His lover paused, then pecked Michael on the temple. “I don’t understand why you’re not.”
Harry heard the kiss and scrambled frantically over their intertwined legs, whimpering like a spurned lover. “Uh-oh,” said Thack. “Kiss Patrol.”
They parted enough to admit the dog, then scratched him in tandem, Thack attacking the lower back, Michael attending to his head. Harry invariably left the room when they were having sex, but simple affection was too much for him to miss.
“This jealousy isn’t healthy,” said Michael.
“He’s all right.” Thack kissed the dog’s neck. “Aren’t you?”
Harry gave a breathy har-har in reply.
“He smells gross,” said Michael.
“Is that right, Harry? Do you smell gross?”
“I’ll wash him tomorrow.”
Thack leaned closer to the dog’s ear. “Hear that, Harry? Better head for the hills.”
Soon enough, Harry did retire to the bedroom, leaving his masters to snooze on the sofa. Michael drifted off to a rising chorus of foghorns and the occasional screech of tires down in the Castro. At eleven o’clock he was jolted awake by his beeper, prickly as a needle in the darkness.
A Practicing New Yorker
FOR SEVERAL YEARS NOW THE TENDERLOIN HAD BEEN on a surprising upswing. Where formerly had been wino dives and inflatable plastic lady shops now bloomed chocolatiers and restaurants with arugula on the menu. Easily the most stylish of the new eateries was D’orothea’s Grille, a postmodern fantasia with trompe I’oeil marble walls and booth dividers that looked like giant Tinker Toys.
As Mary Ann entered, her eyes made a clandestine dash to the wall behind the maître d’s stand. There a row of caricatures alerted newcomers to the restaurant’s more illustrious customers. Her face was still there, of course—why had she worried that it wasn’t?—sandwiched comfortably as ever between the renderings of Danielle Steel and Ambassador Shirley Temple Black.
The maitre d’ looked up and smiled. “There you are.”
“Hi, Mickey. I’m expecting a guy…”
“He’s already here.”
“Ah. Great.”
The maitre d’ leaned forward conspiratorially. “I put him at the banquette in the back. There’s a table available in the front room, but Prue’s there with Father Paddy, and I thought”—and here he winked—“it might be a little quieter back in Siberia.”
She rewarded him with a rakish chuckle. “You’re way ahead of me, Mickey.”
“We try,” he said, and smiled wickedly.
Grateful for this promise of privacy, she fled to the back, while Prue and the priest yammered away obliviously. When she reached the furthermost banquette, Burke Andrew leapt to his feet and hugged her awkwardly across the table.
“Hey,” he said. “You look great.”
“Thanks. Look who’s talking.”
He let his head wobble bashfully. She caught a glimpse of the troubled youth who had left her for a career in New York. Most of that person was gone now, with only the broad shoulders and great hair (strawberry blond and receding heroically) remaining to trigger her memories. His earnest collie face, once such a blank slate, had developed crags in becoming places.
He sank to the banquette and studied her for a moment, shaking his head slowly. “Ten years. Damn.”
“Eleven,” she said, sitting down.
“Shit.”
She laughed.
“And you’re a star now,” he said. “They’ve got your picture on the wall and everything.”
She thought it best not to know what he meant. “Huh?”
“Over there. Next to Shirley Temple.”
A quick, dismissive glance at the caricature. “Oh, yeah.”
“Don’t you like it?”
She shrugged. “It’s O.K., I guess.” After a beat, she added: “Shirley hates hers.”
One of his gingery eyebrows leapt noticeably. “She’s a friend?”
She nodded. “She lives here, you know.”
O.K., maybe “friend” was stretching it, but Shirley had been on the show once, and Mary Ann had chatted with her extensively at the French Impressionist exhibit at the De Young. Anyway, she was certain the ambassador wouldn’t approve of that pouty-faced portrait with the dashiki and the cigarette. Mary Ann had told D’or as much when they hung the damned thing.
