Caroline's Daughters (40 page)

And so Jill got up. “I'm Jill,” at which everyone clapped for the first and only time, and they all said, Hi, Jill.

And then she told about her job, the lucky hostile takeover, all the money, and what a good time she had with her Mercedes and the place on Telegraph Hill. And then Buck coming up with the idea of dates, paid dates. The Game.

They are not really sympathetic to all this. Jill sees thin lines of disapproval down those faces, slightly narrowed eyes, even looks of impatience, of questioning. Some people seem to wonder what she is doing up there, talking on and on about herself. But isn't this what you're supposed to do? Everyone said so. “You'll love it,” everyone said.

Britt is standing up, about to interrupt, but Jill does not want to be interrupted. She is just now coming to the good part, the why-she's-here part. “And then I got involved with this guy who was doing a lot of drugs, and drank a lot.” (This is something of an exaggeration: Noel's drink and drug use were not remarkable, not until that ultimate night, in Stinson Beach, and Bolinas.) “One of the problems was that he was married to my sister. My half-sister—” This sounds like a broken record, and Jill pauses there.

At which Britt jumps in. “We all thank Jackie very much for sharing—”

“Jill. My name is Jill.”

“Oh, sorry. Jill. We all thank Jill for her very interesting share, and now, if there are any other first-timers—”

And so Jill sits down, and a dark young woman in a motorcycle outfit, black jersey and leather tights, gets up. The guy she lives with is in jail now, she says; he was caught dealing crack and there was a big stash of money in their house that got stolen. She has two children, she's pretty sure that she's pregnant again. Her husband was really nice, before all the wine and dope and then the crack. They'd grown up together in Fredericksburg, Texas. They came out here together, and then—

Overcome by tears, she cannot continue. Several people near her hurry to her side, with big hugs.

What is all this about what fun AA meetings are? Jill is wondering that. All she has heard about the neat people you meet there, how everyone loves you at AA meetings. Do you have to cry to get that love? turn yourself into some sort of junkie sobber?

After a while, during which Jill does not pay much attention, having decided that she does not like it there, not at all—they all stand up and join hands to pray. More about serenity. And then the meeting is over.

But no, not over. Another part seems to have only begun. Everyone gets up and goes over to another person, they greet each other, and hug (to Jill the hugging looks rather unnecessarily prolonged). And then they talk very seriously, sometimes with more tears.

A long way from the door, Jill hopes to get out without an encounter of that sort; she begins to sidle in the direction of the exit, with what she hopes is a passable smile on her face. But she is wrong again: a man whom she had not noticed, possibly because he is exceptionally small, about five feet, Jill guesses—this man comes up to her out of nowhere. “Hi, I'm Morry,” he says, and reaches up to be hugged.

And Jill obediently reaches down. If she did not, she believes that all the gooey love in that room would congeal into stony rage; they would all turn and look and start yelling at her. Hitting her, maybe.

“I was really interested in your share,” says Morry, once they disentangle. He looks up at her with tiny button-black eyes, appraising eyes, old eyes, the skin around them is slack and yellow. Morry looks like a very old child—could he be a dwarf? He is not shaped like most dwarfs are, though, he is just very small. He smiles up at Jill, expectantly.

“Well, I somehow didn't feel I was saying the right thing,” she tells him. “I mean I wasn't talking about my, uh, drinking.”

Startlingly, Morry laughs at this, a curious small wheezing sound. And then he says, “You meant to come to an AA meeting, is that right?”

“Of course. Yes.”

“And you've come to Al-Anon instead. And you know how I know? Because I did exactly the same thing myself, other way around. Meant to go to Al-Anon, found myself in AA instead.”

“Al-Anon?”

“Folks related to drinkers, living with them. Parents of them. Married to. Trouble those kinds of ways.”

“Oh Jesus.”

“First way you know is how happy they all are over to AA. All laughing and clapping at each other's stories. And smoking, you never saw so much heavy smoke in all your days.”

“God.” Later Jill supposes she will find this funny, a good story to tell around. How she tried and failed to go to an AA meeting. But just now she does not.

