Tales of the City 07 - Michael Tolliver Lives

about that.

    After dinner we headed for the hot tub. We did our usual thing: taking turns carrying each other, allowing the other to be weightless, like Superman in flight with Lois Lane. (You can do that in a redwood tub, unlike those shallow fiberglass spas that won’t let you float.) It was my turn to be Superman, so Ben’s head was tucked under my chin as I padded around the tub, setting our course in the darkness. A gauzy fog had stalled on the hillside, making the amber porch lights of the valley as dim and fuzzy as fireflies.
    “I wish you’d known Mona,” I said.
    “I know. I do, too.”
    I was quiet for a while. “Do I talk about my past too much?”
    “No, honey…not for me.”
    “It’s just that there’s so much of it.”
    He chuckled, then climbed out of my arms and sat on the underwater bench, pulling me next to him. As silly-old-fool as it sounds, I never stop being astounded by the sheer accessibility of that body, that heart, that “mortal, guilty, but—to me—the entirely beautiful” comrade that W. H. Auden—the ultimate silly old fool—taught gay men to dream about. “What made you think of Mona?” he asked.
    “Just joy, I guess. You take me back to my best times. I feel connected to them again.” (This was true enough, but not the whole truth. I was also dwelling on the pain of impermanence, the way love is always on loan, never the nest egg we want it to be.) Ben put his hand on my thigh and squeezed.
    “Anything specific?”
    I grinned. “The Jockey Shorts contest at the Endup.”
    “When?”
    “Late seventies, I guess.”
    “You went to it?”
    “I entered it.”
    “No way.”
    “Doesn’t sound like me, does it? I wasn’t nearly as self-conscious back then. I’d take off my clothes at the drop of a hat. I went to orgies like they were brunches.”
    Ben chuckled.
    “Some of them were brunches…come to think of it. Anyway…I won the fucking thing…the dance contest, I mean. They must’ve given points for boyish panic.”
    “What does this have to do with Mona?”
    “She was there . She was cheering me on.”
    “Ah.”
    “She just knew me, you know? There was no bullshitting that woman. When she gave you hell about something, it felt like the deepest kind of love.”
    Ben laid his head on my shoulder, saying nothing.
    “She used to say she didn’t need a lover at all—just five good friends.”
    “You must’ve been one of them.”
    “I suppose.” I surprised both of us with a long, histrionic sigh. “I really should have gone to England more often.”
    I wasn’t feeling guilty. What I felt was the depletion of my memory bank, a hunger for more memories to hoard. I like remembering Mona at Easley House, the “simple English country dyke” she claimed she’d always wanted to be, but those images are few and far between and have largely been overpowered by the older ones: Mona at the Endup, Mona on the nude beach at Devil’s Slide, Mona stashing her Quaaludes in a ceramic figurine of Scarlett O’Hara. The Mona who stays with me is the late-seventies model: loose-limbed and free as a sailor, with coils of lava-red hair radiating from her head. I can even remember the telltale sound of her footsteps (both the manic and depressive varieties) on the boardwalk at Barbary Lane. Mona had a full seven years on me back then, so I’d felt like her little brother. Now that I’ve passed the age she was when she died it’s deeply unnerving to realize that she’s becoming my little sister.
    The same is true of Jon, my first partner—only more so, of course, since he’s now been gone for—Jesus!—almost a quarter of a century. How impossibly young we were then. Jon was a gynecologist (I know, I know) and a lovely guy inside and out, if a little buttoned-down around the edges. Had he not died but simply moved to a distant city, I wonder if we’d recognize each other today were our paths to cross at a B&B in P-town, say, or an RSVP cruise to someplace warm and homophobic. Would there still be something he could love—that I could love, for that matter—or would we just swap email addresses and walk away, preferring to remember the old version of ourselves?
    The young version, that is.
    The only version I have left of him.
    And this version of Ben, this gentle otter-sleek creature holding on to me in the amniotic warmth of the hot tub, will one day prove just as ephemeral. If the virus doesn’t claim me, then old age will start playing dirty soon