Ten Days in the Hills

by Jane Smiley

  “Sounds plausible to me,” said Stoney.

  “It makes you wonder how any piece of art at all ever survives.”

  “They put us in the Amber Room, you know. I wonder if it’s the real Amber Room.”

  “They put us in the Flower Room. It has floral wallpaper, a floral pattern in the carpet, paintings of flowers, including what seem to be two Georgia O’Keeffes, and casement windows overlooking one of the gardens. It has its own flowered teacups and teapot, and a collection of flower teas from France. I guess the windows of Delphine’s room open out toward the upper part of the aviary, and the decor is a tropical-bird motif. Elena went in to take her something, and Delphine showed her her bedspread and pillows that were hand-embroidered with a scene of parrots and macaws in a forest. And the handles on the faucets in the bathroom were ceramic birds with long tails, blue for cold and red for hot.”

  “Simon said Charlie’s room was all paneled in inlaid tropical woods in elaborate designs, and the flooring is made of bamboo, and Simon’s own room is ultra-modern. Lots of glass mosaic tiles and trompe-l’oeil mirrors. He said to me, ‘This room is one they could not have put you in, Stoneman. You would have been falling down the steps and walking into the walls, and they must have been afraid of a big liability suit, but to me it’s just another challenge. I keep thinking that maid Monique is going to materialize in the middle of the floor and all of her clothes are going to fall right off her.’”

  Max laughed. “What did you say?”

  “I said, ‘Don’t call her a maid. You’ll have better luck,’ and he said, ‘Okay, I’ll call her a maiden.’” Stoney paused, then said, “But, Max, doesn’t the house make you want to do a movie for Mike?”

  “No. Frankly, Stoney, I much prefer making movies for a couple of cheap bastards who want to cut corners in every scene, because it’s more fun. My guess is that Mike’s instinct will be to weight the whole project down with authenticity, so that, for example, every costume will be perfect from the underwear out. So the actresses will all wear some kind of corsets. But twenty-first-century actresses aren’t used to corsets, so they’ll be distracted by the discomfort of wearing corsets, and they’ll look awkward in corsets. So, as a result of that, Mike and I will get into a lengthy discussion of whether the actresses should be made to wear corsets, and the solution will be to try it out, which won’t in the end demonstrate anything conclusive. There’s thousands of dollars in costume financing wasted and at least a week of filming before we get to the issue of, say, dirt. Is the encampment going to look dirty and authentic, like the sets in The Return of Martin Guerre, or is it going to look clean, like the sets in A Man for All Seasons? Mike has lots of money, so he’s going to think that if we just get all of the details right, then a movie will eventuate, but in fact what will eventuate will be a kind of slow-moving parade of everything we’ve bought. I like staying here, in other words, but I would never live here.”

  “Will you meet with Mike?”

  “Didn’t I say I would?”

  “Yes, but I didn’t believe you. And it sounds like you can’t be persuaded.”

  “I can’t be persuaded by money.”

  “You need money.”

  “Do I?”

  “That’s my impression. You haven’t made a movie in four years. You sold the Hawaii house. Stocks are down. My guess is you do need money.”

  “Well, let me put it this way. If something else were to persuade me, I could thereafter be cajoled into taking lots of money to do the project.” He smiled.

  “What would persuade you?”

  “Something about Mike.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know at this point. Something I don’t expect to be there.”

  “That’s so Hollywood,” said Stoney. “That’s so ‘I don’t know what I want but I want something and I’ll know it when I see it.’”

  Max shrugged. Stoney couldn’t see Max shrug in the dark, but he knew that he was shrugging. Now they fell silent. The moon had risen and faded even more; the breeze had died. The bubbler that was in one of the pools made a low, intermittent sound, and occasionally there was a call of some sort from the aviary. Suddenly there was a cry from the direction of the glen, too, maybe the sound of a coyote or a bobcat. That was a thought Stoney liked, the thought of some scroungy L.A. County predator expanding his territory to include Mike’s property. Come, hawks, he thought. Come, owls and buzzards and crows and Canada geese. Come, feral cats and cougars and deer, gophers and ground squirrels. Partake.

  Max said, “Let’s go in.”

  Charlie had to admit he was impressed. He kept saying the word “On,” and then the other word, “Off,” and the lights in the room came on, and then they went off. Clapping didn’t do it, coughing didn’t do it, bumping one piece of furniture against another didn’t do it. Only the word “on” and the word “off,” at a normal volume. Shouting the words didn’t do it, either. Of course there were switches—one on the lamp beside the bed, and one next to the headboard (a beautiful tall, curved, dark piece out of some tropical wood accented in pale blond). You would expect a backup option, and you could override the general controls by turning various lights on and off individually, and Charlie’s private opinion was that this fancy business would prove confusing in the end, and whoever eventually lived in this room would go back to walking around flipping switches, but, yes, he was impressed. He said “Off” in a medium and not-too-self-conscious tone of voice, and the room went dark except for the bathroom and the window lights, which dimmed gradually and then died. He squirmed down under the covers, lay flat on his back, and inventoried his condition.

