Mary Ann in Autumn (3 page)

Chapter 4
The Puppy Stuff

T
hat morning, of all mornings, Shawna had seriously considered changing her hair. The Bettie Page look had served her well, but it just didn’t pack the same wallop anymore. These days the Mission was awash with wannabe Betties in glossy black pageboys and crimson lipstick. Last week, in fact, when Shawna was shopping at a clothes-by-the-pound shop on Valencia Street, the chick who weighed her seed-pearl sweater set could easily have been her double. To say nothing of that über-obnoxious woman on last season’s
Project Runway
. Clearly it was time to throw in the bangs.

She was finishing her frittata when she got the tweet—four words screaming obscenely from her BlackBerry—BETTIE PAGE IS DEAD. One of Shawna’s fans, the self-described Piercing Diva of Dubuque, had jumped at the chance to share the news with her. The iconic fifties pinup who had somehow made naughty so nice had suffered a fatal heart attack after a bout with pneumonia. She was eighty-five.

Shawna was surprised by how hard it hit her. She had always loved Bettie—or at least the
idea
of her—but Bettie had also seemed slightly unreal, a human-size Minnie Mouse in the Disneyland of desire. Now all she could see was an old woman who’d been living with her brother somewhere in L.A. She remembered Bettie’s three divorces and her struggles with schizophrenia and how she’d regretted tossing out her fishnet stockings after she found Jesus and went to work for the Billy Graham Crusade. Mostly she remembered how Bettie had avoided cameras after her “rediscovery” in the nineties, striving to protect her myth. That myth was finally safe. Now that she was dead.

Shawna rose from the kitchen table with a sigh and went to the rose-tinted mirror at the end of the hall. She studied herself soberly for a moment, checking her lipstick, testing the silken weight of her pageboy in her hands.
What now?
Do I hang on to this pelt out of respect for Bettie or abandon it for the same reason?

She would think about that later. Her blog needed attention (not to mention her advertisers), so there was really no time for reinvention. Besides, she was meeting her boyfriend for lunch, and he might have some thoughts on the subject.

F
OR THE FOURTH TIME THAT
month Shawna met Otto at the Circus Center. This was a yellow-brick building on Frederick, an old high school gymnasium, very Deco-looking, with huge metal-frame windows that filled the room with soft gray light as acrobats practiced on the trapeze. Shawna sat in the top row of the bleachers, as far away from the action as possible, since she hated the thought of embarrassing Otto in his element.

Otto was actually his real name, though he’d lengthened it to Ottokar for his professional handle. The original Ottokar had been emperor of Bohemia—something Otto had learned from a Tintin comic book. He was a lanky, lion-maned man who rode a beat-up bicycle, when he wasn’t riding a unicycle, and carried coffee-stained paperbacks in his knapsack. The night they met (the night Iron & Wine came to the Café du Nord) they’d talked mostly about the music, learning next to nothing about each other. Shawna liked that—not because she was in any way ashamed of her work but because Otto had come to their hookup with none of the usual expectations. He’d never even heard of Grrrl on the Loose, much less followed a blog, so her raffish online persona had never worked its cheap tricks on him. This guy wanted the girl—not the Grrrl—and that made all the difference to Shawna. Bettie Page, poor thing, should have been so lucky.

When Otto told her he was a clown—came out to her, in effect, with a mortified grimace as if he’d just confessed something horrendous—her heart had gone out to him. She’d tried to show him she was totally cool about it, that she understood his art form beyond the kitschy creepiness of Ronald McDonald and Bozo the Clown. She’d told him about her passion for Fellini and how her gay uncle Michael (who wasn’t
technically
her uncle) had introduced her to Cirque du Soleil when she was seven years old.

But all the while she’d been fixated on something else: a report she’d once written for her blog about a local group whose fetish was fucking in clown costumes. She had witnessed this phenomenon herself one rainy night on Minna Street, though it had struck her as more of a stunt than an actual fetish. (“Call me old-fashioned,” she would later write, “but when I feel something red and round and hard, I don’t want it to be a nose.”) She had left the party early, apologizing to the host, having learned nothing beyond the obvious reality that lube and greasepaint were not each other’s friends.

Of course those people had just
pretended
to be clowns. Otto was the real deal; he approached his craft with a dignity that bordered on the sacramental, especially when he made his rounds at schools and nursing homes. She respected him for his charity work and admired his expertise with unicycles and bowling pins, and generally found him to be sweet and a great deal of fun in the sack, but she never started taking him seriously—much less gazed into his heart— until she met Sammy.

