Ten Days in the Hills

by Jane Smiley

  Ty’s mom, Milena, brought Paul to the set because he was interested in how they were doing the Buddhist aspect. He had been her yoga coach at some point. In September, before coming to the set in November, he had gotten back from this trip to China, climbing the seven holiest mountains, and he was in great physical condition, even better than Denzel, who was himself in excellent shape. Paul sat quietly, watched, dug his fingers into his beard, laughed from time to time. When he was sitting across from Zoe at the lunch table, he asked her what her name was. It turned out that he had never seen any of her movies and had only heard her rendition of “I’ll Fly Away” on a Chevy commercial. He was so simultaneously straightforward and relaxed about his total ignorance of her career that it tickled her, and then he said, “Don’t be insulted. I think I was actually the last person in the Western Hemisphere to learn who Monica Lewinsky was.” Zoe took his number and called him a few days later. They went out to dinner at a vegetarian Indian restaurant in Culver City, then went for a walk at Venice Beach, then went to her house and made love six times in four hours, before she had to get up and go to the set and film the last scene, where she drops Denzel at the bus station and he takes the bus back to his monastery. She was great in that scene, because she was exhausted. In the dailies, she looked quietly distraught and self-sacrificing, some of the best work, she thought, that she had ever done. Now it looked like they were going to release the movie in the late fall, when all the serious-contender sorts of movies were released, so she had some hopes for it. In the meantime, here was Paul.

  It was only after maybe a month of dating and great sex that Zoe asked Paul whether she might start having sessions with him, and as he was not a member of any professional organizations or certified by any board, he said of course she could. It turned out that he said of course because it was his policy and his theory never to say no, though sometimes he waited three seconds for you to make a different request, one that was better for you. It was impossible to say whether these sessions were productive, but they were always interesting and sometimes fun. Usually they were in person, but she had had some phone sessions, too. What happened was, she lay down on a yoga mat. He sat in a chair with a clipboard on his lap, and she issued her complaint. Often her complaints were about Isabel. Once, she remembered, she had called Isabel in New York because Delphine had told her Isabel had the flu. She called Isabel to find out how she was feeling and got her voice mail. She left an affectionate and interested message. As soon as she hung up, her cell phone rang, and it was her hairdresser—they had to discuss whether her hair was to be redone for a reshoot of the scene where she came out from under the bed (there were a couple of shots of her with Ty under the bed, too). What could they get away with when she came out from under the bed? What would cobwebs say, for example? The director now wanted cobwebs, but both Zoe and Eileen were against cobwebs in her hair, especially as they had to stay in her hair for the whole next scene, when she and Denzel were to look at each other and understand exactly what there was between them and what it meant, and if they reshot with cobwebs for one scene, they might have to reshoot the next scene, too. So they discussed the cobwebs for about five minutes, and in the meantime Isabel called on the landline and Zoe said, “Call me back in five minutes.” Ten minutes later, just as she was wondering when Isabel was going to call her back, the phone rang, and as soon as she picked it up, Isabel said, “I thought you were going to call me back in five minutes.”

  “I thought you were calling me back.”

  “I hate playing phone tag with you. You’re impossible to get a hold of.”

  “I called you, and as soon as I hung up, someone called me. That’s not so unusual. It’s pretty normal, in fact.”

  “Maybe, but all I know is you are the hardest person I know for me to get in touch with, so there’s a certain level of frustration already built in.”

  “How are you?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I thought you had the flu.”

  “That was days ago.”

  “When?”

  “Tuesday.”

  “Tuesday was yesterday.”

  “Well, it seems like days ago. I’ve nearly forgotten about it. I can’t talk, anyway.” And so they hung up, with Zoe trying to make one last agreeable remark. Lying on her mat, Zoe related this conversation to Paul, and then she came up with a theory about why it bothered her. It bothered her because Isabel’s tone was unforgiving and full of grievance, as usual, and she was tired of failing to please Isabel in even the most mundane sorts of ways, and yet having to keep trying. She felt that their relationship was based on Isabel’s resentment combined with her sense of guilt, but Isabel wasn’t resentful enough to break off the relationship, and she, Zoe, didn’t feel guilty enough to submit to whatever punishments Isabel might like to impose. So they were at an impasse. That was her theory.

  Paul then thought for a while, and declared that her theory was wrong. What was going on had nothing to do with Isabel herself or Zoe herself as they appeared to exist in this life. What was really going on was that in a previous life Zoe had been Isabel’s husband, and Zoe had taken a mistress. Since the society they lived in allowed and even encouraged wealthy men to take mistresses, Isabel had no recourse against either Zoe or his mistress, and so she had begun behaving in a classic passive-aggressive manner. This issue had been unresolved at Zoe’s death, especially since the mistress showed up at the funeral with Zoe’s two children by her, and Isabel, of course, was there with Zoe’s three children by her. It was apparent from the ages of the children that Zoe had been carrying on with both women simultaneously for many years, and Isabel had felt publicly as well as privately humiliated. She retained this grievance into her next life as Zoe’s daughter (though the lives didn’t have to be precisely sequential—Paul had the impression that their wedding had taken place in the nineteenth century), and she was still trying to exact remorse from Zoe. In fact, according to Paul, Zoe did owe Isabel a karmic debt.

