Mary Ann in Autumn

  “Ten . . . twelve years ago.” Cliff gave him a melancholy look that was tinged with a curious sheepishness. “Think I was robbing the cradle?”

  Ben smiled at him. “Not in my book. Love is love. My partner is twenty-one years older than I am.”

  Cliff absorbed that for a moment. “That’s right,” he said.

  This puzzled Ben. “You’ve met him, you mean?”

  “No . . . but . . . I think I saw you with him here last summer. Handsome, stocky fellow? Gray mustache?”

  “That’s him.” Ben was still baffled. Michael almost never came to this park. He preferred Stern Grove, out near the ocean, where Roman could run in the grass.

  “It’s good to have somebody,” Cliff said, staring vacantly into the distance. “I never saw my wife anymore . . . not for years . . . but just knowing she was still . . . out there made it a little easier to be alone.” There were fresh tears on the old man’s face, but he didn’t bother to wipe them away. “Funny how that works.”

  Ben scrambled for something positive to say and ended up scratching Blossom’s silky belly. “These little critters can be really good company.”

  “Yeah . . . for a while. Then nothing works anymore. Not even love.”

  There was a strained silence. Scratching the dog had brought Ben close enough to smell Cliff’s rotten, gin-infused breath, so he leaned away as subtly as possible.

  “Would you do me a favor?” Cliff said after a while.

  “Uh . . . sure . . . if I can.”

  “Would you see she gets a good home, if anything happens to me?”

  “Oh . . . Blossom, you mean?” Ben knew very well what he meant; he was just stalling while he searched for an acceptable excuse. As much as he sympathized with the old man’s situation, this was not a burden he was willing to assume. “You know, Cliff . . . we don’t have a whole lot of room at our house, and Roman tends to—”

  “I didn’t mean you. Just see that she’s not left alone.”

  “But . . . you understand . . . I really wouldn’t have any way of knowing if something happened to you.”

  “Oh, you’d know,” Cliff said vaguely. “Word gets around.”

  “Still I don’t think you should take that risk. It’s better to contact the SPCA. They’re a great outfit, and I’m sure they have provisions for that sort of . . . advance-need situation. If you like, I can look into it for you . . . get the number.”

  It was excruciatingly clear that Cliff was feeling rejected. “I know how to look up a number,” he said.

  “Well . . . of course, I didn’t mean—”

  “I need to be alone now.”

  “You bet. Of course.” Ben rose from the bench, now feeling like a total piece of shit, but glad to be excused anyway. “Take care, okay? I’ll see you soon.”

  He didn’t look back once as he headed for the gate with Roman.

  IT WAS ALMOST DARK WHEN he got back to the house, so he poured himself a tall brandy and took it out to the garden, where a gibbous moon was rising in the lavender sky. He should have done something to help Cliff. He knew that. In his stumbling, shutdown way Cliff had been reaching out, and Ben had effectively ignored him. What was that about, anyway? Was it too personal an act to take responsibility for this old man’s dog? Or at least make an effort to see to it that someone else did?

  Yes. It was. No—it was too familial—and Ben didn’t want to be an in-law to all that wretchedness and regret. Cliff was just a guy he knew from the dog park; he felt pity for him, but he was repelled by him as well, and he didn’t want their casual connection to become something more formal. It was that simple.

  The sad thing, Ben thought, was that Cliff had probably received this reaction his whole life. His social uneasiness seemed part of his very constitution. No wonder he was feeling the loss of someone who had actually married him, however briefly. If his wife had become an addict, Ben couldn’t help wondering if the drugs had driven her away, or if Cliff himself, in his all-consuming cloud of despair, had driven her to the drugs.

  Ben was a little drunk now, so he went into the kitchen to get the irises he had bought on his way home from the dog park. He wanted the cottage to be a welcoming place when Mary Ann got back in the morning. Finding a vase on the shelf above the stove, he filled it with water and fluffed the irises for a while. It felt good to commit this small act of generosity in the churning wake of the larger one he had just dodged.

