Further Tales of the City (3 page)

A
FTER ALMOST TWO YEARS OF BEING A WOMAN IN
television, Mary Ann Singleton was finally a woman
on
television.

Her show,
Bargain Matinee,
attempted to update the old
Dialing for Dollars
afternoon movie format by offering inflation-fighting consumer tips to Bay Area viewers. This was, after all, The Eighties.

The movies, on the other hand, were firmly grounded in The Fifties: comfy old chestnuts like
Splendor in the Grass
and
The Secret of Santa Vittoria
and today’s feature,
Summertime.
Movies that used to be called women’s movies in the days before ERA.

Mary Ann’s shining hour was a five minute spot interrupting the movie at midpoint.

The formula was fairly consistent: dented cans, factory seconds, Chinese umbrellas that made nifty lampshades, perfume you could brew at home, places you could shop for pasta, new uses for old coffee cans. Stuff that Michael persisted in calling “Hints from Heloise.”

Mary Ann was faintly embarrassed by the homebody image this format compelled her to project, but she couldn’t deny
the delicious exhilaration of the stardom it brought her. Strangers stared at her on the Muni; neighbors asked her to autograph their grocery bags at the Searchlight Market.

Still, something was wrong, something that hadn’t been cured by becoming a Woman on Television.

A real Woman on Television, Mary Ann felt, was a glamorous hellraiser, a feminine feminist like Jane Fonda in
The China Syndrome
or Sigourney Weaver in
Eyewitness.
A real Woman on Television was invariably an investigative reporter.

And Mary Ann would settle for nothing less.

Immediately after the sign-off she left Studio B and hurried back to her cubbyhole without stopping in the dressing room to remove her makeup.

It was five o’clock. She could still catch the news director before he mobilized for the evening newscast.

There was a note on her desk:
MRS. HARRISON CALLED.

“Did you take this?” she asked an associate producer at the next desk.

“Denny did. He’s in the snack bar.”

Denny, another associate producer, was eating a microwaved patty melt. “Who’s Mrs. Harrison?” asked Mary Ann.

“She said you knew her.”

“Harrison?”

“That’s what it sounded like. She was shitfaced.”

“Great.”

“She called right after your show-and-tell. Said it was ‘mosht urgent.’”

“It’s
Summertime
is what it is. The drunks always call during the tearjerkers. No number, huh?”

Denny shrugged. “She said you knew her.”

Larry Kenan, the news director, lounged back in his swivel chair, locked his fingers behind his blow-dried head, and
smirked wearily at the Bo Derek poster he had pasted on the ceiling above his desk. Its inscription, also his doing, was burned indelibly on Mary Ann’s consciousness:
FOR LARRY WITH LUST—NOBODY DOES IT BETTER. BO
.

“You wanna know the honest-to-God truth?” he said.

Mary Ann waited. He was always disguising his goddamned opinion as the honest-to-God truth.

“The honest-to-God truth is you’re a daytime face and the public doesn’t wanna see a daytime face on the six o’clock news. Period, end of sentence. I mean,
hey,
what can I say, lady? It ain’t pretty, but it’s the honest-to-God truth.” He tore his gaze from Bo Derek long enough to flash her his “that’s the breaks, kid” grin.

“What about Bambi Kanetaka?”

“What about her?”

Mary Ann knew she had to tread softly here. “Well … she had a daytime show, and you let
her
do the …”

“Bambi’s different,” glared Larry.

I know, thought Mary Ann. She gives head on command.

“Her GSR’s were dynamite,” added Larry, almost daring Mary Ann to continue.

“Then test
me,”
said Mary Ann. “I don’t mind being …”

“We
have
tested you, O.K.? We tested you two months ago and your GSR’s sucked. All right?”

It stung more than she wanted it to. She had never really
believed
in Galvanic Skin Response. What could you prove for certain, anyway, by attaching electrodes to a guinea pig audience? Just that some performers made some viewers sweat more than others. Big fucking deal.

She tried another tack. “But I wouldn’t have to be on camera all the time. I could research things, investigate. There are lots of subjects that the regular reporters don’t have the time or the inclination to cover.”

Larry’s lip curled. “Like what?”

“Well, like …” Think, she commanded herself, think! “Well, the gay community, for instance.”

