Tales of the City 07 - Michael Tolliver Lives

happen again.
    “Sorry,” he said meekly. “I thought you did.”
    “Not since 9/11,” I said. “That’s been…Jesus…four years.”
    Brian whistled, sharing my amazement. “Time flies when you’re waging a War on Terror.”

    On the day that defined the new millennium, Mary Ann had called Mrs. Madrigal from her house in Darien, Connecticut. She wanted to make sure that “everybody” was still there, that no one from the old crowd at Barbary Lane had chosen that week to travel to Manhattan. From Anna’s description, the call had been short and businesslike, more of a schoolyard headcount than a serious effort at reestablishing contact. It was touching to know that Mary Ann had worried about us, but the whole country was worrying that day, so I didn’t read much into it. Still, I gave her a call, wondering if she might have lost someone herself, but our talk was limited to the surreal events we’d just watched on television. A crisis does draw people together, but rarely for the right reason. The old wounds flare up again soon enough; the bond lasts no longer than the terror.
    But every now and then I can’t resist the urge to Google Mary Ann. On a recent search I found her name on a press release for a charitable event in Darien—a food fair for the local Explorer Scout troop that, strange as it seems, runs the ambulance service in that wealthy Republican enclave on Long Island Sound. Mary Ann was expressing her pride in her stepson Robbie, a member of the troop, and pledging her support, somewhat inelegantly, to this “very unique institution.” She was pictured with Robbie and her husband of several years, a tall, skinny bald guy in a patchwork madras blazer who had recently retired as CEO of a New York brokerage firm. Mary Ann was identified as a “former television personality.” It made me think of one of those “As Seen on TV” labels you find on drugstore packaging for vegetable dicers and anti-snoring contraptions.
    Mary Ann’s neighbors in Darien must have had to do some Googling themselves to determine the exact nature of her fame. A few folks may have remembered her short-lived cable talk show in the early nineties—a pleasant enough diversion involving minor celebrities and their pets—but she was far more likely to be known as the gracious spokesperson for a line of adjustable beds for the elderly. I remember the first time I saw the commercial. Thack had left me several weeks earlier, and I was holed up in bed with late-night TV and a pint of Cherry Garcia, having just whacked off, with scant satisfaction, to a porn video in which all the Texas Rangers had Czechoslovakian accents.
    “Are you like I used to be?” Mary Ann was saying, still amazingly pretty in her mid-forties. “Do you wake up feeling more tired than when you went to bed?”
    I guffawed and dropped ice cream on the sheets and thought: Yes, I am, babycakes. I’m exactly like you used to be. It was a strange little moment of communion, as if she were somehow speaking directly to me. I briefly considered tracking her down and having a rueful hoot about the random fucked-upness of life, until I remembered I was helping to raise the daughter she had left behind. Shawna was a teenager by then—and something of a handful—not to mention the fact that I was closer than ever to the guy whose heart Mary Ann had broken. There had been way too much chilly water under the bridge; it was foolish, even dangerous, to pretend otherwise.
    So after the brief emotional ceasefire of a terrorist attack, our separate lives—and the silence—continued as if the towers had never fallen. The urge to reconnect didn’t arise again until Ben and I were married at City Hall. Maybe my guard was down because my heart was so open, but I wanted to share the good news with Mary Ann. I wanted a fifty-something housewife in Connecticut to be happy for me, her old friend Mouse: the guy who once believed—as she surely had—that he’d never live to see forty.
    But I resisted the impulse. I wasn’t even sure if I knew her anymore.

    “Where the fuck is the doctor?” asked Brian, growing restless on the gurney. “I could be dead by now.”
    “Relax,” I said. “Enjoy your drugs.”
    He grunted and stared at the wall.
    “Do you think she’ll look her up?”
    “Who?”
    “Shawna. When she gets to New York.”
    I told him that Darien was a far cry from New York.
    “That’s not the point.”
    “She doesn’t talk about Mary Ann at