Ten Days in the Hills

by Jane Smiley

  Elena made a waving gesture with her hand, mimicking a sea anemone.

  “How much of that sort of thing is too much in a film?” he went on. “I don’t think our models are really Hollywood movies at all, more like National Geographic specials. But even so, if I can look at your hand for a minute, in fascination, then why couldn’t an audience look at it for a minute, too? Maybe they could. And, of course, there would be just the tiniest difference between how he sees the room and how she sees the room. Her arm would look different to her from the way it looks to him, so let’s say for part of the movie—and not exactly half, that’s too obvious—the room is slightly brighter or more vividly colored, or more full of depth than it is in the other section of the movie. His film stock, her film stock. Anyway, think of it this way. Frank kept that show to three hours. Everyone said he was draconian about it. You open your mouth for one more second than your allotted time, and you get the hook. Hallelujah, they held the Oscars to three hours! But, my God, it was three hours long! No camera work! No story! I mean, yes, there was better material than maybe they’ve ever had at the Oscars, what with Brody kissing the girl like that, what’s her name?”

  “Halle Berry.”

  “Of course he couldn’t resist the chance, everyone saw that immediately. And all the stuff with Michael Moore, and then, when they got everyone onstage for the portrait, even Luise Rainer, that was significant drama right there. Just the sight of Luise Rainer all dressed up in that gown and made up and helped out onto the stage. Shocking! We thought she was dead! This one was surely dead, but no! So Frank had a lot to work with, and he did a wonderful job moving it along, and millions of people watched it, so why wouldn’t they watch a minute of your arm, or, you know, Frances McDormand’s arm, while the voice-over makes remarks about things?”

  Elena said, “You want to have penetration?”

  “Well, that would be the promise. I don’t see, if it’s My Lovemaking with Elena, how you could avoid penetration.”

  “You would never get it on the screen. It would be pornography.”

  “Just because of a little penetration? A little penetration embedded in a long conversation? I don’t know about that. Anyway, if the conversation were interesting enough, and the audience got inured to seeing them, us, on the screen, fifty and fifty-eight, who cares? If penetration has a context, then it isn’t pornography, it’s a story. The mere sight of penetration doesn’t arouse, isn’t meant to arouse. It’s their penetration, not an abstract penetration taken out of context. It would be much easier to simply observe and consider a penetration if it were surrounded by other things, especially voice-over. In some sense, the movie would sort of bore the viewer until he was beyond caring about the penetration as penetration. And anyway, in porn movies, they don’t do much with the penetration, because they always want the ejaculation to be on the screen. Our ejaculation would be normal—entirely invisible.”

  “I don’t know that people would see it like that. Don’t you think the penetration would be the news, and that everyone would go to the movie to see the penetration and more or less ignore the other stuff?” Max rolled onto his back and put his hands behind his head. Now the sunlight was stronger. She said, “Are you ready for a cup of coffee?”

  “But having no penetration would be just avoiding the issue. Everyone knows that when you make love you have a penetration and all the various sensations that go with it. How would this movie be different from My Dinner with Andre if there were no penetration?”

  “But here’s another thing. Who would be seeing the penetration? We don’t see the penetration, except from various odd angles.”

  “I see it. I see it in the mirror, and you don’t because you aren’t looking. I also see it from better angles than you do, just because of anatomy.”

  “So would the actor playing you wear one of those little cameras around his head like they do in sports events?”

  “That’s an idea. I’ll have to think about that idea. I actually haven’t seen one of those, so I don’t know how you would fit it onto a regular head, you know, without a helmet or something like that. Also, I would have the penetration in the first act of the movie, not the third. The penetration is not the climax.”

  “What is the climax, then?”

  “Well, think about every Hollywood movie you’ve ever seen. What’s the climax?”

  “A warehouse explosion?”

  “No. The kiss.”

  “They, we, would be making love but not kissing for ninety minutes?”

  “Well, eighty-five. The kiss itself would be quite lengthy, but it would take a while to get to it.”

  “How could they make love for eighty-five minutes without kissing? I don’t think that’s very realistic, especially for us. We kiss all the time.”

  He kissed her. Elena closed her eyes, which shut out the brightness of the room and relocated her back inside her sense of touch. The sensation of his lips on hers flowered along her cranial nerves, which she imagined fanning outward from her lips over and around her head like a spiderweb, and within that web was a darkness whose life she could better sense when her eyes were closed. When her eyes were open, she was all surface, facing the world. When her eyes were closed, she was all hollow, facing inward. And what shape was she? Not precisely human, not precisely bipedal, but more amorphous. She opened her eyes. His face was right there—she could see the bridge of his nose, the orbit of his right eye, and the lid slightly wrinkled across it. Three creases in the corner. The plane of his cheek. She said, “But in some ways, watching people kiss is the most pornographic of all, because, from their point of view, the kiss is in darkness. It’s felt in the body, and there’s no way to get that on film, or even to get that weird view you have of the other person while you’re kissing, just his eye and his hair and the far wall. As soon as they start kissing, no matter what point-of-view shots you’ve had before, you’re out of their consciousness, and you couldn’t have voice-over, either, because they’re kissing. So you’re stuck with watching the two people kiss. I don’t think you—”

