by Jane Smiley
Stoney said, “What did all you guys say when Jerry died?”
Right then, Cassie, who was sitting beside him, looked at him, then put her arm around him. She said, “Honey, we said, ‘Thank God.’ We said, ‘Thank God he lived, and thank God, given his illness, that he died, and thank God we knew him, because he was one of a kind.’”
Stoney looked at Max. Max said, “I would agree with that.”
Now Stoney burst into tears. After a moment, he put his elbows on the table, to either side of his plate, and put his head in his hands. It was sudden. Joe Blow passed the door, and everyone sat very still for a moment. Elena glanced around Paul at Isabel. Isabel was staring at Stoney, but not in shock or horror—more, Elena thought, in relief.
“Here’s a story, Stoney. And actually, it fits right in with this whole discussion,” said Max. He arranged his utensils neatly on his plate, then pushed his plate away. “When Jerry was your age, and I think you were about six—when was that? Early seventies sometime?—anyway, we all had bushy sideburns and lots of hair. I think I had a swashbuckler’s mustache myself. I didn’t know Jerry very well then. He’d picked me out as a hippie type, but a hippie from New York, one he could trust. This particular Saturday morning, he showed up at my apartment. He had on neatly pressed jeans and a nice shirt and polished shoes. I let him in anyway, and he said you had gone to Disneyland for the weekend with your cousins from New York, and since he had two whole days to himself, could we score some LSD? Somehow, he’d decided that I was the LSD type.”
Elena glanced at Simon, who was looking at Max with considerable interest. What was she going to say when he asked her directly if she had ever taken LSD? She tried to look unfazed by this aspect of Max’s story.
“I wasn’t as tuned in as Jerry thought, but I knew a guy in the music business who lived out in Malibu, and so we got into Jerry’s car and drove to his place, which was a ramshackle ranch house on a nice private piece of ground. As we drove, Jerry started looking neater and neater, and less and less cool, and I just kept wondering if my friends would think he was a drug agent or not, but it turned out, when I told my friend that Jerry was a movie agent, he practically fell to his knees in gratitude that Jerry should come to his humble abode, and so there we were. I remember they had these tiny orange pills, and they called them ‘sweet tangerines.’ We each took one.
“The house was full of people. Some of the girls were smoking marijuana and baking chocolate-chip cookies, which of course the guys were eating practically off the hot baking pans. Anyway, I kept my eye on Jerry, who was walking around the yard and the gardens, staring at the poppies and the ceanothus and the Indian paintbrush and oohing and aahing the way you did. I would go out the front door, walk around with him for a while, then come in the back door, and every time I came in, one of the girls would be opening the oven and pulling out a fresh pan of cookies. I thought it was a miracle, and what was especially miraculous was that on each pan the cookies were fewer and bigger, until I was amazed to come in one last time and discover that she was opening the oven and pulling out a pan, and on it there was one big cookie!”
Paul and Charlie laughed.
“I took this as some sort of sign that we were supposed to leave, so we got into the car.”
“Oh dear,” Elena could not help remarking.
“Well. We didn’t get far. Maybe a mile, because Jerry wanted to stop and wander around a small park. So we did that for a while: we lay down and watched the clouds. For me, they kept turning into pyramids. Jerry kept talking about glaciers, so I think he was seeing something different. He couldn’t believe how slowly they moved. Anyway, we were just sitting there, letting the time pass, and I saw a guy come into the park with a couple of dogs. Jerry had taken off his glasses, so he didn’t notice them for a bit, and then he did. Jerry liked dogs, so, as soon as he noticed them, he called out to them. They were Dobermans, and they were friendly. When he hailed them, they turned and came running over. I saw that there was something wrong with the one right away, but Jerry was tremendously nearsighted, so it wasn’t until the dogs were right next to him that he saw that one of them was sleek and muscular and gorgeous, black and tan, while the other one was a skeleton. You could count every rib and every vertebra. And it came right up to him and licked him on the face. He just sat up and started yelling, ‘What’s the matter with this dog? What’s the matter with this dog?’
