“What an incredibly beautiful mushroom.”
“Sure is. But it’s got to be poisonous.”
“You mean all the prettiest ones are lethal? How trite of nature.” Not especially wanting an answer, Sage kneels down on the mat of damp leaves and pine needles, twigs. “Besides, I’m not planning to eat it, it’s too lovely.” From her distance she examines the top surface of the mushroom, which is cream-colored, runnelled with yellow, its center a star of the palest blue. “Really, look at it,” she says, intently.
“I would, but my knee,” Jim reminds her. “If I get down I’ll never get up. I’m a very old man,” he says, with a disbelieving laugh.
“I forgot,” and obligingly Sage rises to stand beside him, as they both look down at the mushroom.
The trail up which they have been hiking is not very clearly really a trail. Or, as Jim has earlier remarked, it could be just a deer trail; as he delicately put it, he has seen deer droppings.
Starting up again, Sage says, “You’d think I’d remember where we are, we used to come here all the time. Though of course that was about twenty years ago. About.”
“Trees grow a lot in that time,” Jim reminds her, puffing a little as he speaks.
“I guess so. Besides, we were usually stoned.”
After a few minutes Jim manages to ask her, “Where is Noel now, do you think?”
“I don’t know. Lurking, I guess you’d call it. He phones a lot, but he doesn’t say where he is. The bizarre part is how friendly he sounds. As though he were off on a trip and just checking in. With the wife.”
“You told him definitely, though?”
“Of course I did. I pointed out that he’d broken my arm, for God’s sake.”
“You’ve got to keep repeating it to him, saying you’re really through, you mean it,” Jim scolds. “Don’t let him pretend you’re just getting over some little spat.”
“You’re right, I know you are.”
Although in a way she has very much liked Jim’s scolding—it gets them back to a safe, familiar emotional plane—Sage still does not really want to defend herself. She does not want to explain her curious paralysis, in terms of Noel.
She feels, though, that this hike has been a very good idea. Months back, even after she had emerged from the initial trough of shame into which that crazy drunken time with Jim had plunged her (the night of the green silk shirt, she has thought of it as), she still thought often and troublingly of Jim. She had thought of calling him, even, to say, Look, all that was crazy. I do love you but you’re my father, for heaven’s sake. I was just so let down by everyone else that night, by Noel and by Cal, whom I hadn’t even yet met, back then. But the business about the show being postponed, everything was terrible for me then.
Sage has said all that in her mind to Jim, but she then came to believe that the best solution would be (if possible) a simple return to their old connection: doing something familiar together, like this hike. She had even thought of a movie; when she was a little girl they went to movies together a lot, when Caroline was busy with new babies, or whatever. But this hike is just right. If only she can carry it off, and not say any more about Noel than she already has. Not bring up that terrible night with Jim. How relieved he will be if she doesn’t!
Sage believes that, wherever Noel is, he is there with Jill. And if she thinks of it, if she thinks specifically about Noel and Jill together, she feels sick. In New York, at least, for the most part she managed not to, and when she did think of Noel then it was only with fury: how could he, how could he push her down in the street outside a restaurant? And in a way for Sage there was much relief in that rage. They had both been enraged, he had looked at her with pure hatred.
However, as she now imagines Noel ensconced somewhere with Jill, somewhere not too far away, probably, she feels sheer helplessness. No more power.
She and Jim have now paused once more in an almost sunny clearing, and Sage says to him, “It’s interesting about sexual jealousy, isn’t it. What an awful weapon it can be, I mean. If you can keep someone jealous all the time you have absolute control of them. I think it was almost deliberate, the way Noel made me jealous, and kept me jealous, and then taunted me about it.”
“How do you mean?”
“Oh, every way. Always making some play for whoever we were with, if she was even half attractive. Telling me about people coming on to him, women he worked for. According to him he always turned them down, but of course I didn’t always believe him. I wasn’t meant to.”
“The truth is,” Jim brings out, “I know quite a lot about sexual jealousy, I’ve had some heavy doses.”
“That’s what you get for consorting with young girls.” Sage did not mean to say this, but was then unable not to.
