by Alice Adams
“Jesus is right,” Calvin goes on. “Jesus Mary AND. I even argued with her, I said I hadn’t absolutely set the prices yet. A big lie, of course. So she said—she insisted, that’s a lady who’s never heard NO—Hoover said she’d give me thirty thousand down. DOWN. And to let her know the final price. She was a little gassed, or coked or something, but I checked with her bank and the money’s quite okay.”
“God.”
“Indeed. The very hand of. So. So far you’re about fifteen thou ahead. Want me to wire it to your bank? Unlike other dealers, I’m prompt. You could upgrade your flight. Make yourself a bit more comfortable. No point going steerage when you don’t have to.”
Waiting for Noel in the pricey new Fillmore Street restaurant at which she is taking him to dinner (“No, it’s not too early to celebrate, Calvin’s convinced me, the money’s in the bank”), Sage sees her image reflected in the multi-mirrored room, herself in the green silk shirt. (Why not? she thought, after Calvin’s call; it’s her best color, jinx or not.) Sage is glad that no one can read her mind as she thinks, I really am beautiful. At last. I really am. My hair, skin, with this color—I look great.
She has ordered a glass of white wine to help her wait, some premonition having warned her that Noel will be late.
But Noel is not late. There he is, just now striding down the aisle of the restaurant, in his old cords. Wearing his work clothes as though they came from Wilkes. And frowning—even from this distance Sage can see his terrific, handsome scowl. His black-Irish scowl.
As Sage thinks, If he doesn’t notice at all how I look, if he doesn’t say anything, I don’t think I can bear it.
Sliding into the booth, still frowning, Noel instantly says, “I don’t suppose you saw the afternoon papers.”
Her heart drops, as she thinks that if something really awful had happened, Reagan killed, an earthquake, then of course Noel would not notice her, how she looks. She must not take everything so personally. “No, I didn’t,” she tells him.
“Well, it’s not good news.” To the waiter who has just delivered Sage’s wine Noel says, “Do you think I could have one too?” His voice is unnaturally challenging, meanly ironic, a mood Sage knows.
“Whatever’s happened?” she asks him.
“Well—” And now Noel does seem to see her. “That a new blouse? It looks great. And—hey!—congratulations.” But before Sage can respond to any of that he frowns again. “More news about Buck Fister,” he tells her.
“Who?”
“Jesus, Sage, don’t you read? You’re supposed to be the big intellectual in our group. The papers have been full of nothing else, don’t you think about anything out in the world?” And then, in one of his familiar but still startling reversals, he leans to kiss her. “Sorry,” he says. “I’m a little upset.”
“Well, I guess I do sort of remember. He’s someone in real estate?”
Noel laughs, shortly, angrily. “Ostensibly. Turns out his real shtick was hookers. Call girls. Hustling sex.”
“Well. But—” But what on earth can this have to do with us? Sage would like to ask this, although even as she phrases the question she knows that it does indeed have something to do with them. Something terrible.
“This afternoon it said where some reporter’d got hold of one of his notebooks. Names and addresses of friends of his. Roland Gallo, that’s the most conspicuous name.” A name that by tacit agreement has not been mentioned between Sage and Noel, not ever, so that now Sage feels its force, even as she wonders: But so what? Roland has some sleazy friends, he always has, so what?
It is very much on her mind that so far Noel has said nothing, really, about her sale, beyond those vague congratulations. Isn’t that what they are doing tonight, supposedly celebrating? “How do you feel about this restaurant?” she now asks, by way of exploring his mood.
“Well—” He lifts his head to look around, and Sage sees that his eyes are not quite focussed; he looks feral, an animal trapped in that room. “Expensive restaurants all look alike these days,” he then says, in the soft, controlled voice (so contradicting his look) that Sage knows is dangerous.
“That’s interesting, of course you’re absolutely right,” she babbles. “You could close your eyes and open them in another place, and the food too, I really don’t know why anyone goes anywhere these days.” Running down, she stops talking and looks at him, sees that he is staring distractedly around the room, as though at any moment he might rush out into the street. He looks trapped, threatened, desperate.