“The owner was way behind the dogs, and when he got to us, huffing and puffing, Jerry was about out of his mind, petting the skeletal dog and almost crying, he was so upset. The owner apologized, and said that the dog had been poisoned, and had gotten out of the pet hospital a few days before, and hadn’t gained any weight back yet. So Jerry shut up, and the owner walked away with the dogs. He seemed like a nice enough guy. Jerry fell back onto the grass, panting, and when I got around to asking him what was going on, which always took a while when you were doing acid, he said, ‘That was Life and Death! I saw Life and Death! I called them to me without knowing which was which, and they both came running! And Death was the friendlier one!’ I think I said, ‘Death was the female,’ and he said, ‘Exactly!’ But he was really shook. Finally, I said, ‘They were dogs. One of them was poisoned.’ And he said, ‘That doesn’t prevent them from meaning something.’”
Stoney had stopped weeping while Max was telling this story. Now he said, “I never heard he did anything but hit the bottle every so often. Well, that and smoke three packs a day.”
“I don’t think LSD suited him very well. Anyway, he was older than I was, and he had responsibilities. I don’t know exactly what that day meant to him as the years passed, but he asked me if I remembered it every so often. That’s all I know.”
“That doesn’t prevent it from meaning something,” said Zoe.
Stoney looked at her.
They had finished their main course, and now Monique and Marya came in and began clearing the plates. Elena scrutinized Monique for a moment, then decided for the millionth time in her life to stop being self-conscious. But then, as Monique passed behind Simon, she touched his shoulder. It was just the briefest, most fleeting touch, but it was definitely intended, and it gave Elena an uncanny feeling. She thought right then that Simon probably had seen a dead body, but that he would never tell her about it.
Joe Blow said, “May I bring anyone coffee?”
Elena looked around the table. Delphine was shaking her head. Cassie said, “Not for me.” She was reaching under her chair for her handbag. Simon was already getting up from his seat. Isabel and Stoney were gazing at one another. Paul had folded his napkin and placed it on the table. Zoe took a deep breath and then released it, all the while staring out the window. Max leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek, which pushed back his chair. Charlie said, “Well, I…” Elena shook her head and gave Joe Blow a cordial, and grateful, smile. She said, “No, thank you, Joe. You-all have been wonderful.”
Simon said, “Well, yeah!”
Stoney said, “We really ought to take one last stroll around, given the fact that we might not come back here, and even if we do, it won’t be the same, and even if it is, we won’t be the same.”
“You sound like Paul,” said Isabel.
“Well, you know, I was talking to Paul the other day, and he said, ‘I don’t mind ça change, because, in fact, there is also always la même chose.’”
Isabel laughed.
Just then, his cell phone rang. He took it out of his pocket, looked at it, put it back. She said, “Who is it?”
“Avram. But he can leave a message. I can hardly hear anything up here anyway, even voice mail. Pleasure before business, I always say.” She took his arm, and went with him under the pergola, into the rose garden. The roses themselves weren’t blooming, but it was the quickest way to the back lawn.
Most of the others had left right after lunch, though Isabel wasn’t sure about Zoe and Paul. Stoney put his arm around her waist, and she put her arm around his waist. He s
till looked a bit disheveled from lunch. If he had been a girl, he would have gone upstairs to wash his face and comb his hair, but he had only taken a few deep breaths and blown his nose in the table napkin. There was something about this that Isabel found endearing. She squeezed his arm and was about to ask him how he was feeling, but just then he said, “I guess Charlie is driving straight to LAX, even though his plane isn’t until six tomorrow morning.”
“I’m sure he thinks he had a very weird vacation. Maybe it was weird enough to send him back to his wife. He’d be much better off with her, you know, mowing the lawn and driving the grandchildren to their soccer games, than he is now. You heard what he said.”