Sammy was a life-size monkey puppet who rode on Ottokar’s arm. In the routine Sammy would poke teasingly at Ottokar until the clown became angry and smacked the monkey in the face, knocking him to the ground. Aghast at what he had done, Ottokar would scoop Sammy into his arms, where, like a simian pietà, Sammy would hang as limp as the rag that he was. Ottokar’s frantic efforts at reviving Sammy would eventually succeed (to the audible relief of the audience) only to be undone when the clown stumbled and fell, crushing the monkey under his weight. For a long time all the audience could see was Ottokar’s inert form. Then, limb by skinny limb, Sammy would appear again, pulling himself from beneath the body of his friend.

What was it about this bit that had endeared Otto to her? Had it simply shown he was a nice guy, a compassionate person, or was it something to do with his irony, his weary grasp of life’s betrayals? Whatever it was, her defenses had fallen on the spot. Her previous lover, a Brooklyn lighting designer named Lucy Juarez, had worn Shawna down with her melodrama and free-range jealousy. Lucy had been the ultimate buzz-kill, in fact, the final nail in the coffin of Shawna’s two-year New York experiment. She had moved East to sell a book (or a “blook,” as Lucy had once snidely called it, since almost all of it had come from the blog) and partly to show her doting single dad that it was time for them to pursue separate lives. But her dad had long ago hit the road in his RV, and Brooklyn, for all its pioneer charm, was starting to wear a little thin. When she packed her bags and headed back to San Francisco, she felt no shame about it whatsoever, only a determination to simplify her life and cut out the neurotic bullshit once and for all.

Maybe, come to think of it, that’s why Otto had seemed so right.

H
E WAS IN THE RING
now, walking on stilts, except they were more of a cross between stilts and skis, and he could bounce on them, like some sort of alien marsupial. Shawna remembered that he was trying out an act that he was taking to Pier 39. He was wearing his “civvies,” as he liked to call them, loose jeans and a ragged gray T-shirt. His only piece of clown gear was the nose itself—that inevitable fucking red rubber ball. She watched him for at least fifteen minutes, enjoying the flirty moves of his muscles, before he spotted her in the stands and raised his arm in a solemn salute.

Ten minutes later, having finally shed the stilt-ski contraptions, he sat down next to her and pecked her on the cheek, still wearing the nose.

“Hello, Mr. Kar.”

“Hey, Puppy.” She had once made the fatal mistake of sharing this childhood nickname with Otto, so he felt called upon to use it from time to time. She found that somewhat endearing, in spite of the seriously heavy shit it dredged up for her.

“I brought sandwiches,” she said, patting the plastic bag next to her. “I thought we could go to the park. Ever been to the AIDS Grove?”

He shook his head. “Can’t say I have.”

She smiled faintly. “I know it sounds morbid. Like . . . Cancer Valley or something, but it’s incredibly gorgeous right now and I think you might—”

“Hey. I’m there.”

So they walked into the park through the Stanyan Street entrance, passing the usual array of bongo players, children, and homeless people until they arrived at the AIDS Memorial Grove, a sunken dell full of redwoods and winding paths. They ate their lunch on the curving stone bench next to the Circle of Friends, where hundreds of names were engraved in ever-expanding circles, like ripples from a stone thrown into a pond.

“Are these all dead people?” Otto asked, munching on his sandwich.

“Not all of them. Some are just donors. See . . . there’s Sharon Stone over there.”

Otto screwed up his face. “That’s kind of confusing, isn’t it? How can you pay your respects to them if you don’t know who’s dead and who isn’t?”

She agreed with him and told him so. How badly,
really
, did Sharon Stone need to see her name in print? Wasn’t there a friend—or even some stranger—she could have memorialized instead? And Calvin Klein, for fuck’s sake. Why did he have to put his name here, of all places, when it was already on half the asses in the country?

She rose and moved closer to the circle, squatting so she could point to a name.

“Here’s one I know about for sure.”

Otto leaned forward to read it. “Jon Fielding. You knew him?”

She shook her head. “He died before I was born. He was Michael’s partner.”

He was struggling to place the name, so she helped him out. “You met him at the farmers’ market. The gay guy I call my uncle?”

“Oh . . . yeah. With the young . . . uh, husband.”

