Logical Family by Armistead Maupin

Author:Armistead Maupin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-08-12T04:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

I DID FIND A PLACE ON Russian Hill—that “pentshack” I mentioned earlier—a tiny studio perched on the roof of an old yellow-brick house at the crest of Union Street. The address was 1138½, a satisfying echo of 38½ Tradd Street, my storybook aerie in Charleston. To get to it you had to climb dozens of steps, some through the steep front garden, still more through the side of the house until you reached the roof. The moment I saw the view I knew I was home. There was a sliding glass door that opened on to a painted plywood deck that opened on to the full pageantry of San Francisco Bay and the distant mountains of Marin. At night the beacon on Alcatraz pulsed softly against the wall, so softly that I didn’t notice it for weeks.

The main room was only big enough to contain an armchair and a bed, a problem discussed at length when my parents visited and found me sleeping on a mattress on the floor. My mother suggested that what I needed was one of those captain’s beds with drawers beneath it, so I could at least have a little storage space. So my father measured the room with his conveniently foot-long feet and we drove out to an unpainted furniture store in Mill Valley. There, as any idiot could have predicted, the choice of a bed took on embarrassing dimensions.

“A single bed will give you more space in the room,” my mother insisted.

I told her I didn’t need to move around. I could put a table and chairs out on the deck and eat meals out there when the spirit moved me.

“That’s silly, darling. There’s only one of you, and the single bed is plenty roomy.”

I told her there was more storage in the double bed.

“You’ll be way too cramped in that room,” she insisted. “You’ll have to squeeze around the bed just to get to the kitchen.”

“I like a big bed,” I said feebly.

My father was the one who put an end to this. “For God’s sake, Diana, he’s a grown man. He might wanna have company some night.”

Did he know what sort of company? Certainly not.

Did my mother know?

Maybe. No, probably.

Did she really think that a smaller bed might keep it from happening?

I NAMED THE pentshack Little Cat Feet after that line in the Carl Sandburg poem. “The fog comes / on little cat feet.” It didn’t really need a name, but I’ve always enjoyed naming places, and the fog was so full of mystery when it rolled over my deck at night and blurred the Deco buildings on either side, leaving only the random yellow rectangles of their windows. Sometimes it got so thick that all I could see from my deck was the pink neon fish above a restaurant down at Fisherman’s Wharf. There was something insistently symbolic about that fish, like the billboard with the big eyeglasses in The Great Gatsby. For someone once steeped in Anglican mythology it was

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