Ten Days in the Hills

by Jane Smiley

  He put the camera to his eye, took it down again, turned it in his hand. It had a nice weight, enough to seem serious but not inconvenient. He was a little impressed and suddenly curious about what more he could do with it. He said, “Do you think Cassie and Delphine would let me video them having a conversation? I always wonder what they talk about. They’ve been talking constantly for twenty years. It was Cassie who found this house. She lived next door, and the day she heard it was coming up for sale, she told Delphine, Delphine told Zoe, and Zoe called an agent.”

  “Ask them,” said Elena.

  But he didn’t think he would. He lifted the camera to his eye again, and focused it just on the curve of her back as it shaped her waist, then swelled into her buttock. When he looked at it with his eyes, it was pleasant but unremarkable. When he looked through the viewfinder, the same curve was bright and erotic, flat in a way, but alluring.

  When Max bought his house, it had a two-car garage, fairly standard for the time (at least outside of Bel-Air). There had been a little garden and a boxwood hedge to the right side of the garage. In 1990, he had taken out the hedge, repaved the driveway, and added another bay to the garage, so that it could now hold three cars. These cars were his own Lexus, dark gray, which he had just driven up the hill and parked on the street; the six-year-old Volvo sedan he had gotten new for Isabel when she turned sixteen, white; and Elena’s moss-green Subaru wagon, though recently she had ordered a Toyota Prius, dark blue. Personally, he thought the Prius was awfully small, but it was the perfect car for Elena—she could drive it in good conscience almost all the time and know exactly how many miles she was getting every moment of every hour of every day. In fact, the only problem with the Prius was that it didn’t seem to offer the Global Positioning option, which would be great for Elena, since knowing just where she was (and what the temperature was, what the time was, and what her average speed was) always relaxed her. “I like to feel well oriented,” was what she said. “It’s reassuring.” He thought the GPS was intriguing himself, except that a friend of his, a lawyer married to another lawyer, had rented a car with that system for a trip to look at autumn color in New England, and his wife and the system had gotten into repeated arguments about the proper route to take. The voice on the GPS would imperturbably announce something like “At Route 128 East, turn south-southwest onto Mars Lane,” and the wife would insist that, according to her map, he had to continue to the next right and turn there. There had been no way to turn off either the GPS or the wife. The friend had lamented to Max, “She couldn’t help arguing with that voice. She would say, ‘Larry, I know it’s not a person, but I hate the way she’s such a know-it-all!’”

  Outside the garage, blocking his ingress, were five cars: Zoe’s new Mercedes SL500 convertible, silver with red leather interior, quite a machine, really; Simon’s ten-year-old black Jeep that he had bought with money he earned working for a caterer before heading off to college; Cassie’s blue Saab; Stoney’s vintage dark-red Jaguar, new in 1980, when Jerry and Max had driven it to Las Vegas for a night just to feel it go; and, of course, Charlie’s rented lemon-yellow Mustang convertible. Cassie normally didn’t park in his driveway, since her own unremodeled two-car garage was right next door, but the trunk was open, meaning they would have been unloading groceries. He looked in the trunk, took out a case of Pellegrino, and then closed it. He set the case of Pellegrino inside the garage door, then resumed his original inspection of the plantings along the driveway. Every year he thought he might redo this area, and in fact, now that the big garden was about as done as it could possibly be without tearing the whole thing up and doing it all over again, it was the perfect time to begin. But the idea of beginning just made him want to go into his bedroom and sit down with a book—it would be a gardening book, maybe a big picture book or maybe something more technical—but it would not be a book that inspired him. It would be a book that soothed him into waiting another day. In the end, this spot was nice enough, and the bougainvillea was thriving, even though it had an outdated air about it. Though the two eucalyptus trees were getting overmature, and they dropped a lot of junk vegetation around the place.

  Lately, whenever he contemplated changing the landscaping in this spot, he also wondered, no doubt as a procrastination device, whether he should do some additional remodeling around this end of the house: Still more garage? Bigger and more modern kitchen? Combine a couple of the smaller bedrooms in the lower story? Do something with Isabel’s bathroom? Buy a new house altogether, since this one was unconscionably large and rather out of the way—would it be nice to live in another part of L.A., in one of those traditional neighborhoods closer to UCLA, for example? Of course, another deterrent to action was that as soon as you contemplated remodeling you had to wonder if your house wasn’t worth more as a teardown. And as soon as he entered upon those sorts of thoughts, the whole thing seemed too much to think about, and so the eucalyptuses stayed put, as did the bougainvillea.

  He knew he could move into Elena’s little house in the flats, which had only three bedrooms (but Simon was on his way out). If sometimes it seemed to him that his house lay down along the hillside like a big comforter, muffling all things, then her house sat on its corner lot like a tiny power station, transforming big currents into small ones and sending them out into the neighborhood. How many boxes of four-inch, six-inch, and twelve-inch tiles do you order if you want to make sure you have enough for a twelve-by-fourteen-foot bathroom floor? Elena could tell you. What were the eight billing options for electrical power, and what did the surcharges mean? Elena knew. If you were installing a ventilating hood above a gas range, which wire was the ground? Elena knew without even thinking about it.

