by Jane Smiley
Now, as familiar as she was with theories of female sexuality, Isabel moved aside. It was like magic. All her mother had to do was say the most horrifying words, and the key was turned and the door was opened. It would be good, Isabel thought, to leave right now. It would be an exit. She could move gracefully, smoothly. She thought of the girls she had known at school whose mothers, they said, talked to them frankly and openly about sexuality. She was not one of those girls. Nor had she seen any of Zoe’s famous sex scenes with Russell Crowe or the notorious almost-nude rooftop scene with Dennis Quaid. (She had seen Zoe shoot plenty of people, though—John Hurt, the old English guy; also Laurence Fishburn; Winona Ryder, on TV; and Faye Dunaway. She had seen her run Gene Hackman down with a car and throw Laura Dern off a bridge, as well as drop suddenly to the floor so that Alan Alda could fall out of a twenty-story window.) The only movie of Zoe’s that she actually liked was Wanda Rossini, and that was because of the music, of course, but also, she often told people, because at the end of it Zoe had died tragically of a brain tumor.
Zoe went on. There was no stopping her. She said, “The guy who wrote Something Good was named Justin Merrill, and he was about a year older than I was, and he was fun. His father was a novelist, and his mother was an artist, and he himself had gone to Amherst, which was better than Harvard, he said, because more exclusive, and I have no idea how he ended up writing that movie, because he never wrote another one, but he was a very naughty, naughty boy, tremendously good-looking, with a drug habit and a car habit and a girl habit.” Now Zoe seemed to be positively enjoying herself. “He was every single thing that Delphine hated, and he was so funny that I was falling down laughing every day. I don’t know why they had him around on the set—usually the screenwriter is only there if he’s rewriting pages—but Justin did whatever he wanted to do. He didn’t recognize rules or impossibilities or the desires of others, and he made up his mind to get me to fall in love with him, and I did.”
Jason Proctor, Isabel thought, in spite of herself, recalling a guy she had dated for a month between the two halves of Leo, but she tossed her chin in a challenging way and said, “Why are you telling me this?”
“Well, Max never knew and Delphine never knew. Now you know. That was my first taste of having my own life, and after that, everything else was broken. I’m sorry it was, but it was. I didn’t want that other life back. I couldn’t have it back. Once I knew I could have a secret and keep it, and do what no one else knew I was doing, then that’s what I wanted to do. It took a few years for me to act, but…”
Isabel recognized that Zoe was being honest with her, and that she had asked for it. Maybe she hadn’t meant to ask for it, but she had anyway. She stepped aside. The exit was clear, but Zoe didn’t go.
Now they both heaved simultaneous sighs, possibly as a substitute for making eye contact. They did not make eye contact. This was the way Isabel recognized that the long conflict was not over, or even very deeply plumbed, but that, for the moment, they were tired of it. And, of course, in an hour or so they were going their separate ways again. Isabel relented, and said, “I guess they want to get in here.”
“I’m sure they do,” said Zoe.
Isabel turned and went out of the pantry, and Zoe was right behind her. A short corridor went off to the right, leading to the dining room. Zoe turned there, and Isabel felt it. That she felt the difference was depressing, but that she was no longer in proximity to her mother was a relief, so it evened out. The kitchen—which Isabel admired because it was fitted out to look like one of those ramshackle upscale English kitchens and had one of those stoves that she had never been able to understand—was to the left. Or you could go directly outside, which Isabel did, thinking she would go back in the far door, beside the swimming pool, and then run up to the Amber Room and find Stoney.
But Stoney wasn’t as interested as he might have been in her argument with her mother. He said, “I don’t mind talking to Zoe about Max’s project. She’s smart.”
“She’s smart?”
“She’s smart about this business. We’ve talked about that.”
Isabel felt herself make a bitchy and resentful face.
Stoney looked at her for a moment, then said, “Your mother has a certain low cunning that passes for intelligence in the movie business.”
She had to chuckle at that.
