Tales of the City 07 - Michael Tolliver Lives

to receive the news as casually as he delivers it, since I want him to know that I’m cool with it. Such is the nature of our open relationship (modified plan), and so far it’s working. It’s a tricky little dance sometimes, but it’s preferable to the perils of endless monogamy or constant whoring.
    I’ve seen too many male couples who have either neutered each other with enforced exclusivity or opened the relationship so wide that they turn into quarreling roommates and make their own sex life superfluous. In either case, romance dies on the spot. We don’t want that to happen. We’ve chosen to walk the middle road of full disclosure (minus details) and primary consideration for the feelings of the other. For the moment, that means no frolicking with mutual acquaintances and no sleeping over anywhere and no bringing guys back to the house at any time of the day. Our bodies may be shared from time to time, but our bed is just for us, the temple of our California King–sized love.
    The first time Ben went to the tubs in Berkeley I drove down to the one in San Jose to show my solidarity with our plan, but this lame little tit-for-tat proved unsatisfying. I wasn’t even horny at the time, and my morbid preoccupation with Ben and some nameless beast across the bay turned my lone encounter into a lackluster foursome. I was done in half an hour and ended up next to the snack machines, boring some poor guy half to death with tales of my happy May-September marriage.
    Since then, I’m more likely to be found cavorting with guys via my DVD on the occasional afternoons when Ben’s out playing. That’s fine with me. When it comes to sex, I’m happy to receive the occasional windfall, but I just don’t have the spirit for the hunt anymore. It’s enough to know that Ben will call as soon as he’s done, proposing plans for the evening and downplaying his fun. “Boy,” he’ll say, “they must’ve been having a special on little dicks,” and I’ll laugh at that and love him for it, whether it’s true or not, because, at the end of the day, I’ll have another eight hours of holding him in my arms.

    At my suggestion Ben had a bathhouse afternoon just before we left for Orlando. I was paying penance-in-advance, I guess, for inflicting my family on him. (My biological family, that is—as opposed to my logical one—as Anna likes to put it.) So Ben took off for the Steamworks at noon, and I stayed at home to wash the truck and curl up in the window seat with a glass of chocolate soymilk and the latest issue of American Bungalow magazine. There was an article on Bisbee, Arizona, and its funky little bungalow neighborhoods, and I wondered if that would make a good destination for us; we’d loved our recent road trip through the Southwest and had talked of returning.
    I laid down the magazine and glanced at the clock. It was almost one.
    He’s bound to be there by now, already undressed and wrapped in a towel, already cruising the hallways. He’s searching for daddies, of course, preferably with fur, politely deflecting the young and the smooth, the ones who inevitably regard him as their natural birthright. But it won’t be long before he finds what he wants…
    I picked up the magazine again, losing myself in the Southwest. In Monument Valley we hired a Navajo guide named Harley, a chummy twenty-seven-year-old in a Metallica sweatshirt who, for a few dollars more, drove us into sacred territory, a roadless landscape of bloodred monoliths reserved for tribal ceremonies and the occasional Toyota commercial. I don’t know if Harley knew we were a couple—he may well have mistaken us for father and son—but he gave a sweet little spiel about the Navajo nation’s reverence for androgyny and later played his flute for us and sang while we lay on our backs in a cave, goofy with peace, staring up through a hole at a perfect circle of sky.
    By now he’s spotted someone—across the steam room, maybe, or loitering in a corner of the labyrinth. He’s a bearded history prof at Berkeley, Jewish possibly, or a black Amway salesman from Oakland with silver at his temples, or some beefy working-class Irish brute. Whoever he is, he’s reaching for my husband right now, cupping those clean-shaven balls in his hairy hand as he smiles with avuncular assurance.
    The gutters, I realized, were in serious need of cleaning, so I dragged the extension ladder from the truck and propped it against the house. I have just the