Ten Days in the Hills

by Jane Smiley

  “What idea are you focused on this very minute?”

  “I want to ask you a question. Are you handsome?”

  “What?”

  “Are you a handsome man?”

  Stoney’s head dropped back, his eyes closed, and he laughed out loud in true merriment. His arms went around her again. He said, “No, Isabel, no, honey, I am not handsome. Jerry was not handsome, and I look just like him. His genetic endowment was too overwhelming for the lovely Diana, at least in my case.”

  “Then it must be that I love you.”

  “What?” He lifted his head and looked at her again. She decided again that what she was saying was true, so she repeated herself.

  “Then it must be that I love you.”

  “Oh, Isabel.” But his face had softened.

  She ran the tip of her forefinger up the bridge of his nose, then brushed her hand across his forehead. His high-and-getting-higher forehead. She whispered, “Because it must be that the love comes first, and then what you love looks beautiful to you. You look beautiful to me, and you always have.”

  Now he stared at her, so intently that, if she had not known him, she would have thought he was angry, but he wasn’t angry. She saw that he was feeling what she said go all through him, and he had to feel every moment of it, she knew that, he had to let it register in every cell, let it become knowledge that his body understood. She saw that she had said something very serious, even though she had never thought of saying such a thing before now. She felt what she had said go through her, too, and install itself. There was a long silent moment, and then, just before he kissed her, he said, “I am yours, Isabel.”

  They, whoever they were, might as well have been dead, Zoe thought when she sat up and looked at her watch. She, at least, had disappeared into nowhere for some period of time, and as she looked around, she could hardly understand where she was. Above a stream? Near some flowering trees? Sitting in the grass beside a mysterious man? Was he the Woodsman? Was he the Wolf? He could not be the Prince, she thought, because he had a wild, long beard. How did she know if she had slept for ten minutes, and not ten days or ten years? How did she know she was not Sleeping Beauty after all? She wiggled her toes. Her shoes had fallen off her feet. She put them on again. She adjusted her shirt and her bra. The Woodsman was still sleeping. Without knowing who she was or who he was, instinctively, as it were, she leaned over him and kissed him full on the lips. He kissed her back. His lips were elastic and responsive, as if she were not in a dream. His eyes opened. Paul, his name was. She knew instantly and without a doubt that they were not going to see one another again after this unless he did something to claim her, something that was entirely outside of “Paul’s” personality as she had come to know it. And if he was not going to claim her, what then?

  She said, “Paul.”

  Without opening his eyes, he said, “Zoe.”

  She said, “My real name is Susan. Susan Brutt. Did I tell you that?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll never forget when I turned six, right on my birthday. My mother didn’t have any money to give me a present or have a party, so she said, ‘I think we should change our names,’ and she let me choose the names. I named us. I named her Delphinium, because I knew that was a flower, but she said, no, that was not a woman’s name, so she changed it to Delphine. Then we talked about me. I had three ideas. They were ‘Dolores,’ ‘Anne,’ and ‘Zoe.’ She said that ‘Dolores’ meant ‘sad,’ and she had had enough of that. So ‘Dolores’ was out. I wanted ‘Anne,’ because of Princess Anne, but she said, ‘No English princesses.’ So we were left with ‘Zoe.’ That was the only other one I liked. I didn’t like ‘Laura,’ which she thought was pretty, but I thought was common, so she let me have ‘Zoe’ even though neither of us had ever met another Zoe or knew what Zoe meant at the time.” Of course this entire thing with Paul had been a mistake. She knew that.

  He said, “‘Zoe’ means ‘life.’”

  “Yes, it does. We found that out later. After we did the first names, we chose ‘Cunningham’ out of the phone book because it was completely safe, we thought. Totally American. There was a whole list of Cunninghams, right between the Cunhas and the Cupps. And there were Cunningham businesses, like ‘Cunningham Plumbing Supply’ and ‘Cunningham’s Fine Men’s Clothiers.’ There was only one ‘Brutt’—us. But, really, now that I think about it, I never knew if the goal was to disappear into the crowd or to excel. The other thing about ‘Cunningham’ was that it was so long we didn’t need middle names.”

