Ten Days in the Hills

by Jane Smiley

  It was true that the war felt like it was just outside the room, not visible through the windows looking out upon the Getty, but still there, like two gunmen hiding in the bushes, waiting to mow them down. You could film it that way—cutting from herself and Max, idly considering his dick, to the brutal-looking hit men, glancing at one another as they took up their positions, then back to her running her index finger up the artery on the Big Classic, then encircling the shaft with her hand, and the two of them smiling at each other, then back to hit man number 1, taking off his jacket as the sun struck the house and laying it neatly under a bush, then back to her rolling the shaft gently against his belly, then back to hit man number 2, setting down his weapon and surreptitiously wiping his nose with a used tissue, then tossing aside the tissue and picking up his weapon again.

  Or you could film the Iraq war as a fog, a thick toxic pall, approaching the house from the other side. While they unknowingly laugh and chat, the suffocating miasma engulfs the house board by board, roof tile by roof tile.

  He said, “Don’t you think it would be able to transcend the geopolitical problem?”

  “I don’t know, because I think this particular geopolitical problem is unprecedented. I think your cock is saying what now, why bother, he’s distracted, she’s distracted. At this point, I think it’s just reacting. I think it will naturally either reject or assimilate the geopolitical situation.”

  He flipped his cock back and forth in a way that she always found a bit disrespectful, or at least overly familiar, but of course perfectly understandable since it was his cock. He said, “Why don’t you turn over, and I’ll just massage your ass?”

  She stretched out on the bed and then turned over, facing away from him. The sheet against her skin was cool and clean. She said, “Don’t you always wonder what you would do in your last hour or so, as the bombs were falling all over Los Angeles? Would you really have the fortitude to sample one last pleasure? Would you really have the strength and fatalism to maintain your privacy, to not show off your end in any way? And say we were together. What would be the most comfortable connection? Just lying in one another’s arms? I guess it would take a lot of savoir faire to do anything else.” Of course she had images in her mind of Mrs. Miniver and of Margaret O’Brien, but she had no images of real deaths, real escapes, real panic, or real fortitude, because the closest she had ever come to such a thing was crouching in a corner of the basement with her babysitter during a tornado as a child. Elena would have been nine and Eric maybe four. They were sitting at the kitchen table after school when the sirens went off, and they stared at one another for a moment, then the girl herded the two of them to the top of the cellar steps. As she opened the cellar door, they looked out. The spot they were standing in was quiet, but ten feet away, the curtains to the windows of the screened porch stood out horizontal in the wind. The two of them went down the steps while the sitter went for Andrew, who must have been about a year old. A minute or two later, here she came down the steps, lightning flashing behind her, with Andrew clinging to her shirt. Yes, trees fell like bombs as the winds broke them over the house, and, yes, the noise was too loud for any kind of communication. Andrew clung to the babysitter, and the babysitter held Elena and Eric in place beside her, their backs pressed against the bricks, until the door opened at the top of the steps and Elena’s mother’s face appeared and they realized everything had been quiet for some period of time. Now she turned toward him and said, “I was in a tornado once. A house two streets over was knocked off its foundation, and all the windows on the west side of the school were blown out. But you were in Vietnam.”

  “I guess the scariest thing that happened directly to me over there was when this crazy guy in our company turned the rocket launcher toward the officers’ tent, which was up the hill. I was actually stepping into the latrine. I’d just closed the door when the force of the explosion knocked it over onto the door and it slid down the hill maybe ten feet. It took them at least a half an hour to roll it over and let me out of there. I wouldn’t say I panicked, but my attitude was far from resigned and accepting. I was the company clerk, so I wasn’t out in the firebases, taking incoming rounds all night. I knew some of those guys, though. Lots of the time they were drunk, of course. Or stoned to the eyeballs, though the real marijuana period was more after my time. I think if you’d asked those guys what they wanted to be doing all night, they would have said fucking, of course, but who knows? They didn’t have that option.” He leaned forward and kissed her breasts, first the left one, then the right one. She put her fingers in his hair and felt the shape of his head. Her nipples lifted. The left one seemed to spark, as if the nerves within were switched on by the unexpectedness of the kiss. Both breasts seemed suddenly lighter and less dense. His skull was hard under her fingertips, and he breathed out a little groan. But the Big Classic was non-responsive. She pulled him on top of her. The Big Classic fell between her thighs.

