“That’s not funny, Mouse.”
“Well, look: we don’t have to take it off the ship. It’s not like we’ll be smoking it on the street in Acapulco. Hell, we won’t even see a customs agent until we get back to L.A.”
Mary Ann sighed and sat down on the edge of the bed. “I used to be a Future Homemaker of America, Mouse.”
“So?”
“So now I’m smuggling dope into Mexico.”
“And traveling with”—he lowered his voice to a sinister basso—“a known homosexual.”
She smiled faintly. “That too.”
He stared at her for a moment to determine exactly how seriously she had taken him. There were times, even now, when his irony came perilously close to describing the way she felt about things. She winked at him, however, so he continued packing.
“I love that expression,” he said, without looking up.
“What?”
“‘Known homosexual.’ I mean, you never hear about known Southern Baptists, do you? Or known insurance salesmen. And when you’re not a known homosexual, you’re an admitted one. ‘Mr. Farquar, an admitted stockbroker, was found stabbed to death in Golden Gate Park early this—’”
“Mouse, you’re giving me the creeps!”
“Sorry.”
She reached over and squeezed his hand. “I didn’t mean to bark at you. It’s just … well, I’m still a little jumpy about dead people, that’s all.”
He started to say “I can dig it,” but thought better of it. Instead, he held on to her hand and reassured her for the third or fourth time that week. “It’ll get better, Babycakes. It’s only been two months.”
Her eyes became moist. “You don’t think we’re … escaping or anything?”
“From what?”
She brushed a tear from her eye, shrugged and suggested feebly: “The law?”
“You haven’t broken any law, Mary Ann.”
“I didn’t report his death.”
He fought to be patient with her. They had hashed this out so many times before that the conversation had become ritual. “That guy,” said Michael softly, “was a certified prick. He was a child pornographer, for Christ’s sake. You didn’t push him off that cliff, Mary Ann. His death was an accident. Besides, if you had reported his death, you would have been obligated to tell the police that he was investigating Mrs. Madrigal. And we both love Mrs. Madrigal too much for that, no matter what was in that file.”
The very mention of the file made Mary Ann shudder. “I never should have burned it, Mouse.”
So Michael ran through that again. Burning the file, he told her, had been Mary Ann’s most intelligent move. By destroying the private eye’s dossier on Mrs. Madrigal, Mary Ann had scored a twofold triumph: She had kept herself from being privy to information she might have been obligated to pass along to the police. And she had kept the file out of the hands of the police.
The police had turned up at 28 Barbary Lane as soon as Mrs. Madrigal had reported her tenant missing. Their investigation appeared to have been routine and short-lived. Norman Neal Williams had been a transient, they learned, an itinerant vitamin salesman with no known relatives. His involvement in the child-porn racket surfaced immediately, though Mary Ann feigned ignorance of it.
She had “gone out with him” several times, she told police. She hadn’t known him well. He had seemed “a little weird” to her at times. And yes, it seemed possible he had moved to another town.
When the police had gone, Mary Ann had summoned Michael to her apartment, where they pondered the real mysteries of this terrible chapter in her life.
Did the police know that Norman Neal Williams had been a private eye?
Did Mrs. Madrigal know that she had been the subject of Williams’ investigation?
Would Williams’ body turn up in the bay?
And why would anyone want to investigate a woman as warm and compassionate and … harmless as Anna Madrigal?
Mexico, of course, was an escape, but not the sort that Mary Ann had meant. Depression and morbidity had settled into her bones like mildew. She would bake it out, she decided, reverting to her adolescent solution for almost everything.
She tucked a bottle of Coppertone into a side pocket of her American Tourister. “You know what?” she said, her voice ringing with pep-rally optimism.
“What?”
“This trip is gonna work for me. I’m gonna meet somebody, Mouse. I know it.”
“A man, you mean?”
