by Jane Smiley
Then she rolled onto her back, and they did it again, and she kept her eyes open and paid attention to his actual physical presence, his beard, his dark eyes, his smallish nose, his thinning hair, the caramel-colored beams behind his head, and the pale stucco on the walls, and she came again, this time a shorter, deeper, and warmer orgasm that was located right between her legs, unlike the outward explosion of the previous one—multiples were always like this, she should ask someone why that was. He did not come again, but he subsided with a smile after she did, and flopped onto the bed beside her, and then he opened his mouth and intoned, “OmmmmmmmmmMMMMMM,” at about G flat below middle C, and she harmonized at D flat above middle C, and then he went down, to about an E, and she went up to an E, so that they sounded quite primitive, like early music, and then they ran out of breath and laughed and she said, “You can make all the noise you want and no one anywhere else in the house can hear you.”
Now they got quite comfortable, really more comfortable than Zoe had felt in days, what with the planned trip to the monastery, which she admitted she had been a little nervous about, and not only the roads, but also the monks themselves and the probable accommodations. There was a double room for visiting couples, but only one, which someone else might already be occupying, and if so you had to go uncomplainingly into separate cells. And you were supposed to sit quietly for meditation, which Zoe had trouble with. In fact, in spite of the war and the television, she had been anticipating the monastery with a bit of dread that she had not confided in Paul. She produced a big yawn as Paul settled against her and settled her against him. She shifted her hips slightly back and forth and stretched. She closed her eyes. The last thing she heard was Paul’s soothing voice meandering around a bit, telling her a bedtime story, it seemed. He said, “You know, I was thinking about this woman I knew at the monastery in Wisconsin. That was a coed monastery, though of course they called it a ‘center.’ It wasn’t exactly Buddhist, because they talked all the time about Jesus, but he was a very Buddhist Jesus. There was always dancing, especially in the winter, because you had to do something for exercise when there was too much snow to go outside. There was a girl there. Her name was Darling. I mean, her original name was Martha Perkins, but the founder gave everyone new names, and hers was Darling. She was a substantial-looking girl, almost as tall as I am. But she was light as a feather. She seemed to float around the room, and dancing with her was amazing. You felt like your job was to hold her down. One guy was a trained dancer, and he would lift her up above his head and spin her around. He had trained for a long tme, and he could do things like step onto the front of a chair and then the back, and then balance himself while the chair fell over. He said she was miraculously light, lighter than a child. And she never wore a coat, either. She went around in the coldest weather in just a T-shirt. In all my practice and of all the yoga masters I’ve met, I have to say that Darling was the only one I ever saw firsthand who actually repealed the laws of nature.” He pulled Zoe more tightly to him. “No training at all,” he said. “No daily practice. Just a name change. I never understood it, really.” Now he was mumbling. Zoe didn’t ask what happened, but she did imagine the goddess Darling, golden-blonde, yielding her substance smile by smile.
Zoe, reading the morning paper, could see Charlie, across the room, glancing at her. She adjusted the paper slightly so that it shaded her from him, and her eye fell on an awful article, about a man who had been carjacked at Ontario Airport. After the carjacker pushed him out of the car, he got stuck in the shoulder strap of his seat belt and, as far as Zoe could tell, tried to grab hold of the top of the car, but fell under the wheels, and was dragged to the end of the airport drive, where the carjacker got into an accident, and by that time the man was dead. The carjacker, apparently, was upset about lost luggage. This was exactly the sort of article Zoe least liked to read anymore, though at one time she would have read it over more than once in a kind of fascinated amazement at the details. September 11, she thought, had cured her of that sort of fascination, and then Paul came along and told her that she didn’t have to reflect upon every gruesome twist of every story, though she could if she wanted—she could choose what to read and think about—and so, rather than letting her gaze drift back to the beginning of this story, she lowered the paper again, which Charlie took as a signal. He came over and sat down. He said, “Hey, Zoe. How are you? I was hoping to talk to you.”
Zoe glanced around the kitchen and family room, even though she knew that there was no likelihood of anyone else appearing. She said, “What are you doing up this early, Charlie? It’s hardly six.” But she smiled.
“Oh, for me it’s after nine. I decided when I came out just to stay on New Jersey time. You can get all your business done before anyone else is up. With the Internet, you can keep your eye on the market, no problem. If I’d thought of it before, I’d have spent more time out here for sure.” He shook his head.
She offered him the paper.
“Oh, I got one of my own,” he said, “I read through it already.”
“Well, then. What are your plans for the day? You seem ready to go.” She gave him an encouraging smile. He settled more deeply into his chair. He said, “You know, Zoe, you really look great. What has it been, fifteen years since I saw you last?”
“Maybe that.”
“Well, if you’ve changed, you’ve changed for the better.” He stared at her, then went on, “And you looked great then, of course.”
She said, “You look good, too, Charlie.”