  When he put the irises on Mary Ann’s bedside table, he saw a T-shirt on the bed next to a gift bag and a spiral of pink paper ribbon. The shirt read PINYON CITY: THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE. He had seen that T-shirt before—lots of them, in fact—gathering dust in his favorite general store. It was touching to think Mary Ann had cared enough about their trip to the mountains, even while it was going on, to commemorate it this way. And the fact she had done so on her own made it seem that much more sincere.

  He stuffed the T-shirt into the bag and put the bag with her other things on a shelf in the closet. Then he stripped the bed and hauled the linens to the laundry room. She would have clean sheets when she got back, and that would be a good way of saying that she was starting over now, that things could only get better from here on out.

  Chapter 30

  The Anna She Remembered

  The guys had been so sweet to her. They had built a nest for her on their sofa and plied her with chick flicks and foot rubs and goodies from the chocolate shop on Castro Street. Almost immediately, she and Michael had begun taking therapeutic walks around the track at Kezar Stadium, though she never stopped being aware of the absence she was carrying. When, on the third day, Dr. Ginny called to tell her the “wonderful news” from the pathologist, she sat down on the bleachers at the stadium and cried in Michael’s arms.

  When the guys were at work, she busied herself with her Facebook friends, commenting on their cute pets and cake-smeared children. She didn’t once mention the cancer, or even the fact that she was recuperating, since she didn’t want an avalanche of Rumi poems from people she barely knew, however well-intended they might be.

  Her silence on the subject was not like her mother’s silence. She was building a new world for herself from the inside out, and she wanted to do so at her own pace. She had already phoned Robbie at NYU and apologized for texting him about his dad’s affair with Calliope. Robbie had been incredibly sweet about it, saying she would always be his mom, that he understood her feelings, this was strictly between her and his dad. He didn’t seem especially surprised when she told him that she would be hiring a lawyer. He didn’t seem especially surprised about anything. She wondered if he had already known about Bob and Calliope, having heard it from his dad in a scotch-fueled buddy-buddy moment, and had been anxiously waiting for her to find out on her own.

  But Robbie wouldn’t do that, would he? He had always been her ally when things got iffy with Bob. Unless, of course, there were no sides to be taken anymore, because Calliope was already a fait accompli. Maybe he was just keeping his head down, bracing himself for the new administration the way his dad was doing with Obama.

  “Are your classes fun?” she asked brightly, trying to show that she still cared about his life.

  “Yeah. Pretty much. It’s a little overwhelming.”

  “I’m thinking of staying at the city apartment for a while . . . while things are getting sorted out, I mean. Maybe we can grab some coffee in the Village.”

  “That would be great,” he said, though not convincingly.

  “I’ve got a few more days here, but . . . it won’t be long. I’m dying to see your new digs.”

  “Yeah . . . well . . . it’s kind of a mess right now, but—”

  “I can help with that. We’ll go shopping . . . get you some nice things.” She heard herself speak this obscenity in her own mother’s voice, and it made her blood run cold. “Sorry,” she added penitently. “Clingy mom. Just what you need right now.”

  •••

  HER ENERGY HAD INCREASED BY th
e end of the week, so Michael took her with him to Mrs. Madrigal’s house when he went to pick up Jake Greenleaf for work. Anna had been alerted of Mary Ann’s arrival, so she—or someone—had laid out tea and sugar cookies on a red lacquer tray in the living room. Once Michael and Jake were gone, Anna made her entrance under her own steam, inching across the room in a pale blue satin kimono, as if to prove to her guest that she was still capable of doing it. Her white hair, encircling her head like a blizzard, was adventurously secured with two large tortoiseshell combs.

  “You look wonderful,” Mary Ann told her as they were hugging.

  Anna chuckled. “What is it they always say?”

  “About what?”

  Anna’s long fingers clutched Mary Ann’s wrist. “I need help with this part, dear.” She meant sitting down, so Mary Ann held the old woman’s elbow as she eased into her armchair. “What they always say,” said Anna, picking up the thread, “is that there are three ages of man: youth, middle age and ‘You look wonderful.’ ”

  Mary Ann smiled. “Well, just the same . . . it’s true.”

  “Thank you, dear.”