“Oh really?” he said, arching an eyebrow. “You know all about that, huh?”

Mary Ann puzzled at his inflection. Did he think she was a lesbian? Or was he just toying with her again? “I have lots
of … contacts there,” she said. A lie. but what-the-hell. Michael had lots of contacts there; it was practically the same thing.

He smiled at her as a policeman would smile at a runaway child.

“I’ll tell you the honest-to-God truth,” he said. “The public is sick of hearing about faggots.”

I
F LARRY KENAN WAS AN ASSHOLE—FOR THERE WAS NO LONGER
any doubt about that—Mary Ann’s paycheck at least provided certain amenities that made life in the city considerably more graceful: She ate at Ciao now.

She drove a Le Car.

She wore velvet blazers and button-down shirts over her Calvins—a look which Michael persisted in labeling as “Ivy Lesbian.”

She had stripped her apartment of all furnishings that were either yellow or wicker and installed gun-metal gray industrial carpeting and high-tech steel factory shelving.

She had canceled her subscription to
San Francisco
magazine and started reading
Interview.

She had abandoned Cost Plus forever.

Still, she couldn’t help but feel a certain frustration over the progress of her career.

That frustration was only heightened later that night when
she watched a particularly compelling episode of
Lou Grant,
one featuring a scrappy woman journalist in her struggle to uncover the truth.

It was almost too painful to endure, so Mary Ann turned off the set and marched into the bathroom to Sassoon her hair. Sometimes a shower was the best of all possible sedatives.

Her hair was shorter now than it had been in years. Waifish and sort of Leslie Caron-like with just the vaguest hint of New Wave. Anything more pronounced would have been pressing her luck with the management of the station.

As she towel-dried her new do into place, she found it extraordinary that she had ever endured the rigors of long hair in the first place. (“You kept trying for a French twist,” Michael was fond of recalling, “but it kept going Connie Stevens on you.”)

After searching in vain for her rabbit slippers, Mary Ann knotted herself into an oversized white terrycloth robe and climbed the stairs to the little house on the roof of 28 Barbary Lane.

She paused for a moment outside the familiar orange door, peering out through an ivy-choked window at a night full of stars. An ocean liner slid past aglitter with lights, like a huge chandelier being dragged out to sea.

Mary Ann heard herself sigh. Partly for the view. Partly for the man who waited inside.

She entered without knocking, knowing he was already asleep. He had worked a double shift that day, and the crowd at Perry’s had been more boisterous and demanding than usual. As she expected, he was sprawled face down on the bed in his boxer shorts.

She sat on the edge of the bed and laid her hand gently on the small of his back.

The most beautiful part of a man, she thought. That warm little valley just before the butt begins. Well, maybe the
second
most beautiful.

Brian stirred, then rolled over and rubbed his eyes with his fists the way that little boys do. “Hey,” he said throatily.

“Hey,” she replied.

She leaned over and lay against his chest, enjoying the heat
of his body. When her mouth sought his, Brian turned his head away and mumbled a warning: “Moose breath, sweetheart.”

She took his chin in her hand and kissed him anyway. “So?” she said. “What if the moose is cute?”

Chuckling, he wrapped his arms around her. “So how was your day?”

“Shitty,” she said, speaking directly into his ear.

“You spoke to Larry Kenan?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And?”

“He still wants nookie before he’ll negotiate.”

Brian jerked away from her. “He
said
that?”

“No.” Mary Ann smiled at his alarm. “Not in so many words. I just know how he operates. Bambi Kanetaka is living proof of
that.”

Brian pretended not to understand. “I find her most incisive myself.”

Mary Ann goosed him.

“Incisive and perky. A winning combination.”

“I’ll do it again,” warned Mary Ann.

“I was hoping you’d say that,” grinned Brian. “Only slower this time, O.K.?”

T
HE BEAUTY OF BEING A WAITER, BRIAN USED TO THINK,
was that you could dump the whole damn thing tomorrow.

There were no pension plans to haunt you, no digital watches after fifty years of service, no soul-robbing demands for corporate loyalty and long-term commitment. It was a living, in short, but never, ever a career.

He used to think.

Now, after six years of working at Perry’s, he’d begun to wonder about that. If it wasn’t a career now, when would it be? After ten years? Fifteen? Is that what he wanted? Is that what
she
wanted?

