by Jane Smiley
“Yes, she was,” said Charlie. “She was Natalie Wood all over.”
“And Ina couldn’t sit still till she got us to Hollywood, and I just came along with her. We rented a place not far from here, where you get off the 405 onto Sunset, but then you make two lefts and you end up in a dead-end street right up against the highway. Anyway, she was acting, and I was acting and writing, and here we were.” He shrugged and looked at Stoney. He said, “It wasn’t until I fell in with Dorothy and Bo and Jerry that I really got to Hollywood Hollywood.”
“You were a very nice boy,” said Cassie.
Max smiled at her, and somehow that was what made Stoney actually want to go to the office. What was really his secret treasure, though, was that he would be back for dinner, tofu and all. And then Isabel walked by as if by mere coincidence, and her hand brushed his lips, and he kissed it on the palm, and no one noticed.
DAY THREE • Wednesday, March 26, 2003
The phone rang exactly at midnight, which would be 9 a.m. in Paris, where Paul’s client Marcelle Vivier lived. Zoe, of course, had been very proactive in setting up this appointment. She had pointed out to Paul that his cell phone was not going to work in the garden room, or even in the garden, and she had gotten Max to give her an extension from some other room, and she had found the jack in the wall and written down the number for Paul so that he could send it to Marcelle. Even so, when the phone rang, it startled her because she had drifted off, and as she woke up and reminded herself of what was going on, she felt several involuntary jolts of annoyance, as she always did when Madame Vivier called for her session.
Paul answered the phone—“Bonjour, Marcelle, bonsoir! Ça va? Ah, mais oui. Oui, oui. On marche bien”—and as he was talking, he got up, kissed Zoe discreetly on the forehead, and carried the phone and its cradle over to the yellow armchair, which sat in the alcove. There he folded himself into the chair with his back to Zoe. She could hear him mumble in French, but she really couldn’t make out his words, and anyway, her French wasn’t the best, so when he really got into the session she wouldn’t be able to understand him at all. Paul’s French seemed to be quite fluent, though Zoe had no idea what Madame Vivier thought of it. She called him precisely once a week at this time, and had been doing so for seven and a half years, ever since Paul did a healing weekend in Biarritz in 1995. Paul made sure that every Tuesday night, wherever he was except when he was on his yearly three-week vacation, Madame Vivier had his phone number. When he was at Zoe’s, he used his cell phone (free minutes after 9 p.m.) and went into Zoe’s glassed-in breakfast room overlooking the pool, all the way on the other side of the house, in order not to disturb her. Sometimes she watched him from her bedroom window as he moved around in there, talking to Marcelle for exactly fifty minutes, for which she sent him a check for ninety dollars, drawn on the Bank of America, where she had an account specifically for this purpose. The other overseas clients called during the day, when Paul kept hours in his home office.
Paul was a precise person, and he had precisely twenty-one clients, for whom he did thirty sessions in a week (one client did three sessions, seven clients did two sessions, and thirteen clients did one session), and so his gross income for the week was $2,700, which came out to $129,600 per year, since he took three weeks off to travel every year and one week off to go to the monastery. Paul had no tax deductions of any kind, not even his telephone expenses, since the clients always called him, so he paid $53,400 in taxes, and so had a disposable income of $76,200 every year. And he expected to keep giving sessions for the rest of his life, so he didn’t have an IRA. On the one hand, Zoe was impressed—that he could make the numbers add up so precisely, that he could pay such a large percentage in taxes without caring, that he could go through life without a single deduction, that he never worried about it—and on the other hand, she was not impressed. Fifty-five years old, and his disposable income was not into six figures. And of course she was impressed with herself for coming up with such an unusual man, not like anyone she had ever dated before. She thought of him not as a therapist—of course there were plenty of those—or even as a religious person or teacher—there were plenty of those, too—but as a solo sailor or flyer, the sort of person who leaves L.A. one day and turns up in Honolulu months later, having sailed across the Pacific on a diet of nuts and dried fruit. Her idea of him was of course metaphorical, but it encapsulated a certain excitement she felt in his presence.
As a part of the perfect package, he was too enlightened to be compliant. She occasionally, as, for example, now, found this grating.
