Caroline's Daughters (38 page)

“A good sign, I'd think.”

“I guess.” Sage frowns dubiously, and then she says, “But, Stevie, you haven't said what you're up to now. You were going to tell me.”

Dextrously chopping—he too has had to give up grating the very moist and fibrous root—Stevie pauses before he tells her, “I do have a plan. I don't know why I feel a little silly telling you about it.”

“It's not a silly plan?”

“Well, no.”

Stevie's plan, which he at first somewhat ironically refers to as his free-food place, has actually been worked out in considerable
detail. He describes it to Sage over dinner, their gingered swordfish, and wine.

“You remember Tony Navarro? That nice Mexican kid we knew in the Movement, came to all the sit-ins and stuff, from Mission High? I ran into him again in the restaurant business, we used some of the same people. His folks had a place out on Mission that he inherited, which has put him more or less in the same position that I'm in now. Some dough to use, and a lot of experience in food. Purveyors, storage, all that. Plus our sentimental Sixties good intentions.”

He and Sage exchange a look, a wry smile. And then Stevie goes on and on, describing a plan that basically combines restaurant food overloads, the goodwill (and a few other emotions) of restaurant owners—and human need. The needs of the homeless, people with AIDS, the impoverished old.

“Anyway, that's what I'm mostly up to now,” he says, as they come to the end of dinner, and apparently of his recital. “Plus a not-so-good relationship that's winding down, I think,” he adds.

“Oh really?” Sage, her spirits suddenly and considerably lowered, does not ask, as she would like to, Who? Why winding down?

“I don't know,” Stevie tells her, “it just seems really hard to work things out these days. The women I meet are so terrifically distrustful. Not that I blame them, but they are.”

“I guess so. I mean, I guess we are.” Sage still feels a certain apprehension about the direction that this talk is taking.

“I meet two kinds of women,” says Stevie, with a little sigh. “The first ones had a really bad experience, sometimes it's a marriage—have you noticed how many people our age have already been married, some of them more than once?—and the bad time was a few years back, but they still don't really want to get into anything. And the second group wants to get married tomorrow and have a lot of children the following week.”

Sage laughs, as she knows Stevie meant her to, but she feels her own laugh as a little dishonest: she would like to get married next week, to Stevie, and have children as soon as they could. “Your current friend must be in the second group,” she says.

“No, actually in the first, the bad-marriage group. The trouble is, she seems to be changing her mind at the same time that I'm
changing mine. I know, it sounds a lot funnier than it is. I feel like I've been not quite honest with her, I mean I didn't really want her all that much, it turns out. But maybe I should have known that in the first place.”

Sage cannot prevent or control the small wave of relief that rises within her. “It's mostly that you care about women much more than most men do,” she tells him. “You're responsible.”

“I do? I am? Well, I guess. It seems a problem for me. The energy involved in just not hurting, or getting hurt.”

How lucky that she did not at any earlier point in the evening declare her great new love for Stevie! That would have been so entirely wrong, Sage now sees. And possibly it is not even
really
true. It even seems a little crazy, those violent emotions applied to Stevie. Slightly hysterical (a version of that terrible, still-embarrassing scene with Jim McAndrew).

Perhaps after all what she does feel for Stevie is the most affectionate friendship, the sort that never needs a declaration.

“Well, if I ever decide that I'm dying to have children next week you'll be the first to know,” she tells him.

And they both laugh. Good old friends.

S
imojoval de Allende, high in the mountains of Chiapas, near the border that separates Mexico from Guatemala, is not what Liza ever envisioned when she thought the word “Mexico.” She had, rather, pictured some aspect of Mexico City, the Anthropology Museum, or teeming, exotic streets, and crowds, and wild-colored flowers. Or, a tropical beach, a slick-magazine scene of sexy smooth white sand, and green clear shallow water, gently rippling. A stand of palms.