Stoney nodded. He said, “Some of those old guys who think they’re flying at last are really just falling out of the nest. I got this weird feeling looking at him that if she doesn’t take him back he’s going to be dead pretty soon, like in a couple of years.” He uttered this sentiment just normally, as if it were a fact of life and no longer the founding principle of his Weltanschauung. Then he added, “But he didn’t sell us out.”
“No, I don’t think he did.” They continued down the path to the white stream. She began, “How are you—” but Stoney said, “You know what I call Cassie’s car?”
“What?”
“The ‘Enigma-mobile.’”
“What does that mean?”
“Do you understand those two?”
“What’s not to understand? They’re friends. They get along. I mean, they’re neighborly. I think it’s nice. And unusual.”
“Well—”
“They’re friends.” Isabel spoke definitively. And cleared her throat.
After a moment, Stoney said, “Well, yeah.”
“You just don’t understand female friendships.”
“No,” he conceded, “I’m sure I don’t.”
“The interesting thing for me was to watch Mom and my grandmother for ten days. I mean, I know they haven’t spent that kind of time together in years and years.”
“They seemed to get along.”
“Yes, I know, but it’s like it doesn’t occur to Mom not to get along. She’s such a narcissist that she’s immune to the swirl of family feelings, good or bad. I think she’s incredibly strange. I thought she was strange before, but now I think she’s even more strange.”
“And your grandmother isn’t strange?”
“She isn’t strange. She’s ideal.” Isabel said this without any self-consciousness, just saying at last what she always felt, but Stoney’s head swiveled around and he grinned at her, as if she were joking. She saw that he saw immediately that she was not.
They came to the white stream and walked along it. Just down from where they were walking, a small group of colorful agates, broken in pieces, had been set into the bottom of the stream. The stones were large enough so that the water split and flowed picturesquely around them. Isabel and Stoney sat down at this spot. She slipped her feet out of her loafers and slid them into the cold water, which glistened around her calves. After a moment, Stoney rolled up his jeans and did the same, saying, “They brought this sand all the way from Australia. Fraser Island. The sand there is perfectly white.” The weird little stream was so clear that the only way she could tell that it was running was when a fragment of a leaf or a bit of a stick slid telekinetically past. Stoney put his hand through the water and dug his fingers into the streambed. As he pulled his hand from the water, the sand flowed out of his palm and drifted in a silvery ripple around the agates. “And each grain is perfectly spherical. Joe Blow told me about it. That island is in the ocean, but it’s full of freshwater creeks that rise near the middle of the island and flow to the sea. Supposedly, they are branches of an underground river that comes to the island below the ocean, from Malaysia. When he was explaining it to me, I didn’t quite understand it.”
“Do you want to talk about lunch? About that black-dog story?”
“Not right now.”
“Do you want to say anything about your feelings?”
“No.”
She waited a moment, then said, “I liked this stream the other day, but now it seems odd. I prefer my sand golden. I like the sand on Kauai. This grass is nice, though.” She pulled her feet out of the water and shimmied a few feet up the hill, then leaned back and surveyed the hillside. “Look at this grass. Grass like this in California is so luxurious. I’d much rather lie down in a big field of grass than on the beach, I have to say.” But what she really wanted to say was, Are you okay? Are you happier? Are you less filled with contradictions and complications? But if she asked those questions and he answered them, then she would have to ask herself questions that she couldn’t answer, like “What now?”
He moved up the hill until he was just beside her. She looked at him. He said, “And do you want to say anything about your feelings?”
She knew she should be saying yes, but she said, “No.”
Stoney looked up at the sky. He said, “You know why we’re sitting here?”
“Are we going to talk about our feelings anyway?”
“You brought it up.”
“I brought up your feelings, not mine.”
Stoney laughed and lay back. After a moment, he put his arm across his face, to shade his eyes from the sun. She rolled over, and stretched out on top of him so that her head shaded his face. He put his arm around her.
She said, “Why are we lounging here?”
“Because we can’t bear to leave.”
“I can bear to leave. I think it’s strange here. I miss my room.”
