Caroline's Daughters (4 page)

“Of course not,” Sage reassures him.

Jim grins. “She wouldn't believe me when I told her how old I am. But I'm always very open about that. I just tell them right out.”

Sage has been hearing this particular little vignette from Jim, the telling of his age, on most of the occasions that they have recently seen each other, she now reflects: the patient who cannot believe Jim's so readily admitted age. And for a crucial moment she now wonders: could he have misinterpreted all around—are they in fact surprised that he is not older than he says?

On the way over to Jim's, Sage now realizes, she had wanted to talk about Noel. She wanted from Jim the magic, impossible words: No, of course Noel isn't seeing anyone else, you're just very insecure, you're too used to trouble, when it isn't there you make it up (true enough). Or, she had wanted some large and quite “inappropriate” dosage of love from Jim.

“How about a drink?” he now asks her. “What a lousy host I am, I go on and on about myself and leave you high and dry.”

There is so much truth to this—and a drink is so much
not
what she wants—that Sage begins to laugh. She laughs and laughs, bending over as she sits there, then cuts off as she feels her laughter out of control, she could as easily cry.

“Actually I have to get home now,” she tells Jim, when she can. “I want to get a little work done before dinner.”

“Work? But it's Sunday. Don't you know there's a name for people like you?” Somewhat heavily he chides her.

“I like to work, it's when I know who I am,” Sage tells him.

“Well, I guess I'm rather like that too. I should stick to medicine, I do best at being a doctor. In fact Caroline said that to me rather often. Only very tactfully of course.”

“Of course,” Sage echoes.

By now they both have risen and are walking toward the entranceway.
Where they repeat their small non-embrace routine. Affectionately.

“Well, I'm really glad you came by. You always do me good,” Jim tells her.

“Oh, me too,” Sage lies.

Driving home, passing Presbyterian Hospital, Sage thinks briefly of the years of her grandmother's dying there. Molly Blair, all shrunken and dying forever, and Caroline going to see her every day. Caroline brushing Molly's thin yellowed hair, and taking home Molly's handmade silk nightclothes to wash by hand and to iron. (Sage, who hates to iron, was especially touched by this detail.) And Sage, visiting, would silently, secretly exhort her grandmother to die. She used to wonder if Caroline ever felt the same. She must have, mustn't she? Must have longed for her mother to die? But if so no one ever knew.

The house now occupied by Sage and Noel, bought by Sage with her inheritance from Molly Blair, is at the end of a small cul-de-sac on the eastern, “wrong” side of Russian Hill, a neighborhood once cheaply inhabited by working-class Italians, now very expensive, mostly occupied by Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodian families who double or triple up, in the tiny rooms of those houses.

Sage and Noel's is a large two-story stucco box with an entirely undistinguished exterior, a sort of disguise, Sage sometimes feels the outside of their house to be. While inside Noel has performed miracles (or, almost performed; he tends to leave things unfinished): walls knocked out so that what had been a warren of tiny rooms now contains essentially one room per floor. Downstairs, a living-dining room; upstairs, big bedroom and bath. Everywhere large white spaces. Scant furniture, good Oriental rugs.

And that is how they first met, Sage and Noel. He was the carpenter whom a painter friend recommended to help her with her new house. “He's sort of offbeat, you'll like him. Very talented, good ideas. And fabulous-looking.” Thinking that she did not especially need a fabulous-looking carpenter, Sage nevertheless called
this Noel Finn and Noel came over, came over again for more talk, and plans. And then wine, excitement, more plans and eventually love, or something like it.

And now they are married, and the house is still unfinished, its suspended quality still (sometimes) afflicting Sage with gloom: Why must their house be so perfectly an expression of their life? she wonders. And she answers her own question: Because this house is Noel's work, he made it this way.

The small panel on her answering machine shows a bright-green 2. Two messages, one surely from Noel, with excuses.

Sage pushes Play, and instantly she hears loud sounds, banging, background shouts and then Noel's clear voice: “For Christ's sake, Bill, you fucker, cut that out, I'm on the phone.” And then, “Sorry, babe, my asshole partner's deaf. And look, I'm sorry I missed the lunch, but we're really going at it down here. Got to go now, it's going great! See you later.”