Not
an almost new but already showing wear, one-story California-ranch-style motel. Rutted, muddy, unpaved streets, and a restaurant that serves burned beans and tepid beer. And not much else. Nevertheless, that is where they are, she and Saul, for their Mexican reunion—where, as he has reminded her once too often, she always wanted to go.

Nearby there is marvellous scenery, deep gorges and waterfalls; and in several neighboring towns and small cities, most notably San Cristóbal de las Casas, there is architecture of a Baroque beauty almost unsurpassed in colonial Mexico. But this is the rainy season, and although it only rains in the afternoons the roads are very slick, almost impassable. There was a horrifying bus accident the week before, thirty-nine people over a cliff, no survivors. A Third Class bus: “Naturally,” Saul and Liza muttered to each other, in an infrequent moment of agreement, on this trip.

Also (“to make everything quite perfect,” as Liza puts it to herself), Saul has crab lice, and not only that but he has run out of
the DDT powder that would have controlled their incursions into the deepest follicle of each hair on his body. Saul is not an exceptionally hairy person, he has none on his back (he now thanks God), only in the ordinary male places for hair, but he now feels himself most horrendously hirsute. Everywhere itches, he feels dirty and disgusting, asexual and full of guilt—and a guilt that will not let him speak its name. Because Liza insists on his innocence.

“Darling, I've had crabs too, once I picked them up or, rather, they picked me up in jail, that time in Santa Rita. I know how easily you can get them,” she tells him affably. “And it's not as easy to get rid of them as they say. Easier for women, I guess, with less hair.”

“You'll get them from me.”

“Sweetie, of course I will. But isn't that what reunions are all about? Funny sex? Things not quite working out?”

Saul has not been in jail, but he has been living in “substandard” conditions, huts and slapped-up dirt-floored shacks, mostly along the coast of Honduras. However, he did not get crabs from those anonymous conditions but from a nurse, fervent skinny Lorna Cassidy, from Michigan. With whom Saul has been fornicating (that is the word that comes to his mind; he could also say that they had been fucking their socks off) at every available opportunity.

Liza in her cheerful way seems to assume that no such thing could ever be possible. And it is not possible: Saul, the good doctor, the good Jewish son and husband, quite passionately and permanently in love with his wife, with lovely blonde Liza, he could never do such a thing. But that is just what he has been doing, fucking Lorna, whom he does not even love, he just likes her. Doing it every time they have found ten minutes of privacy, or less, anywhere at all. Several times standing in a closet. In improvised bathrooms.

In a way Saul would like to tell Liza all this; for one thing she would find it very interesting. She likes stories that involve a lot of sexual goings-on. But Saul admits to himself that telling Liza, for whatever reasons, ostensibly moral and honest, would in fact be a cruel sort of boasting, and so he does not.

In any case there they are, drinking too much tasteless beer, and talking in more or less opposite directions.

Liza is in fact grappling with a moral problem (she sees its essence as moral) of quite a different sort from that which so distracts and disturbs poor faithless Saul. What obsesses Liza is the fact that she sent a story to the largest and reputedly the richest of the so-called women's magazines, and they have called to say that they “love” the story, it is “wonderful.” So much strong feeling, they say, which is so rare these days. They would love to publish it—if only. If only she could make things a little more clear, here and there. And perhaps the lover need not after all be Polish? They mean, why Polish? And the scene in bed, well, just a little too long? And then there's the ending: possibly a little more explanation, a little what you might call lightening up?

“In other words, totally change my original story. To meet their specifications,” Liza concludes her recital. “I'm surprised they didn't want me to put everyone in Ralph Lauren clothes.”

“You're sure?”

“No, I'm not sure. Some other inner voice is saying they could be right, you know, they're not all dummies. They could be really improving the story. And then it all gets more confused because of the money. Of course I'd like it, even if I know we don't need it. But, you know, trips?”

At that word they both smile feebly; in their present hot, damp and dubiously clean surroundings the word “trip” is not exactly magic.

