by Jane Smiley
“Well, Max has been in Hollywood for a long time. And he doesn’t fool himself about anything, so my guess is he’s got a pretty good idea of, you know. Anyway, he has a career left, but it’s harder, and I don’t know that he’s made up his mind to do the hard stuff. I’ve only officially been his agent for a couple of years, and we’ve hardly worked together, because he hasn’t shown much interest.” He didn’t say that, once or twice when he was still lucid, even Jerry had expressed worry about Max.
“What’s the hard stuff?”
“Keeping on writing and pitching and sucking up. I think it’s a toss-up between the three of those which is the hardest. I’ve suggested him for a few things and I’ve suggested a few things to him, but nothing’s connected in a little while. I thought he was going to make this mountain-climbing thing in British Columbia, but then he had that angioplasty when they were in pre-production, remember that? And they’d already rented the helicopters and everything, so they couldn’t wait. But after I saw the rough cut, I was glad he didn’t do it. Talk about slow. Step step step is nothing compared to handhold, grunt, foothold, heave, handhold, deep intake of icy breath, foothold, groan. And then it didn’t even look very good. It reminded me of that old Monty Python routine where you’re watching one of the Pythons hoist himself in agony up the sheer side of the icy cliff, and then the camera pulls back, and there’s Eric Idle standing there on the sidewalk with a microphone, and he says, ‘Will he make it? Yes, here we are, watching the famous mountaineer Marvin Parvin climb the Edgware Road! Marvin, can we have a word with you?’ And then he bends down and holds the microphone to the other guy’s lips.”
“That’s so funny.”
“Believe me, that was an angioplasty sent from God.”
“Maybe my dad could have made it better.”
“Well, he would have been more organized, I’m sure, but I don’t think he would have been able to screw more money out of what they laughingly called the production company. They were very cheap, which is not to say that the insurance people weren’t making them pay through the nose, too. But he has to write something. Something with two characters about your age that takes place in three small rooms and an old car.”
“Something really cheap, in other words.”
“Really cheap would be the key, and with the right angle, probably about stepparents and the eternal screwups of the baby-boom generation, something that would be independently financed and that we could take to Sundance.” He looked at her in the blue light. “Actually,” he said, “Max should do a documentary. I showed him a book a few months ago, about salt. It was a great book, and I thought it would make a great documentary. He said, ‘I would rather make a movie about asphalt.’ I didn’t know whether he was joking, or whether there was something really interesting about asphalt. And then it turned out that there’s a famous old movie named Asphalt.” He shrugged. “So I haven’t mentioned the documentary thing, but people love documentaries now.”
“Everyone in Cowell College at the University of California at Santa Cruz is intending to be a documentary filmmaker.”
“There you go.”
“I like documentaries. Didn’t I tell you that?”
“Yes, but you were stoned.”
“Should I worry about him?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because, as my father, Jerry Whipple, always said to me, ‘It’s not the job of the kids to worry about the parents, because the parents’ problems are way beyond anything the kids can fix. So go worry about yourself, and then I will stop worrying about you, and then I will have the time I need to worry about myself.’”
“That’s just a general principle.”
“Let Elena worry about him. That’s her job.”
“Maybe she doesn’t know enough about Hollywood to worry about him.”
“All the better.”
“They did screw up.”
“Who?”
“The baby-boom generation.”
“Well—”
“You should live in Santa Cruz, the town that time forgot. You can get to know two generations of hippies there. I had this roommate freshman year. Her name is Gloria. She’s from up near Redding somewhere. She was raised in a tepee. She was always setting off the smoke alarm in our room, smoking dope. She would smoke in the closet in the middle of the night, even though I pointed out to her that that was a definite fire hazard. One time, we were having a party, and somebody else set off the smoke alarm with a cigarette, so the dorm manager came down with a couple of security guys, and they opened the closet door and there she was, smoking a joint. So that was her last chance, and they told her to come out of the closet, but all she did was curl up in a fetal position and go limp. They had to drag her out and down the hall. She said it was ‘nonviolent resistance,’ but, really, she was just too baked to move.”
