by Jane Smiley
The last panel, thought Stoney, did not seem to fit. It was of many men eating and laughing around a fire, with the sun coming up in the background, and it also included six sheep, five white and one black. He said, “Is this one from a different set?”
“No, indeed,” said Joe. “When Pierre wakes up, he discovers a group of shepherds and their sheep not far from his tree, and he goes to them and begs for succor, and here they are giving him food and drink. You can see him a bit in the background. The designer has been far more interested in the fire and the sheep. But here is the bit of blue sky that we saw in panel two, only it is larger. Unfortunately, the last panel is missing, This panel would have shown the reunited lovers, probably taking part in a marriage ceremony which has been brought about by the intercession of the noble lady in the other lost panel I was telling you about.” Joe smiled, as if he himself had brought the lovers together.
Max said, “Thank you, Joe. You made it seem like a movie.”
Joe inclined his head for a moment, acknowledging both the compliment and the man who was complimenting him.
Cassie said, “Where did you find such a beautiful set?”
“Mike is a great connoisseur of art, and he has agents who are aware of what has become and what is becoming available. Since I have been working for Mike, I have discovered that there is no scarcity of beautiful artworks in the world, just as there is no scarcity of money. The question, as always, is one of distribution.” He grinned. “Let me say that some of the rooms of our house here are not ready for your inspection, but many are, and you, of course, may wander around as you please. I trust that in your stay you will have many pleasant discoveries. The rooms that are not ready for you are locked. If you can open a door, you may open the door. Mike is not a secretive man. Our residential staff here includes myself; the two girls, Monique and Marya; and the chef, Raphael. Raphael’s cooking skills are quite eclectic. He will be sending in to you a paper every morning, detailing alternative menus for the evening. Whom shall he send this paper to?”
Max gestured toward Delphine, who had come in during the story of the tapestry. “I would like that,” said Delphine. “May I meet him?”
“Of course you may. Our staffing arrangements are quite informal at this point, since Mike has not yet been in residence here, pending the completion of the rest of the rooms. Raphael will be quite pleased with your feedback, since you are, in a good way, his guinea pigs.” Joe grinned again, and led the way into the library.
The library, which was a circular room with a dome, like a miniature rotunda in some state capitol, was full of books on shelves. A mezzanine ran around the room, with a railing and more books on shelves. A staircase on rollers ran on a track set into the base of the mezzanine, and there were various gates in the railing that the staircase could be rolled to. The floor was carpeted with a custom-made Oriental that was woven and laid to accentuate the circular nature of the room. Other Persian rugs were scattered here and there. The furniture consisted of a large desk and a blond leather couch and chair with a reading lamp. There was also a cushioned window seat inset between two sets of shelves below the mezzanine, and another on the mezzanine. These windows faced east, over the cleft that Stoney and Isabel had just been exploring. Joe said, “Does this library look familiar to you?”
No one said anything except Zoe, who said, “My Fair Lady.”
“Yes,” said Joe. “That is correct. This library was inspired by the set of Professor Higgins’ library in London, in that movie. An amusing thing is that when Mike was a boy that was the first movie he ever saw, and although he did not understand it in any way, because he did not at that time speak English, the luxury of Professor Higgins’ library made a great impression upon him, and so he has built this room here in Hollywood. That is his joke, that he is a Russian man from Asia with an English library in Hollywood. He is very globalized. However, there are no media in this library, only books.”
“Can you tell us something about Mike?” said Elena.
“Here is a story about Mike. When he got to the university, he did not want to live as we others lived, in a large, drafty dormitory with no privacy. So he found a shower stall that was not working, and he installed himself in there, with a mattress and a lap desk, and he bribed one of the men who worked at the dormitory to remove the shower head and the handles. He did not have a light, but he made sure to do his work by daylight. He was very enterprising even then.”
“He lived in a shower stall?” said Simon.
