Oh! 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.
“But she’s probably too fat,” Fiona and Jill have concluded.
Caroline too has taken note of Saul as a dedicated husband, and remarked to Ralph, “How wrong I was to urge those kids not to get married. You see? When I’m wrong I’m really wrong.”
Liza’s days, these days, are often spent down at the playground (across from Roland Gallo’s house). She takes the baby and the middle child there, the older one being in nursery school, as next year this barely steady two-year-old will be.
And that playground and park, for Sage the scene of such lonely, jealous anxiety, for Liza is filled with happy nostalgia. “Let’s go down to J.K. and turn on,” the kids used to say, after school—and then they would, ambling or sometimes running down the hill to the park, Julius Kahn Playground, and to some special places off in the woods, the cypress groves. Someone always had some joints, several people had transistors, and they were all off and away, sucking down smoke and laughing and floating, off into the sky with Lucy, with diamonds.
Liza liked all that a lot. She liked her friends and the dope and the music, she felt perfectly happy then. In a permanent way she is crazy about that park.
She especially loved making out, making love with those boys, almost all of them, at one time or another.
Sitting now on the hard green bench, as her small child pushes a dump truck through some sand in the sandbox, Liza sighs for those years. It is not so far back, really, but so passed, now so totally gone, swallowed by the strange Nixonian Seventies, and now the awful Eighties.
And then she thinks, If I’m pregnant now I don’t know what I’ll do. (With Liza this is a frequent concern.) Could she have an abortion without telling Saul? And if not why not? Because it’s his child too, that would be one reason why. But I cannot have four children in this rotten, rotting world, thinks Liza.
“Well, Liza, hi!” A white-blonde young woman, about Liza’s age, with a child the age of Liza’s sandbox child now sits down on the bench beside her, all bright smiles, as her child, a little girl, stumbles into the sand, down to Liza’s child, a boy. “Good to see you again,” says this woman, all teeth, all enthusiasm.
“Oh, good to see you!” But Liza is unable to remember this woman’s name, or where they met. Some cocktail party, she thinks, and now she does remember: it was the sort of party that she and Saul never go to but this time for some reason they had to, and there was this woman, who said, when introduced to Liza (who has kept her own name—she has her own plans, for her name): “Are you by any chance related to Fiona McAndrew? The Fiona of Fiona’s? Oh, her sister? How marvellous! Such a rich famous successful sister! How exciting!”
Well, small wonder that Liza could not recall her name.
“Isn’t it funny, I thought of you this very morning,” this Joanne now tells Liza. “We’re going to Fiona’s tonight, and I’m so excited! Do you think we’ll see her there? Will I know her, does she look a lot like you?”
“I honestly don’t know,” says Liza—a covering answer. And then, “She’s quite a lot thinner than I am.”
“In her business? Wow, she must really work at it.”
This exchange of inanities could go on all day, Liza thinks, or for several days, except that the two small children just then begin to scream. One has thrown sand at the other, now both are throwing sand and screaming, eyes and noses wet, baby voices hoarse with passion.
“Oh shit,” says Joanne. (To Liza, her most sympathetic utterance so far.) “I’ll have to take her home to change, we’re on our way to Roland’s mom’s. Lucky for me we live right over there.”
Thus reminded, Liza now recalls that Joanne indeed is married to nefarious Roland, Sage’s once-lover. Roland left the wife to whom he was married in Sage’s time to marry this Joanne, to marry Joanne instead of Sage. Joanne, even younger than Sage, and so stupid—further cause for chagrin.
Watching silly Joanne as she plucks the child, now calmer, up from the sandbox, saying goodby and watching as Joanne starts off across the grass toward her splendid house, Liza remembers all that her sister suffered on infamous Roland’s account, and she feels a renewal of that old rage as she further thinks, What a total jerk, choosing that dopey woman over beautiful talented Sage. And not quite consistently she also thinks, How lucky after all that he didn’t marry Sage. And she adds, Noel’s quite bad enough.