  Zoe, who had been expecting to discuss Delphine and Max and Isabel’s childhood and how young she was when Isabel was born so early and the pressures of her career, was thrilled by this story, and the possibility that it revealed Paul as a charlatan made it all the more thrilling. She had been expecting to work through guilt and remorse, and here all she had to do was embroider upon this narrative of her past life. Where was it? In Italy! What kind of man was she? A small-time landowner who married rather late, and managed to increase his holdings. Flushed with success, he took first a wife and then a mistress. He also bought a car, one of the first cars in his region. What region was this? Emilia-Romagna! Where was that? Bologna, Ravenna, Parma! And Zoe had been to both Bologna and Ravenna. Had she felt any sense of familiarity there? Any sense of déjà-vu? She had to admit not, but even so, it was the only place in Italy she had been, so possibly that meant something! They talked about the wife, Isabel, and the mistress, and the children of both relationships, until Zoe could just see the movie, and then, after they had filled everything in, Paul had guided her through a meditation in which she recognized that this Italian life not only was over, but had been an illusion in the first place, a conceit, a fiction, as all lives are, as this current life as a movie star was also, and for that reason she and Isabel were not required to act out all the emotions of every life they lived together over and over. They could, if they chose, let all of that go. He had her imagine that former Italian life as the membrane of a balloon, filled with bad thoughts and bad feelings as with air, getting larger and larger, the resentments and jealousies and murderous impulses, the pall of disappointment, the anger and the fear and the threats, and then he had her pop the balloon and allow all of those feelings to dissipate in the fresh air and blue sky of Emilia-Romagna. After that, she said, “What do I do now?” and he said, “What do you want to do?” and she said, “Well, I could call Isabel and apologize for not calling her while she had the flu,” and he said try it, and she did, and they had a nice talk abo
ut Enron. It did not escape Zoe’s attention that Paul’s “technique” had eased her relationship with Isabel at least for a moment, if only because it was more interesting to think about this past life than it was to think about their relationship as mother and daughter.

  Across the room, Paul had hung up, and he stood up from his chair in the light, then turned the light off. Zoe looked at her watch—twelve fifty—stretched out in the bed, let her eyes drift closed, and sighed a few deep sighs. She even let out a pleasantly satisfied groan of the sort that you make when you are happily transitioning into or out of sleep. In fact, the very sight of him dismissing Marcelle Vivier and turning his attentions to her woke her up all over. She stretched seductively.

  He said, “Marcelle is very agitated about the war.”

  “I’m sure she is,” said Zoe. “It must feel very close to them. Closer than it does to us. Personally, I worry more about the North Koreans. I heard they could get a bomb here to California if they wanted to.”

  “I don’t know that proximity is the problem. She didn’t mention that. She just feels that Bush is a monster. She feels very personally imposed upon by him. I thought that was interesting.”

  “Why?”

  “The size disparity. The sense that she is a small child and he is an inhuman, insensate, mysterious creature that can’t be understood in human terms. He’s quite present to her, as if he were in her closet or under her bed. Of course we talked about that, and she went straight to the difference in size between the U.S. and France. Apparently everyone she knows in France has the same view of Bush and the U.S.” He stripped off the lightweight cotton pants he had been wearing and got into bed. He took her in his arms easily and comfortably, without any preliminaries or awkwardness, in a way that told her exactly how he felt about Marcelle Vivier, indifferent, and her, welcoming. Zoe felt herself smile as she cuddled into him. One of the abiding concepts in Hollywood, and one she had wondered about over the years, was the concept of “chemistry.” The odd thing, really, was that you couldn’t tell during the shoot what sort of chemistry you were going to have onscreen, and it wasn’t predictable. She’d had no chemistry with men she liked and respected, and plenty of chemistry with men who put her off, but also vice versa. One famous actor she had found repellent in every way, including his physical type (fleshy), had looked onscreen like her born soul mate. But it wasn’t until Paul came along that she knew what “chemistry” really was—it was the way one body conformed to another one, no matter what the brain felt about it. Take Max, for example. For a few years she had loved Max in the most innocent and classic way, happy that he had found her, grateful for his love, buoyed up by his company day and night, well married. But their bodies couldn’t get along. Where his eye was, there was her elbow. When he was awake, she was asleep. When she was awake, he was snoring. When he hugged her, she got uncomfortably hot. When she kissed him, she often missed his lips entirely and felt the grit of his beard grating across her own lips. They could not walk in step, and often didn’t hear what each other said, even though they both had resonant voices. It was nothing like this with Paul, his body, her body acting like the same body but always pleased with the other body. He said, “I don’t feel I helped her much. But she and Jean-Pierre do agree on the war, so that will please her for a while. She said, ‘We have angry agreements about these Americans, and then we feel very good in a martyred sort of way, and so we make love. He is nice to me for the sake of the Iraqis.’”

