Michael Tolliver Lives

  24

  What Husbands Do

  I’ve always had a thing for guys who work with wood: carpenters, lumberjacks, driftwood artists—you name it. It’s their hands, more than anything, rough and graceful all at once. I remember a counselor in the crafts hut at Camp Hemlock who could make my pubescent heart turn somersaults just by dragging a plane across a plank. And later, in the seventies (or was it the eighties?), there was that woodworker on Public TV. Remember him? The dude in suspendered jeans and Harry Reems mustache who seemed to be broadcasting from a log cabin in the wilderness? That was some fine craftsmanship.

  No wonder I like meeting Ben at work. His studios down on Norfolk Street are part office/part workshop, and more often than not he’ll be hunched over his computer. Sometimes, though, when the planets are properly aligned, I’ll find him in the shop, lit by the pearly light of the translucent fiberglass roof. He’ll be working shirtless in his leather apron, lightly sugared with maple dust, humming as he guides a hand-hewn tenon into a tight mortise.

  Anyway, that’s how it was on this particular day. Irwin had been back in Florida for almost a month, and the first signs of winter had arrived. Rain was coursing down the corrugation of the roof, and the shop was piquant with ozone and linseed oil.

  Ben looked up and smiled when he saw me.

  “Hey, husband.”

  “Hey, baby.” I kissed him on the mouth. “That is fucking gorgeous.” He was working on a sideboard—a long, narrow one, slightly Asian-looking.

  “Thanks.” He stroked the maple as if it were the flank of a beloved horse.

  “I heard from Irwin today.”

  “Oh, yeah? How are things with Lenore?”

  “Not bad, considering…they’re going to Cancún for Christmas. He arranged it himself.”

  “No shit.”

  “I don’t know what he said to her. Or what she said to him. But…it’s like it never happened.”

  “Maybe she told him your dad was a bum fuck.”

  “Eeeeyew.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I think Irwin needed a secret. And a guy he could share it with…even if it had to be me. Mama and Lenore had their own secret for eighteen years. He just needed to level the playing field.”

  “Tit for tat,” said Ben, smiling.

  “Or pussy for tat, as the case may be.”

  It was a lame joke, but I was trying to stay lighthearted for what had to come next: “Listen, sweetie. It’s time for me to go back. Mama’s close to checkin’ out.”

  Ben absorbed my euphemism, then stroked my arm. “You okay?”

  I nodded. “I called Patreese to see what he thought. He said she’s got a few days at the most. She seems to know it, too. She asked him to make her look pretty.”

  Ben’s Adam’s apple bobbed. For a moment I thought he was going to cry, but he just charged toward his office. “I’ll book the tickets, then.”

  “No.” I caught him by the arm. “You don’t have to, sweetie.”

  “Those flights fill up fast.”

  “I mean, you don’t have to go. I can do this myself. You’ve got work to do, and you’ve put up with enough already.”

  “You don’t want me to?” He looked almost hurt.

  “No…of course not. I just didn’t want to make you—”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. This is what husbands do.” He started heading for the office again. “We don’t have to stay with Irwin and Lenore, do we?”

  “God, no.”

  “I’ll find us someplace nice. Does it have to be gay?”

  “I don’t care. Just no orchids in the toilet.”

  The rain lingered as the day wore on, so I called Jake from home and told him I wouldn’t need him for a job in the Marina that afternoon. “Anyway,” I added, “I’ve got some loose ends I need to tie up in the office today. My mother’s pretty close to the end, so Ben and I are leaving on the red-eye tonight.”

  “Shit…I’m sorry, boss.”

  “You think you could hold down the fort for a few days?”

  “Sure. No problem.”

  “There shouldn’t be much to do, with all this rain. Mrs. Langston wants her hedges trimmed, and you know how she gets, so…if there’s a break in the weather today—”

  “I’m on the case, boss. Don’t even think about it.”

  “Good man.”

  “Will you be on your cell?”