  “Your hair has always been amazing. I remember those fabulous chopsticks you used to wear.”

  Anna wore a look of amused chagrin. “I’m afraid Mr. Greenleaf won’t let me wear those anymore. I took a little tumble one night and almost harpooned the cat.”

  This was very much the Anna she remembered: warm and self-mocking and completely present. And somehow that made it even harder to accept how frail she’d become since Mary Ann’s last visit. The spirit was still there, blazing away, but her shrinking body seemed barely able to contain it anymore. Only two years earlier Mrs. Madrigal had somehow wrenched herself out of a stroke-induced coma with nothing to show for it afterward but a few more roses in her cheeks. But that was then, and she had changed considerably. There was no denying what time was taking from her.

  “Help yourself to tea,” Anna told her. “I can’t trust myself with the pouring.”

  “That’s okay. I had coffee at Michael’s. I’ll take one of these, though. They look yummy.” She nibbled on a cookie, mostly so Anna could feel like a hostess.

  “Are you holding up, dear?” Those Wedgwood-blue eyes were fixed firmly on Mary Ann, expecting nothing less than the truth, as usual.

  “How much did Mouse tell you?”

  “He said you have a clean bill of health . . .”

  “Yes . . . well . . . yes!”

  “ . . . and you’re leaving the . . . uh, Republican gentleman . . . because you saw him having an indiscretion on the Internet.”

  Mary Ann grinned ruefully. “Close enough.”

  “So how are you holding up?”

  “Oh . . .” Mary Ann made a mumbling noise that was meant to tell the truth without overtly complaining. “I’ve had better centuries, I guess.”

  Anna chuckled. “Haven’t we all?”

  It surprised her somewhat to hear Anna say this. “C’mon. You live in the moment better than anyone I’ve ever known.”

  Anna shrugged. “We don’t have much choice, do we? But that doesn’t mean I don’t have . . . my special favorites when it comes to centuries.”

  Mary Ann laughed.

  “This one is too complicated for me,” Anna continued. “Thank goodness for Mr. Greenleaf. I wouldn’t know how to make so much as a phone call.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Are Michael and Ben taking good care of you?” Anna asked.

  “Oh yes. More than I deserve.”

  Anna frowned. “What do you mean?”

  Mary Ann felt a tightening in her throat. It was not that far removed from how she felt on mountain roads. She dreaded making this hairpin turn, but she had to, if she was ever going to get off the cliff. She was leaving in a few days, heading home to mop up the mess of her second failed marriage, so postponement was no longer an option. It was not unreasonable to think this could be the last time she’d ever see Anna.

  “I treated you all so badly,” she said at last.

  “Who?”

  “All of you. Brian and Shawna . . . Michael . . . who was sick, for God’s sake, maybe even dying.”

  “How did you treat us badly?”

  “By leaving. By running away and never looking back.”

  “Twenty years ago, Mary Ann. You were following your heart’s desire. I did that myself, dear, need I remind you. I left a wife and a two-year-old daughter without explanation.” Mrs. Madrigal’s face clouded over. Mary Ann knew she was remembering Mona, the daughter in question, whom she’d lost to breast cancer back in the nineties.

  “But you made up for it,” Mary Ann said. “You brought her back into your life and made a home for her.” Now Mary Ann herself was remembering Mona, the flame-haired free spirit who had done a “reading” of Mary Ann’s garbage the morning they first met in the courtyard at 28 Barbary Lane. There was another one she had carelessly lost forever, without even knowing the actual moment she had lost her.

  Mrs. Madrigal gave her a meaningful look. “Daughters, you’ll find, are surprisingly retrievable.”

  She was talking about Shawna now, Mary Ann realized. “I gave it a shot,” she said with a sigh. “I invited her out to Connecticut. It’s perfectly clear she doesn’t approve of me. Why should she? I don’t approve of me myself.”

  Anna fussed with the edge of her kimono, looking impatient. “If you came here for a spanking, dear, you’ll have to look elsewhere.”

  In its own way this felt like an absolution, so Mary Ann smiled at the person who’d bestowed it. “I came here to tell you I love you.”