  He kissed her again. This time her sense of herself was located between her lips and her hands and arms, because between kisses, more or less as an involuntary response to kissing, they had repositioned themselves in order to address the kiss more fully. Now their heads were tilted at more of an angle, their arms were fully around one another, and they were pressed together all down her breastbone, and belly. It was a satisfying kiss, a whole-body kiss, definitely a kiss of the nerves and the epidermis, not a kiss of the mind. They parted, kissed again for a second. He said, “Of course you could have some cut-away shots that represent the kissing. That’s a technique. It can be kind of cheesy, of course, if you cut away to trees blowing in the wind or surf crashing on the shore. But what if you cut away to something simple and abstract, like mere blackness with some indefinable shadows or light patterns? Just for a second. I mean, at this point, artists have been visually representing the inner life by means of abstract color and shape for more than a hundred years. Why hasn’t this made it into film? That’s a question in itself. It’s a challenge. That’s why this whole thing is a good idea.”

  Elena said, “What if you cut away as soon as their lips touched to that Scream painting? I would like to see that. It would make the whole movie not quite so domestic.”

  But even after two quite superior kisses, he didn’t have an erection. And she was stiff from lying in bed. She was fifty, after all. If she remained too long in one position, muscles contracted, that was just the way it was. She rolled away from him, got up, walked across the room, and picked up the velvet dress. He lay there with his hands clasped behind his head, happy with his idea.

  She picked up the velvet dress and smoothed it. The velvet dress added up to, in every sense, a private triumph for her. As far as she knew, no one at the Oscars or at the Governors Ball had noticed the velvet dress. She had not detected a single lingering glance or turn of the head. Whether this was owi
ng to her own obscurity or to the apparent unimportance of the velvet dress she did not know, but the velvet dress was true silk velvet, of a rich, deep gold color, and it had a lineage—it had belonged to Gene Tierney, and been worn by her, though certainly not to the Oscars. Maybe she had worn it as a young woman. When the dress was new, in 1927, Gene Tierney was only seven years old, so perhaps she had inherited it from her own mother. At any rate, the dress had gotten from Gene Tierney to her niece, and when Elena had told the niece, whom she knew from a cooking class, that she was going to the Oscars, the niece had handed her the dress in a brown paper bag and said, “It’s in terrible shape, practically unwearable.” The niece, whom Elena did not know well, seemed to be the sort of woman who had transcended material considerations, and so no longer valued the dress except as a mildly arresting artifact. Elena, having nothing else to wear and not wanting to spend actual money, had taken the dress to a shop full of Iranian seamstresses. Together, she and two seamstresses had inspected all the frays and tears and holes in the dress. Gestures by all three of them had expressed amazement, hope, despair, willingness to try, willingness to acknowledge that with such an old fabric there were no guarantees, willingness to keep the shop open an extra hour on Saturday for pickup, willingness to pay extra for extra effort. It was an exchange of perfect mutual satisfaction in the end—the repairs were invisible, they cost $144.89, the seamstresses were happy with their work, and the dress fit perfectly, shimmering from her shoulders to her mid-calf in a gold that contained shades of red and silver and brown as well as yellow. Now its nap picked up the slanting sunlight and the velvet seemed to smolder around the sparkling beads. And it had been a practical dress for the Oscars, having no train. Her worst moment, the night before, was when she and Max were standing at the bar, waiting to get a drink, and she and the woman beside her realized simultaneously that she was standing on the woman’s ruffled pink train with both feet. After that, Elena had more or less stayed close to the walls of the room or occupied her seat in the Kodak Theatre.

  She took the dress to the closet, where she opened the closet door and took out a hanger. Max said, “This is a shot I would put in, just a shot of you, perfectly naked, walking across the room and hanging up a dress. No bending down, no shimmy, just your hair falling across your shoulder, the muscles of your back, your waist, the backs of your thighs, your calves and Achilles tendons and heels, moving casually across the room.”

  “Maybe Nicole Kidman would play me.”

  “Wrong type. Too young. I mean, apart from the fact that, after last night, there’s all the added factors. If she got out of bed and walked naked across the room and hung up a dress, she would be hauling her whole career with her, if not in her own mind, then in the mind of everyone in the audience, and in my mind as the director. Frances McDormand is perfect for you.”

  Elena folded up the silver shawl and set it on the table by the door—that was borrowed, too, from her friend Leslie, who had an antique-clothing collection. “Frances McDormand is not my type at all.” She knew she sounded a little waspish.

  “Who is your type?”

  She turned and looked at him. He looked jolly and irreverent. She said, “That’s a dangerous question to answer. Lots of potential for vanity on the one hand and false modesty on the other. What if I said ‘Audrey Hepburn’? What if I said ‘Marjorie Main’?”