He guided her in her sessions to understand that this was simply a habit with her. She was used to having her own way with men, because she was beautiful and talented, but, of course, having her own way was the worst thing for her, since as soon as she had her own way she lost interest and began finding fault. It was the oldest story in the book, the Cleopatra story, the Salome story, the Medea story. Zoe, who never liked school, had only the vaguest notion of what really happened to Cleopatra, Salome, and Medea, but she knew it was all bad, and that they got blamed for it, whatever it was. Of course, of course, of course. One especially appealing thing about Paul was that he spoke as if he considered all his opinions self-evident.
Zoe herself was the three-session-a-week client, and Paul didn’t give her a break on fees. “No sliding scale for you,” he had said at the beginning, but, of course, there was no sliding scale for anyone. In these sessions, they did not explore her childhood; Paul considered that banal. “Self-knowledge,” he said, “can be fun in a way, but it convinces you that you are special, when in fact you aren’t. You are only unique, and uniqueness doesn’t have to be a problem. What you really want is training, and it doesn’t matter what kind of training you already got or why you didn’t get what you might call the proper training. No one did. You’re forty-three years old, and now you need some more training, and you can afford it, so get as much as you want.”
When she said, “Discipline will be good for me, I guess,” he replied, “Not discipline. You are not being disciplined, and we are not engaged in a discipline. Your child is grown, your career is established, and you are training for the third quarter of your life, that’s all.”
Paul had several theories, and one of them was that, although at one time biology had constituted destiny, it no longer did so. The great enigma of existence was the wholesale longevity of twentieth-century humans. The mystery of life was what you were supposed to do after surviving and reproducing, and obviously the clue to this question was the extra brainpower humans had. It was there for something, and almost everything it was usually used for was a waste of time and resources. It was only “getting ready for translation to a higher sphere” that was not a waste of time. Paul liked and approved of gardening, and so his theory of this preparation was a gardening theory: pruning. First you pruned your faults, then you pruned your habits, then you pruned your idiosyncrasies, and eventually you disappeared. You didn’t die—that was too dramatic a way of looking at it. Paul liked to think of it as drying up and blowing away—saying less and doing less and being less noticeable until, with only a blink of an eye or a movement of a finger, you slipped out of this world. His conversation was full of comforting vegetable images of this sort.
Zoe sat up and straightened the quilts on the bed and arranged the pillows. The room, which had been yellow when she lived with Max, was green now, and the sheets and duvet cover were a mossy sateen stripe with a very subtle peach accent. There were two rugs on the floor from Kashmir, different sizes and slightly different patterns, but both picking up the subtle green of the walls. It looked good. It looked like her mother had had a hand in it, because Delphine liked uniformity (her own place was uniformly oatmeal-colored, with a Japanese ambience; she slept on a futon on a low platform, and the only decoration in her living room was a beige kimono with a scene on the back of a path going up a mountain).
Now that Zoe and Paul had been here for a couple o
f days, how well she remembered sitting in that kitchen for four years, watching Max talk on the phone, watching her mother cook something for Isabel, watching the assistant they had then, Gabrielle, talk on the other telephone—about what? About her, of course, about which project she should say yes to, where the tour should take her, what the album cover should look like, what she should wear, which fund-raiser she should attend. And as they talked, she would herself swell up with unexpressed, and no doubt adolescent, ire (she was about the same age then as Isabel was now). The most annoying thing was very specific—over and over, each one of them would say, “What do you want to do?” and each time she would answer, because she always knew what she wanted to do, and each time her answer would be the occasion for an argument or at least a discussion about what it would be better to do than the very thing that she wanted to do. And the argument would continue until she gave in, and they did with her what they had wanted to do in the first place. Then she would get worked up—she admitted that—and demand to know why they had asked her in the first place if they didn’t intend to do—for her to do—what she wanted? And they would act a bit astonished, as if this were a tantrum on her part, a mere expression of temperament, rather than an actual grievance. Had they talked about Max’s career, too? She didn’t remember.
