by Jane Smiley
“It’s a separation,” said Charlie.
Cassie said, “Charlie says his wife is relieved, so I guess we can be relieved for her, too.”
“Hi, Cass. Is my mother behaving herself? This is Paul Schmidt, did you meet Paul? Paul, this is Cassie Marshall. Cassie knows everyone and has seen everything, and that’s why she hides out up here in the hills with these people.”
“I do not! I open the gallery six days a week, and I have to deal with artists on a regular basis, and I met Paul a month ago. Nice to see you again, Paul.”
“Charlie, Paul Schmidt. Stoney Whipple, Paul Schmidt. I am so hungry! We haven’t had a thing all morning. Did you have pancakes?”
Isabel said, “I thought you were eating organ meats.”
“Paul does, but I stopped. It’s harder than you think.”
“How could it be harder than you think?” said Cassie.
“Brains was the hardest,” said Zoe. “In the end, I couldn’t actually incorporate the brains into my body. I talked Paul into substituting tofu that’s been made to taste like organ meats. You can get it in Chinatown. Oh my God!” Zoe strode into the living room and dropped into a chair.
Isabel said, “You want some fruit, Mom? I cut up some pineapple.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Zoe.
Paul said, “I’d like some fruit, if you don’t mind, Isabel. May I help you get it?”
“Sure. If we bring it out, Mom will see it and start picking at it and pretty soon eat all the best pieces.” But she smiled.
Paul was wearing khakis, a cream-colored polo shirt, and bone-colored Timberland boat shoes trimmed in tan. The way you could tell he was a healer, Elena decided, was the full beard, so thick that for any normal person it would clearly present a style problem—how was such a beard to be groomed? Shampooed like a thick head of hair, but then what—combed? trimmed? roughed up with fingers? shaped with hair gel? Clearly not. He was a walking paradox—slender and elegant and clean and even careful, the way dapper men were often careful of what they chose to wear and how they wore it, but with all this grizzled hair around his mouth and down to his collar, like a rabbi. Probably, Elena thought, he should not be handling food. Isabel and Paul opened the refrigerator, chatted, took things out. They were the same height and build, taller than she was by five or six inches, and taller than Zoe, who was more or less what you would call “petite.” Max, who had disappeared for a bit, now came out of the bedroom with his clothes on. In the meantime, Zoe continued what she had been saying while Elena had not been listening to her.
“It’s a place of miracles, actually. Miracles are absolutely routine there. It isn’t just that some fire they had up there a few years ago literally stopped at the property line and went back the other direction. Isn’t that interesting? I guess there was a big fire in that whole forest that was set by a lightning storm that came in September. No rain, just lightning. Talk about an act of God. Thunderbolts being cast here, there, and everywhere. And the country was so rough that all there was back in this part of the forest was a Franciscan monastery and a Buddhist monastery, and of course some marijuana farms. The firefighters came after about four days, and they told the monks they had to clear out, even though the monks were doing everything to remove the brush and save the place. So the monks were resisting, of course, though politely. The way they do it is to just not respond to what you’re saying. People think they keep smiling, but they don’t. If you are a true Buddhist, smiling has nothing really to do with it, though you might have been smiling, and the smile could linger, but you are not trying to smile. Anyway, the monks did not want to move, so they just kept clearing the brush and giving the firefighters water, and here came the fire up the side of the mountain, and as it got to the property line, which was visible from the buildings, the wind shifted and the fire stopped, because of course it couldn’t go back down the hill. It just burned out, and the firefighters and the monks dug a trench. The firefighters were really impressed, but the monks considered it fairly routine, all things considered. Buddhists don’t really get excited about things, I’ve noticed. I don’t think the Franciscans had the same sort of miracle, but I don’t remember. Do you remember, dear one?”
Paul sat down across from her and put the plate of fruit on the table between them. Pineapple, strawberries, a couple of slices of kiwi, and some wedges of orange.
“Do I remember what, Zoe?”
“About that fire up at the monastery. What happened to the Franciscans?”
“They ended up rebuilding the residence, I believe.”
“There you go,” said Zoe. “I gather that the Franciscans pray for miracles, but the Buddhists expect nothing.”
