Tales of the City 07 - Michael Tolliver Lives

Nevada.”
    “Really?”
    “And Edgar Halcyon, too.”
    “Her big romance, you mean?”
    I nodded. “We were all at her Christmas party on Barbary Lane…and she was out in the courtyard at one point…and she sort of…felt him leave.”
    “She told you this?”
    “Yeah. Not until much later, but…yeah.”
    “That sounds more psychic than intuitive.”
    “She wouldn’t call it that. It’s more like…a connectedness. She doesn’t talk to the dead or anything like that. She just feels it when…life ends.”
    I’d struck a more somber note than I’d intended, and a shadow fell across Shawna’s face. I made a clumsy effort at changing the subject.
    “When’s your book coming out? Have you heard from your publishers?”
    She rolled her eyes. “The ass monkeys want me to change the ending.”
    “Oh?”
    “Can you believe that? I ended with a chapter on paraplegic sex…and they thought that was—get this—too downbeat.”
    I told her, tactfully, I could sort of see their point.
    “C’mon, Mouse…it’s totally hopeful in a book about sex. It means we all get a shot at getting laid. It’s about as upbeat as you can get.”
    Her eyes were so dark and soulful without the distraction of makeup. Like Natalie Wood’s eyes (or Natalie Port-man’s, if you must). I suddenly felt so blessed to have known her all these years. She was leaving me, too, I realized, and that would sting a little.
    “So,” I told her, smiling, “tell the ass monkeys how you feel about it.”
    “I have. Believe me.”
    “What is it they say? The only difference between comedy and tragedy is where you end the story?”
    “Who always says that?”
    “I dunno. Somebody.” My heart grew leaden again. I sighed and gazed down the empty hallway toward the elevator. “Where will they find food this time of night?”
    “Safeway, I think.”
    “Ah.” I smiled at her rather pathetically. “You won’t have that problem in New York.”
    “No…I guess not.”
    A long silence.
    “Should I be leaving?” she asked.
    I took her hand. “It’s your dream, babycakes.”
    “Yeah…but…I can write anywhere, and…Dad’s just…coming apart at the seams.”
    “That’s not your problem. It’s not even about you.”
    She blinked at me for a moment, apparently understanding, then turned her gaze back toward Anna’s room. Even from here you could hear the sighing of the respirator.
    “This sucks so bad,” she said.

    The guys brought us pizza—lukewarm and oily and curiously satisfying. The four of us consumed it tribally in a nook next to the nurses’ station.
    Then Brian asked me: “Is this déjà vu for you?”
    “Yeah,” I replied. “A little.”
    “Why?” asked Ben.
    “This is where Michael was laid up back in…’77, was it?”
    “It was one floor up, actually, but the view was the same.”
    Shawna wiped her mouth, remembering the story. “The thing with the snooty-sounding name.”
    “Guillain-Barré,” I said, smiling. I had come down with this esoteric syndrome literally overnight and had recovered in a matter of months. In between I was almost totally paralyzed. Jon—my lover, the gynecologist—was working at St. Sebastian’s at the time and would stop by on his rounds, bringing his Norse god face into my limited line of vision. Five years later AIDS would turn the tables. Jon died here in 1982, blind and terrified.
    I knew not to go there now.
    Ben’s face lit up. “Then this was where you came out!” (It’s amazing, really, how well Ben remembers my stories. I’m not nearly as good about remembering his.)
    “What do you mean?” asked Shawna.
    “He wrote his parents from here,” said Brian. “Told ’em he was gay.”
    Shawna turned to me. “But you were paralyzed.”
    “I dictated it.”
    Brian laughed. We all did, in fact. But back then I’d thought I was going to die in this place. I thought the paralysis would reach my lungs and that would be it; there’d be no other chance to say who I was. I remember the butterfly kite that Anna hung on the wall across from my bed. And I remember the people around the bed the day I wrote the letter—Anna and Mona and Brian and Mary Ann—my “logical” family at 28 Barbary Lane.
    “It was a fucking long letter, too,” I said, grinning. “Thank God Mary Ann knew shorthand.”
    Her name hung in the air like an unanswered question.
    Shawna avoided eye contact with her father by staring down at the pizza box. Ben shot a glance at me, then