by Jane Smiley
“Why did they kill the Kennedys?”
“Well, according to my source, they killed Robert because he was about to find out that they had killed John. They killed John—Well, I can’t quite remember why they killed John. The reason made sense to me at the time, though. The real thing you have to know about the Council on Foreign Relations is that they like there to be a middle class. The Council on Foreign Relations is not in favor of every single place turning into the third world. They know that the middle class always pays for itself. When you don’t have a middle class, all sorts of costs are shifted to the state, like right up north, in the Central Valley. In the end, one of the cheapest things you can have is a middle class. A middle class likes schools and roads and hospitals and libraries and parks, and they are willing to pay for them. Rich people hoard their money; the middle class spreads it around. It’s that simple. If you don’t have a middle class, then you don’t have those things, or, rather, you have them, but they are not of good quality and no one takes care of them, and even if they are worthless junk, they cost almost as much as they do when they’re good, and the state has to pay for them because there is no middle class to do so.”
“So,” said Elena, willing to go along, “why has the Council on Foreign Relations allowed what looks to me like the destruction of the middle class over the last twenty years or so?”
“Well, that’s a good question. My guess is that the Council on Foreign Relations has its ups and downs and its ideological infights, just like every other organization. You get more nouveau types in there, who maybe only have five hundred million or so, and they feel cramped and oppressed by the demands of labor. They think the pie is finite—”
“The pie is finite,” said Elena. “The pie is limited by the capacity of the Earth to supply food, energy, and natural resources for an ever-expanding population of people who want ever more goods.”
“Well, the Council on Foreign Relations may be of two minds about innovation and consumption. As I said, they are not omniscient—”
“You said they were not omnipotent,” said Delphine.
“But they are omnipresent,” said Cassie. “Or at least way more omnipresent than people realize. I see them as a force for good, more or less. And, furthermore, I am sure that the overtures that the Pope has been making toward the Evangelicals is exactly the thing they fear most. We see this all around us—a few branches falling out of the upper canopy that are evidence of the storm that is really going on. I mean, we see how, in the Republican Party, the secular multinational corporations have made an uneasy alliance with the religious multinational corporations run by people like Pat Robertson, because, on the surface, money is money and investment is investment. But, in fact, the religious multinational corporations are infected with a sense of grandiosity that comes from their constant preaching and invocation of God. They begin to believe their own PR, and to treat people like the Rockefellers with a bit of condescension and even disdain. And then you bring in the Pope and and cardinals, with their history of making pronouncements that are supposed to be infallible, and if you are a Rockefeller type, you realize that you really have a problem. When the Pope and the Evangelicals begin pooling their wealth…” She shook her head.
“What do they really want?” said Zoe.
“A feeling, an intoxicating feeling. A feeling like you only get when you are in the simultaneous grips of great fear and intense aggression, because that’s what extreme religion is all about, fear and aggression. That’s why those religions are always talking about the Apocalypse or the Rapture or whatever. The Council on Foreign Relations is not a moral organization, it is a reasonable organization that would like to avoid the same things that the average person would like to avoid—namely, nuclear war, the destruction of New York, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, Abu Dhabi, wherever, and the sight of millions or billions of their fellow humans suffering and dying. The extreme religions have that—”
“Fetishistic,” said Elena.
“Exactly,” said Cassie, giving her a smile, “a fetishistic longing for that very thing, the sight of those they fear and those who arouse their aggression suffering and dying on screens that are as big as possible, and they imagine themselves in those scenes like in a movie, of course, just walking along, glorying in being saved, in at last truly having that sensation of election that is so elusive in real life.”
Elena laughed in spite of herself.
