Caroline's Daughters (19 page)

“Well, here you go. Cheers, honey. This'll kill us or cure us, right?” Jim raises his glass, which is tilted in her direction.

“Cheers. Jim. Darling Jim.”

Jim gives her a mildly questioning look that lasts only a moment. Then he sits down on his largest chair, and smiles. “Nice of you to come by.”

“This is the best drink I've ever had.”

“Good. Let's see, you go to New York next week?”

“Well, actually it's been postponed for a while. Maybe January. But I'm sure this is better all around. January, much better. I'll have more time to get stuff together.” Sage feels her own smile to be brilliant, convincing. She can feel the brilliance, the warmth.

Outside Jim's apartment's long windows a darkness that has seemed sudden now descends. Only streetlamps are visible, blurs of yellow, and the occasional slow beams of passing cars. The park across the way would be entirely dark by now, the sole and secret property of whatever and whoever choose to spend their nights there. Dogs, stray cats and smaller animals. Rodents, lizards. And for all anyone knows people are sleeping now out there in the park, in hidden or not-so-hidden corners. Huddled singly or perhaps together. Cold. Afraid.

“Aren't you sort of gulping that?” Jim asks.

“Well, maybe I am. I guess I need another, though, don't you? And then I'll make our dinner.”

“You weren't kidding about drowning germs, were you. But maybe it will cure this goddam cold. What do doctors know.” And he goes off to make more drinks.

So in love! All her life she has been in love with Jim, Sage now sees this very clearly, and her old shrink used to hint as much, now that Sage thinks of it—in her murky Viennese way. Roland, Noel—they were nothing, really.

And Jim will make everything all right. He always has.

“You could sit here,” she tells him. She pats the sofa, and smiles upward.

“And give you my cold for sure? I'll try not to.” But he takes that seat.

Sage puts down her drink, and in another minute they are kissing,
wildly kissing. Opened mouths, wet. Tongues. Hands frantic on each other's backs.

Jim's hands grasp at her waist, then one hand reaches up her thigh, beneath the short silk, touching the top of her panty hose.

But then, as though her flesh had burned him, Jim cries out, “Jesus Christ! Sage! Crazy!”

His hand withdrawn as though from fire, he has moved back, away from her, and now he tries very hard to laugh. Chokes, tries again, and coughs. At last he gets out a laugh. “Drunk! I'm really drunk, have to stay off martinis, pure poison!” With the back of his other hand, not the one that touched her, he wipes at his mouth.

She cries out, “Jim, I love you! No one else. Always—” But her heart is leaden, weighing her down.

Jim stands up, beyond her grasp. “Honey, I love you too. But the truth is I feel really lousy. I'm sick. I'm going to call you a cab, while you get dressed.”

Automatically, almost, Sage bows her head down, down nearly to her knees; the classic pose of a scorned, grieved woman.

But also a woman who is about to be very sick. Who will vomit.

She jumps up, rushes to the bathroom, barely makes it, before leaning into the bright-black bowl and emptying herself of everything. Of bitter bile. Of nothing.

In the cab, Sage forces herself to sit rigidly upright, resisting the impulse to hurl herself to the floor. To lie there, sick and hidden. As everything flashes by, in the dark. Lights, cars, stores. Up hills, down hills. Toward home. Russian Hill. And Noel.

But I don't have any money.

That rational, true sentence prints itself across Sage's mind, along with a clear and reasonable memory: as she checked out at the Cal-Mart she noted only one bill, a ten, and a little change left. Pretty close, she remembers thinking that, pretty close, and remembers too the self-congratulatory note of the phrase, of that distant moment. A golden time, afternoon. And now, now she is hurtling along in a cab, she has given that last ten to a bag lady who seemed not even to want it, and Sage has no money to pay.

Pulling at her bag, a drawstring sack which is hard to open, Sage
examines her billfold again and finds—yes, two singles that she somehow didn't see before. And in her change purse a couple of quarters, dimes, some pennies.

The cab's meter says $3.25. Already, and they have just reached Van Ness Avenue.

“Oh, I have to get out here!” she cries out. “Sorry! Sorry—stop!”

