Caroline's Daughters (33 page)

And since this conversation, if that is what it is (so far, more like a monologue by Joanne), is taking place on a mid-morning, a balmy cirrus-strewn blue April day, Liza thinks it unlikely that Joanne is drunk; this is not a post-lunch or cocktail-hour encounter. (Although Joanne sounds, well, not right.) In any case Liza is less concerned with Joanne's sobriety than with her own children, who are all wandering off in separate directions, at varying speeds. The baby, a terrific crawler, is on hands and knees, heading for some very attractive yellow weeds that would no doubt make her very sick. Jumping up, Liza moves fast, at the same time saying to Joanne, “Well, thanks.”

“Even on an old tape I'd know your voice right off.” Joanne now speaks in a crooning, private way, addressing only herself. And then she asks, “Do you girls all sound the same, you and your lovely sister Sage?”

Inattentively Liza tells her, “No, I think Sage and Portia just sound like themselves.”

“Sage, what a lovely name. What a name from the past, but simply, absolutely lovely.”

At that moment Liza, who has managed to pick up the baby and tuck her under one arm, sees that the older two are pulling each other's hair, for no apparent reason. Their faces are red, noses streaming. Rushing over, Liza with her free hand manages to separate them, a not-easy task—as at the same time she has two thoughts: one, this isn't like her children, there must be something in the air, like pollen; and, two, what on earth is eating Joanne Gallo? whatever is she talking about, all this about voices?

Liza settles back on the grass, with her three children more or less all over her, still sniffling.

“What I can't figure out is when and where you would go to do it, you and Roland. I just can't figure that,” sings Joanne Gallo. “When and where, where or when. When to fuck, where to fuck. Some problems!”

“Fuck!” echoes the oldest child, enthusiastically. A mysterious word, it is very powerful, she knows; all the kids at nursery school say it a lot. Her parents say it rarely.

“Joanne, I honestly don't know what you're talking about.” But as she says this Liza's stomach clutches with guilt, as though she had in fact made love with Roland Gallo. As she has indeed imagined doing, seeing him here in the park, sometimes. Thinking about him and Sage.

“I'll admit he does give great head, fantastic head, I used to come three or four times, did you?” Now Joanne's tone is conversational, almost rational.

“Joanne, look, you've really got it wrong.”

“Oho! No, no I don't. Not wrong. I'd know your voice any old where, I heard what you said to him.”

“Joanne, where do you think you heard my voice?”

“On Roland's tape. He keeps all his phone tapes, it looks like. The one where you talk about fucking in Palermo.”

“Joanne, I have never.”

Joanne is drunk, after all. As she moves closer Liza catches winy breath, sees unfocussed eyes, crazily blue.

Joanne cries, “I'd know your style, I'd know that voice anywhere. I know you! And why do you think he decided not to run for mayor?”

“I—”

“I told him I'd have the tapes played over KPIX!” shouts Joanne. “All of them, all the ones he's too dumb to throw out. Shit, he's as stupid as Nixon, and just as vain. And you, you've got a pretty filthy tongue in your head. Shit, I thought I was a dirty talker, he complains that I am, even if it used to turn him on. But you, honestly, you—”

By now all three of Liza's children are shrieking in panic. This is their first view of a raging adult, a grownup out of control, and they find it terrifying.

Preoccupied as she is with their comfort, stretched three ways for hugs and pats and murmurs of love, another part of Liza's mind still attends to Joanne, and in the midst of all the shouting the obvious answer comes to her: What Joanne must have heard was a tape of Jill talking to Roland Gallo. Or possibly Fiona. For one thing, they both have so-called dirtier mouths than Liza does.

But she cannot say any of that to Joanne, of course not. And when she can speak at all above the subsiding wails of her children she only says, “You know, you've got me confused with someone else. I've honestly never talked in my life to your husband on the phone. And barely anywhere else.”

“Fucking liar.”

The oldest child, now staring with interest at this more controlled grownup conversation, now takes this up, a new chant. “Fucking liar, fucking liar,” she sings with pleasure, as the second child, with even less real sense of the word than the first, tries to sing along.

