Mary Ann in Autumn Read online

  “So what was the problem?” he asked.

  She took another slug of the vodka and set it down. “I caught him fucking someone.”

  “Well . . . that would do it.”

  “Someone I know, in fact. My life coach.”

  “Your life coach? Whatshername, you mean? Calliope?”

  She nodded dolefully.

  “The woman you want to be when you grow up?”

  She winced. “I don’t think I put it quite that way, but . . .” She didn’t bother to deny it; that was exactly the way she had put it, and Michael knew that better than anyone. She had raved about Calliope for hours on end—her womanly wisdom, her impeccable sense of style, her absolute commitment to Mary Ann’s fulfillment.

  Michael’s lip flickered in a way that she recognized all too well.

  “Go ahead and laugh,” she told him.

  “Sorry . . . it’s just a little—”

  “No. It’s a scream. You think I don’t know that? Remember how she was always chastising me for my wudda/cudda/shudda? ‘Stop with the wudda/cudda/shudda, Mary Ann!’ Well, she wudda and she cudda and she did.”

  Michael smiled, but his eyes were glassy with sympathy.

  “Maybe,” he offered tentatively, “it was just a one-time thing. Maybe it wasn’t even serious.”

  She shook her head. “It was serious. Venice is always serious.”

  He frowned. “You were in Venice?”

  “They were in Venice. I was in Darien.”

  “Then how could you walk in on them?”

  “I didn’t walk in on them. We were Skyping.”

  His expression told her nothing.

  “You know what that is, right?”

  “Of course . . . Oprah uses it. I’m just trying to visualize this.”

  “Bob thought it would be nice if we could see each other when he was on the road. He’s on a ton of boards all over the world.” She could feel angry tears assembling behind her eyes, but held them back, knowing they’d be better spent later. Michael, meanwhile, was tugging methodically on his silver mustache, already deep in speculation.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “he was in Venice at the Gritti Palace—supposedly meeting with this group of investors—and I had something really important to tell him, so we Skyped for about fifteen minutes, and he blew me a kiss good-night, and the stupid son of a bitch forgot to turn off the Webcam.”

  Michael parenthesized his head with his hands, waiting.

  “It was kind of sweet at first . . . strangely intimate. He drifted off and I could watch him snoozing on this beautiful hand-painted bed with a gorgeous view of the Grand Canal. Then Calliope came into the room with an armful of Dolce and Gabbana shopping bags and crawled onto the bed with him.”

  “Fuck me,” said Michael.

  Mary Ann nodded. “That’s more or less what she said.” She picked up the glass again and polished off the remains with a grimace. “The sick part is, I couldn’t stop looking. I watched until the bitter goddamn end. Like some crummy porno with a flat-assed old man pounding away on a Botoxed crack-whore.”

  Michael blinked at her. “His ass is flat? You never told me that.”

  “Mouse . . . can we stay on the subject.” The ancient nickname just tumbled out of its own accord, now that she was finally coming clean.

  He picked up her glass. “Want another one?”

  She shook her head. “That was enough, thanks.”

  He set down the glass and slipped his arm across her shoulder. “You know . . . I can’t say I’m terribly surprised.”

  “I can’t, either. He hasn’t been . . . you know . . . present emotionally for several years. The sex wasn’t much to speak of, but we weren’t that young anymore and I just thought we were entering . . . the cozy stage. I was kind of relieved, to tell you the truth.” She realized too late that she had said this to someone her own age who—to hear him tell it, at least—was having the best sex of his life. She hoped he wouldn’t bring that up.

  “So what was it you called to tell him?”

  It was uncanny, after all these years, how Michael could still find his way so deftly to the epicenter of her pain.

  “That I was worried about being pregnant,” she replied.

  His mouth opened slightly, and he made a little huffing sound that didn’t quite qualify as laughter. “You’re kidding, right?”

  His disbelief was understandable, but it still felt like an act of petty cruelty. She couldn’t help but sound wounded. “It does happen, you know, to women my age. It’s rare, but it happens. Even when we’ve been through menopause.”

