Ten Days in the Hills

by Jane Smiley

  “Well, they don’t have…” He laughed at the very thought.

  “So—how were they going to attack us?”

  “No one knows, that’s the problem, they could bring in a dirty bomb or a biological weapon like the plague—”

  “Oh, yeah?” she said. Zoe thought Elena’s voice was getting a little shrill, though not exactly loud. “You know what I would have done if I were Saddam Hussein? I would have said, ‘Yes, I do have nuclear capability, and I did get some uranium, and there is a bomb in a suitcase inside the U.S. that my agents have taken there. It is in an undisclosed location, and as soon as you attack my country, they have instructions to set it off.’ Did he say that?”

  “That’s kind of crazy.”

  “Why is it crazy? Isn’t it more crazy to sit on your weapons of mass destruction while a huge army invades you?”

  “Saddam is a tyrant.” Now Charlie was getting a little loud. “Are you defending Saddam?”

  “What if the Iraqis resist and the Americans have to shoot them?”

  “Well, we expect the Republican Guard to resist. Those are his hand-picked—”

  “But what if the people resist? What if the Baghdadians shoot Americans from the housetops and blow up American soldiers and do the sort of things that the Palestinians do, and Americans have to shoot them and blow them up, what does winning mean in that context?”

  “Honey—” said Max.

  Paul finished cutting the fruit. He arranged it on a blue plate. It looked appealing.

  “I want him to answer.”

  But Charlie was silent. Zoe wasn’t quite sure why. She wanted him to answer, too, because it was a confusing question.

  Paul gathered up the parings and put them in the trash can under the sink. Then and only then did he catch Zoe’s eye. She nodded. He walked around Elena, grabbing a couple of paper napkins from a stack on the island, and came toward Zoe, deliberately but not quickly. Elena said, “They always talk about how well it’s going to go, and they never talk about what if it goes badly, about what that means.”

  “But it is going well,” said Charlie.

  “I don’t believe that,” said Elena.

  “Do you want it to go badly? Do you want Americans to be killed? Do you want the oil fields to be blown up?”

  Max cleared his throat.

  “Oil!” exclaimed Elena. “Now we get to the bottom—”

  Paul opened the slider to the deck. Zoe preceded him into the sunlight. She realized that her heart was pounding. She followed him across the deck to the far corner that overlooked the pool and all the gardens and steps. Across the canyon, the Getty was so bright and distinct in the morning air that she could see tiny dark figures walking there. She said, “We should go to the Getty and look at some art. I haven’t been there in a year.”

  “I would like that,” said Paul. He spread a napkin over her lap and handed her a fork.

  DAY FOUR • Thursday, March 27, 2003

  “Are you awake?”

  He had been awake, thought Max. He had been so wide awake that he was contemplating getting up, and then, apparently, he had fallen asleep again, because now he was heavy and thick and it was hard to open his eyes and he no longer had that erection. Hadn’t he had an erection? He cleared his throat, rolled over, groaned, and rearranged his balls so they wouldn’t get pinched. He said, “I was awake earlier. I had such a big erection that it woke me up.”

  Elena said, “Oh, Max! Why didn’t you just roll me over and stick it in? You know I love that.”

  “You were sleeping so quietly and soundly, I didn’t want to disturb you. It was big, though.”

  “Describe it.”

  Max yawned. He felt the yawn roll down through his body, tightening and then loosening every muscle. He stretched his arms above his head, then pulled Elena to him and arranged her head on his shoulder. He said,

  “Let’s see. Well, it must have been that when I rolled over toward you I felt it bang against something, maybe your hip, and that’s what woke me up, and then I could sense that it was full and hard, so of course I reached down—”

  “Just for technical reasons.”

  “Yes, of course, just to apply the calipers. You know, I’m always interested in length, circumference, weight, that sort of thing, and it was definitely in the upper quintile of Max, maybe even the top ten percent—”

  “Extra Big Classic range—”

  “Exactly. So I refined my survey a bit, by feeling it all over, and gave it a little road test, just to see if it could be grown out any—”

  “Pushing the envelope, which could be dangerous.” She started laughing.

