Tales of the City 02 - More Tales of the City

ingenuously. “You want me to kick her gut in?”
    “I don’t want you to hurt her, Bruno.”
    “OK. You want me to kick her gut in without hurting her.”
    “Your tone is shitty, Bruno.”
    “Oh, kiss my ass!”
    “Look: she’s my wife, right? I don’t want her—I don’t want any permanent harm done. If you can’t promise me that, we might as well forget the whole thing.”
    “How the fuck do you expect me to guarantee …? What about … I mean, there could be—whatchacallit?—complications.”
    Beauchamp made his patient-but-piqued face, an expression that never failed to exasperate harried art directors at Halcyon Communications. “Now, Bruno, she’s seven months pregnant. It shouldn’t be that hard to arrange for … an accident of some sort.”
    The coke dealer stared at his client. “Look, man—”
    “On the other hand,” said Beauchamp dryly, “this may be totally out of your league.”
    “Says who?”
    “You seem a little hesitant. Maybe I should check with someone … more professional.”
    Bruno sulked momentarily, then looked up. “How much?”
    “What’s it worth?”
    That stopped him for a moment. “Uh … five thousand. Considerin’ the hassle.”
    “I’ll give you seven. But I want it done right.”
    “You know I’ll subcontract it.”
    “I don’t care.”
    “I want cash. In advance.”
    “You’ll get it. How soon?”
    “Soon as I get somebody.”
    “It has to be soon, Bruno.”
    “Fuck off!”
    “Bruno?”
    “Huh?”
    “Wipe your mouth, will you?”
    Fifteen minutes later, Beauchamp called DeDe at Halcyon Hill. Her voice was expressionless, a telltale defense against the uncertainties of their day-old separation.
    “Just checking on you,” he said.
    “Thanks.”
    “Is your mother there?”
    “Yes.”
    “Good. If you need anything sent out, let me know, will you?”
    Silence.
    “O.K., DeDe?”
    She began to cry. “Why are you being … so goddamned nice?”
    “I don’t know. I guess I miss you.”
    “Beauchamp … I want these babies so much. I’m not trying to hurt you, I promise.”
    “I know, darling. We’ll give it some time, O.K.?”
    “If I weren’t so confused, I’d be a better wife. I just need … I want to be by myself for a while.”
    “I understand.”
    She sniffled, then blew her nose. “There’s a chicken pot pie in the freezer and some leftover quiche in—”
    “I’ll be O.K.”
    “Beauchamp … I do love you.”
    “I know,” said her husband. “I know.”

Mrs. Madrigal’s Confession
    F OR THE FIRST TIME EVER, BRIAN DECLINED A JOINT.
    He wanted to be straight when he heard this.
    “Once upon a time,” said Mrs. Madrigal, “there was a little boy named Andy Ramsey. Andy was not a particularly extraordinary little boy, but he grew up under extraordinary circumstances: his mother was a madam. She ran a brothel called the Blue Moon Lodge, in Winnemucca, Nevada, and Andy’s best friends and nursemaids were the whores who made that house their home. Perhaps for that reason—or perhaps not—Andy made a startling discovery by the time he reached puberty: There was nothing about him that felt like a boy.
    “Oh, he looked like a boy, all right. All the appropriate plumbing was there. But he never stopped feeling like a girl, a girl locked up inside a boy’s body. To his horror, that feeling intensified as Andy grew older. By the time he was sixteen, he was so frightened that he ran away from the whorehouse and hitched a ride to California.
    “For a while he held body and soul together by working as a migrant laborer. Then he worked as a soda jerk in a drugstore in Salinas, then as a laborer again, this time in Modesto. Shortly after his twentieth birthday, he left Modesto for Fort Ord, where he enlisted in the Army as a private. He was a good soldier, but he stayed at Fort Ord throughout the war—World War II, that is—mostly typing munitions reports for a drunken colonel. In the long run, however, Andy hated the all-male environment of the Army as much as he had hated the all-female environment of the whorehouse. And the feeling that he was really a woman persisted through it all.
    “One night, shortly after the end of the war, Andy met a pretty young woman at a dance in Monterey. She was very young, actually, about seventeen at the time; Andy was twenty-five. She was visiting from Minneapolis, staying at her cousin’s house in Carmel. Her name was Betty Borg, and Andy was quite taken with her, in his own way.