Tales of the City 08 - Mary Ann in Autumn

consolation on more than one Saturday night when she had stayed in with Mary Tyler Moore. This was the original Swensen’s, the one Mr. Swensen himself had opened in the late forties, and he had still been running it when she was here. She was about to stop in for a cone, just for old times’ sake, when she spotted the fire trucks parked on Union.
    Rounding the corner, she found dozens of onlookers assembled beneath a big sooty hole on the second floor of a house. The crisis seemed to have passed; the air was pungent with the smell of wet embers, and the firemen, though obviously weary, were business-as-usual as they tugged at a serpentine tangle of hoses. One of the younger ones, a frisky Prince Harry redhead, seemed aware of his lingering audience and played to the balcony with every manly move.
    We do love our firefighters, she thought, though she had long ago forfeited her right to the Municipal We. She was no more a San Franciscan now than the doughy woman in a SUPPORT OUR TROOPS sweatshirt climbing off the cable car at the intersection. She herself hadn’t used a cable car for years, yet every handrail and plank was as vividly familiar as her first bicycle. This one had a light blue panel along the side, marking it as a Bicentennial model. They were built the year she’d arrived in the city.
    She waited for the cable car to pass, considering something that eventually sent her into Swensen’s to address the middle-aged white man behind the counter.
    “I used to order something here,” she said, as winsomely as possible, “but I can’t remember the name of it. It was thirty years ago, so you may not …”
    “Swiss Orange Chip.”
    “Excuse me?”
    “Chocolate with orange bits, right?”
    “Yes!”
    “That’s Swiss Orange Chip.”
    She gaped at him. “How on earth did you do that?”
    He shrugged. “It’s the flavor people can never remember the name of.”
    “Oh … right.” She gave him a curdled smile, feeling irredeemably average. “It’s really good, at any rate.”
    He made her a sugar cone with a single scoop. Without tasting it, she carried it half a block to Russell Street, the little alley off Hyde where Jack Kerouac had been holed up for six months in the early fifties, working on a draft of On the Road . Her first husband, Brian, had brought her here when they started dating, since the place held great significance for him. Standing before the A-frame cottage like a pilgrim at Lourdes, he had told her only that Neal Cassady had lived there, and she, God help her Cleveland soul, had asked if that was one of David Cassidy’s brothers. He was gentle about it at the time—he wanted to get laid, after all—but he wouldn’t let her forget it for years. Had she paid more attention to that moment and what it said about both of them, she might have saved them from a marriage that was pretty much doomed from the start.
    Now, according to the daughter they had adopted, Brian was out living his own version of On the Road , driving his beloved Winnebago from one national park to another, apparently more at ease with life than he had ever been. He was seven years older than she, which made him sixty-four now, an age that could only be darkly ironic to a boomer who was finally facing it. Will you still need me? Will you still feed me?
    Leaving the Cassady cottage, she headed down the street with her ice cream, finally reuniting with the dark citrus tang of Swiss Orange Chip. The taste of it, as she had suspected, swept her back on a tide of subliminal memory to a much younger self.
    It was the taste of a lonely Saturday night.
    B ACK AT THE S EARCHLIGHT SHE bought a turkey sandwich and ate it by the tennis courts in the leafy little park at the crest of Russian Hill. For a moment she considered taking the cable car to the Wharf for an Irish coffee at the Buena Vista, but that would only delay the deeply unpleasant mission at hand. She had told her Mouse she’d explain everything as soon as she hit town, and since she’d been sobbing the last time they talked, postponement was no longer an option. But how she dreaded putting it into words.
    She dug her iPhone out of her shoulder bag and dialed his number. It rang six or seven times before he picked up: “Mary Ann?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Thank God. I was starting to worry.”
    “Sorry … I just needed …” She let the thought trail off. She had no earthly idea what she had needed.
    “Are you at the Four Seasons?”
    “No. Russian