by Jane Smiley
“My dad said that did go pretty smoothly.”
Max smiled. He said, “That was very grudging. But I take it as a yes. Here’s our deal. I’ll write something up. You get me that book. You read what I write and I’ll read the book, and then we’ll talk again.”
Stoney said okay, and felt some tension that he hadn’t recognized before flow out of his chest. The thought in his mind as the tension dissipated was of Isabel, not Max. They stood up at the same time. Max was taller than Stoney. He led the way around the cypresses and back through the garden. Stoney thought he should probably go to his office now, or at least down to his house. It was nearly eleven.
Around the pool, every seat was taken, and on the big table sat a plate of fruit and another plate of toast. Zoe was saying, “That’s what he told me.” She shrugged. Isabel gave a snort. It was such a loud, indignant snort that Stoney and Max both glanced at her just as she said, “Oh, I can’t believe you would repeat something like that, Mom! Don’t you have any sense at all?”
“I think it’s interesting,” said Cassie, “and I’m not surprised.” She looked at Delphine, and Delphine nodded.
“What’s interesting?” said Max. Now all the eyes turned toward him and Stoney. Stoney noticed that Simon was smiling and that he had pulled his chair closer to the group. Elena was still sitting where Max had left her. Zoe said, “Remember when I did that movie about the French Revolution, when was that, ’88 or ’89? I played Sophie, who had lost her parents and was on her own. I was supposed to be about seventeen, I think. Anyway, in the course of three hours—God it was a very long movie, truly endless, which is probably why it died, it even had an intermission—Sophie goes all around the countryside and meets everyone and sees everything, and eventually she gets thrown into the revolutionary prison—”
“The Conciergerie,” said Isabel, schoolmarmishly, but Zoe ignored her.
“—and she gets tried and she meets all the aristocrats and then all the first wave of revolutionaries that are killed, and Danton and Marat and de Sade. She rides in the tumbrel to the guillotine but is saved at the last moment, and she and her lover escape and they go to America, where she meets Thomas Jefferson and writes a book.”
“I remember that one,” said Max. “I wonder if it’s out on DVD? I wouldn’t mind seeing it again.”
“Well, when we were just starting that one, maybe on the fourth or fifth day of shooting, I had to do a scene where Sophie realizes that the little band of people she had fallen in with are thieves. They take something they find on her—maybe it was her jewels that were strapped to her leg under her gown, or something like that. So they rob her and beat her up and leave her for dead in a bush, and when she revives she is watching two men hidden in a grove behind the bush, and they are obviously having sex, though of course the director did something so that you only had to know they were having sex if you already knew about that sort of thing. You could barely see them, for one thing. So, when Sophie comes to and sits up, they hear her and they stop buggering one another and run over and grab her and pull her out of the bush, and they are going to kill her—the younger one pulls out a pistol and puts it to her head—but the older one sees she is beautiful and saves her, not because he’s attracted to her, but because he thinks he can sell her. So they give her a shot of cognac and sit her on a rock, and she asks them who they are and all, and it turns out the old guy is the local bigwig aristocrat and the young guy is his servant, and as they are talking, the old guy says that all girls are for sale, the more beautiful the better, but no one really actually wants to fuck them. What all men really want is to be buggered by their servants—girls are just bargaining chips. I mean, this movie was really supposed to be a hard-hitting analysis of the French Revolution, and this scene was meant to be a shocking revelation of political reality. I think we did about four takes, and after the fourth one, the old guy—was that Peter O’Toole or someone else? That movie was full of great English actors. Anyway—he laughed and said, ‘Well, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose!’ and I said, ‘What does that mean?’ and he said, ‘What was good enough for the Ancien Régime is good enough for Hollywood, isn’t it?’ I guess I must have looked shocked, and he just laughed and said, ‘Oh, darling! Where have you been keeping yourself?’ So, anyway, we were talking about that, and I was saying that once I came to realize that Hollywood does work like that, everything got a lot easier, and all of a sudden Isabel got upset. You know, I think if I were to recite ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ Isabel would get upset, and I am getting tired of it.”