  “So were you pregnant? Are you?”

  “No,” she said quietly. “It was . . . a false alarm.” What an odd way to put it, she thought, since what she was feeling now was the truest alarm imaginable. An unwanted pregnancy, however inconveniently late in life, paled in comparison.

  “But why would you even think you were—”

  “I was bleeding, Mouse. I thought I was getting my period again.”

  The room was so incredibly still that she could hear, from somewhere in Michael and Ben’s kitchen, the sound of a dripping faucet. Or more likely one of those aerated water bowls for dogs, given the way these guys seemed to dote on their Labradoodle.

  When she finally spoke, it might have been someone else.

  “I have uterine cancer.”

  After a moment, Michael just said: “Shit.”

  “I know this isn’t fair to you, Mouse. There was just no one else I could tell. Darien’s too much of a hornet’s nest and—”

  “Sweetie.” Michael slipped his arm across her shoulder, trying to pull her closer, but she felt herself resisting. She still wasn’t ready to collapse yet. He sensed this and released her after a squeeze or two. “Bob doesn’t know, then?”

  She shook her head. “He’s probably still freaked that I might be pregnant.”

  “Shouldn’t you tell him—?”

  “God, no.”

  “He hasn’t come home yet, I take it?”

  “No.”

  Now she was wondering if Bob and Calliope were still at the Gritti or if they’d taken their act to some other romantic venue, someplace to the south, maybe, sunny and by the sea. If only she had muted the Skype—or just turned the damned thing off—as soon as she had seen what was happening. Now, for the rest of her days, she would have to live with those voices, gruff with lust, then oh-so-achingly tender, voices that were already cutting into her like knives when that clueless young doctor told her the news.

  She turned and looked at her old friend.

  “Mouse, if you can’t do this, just say so.”

  Chapter 6

  Not to Be Alone

  Normally, with groceries in the car, Ben would have headed straight home, but he wasn’t sure how much time Michael needed with Mary Ann, and he didn’t relish the thought of walking in on whatever drama was unfolding. So he headed over to his workshop on Norfolk Street and finished staining a stair-step tansu that was slated for delivery on Monday. Roman, as usual, was thrilled to be there, feverishly prowling the shop for the mice that were known to live behind the walls. The place had once been an appliance repair shop, so even with the addition of whitewash and fiberglass skylights, it hovered on the funky side of dilapidated. Ben loved it, though, loved its rich aromas of cedar dust and linseed oil and the quiet afternoons he spent here, alone with his craft.

  As he brushed the stain onto the tansu, he gazed wistfully across the room at a rustic fireplace surround he’d started on nine months earlier. He and Michael had settled on the pinecone motif, since the piece had been intended—was still intended—for their fireplace in Pinyon City. Except that there was no fireplace, much less a cabin; just three acres of rocky, sloping ground with an unbelievable view of a Sierra range. He had bought the land before the economy began to tank, when there were still people in the market for museum-grade furniture. He’d envisioned their own secret Eden, where Michael could grow old in the bosom of nature and he, Ben, could have ready access to snowboarding. He’d pictured rocking chairs on the deck and hikes up the canyon with Roman and occasional trips into Pinyon City for drinks at the corner saloon.

  For the moment, of course, building anything was out of the question, since Ben could barely manage the mortgage on the land. Michael was in similar straits—still paying the mortgage on the city house—and his shoulder was threatening to put him out of commission for a while. There were hopes that this new administration might be able to fix the economy, but even the most optimistic observers believed that it would take a while—years, even. All things considered, not a time to go further into debt.

  Still, there was no reason they couldn’t enjoy the place now, cabin or no cabin. They could pitch a tent there (at least in the summertime) and wake up beneath the pines with the scent of sage in their nostrils. Michael, of course, could get grumpy as hell on camping trips, but that was mostly at public campgrounds where the crowds made him noticeably misanthropic. “I didn’t come to the wilderness,” he had once announced a little loudly at a campground in New Mexico, “for the chance to shower with America.”

