More Tales of the City

by Armistead Maupin

  His jaw went slack. “Your … Does Mona know that?”

  “No.”

  “I thought she said her mother lived in—”

  “I’m not her mother, Brian. I’m her father.”

  Before he could utter a word, she pressed a finger against her lips, signaling him to remain silent. “We can talk about it back at the house,” she whispered.

  Company’s Coming

  THERE WAS SOMETHING EERIE ABOUT THE SUDDEN change of mood at the Blue Moon Lodge. Mona sensed it immediately, watching the tension mount as Mother Mucca mobilized her girls for the arrival of the big customer from Sacramento.

  “Bobbi, you get the 409 outa the kitchen and clean the crapper in Charlene’s room. It looks like a goddamn truck stop! Marnie, you straighten up the parlor. Get rid o’ those movie magazines. Bonnie, you and Debby take the Ranchero into town and pick up that costume at the Chinaman’s. Wouldn’t ya know it! He shows up here the only goddamn week of the year we sent the costume to the cleaners!”

  Mona kept clear of the eye of the storm, wanting to help but certain she’d only be in the way. Observing her discomfort, Charlene winked and handed her a dustcloth. “Crazy, huh?”

  Mona nodded. “Who is this guy, anyway?”

  “I … You better talk to Mother Mucca first.”

  “Where do you want me to dust?” Well, Mona, you stumped the panel! Arlene, Bennett, I think you’ll be surprised to learn that the lovely Miss Ramsey … dusts whorehouses for a living!

  “Over behind the bar. And that Kennedy statue on the TV.”

  “O.K. Charlene?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Mother Mucca said he wanted a new girl. Is she gonna trade with another house or something?”

  Charlene continued to dust. “Yeah. I guess she could.”

  “You mean … she’s never done that before?”

  “He’s never asked for a new girl before.”

  “Oh. Well, then, how come she’s not—”

  “Don’t talk so much. We’re wastin’ time.”

  Moments later, Mother Mucca charged into the parlor, saw Mona at work, and snapped at the head girl. “Charlene! What’s Judy doin’ cleanin’ for?”

  “Well, you said for everybody to—”

  “Judy is my receptionist, Charlene! She ain’t got no business dustin’—”

  Mona interrupted. “Really, Mother Mucca, I don’t mind helping out a—”

  “Course you don’t Judy. But it just ain’t fittin’ for you to be doin’ housework, when I hired you as a receptionist.”

  Mona shrugged at this breach of protocol and smiled her apologies to Charlene, who frowned and skulked off.

  “C’mon,” said Mother Mucca, taking Mona’s arm. “We’ll have a nice big glass of milk in the kitchen.”

  The old woman’s request hit like a sledge hammer.

  “What?” gasped Mona, almost choking on her milk.

  “He’s a piece o’ cake,” said Mother Mucca.

  “Well, let them eat cake! I’m a receptionist, remember?”

  “I’ll pay you extra, Judy.”

  “You’ve gotta be … Oh, no … Ohhh, no. Got that? No!”

  Mother Mucca reached across the table and grasped Mona’s hand. “He wants somebody with class, Judy. Nobody in Winnemucca’s got your kind of class.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “You don’t have to fuck him.”

  That threw her. “Well, what the hell does he …? Never mind. Spare me the gory details.”

  “Judy, do you think ol’ Mother Mucca would …? Judy, you’re like my own flesh and blood. I wouldn’t do nothin’ to make you think less o’ yourself. I swear, it hurts me a heap to think …”

  The old woman let go of Mona’s hand and fumbled in her grizzled cleavage for a hanky. Turning away, she dabbed at her eyes.

  Mona was shaken. “Mother Mucca, look …”

  “You hurt me, child!”

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  “I’ll tell you the God’s honest truth. I’ve been runnin’ this place for sixty years, and you’re the first girl I’ve ever felt was … Judy, I’d adopt you, if you’d let me.”

  This time Mona reached for the madam’s hand. “You’ve been really good to me, Mother …”

  “Did you know I used to have a little boy?”

  “No.”