  “That’s more like it,” said Anna.

  Chapter 31

  Unscattered Ashes

  Almost a week had passed since Shawna left the note at the house on Tandy Street, but so far no one had called. She had told the whole story in her blog, complete with a photo of Alexandra, but she’d thought it best to omit the address, since she didn’t want her crusade to degenerate into an act of harassment. This ambiguous ending to her tale of the streets only enhanced its poignancy, she felt, and several of her readers had told her as much. Of course, there was still the issue of Alexandra’s unscattered ashes.

  Her relationship with Otto was getting wobbly. The first rumblings had come that day on Tandy Street, when he’d accused her of being capable of romance only in the abstract, or worse yet, only for the purposes of her blog. How could she have addressed that without being unkind? How could she have told him that her problem wasn’t with romance per se but with Otto himself—or, rather, the thought of permanency with Otto. She loved what they had—the sex certainly, the laughs, the warm body at night—but she had never been able to envision whatever was supposed to come next. Outright rejection wasn’t usually in her repertoire, but lately Otto had been forcing the issue.

  “Hey, listen,” he said, without looking up. He was hunched over a burrito at the Roosevelt Tamale Parlor, his skinny shoulder blades jutting out of his shrimp-colored T-shirt like little wings. “Remember my buddy Aaron with the awesome place in Bernal Heights with the open plan and the industrial skylights?”

  “I think. Yeah. Sort of Rob Thomas-y.”

  “I meant the apartment.”

  “Oh . . . yeah . . . sure. We dropped off those tumbling mats.”

  He finally looked up at her. “It’s all ours if we want it. He’s going to Costa Rica for a job. All we have to do is pick up the rent . . . which, by the way, would be a fuck of a lot cheaper than our two rents combined.” He took a bite out of the burrito and waited.

  All she could think to say was: “There are clowning jobs in Costa Rica?”

  Otto didn’t smile. “It’s a very eco-friendly country.”

  “And . . . what? . . . he’s an eco-clown?”

  “I don’t know what he is, Shawna. Why aren’t you answering me?”

  “Because this isn’t about the rent . . . and I don’t know what to say to you.”

  He
looked crushed. “Guess you just did.”

  She reached across the table and took his hand. “C’mon, dude. I love our two or three nights a week. I do.”

  “What is it? Are you bored with me? Do you wanna be with a woman again?”

  She rolled her eyes, trying to keep things as light as possible. “If I do, I’ll get one. And you’ll be the first to know.”

  He returned to his burrito for a while, coming back with his final shot:

  “That apartment is really sick, ya know. There’s even two bathrooms. It wouldn’t have to mean anything.”

  Yes, it would, she thought. Yes, it would.

  THEY PARTED COMPANY AFTER DINNER. Not in any dramatic way, but Otto clearly wanted to sulk in private. Shawna walked back to her apartment and worked off her frustration by washing the dishes that had piled up in the sink. Why did he have to be this way? Why couldn’t he just be content with what they had and not keeping angling for more? When people started making demands of each other, that’s when the trouble started. Lucy had been that way in Brooklyn, and Shawna had grown sick of it.

  She rolled a joint from her stash and smoked it contemplatively as she stared at Alexandra’s ashes. She wanted this to be over now, so she considered driving to Dolores Park and scattering the ashes on the grassy slope at the upper end, where the gay boys liked to sun in the summertime. There was a great view of downtown from there, and the moon would soon be rising above the urban labyrinth that Alexandra had roamed for the last years of her life. To give her ashes on that swath of green, high above the fray at last, would be just the imagery Alexandra deserved. Dolores Park, Shawna remembered, had even been a cemetery in the old days, and the name itself meant “sorrows” in Spanish.

  It was perfect.

  But as soon as she was in the car and heading for the park, that voice in her head, her own instinctual GPS, began directing her back to Tandy Street. She had been there only in the daytime, after all. There would be a much better chance of finding someone home after dark. How could it hurt to check one more time? She wouldn’t even have to get out of the car if there were no lights on in the house. She could just keep on driving, say her good-byes to Alexandra, and be back at her apartment in time for Conan O’Brien.