“Well,” said Max, “apart from the fact that O’Toole, like all Brits, would say anything just to get a laugh out of someone, or, preferably, just to get up the nose of some Yank, why is this shocking, Isabel?”
Isabel exclaimed, “It’s tremendously homophobic and sexist at the same time. It, like, encapsulates everything about how women and gays are destroyed by conventional social arrangements. And she just started talking about it as if that’s the way things are and it doesn’t really matter and there’s no reason to do anything about it. And she went along with it, and made use of it for her own purposes. And she was trying to get a laugh, too.” Isabel was pressing her lips together angrily, and Stoney thought that he was the only one who knew the roots of her overreaction. He went over to get a piece of toast, and while he was putting some pineapple on a plate with one hand he touched her on the shoulder with the other. She stepped away from him. Of course, this was the downside of their secret intimacy—he couldn’t actually comfort her, or rein her in. The best he could hope for was some later conversation about it, but that rarely happened. He took some toast and watched her stalk round the pool and sit down on the corner farthest from her mother, where she said, “If things work like that, then you should make an effort to change them.” Stoney was looking down at his toast, but he felt his eyebrows lift at this sentiment.
“But what if it’s true?” said Cassie. “I think it is.”
“Oh, you do not,” said Delphine. “I’m the one who thinks it’s true.”
“I do, too.”
“We were talking about a year ago,” said Delphine, “and if you’ll remember, it was my idea.”
“You are teasing me,” exclaimed Isabel.
“How did this come up, anyway?” said Max.
In the ensuing silence, Elena sniffed. Simon, who Stoney saw was much livelier now than he had been, said, “I started it.”
“Simon has a part in an alternative movie,” said Cassie. “That’s what he called it.”
“I heard about that,” said Max.
“It’s just for fun,” said Simon. “And it’s good money for, like, two days’ work. Everyone is my age. They’re all at USC film school. It’s funny.”
“What’s an alternative movie?” said Paul, who was relaxing in lotus position, with his head tilted back and his eyes closed.
“Porn,” said Elena.
Paul opened his eyes, but his facial expression didn’t change.
Simon said, “They’re in film school, Mom. It’s a project.”
“It’s a project they’re going to turn in to their teachers?”
“Well, I think so. That’s what they said. I mean, why not? It’s got some very funny bits. There’s a naked male chorus line tap-dancing. It’ll be funny. It makes fun of porn in a way. I mean, most porn movies are all about dicks, if you excuse me saying so, and here are sixteen dicks flopping around. It should be interesting. We’re all going to have umbrellas that we twirl. I laughed for days after they told me that.”
“What’s your part?” said Zoe.
“Well, in addition to the tap dance, I’m in the fantasy sequence where there are two dicks and two pussies out on a date. I mean, there’s a whole bar-full of dicks and pussies, so they needed lots of bald guys to play pool and sit around and do the things you do in a bar.”
“How are the girls dressed?” said Cassie.
“Well, they’re naked, but they have s
econdhand fur coats on, and whiskers and cat ears. Every bald guy is wearing just a stick-on name tag, stuck to his chest, with ‘My Name Is Dick’ written on it.”
“I think it’s cute,” said Zoe.
“It’s about the college dating scene,” said Simon. “It’s a satire! I don’t understand why my mom is so upset.”
Everyone looked at Elena. She said, “Well, you make it sound very innocent, but there’s explicit fellatio and masturbation, you said. I just don’t think—”
“Yes, but in my scene the masturbation is mental. When the pussies walk by, we’re supposed to take both of our hands and rub our heads and close our eyes and moan.”
Everyone laughed. Even Isabel smiled, though she was studiously pretending not to be part of the conversation. It occurred to Stoney that he should take Simon aside and find out who these kids were and see if they had representation. Elena sat up. She was smiling, too, in spite of herself. She said, “Well, it seems like fun now, but these sorts of things come back and haunt you in your later life. What if it gets popular? That defines you! For the rest of your life, people say, ‘Oh, were you in some movie I saw?’ Especially now, when everything is in some Internet database.”