He rolled away from her and stared at the ceiling in silence.

“O.K.,” said Mary Ann. “Out with it.”

“Again?”

She laughed at his joke, then snuggled up against his shoulder. “I know pensive when I see it. So what are you pensing about?”

“Oh … the bar, I guess. I think it may be time for that.”

“I thought you hated tending bar.”

He winced. “The
state
bar, Mary Ann. As in lawyer?”

“Oh.” She glanced over at him. “I thought you hated that, too.”

There was no quick answer for that one. He
had
hated it, in fact, hated every boring, nerve-grinding minute he had ever been Brian Hawkins, Attorney-at-Law. He had sublimated his hatred in the pursuit of causes—blacks, Native Americans, oil slicks—but the “old ennui,” as he had come to call it, proved as persistent and deep-rooted as the law itself.

He still cringed at the thought of the singing fluorescent bulb that had tormented him for hours on end in the grass-cloth-and-walnut conference room of his last law firm. That fixture came to symbolize all that was petty and poisonous about life—if you could call it that—in the Financial District.

So he had fled his profession and become a waiter.

He had also become a rogue, terrorizing singles bars and laundromats in a frenzied and relentless search for “foxes.” He had simplified his life, streamlined his body and subjugated the “old ennui.”

But now something different was happening. The woman he had once described as “that uptight airhead from Cleveland” was easily the love of his life.

And she was the one with the career.

“I have to do
something,
” he told Mary Ann.

“About what?”

“Work,” said Brian. “My job.”

“You mean your tips aren’t …?”

“It isn’t the money.” His voice had an edge to it. His flagging pride was making him cranky.
Don’t take it out on her,
he warned himself. “I just can’t go on like this,” he added in a gentler tone.

“Like what?” she asked cautiously.

“Like your dependent or something. I can’t hack it, Mary Ann.”

She studied him soberly. “It
is
the money, then.”

“It’s one thing to go dutch. It’s another to be … I don’t know … kept or something.” His face was aflame with self-contempt and embarrassment.

Mary Ann laughed openly.
“Kept?
Gimme a break, Brian! I paid for a weekend shack-up in Sierra City. I
wanted
to do
that, you turkey. It was as much for me as it was … oh, Brian.” She reached over and took his hand. “I thought we’d gotten over all that macho stuff.”

He aped her mincingly. “I thought we’d gotten over all that macho stuff.” It was so petty and cruel that he was instantly sorry. Examining her face for signs of hurt, he made the maddening discovery that she had already forgiven him.

“What about John?” she asked.

“John who?”

“Lennon. I thought you admired him for becoming a househusband when Yoko …”

Brian snorted. “It was John’s money, for Christ’s sake! You can do anything you goddamn want when you’re the richest man in New York!”

Mary Ann stared at him incredulously. Now she really was wounded. “How could you do that?” she asked quietly. “How could you cheapen the thing that we shared?”

She was talking about the Memorial Vigil on the Marina Green. She and Brian had spent six hours there mourning Lennon’s death. They had cried themselves dry, clutching strawberry-scented candles, singing “Hey Jude” and smoking a new crop of Hawaiian grass that Mrs. Madrigal had named in honor of the deceased.

Brian had never before—and never since—made himself so vulnerable in Mary Ann’s presence.

Afterwards, he had tacked this note to her door:
HELP ME, IF YOU CAN, I’M FEELING DOWN, AND I DO APPRECIATE YOUR BEING ‘ROUND. I LOVE YOU—BRIAN.

He was feeling down all right, but it had more to do with mid-life crisis than with the passing of a Beatle.

For, on the day that John Lennon died, everyone in Brian Hawkins’ generation instantly and irrevocably turned forty.

“I’m sorry,” he said at last.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, leaning over to kiss his shoulder.

“I’m just … edgy right now.”

“I could sleep at my place tonight, if you need the …”

“No. Stay. Please.”

She answered with another peck on the shoulder. “Do me a favor,” she said.

“What?”

“Don’t become a lawyer on my account. I’m a big girl now. I don’t need any dragons slain on my behalf.”

He looked into her radiant face. Sometimes she understood him better than anyone. “Right,” he murmured. “I’ll get by with a little help from my friends.”

And sometimes she made him say the corniest things.