Caroline's Daughters (6 page)

And the topics for discussion have a certain ritualized quality, though neither woman is aware of this. They talk about their older sister, Liza; far more rarely do they mention either half-sister, Sage or Portia, or for that matter their mother, Caroline. They compare the weather from their respective vantage points, Fiona on Potrero Hill, Jill on Telegraph. Mutual friends, new clothes, trip plans, new novels (both are big readers, in fact Caroline and all her daughters read a lot). They ask each other about investments (Fiona asks Jill) and restaurants (vice versa). The fact that they rarely talk about men, romantic attachments and/or sexual ones is interest, in that such matters are or have been of consuming interest to both young women.

Are they now? Fiona at least has wondered.

In any case, the conversation that takes place a few days after the welcome lunch for Caroline and Ralph is fairly typical of their interchange, with some notable exceptions.

• • •

Waking to sunlight—as Fiona likes to point out to people who live in other areas, Potrero gets the first San Francisco sunshine—Fiona's first thought is that Jill should call her; it is her turn, isn't it? didn't she, Fiona, call yesterday? But no, they did not even talk yesterday, Jill had her exercise class, and it was Jill who called the day before. However, at just that moment the phone rings, resolving indecision.

After their usual, quite minimal greetings Jill says, “Do you think she could be pregnant? again?” It is unnecessary to identify the “she”; it almost always means Liza. “Miss Large. Honestly, she'll have to start going to those big-lady stores.”

“She's not that fat, she can't be more than a twelve.” Defending Liza always gives Fiona a shot of self-approval. “And Saul loves her like that.”

“Jewish men, honestly. How do you know he loves her all that much? He may have some anorexic nurse hidden in the linen closet.”

They laugh.

“Speaking of anorexia,” Jill takes it up again. “Do you think Sage could have it? People can be too thin, and she's living proof.”

“I think she just looks tired, she's always been thin.” She's no thinner than we are, Fiona does not say.

“That terrible Noel. She seems to have some sort of fix on very dark men, doesn't she? Substitutes for a Jewish father?”

“My, we're being quite racist this morning.”

Jill laughs, and insists, “But she does. I keep reading about her old pal Roland Gallo. Do you think he'll run for mayor?”

“I doubt it, he's too sensible.”

“There's some heavy money on him.”

“Sage could do a Gary Hart number. Come forward as the other woman.”

“I think it's a little late for that.” Jill sniffs. “He's got that dumb wife, and God knows who else. Better-looking than Sage, though, I'll bet.”

Fiona is curious as to why Jill so has it in for Sage this morning, when they rarely speak of her at all, but she decides not to ask.
Instead she throws out, “I think they're coming to the restaurant. The Gallos, I mean. He's not related to Ernest and Julio, is he?”

“It's never been proven. God, Italian men must be worse than Jewish men. Macho crooks.”

“Honestly, Jill, I'm glad Caroline and Ralph can't hear you.”

“Me too, those old liberals can be pretty vicious. How's the weather over there?”

“Fabulous, absolutely gorgeous.”

“Well, it's pretty good here too. Must be some sort of record.”

“I guess.”

Hanging up a half-minute later, Fiona wonders whatever is eating Jill, why is she so mean about Sage? To Fiona Sage simply seems in many ways an unlucky person. And Jill was down on everyone today. On everything except the weather.

And then Fiona stops thinking about Jill, and begins her own day, which like all her days is to be extremely strenuous. Not as strenuous, though, as when she first began in the restaurant business, when every morning she had to go personally to both the produce market and the flower mart, to get the freshest and best of everything. Now at least other people do all that for her. Still, Fiona works very hard. She does very little but work.

Potrero Hill is actually a cluster of slopes, like most of the hills of San Francisco: Nob, Russian, Telegraph, Pacific Heights, Bernal Heights. And Fiona's house is on one of the highest hills of Potrero. The lower two floors constitute her restaurant, and the kitchen was built into her basement. Fiona lives up above, in what was once an attic, and is now an elaborate decorator-dream of a penthouse, from which she has views of everywhere: both bridges and most of the rest of the city, its other hills. The Mission District, industrial South-of-Market, plus a great deal of the bay, and Berkeley and Oakland. On especially clear days she can see Mt. Diablo, over in Pleasanton—and out to the Farallon Islands.