“What I wondered,” says Morry, looking up at her with those hard little eyes, “I wondered did you ever think of starting up one of those
houses?
Hearing your share, I just wondered over that. Not anything bad but just someplace that so-called singles could go to on their own, and maybe the management would come up with some sort of a friend. Like when you go out to a restaurant without a tie, and they lend you one.”

Leaning down, as clearly as she can, Jill whispers, “You're out of your fucking mind.” And then, no longer caring what anyone in that room might do or say, Jill bolts, she is out of there within one minute. For good.

After that, but certainly no thanks to that meeting, that accidental brush with Al-Anon, things do improve considerably for Jill. Back at work, her world seems after all not to have fallen apart; it is in fact very much the same as it always was, or as it has been during this decade, the elegant Eighties.

“It looks like the Eighties will go on forever,” a broker friend remarks, during a chance breakfast encounter at Maxine's, one unusually bright summer morning.

“The market looks good.”

“Yeah. Big surprise. So much for the doom-and-gloomers.”

“I have to admit, I was a little surprised.”

“There you go. Hey, you're looking great these days, babe. Dinner some night?”

“Sure, why not?” Why not is that this creep is very married, with
a big house down in Burlingame, to which he is known for returning very late.

As Jill is leaving, at the end of the counter she passes someone who is, really, the dead spit of Buck. Very startled, she then sees that it is not Buck, of course not, and she remembers that a lot of people look like Buck, they always did. That was one of the points about him: Buck looked like everyone.

On that same day, on an impulse, Jill does what she has meant to do for some time: she calls Sage and suggests that they have dinner.

“Not especially to talk,” Jill tells her sister—half-sister. “I'm sure you know pretty much how bad I feel. Just to have dinner.”

“Well, sure. Where?”

They settle on Greens, in Fort Mason, with the view of the yacht harbor, and the Golden Gate.

“It should be really beautiful there tonight,” says Sage. “It's so clear.”

And it is, unbelievably beautiful. Immediately outside their window are the clustered masts of small boats, matchsticks on toys, and the blue-black, flat, reflective water. And then the gate, the broad passage out to the vast Pacific, spanned by the soaring bridge—now all veiled by thin white fog. The bridge and the sea below are fogged, and the rising hills of Marin. Everything is drawn very faintly, like an Oriental painting. So delicate. Unreal.

“Interesting that the greatest pieces of real estate in this city belong to the Army,” Jill says to Sage. “This and the Presidio. If they ever pull out, wow. Watch out.”

Sage asks, “Do you think they will?” This is the sort of thing she would expect Jill to know about.

“There're always rumors.”

Sipping wine, they both turn back to the view.

What on earth do you say to your sister when you've fucked her husband and then really (almost) caused his death? You say nothing, Jill has decided. You have dinner together and say almost nothing at all. The surprising part is that it all seems okay, acceptable. Noel gone, and their both knowing what they know, and not talking about it.

Another surprise is how unlike herself, or any self that Jill can remember, Sage now looks. Sage, the thinnest of them all (Jill and Fiona used to speculate about bulimia), has really put on some weight. Everywhere. Her once-thin, almost sharp face is rounded, softer, and she is wearing her silk shirt outside her pants, unbelted and possibly concealing fat.

Just as Jill has made that observation, Sage's new weight, Sage remarks, “I think I'll have everything on the menu. It all looks so good, and I'm starving.”

“Me too. But you look great, Sage,” Jill lies.

“I've put on too much weight, the doctor says. You did know that I'm pregnant?”

“No. No, I didn't.”

“Oh well. I thought someone would have told you, though I'm only just. This weight gain actually began before, though. Stevie's been cooking for me.”

“Stevie?” A messy person from somewhere drifts vaguely toward Jill's mind.

“You remember, he was a friend of mine back in the Sixties, and then he worked with Fiona.”

“Oh, that Stevie.” The one who got so much money when Fiona sold out, Jill does not say. She is trying to work out how to ask what she most wants to know. But under the circumstances she can't just say, The child is Noel's? although she thinks that it must be. They did still have sex sometimes, Noel told her. She attempts, “I thought you were sort of involved with that dealer from New York. Art dealer, I mean.”

