Babycakes

  He smiled at her sleepily. “What exactly would you like them to say?”

  “Mouse!” After seven years of friendship, she still couldn’t tell when he was kidding.

  “Relax, Babycakes. My waiter was raving about you.” He withdrew from her slightly and gave her a once-over. “I’m surprised he didn’t mention the hat, though.”

  That stopped her cold. “What’s wrong with the hat?”

  “Nothing.” He stayed poker-faced, teasing her.

  “Mouse …”

  “It’s a perfectly nice hat.”

  “Mouse, if every queen in the city was laughing at this hat, I will die. Are you reading me? I will crawl under the nearest rock and die.”

  He gave up the game. “It looks fabulous. You look fabulous. C’mon … sit down and tell me about it.”

  “I can’t. I just thought I’d stop by … and say hi.”

  He regarded her for a moment, then leaned forward and pecked her on the lips. “Hi.”

  “Are you O.K.?” she asked.

  He made a little circle in the air with his forefinger, giving her a rueful smile.

  “Me too,” she said.

  “It’s the rain, I guess.”

  “I guess.” It had never been the rain, and they both knew it. The rain was just easier to talk about. “Well …” She nodded toward the door. “Brian must think I’ve dropped off the face of the earth.”

  “Hang on,” said Michael. “I’ve got something for him.” He ducked into the kitchen, returning seconds later with a pair of roller skates. “They’re ten-and-a-halfs,” he said. “Isn’t that what Brian wears?”

  She stared at the skates, feeling the pain begin to surface again.

  “I found them under the sink,” Michael explained, avoiding her eyes. “I gave them to Jon two Christmases ago, and I completely forgot where he kept them. Hey … not now, O.K.?”

  She fought back the tears, to no avail. “I’m sorry, Mouse. It’s not fair to you, but … sometimes, you know, it just creeps up without any … Christ!” She wiped her eyes with two angry sweeps of her hand. “When the hell is it gonna stop?”

  Michael stood there, hugging the skates to his chest, his features contorted horribly by grief.

  “Oh, Mouse, I’m so sorry. I’m such a turkey.”

  Unable to speak, he nodded his forgiveness as the tears coursed down his cheeks. She took the skates from him and set them down, scooping him into her arms and stroking his hair. “I know, Mouse … I know, baby. It’ll get better. You’ll see.”

  She had a hard lime believing that herself. Jon had been dead for over three months, but she suffered the loss more acutely now than ever before. To gain distance on the tragedy was to grasp, for the first time, the terrible enormity of it.

  Michael pulled away from her. “So … how about some cocoa, media star?”

  “Great,” she said.

  She sat at his kitchen table while he made it. Still pinned to the refrigerator door by a magnetized seashell was the snapshot she had taken of Jon and Michael at a pumpkin patch in Half Moon Bay. Averting her gaze, she commanded herself not to cry again. She had done quite enough damage for one night.

  When the cocoa was ready, Michael removed a blue Fiesta cup from the shelf and placed it on a gray saucer. Frowning slightly, he studied the pairing for a moment, then substituted a rose-colored saucer for the gray one. Mary Ann observed the ritual and smiled at his eccentricity.

  Michael caught her reaction. “These things are important,” he said.

  “I know.” She smiled.

  He chose a yellow cup for himself and set it on the gray saucer before joining her at the table. “I’m glad you came by,” he said.

  “Thanks,” she replied. “So am I.”

  While they sipped their cocoa, she told him about DeDe and Mrs. Halcyon, about her rebellious crew and the rude police, about the few brief moments she had actually laid eyes on the Queen. The monarch had seemed so unreal, she explained, unreal and yet totally familiar. Like the cartoon image of Snow White, walking amidst ordinary human beings.

  She stayed long enough to make him laugh out loud several times, then said good night to him. When she reached her own apartment, Brian wasn’t there, so she left the skates in the living room and climbed the stairs to the house on the roof. There, as usual, she found her husband asleep in the flickering light of MTV. She knelt by the sofa and laid her hand gently on his chest. “Hey,” she whispered. “Who’s it gonna be? Me or Pat Benatar?”