  “Theoretically, though”—he tried to sound grave—“I’ve never heard of any sort of explosion or breakage. You’d think if there had been something like that somewhere, you’d hear about it.”

  “And so—”

  “And so I cultivated it until I felt it had peaked, and—”

  “I think I need a better description than that. More detail.”

  “Let’s see.” He held up his hand and made a circle. He touched the tip of his middle finger to the tip of his thumb, then spread them a bit. He said, “So maybe it was that big around, but of course you don’t really grab it like that. More like this.” He changed to a tennis sort of grip. “Anyway, it was a hand-filler. I know what—” Max threw off his covers and got up. His robe was right there. In the kitchen, he saw that Delphine and Cassie were already eating breakfast. “Morning!” he said. They turned and smiled. He grabbed a banana, came back into the room, and tossed the banana on the bed. While Elena was laughing, he took off his robe and threw it over the chair. She was naked, and their covers were on the floor. He picked up the banana and wrapped his hand around it. He said, “About like this.” He approximated the stem end of the banana to his groin and arranged his hand as if he were masturbating, but then turned the banana upward. “Actually, more like this.” The banana curved upward, and he made the blossom end tap his navel. “Almost exactly like this. Almost exactly the length, circumference, and direction of this banana.”

  “What a wonderful coincidence!” she exclaimed, but now they were both laughing. He put the banana into her outstretched hand, and got back into the bed. He said, “Don’t eat it just right this very minute, okay?”

  “I won’t. I want to hear more.”

  “Well, big isn’t exactly a dimensional thing. I mean, objectively, it’s probably more or less the same size every time, within a few millimeters. What makes it feel big is more about the blood trying to get in, more about a sensation of rigid fullness. That’s what I had this morning. Blood just piling up at the gates. And it was right up against my stomach. I could feel that.”

  “Was it warm?”

  “Of course it was warm. It was warm and silky, and my balls were hard, too.”

  “What color was it?”

  They both gazed at it for a moment. He said, “Well, I didn’t actually look at it, because it was dark still, but I’m sure it was flushed.” He lay back and she knelt over him and kissed him appreciatively and firmly on the lips, then more gently on the tip of his cock. She said, “I’m so glad it isn’t pierced.” At dinner the night before, Simon had been showing Charlie the tattoo on his leg, and Charlie had asked if tattoos and piercings were still a big deal.

  “A big deal to whom?” said Simon. “To parents?”

  “To kids,” said Charlie.

  “Most people have them,” said Isabel. “So they’re not a big deal.”

  “So what’s the weirdest place to pierce?” said Charlie.

  “There’s a guy at school who has his ass cheeks pierced and connected by a bar,” said Simon. “I saw him at the gym one day.”

  “How does he sit down?” said Cassie.

  “It’s up at the top of the cleft.”

  “Leo and I saw a guy on TV a few months ago,” said Isabel, “who did the head of his dick. They called it a ‘Prince Albert.’”

  “How d
oes that work?” said Zoe.

  “Well,” said Simon, quite informatively, Max thought, and, you almost might say, enthusiastically, “they gather the skin that’s under the head of the penis and pinch it together and pierce it, and then they put a ring or a barbell-type thing through it.”

  “You’re kidding,” said Cassie.

  “Supposedly,” said Isabel, “a ‘Prince Albert’ is when a ring goes down through the urethra and comes out underneath. Leo couldn’t stand to watch long enough for them to explain.”

  “Maybe it’s like a French tickler,” said Charlie.

  “What’s that?” said Simon.

  “A condom with a lot of stuff hanging off it,” said Stoney. “Sort of like a party hat. Or a Rastafarian wig, with latex Rasta locks.”

  Everyone had laughed.

  “Have you ever used one of those?” said Simon.

  Stoney shook his head.

  Elena had said, “Do you think they do that piercing for their own pleasure or the pleasure of the partner?”

  “I think it’s just a sexy thing to do,” said Stoney. “I don’t think it enhances the pleasure for either one.”

  “Imagine how much adjusting you’d have to do just to keep it from getting caught in your shorts,” said Max.

