Caroline's Daughters Read Online Free Page B

about their biological clocks. Girls wanting babies. But she saw a lot of reasons why not, as things turned out, and it wasn’t just my age. For one thing she doesn’t like doctors. Gosh, I thought everyone loved doctors.” (This is only half ironic). “For another thing she has this really pathological obsession about AIDS. No new relationship for her, she says.”
    Jim talks on and on, a boyish man in his early sixties, in the throes of an obsessional love. Sage’s glance and her attention wander out to the terraced park, the dark swaying pines and redwoods, the eucalyptus. And she thinks of the time when she walked through that park in black blind mourning for Roland Gallo, who was only a few blocks away, but could not see her. As Jim has no doubt walked along those same paths.
    She listens enough to grasp the essence of his story, though: a rational, older-than-middle-aged man, a doctor, a “success,” is having a sort of semi-breakdown all over this thin, thin girl (“I even worried that she could be anorexic, I cared that much about her, wanted to run some tests”). This girl, who, like his youngest daughter, Jill, is also a big success, another lawyer, is clearly quite uninterested in him, in Dr. James McAndrew. Refusing sex, refusing finally to see him. So that Jim indeed went a little crazy, walking around on upper Grant, where she lived. And calling, calling, leaving messages on her machine. “I even fell in love with her answering machine,” is Jim’s small joke.
    During the Sixties, when so many middle-aged men, Jim’s-age men, were growing beards, buying turtlenecks and Nehru jackets, taking off after young girls, Jim was a stalwart, only mildly liberalhusband and father, in clothes from Brooks. And that period was the nadir of his relationship with Sage, who was actively demonstrating for Free Speech, the People’s Park, and was totally committed to the Anti-War Movement. “It’s your methods, that’s all I disagree with,” Jim used (not quite truthfully) to complain. “You mean you think we’re vulgar? Noisy? Well, you’re fucking right, we are,” Sage would cry back.
    What he is going through now could be called a delayed mid-life crisis, then, Sage thinks. Apparently men can have them at any time, and repeatedly.
    But why are you telling me all this? she also thinks, observing his pale bony high-browed familiar face (so similar and yet so much more distinguished than the smaller faces of his daughters, Sage believes). I am not in sufficiently good shape myself to hear so much of your nutty obsession, she thinks. And the real problem is that you old guys are just not used to being turned down, you’ve had it your way forever, all you middle-aged establishment successes. Young girls all tumbling into your tired old beds.
    At the same time she knows she is being both selfish and unfair; for one thing, Jim has never been “promiscuous” in the sense that she thinks Roland is—fears that Noel is—and an impulse urges her to go over to Jim, to cradle him in her arms with murmurs of reassurance, of ultimate love. And then, as in Sage’s childhood dreams, could the two of them run off somewhere together? Could they live happily and sexily ever after? Sage often believes that they could, if things were ever so slightly changed, changes that she cannot exactly specify.
    â€œI’ve even thought of going to a shrink,” Jim more or less finishes, running nervous medical fingers through his fair graying thinning hair.
    â€œThat wouldn’t be the worst idea.”
    â€œI guess not to my son-in-law, though.”
    â€œSaul could recommend someone.”
    â€œI wonder if Caroline would see me,” Jim muses.
    â€œIt’s not quite the same thing.”
    Sensing a small joke, Jim laughs a little. “Don’t think I don’t know how trite all this is,” he tells her. “If