“San Francisco is the smallest town I’ve ever been in,” is a frequent remark of Caroline’s, and one that her daughters have sometimes put down to sheer snobbery, shades of English Molly. However, in one way or another, from time to time, they all come to agree with her, more or less. Particularly, Liza now thinks, when faced with coincidences of this very small-town nature: running into Joanne Gallo in the park, on the day when Joanne is going to Fiona’s.
“I’m the non-achieving sister,” Liza has had occasion to remark, though perhaps it is she herself who has created these occasions, through a bad habit of self-depreciation.
The usual rejoinder is, “Oh, but you have those great kids, and a really nice husband; in fact he’s great, and attractive.”
And all of that is perfectly true, Liza knows very well. And yet, and yet, these days it is simply not enough. Now women are supposed to have a great husband and children and run several corporations; be good at Leveraged Buy-Outs or design marvellous post-modern houses. Or run for public office. Or maybe all of those somehow at once. Not to mention being very thin and aerobically fit, a memorable cook-hostess-decorator. And fabulous in bed, multi-orgasmic and tender and demanding, all at once.
“It’s like the Fifties in spades,” Caroline has remarked, of the present decade. “Only then we didn’t have to have careers as well. We were just supposed to make all our own curtains and iron a lot of shirts, and do what people back then called ‘gourmet cooking.’ You know, all that cream-enrichment business that now you’re not supposed to do at all.”
Liza thinks her mother is quite right (as usual). Too much indeed is asked of women now. And men are not helping as much as they think they are, even Saul is not. And she, Liza, is asking too much of herself. Probably. Nevertheless.
The fantasy with which Liza comforts herself for this perceived underachievement of her own is that in another five years, say, when she will be just forty, and all three kids will be in school, then she will write a novel. And then more novels. Liza McAndrew, a novelist.
In the meantime she reads, and reads, and reads, her taste running generally to heavy Victorians, Mrs. Gaskell and Gissing and Trollope, Dickens—and, further down the line, Henry James and Edith Wharton, Elizabeth Bowen—and of course Virginia Woolf.
She keeps a notebook in which she writes every day. And this is a secret from Saul, one of her few: if he knew that she kept some sort of secret journal, he might suspect that she wrote about him, which, meticulously if for the most part lovingly, she does. She writes about everything, her mother and sisters, her father and his girlfriends, her stepfather. Her sisters’ husbands and lovers, and their work, their successes (Fiona, Jill), or unsuccesses (Sage, so far, and Portia). Her friends.
Also, in an acerbic, occasionally mean-spirited way that would probably have surprised anyone who knew her, Liza writes about the current San Francisco literary scene. “Such as it is,” as Liza herself might put it. She has found it interesting, for example, to note that the local writers, all male, who were so prominently billed as such (“LOCAL NOVELISTS X AND Y”) in the Sixties, early Seventies—those who at that time spent all their days at Enrico’s Coffee House (always hard to imagine when they wrote), now seemed to a great extent to have faded away. Their books if published at all do badly, are even ridiculed as sexist, macho stuff.
But Liza wonders: are these valid critical or even novelistic observations, or is she simply mean and envious, even of those old has-been writers? of anyone, in fact, who has published.
She thinks continuously, though, of her own novels, a long bright row of them, all fat and heavy and deeply satisfying. Complex and funny, and beautiful and wise. Books that everyone or almost everyone will love.
In the midst of this fantasy, however, today Liza is struck by the cruel realization that she could quite as easily be imagining children, a row of babies. Plump and handsome, funny and wise, and almost universally loved.
Sighing, Liza thinks, I cannot have four children. I cannot. I want to write.
Looking up from these not entirely encouraging thoughts, Liza sees a thin woman in jeans and a shabby red sweater hurrying toward her, a young woman whose heavy dark hair swings out as she walks, who walks happily. And whom at first, in her own abstraction and confusion, Liza does not recognize as Sage, her own Sage. Her favorite (she sometimes thinks this) sister. Half-sister. It is Sage, looking totally happy (further reason not to recognize her), Sage trying for whatever reason to repress that joy. Or perhaps only trying to calm down.