  “Yeah…and the house’ll be empty, so…if you and Connor, or whoever…wanna come hang out and use the hot tub…consider it your spa.”

  “You serious?”

  “You bet. It’ll be nice to think of life going on back here. You know where the key is, and there’s some extra towels under the bathroom sink. Just turn off the hot tub when you leave. And don’t forget to cover it or the raccoons will have a field day.”

  “No sweat,” said Jake. “I’ll tell the roomies.” His failure to mention Connor made me wonder if that romance had faded because of the aforementioned plumbing issues, or if Jake was just being his usual private self. “We’ve got our poker game tonight,” he added. “We’re cooking paella. Anna’s coming up for it.”

  “Since when does Anna play poker?”

  Jake chuckled. “Since a few weeks ago. Marguerite and Selina taught her.” (Those were his roommates, the teacher and the investment counselor, both trannies in their thirties.)

  “Damn,” I said. “She never fails to amaze me.”

  “She said her mom used to play it in Winnemucca.”

  I could picture little Anna—or Andy, as she was back then—watching her mother deal cards to her “girls” at the Blue Moon Lodge during the flapper era. Mona, lucky devil, actually got to see that ancient brothel (and live there briefly) before her grandmother—widely known in those parts as Mother Mucca—passed away in the early eighties. The place was deserted for years, then finally torn down to make room for a casino/hotel complex, though some clever soul with a sense of history saw fit to preserve the name. Grasping for atmosphere where I’m sure there’s none to be found, the placemats at the Blue Moon Bar and Grill make coy reference to the “colorful house of ill repute” that once stood on that spot.

  Anna learned all this from Bobbi, the youngest of Mother Mucca’s brood, when Bobbi came through San Francisco toward the end of the millennium. Anna remarked at the time that her mother would have pitched a fit at the notion of her house being one of “ill repute,” almost as much as she would have denounced the clinical sound of “sex worker,” the newest politically correct euphemism for hookers. Mother Mucca was an old-fashioned gal.

  Bobbi was in her forties by then and no longer a hooker. She was married and living in Houston, finally making an honest living. She worked as a receptionist at Enron.

  I called Brian at the nursery to tell him about Mama—not for comfort, really, just to keep him in the loop. I was already feeling guilty about not having shared Irwin’s crisis with Brian, since I know he would have gotten a kick out of the whole gruesome mess. But telling that story—and the solution I’d offered—would have brought Shawna into the picture, and that would not have amused her father nearly as much. Besides, my gift to Irwin had been a secret of his own, so my obligation—I told myself—was to keep it that way.

  Secrets and lies, I thought as I hung up the phone. After thirty years of insisting on the truth, I’m still my mother’s son. The orange doesn’t fall very far from the tree.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon doing laundry and online banking. My business account was disastrously low—given that I was leaving town—so I rounded up some stray checks from clients and made a mental note to deposit them at the airport. I hate the grim little dance of finance and always have; it’s so lifeless and unyielding, the antithesis of planting a garden. Money, if you ask me, has no right at all to be green.

  Ben wouldn’t be home before dark—there was still that sideboard to finish—so I began to pack for both of us. I started with my compartmentalized pill box, filling it wi
th a week’s worth of meds—just in case. Then I chose a suit bag for both our dark suits: Ben’s nice new navy-blue one from Nordstrom and the ancient black crepe one I finally bought in the late eighties when funerals were proving more commonplace than theme parties. (I’d let out the waist a few times, but it was still holding up all right.)

  I figured that the rest of our clothes could be casual, so I filled a duffel bag with jeans and socks and T-shirts, leaving room for our shaving kits and a zippered bag we take on the road for condoms, lubricants, and the like. It felt odd to be preparing for sex in the midst of death, but utterly necessary. I drew the line at packing our latest toy: a glass-and-rubber penis pump we had ordered online. It had given us both a rollicking good time (somewhat to our surprise) but it looked like something out of a fifties mad-scientist movie and would almost certainly read as a terrorist device on an airport X-ray machine.

