Ten Days in the Hills

by Jane Smiley

  “You’re just making my fears sound ridiculous.”

  “Well, I am trying to get you to laugh.”

  “Why?”

  “Because my take on things is that life is more powerful than death, way more powerful, and if we think about death over and over, look what happens, I can’t get it up, and so my sense of being alive is diminished. I would rather be like Klaus. I would rather be an immovable object than an irresistible force. I think you would rather be an irresistible force. But the world is full of people that do harm in the name of doing good. If you are an immovable object, then you are less likely to do harm.”

  “But you make movies. You depict things. You put stories and images on the big screen and try to have an effect. I think most people would laugh at the idea of a movie director thinking of himself as passive and undynamic.”

  “Well, I have several ideas about that. In the first place, movies that I make are stories. Even when I try to make it as compelling as possible, I know they are stories and the audience knows they are stories and the actors know they are stories. The thing about a story is that it affects you if you want it to, but you can take it or leave it. It’s like Alcoholics Anonymous. Have you ever been to a meeting?”

  She shook her head.

  He was warming up now, he thought. “What they do at meetings is tell stories. You aren’t allowed to give advice or tell people what to do. You’re encouraged to tell your own story and leave it at that. The reason they do that is because alcoholics can be volatile and sometimes take offense. Telling stories is the least offensive way to communicate, because it’s the least coercive. So that’s one of my defenses. Another one is that most movies are bad and most audiences are too sophisticated to buy most movies. I would like to have made a string of movies like One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, that seem so real while you are watching them that they replace all your own feelings and opinions, but I haven’t. Even the guys who made that movie haven’t. Michael Douglas went on to make Wall Street. Wall Street was kind of hokey at the time, and it’s more hokey now. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest was not hokey then, and it’s even less hokey now. What happened on the set of Cuckoo’s Nest was that everything clicked. The script clicked, the set clicked, the actors clicked, Forman, the director, clicked. It was like conducting a sublime performance of the Ninth Symphony. It was not work. Probably it was Nicholson who caused the click. He got along with everyone, and it seems like he’s the energy center when you look at him on the screen. But they all clicked, DeVito, Chris Lloyd, Scatman Crothers. Louise Fletcher’s performance gets better every time you look at it. When you watch William Redfield, who died after the movie came out, you know that he hates Nicholson’s character, and for the moment you can see why, and you hate Nicholson’s character, too. When the doctor comes on, who was the real doctor at that hospital, you can’t believe what a good job he is doing playing the doctor! That movie is the only thing in the entire world that makes me want to be someone else than myself. I would like to have been Milos Forman just in order to be part of that. But guess what? One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest came and went. It is not life-changing for most people who watch it. It’s a story. It may be the most perfect movie ever made, or one of them, but you can still take it or leave it. You can still get up, walk away, and make up your own mind about mental institutions, psychotherapy, electroshock, and even frontal lobotomy, not to mention euthanasia. So I don’t see what I do as coercive. In fact, I see it as objective. I offer something for the audience to contemplate, and even though we look like we are being madly active in making our offering, really our offering is as passive as a big stone lion on a pillar. Take it or leave it. And when a movie doesn’t jell like that one does, it isn’t at all hard to leave it.”

  She looked at him, didn’t say anything and kept looking at him. He could not interpret this look, except that in some sense it was a look of defeat. How long had he known her? A little less than a year. Even before he met her, she’d been in full attack mode for, by her own testimony, at least fifteen months. It suddenly occurred to him, as she looked at him, that perhaps he didn’t know her at all. And so he said, “What were you like during the Clinton administration?”

