Ten Days in the Hills

by Jane Smiley

  “We still can,” said Elena.

  “Yes,” said Cassie, “there’s plenty here. For example, look at this. ‘Although a final tab for the U.S.-led war against Iraq remains unknown, the Bush administration does not expect American taxpayers to bear the entire burden for rebuilding the country, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told Congress on Thursday. “When it comes to reconstruction, before we turn to the American taxpayer, we will turn first to the resources of the Iraqi government and the international community,” Rumsfeld said.’”

  “We invaded you, and you’re going to have to pay for it,” said Elena.

  Simon got up and, as he ran down the stairs to his room, called out, “Okay, I’m going!”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” said Elena. She turned to Paul. “Did he apologize enough? Is there something else he can do for you?”

  “‘The administration plans to tap frozen Iraqi assets, revenue from the country’s oil fields and contributions from U.S. allies to largely fund the reconstruction effort, said Rumsfeld.’”

  “I have a big bridge between San Francisco and Oakland to sell you if you’re going to believe that,” said Max.

  Isabel glanced out of the corner of her eye at her mother, who, she saw, was glancing out of the corner of her eye at her. Then Zoe turned and smiled at Paul, who was feeling his jaw again. Zoe said, “Dear one, that was so strange, wasn’t it?”

  “I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” said Elena. “Simon is terribly impulsive. It’s been a nightmare for me. His motto since he was a little boy has always seemed to be ‘I wonder what would happen if I did such-and-such? If I put this bobby pin into this electrical outlet? If I set this plastic toy on the burner and turned it to high? If I went all the way down this long steep hill on my skateboard but didn’t bother to tie my shoes? Could I jump off the skateboard and out of my shoes simultaneously? What if I said “Fuck you” to my math teacher for no reason? What if I tried to jump into my briefs?’ That last one, he fell, hit his head on the dresser, and had to be observed for a night in the hospital in case he had a concussion. I used to call it ‘the red-button effect.’ If his eye caught any sort of red button, like an alarm button, he would just have to press it.”

  “He doesn’t seem hostile,” said Zoe.

  “Oh, he’s never been angry or hostile,” said Elena. “Quite the opposite. If I got mad at all of these antics, he would be so surprised, as if trying these things out was just the most natural thing in the world. And it’s not like there was peer pressure. He didn’t have friends for years. He’s such an oddball.”

  Isabel saw Zoe glance at her, as if she, too, could come up with a word, a mother’s sort of word, like “oddball,” that would diminish Isabel’s most authentic feelings and assign them to a mere kid. Isabel wondered what this word might be—“bitch,” probably. But Zoe held her tongue and smiled at Elena. Then she said, “Dear one? May I get you some ibuprofen or something like that?”

  Max, in the meantime, had picked up the paper, and now put it down. Cassie said to Delphine, “Are we going?”

  “I need my list,” said Delphine. “It’s supposed to be windy again today.”

  “Did you see where that fellow got blown out of the basket in one of those cherry pickers?”

  “I don’t think he got blown out. I think it fell over or something like that.” Delphine gave her an absentminded hug.

  Isabel continued to stand by the sink. Max got up and came over to her. He took her face in his hands, then he kissed her on the forehead, but he did not say anything about being nice to her mother or being polite or did she want to talk. He smoothed her hair back and kissed her again. One by one, everyone left her there, standing in a shaft of sunlight by the sink. It was nine-fifteen. The Getty, she thought, would open at ten. That would be a good place for her. She could look at some paintings, and then stand on that one west-facing balcony and look for this house from a distance. Sometimes she could see it, and sometimes she couldn’t, the roof of her room peeking above every other building on this hillside. Doors slammed. Cars left. She thought that tomorrow morning she would certainly do something smarter—go out for breakfast with a friend, maybe, or take a run on the beach. No, no, no relatives.