“It did have a door,” said Joe. “He lived there for three years. Now perhaps you will be wishing to go to your rooms. If I may ask, will you be needing ten rooms, or not so many?” He smiled. “The rooms are actually small suites, with a generous bedroom, a sitting area, and, of course, a large bathroom.” He paused.
Elena said, “Max and I only need one room.”
Zoe glanced at Paul, then said, “Two for us, I believe?” He cocked his head at her, and she said, “I think so, yes.”
At this, Charlie cleared his throat, and then Zoe said, “Paul does need to be able to receive late-night phone calls from his client in Europe. Also, he rises at four a.m. now.”
“Certainly,” said Joe. “I will give you our telephone number for the calls, and you will have your own extension number, Paul.”
“One room for us,” said Isabel.
Stoney saw Max’s head swivel toward Isabel and heard Max let out a surprised cough. He then glanced at Elena and at Simon, who was standing next to Isabel. All Simon did was raise the fingers on his right hand about an inch, but it clearly said, Who me? Not me. Isabel acted nonchalant. “One room for me and Stoney, I mean.” It was then that Stoney remembered that he had intended to have things out with Isabel somewhere in the garden. Well, not things, but something. He had forgotten, and now they all looked at him, and of course he nodded and smiled. He could feel himself smiling. He nodded again, more emphatically. He said, “That would be good.” Joe must have registered the general surprise, but he made no sign. He said, “And the others?”
“We come alone,” said Simon.
“So—eight rooms. Thank you. Monique and Marya will show you to your rooms. All of them are on the first floor.”
“The premier étage,” said Isabel. She took Stoney’s hand tightly in her own.
Two smiling girls appeared in the doorway of the library, both blonde. Simon said, “But maybe we won’t leave alone,” and Stoney noticed that Elena gave Simon a look, but then, evidently, it was time for Isabel to march him out of the library, which she did, and as they came to the center of the entry hall, where they were surrounded by tapestries depicting true love, she leaned toward him and kissed him on the cheek in the full sight of her father. And in front of her mother. And in front of her grandmother. And Stoney did what he thought appropriate among those tapestries, which was to pause, turn toward her, and kiss her on the lips, her lips being so familiar and simultaneously so forbidden that it gave him a zinging sensation not so much in his groin as in his knees. Isabel said, gaily, “Are the rooms decorated more or less alike?”
“Oh, no,” said Joe. “They are all different. I am putting you in what we call the Amber Room.”
Behind them, Zoe laughed aloud. Stoney thought maybe that was a good sign.
After dinner (rack of lamb served with a reduction of red wine and woodland mushrooms, braised bitter greens, and roasted potatoes, plus an artichoke-and-caramelized-fennel frittata for the vegetarians, followed by pistachio biscotti and blood-orange sorbet made with Grand Marnier), Stoney disappeared from the dining room when nobody happened to be looking in his direction—he went out one of the French doors, turned right past the upper pool, and trotted down the steps until he found a seat in the shadows not far from the second pool. The only thing that prevented him from going on down to the lower pool, the one in the grotto, was that he didn’t want to seem to be fleeing, even though he was fleeing. When he got to the second pool, he lit a cigarette, his f
irst since Jerry was diagnosed with his brain tumor, which everyone knew came from years and years of smoking and an earlier bout with lung cancer. And he got a buzz from his first drag on that cigarette, no coughing or hacking or adjustment at all, and he felt himself starting back down that very bad tobacco road that led nowhere good and everywhere bad, that he had started down at fourteen and Jerry had started down at eleven, and that he had forsworn, and that Isabel hated, and here was Max.
Max sat down on a concrete bench that was decorated with a mosaic of some sort, maybe six feet from him and a little off to the right. All of L.A., spread over the hills and the mountains in a Milky Way of lights, lay beneath them. The sky above was pale. The moon, as so often in L.A., looked nondescript and tentative. The breeze was cool, almost chilly, and Stoney found himself thinking that, after all, the site of the luxurious house was a little too exposed for his taste.
Max said, “Do you have something to tell me?”
“Would you care for a cigarette?”
“No, thanks.”