  She didn’t say anything, only worked her mouth a bit and pushed her hair back, as if maybe he had gone too far. She put her chin in her hand and looked out the window. More than anything, he thought, he would like to pick up that camera and film this set of gestures. Her face was alive with feelings that he couldn’t quite read, and, he thought, if he were to look at her through the camera lens, he would be able to read them and figure out what to say next. But he resisted temptation, only taking her hand with the hand he would otherwise have used to pick up the camera. After a moment, she removed her hand from his and picked up the banana skin that had been sitting on the coverlet, and smoothed the edges together, and set it neatly beside the camera box. She said, “I’m trying to encapsulate what I thought about Bill Clinton. I didn’t think he was a saint. I mean, Cassie once said he was and is a saint, but I didn’t find him attractive or unattractive. I did find him reassuring. I mean, from the very beginning of his administration, when he got in trouble for having his hair cut on the runway at LAX, and then for firing people in the White House travel office, it was apparent that they were out to get him and they weren’t going to let him do anything that was even his own business without a fight. That was a shock, but those were the terms of his presidency, and they started right away, and so everyone got used to them. It was like watching a guy walking down a road. The road runs behind a hedge. All you see are his head and shoulders, and he seems like he is having a nice walk. He’s happy, he’s smiling. Then there’s a gap in the hedge, and you realize he’s being mauled by a pack of dogs. They’ve ripped off his pants and they’re nipping at his legs and his ass and even his testicles, but he’s still progressing, not paying much attention to the dogs, keeping his mind more or less on his destination. It was reassuring. You had the feeling that, even though there was a lot of discord, the country wasn’t in danger, because he, Bill Clinton, didn’t seem afraid. They weren’t going to get him, and that was that, and so you could go about your business, and the economy could expand, and everything would be okay. I think that’s what a president does. He takes it, whatever it is, and is undaunted. You know, as soon as Bush got the nod, sometime that December, he said that the economy was going to collapse. Why would he do that? It was like the weapons of mass destruction. He wanted the economy to collapse, in order to instill fear into the citizenry, and so he began talking about it right away. Clinton never did that. So I guess during the Clinton administration I was going about my business, trying to keep Simon moving forward and trying to keep writing. Oh, and I had that call-in radio show for a while on a local public radio station where people called me for household advice, but it didn’t really go well, even when we started having authors on, though that was fun. Cookbook authors and housecleaning authors. My favorite was this woman who knew how to get all the pet stains out of your carpet and upholstery.”

  “What?” Max relaxed, and then he leaned over and picked up the camera after all. Elena put her hands behind her head.

  He turned on the camera again and looked through the viewfinder at her. He focused only on her face, so that it filled the frame. She smiled. Through the camera lens, he could read that smile perfectly. It was amused and nostalgic and friendly. He picked up one of the tapes that were sitting on the bedside table and inserted it. The camera made its dinging noises and came on. He said, “Ready?”

  She nodded.

  The camera, of course, had autofocus.

  “Well, I had this author on the radio, and we weren’t getting any calls, so I asked her how she got into the pet-stain cleaning-expertise business. She was British and little and cute, and I’d already realized she was the sort of person who would say anything, so she said, ‘Well!’ and licked her lips and told me this story.” Elena licked her lips. He closed in on
them. She went on: “She was out at a bar in Pasadena with some girlfriends, and she got hit on by a guy who was very cute. It turned out he lived in a guesthouse in Arcadia, not far from Santa Anita Race Track. They left the bar and went to his place, and hopped into bed, and made love a couple of times.” He backed away from her, then got off the bed and went across the room, until he had all of her in the frame. She stretched a bit, and then pulled up her knees. “When they had stopped wailing in ecstasy the second time—remember, she was saying this on the radio at ten-thirty in the morning—they realized that there was someone else shouting or screaming outside in the dark, and also there was a tremendous squawking, and the guy said, ‘Uh, there’s something wrong with the chickens.’” She sat up. “So he jumped out of bed, and she did, too, and they got on some clothes and ran outside. Just then, the guy who owned the main house, who bred fighting cocks, ran out of the house with no clothes on and a couple of shotguns under one arm and a big flashlight in the other hand. He sees the two of them, and he hollers that a raccoon has been in the chicken house. This is right in town! So the naked guy runs around the yard, shining the flashlight up in the trees, and, sure enough, there’s a raccoon up on one of the the branches, and as soon as the raccoon is discovered, it starts throwing chicken heads at the naked man, and he starts shooting at the raccoon, but of course he can’t both hold the flashlight and shoot the gun, not to mention also keep loading the gun, so he gets the girl to hold the flashlight and the guy to load the second gun, while he tries to shoot the raccoon. The raccoon, by the way, escaped once he ran out of chicken heads. So, a week later, the girl got married to this cute guy in Vegas, because, she said on the radio, ‘that first night was so utterly brilliant!’ And he had seven dogs, ‘and, my dear, not all of them were trained!’—not to mention that they brought in dead things and devoured them under the chairs, though never chickens! She got to be an expert at getting organic stains out of clothing, curtains, and carpets. So she wrote the book and got on my show.” She put her head back, and he focused on her throat as she said, “Oh, I loved her. Her book had pen-and-ink drawings of dogs peeing and pooping in the house, and dragging in rodent bodies with X’s for eyes, with little thought balloons coming out of their heads with comments like ‘She said she’d be home at three,’ and ‘She’ll never see it,’ and ‘She’ll think that damned cat did it.’ It was so funny.”