“Actually it was your mother who gave me the really worst time.” Jim looks uncomfortably into the thick dark woods to one side of their clearing, as though someone (Caroline?) might be listening there. Facing Sage again, with a reluctant smile he tells her, “She was sort of a flirt in those days, I guess you’d say. There was always someone around she seemed to like. Of course I doubt if there was anything really going on—”
“Probably not,” Sage agrees, as at the same time she thinks: If there’s anything Caroline is not it’s a flirt. She’s serious. Probably one hell of a lot was going on. For some reason Sage finds this cheering.
“But Noel’s a whole other story,” defiantly Jim tells her. “Bad news. You’ve got to get rid of that guy.”
“I know.”
They take up their walk again, and quite soon the woods ahead of them begin to clear, smaller trees and bushes, more sky. And then they are at the actual crest, the spiny ridge that marks the top of Mt. Vision. What they now face is the sea, the shining, spreading Pacific, with long green complicated fingers of land reaching out into the water, curling around it. Turning back for a moment to face the other direction, they see wide flat Tomales Bay, and the smooth low shape of green hills on its farther side.
“Marvellous! so beautiful!” Sage and Jim simultaneously breathe.
And then, because by now she has to, Sage says, “You know, I’ve felt so awful about that night I came over, I mean—”
Jim’s frown is very deep. “Sage, please. We were smashed. Martinis! Please don’t think about it.”
“Well, I don’t exactly dwell on it,” Sage lies. “Just sometimes I do think about it, and I worry.”
“Well, not to worry. I’d say our luck has improved a lot since then, wouldn’t you? Both our luck?” By now Jim is smiling with relief, glad to have finished (he thinks) with that major topic and happy to introduce another. “I’ve been wanting to tell you,” he says, with some enthusiasm. “Remember that time, oh, maybe a year ago? You came over, you’d been to some lunch thing, I think, at Caroline’s? And I was really down? I think I told you about this girl, we weren’t getting along?”
“I think I remember.”
“Well, it’s okay now,” Jim announces. “I mean we’re together, and I, uh, I really like her, and she seems to like me too. Pretty good for an old guy, huh?”
“Jim, that’s swell,” Sage tells him. “I’m really glad.”
“Well, what do you say we start back down?” He looks at his watch. “No point hanging around up here, do you think?”
“I guess not.”
“And you’ve got this nice new friend out from New York. That’s great.”
“Well, sort of,” Sage tells him.
“I think I’ll have a martini, care to join me?” Roland says, smilingly. “Oh God no—”
“Such violence. You have an allergy?”
“No, not really. I just never drink at lunch, remember?”
“Oh, right. And you still don’t.”
“Roland, please don’t talk like a moron,” says Sage.
“I’m sorry, I’ve had a lot of very upsetting events in my life recently. And, then, it was a surprise. Your calling, and then, uh, this.”
“Well, I guess. Hearing from me.”
They are seated, Sage Levine and Roland Gallo, in a small new garden restaurant, on Russian Hill. The choice was Sage’s; this is a place that she heard about in New York from a friend of Cal’s. They face each other from opposite sides of their small white table; again, Sage’s choice. Roland would have taken the place adjacent to hers but Sage very firmly said, “No, I want to see you. That’s the point.”
Now she says, frowning into her empty water glass (the drought: you only get water if you ask for it), “Tell me about your upsetting events. I mean, if you want to.” Saying this, she remembers a long time ago when Roland said to her, “It’s amazing how I talk to you. Never before in my life.”
“Well, that’s a rather large order,” Roland tells her. “As you know, I’m a very political man, and so certain secrets—well, that may be the point, I’m overloaded with secrets. Mine and some other people’s. But lately certain events, there was something I put in motion, I mean, that had an outcome that I didn’t at all foresee, that would be one way to put it. But, thinking back, I wonder now if I shouldn’t have. Foreseen what happened.” He smiles, or, rather, his wide mouth smiles. His eyes are black and worried.
The thought flashes across Sage’s mind that he is confessing to her: he is telling her that he was responsible for the death of that man, that friend of Jill’s. Buck Fister. The thought is so clear and so immediate that Sage believes it, although at the same time she thinks, How could I possibly know that? I don’t even know those people, what can I be thinking?
She asks him, “Do you know my sister Jill?”
He pauses, looking away. “I don’t think so, no. I’ve met another sister, Fiona, and come to think of it also your mother.”
“We must seem an odd group.”
“I suppose.” But he seems not to want to consider Sage’s family—and returns to his own. “My wife, well, she’s also a worry to me. I’m a terrible husband, I know that.”
Sage laughs. “Are you saying I should be glad we didn’t get married?”
