Tales of the City 06 - Sure of You

think. Sounds like he wants to dish a little television dirt.”
    “Ah.” He closed the dishwasher door. “Should be good.”
    “We’ll see.” She didn’t want to come off as too enthusiastic.
    Fiddling with the dishwasher controls, Brian said: “Does he know you’re famous?”
    She couldn’t tell if he was being snide, so she took the question straight. “He’s seen the show, apparently.”
    He seemed to ponder something for a moment, then asked: “The one today?”
    She had no intention of resurrecting those furry little bodies again. “I don’t know,” she lied. “He didn’t say.”
    Brian nodded.
    “Why?” she asked.
    He shrugged. “Just wondered.”
    She started to ask if he’d watched the show, but a well-oiled defense mechanism told her to leave it alone. He’d seen it, all right, and he hadn’t approved. Why give him another chance to tell her so?

Life with Harry
    W HEN CHARLIE RUBIN DIED IN EARLY 1987, MICHAEL Tolliver and Thack Sweeney had inherited his dog. They had known Harry a good deal longer than that, of course, caring for him intermittently during Charlie’s third bout with pneumocystis and later boarding him at their house when it became apparent that Charlie wouldn’t leave the hospital again. While Charlie was still alive; Harry had been addressed as K-Y, but Michael had found it more and more humiliating to walk through the Castro calling out the name of a well-known lubricant.
    The name change, however, was only partially effective, since he couldn’t go to the bank or mail a package at P.O. Plus without discovering someone who had known Harry in his former life. With no warning at all, the dog would pounce ecstatically on a perfect stranger—strange to Michael, at any rate—and this person would invariably exclaim “K-Y!” in a voice that could be heard halfway to Daly City.
    Michael and Thack doted on the dog to a degree that was almost embarrassing. Neither one of them had ever planned on owning a poodle—they regarded themselves as golden retriever types—but Harry had banished their prejudices (poodlephobia, to use Thack’s term) on his first visit to the house. For one thing, Charlie had always avoided those stupid poodle haircuts, keeping the dog’s coat raggedly natural. With his round brown face and button nose, Harry seemed more like a living teddy bear than like a classic Fifi dog.
    Or so they assured themselves.

    They had lived on the hill above the Castro for over two years now. Michael’s decade-long residency at 28 Barbary Lane had come to an end when he and Thack recognized their coupledom and decided to buy a place of their own. Thack, who’d been a preservationist back in Charleston, was far more keen on their home-to-be than Michael, who on first sighting the For Sale sign had regarded the place as a hopeless eyesore.
    Faced with green asbestos shingles and walled with concrete block, the house had seemed nothing more than a hideous jumble of boxes, like three tiny houses nailed together at odd angles. Thack, however, had seen something quite different, hurdling the wall in a frenzy of discovery to pry away a couple of loose shingles near the foundation.
    Moments later, flushed with excitement, he had announced his findings: underneath all that eisenhowering lay three original “earthquake shacks,” refugee housing built for the victims of the great disaster of 1906. There had been thousands of them in the parks, he said, all rowed up like barracks; afterward people had hauled them off on drays for use as private homes.
    In negotiation with the realtor, of course, they kept quiet about the house’s architectural significance (much in the way the realtor had about the bum plumbing and the army ants bivouacking below the deck). They moved in on Memorial Day, 1986, christening the place with a Chinese meal, a Duraflame log, and impromptu sex in their Jockey shorts.
    For the next two years they had set about obliterating the details that offended them most. Much of this was accomplished with white paint and Michael’s creative planting, though Thack made good on his promise to bare the ancient wood in both the kitchen and the bedroom. When, after a season or two of rain, their new cedar shingles took on the obligatory patina of old pewter, the householders glowed with parental appreciation.
    Yet to come were a new bathroom and wood-frame windows to replace the aluminum, but Michael and Thack were pressed for money at the moment and had