“Do I? I’ve been working on it. Later I’ll show you my stash.” He laughed. “You know, I must have run more than a mile and a half yesterday on the beach over there in Santa Monica. I wasn’t just jogging, either. I was catching up to lots of the younger guys and passing them. My cholesterol, you know the LDL? It’s down to about a hundred twenty-five most of the time. Two years ago, it was over two fifty! I was just waiting for that myocardial infarction, the doctor said, and now it’s inside the safe range, and the other indicators are good, too, but, hey, when I pass the forty-year-olds running on the beach and I’m fifty-eight, you know, then that’s a good enough indicator for me.”
“That’s impressive, Charlie,” said Zoe.
“That’s my story,” said Charlie, “and I’m happy with it, but, you know, my story is not important to millions of people around the world! LDL 125 seems like life and death to me, but in the larger scheme of things, who cares?”
“I don’t know,” said Zoe. “Maybe Max.”
Charlie laughed. He said, “That was funny! I was speaking rhetorically, and you thought I was asking a serious question. Well, we’ll get back to who cares about Charlie Mannheim later, right?” He laughed again.
“I hope so,” said Zoe.
“You know,” said Charlie, “this time I’m out here and I realize how much I love Max. I realize how much Max has not changed in fifty years, and it makes me love the guy. I mean, he even looks the same as he did when he was in grammar school.”
At a loss for a response to this, Zoe said, “Well, he did shave his beard.”
And Charlie laughed again. He said, “Hell, Zoe, I had no idea you were so funny. Your timing is great! They should put you in a comedy! You know, I saw that movie you made a couple of years ago, what was that, let’s see, that one where you played the local TV news anchor and you fell for the quarterback on the football team and he got you into drugs of some kind and you overdosed? I mean, it wasn’t a big part, but you were great in it. I thought they were going to save you at the end, in the hospital, but they didn’t. I guess they had to have a reason for the Eriq La Salle character to feel remorse and turn his life around.”
She said, “In the original script, the quarterback killed his friend in a drug-related car accident, and the league hushed it up and paid my character not to investigate the matter, even though she knew all about it. My feeling about the picture they ended up with was that the first half and the second half didn’t
really make sense together.”
“Well, maybe.” He waved his hand. “But you could do comedy.”
“I’m surprised you saw that movie. No one saw that movie.”
“I like sports movies. And they filmed some of it in Trenton. Remember? Not your scenes, but some of the drug stuff, and the quarterback’s high-school scenes. I didn’t go to see you, but you were the best thing in it. The couple we took to the movie couldn’t believe we knew you. I told them about Max, but they’d never heard of Max.”
Zoe cleared her throat and then folded and put down the paper, making it as clear as she could that she was going to stand up, but Charlie, his eye caught by the front page of the paper, didn’t notice. He said, “What do you think of Elena?”
“She’s sweet—”
“I think she’s something of a Nazi myself, though I would never say that to Max. Don’t tell him I said that.”
“A Nazi?”
“Well, a feminazi.”
“What’s that?” said Zoe.
“You don’t listen to Rush?”
“Who’s that?” said Zoe.
“Rush Limbaugh. On the radio.”
“I don’t listen to the radio.”
“You drive all over L.A. and don’t listen to the radio?”
“I like it to be quiet.”
“A feminazi is one of these militant feminists who want to abolish the differences between men and women.”
“Like Delphine, you mean?” And Charlie roared with laughter again. Zoe didn’t remember his being nearly as good-humored as this when she was married and he and his wife had five kids. He said, “Well, between you and me, your mother is a little scary, but that’s just who she is. Elena has a program, though.”
“What kind of a program?” Looking over his shoulder, Zoe realized that she could not comfortably evade this conversation, especially as he was opening up the paper and adding to the barrier between her and the rest of the room. What had seemed a secluded corner now seemed like a trap. She said, “You know, I need to—”
“I think she should keep her mouth shut about the war when our troops are in harm’s way.”
“You do?”
“You can’t believe how much Vietnam veterans still hate Jane Fonda. Soldiers don’t like to know that they aren’t being supported back home. I thought these antiwar protests they’ve been having were criminal. You didn’t go to any, did you?”
Zoe shook her head.
“I didn’t think you would. But Elena did, and she took Max. Max doesn’t think sometimes.”
“Max is a Vietnam vet. He doesn’t hate Jane Fonda. We saw her at a party once, and he was quite friendly to her. She complimented him on that movie he made that was a remake of Topper set in Hawaii—remember, it was called Aloha, Topper? And he told her he liked her in The Morning After. He never said a thing to me about hating her, or even disliking her.”
“And Max is very strange. I admit that. When we were kids, I considered it my job to look after Max, because it was pretty clear that he couldn’t look after himself. And now he’s got this feminazi telling him what to do every minute of the day. When we were talking about the war last night at dinner, frankly”—he leaned toward her and lowered his voice—“I was beginning to think she was really, really crazy. I mean, the sort of crazy that ends up in a mental institution.”
“She seems to take the war very seriously.”
“Well, she’s got a thing about the President that’s way off the wall, all that stuff about how everything he says is a lie, and he knows it. And what does Enron have to do with Saddam Hussein, I’d like to know. It’s crazy leaps like that that let people know you’ve got a screw loose. And fighting fire with fire is not a war crime. If they come and get us, we have to go get them, that’s just the way the world works. Just because you know someone who was at a party at Yale University when the President was going to school there and he came in and swiped your friend’s keg under the influence of alcohol—he’s the first to admit he was a drunk—does not mean you can call him a sociopath—”
“Why not?”