When at last he speaks to Sage, Noel’s voice is a whisper, barely audible above the restaurant noise. “Jill was in the book too,” he tells her. “Jill was on his list.”
In the stupefied way of someone repeating bad news, Sage repeats her half-sister’s name. “Jill,” she says, unemphatically.
“Jill McAndrew. Young corporation lawyer. Your sister,” Noel confirms.
Your sister Jill is in trouble.
That is Noel’s audible, intended message, but Sage hears his true declaration as loudly as though he had shouted it. He has said, I’m in love with Jill, I’ve been fucking Jill, I only care about Jill.
That was absolutely in Noel’s voice, but Sage is only allowed to respond to his actual words. She says, “That’s too bad, poor Jill. But she doesn’t necessarily know him very well, do you think? I mean, Jill knows a lot of people, I’m sure she does.”
As her heart clutches, and she thinks, You lousy rotten prick, my own half-sister, how dare you? how dare she?
Having probably heard all or almost all of what she did not say, Noel glares across the table. “You bitch. Cunt. You don’t even care about your sister’s reputation.”
“But.” Have her heart’s valves closed? She feels that. “But it just said her name was in the notebook, didn’t you say? It could just mean—”
“You don’t care. Your sister’s name is implicated in a call-girl ring and you’re only thinking about your fucking art show, your trips to New York. Your money from some alcoholic real-estate broad.”
“But Noel—”
Having always foreseen doom, Sage has always known that one day Noel would get up and leave her. Just walk out.
Which now he does.
With a quick flashed look of total defiance, defiance both of Sage and of the room at large (some people of course have begun to turn and listen), Noel stands up, throws his napkin on the table. He turns and rushes toward the door.
But Sage cannot let him go, she will die if he goes.
Throwing money down on the table, too much money but no matter, Sage runs out after Noel, out to the sidewalk in the rain, just reaching him there.
“Noel, you can’t—don’t—”
“Crazy bitch—”
She is clinging to him fiercely, as though the pressure, the urgency of her body could stop him—and knowing as she does this how appalling, how infantile, hysterical and utterly futile is her gesture. But still she can’t let him go.
Noel is much stronger, and even more charged with purpose than Sage is. He pulls her hands off and then, because she still presses against him, he pushes at her body, and then he leaps aside, away from her, as she falls back against a building, then slips down on the rainy, skiddy sidewalk.
Sage gets up very quickly. Not hurt, she thinks. A man who was standing there watching seems also to decide that she is all right, or perhaps it is to spare her shame that he moves on.
As though she had simply slipped and fallen for a moment, as anyone could, in this rain, Sage manages to walk along, as though she were quite all right, so that if anyone saw what happened they would not stop, not offer help. She is vaguely aware that her arm hurts, but she still needs to talk. Far up ahead on Fillmore Street she thinks she sees Noel, darting fast between traffic. But maybe not, maybe that is not Noel—and in any case Noel is gone.
Wherever he now goes (to Jill?) he will stay for several hours, and then come home to Sage, creeping in, crawling into her
bed, their bed, carefully making just enough noise to wake her. And then in loud unnecessary whispers (who could hear him, possibly, in their house?) he will tell her what an awful man he is, how despicable, stupid, illiterate; how can she put up with him? To which so far there has only been one answer, which Sage has always given: No, darling, you’re none of those things, and yes, I do forgive you, I know it’s difficult, I know I’m difficult too. Please, only love me.
But: but this is a little different. Whereas before he has rushed out of the house from some drunken quarrel, which was bad enough, sufficiently hard to bear, he has not before pushed her away. Not pushed her down to a sidewalk.
He has not before told her very clearly, in effect, that he loves, is making love to, someone else.
And now, as she comes to a halt on the dark rainy sidewalk, Sage for the first time imagines another set of responses to his throes of self-castigation; she imagines saying, You knocked me down, you rotten bastard, I don’t care if you didn’t really mean to do it, or if it was partly my fault.