“So I don't know quite what to do.” About anything, Liza could continue, including us. How terrifically lonely I feel, now that we're together. How much closer, really, I felt when I was in San Francisco and you in Honduras, or wherever. Thinking of you, I felt much closer than I do now.

Maybe I'm supposed to live alone? Liza wonders. Maybe that's better for writers? But how can I, with three children?

The proprietor of this bar, and at the moment its sole other occupant, is a very thin and sad-faced, very dark young woman, her high-boned face a mask, her clothes dark and drab, anonymous. But despite her Mayan (Olmec? Zapotec?) features, she could easily be a California Mexican woman—and this bar could be in some remote High Sierra hamlet, to which the woman's family had in
some way been displaced, from the valley. The calendar on the wall advertises Pepsi, the radio plays Mantovani.

“I wish I could have met you at some beach.” Saul apologizes with a gesture that includes the whole of their surroundings: The ugly room, and the speechless sorrows of the woman who served them warm beer. The mud and the dripping trees outside. His crabs.

“This is like northern California,” Liza tells him.

Saul brightens. “Quite a lot.” And then, “You don't know how much I've missed you. And the kids. Less them, though.” He smiles.

“Well, that's good.”

“It's strange,” he says. “I feel more troubled by the people I've been treating here, Christ, I mean trying to treat, than I ever did back in the States. And I don't think it's only because they're worse, worse troubles, I mean. But. There I am with some guy whose life could not be less like mine, we're just barely communicating, I have to say that my Spanish is not as great as I thought it was. And his pain really gets to me. It gets through.” He pauses. “I'm not really making sense, am I.”

“Sure you are.”

In fact this is their moment of greatest rapport, so far. Looking at each other across the stained, once-white table cover, Liza and Saul both know this, and they smile, acknowledging the moment. But they are unable to sustain it, and their fragile connection sags.

“I think I don't know what I'm talking about.” Saul sighs, and stretches—and reaches to scratch, he can't not.

Saul looks more sad than Liza has ever seen him, the lines in his long lean face are deeper and darker, his large dark eyes are downcast. And not quite meeting hers? Liza has this sense of him, of some private, harrowing pain, or guilt—a sense for the moment she suppresses.

Or, almost suppresses, as she wonders, Can he be so foolish as to feel guilty, still, over having left me more or less alone, while he went off to the wars, so to speak?

Or, can he possibly be so foolish as to have screwed some nurse, or someone, who gave him crabs? And she thinks, If he did I just pray he doesn't tell me about it, I can't stand confessions.

Nevertheless she says, “I sure hope it wasn't really some sexy nurse who gave you crabs.”

Saul scowls. “Of course not.”

“Well, good.”

There is a tiny pause, during which Liza, incredulous, receives the clearly intuited information—his whole face is telling her this, and the way he slumps in his chair—that Saul did indeed screw someone. Saul unfaithful, the one thing she never expected. It makes her rattle: “I do wonder about my mother in Italy. She's staying such a long time.”

“Isn't that a good sign? She's having fun?” Saul indeed looks relieved at the change of subject—as well he might.

“Oh, I suppose. But in some terrible way everything seems to fall apart when she's out of town.”

“We weathered the years in Portugal,” Saul reminds her.

“Well, did we, really? You and I were too busy having kids to notice. And that's when Sage went crazy over Roland Gallo, and then married Noel, and God knows what Fiona and Jill were really up to. Or what they're up to now, for that matter.”

She simply does not want that sort of confrontation with Saul, Liza believes, at the moment. It would only be damaging, and besides, she could be quite wrong? Her literary imagination running away with itself?

But maybe later on she will bring it up, and Saul will deny it, and they will have a terrific fight—something they never do, but it might clear the air between them. Now.

She says, “I'm worried about this black guy I keep seeing in the park. At first I thought he was someone I used to know, but he's not, he's just this guy living in the park. I tried to give him some money but he wouldn't take it, and I brought him some food but I don't think he ate any.”

“If he were rich we'd call that a clinical depression. And try Lithium. Or shock.”

“As it is he's just a street crazy.”