Stoney knelt down and peered under the bed, put his entire head, in fact, underneath the embossed gold silk bedskirt, and came up with one of her flip-flops. He handed it to her, stood up, and said, “Does Joe Blow look a little subdued to you?”
“I didn’t notice.”
“It’s not exactly that. I don’t know what it is.”
She unzipped her suitcase and slipped the shoe in. He went around to the other side of the bed, knelt down, and disappeared again. This time, he came up with her book about potatoes. She said, “Simon should read that. There’s a whole chapter about the revolution in marijuana growing over the last thirty years. I thought Leo made all that stuff up, but I guess he was reading this book.” She took the book and put it in her handbag.
“Did you check the bathroom?”
“I thought I did.”
“Then you did.” He put his hands on his hips and cocked his head slightly. “And Marya and Monique were whispering about something, too. They were whispering in Russian and so into it that they didn’t even see me. It makes me nervous.”
“I’m sure they’ve seen enough to talk about for a month. Zoe Cunningham and her guru, for one thing, but even my dad. Even you. And God knows what they’ve made of Simon. He seemed on pretty good terms with them when he was talking to us last night.”
“He’s funny.”
“Okay.”
“Well, he is.”
Isabel admitted that he was. She didn’t mind Simon. She was sure she would have minded Simon when she was ten and he was seven or when she was eighteen and he was fifteen, but in fact she didn’t mind him now. Stoney went to the window and looked out. It really was amazing, Isabel thought, to stand in the Amber Room on a sunny day and have the walls blaze up like a fire around you, and to stand in the Amber Room in the middle of the night and have the walls vanish in the darkness like forest pools. Last night, her third night, she had been completely disoriented when she woke up and wanted to go to the bathroom. Even after she was wide awake, she could not at first figure out where the bathroom was. Stoney said, “I just have a bad feeling about my deal.”
“You don’t have a deal, Stoney. He might not do it.” She meant, He won’t do it.
He turned and looked at her. He said, “You saw them yesterday. They were looking at everything—the pictures, books in the library. They were keeping it quiet, but they were investigating.”
“I don’t think you should count on—”
“I’m not. Really. But I keep remembering how Jerry used to rant all the time that the business was changing. When he started out, it was great! Every studio had rows and rows of producers, and he took projects to them and they bought them and developed them, and Jerry was rich and powerful and happy. Then he would say, ‘These days, I’ve got to package everything! Why have I got to package everything? I’m not a producer! But now I have to attach the star and I have to attach the writer and I have to attach the director. What are the producers doing all day? Just tell me that one thing.’ But I like that part! I think it’s fun, and I like this package. Here it is, the book, the director, and the financing! But it makes me superstitious. I’m sure everything’s okay. I’m sure I’m just paranoid. Right?”
Isabel picked up her suitcase. She said, “Right.”
In the dining room, everyone already had their salads, microgreens from the greenhouse with a champagne vinaigrette. The rolls were Isabel’s favorite—nine-grain with poppyseeds on top. And, of course, the French butter. She and Stoney were last to the table, and everyone glanced up at them when they entered the room. The two seats remaining were not next to one another. Stoney
took the seat next to Cassie. Isabel had to sit beside Paul (she thought, In the vegetarian ghetto). As soon as she sat down, Marya and Monique began to carry in the soup course. Isabel didn’t notice anything different about them. Monique set her dish of asparagus bisque before her. A pink grilled shrimp in its shell, flecked with bits of seasoning, floated in the creamy green of Stoney’s soup across the table. Hers had a golden cube of a crouton and two small grilled asparagus tips. Zoe said, “Mom. Tell Isabel about that time when I was a kid and they found the dead body.”
Isabel looked up.
Delphine smiled at her, but said to Zoe, “Why do you want to tell that story?”
“I just thought of it. I was telling Isabel about practicing piano before school in the bar there at the hotel, and I thought of that.”
Delphine tossed her head. “It was nothing dramatic. No one was shot or anything. One of the patrons had had a heart attack the night before and fallen down in a corner behind a banquette, under some curtains. He was discovered while Zoe was in there playing her pieces before school.”
