Sure of You (5 page)

“I’m not sure they’re the
right
ones. I got confused about our model.”

“Fuck it.”

Thack chuckled. “You know what I’ve been thinking?”

“What?”

“We should just go to an ACT-UP meeting. I mean, just stop by to see what it’s like.”

Somehow, Michael had been expecting this. Thack’s advocacy had been bubbling like a broth all week, close to over-flowing. If it hadn’t taken this form, it would have almost certainly taken another. An irate letter to the
Chronicle,
maybe, or a shouting match with a Muni driver.

When Michael didn’t react, Thack added: “Don’t you feel like kicking some butt?”

He tried to keep it light. “Can’t we just hug it for a while?”

Thack was not amused. “I have to do something,” he said.

“About what?”

“Everything. AZT, for one thing. How much do we pay for that shit? And Jesse Fucking Helms is gonna fix it so poor people can’t even get it. And you know what those sorry bastards think? Serves ’em right, anyway. Shouldn’t’ve been butt-fucking in the first place.”

“I know,” said Michael, patting Thack’s leg.

“I can’t believe how cold-blooded people have gotten.”

Michael agreed with him, but he found his lover’s anger exhausting. Now, more than ever, he needed time for the other emotions as well. So what if the world was fucked? There were ways to get around that, if you didn’t make yourself a total slave to rage.

“Thack…”

“What?”

“Well…I don’t understand why you’re mad all the time.”

His lover paused, then pecked Michael on the temple. “I don’t understand why you’re not.”

Harry heard the kiss and scrambled frantically over their intertwined legs, whimpering like a spurned lover. “Uh-oh,” said Thack. “Kiss Patrol.”

They parted enough to admit the dog, then scratched him in tandem, Thack attacking the lower back, Michael attending to his head. Harry invariably left the room when they were having sex, but simple affection was too much for him to miss.

“This jealousy isn’t healthy,” said Michael.

“He’s all right.” Thack kissed the dog’s neck. “Aren’t you?”

Harry gave a breathy har-har in reply.

“He smells gross,” said Michael.

“Is that right, Harry? Do you smell gross?”

“I’ll wash him tomorrow.”

Thack leaned closer to the dog’s ear. “Hear that, Harry? Better head for the hills.”

Soon enough, Harry did retire to the bedroom, leaving his masters to snooze on the sofa. Michael drifted off to a rising chorus of foghorns and the occasional screech of tires down in the Castro. At eleven o’clock he was jolted awake by his beeper, prickly as a needle in the darkness.

A Practicing New Yorker

F
OR SEVERAL YEARS NOW THE TENDERLOIN HAD BEEN
on a surprising upswing. Where formerly had been wino dives and inflatable plastic lady shops now bloomed chocolatiers and restaurants with arugula on the menu. Easily the most stylish of the new eateries was D’orothea’s Grille, a postmodern fantasia with trompe I’oeil marble walls and booth dividers that looked like giant Tinker Toys.

As Mary Ann entered, her eyes made a clandestine dash to the wall behind the maître d’s stand. There a row of caricatures alerted newcomers to the restaurant’s more illustrious customers. Her face was still there, of course—why had she worried that it wasn’t?—sandwiched comfortably as ever between the renderings of Danielle Steel and Ambassador Shirley Temple Black.

The maitre d’ looked up and smiled. “There you are.”

“Hi, Mickey. I’m expecting a guy…”

“He’s already here.”

“Ah. Great.”

The maitre d’ leaned forward conspiratorially. “I put him at the banquette in the back. There’s a table available in the front room, but Prue’s there with Father Paddy, and I thought”—and here he winked—“it might be a little quieter back in Siberia.”

She rewarded him with a rakish chuckle. “You’re way ahead of me, Mickey.”

“We try,” he said, and smiled wickedly.

Grateful for this promise of privacy, she fled to the back, while Prue and the priest yammered away obliviously. When she reached the furthermost banquette, Burke Andrew leapt to his feet and hugged her awkwardly across the table.

“Hey,” he said. “You look great.”

“Thanks. Look who’s talking.”

He let his head wobble bashfully. She caught a glimpse of the troubled youth who had left her for a career in New York. Most of that person was gone now, with only the broad shoulders and great hair (strawberry blond and receding heroically) remaining to trigger her memories. His earnest collie face, once such a blank slate, had developed crags in becoming places.