Burke’s eyes roamed the room. “I like this.”
She nodded. “It’s kind of a media joint.”
“Yeah. So you said.”
At the moment, she realized, the wattage of the lunching luminaries was embarrassingly dim, so she made do with the material at hand. “That showy blonde,” she muttered, nodding toward the front room, “is Prue Giroux.”
He had obviously never heard of her.
“She was in Us last month. She took some orphans to Beijing on a peace mission.”
Still no reaction.
“She’s a socialite, actually. Kind of a publicity hound.” He nodded. “How ’bout the priest?”
“Father Paddy Starr. He has a show at my station. Honest to God.”
“Honest to God, he has a show? Or that’s the name of it?” “That’s the name of it.”
He smirked.
She smirked back, feeling a little queasy about it. She hated how rubey all this sounded. Burke, after all, was a practicing New Yorker, and the breed had a nasty way of regarding San Francisco as one giant bed-and-breakfast inn—cute but really of no consequence. She made herself a curt mental note not to gossip about the locals.
“How’s Betsy?” she asked, changing the subject.
“Brenda.”
“Oh. Sorry. I knew it was B.” She mugged and rolled her head from side to side. “Burke and Brenda, B and B.”
“She’s doing fine. Got her hands full with the kids, of course.”
Wouldn’t she just, thought Mary Ann.
“She wanted to come with me this time, but Burke junior came down with flu, and Brenda didn’t trust the housekeeper to manage without her.”
“God, I know what you mean!” She seized his wrist lightly. “We have this Vietnamese woman. She’s really dear, but she can’t, for the life of her, tell the difference between Raid and Pledge!”
His laughter seemed a little strained, and she worried that the remark had come off as racist.
“Of course,” she added, releasing his wrist, “I can only speak one language myself, so…anyway, her family had a rough time over there, so we figured it was worth a little extra trouble.”
“You have a kid or two of your own, don’t you?”
“One. How’d you know?”
His smirk came back to life. “I saw you with her on Entertainment Tonight.”
“Oh…you saw that?” It was good to know, anyway, that he’d seen her on national TV. At least now she knew he didn’t think of her as completely local. Even if that ET segment had been about local talk-show hosts.
“She’s a cute little girl,” he said.
For an unsettling instant she flashed on Shawna’s tarty makeup of the day before. “Well, she’s a lot bigger now, of course. That was over three years ago.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“I bet she looks more like you than ever.”
She smiled at him benignly, hoping he wouldn’t make a big deal out of this. “She’s not my biological daughter, actually. We adopted her.”
“Oh. Yeah.” He did his bashful wobble again. “I guess I knew that.”
“I don’t see how you could, really.”
“Well, maybe not.”
“Her mother was a friend of mine. Or someone I knew, anyway. She died a few days after Shawna was born. She left a note asking me and Brian to take care of her.”
“How wonderful.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s a great story. She’s a lucky little girl.”
She shrugged. “Brian was a little more crazy about the idea than I was.”
This unraveled him noticeably. “Still…you must…I mean, I’m sure it took some getting used to, but…”
She smiled to put him out of his misery. “I’m learning,” she said. “It’s not terrible. It’s O.K., actually. Most of the time.”
“How old is she?”
“Oh…five or six.”
It took him forever to realize she was joking. “C’mon,” he said finally.
“She’ll be six next April.”
“O.K. There.” He nodded to fill the dead air. “And…Brian?”
“He’s forty-four,” she answered, though she found the question a little weird.
“No.” He laughed. “I meant, who is he?”
“Oh, I thought you knew. Brian Hawkins.”
It didn’t register.
“He was upstairs at Mrs. Madrigal’s.”
Now he was nodding, slowly. “The guy who lived on the roof?”
“Right. That’s him.”
“Well, I’ll be damned!”
His apparent amazement unsettled her. “You remember him, huh?”
“I remember how much you hated him.”
“Excuse me?” She gave him the sourest look she could muster.
