Mary Ann in Autumn (9 page)

“Like . . . Russian?”

“Yeah.”

Shawna clarified things for the operator, spelling the word for her. “We need an ambulance quick. She’s bleeding a lot.”

Otto joined them, stroking Shawna’s hair while she held Leia’s hand.

“Did he take my knife?” asked Leia.

Down the alley the guy under the polyester blanket continued intoning his evening prayer: “Shut up, shut up, shut up.”

Even the sirens, when they came, didn’t silence him.

Chapter 13
A Nibble on the Line

“
I have the perfect person,” said DeDe Halcyon-Wilson as she topped off Mary Ann’s wine glass like the gracious hostess she’d been raised to be. “Her office is just a couple of miles away. You could recuperate here, if you like.”

Here
was Halcyon Hill, the mock-Tudor manor house in Hillsborough that had been DeDe’s home since childhood. She and D’orothea had recently re-chintzed the furniture and installed pretty green-silk Roman shades, but the house was still very much the way Mary Ann remembered it. Only DeDe herself had changed significantly; the prodigal debutante who’d returned from Guyana so sinewy and serious was now this pleasant little partridge of a woman. Her patrician, finely furred jawline evoked the previous mistress of this house, DeDe’s long-dead mother, Frannie Halcyon. And Mary Ann could well imagine what Frannie would have said about the fountain on the wall of the sunroom: a stylized vagina with water sluicing through petals of smooth pink marble.

“Too much?” asked DeDe, seeing where Mary Ann’s eyes had landed.

“No . . . it’s very subtle, actually. It’s like a Bufano.”

“That’s what it is.”

“You’re kidding?” Mary Ann had prided herself on spotting the sculptor’s distinctive work when she’d lived here—all those faceless penguins and slope-shouldered mama bears embracing their young. “I didn’t know he did . . . people.”

DeDe chuckled. “He didn’t. D’or bought it in a spiritual shop in Gualala. I told her it was a horrid idea, but she’d just taken a Lorezepam and could not be contained.”

“It’s not a Bufano, you mean?”

“God, no. I feel so insensitive, Mary Ann. I should have taken it down before you got here.”

“Why?” Mary Ann gave her a spunky smile. “I get to keep
that
part.”

Clearly relieved by this offhanded absolution, DeDe managed a laugh. “Leaving in the playpen, as they say.”

“What?” said Mary Ann.

“Our friend Barb had a hysterectomy last summer. She told us: ‘They may be taking out the baby carriage, but at least they’re leaving in the playpen.’ ”

Cute, thought Mary Ann, if not especially comforting, since these days her playpen saw about as much action as her baby carriage. “So your friend is okay?”

“She’s great. Just fine. I asked her to join us today, but she had a meeting of her sustainable-gardening group. You know, it’s the most fixable form of cancer there is.”

“So they tell me.”

“Are you scared?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Of what exactly?”

Mary Ann’s gaze drifted through the diamond-paned window into the green-and-gold blur of the garden. “That I’ll be different when it’s over . . . or dead. I alternate.”

DeDe, thank God, didn’t try to be a Pollyanna about it. “You’ll really like Ginny, I think. She’s a good egg.”

“The oncologist?”

“Mmm. She’s a serious advocate for women.”

“She’s gay, I take it.”

“Is that an issue for you?”

“Of course not. Please. I was just curious.”

“I can drive you there this afternoon, if you like. I’ve already told her we might stop by.”

Mary Ann felt a rush of unalloyed affection for her old friend. “Oh, DeDe, would you? That would be such a load off my mind.” It soothed her considerably to have someone she trusted take matters in hand like this. She felt so much less alone.

“Ginny says it’s a simple matter to have your records transferred. There are no hard feelings, are there? With your oncologist in Darien, I mean?”

Mary Ann shook her head. “Not yet. I haven’t said a word to him.”

“Guess you’d better, then.”

Mary Ann hesitated, imagining that awkward scenario as she took another sip of her Sauvignon Blanc.

“What’s the matter?” asked DeDe.

“It’s a little too close for comfort. He plays racquetball with Bob at our club.”

“Oh, shit.”

“Of course I didn’t find that out until I was in the stirrups and he asked how good ol’ Bob was doing in Europe.”

DeDe groaned. “No wonder you wanted a new doctor! Jesus, do you think he knew about . . . you know . . . Bob and your life coach?”