Stoney laughed.
“Another time, everyone was talking about what their parents liked to do, and Gloria said that her mom’s favorite thing was to go to one of these competitions where she would catch a sheep, shear it, card the wool, spin it, and make something before the end of the day.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“It does not prepare you for this world! And then we would have this constant discussion about a certain ethical question—should parents sell dope in front of their children? Whenever I said no, they all said, Well, she’s from Hollywood. Then they would talk about ‘white-skin privilege,’ and I always thought”—she turned her face toward him in the blue light and spread her hands under her chin—“‘Hello! Look at me, you blondes!’ but I didn’t say anything, because of course I knew what they were getting at, so I was just as bad as they were, and cowardly, too.”
Stoney laughed.
“I’ll tell you something. You’re fifteen years older than I am. People normally think that’s good, to be the younger one, but I think the fifteen years that I have more than you, say, I think it’s going to be a nightmare. I mean, I’m scared of global warming. I’m scared of estrogen imitators in the water. I’m scared of the death of the rain forests. I’m scared of fish with no eyes. At my job, we talked about that stuff all the time, and you know what, there are people at my job who’ve been there for a whole generation, as long as I’ve been alive, just about, and they’re still going at it, and it’s gotten worse, not better. I mean, there’s this group of gorillas saved here, and that group of hunters and gatherers who don’t drink Coca-Cola there, but in general, it seems like they’ve done more harm than good, because they’ve just been feeding the other side and making it bigger and bigger. Here you are, you sixty-year-old woman, in your Birkenstocks and your homemade wool sweater and your gray hair, and you think globally and act locally, and they just sneer at you! And everything you say or do increases their contempt.”
“The two halves of your analysis don’t really seem to mesh—”
“Well, aren’t you scared? Aren’t you angry?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Angry? Of course I’m angry, I guess, but I’m angry that here I am, doing the same thing as my father and my grandfather, but I’m not doing it very well, not as well as they did, and I’m angry at Dorothy for being angry at me that the power in the agency is shifting to people that Dorothy doesn’t like and never had any respect for, and I can’t stop it, even though that’s my job. We all know that I am the interregnum while Monty and Clark get it together, and believe me, they have a perfect right to be named Monty and Clark, because Monty and Clark were tremendous friends of Dorothy and her father, Dorothy is Hollywood royalty, and her father’s father came over with the original Hungarians, and before they came, they were very important in Hungary, which means that Dorothy was born to be important, or maybe not, depending on what day it is, maybe they were extra unimportant and that’s why it is so amazing that Dorothy is who she is today. So—someday Monty and Clark are going to take over the agency, except that Monty plays the guitar and the piano and the sax
ophone and wants to write music for video games—that’s his consuming ambition—and Clark wants to ride reining horses out in the Valley and live with that girl who trains dolphins at SeaWorld, and Dorothy is of course happy that they have talents, but in Hollywood, if you’ve got talent but not genius, then you are nobody, really. So…” He shrugged.
“You don’t sound angry. You sound like you think it’s funny.”
“Well, I do think it’s funny. But I am angry.”
“But you’re not scared?”
“Honey, I’m scared your father is going to find out I’ve been putting it to you since you were underage, since my father was alive, since I was married. If this were a Hollywood movie, it would be Badlands or something like that, and probably I would have to die in a major shoot-out in the end, or at least a car wreck.”
“What’s Badlands?”
“Badlands is that Terrence Malick movie where Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek go on a killing spree in South Dakota, and she is about fifteen, though I think she was about your age when she made the movie. Anyway, they have fun, but he has to die in the end.”
“I can’t believe you’re not scared about bigger things.”