“Oh, come on kids, shut up. I don't like that song,” Liza tells them. And, to Joanne, “I'm sorry, you're just wrong. All around.”

Joanne manages to get to her feet, and with a long baleful look
at Liza, she starts off across the grass to her own house. Roland Gallo's house.

Watching her unsteady progress—Joanne is wearing heels, a narrow black skirt—Liza is moved to go and help her along; it is terrible to see another person, a woman, in such dire straits, and when Joanne thinks of it later, presumably sober, how deeply humiliating this will be for her, for poor deluded crazy drunken Joanne.

However, both because of the children and because of Joanne's very possible response, extreme anger, Liza does not go to her; she stays where she is on the grass, and her lively, busy mind runs over the interesting scenarios, possibilities suggested by Joanne, who has now moved out of sight.

Just suppose, thinks Liza, that as she, Liza, once assumed, Jill had at one time indeed been a call girl: could she have met Roland Gallo (so to speak) in that capacity?

Liza plays with that idea. She envisions Jill in a posh hotel room, lying there waiting in some very fancy nightgown; she envisions the entrance of R.G.—whom Jill of course would instantly recognize from all his pictures in the papers. R.G. the family villain, the demon lover of Sage. What would Jill say—and what would Roland?

Next Liza wonders if she should tell any of this to Saul. This is a tricky problem, which she now ponders in all its complexity, as she gathers up her children and their gear (this gathering is an even trickier problem, both in physics and logistics), as she tries to start off for her house, for their lunch.

But is this information that he should have? Should he be told about a drunk and seriously delusional Joanne, at such an hour of the morning? Liza decides that it could, conceivably, be important, and she decides too that she can easily pass it off as gossip: silly me, you know how writers are, but guess who I saw in the park, and guess what she said?

More or less pulled together, trailing Pampers and toys, Liza and her group at last start up the rutted path by the twisted cypress trees, through an area of dark woods, and now bright spring weeds. Someone, a man, seems camped out there. Liza sees a red blanket, a torn backpack, a dark and grizzled head propped up against a tree. A black man lying there, bearded, in ragged dark clothes. Whom Liza automatically labels A Homeless Person. And she remembers
Caroline's fantasy, the homeless all over the parks, armies of homeless, taking over all the “lovely homes,” reclaiming space for themselves. Reclaiming this last lovely city for their own.

The man stirs, shifts his face slightly, so that for one instant Liza has a terrifying sense of recognition: could it possibly be John Lee, this derelict?

In the next instant she thinks that of course it could be, but most probably is not. However, despite herself she finds that she is hurrying faster, rushing against the possibility that this man could be someone she knows.

“I really think she must have been drunk. Maybe not totally plastered but close to it, I
know
she'd been drinking. And the venom. It was really scary, the kids were very scared, they'd never seen anything like that, and actually I was scared too. I mean, I don't suppose she's a violent person but these days anyone could be, couldn't they. You read so much about violence. Random—”

“Yes.” Saul's tone as always is fairly neutral, noncommittal, but he seems to wait for her to continue.

Having decided that she should tell Saul all this about Joanne Gallo (and besides she wants to, she needs the reassurance of his listening), Liza goes on. “So nutty all around. Roland keeping the tapes of his intimate phone calls, having them in his house. What vanity!”

“Condoms in the sock drawer.”

“Exactly, but a lot more cruel. And so crazy, Joanne assuming it was me she heard. God, I barely know the guy. It's got to have been Jill or Fiona, and I rather think Fiona, don't you?”

“I don't know. But you're right, you do sound incredibly alike. You all. And not like anyone else.”

“There was some craziness about making love in Palermo. Is Roland a Sicilian? I suppose he is. But honestly, the poor woman. My feeling is, and of course I could be making this up, in some accidental way she played that particular tape, and it more or less pushed her over the edge. It must have been a couple of weeks ago, she mentioned his not running for mayor. I mean, she's always seemed a little, uh, upset, but now she's really out of control. This
is the first time I've seen her for a couple of weeks, come to think of it.”

