“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.
THE 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.”
THAT NIGHT, WHILE MICHAEL 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.
Chapter 14
Dwelling on Things
“Watch it!” yelped Michael, “that guy is totally shitfaced!”
Ben winced, tightening his grip on the steering wheel. “I see him.”
“Didn’t look like it.”
“Michael—”
“Okay. Fine. He was staggering into the street, that’s all. You could barely see him in the dark.”
“I saw him.”
“I was trying to be helpful.”
“It doesn’t help when you do that. Believe me.”
Michael maintained a moody silence as they passed Dolores Park on their way down 18th Street to the Mission. When he spoke again, his hand was on Ben’s thigh.
“Is it backseat driving when you’re both in the front seat?”
Ben smiled but said nothing. In the five years they’d been a couple, he’d always been the one to drive when they traveled together. They both preferred it that way, since Michael was a dangerously nervous driver, though that hadn’t stopped him from being “helpful” to the point of obnoxiousness. Ben let it go most of the time, since he knew it had far less to do with control issues than with Michael’s morbid preoccupations.
Tonight they were on their way to see their friends Mark and Ray at their flat on Fair Oaks Street. Mark was sixty; Ray was eighty-two. The difference in their ages was almost the same as Ben and Michael’s, making the older couple both an intergenerational role model and, for better or worse, a possible bellwether of things to come.
Ray had Alzheimer’s these days (“a fairly mild form,” as Mark had gamely put it), which rendered him foggy but jolly, a nicer person by far than his former ornery self. It was Mark, poor guy, who’d been shafted in the bargain. The lupine young man in drawstring pants, whom Ray had fallen for one balmy night at Short Mountain, had been forced, after thirty years of contented man-on-man love, to open their relationship to another person.
This made for some interesting dinner parties.
“GENTLEMEN, GENTLEMEN,” RAY CROONED FROM the top of the stairs, as soon as he had buzzed them in. “Did you find a place to park?”
“No problem,” yelled Ben, peering up that alpine slope at the lower half of Ray’s skinny legs. It amazed Ben that the old man could still negotiate this climb, though it was saddening to have such demonstrable proof that Ray’s body had outlasted his mind. He was wearing sneakers tonight, Ben noticed—fluorescent green ones, polka-dotted with peace signs—which an outsider might have taken as another sign of dementia. Ben saw them as an echo of Ray’s Radical Faerie days, and therefore found them reassuring.
“Cool shoes,” he said.
“Who? Me?”
“Who else?” He kissed Ray’s parchment cheek, joining him on the landing. “Don’t let my husband see them. He’ll want some.”
Ray seized Ben’s hand and held on to it. “Where is he?”
“Down here with the Sherpas.” Michael was halfway down the stairs, exaggerating his breathlessness as he held tight to the iron banister. It was the game he always played, a pose to make Ray feel younger and stronger. Ben loved him for it.
“C’mon,” said Ray, beckoning Michael with a skinny arm. “There’s hot buttered rum at the summit.”
They followed Ray into what Ben always thought of as the great room, a long, warmly lit space on which this couple had left their vaguely hippiefied mark since the early eighties. There was nothing special about the flat, decoratively speaking—Bohemia by way of Pottery Barn—but Ben loved the sheer archaeology of the place, the history buried under magnets on the refrigerator door. These guys had lived a life here, and it showed.
Ray hollered into the kitchen for Mark, who appeared seconds later carrying a tray of mismatched ceramic mugs. “What is it, you cuntface?”
The old man hooted with laughter. Ben shot a glance at Michael and saw that he had been every bit as jolted by the greeting as Ben himself.
“It’s from The Sound of Music,” Mark explained, holding the tray out to his guests. “You know the scene where—”
“I was going to do that,” Ray said, interrupting.
“Do what?”
“Bring out the rum.”
“That’s sweet, my darling, but it’s hot. Not to mention buttered.” Mark shot a knowing look at Ben and Michael. Ben could remember a time, only a few years earlier, when Ray could be entrusted with a tray of cocktails without danger of losing a drop.
