Caroline's Daughters (15 page)

Since Sage and Noel's romance had been fairly brief, about five or six months, this was the first time that several of the wedding guests had ever met Noel, including Jill. (Caroline and Ralph were already off in Lisbon, and had yet to meet him.) And Jill had two very clear, related impressions. The first of course had to do with his extreme handsomeness, that curved mouth, indented chin and
all that thick dark hair made him almost too handsome, nearly pretty. And the second very clear idea that she had of Noel, right off, was that he was a really big flirt. A real male tease who would never, never in his heart be married. Jill felt this quite clearly despite the fact that on that day, certainly, Noel was all over Sage with affection, little kisses and small touchings. If you didn't watch too carefully you might think he was mad for Sage, which is what poor Sage herself must have thought, probably.

Jill, though, had picked up on a certain look, a look that Noel surely meant for her to think was meant for her alone (and recently he has said as much, in one of their increasingly long phone calls: “My wedding day, and I couldn't take my eyes off you, babe. My new sister. I thought, Oh, right!”). But Jill also knew that his flirty look could have landed on anyone, any woman, that is, whom Noel had sized up as the best-looking, or simply the most available, or the sexiest, maybe, in any group he landed in. At that moment. For Noel was a very momentary person, Jill knew that right off, along with all the rest she knew about him, just seeing him that first time. They were in some ways rather alike, she knew that.

Will Sage ever work that out? Will she ever get a fix on what Noel is really like? Probably not, Jill decides.

In any case, on Noel's wedding day, Jill just happened to be the best around, the best in sight, for the moment. Liza was pregnant (of course) and Fiona was in one of her imperious, Red Queen moods (Caroline used to tease her when they were teenagers, “Come on, Fi, please don't Red Queen it with me, I'm tired”). Fiona, cross and bossy, was not at her most attractive. And Portia was much too young, and that day especially nerdy in her pinkish Indian gauze, so Cost Plus. And there was Jill in her bare black dress. No one cares about black at weddings any more, it's all right to wear black. Jill had assured herself of that, since she wanted to wear that particular great dress—although if Caroline had been around she just might not have.

Anyway, Noel was managing to be wildly affectionate with Sage, while communicating quite another set of messages to Jill. Nothing really sleazy, though, nothing to put her off, make her mad. Noel's glances at Jill said, rather, Can't we be friends? And, We two have a certain understanding of how things are, now, don't we?

And then more looks. And after that, at all the so-called family gatherings, over the next few years, some idle but not really idle conversation.

Very little comes to Jill today on the Midland mineralogy publication, and so she simply gives it a negative report. Which it very likely deserved. Forget it, guys.

Walking home through Chinatown, along jam-packed Grant Avenue, among all the lagging tourists, fat and ugly in their polyester travelling clothes, and the fatter and uglier Chinese, shopping and stopping to talk—and oh, how long and loud they talk, those Chinks, Jill hates them all—she wonders why she walks this way. It's all so terrible, and getting worse, daily more Chinese, or whoever those people are, from wherever, and every day more tourists. The two major San Francisco industries, Jill with some asperity thinks: tourism, and taking in Orientals.

And then she thinks, Christ, I haven't fucked anyone for over a month, no wonder I'm turning into such a snarling racist.

She thinks, I hope, I really hope that Buck doesn't start calling me again with any big Game plans. I might, I really might just say yes. Maybe that's what my new nightgown's all about. Not Noel. Maybe it's really a brand-new uniform for the Game, when I always secretly hope for that first John to come back again.

Besides, I could really use a thousand bucks about now. I really could.

If she takes a long, foaming, scented bath, and then tries on her new nightgown, no one will call her. Jill is superstitiously very sure of that. It is her kind of logic.

And so she does just that. She lies back in a tub that is scented with bath oils and bubbles, she lies there admiring her breasts. So nice, small hard pink nipples just peering up through the foam. She loves her breasts.

But she is thinking of sex, distractingly. Of course she is. All the
terrific men she's done it with. And it all seems so long ago, dear God! As though sex were something she just didn't do any more. As though everything were dangerous now. Which everything is, she thinks, the air we breathe is carcinogenic, probably.