“So I’ll grow hair. I don’t think I’ll be that recognizable. Anyway, we have to shave our eyebrows the night before the filming of our scene.”
Elena frowned. Stoney could see that she felt a little defeated, but he could also see her point of view, and he didn’t think it was about the kid’s being haunted in the future by this particular youthful indiscretion, more about what were probably a train of youthful indiscretions one by one taking their toll. Simon had that look—the bald head, the tattoos, the piercing—but more than that a certain look, the look of a smoker, right out of that book he had been talking to Isabel about. According to that book, smokers had a natural nervous daring that they realized very early on, primarily through the process of learning to smoke cigarettes. Stoney was willing to bet that Simon was one of those who had been in and out of trouble since high school, and that Elena was mostly reacting to this episode as yet another item on a long list.
“What about classes you’re missing in order to come down here?”
“We’re just working on our final projects this quarter.”
“I’m not even going to ask what that is,” said Elena.
“Well, I’m not quite sure yet, but I have some ideas and some photographs, if that’s what I choose to do.”
“That’s why I’m not asking.”
“Oh, Mom,” said Simon, but he knew he’d won.
The sunlight had now spread everywhere around the pool and spilled down the hill into the Japanese garden. Conversation subsided, and everyone stretched out and did something in the sunshine. Sure enough, Simon reached into the pocket of his shirt and came out with a cigarette, which he quietly lit. Here’s why I need a wife, Stoney thought: with a wife you could say, “This is what I think,” and then, after a while, after something had happened, she would say, “It was just the way you said it was going to be.” And then all of your passing good ideas didn’t simply vanish into thin air. For a while his former wife, Nina, had been good at reinforcing this feeling of having a life and building toward something—not a fortune, exactly, or a family, or a legacy, or the things that Jerry and Dorothy cared about, but something more like the idea that one thought was adding to another and eventually there would be a state of understanding. He looked at the scripts on the table. There would also be a reason to not just let his career slide into the maw of his natural temperament.
After a few minutes of quiet, Cassie said, “Well, I need to get to the gallery, and I wondered what about dinner, because Delphine and I can go get something. Let’s see.” She reached for her handbag and took out a small pad. “Okay, how many regular vegetarians?”
Zoe’s hand went up, then Paul shrugged and put his hand up.
“Vegans?”
Only Isabel.
“Anyone lactose-intolerant?”
Delphine nodded.
“Low-fat?”
Max’s hand went up. Cassie said, “What about Charlie?” and Stoney realized he wasn’t present. Max said, “If he isn’t, he should be.”
“Okay. Let’s see. How about hot-pepper-intolerant?”
No hands went up.
She said, “Do you care, Elena?”
“No okra.”
Cassie wrote that down, then said, “I don’t like lamb. Hmm.” She showed the list to Delphine. “Simon likes everything?”
Simon nodded.
“I know Stoney likes everything.”
Stoney nodded.
Cassie and Delphine stared at the list for a moment. Then Delphine said, “I think baked tofu in a spicy orange sauce with pea pods and pea tendrils, Szechuan green beans, some with shrimp and some without, and some baby greens with champagne vinaigrette—”
“How about Black Japonica fried rice?” said Elena. “It comes out the most beautiful rich purple color. I can sliver up some bamboo shoots and baby carrots and chanterelle mushrooms to go in it.”
“Tell us what to buy,” said Cassie.
“Get a New York Times,” said Max. And everyone who had been smiling sobered up. Stoney saw Isabel survey everyone with a belligerent air, then get up and go into the house. Moments later, she called from the doorway, “I’m going now! Here’s Charlie!” And then Max’s friend walked out onto the deck. He said, “Hey! Wake up, you sluggards! Some of us have been running on the beach!”
“Where’d you go?” said Elena.