“Very good,” she said, smiling at him.

“Hey, I’m from Portland, okay?”

She laughed and looked back at Jon’s name. “He was hella handsome. I’ve seen pictures of him. My dad really liked him.”

She could see his wheels turning for a moment. Then, hesitantly, he said: “So your dad is gay, too.”

“No. He just . . . lived among them.” She was amused by the anthropological sound of that, like some overly serious voiceover on the Discovery Channel.
Brian Hawkins has explored the darkest reaches of San Francisco
,
where for many years he lived peaceably among the homosexuals.

“Well . . . that’s cool,” said Otto.

“Yeah. I had some fierce uncles.”

“What about your mom?”

Shawna shrugged, since they had talked about this before. “She was a flight attendant or . . . whatever they called them. She died when I was born.”

“I meant your adoptive mom.”

“She left when I was five. Left
us
. . . me and my dad. I really don’t know her.”

“You haven’t seen her since then?”

“Oh, I’ve seen her. She came out several years ago when my friend Anna was sick. And I went to see her once in Connecticut when I was still living in Brooklyn.”

“And?”

“She was married to a retired Republican CEO and lived in a big house on a golf course. The sandwiches she served—I swear to you—had the crusts cut off.”

Otto winced sympathetically. “Do you know why she left in the first place?”

“A job in New York, my dad said. I don’t remember it. She was a local TV personality. She had a show here called
Mary Ann in the Morning
.”

“Aha. So that’s where you got it from.”

“Got what?”

“Being a personality.”

She felt her face turning hot. “I’m not a
personality
! Where did you get that? Don’t call me a personality.”

He smiled in appeasement. “I just meant . . . media in general. And you moved to New York and all . . . for professional purposes . . . like she did.”

Shawna grunted. “I wasn’t following in her footsteps, believe me.”

“I do, Puppy. I believe you.”

“And while we’re at it, could you lay off the Puppy stuff? I told you that in the weakest possible moment, and I really hate being called that.”

“Sorry . . . I thought your dad called you that.”

“Only because Mary Ann did.”

“And that would be . . . ?”

“The woman we’re talking about.”

“Right. Got it. No more Puppy.” He seemed to be puzzling over something.

“What?” she asked.

“I thought you couldn’t remember her.”

“I can’t. Not really.”

“But you remember Puppy?”

“My dad told me that when I was a teenager. To convince me she didn’t have ice water in her veins.”

Otto shrugged. “Sounds like she liked you a
little
.”

“Sure,” said Shawna. “Just not enough to keep her here.”

Chapter 5
The Truest Alarm

T
he first thing Mary Ann looked for at Michael’s house was the new construction at the end of the garden. Like the rest of the house, this Lilliputian structure was cedar-shingled and one-story, with latticework on the street side, which was already threaded with roses. Michael had referred to the place as a “cottage” in a recent phone conversation, but that was really stretching it. It was barely as big as one of those 1920s Model T garages that people here turned into gardening sheds. Its shingles were still raw and blond, having yet to know the rains of a Northern California winter. All in all, it was kind of sweet.

The rest of the compound seemed unchanged since her last visit. (She thought of it as a compound, since it was really three old “earthquake shacks” that had been strung together to make a higgledy-piggledy house.) Climbing from the taxi, she found herself unexpectedly buoyed by the sight of her old friend’s deftly feathered nest. Unlike the old house on Barbary Lane, this one still harbored someone she loved.

Michael must have been looking out for her, because he was halfway down the garden path when the taxi pulled away. “Babycakes,” he called, opening his arms to her. In three years his salt-and-pepper hair had lost most of its pepper, and his stomach beneath his untucked green Polo shirt had become a sturdy dome that approximated an early pregnancy. She remembered Michael telling her the belly was caused by his HIV meds. Lipodystrophy, he called it. Likewise the grooves in his cheeks, which she might have described as rugged had she not known differently. Only his smile was unchanged.

She leaned against him for a moment, accepting his warmth in silence.

Finally, she pulled way. “This is sweet of you.”

“C’mon.”

“I’m so fucked up.”

He gave her an ironic smile. “I’m gonna need more than that.”

“You’ll get it. Trust me.”

He led her into the house. Once he had settled her on the couch, he brought out a cheesecake, which prompted him, naturally, to make a forced joke about
The Golden Girls
. She wondered if some of that belly might be attributable to natural causes.

