Tales of the City 06 - Sure of You

finally.
    “She’ll be six next April.”
    “O.K. There.” He nodded to fill the dead air. “And…Brian?”
    “He’s forty-four,” she answered, though she found the question a little weird.
    “No.” He laughed. “I meant, who is he?”
    “Oh, I thought you knew. Brian Hawkins.”
    It didn’t register.
    “He was upstairs at Mrs. Madrigal’s.”
    Now he was nodding, slowly. “The guy who lived on the roof?”
    “Right. That’s him.”
    “Well, I’ll be damned!”
    His apparent amazement unsettled her. “You remember him, huh?”
    “I remember how much you hated him.”
    “Excuse me?” She gave him the sourest look she could muster.
    “Sorry,” he said. “I mean…you know, disapproved of him…”
    She was about to take him on, when the waiter appeared. “You folks had a chance to look at the menu yet?”
    “I’ll take the grilled tuna,” Mary Ann told him crisply. “And some orange-flavored Calistoga.”
    Burke cast a cursory glance at the menu, then flapped it shut. “Sounds great.”
    “Same thing?” asked the waiter.
    “Same thing.”
    “You got it.” The waiter spun on his heels and left.
    “O.K.,” said Burke. “Let me start over, if I can.”
    “Let’s just leave it.”
    “No. That sounded terrible.”
    “I knew what you meant, though. He was a real womanizer then.”
    “I liked him, though. I thought he was nice.”
    She realigned her silverware against the salmon tablecloth. “He is nice. He puts up with a lot, believe me.”
    He smiled gently. “C’mon.”
    She shrugged. “He does. It isn’t easy being married to Mary Ann Singleton.”
    He blinked at her for a moment, then asked: “When did you start seeing him?”
    “Oh…a year or so after you left.” Make that a week, she told herself. No, make it four days. She remembered all too well the weepy night she had headed up to Brian’s room with a joint of Maui Wowie and a bottle of rotgut Chianti. He’d been dating Mona Ramsey at the time, but he’d been ready and willing to offer consolation.
    How odd it was to sit here now with the man who had caused her all that pain and feel nothing but a sort of pleasant sense of shared history. She could scarcely remember their passion, much less reconstitute it for a moment’s titillation.
    “How’s Mrs. Madrigal?” he asked.
    “She’s O.K., I guess. I saw her down at Molinari’s a month or so ago.” She smiled and shook her head. “Just as dear and loony as ever.”
    Burke smiled back.
    “Brian and I moved out of the house after we got Shawna. It had a certain funky charm, I guess, but it wasn’t much of a place to raise a kid.”
    “What about Michael and…Jon, was it?”
    She nodded solemnly. “Jon died of AIDS in ’82.”
    “Damn.”
    “I know.”
    “Is Michael O.K.?”
    Another nod. “He’s got the virus, but so far he’s been fine.”
    “Good. Thank God.”
    “He has a new boyfriend,” she told him. “They bought a house in the Castro.”
    “What does Michael do now?”
    “He runs a nursery out on Clement.”
    “No kidding?”
    “Yeah. He and Brian run it together, actually.”
    He seemed to like this idea. “All in the family, huh?”
    “Yeah.”
    He nodded slowly, absorbing their lost decade with a look of sanguine acceptance. “You look great,” he said finally.
    Fine, she thought, but isn’t this where we came in?

    This particular waiter knew she didn’t like a chatty presentation, so their tuna arrived without fanfare. Burke took a few bites and said: “I’m producing now. For Teleplex. Did you know that?”
    “Sure,” she said. “Doesn’t everybody?”
    He chuckled. “No way.”
    “Well, I do.”
    He focused on his plate as he composed his words. “I’m developing a new morning talk show. Out of New York. We think there’s a real market for something more home-oriented and…more intelligent than what’s currently being offered.”
    “You got that right. People have had it with this tabloid shit. There’s bound to be a backlash.”
    “I think so,” he said, still addressing his tuna. “I think we can make it happen, in fact. We’ve got the backing, frankly, and some very real interest from the networks. What we need now is the right host. Someone who knows how to chat with, say, Gore Vidal and yet still be lively in a kitchen segment.”
    Mary Ann’s fork froze in mid-descent. Don’t, she warned herself, jump to any hasty conclusions. Maybe he just wants your advice. Maybe he…
    “What do you