by Jane Smiley
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Simon, laughing.
“That night, Roger shows up at her apartment in a white outfit, and he parades around telling her about heaven and all the cherubim and seraphim, and brings her regards from her grandmothers and also from Tsar Nicholas—”
Marya laughed at this, and the three of them wriggled into a more comfortable position. Monique interrupted herself and said “Off.” The light above the painting went off, the room turned blue, and she lowered her voice. She said, “And she said to me, ‘And the angel Gabriel came unto me four times in the one night, and then he slept beside me, but after I fell asleep, the angel Gabriel vanished.’ When Roger showed up later, he acted completely as though he didn’t know what happened, and she believed him. ‘In fact,’ she said, ‘I tested him, and he had never even heard of Tsar Nicholas!’ They intend to put this miracle in the movie just the way it occurred!” The two girls laughed merrily again.
“That seems like a lot of effort just to have sex with some girl,” said Simon.
“I always said it would take a miracle to get Svetlana into bed,” said Marya, and the two girls laughed again.
Then Monique said to him, “Are you comfortable still?”
“Not especially, but I’m okay.” Actually, he had a decided crick in his neck.
“I want to go to bed,” said Monique. “It’s after midnight.”
Simon knew that her previous night had included Charlie. Marya said to him, “You can sleep in, but we have to be up by seven.” The three of them sat up and stretched, and Monique began reaching for their clothes, which were scattered behind the couch. The room was not dark at all. The huge window was as bright as a movie screen, and the high white ceiling seemed to gather the light that came from it and reflect it downward, upon the paintings hanging on the walls and the pieces of antique china and the traditional Russian boxes that sat on the shining tables. Pale areas in several of the paintings—the sky in the Kramskoy, a campfire in one of the others, the eyes of some forest animals in still another—caught the shimmering light and cast it back. He said, “This is a beautiful room.”
“Look at this,” said Marya. “This is a silver samovar from the 1840s. Joe says it belonged to the family of General Gorchakov.” The moonlight reflected off a tall silver object shaped like a hot-air balloon on legs, with a small protruding tap. The silver was chased and polished, and Simon could make out figures progressing around the perimeter of the widest part—some dogs on a leash, and a man with a gun.
“They are chasing a girl,” said Monique. “She isn’t wearing much. She’s on the back.”
The knob on top of the samovar was in the shape of a delicate spiraling shell with a point at the apex. “That shell is called a Neptune,” whispered Marya. Exploring the room, both Monique and Marya had become more cautious. When Simon reached for one of the cups, Marya prevented him from touching it. She said, “This is the favorite room. We shouldn’t be in here.”
Next to the samovar was an antique clock—a horse, rearing up, with jewels for eyes, and on the horse, a man, gold-plated and brightly enameled. Monique said, “When that clock was new, the rider would swing his sword every time it struck the hour, but it doesn’t work anymore. The eyes are supposed to be diamonds.” She shrugged. The hands had stopped at midnight.
It was much darker in the entry hall—the big double door was closed, of course, and the two windows, one on each side of the door, were tall and narrow. He could not see the tapestries, but he could sense them hanging on the walls, more alive than paintings. Monique gave him a kiss on the cheek, sisterly and kind. Then, very quickly, she stooped down and gave him another kiss, on the fly of his jeans, not sisterly at all. Marya kissed him on the other cheek, and then the two girls whispered, “Night!” They put their arms around one another’s waists as they disappeared, yawning, down the corridor that led toward the kitchen wing of the house. Simon went to the bottom of the staircase and looked upward. He actually felt like going to bed. Life here at home was changing his daily routine. At school, he rarely got to bed before 4 a.m., if then.
He put his hand on the carved banister and began to climb the stairs. He suddenly remembered what his mother had said at dinner: “Isn’t it strange that here we are and over in Iraq there’s a war? And when people look back on this in fifty years, they will think that we voted for that war, when we didn’t. We will look to them like those German people in 1939.”