Oh, so he really is at work, is what Sage thinks. And then, How terrible that I should be pleased by the mere fact that he isn't lying.

The next message is fairly long, and entirely unexpected.

“Sage Levine? Jack Cronin. You won't remember but I'm the guy who bought that little woman-holding-cat figure from your show at that place down on Union Street?” (Sage does remember, it was her only sale from that show.) “Anyway, I'm in New York, and a friend of mine saw it and went a little nuts, I mean he really liked it, and guess what? He has a gallery down on Broome, in SoHo. So, do you have some slides? Would you be interested in something back here, and if so would you call him tomorrow? Calvin Crome,” and he left a number.

Sage has been a ceramic sculptor for about fifteen years by now, and she has considerable dark knowledge of the probabilities of success in her field (she knows about the art world in the meticulous way that a jealous lover knows the faithless habits of his beloved). Still, despite all that information, her blood leaps at this message, this possibility of a New York show—and the woman whose face she sees in the mirror above the phone table, the woman holding the phone, is grinning, a bright grin that seems to cover her face.

And even with such a grin this woman, Sage, looks very pretty, she has to admit this of herself. She looks like a happy, very pretty woman.

“Baby, that's great, that's
great
.” Noel hugs her to his chest, but the face that Sage now sees mirrored, Noel's face, is frowning, preoccupied. He came up to the bedroom, where she has remained since the phone call, where she has been sitting and thinking, daring to imagine: a New York gallery. And so as she went to greet him, to tell him, and as Noel embraces her she can see the two of them mirrored there. And at his slight frown her elated spirits sink, just a little.

She asks, “But you don't think it's necessarily so great?”

He touches her hair very lightly, quickly. “Well, maybe not.” He laughs, a light quick laugh. “But don't take me so seriously, babe. After all, what do I know?”

Noel's very dark hair is longer than men are generally wearing their hair that year, and his skin is very white and fine. His nose is narrow, finely molded, eyes narrow and gold. A Renaissance face, Sage thought, when they first met. The face of a Medici prince—a description that pleased him a lot, early on, that made him laugh with pleasure.

Actually they look quite a bit alike, Sage and Noel. Others (her sisters) have said this, and at certain times even Sage can see it, but she would not say this to Noel. He does not even like it when Sage has borrowed and worn a shirt or sweater of his (she no longer does this, ever), although they are very close to the same size. A small, slight man, Noel is even thinner, narrower than Sage is, a new experience for her: she has generally loved very large men. Roland Gallo is large, and so is Jim McAndrew.

“You're right,” Sage now tells Noel. “I know I'm grasping at straws. Leaping for them in fact. But. Well. You know.”

“I sure do.” He gazes at her, but dreamily, his gaze somehow abstract. And then, returning to her, he advises, “Well, get some slides together, send them off. Why not? What've you got to lose?”

Sage smiles, feeling the melancholy of her face. “Not a hell of a lot, I guess.”

O
h! Oh—good!” Saul breathes out, as he always does, as he comes. His words are slightly muffled in Liza's hair, as was her outcry a minute before: their middle child is uncannily alert to sexual sounds. “You're beautiful,” Saul now whispers to Liza's ear, so that she makes a small half-laughing sound of pure pleasure. “I love you,” she whispers.

Removing himself from her body, Saul now stretches beside her, his hard bones and tight skin against her much softer, very ample flesh. I am perfect for Saul, Liza has sometimes thought and sometimes said to him; a thinner woman with Saul would be a mass of bruises.

Liza pulls the covers up over them both. The fog has come in, a cold night succeeding the hot, hot April day. She should get up and see that the children are covered too, Liza thinks, but maybe she doesn't have to, actually? She wants so badly just to lie there next to Saul, savoring sated flesh. To lie in peace.

In the late Sixties, the years of her own late teens, Liza appeared to be the essential Flower Child, plump and blonde, streamy-haired, braless, in her bedspread or Indian-looking flowered fabrics. She was often half stoned on grass, and in a feckless, affectionate way she made love a lot, as everyone was enjoined to do, back then. With a lot of long-haired boys, who often gave her flowers to wear.