“Well, that’s true. I can bear to leave, though not to get back to my specific chair in front of my specific TV.” She kissed him on the nose. “And I think the Amber Room is oppressive and this hillside is bizarre, too. It’s like when you go on a movie set at Paramount or somewhere, and the set is, say, a run-down old farmhouse.” He pushed her hair back, then ran his index finger across her cheek. “You step up on the screen porch, and not only does it look just like a screen porch somewhere in Illinois—I mean, with the right moldings and the authentic-looking steps—they’ve also done the boards. If you bend down and look at the floorboards that you’re standing on, they have layers of paint beneath the surface coat. They look like they would look if they were sixty years old and had been halfheartedly scraped and repainted two or three times over the years. You think it’s amazing!” This time, she kissed him on the lips. After a moment, he went on, “You marvel at the skill and thought of the set decorators and scene painters, but then you think, Who’s going to see this? Even the actors aren’t going to notice this, and certainly it won’t show up on film. But they did it anyway.”
“Usually that sort of excessive detail is the result of low labor costs.”
“Is it, Miss Smarty Pants?”
She nodded.
Stoney ruffled her hair. He said, “Well, it gives you the willies, and this place gives me the willies in the same way. So it’s not that I can’t bear to leave, it’s that I can’t bear to go anywhere.”
Isabel heard herself say, “Why is that?”
Now he looked right at her, and he kept looking right at her, only shading his eyes with his hand. He squirmed underneath her, and pulled her more tightly into him. She put her face down against his neck, and the grass brushed her face and gave off its fresh aroma. While they were not talking, Isabel could hear lots of birdsong—calls and trills from the aviary up at the house, but also humbler notes from the trees across the stream. And from the woods there was some sort of little cry, as of a squirrel, and scratching sounds. No traffic. Maybe this was the only place she had ever been in L.A. where no traffic hum intruded. It was true, she admitted, that she knew nothing. Or maybe it was that she knew so many things now, about herself and Stoney and their relationship, that no rational decisions could be made. He was too complex for her. She was too complex for him. And their history was certainly too complex for Max (though, she was willing to admit after today’s
revelations, possibly not too complex for her mother). Yes, she could tell her father her story, and if she backed it up with a lot of feminist theory, she could talk him into accepting it, just as he always let her do whatever she wanted because she wanted to, but even now, even lying here like this, she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do. She suspected that that was what Stoney was saying, too.
She felt his arms release her, then she felt his hands on her shoulders. A moment later, he was looking at her. Soberly. Seriously. He said, “Are you still afraid of being alive?”
She knew perfectly well what he was referring to, but she pretended not to. “What?”
“Remember in the middle of the night that first night, when you asked me whether being suicidal was the same as being afraid of being alive?”
“I was so stoned.” She kissed him again, but he made her look at him. She said, “That night was fun. I loved that night.”
“Well, are you? You said the baby boomers had wrecked everything and the only thing people your age had to look forward to was everything getting worse and worse.”
“Don’t you think that’s true?”
“I don’t know. I leave it to you to distinguish between the personal and political.”
“There is no—” But she knew that he knew that she knew that, right at this moment, that was too easy. He was looking at her very earnestly. She said, “Things are likely to get worse and worse.” She rolled off him, and then he rolled onto her, pressing her deliciously into the turf. She said, “The probability is that they will get worse and worse, or at least get a lot worse before they get better.”
He said, “I think so, too. It makes you think of the Thirty Years’ War or the Hundred Years’ War, even if you don’t know anything about them.”
They agreed on this, then. But, really, what was important was that she could not stop staring at him. She had always thought he was handsome, even though no one ever said that about him—quite the contrary. Blair Underwood was handsome. Heath Ledger was handsome. Brad Pitt was handsome. Owen Wilson was handsome. Stoney Whipple was not, by any standard, handsome. And yet. She said, “I know. But I guess, between Mom and Cassie and Simon and everything that they’ve done to drive me absolutely crazy, I’m not especially focused on that idea right this very minute.”
