by Jane Smiley
“Well, only in the age-difference thing. But I have to admit that, when we were eating dinner and he was sitting across from me, surrounded by the others, I felt a little odd and naughty.”
“Zoe—” He was going to exclaim at the irresponsibility of her choice, but he stopped himself, thinking again of the ground rules, and said, “What do you think will happen when the others find out?”
“I don’t think they will. Simon says his mother still thinks he’s a virgin.”
“I truly doubt that.”
“Believe me, she can’t imagine all the experience he’s had. It’s like his vocation.”
“That,” said Paul, “I do understand.”
“He said he made up his mind to fuck me the moment I walked into the house. I am the prize.”
“He said that? That seems very calculating.”
“Well, yes, it does as I repeat it, but it was flattering when he said it. I laughed. I mean, he’s got the look of a prize himself, he’s so cute.”
“So,” said Paul, “how was it?”
“Oh, it was fun. Just a fuck. Nothing deep. It’s nice to be around a young body.”
“I’m sure. But don’t you think he’s going to brag about this? It would be inhuman not to.”
“Yes, but not to his mother. I don’t think he’s going to brag to his mother.”
“But to others?”
“People brag about having slept with me all the time, whether they have or not or whether they’ve even met me or not, and I don’t pay any attention to it. I can’t say yes and I can’t say no. I just keep smiling and I don’t say anything.”
“But haven’t we had several sessions about whether you should act on impulse in this way?”
“Paul.” She sat back on her haunches and looked right at him. “Do you care whether I had a thing—”
“Had sexual intercourse with—”
“—had sexual intercourse with Simon?”
“Do you mean, does it threaten or hurt me in any way?”
“Yes.”
“You mean, how do I feel about it as opposed to how do I think about it?”
“Yes.”
“You mean, what meaning do I give it?”
“Yes.”
“Especially in light of the fact that he socked me first thing in the morning and my jaw still throbs?”
“Does it? I’m sorry about that, honey.” She feathered her fingers along his jaw, and he let her. Was this, he thought, the attack he had been dreading, the shadow he had intuited, something as simple, after all, as sexual infidelity? And this bit of information did have an effect—it made his throat ache and his mouth go dry. But he said, “Well, I’ll give you my first reaction, my very first thought.”
“That should be telling.”
“I think it is.” He cleared his throat yet again. He said, “The fact is, I’m a little relieved.”
“You are?” She looked surprised.
“A little.”
“Why is that?”
“Because you are a big responsibility.”
“Oh,” she said. She looked hurt. He held her gaze. Her expression fixed itself, then shifted and grew a little more remote for a moment. Finally, she looked away, toward the door, then she looked back. She said, “Yes, of course you’re right. All you have to do is watch Sunset Boulevard, d-a-a-h-hh-h-ling, to realize that.”
He gave her a moment. Then he said, “But you are fun.”
She moved across the bed toward him again, almost as if she didn’t even realize what she was doing. She snuggled against him. Yes, he thought, it was dishonest. But it was a relief, too. He put his arm around her.
“Look at that,” said Cassie. “He dropped the burning cigarette on the wooden floor of the hallway, and stubbed it out with his toe. We used to do that all the time.”
“That’s true,” said Max. “There used to be cigarette butts everywhere. I’ve been to parties where people actually snuffed their cigarettes out on the wall-to-wall carpet. When they first had nylon carpeting, you put a butt out on that and it would just melt the nylon right down to the matting. Wool, you could get a pair of scissors and cut the carpet out from around the burn, but not, what was it, olefin. And it wasn’t just stubbing them out. The burning tips would drop off during parties, and no one would even notice—”
“That’s because they would have had so much to drink,” said Cassie. “I mean, look at this fellow. Every time he enters a scene, he asks for whisky. That’s what acting used to be, smoking and drinking.”