“Lady, you all right?” He is black, black-bearded, enormous. He could kill her, in a way she wishes he would. Just dispose of her, somewhere.

“Sick! No money. Here.”

“Lady, you be sick I take you home.”

“No—” Sage has pushed all her money into his hand, pushed down the handle of the door, and she is out, out on the street. She is standing there unsteadily for a moment, dazed, and then heading across Van Ness with the crowd.

And now she will have to walk up Union Street, up all that hill, and her feet hurt. She is limping along, she is not at all sure she will make it.

And she has left all her food at Jim's, she now remembers.

Jim, whom she now can never see again.

S
ome letters from Liza McAndrew:

Dear John Lee,

In case you're still in Mendocino, I still think about you, sometimes. In fact these days I spend a lot of time down in J.K., again, but now I'm there with my kids. Not quite the same, not at all. I sort of look for you there, though. I think how great it would be if you just showed up. Not bloody likely, right?

Love. Still. Anyway. From Liza.

John Lee, in 1968, when Liza was eighteen, was a hero to most of her friends, and especially to Liza. A dropout from Lowell High, a couple of years older than Liza and her friends, and a semi-dropout from his very middle-class black family (both parents successful lawyers), John Lee was in Paris during the May riots, had hung out with Danny the Red and been arrested (briefly). Had fought the police in the People's Park confrontation, again been arrested, held overnight in Santa Rita prison. Had smoked dope in front of City Hall.

John Lee got a job working nights at the Rincon Annex, the main post office, down on Market Street. Sometimes he would show up in the afternoons at Julius Kahn, usually with some really good dope. And then he and Liza, or whoever (John Lee was very popular), would take off for his place over on Haight Street for what John Lee called “breakfast,” and some very fancy screwing.

He was a sexual as well as a political guru in those days. He spoke Sixties messages: against possessiveness, lasting involvements, exclusivity, as well as all the Fifties icons of togetherness, marriage and houses, cars and kids.

And John Lee looked quite a lot like his idol, Martin Luther King—a compact handsome man with flat slant eyes, and a resonant, compelling voice.

Everything John Lee said was received as gospel by his bevy of blonde followers, and they all suffered considerable remorse (big guilt trips) when inevitably they fell in love with him, wanting him for their very own, resenting the others.

Liza fared better than the rest; for one thing she had heard all that stuff before from Sage and her Movement friends, for another she had quite a number of alternative loves of her own.

But she still remembers his near-priapic skills. His interesting eyes and his voice.

Another letter:

Dear Jonathan H. {in Liza's high-school class there were four Jonathans},

I seem to read about you all the time these days. Is it true, are you really such a hot shot Montgomery Street guy? I guess you must be, there you are in the phone book, in that old firm.

I am spending half my time, still, down in J.K., but it's a little different now, with babies in the sandbox.

In case you're ever wandering by that way, there I am.

I wonder if we still look sort of alike.

Would it be fun to talk?

Anyway. Love, still, from Liza.

Jonathan H. in the late Sixties was a plump but handsome blonde boy who did just slightly resemble Liza, with his pale-gray California eyes and long straight blond hair. And this was a joke between them, once they became lovers: “We're the fucking Bobbsey Twins. Incest! It's terrific!” Like most dumb jokes, it was a great deal funnier when they were stoned, which they both were, much of the time.

Jonathan's name was Jonathan Hamilton; his extremely rich parents lived in an outer Broadway mansion, conveniently near to J.K., to which Liza and Jonathan used to repair for hours of sweet sex and dope and cookies from Fantasia. After high school Jonathan went up to Reed College, against the protests of his Harvard (both of them) parents, and then on to a commune near Vancouver. And then back home to a proper marriage to a girl from Belvedere, to a job in his father's brokerage firm on Montgomery Street. A house on Green Street, on Russian Hill, and routine appearances in what passes in San Francisco for high society.

Liza wrote a similar note to Jonathan K., a dark wispy boy, the shy and poetic prodigal son of a famous criminal lawyer who always feared that his son might turn out “queer,” who used to beg Liza to come up to the family house at Lake Tahoe. Liza and Jonathan K. were terrific friends and only very occasional lovers.

She found his name very easily in the phone book, and saw that he was living in the Castro. She thought with great affection of Jonathan K.