  Ben still smelled sweetly of his workshop when he got home. He smooched me at the door without ceremony and headed straight for the shower. When he joined me in the bedroom, he kissed me again and put on a T-shirt and sweatpants.

  “Is that what you’re wearing on the plane?”

  “It’s a red-eye,” he said with a shrug.

  “You’re right.” I pulled off my jeans and grabbed sweatpants from the closet.

  “We should pack the Ambien.”

  I patted my carry-on bag. “Gotcha.”

  “Will this be open-casket?” Ben asked.

  “What?”

  “Don’t Southerners generally prefer open-casket funerals?”

  “Not this one,” I said with a wince, but it did make me think. “Of course. You’re right. That’s why she asked Patreese to ‘pretty her up.’ Not before but after.”

  My father’s funeral had been closed-casket, to the obvious disappointment of some of the mourners, but now I could understand why Mama hadn’t wanted one last chance to gaze at her husband’s face—prettied up or not. The loudest objection to Papa’s closed casket had come from an aunt in Pensacola who’d sent the biggest wreath at the funeral. I still recall that monstrosity more vividly than anything else that day: a mass of white carnations surrounding a child’s toy telephone. A glittered ribbon at the top said: JESUS CALLED. The one at the bottom said: AND HERB ANSWERED.

  Herb, of course, had answered for nothing, but Mama had finally told the truth, and that made an open casket strangely appropriate. She could face the world without shame.

  “Should we try to call her before we leave?” Ben asked as he packed his dressy black shoes.

  I shook my head. “Irwin says she’s really out of it—sleeping most of the time. They’ve got her on morphine. She’s still adamant about staying off the respirator.”

  “She knows we’re coming, though?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  Ben left the suitcase and pressed against my back, wrapping his arms around me.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, sweetie, I’m fine. Why do you keep asking that?”

  His cheek was against my shoulder blade. “Because you’re not crying.”

  Ben knew better than anyone that I can cry at the drop of a hat. I had cried the night before when we were watching Victor/Victoria on Logo, the new queer channel. The movie came out the year Jon died, and I bought the album (remember albums?) just weeks after we buried his ashes at 28 Barbary Lane. I loved the song “You and Me,” the sweet little soft-shoe number performed by Julie Andrews and Robert Preston. Those two are, in effect, playing a gay male couple, so the lyrics hit my heart dead center: “We don’t care that tomorrow comes with no guarantee, we’ve each other for company.” Since then, of course, there have been thousands of tomorrows with no guarantees. Only now I saw Robert and Julie in a different light—as an intergenerational gay couple. I was no longer Victor, the ingénue; I was Toddy, the fussy “old queen with a head cold,” who knows, in spite of everything, that he is loved.

  “I’m not gonna cry about Mama,” I said.

  Ben tightened his grip on me.

  “Does that sound awful?”

  “No.”

  “I’m sure she wants to go…but…that’s not the point. It’s just not in me anymore.”

  “Some things are just too big, I guess.”

  “Or too late,” I said.

  25

  Red-Eye

  We took a cab to the airport to avoid a decision about parking—short-term or long-term?—and the implications of that. The security line was relatively hassle-free that late at night, so we made it to the gate without difficulty. But thanks to the annual cataclysm of our first rainfall, our flight was delayed for another hour and a half. The latest update from Orlovista suggested that time was of the essence, so I could feel my gut tightening on the spot. I called Irwin’s voice mail and told him about the delay, assuring him that we were still on the way. Then we dragged our carry-ons to the newsstand and sought diversion.

  The magazines we bought spoke volumes about both of us. I bought People (because I let myself do that in airports) and Coastal Living (because lately I’ve entertained fantasies about a place on the water—though I have no idea where the place, or even the water, would be). Ben bought National Geographic and Yoga Journal (because he has no idea how unwholesome his wholesomeness makes me feel). We buried ourselves in words and pictures for over an hour, remaining largely silent, both of us conscious of preserving our energy.