  DAY SIX • Saturday, March 29, 2003

  Paul roused all of a sudden with what he considered to be the most terrifying thought, that he was in time. The way it presented itself to him was deceptively simple—here he was again, waking up again, night and darkness again, days slamming shut ever more quickly behind him with a sound like the sound of machine-gun fire. It was a quick thought, but frightening and stimulating. The shot of adrenaline that accompanied it woke him up thoroughly, and he saw that there was nothing wrong. The room was cool and quiet, Zoe was sleeping, the covers were not disarranged. Only his jaw hurt a little bit. As he gained consciousness, his jaw gained pain. It wasn’t agony, but it presented him with an obstacle to going back to sleep. He slid gently upward, so that his head angled higher. He visualized the pain in his jaw draining downward like water, flowing around the back of his neck, and dissipating through the weave of the sheets, the fibers of the mattress, dripping in slow drops from the underside of the box spring onto the carpet, then diffusing into the earth, where it became—what?—bacteria? diamonds? earthworms? Something like pain or something unlike pain? He was adept at visualization, and the pain moved off, locating itself at a distance and staying there obediently.

  Everyone had made a big deal about the punch. Even Simon, in his inexperienced way, had manifested true remorse, greater remorse than Isabel had shown for lashing out at Zoe, a more serious symptom in Paul’s view. But Paul wasn’t at all surprised that he and Zoe would catalyze some sort of violence and conflict. What was surprising, in his view, was that Isabel had suppressed her resentments against Zoe as long as she had, dissipating them with ironic or unkind remarks and avoidance rather than going for the catharsis. In Paul’s opinion, this indicated that she was both stronger and more fearful than other girls he had observed. Of course, Zoe would be a worthy and intimidating antagonist for a daughter. One of the things that fascinated Paul about Zoe was what he called her “cloak of visibility”—all the robes and jewels and furs, the public aspect of her beauty and talent and fame, that she always had with her but seemed not to recognize as hers. He could see that Isabel tried not to relate to that part of Zoe, but it was no doubt difficult to avoid. And it was good that Isabel looked like Max and bore his name. She could, as he had heard her say once, “out” Zoe or not, as she pleased. In fact, Isabel’s connection to Zoe was a convenient one for a Hollywood child, as close to voluntary as it was possible to get. Isabel, of course, didn’t realize this and might never realize it, but Paul thought that, in the fatal compromise that was life in Hollywood, Isabel had gotten away with more of the good things and fewer of the bad things than anyone else Paul had known. No doubt this was owing to Delphine, whose indifference to fame and fortune, at least on the surface, was remarkable and worthy of emulation. Delphine, for Paul, was way more intimidating than Zoe, and if he were a young man and a suitor, he would certainly watch his step with her. Fortunately, he was neither.

  He slid a little higher in the bed and arranged his beard a bit. He had taken the ponytail holder out of his hair before going to sleep, so, as surreptitiously as possible, he slipped his hands under the back of his hair and lifted and spread it out. Then he put his hands together over his abdomen, turned his feet directly upward, and performed some floating breaths, maybe ten or twelve of them. He was adept at these, too. He brought the prana first into his mouth, then into his throat, then into his upper chest, then into his diaphragm, then into his abdomen, his genitals, his upper thighs. Then he performed a still finer operation on it—he brought it into his skeleton and muscles, the layers of his dermis and epidermis. By the time it was entering every cell in his body, it was less air than light, but it still worked. With each breath he could sense his layers inflating, not so much a balloon as a spon
ge. If he really concentrated, he could stand the hairs on his arms right up on end. But that sense of being in time still did not lessen; he remained, as always when this happened, startled and afraid. No doubt the war had something to do with it, as a form of background radiation. It didn’t help that he and Zoe had gone to the Middle Eastern antiquities show at LACMA in the afternoon. You couldn’t walk through those rooms full of carefully curated artifacts without imagining other, more precious and more mysterious artifacts being blown to atoms at this very minute, by American bombs, under the bright Iraqi sunshine. Paul, of course, had not been to Iraq, but he had been to lots of other archeological sites and ancient temples and holy spots. The closest one to Iraq was in Istanbul, where he had visited both the Blue Mosque and Ayasofya. And there was Crete, where he had visited the palaces at Knossos and Agia Triada. And one rainy day in the winter of 1972, he and Sarah Cochran had walked up the solitary road leading from the train station to the hilltop fortress of Mycenae, regarded the ruts in the paving stones of the Lion Gate with considerable awe, entered the beehive tombs, and looked down on the valley below them, entirely alone with the Bronze Age. Bam Bang Smash. It was easy to imagine all of those bits of the past that had managed to survive the last three thousand years being pulverized by American bombs.