  He stirred, rubbing his eyes with the knuckles of his forefinger.

  “Well?” she prodded.

  “I’m thinking.”

  She smoothed his chest hair, following the lines of its natural swirls. “I’m sorry I broke our date.”

  He smiled drowsily at her. “Hey.”

  “Did you see me?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Mrs. Madrigal and I watched.”

  She waited for his reaction.

  “You were terrific,” he said at last.

  “You’re not just saying that?”

  He raised himself slightly on his elbows and rubbed his eyes again. “I’m never just saying that.”

  “Well … the fortune cookie stuff was pretty fabulous, if I do say so myself. Of course …” She was silenced when he reached out and pulled her onto the sofa next to him.

  “Shut up,” he said.

  “Gladly,” she replied.

  She kissed him long and hard, almost ferociously, in direct proportion to the intensity of her workday. The more public her life became, the more acutely she relished such moments of unequivocal privacy. Within seconds, Brian’s hands had found the hem of her tweed skirt and pulled it up over her hips. Lifting her gently under the arms, he propped her up against a nubby cotton bolster and began kissing her knees. She felt faintly ridiculous.

  “Let’s go downstairs,” she whispered.

  He looked up from his single-minded mission. “Why?”

  “Well … so I can get out of this hat, for one thing.”

  A boyish leer transformed his face. “Keep it on, O.K.?” His head went down again, and his sandpapery cheek scraped against her pantyhose as he moved his tongue up the inside of her thighs. “What is this?” she asked. “Your Evita fantasy?”

  He laughed, enveloping her in a wave of warm breath, then yanked off her pantyhose in a single, efficient movement. She laced her fingers through his chestnut curls and pulled his face into her groin, warmth into warmth, wetness into wetness. Moaning softly, she arched her neck and fell back into the embrace of the sofa. At a time like this, she decided, ridiculous was the last thing that mattered.

  They were back at the apartment when she finally took off the hat. “The skates are from Mouse,” she said. She tried to sound matter-of-fact about it.

  “What skates?” He was sitting on the edge of the bed in his boxer shorts.

  “In the living room.” She avoided his eyes by pretending to arrange the hat in its box.

  He rose and left the room. He was gone so long that she stopped brushing her hair and went to look for him. He was seated in the wingback armchair, staring into space. The skates were at his feet. He glanced briefly in her direction. “They’re Jon’s, right?”

  She nodded, but moved no closer.

  He shook his head slowly, a thin smile on his face. “Jesus God,” he said quietly. He brushed a piece of imaginary lint off the arm of the chair. “Is Michael doing O.K.?” he asked.

  “O.K.,” she replied.

  Brian cast his eyes down at the skates. “He thinks of everything, doesn’t he?”

  “Uh-huh.” She moved to the chair and sat on the floor between his knees. He stroked her hair methodically, saying nothing for almost a minute.

  Finally, he said: “I almost lost my job today.”

  “What?”

  “It’s O.K. I didn’t. I smoothed things out.”

  “What happened?”

  “Oh … I punched out this guy.”

/>   “Brian.” She tried not to sound too judgmental, but this had happened before.

  “It’s O.K.,” he said. “It wasn’t a customer or anything. It was just that new waiter. Jerry.”

  “I don’t know him.”

  “Yeah, you do. The one with the Jordache Look.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “He shot off his mouth all day about one goddamn thing or another. Then he saw me eat a french fry off a plate that had just been bused and he said, ‘Shit, man, you’ve played hell now.’ I asked him what the fuck he meant by that and he said, ‘That was a faggot’s plate, dumbass—your days are numbered.’ ”

  “Great.”

  “So I pasted him.”

  She wrenched her head around and stared at him. “Do you really think that was necessary?”