Delphine said, “Frankly, I haven’t seen any signs in the last seventy years—since I was, say, six years old—of anyone being in control at all. As far as I see it, no form of control actually works, and all lines of authority break down when they get longer than about two steps. I never saw a single person who realized he was outside of the gaze of the boss who didn’t think he knew better than the boss what he should be doing. I never saw that. So—you’re telling me that somehow a world government without an evident policing force, without a public presence, without the power to inspire or punish in a practical way, would be more successful at controlling the entire world than a mother is at controlling her children when they are playing by themselves out in the backyard? Yes, there is a Council on Foreign Relations—I know that—and, yes, it may have been started sometime with those goals in mind, and, yes, it may be connected to a secret arm of the CIA that enforces its decisions and policies, and, yes, it might have assassinated the Kennedys, but there is no system that would make it actually work on a day-to-day basis. Whenever we talk about this, I think how nice it would be to have someone at the top who has a reasonable attachment to the idea of the middle class, and to the idea of the quiet, mostly orderly shunting of money around the world, but it ain’t human.”
Elena, too, thought the Council on Foreign Relations sounded reassuring. There had been a time, of course, when the very idea would have enraged her, but now it was pleasant to hope that someone reasonable was making an effort to discipline the President and the Vice-President and all of the rest of them.
“Well,” said Zoe, thoughtfully, running her fork around on her plate and sweeping up stray bits of the mushroom omelet she had been eating, “I guess it’s a test case. If they assassinated the Kennedys, then we’ll see if they assassinate Bush—”
“It would be a mess and a nightmare if they assassinated him. No shadow government in its right mind would assassinate him and leave Cheney to be president, and if somehow they took out both of them, the country would be in such a turmoil that God only knows what would happen. No,” said Delphine, “if the Council on Foreign Relations has a plan at this point, it’s a bad plan and doesn’t speak well for their competence as a shadow world-government. That’s my view.”
This last exchange, Elena thought, was so suddenly depressing, after Cassie’s earnest but light tone, that she began to contemplate, as she had been during the night, where exactly she could emigrate to. She started on the usual round—Canada, Australia, New Zealand—but then stopped herself. In addition to the fact that Max and Simon had no desire to emigrate and that the thought of her lonely self making a moral pilgrimage to a country that opposed the Iraq war, even if that country were France, seemed like more than she could actually stand doing, there was also this appalling sense of vertigo that entered her every time she thought about it.
Zoe took her handbag from underneath her chair and opened it. She placed her cell phone on the table. As soon as she did so, it beeped, and with her long, graceful fingers, she opened it. She said, “Did you hear the phone ring? I didn’t.”
“I didn’t,” said Cassie. Elena had not heard it, either. Zoe pressed some buttons and then listened. After a moment, she said, “It’s from Isabel, who says she left in Stoney’s car and forgot to get the number of the house, which is why she’s calling me. Okay. Let’s see. Stoney is here, in the meeting with Max and Mike. Oh, I didn’t realize they were already going at it. Did you, Elena?”
Elena shook her head.
“And she has Stoney’s cell phone with her. Yes, I
sabel, get on with it. Have you noticed how long her messages are? She can never get to the point.” Then she grinned and said, “Oh dear. She went into the ladies’ room at Starbucks, and as she was standing up from going to the john, the car keys fell out of her pocket into the toilet, and because it was an autoflush toilet, they went down before she realized what was happening, and then, when she called the barista in and they leaned down in front of the toilet, it flushed again.” She laughed, and then said, “Well, it is funny! Poor Isabel. Of course, there’s also the ultimate humiliation of calling me, which I gather she did because everyone else’s phones are turned off.” She glanced for just the briefest second at Delphine, a glance that Elena couldn’t read, then peered at her own phone. She said, “Well, the signal is very weak up here. I guess that’s why we didn’t hear a call.”
Cassie said, “Stoney’s driving that old car of his dad’s. I wonder if he even has a second set of keys.”
The phone sounded a scale of four or five ascending tones, and Zoe answered it. She said, “Okay. Okay. Oh dear, Isabel. Okay,” then looked around the table. “She called Triple A, and they told her it would be at least a two-hour wait and maybe longer, and at that point they would have to tow her to the dealer. It will take even longer to send a locksmith.” She spoke into the phone. “I don’t know how long that meeting is going to go, Isabel. I think they just started, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll call Nedra.”
