Tales of the City 07 - Michael Tolliver Lives

Colonel Butler!”
    He laughed. “I mean it.”
    “I know,” I said, kissing the top of his head.
    “Your generation has a lot of baggage.”
    I said that’s why I preferred not to date them.
    “They think of themselves as liberated, but there are so many wounded old tarts out there. Sex inside a relationship scares the holy shit out of them.”
    “Well, I’m grateful for them,” I said. “They were saving you for me.”
    He snuggled closer and pecked me on the ear. We were silent for a while.
    “I saw Anna at the Bi-Rite,” he said at last. “She was there all by herself, just humming away over the produce bins.”
    I told him that Anna liked to walk to the market sometimes, that she usually referred to it as her “constitutional.”
    “I hope I’m still that vigorous when I’m her age,” Ben said. “I hope you are, too,” I replied. “I’ll be a hundred and five, so I won’t much feel like getting the groceries.”
    He laughed. “Did she ever have…you know…anybody?”
    “Anna, you mean?”
    “Yeah.”
    I thought about that for a moment. “One or two, I guess. A long time ago. She had an affair with a married businessman back in the seventies. His wife was a major drunk and he was dying of something, and…Anna gave him a real life for a while. He was dead in a year, but she still keeps his picture around. And there was this guy in Greece in the late eighties. On Lesbos.” I chuckled at the thought of that. “He was an actual Lesbian.”
    “What was she doing on Lesbos?”
    “Vacationing with her daughter…the lowercase lesbian.”
    “Oh, yeah,” said Ben. “So what happened to this guy?”
    “Nothing. He’s still there, I guess, if he’s even alive. He was this stocky little guy with white hair and twinkly eyes. He wanted her to come live with him. They were really hot for each other…soul mates even, but…she turned him down.”
    “Why?”
    I heard myself sighing. “I think it was me, actually.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I’d been positive for a couple of years, and everybody just assumed I was about to get sick and die. I assumed it myself. That’s the way it was back then.”
    “And she didn’t want to leave you, in case…”
    “…she never saw me again.”
    Ben muttered a reverential “Wow.”
    “She never said that, of course, but I’m sure it was the reason.”
    He petted the side of my head, having already arrived at where I was heading. “You shouldn’t feel guilty about living, honey.”
    I told him I felt guilty about not insisting that Anna go back to Greece, that I could have made that my dying wish, that she had been my rock when my lover Jon was dying and it was time for me to return the favor, to place her best interests above my own, especially if I thought I was near death. Anna had waited until she was almost seventy to find a satisfying love, and I had effectively stood in the way of that great happiness.
    “She wouldn’t have gone,” said Ben. “Even I can tell that.”
    “Maybe not,” I said, “but I should have tried. I could have shown her what she meant to me. I could have been a grown-up about it and not just a needy child. I think of her walking down to the market all by herself…” I started to tear up, surprising myself.
    “C’mon. I told you she looked happy. And she’s surrounded by all sorts of people who love and respect her.”
    “She doesn’t have this, though.” I meant, of course, a warm body next to hers.
    “Well, no, but you didn’t either after Thack left. You thought it was the end of love…you told me so yourself. You can’t control these things, Michael. Life hands you shit, and you have to take it. And nobody can fix that for anybody else.”
    Then why do I feel so fixed? I thought.

8
    Darn Straight
    M y brother’s living room in Orlando is two stories high, a cathedral of drywall with portholes high up that look out into the tops of palm trees. Ben and I found five such houses on that cul-de-sac, but Irwin had made a point of telling us that the Tolliver residence would be the only one with a speedboat in the driveway: “There’s no way you can miss it, bro.” There was no way you could miss it from the living room, either, thanks to a strategically positioned sofa. Irwin’s latest toy was perfectly framed in the window as he sang its praises from a big leather armchair shaped like a catcher’s mitt.
    “She’s a hottie, ain’t she?”
    At fifty-seven Irwin was just too old to be