And then the men—he had seen it—had all glanced at one another as if his mom had a condition of some sort. Charlie had said, “Luckily, we’ll be dead by then, so what they think won’t be any of our business.”
The fact was, Simon thought the war in Iraq was interesting. He could hear himself say it to his mother: “Interesting! Just interesting, Mom! I didn’t say ‘attractive’ or ‘appealing.’ I just said ‘interesting.’” It was interesting the way a car wreck or a fire or a horror movie was interesting. Once, a couple of years ago, he had been driving late at night somewhere on the flats outside of Davis—he was drunk, and he didn’t even know where he was, just sort of on automatic pilot in terms of getting back to his dorm—and he drove past a house burning down in a flat field. The whole house was actually burnt to the ground. The only thing still burning was its outline, a bright flaming set of rectangles in the grass. Even drunk, he had realized that the deserted scene was tremendously mysterious, since if it was a house fire, the firemen hadn’t put it all the way out—and that was in California (though in the wet of winter). But if it was arson, then that was mysterious, too. His roommates dismissed the whole thing when he told them about it—just some abandoned building put to the torch by a farmer or his kids—but they hadn’t seen it, seen the strange abandoned flaming weirdness of it unexpected in the middle of a dark, overcast night. He hadn’t had his camera with him, and had failed to take the best pictures of his life.
So—how could he present to the mom this idea that maybe Iraq was interesting, interesting in a photographic sense, but in another sense, too? The war wasn’t supposed to last long, and (he realized completely how selfish this was) he was sorry in a photographic sense to have missed it. What was it Paul had been saying the other day about the smashed archeological sites and old buildings? Iraq was a one-time opportunity, if you looked at it in a certain photographic way. He came to the top of the stairs and gazed down the long corridor of bedrooms. He was thinking about Iraq. He tiptoed past his mom’s door, because it seemed like she might easily read his thoughts, open the door, and leap out at him. But she didn’t. What if the war were to go on longer? Past the summer, say? What might he do then? He coughed quietly to clear this thought.
Let’s see. The room next to his mom and Max was empty—that might be the suite Paul had been talking about at dinner, so that had two doors. On the left side of the corridor was a large closet, and then, he thought, Cassie, and next to her Delphine, surrealism and ornithology. Next to Delphine was Paul; across from Paul, Charlie; next to Paul, his own room; across from him, the Amber Room; past the Amber Room (he paused), the sound of voices. Zoe’s room. She had invited him in there sometime in the afternoon, and he had been duly impressed with the grandeur. Zoe professed herself uncomfortable in such a place, and maybe she was, but he had seen her in enough movies—four or five, was it?—that to his eyes the Gold Room was a perfectly fine set for her, as good as any other, and she moved around it gracefully, neither overwhelming it nor failing to balance it. The room remained the immovable object; she remained the irresistible force. But she hadn’t asked him to linger, or kissed him, which he had rather expected her to do, given how much they both seemed to enjoy the other day. His visit had soon shaded into awkwardness, and at dinner he had sat on the same side of the table but at the opposite end from her. In the general dinner conversation about her next movie, Max’s next project, his own college education, Paul’s trip later in the year to France, and Delphine’s wish to buy a laptop computer, he and Zoe had exchanged only a few impe
rsonal remarks.
He edged up to the door and leaned toward it. Zoe’s was the only voice, intermittent, resonant, and easily understandable. She was not singing, but she might as well have been, since she was projecting from her diaphragm. It was hard to tell whom she was talking to, or, rather, yelling at, since no voice responded when hers fell silent. Was she watching one of her own movies? He glanced at Paul’s door, but it revealed nothing. He stilled his body and listened.
