Tales of the City 07 - Michael Tolliver Lives

master raking sand.
    I asked him what he meant.
    “I think you do the garden at my neighbors’ house,” he said. “No kidding? Where?”
    “Out on Taraval.”
    “Not Mrs. Gagnier?”
    “I don’t know her name, really.”
    “French-Canadian, right? Prematurely gray. Makes jam out of her lavender.”
    “Well, I don’t know about the jam part, but…”
    “I do. She gave me some last Christmas. Tastes like shampoo.”
    He chuckled. “Do you always work with your shirt off?”
    I scolded him with a playful yank on his ear. “Only when I think someone’s spying on me in the bushes .”
    “I wasn’t in the bushes, I was on my roof.”
    “Why didn’t you yell down or something?”
    “I dunno. I couldn’t tell if you were queer from up there.”
    I gave him a puzzled frown. “How high is that roof, anyway?”
    He laughed, snuggling into my side again. After an interval of uncomplicated silence he said, “So how do you know the lady you were with?”
    I explained that she had been my landlady years ago when I lived on Russian Hill. I told him about her backyard marijuana garden and her huge collection of kimonos, and the rambling old house itself, tucked away in the alps of those high wooden stairs.
    “How does she manage that now?”
    “She doesn’t. She had a stroke a few years ago, so she moved down to the Dubose Triangle. There are people who help out, you know, in the building, so there’s a number of us to…share the load.”
    “Well, that’s good.”
    “Not that it is one,” I added. “I love being with her.”
    “Sure.”
    “She affects a lot of people that way, which is good. She’s still got it going, you know? She still gives a shit about things. Most trannies never make it that far.”
    He blinked at me for a moment. “You mean…?”
    I smiled in the affirmative. “She was the first one I ever knew.”
    “She pulls it off pretty well,” he said.
    I told him she’d had some practice, that she’d been a woman for over forty years, almost as long as she’d not been a woman.
    Ben took that in for a moment. “I’d like to meet her sometime.”
    Already that sounded so right to me.

    After that first pyrotechnic night, we saw each other about twice a week for three or four months. Ben was kind and bright and appreciative of everything about me I’d recoiled from in recent years: the thickening trunk and silky butt, the wildfire of gray hair sweeping across my chest. Some people think we finally become adults when both our parents have died; for me it happened when someone desired the person I’d become. For years I’d been in a state of suspended boyhood, counting every crow’s foot as I searched for the all-loving man who would finally set things right. Ben made me think that I could be that man. Not as some father figure, if that’s what you’re thinking—Ben was way too independent for that—but simply as someone who knew how it felt to be cheated of a father’s comfort and tenderness. Someone who could give you all that.
    Loving Ben would be like loving myself, long ago.
    I tried to stay cool about it. There was very little to indicate that Ben was even in the market for romance. The emails he sent me from work usually closed with “Hugs, Ben”—a surefire sign, I felt, that he saw us as compatible fuck buddies and nothing more. True, Ben had been partnered several times already, and always to older guys, but there was something distressingly self-contained about him. My heart sank when he outlined his plans for remodeling his tiny one-man apartment, or rhapsodized about hiking in the Alaskan wilderness, where he’d perch on mountaintops for hours on end, reveling in his solitude. Even Ben’s job with a South of Market furniture designer was a little troubling, since one day, he said, he hoped it would afford him the chance to live in Milan or Paris.
    None of these scenarios left much room for me, I felt.
    But all of them turned me on. I loved picturing Ben in that matchbox room on Taraval, making hibiscus tea before bed. Or swimming naked in a mountain stream, his jeans warming on a nearby boulder. I often fell hard for such manly free spirits when I was Ben’s age or younger, though very few of them returned the favor. That my prince should come now, desirous as he was desirable, was almost too much to believe.
    So I took each day as it came, dutifully noting even the slightest sign of hope along the way. The day he showed me sketches of a sideboard he