They stared at each other. Stoney knew that now it was time to mention the war, which had come up for discussion at the dinner table after an entire day without television. In the afternoon, Stoney had walked down the hill to his own house and watched CNN for an hour, but he didn’t say anything about it when he got back, implying that he’d gone to the gym, where, of course, CNN or Fox News would have been blasting away anyway. Whatever show he’d been watching on CNN at his house amounted to a parade of experts interspersed with footage of the soldiers crossing the desert, and Stoney found himself agreeing with all of them, even when the moderator advertised them as being in violent disagreement with one another. What swayed him, he thought, was the conviction with which each one spoke, even those speaking for the administration, of whom Stoney was inclined to be suspicious. Part of the reason he didn’t say anything at the dinner table was that he hadn’t learned anything from the television except maybe that if all premises were true then no conclusions could be drawn, a remark that would confirm Isabel’s impression that he had arrived prematurely at some plateau of uselessness, though his own idea was that he had risen artificially and reluctantly to a higher stage of development (marriage, moderate career success, pretty good money, though not children) than he had actually been capable of, and was now falling back to his natural level, which was more or less adolescent (eating whatever was in the refrigerator, getting to work most of the time, driving around even when he didn’t need to, and watching car chases on TV). He said, “I am not for the war.”
“There’s this woman at my job whose husband was killed in the Trade Center eleven days after I met her. She’s convinced that he was one of the ones who jumped. For a long time after, she would stare at pictures of the ones who jumped, trying to figure out if she could recognize him, and then she said that she saw him, something about his face or his body or something, and so she knew that he jumped, and she began to wonder if when he jumped he was on fire, though that didn’t appear in the picture. She stopped talking about it, but if you asked her she would tell you her latest ideas, because she said she had decided that the best policy for her mental health was not to offer to talk about it, but not to resist talking about it, either. I thought that was good myself, in principle. Last year, we were working on a project together, just working up a proposal about funding research into temperate rain forests, and when we began reading up on the material, we came across these guys up north who climb the sequoias to look at what’s going on in the canopy. One time, she said, sort of to herself, ‘Well, that’s like the thirty-fifth floor,’ and these images came into my mind of her husband jumping from the sixty-fifth floor, because that’s where his office was. So we were reading along and working, or pretending to work, saying this and that, and all of a sudden I felt like I was in her mind and it was hell. It made me breathless to think that for over a year she’d had this constant, pounding image of her husband jumping out of the window of his office, maybe on fire. While I was reading a book or sleeping or riding the subway thinking how lucky I was to be in New York or, you know, arguing with Leo, she was seeing that repeat over and over again. The husband doesn’t have that. He’s dead. I feel sorrier for her than I do for him. So that’s what I mean by a larger fear.”
“You mean a fear of being alive.”
“Yes, I do. I am afraid of being alive. And I think my job has made it worse, because we’re always talking about endangered things. Do I sound suicidal?”
“Excuse me?” At this word, Stoney felt truly startled.
“Do you think being afraid of being alive is the same as being suicidal?” As she said this, she had her most typical Isabel look on—inquisitive and intent, vaguely threatening (which surely she inherited from Zoe, whose displeasure was a sight to see), not at all suicidal as Stoney had seen it—strung out on drugs or depressed. He said, “I have no idea.” And then, “I hope not.” Then he said, “You watched television today, didn’t you?”
She nodded.
“Me, too. But I didn’t get anything out of it.”
She nodded. She looked less intent, and younger, too. Since she was as tall as he was and broad-shouldered, like Max, and strong, he was not in the habit of worrying about her—more in the habit of trying not to offend her. This went back to when she was sixteen, too, and full of teenaged-girl bravado. Now, though, he saw it was time to do what his dad meant when he said, “Be a man.” He put his arms tightly around her and pulled her into him. He even put his chin on her head, as a way of enclosing her protectively. Then he said what Jerry might have said: “But, Isabel, you don’t have to think about the whole world. In fact, I think you should try not to think about the whole world. That’s what crazy people do. That’s why they end up thinking they are Jesus Christ or Genghis Khan or someone like that. Did you ever see that Albert Brooks movie Defending Your Life? There’s a place where he talks about how everyone thinks he is a reincarnation of Napoleon or Alexander the Great, when actually he’s just a reincarnation of someone who got chased by a bear, or hit by a car.”