In the Amber Room, Isabel had intended to wait up for Stoney, but had drifted off to sleep. The DVD they were watching, of Harlan County, U.S.A., a movie she had always meant to watch, had not turned out to be as compelling as she had wanted it to be, and did not inspire her to become a documentary filmmaker the way she thought it would. It was no longer running; the DVD player was stuck on the introductory table of contents, and had been for at least ten minutes. The room was silent. Isabel was having a dream. The dream was of their old house in Kauai, but it was not on the beach in the southern part of the island, as it had been. While she had been away, her father had had the house moved inland, and now it overlooked that spot—the rainiest spot in the world, at Waipio Canyon—where the trade winds got caught on the summit of the mountain and dropped something like four or five hundred inches of rain every year. In the dream, she was telling her father that he had made a terrible mistake, because, although the view of the waterfall was pretty (and the view from the house in her dream was just like the view she had gotten from helicopter rides), there was nothing to do there now—you couldn’t even lie out. Max was shaking his head stubbornly and insisting he had done the right thing because the property was more valuable. In the dream, she kept going up to him and butting her head against his chest, not terribly hard but hard enough to express annoyance, and he kept caving his body so as not to receive the blow, which made her angrier.
The door creaked loudly, and she woke up. When she woke up, she saw that she was in the Amber Room, and that the door had not opened. She was still alone in the Amber Room, propped up on the bed with her head on her chest and a quilt over her legs. Her shoulders hurt from her odd position. The video screen was on. She picked up the remote and turned it off. She said, “On, left,” and more lights came up in the Amber Room. She looked around, and then at her watch. He had only been gone for twenty minutes.
He would be out looking at the car again. She sighed. What had happened to the red Jaguar was not good, but it was not, in the end, mysterious. She had driven to Starbucks, been unable to find a spot in the lot, parked in the thirty-minute spot on the street, and run in. In the chaos of losing the keys, she had forgotten she was in a thirty-minute spot. And when Elena picked her up, they had not called the police or parking control, and sometime after they left, the red Jaguar had been towed to the city impound lot. Joe Blow had found it. But the car that came out of the impound lot was not the same car that went in. The guy who ran the impound lot had not, really, shown a whole lot of either surprise or remorse at the broken windows and lights or the scratched paint. He had shrugged, according to Joe Blow, and said, “You park your car illegally, and you go to the impound lot, and it ain’t like going to a private garage, you know? This one fellow sued the city of West Hollywood. Guess how far he got?” And the guy laughed, said Joe Blow. So that was that.
She and Stoney did not see eye to eye on the size and importance of the damage to the car. When she and Elena had gotten back, the car had been parked out in front. She, Isabel, had been shocked and sorry once again that she had dropped the keys in the toilet, but the windows, the headlights, and even the red finish had looked fixable to her. It would be expensive, and the car was unusable for a week or two, but, she thought, it was a car. No lives were lost; no species had gone extinct. They had gone back down the hill and picked up the Volvo.
But it had dumbfounded Stoney. He said, “Did you see it? Did you see it?”
She said, “I did see it. I do see it. I don’t know why Joe Blow had it brought here and not taken to the Jaguar dealer. It’s the middle of the week. We’ll get them to take it right to the Jaguar dealer—”
Stoney could not stop looking at it. She would’ve had to take him by the shoulders and turn him away and walk him into the house and sit him down and give him some smelling salts or something, right out of a movie, but she hadn’t done that. She had gone into the house, exchanged her tight jeans for the loose ones, and then gone into the dining room and had a sandwich. When she went back upstairs for the swimsuit, he was sitting on the bed of the Amber Room with the remote in his hand, but there was nothing on the screen, and it was a perfectly beautiful day out, so she said, “Come swimming with me,” and then “I’m so sorry about the car,” and then “Oh, come on,” and then “What’s the matter with you?” and “I think you’re overreacting,” and then “Oh, for God’s sake.” In a way, it was his fault that she had kept talking, because he hadn’t reacted. It would have been way better if there had been another person with her, someone who had not actually been the cause of the impoundment, because then she could have maintained a remorseful silence while the other person snapped him out of his shock or whatever you would call it. After two more remarks, “I can’t believe this” and “What’s with you, anyway?,” she had flounced off with her suit—yes, she had flounced, unfortunately, and it was only by the time she was out to the pool that she understood the whole thing, the identification of the car with the father, Jerry, and the unresolved trauma of the father’s death, and probably his illness, too, and then that opened the door to the earlier trauma with his mother’s death, another car-related event that was surely unresolved, because, in addition to the fact that how could anyone deal with that, there was Dorothy, who was a Hollywood rhinoceros if ever there was one, whose favorite remark was “If you show them any weakness in this town, they’ll eat you alive!”