“Well, Santa Monica, where else? Look at this!” He held up a small capsule. “It’s a grain of rice with a yin/yang symbol etched on it. Isn’t that great? I love it.” It was strung on a thin chain, which he hung around his neck. He sat down on a chaise and stretched out his legs. He said, “And here’s some papers. I got The Wall Street Journal if anyone wants that, and a USA Today.”
There was something about Charlie’s enthusiasm that was mildly disturbing, but still no one stood up. The sunshine was so pleasantly comforting that Stoney nearly fell asleep. Then, at some point when he was thinking something about cars on the 405, he heard Paul’s voice say, “So, Max, how did you get to Hollywood?”
At this point there was a creak, the creak of Max’s chair as he shifted position, and Stoney opened his eyes. He was slightly surprised to find that he was still here. He sat up. Max said, “Oh Lord. Well, I have to blame Bette Davis.”
“How did you know Bette Davis?” said Charlie.
“I did not know Bette Davis. Remember Laurie Lehman, though?”
“Oh, yeah,” said Charlie.
Max turned toward Paul. “I had a girlfriend in high school named Laurie Lehman. She was very smart and went off to Radcliffe, at which point she broke up with me. Well, her mother wasn’t old, less than forty at that point, and she and Laurie’s old man were divorced. He was a dentist. So Mrs. Lehman modeled herself on Bette Davis. Women did that in her generation. A girl had a type—the Barbara Stanwyck type or the Ingrid Bergman type. Anyway, after Laurie went off to college, Mrs. Lehman started inviting me over. She would carry a drink in one hand and a cigarette in a holder in the other and stalk around the house trying to cook dinner and saying all sorts of Bette Davis lines, like ‘Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.’ She had a way of opening her eyes very wide and enunciating her words, and she always cultivated the idea that she was hard to handle. Bette Davis wasn’t a tremendously big star anymore at that point, so I hadn’t seen any of her movies until one night when I stayed up to watch Dark Victory on TV, and I was amazed. It was exactly like watching Mrs. Lehman walk across the kitchen.”
“Did you sleep with her?” said Cassie.
“I did,” said Max. “For about two weeks, then I went off to college myself, and then I got drafted. She wrote me when I was in the army, and her letters were always newsy and happy, full of funny gossip, and not at all concerned about what might happen t
o me. She acted as if nothing bad could possibly happen to me, and my sojourn in Vietnam was just a little break in the general life of good times that I had been and would be leading, so I liked getting them. Letters from my parents were much more anxious and full of advice. She was talented. She always put in little drawings of people we knew that she had seen at the grocery store or the hairdresser’s. One time she drew a whole line of women sitting under hair dryers, and I could recognize every one of them. By the end of my tour, I felt like she was about my best friend, so, when I got back Stateside, I went to her house for a few days before I went home to my folks.
“Laurie was married and living in England by that time, and her mom’s place was a mess. As soon as I got there, I realized that she was drinking very heavily and that she and her house and her alcoholism were way more than I could handle, so I only stayed two days. In those two days, though, she pulled some string, some very, very old string she had from her days in New York, and who should show up the second night but Lee Strasberg. And he must have known her pretty well, because he came for dinner and he brought the food with him—Chinese food. So he sat down and ate dinner with us in the middle of the mess, and he didn’t talk to me much. He just was nice to Mrs. Lehman, and she was Bette Davis all night long. I have to give it to him, because he never even gave me a complicit glance. Her role was that she was Bette Davis, and his role was that he was happy to be there and interested in her, and my role was more or less to clear the table and wash some dishes so we could eat, and pick up magazines so we could sit down. The next day, I made her realize that I had to go home to my parents’ house, which was about twenty-five miles away, and I managed to escape, but then, a couple of days after that, she called me and said that Strasberg thought I had potential and would I come to New York and talk to him, and my parents thought I might as well do that while I was getting ready to go to chiropractor’s school, which was going to be my real vocation. So I did, and he let me in, and I met Ina the first day, and Ina was a Natalie Wood type.”