Caroline's Daughters (34 page)

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.

“Y
ou'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 hundred 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 time 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.”

“Okay, you're right, I wouldn't dare. But what does this famous Roland like best?”

“You mean in the sack?”

“Of course.”

Fiona studies this question for a moment, then mentions an act that she is fairly certain Roland would find abhorrent; he is actually far more conventional than she would like Jill to believe.

“Yuck, who does he think he is, Norman Mailer?”

Fiona laughs, feeling obscurely that she has won some contest with Roland. “Well, you asked,” she says.

“Well, in that case I won't.”

“Okay, it was just an idea.” The relief that she now feels informs Fiona of just how much she did not want Jill in bed with Roland, doing
anything
. And at the same time (not quite coincidentally) she observes how very much better her sister looks today. After last night's wild rains the air is now washed and fresh, and even in that very hard light Jill's skin is clear and pale, and her eyes are bright—as though in the night she had come upon some cheering information. Maybe a phone call, turning her life around.

And so it is not entirely surprising when Jill then says, “Today's the day, I know you'll be happy to hear. I'm off at last.”

“Well, I'm not all that happy.”

“Oh, come on, Fi, don't overdo. You've been great, you really have. A true pal in need. In fact a sister.”

“I guess it is time you went back there, though.”

“To Telegraph Hill? But I'm not, I'm heading out to Stinson again. I really like it there.”

“You don't mind the beach by yourself?”

“Well, I could always head over to Bolinas and check out our baby Ports, couldn't I?”

“You mean the heiress. She's probably all wrapped up in her Bernal digs. With that creepy Polish lawyer.”

“Lebanese. Probably. But no. One, I don't mind Stinson alone, I sort of like it. And two, this time I don't plan to be alone there.” And Jill gives a satisfied smile.

Fiona smiles too, having learned what she had already intuited from her sister's whole demeanor. From her skin.

Having Jill gone is not exactly the improvement in Fiona's life that she thought it would be, though. The lack of her sister, who is not at the moment available even for phone calls (something about the people who own the place not paying their bill), simply underlines and emphasizes all the other lacks in Fiona's life: she is suddenly without significant occupation, the restaurant is more or less running by itself. And she is also without any lover—a condition relatively new to her, and entirely unpleasant.

T
he Stinson Beach house is now for sale and stripped almost bare; as well as there being no phone, there is almost no furniture. Just basics: the bed, kitchen table, two chairs and the long hard living-room sofa. The heavy things. No draperies or curtains or lamps, just overhead lights. Not a great place to be alone in any more, Jill thinks—good that Noel is coming out.