by Alice Adams
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.
Fifteen
Some 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 o
ne 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?
She must mean Fiona, which would explain quite a lot, now that Liza thinks back to the “family dinner” at Fiona’s, and so she asks, “Do you possibly mean Fiona?” This direct approach may shock Joanne into some sort of clarity, Liza believes, or hopes.
But no. “Fiona who? The Fiona of Fiona’s?” Conveniently drunk again, Joanne laughs, lightly, messily and unsuccessfully. Her face then crumples, doll-blue eyes tighten, and she is crying, small sad constricted sobs, small tears trickling through the vestiges of her makeup.
“Mommy, he threw sand at me!” Liza’s small daughter just then from the sandbox shrieks, just before knocking her brother over backwards. He too begins to shriek.
So that all Liza can do by way of comfort for poor Joanne is a small pat on the shoulder, as she gets up and heads for the sandbox, to separate her murderous children. As she does so, trying to be a good fair mom, her peripheral vision takes in Joanne hurriedly getting up, her wrecked face hidden in Kleenex. Joanne, leaving J.K.
Liza’s next quite unexpected visitant that afternoon in the park is Sage—Sage, with quite another story to tell.
“When I got all this bad news I went over to, uh, Jim’s,” Sage says, with almost no preamble. She is perched on the same green slatted bench beside Liza where Joanne sat, overlooking the sandbox where the two small children are now deeply involved in making a municipal garage, or so they say.
Sage smiles, a quick humorless twist of her mouth. “Poor Jim. I was really not in good shape, I mean I was worse than I thought I was. More upset. And he had a bad cold.” Divulging this piece of information, which is to Liza quite unalarming, Sage looks as though she, like Joanne, might weep—and Liza at once understands several related facts.
The first is that Sage, who tends to be indirect, who is never confrontational—Sage in this way is apologizing to Jim for whatever happened between them, apologizing through the medium of Liza, who is supposed to tell her father that Sage is sorry—Sage did not mean to get drunk, did not mean to do whatever reprehensible things she believes that she did.
Liza finds herself not wanting to speculate about whatever scene took place between Sage and Jim. Her father. Odd: usually she is quite given to speculation about such scenes.
It would really be better, Liza believes, if Sage could just say, I threw up. Or, I talked too much. I told Jim stuff that I really shouldn’t have, I told him that Noel is a shit, and probably unfaithful.
Whatever Sage did or said, though, Liza knows that she will keep it to herself, contained within her infinitely complex mind, her series of selves. Liza has sometimes imagined this much-loved, subtle and difficult sister as a series of rooms, leading into each other but all quite separate, discrete as to decor, to mood.
“Are you able to get any work done these days?” Liza now gently asks.
“Not much. You know, I’m pretty discouraged. I’d counted on the New York thing too much. I just feel—and then Noel—” Sage gestures her feeling of helplessness, spreading her hands before her, in feeble self-defense.
“But Sage.”
“I know.” Again, the twist of a smile. “I know. I’ll go to New York in January, nothing so different. It could be better, even. I could have finished something new by then. I never did really get at that group of women I meant to do. It doesn’t matter about now, really, I keep telling myself. I’m being very childish, I know I am.”
Liza smiles. “As who is not.”
“Anyway, that same night, after I got home from Jim’s, Noel came in really late, and I made this terrible scene with him. Honestly, Liza, what’s happening to me?”
“Maybe making a few scenes would be good for you. Everyone gets upset. It’s not so awful to let it show, I don’t think.”
“You mean, good for me to let it out for a change? Liza, you’re such a wise kid. Not to mention really kind.” As she says this Sage’s narrow gold eyes fill.
As Liza thinks, I really cannot stand all this weeping. Honestly, everyone seems to be in tears. When what I really came to the park for was some sexy encounters. Honestly.
“What’s so funny about your stupid older sister?” Sage has asked, responding to Liza’s smile. But her tears have gone, as suddenly as they came into her eyes.
“Oh, nothing,” Liza tells her. “Just sometimes I remember coming here to J.K. when I was sort of a kid, you know, high-school stuff. Afternoons in the Sixties. All those guys.”
Sage smiles again. But even now, relatively cheered, she has a damaged look. Earlier, as she came toward Liza, Liza took note of her lagging walk, her especially tattered black turtleneck.
“Those must have been really good times,” Sage says, wistfully, probably enviously. “But now you have good Saul. Even better.”
“Oh yes. Better.”
“God, some afternoon,” says Liza that night after dinner to Saul. A rare civilized interval during which neither of them is actually doing anything else as they speak. Dinner and the dishes are done, the children asleep and Saul is neither trying to read nor playing with any of his various electronic audio equipments, not recording or listening, retaping anything. And Liza is not turning the pages of magazines that she means to read later. They are simply talking.
“First Joanne Gallo. Honestly, that poor woman. A potential suicide if I ever saw one. And then Sage. If Joanne were a patient of yours would you tell me?”
“No, of course not.”
“I sure hope she’s someone’s patient. If I ever saw a woman in bad shape. Sage is not exactly happy either but she has more going for her, at least I think so.”
“Sage. I don’t know, but I think you’re right. She’ll probably be okay. Depending on what you mean by okay.”
“Do you say that just because you know she put in all that time with your colleague?”
“No, certainly not.”
“Saul, don’t you ever get really turned on by a patient? I mean, you must get an occasional really dishy young girl?”
Liza has asked this question before, in various forms, so that now Saul smiles—in a way that Liza has wondered about: is he being condescending to her? would he dare? “Not often enough,” he now tells her, with that smile.
“The point is, you wouldn’t tell me if you did, is that right?”
“Even more to the point, I wouldn’t tell her. How dishy she looked.”
“Like a priest. How sexy, I’m married to a Jewish priest. But, Saul, it
surely must happen?”
“I suppose. Or so some people say.”
“The irony.” Liza sighs. “People observe that we get along, we seem to talk to each other a lot, and from that they probably conclude that you confide in me. That I’m privy to all sorts of juicy secrets, the way lots of doctors’ and lawyers’ wives are. Whereas actually it’s the other way around, I tell you things.” She sighs again, before continuing. “Anyway, I did get a clear impression that something went very wrong between Sage and Jim.”
“I hope not. I think she counts on him. She needs him.”
“Of course she does. After all, he began in her life as her father, really. But I got such an odd impression today, as though things had taken a sort of sexual turn. Between Sage and Jim.” Liza gives a tiny shudder. “Needless to say, that made me feel a little odd. After all. My dad.”
“True enough.”
“If they actually did it, would that be incest?”
“Good God, Liza. What a thought. I guess technically not, literally not, since they aren’t related by blood. God knows what the laws are about that, if there are any. But emotionally it surely would be.”
“On the other hand, once you’re grown up, why not?”
“Liza. God. I’m going to see to it that you never get a chance to remarry. God!”
A small pause, and then Liza asks, as she reaches to pull gently at the longish hair on his neck, “Do you not get haircuts because you hate to or is it really some vanity about your hair?”
“Oh, Liza—”
“Do you mean you don’t know?”
“Maybe both things are true? That’s what my patients and I often seem to say to each other.”
“Well, really. Are you actually quoting a patient—to me?”
“Patients. I was speaking generally.”
“Darling, you do have lovely hair, though.”