Michael Tolliver Lives

by Armistead Maupin

  Sweet. Typically Anna in its gentility and thoughtfulness. Her sign-off had a finality that unsettled me, but I wrote that off to her general inexperience with leaving voice messages. On the other hand, when you’re eighty-five years old, maybe you know to treat every goodbye as potentially your last. Maybe you’re just more conscious by then.

  It was too early to return her call, so I waited until midmorning, when Ben was doing his yoga down in the motel’s workout room. She answered on the first ring.

  “Madrigal.”

  “It’s me, Anna.”

  “Oh…dear. How lovely.”

  “It’s good to hear you, too.”

  “I hope I didn’t call at an inconvenient time last night.”

  “Not at all.” I smiled to myself when I said that, but I meant it just the same. More than anything, sex with Patreese had been a well-deserved escape from the bullshit of the biologicals, so it struck me as sort of charming, really, that Anna’s good wishes had reached us—shall we say?—post-climactically. It was like a transcontinental blessing.

  “How is your mother doing?” she asked.

  “No better,” I told her, “but no worse.”

  “Ah…well.”

  “She seems to be in a good place, though. The home, I mean. Christian as all hell, but what can you do?”

  “What does she do?” asked Anna.

  “Not much,” I said. “There’s a man who comes by regularly to do her hair and makeup.”

  “Well, that’s good,” said Anna. “I know that’s important to her.” How she knew this, I couldn’t tell you, given how little time she’d spent with Mama all those years ago. Maybe she just meant that women in general—and those who’ve successfully achieved womanhood—often appreciate the value of hair and makeup.

  “He’s a sweet guy,” I said. “And when he’s not doing hair, he strips.”

  Anna hesitated for a moment. “I take it you don’t mean floors.”

  I laughed. “He gets nekkid for the ladies.”

  “Well, that must be a hit at the home.”

  I laughed. “It’s just how he moonlights…far as I know.”

  “What a pity. How’s the rest of the family?”

  “Pretty much the same. My brother’s still bragging about his boats. My sister-in-law’s still heavy into her Jesus puppets.”

  She uttered a tolerant sigh. “Well, to each his own, dear. Have they been sweet to Ben?”

  “Everybody’s sweet to Ben.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” she said.

  “My seven-year-old great-nephew has a huge crush on him.”

  “Indeed?”

  “It’s platonic,” I told her, “but the kid is definitely a nancy boy.”

  Anna paused for a moment. “Isn’t seven a little early to know who you are?”

  “It wasn’t for me,” I said.

  She took that in for a moment. “No,” she said softly, “not for me, either.”

  “I’m worried about him,” I told her. “I think his grandfather’s on to him. He’s been making noises about boot camp.”

  “Boot camp? For a seven-year-old?”

  “It’s something they saw on Maury.”

  “On what?”

  “A TV show. Never mind. I think my brother was just thumping his chest.”

  Anna’s wheels were already turning. “Get them to send him out here for the summer.”

  I chuckled. “They’d sooner send him to Afghanistan.”

  “No…really, dear…we could take him to the new museum. And Chrissy Field…and the Exploratorium. The redwoods, for heaven sake.”

  Anna hadn’t had a kid to raise since Shawna (unless you count the thirty years she’s been raising me), so it was touching to see how quickly she could still embrace her inner landlady. I loved the thought of nellie little Sumter basking in her all-forgiving aura, but she and I both knew she didn’t have the strength for it.

  “Have you been keeping busy?” I asked.

  “Keeping busy? That’s a terrible thing to ask someone.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Only the bored keep busy. I am busy.”

  “I have no doubt of that.”

  “Brian and Shawna took me to see The Black Rider the other night.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A musical. Sort of. Tom Waits and William Burroughs, if you can imagine. Tuesday is acid night, apparently. The kids get high and take over the first six rows.”

  “And what decade was this?”

  Anna giggled. “I know…plus ça change, eh?”

  I could feel her glow warming me across the miles. It made me get serious for a moment. “You’re doin’ okay, though, aren’t you?”

