Caroline's Daughters by Alice Adams

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, havingsimultaneously 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 beingdelivered, 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).
    â€œFoxgloves!” is Fiona’s shouted greeting to Stevie. “Give me a break!”
    â€œBut 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.
    â€œShit, 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