He sank to the banquette and studied her for a moment, shaking his head slowly. “Ten years. Damn.”

“Eleven,” she said, sitting down.

“Shit.”

She laughed.

“And you’re a star now,” he said. “They’ve got your picture on the wall and everything.”

She thought it best not to know what he meant. “Huh?”

“Over there. Next to Shirley Temple.”

A quick, dismissive glance at the caricature. “Oh, yeah.”

“Don’t you like it?”

She shrugged. “It’s O.K., I guess.” After a beat, she added: “Shirley hates hers.”

One of his gingery eyebrows leapt noticeably. “She’s a friend?”

She nodded. “She lives here, you know.”

O.K., maybe “friend” was stretching it, but Shirley had been on the show once, and Mary Ann had chatted with her extensively at the French Impressionist exhibit at the De Young. Anyway, she was certain the ambassador wouldn’t approve of that pouty-faced portrait with the dashiki and the cigarette. Mary Ann had told D’or as much when they hung the damned thing.

Burke’s eyes roamed the room. “I like this.”

She nodded. “It’s kind of a media joint.”

“Yeah. So you said.”

At the moment, she realized, the wattage of the lunching luminaries was embarrassingly dim, so she made do with the material at hand. “That showy blonde,” she muttered, nodding toward the front room, “is Prue Giroux.”

He had obviously never heard of her.

“She was in
Us
last month. She took some orphans to Beijing on a peace mission.”

Still no reaction.

“She’s a socialite, actually. Kind of a publicity hound.” He nodded. “How ’bout the priest?”

“Father Paddy Starr. He has a show at my station.
Honest to God.
”

“Honest to God, he has a show? Or that’s the name of it?” “That’s the name of it.”

He smirked.

She smirked back, feeling a little queasy about it. She hated how rubey all this sounded. Burke, after all, was a practicing New Yorker, and the breed had a nasty way of regarding San Francisco as one giant bed-and-breakfast inn—cute but really of no consequence. She made herself a curt mental note not to gossip about the locals.

“How’s Betsy?” she asked, changing the subject.

“Brenda.”

“Oh. Sorry. I knew it was B.” She mugged and rolled her head from side to side. “Burke and Brenda, B and B.”

“She’s doing fine. Got her hands full with the kids, of course.”

Wouldn’t she just, thought Mary Ann.

“She wanted to come with me this time, but Burke junior came down with flu, and Brenda didn’t trust the housekeeper to manage without her.”

“God, I know what you mean!” She seized his wrist lightly. “We have this Vietnamese woman. She’s really dear, but she can’t, for the life of her, tell the difference between Raid and Pledge!”

His laughter seemed a little strained, and she worried that the remark had come off as racist.

“Of course,” she added, releasing his wrist, “I can only speak one language myself, so…anyway, her family had a rough time over there, so we figured it was worth a little extra trouble.”

“You have a kid or two of your own, don’t you?”

“One. How’d you know?”

His smirk came back to life. “I saw you with her on
Entertainment Tonight.
”

“Oh…you saw that?” It was good to know, anyway, that he’d seen her on national TV. At least now she knew he didn’t think of her as completely local. Even if that
ET
segment had been about local talk-show hosts.

“She’s a cute little girl,” he said.

For an unsettling instant she flashed on Shawna’s tarty makeup of the day before. “Well, she’s a lot bigger now, of course. That was over three years ago.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“I bet she looks more like you than ever.”

She smiled at him benignly, hoping he wouldn’t make a big deal out of this. “She’s not my biological daughter, actually. We adopted her.”

“Oh. Yeah.” He did his bashful wobble again. “I guess I knew that.”

“I don’t see how you could, really.”

“Well, maybe not.”

“Her mother was a friend of mine. Or someone I knew, anyway. She died a few days after Shawna was born. She left a note asking me and Brian to take care of her.”

“How wonderful.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s a great story. She’s a lucky little girl.”

She shrugged. “Brian was a little more crazy about the idea than I was.”

This unraveled him noticeably. “Still…you must…I mean, I’m sure it took some getting used to, but…”

She smiled to put him out of his misery. “I’m learning,” she said. “It’s not terrible. It’s O.K., actually. Most of the time.”

“How old is she?”