“Not that you aren’t the best company in the world, Mouse, but I really—”
“Look, you don’t have to explain that one. I’ve got this dynamite plan, anyway. I spot a guy, right? Lounging out by the ship’s pool, maybe, or … whatever, and I saunter up kind of casual like, with you on my arm all tanned and gorgeous, so that he’s bound to be eating his heart out, and then I say in my very butchest Lee Majors voice, “Hi, guy, I’m Michael Tolliver and this is Mary Ann Singleton. Which one of us would you like?”
Mary Ann giggled. “What if he doesn’t want either one of us?”
“Then,” said Michael matter-of-factly, “you push him off the first available cliff in Acapulco.”
Mona Flees
AFTER MONA HAD DRIVEN MARY ANN AND MICHAEL to the airport, she returned to Barbary Lane and fell into a cosmic funk.
She felt grossly disoriented, partially because of her mother’s weird phone call, and partially because two of her friends had managed to break the bonds of this incestuous backwater Babylon called San Francisco.
That was what she needed, really. Fresh territory. Blue skies. Communion with the Eternal. A chance to restructure her life into something that would bring her the inner tranquillity she so desperately wanted.
She mapped out a plan of action in less than ten minutes, leaving a terse note on Mrs. Madrigal’s door:
Mrs. M.
I’ll be gone for a while.
Please don’t worry. I
need to breathe.
Love,
MONA
She made her escape by cable car, irked by the bitter irony of it all. Wouldn’t Tony Bennett be tickled to know that Mona Ramsey, aging freak and transcendental cynic, had been forced to flee Everybody’s Favorite City on one of these cloyingly cute tourist trolleys?
At Powell and Market she disembarked, separating herself from the double-knit masses as soon as possible. She strode up Market to Seventh, turned onto Seventh, and stopped with a sigh in front of the Greyhound bus station.
After three minutes’ consideration, she bought a ticket to Reno, deciding on the spot that sun and sky and desert might somehow offer new horizons. The bus, they told her, would leave shortly after midnight.
For the rest of the afternoon she sat in Union Square, where the drunks and derelicts and burned-out hippies could only reinforce her decision to leave. Then, as soon as night fell, she smoked a potent mixture of grass and angel dust and drifted back to the bus station.
She was eating a cheese sandwich, when a garishly painted crone—eighty if a day—tried to make conversation with her in the snack bar.
“Where ya headin’, dolly?”
“Reno,” she said quietly.
“One stop after me. You takin’ the midnight bus?”
Mona nodded, wondering if the angel dust had made this woman more grotesque than she really was.
“How ‘bout sittin’ with me, then? I get real nervous on the bus, what with the perverts and all.”
“Well, I’m not sure I’d be much—”
“I won’t bother you none. I won’t say nothin’ unless you want me to.”
Something about that touched Mona. “Sure,” she said finally. “It’s a deal.”
The old woman grinned. “What’s your name, dolly?”
“Mo … Judy.”
“Mine’s Mother Mucca.”
“Mother …?”
“Mucca. It’s kind of a nickname. I’m from Winnemucca, see?” She cackled gleefully. “It’s
a long story, and I don’t see no point in … Say, dolly, are you OK?”
“Yes.”
“You look kinda fucked up.”
“What?” A terrible sea roar was resounding in her head, as if someone had lashed a giant conch shell to her ear.
“I said you look fucked up. Your eyes are all … You ain’t been smokin’ no reefers, have you, dolly?”
Mona nodded. “Sort of.”
“Meanin’?”
“I don’t think you’d—”
“Something’ in it?”
“Ever heard of angel dust?”
Mother Mucca’s hand came down on the counter so hard that several sleepy diners looked up from their coffee. “Holy shit! That stuff is for puttin’ elephants to sleep, girl! If you don’t know any better than to fuck yourself up with an animal tranquilizer, you ain’t got no business ridin’—”
Mona lurched to her feet. “I don’t have to sit here and listen—”
A bangled talon of a hand clamped onto her wrist and pulled her back down.
“The fuck you don’t!” shrieked Mother Mucca.
Animal Magnetism
SOME PEOPLE DRINK TO FORGET,” SAID MRS. MADRIGAL, basking in the sun of her courtyard. “Personally, I smoke to remember.” She took a toke of her new Colombian and handed the joint to Brian.