“Well, now that you say so. But, my very dear Sage, are we really going to have that sort of conversation? Must we? I should warn you, I’m much too old to be what people call open. I’m a closed Sicilian book.”
Sage laughs again, appreciating him almost against her will. “I just wanted to see you,” she tells him. “I thought it would be fun to ask you to lunch. To see you again. And that some of the things I worry about might come clearer.”
He spreads his hands, palms upward, in a very Latin gesture. “I’m all yours,” he tells her.
“Well, actually it was nice of you to come.” Looking across at those somewhat stagy, dark, dark eyes, at that arrogant nose and shining, domed bald head, Sage wonders why she is feeling such a rush of affection for this man, whom she has always thought of as deeply injurious. As bad. At this moment she simply likes him very much, strange as it is that she should. She tells him, “I did feel terrible about your not marrying me, but maybe you were right, I mean it wouldn’t have been a good idea for either of us.”
He acknowledges this with a small gesture of his head, then says, “I’m sure marrying Joanne was a very bad thing to do to her.”
There is a small pause before Sage asks him, “How about running for mayor? Will you, still?”
At that his whole face shifts, and seems to sag. His eyes droop as Roland says, “No way. It’s out, for every possible reason. First off, I’d lose my shirt, financially, and I wouldn’t win. I had to announce this. It’ll be in the papers later this week, in fact.”
“That’s too bad.”
“What’s really bad is that I would have been a terrific mayor. The power would have brought out my better qualities. Look what happened with Harry Truman, if you’ll pardon the analogy.”
Sage is unable not to smile at this, in part because of the incredible difference in personal styles—plain, uxorious Harry Truman, from Missouri, and flamboyant, faithless Roland, the dashing Sicilian.
“I really had great plans,” he tells her. “I had a plan for the homeless, and even ideas about AIDS.”
“You did?” When she and Roland were lovers, Sage remembers, they never had political conversations, other than his conventional teasing of her Sixties views, her marches and protests. Although what he actually said was, she now remembers, “You people are right, of course, but you don’t have a clue as to how to get things done. Take it from an old pol.” She can hear him saying that.
And now Roland asks her, “Have you been out on the bay lately? Seen all those empty wharves? Just imagine them all turned into good clean living quarters. Dormitories, family condos, all types. And think of the work that would involve. Put people to work making houses for themselves. I really like that.”
“God, Roland, you sound like some kind of commie-pinko radical.”
“Well, maybe I am at heart. You know, I always told you that basically I agreed with what your people were saying. And maybe I’ve even been radicalized a little more by Reagan.”
“I love it.”
“Well, the guy’s such a total old twit, he gives ideology a bad name.”
“That’s what Michael Harrington said.”
“Who? Oh, that socialist.”
“Right.” This conversation is becoming heady stuff, to Sage. First, her queer discovery of liking Roland, liking him, feeling this odd affection. And now this beatific, genuinely socialist vision of his, about which she knows he is absolutely sincere.
But what about the very strange flash she had, when he told her about setting in motion something very bad, regrettable—and she instantly thought of the murder of Buck Fister? Why did she think that? Is everything that she now perceives of Roland, including that message, simply more craziness of her own? Could she be falling in love with Roland all over again? (It would be so like her, she knows, to sexualize almost any strong emotion; she does that repeatedly.)
All those thoughts have been very scary indeed, and in a brisk way she now asks him, “And AIDS?”
“Again, some abandoned buildings converted into AIDS hospitals, and several hospices. Apartment-type places. And more research money, piles and piles. Don’t ask me where all the money’s going to come from.” He grins, very quickly. “No wonder those guys, guys with AIDS, are so mad at the administration. They really got shafted, and they’re dead right about why. It’s because those assholes in Washington think they’re a silly bunch of queers.”
“Which is almost as bad as being a woman, or black.”
“Well, probably worse.” And then he says, “What an odd conversation we seem to be having. This is not quite what you had in mind, I’ll bet.”
“You’re right, but, then, I keep telling you, I didn’t really have anything specific in mind. I wanted to see you, and I must say, you’re a big surprise.”
“May I take it, a not entirely unpleasant surprise?”
“Oh no, in fact—But really, Roland, do I always have to feed your ego?”
“Be nice if someone did.” That was a plaintive old tune, very recognizable to Sage.
“Come on, now,” she tells him. “Just when I’ve been thinking how nice you are.”
