Tales of the City 07 - Michael Tolliver Lives

Besides, my gift to Irwin had been a secret of his own, so my obligation—I told myself—was to keep it that way.
    Secrets and lies, I thought as I hung up the phone. After thirty years of insisting on the truth, I’m still my mother’s son. The orange doesn’t fall very far from the tree.
    I spent the rest of the afternoon doing laundry and online banking. My business account was disastrously low—given that I was leaving town—so I rounded up some stray checks from clients and made a mental note to deposit them at the airport. I hate the grim little dance of finance and always have; it’s so lifeless and unyielding, the antithesis of planting a garden. Money, if you ask me, has no right at all to be green.
    Ben wouldn’t be home before dark—there was still that sideboard to finish—so I began to pack for both of us. I started with my compartmentalized pill box, filling it with a week’s worth of meds—just in case. Then I chose a suit bag for both our dark suits: Ben’s nice new navy-blue one from Nordstrom and the ancient black crepe one I finally bought in the late eighties when funerals were proving more commonplace than theme parties. (I’d let out the waist a few times, but it was still holding up all right.) I figured that the rest of our clothes could be casual, so I filled a duffel bag with jeans and socks and Tshirts, leaving room for our shaving kits and a zippered bag we take on the road for condoms, lubricants, and the like. It felt odd to be preparing for sex in the midst of death, but utterly necessary. I drew the line at packing our latest toy: a glass-and-rubber penis pump we had ordered online. It had given us both a rollicking good time (somewhat to our surprise) but it looked like something out of a fifties mad-scientist movie and would almost certainly read as a terrorist device on an airport X-ray machine.
    Ben still smelled sweetly of his workshop when he got home. He smooched me at the door without ceremony and headed straight for the shower. When he joined me in the bedroom, he kissed me again and put on a T-shirt and sweatpants.
    “Is that what you’re wearing on the plane?”
    “It’s a red-eye,” he said with a shrug.
    “You’re right.” I pulled off my jeans and grabbed sweatpants from the closet.
    “We should pack the Ambien.”
    I patted my carry-on bag. “Gotcha.”
    “Will this be open-casket?” Ben asked.
    “What?”
    “Don’t Southerners generally prefer open-casket funerals?”
    “Not this one,” I said with a wince, but it did make me think. “Of course. You’re right. That’s why she asked Patreese to ‘pretty her up.’ Not before but after .”
    My father’s funeral had been closed-casket, to the obvious disappointment of some of the mourners, but now I could understand why Mama hadn’t wanted one last chance to gaze at her husband’s face—prettied up or not. The loudest objection to Papa’s closed casket had come from an aunt in Pensacola who’d sent the biggest wreath at the funeral. I still recall that monstrosity more vividly than anything else that day: a mass of white carnations surrounding a child’s toy telephone. A glittered ribbon at the top said: JESUS CALLED . The one at the bottom said: AND HERB ANSWERED .
    Herb, of course, had answered for nothing, but Mama had finally told the truth, and that made an open casket strangely appropriate. She could face the world without shame.
    “Should we try to call her before we leave?” Ben asked as he packed his dressy black shoes.
    I shook my head. “Irwin says she’s really out of it—sleeping most of the time. They’ve got her on morphine. She’s still adamant about staying off the respirator.”
    “She knows we’re coming, though?”
    “Oh, yeah.”
    Ben left the suitcase and pressed against my back, wrapping his arms around me.
    “Are you okay?”
    “Yeah, sweetie, I’m fine. Why do you keep asking that?”
    His cheek was against my shoulder blade. “Because you’re not crying.”
    Ben knew better than anyone that I can cry at the drop of a hat. I had cried the night before when we were watching Victor/Victoria on Logo, the new queer channel. The movie came out the year Jon died, and I bought the album (remember albums?) just weeks after we buried his ashes at 28 Barbary Lane. I loved the song “You and Me,” the sweet little soft-shoe number performed by Julie Andrews and Robert Preston. Those two are, in effect, playing a gay male couple, so the lyrics hit my