Significant Others (2 page)

“Don’t change the subject, young lady.”

Shawna sat on the edge of the bed and let her head dangle in a loose semicircle. The little charlatan was condescending to cute as a last resort.

“What did you trade for it?” he asked.

Her answer was unintelligible.

“What?”

“My
Preemie,
“ she said.

She slid off the bed, hitting the expensive new carpet with a soft thud. “My Cabbage Patch Preemie.” Her tone indicated that this was a matter of simple laissez-faire economics and none of his goddamn business.

He felt a vague responsibility to be angry, but he couldn’t help smiling at the inevitable scene in the condo across the hallway: Cap Sorenson, the ultimate Reaganite, returning home after a hard day of software and racketball, only to come upon Daddy’s little soldier playing mommy to a premature Cabbage Patch doll.

Shawna tugged on his arm. “Dad-dee … c’mon!”

He checked the clock. Seven thirty-seven. “O.K., Puppy, go pick out a tape.” This was his usual ploy to get her out of the room while he pulled on his bathrobe. It was no big deal to him, but Mary Ann thought it “inadvisable” that he walk around naked in front of Shawna. And Mary Ann should know; she was the one with the talk show.

“No,” said Shawna.

“What do you mean, no?”

“No VCR. Go see Anna.”

“We’ll do that, Puppy, but not yet. Anna’s asleep. Go on now … pick out a tape. Mommy brought you
Pete the Dragon
and
Popeye,
and I think there’s—”

A whine welled up in the child. She pawed the carpet belligerently, cutting a silvery path through the powder-blue plush. He couldn’t help wondering if parenting was an age-related skill like warfare—tolerable, even stimulating, at twenty, but inescapably futile at forty.

He looked his daughter in the eye and spoke her name—her given name—to signal his seriousness. “I want you to go pick out a tape before Daddy gets unbelievably mad at you. We’ll go see Anna later on.”

Shawna’s lower lip plumped momentarily, but she obeyed him. When she was gone, he dragged himself to the bathroom and brushed his teeth. The floor was still wet from Mary Ann’s frantic ablutions, so he mopped it with a damp towel and tossed the towel into the laundry hamper.

He hesitated before weighing himself, then decided that the ugly truth was a surefire antidote for his late-night jelly doughnut binges. The scales surprised him, however. He had lost four pounds in four days.

This made no sense to him, but he had never been one to argue with serendipity.

Shawna threw her usual tantrum over breakfast. This time her yogurt was the wrong color and there wasn’t enough Perrier to make her cranberry juice “go fizzy.” Would she ever tire of testing him?

After breakfast, according to custom, he let her pick out her clothes for the day. She chose a green cotton turtleneck with ladybugs on the arm and a pair of absurdly miniature 501’s. He dressed her, then left her in the custody of Robin Williams and the VCR while he changed into his own version of her ensemble.

The clock said eight forty-six when he went to the window and peered down twenty-three stories into the leafy green canyon of Barbary Lane. From this height, Anna Madrigal’s courtyard was nothing more than a terra-cotta postage stamp, but he could still discern a figure moving jauntily along the perimeter.

The landlady was making her morning sweep, brandishing a broom so vigorously that the ritual seemed more akin to exercise than to practical considerations of cleanliness. Later, she would cross the postage stamp diagonally and sit on the bench next to the azalea bed. For all her professed free-spiritedness, she was a creature of blatant predictability.

He lifted his gaze from the courtyard and surveyed their vista, a boundless sweep of city, bay and sky stretching from Mount Diablo to Angel Island and beyond.

There were no chimney pots or eucalyptus branches blocking their vision, no unsightly back stairwells or rocky rises framing some half-assed little chunk of water. What they had at The Summit was a goddamn
view
—as slick and unblemished as a photomural.

And just about as real.

Sometimes, when he stared at the horizon long enough, their teal-and-gray living room lost its identity altogether and became the boardroom of a corporate jet dipping its wings in homage to the Bank of America building.

Today, the sky was cloudless and the air was clear. No hint of the holocaust raging sixty miles south of the city. There, amid the brittle manzanita brush of the Santa Cruz Mountains, a jagged trail of fire seven miles wide had already blackened fifteen thousand acres and driven five thousand people from their homes.

