Babycakes (4 page)

A Hard Time Believing

I
T WAS ALMOST MIDNIGHT WHEN MARY ANN GOT HOME.
A winter full of rain had left a moss-green scum on the wooden stairway to Barbary Lane, so she climbed it cautiously, holding fast to the rail until she felt the reassuring squish of eucalyptus leaves under her feet. She noticed that Michael’s lights were still on when she reached the lych-gate at Number 28. For some reason, that worried her, activating an instinct that might roughly be described as maternal.

She hesitated on the second-floor landing, then rapped on his door. He appeared moments later, looking rumpled and a little discombobulated. “Oh, hi,” he said, raking his hair with his fingers.

“I hope you weren’t asleep.”

“No. Just lying down. C’mon in.”

She stepped into the room. “Did you catch my little coup, by any chance?”

He shook his head. “I heard about it afterwards, though. The Castro was all abuzz with it.”

“Really?” The upward inflection of her voice was a little too girlish and eager, but she was hungry for reinforcement. Her secret fear was that her performance had been clumsy and sophomoric. “What exactly were they saying?”

He smiled at her sleepily. “What exactly would you like them to say?”

“Mouse!” After seven years of friendship, she still couldn’t tell when he was kidding.

“Relax, Babycakes. My waiter was raving about you.” He withdrew from her slightly and gave her a once-over. “I’m surprised he didn’t mention the hat, though.”

That stopped her cold. “What’s wrong with the hat?”

“Nothing.” He stayed poker-faced, teasing her.

“Mouse …”

“It’s a perfectly nice hat.”

“Mouse, if every queen in the city was laughing at this hat, I will
die.
Are you reading me? I will crawl under the nearest rock and die.”

He gave up the game. “It looks fabulous.
You
look fabulous. C’mon … sit down and tell me about it.”

“I can’t. I just thought I’d stop by … and say hi.”

He regarded her for a moment, then leaned forward and pecked her on the lips. “Hi.”

“Are you O.K.?” she asked.

He made a little circle in the air with his forefinger, giving her a rueful smile.

“Me too,” she said.

“It’s the rain, I guess.”

“I guess.” It had never been the rain, and they both knew it. The rain was just easier to talk about. “Well …” She nodded toward the door. “Brian must think I’ve dropped off the face of the earth.”

“Hang on,” said Michael. “I’ve got something for him.” He ducked into the kitchen, returning seconds later with a pair of roller skates. “They’re ten-and-a-halfs,” he said. “Isn’t that what Brian wears?”

She stared at the skates, feeling the pain begin to surface again.

“I found them under the sink,” Michael explained, avoiding her eyes. “I gave them to Jon two Christmases ago, and I completely forgot where he kept them. Hey … not now, O.K.?”

She fought back the tears, to no avail. “I’m sorry, Mouse. It’s not fair to you, but … sometimes, you know, it just creeps up without any … Christ!” She wiped her eyes with two angry sweeps of her hand. “When the hell is it gonna stop?”

Michael stood there, hugging the skates to his chest, his features contorted horribly by grief.

“Oh, Mouse, I’m so sorry. I’m such a turkey.”

Unable to speak, he nodded his forgiveness as the tears coursed down his cheeks. She took the skates from him and set them down, scooping him into her arms and stroking his hair. “I know, Mouse … I know, baby. It’ll get better. You’ll see.”

She had a hard lime believing that herself. Jon had been dead for over three months, but she suffered the loss more acutely now than ever before. To gain distance on the tragedy was to grasp, for the first time, the terrible enormity of it.

Michael pulled away from her. “So … how about some cocoa, media star?”

“Great,” she said.

She sat at his kitchen table while he made it. Still pinned to the refrigerator door by a magnetized seashell was the snapshot she had taken of Jon and Michael at a pumpkin patch in Half Moon Bay. Averting her gaze, she commanded herself not to cry again. She had done quite enough damage for one night.

When the cocoa was ready, Michael removed a blue Fiesta cup from the shelf and placed it on a gray saucer. Frowning slightly, he studied the pairing for a moment, then substituted a rose-colored saucer for the gray one. Mary Ann observed the ritual and smiled at his eccentricity.

Michael caught her reaction. “These things are important,” he said.

“I know.” She smiled.

He chose a yellow cup for himself and set it on the gray saucer before joining her at the table. “I’m glad you came by,” he said.

“Thanks,” she replied. “So am I.”

While they sipped their cocoa, she told him about DeDe and Mrs. Halcyon, about her rebellious crew and the rude police, about the few brief moments she had actually laid eyes on the Queen. The monarch had seemed so unreal, she explained, unreal and yet totally familiar. Like the cartoon image of Snow White, walking amidst ordinary human beings.

She stayed long enough to make him laugh out loud several times, then said good night to him. When she reached her own apartment, Brian wasn’t there, so she left the skates in the living room and climbed the stairs to the house on the roof. There, as usual, she found her husband asleep in the flickering light of MTV. She knelt by the sofa and laid her hand gently on his chest. “Hey,” she whispered. “Who’s it gonna be? Me or Pat Benatar?”

He stirred, rubbing his eyes with the knuckles of his forefinger.

“Well?” she prodded.

“I’m thinking.”

She smoothed his chest hair, following the lines of its natural swirls. “I’m sorry I broke our date.”

He smiled drowsily at her. “Hey.”

“Did you see me?” she asked.

He nodded. “Mrs. Madrigal and I watched.”

She waited for his reaction.