  “We were in that tornado with a babysitter. She was fourteen or something, maybe only thirteen. She sent Eric and me down the cellar and went for Andrew. When she appeared in the doorway, her hair was puffed out from her head because of static electricity, like a helmet. Andrew’s hair was standing straight out, too. He didn’t cry until he saw my mother when she got home and found us. The babysitter charged fifty cents an hour, and my mom gave her a ten-dollar tip for saving our lives. She said, ‘Oh, you don’t have to do that, Mrs. Sigmund.’ Then my dad came home and we ate dinner and he told us how the tornado went right down our street just when he would have been coming home, except that he had to stop at my uncle George’s house to give his car a jump.” Now she could feel the muscles in his back and buttocks as she stroked him up and down. He pressed her comfortably into the mattress, and she felt completely safe. She said, “I would do this if the bombs were falling. I would pull you on top of me and be crushed by falling debris.”

  He lifted his head and put his hand behind her. “My friend Charlie who’s coming today and I were in a thunderstorm in high school. We were watching TV with our girlfriends in his living room. Marnie Cushman and Patty Danacre. Lightning came down the cord and blew the thing up right in front of us.”

  “Oh my God!” exclaimed Elena.

  “Charlie threw himself over Marnie so he would get some credit for saving her. They made out for the first time right then and there, with the TV smoking against the far wall. I tried to get that scene into a movie once, but I had to leave it out.” His weight along her body was reassuring. She gently pulled his cheeks apart and pushed them back together; pulled them apart, pushed them back together; then she made deep circular strokes, her right hand clockwise and her left hand counterclockwise. She said, “What would you have to leave out of My Lovemaking with Elena?”

  “I wouldn’t have to leave anything out. That’s the challenge. Say, for example, there is no lovemaking with Elena, or at least no penetration, because part of the team isn’t cooperating. You might be tempted to leave that out, or to film another day, or to use a body double or some sort of special effect. Even as I say it, I can imagine how I would do it. But the noncooperating member does have a contribution to make. What is it? This here seems to be intimately related to the manliness problem.” He was smiling.

  “I’m not sure that it is, actually. The manliness problem is more of a social problem. The noncontributing-member problem could have a more idiosyncratic context, and anyway would be a problem that lots of people could relate to. Really, how many guys are going to boo or jeer? People might get up and walk out, but not just because the protagonist can’t get an erection. What is it that lawyers say? His manliness problem is mooted. It’s personal. Members of the audience don’t judge. It’s bad luck to judge something like that, and they know it.” She was smiling, but again the war was imminent. It was fun to lie here beneath him in the bed in the tidy room in the well-cared-for wing of the charming house nestled at the top of the canyon on the west side of L.A., overlooking the shi
ning Getty in southern California, far from Washington and even farther from Iraq. It was a relief not to know personally any of the government officials who were setting up the deaths and dismemberments and talking about them reasonably. But now that she had remembered that old tornado and had in her mind simultaneously the dim memory of the babysitter’s hand on her arm, holding her against the wall, the earthen smell of the basement of that house, and the soundless roar of the wind, but also an image of them as if from her mother’s point of view as she would have opened the cellar door and looked down, four children pressed into a dirty dark corner, only the pale colors of their clothes and skin visible at first, that was the image she now had of the waiting-to-be-bombed ones in Iraq. What if the mother never came home, what if the bombs, unlike most tornadoes, came right through the house into the basement, what if the babysitter was killed, leaving three, two, or one child to linger in shock and pain, what if the bombing went on for days instead of an hour or so, what if the basement was flooded, what if rats came around and ate the children, what if the mother showed up but way too late? It might be that these what-ifs didn’t cross the minds of those prosecuting the war, and it might be that if they did cross those minds, those people said to themselves, So what? Elena could imagine that, too. She could imagine how it was when you wanted to do a certain thing—you thought, that’s the way life is sometimes, or they’ll get over it, or that’s not my problem. There was a little frisson to that, a frisson of selfishness combined with willfulness. Who had not felt it? Of course the architects of the war felt that. And then there would be the afterthought, after the war was done and countless agonies had gone unwitnessed or unexpressed. The afterthought would be, we did our best. Mistakes were made; some things are always unforeseeable. But actually, from beginning to end, indifference would be permanently on display, the indifference of those who made the war to the war’s resulting deaths and dismemberments. The war-makers knew they should care—everyone agreed they should care—but in fact they didn’t, and you couldn’t get around it. They themselves would say that they cared about something else more than the deaths and dismemberments, that one had to have priorities, but that was a rationalization of the fact that, no, they didn’t care.