  Paul sat up and kissed her again, her face between his hands, a solid, appreciative kiss. She said, “I never told anyone that before. Her name was Ada.”

  He said, meditatively, “Ada Brutt. Hm.”

  Now, for just a very short moment, she felt herself close to tears.

  He went on. “I called myself ‘Deva’ for a while. A short while, I admit. And in high school, I was called ‘Squirrel’ because when I was a junior I got appendicitis, and when my friends came to see me, I went to show them the scar and they saw that my pubic hair had been shaved, so they decided that my genitals looked like a squirrel, for some reason. So I was known as ‘Squirrel’ for the next year and a half.”

  That weepy sensation went away. She said, “God knows what Max’s real name is. It might be Milstein. I guess his grandfather changed it, or maybe his dad. Nathan Milstein would be his real name. And Jerry Whipple changed his own name, from ‘Hillel Goldman.’ Stoney was named after his mother’s father, so his name really should be Axel Goldman rather than Stoney Whipple. His mother was Diana Carstairs. Did you ever see anything of hers? She made about four movies, but then she was killed on Mulholland Drive. She went right over the edge one night, Max said. I never met her, of course, since I was only about six at that point, and changing my name to Zoe Cunningham. Anyway, her real name was Audrey Putz, daughter of Axel Putz! No kidding! She was from some small town in Iowa that was peopled by Putzes, and even though she died, that still makes me laugh.”

  She and Paul laughed together.

  She went on: “Poor Stoney. So—what I always think is, if there were a biopic of me—which there won’t be because I don’t intend to live an eventful life, though I wouldn’t mind doing a biopic myself, of Josephine Baker—some girl who was born Davina Jefferson but changed her name to, say, Doree Bonard, would play me, Susan Brutt, but as Zoe Cunningham, and it would be directed by Jack Martin, who was originally Aziz Ungatz, and Max Maxwell, originally Nathan Milstein, would be played by some name that is two English nouns, say River Lodge, who was originally Dave Conker.” Zoe thought this was a very good joke.

  “That’s Hollywood,” said Paul. This, perhaps, was why they were breaking up, or diverging, or whatever you would call it—his failure to laugh at what she knew were good jokes. He had (she could feel herself growing irritable), you were given to believe, evolved beyond jokes.

  “If Isabel and Stoney have a baby, I guess we’ll have to call her Ada Susan Audrey Milstein-Putz Goldman, because Isabel is very literal about things like that.” She wanted to say, Max may still be wondering what’s up between Isabel and Stoney, but for some of us, it’s plain as the nose on your face.

  No response. He stood up, and then gave her his hand. She stood up. She said, “It’s almost four. We won’t be back to my place before six, if there’s traffic.”

  “I’ll spend the night at my apartment, I think. Then I can be off to the monastery by five.”

  “That sounds good.” She led the way up to the house. She knew that if, as planned, they had gone to the monastery for the last ten days, there would be none of this diverging. Rather, she would have been incorporated into his life, almost without thinking. But it was evident to both of them that he could not be incorporated into her life. The only question, if you could call it a question rather than an impulse, was whether she should respond to this diverging by having a tantrum, as Delphine might say, or giving vent to her honest feelings, as she wou
ld say.

  They tried the door near the pantry. She thought that she would run up and check her room one last time for anything she might have left behind. She was good at not leaving things behind, because she was always worried about leaving things behind, and she could actually name each of the four things that she had left behind over the years (a not-very-expensive but unique pearl necklace, in which the pearls were encased in individual gold links that were then hooked together; an almost-new flacon of Bulgari Rose Essentielle; a novel called Family Pictures that she had nearly finished; and a silver-framed picture of Isabel at age one and a half, flourishing a spoon).

  That door was locked. To get around to the front, they had either to go back down the hillside and all the way around the swimming-pool complex (since the pools were all interconnected, they would have had to enter the water to cross the complex otherwise) or to go through the garden the other way, circumnavigating the bulk of the building and most of the garden beds. It was annoying. Annoyance was swelling.