“I’ll go get her,” said Elena. “I don’t mind.”
“Just a minute,” said Zoe into the phone.
And Elena didn’t mind at all. As soon as Zoe had said “Starbucks,” the first image to enter her mind was the image of newspapers—the L.A. Times, the New York Times, strewn about on tables, defining just how bad it was in Iraq, and how bad it wasn’t. It was all very well to sit here under a lovely pergola between a spectacular house and an amazing aviary with three interesting and friendly women who, moreover, had plenty of insight into Max, about whom she was consumingly curious, and maybe she would not have all that many chances like this, but it was also like floating above the earth inside a large balloon, and knowing that at any time the balloon could pop. She said, “Actually, I’m happy to do it.”
“Honey?” said Zoe. “Elena says she’ll pick you up. You and Stoney can find another set of keys and go get the car later. Where are you, exactly?” She pulled a slip of paper and a pen out of her bag and wrote down what Isabel was telling her, then hung up the phone. She said, “And why did she leave, anyway? I thought we were in retreat here.”
“I guess we’ll find out,” said Delphine.
As soon as she got into Elena’s Subaru, Isabel said, “I knew she wouldn’t come pick me up herself.”
“I offered to do it,” said Elena, and then she rushed to add, “There was something else I thought I would do,” but she wasn’t yet ready to admit that she was going to buy newspapers.
“Yes, but everyone does her bidding,” said Isabel, peevishly, and then she took off her sunglasses and put them back on.
“Well, she is a movie star.”
“Don’t remind me, please! Anyway, movie stars drive around all the time. I saw Reese Witherspoon just this morning. She was standing on Melrose when I drove past, looking into her handbag.”
Elena turned out of the parking lot onto Sunset. She said, “What kind of handbag did she have?”
After a pause lasting a whole stoplight, Isabel said, “Kate Spade.”
“You noticed that, just driving past?”
“Well, I did. Actually, I thought, Why does she have that bag? I would never have that bag. It was pink and turquoise. When I flew out here last week, there was a girl my age sitting next to me on the plane, and she had an eight-hundred-dollar Ferragamo bag. She refused to put it under the seat in front of us. Finally, I said to her, ‘If the plane crashes, I don’t want to be hit in the head by your bag.’” Elena looked over at her, Isabel looked at Elena, Elena thought how much she looked like Max, and then they laughed. Elena realized that she had never been alone with Isabel before.
But then Isabel frowned and threw herself back in her seat. She said, “Thanks for coming. I can’t believe what a mess this is. I really hope Stoney has another set of keys, I really do, but, you know, having another set of keys is not his style.”
“What is his style?”
Isabel considered this question. Finally, she said, “Wishing he had bothered to have another set of keys made when he realized that he only had one set.”
Elena didn’t say anything. One of the first things she always did with a key was duplicate it, mark it, and hang it on the key board in her kitchen closet.
Isabel sighed. “What I really hate is those strings of choices that led to the disaster. For example, I brought two pairs of jeans with me up the hill, only two, because the others were dirty and I hadn’t bothered to do any laundry all last week. So, this morning, I looked in my suitcase and I saw the loose ones and the tight ones, and Stoney was coming out of the bathroom and looking at me, and that made me feel very sassy, so I put on the tight ones, but if I’d put on the loose ones, the keys wouldn’t have squeezed out of my back pocket as I was standing up, and, you know, I heard the splash, but it just didn’t occur to me what was splashing until a moment later, when it flushed, and I realized that the keys had been in my back pocket.”
“Why did you go out in the first place?”
“Oh, shit! Where are we? That reminds me! We have to go up to our house, because I went out to get my birth-control pills, because I forgot them. I’m sorry. It’s so out of the way.”
Elena had to admire the way Isabel slipped that phrase “birth-control pills” into the conversation so naturally. She said, “Better to have them. Maybe we should call and see what other things people forgot.” The L.A. Times, she knew, could well be lying right there by the front door, and she could pick it up without seeming to be doing anything besides going into the house.