  Zoe didn’t know quite what to make of this remark, so she said, “Does she realize how you feel about the war?”

  “She didn’t ask. And I told you, dear one, that I don’t have a feeling about the war, at least a for or against feeling. What she says is interesting, what you say is interesting, what Saddam Hussein says is interesting, what George W. Bush says is interesting. The more dramatic any situation is, the more people reveal themselves. I don’t think that’s a ‘cold’ point of view, as you say. But, whatever, it’s my point of view.”

  “I know that. I was just asking a question.” She knew she sounded defensive, but still they pressed close, and she felt her whole body relax and open up in a tingly sort of way. He began kissing her, which was very nice, too, beard and all. She had not thought his beard very appealing at first, but now it was delightful, a part of him and therefore sexy and alluring. She felt his body charge up slightly with intention, and then hers did the same. They kept kissing, tongues, lips. He sucked her tongue into his mouth and she felt as though she were fucking him, in-out, in-out. She pressed him onto his back, and crawled over him, not in any way mitigating the kissing, but intensifying the kissing. She could feel against her stomach that his prick was hard, and she thought the word “throbbing,” which was a common and lovely word having to do with erections. She had never actually felt one throb, but she thought the word “throbbing” anyway, and then felt a certain throbbing, but it was their hearts—her heart in her chest against his heart in his chest. Then he introduced his hand between them, and reached for her pubic area. She felt his fingers in her pubic hair.

  She pulled away from the kiss for just a moment and said, “You’re stroking it the wrong way.”

  “I’m sorry, what way would you like me to stroke it?”

  “I mean, the wrong direction. You need to go down rather than up.” She kissed him, but it was a compensatory kiss, not a passion kiss. She said, “You need to stroke with the growth pattern. Otherwise it’s irritating.”

  “Pubic hair doesn’t have a growth pattern, dear one.”

  “Mine does.”

  “Why is this the first I’ve heard of it?”

  “I don’t know. It came up before, but I didn’t mention it.”

  He sat up and pushed back the covers. They both looked at his crotch, but it was too dark to see anything other than his half-detumescent prick listing toward her. He said, “Turn on the light.”

  She said, “Why are we doing this?”

  “Doing what?”

  “Looking at our pubic hair. We were making love.”

  “I want to see.”

  “I want to fuck!”

  Three seconds went by. She said, “Okay,” and turned on the light. Since the light was on her side, he squirmed over toward her so that it could shine equally on his pubic hair and hers. His rose like foam around his member, blondish-gray and curly. Then they looked at hers. Hers lay flat, and, compared with his, most of the individual hairs were oddly straight. They turned this way and that. He said, “Hmm. They look more like eyebrow hair than chest hair. It’s funny how pubic hair never looks like the hair on your head. Hmm.” He touched her pubis with an index finger. She said, “See? There’s a growth pattern. There’s almost a cowlick.” She tried to sound mildly interested, but really she was getting quite annoyed. If she had known what a simple statement of preference—down, not up—was going to lead to, she would have kept her mouth shut.

  “I never noticed that before.” He put his head down for a good look, careful not to block the light. “I’m amazed.”

  “Why are you amazed?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just interesting, and not something I’ve seen before.”

  It was here that she made her second mistake. She said, “I would appreciate it if you would not refer to all the women you have, ah, fucked over the years.”

  That got him. It was so hard to get him, and that did it. For a very short split second, Zoe quailed.

  He lifted his head and looked at her, first in surprise and then, just for a second, in distaste. The distaste passed almost instantly into his usual look of benign concern, but she saw it, and it made her jump away from him. Yes, she should have waited three seconds. On the surface, three seconds didn’t seem like a very long time, though long enough, she understood from articles on cosmology, for the universe to form itself out of nothing. But she couldn’t wait three seconds. She exclaimed, “Fine, that’s enough. Do what you want. You always do.” She threw herself into an elabora
te fuck-me sprawl, and slightly lifted her hips to offer her “eyebrow hairs” for his consideration. He sat up and looked down at her, his fingers in his beard, neither cold nor angry. He knew better than to say anything. Still the three seconds! She pursed her lips shut so that she wouldn’t back down. Finally, he said, “It seems to me that you have a pattern of losing your temper when I have sessions with Marcelle Vivier in your presence. Does that seem to be the case to you?”