Glancing around her steamy bathroom—but basically a beautiful room, all bright glass and steel and mirrors, she spent a fortune on this bathroom—Jill's eyes come to rest on the phone, in its cradle on the wall, not far from her head. Just as, jarringly, it rings.

She reaches for the receiver. “Hello?”

“Hello.” It is indeed Buck, which is somehow not at all a surprise.

However, as they pass through the preliminary small talk, not having seen each other or communicated for quite a while, as Jill is thinking, Well, why not? Why not right now, tonight?—in a very slow way she realizes that Buck is not calling about the Game. No John.

For one thing, he is taking far too long to get to the point: if he had some guy whom he wanted her to “meet” there would be some urgency, some haste to get on with it. But no, tonight he runs on and on about nothing at all. New restaurants, stale gossip. As though they were big friends.

And then, as she has almost turned off listening to Buck, almost gone back to her own concerns, Jill quite clearly hears, from Buck, “slight cash-flow problem.”

Buck Fister wants to borrow money from her? Is he out of his mind?

Without having consciously decided how to handle this, Jill instantly tells him, “Oh, me too. I was just thinking that today, low on cash. Do you think it's a trend? Are we all going broke, the whole country?”

A pause, and then a heavy, “Well, could be.”

Jill decides to help him save face, a little. “It's just as well I'm low, though,” she babbles. “I went to Magnin's this afternoon, God knows why, and the clothes, well, really I can't tell you how dreadful. Just the worst. Just made for all those Peninsula ladies. Stanford golfers.”

Buck is unresponsive for a moment (he must be in bad shape),
and then he asks, “Do you think the three of you McAndrew girls sound like your mother, or just like each other?”

Slightly taken aback—and besides, the water is getting cool and she doesn't want to turn on more hot, Buck would hear and know where she was, and she doesn't want to be that intimate with Buck—Jill tells him, “I have no idea. I really don't know how we sound, I'm so used to us all. But I think Caroline sounds more English than we do. Like her mom.”

“I suppose. Never met the lady.” And then Buck asks, “How well do you know Roland Gallo?”

“Hardly at all. I've seen him at parties, restaurants. We sort of avoid each other. Is he going to run for mayor, do you think?”

“I wouldn't be surprised.” Another pause, until Buck's next question: “Is Fiona seeing anyone special these days?”

He cannot be wanting to fix Fiona up with Gallo. The nerve! Hiding a genuine shiver with a small false laugh, Jill gets up and out of the tub, still clutching the receiver as she asks him, “What is this, a quiz show about my family?”

“I just wondered.”

Buck never “just wonders.” Jill knows that as well as he does, but she does not at the moment feel inclined to pursue his questions. What's it to him, about Fiona? If he thinks Fiona would ever play his Game he's dead wrong.

For a moment then Jill experiences her cold and familiar panic: if anyone, especially anyone in her family—oh Christ!—should ever, ever find out, she would quite simply, actually die. She would have to. Which is a reason she has to be nice to Buck.

“Dear Buck,” she now says. “It's been adorable but I've got to do my exercises, it's been such a day.”

And with a few further endearments, and vaguer plans to meet, they both hang up.

Drying and powdering herself, applying lotions, Jill still feels a little cold. She feels very alone, and scared. Her life is so exposed, she sometimes thinks. She is running so fast she could fall, and there's no one for her to count on. Her mother, Caroline, is great, of
course, but all Caroline really cares about these days is Ralph. Her last big love, old Ralph. And besides, she, Jill, is too old even to think about her mother, in terms of dependence.

Even her apartment, which most of the time she is crazy about, is very proud of, at other times seems precarious, perched as it is on a high edge of Telegraph Hill, facing out to the bay. It could fall, there could be an earthquake, or just a simple and terrible cave-in. It has happened before.

Sometimes now she can hardly bear the sound of the foghorns. They sound like prehistoric animals, huge ugly mammals out there in the water. Groaning, dying.

But she might as well at least try on her new gown, Jill decides. In fact she had better, she had better break this mood, or she'll never sleep. She wishes she had a little of the white stuff.

