Caroline's Daughters (13 page)

Noel, in Liza's view, was at his most charming that night, which is to say that he was fairly quiet, and helpful in small ways to Fiona, courtly to Caroline and very sweet with Sage (too sweet? could he be up to something?). He and Sage looked marvellous together that
night, with all that thick dark hair, those two very lithe thin bodies, their golden eyes.

Portia, in a gauzy flowered dress, looked, well, odd, in her sisters' opinions. “A little like a tall young boy in drag,” Liza put it to Saul, later on.

“Later we got into travel talk,” Liza reported. “I've often wondered, where would Eighties conversations be without food and travel? I always think of this at doctor parties, you know? All those rich doctors and their wives, going on about the boiled beef at the Sacher, kidneys at Claridge's. It's enough to put you off food entirely.”

The ostensible reason for the travel talk that evening was to advise Sage about her trip to New York. The best fares for getting there, the various Frequent Flyer plans—as though that were what Sage was about to become, a Frequent Flyer. And then they talked about New York restaurants. Where her dealer should take her for dinner.

Later still, on the way to the ladies', Liza got somewhat lost, easy enough to do in that maze of Fiona's. She went past the tiny room that Fiona calls her bar, and was sure that she saw Roland Gallo there, although she was hurrying past. But Liza would know that shining dome anywhere, she thought.

And she wondered: Is that who Fiona is hiding from everyone? Protecting Sage from Roland, which would not be like Fiona? Also, Liza was sure that Roland Gallo was there alone, Joanne the airhead was definitely not in the ladies'.

Could
Fiona be getting it on with Roland Gallo?

“W
hat can I woo you with? I'm an old-fashioned wine-and-flowers man, and you're surrounded with both. I don't know what to do about you, I'm really upset. I don't know myself these days. I could write a book—now, there's a song for you. You've turned my life upside down. You see how silly I sound? But you can't keep turning me down. I won't let you.”

Smiling Fiona, in her sunny penthouse bedroom, now streaming with rare brilliant August sunshine—Fiona turns off the tape to which she has just listened, as to herself she complains, Well, really, doesn't he have anything else to do but make these phone calls? He's been calling me all day.

However, at the same time another, interior voice is saying, Of course he's right. I can't keep turning him down. I really can't.

On another tape, a couple of days ago, Roland said, “I am mad, you know that? around the bend. I am seriously thinking of cashing in everything, the practice, my house, everything I own, and kidnapping you. Permanently. We could go to Capri, or maybe Taormina. Or Palermo. You'd like it there, it's beautiful. Flowers. I have a few connections, some cousins there. We'd stay there for good. I am seriously thinking of this. I am crazy about you, Miss Fiona McAndrew.”

Of course he knows that she could keep all the tapes, that is
another thing that Fiona thinks. The Gallo-McAndrew tapes. The
Chronicle
would pay a lot for them, if he runs for mayor.

But of course I wouldn't dream of doing that, thinks Fiona.

She also thinks of saying to Roland, straight out, Just how many times have you said all this stuff before, old pal? You're coming on as though the whole thing were entirely new, the very first time. For you.

Fiona would truly love to have a conversation with Sage along these lines, a real tell-all chat, the kind that men imagine women have all the time, when actually we don't.

I could never even bring it up with Sage, thinks Fiona.

Uncannily prescient, or something, Roland shows up at the restaurant, Fiona's, at various times all during the course of the day. There he is, just wandering through, or sitting in the bar with a paper.
But only when Fiona is there
. And how could he possibly know? She is in and out all day, in a way that no one could predict, not possibly. Has he hired someone, maybe someone who works for her, to clue him in, let him know about any plan or appointment of Fiona's? He wouldn't do that, would he? Fiona in fact believes that he would not, more likely he goes on instinct, and Roland's instincts are probably quite uncanny.

At times with severity, at other times with a sort of envious amusement, Fiona has observed the extremely sexual behind-the-scenes atmosphere at Fiona's. She has pondered this, and at some point she read an article about another famous local restaurant in which the same condition was described, a heightened sexual atmosphere. But no explanation was proffered.