  He answered with a shrug. “I got a big kick out of it.”

  “Brian … they told you if it happened again …”

  “I know, I know.”

  She kept quiet. These half-assed little John Wayne scenes were simply a reflection of his frustration with an unchallenging job. If she didn’t tread carefully, he would use her disapproval as an excuse to remind her that fatherhood was the only job that really mattered to him.

  “Did you ever read Nineteen Eighty-Four?” he asked.

  The question made her wary. “Years ago. Why?”

  “Remember the guy in it?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “Do you know what I remember about him the most?” She shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t know. They put rats on his face. What?”

  “He was forty,” he answered.

  “And?”

  “I was sixteen when I read it, and I remember thinking how old the guy was, and I realized that I would be forty in nineteen eighty-four, and I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be that far gone. Well … nineteen eighty-four is almost here.”

  She studied his expression for a moment, then took the hand lying on his knee and kissed it. “I thought we agreed that one menopause in the family was enough.”

  He hesitated, then laughed. “O.K., all right … fair enough.”

  She sensed that the crisis had passed. He seemed to know that this wasn’t the time to broach the subject, and she was more than grateful for the reprieve.

  Anna’s Family

  WHEN MICHAEL WENT DOWN TO BREAKFAST, MRS. Madrigal’s kitchen smelled of coffee brewing and bacon frying. The rain that streaked the long casement windows above her sink only served to heighten the conspiracy of coziness that ensnared even the most casual of visitors. He sat down at the landlady’s little white enamel table and sniffed the air.

  “That coffee is heaven,’’ he said.

  “It’s Arabian Mocha,” she replied. “It’s the sinsemilla of coffees.” She tore off a length of paper towel and began laying the bacon out to drain.

  He chuckled, but only because he understood exactly what she meant. If he was a true pothead—and sometimes he thought that he was—this fey sixty-year-old with the flyaway hair and the old kimonos was the fiend who had led him down the garden path. He could have done a lot worse.

  She joined him at the table, bringing two mugs of coffee with her. “Mary Ann was up awfully early.”

  “She’s in Silicon Valley,” he said. “Mr. Packard is showing the Queen around.”

  “Mr. Packard?”

  “The computer man. Our former deputy secretary of defense.”

  “Ah. No wonder I forgot.”

  He smiled at her, then picked up his mug and blew off its halo of steam. “He’s giving the Queen a computer.”

  She made a quizzical face. “What does the Queen want with a computer?”

  He shrugged. “It’s got something to do with breeding horses.”

  “My word.”

  “I know. I can’t picture it either.”

  She smiled, then sipped her coffee for a while before asking: “You haven’t heard from Mona, have you?”

  It was an old wound, but it throbbed like a new one. “I’ve stopped being concerned with that.”

  “Now, now.”

  “There’s no point in it. She’s cut us off. There hasn’t been so much as a postcard, Mrs. Madrigal. I haven’t talked to her for at least … a year and a half.”

  “Maybe she thinks we’re cross with her.”

  “C’mon. She knows where we are. It’s just happened, that’s all. People drift apart. If she wanted to hear from us, she’d list her phone number or something.”

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Only a silly old fool would fret over a daughter who’s pushing forty.”

  “No I’m not. I’m thinking what a silly old fool your forty-year-old daughter is.”

  “But, dear … what if something’s really the matter?”

  “Well,” said Michael. “You’ve heard from her more recently than I have.”

  “Eight months ago.” The landlady frowned. “No return address. She said she was doing O.K. in ‘a little private printing concern,’ whatever that means. It’s not like her to be so vague.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Well … not in that way, dear.”

  When Mona had moved to Seattle at the turn of the decade, Michael had all but begged her not to go. Mona had been adamant, however; Seattle was the city of the eighties. “Go ahead,” he had jeered. “You like Quaaludes … you’ll love Seattle.” Apparently, he had been right; Mona had never returned.

  Mrs. Madrigal saw how much it still bothered him. “Go easy on her, Michael. She might be in some sort of trouble.”

