“Thank the Lord,” I said.
He laughed. “I’m happy for you, man. You deserve it.”
“Well, so do you, buttwipe. Get your ass online. The ladies’ll be lining up. Whatever happened to that sculptress you met at Burning Man?”
“She was too much of a purple person.”
Purple people, in our private lexicon, are old gray lefties of either gender with a fondness for purple clothing, squash-blossom necklaces, and the like. Brian and I are both purplish, philosophically speaking, but we’re put off by the predictability of the uniform. To me it’s no more radical or original than, say, Arizona retirees in their pastel pantsuits.
Brian seemed lost in thought, and then: “Heard from Mary Ann lately?”
“Nope.”
“You talk to her, though.”
It was more of a statement than a question, so I set him straight. “No, I don’t, Brian. Not for a long time.” I’d been caught between the two of them when Mary Ann left him eighteen years earlier, and I had no intention of letting that happen again.
“Sorry,” he said meekly. “I thought you did.”
“Not since 9/11,” I said. “That’s been…Jesus…four years.”
Brian whistled, sharing my amazement. “Time flies when you’re waging a War on Terror.”
On the day that defined the new millennium, Mary Ann had called Mrs. Madrigal from her house in Darien, Connecticut. She wanted to make sure that “everybody” was still there, that no one from the old crowd at Barbary Lane had chosen that week to travel to Manhattan. From Anna’s description, the call had been short and businesslike, more of a schoolyard headcount than a serious effort at reestablishing contact. It was touching to know that Mary Ann had worried about us, but the whole country was worrying that day, so I didn’t read much into it. Still, I gave her a call, wondering if she might have lost someone herself, but our talk was limited to the surreal events we’d just watched on television. A crisis does draw people together, but rarely for the right reason. The old wounds flare up again soon enough; the bond lasts no longer than the terror.
But every now and then I can’t resist the urge to Google Mary Ann. On a recent search I found her name on a press release for a charitable event in Darien—a food fair for the local Explorer Scout troop that, strange as it seems, runs the ambulance service in that wealthy Republican enclave on Long Island Sound. Mary Ann was expressing her pride in her stepson Robbie, a member of the troop, and pledging her support, somewhat inelegantly, to this “very unique institution.” She was pictured with Robbie and her husband of several years, a tall, skinny bald guy in a patchwork madras blazer who had recently retired as CEO of a New York brokerage firm. Mary Ann was identified as a “former television personality.” It made me think of one of those “As Seen on TV” labels you find on drugstore packaging for vegetable dicers and anti-snoring contraptions.
Mary Ann’s neighbors in Darien must have had to do some Googling themselves to determine the exact nature of her fame. A few folks may have remembered her short-lived cable talk show in the early nineties—a pleasant enough diversion involving minor celebrities and their pets—but she was far more likely to be known as the gracious spokesperson for a line of adjustable beds for the elderly. I remember the first time I saw the commercial. Thack had left me several weeks earlier, and I was holed up in bed with late-night TV and a pint of Cherry Garcia, having just whacked off, with scant satisfaction, to a porn video in which all the Texas Rangers had Czechoslovakian accents.
“Are you like I used to be?” Mary Ann was saying, still amazingly pretty in her mid-forties. “Do you wake up feeling more tired than when you went to bed?”
I guffawed and dropped ice cream on the sheets and thought: Yes, I am, babycakes. I’m exactly like you used to be. It was a strange little moment of communion, as if she were somehow speaking directly to me. I briefly considered tracking her down and having a rueful hoot about the random fucked-upness of life, until I remembered I was helping to raise the daughter she had left behind. Shawna was a teenager by then—and something of a handful—not to mention the fact that I was closer than ever to the guy whose heart Mary Ann had broken. There had been way too much chilly water under the bridge; it was foolish, even dangerous, to pretend otherwise.