“Who discovered him?” said Isabel.
“I think her name was Hortense,” said Delphine. “She would have been the regular cleaner for the lounge.”
“And you were sitting there?” Isabel turned to Zoe.
“I was sitting on the piano bench, yes. I always practiced for an hour, so I’d been there a while.” She put her hands on the table, picked up her fork, put it down. “It was me. I discovered him. As a rule, I made a beeline from the door to the piano and never went anywhere else in the room. I stayed where I was supposed to be and kept my fingers moving. Before Hortense came in, I saw the foot in its shoe right there by the curtain. It was a brown- and-beige spectator oxford with a capped, pointed toe, and the brown part was either real alligator or fake alligator. I can see it perfectly in my mind’s eye.” She looked around the table, then right at Isabel. “I knew that because I got up and walked across the room for the first time ever, and I stared down at that shoe, then at his trouser cuff, which was cream-colored, then at his knee, and then I went back to the bench and I played through my piece. I didn’t look at his face; the one shoe was enough for me. Then Hortense came in with her vacuum cleaner, and then, a moment later, she screamed.”
The asparagus bisque was good, Isabel thought. She finished it, then ate the grilled asparagus.
Delphine said, “Well, I didn’t even hear about it until later that day, after Zoe had gone off to school. What grade were you in?”
“I was in fifth grade, so I would have been ten.”
Monique took away Isabel’s soup bowl and came back a moment later to set down her next course, a mound of wild rice set upon some leaves of Bibb lettuce, with two slices of grilled eggplant beside it, nicely decorated with a grid of black lines.
“That looks good,” said Cassie. Those outside the vegetarian ghetto had salmon instead of eggplant.
Isabel saw Stoney nod appreciatively, and then divide the salmon with an expert flick of his fork.
“I’ve never seen a dead body,” said Isabel.
Elena had expected, of course, to think about death at lunch, but not to talk about it. It was appropriate to the times, but also to the room, which was a fantasy of France and specifically of the old market Les Halles. The feathery, soaring metal grillework of that building was neatly painted on the walls, and in the frames created by the faux grillework, the painter had painted long, sunny perspectives of Paris: Eiffel Tower to the west, Luxembourg Gardens to the south, Père Lachaise Cemetery to the east, and Montmartre to the north, all recognizable and in proportion, as if, indeed, you could look out through the nonexistent windows of Les Halles and see what you could not see. There were real windows on three sides, too, with interior shutters. When the shutters were closed, as in the evening, the French scenery encircled the room. When they were open, as now, sunny France and sunny southern California complemented each other nicely and gave the dining experience an air of picnic exuberance. The whole idea had been Joe Blow’s—inspired by the chandelier above their heads, Louis XV, that Mike had found in France but had not had a spot for in the Menton house. The trompe-l’oeil artist Joe found had done nice things with the ceiling, too, making the “ironwork” seem, though the ceiling itself was flat, to soar away above the chandelier into misty darkness. Elena thought it was the best dining room she had ever seen. But death was present here—how many protesters against modern chicken-raising methods knew that the poulterers of nineteenth-century Paris had kept chickens in cages in the vaults beneath Les Halles, sending children and servants down to hold candles for the chickens so that they would eat sufficient grain to keep them fat? Since Elena knew this, the decor gave her the vague sense that underneath the dining room there were some sort of mysterious vaults or caves, where animals, vegetables, and wine were imprisoned. Today, too, it was connected in her mind to the Reformation/Counter-Reformation Suite (was that one directly above this one?), where she and Paul had chatted the afternoon before.
“I’ve never seen a dead body,” said Isabel.
Delphine looked at Zoe, and Elena suspected that Delphine was thinking that, therefore, her child-rearing practices were vindicated. And they were, as far as Elena was concerned. Delphine said, “Honey, the best thing to do with a dead body is to sit with it for a while. Till you get used to it. If someone else is around, you should both sit with it, and chat about what that person was like. In my experience, if you can just give yourself time to get used to the way that person is now that he’s dead, or she’s dead, then all the rest comes easier. Dead bodies are quiet. That’s comforting, in a way.”