  But this would be different. This would be their own turf, where they could stake a sort of spiritual claim just by spending some time there. As for showering, they could do that down the road at the state park, preferably at a time when America wasn’t around. The important thing was to be on that land, leave their mark. Burn a little sage, maybe, make a little love. The property wasn’t visible from the access road, so maybe they could find a talisman here in the city—a big stone raven or a rusty iron Quan Yen—that they could plant there on the mountainside as proof of their intentions, even when they weren’t around. He loved the idea of finding it there every time they came back.

  Pinyon City had become their version of the future. “We’ll get that for Pinyon City,” they would say when they spotted a woolen blanket in a garage sale or a set of rugged dinnerware, and they would buy that thing, whatever it was, and stuff it into the coat closet to await its eventual alpine destiny. Some of these items had been absorbed by the city house, like the rare Indian basket that Michael surprised Ben with on his birthday. Michael had tracked it down on the Internet, ordering it from a private collector in Reno. Roughly the size of a grapefruit, it was woven from pine needles and red gum—a reliable indicator that its maker had lived not far from their homestead-to-be. They had already picked the very spot it would occupy on the mantelpiece that Ben was building. It would have made it there, too—a perfect symbol of their reverence for the land and its culture—had they not displayed it on the coffee table in full view of a teething Labradoodle.

  Ben stayed at the workshop until the skylights turned dove-gray with dusk. He drove home through the Mission, where the traffic was predictably sluggish and snarled, then double-parked at a boutique pet shop in the Castro to pick up a brand of organic dog food they didn’t carry at Delano’s. By the time he reached Noe Hill, the sky was already doing its crazy purple thing. He stopped at the gate to admire it, then studied the house with a sense of palpable apprehension. Had she left or were they still in the thick of it?

  Roman led the way, dragging Ben on the leash, delirious at the thought of an imminent reunion. Michael, as it happened, was sitting on the sofa, apparently alone, rummaging through a box of old snapshots. The dog had been trained not to jump on his masters, so he did a little river dance instead, hopping on his back legs in an unashamed exhibition of his poodle ancestry. “That’s right,” said Ben. “There’s Dad. Give Dad a kiss.” This was already a ritual with them; the dog always got the first kiss.

  Ben leaned down and pecked Michael’s mouth, which tasted of pot smoke, despite Michael’s cherished belief that his vaporizer had magically eliminated all that. He worried sometimes that Michael smoked too much. There were days when he came home and found his husband too buzzed and chatty to connect with. At such moments Michael could lose his train of thought completely, though he usually tried to cover it up. What would happen, Ben wondered, when this chemical forgetfulness merged with the ordinary sort that comes with aging? Unless, of course, this was the ordinary sort.

  He sat down next to Michael and leaned his head against his shoulder.

  “Is Mary Ann—?”

  “Back at her hotel,” said Michael.

  “Oh.” Ben made an effort at sounding sincere. “Sorry I didn’t get to say hello.”

  Michael wasn’t buying it, of course. “I wish you liked her more.”

  “I don’t dislike her. She’s just . . . kind of a mess, and . . . it gets to be too much sometimes.”

  “In what way?”

  “C’mon. She calls here three or four times a week.”

  “That was just last week.”

  “No, it wasn’t. It’s been going on for ages, and you’re on the phone for hours sometimes. It feels like she’s living with us, Michael.” When his husband said nothing in response, Ben added: “Not to sound jealous or anything.”

  Michael lifted his head and planted a peck on Ben’s shoulder before righting himself with a grunt. “We just have a history, you know. We’ve been through a lot of shit together. I can’t just cut that off.”

  “I’m not asking you to.”

  “I know that.”

  “So what’s going on with her?”

  Michael released a resonant sigh. “She has cancer. That’s why she’s here. She’s having a hysterectomy.”

  Ben scrambled for the right thing to say. There was plenty of reason for sympathy, of course, but he found himself weighing his words with miserly care, wary of what was coming next. “Why isn’t she having it . . . closer to home?”