But not here at The Summit. Nature wouldn’t stand a chance at The Summit.

He sometimes wondered about that preposition. Should he tell people he lived
at
The Summit,
in
The Summit or
on
The Summit? Usually, when pressed, he admitted to 999 Green and left it at that.

If he was embarrassed, he had every right to be. He’d lived in the shadow of this concrete leviathan for nearly eight years, cursing it continually. Now, at his wife’s insistence—and using his wife’s money—he’d joined the enemy in a big way.

They had done it for Shawna. And for security. And because they needed a tax shelter. They had also done it because Mary Ann wanted a glossier setting for her “lifestyle” (God help her, she had actually used that word) than could ever be provided by the funky old bear of a building at 28 Barbary Lane.

Mrs. Madrigal had taken it well, but Brian knew she’d been hurt by their departure. At the very least, her sense of family had been violated. Even now, five months after their ascension, their old apartment on the lane remained empty and unrented, as if something had died there.

Maybe something had.

Life was different now; he knew that. The guy who had once waited tables at Perry’s bore scant resemblance to this new and improved postmodern version of Brian Hawkins.

The new Brian drove a twenty-thousand-dollar Jeep. He owned three tuxedos and a mink-lined bomber jacket from Wilkes (which he wore only while driving the Jeep). Something of a fixture at Pier 23, he knew how to do lunch with the best of them.

When the new Brian went to parties, he usually ended up making man talk with the mayor’s husband or Danielle Steel’s husband—and once even with Geraldine Ferraro’s husband.

O.K. He was a consort.

But even that took skill, didn’t it?

And who was to say he didn’t rank among the best?

When Shawna grew bored with television, he helped her into a windbreaker and briefed her for the trek to Barbary Lane. His basic requirements were two: Don’t scream bloody murder on the elevator, and don’t point at the doorman and yell “Mr. T!”

She did as she was told, miraculously enough, and they reached Green Street without a hitch. As they trooped along the crest of Russian Hill, his limbs felt curiously leaden; his temples pulsed a little, threatening a headache.

If this was the flu, he didn’t need it. There were four major events in the next week alone.

Shawna insisted on being carried in his arms as they descended the steepest slope of Leavenworth, but she squirmed her way to the ground again as soon as they reached the rickety wooden stairs leading to Barbary Lane.

“Anna steps,” she said, already recognizing the boundaries of another duchy. The lane, after all, belonged to Mrs. Madrigal. Even the grownups knew that.

There was a bulletin on the landing that confirmed the landlady’s sovereignty:
SAVE THE BARBARY STEPS—
Insensitive city officials have plans to replace our beloved wooden steps with hideous concrete ones. Now is the time to speak up. Contact Anna Madrigal, 28 Barbary Lane.

Damn right, he thought. Give ‘em hell, Anna.

Nevertheless, he took Shawna’s hand as the beloved rotting planks creaked ominously beneath their tread. At the top, where the ground bristled with a stubble of dry fennel, he let her go and watched as she pranced between the garbage cans into the musky gloom of the eucalyptus trees. She looked like a child heading home.

By the time he’d arrived at the first clump of cottages, she was already playing havoc with Boris.

“Take it easy,” he told her. “He’s an old kitty. Don’t pet him so hard.”

She snatched her hand away from the tabby, cackling in her best mad-scientist fashion, then dashed up the lane again. The path at this point was paved with ballast stones, treacherous even for grownups.

“Slow down, Puppy. You’re gonna hurt yourself again.” He caught up with her and took her hand, leading the way toward the smoother, wider portion of the lane.

“You remember Anna’s number?” he asked the kid.

Of course she didn’t.

“It’s twenty-eight,” he said, feeling stupid as soon as he said it.

Why the hell should she have to learn
that?

Because the house at the end of the lane was all he had to give a child.

It was all the lore he knew, his only storybook.

The door to the lych-gate was open.

The landlady stood in the courtyard, hunched over her largest sinsemilla plant. She was plucking its leaves with a tweezer, coaxing the potency into its blossoms. Her face suggested brain surgery in progress, but she was humming a merry little tune.

Shawna bolted into the courtyard, losing herself in the folds of Mrs. Madrigal’s pale muslin skirt. The landlady gave a startled yelp, dropping the tweezers, then laughed along with the kid.