  “What if you said ‘Liv Ullmann’? She’s Scandinavian, like you. Or ‘Constance Bennett’?”

  “Constance Bennett was a lifelong blonde and at least four inches shorter than I am. Not to mention that she’s the same age as my grandmother.”

  “But she’s your type. Every move she makes is organized and precise. Every moment she’s onscreen, she’s taking measure, observing. She would never get herself into that situation that, say, Joan Fontaine got into in The Women, where she leaves the husband in a fit of petulance and talks in a baby voice. It’s not in her. The thing you just did, walking across the room naked, hanging up the dress, turning to face me down though I lie at your mercy in my bed, Constance Bennett would have done that effortlessly. Joan Fontaine would have made a fuss about it. It’s one take versus twenty takes.”

  “Thank you, you’re forgiven, she’s dead, so who else?”

  “Frances McDormand.” But he was teasing her.

  “Say who for you.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We’re not actually casting the movie. Just say someone who’s dead. Say someone who’s too attractive, too unattractive.”

  “Let’s see. Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird. Too thoughtful and wise and forbearing. So full of virtues that the good looks slip into the background. That’s not me. Walter Huston in Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Too garrulous and hairy. I can’t jump up and down like he does. I’m too nervous for that.”

  “What if I say Dana Andrews is your type?”

  “I like that.”

  “Whatever he’s doing, you want to watch him. You don’t have to watch him, the way you do Humphrey Bogart. The whole time you’re watching Humphrey Bogart, you’re thinking of reasons to stop watching him, but you keep watching him anyway, even when he makes that little move with his upper lip and you go, Ughh, don’t do that! With Dana Andrews, you just sit there and when he’s onscreen you’re happy and when he’s not onscreen you’re less happy.”

  “That’s a very female perspective.”

  “I’ll tell you what. It’s going to be harder to cast you, because it’s harder to cast a man as a regular man, a man with a brain and a point of view. As soon as you have a man on the screen, everything about him is exaggerated. When he’s lying around in bed, he’s got a manliness problem. When he’s sitting at the kitchen table, he’s got a manliness problem. He’s got to get out of bed and stand up and prove he’s a man and then do that all day and all night, and every time he does something or fails to do something, either he’s more of a man or less of a man. I don’t think that’s going to work in a simple tale of My Lovemaking with Elena.”

  “I didn’t realize you were such a theorist of the cinema.”

  “Adrien Brody could do My Lovemaking with Elena, but not with Frances McDormand.”

  “I think he solved his manliness problem last night, for sure. He took her in his arms, he pulled her to him, he bent her back, he gave her the kiss of a lifetime and took her completely by surprise. His rhythm was perfect.”

  “He did, but men in European movies don’t have a manliness problem. They can do whatever they want.”

  “Brits, too?”

  “They’re transitional. For example, Hugh Grant never has a manliness problem. He has abdicated all considerations of his manliness, and if a question of manliness comes up, he ignores it, so he’s fallen back to the default option—he’s a man. That makes all movies with him much more simple and relaxed. Colin Firth, on the other hand, always has a manliness problem, because his willingness to keep working on the issue is evident in his face every time he’s onscreen. He has to win something or get something or understand something. Hugh Grant only has to allow things to be thrust upon him. So English actors have a choice. American actors have no choice, and European actors are outside the manliness problem altogether.”

  Max laughed.

  By now she had put away everything, closed the closet doors, raised the shades, looked across the canyon at the Getty shining through the smog, straightened the pillows on the settee, and flipped a corner of the area rug, a rose-colored Oriental, so that it lay flat again. The room looked neat and quiet. For her, disorder was what noise was for most people, distracting and irritating, but, oddly, she didn’t mind noise. If the room she was in was straight and the windows were clean, no amount of noise disturbed her.

  He threw the quilt to one side and said, “Here’s a manliness problem right here.”

  She sat down cross-legged on the bed and regarded his member. Once, in the Hustler Store on Sunset, they had gone through all the dildos on the shelf to find the one t
hat most resembled him. In the end, they had settled on the “Big Classic.” Now, though, the Big Classic had subsided into cushy somnolence, though as far as Elena was concerned it was still appealing. It lay over to the side, not a straight, evenly shaped sausage, but more of a baguette, bulging comfortably in the middle and then narrowing just below the cap. Blood vessels of various shapes and sizes ran all over its length. The major artery ran up the left side and branched at about the middle. The cap itself was large. It swept back in a fire-helmet sort of shape and bore a faint triangular discoloration, a birthmark, that was only visible in bright daylight. The most interesting thing about the Big Classic was that, even though it was fifty-eight years old, the fineness of the skin, its smoothness and softness and resiliency, seemed not to have diminished over the years. Was this from lack of exposure to the sun, or simply a feature of this special sort of skin? It differed in this from all the other skin on his body, even the skin in the creases of his hips and the tops of his thighs. And his scrotum showed considerable wear and tear, even though one couldn’t actually say what the wear and tear on a scrotum would be. She said, “I told you I consider this a geopolitical problem.”