Although Elena expected her to go on, she didn’t. Next to Isabel, Paul, who had been very at home in that suite, not impressed at all with the tortures depicted in the paintings, continued to eat in his methodical way. She put her hand under the table, on Max’s knee, and felt his hand cover hers momentarily. The main course was good. She had suggested the julienne of fennel to Raphael, and she thought it added a crisp, bright accent that went well with the earthiness of the wild rice. Of course, for her, eating wild rice in April, on the second of April, was somehow an odd thing. She had grown up eating wild rice, but they had always eaten it in the fall, when her father brought home bags from Minnesota and Wisconsin during the deer season. Another thing you could do with wild rice was something Elena would never do, but her mother had often done, which was to make wild-rice–cheese soup (Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom and Cream of Potato both figured into this recipe). As a child, she had also seen her grandmother pop kernels of wild rice like popcorn, then salt them and use them as a garnish, but she had never tried that herself. She said, “I saw five dead bodies before I was twenty-three. One was my thirty-five-year-old uncle, who was kicked in the head by a horse when I was ten, and another was a boy in our neighborhood who drowned when he was sucked down a storm drain.” As she made this remark, she wondered if Simon would take it as his cue to tell her if he had ever seen a dead body, but all he said was “Jeez, Mom!,” lifting his eyebrows.
Joe appeared in the doorway and looked at them all. He didn’t look as playful and bright as usual. She suspected all four of the staff were happy to see them go. Elena wondered if she would be out of bounds making sure that Isabel, as well as Simon, wrote the Russians a thank-you note within the next three days.
She took a sip of the Riesling. It was too sweet to be one of her favorites, and she didn’t think it was quite right with the salmon, but the others seemed to like it well enough. In fact, she dreaded the wine chapter in her book, and had been putting it off for six months, in favor of Congress, the presidency, and auto maintenance. They had chatted in the Reformation/ Counter-Reformation Suite for almost an hour. She had been walking down the hall from the Flower Room, and Paul had said, “Have you seen this suite? It’s fascinating.”
She had said, “I guess I’ve avoided it.”
Paul had said, “This is my fourth time. You shouldn’t
miss it, really.” And so they had gone in, and Paul had shut the door behind them.
She saw Isabel glance sharply at Stoney and then looked at her plate again. Whatever was between Stoney and Isabel seemed to complicate Isabel’s attitude, but not Stoney’s. Isabel’s attitude toward things, truth to tell, was already plenty complicated, Elena felt.
“I want to be buried with my handbag,” said Cassie, suddenly.
“What is that about?” said Delphine.
Cassie picked up her handbag, which was next to her chair, and said, “When I was carrying it down the stairs, I realized that. It’s not about anything, except at my age these are the sorts of idle thoughts you have.”
“Do you know that joke?” said Charlie.
Cassie shook her head. Charlie settled back in his chair and began while everyone else continued to eat. “There’s this old guy, and he’s incredibly rich, but he’s on the outs with everyone in his family except the wife, and she’s spent her whole life doing everything he’s told her to do. As he gets sicker and sicker, he takes her aside and says, ‘Now, Essie, you’ve got to promise me one thing.’ She says, ‘What’s that one thing?’ And he says, ‘You promise first, and then I’ll tell you. Have I ever treated you badly? Have I ever not had your best interests at heart?’ And she agrees that he hasn’t. So she promises, and then he says, ‘I want you to go to the bank and get all of my money, and put it in my casket in a lead-lined box with me.’
“Well, old Essie is pretty pissed, and she says, ‘What about me?’ But he says, ‘You promised, and, besides that, you’ve always been a good wife and done what you’re told, and Jesus will provide for you because you’ve done your wifely duty, just the way he always has.’ So she calmed down, and pretty soon he died.