“Sorry,” he said. “I mean…you know, disapproved of him…”
She was about to take him on, when the waiter appeared. “You folks had a chance to look at the menu yet?”
“I’ll take the grilled tuna,” Mary Ann told him crisply. “And some orange-flavored Calistoga.”
Burke cast a cursory glance at the menu, then flapped it shut. “Sounds great.”
“Same thing?” asked the waiter.
“Same thing.”
“You got it.” The waiter spun on his heels and left.
“O.K.,” said Burke. “Let me start over, if I can.”
“Let’s just leave it.”
“No. That sounded terrible.”
“I knew what you meant, though. He was a real womanizer then.”
“I liked him, though. I thought he was nice.”
She realigned her silverware against the salmon tablecloth. “He is nice. He puts up with a lot, believe me.”
He smiled gently. “C’mon.”
She shrugged. “He does. It isn’t easy being married to Mary Ann Singleton.”
He blinked at her for a moment, then asked: “When did you start seeing him?”
“Oh…a year or so after you left.” Make that a week, she told herself. No, make it four days. She remembered all too well the weepy night she had headed up to Brian’s room with a joint of Maui Wowie and a bottle of rotgut Chianti. He’d been dating Mona Ramsey at the time, but he’d been ready and willing to offer consolation.
How odd it was to sit here now with the man who had caused her all that pain and feel nothing but a sort of pleasant sense of shared history. She could scarcely remember their passion, much less reconstitute it for a moment’s titillation.
“How’s Mrs. Madrigal?” he asked.
“She’s O.K., I guess. I saw her down at Molinari’s a month or so ago.” She smiled and shook her head. “Just as dear and loony as ever.”
Burke smiled back.
“Brian and I moved out of the house after we got Shawna. It had a certain funky charm, I guess, but it wasn’t much of a place to raise a kid.”
“What about Michael and…Jon, was it?”
She nodded solemnly. “Jon died of AIDS in ’82.”
“Damn.”
“I know.”
“Is Michael O.K.?”
Another nod. “He’s got the virus, but so far he’s been fine.”
“Good. Thank God.”
“He has a new boyfriend,” she told him. “They bought a house in the Castro.”
“What does Michael do now?”
“He runs a nursery out on Clement.”
“No kidding?”
“Yeah. He and Brian run it together, actually.”
He seemed to like this idea. “All in the family, huh?”
“Yeah.”
He nodded slowly, absorbing their lost decade with a look of sanguine acceptance. “You look great,” he said finally.
Fine, she thought, but isn’t this where we came in?
This particular waiter knew she didn’t like a chatty presentation, so their tuna arrived without fanfare. Burke took a few bites and said: “I’m producing now. For Teleplex. Did you know that?”
“Sure,” she said. “Doesn’t everybody?”
He chuckled. “No way.”
“Well, I do.”
He focused on his plate as he composed his words. “I’m developing a new morning talk show. Out of New York. We think there’s a real market for something more home-oriented and…more intelligent than what’s currently being offered.”
“You got that right. People have had it with this tabloid shit. There’s bound to be a backlash.”
“I think so,” he said, still addressing his tuna. “I think we can make it happen, in fact. We’ve got the backing, frankly, and some very real interest from the networks. What we need now is the right host. Someone who knows how to chat with, say, Gore Vidal and yet still be lively in a kitchen segment.”
Mary Ann’s fork froze in mid-descent. Don’t, she warned herself, jump to any hasty conclusions. Maybe he just wants your advice. Maybe he…
“What do you think?” His eyes met hers at last.
“About what?”
“Doing it.”
She set the fork down and waited for a count of three. “Me?”
“Yes.”
“As host?”
“Yes.”
It took all the discipline at her command to conceal her excitement. “Burke…I’m tremendously flattered…”
“But?”
“Well, for starters, I have my own show.”
“Right. Local.”
Stung, she composed herself, then said coolly: “This is one of the most sought-after markets in the country.”
