murals and deco apartment house lobbies.

  “Oh look!” a sophisticated but hunky workman would cry, peeling back a piece of rotting wallboard. “There seems to be a painting back here! My God, it’s from the school of Tom of Finland!”

  The band was playing “Stand By Your Man.” As soon as they recognized the tune, Michael and Ned smiled in unison. “Jon was big on that one,” said Michael. “Just as a song, though. Not as a way of life.”

  Ned took a swig of the Calistoga. “I thought it was you that left him.”

  “Well, technically, maybe. We left each other, actually. It was a big relief to both of us. We were damn lucky, really. Sometimes it’s not that easy to pull out of an S & M relationship.”

  “Wait a minute. Since when were you guys …?”

  “S & M,” Michael repeated. “Streisand and Midler. He was into Streisand. I was into Midler. It was pure, unadulterated hell.”

  Ned laughed. “I guess I bit on that one.”

  “I’m serious,” said Michael. “We fought about it all the time. One Sunday afternoon when Jon was listening to “Evergreen” for about the three millionth time, I suddenly found myself asking him what exactly he saw in … I believe I referred to her as ‘that tone-deaf, big-nosed bitch.’”

  “Jesus. What did he say?”

  “He was quite adult about it, actually. He pointed out calmly that Bette’s nose is bigger than Barbra’s. I almost brained him with his goddamned Baccarat paperweight.”

  This time Ned guffawed, a sound that told Michael he had struck paydirt. Ned was the only person he knew who actually guffawed. “It’s the truth,” grinned Michael. “Every single word of it.”

  “Yeah,” said Ned, “but people don’t really break up over stuff like that.”

  “Well …” Michael thought for a moment. “I guess we just made each other do things we didn’t want to do. He made me alphabetize the classical albums by composer. I made him eat crunchy peanut butter instead of plain. He made me sleep in a room with eggplant walls. I made him eat off Fiesta Ware. We didn’t agree on much of anything, come to think of it, except Al Parker and Rocky Road ice cream.”

  “You ever mess around?”

  “You betcha. None o’ that nasty heterosexual role-playing for us. Lots of buddy nights at the baths. I can’t even count the number of times I rolled over in bed and told some hot stranger: ‘You’d like my lover.’”

  “What about rematches?”

  “Once,” said Michael grimly, “but never again. Jon sulked for a week. I saw his point, actually: once is recreation; twice is courtship. You learn these nifty little nuances when you’re married. That’s why I’m not married anymore.”

  “But you could be, huh?”

  Michael shook his head. “Not now. Not for a while. I don’t know … maybe never. It’s a knack, isn’t it? Some of us just don’t have the knack.”

  “You gotta want it bad,” said Ned.

  “Then, maybe I don’t want it bad enough. That’s a possibility. That’s a distinct possibility.” Michael took a sip of the mineral water, then drummed his fingers on the bar in time to the music. The band had stopped playing now; someone at the jukebox had paid Hank Williams Jr. to sing “Women I Never Had.”

  Michael handed the Calistoga back to Ned. “Remember Mona?” he asked.

  Ned nodded. “Your old roommate.”

  “Yeah. Well, Mona used to say that she could get by just fine without a lover as long as she had five good friends. That about sums it up for me right now.”

  “I hope I’m one of ’em,” said Ned.

  Michael’s brow wrinkled while he counted hastily on his fingers. “Jesus,” he said at last. “I think you’re three of them.”

  House of Wax

  PRUE GIROUX AND VICTORIA LYNCH WERE KINDRED spirits.

  For one thing, they were both handsome women. For another, Victoria was engaged to the ex-husband of the woman who was engaged to Prue’s ex-husband. Bonds like that were not easily broken.

  Today, Victoria had called to share a secret with her spiritual sister.

  “Now listen, Prudy Sue, this is cross-your-heart stuff, definitely not for publication, understand?” (Prue’s closest friends always addressed her by her childhood name.)

  “Of course,” said Prue.

  “I mean, eventually of course I would adore for you to give it a little publicity in your column, which is part of the reason I called, but right now it’s just in the embryonic stage, and we don’t want to kill the baby, do we?”

  “Of course not,” said Prue.

  “Well,” announced Victoria, sucking in breath as if she were about to blow a trumpet fanfare, “yours truly is in the process of organizing the world’s first society wax museum!”

  “The … come again?”

  “Now, shut up a sec, Prudy Sue, and h
ear me out. I met this absolutely divine little man at the Keatings’ house in Santa Barbara, and it seems he’s fallen on rather hard times lately, which is too tragic, because it turns out he’s descended from the Hapsburgs or something. I mean, he’s got the prominent lower lip and everything. Anyway, Vita told me he used to work at Madame Tussaud’s, where he was their principal designer …”

  “Ah, yes. I have one of his gowns.”

  A pause, and then: “You do not have one of his gowns, Prudy Sue.”

  “But that mauve cocktail dress I wore to …”

  “That’s a Madame Gres, Prudy Sue. You do not own a Madame Tussaud. Madame Tussaud’s is a wax museum in London.”

  “I knew that,” sulked Prue. “I thought you said …”

  “Of course you did, darling. Those French names all sound alike, don’t they? Now … where was I?”

  “He used to work at Madame Tufo’s.”

  “Uh … right. He worked … there, and he’s terribly aristocratic and all, and he thinks that it’s just a damn shame there’s never been a wax museum for society figures. Think about that, Prudy Sue! We have wax museums for historical people and show business people and sports people, but nary a thing for the movers and shakers of society. It’s shocking really, when you stop and think about it.”

  “That’s a good point,” said Prue. “I never really …”

  “And if we don’t take the initiative on this, who will? I mean, that’s what this little man said to me, and I was absolutely floored by his insight. Our children can see for themselves how short Napoleon really was, for instance, but where can they go to look at a replica of, say, Nan Kempner. Or Sao Schlumberger. Or Marie Hélène de Rothschild. These people are legends, Prudy Sue, but they’ll be lost to posterity forever, if we don’t take decisive action now. At least, that’s what Wolfgang says, and I think he’s dead right.”

  “Wolfgang?”

  “The little man. He’s such a dear, really. The wax figures usually run about fifteen thousand apiece, but he’s offered to do them for ten as a sort of a public service. He wants me to scout locations for the museum, which is a damn good thing, since he was leaning towards Santa Barbara when I talked to him, but I think I convinced him to move it here. That way, see, we can have a San Francisco wing as well as an international wing.”