Caroline's Daughters

by Alice Adams

  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.

  Saul grins, reprieved, and he begins to tell her more about the plans. When they will go (next month). He tells her that he thinks she should hire more help for herself. He is full of plans for them both.

  And Liza listens, taking in all that he says, but mostly she is thinking, Now I can write my novel.

  Twenty-eight

  “You’re not Fiona, what is this?” Thus speaks an angry Roland, on a black and stormy San Francisco spring night, as he strides into Fiona’s penthouse boudoir—where he finds a thin blonde woman in a new pale-blue silk peignoir. A woman with very short hair, who looks unfamiliar.

  “You asshole, of course it’s me,” Fiona tells him, with a pleased crowing laugh.

  “Same foul mouth, but for all I know your sister talks the same. You must be Jill.”

  “In point of fact Jill does talk a lot like me, but I’m not Jill. Roland, come over here. It’s me. Look at me—”

  He has stopped at her door, and now he just stands there, frowning.

  And since it was she who called him (“I’m frightened of all this wind,” Fiona said, “I need to see you”) Fiona is loath to plead further. “Desperate women have their hair cut, don’t you know that?” She laughs a little.

  In Fiona’s house, which is almost a hundre
d years old, the creaking and rattling from that ferocious wind have been loud indeed, and menacing, even to Fiona, who has lived there for years. Could this be a much worse than usual storm, be actually dangerous? Or is she simply in not very good shape? Or, are both those things true: the storm indeed is formidable, such powerful winds, and beating, pelting rain—and she herself is vulnerable, at low ebb?

  Certainly nothing lately has gone very well for her, Fiona thinks. She saw no alternative to selling Fiona’s; all her instincts informed her that this was the moment, and even Jill agreed that the offered price was good. But Fiona does not know now what to do with all that money, how to make it work best for her. Nor where to live, when she has to move out.

  And besides (so irritating!) there was no way for Stevie not to get a huge chunk of it, thanks to their original agreement, when he lent her a sum that now seems very minor: clever Stevie, insisting on a percentage and a high-powered contract.

  And then, just when she needed him, Roland has been evasive—for months. God knows he has problems of his own right now, but so does she. He had all that mess about that creep Buck Fister, and not running for mayor after all (Fiona was very glad: who needs that kind of attention all the time?). And always crazy, drunk Joanne in the picture. Still.

  “What you need now is a terrific new haircut,” was Jill’s advice (Jill is now living temporarily downstairs, Fiona hopes it’s temporary; Jill is getting her own shit together). Jill sent Fiona to her own great stylist. “The price will knock you on your ass,” Jill warned. “But it’s just about the same as an hour with a first-class shrink, think of it that way.” And so Fiona did, and she came out looking wonderful, she thought. Not much like Jill at all.

  “You’re right, this is some storm,” agrees Roland, now advancing toward her bed. “This old house really creaks, it’s good you’re moving. God knows what an earthquake would do to it.” Sitting beside her, he picks up her hand and begins to kiss it, but sexily, using his tongue. “You are my Fiona,” he tells her, “I know your taste. But, my darling, it’s not like you to be afraid of a storm.”

  Please stop talking. I just want to be fucked. Fiona would like to say that but of course she does not.

  She smiles, though, and twists toward him, reaching to curl her fingers around his wrist, pulling him very gently, and thinking: How I dislike him, this bald old man, with his big fat pink-gray cock, its droopy foreskin. How can I want such a man? And then, as he begins to kiss her mouth, But I do want him, a lot.

  “My darling, I seem not to be myself,” explains Roland, some ten or fifteen minutes later, as they lie nakedly and unhappily enmeshed. “Would you believe that this has never happened to me before?”

  “Sure.” Fiona does not believe him: she takes him to mean that he is only infrequently so disabled, which she knows to be true. Surprisingly (Fiona is surprised), she is not angry, she feels quite tender toward him, the poor old bastard. “Tell me how you’ve been,” she says. “Somehow we never talk. We could now.”

  Roland sighs. “My soap-opera life.” Like a beached whale he turns over on his back—but this is unfair, thinks Fiona; he is large but not fat.

  “Most recently,” continues Roland, “Joanne has decided to leave me for Betty Ford. The drinking had got a lot worse. All morning, drunk. So she quit. Went down there. But I’m supposed to show up for interviews. They like what they call the total picture.”

  As Roland talks—and it is quite true that they have never had a conversation—Fiona listens, and strokes his muscular stomach lightly, twisting body hairs gently, affectionately.

  He should never have married Joanne, now says Roland. And he did so for the oldest, most chivalrously foolish reason of all: Joanne was pregnant. “And over thirty, she thought she might never conceive again.”

  “Why didn’t you marry Sage, do you think?”

  “It would have wrecked her life. I believe she sees that now. But I knew it then, I could see it. A brilliant and talented woman should never marry an old Sicilian pol like me.”