Fiona has thought about this a lot, but has not come up with much beyond the inherent sexiness of food: there must be something
excitingly permissive and generous about working with food? really getting into very good food, with hands and mouths? anticipation? smells?

She can't work it out, but all around her everyone seems to be getting it on with someone else who works there; the very air is full of sex, romance, with whispers and whispery, sexy laughs. Along with the cooking aromas, the wonderful garlic and fish smells, the lemon and rosemary.

Even the two young women who deliver flowers for Stevie every morning are lovers, one tall and black, the other small and fair.

In other words, everyone at Fiona's is doing a lot of sex. Except Fiona.

Does Roland Gallo know all that? It almost seems possible that he does. Almost. Or is Fiona getting a little paranoid?

She doesn't know.

“If she keeps this up I may have to have her disappeared, I'm that crazy about that girl,” Roland confides, over a lunchtime Campari, in the bar of the Big Four restaurant. “I know you think I'm crazy, but I've really got it for her. Like, like nothing. I could throw it all over for that kid. Make tracks for Palermo.” He flashes his widest, most Sicilian grin at his companion-confidant. Who is Buck Fister, an unlikely choice all around that even Roland cannot understand, except that Buck has a certain reputation for discretion; he does not talk.

As Roland himself might put it, With the deals that guy's got, he's got to be discreet.

Most recently, Buck has shifted from the engineering-illumination projects that no one ever quite grasped, that were always slightly mysterious (there were hints of union connivance), from all that he has gone into real estate, making the shift with a very loud noise indeed. His name is now attached to most of the largest property deals in town, residential-wise. Two-bedroom cottages, needing work, in Pacific Heights, for 995. Or, on Russian Hill, bargain condos at 950. Not to mention mansions for, probably, somewhere
in the neighborhood of 3. And
BUCK FISTER
, in small discreet lettering on the black-and-white signs affixed to all those properties. (Like many profoundly vulgar people, Buck is a stickler for what he calls “taste.” He likes things to be “elegant,” and he uses that word a lot. He is a passionate if partially informed Anglophile—of course.)

And, to his occasional displeasure, his name is suddenly proclaimed in every column; he is at every dinner party, opening or ball, giving almost half of those parties himself, it seems. In his tasteful, elegant Nob Hill pied-à-terre.

Plump and rosy-faced, average-ordinary-looking Buck. Nothing you would ever notice or remember about that face, thinks Roland, who is something of a snob about good looks. You can't even tell which way Buck swings, to look at him, thinks Roland. Of if he swings at all. Buck's sex life is something about which there have been no rumors that Roland has ever heard. Or maybe he just hasn't heard them yet. It could be something wild, but Roland doesn't think so, he does not think Buck does anything very interesting, along those lines. He may be just one of those guys with a very low sex drive, whom Roland sometimes envies, sort of. Buck functions as a walker, an escort for very rich, older women whose husbands do not wish to go to the opera, but he is also quite often seen with very pretty young women. In any case Roland knows that they, he and Buck, make a most unlikely couple, as, leaving the bar, they pass into the dining room, with its portraits and hunting horns, its suggestion of private clubs, of “Englishness.”

The Pacific Union Club, with its difficult, expensive memberships, its excellent food and its ludicrous rules concerning the presence of women, its terrific basement swimming pool, is just across the street, in the old Flood Mansion. It is to that club that both Buck and Roland most secretly, unadmittedly and probably in vain aspire.

Today, in addition to his loverly wish to speak of his beloved, Roland has what could be construed as a favor to ask of Buck: he has recently heard a rumor about Buck and a certain property that Buck owns, a big house, a mansion actually (though no one would buy
it), out in Seacliff, near the Golden Gate. If the rumor is true, and Roland has every reason to believe that it is, then Buck could be very useful sometimes to certain of Roland's relatives who come to town, people whom Roland refers to and even thinks of as his distant cousins. To whom Roland, for ancient but unburied family reasons, old debts, has inherited some indebtedness—which he cleverly manages to over-pay, usually, thus incurring an indebtedness in his own direction.