Mary Ann shrugged. “I wouldn’t put it past Bob to brag about it.”

DeDe absorbed that for a moment. “Let Ginny handle it, then. That’s just the sort of challenge she enjoys. Does Bob know yet, by the way?”

“About what?”

“That you caught him in the act . . . or where you are, for that matter.”

Mary Ann shook her head grimly. “I don’t have the energy for that.”

“I hear you,” said DeDe.

What they
both
could hear in the weighty silence that followed was the gurgle and purr of the vagina fountain.

“Listen to that infernal thing,” DeDe muttered. “I could just kill D’or. The pump got clogged one week last month, and it started spitting at people.”

“No.”

DeDe smirked like a wicked teenager. “It happened during D’or’s Buddhist study group.”

And they laughed, wearily, for a good little while.

T
HE ONCOLOGIST’S OFFICE WAS IN
a rambling shingled L tucked in a grove of gnarled oaks. It reminded Mary Ann of a small but elegant shopping complex in Darien where she had sometimes bought wine-and-cheese baskets as last-minute birthday presents. Dr. Ginny herself was equally reassuring: fortyish and clear-eyed, authoritative without being bossy. “I want you to know,” she said, “I’ve done this over eleven hundred times.”

Mary Ann’s response was a soft-spoken “Wow,” as if this handsome woman had just announced an impressive golf score.

“I’m good at it, in other words. I consider it my calling.” The doctor’s honeyed earnestness was a perfect fit with her neutral-toned office and its Zen-spa furnishings.

“How long will it take?” Mary Ann asked.

“We’ll have you out in a day.”

Mary Ann heard herself exhale. “Great.”

“Have you had your appendix out yet?”

Mary Ann was thrown. “No . . . actually.”

“I can do that at the same time, if you like.”

Mary Ann was beginning to feel like a dusty attic from which useless items were being systemically discarded. “Do you think my appendix might be . . . cancerous?”

Dr. Ginny shook her head with an indulgent smile. “Here’s how it’ll play out, Mary Ann. Once I’m in there, I’ll lift out your uterus very gently”—she cupped her hands as if holding a small, helpless animal—“and then I’ll slip it into a plastic bag and hand it to the pathologist, who will proceed to slice it finely to determine the extent of the cancer. Which means that you and I will have some time on our hands. Well,
you’ll
be asleep, of course, but I might as well make myself useful . . . hence the appendix.”

“But it’s never given me any trouble,” Mary Ann offered feebly.

“Yes, but next year you’ll be scuba diving in Palau and it
will
give you trouble, and they’ll airlift you to Guam, where they have a 1984 MRI machine, and so one of my well-intended colleagues will give you a big ugly scar that I can avoid completely with laparoscopic surgery. I plan on leaving you with a nice smooth tummy.”

“Oh . . . okay, then . . . I guess.”

“No extra charge, of course.”

“Thanks.” It was the same tone Mary Ann would have used with a saleslady at Bergdorf Goodman who’d just offered to throw in free alterations. It occurred to her that this was Dr. Ginny’s gift: the ability to make something casual out of the cataclysmic.

“So here’s the deal. From now on, I’ll do all the fretting, because I intend to do this as perfectly as possible. I’m funny that way.”

Under other circumstances, such cavalier boasting might have annoyed the hell out of Mary Ann, but certainly not here, not now; she craved the steel-reinforced tenderness that Dr. Ginny was offering, and that made her a believer on the spot.

“I’ll warn you,” the doctor continued, “you may feel a little depressed afterwards, but that’s just part of the healing process.”

Mary Ann figured that couldn’t possibly be worse than the suffocating gloom she was feeling now.

“Are you staying with DeDe and D’or?” asked the doctor.

“No. Friends in the city.”

“Would you like a hospital there?”

“If possible.”

“Of course.” Another smile. “We’re in this together, Mary Ann.”

T
HAT NIGHT, WHILE
M
ICHAEL AND
Ben were visiting friends on Potrero Hill, Mary Ann brewed a pot of peppermint tea and took it out to her cottage in the garden. There was finally a nip in the air, a pungent dampness that suggested the onset of winter. She found herself grateful for the jokey gift the guys had bought her several days earlier: a ridiculous blanket with sleeves they had all seen on television and laughed about.