Charlie said, “You know, when I first started working, when was that, the early sixties, I worked in this office where we all just threw our cigarette butts into the wastepaper basket, and the secretaries would throw used carbon paper in there, too. No one thought a thing about it until, one day, some of the carbon paper caught fire, and since there wasn’t a fire extinguisher, one of the secretaries ran for a glass of water, but the other one stood up and went over and pulled down her panties and pissed the fire out.”
“How could she do that?” exclaimed Isabel, skeptically.
“It wasn’t actually flaming,” said Charlie.
They were watching a movie Paul had never seen before, from England. It was called The Day the Earth Caught Fire. Paul recognized only one actor, Leo McKern. It seemed to be a newsroom/romance/apocalypse movie. Paul felt that it was taking a long time to get going. He was sitting on the couch beside Zoe. Simon was sitting on the floor in front of the two of them, in what Paul considered to be a very sonlike position. Isabel was sitting on the other side of Zoe. The others were ranged around the room. The only thing notable about the arrangement was that Elena was as far from Charlie as she could be. The two of them had had a huge argument in the middle of the afternoon, down by the pool, in which he had called her a know-nothing traitor and she had called him a Republican Party robot-apparatchik. The tumult had since died down, but there had been no apologies. Dinner had been strained. It didn’t help that the nightly movie seemed to be about climate change.
The movie was heavy on the dialogue, so Paul was with Delphine in this. If they were going to watch it, then everyone should be quiet, but of course everyone was not quiet. The screen was the biggest Paul had ever seen in a private home. Max had told him that the equipment was outdated, but Paul had to admit that he enjoyed the luxury, just as he enjoyed the luxury of the cool and quiet wine-cellar room, and the luxury of the pool, and the luxury of the garden, and the luxury of the location, though all of them, in their way, were outdated.
“I like her,” said Zoe of the girl in the movie. “She has a good haircut. Was she ever in anything else?”
Isabel made some noise, rather like a muffled snort, and Zoe reacted immediately, assuming the noise was directed at her. “Well, she does have a good haircut. It shows her independence.”
“She was in a few things,” said Max. “She died young.”
This caused everyone to fall silent.
The movie went on. The premise was that two huge atomic blasts—one at the North Pole, set off by the Russians, and one at the South Pole, set off by the Americans—cause global ramifications. Right now, on the screen, crowds gathered in London for an antinuclear protest happened to notice a solar eclipse. The hero took a picture of it and ran back to his newsroom.
“I think the global-warming stuff is pretty interesting,” said Isabel. “You might even call it prescient.”
The question about the eclipse was why was it coming ten days early, and why was it tracking across the Northern Hemisphere rather than, as predicted, the Southern Hemisphere? Meanwhile, holiday-makers at Brighton were having a wonderful time. The hero met up with the girl again. She was wearing a skimpy two-piece outfit, and he was wearing a suit, and they were both shining with sweat but smiling. Leo McKern, the science editor, put two and two together for the newsroom and for the audience—the simultaneous atomic explosions had tilted the earth off its axis, changing the location of the equator.
Isabel said, “With actual global warming, Europe will be much colder, not hotter. The weather parts are good, though.” So far, the movie had featured torrential rains and blistering heat. As they kept watching, a fog came in, but only a low-level fog, maybe a story or two high. When the characters were at ground level, they could not see a thing. When they went up to their apartments, the brilliant sunlight shone over the white coverlet of the fog and reassured them. Paul said, “It’s a good detail that they think it’s beautiful in spite of themselves.”
“The special effects aren’t bad,” said Max.
The romance gained speed. The hero knocked on the girl’s apartment door just as she was getting out of the tub. She heard the knock and turned toward the camera, and there was the most fleeting view of her breasts, so quick that you almost didn’t see it. When she let him in, he asked for a drink, and much was made of the fact that he would have to settle for coffee. Within a few minutes, she was lying on the bed, on her back, and he was leaning over her. Once again, though they didn’t complain of the heat, they were shining with perspiration, his face and forehead and her chest.