But the problem was that, when all of this came to her as she went into the poolhouse and changed into her suit, what she felt was a shiver of apprehension. For the first time in her life, she knew, really knew, that he was way older than she was, and that his complexities were more than set—they were confirmed and habitual. The very thing that she had always responded to in Stoney, that he was reliably himself, had this other side to it that she had never thought about when he was only coming and going (and, of course, she hadn’t really seen him in a year); she had never paid much attention to it.
She had dived into the deep end, where the virgin’s hair swirled into the tail of the unicorn, and in the middle of her second lap had realized that in fact she was precisely different from the person her father thought she was by the measure of Stoney’s influence. It was scientific. Here would be Max’s wish, that a young man would come along, someone about her age or a year older, and he and she would be equally idealistic and optimistic, and they would be just self-centered enough so that they would set out confidently to save the world, or some part of it, African felines or babies suffering from malnutrition and dehydration, and they would work out a plan and start a family, not knowing any better, and their life would become a fait accompli before they realized how hard it was, and then, after they realized that, they would do as everyone else does, wake up from their idealism and go on to achieve what they could. Typical fuzzy thinking in the older generation, Isabel had always thought.
But, yes, Stoney had ruined her for the raw boys, for their ill-assorted body parts, spotty faces, brash ignorances, lack of money. But he had also, maybe, ruined her for himself, because, as the Jaguar thing was showing her, she wasn’t ready for whatever today presaged. The reason, she realized, that Stoney had been reluctant to claim her in front of Max was only in part that he was wrong to have slept with her when she was sixteen, it was also that, to her father, he was a known quantity, a formed quantity. Since he had already betrayed his early promise, now his only chance was redemption, and that chance was slim. He knew it and Max knew it. Only she, Isabel, had not known it, but now she did. As she swam her laps, the
whole thing unrolled in front of her like a big map, and once she had seen it, she had known she would never see it differently.
And at this very moment, as if scripted, Max had appeared, in his swim trunks, and slipped into the pool. She was swimming laps, and he began to swim laps, and everything about this situation had the marks of a setup of a particular kind—parent needs to have a talk, so he arranges it so that he and daughter will bump into one another in a casual manner. She kept swimming; he kept swimming. Ultimately, though, after thirty-two laps, she had to stop, and he was on her. So she did the child thing, and slithered over to him through the water and, when he stood up, pushed his hair back and kissed him on the cheek, then said, “You can’t just paddle around. You have to raise your heartbeat to at least a hundred and forty.”
He smiled and said, “Okay.”
She stretched out on her back, floating in the water (but with her ears immersed so that she could honestly say that she couldn’t hear him). She kept a happy look on her face. Then she had a bright idea and said, “Personally, I think Elena and Simon fit in pretty well. I mean, I’m not asking if you’ve made any final commitments or anything. But I think it’s been pretty comfortable.”
“Do you?”
She stood up in the water and showed enthusiasm. “I really do.” She gave him a grin.
But he was not to be deflected. He asked it anyway: “So what’s going on between you and Stoney? I find this a little surprising.”
“What did Stoney say?” But she knew what Stoney had said; they had talked about it the night before. She only asked in order to gain time.