Frowning deeply, Saul makes an ambiguous sound. Liza would swear that he means (but would not say): I haven't seen her either.

“I just don't know what to do,” says Liza, vaguely. She has decided not to mention the possible John Lee to Saul.

“About anything,” Saul gloomily agrees. And then, decisively, “Excuse me, I have to go phone.”

“Leave me some money, will you?”

“Here's all I have on me.”

Early the next morning Liza gets a phone call (it is not so early in New York, it is 10). From Kathy, the editor at
You
. “It's sort of odd the way this happened,” Kathy tells her. “But it's really good news, I think. Anyway, last night my boyfriend, he's an editor at T & T, was fooling around with some stuff on the coffee table—I'm afraid I don't put things away. He picked up the galleys of your story, he's a compulsive reader by the way, and he really flipped out halfway through. The greatest Sixties stuff he's read. You've really got the tone, he went on and on. He says you've got to write a novel. This could be the first chapter, he says. And get this, he thinks he could get you an advance on what you have so far. You guys must be about the same age?”

“I'm almost thirty-five.”

“So's he, and really suffering over it. I guess I should be more sympathetic.” Kathy laughs, giving Liza to understand that she, Kathy, is of course considerably younger. Maybe just thirty.

“Well, that's really great,” Liza tells Kathy.

“Well, it is, I've honestly never heard him go on like that, he's a very restrained type. You know, New England.”

“But really, a novel?”

Seated at her desk, in the screened-off corner of her bedroom that she has designated as her study, the idea of a novel begins to seem slightly less implausible to Liza. There are after all these notebooks,
these pages and pages of scribbling, done when that was all she had time for, she thought. Those random jottings. Random, but there they are.

She picks up one of the big loose-leaf books and, opening it, begins to skip through, not exactly reading but catching a sentence here and there that makes her smile, or frown, remembering something.

Absorbed in such contemplation, in speculations, Liza at first does not quite take in the fact that the front door downstairs has opened and closed, and that someone (it must be Saul) is hurrying toward her, hurrying upstairs. This is not unusual: when he has a cancellation or just a free hour Saul does occasionally come home. (Liza does wish he had not chosen just this moment to do so, and she scolds herself for that wish.)

Saul looks elated, and out of breath. “We have to talk,” he says, as he sometimes does, positioning himself on the corner of the bed that is nearest Liza's desk. Nearest Liza.

He is very excited: can he be going to announce that he has fallen in love with someone? Liza for one instant wonders this, and in the next she castigates herself. What a vulgar, low, obvious mind I have, she thinks.

“You remember the team of doctors I told you about?” Saul asks, right off. “The medical aid in Central America? Well—”

He wants to join up. To go there to help, for a year. He had thought they did not need a psychiatrist, but it turns out that they do, very much. To help people who have been imprisoned, maybe tortured. Or maybe just very upset people. “And you know I'm very good at first aid too,” Saul reminds his wife. He also reminds her, unnecessarily, of how often he has expressed frustration at what he has felt as his total uselessness, his near-despair at doing “nothing”: seeing middle-class neurotics in such a needy world. “I suppose this is a form of middle-aged angst,” Saul says.

“It could be a lot worse.” Liza smiles. And with an odd sense of permissiveness, of motherliness, even, she thinks, Is this what women come to, finally, with men? Do they inevitably, one way or another, turn us into their mothers?

On the other hand, she very much means it, she does agree with Saul that for every reason he should go. Wherever. Ideologically and emotionally, he is right, and she is with him, supporting.

He asks, “You're not afraid I'll run off with some Salvadoran guerrilla woman?”

“No, not really. Do you want me to be? But you know how smug I am, at least according to my sisters.”

Also, Liza is thinking, with Saul away she will get more writing done. She simply, surely will. One less person in her immediate orbit will make a lot of difference. She can write at night. Saul is not an especially demanding man; on the other hand, in his way he is—quite demanding.

“I'm afraid this pretty much takes care of our Mexico trip,” Saul then tells her.

He sounds so rueful, so guilty-boy, that Liza can only laugh at him—as she would at a child. “Such a surprise,” she tells him.