  Ten minutes before boarding time I made a run to the bathroom. On my return Ben told me that my cell phone had rung. I dug it out of my bag. There was a brief message from Jake: “Hi, boss. I know you’re in the air right now, but…gimme a call when you get this.”

  It was almost two a.m. but I called him back—certain I knew what he wanted.

  He sounded tentative when he answered. “Hello?”

  “They’re in the red box by the front door,” I told him.

  “What?”

  “The keys to the truck, right? I should’ve told you…I’m sorry.”

  He seemed to be gasping for air. It took me a moment to realize he was crying.

  “Jake…what is it?”

  “Anna,” he said, strangling his sobs, “had a heart attack.”

  I was looking directly at Ben now, who was obviously hearing everything. I knew what I had to ask Jake, but I found it impossible to speak.

  “I guess you haven’t taken off,” Jake said.

  “No…there was a…do you mean she’s—”

  “She’s still alive, but she’s…not awake. Damn, boss. I figured you be long gone. I hate to lay this on you when—”

  “Where are you?”

  “St. Sebastian’s. Room 5ll.”

  “We’ll be there.”

  “But won’t that make you—”

  “I’m glad you called, Jake…really.”

  I closed the cell phone and looked at Ben. He was already gathering our stuff.

  “Are you sure about this?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  But my legs wobbled pathetically as I tried to stand, so Ben grabbed my arm to keep me from toppling. Somehow he got me from there to the corner of a sports bar, where, for at least five minutes, in full view of the sports fans, I did the unimaginable and cried for my mother.

  It was raining like all get-out by the time we reached St. Sebastian’s Hospital. The whole place was in sleep mode, and the hallways were all but deserted until we reached the one outside Anna’s room. Jake had thought to notify Brian, so he and Shawna were there—noticeably distraught—as well as Marguerite and Selina, the flatmates. Jake was at the end of the hallway, deep in conversation with a doctor. Marguerite was the first to spot us.

  “Hi, guys.” She stood up and hurried over to embrace us, one at a time, briskly and equally, like the elementary schoolteacher she was. Short and partridge plump, she even looked like a schoolteacher that night. Or at least a stereotypical one. Her brown hair was wrapped tight in a bun, and there was a cameo at the throat of her high-col
lared blouse.

  “She’s stabilized,” she said quietly. “She’s in a coma…but she can still pull through, the doctor says, if she makes it through the next couple of days.”

  I finally managed to speak. “When did it happen?”

  “We’re not sure. She didn’t show up for poker, so Jake went down to check on her. She was already unconscious by then. Notch was lying by her side.”

  Someone to sit in the sun with me. Who doesn’t want to go anywhere.

  Marguerite leaned closer and spoke in a whisper. “Jake is kind of…punishing himself. He thinks he should’ve checked on her earlier. I guess he was working late.”

  Mrs. Langston, I thought. Mrs. Langston and her fucking hedges.

  “I’ll speak to him,” I said.

  Brian and Shawna joined us. We didn’t hug—somehow it wasn’t the right thing.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” I told them.

  Brian nodded. “You too.”

  “Are we allowed to go in?” Ben asked.

  “Sure,” said Shawna. “It just got kinda crowded in there.”

  I nodded a greeting to Selina ( Jake’s other flatmate, the investment counselor, a Korean-Canadian) as Ben and I entered the room. Selina returned the nod. I’d met her maybe three times at the most, but her total devotion to Anna was painfully apparent.

  Anna was lying flat on the bed with her eyes closed, robbed of her usual color by a hospital gown and a respirator. I know you’re supposed to talk to people in comas, but I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. It wasn’t like Anna at all. There was nothing to connect with but the wheezing of the machinery and the grim drizzle of the rain against the window.

  Don’t blame the rain, I told myself. Without it you wouldn’t even be here.

  Back in the corridor, I had a few moments alone with Jake.

  “How long have you been here?” I asked.

  “A few hours. I dunno.”

  “You looked exhausted. Why don’t you go home?”

  “I can’t, boss.”

  “Yes, you can. We’ve got cell phones. I can take it from here.”