“You know so many people,” Roland in his most flattering tone begins (his detractors sometimes call him oily).

“Unlike you. You of course don't know a soul.” Buck's somewhat crooked grin is very boyish. But a fleshy mouth is one of the things that keep Buck from being good-looking, Roland now observes.

“Well, some of my relatives, my cousins, have heard of you. And they come to town sometimes.”

Buck answers with a very long look—a look in which much more is contained than in their usual, fairly prolonged conversations. “I'll give you a number,” he says at last. “But nothing funny. Absotively, poso-lutely.” (This last is a teasing putdown of Roland's own somewhat dated slang; it is not an expression of Buck's.)

Roland laughs. He is trying to be good-natured about fulfilling an obligation that he finds inherently distasteful. And all this business of women in houses is very dangerous, as Buck should know. “Of course not,” he says to Buck. And, “These are not funny people, my friend. But thanks, old man.” (This last was in Buck's own ersatz-English voice, and manner.)

Propitiously, just at that moment the first course arrives, spinach salads for both.

“You ever thought you'd grow up and order spinach in a restaurant, go out and eat spinach on purpose?” asks Roland, in the chatty, bantering mode he seems most usually to use with Buck. “If my sainted mother could see me ordering spinach—” He laughs, his dark eyes sentimental. But both the sentiment and the subject of food have led him directly back to his obsession, back to Fiona. “They make these terrific soufflés at Fiona's place,” he tells Buck.

“It's a very good restaurant, she's doing a good job.” Buck is sober, judicious. A man who knows good restaurants, as who in his world these days does not?

“She's got a nerve, though. Putting me off.”

“True,” Buck mumbles, chewing spinach.

What is it about Buck that urges Roland to run off at the mouth like this? Roland himself has no idea, he is not even entirely (posolutely) sure that Buck does keep his own mouth shut. God knows who Buck talks to. Some flabby-mouthed bimbo, that could be. “Your mother still living?” for no reason Roland then asks Buck.

“She's in a nursing home, actually. Just outside Boston. The best I could find.” Buck smiles, deprecating his own efforts. (Although in actual fact his mother, called Rosette, in late middle age is lively and well and quite on her own, operating a small, highly successful bordello in Carson City, Nevada.)

It must be something like this to go to a shrink, Roland imagines, this urge to go on and on about yourself. At a certain point Sage used to write him long letters about her hours with that woman she went to, how much it helped. And as though writing to him were also helpful. Poor old Sage.

Talking to Buck is sure as hell not like confession, where he, Roland, was always controlling what he said (good Christ, he had to), leaving out some things, making up some innocent others. With Buck, Roland is aware of being just slightly out of control, and what is strange is that he enjoys it, Roland does; he likes this yielding to his own urge to talk, and talk. To tell Buck everything. Maybe he should try this Viennese shrink sometime—but no, you'd have to be sick.

“It's an interesting family,” Buck next remarks, tidily finishing the last leaf of his salad.

“Family?” This is a word that Roland almost never uses.

“The McAndrews. Remember the old Andrews Sisters? You must. But those five girls, and their mother.”

“Yes,” Roland agrees, as he uneasily wonders where all this could go. He does not want to talk about Sage, although Buck surely knows that old chapter.

“You met the youngest?” asks Buck. “I think Portia.”

“No, I don't think I have. I know perfectly well I haven't. Maybe I'm working my way down to her, so to speak.”

Both men laugh, and Roland thinks, Good, now, that's enough family talk.

“You know Jill?” Buck asks.

“No, not really. I've seen her around, I think. Pretty girl.” Roland has spoken in the tone of a man having no interest at all in the pretty girl under discussion.

Which Buck catches. “She doesn't do much for you, huh?”

“Well, you know how it is, I'm in love.” Roland laughs.

“You don't think they look alike?”

“Fiona and Jill? Well, maybe the slightest. I hardly see it, though. Fiona's hair, it's so long, such beautiful hair. Fiona is a really beautiful woman, she just needs a few pounds. But why? You know Jill?”

“A little. I was thinking, you might have an easier time in that direction. I could even put in a word.”