Tales of the City 02 - More Tales of the City

out.
    For one thing, Mona never quite forgave D’orothea for not being black. (Her skin color, Mona learned eventually, had been artificially induced by pigment-altering pills and ultraviolet treatments, a ruse that had rescued the model from professional obscurity.) For another, she had come to grips, however grumpily, with the fact that she missed the company of men.
    “I’m a shitty heterosexual,” she had told Michael when she returned to the nest at Barbary Lane, “but I’m a shittier dyke.”
    Michael had understood. “I could have told you that, Babycakes!”
    Her last Quaalude had begun to take effect as Mona climbed the rickety wooden stairway leading up to the lane. She had spent all evening at the Cosmic Light Fellowship, but her mood was blacker than ever. She simply wasn’t centered anymore.
    What had happened to her? Why was she losing her grip? When did she first peer up from the dark, wretched pit of her life and see that the walls were unscalable?
    And why hadn’t she bought more Quaaludes?
    She moved groggily through the leafy canyon of the lane, then crossed the courtyard of number 28 and entered the brown-shingled building. She rang Mrs. Madrigal’s buzzer, hoping that a glass of sherry and a few mellow words from the landlady might somehow banish her bummer.
    Mrs. Madrigal, she realized, was a special ally. And Mona was not just one of the landlady’s “children.” Mona was the only person in the apartment house whom Mrs. Madrigal had actively recruited as a tenant.
    And she was—she believed—the only one who knew Mrs. Madrigal’s secret.
    That knowledge, moreover, formed a mystical bond between the two women, an unspoken sisterhood that fed Mona’s soul on the bleakest of days.
    But Mrs. Madrigal wasn’t at home, so Mona trudged upstairs to her second-floor apartment.
    Michael, as she had dreaded, was also gone. Upstairs, no doubt, planning his trip with Mary Ann. He spent a lot of time with Mary Ann these days.
    The phone rang just as she flipped on the light. It was her mother, calling from Minneapolis. Mona slumped into a chair and made a major effort to sound together.
    “Hi, Betty,” she said evenly. She had always called her mother Betty. Betty had insisted on it. Betty actually resented the fact that she was older than her daughter.
    “Is this your … permanent number again?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I called the place in Pacific Heights. D’orothea said you’d moved back. I can’t believe you’d leave that charming home in a nice neighborhood for that shabby—”
    “You’ve never even seen it!” She’s always in character, thought Mona. For Betty was a realtor, a hardassed career woman whose husband had left her when Mona was still a baby. She didn’t care much for buildings without security guards and saunas.
    “Yes I have,” snapped Betty. “You sent me a picture last summer. Does that … woman still run it?”
    “If you mean Mrs. Madrigal, yes.”
    “She gives me the absolute creeps.”
    “Remind me not to send you any more pictures, will you?”
    “What was wrong with D’orothea’s place, anyway?” Betty, of course, didn’t know about the shattered relationship. She seldom thought about relationships at all.
    Mona hedged. “I couldn’t handle the rent.”
    “Oh, well, if that’s the problem, I can tide you over until you’re able to—”
    “No. I don’t want your money.”
    “Just until you’re able to find a job, Mona.”
    “Thank you, but no.”
    “She’s lured you in there, Mona!”
    “Who?”
    “That woman.”
    Mona blew up. “Mrs. Madrigal offered me an apartment after we became good friends! And that was over three years ago! Why are you suddenly so goddamned concerned about my welfare?”
    Betty hesitated. “I … I didn’t know what she looked like until you sent me—”
    “Oh, come off it!”
    “She’s just so … extreme.”
    If she only knew, thought Mona. If she only knew.

Down on the Roof
    B RIAN HAWKINS WAS THIRTY-THREE.
    And that, he realized with a shudder as he shed his denim-and-corduroy Perry’s uniform and flopped on the bed with an Oly, was as old as Jesus on Calvary.
    Or the idiot in The Sound and the Fury.
    He was treading water now. Nothing more. He was working to survive, to continue, to pay for his pork chops and his beer and his goddamn Ivory Liquid. And no amount of laid-back, mellowed-out, half-assed California philosophizing could compensate for the emptiness he felt.
    He was getting old.