“Well, I sort of am. But I don't think in the way you mean. He's gay, and the most terrific friend.”

“Oh.” This is something that everyone says, these days; women are always talking about what terrific friends gay guys are, but Jill does not actually have any gay friends. In fact she does not have a lot of friends, she now reflects, without sadness. Just people she knows.

“And then Stevie and I, well, fell in love is not exactly how it was, but our friendship changed.” Sage laughs, as at some very private, very happy memory. “And then, when I turned up pregnant, there seemed no reason to have an abortion, to put it negatively.
We just got more and more pleased.” She laughs again. “In fact we're really excited. I know I'm too old, but we're all very hopeful. Me and Stevie and the doctor.”

“Well Sage, that's absolutely great.” That will be something to do with all the money you both have now, Jill is thinking. The costs of kids these days: it's amazing that anyone has them any more.

“Fiona, this place is truly, truly fabulous. The absolute greatest.” Balancing her wineglass on the low stone edge of the terrace, Jill stares out at the view. “Of course you'll have to put in a pool, but still.”

“Isn't it something? The very, very most beautiful. Honestly, when I think of all those sleazy places in New York. And
Boston
.”

Both women are somewhat drunk. Having driven up to Napa, to Fiona's new house, quite early in the day, a Sunday, they have been sipping at some cool and festive Napa Chardonnay. And they have been snacking, or grazing, their mutually preferred method of food intake; they brought along some tomatoes and grapes, some radicchio-wrapped goat cheese and cold marinated eggplant. Nothing very substantial, or alcohol-retardant.

Now, toward the end of that long summer afternoon, the sky is streaked with strange gray-lavender clouds, and the hills are shadowed with large odd-shaped patches of darkness. At the most distant horizon are dark fogbanks, gradually encroaching, building to black. Leaves tremble in a silver-green stand of aspen, near the terrace, stirred by a slight breeze in which there is more than a hint of fall. Which neither Jill nor Fiona has so far mentioned, or noticed.

“When I went to that supposed AA meeting,” Jill now tells her sister, “this tiny little man did say something that was actually quite funny. He said, why didn't I open a house for singles? A whorehouse is what he damn well meant. But he said a house that'd supply a person for people who came there alone. Sort of like restaurants handing out neckties, he said.”

“Well, that really is quite wonderful.”

“Like handing out ties. So marvellous, when you think of it.”

They giggle together for quite a while, each one's laughter reinfusing the other's.

When at last they come out of it, Jill says, “And actually not the dumbest idea in the world. A place where singles would go, and know there'd be someone. Supplied by the management.”

“Jesus, do you think we actually could? And get away with it?”

“Well, why not? The most discreet, most elegant operation in the world.”

“How rich we'd get.”

“You mean, how richer.”

“Oh, right.”

“I
could never tell you how really beautiful Lebanon is. Beirut.” Wistfully Hilda sighs, and gives up, gazing silently out across the Mission District—the view from their house, from their deck, hers and Portia's. Once Mrs. Kaltenborn's.

“What we should have done, I guess, is find out more about roses before we went and bought all these,” muses Portia. She adds, as though joking, “I wish Caroline were here. I need my mom!”

“The roses in Lebanon become enormous,” Hilda tells her. “My mother's roses.”

“Do you remember how she did it? I mean, were there tricks for growing them?”

“I don't know but I'll ask her. Remind me.”

Hilda has suddenly (to Portia it seemed very sudden indeed) accepted a fellowship at the law school of the American University in Beirut. “There was a law school when it was Roman, fifteen hundred years ago,” Hilda has said, as though that explained everything.

The fellowship is only for a year (only!) and the plan is that Portia will go to visit at least twice—or, that they will meet in an intermediate place, like Paris, or Rome.

One of the things that Portia feels is that they do not know each other well enough for such a separation; their “relationship” may not be old enough or sufficiently established to bear it. Also, as she is unable not to say to Hilda fairly often, it's dangerous there.