  “Of course, dear.”

  “We’ll be home in a few days. You can take me to the museum.”

  “It’s a date,” she said. “Then we’ll get me a cat.”

  “Beg pardon, ma’am?”

  “I’d like to go to the SPCA and adopt a beat-up old cat.”

  I smiled. “Very well.”

  “Someone to sit in the sun with me. Who doesn’t want to go anywhere.”

  I knew this wasn’t a veiled plea for sympathy. Anna doesn’t veil anything beyond her head and an occasional lampshade. She would have been mortified, in fact, to know she’d come off as anything less than blithely self-contained.

  But she did, somehow; somehow she sounded sad.

  She had a cat when I met her. An old tiger tabby named Boris that prowled the mossy boardwalks of 28 Barbary Lane, slipping into windows at will. He didn’t live with Anna—or anyone else, for that matter—but she considered him her own. She was in her mid-fifties then and already grandedameing it in kimonos with a houseful of tenants who felt privileged to live under her spell. I was one of them, of course. Another was Anna’s biological daughter, the child left behind by—as Anna put it—the “lesser man” she used to be. Mona was restless and loving and funny and utterly impossible sometimes. She moved to England early in the reign of Princess Di and married a queer lord so he could get a green card and wag weenie in San Francisco. Whereupon Mona—well, Lady Mona, technically—began to take in lodgers at the rundown country house left behind by the weenie-wagging lord. The place just climbed into her raggedy soul. At forty she adopted a teenager of Aboriginal descent and decided to stay for good.

  Having lost her daughter to another country, Anna resigned herself to a life of vacations. I went over there a few times myself, since Mona and I had always been close. (We had roomed together once, and she had been my first lesbian fag hag.) When I saw her ensconced at Easley House, I realized how perfectly it suited her, and that somehow helped to shrink the planet she had put between us. Back in the city, I could still picture her clomping around in her wellies as she collected rent from the villagers. Or serving tea and shortbread in the Great Hall to goggle-eyed tourists from Texas. She had followed in her father’s footsteps, our Mona, becoming a landlady extraordinaire.

  I should have been better about keeping in touch, but I’ve never been a regular letter writer. Anna, of course, remained faithful in that regard, filling page after page of flimsy blue stationery with spidery lavender handwriting. When email came along a decade later, I mended my neglectful ways and began regular correspondence with hasbian@easleyhouse.co.uk, a handle Mona devised to suggest a lesbian who’d lately been straying with men. This was true only in the sense that once on Guy Fawke’s Day she’d gotten loaded on Quaaludes (you can still get them in Switzerland—who knew?) and fucked her stonemason, a guy she claimed looked “too much like Brad Pitt to pass up.” The hasbian label worked wonders, though. Half the dykes in the Cotswolds, many bearing pies and garden cuttings, showed up on Mona’s doorstep in a fevered effort to return her to the labial fold. “Got me laid for weeks,” she told me triumphantly.

  There were live-in girlfriends from time to time, but none lasted very long. Mona was way too independent, and her life was full. It was Wilfred, Mona’s adopted son,
who called me with the news. He hated asking this, he said, but it would probably be better if someone told Anna in person. So one warm October afternoon, after brunch in the Castro, I walked her back to the Dubose Triangle and told her that her daughter, my oldest friend, had been undergoing treatment for breast cancer for the past two years but didn’t want us to “make a big fuss about it.” The late delivery of this bombshell angered Anna as much as it had me, and we agreed that we damn well would make a fuss about it if we wanted. Indignation had been our only shield against the nasty bitch slap of reality.

  Anna had about five weeks with Mona; I was allotted the last five days, maybe because she knew me well. When I arrived in England, she was flying on morphine, so it went better than I’d imagined. She told me to fuck myself more than once, and said it with a smile on her face. It was quality time, as they say, which for Mona meant ranting and reminiscing and joking about Bill Clinton’s dick. Several years later, when those planes hit the Twin Towers, I remember thinking how shrewdly she had timed her exit. Her big wounded hippie heart would not have prospered in this cold new climate.