  “I did. He was the sweetest little thing you ever laid eyes on. He used to sit right here on this floor and jus’ laugh and giggle, and me and the girls, we’d do anything for that little tyke, and I never thought …”

  “Please don’t cry.”

  “I never thought in a million years that little darlin’ would run off an’ leave his mama when he was sixteen. I never thought nothin’ like that. I trusted him, Judy, jus’ like I trust …”

  She silenced herself when Bonnie and Debby appeared with the important bundle from the laundry.

  “Take it away,” ordered Mother Mucca.

  Bonnie frowned. “But didn’t you say …?”

  “Take the goddamn thing away!”

  “Wait a minute,” said Mona. “I have to see if it fits O.K.”

  Mother Mucca stared at Mona for several seconds, dabbed her eyes, and grinned. “You’re an angel, dolly.”

  “And you’re full of shit,” said Mona.

  This Year’s Song

  THIS IS NICE,” SAID MARY ANN, SIPPING A PINA COLADA in the Starlight Lounge of the Pacific Princess, while a pianist played “I Write the Songs.” Burke answered with a nod, smiling at her.

  “Michael says this song is this year’s ‘What I Did for Love.’ ”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Well, you know. Like every year there’s a song that everybody records. Two years ago it was ‘Send in the Clowns’—or was it three? Anyway, last year it was ‘What I Did for Love,’ which I really like, even though they do play it to death. I mean … if a song is good, I don’t see what’s wrong with playing it a lot, do you?”

  “No. I guess not.”

  “I think ‘What I Did for Love’ is probably my all-time favorite. At least … well, it’s the only one on the album that you can hum. Not that that’s all that important, but … well, I mean, who can hum ‘The Music and the Mirror’?”

  “You’ve got me there. I don’t even know what album you’re talking about.”

  “You know. Chorus Line.“

  He shook his head. “Sorry.”

  “The musical, Burke. It came to San Francisco.”

  “I told you I was out of it.”

  Mary Ann shrugged, but she was inwardly relieved. He couldn’t be gay if he’d never heard of A Chorus Line. She decided to change the subject. Burke seem uncomfortable with popular music.

  “How long did you live in San Francisco, Burke?”

  “Not long, really. Actually, I consider Nantucket my home.”

  “You work there?” She felt that was more tactful than “What do you do?” Nine months in San Francisco had programmed that question out of her system forever.

  “Sort of. My father’s in publishing. I help him out sometimes.”

  “Oh, what fun!” Was that ever gushy! Why was this conversation such a dud?

  “Mary Ann, let’s get some air, O.K.?”

  Out on the fantail, they leaned against the rail and watched the moon rise above a calm sea. As usual, she was the one to break the silence.

  “I talk too much, don’t I?”

  He slipped his arm around her shoulder. “Not at all.”

  “Yes, I do. I won the Optimist Oratory Contest in high school, and I haven’t stopped talking since.”

  He laughed. “I’m afraid you’re holding up both ends of the conversation.”

  She let that go, turning to face the water again. “Do you know what blew me away this morning?”

  “What?”

  “The lifeboat drill … what the captain said. I didn’t know that women and children don’t get to go first anymore.”

&nbs
p; “Yeah. Things have changed, I guess.”

  “I wish they wouldn’t.”

  He answered by squeezing her shoulder.

  “I mean, it isn’t a bit fair. The song says it’s still the same old story, but it isn’t, is it? Who the hell gets to be Ingrid Bergman anymore?”

  “Now that’s one I know.” He chuckled.

  “How old are you, Burke?”

  “Twenty-seven.”

  “You seem—I don’t know—not older exactly, but more … It’s hard to explain. You seem like you’re twenty-seven, but someone who was twenty-seven a long time ago.”

  “Out of it, in other words.”

  “Why do you keep saying that? I like it, Burke. I really do.”

  He leaned down and kissed her lightly on the mouth. “I like you.”

  “Do you?” she asked.

  “Yes. Very much, Mary Ann.”

  “Ingrid,” she said, and kissed him back.