“Oh, I found you!” Sage sits down on the bench beside Liza, breathing hard, as though she had been running all over the city, looking for Liza.
“Sage, tell me, what on earth?” Liza laughs, and reaches to give Sage’s shoulders a light quick hug.
“Well.” Sage too laughs, clearly at herself, at her own too-obvious inability to contain this excitement. “Well, I can’t even remember if I told you, Noel said not to tell anyone and so maybe I didn’t. But I sent some slides to this man in New York, and he called me just now, and he wants to give me a show! Isn’t that really fantastic? A New York gallery! A show!”
“Oh, Sage, that is so super.” But even as her eyes tear over (surely with pleasure for Sage?) Liza hears a new, quite horrible interior voice that says, God, one more sister with some big success out there in the world. And I just keep on being a tired and semi-broke mother who’s pregnant, probably. I’ll never get to write books, even if I could write, which is dubious.
But, “Sage, that’s fabulous,” Liza says quite loudly, silencing those other, awful voices with her own actual kindly voice.
And Sage of course hears only the spoken words.
However, strange Sage, who is unpredictable, has already gone off in another direction. More precisely, she has gone backward, in the direction of Roland Gallo. “You know, I still even now think of Roland in this goddam park,” she says to Liza. “People don’t get over things, really, do they. Even getting this great news, I sort of thought of wanting him to know. That I’m not just the run-down kid radical he used to know.”
With these reflections Sage’s face has gone from near-ecstasy to a wild black melancholy. Only the intensity is constant.
As Liza thinks, No wonder men find Sage just a little wearing, certainly a man like Roland would have. He probably only meant to have some heavy motel hours with an almost beautiful young girl, whom luckily no one would know. And Sage is probably a little much for poor foolish Noel. Men are not really mad for complexity in women, or big intensity.
She wonders if she should tell Sage that she just saw Roland’s dumb blonde wife, the ubiquitous Joanne. And she quickly decides that she absolutely should not, and how mean and stupid of her (of Liza) even to consider telling. Indeed, what sort of person, what sort of sister is she becoming?
Sage has now gone back to her excited, happy phase (“a manic-depressive on a very short cycle,” Sage has described herself as being). “I haven’t even told Noel this latest, about the show,” she says. “Lord, what will he say?” Her eyes glitter, challenging, seeming to dare Noel not to be as happy as she is.
“He’ll be so proud,” Liza tells her, hoping that this is true.
“You can’t tell with Noel,” Sage muses. “I can never predict with him.”
“That’s supposed to make life interesting.” This had come out with more irony than Liza intended, and so she adds, “You’ll have to go to New York! What fun!”
But just as Liza is thinking how silly that sounded, even how false, Sage has got quickly to her feet again. “I’ve got to tell Jim,” she announces. “It’s Wednesday, he just might be at home, don’t you think? Before golf.”
“I guess.”
“Well, ciao.” Sage laughs; they both dislike people who say ciao. And then she is off, running across the park in the direction of Jim’s condominium. Her stepfather, Liza’s father, whom Liza almost never sees.
At that moment, for no reason, Liza’s child in the sandbox begins to cry. He sits there and screams, his face all red, his eyes and nose streaming.
Going over to pick him up, Liza reflects that this particular child is quite as mercurial as Sage is. She hugs and comforts him, and considers the oddity of genes—odd that a child of hers should be like Sage.
She reflects too on Sage’s news, and she tries to imagine this new person, successful Sage. With a gallery in New York, and big sales, maybe.
The small boy in her arms stops crying and nestles his head against her, as Liza thinks, You’re only tired, poor baby.
And just then she experiences the sensation for which all that week she has longed: the cramping twist that with her announces the onset of a period. And Liza thinks, Oh, thank God. Now I can write.