They laugh, in mutual surprise.
“And this is a very nice restaurant you’ve brought me to,” Roland tells her, with an appreciative look around at flowers, water-colors of flowers, and palest-pink walls.
The restaurant is in fact to be the eventual successor to Fiona’s, in terms of an extreme if temporary popularity. But Sage is always to remember it as the place in which for the first time, after so many years of passion, then of rage and pain, she began to like Roland Gallo, to see him as an exceptionally complicated, contradictory and humanly flawed person, whom she cares about, in his humanness.
Late that afternoon, after Sage has visited her mother and stayed much longer than she meant to (Caroline seemed a great deal more interested in hearing about lunch with Roland Gallo than Sage would have expected—curiously enough), Sage comes into her own house on Russian Hill to the sound of the phone ringing.
Noel. She is sure it is Noel, it must be. And she is right.
“No, Noel, tonight isn’t good for me. Well, I’m busy. A friend from New York. No, I’m not. No, of course you can’t, you wouldn’t get on at all. Well yes, as a matter of fact, he is. Well, what’s wrong with friends? Noel, please, I have to go now. No. No, I just don’t feel like talking right now. I’m sorry. No, no, I don’t think so. No, I’m sorry. Well, goodby.”
Noel’s insistence that they see each other, tonight, is quite out of character for him—but, then, Sage reflects, he has usually not had to insist, with her. Sage was reminded of Jill and Fiona as tiny children, two- and four-year-olds, who never took no for an answer.
But Noel is not a small child, he is a very spoiled and now very angry strong, adult male. And Sage is frightened. Suddenly really scared.
She considers calling the police, but does not. Asking for protection would make her sound foolish, she believes, a “hysterical woman.” In the midst of a “domestic crisis”—she has been told that cops hate both those categories of trouble, especially in combination.
And is she in fact hysterical? Paranoid, even? Noel has no history of violence, unless you count pushing her down on the sidewalk that night, when she broke her arm. And Sage does not exactly count that, she feels that in some way she provoked it.
In an agitated, quite unfocussed way she walks about her house, in and out of rooms.
Realizing her total lack of direction, she tries to concentrate on something simple, like the choice of a restaurant for dinner that night with Cal. But she is unable to think of a place, no restaurants in that city of thousands of restaurants come to mind. Except, quite crazily, Fiona’s. Which is out of the question. Or is it? Caroline did tell her that Fiona was worried, her regulars were falling off. So maybe—
Sage picks up the phone and taps out the number.
And gets Stevie. “Stevie, how great!” she tells him, very much meaning it. His warm voice has come through to her like a much-needed present. “I’ve missed you,” she says.
Stevie says he has missed her too, they must get together, seriously. And yes, she and Cal can have a nice table at 8:15, and yes, he himself will be there. “This someone important to you?” Stevie asks, a somewhat strange question for him to ask, unusual—but quite okay, Sage thinks.
“Very important,” she tells him, “but maybe not in the way you mean. He’s an art dealer, and he likes my work. He’s gay.”
“Well, I think I can handle that.”
They laugh again, old good friends, and Sage hangs up feeling considerably better, cheered, at the very idea of Stevie.
She still jumps, though, at the sound of her telephone, and she thinks that it must be Noel, again, and considers not answering.
But she does answer, and she hears not Noel but Cal, sounding most unlike himself. He must have eaten something terrible, he tells her, he is not at all well. No, he doesn’t think he needs a doctor, the crisis is over, he’s sure. Rest and hot tea will do the trick, he knows. And he couldn’t be sorrier about tonight—will she be okay?
Reassuring him that she will, she could use some rest herself, Sage on the instant of hanging up wishes that she had insisted on coming around to his hotel to see how he was (ostensibly). The truth is that she does not want to be alone in her house. Does not. She is frightened. Even another phone call from Noel would be more than she could handle, much less all the normal night noises that are very frightening to a person alone, a frightened person.
Various possibilities come to mind. She could after all just go to a hotel by herself, check in for the night: who would know? But that seems a little extreme, an admission of panic. Or, she could call Caroline, and go stay over there. But they just saw each other, Caroline would be alarmed.
Then she remembers that the first thing she should do is call Stevie at the restaurant, to say they won’t be coming—and then she thinks, Why not? I can go by myself, and see Stevie. Stevie in one way or another will surely help.