Paul might have been smiling, but, Elena thought, it was hard to tell. She said, “Are you going up there today?”
“We were,” said Paul.
“But what time is it? Oh, about eleven. To us that’s like three or four in the afternoon, because we get up at four, so my own opinion is that it’s too late to go all the way up there. It’s six hours just on the highway, then another couple of hours on very treacherous roads with no guardrails, and at this point that would be in the dark, which I don’t like, so maybe tomorrow, don’t you think, dear one?”
“We’ll see.” He ate another piece of pineapple.
Elena glanced at Max. He looked amused and benevolent. She glanced at Isabel. She looked amused and irritated, the way Elena herself could remember feeling so well, that overwhelming weariness that came from being too familiar with your parents, more familiar than anyone should be with any other person. She glanced at Delphine. Delphine was smiling in Isabel’s direction, not as if she expected Isabel to return her gaze, but as if she didn’t and was simply enjoying the chance to look at her granddaughter. It was sort of like watching Delphine reveal a secret, something that Elena, at any rate, had never seen Delphine do before. In fact, secrets abounded in this house. The biggest one, as far as Elena was concerned, was how long it had taken Max to get over Zoe, if he was over her yet. As Max beamed (a low beam, for sure, but nonetheless a beam) at Zoe reaching for a strawberry, Elena suspected that he was surveying Paul for clues, using this new guy to ask, What does she want, what did she want? And Elena herself was staring at Zoe, as she always did, thinking, What does she have, is there something beyond the beauty and talent, or is it just that surface thing?
Officially, of course, Max didn’t love Zoe—she had devolved into just another person who was around from time to time, important as Isabel’s mother but otherwise more tedious than attractive. Officially, Max’s adult life, at least with regard to women, had flowed like a river, through several sets of locks and dams, and no reach of the river was that much different from any other, except in regard to landscape. When he was first in the business, he told her (he told her all of this in an easy, good-natured voice), he was married to a girl named Ina that he had met at the Actors Studio in New York. They had come to Hollywood, but she had been artistically offended by the parts she landed, and so she’d gone back to New York. After Ina, who lasted only two years, he dated Dorothy, who was the daughter of Bo Levin, the famous agent. When the time came to break up, Dorothy and Bo had sat Max down in Bo’s office and told him he was too antisocial ever to make it in this town, and so Dorothy was leaving him, no hard feelings. Later, she married Jerry Whipple, who worked in Bo’s agency and was Max’s agent. Jerry had Stoney from his previous marriage to Diana Carstairs, a starlet who died in a car accident under mysterious circumstances when Stoney was not more than a year old. Jerry went on to make the sort of money that Dorothy and Bo were comfortable with, and to have three more children, while Max dated beautiful women. In 1979, Max met Zoe at a party, where she was singing with the band. In 1980, as a result of winning his Oscar for writing Grace, which had been about a classic British actress that Elena couldn’t now remember the name of and a child actor named Josh Lane escaping the Russian Revolution and ending up in Japan, but was really about Max’s grea
t-grandmother and his grandfather, Max got Zoe a part in a comedy about college students in San Francisco, and she was so sexy and gorgeous, even before she sang, that for her next movie she had to hide the fact that she was pregnant with Isabel through almost the whole shooting. After Isabel was born, Zoe made one movie after another, with no one realizing that the woman on the set taking care of the baby was Zoe’s actual mother (because Delphine insisted on wearing what seemed to be a uniform, but was, according to Max, just the sort of cool, natural cotton trousers and shirts from India that Delphine liked to wear). Max didn’t make movie after movie, but he wrote two more and then directed his first, which was a success, and then directed his second, a blockbuster called A Very Bad Day, in which the Beverly Center was destroyed by a flotilla of tornadoes and the La Brea Tar Pits gaped open and swallowed up UCLA. After that movie, Max and Zoe bought this house. In 1990, Zoe suddenly bought a house in Malibu, and they broke up. In the late nineties Zoe had fallen in love with the costar on her most ambitious film, which was a remake of Green Mansions, set in the Amazon, written expressly for Zoe, though they actually filmed somewhere in British Honduras, and Zoe got malaria, which stopped filming for a while, and by the time the movie was in the can, Zoe didn’t want to see that director ever again.
