Tales of the City 01 - Tales of the City

sorry about Edsel.”
    “Who?”
    “That’s his name. The waiter. Edsel Ford Fung.”
    She giggled in spite of herself. “Really?”
    “I meant it to be fun, Mary Ann.”
    “I know.”
    “I really blew it. I’m sorry.”
    She stopped in the courtyard and turned to face him. “You’re very old-fashioned. I like that.”
    He looked down at his black wing tips. “I’m very old.”
    “No you’re not. You shouldn’t say that. How old are you?”
    “Forty-four.”
    “That’s not old. Paul Newman is older than that.”
    He chuckled. “I’m not exactly Paul Newman.”
    “You’re … just fine, Norman.”
    He stood there awkwardly, as her palm slid gently along the contour of his jaw. She pressed her cheek against his. “Just fine,” she repeated.
    They kissed.
    Her fingers moved down across his chest and clutched at the ends of his tie for support.
    It came off in her hand.

Starry, Starry Night
    T HERE WERE MORNINGS WHEN VINCENT FELT LIKE THE last hippie in the world.
    The Last Hippie. The phrase assumed a kind of tragic grandeur as he stood in the bathroom of his Oak Street flat, fluffing his amber mane to conceal his missing ear.
    If you couldn’t be the first, there was something bittersweet and noble about being the last. The Last of the Mohicans. The Last Supper. The Last Hippie!
    He had mentioned the concept once to his Old Lady, just hours before she had run off to join the Israeli Army, but Laurel had only sneered. “It’s too late,” she said, lifting the hair on the left side of his head. “You’re only seven eighths of The Last Hippie.”
    She hadn’t always been that way.
    During the war, she had been coming from a different place. Her Virgoan anal retentiveness had been channeled into positive trips.
    Astral travel. Sand candles. Macramé.
    But postbellum, things had got heavy. She had enrolled in a women’s self-defense course and would practice holds on him while he was saying his mantra. Later, despite the efforts of her instructors at an Arica forty-day intensive, she developed an overnight obsession for Rolfing.
    But not as a patient. As a practitioner.
    That budding career came to an abrupt end when a dentist from Marin threatened to have her arrested for assault and battery.
    “He was paranoid,” Laurel claimed afterward.
    “He said you were getting into it,” Vincent replied quietly.
    “Of course I was getting into it! It’s my job to get into it!”
    “He said you said things while you Rolfed him.”
    “Like what?”
    “Let’s drop it, Laurel.”
    “Like what?!”
    “Like … ‘Bourgeois pig’ and ‘Up against the wall.’”
    “That’s a lie!”
    “Well, he said …”
    “Look, Vincent! Who are you gonna believe, anyway? Me or a goddamn paranoid bourgeois pig?”
    Well, she had gone now. She had left Amerika for good.
    That’s the way she had spelled it. With a k.
    The very thought of that quirk made him tearful now, clinging desperately to the last vestiges of their life together.
    He shuffled into the kitchen and stared balefully at his Day-Glo “Keep on Truckin’ “ poster.
    Laurel had put it there. A hundred years ago. It was yellow and cracked with age now, and its message seemed a cruel anachronism.
    He had stopped truckin’ a long time ago.
    Lunging at the poster with his five-fingered hand, he crumpled it into a ball and hurled it across the room with a cry of primal anguish. Then he stormed into the bedroom and did the same to Che Guevara and Tania Hearst.
    It was time to split.
    The switchboard, he decided, was the best place to do it. It was neutral ground somehow. Public domain. It had nothing to do with him and Laurel.
    He arrived there at seven-thirty and made himself a cup of Maxim from the tap in the bathroom. He tidied the desk, emptied the wastebaskets and cleaned his scalpel with a Wash’n Dri.
    Mary Ann would arrive at eight o’clock.
    There was time to do it properly.
    He made his last entry in the log book, feeling a twinge of remorse for the tortured souls who would call tonight seeking his solace.
    What would Mary Ann tell them?
    And what would she do when she found him?
    The scalpel wasn’t fair, he decided, fingering his worry beads for the last time. There had to be a cleaner way, a method that would lessen the horror for Mary Ann.
    Then he thought of it.

The News from Home
    B EFORE LEAVING FOR THE CRISIS SWITCHBOARD, MARY Ann stopped by Mona and Michael’s. A red-eyed Michael opened the door. “Hi,” he said