Ten Days in the Hills

by Jane Smiley

  “Oh, pattern this, pattern that. I don’t think in that way. That woman needs to get over it.”

  “Get over what?”

  “Whatever it is that keeps her calling you from France once a week.”

  “She feels that she is getting something from our work. When she no longer feels that way, I’m sure she’ll stop.”

  “What about you? What are you getting from it?”

  “Well, it is my job. And I do think it’s interesting. I do think she’s interesting. I’m learning from our sessions.”

  “That’s what you always say! Marcelle is interesting! My pubic hair is interesting! George Bush is interesting! What’s the difference?”

  “Well, there isn’t much, really. Probably my feelings about all three of those things are essentially the same.”

  “Don’t you think that’s weird? Don’t you think that anyone in the world would hear what you just said and think that you were very weird?” Her voice was rising. She knew her voice was rising and she knew he knew her voice was rising, which was yet another point against her, wasn’t it? She rolled over in disgust, turning her back on him. In the end, it was always the same with men. Even the enlightened ones took refuge in not saying anything. She closed her eyes, though obviously she was not going to sleep. What she was going to do was lie there all night, churning with indignation, and then she was going to have to get up in the morning and deal with Isabel for one and her mother for another and that woman Elena and her kid for a third, though the kid was good-looking and seemed nice, and he didn’t give his mother nearly the hard time Isabel gave her. It was much worse to have a supposedly good kid, who did all the right things, but was angry at you all the time, than it was to have a kid who was sometimes a fuckup but who liked you. What was it Simon had done? Zoe had seen him before dinner, when everyone was cooking, put his arm around Elena and laugh and give her a nice kiss, and not as if he never did that sort of thing and now he was handing it to her on a platter just this once, was she satisfied now, but as if he was used to showing his mom affection. It never occurred to Isabel to suck up. Probably she would rather die than suck up to Zoe. It was a very bad and inflexible attitude, and came straight from Delphine as far as Zoe was concerned.

  “Zoe?” said Paul.

  “I’m sleeping.”

  “Are you?”

  “No, but I’m thinking about Isabel and my mother.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “Why do you want to know? Because it’s interesting?”

  “It is interesting. But, of course, it’s interesting to the same degree as anything else is interesting, no more, no less.” But he said this as if he were suppressing a laugh.

  She sat up and said, “No, it’s more interesting.” But now she was suppressing a laugh. Because it really wasn’t more interesting, it was just the same old mother thing. She thought she could rise to the challenge, though. She cleared her throat. She said, “Okay, it’s not interesting, I admit that. But it’s no less interesting than Marcelle Vivier’s opinions about Iraq, and you spent an hour—”

  “Fifty minutes.”

  “Fifty minutes on those, so—”

  “Is this a session?”

  “It could be.”

  “Is it one of your weekly sessions?”

  She thought for a moment, then said, “No. May I have an extra session? A half-session?”

  “Gratis?”

  Now she waited three seconds. She counted them internally. She thought this was a question for him to decide without her urging. After three seconds, he said, “Okay, informal session. Gratis. But only because I’m tired and I’m not sure if I can help you.”

  She nodded, paused a moment, then began in a more formal tone. “You know, I was terrified of Isabel after she was born. I was sure I was going to make a mistake that would kill her. I even had this dream right before she was born that I went to the grocery store with her, and just happened to put her in the sack before the bagger put the groceries in, and then he put everything in on top of her, and I didn’t realize it until I got home, by which time I was really in trouble, you know what I mean? Not to mention that she was in trouble, of course.” She cleared her throat. In a session, everything you said, every word you used, was revealing. She glanced at him, but he looked authentically neutral. “The dream didn’t even go all the way to unpacking her, just to staring at the bag on the counter, wondering if she was okay. And then, one night when she was only six weeks old, I woke up and saw her in her crib, which was in our room, and the blanket had fallen over her face. I remember thinking, Oh my God, she can’t even push a blanket out of her face! I was already wondering what I would say to my mom and Max if she died. She was premature—that was a crisis in itself.

  “Whenever she cried or fussed, I knew I was doing a poor job. I used to balance Isabel on her side with blankets rolled against her back and her front so she couldn’t fall in either direction, and I would spend ages adjusting those blankets so that if there was throw-up it wouldn’t get on the blanket roll in front and be reaspirated or somehow forced back into her mouth, and the one against her back had to be just the right size or she would either roll forward onto her stomach, which I considered to be instantly fatal, or roll onto her back, which would take longer but have the same ultimate result. Every time she cried or fussed, I knew she was blaming me.”

  “You felt she was blaming you.”

  “Well, yeah.” But after a moment, she recognized the difference between “knew” and “felt.”