To Max (Elena was sure), Zoe felt like the main event of his life, but to Zoe (for some reason), Max felt like the opening act. Elena understood that this was a common pattern in Hollywood, where the calibrations of success, especially for “talent,” were highly refined, and every marriage was simultaneously an assertion of who and how important you thought you were at a particular moment in your career and a sign of how you were to be treated by others. But Max’s feelings (Elena was sure) about Zoe went beyond those prescribed by the system, even, as far as Elena could tell, beyond his history or psychology. He found her at a party, he was married to her for ten years, fixated on her for another ten, and never for a moment did he cease—what? Maybe it was something Elena could not imagine, but it was very romantic, larger than life. Desiring her, of course; contemplating her, of course; longing for her, wondering about her, molding her, wishing to touch her, be next to her, look at her, fuck her, make love to her, give her things, serve her, make an impact on her even when she was thinking about something else. Once he had said to Elena (and she thought about it for days), “What I wanted was to be fused with her, for our molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles to be intermingled, and then, when Isabel was about two and we were watching her and talking about how she looked like each of us, I realized that I had had my wish—in the fusing of sperm and egg, there it was, we were intermingled at the minutest possible physical level, but it didn’t satisfy me. The result was Isabel, an entirely separate human being, a child that I loved, but not what I wanted in terms of the potential outcome of my feelings, which felt like it should be an explosion or a melding, not another person. I considered this a tragic revelation about the impossibility of true love.” When he told her that, he laughed at his folly, but what he said was so like what she felt about him that at first she felt like she wasn’t going to get over hearing him say it about Zoe (though jealousy was the ultimate incorrect thing).
In the end, Elena saw what Max had felt for Zoe (she saw this privately—she had never confided this idea to Max himself) as a gift, an example of unprecedented inspiration on Max’s part in which he recognized the inherent possibilities of romantic love, not only for himself and Zoe, but for everyone. He had been in the grips the way everyone wanted to be in the grips but couldn’t manage, or was afraid to permit. And furthermore, it was his inspiration, not theirs—that much was evident in Zoe’s attitude. She treated Max as if he were her father or uncle, whose affection she could rely on but whose wrath she preferred not to incur, not because she was afraid of it, but because it would inconvenience her. Look at how she had apparently consigned Delphine to him, and he and Delphine continued to live together the way estranged couples were said to do in Japan—separate living quarters, separate entrances, separate recognitions that the arranged marriage didn’t work as a form of intimacy, but did work as a way of life. He did say, “It’s okay for me that Zoe and I aren’t married anymore. I never actually wanted to be a family with her. It was just that that was the only form available to embody what I felt about her.” Elena contemplated this as she gazed at Zoe.
The new Max, the Max that loved her, Elena, had chosen not to engage in that Zoe sort of love anymore, or ever again. He was kind, attentive, faithful, thoughtful, conversational, and sexy, just exactly what Elena had always looked for. Every day she marveled that she had found him, attracted him, and had many minutes and hours to enjoy him. It was love of a very correct sort, much like finding your notions, plans, and presuppositions satisfactorily confirmed—you thought that you wanted a certain thing, you got it, and it turned out to be everything you had hoped for and more, because your capacity for enjoyment turned out to be larger than you had realized. So—nothing wrong there. But how was she to think of Max’s progress? Had he been sick before and now he was well? Had he transcended before and now he had come back to earth? Had he painted his masterpiece and now he was idling out his later life? Had he embraced an illusion and now he was back to reality? Had he been an older man falling in love for the first time with a younger woman and gone a little crazy? Or was it just pure Hollywood? She could have asked him about that when he was talking about his joke film, My Lovemaking with Elena, but she had forgotten to. Or not dared.
Paul and Isabel offered the last strawberry to Zoe, who took it and said, “I could eat a piece of toast. What kind of bread do you have around, Max? Dear one, do you want a piece of toast?”
Elena said, “I bought some of that nine-grain loaf that they have at Gelson’s Friday. That’s good toasted.”
