by Jane Smiley
Elena laughed. As he told this story, he carefully cut the crusts off the toast, cut the four slices into eight triangles, picked a sprig of parsley off the plant in the window, and set it on the plate. Elena said, “What about water? I have some Pellegrino.”
“We drink Pellegrino.”
She opened the refrigerator again and took out a big green glass bottle. There were two glasses in the dish drainer. He said, “Do you have room for us?”
“Oh my goodness,” said Elena, “I think it’s a crime the way the rooms in this house sit empty. And Delphine lives in the guesthouse, so that’s four bedrooms that hardly ever even get aired.”
“It’s a thought,” said Paul as they carried the food into the sitting room.
“Dear one!” said Zoe. “Guess what. We’re staying here for the night! Isn’t that a good idea? We’re right above the 405, and we don’t have to go all the way back to my place and start all over again tomorrow morning. Max said we could stay in the garden room. It’s a cave! You’ll love it. The previous owners actually dug it out of the hillside for their wine cellar. You could never do that nowadays. And then they got divorced, and all the wine went to some bank or something. Anyway, it’s totally quiet, it looks onto the Japanese garden, and when you get up, you can go out and pull weeds. It’ll be just like spending the night in the monastery. It even has a tiny little kitchen, if we want to cook. It is just my favorite room, even though it’s forty-eight steps down and forty-eight steps up.”
“It sounds perfect,” said Paul.
“We’ll stay, then,” said Zoe.
Isabel made a little noise, as if she couldn’t believe that Zoe had gotten away with something yet again.
DAY TWO • Tuesday, March 25, 2003
The nice thing about Isabel’s bedroom, which Stoney had discovered years ago, was that it had windows on all sides but it was entirely private, like a fire lookout. The Getty on one side, mountainsides full of houses on another, the cul-de-sac and another street beyond that. It was a California view for sure, one of the best Stoney had ever seen in Los Angeles. Isabel had been living in this room since she insisted upon moving up here when she was ten, and the room had remained more or less the same over the years, since it had too many windows to be decorated in any style. The bed sat in the middle of the floor; cream-colored Japanese shades hung in each of the windows, and a few inexpensive bright area-rugs were thrown around that sort of matched the bedspread. The only thing Isabel had collected over the years was pillows, and there were pillows everywhere—in the corners, stacked against the walls, on the bed. There were also a few small palms and rubber plants, because of the light, but no pictures or paintings. L.A. was the panoramic picture, out of every window. Stoney felt that it was this view that had formed Isabel’s perspective, literally. She was entirely self-confident, a tad remote, unimpressed by luxury or comfort, and tall. It was when she had gotten tall—at fourteen—that Stoney, who had known her all her life, really noticed her. It was when she had gotten self-confident, at sixteen, that he had started coming to this room and smoking dope with her, and talking to her. He had been nervous from the beginning, but there was a separate entrance, which, most important, was not visible from Delphine’s place or Cassie’s place (just around the cul-de-sac, but hidden by thick olive trees).
Of course, Stoney knew that the sense of remoteness and security he felt here was an illusion—for years he had parked his car a hundred yards down the street and walked up the hill, his heart pounding in case Delphine or Cassie or Max should emerge suddenly and ask him what he was doing—but it was something he could not shake and was always reassured by. It was the reason he had recently bought himself a lesser house in the same neighborhood, even though he could afford something bigger, better, and more convenient to his office across the 405. His house was much less interesting than this one—just a 1970s rambler with lots of rough wood paneling and the remnants of psychedelic wallpaper here and there and beaten-copper fixtures. He had not quite started to update it—his floors weren’t really being refinished for another month, but when Isabel called him and said she was coming, floor refinishing was the first excuse he could think of to get himself inside Max’s house for a week. There were so many ways that his relationship with Isabel was unacceptable to almost everyone he knew that when he was in this room he was grateful for everything that permitted it, but when he was out of this room he thought he probably wouldn’t come back again. Nevertheless, he always did.
The bathroom door opened, and Isabel came out. She was wearing pajama bottoms—black and white, patterned like the hide of a cow—Uggs, and a yellow sweatshirt from UC Santa Cruz. She looked willowy and tired. She said, “It’s five a.m. to me. I am so baked. Where did you get that stuff?”
“Some guy. I hardly smoke it anymore, because it’s so much worse than cigarettes, and I quit those last summer. I read that book, The Tipping Point? Have you read that? He said there were something like five different degrees of being a smoker, and you could tell what degree of commitment you had to it by whether you had a buzz the first time you ever smoked. So I remembered I hated smoking and it took me real effort to start. I thought I could probably quit pretty easily, and—boom—I quit.”
Isabel paid attention to him for about the first five seconds of this dissertation, and then began looking around the room. Long after he stopped talking, she said, “I think my grandmother was in here and threw away my bong, because I was looking for it before dinner and it’s nowhere to be found. She used to do that in high school. She never forbade anything, but she would make it hard to do whatever it was, so, if you got an impulse, four or five times out of ten you couldn’t give in to it, because it was too much trouble.”