  “My mother was quick. You don’t see it so much now; she’s pretty stiff. But back then, she was, what, around fifty. She didn’t have to think. There was the baby, the baby needed something, my mother was on it before the thought hardly crossed my mind. And Max. Max had his opinions, too. And his mother came out from the East, and Dorothy was always in and out, being helpful. When should you introduce solid food? There was a question. I started solids at two weeks! said Delphine. Two months! said Max’s mother. Not until she reaches for it on her own! said Dorothy. Five months! said one book. What seems natural to you? said the doctor. Talk talk talk. Everything about how to treat Isabel was a topic of conversation that had to be exhausted over and over again. I mean, it’s not like everyone fought—everyone was very nice—but I was only nineteen, and I’d never even held a baby before Isabel. I don’t know.” She cleared her throat and fell silent. The silk strap of her chemise had slipped down over her shoulder. She didn’t push it up.

  Paul gazed at her in a kind of distant way, contemplating, pooching out his lips inside his beard, then pulling his beard idly for a moment. Finally, he said, “Well, it wasn’t about the baby.”

  “What?”

  “That whole thing, it wasn’t about the baby.”

  “It sure seemed like it was about the baby. The baby was everything!”

  “But of course it was about—” He waited for her to fill in this blank.

  “It was about me. I know everything is about me in the end, because I am projecting my entire world and constructing it and creating it, but, you know, I didn’t know you then, and I hadn’t thought about things in that way, and it sure seemed like we had this baby and there was absolutely no agreement on how to take care of her, and so—”

  “And so?”

  “And so—” But her mind had stopped working, so she looked at him.

  He closed his eyes. This was a sign either that he was receiving something from on high, or abroad, or out there, or within, or that he was making something up. In the quiet, she could hear the hum of the dehumidifier. Outside the sliding glass door, she could see the garden lit up by the moon. He said, “Did you know you were once a god?”

  “A what?”

  “A god.”

  Yes, she was startled. She said, “My mother will be interested to hear that.”

  “Do you know where Oaxaca is?”

  “You mean, in Mexico?”

  “Yes. It’s a very holy site. Ther
e’s a huge complex called Monte Albán that’s only partially been excavated, though when you were the god of thunder it was quite different. Beautiful buildings with wonderful carvings and luxuries of all sorts, though of course you and your fellow gods and goddesses were extremely cruel to the human population. Lots of blood sacrifices and ritual disembowelments.”

  “Maybe we didn’t know any better.”

  “Maybe as gods you didn’t recognize a problem, and saw the human population passing from one shape to another, and were just interested or amused by it, since from an immortal perspective you didn’t recognize death as death.”

  “Maybe that,” said Zoe.

  “At any rate, you were the god of thunder, which I take to mean that you controlled the weather in some way, certainly the rainfall and the extent and violence of the storms and the length of the rainy season, and therefore the growth of the crops and the overall prosperity of the community. You were very powerful. Only the sun god was more powerful, and the goddess of the earth, who controlled earthquakes, was as powerful as you were, but somewhat more feared, as you can imagine.”

  “Oh, sure,” said Zoe, “that stands to reason.”

  “You did a terrible job.”

  “Oh,” said Zoe.

  “Some people wanted one thing and some people wanted another, and they would pray to you and sacrifice to you to get what they wanted. They were always upping the ante. If one farmer sacrificed his old mother to you, then the farmer next door would sacrifice his third wife.”

  “Why didn’t they stick with sheep or goats or something like that?”

  “No domestic animals to speak of. Excess of human labor, paucity of animal labor. It was a problem throughout the Western Hemisphere, actually. Of course, they figured you wanted more and more, so they sacrificed people to you that were more precious and more beautiful and younger. They began wars just to get sacrificial victims from other tribes, and there was a premium on getting the very best—not just the king’s child, but the king’s best child. This in turn made it very hard for your tribe to get along with the neighbors, and there was a technological push in the invention of weapons, which always heightens tensions between warring groups. They had, for example, been killing each other with axes, but someone invented two-handed, double-edged axes, and the killings became offensive to some parts of the society, who considered them excessively brutal and felt that the breakdown of certain ritualized parameters was a sign of general desperation and breakdown, which obviously it was. The humans came to feel that nothing worked, that you were always sending the wrong weather.”

  “Was I?”

  “Well, you may have been god of the weather, but you didn’t actually control the weather per se. I would say you had some limited effect on upper air patterns and local precipitation, but no more than that and often less. And it may be that this period I am speaking of was a period of general climate change.”

  “Like now.”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened to me?”

  “They executed you.”

  Oddly, Zoe was a bit shocked by this. She exclaimed, “But I was a god!”

  “Gods are executed all the time. They went around to all your altars and broke up the statues of you. They defaced and obliterated all representations of you, and stopped saying your name. They made dolls of you and burned you on a pyre. They killed your priests and reassigned your wives to the sun god. They purged you from the records, which wasn’t easy, since the records were carved in stone.”

  “Did I die?”

  “I gather that you must have, because you were reincarnated shortly thereafter as a large predatory bird of some kind.”

  “Did the weather improve?”

  “I don’t think so. That civilization died out fairly suddenly.”

  “Well, they were killing each other right and left, it sounds like.”

  “Usually there is a combination of ecological and sociological factors.”

  “How is this like Isabel, though?”

