Tales of the City 02 - More Tales of the City

year?”
    “Yeah. I guess.”
    “We met in a grocery store,” explained Michael. “Mary Ann was trying to pick up my boyfriend.”
    Burke blinked. “You …?”
    “Gay as a goose,” said Michael. He stood up, smiling, adjusting his blue satin Rocky shorts. “I’m gonna take a hike. I’ll give you two exactly an hour to get it on.”
    Mary Ann turned and watched Michael sprint recklessly to the surf. Her smile to Burke was amused and apologetic. “I can’t do anything with him,” she said.
    “Apparently,” laughed Burke.
    She laughed with him. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
    “He seems very nice, actually.”
    “He is. I love him a lot.”
    “But he’s not your …?”
    She shook her head, then giggled. “He says he thinks of himself as my pimp service.” Her smile faded when she saw Burke’s expression. “Did that sound gross?”
    “Not at all. I just … well, I’ve never met anybody like you two.”
    Mary Ann pored over his face for a moment, assessing the firm jaw and the full mouth and the baffling naïveté of those wide-spaced gray eyes. Was anybody that innocent anymore?
    “Where are you from, Burke?”
    He looked back at her for a moment, then traced the rim of his coconut with his forefinger. “All over, really.”
    “Oh. Well, then, most recently?”
    “Uh … San Francisco.”
    “Great! So am I! Where do you live?”
    “Actually, I’m from Nantucket. I mean, my parents live there now, and I’m staying with them. I used to live in San Francisco for a while, but I don’t anymore.”
    “Where did you stay when you were—”
    He pushed his chair back abruptly. “Would you like a swim or something? I feel like we should use that hour.”
    She smiled at him. “You’re right. Let’s go.”
    They strolled up the beach in the direction of town, stopping occasionally to romp in the surf or gasp at the billowing parasails soaring through a cloudless sky. Burke took it all in with unembarrassed wonder, as gleefully open as a child catching his first glimpse of the sea.
    He was gentle, Mary Ann observed, gentle in a primitive, manly sort of way. And manly without being macho. It was impossible to imagine him hustling Kelly Girls at Thomas Lord’s. When a peddler appeared, draped in a hideous necklace of stuffed iguanas, Burke reached immediately for his wallet.
    “Which one do you want?”
    “Ick! You’re not serious?”
    “One of those shirts, then? With the embroidery?”
    “Burke … you don’t have to buy me anything.”
    He wrinkled his brow solemnly. “How will you remember me if you don’t have an iguana?”
    Smiling, she laid her hand on his back at the spot where a patch of golden hair peeped over the top of his swim trunks.
    “I’ll remember,” she said. “Don’t you worry about that.”

Desperate Straights
    W HEN DEDE HALCYON DAY WAS TEN YEARS OLD, her parents sent her to camp at Huntington Lake. For six excruciating weeks, she hurt as only a fat child can hurt when forced to paddle canoes, stitch wallets and sing songs to the tune of “O Tannenbaum.”
    The end came as a merciful release, an escape from the tyranny of children into the comfortable, protective sanctuary of Halcyon Hill.
    She felt something of that now, something of that ancient longing for home, as she packed her Gucci luggage and prepared herself mentally for Hillsborough.
    She wanted Beauchamp behind her.
    She wanted him to be like poison oak and short-sheeted beds and pretty preteens who made jokes about Kotex.
    She wanted him gone.
    But Beauchamp persisted:
    “This isn’t doing a goddamn bit of good, you know!”
    She ignored him, continuing to pack.
    “O.K. So you run home to Mommy. Then what? What the hell do you think people are gonna say when those babies are born?”
    “I don’t care what they say.”
    “How very au courant of you!”
    DeDe’s voice remained calm. “I want them, Beauchamp.”
    “Do you think their father wants them? What the fuck’s he gonna do, anyway? Strap ‘em on the back of his delivery bike?”
    “Leave him out of this.”
    “Oh, heavens, yes! For Christ’s sake don’t offend his delicate Asian sensibilities. All he ever did was take an innocent ethnic poke at my—”
    “Shut up, Beauchamp!”
    He was snarling now. “Why don’t you just drop the Pearl Buck routine, Miss Tightass! You couldn’t give a flying fuck about those babies and you know it!”
    “That’s not true.”
    “Half your friends have had abortions,