And a note to Gregory Chan, who was busted for stealing socks from the Young Man's Fancy, which he did on a silly dare, and got thrown out of school. Whence he went on to M.I.T. A good friend of Liza's, a part-time lover, but she had heard nothing from or about him for years.

And she wrote to Adam Argent, son of the writer David Argent, whom Liza especially disliked (the father, not the son). She felt a little sorry for Adam. So embarrassing, to have a father chasing girls about your own age, and writing those awful sexist books, one after another.

For Liza, the first effect of having written those letters is a certain new spice in her Julius Kahn afternoons. Getting ready to go down
there, in addition to the necessary cookies and sweaters and Kleenex and Pampers and wheel toys, these days she remembers to insert her gold studs or sometimes big silver loops in her ears. To brush on mascara and to spray a tiny shot of Chanel 19 behind each ear.

And there she sits, in the suddenly glorious October weather—in what is often referred to as one of the most beautiful pieces of real estate in San Francisco, the park within the Presidio, a pocket of city land in the Army's lovely woods, the cypresses, eucalyptus and pines that, should the Army leave, as is sometimes feared, developers would almost instantly decimate. In the meantime those beautiful acres of the most northern, western tip of the city, overlooking the Golden Gate and looking out to sea, to the sometimes visible Farallons—all that is occupied in part by ugly barracks and just as ugly, if larger, officers' houses. And by beautiful country-seeming woods. And the Julius Kahn Playground. J.K.

There sits Liza, on her green slatted bench, her children for the moment happily ensconced in the sandbox—Liza, waiting for almost anything, for anyone. Fat pretty Liza, in her old pale-blue denim skirt, her blue shirt, with her nice long bare brown legs in sandals, silver loops in her ears, her long fair hair clean and brushed.

There is much more of curiosity than of personal eagerness, though. This is not a young woman awaiting the arrival of possible lovers with any anxiety, she is not at all worried that they might not show up. Liza is neither an anxious nor a fearful person, nor is she in any sense lonely, and the chances seem good that she will never be so. After all, at birth she fell into a young family in love: Jim and Caroline McAndrew were surely somewhat in love, at first, and it was a family in which there was already a lonely, somewhat anxious older sister, Sage, who was eager to welcome and love this pretty new baby. (Sage's more negative, rivalrous feelings found their objects quite readily and soon enough with Fiona, and then with Jill; by the advent of Portia she was again welcoming, and possibly looking for an ally.)

Instead of any former lover, though, the person who now approaches
Liza, teetering unsteadily on very high heels across the grassy meadow, is Joanne Gallo.

“Joanne. Hi.”

“Oh, hi. You're not Sage or Fiona, you're Liza, right?” With one of her sillier laughs Joanne sits down on the bench, fairly near but not exactly next to Liza.

“No kids today?” Saying this, Liza then remembers that Joanne and Roland have only the one pale unhappy late-life child, poor girl.

“No, I had lunch with my art group. God, I feel so drunk, we had margaritas.”

There is a long dark stain of something, possibly coffee, on Joanne's purple silk shirt (Liza, who tends to spill things, finds this endearing, sympathetic), and her dark-green skirt is all awry. Her hair is all over the place, white-blonde, too teased and sprayed.

Curiously, at the moment of Liza's noticing her hair, Joanne chooses to say, “I'm really blonder than you and your sisters are even, aren't I. But no one knows it's real. The truth is, my mother's Icelandic. An Iceland poppy, my dad used to call her, and sometimes Roland called me that. So I really am more of a blonde than you, all you sisters.”

“Except Sage.” Liza speaks that name quite deliberately, looking directly at Joanne as she does so.

“Oh, Sage,” says Joanne, with an unsuccessful flutter of one hand. “Sage is history. What's the name of the stockbroker sister? She's the one you ought to warn. I'm sure she's on his list. The next one.”

Liza, having never spent much time with drunks, finds Joanne's slippage in and out of drunkenness unnerving—and that is what she does: within a single sentence, almost, Joanne will be focussed, sensible-sounding, and then as suddenly she is not sensible at all, or focussed. And what on earth is she talking about, these hints of Roland and Jill?