And she thinks, I really don’t want to talk to Noel tonight. About anything. I don’t want to hear his voice.
Providentially, at that moment a cab swerves past, a free cab. Sage hails it and gets in, gives directions to her house on Russian Hill.
Arrived at her front gate, she tells the driver to wait.
Upstairs, now entirely galvanized, Sage in seven minutes accomplishes the packing that she had thought would take her a day.
Back in the cab, with her bag, she directs the driver to the airport.
“What time’s your plane?”
“Oh, I’m not sure.”
“You know what airline?”
“Uh, United.”
“Well, it’s good you’ve got no definite time, this traffic’s murder. A little rain and all the drivers in town go apeshit, you know that?”
“I guess.”
To herself Sage is saying, He knocked me down, he really did. Even if I was asking for it, as he might say. And he didn’t stop to see if I was okay.
Her arm in fact does still hurt quite a lot; she is dimly aware of pain, an ache, but this pain contributes to her mounting exhilaration, sharpens it, as the cab maneuvers through the dark and rain and the dazzling lights, the swish of tires on wet concrete, out onto the freeway.
He won’t know where I am, thinks Sage, and he won’t dare call Caroline, or Liza; I might have told them, he’d be too ashamed.
A little later she thinks, No wonder I feel a little drunk, I had that glass of wine and no dinner, I hope they serve something on the plane. I hope I can get on a plane, any plane. Tonight, I’ll probably have to go First Class, she thinks, with the smallest smile.
She does not think about flying into storms, into snow. She is not now afraid of this trip.
Twenty-one
“She was in shock, but still, to sustain a compound fracture. And then get herself on a red-eye flight for New York—” “She did get to go First Class,” Liza interrupts her husband.
“Even so. But then to go to your own gallery opening, well, it’s pretty amazing. Of course the ortho department at Columbia-Presbyterian is absolutely tops, really lucky she got there and got to Kiernan, he’s the best. Does mostly knees but he’s first-rate—”
“Lucky her new friend Calvin took her there,” puts in Liza.
“Oh indeed. Compound fractures can be very tricky. Have to be reset, ugly stuff like that.” Saul, like many psychiatrists, is extremely happy (he is happiest, Liza has thought) when dealing with or discussing problems that are strictly medical. Such a relief to have a concrete issue, Liza imagines, rather than the nebulous, often contradictory dark strands of neurosis.
“Sage has always been extremely brave,” puts in Caroline, her mother. Then adding, thoughtfully, “In her way.”
The three of them, Liza, Saul and Caroline, are having an old-fashioned picnic (so they all have termed it) in Julius Kahn Playground, on the grass—from which they are protected by several very old-fashioned steamer rugs, one of Caroline’s most durable legacies from Molly Blair. The heavy wool protects them from the still-damp, still-cold earth; they could in fact be said to be celebrating what is at least a lull in the season of rain, if not the onset of spring. The day is warm and bright, the sky a pale washed blue, with giant billowing white clouds along the horizon, above the cypress-and-eucalyptus woods, and out across the bay, above Marin.
The two women are dressed in a way that suggests a hope of spring, Caroline in flowered cotton, pink espadrilles, and Liza in her usual denim skirt, with a lemon-yellow T-shirt, more or less the color of her hair. Even Saul, in his khaki pants and sleeve-rolled blue workshirt, looks as though he believed in a change of weather.
This being a Wednesday, Saul has his day off—and Caroline, somewhat to Liza’s surprise, had announced it as her day off too. “The nice Guatemalan lady comes, Ralph loves her, she can get him anything he needs.” It seems to Liza (in fact she is sure of this) that a couple of weeks ago her mother said she never went anywhere.
However, at the moment Liza is too preoccupied with the vagaries of her sisters to give much thought to her mother’s possible inconsistencies.
Today Caroline has outdone herself in the matter of sandwiches, as her daughter and Saul (the clear if unacknowledged favorite son-in-law) have told her. Crustless cucumber and watercress, breast of chicken, cheese and ham. With sturdier fare for the children, fried chicken, peanut butter and raisins, their favorites. And a big lemon cake for everyone. “I must be in a really retrogressive Molly phase,” Caroline has explained. “So English, at her best with sandwiches and cakes. Absolutely hopeless with vegetables, or fish.”
