by Alice Adams
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.”
Twelve
Of 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.
“You know what I most hate about this place?” Portia asks him.
“Let me guess. Let me count the ways.”
“No animals. I can’t stand it. No warm fur to touch.”
“She’s allergic, isn’t she?”
“Most likely. It’d be just like her, poor thing.”
After a few minutes Harold tells her, “But I have to say, I really don’t mind all that much.” And then he says, “You remember I’m having dinner with a visiting aunt tonight? You’ll survive here alone?”
“Silly boy. Of course.” But Portia, who had indeed forgotten the visiting aunt, had rather hoped that she and Harold could go over to North Beach for pizza or something, and she now experiences a certain pang; she in fact does not like to be alone in this particular place at night—infantile, regressive as she knows that feeling to be. For one thing, the phone rings at all hours, people who generally hang up, realizing that she is not Janice Lee. But she tells Harold, “It’s okay, I’m having lunch with my dad. Family day for me, I guess.”
Portia does not especially like Bruno’s, the once extremely popular North Beach restaurant that is still her father’s sentimental favorite. In the distant (to Portia non-existent, prehistoric) Forties and Fifties, it was popular with Telegraph Hill’s new bohemians, the bright young men and women with little money and considerable taste, aspirations and a sense of local history—and with what came to be known as the Beats. It was popular with writers generally, some painters and a scattering of newspeople. And with a few old leftist political types, relics of waterfront, Wobbly days, including Ralph Carter.
A colorful mix, Ralph likes to tell his daughter, and, like many people of his age, Ralph finds it hard to resist alluding to prices then: the five-course meals for $2.50, the fifty-cent drinks (Portia believes he exaggerates, but he does not). Just sitting in Bruno’s seems to bring a form of instant happiness for Ralph, and so from time to time Portia agrees: okay, they’ll meet for lunch at Bruno’s.
But she does not like waiting for Ralph, in this window seat of honor that he is always given—another reason that he cleaves to this place, obviously. Portia hates the exposure, the conspicuousness of being seated there just next to the hustling, bustling sidewalk, where anyone and everyone can see her.
How she wishes she had thought to bring a book or a magazine, anything to read. Lacking that, she studies the big shiny white menu, as if it ever changed, as if she did not know it by heart. But anything to avoid all those faces on the street, looking in at her.
Impossible, though, not to look up from time to time, as, even when you are terrified of heights (Portia is), in a high building sometimes you have to look down. And to nearsighted Portia, looking out, those faces all blur in a single stream, as she glances out at them, a scary stream of unknowns.
And then, in a stabbing flash of clarity, two well-known faces pass, and then are gone, but not before Portia has recognized Jill and Noel. She has seen Jill’s sleek fair cap of hair, Noel’s dark thick hair (so like Sage’s), and their radiant, blind smiles; dazed with each other, they see no one.
Portia’s stomach twists, and she gulps at her water. What jerks, she thinks. Ralph could easily have been here, Jill knows he comes here all the time. Anyone could have seen them. And then she thinks, Oh God. Oh Sage—as her old extreme love for her sister overwhelms her.
“Well hey there, honey. I’m not really late, now, am I?” With an anxious frown, a mouth-avoiding kiss, her father, Ralph, is with her. Settling down across from her, and in another instant checking out the room: no one he knows. Portia sees that in a tiny flicker of disappointment across his face.
“No, you’re not late,” she reassures him.
“Well, I guess it’s time for my bi-monthly martini. You’ll have a shot of that expensive imported water you favor?” Ralph very much disapproves of Perrier and its offshoots, something he mentions a little too often.
“No, I’ll have a glass of wine. Uh, white.” It might help her, Portia is thinking. And if it makes me feel worse that will at least be a distraction (the total illogic of this last escapes her for the moment).
“Your mother is home praying for rain,” Ralph then tells her. “I have to remind her that in California dark clouds don’t mean a thing, necessarily. But I think that woman lives for her garden these days.” He grins fondly.
“That’s nice,” Portia tells him. She is thinking that at some point they will have to get to Sage, their whole family lately is talking so much about Sage, and how difficult now to discuss her—for Portia, with her new knowledge. She thinks, How could Noel? How could Jill? I do not understand the sexuality of grownups, Portia thinks, having momentarily forgotten that she is one; twenty-five is grown up, by most standards.
“—worried over Sage,” her father indeed is saying at just that moment. However, the waiter then interrupts with their drinks, and a stern demand for their food choices.