One day at the end of those four years, she was looking at her financial situation—like Delphine, she always knew what money was where, how much she was worth, what taxes she owed, and how much things cost—and she saw that it was time to make some sort of investment. She had a big wad of cash, and no one had asked her what she wanted to do with it yet (preparatory to overriding her decision), and so she drove out to Malibu and bought the second house she saw. The place had one bedroom for her and one for Isabel, and none for Max or Delphine, and since Max was away for five weeks on a shoot, she moved her things over there in her car, trunkload by trunkload. It was a beach house, so it came furnished, and for a long time it was most ravishingly like living in a hotel, and she was never lonely or nervous there, even with glass windows in big storms. No one liked it there. Isabel hated the roar of the ocean and the damp smell of the run-down furniture, nor did she like the beach, which Zoe had thought all children liked. Delphine complained about the drive; Max thought there was too much sand everywhere. And so all she had to do was squat there, and pretty soon, like a tide running out, they flowed away, and she got to visit them when she felt like it, and to not visit them when she didn’t feel like it. In a way this pleasure was her greatest secret sin—“Come out here,” she would say, but they rarely did. The Malibu place was quiet—no one asked her a single question—and she didn’t even care whether she was actually in residence there or not; she could be on location or on tour, and all she had to do was think about 87549 Rokeby Road in Malibu, and she would feel calm and adult.
And then, in the winter of ’97, the house fell down. She was away for four days in San Francisco, doing some looping, though why up there she couldn’t remember, and while she was gone there was a big storm, though not so big that it got into the San Francisco papers. When she got back, part of the foundation had slipped, and the right front corner of the house was listing to one side, and some of the floor and the roof had broken away, and rain had gotten in. Of course it turned out that the whole place was rotten and would have to be completely rebuilt, which defeated its original purpose, so she sold it as a teardown for more than she had paid and bought a place in the hills not far from the Hollywood Bowl, where she now lived, still gloriously alone except for when Paul stayed over.
Paul never asked her what she wanted. If a question came up, he stated what he wanted, and expected the same of her, and quite often, since she wasn’t asked, she didn’t really care. In the end, that was what had bothered her—the effort of having to come up with a response in the first place. Once, she had done a personality test, and on it was a telling question: “At the end of a party, do you prefer to go home and be by yourself, or to go on to another party?” Alone, perhaps, in all of Hollywood, she would have said, Go home and be by myself. And not at the end of the party, either, but in the middle, or at the beginning. That was the sign, the quiz said, that she was an introvert. People thought that if you were a singer and could stand up in front of thousands of people and sing for an hour or two, then you must be an extrovert, but no. In the first place, the stage lights were so bright, how would you even see anyone out there? And in the second place, you weren’t relating to the people, you were relating to the song. You were singing; they were eavesdropping.
The best thing about living in Malibu had been the drive. She could find her way around Los Angeles better than most limo drivers, and none of it came naturally—all of it came because of how much she loved to drive by herself from Malibu, in the car as in the house—alone. Cars were wonderful philosophical things, zones of privacy and occasions for cooperation. There was something especially fine, she thought, in world-historical terms, about a car belonging to a stranger whom you had never seen before moving into the left lane in order to allow you onto the freeway. There was something politically beautiful about four cars at a four-way intersection smoothly taking their turns. Good traffic made you a benevolent person and a believer in basic human goodness. A nice drive from Malibu to Universal, quiet, comfortable, expeditious, and deliberate, was a form of meditation, the truest experience of being yourself, and the closest you could come to passively sensing the unity of time and space, which always put her in a good mood. Paul had liked this idea, too, when she told him about it, but, unfortunately, it was something they couldn’t experience together, because the whole thing vanished if there were two people in the car, even if the other person was enlightened, as Paul was.
Across the room, in the arc of yellow light that shone on the pea-green armchair, Paul laughed out loud. Zoe looked at her watch. It was twelve thirty-one. Zoe imagined Marcelle Vivier, whom she had never seen. She would be dark-haired and pale-skinned and thin. Normally, French people did not interest Zoe in the slightest, though she was popular in France because she was a woman of color and she sang songs they liked, but this Marcelle woman was slightly different from Paul’s regular set of lugubrious complainers such as herself, and she knew that he enjoyed doing the weekly session with her. It didn’t help, of course, that the session was at midnight and that they talked about sex. Obviously, all of Paul’s clients talked about sex. Zoe talked about sex, too—Paul considered sex and enlightenment to be intimately connected, and part of his theory was that once you had talked about sex to your absolute heart’s content, you could then go on to other things wholly and sincerely. You could talk about sex in any way you pleased with Paul. Neither he nor his theory made any promise that your sex life would improve or that you would have better relationships. There was only the promise that you would eventually get bored with talking about sex and discover that life had more to offer than sex and relationships, at which point it might be that your sex life and your relationships would improve, or it might be that you would forget about sex and relationships altogether—both things had happened with Paul’s clients. He didn’t have a theory about which was better, or even about what constituted improvement—more, less, more orgasmic, less orgasmic, fewer partners, one partner. The only goal was to have your say about it and see what might happen. Marcelle Vivier had been talking about sex once a week for seven and a half years—that was 360 conversations about sex, give or take a few—which struck Zoe as a lifestyle rather than a therapy. In her own sessions with Paul, her sense was that she was doing an extra-large housecleaning. Obviously, some tasks get performed every day, others once a week, and some only once, but eventually, in much less than seven and a half years, the house is clean. However, Paul said that Marcelle was really benefiting from the therapy, and that in his experience of French people, the act of doing something is in itself sufficiently healing. He said, “French people aren’t obsessed with finishing one thing and going on to the next. They are obsessed
with doing each thing properly. It’s not necessarily better, but it does pass the time and offer a feeling of satisfaction.”