“Continuity glitch,” said Zoe.
“I see that,” said Simon. “Her wrap is up under her armpits and across her chest, and then it’s down almost showing her nipples, then it’s up again, then down again.”
“Rage in the cutting room,” said Max, and everyone laughed. Zoe ran her hand over Paul’s knee in an affectionate manner. In the next scene, the wind came up, dispersing the fog in the night and blowing people, cars, and heavy objects everywhere. “The London Eye would be down in a second with that kind of wind,” said Isabel. “Something to look forward to. You know, there were something like twenty-five or -six major flood disasters in the nineties, eighteen in the eighties, eight in the seventies, seven in the sixties, and six in the fifties—”
“Is that what they taught you at the Little Red Schoolhouse?” said Charlie. Paul saw Max give him a kick. Isabel grunted, then said, “There’s a Web site not connected with the University of California in any way—”
“Well,” said Charlie, “don’t you ever pause to wonder—”
“It said on the radio when I was driving here that the winds in L.A. were more than seventy miles per hour today and yesterday. You have to admit that’s unusual,” said Stoney.
“I don’t live in L.A., so I don’t—”
“Shhh,” said Delphine.
“I don’t understand why we’re watching a disaster movie in the middle of a war,” said Elena. “The Day the Earth Stood Still was sort of funny and innocent, but this one actually bothers me.”
“I didn’t know what it was going to be about,” said Max. “I never even heard of it before that article about great disaster-movies in the paper the other day.”
On the screen, there were sunny panoramas of London after the storm. Paul knew that the brightness of the cityscape was supposed to seem sinister, but the real effect was to remind him of all those disasters that had struck London over the years and been survived—the Black Death, the Great Fire and the Plague of the 1660s, the Blitz. It seemed a picture of invulnerability rather than vulnerability.
“I might go read in the bedroom,” said Elena, but she kept watching.
And just as he was thinking about the Great Fire, it seemed that the filmmakers were, too, because there was suddenly footage of fires—Covent Garden, New Forest (ponies whinnying in the smoke), Epping Forest, then, it appeared, Windsor Castle.
“Do you think that’s really England burning?” said Zoe. “The vegetation looks like England, but the fires look like California.”
After the fires, the girl, who worked for the ministry of something, leaked to the press (the hero). She met him at an amusement park and, while going around on the Ferris wheel, told him that, yes, the angle of the Earth’s axis had been tilted by eleven degrees. They had a disagreement about the government. She said, “Those at the top are cleverer than we are. They know what to do.” He then outed her, and she was put in jail.
Simon said, “It was a more innocent time, huh?”
Cassie said, “Look at those smokestacks belching into the sky. You don’t see that much anymore.”
“But that’s prescient, too,” said Isabel.
When the hero rushed with the story into the news office, he was in despair at the stupidity of mankind, so much in despair that he didn’t even care to write his story. His editor, the Leo KcKern character, looked at him and said, “It’s never too late for a good story, well written.”
“That would depend on who you are,” said Elena, but Paul more or less agreed with the editor. He’d never had a single client who didn’t benefit from the telling of a good story.
The weather got hotter—125 in London, 140 in New York—but this information was interspersed with pictures of snowstorms and floods. Finally, the editor got a call from his Moscow correspondent, who told him that the result of the double bomb blast was worse than expected—the orbit of the earth around the sun had been altered as well as the tilt. Leo McKern stepped forward and opined that they had four months until something happened. Paul did not understand whether this something was simply steaming and roasting, à la the orbit of Venus, or whether it was actually the falling of the Earth into the sun.
Stoney said, “This is definitely category-five bad news.”
“What’s that?” said Simon.
“Well, the end of the world, of course. Category four would be ‘incomprehensible, but life goes on.’”
“That’s very glib,” said Elena.
“Shh,” said Delphine.