Sitting in her only chair with her laptop on her lap, the lights of the hillside winking through her window, she logged onto Facebook and posted her status report:

Mary Ann Singleton is drinking peppermint tea in her Snuggie, wondering if life is going to get better.

Then she waited, like a fisherman, for a nibble on the line.

As usual, she’d been careful not to betray her location. She didn’t want Bob—or any of her friends in Darien—to start making inquiries. She was savoring the sensation of floating free in cyberspace, tethered only to a growing number of capital-F Friends who, with half a dozen exceptions, were not her friends at all. In the beginning most of these people had some connection to Michael or Ben, but now she was engulfed in an ever-widening vortex of friend requests, and she was recklessly accepting them all.

Most of them, as Ben had predicted, recognized her name from the old days in San Francisco:

i watched yr show when I stayed home sick from school, freeze-dried pets, lol

My dad thought you were way hot

I am soooooo honored to be your friend

I love that dress you wore when the Queen of England ate at Trader Vic’s

Are you really THAT Mary Ann Singleton?

Using her maiden name had not only severed her from all things Bob but also unearthed people who actually predated her celebrity in San Francisco. There were three high school classmates, all looking
ancient
and only one of whom she remembered, because of her weird-looking close-set eyes. There was a lumpy old Irish guy who had worked on “the floor”—as he had called it—when she was still a secretary at Lassiter Fertilizer in Cleveland. This wasn’t so much her youth as a previous incarnation.

From her San Francisco days she had found people who’d been featured on her show: a white witch she had interviewed one Halloween, a beefy Samoan guy who had made scrap-wood sculptures on the Emeryville flats. She had never really
known
these people; their value at the moment lay in the fact that they had passed through her life without lingering. This enabled her to create a manageable version of the past, an epic drama with a cast composed entirely of walk-ons. These near-strangers with whom she bantered so breezily could hold a mirror to her life without ever reflecting the pain.

A week earlier she’d imagined scaling down her life to the size of this cottage, but, in reality, she’d shrunk it smaller still. Tonight, as DeDe had driven her home from Hillsborough, uttering sweet reassurances, Mary Ann’s mind had already been racing ahead to the cozy hearth-glow of her laptop. She assured herself that this was
not
addictive behavior, since there was really nothing else for her to do right now. Social networking was just a salve for her troubles, a harmless diversion to fill the hours until she went under the knife—or the laparoscope—and knew where she was heading.

While waiting for a response to her post, she accepted three more friend requests and blocked an application for something called “Farmville”—another imbecilic game, no doubt. She’d already rejected a glut of offers to participate in “Mafia Wars” or to suck on someone’s “Lollipop,” whatever
that
meant. She preferred the kind of Friends who just talked about the weather, or showed off their vacation snaps of Fiji, or wondered aloud whether to eat that bar of 70% dark chocolate
right now.
There was a terse sewing-circle flavor to this discourse, a genial brevity, that she found appealing.

The first person to react to her post was someone called Fogbound One. There was no photo on the profile, just the little silhouette of a cowlicked head that Facebook provided as a placeholder. “Happiness is a choice,” wrote Fogbound One, displaying his/her usual weakness for bumper-sticker wisdom. Mary Ann had hidden this person from her News Feed as soon as she’d learned it was possible, but he/she was technically Mary Ann’s Friend, so, when the chat box pinged onto her screen, she felt obliged to respond.

Still feeling blue?

Little better, thanks.

What color is your Snuggie?

Red.

Mine’s blue.

Lol. Silly aren’t they?

Their warm.

Yeah they are.

I loved your show.

Thanks so much.

Didn’t you use to live on Barbary Lane?

Yes.

I was not far from there.

Somewhere in the fog, I take it.

ROFLMAO

Sorry. What’s that? New to this.

Rolling on the floor laughing my ass off.

Ah.

Your quick.

Thank you.

Do you still live on Russian Hill?

No. I miss it.

Me too. I used to be friends with somebody who lived in your building.

Who?

Norman Neal Williams. Remember him?

Sorry. Doesn’t ring a bell.

I thought you dated him.

No. Sorry. Long time ago. Nice talking to you.

She clicked the little x to make this awful thing go away. She’d wanted to stay for another comment or two, just to look natural about it, but she could already feel the coppery sting of vomit in the back of her throat. Shoving the laptop aside, she flung off the Snuggie and lunged for the bathroom, but made it only as far as the shower stall.