  “Look,” said Paul, in his unnaturally cool way, “the drapes are drawn. Aren’t those casements the windows of the library? They’re closed, with the shades down. And over there, that big arched window at the end of the salon. I didn’t even realize that one had blinds. They must have been hidden in the wall somehow.”

  Zoe backed away from the house, looking up. Every window in the second story was whited out, too. She said, evenly, “I did see that the shutters in the dining room were closed as we were coming up the hill. Well, they haven’t lost any time in getting rid of us.” But she was beginning to feel something larger than annoyance, something more like fear.

  “Or maybe taking the day off. They were pretty attentive for the last four days. I don’t know that anyone was getting any time off.”

  “Well, of course,” said Zoe. “But it is a little creepy, don’t you think?” She glanced at him. “I mean, I don’t mind that everyone is gone”—and as they came around the corner of the house, she saw that her car was the only one left in the driveway—“that’s entirely understandable. It’s not a hotel, after all.” Her voice rose a little. She coughed it back to normal and tried to sound casual. “But everyone looks so completely gone. It’s so empty-looking that I almost can’t imagine what’s in there anymore, or even that we were in there, gawking at not just the paintings and the furniture but the walls and the floors and the amenities.” She looked up at the façade. Every window shut and blanked. She said, “But now it hardly looks inhabited. I can’t help thinking that somehow Mike died, or the world ended, so no one cares, and it turned back into, what, a bank vault, I guess. Anyway, that’s what it looks like now.” Yes, she sounded a little upset. “It looks like it might pop.”

  He said, “There’s an interim in the history of every ruin after everyone leaves and before it falls down.”

  Zoe said, “Ugh. Well, it was a strange place all along. I felt like in every room I was constantly being asked to think about history and the meaning of Europe and things like that. I’m sure Isabel loved it.” She went to the driver’s side of the silver Mercedes. Paul opened the door to the passenger’s side. Her door opened with that quality click she liked so much. The keys were in the ignition, where she had left them. They were swaying ever so slightly, which seemed odd, but, then, it only seemed odd by contrast to the utter stillness of the big golden house, the quiet aviary, the gardens unruffled by any breeze. She shivered, then turned on the engine, put the car in reverse, backed around, put the car in drive. They were pointed toward the row of thick eucalyptuses. She forgot to look back at the house before she was halfway down the avenue, and then it was too late—all she could see were smoky-green leaves and peeling silver trunks. He said, “There’s a phrase for what you’re feeling,” and she was tempted not to respond, but in the end, she was curious, so she said, “What?”

  “Existential dread.”

  “Are you feeling it?”

  “No.”

  But she didn’t ask what he was feeling. She was sure she knew. He was feeling relief. Still, they didn’t have their first actual disagreement until she turned left rather than right at Mulholland. Paul said, “Why are you turning left? If you turn right, you can just take Mulholland all the way over to Outpost.”

  “I don’t like Mulholland at this time in the afternoon. Or at all, really. This will be quicker.”

  He said, “For one thing, it’s two miles longer by the highway, and for another, I don’t think it will be quicker. You’re always quicker in L.A. if you go the street way rather than the highway.”

  “Usually it is quicker to go by the streets, but I don’t like Mulholland.”

  “You don’t?”

  “I don’t.”

  “I love Mulholland.”

  “How can you love all those twists and turns? And how can you love any road? You hardly ever drive yourself.”

  “I just like Mulholland.”

  This argument got them almost to the 101. As soon as they were on the 101, she saw that maybe the 101 was a little slow after all. She glanced at him. He was looking at the traffic. Or maybe not. He was looking out the front window. He looked serious, or maybe merely enigmatic. What did they have here, seven miles, maybe eight on the 101?

  He said, “Or you could have gone out the other way, to North Sepulveda and then left on Sunset and over.”

  “That takes forever. No one goes that way.”

  “Well, not on Sunset itself, but—”

  She interrupted him. She said, “You know what Bette Davis said when someone asked her how she had managed such a wonderful and productive career in the movies?”