So after the brief emotional ceasefire of a terrorist attack, our separate lives—and the silence—continued as if the towers had never fallen. The urge to reconnect didn’t arise again until Ben and I were married at City Hall. Maybe my guard was down because my heart was so open, but I wanted to share the good news with Mary Ann. I wanted a fifty-something housewife in Connecticut to be happy for me, her old friend Mouse: the guy who once believed—as she surely had—that he’d never live to see forty.
But I resisted the impulse. I wasn’t even sure if I knew her anymore.
“Where the fuck is the doctor?” asked Brian, growing restless on the gurney. “I could be dead by now.”
“Relax,” I said. “Enjoy your drugs.”
He grunted and stared at the wall.
“Do you think she’ll look her up?”
“Who?”
“Shawna. When she gets to New York.”
I told him that Darien was a far cry from New York.
“That’s not the point.”
“She doesn’t talk about Mary Ann at all. It’s not something that concerns her. She’s always been more curious about Connie.”
“Yeah,” he said numbly. “I guess you’re right.”
Connie Bradshaw, Shawna’s birth mother, was a not-that-close friend of Mary Ann during high school days in Ohio. Connie had become a stewardess for United (back when there were still stewardesses) and was Mary Ann’s only contact in San Francisco when she defected from Cleveland. She crashed on Connie’s sofa bed in the Marina just long enough to get her bearings, and more than long enough to realize that her once envied classmate (a head majorette no less) was not quite as sophisticated as she’d remembered. Connie was a daffy, good-natured sleep-around. (Later, in fact, she would share an awkward one-night stand with Brian, before he finally hooked up with Mary Ann.) Mary Ann wanted no part of Connie’s free-range tackiness—not the Pet Rock or the plush python or the Aqua Velva she kept in the bathroom cabinet for the guys who slept over. She fled within the week, as impulsively as she had fled Cleveland.
San Francisco, however, is basically a village, so Mary Ann never quite escaped Connie’s worshipful attention, especially as Mary Ann’s star began to rise. In a weak moment, during a chance meeting at the zoo, Mary Ann told Connie (then pregnant with Shawna by an undetermined father) that Brian wanted a baby but was shooting blanks. Connie never forgot this. Months later, as she lay dying on the delivery table, her blood having failed to clot, she bequeathed her newborn daughter to her famous classmate from Cleveland and a guy she’d mostly remembered as having once been sweet to her.
When Connie’s brother delivered Shawna (literally) to the startled couple at 28 Barbary Lane he brought them a trunk of Connie’s treasures—her legacy as it were—a sad collection of dried corsages and pep buttons and yearbooks scrawled with smiley faces. Mary Ann waited until Shawna was five to open the trunk, an event that Shawna remembers as both tender and curiously momentous. Not a bad call, given the fact that Mary Ann left for New York only days later. I’ve often wondered if Mary Ann saw that little ritual as a moment of divestiture, a changing of the guard. Here’s your real mom, darling. She’s the one who deserves your love. She’s the one that you’ll be missing.
As it happened, Shawna took Mary Ann’s departure rather well and began a serious fascination with Connie. Flight Attendant Barbie became the centerpiece of Shawna’s toy collection and was often drafted for theatrical extravaganzas requiring a mother figure. Before long I found myself being interrogated about a woman I’d met only once—when Brian brought her to one of Anna’s Christmas parties. I’d end up telling Shawna how pretty Connie was, and how nice, and how much genuine cheer she brought into
a room. But the kid was no dummy and demanded more as she grew older. She was about twelve when she grilled me one afternoon on Heart’s Desire Beach, a tree-lined cove on Tomales Bay, where we’d settled with a picnic lunch. She waited until Brian was dog-paddling offshore before asking me if I’d ever met her “real dad.”
I told her—coward that I am—that I’d always thought of Brian as her real dad.
“The other one,” she said. “The one that got my real mom pregnant.”
What was I supposed to say? “Well, no, honey…I never did.”
Shawna dug in the sand with her toes, idly making a trench. “Do you know where she met him?”
All I could remember from Mary Ann’s account was that Connie had narrowed Shawna’s paternity down to two “really nice guys.” Only one had come with an actual location, so that’s the one I went with. “I think it was the Us Festival.”