And then, one day in Presbyterian Hospital, where Liza was visiting her endlessly dying grandmother, Molly Blair, an intern came in to check on Molly (who usually gave him hell). Saul Jacobs, who took one look at Liza and had to have her, he was instantly crazy about her and not only that—he took her seriously, he insisted on marriage and began at once to talk about having children.

Even Caroline, who had done more or less the same, married impulsively not once but twice (Jim, whom she now regarded as in most ways an error, had been the single reasoned choice)—Caroline nevertheless thought this was a bad idea. “My darling, you're so young, and you don't have any money. It'll be really tough, these days, the expensive seventies. Are you really sure you want children?”

Liza laughed. “Didn't you want us?”

“Well, once I had you I did.”

And so everyone who thought it would not work out was wrong, for the most part. And the parts of the marriage that worked less well were known only to Liza, who never spoke of them, not to anyone.

“If we didn't have children we could do a lot more screwing,” Saul now whispers.

“We do quite a lot, don't you think?”

“Not as much as I want to.”

“Me neither.”

“We'll have to get away for at least a weekend this summer. Carmel or Tahoe, somewhere like that.”

“Yes.” But Liza knows perfectly well that this will not happen, something else will take precedence. Saul's patients. The children.

However, raising himself on one elbow to look down at Liza, Saul now says, “I mean it. Let's make a definite plan. Commit ourselves to a place for five or six days anyway. Pay for it ahead, so there'll be a penalty if we don't go.” He laughs a little as he says this, knowing that Liza thinks him a little, well, thrifty, as she herself might tactfully put it. While he finds her, of course, a wild-handed spendthrift.

“Listen, I'm going to hold you to that, you'll be sorry,” she tells him.

As she says this Liza sees a huge low motel bed, heavy draperies covering long windows, so that it really doesn't matter where you are; the point is, you can sleep as long as you like. That is Liza's idea of a wonderful trip away, she realizes, lots of sleep. She loves making love with Saul, he is better at it than anyone, more generous, imaginative and patient (she thinks his cock is very beautiful). That was why she married him, mostly: for great sex. But she has had enough sex in her life, she thinks, she really has. After all those years of marriage they still make love at least four or five times a week, but she needs more sleep; she is almost asleep right now. How nice of the children to let her sleep. How good of Saul.

In her dream, though, a hand is caressing her breast, and a voice murmurs near her ear, “So beautiful—”

She is not asleep, not dreaming, and Saul is whispering, “Why not? Couldn't you? Come on, lovely Liza, just turn over. A little variety will wake you up.”

Turning, sleepily aware of at least a little response, some rush of warm blood to all the usual places, as she reaches back to touch Saul, Liza next hears a small voice from the doorway, inquiring, “Mommy, are you and Daddy planning to talk all night?”

“Damn,” Saul mutters, flopping back, as Liza, turning again, holds her arm out to her child. “No, darling, and you're supposed to be asleep.”

Although only two years older than Liza, Saul was married once before. And during all that time of Liza's feckless love affairs, and flowers and dope and hikes on Mt. Tamalpais, Saul was a serious medical student, who had married a very young nurse, the first woman who let him make love to her, and unhappily for them both she did not take to the experience. Not at all.

Saul's next sexual encounter was with Liza (he and the nurse had just separated when he wandered into the room of the cross old actress Ms. Molly Blair and found beautiful Liza), and from then
on, as far as Saul was concerned, Liza
was
sexuality. She was his blonde erotic goddess, his muse. He had, indeed, certain objections to her character: Liza tended (as her mother did) to messiness; she was disorganized, often late and often extravagant. But none of that mattered, really, to Saul; he placed infinite and grateful value on their shared sexual life, and he also valued Liza's kindness, her considerable intelligence, her general good humor with the children, as well as with himself. In his own view, Saul is a difficult, somewhat problematic person.

Even Saul's sexual fantasies center around Liza; other women do not occur to him, in that way. And this fact, this sexual single-mindedness of Saul's, can be observed: Liza's jealous sisters, especially Fiona and Jill, and Sage, with a thrust of pain as she thinks of bad Roland, of wandering Noel, all those women took note of Saul's “pathological monogamy” (their phrase). “If anyone strayed from that ménage it'd have to be Liza,” they have speculated, and they look for signs that she might.