“I guess Dad and Stoney are in the meeting with that guy.”
“They were when I left, but none of us saw them.”
“He already financed another movie. Did you know that? Stoney and I watched it in our room last night. It was animated. I guess he found a studio in Japan to do it, so it was Japanese with Russian subtitles, but we could make out the story. I enjoyed it.”
“What was it called?”
“Something about hawks. I couldn’t make that out. Anyway, it begins in 1180, because the date showed on the screen first thing, and the main character is Saladin. At the beginning, you see Saladin and two companions take off their golden robes and put on humbler dress, and then they leave what Stoney thought was Damascus and head west. You know, Saladin was a Kurd. Isn’t that interesting? We learned that in my medieval-history class, when we studied the Crusades. The scene changes fairly frequently but smoothly as they travel through Turkey and Greece and Albania, and pretty soon they are in Hungary, and then they go down through the Alps into northern Italy, and I mean this part passes in only a few minutes—it’s a beautiful backlit panorama, in anime, of course, of all the landscapes—”
“That George W. Bush could have visited but didn’t care to.”
“Well, exactly. Anyway, we were fascinated. Somewhere in northern Italy, they’re walking along, looking pretty bedraggled by this time, and they encounter two men out hawking. It’s almost nightfall. When they’ve finished talking, the one local man sends the other with the travelers, and as soon as they leave, he gallops home. In the meantime, the second man takes the travelers down the back roads. They arrive at the castle, owned by the first man, and he welcomes them with feasting. You can tell that the man who owns the castle is curious, and that he realizes these guys are important. After everyone is in bed, he sneaks out to where the horses are, and he looks into one of the packs and finds gold coins and silk cloth gleaming in the moonlight. So he sends a messenger into the nearby city to his wife, who is a beautiful young woman in the Japanese anime tradition�
��”
“Which means?”
“Which means she has long hair hanging over her face, and great big eyes. But she’s dressed like a medieval Italian woman. The next day, all the men wake up and they go hawking in the country, and Saladin admires the Italian guy’s hawk, and the hawking scenes really are brilliant, the way the hawks fly up toward the sky, then drop on the prey, and everything is reflected in the surface of a lake. When they go into town, the beautiful wife has put on this fabulous feast, and all for these dusty, bedraggled merchants. The next morning, the husband and wife give the travelers five new horses and some new clothes and watch them go off, and from the dialogue even we realized that they think their visitors might have been Jesus and two of his disciples.
“Then it’s five years later, and we see Saladin conquering Jerusalem, and there’s a lot of typical anime violence, Japanese-style swordplay, and then the next scene is back at the castle in Italy, and the beautiful wife is weeping and saying goodbye to the husband, who is off to the Crusades. There are lots of scenes of sickness, dying, and burial, and then the ones who are left attack Jerusalem and are beaten, and the Islamic army goes through and kills and enslaves whoever is left, which includes our friend. A couple of the Crusaders manage to escape, and the Italian guy gives one of them a message for the wife.
“In the next scene, the Italian guy is dressed in humble robes, wearing a turban, and working in the palace hawkery or whatever it’s called, training hawks. The wife back in Italy weeps and grieves at the news of his death, then meets and rejects a suitor. Her brothers come in and threaten to imprison and beat her if she doesn’t agree to get married, so she points to a barren tree, from which we gather that when the tree leafs out again she will marry someone, but not before. And then there’s a scene of the messenger being waylaid and killed on the way home from Jerusalem. Meanwhile, back in Damascus, Saladin is out hawking. The hawk flies out into the late-afternoon sun in the same way the hawk had done in the earlier scene, and then there’s this terrific shot of everything reflecting in the surface of a pool in an oasis, and at that point Saladin looks directly at his captive and realizes that it is that man who had been so hospitable, so, the next scene, you see the Italian as a guest in the palace, eating at a banquet. Then they cut to the tree flowering in the courtyard of the castle, and the wife sitting beneath it, weeping.