“I don’t see what you’re getting at.”
“Well, of course you’re afraid to be alive, if you think being alive is rectifying or even sorting out all the causes and effects that produce the war, or the fish with no eyes, or the women whose husbands have been killed. You should be afraid if it’s that. But maybe it isn’t that.”
“What is it?”
“What is life?”
“Yeah.”
Sitting like this, with his arms around her and her warmth and fragrance engulfing him, he thought that it would be romantic to say, This, this is life, just like that, the way you would say it in a movie, but in fact he could not say that, because for such a long time he had been careful to define this as not life. Life was everything outside of this room-in-the-sky. So he said, “Okay, let’s say that life is a much smaller thing, the thing of doing what needs to be done when it needs to be done. Accomplishing the tasks or making the decisions that present themselves to you as they present themselves to you.”
“How would you come up with a plan, Stoney, if you just did that?”
“I don’t know.”
“It would just be chaos.”
“No, it wouldn’t. I mean, look at what happens when people die. It doesn’t matter what they planned, really. Their lives are consistent. In fact, they did the same things over and over. Even if they have the luxury of years of psychoanalysis, like my father had, in an effort to break old patterns and destroy the hold of the past on the present, blah blah blah, he talked about it for years, it was all of a piece when he died. Even though he died of a brain tumor, and everyone thought, ‘Well, where did that come from?,’ I remember thinking as soon as he told me the diagnosis, ‘Well, what do you expect, Dad? You think too much, and now you broke
it.’”
“Oh, Stoney!”
“Well, I was sympathetic and really devastated, actually, and the whole year of his decline was the worst year of my life, but my dad aways had a theory, and his brain tumor was a perfect example of theory buildup. The neurons were crusted over or worn out or something like that. At one point, I read that book by Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and I thought that I had located my father’s tumor right in the spot where all the psychoanalysis had taken place. Five times a week for decades. But I don’t know. It would be nice to blame Dr. Epstein. But anyway, whose life have you ever heard of that turned out random? No one. Everybody turned out to have made a life that looked like a package, no matter what they thought about it as it was going on. If you ask me what life is, well, that’s what I say. It’s what you were going to do anyway, before you started worrying about it.”
“Oh, Stoney, you are such a slacker.” But she was smiling and light again. He looked at her and pinched her cheek, then stroked her arm. No suicide there, he thought. Her skin was resilient and hydrated, her eyes were clear, her whole body was well oxygenated and vibrant. When people used the word “suicidal,” Stoney thought, they didn’t know how hard it was to kill the animal. That’s what he’d discovered when his father was dying. For a year after the diagnosis, which was now just about exactly two years ago, all they had done really was try to enable his mind to last as long as his body, and they had failed. In the last two months, when Jerry really hadn’t known what he was doing at all, he had gotten out of bed and wandered around, fortunately setting off all sorts of alarms, night after night, shouting and disoriented, stumbling over furniture, evidently in terror and pain (which was worse?), until Stoney thought it would be easier to shoot him or let him fall in the pool, except that if he had fallen in the pool he would have surely kept swimming, in the same way that he kept eating and walking and yelling and pissing and shitting, a big man, a big animal, but not, of course, Jerry Whipple, husband, father, mentor, boss. The tumor did finally kill him, but only by shutting down the brainstem somehow. By that time, Stoney didn’t care about the details. Thinking about it now, he stroked Isabel’s arm again. Then he said, “Personally, I try to think the smallest thought I can at any given moment.”