  “It seems like you are always at the vortex. What you do initiates conflict even when you don’t ‘want’ it to.”

  “Oh.” Zoe was definitely disappointed. She sank down in the bed and pulled the covers up to her chin. She knew it was true. She said, “Even in elementary school I couldn’t do the simplest thing without causing a fight of some kind.” Then she said, “That’s not the same as precipitating the end of a civilization, though.”

  He didn’t say anything for a moment, then he said, “There’s nothing wrong with the end of a civilization,” and she had this sudden image of some sort of clearing in a jungle, as seen from far away and high up. The figures in the clearing were human, and they were running around at top speed. She knew what they were doing—they were killing one another in battle—but from a distance they looked like they were bumping together, bouncing apart, falling down, jumping up. The scene was alternately light and dark, as the sun rose and set. The figures disappeared, reappeared, disappeared again. The jungle vegetation advanced and receded like a wave on the beach, and the piece of ground was green, then gold, then green again, then gold again. Then she imagined herself looking upward, and in the dark sky, stars began to explode like fireworks. Paul said, “Isabel turned out fine, didn’t she?”

  “Did she?”

  “I was talking to her after dinner about her job and the young man, what’s his name?”

  “Leo. Wow, I never liked him. He always acted like it was a favor to her that he was dating her, a favor to me if he was eating dinner at my house, and a favor to the world in general if he bothered to smile. And now she says he refuses to move out of their apartment because the marijuana plants that he keeps in the closet under lights are flowering and can’t be disturbed.”

  “So it’s good that she’s fed up with him, and good that she’s ready for another job, and she’s healthy and full of energy, so it doesn’t matter what happened about the solid food, does it?”

  “No. But she’s always been such a picky eater. I’m sure that if we—”

  “It’s not so bad to be a picky eater. Picky eaters tend to have fewer obesity problems. French people, for example, are notoriously picky eaters.”

  Yes, she did smile, acknowledging that Marcelle Vivier was actually none of her business.

  “And it doesn’t matter about the end of that Oaxacan civilization, or the end of this one, either, does it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, where is the end of that civilization taking place?”

  “In my imagination?”

  “Absolutely, so it only matters what you feel about it. What do you feel about it?”

  “I don’t know. Curious. I mean, it’s invigorating more than anything else to think about being a god and then screwing up and being executed by your followers. And it’s funny in a way.”

  “I think so, too.” He smiled a big amused smile. She emerged from the covers, which now seemed too warm, and sat up with her legs crossed. She saw him glance down at her breasts, and it was true, she was wearing a peach-colored silk chemise that she had bought on Melrose for just this sort of occasion. It had slender double strands for straps, and the front was cut narrow and loose so that it seemed to be barely clinging to her breasts, which, of course, were something she was known for, the other something being her ass. “Just a minute,” she said, and she knelt up onto her hands and knees and reached across the bed for the glass of water she had set on the nightstand before getting into bed. It took her a long time to reach for the glass of water, and when she had reached for it, it took her a long time to drink it, which she did while continuing to present her bare-naked buttocks for his appreciation. While she was drinking, she heard him open the drawer on his side of the bed, and then she heard the slippery, moist sound of his hand anointing what would certainly be his very nice erection with Aqua Lube. A neat and methodical person, he put the Aqua Lube bottle away and closed the drawer before kneeling up himself and intro
ducing his prick. He went in slowly and with some difficulty at first, as if the session and all that talk of conflict had tightened her up. Then, as she felt herself be entered and filled, she also felt his hands on her hips, balancing himself and securing her. He said, “Mmm.”

  It was interesting, she thought, how this idea of him right behind her, his hairless muscular chest and his beard, his shoulders, arms, and hands, so smoothly and easily succeeded that other image of the stars exploding. Even as he pressed his way into her and she could feel every millimeter of her vagina opening and widening around the pressure of his thrust, she could go in her mind from the thought of him to the thought of the black night and the bursting stars, some close, some far away—that would be some exploding right now and some exploding long ago. She could think how much she liked to be taken without foreplay, because without foreplay she felt it more suddenly and intensely, and right afterward she could remember the waves of green and gold surging and ebbing across the land, and of course there were mountains thrusting upward, too, and, more slowly, crumbling away and thrusting upward again, and once in a while a lake would appear at sunset in the cleft of the mountains like an opal and then vanish, and then her mind would go back to him, so odd that he was named something as dull as Paul. She cried out because he delved too deep, and she pulled away from him, but he pressed against her again, and then again, until she had fallen off the perch of her hands and knees and was collapsed into the bed, and still he was pressing, pulling out, and pressing, and then he pulled out completely and reanointed himself, and then he went in fast and hard and very quickly, and they were both calling and maybe screaming, though he was not howling in her ear as he had done once, because she told him no, under no circumstances, was he to put his mouth near her ear when he was having an orgasm, because he could damage her hearing, and for a singer that was potentially disastrous, but he was leaning back and arching upward and singing out to the rafters while she was crying, “Oh Oh O-H-h-h,” and pressing her face into the pillow.