“It’s the Feds,” said Brian, grinning.

Mrs. Madrigal looked down at the creature clamped to her leg and stroked its hair affectionately.

“She’s missed you,” said Brian. “It’s been two whole days.”

The landlady’s huge blue eyes swung in his direction momentarily. She offered him a dim smile before returning her attention to Shawna. “I’ve missed her too,” she said to the kid.

It was asinine, but he felt a little jealous of Mrs. Madrigal’s undivided devotion to Shawna. “I saw your notice,” he said, searching for something to please her. “Are those crazy bastards really gonna tear down the steps?”

The landlady nodded soberly. “If we don’t put up a fight.”

She said
we,
he noticed; that was something. She still considered him part of the lane. “Well … if there’s anything I can do …”

“There is, actually.”

“Great.”

“I thought perhaps if Mary Ann could say something on her show … you know, just a few words about preserving our heritage, that sort of thing.” She fussed with a wisp of hair at her temple, waiting for his response.

“Yeah … well, sure … I could mention it to her. They have an awfully rigid format, though.” He was backtracking now, remembering Mary Ann’s aversion to what she called “hokey local items.” Mrs. Madrigal’s crusade would almost certainly fall into that category.

The landlady read him like a book. “I see,” she murmured.

“I’ll tell her, though. I’m sure she’ll be upset about it.”

Mrs. Madrigal studied him for a moment, almost wistfully, then began scanning the ground around her feet. “Now where did those damn things go? Shawna dear, look over there in that ivy and see if you can find Anna’s tweezers.”

He thought briefly of begging her forgiveness, then turned frivolous in his embarrassment. “Hey,” he blurted, “you should grow your fingernails long.”

Now on her hands and knees, Mrs. Madrigal looked up at him. “Why is that, dear?”

“You know, like those housewives in Humboldt County. Works much better than tweezers, they say.”

She handled this clumsy inanity with her usual grace. “Ah, yes. I see what you mean.” Falling silent again, she searched until she found the tweezers, then stood up and brushed her hands on her skirt. “I tried that once … growing my nails long.” She caught her breath and shook her head. “I wasn’t man enough for it.”

He laughed, hugely relieved. In Mrs. Madrigal’s repertoire, a proffered joke was the next best thing to forgiveness. When her eyes locked on his, they were full of their old familiar playfulness. He saw his entry and took it.

“I wonder,” he said, “if I could ask a big favor of you.”

She looked at him for a moment, then peered down at the child hanging on her skirt. “Tell you what, dear. Go into the house and look on the sofa. There’s a nice new friend for you.”

Shawna looked skeptical. “A Gobot?”

“You’ll see. Be careful of the steps, now. The door is open.”

As the child toddled away, Mrs. Madrigal beamed appreciatively. “She’s just as smart as she can be.”

“What did you get her?” he asked.

“Just a stuffed animal,” came the mumbled reply.

It embarrassed him a little that the landlady spent money on Shawna. “You really shouldn’t,” he said.

She answered with a faint who-gives-a-damn smile, then said: “What sort of favor?”

“Well,” he said, “my nephew is coming to town for a few days, and I wondered if … if he could stay at our old place.”

She blinked at him.

“If it’s a problem,” he added hastily, “just say so, and I’ll …”

“How old is he?”

“Uh … eighteen, I think. Maybe nineteen.”

She nodded. “Well … there’s no furniture, of course. There’s a cot in the basement and maybe a chest of drawers.” She tapped her forefinger against her lower lip. Her maternal juices were obviously functioning again. It cheered Brian to know that he could still do this for her.

“His name is Jed,” he said. “He’s in pre-law at Rice University. That’s all I know, except that he’s probably straight.”

The landlady gave him a sly smile. “That’s what he told you? He’s probably straight?”

He laughed. “Well, he’s currently in love with Bruce Springsteen, so I just assumed he was.”

“Now wait a minute.”

“It’s Michael’s theory. Get him to explain it. He says every generation produces one male performer that straight boys are allowed to be queer for. It was Mick Jagger for a long time, and now it’s Bruce Springsteen. So I figure the kid’s straight.”

“You and your featherbrained theories.”