Ralph, who always has linguini with clam sauce, today orders minestrone.
And Portia, who often orders minestrone, chooses a Caesar salad.
The two sips of wine that she has had so far have a somewhat giddying effect, Portia now observes. Well, good, she thinks. And she begins to tell her father in some detail how much she does not like the condominium of Janice Lee. “It’s so bloody English,” she tells him. “Why are so many insecure people such Anglophiles? Nothing against the English, it’s not their fault, but I do wonder. Poor Janice Lee. Even the magazines that she gets are the English editions. British Vogue—”
“Would you excuse me for a minute?”
With her father gone, Portia has again no defense against her angry thoughts of Noel and Jill (her quite prurient thoughts, actually: by now they must be back in Jill’s apartment, to which they were so clearly headed. They are naked there, together, having sex, doing everything that people do—about which Portia is a little vague). These terrible—reprehensible, embarrassing—and complicated thoughts twist Portia’s face in shame, as she also thinks, again, Oh, poor Sage, after Roland she loved and trusted Noel, she seemed really happy with Noel.
Has Ralph actually been gone a long time, though, or has she simply felt his absence is long, alone with her painful imaginings? Portia cannot be sure, but as she begins to focus on waiting for him the time then seems long indeed.
When at last Ralph does return to his chair, he sits down heavily, not speaking for a moment. His large face is gray, and he tells Portia, “I have to say, I don’t feel so wonderful. That martini, maybe. I’ll have to cut down to one a month. I think—I think I’d just better get a cab.”
“Sure, I’ll come with you. I’d love to see Mother.”
“Don’t you dare, you’d scare the woman to death, taking care of me. No, I’ll just go along, a little rest will fix me right up.”
She can’t call Caroline right away, that indeed would alarm her mother, Portia tells herself, forcing her steps to slow down on the short walk from Stockton Street, in North Beach, up to California Street, on Nob Hill. At Broadway she allows the light to change twice, three times, making herself just stand there among the tourists, the local Chinese, businessmen, women out shopping, children getting home from school—the anonymous throngs who blur before her distracted, nearsighted face.
But then she thinks, Suppose I run into Jill and Noel again? The way this day is going I really could. And that thought alone gives her license to hurry, Portia decides, back to poor misguided Janice Lee’s fake-English retreat, her county spread of rooms, high up in the fog.
She dials from Janice Lee’s “study,” but there is no answer at her mother’s house.
And no answer at Sage’s either. Sage and Noel’s.
And no answer at either place, still, an hour later, after Portia has done every time-consuming thing she can think of, in terms of cleaning up chez Janice Lee. Washed the kitchen and bathroom shelves, d
usted and straightened up the floors of closets, polished various small needy pieces of silver, and washed and dried all the tiny Baccarat animals, from Neiman’s.
When the phone rings a little after 5 Portia runs for it, almost trips, and answers breathlessly, “Hello?”
A woman’s voice, “Hey there, lambkin. You feel like seeing anybody?”
Horribly tempted to say yes, yes, I would love to see almost anyone, Portia nevertheless explains that she is not Janice Lee. No, Janice Lee will not be back for another week.
At about 5:30 Caroline calls, sounding very tired but using what Portia thinks of as her English good-sport voice. “He’s in Presbyterian Hospital, so lucky it’s so near,” Caroline tells her daughter. “A mild stroke, he’s being monitored. They thought it’d be best to keep him there for a while, but you can imagine how Ralph liked that.”
“But, but he’ll be okay? really soon?”
“Well, darling, of course that’s what we hope. But it’s hard to tell.”
“Shall I come over?”
“No, love, if you don’t mind I think really better not.”
Sage is not at home.
Nor is Harold. Dialling his number, Portia had entirely forgotten the visiting aunt. Of all times for an aunt, she rancorously thinks. And she thinks, senselessly, Why don’t I have a true lover? Someone I could always trust and count on? (Someone with whom sex was wonderful.)
It would be very inconsiderate to call Caroline again, thinks Portia, and so she does not. She remains alone, and falls at last into a light and troubled sleep, broken by pornographic visions of Noel and Jill. And every now and then she wakes to foghorns, their heavy, grating, mourning sobs, far out in the bay.
At last, she allows herself to admit (she has no choice, at that undefended time) the true source of her panic: she is thinking, feeling, that Ralph might die.
When the phone does ring, at some cold black pre-dawn hour, her first conscious thought is, Oh Christ, all I need right now is some drunken Janice Lee old pal.