  Family Planning

  UNDER THE FLUORESCENT LIGHTS OF THE DOGGIE Diner, the crags and craters of Bruno Koski’s face assumed lunar proportions. The corners of his mouth, Beauchamp noticed, were hydrophobic with mayonnaise.

  “Now, lemme get this straight, man. You don’t want her greased, you just—”

  “Keep your voice down, Bruno!”

  Bruno shrugged and cast a contemptuous glance around the diner. “They’re all space cadets, man. They ain’t listenin’.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I know a fuckin’ space cadet when I see one.”

  This was true. Bruno did know his space cadets. Beauchamp looked down at his hamburger. “OK. I didn’t mean to … Look, I’m just jumpy. I’ve never done this before.”

  “So tell me what the fuck you want, man.”

  Beauchamp kept his head down, laboriously removing the onions from his hamburger. “I want you to … see to it that she doesn’t have the baby—the babies.”

  Bruno blinked at him ingenuously. “You want me to kick her gut in?”

  “I don’t want you to hurt her, Bruno.”

  “OK. You want me to kick her gut in without hurting her.”

  “Your tone is shitty, Bruno.”

  “Oh, kiss my ass!”

  “Look: she’s my wife, right? I don’t want her—I don’t want any permanent harm done. If you can’t promise me that, we might as well forget the whole thing.”

  “How the fuck do you expect me to guarantee …? What about … I mean, there could be—whatchacallit?—complications.”

  Beauchamp made his patient-but-piqued face, an expression that never failed to exasperate harried art directors at Halcyon Communications. “Now, Bruno, she’s seven months pregnant. It shouldn’t be that hard to arrange for … an accident of some sort.”

  The coke dealer stared at his client. “Look, man—”

  “On the other hand,” said Beauchamp dryly, “this may be totally out of your league.”

  “Says who?”

  “You seem a little hesitant. Maybe I should check with someone … more professional.”

  Bruno sulked momentarily, then looked up. “How much?”

  “What’s it worth?”

  That stopped him for a moment. “Uh … five thousand. Considerin’ the hassle.”

  “I’ll give you seven. But I want it done right.”

  “You know I’ll subcontract it.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “I want cash. In advance.”

  “You’ll get it. How soon?”

  “Soon as I get somebody.”

  “It has to be soon, Bruno.”

  “Fuck off!”

  “Bruno?”

  “Huh?”

  “Wipe your mouth, will you?”

  Fifteen minutes later, Beauchamp called DeDe at Halcyon Hill. Her voice was expressionless, a telltale defense against the uncertainties of their day-old separation.

  “Just checking on you,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Is your mother there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. If you need anything sent out, let me know, will you?”

  Silence.

  “O.K., DeDe?”

  She began to cry. “Why are you being … so goddamned nice?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I miss you.”

  “Beauchamp … I want these babies so much. I’m not trying to hurt you, I promise.”

  “I know, darling. We’ll give it some time, O.K.?”

  “If I weren’t so confused, I’d be a better wife. I just need … I want to be by myself for a while.”

  “I understand.”

  She sniffled, then blew her nose. “There’s a chicken pot pie in the freezer and some leftover quiche in—”

  “I’ll be O.K.”

  “Beauchamp … I do love you.”

  “I know,” said her husband. “I know.”

  Mrs. Madrigal’s Confession

  FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER, BRIAN DECLINED A JOINT.

  He wanted to be straight when he heard this.

  “Once upon a time,” said Mrs. Madrigal, “there was a little boy named Andy Ramsey. Andy was not a particularly extraordinary little boy, but he grew up under extraordinary circumstances: his mother was a madam. She ran a brothel called the Blue Moon Lodge, in Winnemucca, Nevada, and Andy’s best friends and nursemaids were the whores who made that house their home. Perhaps for that reason—or perhaps not—Andy made a startling discovery by the time he reached puberty: There was nothing about him that felt like a boy.

  “Oh, he looked like a boy, all right. All the appropriate plumbing was there. But he never stopped feeling like a girl, a girl locked up inside a boy’s body. To his horror, that feeling intensified as Andy grew older. By the time he was sixteen, he was so frightened that he ran away from the whorehouse and hitched a ride to California.