  “Of course you’re absolutely right.” Fiona wonders just when this version was invented; probably some years after his breakup with Sage, she imagines. “How smart of you to have seen that,” she tells Roland.

  “Lucky for Sage that I did.”

  “Oh, right.” But you could marry me, that would work out perfectly for both of us. We could more or less retire together. Buy something big but dignified, really elegant, in Hillsborough, or maybe up in Ross, with a pool and maybe horses. Just live in a nice quiet elegant way, we could look like a Ralph Lauren ad. I could learn to cook, at last (Fiona as she thinks this enjoys the nice irony). Maybe even have a couple of kids, she thinks, and the little girl, whatever her name is, could come and stay sometimes. Not too often, she should be with her mother. Joanne would be all out of Betty Ford, graduated and okay, recovered.

  Fiona herself is surprised by the total correctness of this picture. Odd that she had never thought of it before.

  She murmurs, “Shall I kiss you?”

  “Mmm.”

  She does so, moving slowly down to him, taking him in.

  “You’re the greatest in the world,” she tells him, somewhat later.

  “You’re a very dear girl,” says Roland.

  Hearing some new note in his voice, something not exactly madly in love, Fiona chooses to ignore it: she has her own plans. “How awful of you to look at your watch,” she says, for that is what he has just surreptitiously done.

  “My dearest, I told you, Joanne is in very bad shape. I gave her some excuse about a meeting, but this is not a time to upset her more.”

  “I thought—Betty Ford—”

  “That’s tomorrow.” He looks at his watch—again. “And now it’s late,” he says. “But the storm is over, you won’t be frightened any more.”

  “Roland, I really wanted to talk.”

  “But love, we have talked.”

  “Roland, I insist on ten minutes more of your time.”

  Roland smiles his most appeasing, most political-Sicilian smile. “My darling, I grant you ten minutes.”

  “Roland, I think we should get married.”

  He stares. “You can’t be serious. That’s terribly sweet and flattering, but you must not be serious.”

  “I am.” She stares into his eyes. “It’s the most perfect idea.”

  “You must be mad.”

  “I am not mad. I want us to get married. Have a house. I know of one in Ross, with a pool. Stables. We could have children.” She smiles.

  “You are mad. I thought you were a sensible woman.”

  “I am not a sensible woman. I just want to be married. To you.”

  “For one thing, you seem to forget that I am married.”

  “I didn’t forget. But Jesus, you’re a lawyer.”

  Roland begins to get out of bed, at the same time reaching toward his clothes. “While Joanne is at Betty Ford I will go to Sicily with my daughter, to collect ourselves, so to speak. And to visit my mother.”

  “Your mother!”

  Pulling up boxer shorts (an old-fashioned touch that Fiona has always appreciated, that crisp Sea Island cotton), and then long black socks, with some dignity Roland tells her, “My mother is ninety-seven. A most marvellous woman. I do not see her only out of duty.”

  “I couldn’t believe it,” Fiona tells Jill. “First he asks me to marry him, and then in the next breath he tells me that his mother is coming over from Sicily to live with him, with us, and she is ninety-seven. Not to mention his creepy daughter.”

  “What a jerk.” Jill, who is smoking heavily these days (one among many things about her that are driving Fiona crazy), now lights another cigarette, her fourth during breakfast; Fiona counts.

  “And he wants to stay right there in his house on Pacific, you know, right across from horrible Julius Kahn, where Liza used to go and smoke dope all the time and God knows what else, with those black guys. You’d think he’d know that it’s t
ime to get out of town.”

  Having hit on this version of her conversation with Roland, Fiona is finding it more and more plausible. He did more or less say that he couldn’t get married now because he was going to see his mother, didn’t he? Fiona has almost convinced herself that he did.

  Fiona has a truly remarkable capacity for self-deception; and she believes her stories. She could very easily have fallen into a black and painful despondency, over Roland—but instead she managed to think, How dare he? and she made up this story to try out on Jill, a story that in time she will come to believe herself—almost.

  “I’d really like to get back at him somehow,” in a musing way she says to Jill.

  “Why not?”

  Jill is not really paying attention, but Fiona is used to that with her sister, these days. Jill is still not at all in good shape, though at least she has started back to work, she is not around the house all day, as at first she was. And Fiona assumes that soon Jill will move back to her own apartment.

  “He thought I was you at first,” Fiona tells Jill. “My new short hair. Maybe you could pretend to be me, maybe we could get at him that way.”

  “My call-girl time could come in handy.”

  “what?”

  Jill laughs. “I used to turn tricks.” As she says this her look at Fiona is speculative; she is wondering (Fiona thinks) if Fiona will believe her. “I used to get a thousand bucks.”

  “Such a liar, you really are. Honestly, Jill.”

  “Okay, I’m a liar. But I might as well have, if you see what I mean.”

  “You wouldn’t dare turn tricks. Jesus. AIDS.”