Slipping the silk down over her head, down her body, Jill then thinks, Oh, it was worth it, worth every fucking cent. Just the feel of this silk, so light.

Going over to the full-length mirror she sees—she sees that never at any moment in her life has she been more beautiful. Never so perfect.

A pity.

She sighs, and picks up the peignoir.

And then the phone rings—as she must have known it would. It had to.

“Noel?” She laughs. “Are you crazy? It's so late.” She laughs again, a small excited laugh. “Whatever are you doing in North Beach? Are you crazy? Well, okay, since you're already almost here. But just for a minute, I really mean it. One minute, Noel.”

O
f all her house-sitting jobs, the one that Portia likes least is in a million-dollar (probably more, by now) condominium on top of Nob Hill, very near the Pacific Union Club, to which Buck Fister and Roland Gallo so vainly aspire. The cathedral, Fairmont and Mark Hopkins, all that. Portia dislikes the neighborhood, the hotels and traffic, the Gray Line buses clogging and polluting everything. Even the cathedral seems to her austere, too new and cold. She is not even fond of the small park there, where uniformed nannies guard the large expensive English prams.

And the rooms themselves of this extremely pricey condo are truly terrible. Their owner, a deeply insecure, semi-alcoholic, emotionally battered woman (from New Orleans: as a young beauty she modelled at Neiman-Marcus, and married Big Oil in the person of a man who after various forms of “minor” abuse broke her arms, a farewell tussle that entitled her to three times the amount of alimony that he was protesting)—in any case, poor Janice Lee is as vulnerable as she is rich, and Portia feels sorry for her.

The insecurity and the money, though, produced these frightful rooms with their pseudo-comfortable, pseudo-English look: everywhere wicker and chintz, and towering glass-fronted bookcases filled with gilt- and dark-leather-bound volumes, all unread by human eyes. Even the bedrooms look like studies into which beds have been discreetly placed, in disguise.

It is awful here, Portia thinks, waking with Harold in what is the
least “done” room, ostensibly for a maid—but Janice Lee never has maids, she can't trust them.

“Why do we do this, really?” Portia asks Harold, on that dark October morning. It is supposed to be Indian summer, but not so; a dirty fog obscures what could be a view of the bay, and the Bay Bridge, and a mean wind blows leaves about the little park.

“Do you mean, stay in this place or, uh, have sex?”

Actually the sexual act just completed, more or less, between them was indeed what Portia meant. Why do we do this? was a cry from the heart, or the flesh. Why? Why these clumsy pawings at each other's bodies, Baby Oil spilled all over the sheets.

However, given an out (it is so much easier, obviously, to complain about this place), Portia decides not to go into their sexual failure of rapport. Or, not now. And Portia knows herself to be a coward, with an exaggerated fear of hurting Harold. “This awful place,” she says. And then she says what is also true, “I'm worried about Sage.”

“She goes next week?”

“Week after. And she's been so up, so high on it all. And that guy in New York, he keeps puffing at her, blowing her up.”

“How's Noel reacting?”

Portia looks at Harold, feeling the friendship that she counts on, with him, despite the floundering sex. “Good question,” she says. “He seems to be suddenly terrifically busy, all over the place. Sage says she barely sees him, he's so busy. But she doesn't seem to care, that's how high she is.”

“What a handsome guy. An Irish prince,” Harold muses.

“Superficially speaking.” Prim Portia, who suddenly wonders, Could Harold too be in love with Noel, and if so does he know that?

Harold stretches his legs out, longer legs even than Portia's are, and with one hand rubs at his stubbly blond chin (his sadly small, shyly recessive chin), and he looks around. “This place is quite ghastly, though. Holy heaven.” And then he laughs, “Ports, I've got the greatest idea, why don't we just trash it? Take a little jewelry so the cops will think robbery? We'd really be doing Janice Lee a great big favor.”

“Someone could probably work out that it was us,” Portia tells him, dryly.

Easily deflated, Harold sighs and accepts her logic. “I guess,” he says. “But still.”

“You know what I most hate about this place?” Portia asks him.

“Let me guess. Let me count the ways.”