“This isn’t my usual practice,” he said, apparently reading her mind.

“It looks yummy,” she said. “Can I pass for now?”

He looked more bewildered than offended. “Sure . . . of course. Would you rather vaporize?”

“Do what?”

“I told you about it, remember? Very little smoke, just cannabis-flavored air. It’s a great buzz, and it saves your lungs.”

The last thing she needed right now was something that would make her story more vivid than it already was. “You wouldn’t have any vodka, would you?”

“You bet.” He headed back to the kitchen with the cheesecake, stopping at the door. “Cranberry or tonic?”

“On the rocks would be fine.”

“Should I make one for myself, or do you want me sober?”

“Whatever you want,” she said absently. “It doesn’t matter.”

Michael returned with two glasses of vodka—one on the rocks for her, one with cranberry for him. She took a sip of hers without waiting to toast him, since it would have felt weird at a time like this. Then she widened her eyes to approximate delight and offered her own bit of stalling: “It’s wonderful about Obama, isn’t it?”

He agreed with her less exuberantly than she’d expected. “Yeah . . . pretty amazing.”

“But?”

“C’mon . . . it was ‘Yes, We Can’ followed by ‘No, You Can’t.’ ”

“Oh you mean . . . the proposition?” She knew how clumsy this sounded the moment she said it, but she couldn’t remember the number of the damn proposition and she didn’t want to sound disinterested. “What a heartbreak that was.”

“More like a rat-fuck.”

“I should have mentioned that first. I’ve just been so preoccupied . . . to put it mildly. It didn’t
un
marry you, did it?”

“Who knows? There’s gonna be a ruling in the spring.”

Michael and Ben had been married for the third time in August. The first wedding had been performed at City Hall but was thrown out by the state courts. The second had happened at a B&B in Vancouver but was valid only in Canada. The third one Michael had referred to as the “shotgun marriage” since he and Ben had rushed to say their vows before the November election, when the voters would have their say.

“Well,” she said lamely, “I’m sure it’ll take eventually.”

“Like a flu shot.” He gave her a half-lidded smile.

“If only,” she replied ruefully.

“If only what?”

“There were an inoculation against marriage.”

Michael’s brow furrowed. “Are we still talking about me?”

She took a long slug of her drink, set it down and turned to face him.

“I’m leaving Bob,” she said quietly. “I’ve left him.”

Michael nodded slowly, seemingly unsurprised.

Had she been that obvious? She knew her late-night phone calls to Michael had sometimes been protracted rants, but they had mostly been nonspecific, focused on the tedium of life in Darien or the tedium of life in general. She had hardly talked about Bob at all. “How did you know?” she asked.

He shrugged as if it were obvious. “You never talked about him. Happy people talk about their spouses.”

“Do they?”

“Did you just get bored or something?”

“No . . . well, a little, but I could’ve dealt with that. He was decent enough most of the time and . . . you know, a good provider.”

“As they say,” Michael added, and Mary Ann could have sworn she detected the shadow of a smirk. She wondered if he saw her as a spoiled suburban housewife, someone who had long ago sold out everything for a man who could “provide.”

“So what was the problem?” he asked.

She took another slug of the vodka and set it down. “I caught him fucking someone.”

“Well . . . that would do it.”

“Someone I know, in fact. My life coach.”

“Your
life coach
? Whatshername, you mean? Calliope?”

She nodded dolefully.

“The woman you want to be when you grow up?”

She winced. “I don’t think I put it
quite
that way, but . . .” She didn’t bother to deny it; that was
exactly
the way she had put it, and Michael knew that better than anyone. She had raved about Calliope for hours on end—her womanly wisdom, her impeccable sense of style, her absolute commitment to Mary Ann’s fulfillment.

Michael’s lip flickered in a way that she recognized all too well.

“Go ahead and laugh,” she told him.

“Sorry . . . it’s just a little—”

“No. It’s a scream. You think I don’t know that? Remember how she was always chastising me for my wudda/cudda/shudda? ‘Stop with the wudda/cudda/shudda, Mary Ann!’ Well, she wudda and she cudda and she did.”

Michael smiled, but his eyes were glassy with sympathy.

“Maybe,” he offered tentatively, “it was just a one-time thing. Maybe it wasn’t even serious.”

She shook her head. “It was serious. Venice is always serious.”

He frowned. “You were in Venice?”

“
They
were in Venice. I was in Darien.”

“Then how could you walk in on them?”