“Like what?” he asked.
“Oh … old lovers, train rides, the taste of fountain Cokes when I was a kid. Grass is a lovely, sentimental … Reader’s Digest kind of a thing. I can’t understand why the bourgeoisie doesn’t approve of it.”
Brian smiled, stretching his legs out on the beach towel. “You’ve been smoking long?”
“Not by my standards. Oh, I think … since you were a teen-ager, probably.”
“That’s not long.”
She smiled. “I thought you might say that.”
“Do you remember the first time?”
“No. I remember the third time, though.”
“The first time didn’t work?”
“No. It worked.” She chuckled. “Don’t you hate people who say that?” She mimicked the voice of a middle-aged matron. “‘The children insisted I smoke pot, so I tried it, Madge, and it didn’t do a thing for me, not one thing.’”
Brian laughed. “Sometimes it’s true, though. My first time didn’t work.”
“So?” The landlady shrugged. “Your first time at sex doesn’t work. It’s still the first time, though. Isn’t that enough?”
“I guess so.”
“There’s nothing that beats the high of a first time. Nothing.”
“Something tells me you’ve had a lot of first times.”
“I try to. And you’re changing the subject.”
“Sorry. I’m ripped.”
“I was going to tell you about my third time.”
“Oh, right.”
“The third time,” said Mrs. Madrigal, adjusting the sleeves of her kimono, “happened at the San Francisco Zoo just after Bobby Kennedy was killed.”
“Bummer, huh?”
“No … I mean, I didn’t get stoned because of that. He had just been killed, that’s all. Anyway, I knew this lovely little man at the zoo who was in charge of the monkeys. Actually, that’s the wrong term. He was more like one of the monkeys. He had rather long arms and he was quite hairy and the monkeys simply adored him. I adored him too. He was a marvelous backgammon player.
“Well, on this particular day, we had a nice long chat in this funny causeway thing that led from the gorilla quarters to the cage where the gorillas go to diddle with themselves in public—”
Brian chuckled.
Mrs. Madrigal raised an eyebrow. “Well, isn’t that what zoos are for? Why else do people watch gorillas?”
“I see what you mean.”
“So there we were, standing in this causeway, chatting pleasantly, when this rather formidable-looking lady gorilla strolled up and joined our little group. She stood next to my zookeeper friend and flung an arm across his shoulder, like an old school chum or something. Then my friend said, ‘Oh, I almost forgot,’ and pulled a joint out of his shirt pocket. He lit the joint, took a toke off it and handed it to the gorilla—”
“C’mon!”
“So help me God! And then, if you please, the gorilla took a long hit and handed the joint to me!”
“Jesus. What did you do?”
“I am not rude, dear boy. I accepted it graciously, without Bogarting, and passed it back to my friend. The gorilla stayed for two more hits, then promenaded down the causeway to greet her public. She was a very mellow lady by then.”
“She did this all the time?”
“Every day. It helped her cope, I suppose.”
“Is she still there?”
Mrs. Madrigal tapped a forefinger against pursed lips. “You know, I’m not really sure. I often wonder if she’s still alive. Gorillas can live to be quite old, I understand. I’d rather like to see her again.”
“Why?”
“Oh … I guess, because we have a lot in common. She was a tough old cookie, and she had fun the best way she knew how. And … because she learned a lot late in life.”
“So what have you learned?”
She smiled at him reprovingly. “I’ve learned how snoopy you get when you’re loaded.”
“I wasn’t asking for your life story.”
“What a pity. You should sometime. But not when I’m loaded.”
“Why?”
“Because, dear … I might tell you the truth.”
The Kindest Cut
EMMA WAS GETTING OLD, FRANNIE NOTED WISTFULLY, as the rail-thin black maid tottered into the master bedroom with a breakfast tray in her hands.
“Open the drapes, Miss Frances?”