“Do you have any hummus?” said Zoe. “We’ve been eating that instead of dairy products.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Mom,” said Isabel.
“I thought you were a morally superior vegan,” said Cassie.
“I am, but not being greedy is a moral category that trumps vegan. Sometimes, when the virtues you want to promote contradict one another, you have to choose one over the other. In this case, I notice that Mom came into the house, made herself the center of attention, asked for food, didn’t like what was offered, and then asked for what else we might have as if this were a restaurant.”
“No one minds,” said Elena.
“We’re used to it,” said Delphine.
“Are you joking, Isabel?” asked Zoe.
“What do you think, Mom?” said Isabel.
“I don’t know,” said Zoe. After a short, meaningful pause, she went on, “Honey, why don’t you show Paul where the bread is.”
“I’ll do it,” said Elena.
“Do you know how irritating you are, Mom?” said Isabel.
“I irritate you because you can’t give me a break, Isabel,” said Zoe, and as Elena passed her to go into the kitchen, she thought that that was probably true. She herself would have never gotten along with a daughter. However, had she been Zoe’s daughter, she would have found her irritating also.
The nine-grain bread was in the freezer. She took out the loaf and broke off four of the frozen slices. While she was putting them in the toaster, Paul came up behind her. He said, “Let me do that. We meant to pack some food, but we forgot, and then we meant to stop for something to eat on the way over, but the traffic was terrible and there wasn’t anywhere I was willing to eat. Probably Zoe’s a little annoyed about that.”
Elena considered how not to offend by showing that she knew more about him than she had learned from actually talking to him. Finally, she said, “Are you on a special diet? I mean, other than the organ meats?”
“Well, the organ meats are temporary. I only do that once a year, for about four weeks, for the iron mostly. Zoe never did it before, so it’s a big deal to her, but I’m so used to it I just think, ‘March—organ meats.’”
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“Why March?” The toast popped up. Elena picked out the slices, turned them over, and put them back in so they would toast evenly.
“By now, it means spring, I guess. I used to live in Ohio, where spring actually came in March, but if I remember correctly, I just happened to do it the first time in March, and so I did it a year later, and so on.”
Elena opened the refrigerator and took out a container of roasted-garlic hummus. The toast popped. She opened a drawer and took out a knife. He took it from her in a smooth, courteous way, and began to spread hummus on the toast. It was awkward to stand there not knowing anything significant about him and to make assumptions based on someone’s saying that he was a “healer” and that he ate organ meats before six in the morning. He was too vivid in her mind to be a stranger, and yet he was a stranger. So she said the wrong thing. She said, “If it’s too late to leave for the monastery, you ought to spend the night here. I mean, if you go back to Zoe’s house, that’s going to add an hour to your trip starting out again tomorrow.”
“We could stop somewhere along the way, though my idea of a good place to stop isn’t going to be the same as Zoe’s. I like a nice dive myself. There’s a motel in San Miguel. It’s right out of The Postman Always Rings Twice. You know, two hard beds and a lightbulb hanging from the ceiling.”
“You like that?”
“I like paying $44.95.”
“It’s probably better that you get all the way to the monastery in one day, then.”
“The first time I ever stayed there, I couldn’t figure out why the doors were slamming all night long. Every time I would drift off, bam, the door next to mine or down the line would go off like a shot. And the semis were idling in the parking lot. At about five, I finally woke up for the day when someone came pounding on the door next to my room and shouting, ‘Let me in!’ and the girl inside called out, bright as you please, ‘Who is it?,’ and the guy shouts, ‘It’s me! Let me in!,’ and the girl calls out again, ‘Who is it?,’ and the guy says, “Come on! Let me in! You know who it is!’ They go on like this for about ten minutes, and she never lets on that she knows who it is or that she’s intimidated in any way, always just calling out ‘Who is it?,’ and he refuses to say his name. So the guy heads off to the office, I guess to wake up the manager and get another key, and there’s quiet for, oh, say two minutes, and then, all of a sudden, the girl runs out of the room, jumps into the car, and races away. When the guy comes back with the key five minutes later, she’s miles down the road. I always thought that was brilliant, the way she did that.”