“The what?”
“It was sort of like Woodstock, I guess, but a lot more calculated and commercial.” (A few weeks earlier we had watched the Woodstock documentary on Brian’s VCR, so it made for an easy reference point.)
“Was everybody naked?”
I smiled, shaking my head. “This was the eighties. Things had changed by then. Your mom was probably wearing something shiny.”
“Did she see him after that?”
“I’m not really sure.” I smoothed a patch of sand with my palm, hoping we’d get the hell off this subject. “I just know where she met him.”
There was a long uncomfortable silence, so we both gazed out at the water. While Brian splashed in the distance like a drunken seal, the waning sun was copper-plating the surface of the bay. It was easy to forget that this sleepy inlet marked the exact location of the San Andreas Fault. Many eons earlier (as Anna had once explained to me) the earth had ripped open here, leaving only this shimmering, seductive scar.
Shawna turned to me: “So…was my real mom a ho or what?”
My jaw must have hit the sand. “Jesus, Shawna, what sort of question is that?”
She shrugged her delicate nut-brown shoulders. “Just a regular one.”
I felt like one of those big-bosomed matrons in The Three Stooges movies who were always huffing “Well, I never!” so I softened my tone to keep from losing the girl completely. “Let’s put it this way,” I told her. “If she was a ho, then I was one, too. And so was your dad, for that matter. Back in those days we were all a bit…”
“Ho-ish,” she said, filling in the silence.
I flicked sand at her blue-jeaned legs. “You just watch it.”
“No, you do!” she said, flicking back and giggling. She could still be a little girl sometimes, and it never failed to melt my heart.
The conversation ended when Brian came in from his swim, swaddling himself in an ancient Grateful Dead beach towel. Shawna offered him a sandwich from the picnic basket, then leaned against him as he ate it, commenting on the gulls that were wheeling above the bay. I envied them both at that moment, but mostly Shawna, for having a father with such a boundless capacity for love. What must that feel like? I wondered.
There were footsteps in the hospital corridor, so I wrapped up as succinctly as possible.
“Don’t worry about Shawna,” I said. “She’s yours for life.”
“You think so, huh?”
“I know so, Mr. Man.”
“Okay, fine, but what if—”
The curtains parted with a sudden swoosh to reveal a young male doctor of South Asian descent. He looked a lot like M. Night Shyamalan, I thought. “Okay,” he said as he consulted his clipboard. “What have we here?”
I turned to Brian. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”
Brian chuckled.
The doctor frowned in confusion. “I’m sorry, I—”
“You must be straight,” I said, grinning.
The doctor smiled sweetly. “Is that relevant?”
“No, I was just…never mind…I’m sorry.”
The doctor studied Brian’s foot for a moment, then asked him how it happened. “He fell into an abyss,” I explained.
“Is this your partner?” the doctor asked Brian.
Brian glanced at me and smirked. “Close enough,” he said.
19
The Burning Question
It was almost dark and Ben and I were crammed into our galley kitchen, trying out a new recipe for brussels sprouts that a checkout guy at Trader Joe’s had shared with me. Neither one of us is a serious foodie—by anyone’s measure—so we tend to approach cooking with the peppy unprofessionalism of fifth-graders assigned a science project.
“I’ll fry the pancetta,” said Ben, squeezing past me to the stove in a minuet we’d already perfected. “Do you know how to blanch?”
That’s a wonderful setup line for a queer of my generation, but I squelched my inner Baby Jane for fear of wearing out her welcome. “It’s the same as steaming, right?”
“Yeah…I think so.”
I grabbed a saucepan and began to fill it under the tap. “This is gonna be so fucking good.”
“I dunno,” said Ben, snipping the pancetta with the kitchen shears. “I’m not sure about the maple syrup.”
“Why not?”
“With brussels sprouts?”
I’ve never been a fan of vegetables. To my way of thinking, there are very few of them that would not be hugely improved by the addition of bacon and syrup. Ben, on the other hand, likes his greens unadulterated. He munches them raw like a giraffe.