  His condition was better than it had been the night before.

  Aches and pains: His left trapezius muscle was hurting from the base of his neck down behind the shoulder blade. His right little finger was throbbing, unknown origin. His right knee hurt at about a three on a scale of ten, not bad, but something to be aware of, possibly from running on the slope of the beach. One thing he’d noticed since taking up fitness and health was that if you hurt yourself running north, say, on an uneven surface, you could not then fix yourself by running south over the same surface, though it seemed like you should be able to.

  Digestive system: Mild feeling of bloat, possibly from eating bread and a very little bit of butter at dinner. No actual pain.

  Heart and lungs: He put his first and second fingers to his carotid artery. Pulse, about sixty-eight. He took two deep breaths. No discernible congestion. Respiration good. He put his hand over his heart. It was beating. In spite of himself, he felt reassured.

  Bowels and urinary tract: He had urinated five times in the course of the day, every time for at least twenty seconds, which he personally thought indicated good hydration. Longest urination of the day, twenty-nine seconds. Onset of urination: good. Two bowel movements, optimal consistency, medium color, no dark spots or streaks or other evidence of blood.

  Genitals: No anomalies evident upon palpation. Small pimple just behind his balls, which he would look at in the morning (he resisted the impulse to call out “On” and look right then, because he had found, through experience, that if he gave in to that sort of thing, in the end it was worse). He probably should not have touched his genitals—some guys he knew never touched their genitals when doctors’ offices were closed—but he had been lax, and there he was. The pimple would either grow or not before morning; he decided to be philosophical about it.

  Skin: Nothing evident, though he suspected he had gotten the merest touch of sunburn on the beach that day. His skin before bed felt a little hot and looked a little red—say, two on a scale of ten. But that could be a bit of niacin flush, too. He would know by morning. His moles didn’t worry him—they had been catalogued just before he left Jersey and found harmless.

  Looks: Better than many, worse than some. Worse than Max? Hard to tell. Today, when he was running a last time on the beach before coming up here, he paid attention to who seemed to notic
e him—men, women, young, old. It was fewer in California than it was on the beach in Jersey, but the notice was often friendly rather than hostile, as it could be in Jersey. When you factored in the difference between California and Jersey, that complicated things. Just in terms of looks, people in California got more exercise and probably more sex, but they also got more sun. In his own mind, if Charlie had to choose betwen the eighty-year-old country-club couples in L.A. County, and the eighty-year-old country-club couples in Hunterdon County, he would choose the latter. Old Californians were wrecks, what with sun damage and athletic injuries. Old New Jerseyites, if they lasted that long, looked better. Chances were, at eighty he would look better than Max at eighty. But if he was eighty in Jersey, people might not be as friendly as they would be to Max, an eighty-year-old wreck in California. Just right now, though, it was hard to guess who was going to care what he might look like in twenty-some years.

  Charlie cleared his throat and put that thought out of his mind.

  He had turned onto his left side without realizing it, bad for the trapezius. He eased onto his back and took a pillow, one of the many that were scattered across the king-size mattress, and stuffed it under the covers, under his knees, which he bent upward. Sometimes a pillow under his knees reminded even his sleeping self not to move from a stable flat-on-his-back position, though five and a half decades and more of sleeping habits made him long to be on his stomach. But his neck couldn’t take that anymore, and his lower back needed support, too. Back in New Jersey, he had given up on finding the right mattress. He’d tried a waterbed (two of those, both the old-fashioned kind, made like a giant cushion, and the new kinds, constructed of long plastic water-filled sausages). He’d tried the Swedish foam and thought he’d found the answer, but in the Swedish foam, he never shifted position all night long, and that stiffened him right up. He’d tried the air-mattress thing, and the firm mattress with the softer pillow on top, as well as the softer mattress with the firmer pillow on top. But there was no solving the mattress problem, and his Chinese-medicine crony was no help—he slept on a couch and never complained.

  When Charlie had finished rustling around in his bed and rearranged and stilled himself, he noticed again how dark it was, and thought of saying “On,” but he didn’t want the whole lighting system to wake up. He opened his eyes and closed them. No doubt about it, it was really dark in this room. But cool and yet not cold. Yes, the temperature was quite nice, which he appreciated after Max’s place, where climate control was slapdash at best. At Max’s, he was always throwing off a blanket or piling one on.

  On balance, he was glad he had not acted out his impulse the night before and gone back to New Jersey. Oh, it was easy enough, when you were pissed, to drive the rental to LAX and imagine that you were going to find yourself a flight back to Newark, but the first question you had to answer was, Turn in the rental or not? If you did turn in the rental (and Budget was at least a half-mile from the actual airport), then were you going to walk from terminal to terminal, looking for a reservations desk? And if you didn’t turn in the rental, where to park it? And even though there were some red-eye flights to the East Coast, you couldn’t just take them at the last minute. And on top of all that, he had to factor in the extra security that came because of the war. So he had found himself a room at the Sheraton, more for the parking lot than for the room, intending to get up and look for a flight in the morning, but then the first three flights on American had been fully booked, and by that time he’d had a chance to look at the Weather Channel, and so he had gone back to Max’s, and actually, everyone had been pretty nice to him all day, and then that dinner and this bed, he thought, were some compensation to his pride. Plus the fact that there really was no news of the war up here. It was a relief, though he would never admit that to Elena.