“He also said that real smokers tend to have a certain type of cool personality. You know, rebellious and funny, kind of the high-school version of a Lenny Bruce personality. I realized that I don’t actually have that personality, I just used to aspire to it. You look good.”
She looked down at herself in a speculative way, then said, “You don’t.”
“I don’t? I’ve been going to the gym. I was going to put a workout room in my house—”
“That’s what I mean. You look like you don’t have anything better to do than polish your presentation.”
“Oh, thank you.”
“Well, it’s true.” She scratched her cheek and pushed her hair out of her face. She did look good—a perfect meshing of Zoe and Max, or maybe she just looked like Max as a woman with Zoe’s hair. She had a rectangular face and a wide mouth and a narrow nose with a bit of beakiness to it, a long neck, and broad shoulders. Under her sweatshirt, he knew, her back was long and her waist distinct. She had prominent hip bones and a flat ass. She was not his type, but he had been sleeping with her at this point longer than with anyone who was his type, including his former wife, Nina—petite and ballerinalike, with wiry muscles and a lot of surface tension. Nina was Italian; her family had moved to New York when she was ten and had a shop full of luxury goods there. Luxury goods had turned out to be more of a feature of her personality than he’d realized when they got together in the early days of her career in wholesome Disney movies. He said, “So what do you think of Elena?”
She came over and lay down on the bed. She looked around the room for a moment, staring toward the west bank of windows. Finally, she said, “She’s cute. She’s not like anyone my father ever was interested in before. She’s kind of dry and neat. She makes my mom, the legendary Zoe Cunningham, seem quite out of bounds. I like that part. I guess she’s okay with my grandmother.”
“What makes you say that?”
“No emanations.”
“Excuse me?”
“Delphine is so vibratory. It comes off her in waves. If she doesn’t like something, she just zings.”
“I never noticed that.”
“Oh, Stoney, you never notice anything. You are like the least intuitive person I ever met.” She yawned. “Do you think
it freaks Elena out to have us all descend on her like this? The daughter! The ex-wife! The best friend! The neighbor! It’s right out of a horror movie. ‘And they weren’t leaving!’” She laughed.
“Not to mention the strange guru from nowhere, the sinister Jamaican grandmother, and her own son, grotesquely changed!”
“What about you yourself, the mysterious stranger?” Now they laughed together, maybe longer than this joke warranted; then she said, “But of course this family reunion is weird to all the rest of us, too. We never had one before.” She shrugged.
“It’s been a whole year since I’ve seen you. When are you moving back?”
“To L.A.?”
“Well, yeah.”
“You don’t mean to be with you or something?” She sat up and looked at him in a critical way, then pursed her lips. Suddenly she opened her mouth as wide as she could, then closed it as tight as she could, then opened it again. Then she looked at him. He said, “What does that mean?”
“What?”
“You just made a face at me.”
“I didn’t make a face. I exercised my facial muscles.”
“Your mouth is the biggest mouth I’ve ever seen.”
“Look at this.” She opened her mouth and introduced her clenched fist almost entirely into the space between her teeth, then took it out, looked at it with satisfaction, and said, “You try it.”
“Put my fist in your mouth?”
“No, put your fist in your mouth. Try it.”
He opened his mouth as wide as he could, wide enough so he could hear the tiny sound of his mandibular joint creaking. He got his fist in up to the dip between his second and third knuckles.
“See?” she said. She smiled, then stared at him again.
“See what?”
But she was stoned. She said, “You know I wouldn’t come back to L.A. and live in this room.”
“Why not?”
“Because, you loser, I am not going to live with my family. I am twenty-three years old. So any fantasies you have of this life where you sneak up the hill and we cultivate eternal youth behind the backs of my grandmother and my father, it ain’t gonna happen. This right here is, as they say, your last hurrah.”
“This is the best bedroom in L.A.”
“Well, of course it is. It is the best room, and I have had the best adolescence in it, so what now? I quit my job.”
“What job was that?”
“My job at the Wildlife Conservation Society. At the Bronx Zoo.”
Stoney knew that he looked blank, that once again he had forgotten the terms of a woman’s personal drama even though, evidently, he had been informed of them in some detail. But last year, when she came back for Jerry’s funeral, he had been in no shape to take in anything about her job.
Stoney now did what Dorothy had always taught him to do. He looked Isabel right in the face and said, “I’m sorry, Isabel. I didn’t remember where your job was, which I should have done, or maybe would have done if I had been paying attention, which probably I wasn’t, but I am really sorry, so tell me about it.”
“I’m too fucked-up to talk about it right now.”
“Okay.”
“Did you smoke any of this shit at all?”
“I had a hit.”
She slid down in the bed and moved over toward him. A moment later, she turned off the light and then said, “Take off your jeans.”
He sat up and took off his jeans.
