Read Online Michael Tolliver Lives by Armistead Maupin - Free Book Online

condescension. He would visit on his own after that, bringing her chocolate and magazines, then just sitting by her bed while she read. “He doesn’t have much to say,” Anna once told me, “but there’s a lovely little light in there.”
    At that point Anna was just another tenant at 28 Barbary Lane, having sold the building in the early nineties to a Hong Kong investor. When her stroke made it clear that she could no longer manage that precipitous climb, it was Jake who proposed a solution. There was a vacancy in his building, he told her, a sunny garden apartment surrounded by level terrain. His own place was upstairs, so he could lend her a hand whenever she needed it. Anna accepted this invitation but only if Jake would agree to be paid for his services. She had a decent nest egg from the sale of the building, and she needed assistance from someone, so why shouldn’t it be Jake? She knew he needed the money, and he already felt like family.
    She got a good deal more family than she bargained for. Jake’s flatmates, an investment counselor and a teacher at the Harvey Milk School, were also transgendered folk—MTFs like Anna—and they regarded their new downstairs tenant with something akin to reverence. Anna, after all, had affirmed her womanhood well before either one of them was born, so it was almost like having an ancestor around—or so they once told me.
    I was invited to a cocktail party in the upstairs flat shortly after Anna took up residence. There were several dozen trannies in the room, hovering around her like acolytes. I couldn’t help remembering that Anna had struck me as the rarest of birds all those years ago, yet here she was now, just one among the many. She had never aspired to being ordinary, of course, but it must have been awfully nice to have a little company.

7
    Footnotes to a Feeling
    E very six weeks or so Ben takes off for an afternoon of hunting and gathering at one of the local bathhouses. He invariably tells me this a day or so before, since he wants me to know he’s not sneaking around, and I do my best to receive the news as casually as he delivers it, since I want him to know that I’m cool with it. Such is the nature of our open relationship (modified plan), and so far it’s working. It’s a tricky little dance sometimes, but it’s preferable to the perils of endless monogamy or constant whoring.
    I’ve seen too many male couples who have either neutered each other with enforced exclusivity or opened the relationship so wide that they turn into quarreling roommates and make their own sex life superfluous. In either case, romance dies on the spot. We don’t want that to happen. We’ve chosen to walk the middle road of full disclosure (minus details) and primary consideration for the feelings of the other. For the moment, that means no frolicking with mutual acquaintances and no sleeping over anywhere and no bringing guys back to the house at any time of the day. Our bodies may be shared from time to time, but our bed is just for us, the temple of our California King–sized love.
    The first time Ben went to the tubs in Berkeley I drove down to the one in San Jose to show my solidarity with our plan, but this lame little tit-for-tat proved unsatisfying. I wasn’t even horny at the time, and my morbid preoccupation with Ben and some nameless beast across the bay turned my lone encounter into a lackluster foursome. I was done in half an hour and ended up next to the snack machines, boring some poor guy half to death with tales of my happy May-September marriage.
    Since then, I’m more likely to be found cavorting with guys via my DVD on the occasional afternoons when Ben’s out playing. That’s fine with me. When it comes to sex, I’m happy to receive the occasional windfall, but I just don’t have the spirit for the hunt anymore. It’s enough to know that Ben will call as soon as he’s done, proposing plans for the evening and downplaying his fun. “Boy,”