Last notes for Madrigal are sweet
Transgender heroine confronts her past in Maupin’s final instalment
What could be more pleasant than having a dear old friend back in town? That’s the feeling Armistead Maupin’s many fans will get from reading his latest novel, The Days of Anna Madrigal.
This is the ninth and final instalment in Maupin’s bestselling Tales of the City series, made even more popular by the TV series of the same name starring Olympia Dukakis and Laura Linney. Dukakis played Anna Madrigal, the iconic transgender landlady of 28 Barbary Lane in San Francisco.
Madrigal is now 92, a little frail, but still smart as a tack and funnier than all get-out. No longer a landlady, she has decamped to San Francisco’s Duboce Triangle neighbourhood. She entertains her many visitors in her elegant parlour, where she sets out sherry, shortbread — and marijuana.
Funny, tender and occasionally suspenseful, this novel is also a kind of meditation on the end of things. Michael, one of Anna’s numerous friends, is himself past 60. Happily married to a younger man named Ben, Michael, who is HIV-positive, observes: “Teenagers rage against the end of childhood, old people against the end of everything.”
But Madrigal is not the raging sort. Rather, she is grateful for the life she’s had and for the company she’s kept, the people she calls her “logical family.”
When this novel opens, several members of that family are planning to attend the Burning Man art event in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. Anna is heading to another part of Nevada. Her old friend and former tenant Brian and his new wife, Wren, are taking Anna to Winnemucca, the town where she grew up. Only in those days, Anna was Andy Ramsey.
Maupin’s story shifts back and forth between the past and the present, in much the same way as Anna’s thoughts.
Michael always assumed Anna took the name Anna Madrigal because it is an anagram for “a man and a girl,” but it turns out there was more to the choice.
Andy’s mother was a madam who raised her son at the Blue Moon Lodge, the brothel she owned. But it was a big-hearted prostitute named Margaret (“she had a vast, promiscuous kindness”) who recognized Andy’s true nature before he did, giving the boy a chiffon gown that he wore in secret. In many ways, Margaret was more of a mother to Andy than his real mother.
Looking back, Anna understands that “You cannot be loved by someone who doesn’t want to know you.”
Anna has unfinished business in Winnemucca. Her memories take her back to her first crush — a Basque boy named Lasko who betrayed Andy when they were teenagers.
Other events take place at Burning Man, but the most powerful scenes in this novel are Anna’s memories of Winnemucca.
There’s no shortage of oddballs at Burning Man: a young man who offers his sperm to anyone who needs it; a poet who rails against genetically modified foods; a group of friends who operate a Hug Deli where visitors can order, “among other items, the Warm & Fuzzy Hug, the Beverly Hills Air Kiss … with side orders of Pinch, Tickle and Back Scratch.”
But the event is not about oddballs — it’s about community, a subject close to Maupin’s heart. How could Anna have become who she is without a community of loved ones to support her?
Jake, Anna’s young transgender housemate, would like Anna to come to Burning Man. But Anna would have to contend with the crowds and the desert dust. As Shawna, another friend of Anna, notes, “Dust was the constant here.”
Dust is an important symbol here. Though Maupin never invokes the phrase “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” from the Anglican burial service, it hovers over his story’s surface. Dust represents both creation and death.
Like all of us, though perhaps in a more dramatic way, Anna has created herself. And like all of us, she will return to dust.
On their way to Winnemucca, Brian, Wren and Anna take a break at Lake Tahoe. Wren removes Anna’s Chinese slippers so she can have the pleasure of walking barefoot in the sand. When Anna stops to wiggle her toes, she tells Wren:
“The earth knows exactly how to hold us if we just let it.” It’s a simple enough philosophy, but it goes a long way in explaining how Anna has made peace with her past and herself.