  Then Charlie had said, “When I was in college in the early sixties, there was supposedly a kid in the ag school who could piss over four lanes of interstate highway. He was a farm kid who had been pissing at fenceposts all his life, aiming from farther and farther away. Supposedly, he could shoot it out in a long stream—”

  “Say you’re a trucker,” said Simon, “and you’re just rolling down the road, and this arc of pee lands on your windshield—”

  “Or you see a tiny, tiny rainbow,” said Zoe.

  Everyone had laughed.

  “Did you,” said Simon, “ever see that Web site called ‘Clone-a-bone’?”

  “What’s that?” said Elena.

  “It’s for making your own personal dildo, or maybe, you know, a monument to your—Well, anyway, they send you this tube and a jar of something you mix up called Buddy Batter, for making the mold, and then some kind of rubber—they have different colors and shades—and when you have it just the way you want it, you fit the tube around it and pour in the Buddy Batter—” But then he had looked at Elena and fallen silent.

  The good thing about this dinner-table conversation, as far as Max was concerned, was that there had been no ensuing discussion of the Iraq war. “Or tattooed,” he said now. “I’m glad it isn’t tattooed. I worked on a paint crew as a summer job, and there was one guy who had tattoos all over his body, mostly cartoon figures. One day we were out behind the school we were painting, taking a leak, and I saw that he had ‘FWO’ tattooed on the head of his penis. He said it meant For Women Only. That’s the only one I’ve ever seen or heard of.”

  She snuggled closer, then said, “When we were talking about those things last night, Simon seemed so—”

  “Enthusiastic?”

  “Well, I was going to say ‘knowledgeable.’”

  “That, too.”

  “I feel like he would try anything.”

  “I think he would try a lot of things, but my guess is that he won’t have his penis pierced or tattooed. He’s less careful than Isabel, but with boys the question is not ‘Will they try it?’ but ‘Can they handle it?’ Just the other day Stoney and I were discussing the dumbest things we did at twenty-one, and obviously Paul took his laps in the risk pool, too. And Charlie did, too, I know for a fact, because I was there, gawking.”

  “What was the stupidest thing Charlie did?”

  “I guess the stupidest was when we were sixteen or so. I came back from some family trip and found out that he and another friend of ours, named Brian Moody, had stolen a stick of dynamite from a construction site, and a blasting cap, too. The day after I got back, we drove around the countryside until they found what they wanted to blow up. It was an old outhouse. The whole time we were driving, they were talking about how you were supposed to do it. I guess everything they knew about dynamite they learned in the movies. One thing they couldn’t decide when we found the outhouse was whether to drop the dynamite down the hole or set it on the seat. They finally tossed a coin, and dropped it down the hole. I stood off about a hundred yards. Brian lit the fuse and ran, and then we watched the outhouse shoot up like a rocket. I don’t know what the farmer thought. Then, about six months later, we were out in Brian’s father’s pickup from his work. There were three of us in the cab and three guys in the back, and we were driving down a dirt road between a couple of farm fields that were set lower than the road. Anyway, there was some kind of berm in the road, I don’t know what it was, but we were going quite fast, and then Charlie, who was driving, swerved all of a sudden, and the truck went over the edge and rolled into the field. The guys in the back just flew out and landed in the mud. The truck rolled almost all the way over. Man, the tools in the cab were flying everywhere. I was down in the footwell with my arms over my head. Charlie was shouting, ‘Whoooooaa! Whoooaaa!’ But everyone walked away from it. I guess afterward Charlie and Brian kind of hammered out the fenders and rinsed the truck off, and the father never knew. I mean, it was a work truck, and fairly beat up already.”

  Elena said, “Oh God, you’re making me nervous. Remember that movie Twins? With Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito?”

  “I didn’t see that one.”

  “They play two fraternal twins who are the product of a breeding experiment. The DeVito twin has been conveniently disposed of, and ends up a small-time crook on the streets of L.A. Arnie is a genetic superman, so they keep him and raise him with every advantage on a secluded island in the Caribbean. He escapes at about thirty. He’s totally innocent and safe and well intentioned and happy. That’s what I always wanted for Simon.”

  “Looks like you didn’t get your wish.”