“Because he wasn’t and isn’t a sociopath—”
“But she can call him anything, right? I thought the line that you couldn’t cross was plotting against him in some way.” She let her voice trail off a bit, and she could see that he clearly didn’t realize that she was annoyed with him and making fun of him, if only for her own pleasure. She was an actress. She could do whatever she wanted with her voice.
He exclaimed, “Not in a time of war! Calling the President, who is doing his best to keep this country safe, a war criminal is what is a war crime.” Charlie was getting a little worked up. “Lots of liberals are for this war! Does she realize that? She is in a very, very small minority here—”
“Well, not here.”
“Excuse me?”
“She’s not in a small minority in this house, I don’t think, judging by the talk at the table last night. And, you know, she didn’t say he was a sociopath because he stole the keg. She said he was a sociopath because he punched the owner of the keg in the stomach, even though that guy was supposedly much smaller than he was at the time.”
“I thought, ‘Christ, Elena, don’t you know any boys? That’s what boys do!’”
“Her boy seems nice.”
Charlie rolled his eyes. He said, “Anyway, her house, she gets her way. My take on the conversation last night was that no one wanted to speak up, least of all Max. Her face was all red. Max may not have realized what he was getting into with this one. Steel magnolia and all that.”
“I think she grew up in Chicago,” said Zoe. This, too, she made sound naïve. In fact, though she worried more about the North Koreans, Zoe did not care for the turn the morning’s discussion was now taking. She listened for noises somewhere in the house, heralding the advent of someone who would save her from this man, who was actually breathing hard.
Then he said, all of a sudden, “You know, I love talking to you.”
Startled, she cleared her throat. “That’s very nice.”
“You think so? It’s true. I’ve always loved talking to you. I’ve always thought you were the kindest, most sympathetic person I knew. I remember that time we visited and Sarah Beth was all bent out of shape about everything, and after she had been a little bitch for four days, you said at the breakfast table, ‘I need to go to the Beverly Center for something. Want to come along?’ and she went, and you bought her, gosh, boots and a hat of some kind, jeans, a top, and some books and makeup, and it was all very L.A., not the sort of thing Karen would have let her have at all, but cute. A real shopping spree. What was she at that point, fourteen? And at first I admit I didn’t approve, and Karen was a little put off for part of the day, but, you know, Sarah Beth was so happy, and I could really see how, when you’re fourteen, being taken for a shopping spree by someone you don’t have it in for, I mean, being treated as special when you feel ugly and pissed off all the time—I realized that was a great thing you did. We never thought a bad attitude should be rewarded, but what a silver bullet that was! And it wasn’t even that you were a movie star, but just getting to do it. So, ever since then, I’ve felt very close to you, even though, of course, we’ve hardly had any time to get together.”
Zoe smiled. She did remember taking Charlie’s daughter to the Beverly Center and buying, buying, buying. What had they spent? Five hundred dollars? Nothing, really. And she didn’t do it to be nice. It was just that the girl’s expression was so sour, and her skin was so bad, and her bangs were so thick, and her hair was so crimped and curled that at that breakfast Zoe couldn’t stand to look at her any longer. At the time it felt more like self-preservation than kindness, but then Sarah Beth turned out to be rather cute when you did her up properly, and then the charitable feeling flowed in and felt good. She said, “Yes, it was fun for me. I guess Sarah Beth has a couple of kids now?”
“Yeah. She married a very big-deal shoe importer from Tennessee. Y
ou should see their house. Makes my house look, well, I don’t have a house, really, but my old house where Karen’s living that we built? All I can say is, we thought it was big at the time.” He laughed and shook his head. Then he said, “That’s what I’m getting at. My own story is very big to me—the marriage and the kids, and the house we built, and the separation, and now my cholesterol levels and how far I can run on the beach and getting this supplement business going, but coming out here puts it in perspective and makes me know it’s just a story. You know, eight million stories in the naked city.”
“That’s how Paul sees things, too.”
“Hmmp,” said Charlie, clearly startled by this idea. But he didn’t say anything more, and then Simon’s bald head appeared, rising out of the stairwell. Charlie glanced in the boy’s direction, then picked up the paper. Zoe realized that, over the course of their conversation, his chair had inched toward her, so that the paper was practically touching her. The headline of the article that was right in her face was “State Doubtful FERC Will Grant Refund Request.” She leaned forward and said, “Excuse me, Charlie. Mind if I get past you?”
“Oh, not at all,” said Charlie, moving his chair. As she slipped through the opening he made, she could not fail to notice how thin his hair was on top. Thin, but not bald. Max looked better than Charlie, she thought, more hawkish and sinewy and Mediterranean. “Hey!” she said to Simon, who had his head in the refrigerator.
“What time is it?” said Simon.
“About seven.”
“Why am I up so early?” said Simon, as if he really wanted to know. Zoe laughed and shrugged. He said, “Why are you up so early?”