Miss Frances! That was what made Emma an absolute gem, the last of her species. As long as she had worked at Halcyon Hill, it had been Miss Frances, Miss DeDe, Mr. Edgar …
“No, thank you, Emma. Just leave the tray on the table, please.”
“Yes’m.”
“Emma?”
“Ma’am?”
“Do you think I’m … Sit down, will you, please, Emma?”
Emma complied, perching delicately on the edge of a button-tufted lady chair near the bed. “You aren’t … sick, Miss Frances?”
“No …”
“Mr. Edgar’s gone, Miss Frances. You gotta live with that now. He’s passed on to the bosom of Jesus, and there’s not a livin’ thing in this whole blessed world that can bring him back until the final judgment of the Lord delivers His people from—”
Frannie cut her off with a jingle of the bedside bell. “Emma, dear … you’re giving me a headache.”
“Yes’m.”
“Now, what I’d like to know is … Emma, I trust your opinion a great deal. I think you know that, and … Do you think I need a face-lift, Emma?”
Silence.
“You do know what a face-lift is, Emma?”
The maid nodded sullenly. “Cuttin’.”
“No … well, yes, that’s part of it, but it’s a complete cosmetic process that’s really quite common these days. I mean, lots of ladies—”
“White ladies.”
“Don’t be impertinent, Emma.”
A quarter century of faithful employment at Halcyon Hill entitled Emma to the scowl with which she now confronted her mistress.
“Miss Frances, the Lord gave you a perfectly fine face, and if the Lord had intended for—”
“Oh, poo, Emma! The Lord doesn’t have to go to Opera Guild meetings!”
“Ma’am?”
“I’m so old, Emma. And everybody I know looks like … Nancy Kissinger! I’m nothing but an old turkey gobbler!” She pinched the flesh along her cheekbone. “Look at that, Emma!”
Emma’s expression was dour. “Mr. Edgar wouldn’t like that kind of talk.”
Frannie rolled over in bed and pushed out her lower lip. “Mr. Edgar is dead,” she said dully.
When Emma
was doing the laundry, Frannie locked the bedroom door and phoned Vita Keating. The furtiveness of this act made her realize that, even at fifty-nine, she was not an adult. She had always been answerable to someone.
Edgar, however, was gone now; Emma was all she had left. Vita, thought Frannie, had never known that kind of emotional servitude. Vita was a trailblazer, a vigorous independent whose nineteen-fifty-something Miss Oklahoma title had spurred her on to runner-up stardom in Atlantic City and a Republican husband in San Francisco.
A hostess of impeccable credentials, Vita sometimes shocked her stuffier peers by shattering long-established social traditions in the city: She was, after all, the first socially registered localite to pair denim place mats with Waterford crystal. And she did the cutest things with bandannas.
Who else but Vita had the panache to show up at the Cerebral Palsy Ball wearing a gingham granny dress and twirling a lasso? She was such fun.
Naturally, she laughed heartily when Frannie blurted out her request.
“My face man? God, honey, for all I know, he’s bottling sheep semen in Switzerland. His last patient was a total washout—some poor woman in Santa Barbara who ended up looking like the Phantom of the Opera.”
Frannie couldn’t hide her disappointment. “I see,” she said glumly.
“Have you thought about the shots?” chirped Vita.
“The shots?”
“The sheep semen, honey.”
“Vita!”
“Well, I couldn’t agree with you more, but Kitty Cipriani says it’s made her a new woman. Personally, I think someone’s pulling the wool over her eyes!” Vita roared with laughter, and Frannie, despite her ever-blackening mood, joined in with her.
Finally, Vita said abruptly, “How old are you, Frannie?”
The question stung more than it might normally have. Vita was Frannie’s junior by at least fifteen years. “I’m asking for a reason,” Vita added apologetically.
“Fifty-four,” said Frannie.
“Oh. Too bad.”
“Don’t rub it in, Vita.”
“No, honey. I mean, it would help if you were sixty.”
“Why on God’s green earth would that help?”
Vita chuckled throatily. “I won’t tell you unless you tell me your real age.”