Tales of the City 07 - Michael Tolliver Lives

rows.”
    “And what decade was this?”
    Anna giggled. “I know… plus ça change, eh?”
    I could feel her glow warming me across the miles. It made me get serious for a moment. “You’re doin’ okay, though, aren’t you?”
    “Of course, dear.”
    “We’ll be home in a few days. You can take me to the museum.”
    “It’s a date,” she said. “Then we’ll get me a cat.”
    “Beg pardon, ma’am?”
    “I’d like to go to the SPCA and adopt a beat-up old cat.”
    I smiled. “Very well.”
    “Someone to sit in the sun with me. Who doesn’t want to go anywhere.”
    I knew this wasn’t a veiled plea for sympathy. Anna doesn’t veil anything beyond her head and an occasional lampshade. She would have been mortified, in fact, to know she’d come off as anything less than blithely self-contained.
    But she did, somehow; somehow she sounded sad.

    She had a cat when I met her. An old tiger tabby named Boris that prowled the mossy boardwalks of 28 Barbary Lane, slipping into windows at will. He didn’t live with Anna—or anyone else, for that matter—but she considered him her own. She was in her mid-fifties then and already grandedame ing it in kimonos with a houseful of tenants who felt privileged to live under her spell. I was one of them, of course. Another was Anna’s biological daughter, the child left behind by—as Anna put it—the “lesser man” she used to be. Mona was restless and loving and funny and utterly impossible sometimes. She moved to England early in the reign of Princess Di and married a queer lord so he could get a green card and wag weenie in San Francisco. Whereupon Mona—well, Lady Mona, technically—began to take in lodgers at the rundown country house left behind by the weenie-wagging lord. The place just climbed into her raggedy soul. At forty she adopted a teenager of Aboriginal descent and decided to stay for good.
    Having lost her daughter to another country, Anna resigned herself to a life of vacations. I went over there a few times myself, since Mona and I had always been close. (We had roomed together once, and she had been my first lesbian fag hag.) When I saw her ensconced at Easley House, I realized how perfectly it suited her, and that somehow helped to shrink the planet she had put between us. Back in the city, I could still picture her clomping around in her wellies as she collected rent from the villagers. Or serving tea and shortbread in the Great Hall to goggle-eyed tourists from Texas. She had followed in her father’s footsteps, our Mona, becoming a landlady extraordinaire .
    I should have been better about keeping in touch, but I’ve never been a regular letter writer. Anna, of course, remained faithful in that regard, filling page after page of flimsy blue stationery with spidery lavender handwriting. When email came along a decade later, I mended my neglectful ways and began regular correspondence with [email protected], a handle Mona devised to suggest a lesbian who’d lately been straying with men. This was true only in the sense that once on Guy Fawke’s Day she’d gotten loaded on Quaaludes (you can still get them in Switzerland—who knew?) and fucked her stonemason, a guy she claimed looked “too much like Brad Pitt to pass up.” The hasbian label worked wonders, though. Half the dykes in the Cotswolds, many bearing pies and garden cuttings, showed up on Mona’s doorstep in a fevered effort to return her to the labial fold. “Got me laid for weeks,” she told me triumphantly.
    There were live-in girlfriends from time to time, but none lasted very long. Mona was way too independent, and her life was full. It was Wilfred, Mona’s adopted son, who called me with the news. He hated asking this, he said, but it would probably be better if someone told Anna in person. So one warm October afternoon, after brunch in the Castro, I walked her back to the Dubose Triangle and told her that her daughter, my oldest friend, had been undergoing treatment for breast cancer for the past two years but didn’t want us to “make a big fuss about it.” The late delivery of this bombshell angered Anna as much as it had me, and we agreed that we damn well would make a fuss about it if we wanted. Indignation had been our only shield against the nasty bitch slap of reality.
    Anna had about five weeks with Mona; I was allotted the last five days, maybe because she knew me well. When I arrived in England, she was flying on morphine, so it went