  She’d been gone for almost eight years, and her surviving parent wanted a cat.

  Someone to sit in the sun with me. Who doesn’t want to go anywhere.

  15

  Word One

  On Thursday morning Ben holed up at Inn Among the Flowers with his laptop and a backlog of furniture orders, so I could be alone with Mama before signing the papers. When I arrived at the Gospel Palms, she was propped up in bed watching Bill O’Reilly on a TV set bolted to the ceiling. Her makeup seemed fresh, so I figured Patreese had already made his rounds. I wondered if he’d talked about meeting me and Ben, and, if so, how free he’d been with the details. He was a hairdresser, after all.

  “Where’s your friend?” Mama asked, meaning Ben.

  I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the floor. “He’s my husband, Mama.”

  She scowled at me.

  “Irwin told you that, didn’t he? That we got married a few years ago.”

  A long, brooding silence and then: “Don’t be like that, Mikey.”

  All I could do was smile. Mama had been telling me not to be like that as long as I could remember. “All right. I won’t be like anything.”

  She fussed with the tiny blue curls around her temples. “What do you…ssss…want with a husband, anyway?”

  I laughed.

  “They’re nothin’ but heartache,” she added.

  I scoured my mother’s face for clues to her state of mind. In half a century of knowing this woman I’d never heard her speak a word against my father. I decided to be bold in return. “Why didn’t you leave him, Mama?”

  She recoiled visibly. “Watch your mouth, son.”

  “I mean it. Why didn’t you?”

  She fidgeted with the hem of the sheet. “I was going to, believe me.”

  “And?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “He died.”

  I suppressed a smile; then I realized she found this funny herself.

  “I reckon he saw it comin’,” she added dryly.

  Papa had died of colon cancer in 1987—not that long ago in the general scheme of things. “You never considered it before then?” I asked.

  Her lower lip stiffened. “I did more than…ssss…consider it.”

  “You left him, you mean?”

  She grunted and looked up at the big white face of Bill O’Reilly, hovering above us like a hot-air balloon. I found his aura of white-guy entitlement especially intolerable at that moment, so I reached for Mama’s clicker and turned him off.

  “I was watchin’ that,” Mama said.

  “When did you leave Papa?” I asked.

  She sighed in the same put-upon way she used to sigh when I was twelve and asked her if she’d seen my neckerchief slide or knew where Irwin had left my bike. “Remember the summer…ssss…we drove you boys up to…ssss…Camp Hemlock?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I left him on the way home. After we dropped y’all off.”

  “How? How did you leave him?”

  “On the side of the road.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  Mama, I have to say, looked a wee bit proud of herself. “He stopped to get a Nehi soda…ssss…and I just drove off and left him.”

  I was grinning shamelessly. “I take it you went back for him.”

  “I did not,” she said, smoothing the sheets. “I went to the Baptist retreat…ssss…at Blowing Rock. I didn’t get home for ten days.”

  “Papa never told me this.”

  She twisted her lips into a small, triumphant smile. “He was a proud man.”

  “How did he get home?”

  She shrugged. “Never told me.”

  “Did he have to cook for himself?”

  “I reckon.”

  “Musta bought Moon Pies from ol’ Drool Rag.”

  She let that go without a smile. “I needed some private time with the Lord…ssss…and it never cost Papa a cent.”

  “How’d you manage that?”

  “Green Stamps,” she said proudly.

  “Green Stamps?”

  “From the…ssss…Piggly Wiggly.”

  Green Stamps were Mama’s personal currency back then. She’d sit in front of the TV at night with a wet sponge and fill up whole booklets with them, later redeeming them for toasters and curtains and, once, even an Electrolux vacuum cleaner. They offered her the illusion of wealth, since all she ever really bought were groceries.

  I still didn’t get it. “The Baptist retreat took Green Stamps?”

