Tales of the City 03 - Further Tales of the City

understand. “I find her most incisive myself.”
    Mary Ann goosed him.
    “Incisive and perky. A winning combination.”
    “I’ll do it again,” warned Mary Ann.
    “I was hoping you’d say that,” grinned Brian. “Only slower this time, O.K.?”

Remembering Lennon
    T HE BEAUTY OF BEING A WAITER, BRIAN USED TO THINK, was that you could dump the whole damn thing tomorrow.
    There were no pension plans to haunt you, no digital watches after fifty years of service, no soul-robbing demands for corporate loyalty and long-term commitment. It was a living, in short, but never, ever a career.
    He used to think.
    Now, after six years of working at Perry’s, he’d begun to wonder about that. If it wasn’t a career now, when would it be? After ten years? Fifteen? Is that what he wanted? Is that what she wanted?
    He rolled away from her and stared at the ceiling in silence.
    “O.K.,” said Mary Ann. “Out with it.”
    “Again?”
    She laughed at his joke, then snuggled up against his shoulder. “I know pensive when I see it. So what are you pensing about?”
    “Oh … the bar, I guess. I think it may be time for that.”
    “I thought you hated tending bar.”
    He winced. “The state bar, Mary Ann. As in lawyer?”
    “Oh.” She glanced over at him. “I thought you hated that, too.”
    There was no quick answer for that one. He had hated it, in fact, hated every boring, nerve-grinding minute he had ever been Brian Hawkins, Attorney-at-Law. He had sublimated his hatred in the pursuit of causes—blacks, Native Americans, oil slicks—but the “old ennui,” as he had come to call it, proved as persistent and deep-rooted as the law itself.
    He still cringed at the thought of the singing fluorescent bulb that had tormented him for hours on end in the grass-cloth-and-walnut conference room of his last law firm. That fixture came to symbolize all that was petty and poisonous about life—if you could call it that—in the Financial District.
    So he had fled his profession and become a waiter.
    He had also become a rogue, terrorizing singles bars and laundromats in a frenzied and relentless search for “foxes.” He had simplified his life, streamlined his body and subjugated the “old ennui.”
    But now something different was happening. The woman he had once described as “that uptight airhead from Cleveland” was easily the love of his life.
    And she was the one with the career.
    “I have to do something, ” he told Mary Ann.
    “About what?”
    “Work,” said Brian. “My job.”
    “You mean your tips aren’t …?”
    “It isn’t the money.” His voice had an edge to it. His flagging pride was making him cranky. Don’t take it out on her, he warned himself. “I just can’t go on like this,” he added in a gentler tone.
    “Like what?” she asked cautiously.
    “Like your dependent or something. I can’t hack it, Mary Ann.”
    She studied him soberly. “It is the money, then.”
    “It’s one thing to go dutch. It’s another to be … I don’t know … kept or something.” His face was aflame with self-contempt and embarrassment.
    Mary Ann laughed openly. “Kept? Gimme a break, Brian! I paid for a weekend shack-up in Sierra City. I wanted to do that, you turkey. It was as much for me as it was … oh, Brian.” She reached over and took his hand. “I thought we’d gotten over all that macho stuff.”
    He aped her mincingly. “I thought we’d gotten over all that macho stuff.” It was so petty and cruel that he was instantly sorry. Examining her face for signs of hurt, he made the maddening discovery that she had already forgiven him.
    “What about John?” she asked.
    “John who?”
    “Lennon. I thought you admired him for becoming a househusband when Yoko …”
    Brian snorted. “It was John’s money, for Christ’s sake! You can do anything you goddamn want when you’re the richest man in New York!”
    Mary Ann stared at him incredulously. Now she really was wounded. “How could you do that?” she asked quietly. “How could you cheapen the thing that we shared?”
    She was talking about the Memorial Vigil on the Marina Green. She and Brian had spent six hours there mourning Lennon’s death. They had cried themselves dry, clutching strawberry-scented candles, singing “Hey Jude” and smoking a new crop of Hawaiian grass that Mrs. Madrigal had named in honor of the deceased.
    Brian had never before—and never since—made himself so vulnerable in Mary Ann’s