Zoe felt that it was time for Marcelle Vivier to move on.
He laughed again. Zoe had not thought that French people were witty enough to provoke a guffaw, or that therapy was the appropriate occasion for laughter. She wiggled down under the covers and closed her eyes. Marcelle was really the only client she was jealous of, though seven of the other nineteen besides herself and Marcelle were women. The men she didn’t mind at all. They could talk about sex for the rest of their lives and she would feel nothing but indifference toward them.
Paul’s days were exceptionally peaceful. She had seen it with her own eyes. He slept, he ate, he defecated, he urinated, he groomed himself and his home. He traveled near and far. His hair and beard were shiny, his breath was pleasant, and his sweat smelled good. He could walk for hours and stand on his head and do yoga postures that defied belief. He could sink ten baskets in a row and make a penny travel back and forth along the tops of his knuckles. He could go without speaking for half a day. He had no children, and his parents were dead. He never had crises in his life that he spoke about, and he progressed by means of minute adjustments—no lurching from one thing to another. She recognized that he would and did have no appeal for many people. His appeal for her was that in part his way of being constituted a rebuke to her own way of being, but also in part that she was enough like him that she could see how well he lived, a still point inside the frantic chaos of a world that neither acknowledged nor affected him.
And he loved sex. They had met during her last film shoot. The mother of the kid whose mother she played brought Paul onto the set one day, and they got to talking over lunch. The picture had a vaguely Buddhist theme, since it was about a man who has been living in a Buddhist monastery for ten years. The backstory in the movie was that the man, who had been a cop and was played by Denzel Washington, had quit being a cop after investigating an especially brutal murder, and gone to live in a monastery. At the beginning of the picture, someone comes and tells him that his younger brother has been killed by street kids. Denzel leaves the monastery to go to his brother’s funeral, and when he’s there, he becomes suspicious and gets the urge to investigate the crime, though he’s conflicted, of course, partly because he’s hardly said a word in ten years. What finally draws him into the case is the fact that Zoe’s son, who was played by a first-time actor named Ty Griffin Abbas (who was truly, truly gorgeous, a real mix, not only black and white, but Vietnamese, too, small but quick and graceful, and brilliant on the screen, much too good, in a way, for this movie, Zoe thought), had witnessed the murder and didn’t recognize any of the alleged street kids who did the killing. So Denzel is moved by the vulnerability of Ty and Zoe and decides to watch over them and investigate his brother’s murder, even though his brother had made much different and more dangerous choices than Denzel has made over the years. Of course it turns out that something much bigger is going on, something that goes right up to City Hall, though now, four months later, and not having seen the final cut of the movie yet, Zoe was a little vague on what exactly that was. Her character and Denzel’s character do have a bit of a flirtation—he’s a good man, after all, and her savior—but he goes back to the monastery, fade out. The movie was called Zone of Light, and she only sang one song, a lullaby to the kid, which Denzel overhears when he is sitting in the living room of her house, staring out at the street, waiting for the bad guys to come and try to smoke them out. The sequence went: lullaby, quiet glances between Zoe and Denzel, explosion of gunfire, with Zoe and Ty diving under the bed, then the shoot-out, then quiet again as Zoe and Ty crawl out from under the bed, and Zoe and Denzel exchange another series of quiet glances, then the cops show up to clean up the mess.