Leo McKern kept drinking Coke out of old-fashioned small glass bottles, which was what preserved him when the young and handsome errand boy got typhus from contaminated black-market water and died onscreen. Paul saw Zoe’s bare foot snake forward and touch Simon on the buttock.
“They thought of a lot of things,” said Max. “They really made wonderful use of their budget. A few newsroom sets. Her room. The local pub, some short London street sets. Some other London sets, some artwork, and then some library footage. I’m impressed. They had to depict the end of the world in a very intimate way. No fabulous computer graphics or anything like that. They aren’t bombing you out of your seat, but, still—” Max chuckled (with pleasure, Paul knew) and said, “Who’s the director again? Oh, Val Guest. Writer, director, producer. Simon, I bet your guys have a bigger budget than he did.”
“Well, they have to have a bigger budget, because they had to completely redo the tit suit and reshoot that scene, but it looks a lot better. More like real tits.”
Everyone fell silent again. Now there was an announcement from the Prime Minister, in which he acknowledged that mistakes had been made and relayed the information that the authorities were going to try to blast the planet back into a circular rather than a spiral orbit by setting off four simultaneous atomic explosions in the wilds of Siberia. In preparation for this scene, the hero drove into a riot of young people drinking and on drugs, seizing the day, throwing water on one another, playing jazz, and otherwise committing mayhem. The hero saved the girl, who had angered her neighbors by taking a bath. The hero found her fending off the local thugs. Paul didn’t quite understand the logic of this scene, but it offered another opportunity to see the girl with no clothes. Danger had the desired effect—she fell for him, he fell for her. The rest of the movie was about the countdown to the big blast. As shots of London, Paris, Rome, the Taj Mahal, and New York filled the screen, different voices said different numbers in different languages. Then, back in the pub, at zero, dust lifted into the air. The ending was ambiguous—one headline read “World Saved”; another read, “World Doomed.” When the sound went off, Charlie said, “Must’ve worked. Here we are.”
“But without having learned anything,” said Elena.
“People never learn anything from a happy ending,” said Delphine.
“I’m sure you’re right,” said Elena, and Charlie j
umped on this immediately. He said, “Am I to assume that you do not want the war in Iraq to succeed?”
“I wonder,” said Max, “if people learn anything from an unhappy ending, either.”
Paul looked at Zoe’s watch. It was early, only about nine-thirty. Her foot, he saw, had returned to her own territory. Just at that moment, Simon shifted position and stretched out on his back, his hands behind his head. In the seventeen hours since Zoe had admitted to her intercourse with Simon, Paul had had the occasion several times to reflect upon the visceral male response he was having to the idea. It was at least partly owing, he thought, to the fact that Simon was youthful and good-looking. Had Charlie, for example, succeeded in bedding Zoe, he would have been far more philosophical. Simon said, “If I am leaving the movie theater in 1962 and I have just seen this movie, what am I supposed to be thinking?”
“I think you’re supposed to be scouring the horizon for a mushroom cloud,” said Max.
“I would have been doing that, anyway,” said Elena. “Cuban Missile Crisis. Better dead than red, you know. My cousin had a friend whose family had a bomb shelter. Whenever he went over to spend the night, the father would explain to him very carefully that if the Russians attacked that very night, they would be happy to take him into the shelter, but no one else in his family, and if they attacked some night when Brian wasn’t sleeping over, he better not think that those people would take him in, just because they had a shelter. He explained that to him more than once.”
Charlie said, “I remember when we were sitting at the dinner table the night of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and someone asked my father if we were going to try to flee if the bombs dropped, like head into the country or something, and he said, ‘No. Life won’t be worth living if that happens.’ We all nodded and kept eating, then cleared our plates.”
Elena said, “I just can’t believe that they thought nuclear annihilation was preferable to alternative socioeconomic arrangements. Can you imagine telling your children that it’s their fate to sacrifice their lives for the New York Stock Exchange? Or for, let’s say, Pan American Airways and the tax privileges of General Electric?”