He gave her a patient smile. “I know you know the difference.”
“Well, maybe so, but…”
“And I think you’ll find the money is a whole lot better.”
“That isn’t the point,” she said calmly.
“Well, what is? Tell me what I have to do?”
He was practically begging. God, how she loved this. “I have a home here, Burke, a family.”
“And they wouldn’t want to move?”
“That’s part of it, yes.”
“O.K.” He made a little gesture of concession with his hands. “What’s the other part?”
“When have you even seen me, anyway? I mean, the show.”
“Lots of times. On my way through the city. I’ve never seen you when you weren’t brilliant.” He gave her an engaging little smile. “We can even keep the name, if you want. I like the sound of ‘Mary Ann in the Morning.’”
She was thinking more along the lines of just plain “Mary Ann.”
“Look,” he added, “if it’s gonna be no, fine. But I want to make damn sure you know exactly what’s being offered here.”
“I think I do,” she said.
“Then what can I tell you?”
“Well…what you think I can offer, for one thing.” He gave her a disbelieving look. “C’mon.”
“I mean it.”
“O.K.” He thought for a moment. “You’re not an automaton. You listen to people. You react. You laugh when you feel like laughing, and you say what’s on your mind. And you’ve got this great…Cleveland thing going.”
She drew back as if he’d hit her with a mackerel. “Cleveland thing?”
He grinned maddeningly. “Maybe that was the wrong way to put it…”
“I’ve spent years making sure Cleveland was gone forever.”
He shook his head. “Didn’t work.”
“Well, thanks a helluva lot.”
“And you’re lucky it didn’t. That naïveté is the best thing you’ve got going for you. Look, c’mon
…where would Carson be without Nebraska?”
With a private shiver, she realized that she could be on Carson in a matter of months, chatting chummily about her meteoric rise to fame.
“So how was it?” asked a throaty female voice, taking Mary Ann by surprise.
“D’or…hi. Yummy, as usual. Burke, this is our hostess, D’orothea Wilson.” She looked especially elegant today, Mary Ann thought, in a mauve silk blouse and gabardine slacks.
“This is great,” said Burke, indicating the remains of his tuna. “Especially the peanut butter sauce.”
D’or nodded. “I’ve been making that one at home for years.” She looked at Mary Ann and smiled wryly. “DeDe and the kids are sorta pissed that I went public with it.”
“Is she here today?”
D’or shook her head. “Not till two.”
“Well, tell her I said hi, O.K.? It’s been a while since we’ve talked.”
“You bet,” said D’or, and she sailed off to the front room on her proprietorial rounds.
“She’s a beauty,” said Burke.
“Yeah. She used to be a model. She and her lover escaped from Jonestown just before everybody…you know, drank the Kool-Aid. They hid out in Cuba for three years.”
“My God.”
She enjoyed his amazement. “Yeah. I broke the story, actually.”
“On your show?”
“No. Earlier. When I was still hosting the afternoon movie. Back in ’81. It’s how I got my start.”
“They made you a reporter so you could break it?”
“No.”
“Then…?”
She shrugged and gave him an enigmatic smile. “I just broke it during the afternoon movie.”
“Uh-huh” was all he could manage.
“It was just a local thing. I doubt if you would’ve heard about it in New York.”
He caught the irony and narrowed his eyes at her. “When did you get to be so dangerous?”
“Who, me?” she replied. “Little of me from Cleveland?”
Some Rather Exciting News
THE VELVETY FOG WHICH ARRIVED THAT EVENING HAD sketched a halo around the streetlight at the foot of the Barbary steps. Thack stopped beneath it and muttered, “Shit.”
“What?” said Michael.
“We forgot to get sherry.”
Michael’s guilt flared up again. After several months’ absence, he hated showing up at Mrs. Madrigal’s house without some reassuring talisman of his affection. Gazing up the impossible slope of Leavenworth, he mused aloud. “There’s a mom and pop up at the top there.”