“She can’t do one goddamn show without talking about it. Not one. She’s a professional divorcée.”
“Yeah…seems like it.”
Brian swatted off the set. It felt curiously satisfying. “You’d think she’d at least wait until the divorce was final.”
His partner gave him a half-lidded smile. “I think she wanted to start with a new persona.”
Brian grunted. “Have you talked to her lately?”
“Not lately, really. Last week.”
“That’s lately.” He glanced guiltily toward the blank screen. “I’m sorry, man. If you wanna…”
“No. Who cares? I just thought she might do a Lucy tribute.”
“Well, here…” He reached toward the set. “Let’s turn it back on.”
“No. Really. I’m Lucyed out.”
How could he not be? thought Brian. Only yesterday his partner had passed an impromptu memorial at Eighteenth and Castro and been so moved by the sight that he’d bought a small box of chocolates (“for my favorite episode”) and laid it ceremonially among the flowers.
“Are you sure?” asked Brian.
“Yeah. All they ever show is the grape-stomping scene.”
“Who?”
“Mary Ann.”
“Not much. Just stuff about the show.”
“Nothing about me?”
Michael looked annoyed.
“Sorry…I promised I wouldn’t do that.”
“That’s right. You did.”
“O.K.” Brian nodded. “Point taken.”
“Life goes on, sport.”
“I Know.”
“You wanna do a movie tonight?”
“Sure.”
“Thack wants to see Scandal.”
“What’s that?”
“You know. The Christine Keeler thing.”
He shrugged. “Sure. Whatever.”
“Can you find a sitter?”
“Yeah. I think Mrs. M. is probably…”
“Well, well, well.” Michael was suddenly distracted by something out the window. “Look at that, would you?”
He looked.
“Jessica Rabbit is back.”
Sure enough, she was. This time in a pink cotton blouse and khaki short shorts. Brian moved to the window and watched as she strode down a sun-dappled aisle, her rustcolored hair swinging like draped satin. He could practically smell her.
Then, out of nowhere, Polly bounded onto the scene, taking a shortcut through the Burmese honeysuckle to head off her quarry at the pass. He couldn’t hear what was said, but both women smiled a lot, and Polly reached out at one point to touch Jessica’s arm.
“I knew it,” he said with quiet resignation.
Michael regarded him with sympathetic spaniel eyes.
“I had her spotted the minute she laid eyes on Polly.”
“Oh, well.”
Brian turned his gaze from the women and tried to be a good sport about it. “What the hell. More power to ’em.”
“I dunno,” said his partner, still watching.
“C’mon. That’s a pickup if I’ve ever seen one.”
“Then what’s she doing now?”
Jessica, in fact, was walking away from Polly, a purposeful glint in her slanting cat’s eyes. When she reached the end of the aisle, her creamy legs pivoted and scissored smartly up the path to the office.
“I’m outa here,” said Michael.
“Where are you going?”
“Just in back. I’ve got some reorganizing to do.”
“Michael…”
But his partner had already ducked into the storeroom and closed the door. By the time Brian had turned around again, Jessica Rabbit was at the door of the office. “Hi,” she breathed, gliding in.
“Hi,”
She came to the counter and gave him a languid smile. “Remember me?”
“Sure.”
“The bushes are doing great,” she said.
“Well…good. Glad to hear it.”
She studied him for the longest time, looking wryly amused.
“Is something the matter?” he asked.
“Oh, no.” She wet her lips. “Not a thing in the world.”
He did his damnedest not to squirm.
“Your friend out there”—she jerked her head toward the window, but didn’t take her eyes off him—“says you’re a free man again.”
He gazed uneasily out the window. Polly stood by the door of the greenhouse, watching them. She grinned at him for a moment, then thrust out her thumb triumphantly. He was certain he was blushing when he turned back to Jessica.
“Yeah,” he told her. “Looks like it.”
About the Author
ARMISTEAD MAUPIN is the author of Tales of the City, More Tales of the City, Further Tales of the City, Babycakes, Significant Others, Sure of You, and Maybe the Moon. In 1994 Tales of the City became a controversial but highly acclaimed miniseries on public television. More Tales of the City became a Showtime original miniseries in 1998. Maupin lives in San Francisco.
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PRAISE FOR ARMISTEAD MAUPIN
“I love Maupin’s novels for very much the same qualities that make me love the novels of Dickens.”
Chirstopher Isherwood
“A consummate entertainer who has made a generation laugh….[Maypin] works his dialogue with a jeweller’s precision and a playwright’s deployment of dramatic irony.”
Edmund White, Times Literary Supplement
“Armistead Maupin has this uncanny way of providing a different sort of mirror on life, which he then rotates to a particular angle, so that we can see the backs of our own heads—that wayward cowlick, the bald spot we’ve been trying to cover up, what’s really on our minds.”
Amy Tan
“Maupin has a genius for observation. His characters have the timing of vaudeville comics, flawed by human frailty and fueled by blind hope.”
Denver Post
“Armistead Maupin is a first rate, world-class novelist, creating characters so vivid, complicated, tender, and true as to seem utterly timeless…I’m willing to bet that fifty years from now Maupin’s work will be read for its detailed describtions of late twentieth century America, its rollicking humor and kind heart, its Chekovian compassion, its Wildean wit, its intricate…sometimes unbelievable but always utterly irresistible plotlines.”
Stephen McCauley
“Like those of Dickens and Wilkie Collins, Armistead Maupin’s novels have all appeared originally as serials. It is the strength of this approach, with its fantastic adventures and ashonishingly contrived coincidences, that makes these novels charming and compelling. Everything is explained and everything tieed up and nothing is lost by reading them individually. There is no need even to read them chronologically.”
Literary Review
BY ARMISTEAD MAUPIN
Novels
Tales of the City
More Tales of the City
Further Tales of the City
Babycakes
Significant Others
Maybe the moon
Collections
28 Barbary Lane
Back to Barbary Lane
Copyright
SURE OF YOU. Copyright © 1989 by Armistead Maupin. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © MAY 2007 ISBN: 9780061843044
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Contents
Pretty Is
Life with Harry
A Practicing New Yorker
Some Rather Exciting News
Well Enough Alone
Dance with Me
The Designer Bride
A Picnic
Parlor Games
Desperadoes
A Bad Dream
Lesbian Sauce
The Wave Organ
Interrogations
A Blind Item
The Third Whale
Disguises
Completely Amicable
A Long Evening
The Kastro
Cock-and-Bull Stories
Remembering's Different
Nickel-Dime Stuff
In the Loo
That Eternity Crap
Love on the Machine
Inheritance
Not That
Snaps
Stay, Then
Another Letter to Mama
Relief
That Much in Love
About the Author
Praise
Other Books by Armistead Maupin
Copyright
About the Publisher