  She shook her head. “I traded ’em in for a kitchenette set…ssss…and sold it to Mee-Maw.” Mee-Maw was my grandmother, my mother’s mother, who died in a car wreck in South Carolina a few years before Mama joined the Anita Bryant Crusade.

  “So Mee-Maw was in on this?”

  “Oh, no…ssss…I didn’t tell a soul.”

  “Nice work, Mama.”

  “Don’t you tease me.”

  “I’m not,” I said. “I mean it.”

  “Turn the TV…ssss…back on.”

  “No. I want to talk about the…power of attorney…thing.”

  She arranged her hands in front of her, one over the other, the way a cat does. “All right, then…ssss…talk.”

  “I’m just…I just want to make sure it’s what you really want.”

  “You’re hearin’ it…ssss…from the horse’s mouth.”

  “All right, then.”

  “I wanna go…ssss…when the Lord calls me. When he takes…ssss…my last breath. I don’t wanna lie here like a lump on some infernal…ssss…machine with Lenore praying over me…ssss…. you hear?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And those puppets better not come around after I’ve passed.” Smiling, I took her hand in mind. “I’ll do my best.”

  “You don’t have to be here,” she said. “I…ssss…didn’t mean that.”

  “I want to, Mama…if I can.”

  She shook her head emphatically, withdrawing her hand. “This is between…ssss…me and the Lord, Mikey.”

  She wasn’t trying to be brave; she meant it. The Lord was the only man who’d never let her down. He was not her angry, bullying husband or her unrepentant homosexual son or even her good son, the one who worked so hard to be a Christian but was hopelessly indentured to a woman Mama despised. As long ago as Blowing Rock the Lord could be counted upon to be exactly what Mama needed, when Mama needed it.

  There was no point in wasting time with the others.

  The signing process was surprisingly quick. Ben arrived in a taxi at noon and met the lawyer in the lobby. (Mama had chosen this guy from the Yellow Pages, reasoning that someone named Joel Bernstein wasn’t likely to know anyone in Lenore and Irwin’s crowd.) When Patreese arrived, resplendent in a crisp pink shirt and gray tie, the three of them joined me in Mama’s room. We looked more like a caucus at an ACLU convention than the hastily
assembled support group of a dying Christian lady.

  Patreese pulled me and Ben into a huddle while the lawyer was conferring with Mama. “Y’all doin’ all right?” he whispered.

  “Pretty good,” I said.

  “I came in this morning,” Patreese said. “She wanted to look pretty for y’all.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I noticed.”

  “I told her we bumped into each other.”

  Ben smirked. “One way of putting it.”

  Patreese rubbed my back with a big warm palm, while doing the same to Ben. For a moment we were a threesome again, and it was oddly reassuring.

  I glanced toward the door. “What if we have visitors?”

  Patreese frowned. “You mean the puppet lady?”

  Ben stifled a giggle.

  “Don’t sweat it,” said Patreese. “Mohammed’s looking out for us.”

  I almost took this as a declaration of faith, considering Patreese’s less-than-predictable profile, but stripper/hairdresser/Muslim seemed like one note too many.

  Ben caught my confusion. “Mohammed’s the guy at the desk,” he said.

  When we were done with the signing, Mama dismissed the lawyer, kissed me goodbye with brisk efficiency, and declared her need for a nap, thereby banishing the three of us to the Starbucks across the street. (Mr. Bernstein had to be in court.)

  “Are y’all still headin’ home tomorrow?” Patreese asked.

  “Yeah,” I replied, feeling the strangest mixture of relief and guilt. “I really gotta get back to work.”

  “I’ll keep an eye on her for you.”

  I told him that would be wonderful and wrote down our phone number and email address on a napkin. “Don’t get that mixed up,” I said, “with all the other ones you get.”

  Patreese lowered his eyelids playfully. “Listen here,” he said. “I don’t mess around with just any ol’ coupla white boys.”

  I thought that was a charming thing to say. “Hang on to your copy of the document,” I told him. “Just in case my sister-in-law gives you any shit.”