  “No, I haven’t.” She sighed. Then she lifted her head and looked at him in what he thought was a peculiar manner, and said, “But you think Isabel plays it safe?” Isabel, Max knew, was an ideal daughter and always had been—happy but serious, straightforward, perfect in every way—but, knowing Elena’s concerns about Simon, he didn’t want to brag. Instead, he said, “At least she’s getting rid of this kid Leo. I never liked him.”

  “I hear he’s a dedicated horticulturalist.”

  “Yes, I heard that, too. And I’m sure it’s an agribusiness with him, not subsistence farming. When he used to come around from time to time, the only thing he ever asked me about was money. He always wanted to know how much things cost. Or else how much you could get for something. Even when they were in high school, I was doing a movie, what was it, oh, that movie Imperial that was the story of Salome but set out in Brawley, that was supposed to be on HBO but they never showed it. Leo couldn’t stop asking me about the budget. I almost gave him a copy of the breakdown. I don’t know what she saw in him. She doesn’t seem to me to care about money, or even things. She buys all her clothes at regular places. That’s the way Zoe is, too. If Zoe’s ever shopped on Rodeo Drive, I’d be stunned.”

  “If you look like Zoe, you don’t have to shop on Rodeo Drive.”

  “True enough.” Then she looked at him again, and he knew what this look meant—did he care what Zoe looked like? And the answer was, he was so used to what Zoe looked like by now that he hardly noticed, but he doubted whether, if he said that, she would believe him. So he said, “What time is it, anyway? When I ran out there for that banana, I noted that the older generation is already eating breakfast.”

  “Can we eat the banana yet?”

  “Not quite.”

  “Well, in that case, it’s time for a present.”

  He felt a little charge of pleasure, he had to admit. “A present for me?”

  “Yes.”

  “From you?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Is it my birthday?”

  “What do you think?”
/>
  “No. Is it your birthday?”

  “No. My birthday is in September. It’s just something I saw, and it might be the wrong thing, but we can return it.” She leaned over the side of the bed and reached under the bedskirt.

  She pulled out a large-ish box wrapped in blue paper. Inside, Max found a Canon digital video camera, about hand-size. He lifted it out of the box. It was silver. He opened the door on the left side, then closed it again. Just by looking at it, he could tell that it was a nice piece of nonprofessional equipment. He said, “How much was this? I haven’t bought a video camera in five years at least.”

  “About twelve hundred dollars. After we were talking the other day, I was driving down Sunset, and I saw that big video store, and I thought I would just see what they had. Doesn’t it seem funny to you that a motion-picture director wouldn’t have a video camera?”

  He gave her a kiss and said, “Doesn’t Mario Andretti usually take the bus?”

  Her face fell just for a split second, but then she smiled. “Anyway, I did ask Isabel if you had a video camera, and she said she didn’t think so, and Delphine didn’t think so, either, so here it is. Not necessarily the best, though the man in the store said it was the best for the money.”

  “Do Delphine and Isabel know what I’m going to use it for?”

  “I’m sure they think you’re going to record family get-togethers, with a long shot of the turkey and before and after shots of the pies.”

  “I guess they’ll be surprised, then.”

  Elena lay back against the pillows and said, seductively, “I guess they will.”

  “Are there tapes?”

  “Y-e-e-s-s. Look in the box.”

  “Does it need to be charged?”

  “I did that already. I bought it yesterday.”

  Max took off the lens cap and turned the camera around in his hand. It was compactly appealing. He found the power button and listened while the camera made a few discreet dings and issued a low, whispery hum. He looked through the viewfinder at the door, and then at Elena’s face. Both looked good. He said, “I don’t know much about digital images, but you look shiny.” He panned down the length of her body and then did a close-up of the big toe of her right foot, which she wiggled. He ran the camera up her leg, came to her pubic hair. He did a close-up of her pubic hair. The definition produced by the camera and the light in the room was good enough so that he could see the swelling curves and the subtle color, brick-pink, of her labia. She opened her legs an inch or so. He moved the focus in closer. He said, “Factor-ten close-up is pretty good. Closer than that and I think we wouldn’t know what we were seeing.”