The room was, in some sense, no less light than it had been when the light was on, but the light in it was blue and white rather than yellow and red. As she snuggled against him and he put his arm around her, he could see her profile, moon-colored against the bright windows. It was funny that, in spite of the fact that he knew Delphine and he knew Zoe, he almost never thought of Isabel as being of “mixed race.” In California, she looked vaguely Hispanic, or unidentifiable, or simply herself, Isabel. He must have been stoned, because he had one of those stoned thoughts about how her lips were beautiful because they had to open that wide in order to accommodate the size of her jaw, or maybe it was the other way around—her jaw could open that wide because her lips were so elastic. And then, when she closed her lips, they had to do something to fit into a much smaller space, so they bunched up and curved in an attractive way. Then she put her hand up his shorts and began tickling his scrotum. He let his legs relax and fall apart. Her fingertips tickled down one side and up the other, then underneath and behind, then made little circles. His cock began to press against the seam of his boxers and pretty soon showed its tip above the waistband, and it, too, was pale and moonlike in the air of the room. He closed his eyes and pulled her a little closer. She continued to tickle him, sometimes only brushing the tips of his pubic hair, sometimes stroking the skin. He shifted position and pushed his boxers down. She stroked his cock lightly upward once, and then made a ring of her thumb and forefinger and ran it downward from the tip. This was something he had taught her to do, and it was very exciting. He gave out a little bark of pleasure. She said, “Remember the first time we slept together? You were twice my age.”
“I was not twice your age. I was twice your age when you were fifteen, but when we slept together, you were sixteen, so I was only about 187 percent of your age. I worked it out at the time.”
“How about now?” She gave a big sigh.
“Now…” Her hand wandered up his chest and pinched his nipple. He said, “Let’s see, I’m about 162 percent of your age.”
“You took off my clothes very slowly. I was wearing a shirt with something like sixteen buttons, and you unbuttoned every button from top to bottom, and then you unbuttoned the two buttons on each sleeve, and then you unbuttoned the two collar buttons. I thought that was so romantic, the way you undid the collar buttons before you opened my shirt and unbuttoned my jeans.”
“Your bra had hooks in the front, too.”
“One hook. It was my first bra from Victoria’s Secret. My friend Daria got one, too. We thought we were so hot.” She laughed and then rolled over against his chest and kissed him between the eyebrows. He could feel her breasts sway beneath her sweatshirt and then press against his chest. “And we got thongs. Mine was black stretchy lace. Daria read in some magazine that if you got the stretchy lace ones they would be pretty comfortable, but they weren’t. It was better just to not wear any underwear at all.”
“No panties.”
“No panties. But girls don’t call them panties.”
“I remember that you didn’t wear panties for a while. It was nice.”
“You were so hot for me. Remember we had the bed kind of turned around, closer to that set of windows, and you would look at my reflection in the glass?”
“It was ghostly and really erotic.” Now she lifted her sweatshirt and arranged her breasts against his chest, rubbing the nipples up and down lightly in his chest hair. He said, “I loved trying to make out what I was seeing, and I would think, Oh, that’s her ass, or Oh, that’s her tit.”
“So you know that when you took my shirt off, and took my jeans down and began to stroke my ass, I was thinking how no one had ever stroked my ass in my entire life up to that point, and I thought it felt so good, the best thing I had ever felt. I think you should do that now.” She swung her leg over, sat up, and took off her cow pants, letting them drop over the side of the bed. She was not wearing any panties. When she sat down on him again, she made sure to position her labia right on his cock. That was exciting, too. He slapped her ass a little bit, first right, then left. She muttered, “Oh, I just love that. Why isn’t it the same when you try it yourself?” She moved back and forth on his cock, and his erection felt like it swelled a bit, if that was possible. He knew there would be a moment when she hitched her hips upward and he slipped into her, but it wasn’t just yet. She said, “That’s good. Oh, just like that. Right there. Now run your hands down a little bit and pull apart the inner thighs, right there at the top. Oh, yeah. Just stroke there. That�
�s nice, too. Remember how surprised I was at what your erection looked like?”
“No, I don’t remember that.”
“Oh, shit. I was sort of dumbfounded.”
“I thought you had seen some erections before.”
“I must have said I did. I guess I’d seen a picture and maybe some porn movie. Did they have erections in Boogie Nights?”
“I don’t think so. Anyway, Boogie Nights wasn’t out by then.”
“Daria had access to her dad’s stash of porn movies, so we watched one together. She watched them all the time.”
“Daria did? Little Daria?”
“Little Daria tried to seduce both her stepbrother and her cousin. She was very curious. She was the one who talked me into doing you. She said it was perfect, because I’d known you all my life, and you were into it, and we weren’t related in any way, not even as steps, and you were married. She said you would be nice. Oh, it was funny, she also said, ‘There are bonus points if he’s married.’”
“I had no idea.” He slid his hands slightly upward and positioned her on his cock again. She rocked slowly back and forth, and he moved with her. It was gentle, like the motion of a boat on a calm sea.
“We talked about it every night for a month. We aren’t friends at all anymore, but Daria pretty much made me who I am today, since our first project together was caring for that baby mole. Remember the baby mole?”