  He glanced at her. “No.”

  “She said, ‘I always took Fountain.’”

  Paul smiled, and the traffic opened up. Paul said, “I never heard that.” At his smile, her feeling of existential dread dissipated a bit. He actually was nice, she thought. Possibly, she didn’t really know how nice he was, given his manner. She said, “It’s so obvious that Elena is the one for Max, I mean the one who’s ready and willing to live in his bedroom with him, and who never thinks of turning him down for sex.” Traffic slowed again. “She’s just like Ina. I met Ina once. She told me everything I needed to know about Max, French New Wave cinema, nineteenth-century German poetry, puff puff on her Marlboro, Islam, the Reagan administration, her local school-board election, and also me. She looked me up and down and said”—here Zoe went into her Bronx accent—“‘When I was in Hollywood, Zoe, I was too tall and commanding-looking to get parts I liked. I simply did not have the right look for color film. I should have been born in time for black and white. You’re so much less intimidating than I was, and just the right build. What’s your waist, about twenty-five? And your hips, thirty-six? You’ve had surgery, right? On your tits? Really not?’” Paul smiled again, but kept watching the traffic.

  She was willing to admit that she envied Max and Elena. They did get along, and they did have a free and easy affection for one another, and they did evidently have a good sex life, and he was in fact satisfied, and Elena did have no idea how hard it was to satisfy Max. She said, “I think it’s nice that Max has finally found himself the perfect female servant.”

  “Do you?” said Paul.

  “Of course I do. And, obviously, she’s crazy about him, and both the kids are grown, so that’s not a factor, and she seems to accept my mom, so things couldn’t be better, it looks like.” She turned off onto Cahuenga.

  Paul said, “We had a session.”

  “You and Elena had a session? When was that?”

  “Yesterday afternoon, in the Reformation/Counter-Reformation Suite.”

  Zoe turned onto Woodrow Wilson. “What about?”

  “The Iraq war.”

  “But what did you link it to?”

  “The Iraq war.”

  “Yes, but did it go back to her past life as a Chinese peasant, or anything like that? Or biochemical imbalances in her brain?”

  “No. It
went back to the Iraq war.”

  “You let her stay on the surface like that?” Zoe didn’t know whether to be insulted or disdainful.

  “Well, I acknowledged her tendency to obsessive personality disorder, because she brought that up. But actually, I think it’s okay to be disturbed by inhumane and incomprehensible events in the material world. I tried to help her distinguish between productive thought patterns and unproductive ones.”

  “Is she going to have more sessions?”

  Paul cleared his throat. “We talked about closed-loop and open-loop thought patterns. When she’s in a closed-loop pattern, she’s just thinking the same thoughts over and over again, and can’t get out of them, so they get bigger and bigger and she comes to feel more and more helpless. At that point, she needs to divert her thoughts to something else, and keep focused on that until she can relax, then, when she can, as it were, entertain thoughts of the war in Iraq, or the Bush administration, and the Christian right, it might be that she would come up with a new idea for effecting change. That’s what we talked about.”

  “Is she going to have more sessions?” Zoe asked again.

  “She might. She said she felt less preoccupied after. It could be productive for her. At lunch today, she didn’t seem so on edge.”

  “I thought that, too.”

  Here was Pacific View. At Outpost, Paul said, “Do you have any more to say about Max and Elena?” Only now did she realize that this was a session. She said, “I guess I’m surprised that he’s satisfied with someone who is so ordinary.”

  “Maybe,” said Paul, “he’s learned his lesson.”

  “What lesson would that be?”

  “I don’t know. It’s his lesson.” And that was her lesson.

  Left onto Senalda, and up the last hill. It wasn’t dusk, but it was late afternoon. She stopped the car, opened her window, and pressed the buttons. Her gate opened. By the time Paul switched his things and departed, it would be even later. She said, “You won’t be back to your apartment until dark. Would you like to come in?” She drove through the gate, leaving it open. She saw that the gardeners had been there. There was no evidence of wind damage. Her existential dread receded a little more.