  That would hardly be news. He couldn’t remember a time when his former roommate hadn’t been on the verge of some dark calamity or another. “I told you,” he said calmly. “I don’t think about that much these days.”

  “If we had a way of telling her about Jon …”

  “But we don’t. And I doubt if we ever will. She’s made it pretty clear that she …”

  “She loved Jon, Michael. I mean … they squabbled a bit, perhaps, but she loved him just as much as any of us. You mustn’t doubt that … ever.” She rose and began cracking eggs into a bowl. They both knew that nothing was to be gained by pursuing the subject. All the wishing in the world wouldn’t make a difference. When Mona had fled to the north, she had put more than the city behind her. Starting from scratch was the only emotional skill she had ever mastered.

  Mrs. Madrigal seemed to share his thoughts. “I hope she has someone,” she murmured. “Anyone.”

  There was nothing he could add. With Mona, it could well be anyone.

  He tried not to think about her on the way to work, concentrating instead on the dripping wound in the roof of his VW convertible. A knife-wielding stereo thief had put it there three weeks earlier, and the bandage he had fashioned from a shower curtain required constant readjustment against the rain. It was no wonder the car had begun to smell like a rank terranum; he had actually discovered a small stand of grass sprouting in the mildewed carpet behind the back seat.

  By the time he reached God’s Green Earth, the downpour was much worse, so he gave the plastic patch a final fluffing before making a mad dash to the nursery office. Ned was already there, leaning back in his chair, cradling his bald pate in his big, hairy hands. “That hole is a bitch, huh?”

  “The worst.” He shook off the water like a drenched dog. “The car is forming its own ecosystem.” He peered uneasily out the window, beyond which the primroses had dissolved into an impressionistic blur. “Jesus. We’d better get a tarp or something.”

  “What for?” Ned remained in repose.

  “Those bedding plants. They’re getting beat all to hell.”

  His partner smiled stoically. “Have you checked the books lately? There isn’t exactly a major demand for primroses.”

  He was right, of course. The rain had played hell with business. “Just the same, don’t you think …?”

  “Fuck it,” said Ne
d. “Let’s hang it up.”

  “What?”

  “Let’s close for a month. It won’t hurt us. It can’t be any worse than this.”

  Michael sat down, staring at him. “And do what?”

  “Well … how about a trip to Death Valley?”

  “Right.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Ned … Death Valley?”

  “Have you ever been there? It’s a fucking paradise. We could get six or eight guys, camp out, do some mushrooms. The wildflowers will be incredible after this rain.”

  He was less than thrilled. “How about during?”

  “We’ll have tents, pussy. C’mon … just for a weekend.”

  Michael could never have explained his panic at the prospect of unlimited leisure. He needed a routine right now, a predictable rut. The last thing he wanted was time to think.

  Ned tried another approach. “I won’t try to fix you up. It’ll just be a group of guys.”

  He couldn’t help smiling. Ned was always trying to fix him up. “Thanks anyway. You go ahead. I’ll hold down the fort. I’ll be glad to. Really.”

  Ned regarded him for a moment, then sprang to his feet and began rearranging the seed packets in the revolving rack. It struck Michael as a defensive gesture. “Are you pissed?” he asked.

  “Nope.”

  “It just isn’t there right now, Ned.”

  His partner slopped fiddling. “If you ask me … a good jack-off buddy would do you a world of good.”

  “Ned …”

  “O.K. All right. Forget it. I’ve done my Dolly Levi for the day.”

  “Good.”

  “I’m going, though. If you want to stay here and watch the roots rot, that’s O.K. by me.”

  “Fine.”

  They had little to say to each other for the next hour as they busied themselves with minor maintenance chores, things that didn’t get done when customers were there. After Ned had finished stacking pallets in the shed, he stepped into the office again and confronted Michael at the desk. “I wanted your company, you know. I didn’t do it to be nice.”