“I
didn’t
walk in on them. We were Skyping.”

His expression told her nothing.

“You know what that is, right?”

“Of course . . . Oprah uses it. I’m just trying to visualize this.”

“Bob thought it would be nice if we could see each other when he was on the road. He’s on a ton of boards all over the world.” She could feel angry tears assembling behind her eyes, but held them back, knowing they’d be better spent later. Michael, meanwhile, was tugging methodically on his silver mustache, already deep in speculation.

“Anyway,” she continued, “he was in Venice at the Gritti Palace—supposedly meeting with this group of investors—and I had something really important to tell him, so we Skyped for about fifteen minutes, and he blew me a kiss good-night, and the stupid son of a bitch forgot to turn off the Webcam.”

Michael parenthesized his head with his hands, waiting.

“It was kind of sweet at first . . . strangely intimate. He drifted off and I could watch him snoozing on this beautiful hand-painted bed with a gorgeous view of the Grand Canal. Then Calliope came into the room with an armful of Dolce and Gabbana shopping bags and crawled onto the bed with him.”

“Fuck me,” said Michael.

Mary Ann nodded. “That’s more or less what she said.” She picked up the glass again and polished off the remains with a grimace. “The sick part is, I couldn’t stop looking. I watched until the bitter goddamn end. Like some crummy porno with a flat-assed old man pounding away on a Botoxed crack-whore.”

Michael blinked at her. “His ass is flat? You never told me
that.
”

“Mouse . . . can we stay on the subject.” The ancient nickname just tumbled out of its own accord, now that she was finally coming clean.

He picked up her glass. “Want another one?”

She shook her head. “That was enough, thanks.”

He set down the glass and slipped his arm across her shoulder. “You know . . . I can’t say I’m terribly surprised.”

“I can’t, either. He hasn’t been . . . you know . . .
present
emotionally for several years. The sex wasn’t much to speak of, but we weren’t that young anymore and I just thought we were entering . . . the cozy stage. I was kind of relieved, to tell you the truth.” She realized too late that she had said this to someone her own age who—to hear him tell it, at least—was having the best sex of his life. She hoped he wouldn’t bring that up.

“So what was it you called to tell him?”

It was uncanny, after all these years, how Michael could still find his way so deftly to the epicenter of her pain.

“That I was worried about being pregnant,” she replied.

His mouth opened slightly, and he made a little huffing sound that didn’t quite qualify as laughter. “You’re kidding, right?”

His disbelief was understandable, but it still felt like an act of petty cruelty. She couldn’t help but sound wounded. “It does happen, you know, to women my age. It’s rare, but it happens. Even when we’ve been through menopause.”

“So
were
you pregnant?
Are
you?”

“No,” she said quietly. “It was . . . a false alarm.” What an odd way to put it, she thought, since what she was feeling now was the truest alarm imaginable. An unwanted pregnancy, however inconveniently late in life, paled in comparison.

“But why would you even
think
you were—”

“I was bleeding, Mouse. I thought I was getting my period again.”

The room was so incredibly still that she could hear, from somewhere in Michael and Ben’s kitchen, the sound of a dripping faucet. Or more likely one of those aerated water bowls for dogs, given the way these guys seemed to dote on their Labradoodle.

When she finally spoke, it might have been someone else.

“I have uterine cancer.”

After a moment, Michael just said: “Shit.”

“I know this isn’t fair to you, Mouse. There was just no one else I could tell. Darien’s too much of a hornet’s nest and—”

“Sweetie.” Michael slipped his arm across her shoulder, trying to pull her closer, but she felt herself resisting. She still wasn’t ready to collapse yet. He sensed this and released her after a squeeze or two. “Bob doesn’t know, then?”

She shook her head. “He’s probably still freaked that I might be pregnant.”

“Shouldn’t you tell him—?”

“God, no.”

“He hasn’t come home yet, I take it?”

“No.”

Now she was wondering if Bob and Calliope were still at the Gritti or if they’d taken their act to some other romantic venue, someplace to the south, maybe, sunny and by the sea. If only she had muted the Skype—or just turned the damned thing off—as soon as she had seen what was happening. Now, for the rest of her days, she would have to live with those voices, gruff with lust, then oh-so-achingly tender, voices that were already cutting into her like knives when that clueless young doctor told her the news.

She turned and looked at her old friend.

“Mouse, if you can’t do this, just say so.”