“Don’t you think,” he said judiciously, “that the syrup might overwhelm the sprouts?”
“I certainly hope so.”
He grinned at me sideways, benignly disapproving, as he dropped the pancetta into a hot skillet. “How long do we bake it then?”
“Ten or fifteen minutes, at least. Long enough for ’em to get all tender and syrupy.” I waggled my eyebrows in lascivious appreciation.
That was when my cell phone rang. Rang off the hook, as they used to say, back when telephones sounded like my cell phone—noisy and demanding.
I checked the readout and saw my brother’s name.
“It’s Irwin,” I said, looking up at Ben. It was a sobering moment, to say the least, since we both knew that Irwin never calls just to chat.
“Pick up,” he said. “I can handle this.”
I headed for the living room and settled on the sofa, giving a final holler to Ben in the kitchen—“A full half-cup of syrup, please, sir”—before opening the phone and greeting my brother as nonchalantly as possible. “How’s it goin’, Irwin?”
That seemed to be a tough question.
“Is it Mama?”
“Oh…no, she’s fine. I mean, not fine but…you know…”
“Sure.” I was growing more and more uncomfortable. I was pretty sure I was about to catch holy hell for the change in the power of attorney.
But Irwin sounded oddly subdued. “Listen, Mikey. I’m headin’ out your way in a few days. I thought we could have lunch or something.”
“Sure,” I said, now completely confused. “What’s up?”
“Oh…you know…just a conference in San Jose.”
“What sort of conference?”
“Uh…Promise Keepers.”
That’s the big Christian men’s powwow. They gather in stadiums and bond over Jesus and promise to love their families and “lead” their wives. Lenore has not been led anywhere for years, but guys like my brother are so starved for male-to-male intimacy that they have to grab it wherever they find it. I could hardly give him shit about it.
“Why don’t you come for dinner?” I said. “We’ve got a great new recipe for brussels sprouts.”
Ben hooted from the kitchen.
“You know,” said Irwin, “I mean no disrespect to Ben, but…this is more…brother to brother.”
What the fuck was he getting at?
“Okay,” I said evenly. “We can get a bite somewhere. The two of us.”
/>
“Could you come to the hotel?”
“In San Jose?”
“I’ll be out at the airport, actually.”
“Jesus, Irwin, that’s bleak. At least come into town.”
There was silence, so I figured I’d upset him with the J-word. “Sorry. I just meant there’s better places to eat if—”
“I don’t care about the food, Mikey! I just want to get together!”
“Okay. Fine. Whatever.” I was surprised by the anguish in his voice. “Can you tell me what this is about?”
“No…not on the phone.”
“Will Lenore be with you?”
“No.”
“Well…call me when you get in.”
“I will, bro.” His tone was softer now. “Thanks for this, you hear?”
Thanks for what was the burning question.
I have a gardener friend up in Sebastopol who likes to tell people that he has a mind like a steel trap—sometimes he has to gnaw his leg off to get away from it.
That’s me to a T. Once I start fretting about something, there’s no escaping its viselike grip. It pops up on the treadmill at the gym. Or during sex. Or in the middle of a pleasant dinner at home when you should be concentrating on the food.
“They’re actually pretty good,” said Ben.
I drew a blank. “Uh…sorry…what?”
“The brussels sprouts.”
“Oh…yeah…it works, doesn’t it?”
Ben set his fork down and regarded me with a gentle, knowing smile. “I wouldn’t worry about it, babe. Maybe he just wants some time with you.”
“He’s never wanted time with me.”
“What about when you were molesting alligators?”
“That was the last time, believe me. He just needed an accomplice.”
Ben took a sip of his wine. “Maybe he wants to come out of the closet.”
I rolled my eyes at this deliberate mischief. “How did I know you would say that?”
A wicked chuckle.
“Trust me,” I told him. “That ain’t it. And if it were, he wouldn’t be doing it during a Promise Keepers convention.”
Michael Tolliver Lives Page 15