  A female voice said, “Hi.”

  Charlie went rigid among his marvelous linens for a long moment, but then decided that he must have been dreaming. He scratched his head. Yes. It would surely have been an illusion of some—

  She said, “Hi, Charlie. Is that what they all call you?”

  And Charlie said “On.” The room lights came up, revealing the beautiful paneling, the sleek heavy furniture, the large pink Persian rug on the bamboo parquet flooring, the painting of three big dogs taking down a hideously tusked boar, and Monique, standing at the foot of his bed. She smiled.

  Charlie felt all of his tissues slam together in shock and only just stifled a holler. Well, a scream. As it was, he did gasp in a very unbrave sort of way, and Monique’s smile widened into a grin. At last he said, as indignantly as he could manage, “How did you get in here?”

  “There is a door in the paneling of the sitting room. It opens into a little corridor behind the wall, and then into the upstairs gallery. It is a beautifully crafted door. This has been my room, actually, but Joe put me into one of the unfinished ones that we will be using later. It is almost finished, I do not mind, but I”—now her smile turned playful—“I was walking down the gallery, and I just wished to try the secret door. You can lock it from this side, if you want. I’ll show you how.”

  Charlie realized he was in a cold sweat. He had not thought that an actual cold sweat was possible, but his whole body felt clammy and wet under the covers.

  She went on, “And anyway, you touched me at dinner, didn’t you?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “When I was passing your corner of the table with the coffeepot, you touched my derriere.”

  “I did?”

  “Didn’t you?”

  Charlie cleared his throat, then said, “Well, I did. But I didn’t realize you’d noticed.”

  “What would have prevented me from noticing that you patted my ass?”

  “Well, it was a little pat, and you didn’t react, and your jeans were tight–”

  “I did notice.”

  There was a long pause. She was still standing at the foot of the bed, and she was staring down at him. He had estimated she was about twenty, but as she stared at him, he began to revise his estimate upward. He said, “Are you wanting me to apologize?”

  “Don’t you think that would be appropriate?”

  “Then why do you wear your jeans so tight?”

  She frowned and put both her hands on the top edge of the footboard. She was looking older and more resolute every second. He said, “I don’t mind apologizing.”

  “I would like to hear it.”

  “I shouldn’t have fondled your ass. I probably shouldn’t even have looked at your ass. I’m sorry I did. I’m not looking at your tits right now, either. I’m looking right at your face, and I’m sorry in advance if my gaze seems to wander. It isn’t wandering. My guess is that you are far too young for me to look at, at any rate.” He guessed that even Isabel would be satisfied with this apology.

  “I’m thirty-three.”

  Now Charlie sat up in bed, and the covers fell from his chest. He said, “You are? That’s amazing. I thought sure you were closer to twenty.”

  “Twenty?” She came around the footboard and sat down on the end of the bed. “Did you really think I was twenty?”

  “Well, twenty-two. Twenty-five at the most. I really did.”

  “And what are you, about sixty?”

  “Fifty-eight, actually. I’ve looked sixty for years, I suppose, but now I’ve found a new health regimen. I can tell you about it, but the long and short of it is that sometimes you can’t actually turn back the clock but you can stop the clock, in a way, and more or less catch up to it. That’s the way I look at it. Are you French?”

  “No, I am Russian. We are all Russian here in this house, but I spent some time working in France, at Mike’s house there. He has a house in the south, near Menton. I lived there for six years, but I never went out in the hot sun. That is the secret to my youthful appearance. I said before I went there that I was never going to go out in the hot sun, and I never did, and I pursue the same policy here in Los Angeles. Here i
s my theory; let me know what you think of it. You see that I am pale and blonde. This is what you might call northern coloring. We pale, blonde, blue-eyed types suffer much more from vitamin-D deficiencies than others, but at the same time, we do not have sufficient melanin. We are much more subject to certain types of diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, and certain types of cancer. If we use sunblock, then we don’t get sunburned, but we also don’t get enough vitamin D, which is a very important vitamin in preventing auto-immune diseases. You may read about this in the British press, not so much in the American press. Some people even think that cancer itself is inhibited by vitamin D. And if I were to get pregnant with a baby and not get enough vitamin D, my baby could have severe defects. And so this is what I do, I turn the year around. I treat Los Angeles or Menton as if it were Russia. Now we are coming out of winter and going into summer. In the winter I go out without a hat or long sleeves, and in the summer I do not go out, or I go out with sun-repelling clothing on, and so I am preserving my skin and also getting a proper dose of vitamin D. That is my story.”

  “I see,” said Charlie, “that we have a common interest in health.”

  “Yes, but I am interested in my health, and you are interested in your health. I am not sure I am interested in your health.”