In 1980, with her share of the Molly Blair money, Fiona bought what was then a very nondescript building. At first she simply rented out some rooms to friends, while she herself and her current lover would sleep in the attic. And then she and one of her friends, having
simultaneously lost their downtown receptionist jobs, decided to start serving lunches and dinners in one of the downstairs rooms. She (the friend) loved cooking and had high ambitions in that direction, seeing herself as the newest Alice Waters. Mostly other friends came at first, and some interested locals. The ambitious cook, though, turned out to be possessed of impressive skill and imagination—and Fiona, through a lover in the wholesale grocery business, was well connected with growers in Half Moon Bay and all the way up to Napa.

And word got out. Someone wrote a review, and what came to be known as Fiona's was launched.

Fiona remodelled, she hired more people, she vastly expanded her menu, wisely never letting it get out of hand. Nothing more elaborate than she could cope with. The first cook, the friend, left to start up her own place in Beverly Hills, which did not do so well, but by then Fiona had found someone even better, a bona fide graduate of Chez Panisse.

These days the downstairs is a cluster of smallish, private-seeming rooms, and the basement is a state-of-the-art kitchen. And the attic is Fiona's penthouse, with a sundeck and sauna, hot tub, tiny kitchen and enormous red-tiled bathroom. Hugh bedroom, endless closets.

And those views.

But now in the penthouse there are almost never visiting lovers, any more than downstairs there are live-in friends. Sometimes Fiona feels this lack acutely, both of lovers and of friends. At other times she is simply too busy to notice.

In the hour succeeding her conversation with her sister, Fiona does the following things: aerobics, ten minutes, and isometric facial exercises, five. A shower, blow-drying hair. Doing her face and hands and feet. Two phone calls to New York—one to the editor of a magazine that wants to do a spread on Fiona's; Fiona wants her own favorite photographer, and this conversation ends in a standstill. And, second call, to a woman in Nova Scotia who grows chanterelles, and freezes them.

Then, in clean jeans and a red silk T-shirt, long hair tied back, Fiona goes downstairs to the kitchen, where the produce is being
delivered, along with the flowers. And both are being checked over by Stevie, an apprentice chef, an all-around help (and, a fact that Fiona tends to forget, an investor in her business).

“Foxgloves!” is Fiona's shouted greeting to Stevie. “Give me a break!”

“But imposing. And scrutinize that purple. The depths.” Stevie, a tall, heavy, long-haired blond young man (not so young, actually: he and Sage were Sixties radicals together, another fact that Fiona tends to forget)—Stevie sometimes talks in this campy way, Fiona has no idea why. He could be gay but she doesn't really think so; if he were he wouldn't talk like that, probably. Although it is clear that a couple of waiters have big crushes on Stevie.

And as usual he is right about the flowers, they look great. The purple is deep.

“Shit, you're right,” Fiona tells him as with the slightest smile Stevie turns and walks off between the crates of baby lettuce, from Sonoma.

What a shapely ass, Fiona thinks. Well, how about Stevie?

And then she forgets about Stevie, and on the whole forgets sex for the rest of the day.

She eats some yogurt and granola, she drinks two cups of herbal tea.

In the restaurant area she confers with the bookkeeper, then checks the day's menu, and the evening's reservations.

Roland Gallo. Two, at 9.

For several reasons Fiona has been highly aware of this particular entry, this reservation. First, of course, she noticed because of Sage's awful old love affair, of which all her family eventually became aware; they all, in one way or another, have followed the career of Roland Gallo with more than passing interest.

Additionally, for Fiona, the very making of the reservation was odd: she took the call herself, for the very simple and stupid reason that she was passing the phone when it rang and inexplicably, inexcusably, no one else was near it (“Can't someone answer the fucking phone?”). And so, of course, in the voice of some underling, not “Fiona,” Fiona answered the phone. And she had a very strange, strong sense that the person on the other end, the person billing himself as Roland Gallo's assistant, was in fact Roland Gallo himself—or
else maybe a complete impostor: it is possible that no one will show, that happens, and you can't ask “Roland Gallo” to reconfirm. In any case it was a very odd exchange, enough to make Fiona seriously wonder for at least a full minute what will happen at 9 tonight. If anything.