Now the baby sleeps in her canvas basket between her parents, and the two others are off in the sandpile, from which from time to time they return, to report to the grownups.
“You haven’t heard any more from Jill?” Liza now asks her mother.
“No, and I must say it is a little worrying.”
Jill called Caroline and simply said that she was staying with a friend, that she felt like lying low for a while. She had taken some time off from her firm. She would check back in, which so far she has not done.
“Well, at least there’s nothing more in the papers.” For several days, perhaps a week, there had been photographs of everyone listed in Buck Fister’s book, of Roland Gallo, and of Jill—Jill, in a bathing suit, even, at someone’s Woodside party; Jill, laughing and very sexy. Recalling all that, out of her multiple reactions Liza sighs, and then asks her mother, “But weren’t you even tempted to ask her how on earth she knew Buck Fister?”
“I didn’t think I could, you know. None of my business.” Caroline has always had a strong regard for the privacy of her daughters—too much so, they have all at one time or another thought. They have sometimes wished to be asked more, all of them. To be more certain of her interest.
“I couldn’t have resisted asking her.” Although Liza now reflects, the fact that Jill should know Buck Fister is not actually so odd, not in itself; Jill, as the phrase once went, gets around a lot, she is out almost constantly, in restaurants and bars, at gallery openings, she goes to all sorts of parties with all sorts of people. Liza thinks of all this with what she has to admit is another small breath of envy, her own life being so very much more restricted, necessarily. For the moment (she hopes it is only for the moment).
The absolutely unmentionable question is: just in what way did Jill know Buck Fister, who is now under indictment for running a ring of call girls?
Caroline, although she seems in many ways a contemporary of her daughters, is nevertheless of another generation; she must find it simply peculiar that Jill would know such a sleazy fellow, know him well enough to be entered in his engagement book. To have had lunch with him, probably.
The further possibility, that Jill could actually have been one of Buck Fister’s “girls,” would not even enter Caroline’s mind, Liza thinks.
It has, though, entered Liza’s mind, and, she has to admit, with a certain air of plausibility: Jill might easily think a little minor hustling was fun, or far out, or off the wall. However Jill might put it. And God knows (and Liza knows, they all know) that Jill loves money, deeply, passionately.
Or is she, Liza, simply fictionalizing her sister’s life? It comes to her rather easily, Liza notes: She can see Jill in some very posh hotel suite (it would have to be posh, for Jill) with some guy who was lined up to have sex with her. For money. Some john. Very easy to imagine. Jill in fact would be terrifically turned on by the whole scene. She would probably come, even if, supposedly, real hookers never do.
But this cannot be true, Liza next thinks. It is only my own very sleazy imagination. Not to mention disgusting rivalrous-sibling feelings.
“The point is,” says Caroline now, “I really don’t know where she is.”
“These are the best sandwiches,” Saul tells her, in his serious way. And then, “Have you asked Fiona?”
“Asked Fiona where Jill is? Well of course not, I couldn’t. What an idea.” Caroline laughs nervously at the very idea of using one daughter to spy out another.
“She might know, though.”
“Even so. And come to think of it I’m not exactly hearing a lot from Fiona these days either.”
The park is relatively unpopulated at this hour, despite the beautiful fresh new weather. At the moment only one other picnic group sits gingerly on their blanket, some distance off: two very blonde young women, probably au pairs, speaking either Swedish or German. And much farther away, in another part of the playing field, is a small cluster of people, impossible to tell just how many, all huddled on the grass.
Thus, as soon as she enters from across the way, from her dark Pacific Street mansion, Joanne Gallo, coming across the park, can be seen by Caroline, Liza and Saul. Very clearly. Joanne on what must be very high heels is stumbling nearsightedly along the damp ground, her small sad thin daughter pulled along beside her. Both mother and daughter in pink.