“You were terrific,” he said at last.

“You’re not just saying that?”

He raised himself slightly on his elbows and rubbed his eyes again. “I’m never just saying that.”

“Well … the fortune cookie stuff was pretty fabulous, if I do say so myself. Of course …” She was silenced when he reached out and pulled her onto the sofa next to him.

“Shut up,” he said.

“Gladly,” she replied.

She kissed him long and hard, almost ferociously, in direct proportion to the intensity of her workday. The more public her life became, the more acutely she relished such moments of unequivocal privacy. Within seconds, Brian’s hands had found the hem of her tweed skirt and pulled it up over her hips. Lifting her gently under the arms, he propped her up against a nubby cotton bolster and began kissing her knees. She felt faintly ridiculous.

“Let’s go downstairs,” she whispered.

He looked up from his single-minded mission. “Why?”

“Well … so I can get out of this hat, for one thing.”

A boyish leer transformed his face. “Keep it on, O.K.?” His head went down again, and his sandpapery cheek scraped against her pantyhose as he moved his tongue up the inside of her thighs. “What is this?” she asked. “Your Evita fantasy?”

He laughed, enveloping her in a wave of warm breath, then yanked off her pantyhose in a single, efficient movement. She laced her fingers through his chestnut curls and pulled his face into her groin, warmth into warmth, wetness into wetness. Moaning softly, she arched her neck and fell back into the embrace of the sofa. At a time like this, she decided, ridiculous was the last thing that mattered.

They were back at the apartment when she finally took off the hat. “The skates are from Mouse,” she said. She tried to sound matter-of-fact about it.

“What skates?” He was sitting on the edge of the bed in his boxer shorts.

“In the living room.” She avoided his eyes by pretending to arrange the hat in its box.

He rose and left the room. He was gone so long that she stopped brushing her hair and went to look for him. He was seated in the wingback armchair, staring into space. The skates were at his feet. He glanced briefly in her direction. “They’re Jon’s, right?”

She nodded, but moved no closer.

He shook his head slowly, a thin smile on his face. “Jesus God,” he said quietly. He brushed a piece of imaginary lint off the arm of the chair. “Is Michael doing O.K.?” he asked.

“O.K.,” she replied.

Brian cast his eyes down at the skates. “He thinks of everything, doesn’t he?”

“Uh-huh.” She moved to the chair and sat on the floor between his knees. He stroked her hair methodically, saying nothing for almost a minute.

Finally, he said: “I almost lost my job today.”

“What?”

“It’s O.K. I didn’t. I smoothed things out.”

“What happened?”

“Oh … I punched out this guy.”

“Brian.” She tried not to sound too judgmental, but this had happened before.

“It’s O.K.,” he said. “It wasn’t a customer or anything. It was just that new waiter. Jerry.”

“I don’t know him.”

“Yeah, you do. The one with the Jordache Look.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“He shot off his mouth all day about one goddamn thing or another. Then he saw me eat a french fry off a plate that had just been bused and he said, ‘Shit, man, you’ve played hell now.’ I asked him what the fuck he meant by that and he said, ‘That was a faggot’s plate, dumbass—your days are numbered.’ ”

“Great.”

“So I pasted him.”

She wrenched her head around and stared at him. “Do you really think that was necessary?”

He answered with a shrug. “I got a big kick out of it.”

“Brian … they told you if it happened again …”

“I know, I know.”

She kept quiet. These half-assed little John Wayne scenes were simply a reflection of his frustration with an unchallenging job. If she didn’t tread carefully, he would use her disapproval as an excuse to remind her that fatherhood was the only job that really mattered to him.

“Did you ever read
Nineteen Eighty-Four?”
he asked.

The question made her wary. “Years ago. Why?”

“Remember the guy in it?”

“Vaguely.”

“Do you know what I remember about him the most?” She shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t know. They put rats on his face. What?”

“He was forty,” he answered.

“And?”

“I was sixteen when I read it, and I remember thinking how
old
the guy was, and I realized that
I
would be forty in nineteen eighty-four, and I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be that far gone. Well … nineteen eighty-four is almost here.”

She studied his expression for a moment, then took the hand lying on his knee and kissed it. “I thought we agreed that one menopause in the family was enough.”

He hesitated, then laughed. “O.K., all right … fair enough.”

She sensed that the crisis had passed. He seemed to know that this wasn’t the time to broach the subject, and she was more than grateful for the reprieve.

Anna’s Family

W
HEN MICHAEL WENT DOWN TO BREAKFAST, MRS.
Madrigal’s kitchen smelled of coffee brewing and bacon frying. The rain that streaked the long casement windows above her sink only served to heighten the conspiracy of coziness that ensnared even the most casual of visitors. He sat down at the landlady’s little white enamel table and sniffed the air.

“That coffee is heaven,’’ he said.

“It’s Arabian Mocha,” she replied. “It’s the sinsemilla of coffees.” She tore off a length of paper towel and began laying the bacon out to drain.

He chuckled, but only because he understood exactly what she meant. If he was a true pothead—and sometimes he thought that he was—this fey sixty-year-old with the flyaway hair and the old kimonos was the fiend who had led him down the garden path. He could have done a lot worse.

She joined him at the table, bringing two mugs of coffee with her. “Mary Ann was up awfully early.”

“She’s in Silicon Valley,” he said. “Mr. Packard is showing the Queen around.”

“Mr. Packard?”

“The computer man. Our former deputy secretary of defense.”

“Ah. No wonder I forgot.”