“Stevie, I have something to tell you. I’ve fallen in love with you. Really. I’m sorry, but there it is. I love you.”
“Uh, Stevie, instead of going out why don’t we just take some dope and go up to bed? I’ll cook something later.”
“Uh, Stevie, have you ever given much thought to how you, uh, feel about me?”
“Stevie, something really sort of amazing has happened.”
Sage, who is having considerable trouble getting to work, is saying all that to Stevie, all those nutty sentences, in her mind. They are to have dinner together tonight, and it is true, she is in love with Stevie. Tremendously. She realized it only this morning.
And how wonderful, really, to fall in love with an old and trusted friend, good kind smart dear Stevie. It struck her like a whirlwind, as, at breakfast, she began to think of the coming night. Of seeing Stevie. And then the feeling went on and on, as she tried to work.
How very surprised he will be to hear this, though. But since they are indeed friends, Sage feels a clear compulsion to tell him of her feelings, just as she would if she were in some way angry at him. The problem is how to put it so that Stevie will not be embarrassed. He is such a gentle, on-the-whole quiet person.
Strong mid-afternoon sunlight, strained through the streaky windowpanes, illuminates all the comforts of Sage’s studio: the broken-down but still comfortable leather sofa; the small bookcase, holding some favorite poetry (what Sage reads when she really cannot work): Neruda, D. Levertov, Auden, Chaucer, Yeats. A. Rich. A Bible, and several green Michelin guides. Two bentwood chairs, her worktable, the radio—turned always to the classical music station, which is just now playing some Brahms, familiar, stirringly melodic, undoubtedly contributing to Sage’s mood, all that lavish lonely love. The haunting cello, tremulous violins. Enough to make anyone believe herself in love.
But despite the support of such surroundings, the sunlight and the music, Sage is getting nowhere with her work.
Her fingers dig into the clay, and her delving, shaping tools form and re-form and shift its small mass, but whatever she had in mind does not come forth. (She had Stevie in mind actually: not literally Stevie but a tall heavy man like Stevie with a group of less defined small children. Very interesting, she thought—and whatever is that all about?)
Sometime later, though, an hour, maybe two, there on Sage’s table is a small intricately and delicately fashioned naked man, far more detailed than most of her figures: she had shaped his shoulder blades, rib cage, loins, penis and long muscled legs. He stands in repose, his head just bent, his hair too long. And Sage sees that it is Noel. It is far more clearly Noel than if she had meant to portray him. With a painful accuracy she has re-created Noel, strong and intense and very beautiful.
All she has heard from him is a postcard from Grass Valley: “Burned out. (Joke.) Divorce me. I’ll sign.” And a box number.
Sometimes, unexpectedly, she has wept for Noel. His lost beauty, the sheer waste of their life together. She does so now, there in the sunny studio that he made for her, as from her radio still come the lovely rippling trembling piano runs. More Brahms.
Sage weeps until she realizes that she is enjoying the tears, along with the music—and then she stops, and gets back to work.
“We celebrate today the birthday of Johannes Brahms,” says that unctuous voice. “Over a hundred and fifty years ago today, in Frankfurt, Germany. His mother, already in her early forties, his much younger, by seventeen years, father—” (Which explains what all that Brahms was about.)
As Sage thinks, Amazing! And, That’s not a bad life plan, marry a much younger man when you’re in your forties, and then produce a genius.
“I wonder what on earth my mother’s doing in Italy,” Sage muses aloud to Stevie, that night, as she not very successfully tries to grate fresh ginger into a marinade. They are both in her kitchen, which, since Noel, Sage has tried to finish up: with a butcherblock table, a Cuisinart and a microwave, all attesting to considerable money spent (“My nouveau riche cuisine,” Sage has earlier remarked to Stevie). Plus some blue-and-white toile curtains, and a Barcelona chair, in which Stevie now comfortably lounges.
“What she says is most likely the truth,” he tells Sage. “I’d imagine she’s having a very good time, like she says. And probably not really wishing you all were with her.”
“I guess. Oh shit!” Sage has just grated her thumb, which she now protectively sucks.
Getting up, unwinding, “Here, let me do that,” Stevie tells her. “I must say, for a sculptor—”
“I know, clumsy fingers. Noel always said that.”
“Which I did not. Give me credit.”
“Dear Stevie, I do. Well, I hope she’s just having a good time. Caroline.”
“What on earth else would she be doing? Why are you so suspicious of your mother? An unusually nice woman, as you know.”
“I do know. She’s so nice that I get suspicious. And she is staying a lot longer than she said.”
“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.