  At any rate, now that those tornado-generated images were in her mind, she didn’t really want to kiss, or to have him lie on top of her. She pecked him on the lips and eased him off. She said, “You know, I can’t get this war out of my mind. I hate it.”

  “It’s a dilemma.” He looked regretful.

  “What’s a dilemma?”

  “What to do about the weapons of mass destruction. What to do about Saddam.”

  “You know I don’t believe in the weapons of mass destruction.”

  “I know that. But he didn’t prove they aren’t there.”

  “You can’t prove a negative.”

  “You can be open and aboveboard. You can let in the—”

  “Or bend over and take it in the ass. You can do that. If you’d been to enough movies, though, you would hesitate to do that because of the manliness problem.”

  “I’m sure Saddam is beyond the manliness problem. I mean, the manliness problem doesn’t seem really to apply to him.”

  “Why not? Don’t you think he watches movies?”

  “You sound a little aggressive.”

  “You sound a little condescending.”

  “Do I?”

  She sat up and looked around the room. The angle of the slanting sun had risen, and it crossed the feet of the woman in a photograph she liked. The sight of it relieved her a degree, and she said, “No. You just sound like you disagree with me. Supposedly, in some abstract way that I can’t quite comprehend right now, that’s not only okay but inevitable and even desirable.”

  “I do agree with you. I just can’t quite gauge what will satisfy you.”

  She thought for a moment. “Okay. Here it is. I don’t want arguments to be made. I don’t want logic to pertain or issues to be carefully weighed. I want the whole idea of the war to simply be disgorged from the body politic like the poison it is, and I want those who thought it up to feel sick with overwhelming nausea and horror that they somehow ingested the poison to begin with. I want them to sincerely and abjectly plead for forgiveness. Then I want them to spend a lot of time thinking about what happened. And I want them to make a solemn vow to change their ways and do better in the future. I don’t think it’s too much to ask.”

  “But you know it’s too much to expect, right?”

  “A remote part of me knows that,” she acknowledged.

  “You know that there are people whose job it is to know more about this than you do and that they think this is a regrettable necessity, right?”

  “I’ve heard that rumor, but I question their motives. If their motives are humane, I question their logic. If their logic is reasonable, I question their worldview and their right to impose their worldview on the lives and bodies of others.”

  “Then, honey, you question the nature of civilization.”

  “And you don’t?”

  He sat up, put his arm around her, and brought her down again, but now they were lying face to face in the sunlight. His face had that clear, open shape she liked so much, prominent nose, smooth brow, well-defined chin, blue eyes. He was smiling. He said, “Do you know how long I’ve been in Hollywood?”

  “Thirty-five years.”

  “Do you think I have any faith in human civilization after that?”

  “No.”