  He turned off the camera and took it down from his eye. He said, “So—do you want to be in pictures?”

  “I would put that raccoon in a movie.” Then she sighed. “So, anyway, that was the Clinton administration. He wasn’t perfect, or even great, but he was undaunted, so you could get on with your life. I didn’t feel like we were headed toward the edge of the cliff, so I had more time to relax and enjoy myself, even with all of Simon’s misadventures, which of course I took too seriously, too.”

  “Are you relenting?”

  “Well, I did listen to what you said. It doesn’t make me relent, but it does make my concerns recede a bit. I’m not so rampantly offended as I was before you made your case, but I’m sure I will be when we get up and read the paper. I could argue, but I guess that I know that I will argue, and so I guess I think I could wait to argue. It’s possible to hold my feelings in abeyance for a moment. I mean, this is what I always wonder—do feelings build up like, say, the sewage in a septic tank, until they require some sort of drainage, or do they just come and go, like waves on the beach? If it’s the sewage way, then not expressing your feelings is more dangerous, and if it’s the wave way, then expressing them is more dangerous. You’d think I would know by now how feelings work, but none of the theories you read about seem to agree. Remember Primal Scream Therapy? That was the septic-tank model. But Parent Effectiveness Training is the waves-on-the-beach model.” Now she arranged her pillow again and slid down in the bed. Max lifted the coverlet and got in beside her, only not on his customary side. When he took her in his arms this time, it was his left hand that was free to push the hair out of her face and then press the back of her neck slightly and make a long stroke down her spine all the way to her buttocks, which he fondled, or, rather, he fondled her right buttock, which in the normal course of events was the lower buttock, but now was the upper buttock. In fact, even so minimal a change as this—embracing her mirror image with his unaccustomed left hand—was enlivening and even erotic. She turned her chin toward him, and he began to kiss her, pressing his chest and belly against hers and continuing to stroke her back, waist, and buttocks with long left-handed strokes. She snaked her hand under his arm and around his left buttock and began tickling his testicles from behind, lightly and rhythmically but not idly, rather as if she was systematically enjoying their shape and swell. He had a tiny scar on his scrotum, from his vasectomy, and her three fingertips touched and worried it, but oh so gently. It was exciting. Still they were kissing and kissing. To look at her, you wouldn’t think she would have a special talent at kissing. Her lips were not full, but she had a way of meeting his lips firmly, and then a moment later softening and in some way taking his lips into hers. This talent she had, specifically for kissing, did not manifest itself in her appearance at all. You could look at her, and probably many men had looked at her in the course of her adult life, and then you could overlook her, as, by her testimony, most men did. She was small, she was neat, her features were even and pleasing enough. Her clothes were self-effacing. Her hair was well cut, and she did move with grace across the room, but most men, he thought, would look at her and think that they should try for something better. If she were an actress, she would never get cast as the female lead, but always the schoolteacher or the prim older sister, the best friend if she was lucky. Nor would the audience ever know, of course, of the anatomy of her vagina, or her ability, unique in his experience, to squeeze the entire shaft of his cock while he was inside her. All the best parts of Elena were those that were not advertised, that were secret and safely preserved for the one she loved. And the one she loved was him, Max.

  Thinking this, he turned her on her back and began kissing her forehead and eyebrows and hairline and earlobes, and he said, “I love you,” and she smiled with her eyes partly closed. Her eyelashes were good, too, long and thick, but you only noticed them if you were looking, since they were neutrally colored. This was what Max appreciated about Elena—now that, late in his life, he had enough sense to appreciate her. He had loved three women. Experience showed that most men, given the slightest opportunity, could appreciate Zoe Cunningham. As for Isabel, appreciating her and loving her, for him, and, he feared, for most men, was automatic. Delphine always maintained that the girl had faults, but primarily as a piece of logic—Isabel was human, all humans have faults, therefore Isabel has faults, though what they were in particular often escaped him and Delphine both. Elena, however—well, it seemed as though she was his to appreciate in full, and his alone, and that made her all the more precious to him. After years in Hollywood, he supposed that he was inured to the common, and even general, desire to possess someone because she was desired by everyone else.