No longer, apparently.
Michael took one of the mugs. “I don’t get it. What’s from The Sound of Music?”
Ray grinned impishly. “The Mother Superior says it to . . . whatshername . . . the star.”
“Julie Andrews,” Michael offered.
“ ‘What is it, you cuntface?’ ” This time it was Ray who said it, giggling.
Ben was still lost. “Is this in a drag version or something?”
“It’s in the movie,” said Mark. “Julie doesn’t want to be a nun anymore and tells the Mother Superior she just can’t face it anymore, so the Mother Superior says, ‘What is it you cahnt face?’ You know . . . with a broad European a. Hence . . .”
“ ‘What is it, you cuntface?’ ” Ray crowed the line one more time before pressing his fingers to his mouth. “Hope Arlene didn’t hear. She hates that kinda talk.”
Ben’s eyes darted nervously toward Michael, who, in turn, glanced at Mark, who connected with them both in a cat’s cradle of wordless mortification.
“Shall we get comfortable?” said Mark.
“Arlene should be down soon,” said Ray. “She’s putting her face on.”
Mark sighed and took Michael’s arm, leading the way to the sofa.
Ben sidled up next to Ray, placing his hand on the small of Ray’s back as he did his level best to shift the focus. “I hear you guys went out to Cavallo Point last week.”
“Mmm.”
“What did you think of the new restaurant?”
“It used to be a military base, you know.”
“I did . . . yes. Did you like it?”
Ray eased himself into a big armchair upholstered in paisley wool. “I thought it was completely stark and charmless, to tell you the truth. And way too expensive.”
“I agree with you completely.”
“Arlene adored it, though. She’s always been partial to fancy places.”
Arlene had once been Ray’s wife. They had divorced several months before the life-changing Faerie Gathering where he met Mark. Arlene had stayed in For
t Wayne for a few more years before moving to South Dakota with a widower she’d met on a bus tour of the Holy Land. After that, by mutual consent, Ray and Arlene lost touch. Ray, in fact, hadn’t learned of Arlene’s death until eight months after her funeral, when a former neighbor from Fort Wayne was visiting San Francisco. Mark, who was almost forty by then and had never even met Arlene, had confessed, shamefully, to a certain relief. With Arlene gone, the slate would finally be clean; Ray would be his and his alone.
Or so he’d thought. Arlene had come back with a vengeance after Ray came down with Alzheimer’s. It wasn’t that his failing mind had resurrected the strained decade he’d spent with Arlene; it had simply imported her into his life. Anything Ray had shared with Mark inevitably became a fond, fuzzy memory of life with Arlene. She was gobbling up Mark’s marriage like a fungus—even recent events like Cavallo Point, where, if Ben recalled correctly, the two men had celebrated their thirtieth anniversary.
After dinner, while Michael and Ray were having coffee in the great room, Ben helped Mark with the dishes.
“It’s getting worse, isn’t it?”
Mark nodded grimly. “Last week he told the cleaning lady that him and Arlene had just gone to the nude beach in Sitges.”
“Ouch.”
“It wasn’t like he ever loved her. He didn’t even like her that much. He barely talked about her at all for thirty years.”
Ben towel-dried a plate and handed it to Mark. “Do you ever correct him?”
“They tell you not to. They say it just confuses them and makes them feel bad.” He put the plate on the shelf above the sink. “I really hate that dead bitch.”
Ben smiled faintly.
“At least he still remembers me,” said Mark. “I shouldn’t complain.”
“Go ahead. You’re entitled.”
“No . . . really . . . we still have the moment. That’s all anybody has. And he’s always a lot of fun.”
As if on cue, Ray bellowed from the great room: “Arlene! We need a fill-her-up out here. You still there, Arlene?”
Mark sighed and grabbed the carafe off the coffee maker.
“Hate her,” he muttered, as he leaned into the swinging door.