  “Let me tell you how I see it.”

  She rolled over onto her back and said, rather petulantly, she was willing to admit, “Okay.”

  He rolled her onto her side again. He said, “Look at me.”

  “Okay.”

  “The people who are running this thing have spent their whole lives as corporate executives, more or less, and not only that, corporate executives with in-house philosophers of the free market. Not only are they rich and powerful, they feel that they deserve to be rich and powerful, because the free market is the highest good and they have worked the free market and benefited from it, and so has everyone they know. There are two things about them that you have to remember—that deep down they feel guilty and undeserving and that they live very circumscribed lives. Inside the office, inside the house, inside the health club, inside the corporate jet. Iraq is the size of California, right? But none of these guys has driven from L.A. to, say, Redding, in living memory. They have no idea what the size of California is, much less what it means in terms of moving armies and machinery, or having battles or conquering territory. They are used to telling people to get things done and then having them done—or partially done, or done in a good enough way, or done in a half-assed way that someone has convinced them is good enough. The real problem is that they don’t understand logistics and that they’ve been downsizing for decades. Even though Iraq is the size of California, they think it is the size of United Airlines. United Airlines could possibly be reorganized and made to sustain itself in a couple of years with the right sort of ruthless leadership, but California doesn’t work like that. That’s how I see it.”

  “As an administrative problem that can’t be solved.”

  “In a way, but more as a testament to inexperience and lack of imagination. If one of them had been in the army, or even just drove around in the Central Valley for a week and saw the scale of things, that might help everyone emerge from the fantasy. Or if everyone all the way up and down a single chain of command—let’s say forty levels of authority, down to the guy fixing the carburetor on the Hummer—just came into the office and told one of them what he had actually done for the last twenty-four hours, the inevitability of fuckups and waste would be so evident that even the idea of ordering up a successful invasion would seem laughable. Situation Normal All Fucked Up, as we used to say. But I know it isn’t going to happen. I know the machine is going to keep running and lots of people are going to be crushed beneath the wheels an
d mangled in the gears. I can’t not know that. I can’t even have hope that it won’t be so.”

  Now she rolled on her back again, and he let her, though he kept his arm comfortingly under her head. Though no theory worked, she couldn’t help toiling at her theorizing. Her fellow citizens had become unaccountable. She had lost even the most rudimentary ability to understand their points of view, but she could not stop theorizing. Each new theory was accompanied by a momentary sense of uplift—oh, that was it—fear, native aggression, ignorance, disinformation and propaganda, a religious temperament of rules and punishments. But in the end, it was that they didn’t mind killing; they didn’t think killing had anything to do with them or their loved ones. It was unbelievably strange, a renewed shock every time she thought about it.

  She said, “I think I’m becoming deracinated.”

  “Then it’s time to get up.”

  “Is there a word beyond deracinated?”

  “Only in the realms of mental illness.”

  “Well, mental illness is not the problem. Moral illness is the problem.”

  He put a hand to each side of her face and turned it toward his face. He spoke slowly and clearly. He said, “I agree with you even when I don’t feel exactly as you do. That’s the best we can do.” He took his hands off her face. She nodded, feeling at first a bit chastened and after that comforted. Now he rolled her up against himself, her head in the crook of his neck, her breasts against his chest, his belly pushed into hers, his leg crooked over her leg and pulling her legs toward him. She could feel his warm solid body all the way down hers, no gaps. His wide hand was on the small of her back, pulling her tightly against him. Then he shifted toward her a bit, not on top of her but pinning her nonetheless between his weight and the resilience of the bed. She felt him breathing, then felt her own breath synchronize with his. She let this happen. It was slow, but they had done this many times, this exercise of physical agreement, usually as a way of getting back to sleep in the middle of the night. Even now, after only a minute or two, it made her feel relaxed and then sleepy. Should the occasion arise, she thought, this was a good way to be buried, and she should remember to put it in her will.