  Now she was stretched out completely, half smiling, the top of her head pushing into one of the pillows, and the covers on the floor. Sunlight angled across her chest, lighting up her pubic hair with a few morning sparkles. He smoothed his hands around her waist, then lifted her breasts together and kissed each nipple. After that, he took his left hand, his thumb and middle finger, and gently stroked the line of her jaw and the tendons in her neck, which somehow caused her nipples to harden even more, until she giggled suddenly and said, “Oh, I love that.” Now he gently parted her knees and spread her legs, then knelt between them, his cock hanging between his legs and her body open before him. While he looked at her, he held her feet in his two hands, feeling the soles with his fingers for a moment, then the toes. As he did this, her back arched and her stomach tightened, as if he were almost tickling her, then he moved his hands and encompassed her heels, giving them little rhythmic si
multaneous squeezes. After a few of those, he moved his fingers to her Achilles tendons, and first gently stroked them, and then squeezed the skin between them and her ankle bones until she sighed. Then he ran his hands lightly back up her feet and squeezed her insteps once, before changing his grip and running his hands up the outside of her calves, which were, of course, smooth. He liked that, that she worked in a little oil or cream every day. What was the scent? Lavender or something like that? A fresh, gardeny scent. Thinking of it made it almost there, in the air around him. He stroked her knees, then her inner thighs, which were smooth and silky. He spread her knees wider and wider, just stroking the tender flesh up and out, and there was her cunt, the labia folded together like petals, its shape and color as unique as any face. What a movie that would make, a thousand cunts and a thousand faces, no words, only some music! Her eyes were closed. Her hands were on his thighs, but not doing anything. Some birds were calling outside the window, and then they flew away, and he continued to regard her portal. It was having no effect on his member, but it was having an effect on him, a soothing, pleasing effect. Since he could not do the usual thing with it, looking at it made him feel lighter and more relaxed, as if he had more time than he had ever had, as if he had never been a teenager or a young man, had never wanted anything so much that he overshot the mark and screwed it up. That expression was apt, wasn’t it? This thing, these labia, this entry was the goal, but, then, you rarely bothered to look at it, did you?

  And, having looked at it, he leaned forward and kissed it. The labia were still dry, but as he kissed them, they swelled slightly—he could feel it with his lips—and she moved against the bed, though she didn’t say anything. Anyway, the sound of her hips against the fibers of the bedsheet was arousing enough, the audible signal that his kissing was sending charges through her that were like those he was feeling. He kissed her all over—her thighs, her pubis, the labia again, which he separated gently with his finger, kissing the inner sides and then the outer sides, then the hood over her clitoris, which was beginning to swell. Her hand rested on the top of his head and she cried out. She moved away from him, and he hooked his hands underneath her and anchored her. She cried out again. Now the labia were warm and swollen, not bladelike and nestled, but beginning to open. He felt his cock, but really he didn’t have to. His cock didn’t care, for whatever reason, except that now when he thought of his cock he did think of Baghdad—how long would it take him to get over that?—and the tanks rolling over the desert even as he was kissing her labia, not the real Iraqi desert but a desert like Death Valley. He kissed her again, and then pulled her labia into his mouth and ran his tongue over them. He could feel her clitoris begin to touch his upper lip. He gripped her tighter, but tried not to press his face too firmly into her. There was a right touch—interested but reserved. You had to keep your wits about you in a way that was not so important when you were fucking. Suddenly she shivered and cried out, and the aroma of her sex mushroomed around him, tangy and rich and erotic. “Ah ah ah ah ooh!” she said, and a moment later pushed his head away. “Oh, it’s too much,” she said, “I can’t stand it,” and she laid her fingers over her vagina opening and took a deep breath. He sat up. She often couldn’t stand to be touched for the moment or two after she had orgasmed. “Mmmm,” she exhaled, then she sighed again. He sighed, too. Then she smiled and opened her eyes. He smiled back at her. Baghdad receded a bit, as if, for example, it were no longer in Death Valley, but somewhere in Nevada or even West Texas. Oh, the camera. What a compact, useful, and attractive object it was. He picked it up again and turned it on. She stretched and eased over, then closed her eyes again.