  “She’s leaving Bob. She doesn’t want to be anywhere near home.”

  “She’s leaving him now? Shouldn’t she at least wait until she’s—”

  “She caught him fucking somebody. She saw the whole thing on Skype. She’s humiliated and heartbroken and scared shitless about the cancer. She’s just trying to take care of herself right now. So she got the fuck out of there.”

  Ben knew better, of course, but he couldn’t help fixating on entirely the wrong part of that explanation: “How do you see that on Skype?”

  “Sweetie . . .” Michael laid his hand tentatively on Ben’s leg before taking the leap. “She asked if she could stay in the cottage.”

  Ben nodded slowly, his suspicions confirmed.

  “It wasn’t easy for her to ask,” Michael added. “More than anything . . . she doesn’t want to invade our privacy.”

  Ben adopted a tone that he hoped would sound compassionate yet practical. “Then why not take a hotel or rent a condo? She’s not, you know . . . hurting for cash. The cottage is barely big enough for that bed, and . . . she’ll need her own privacy, won’t she?”

  “She needs not to be alone, Ben. That’s what she needs. She doesn’t have a home anymore.”

  Ben knew already there was no point in resisting. He had no deep sentimental connection to Mary Ann, but Michael’s conscience—and, yes, Ben’s own—made this huge inconvenience inevitable. “How long does she want to stay?” he asked.

  Michael shrugged. “The surgery is in two weeks, so . . . I guess at least that long and . . . a little bit longer.”

  “Will the surgery take care of it? The cancer, I mean?”

  “They won’t know until they . . . get in there.”

  Ben laid his hand on Michael’s knee, signaling the end of the discussion, then stood up. “Call her, then . . . unless you’ve already agreed to it.”

  His husband shook his head. “I was waiting to hear from you.”

  That had to be less than the truth, but Ben appreciated the effort.

  WHILE MICHAEL WAS IN THE bedroom talking to Mary Ann on his cell phone, Ben gave the cottage a once-over in preparation for her arrival. The sheets on the bed had not been changed since some friends from Nevada City had crashed there over Halloween, so there were still traces of green Hulk makeup on the pillowcase.

  Ben stripped the bed, then hauled everything to the laundry room before tackling the cramped cottage bathroom. The toilet and sink were relatively clean, but the floor of the fiberglass shower stall was tinted the same lurid green as the pillowcase. He got on his knees and scrubbed it ferociously—a little harder than needed, in fact—while he fretted over the sea change that would soon be coming to their domestic life. He valued their daily rituals and hard-earned independence and, frankly, didn’t want them fucked with. He knew that was selfish, and that charity, in this case, literally began at home, but he couldn’t shake the ungenerous feeling that someone had just stolen his husband.

  Back at the house, he found Michael stuffing the sheets into the washer.

  “I’ll get that,” Ben told him, already trying to atone for his thoughts.

  “That’s okay. I’ve got it.”

  “If you need Clorox, it’s on the top shelf.”

  “Great.”

  “Where is that fancy goat soap the two Susies gave us for Christmas last year? I thought we could put it in her bathroom.”

  Michael turned and gave him a sleepy, appreciative stoner smile.

  THAT NIGHT, AFTER CATCHING TWO inscrutable episodes of Lost on Apple TV, they turned in earlier than usual, leaving the lights on for a while as they scratched Roman’s belly in unison. The dog was sprawled between them, dark limbs flopping, as big and goofy as a chimpanzee. For Ben, the moment had a wistful quality, since this cozy family unit would be altered dramatically come morning, when their guest would return with her expensive luggage. There was no point in kidding himself; he would just have to make the best of it and accept this altered reality as something that mattered to Michael.

  “Where did you meet her again?” Ben asked, trying to take an interest. “At Anna’s apartment house?”

  “Mmm. Well . . . actually . . . the first time was at the Marina Safeway. She tried to pick up a boyfriend of mine.”