“I think,” said Stoney, after what he gauged to be a thoughtful pause, but was really a blank as far as he was concerned, “that I might like to tell you some things, but unless Isabel and I agree on what there is to tell you, no doubt she would say that we would be entering on an essentially patriarchal discourse that would demean her personhood, so I’m not sure what I have to tell you.”
“How is it that I don’t seem to have any idea that you and Isabel have a relationship?”
“I think I can divulge that we have made an effort to keep it a secret.”
“Can you divulge why?”
Stoney thought about this for a moment, then decided to say the most honest thing he could think of at the time, which was: “My inference from what Isabel has said to me is that she didn’t want it to get out, because she didn’t want such an unimportant relationship to be formalized by publicity. I think I would have said before this morning that, while she enjoys me, she isn’t very interested in me, or at least she wasn’t. I’m not sure how she feels now. I was quite surprised when she told Joe Blow that we would be sharing a room.”
Max drew in a deep and, to Stoney, threatening breath, and said, “Stoney, are you telling me the truth?”
Stoney sat silent for what he considered to be a long moment, pondering this question. Questions about the truth worried him, because of course he didn’t know what the truth was. His own true feelings were always confused, he had no access to any general truths, and if you said you were telling the truth, you laid yourself open to all sorts of contradictions that would ultimately confuse you even further. Whenever “the truth” came up, it was often as a prelude to a lengthy and usually contentious discussion. He reiterated, “I’m really not sure what she feels now, and it was a surprise when she wanted to share a room.”
“What do you feel?”
“What do I feel for Isabel, or how do I feel in general, you know, glad, sad, anxious, depressed—”
“What do you feel for Isabel?” Max said this impatiently, and so Stoney’s general feeling edged even farther away from more or less happy and toward more or less anxious. He said, “Would a good reply be that I want to do what others—namely, you and Isabel and maybe Zoe and certainly Delphine, but not necessarily my own family—want me to do?”
“That would not be a good reply.”
“Can we talk about that?”
“No. Anyway, I didn’t ask you what you want to do. I asked you what you feel for Isabel. Is that a question you can answer?”
His impulse now was to tell the apparent truth, and so he did. He said, “No.”
“Why not?” Now Max sounded more than impatient, almost belligerent.
He said, “Well, because I have never said how I feel about Isabel, especially to a third party, and so it feels like I am breaking some strict taboo, like saying ‘fuck you’ to the rabbi, for example, or, let’s see, what would be an impossible thing? I guess putting my arm around Dorothy and comforting her, which maybe I should have done when Jerry died, but I simply could not do, because Dorothy doesn’t seem to exist in the same universe as that sort of gesture.”
And Max chuckled. He said, “No, she doesn’t, does she? But anyway, try to tell me how you feel about Isabel.” He sounded firm.
“And you’re sure that you don’t want to just ask her?”
“No. I want to hear it from you.”
Stoney cleared his throat. The fact was, he hadn’t very often said even to himself how he felt about Isabel, because for many years he had been more or less not allowed to feel anything about her, especially because, until this very day, acting on whatever feelings he had seemed to be foreclosed at every turn. So, once again, he said the most apparently truthful thing he could, which was: “Isabel and I get along perfectly, and we have never had an argument. I always enjoy being with her. Probably, as I think about it, the lack of conflict is because whatever she says goes. I mean, it’s not that I am passive, exactly, it’s more that she cares about lots of things and I care more about her than I care about anything that she has an opinion about.”
“Are you afraid of Isabel?”
“Well, of course. Aren’t you?”
Now Max laughed out loud, but then he said, “How old are you now, thirty-eight?”
“Yeah. Almost.”
“Do you realize how feckless you sound?”
“Is that the word?”
“What word would you use?”
“Scrupulously truthful.”
“Okay,” said Max.
