Tales of the City 05 - Significant Others
curls. “You were sweet to let the boys take the limo.”
“It’s no big deal,” he said. “What’s gonna happen to your car?”
She began to fret again. “Well, Booter said to leave it here.”
“Oh.”
“I’ve done what I can do,” she said. “I’m not his wife.”
“Right.”
Why the hell was she still issuing disclaimers? “I’ll call his house when I get to Chicago. Somebody’ll know something by then.” She heaved a mother’s sigh before adding glumly: “I hate being a whore. There are too many responsibilities.”
“Don’t talk like that,” he said.
She smiled and slid her fingers through the swirly hair of his chest. “Thanks for the indignation, but I’m not ashamed of it. I wanted the experience, and I wanted the money. And Booter got his money’s worth.”
The bedside phone rang.
“Yell-o,” she piped in her best receptionese.
“Wren,” said the caller, “iss me.”
“Booter?”
“Yeah, iss me.”
If he wasn’t shitfaced, he sure sounded like it. “Where are you, Booter?”
“Uh … Guerneville.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah. I’m … I’m O.K.”
“You could have called, for Christ’s sake. Why didn’t you call?”
“I couldn’t…. Was in a canoe.”
“What?” She heard a woman mutter something in the background. “Booter … who’s with you?”
A pause and then: “Nobody.”
“Oh, right.” Now she was boiling mad.
“Iss juss somebody who—”
“You have one helluva lot of nerve, Booter.” She turned to Brian and said: “He’s ripped to the tits and he’s got some woman with him.”
“No,” said Booter.
“What do you mean, no? I can hear her.”
“Iss not like that.”
“I’m leaving tomorrow, Booter. That check better be good.”
“Iss good.”
She could hear the woman cackling in the background. “I’m hanging up, Booter.”
“Gobblesshew,” he said.
“Right,” she said, and slammed the receiver down.
She fumed in silence. Then Brian said: “I’m sorry you worried so much.”
“I wasn’t worried,” she said. “Well … still.”
“Fuck him,” she said. “I should’ve charged him the full ten thousand.”
She went to sleep angry and woke up that way, rising before Brian to finish her packing. He made french toast for them both, then took out her last bag of garbage. When the limousine arrived at nine forty-five, they were waiting for it on the back steps. The driver was a new one (not, thank God, the one she had slept with), and he was openly curious as to why he’d been treated to a night at the Sonoma Mission Inn.
She let him wonder, determined to put the fiasco behind her.
They drove in silence to Cazadero, where Michael and Thack swapped places with Brian amidst coos of approval for the limousine. She gave Brian a quick hug at the door of his little cabin. “Call me,” she whispered.
“O.K.,” he answered.
She waved goodbye to him from the back window of the limo, but wasn’t sure he had seen her.
Back in the city, at Michael’s insistence, she told the driver to climb Russian Hill on its steepest slope. This turned out to be a street called Jones, a near-sheer cliff of a street which taxed the limo to the fullest and had them all whooping like idiots.
“Is this legal?” she gasped, clapping her hand to her chest.
Michael laughed. “It’s even better going down.”
“You’re twisted,” she said.
“I’ve never done this in a limo,” he said.
She snorted. “There are better things to do.”
“I’ll bet,” said Thack.
“Christ,” she gasped. “Is that a stop sign up ahead?” She leaned forward and tapped the driver’s shoulder. “Don’t stop, O.K.? My system can’t take it.”
Another laugh from Michael. “Can it take a speeding Muni bus?”
The driver stopped where he was supposed to stop, then turned right and kept climbing, though far less precipitously this time. Taking another right, he inched his way down another nauseating drop-off. The bay lay beneath them in the distance, ridiculously blue.
“All right,” she said, turning to Michael. “Enough with the Space Mountain.”
“This is it,” he said, wide-eyed. “Really.”
“This is really what?” She was pressing her fingertips against the back of the front seat, as if this would prevent her from tumbling forward, out the window, down the hill and into the bay.
“Where I live,” he replied. “That stairway beneath us. The wooden one.”
“Sure.”
“It is!” he
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