  Zoe turned toward him, but she didn’t open her eyes, though she adjusted her pillow and pushed her hair out of her face. In the dark, he could hardly see her—he was quite nearsighted, and he didn’t want to admit that he would not be going back to sleep by putting on his glasses or looking at the clock on her side of the bed. Thus his impression of her was more imagined than experienced—she was not sleeping next to him in the blackness as much as she was crisscrossing the room by the light of the bedside lamp, folding her clothes, and setting them inside drawers in the chest opposite to the bed. The yellow light of the lamp illuminated her hip and her breast and her chin and the underside of her arms as she lifted her hair, and then, still talking, she came to the end of the bed and crawled toward him, smiling. This image of her was not accompanied by sound, though of course he remembered perfectly what she had been talking about, just as now he perfectly heard her breath as it went in and out, sometimes catching behind her lips and emerging as a soft plosive. She had been talking about Casablanca, which all of them had watched after dinner, or, rather, she had been talking about a project she’d done with Lauren Bacall in the eighties sometime. “Remember that movie with Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd?” she said. “Where Eddie goes to live at Dan’s house, and Dan goes to live with Jamie Lee Curtis, and in the end the three of them engineer some kind of stock market coup against the old guys who set them up? Well, Bacall and I were cast in a similar sort of movie, where she played my maid. She was supposed to be an old Broadway star who had fallen on hard times, and was working as the cigarette-smoking, hard-drinking secretary to the big impresario who was going to be played by Woody Allen to begin with, but he dropped out and we ended up with Carl Reiner. Anyway, Carl discovers me singing in the restaurant where I have a job washing dishes, but of course my character knows nothing about anything, so, to avoid the Cinderella thing or the My Fair Lady thing but at the same time making use of both the Cinderella thing and the My Fair Lady thing, he installs me in the Plaza Hotel and has Lauren Bacall tutor me for a couple of weeks or a month or whatever. And of course we hate each other but then save each other. One scene we did film was where I am sitting in the living room of the suite, rolling a joint, and she comes in and sees me and gets all upset, but as soon as I light up, it makes her want a cigarette, so she asks me for a match and pulls out a Lucky Strike. Anyway, it was supposed to be this great Hollywood joke that Lauren Bacall, who looked absolutely gorgeous at the time, had fallen so low as to be picking up after me. There was going to be a scene where my mom, who really is a maid, shows up and they have it out. I wanted them to cast Ella Fitzgerald in that part—I thought it would be fun to see the two of them play that scene. Who’s the toughest old girl after all? But they didn’t get that far. It was shocking, really. The director was a guy named Sidney Gorman. He got up from lunch and said he was going to lie down in his trailer for a few minutes, and the next thing we knew he was dead. I think we had filmed four or five scenes. The script wasn’t in very good shape, so the studio killed the project. I think the main problem was that Sidney and the studio hadn’t agreed about who was going to be my love interest.” And then she had crawled under the covers and curled next to him, thinking, he knew, that they should make love, but Casablanca had not put him in a lovemaking mood and probably had set him up for his dream that he was in time.

  During the day he didn’t believe in either death or time, but at night he occasionally woke up as he imagined a small animal hidden in the grass might, sensing the shadow of a predatory bird passing over. Even though the rabbit, say, was too young and inexperienced to understand it, it nevertheless reacted with a surge of primeval dread, a dread, Paul was sure, that was worse than actually being picked up and ripped apart and eaten. Pain and death were concrete and specific, and, at least according to victims of near-death events, in some sense not even experienced. But dread was dreadful, and in his own case (lying quietly beside the most beautiful woman in the world, to whom he had made no promises and had no responsibilities other than to keep giving her sessions and to treat her with consistent human kindness) utterly meaningless.