  “For a while he held body and soul together by working as a migrant laborer. Then he worked as a soda jerk in a drugstore in Salinas, then as a laborer again, this time in Modesto. Shortly after his twentieth birthday, he left Modesto for Fort Ord, where he enlisted in the Army as a private. He was a good soldier, but he stayed at Fort Ord throughout the war—World War II, that is—mostly typing munitions reports for a drunken colonel. In the long run, however, Andy hated the all-male environment of the Army as much as he had hated the all-female environment of the whorehouse. And the feeling that he was really a woman persisted through it all.

  “One night, shortly after the end of the war, Andy met a pretty young woman at a dance in Monterey. She was very young, actually, about seventeen at the time; Andy was twenty-five. She was visiting from Minneapolis, staying at her cousin’s house in Carmel. Her name was Betty Borg, and Andy was quite taken with her, in his own way. She had a perky, independent spirit that he admired, and he was relieved to discover that he was attracted to her. Even sexually.

  “Betty wanted to get married and move back to Minneapolis. It was she who proposed, in fact, and Andy decided that this might be the best cure for his problem. So … they did just that. Andy fulfilled his responsibilities as a husband by working in a bookstore in Minneapolis. A year later, a little girl was born to the couple. They named her Mona, after Andy’s estranged mother back in Winnemucca.

  “None of it worked. Not for Andy, anyway. He ended up leaving his wife and child—deserting them—when the child was two years old. For the next fifteen years, he virtually dropped out of sight, drifting from city to city, a miserable, self-pitying creature who had botched his own life and the lives of the people around him. All of that ended, however, when Andy was forty-four. That was when he picked up the pieces and traveled to Denmark and spent his life savings on a sex change.”

  “And came back as Anna Madrigal.” It was Brian who supplied this information. More fascinated than shocked, he smiled at the landlady.

  She smiled back. “It’s a nice name, don’t you think? It’s an anagram.”

  “But if Mona is your daughter …?
Well, I thought you said she doesn’t know.”

  “She doesn’t. She moved to San Francisco three or four years ago, and shortly thereafter I read an item in Herb Caen’s column about a Mona Ramsey working at Halcyon Communications. I knew there couldn’t be that many Mona Ramseys in the world, so I did a little checking, and I cornered her one night at the Savoy-Tivoli.”

  “And?”

  “She liked me, if you please. So I invited her to come live at Barbary Lane. She fancies herself a bohemian, and I think she rather relished the idea of having a transsexual as a landlady.”

  “She knew that, then?”

  “Oh, yes. From the beginning.”

  “Does your … your wife know where you are? Or your mother?”

  Mrs. Madrigal shook her head. “They must think I’m dead.” She smiled faintly. “Of course, Andy is.”

  “And now you think Mona’s found out you’re her father and freaked out over it?”

  “It’s possible, don’t you think?”

  He smiled. “I’m not thinking very clearly right now.”

  “You poor boy!”

  “I’m … I’m very flattered that you told me, Mrs. Madrigal.”

  “Good. Now can we smoke that joint?”

  He laughed. “The sooner the … Wait a minute. How can Anna Madrigal be an anagram for Andy Ramsey?”

  “It’s not.”

  “But you said …”

  “I said it was an anagram. I didn’t say what for.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “My dear boy,” said the landlady, lighting a joint at last, “you are talking to a Woman of Mystery!”

  Once in a Blue Moon

  BOBBI BUZZED AROUND MONA LIKE A BRIDESMAID MAKING last-minute adjustments to a bridal gown. “I think you’ve got the headpiece on backward, Judy. Try it … no, the other way. There. Look how pretty that is!”

  “For Christ’s sake, Bobbi. It’s not supposed to be pretty!”

  “Well, you know. Anyway, you are pretty. You should be real proud.”

  Mona managed a tiny smile. “Stop trying to cheer me up.”

  “You’re gonna be the best yet, Judy. He’s gonna love you!”

  “He’d better not.”

  Bobbi giggled. “Don’t worry. Lots of our customers are like him.”