The rest of the reservations are more or less routine, the usual mix of people whom Fiona knows or whose names she recognizes. Quite a few regulars, including some hard-core patrons who are there a couple of times a week. (This is a pattern that Fiona knows from experience won't last: the group will move on almost in a body to whatever is trendiest next, and go there twice a week. Fiona is perfectly prepared for these predictable defections, she tells herself.)

As always, there are several people on the list whom Fiona has never heard of, although it always pays to check very carefully, just in case she should have heard of them. Some hot New York playwright, for instance, whose fame has not yet travelled across the Rockies. But the truly unknown have usually reserved a long time in advance; right there is a tipoff to their lack of fame.

Fiona's office is strictly speaking not that at all. Her big desk and most of her files are up in the penthouse, in fact in her bedroom, discreetly hidden. However, the smallest downstairs dining room, the one requested for most private dinners (the one that Roland Gallo has requested for tonight), this pretty pink-toile room is preferred by Fiona herself and by her staff as Fiona's office, and it is there that she receives certain business callers, has certain appointments.

This afternoon there are two such: the first with her lawyer, the second with a young woman who wants an interview, Fiona has forgotten for what, and she can't for the moment find wherever she wrote it down.

Actually the young man who arrives very promptly at 2 is not Fiona's lawyer but an associate from that law office. The young man is lean and tan, obviously a tennis-playing type, in his new Wilkes suit and with his too-new Mark Cross brief case (not much imagination working there). He wants to talk about a new restaurant
that just started up in Petaluma, and it is called Fiona's. Of all the unlikely names to find duplicated in Petaluma, as the lawyer remarks.

He goes on about this at some length. Petaluma Fiona's is also in an old house, several stories divided into small rooms. Kitchen in the basement. He quotes some specialties from both menus—similar use of goat cheese, radicchio, chanterelles, monkfish and yellow peppers. Pausing, he laughs. “And that Fiona is even a tall thin blonde with very long hair.”

“Unlike any other thirty-three-year-old women in northern California,” Fiona cannot resist saying. “In the middle Eighties.”

Only slightly abashed, the young man then delivers his punchline, or, rather, his punch paragraph. It is fairly long.

There was such a case quite recently, he tells Fiona. A restaurant opened up down in San Bruno, called The Nob Hill. (“Pretty funny right off, don't you think? The Nob Hill, in San Bruno?”) Named of course after the one and only San Francisco restaurant, The Nob Hill. Well, those guys apologized all over the place, offered to change the name, et cetera. But Roland Gallo would not let them off the hook, he kept right after them, and he came up with a very high five-figure settlement.

“Hey, why not six?” asks Fiona.

“Well, even R.G.'s got his limits, I guess.”

There is a pause, during which Fiona is staring out the window as though coming to a decision. This small room faces east, and its eastern wall is all glass, a French door leading out to a miniature herb garden, and so what Fiona sees beyond the garden is the shining dark slate of the San Francisco Bay, boats, tankers and big white container ships—and the shining windows of Oakland. She could buy a boat, Fiona thinks, a nice big boat but still small enough for exploring, up the secret inlets of the bay and far up into the delta. Christ, she could live on her boat. She does not have to do all this stuff that she does.

“Would you believe,” she then says to the young apprentice lawyer, who is smiling expectantly in her direction, “that I don't give a flying fuck what that dago pig Roland Gallo does?” Fiona had no idea that she was going to say that.

After an instant he recovers. “May I quote you on that?”

“You do and I'll sue, I'll have you out looking for work.” And she adds, “And tell Stanley to stop hustling me, okay?” Stanley being the main lawyer, who wishes that Fiona would lead a more active legal life.

“You must be the thousandth person to ask me that question. I'm thin because I'm thin. I do not suffer from anorexia or bulimia—is that what you wanted to ask me? I am simply a very thin person. My two younger sisters are even thinner than I am. I eat quite a lot, in fact I eat all day. I love my own food very much. Obviously I would not spend my entire day doing what I do if I didn't like food, would I.