  And so he had said little, put his arms around her, which was wonderful to do, and not made love to her. He had just started doing a few breathing exercises, and she had dropped off. He had felt possessed of a wonderful present that he could open at any time—the privilege of touching her and making love to her. Or not.

  Paul hadn’t seen Casablanca in thirty years or more, not since he took Marie Ellis to a showing at a UCLA film-society screening when there were no DVDs or even VCRs and you felt a little special to be eating Lebanese food and then taking in a double bill of Casablanca and Knute Rockne—All-American. To tell the truth, he hadn’t understood Casablanca at the time and had never bothered to see it again. Simon and Isabel had stared in disbelief at Bogart crying in his beer, and Simon had said, seriously, “Is this where that expression ‘crying in your beer’ comes from?” And Max had had to explain to him, in fifty words or less, that there used to be a whole saloon culture where men gathered together without women and got drunk and emoted, either fighting or crying, and that, far from originating the idea of crying into your beer, Bogart had been piggybacking on thousands of years of accepted masculine behavior, and Isabel had said, “You’re joking, right?,” earnestly seeking to know. “No, I’m not,” said Max, and Isabel said, “Hnh,” filing this fact away with all the others.

  During the flashback to Rick and Ilsa’s earlier romance, Isabel had said, “You mean to say that, just because Ingrid Bergman didn’t show up at the train, Bogart didn’t care at all about the Nazis or the concentration camps or the war? Is that what they’re trying to show?”

  “Some Americans were more or less disengaged in the early stages of the—” said Max.

  “But one wonderful weekend or whatever, and he didn’t care at all? Was he, like, a virgin or something like that? Are they saying that, before they met in Paris, Bogart was a virgin?”

  “People thought about love differently during the war,” said Max.

  “I understand that,” said Isabel. “But she didn’t even tell him her last name or anything about her past. How did they achieve actual intimacy?”

  One thing Paul liked about Isabel was the dogged, literal cast of her mind. She was intelligent without being quick, quite different from Zoe. One thing he liked about this visit, even though it was disquieting in comparison with the monastery, was the opportunity it presented of observing the chimps in their natural setting, one of the chimps being himself. Because of course he recognized Max, though Max didn’t recognize him. He remembered Max from sixth grade, the year he was a new student at Roosevelt Elementary School, Vineland, New
Jersey. Paul, who was now six feet tall and a hundred fifty pounds too, had, at eleven, been about four foot eight and weighed something like sixty-two pounds. Max had been four years older, eight inches taller, and forty pounds heavier. He and two friends had picked up Paul in the hallway of the school, taken him into a classroom, and turned him upside down into one of those tall trash cans they had, then tied the laces of his oxfords together. He had not been hurt, though he got in trouble that evening for breaking his glasses. In the forty-four intervening years, he had come to understand that being bullied was a routine and even essential American school experience. The unique thing was that here he was, and here Max was.

  He had not recognized Max right away—even his and Charlie’s references to New Jersey hadn’t clued him in. But the second night, when they were sitting around the dinner table talking about whether Zoe was too young, at forty-three, to play a grandmother, he had happened to notice a vein in Max’s forehead, a small vertical blood vessel, and he had thereupon watched Max’s face reorganize itself around that vein. The unfamiliar eyes and the gray hair and the alien cheeks and the beaky nose and the lips and chin visibly reconfigured themselves in relationship to the familiar shape of the vein, and within about a second, he saw Max’s face and remembered his name, Nathan Maxwell, and his school locker number, 435. Compared with this, he thought, Casablanca was the sheerest realism. His recognition of Max had the effect of collapsing and accelerating time. But though the coincidence was amazing, he could not say that the one incident had even influenced the course of his life. His family had sojourned in New Jersey for one year only, and had then gone back to Michigan, where his father got a better job and they returned to the nest of his mother’s family (which he now knew his father had been trying to escape). He had mushroomed in size and taken up football, then come to UCLA, but even that was a mere distraction from his true vocation, which was, of course, given the DNA from his mother’s side and the power of the giant X chromosome compared with the fragmentary Y chromosome, God.