The breeze shifted direction, and began to ruffle the smooth sheet of the waterfall and throw up a bit of spray. Instinctively, Stoney pushed his chair back from the pool, even though he was sure the spray would not hit them. Max moved from the bench, which for sure would be hard, Stoney thought, to a chair like his, which he scooted toward him. Stoney said, “You know, Max, I asked her this afternoon what her plan is, and she said, ‘Nothing. Acting on impulse. I look around at everyone and listen to the stories they tell, and then I listen to myself, and I seem like the oldest one of all of us. I am the stick in the mud. I’m twenty-three. I don’t want to be the stick in the mud, and anyway, this is a vacation, right?’ That’s what she said.”
Max said, “Well, Simon does seem to be having more fun than she does. Maybe too much fun, in some ways. I worry constantly about Isabel and not at all about Simon, and Elena worries constantly about Simon and not at all about Isabel.”
“Who does Zoe worry about?”
“Herself.”
“That was mean, Max.”
“Well, she does so in a very charming way. And she has a theory, too. Her theory is that worrying about healthy, normal kids just because they are yours is a form of self-indulgence and lack of faith, whereas worrying about yourself is more likely to be a realistic appraisal of your shortcomings.”
Stoney laughed. “That’s like something Jerry used to say, actually. Anyway, I worry about myself all the time. But I think it’s just a habit at this point. I don’t worry about Isabel.” Even using this word “worry,” though, reminded him that, should the history of his relationship with Isabel come to light, he would indeed have something to worry about. At that very moment, he began to worry. What it felt like was the difference between feeling something and seeing something. What might feel warm and yielding and comforting might look disfigured and ugly. That sort of thing happened all the time when you began to discuss “truth.”
Max shifted his weight, and his chair squeaked.
Stoney thought of something, and continued: “Just out of curiosity, Max, you don’t worry that Isabel is going to turn out to be a schmuck, do you? Because that’s what I always thought Jerry worried about with me.”
“No, I don’t have the slightest fear that Isabel will turn out to be a schmuck.” Stoney saw him smile.
Stoney did not quite dare to go on to ask whether Max worried about whether he, Stoney, would turn out to be a schmuck. H
e said, “Well, that’s something, anyway.” He said, “I think we should join the others. If we’re the only ones missing, then for sure Isabel will know that we are talking about her.”
“Then let’s talk about Mike.”
Stoney sat up, the way you do when something forgotten but redemptive is suddenly remembered. He said, “Let’s do.”
“Did you look around?”
“I did.”
“Did you see the Vermeer?”
“I saw what they said is a Vermeer. And it looked like a Vermeer to me, or a very good fake. I didn’t scrutinize it or peek at the back.”
“It’s a lovely painting,” said Max. “The girl’s face is very good-natured. And you could see how such a small Vermeer could get lost in the course of a few centuries, especially if, as they said, the Dutch family that originally commissioned it fell on hard times, and the last heir died intestate, and the house was in a state of disrepair, and a Russian army officer who was in Antwerp bought a bunch of pictures at the auction and boxed them up and sent them home to Moscow and then was killed in a war, and the box went astray, only to be discovered in a government postal lost-and-found by one of the army officer’s illegitimate daughters when she herself was fleeing Napoleon’s army, so she hid it with friends as a keepsake of her father, whom she had hardly known but remembered fondly, and then one of their sons opened the box twenty years later and saw that insects and mold had destroyed the other three pictures, leaving only this one, and so he hung it in his library, and one day Vladimir Nabokov’s grandfather was visiting, and he asked the owner if it was a Vermeer, and they deciphered the signature at the bottom, which has now been worn away, and so they treated it with much more care, so that when the Revolution came one of the daughters took it out of its frame and rolled it up and carried it under her dress to Finland, and then it went in their luggage, sewn into a patchwork coverlet, when they immigrated to the United States, and only a year ago the last son of that family decided to put all his artwork on the market because he wanted to switch all of his investments to gold after the election of the Bush administration, and so it came on the market, and Mike bought it, and feels justified in keeping it, because, even though it was painted by a Dutch painter, it was preserved through the efforts of Russians, and in it he sees all of the ups and downs of Russian history.”