“Oh…five or six.”

It took him forever to realize she was joking. “C’mon,” he said finally.

“She’ll be six next April.”

“O.K. There.” He nodded to fill the dead air. “And…Brian?”

“He’s forty-four,” she answered, though she found the question a little weird.

“No.” He laughed. “I meant, who is he?”

“Oh, I thought you knew. Brian Hawkins.”

It didn’t register.

“He was upstairs at Mrs. Madrigal’s.”

Now he was nodding, slowly. “The guy who lived on the roof?”

“Right. That’s him.”

“Well, I’ll be damned!”

His apparent amazement unsettled her. “You remember him, huh?”

“I remember how much you hated him.”

“Excuse me?” She gave him the sourest look she could muster.

“Sorry,” he said. “I mean…you know, disapproved of him…”

She was about to take him on, when the waiter appeared. “You folks had a chance to look at the menu yet?”

“I’ll take the grilled tuna,” Mary Ann told him crisply. “And some orange-flavored Calistoga.”

Burke cast a cursory glance at the menu, then flapped it shut. “Sounds great.”

“Same thing?” asked the waiter.

“Same thing.”

“You got it.” The waiter spun on his heels and left.

“O.K.,” said Burke. “Let me start over, if I can.”

“Let’s just leave it.”

“No. That sounded terrible.”

“I knew what you meant, though. He was a real womanizer then.”

“I liked him, though. I thought he was nice.”

She realigned her silverware against the salmon tablecloth. “He is nice. He puts up with a lot, believe me.”

He smiled gently. “C’mon.”

She shrugged. “He does. It isn’t easy being married to Mary Ann Singleton.”

He blinked at her for a moment, then asked: “When did you start seeing him?”

“Oh…a year or so after you left.” Make that a week, she told herself. No, make it four days. She remembered all too well the weepy night she had headed up to Brian’s room with a joint of Maui Wowie and a bottle of rotgut Chianti. He’d been dating Mona Ramsey at the time, but he’d been ready and willing to offer consolation.

How odd it was to sit here now with the man who had caused her all that pain and feel nothing but a sort of pleasant sense of shared history. She could scarcely remember their passion, much less reconstitute it for a moment’s titillation.

“How’s Mrs. Madrigal?” he asked.

“She’s O.K., I guess. I saw her down at Molinari’s a month or so ago.” She smiled and shook her head. “Just as dear and loony as ever.”

Burke smiled back.

“Brian and I moved out of the house after we got Shawna. It had a certain funky charm, I guess, but it wasn’t much of a place to raise a kid.”

“What about Michael and…Jon, was it?”

She nodded solemnly. “Jon died of
AIDS
in ’82.”

“Damn.”

“I know.”

“Is Michael O.K.?”

Another nod. “He’s got the virus, but so far he’s been fine.”

“Good. Thank God.”

“He has a new boyfriend,” she told him. “They bought a house in the Castro.”

“What does Michael do now?”

“He runs a nursery out on Clement.”

“No kidding?”

“Yeah. He and Brian run it together, actually.”

He seemed to like this idea. “All in the family, huh?”

“Yeah.”

He nodded slowly, absorbing their lost decade with a look of sanguine acceptance. “You look great,” he said finally.

Fine, she thought, but isn’t this where we came in?

This particular waiter knew she didn’t like a chatty presentation, so their tuna arrived without fanfare. Burke took a few bites and said: “I’m producing now. For Teleplex. Did you know that?”

“Sure,” she said. “Doesn’t everybody?”

He chuckled. “No way.”

“Well, I do.”

He focused on his plate as he composed his words. “I’m developing a new morning talk show. Out of New York. We think there’s a real market for something more home-oriented and…more intelligent than what’s currently being offered.”

“You got that right. People have had it with this tabloid shit. There’s bound to be a backlash.”

“I think so,” he said, still addressing his tuna. “I think we can
make
it happen, in fact. We’ve got the backing, frankly, and some very real interest from the networks. What we need now is the right host. Someone who knows how to chat with, say, Gore Vidal and yet still be lively in a kitchen segment.”

Mary Ann’s fork froze in mid-descent.
Don’t,
she warned herself, jump to any hasty conclusions. Maybe he just wants your advice. Maybe he…

“What do you think?” His eyes met hers at last.