Tales of the City 04 - Babycakes

and opened the door leading to the suite above theirs in the lower. They passed through this space, climbing still another stairway in the semidarkness.
She flung open the last door with a flourish. They had reached a tiny, open-air observation deck at the summit of the tower. Before them stretched the entire Bay Area from San Mateo to Marin, ten thousand electric constellations glimmering beneath a purple sky.
She moved to the edge of the parapet. “This should do nicely.”
He joined her. “For what?”
“Just be quiet now. You’ll screw up the ritual.” She unbuttoned the pocket of the Pendleton and removed a pink plastic case roughly the size of a compact. She held it up like a sacred talisman. “Farewell, little Ortho-Novums. Mama doesn’t want you anymore.”
In a flash, he realized what she was doing. “Jesus, you dizzy …”
“Shh …” Her arm swung forward in an arc, launching the pills into the night, a tiny pink spaceship bound for the stars. She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted: “Did you see that, God? Do you read me?”
He threw back his head and roared with joy.
“You approve?” She was smiling into the wind, looking more beautiful than he had ever seen her.
“I don’t deserve you,” he said.
“The hell you don’t.” She took his hand and pulled him toward the stairway. “C’mon, turkey, let’s go make babies.”
    Enter Miss Treves
M ICHAEL HAD ALWAYS REGARDED JET LAG AS AN affectation of the rich, but his first three days in London changed his mind about that forever. He awoke without fail at the magic hour of three o’clock—sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon. His disorientation was heightened by the fact that he found himself in a house where the telephone never rang and the drums never stopped.
The drums were actually next door, but their basic rhythms were easily audible at dawn, when he invariably lay in four inches of lukewarm water and watched the cold, gray light of another rainy day creep across the bogus blue sky of his bathroom ceiling.
In search of a routine, he touched base with his launderette, his post office, his nearest market. Then he trekked into other parts of town to check out familiar haunts from bygone limes: a rowdy pub in Wapping called the Prospect of Whitby (more touristy than he had remembered), Carnaby Street (once mod and cheesy, now punk and cheesy), the charming old cemetery in Highgate where Karl Marx was buried (still charming, still buried).
When the skies cleared on the third afternoon, he ambled through Kensington and Chelsea to the river, then followed the Embankment to Cleopatra’s Needle. As a sixteen-year-old, he had been intrigued by the Egyptian obelisk because the bronze lions flanking it—when viewed from a certain angle—had strongly suggested erect cocks. True, almost everything had suggested that when he was sixteen.
He left the river, mildly disenchanted by his reunion with the lions, and threaded his way through the streets in the general direction of Trafalgar Square. For reasons of economy, or so he told himself, he ate lunch at a McDonald’s near the Charing Cross tube station, feeling wretchedly American about it until the man in front of him ordered “a strawbry shike to tike awy.”
Arriving in Piccadilly Circus, he bought a copy of Gay News and perused it amidst a crowd of German backpackers assembled at the foot of the Eros statue. Judging from the classified ads, gay Englishmen were perpetually searching for attractive “uncles” (daddies) with “stashes” (mustaches), who were “non-scene” (never in bars) and “non-camp” (butch). A surprisingly large number of advertisers made a point of saying that they owned homes and cars. On the women’s news front, a group of North London lesbians was organizing a Saturday jog to the tomb of Radclyffe Hall, and everyone was looking forward to Sappho Disco Night at the Goat in Boots, Drummond Street.
Back at Colville Crescent, he did his best to rid the bathroom of its stench by anointing the ratty carpet with a concentrated room deodorant he had found at Boots the Chemist. (In some ways, English drugstores were the most unsettling institutions of all. The boxes and bottles looked pretty much like the ones in the States, but the names had been changed to protect God-knows-whom. Was Anadin the same thing as Anacin? Did it matter?) He shook the little amber bottle vigorously, releasing a few drops of the pungent liquid. It merged