  Should he ask everyone to come outside and rearrange the cars so that he could get into the garage? Or should he give up, leave his car on the street, and go inside, even though he suspected that Charlie and Elena were having it out at last and that everyone else had formed up sides and that dinner would be fraught with tension? In fact, how did it happen that all these people were here in the first place? Every single one of them he liked and enjoyed one on one, even Simon, whom he didn’t know very well, even Charlie, whom he knew only too well, and even Paul, whom he considered a fraud. Zoe could come in and out of the house all day. Isabel he was more than happy to see. Delphine he was used to, and Elena it didn’t seem he could live without, odd as that was. Stoney and Cassie were Hollywood itself in some way for him—he didn’t think he would know where he was in the absence of her stories and his history, and, for now, at least, here was where he loved to be, in this house, looking at the Getty and across the 405 to the delightful but happily remote Elysian Fields of Bel-Air and Beverly Hills. But.

  It was all very well, in principle, that his family should foregather at his house as the world, it seemed, was flipping over, taking a new shape, entering a gloomier era. Hadn’t he tried to talk Isabel into coming home right after 9/11 and finding a job in L.A.? Or, better even than that, decamping with him and Delphine to his old place on Kauai (even though Zoe had gotten a little hysterical at that, certain as she was that the North Koreans would aim there first)? But Isabel had refused to leave New York, the three of them had not decamped, he had met Elena, and this house had returned to its former identity as his own personal retreat in the Palisades (wasn’t that a nice word these days, “Palisades”?), and now here they all were, together, in retreat, carrying in their very selves his entire life all at once. Only Ina, a woman with grandchildren, was missing.

  Max did not consider himself an introspective, or retrospective, person. What he liked to do was to make movies, especially contemporary movies. He liked organizing the writer or writers, the actors, and the scenes so that they told a compelling story, and he also liked finding the locations and putting together the costumes and the makeup and the set decorations so that anyone watching the movie even six months later could say to himself or herself, Oh! That picture must have been filmed last March, before
the Starbucks was built on that corner, when kids were still wearing Skechers and dress shirts with ripped sleeves. He was not known for these sorts of movies—only Southern Pacific, which he’d made in and around the train station in downtown Los Angeles in 1993, had made any money—but they were his favorites. He was known for being able to organize big productions taking place in distant eras and avoiding the “Ready when you are, C.B.” effect. (Cecil B. DeMille is filming thousands of Israelites and thousands of Egyptians on the shores of the Dead Sea. It’s a hot day, and it has taken seven hours to set up the shot. There are horses and chariots and elephants and camels and even a few lions for some reason. DeMille is shouting through a megaphone, and the wind is coming up. Action! The scene begins. Ten minutes later, Cut! DeMille turns to the first cameraman, who says, “Gosh, C.B., the camera jammed!” Then he turns to the second cameraman, who says, “Hell, C.B., someone forgot to load the film!” So DeMille puts the megaphone to his lips and shouts to the third cameraman, far in the distance, who is looking intently through his viewfinder. “Jack, Jack!” he shouts. “Jack! Can you hear me?” Jack looks up. He looks happy. He has a big grin on his face. DeMille feels relieved. Then, just flickering on the wind, comes the shout, “Ready when you are, C.B.!”) That was a joke Max heard before he ever came to Hollywood—maybe his uncle told him that joke when he was a kid at the dinner table, still planning to fight fires for a living—but he had never forgotten the punch line and often said it—someone said it was time to go, or to start a meeting, or to eat dinner, and he said, “Ready when you are, C.B.,” and no one knew what he was talking about. But the joke always reminded him to make sure there was film in the camera, that the camera worked, and that the cameraman had it together. DeMille movies were not his favorites exactly, because they looked like the 1940s and ’50s, not 356 B.C. and A.D. 66. Costume movies dated faster than any other kind, probably because of the actresses’ hairstyles, but, still, that was what they kept asking him to make. He did not think he was going to make the novel Taras Bulba into a movie.

  Max knew that around town he was known as “a survivor.” It was either the greatest compliment or the smallest compliment. It meant that you had been able to sustain your career, make the best of your talents. That you had been clever and canny and had fit in pretty well. It meant that you had never offended the studios, had a knack for organization, could get along and go along. It was the greatest compliment to people who got up in the morning thinking of the movie business as a field pockmarked with land mines that had to be avoided every day. It was the smallest compliment to people who cared about movies, because it meant that you were not a brilliant or interesting artist, but, rather, a reliable manager. Max cared about movies.

  He walked back over to his car, opened the passenger’s-side door, and took out the jacket he had laid over the back of the seat. Then he closed the door and pressed the button on his key fob. The doors locked with an expensive heavy click. The Lexus was an okay car, anonymous and Japanese and possessed of sufficient status to not arouse remark. The nicest thing about it was the sound system, which at the touch of a button could mimic the acoustics of any of a number of venues. You could listen to Mozart in a concert hall or a church or your bedroom. You could listen to Neil Young in a club, or in a hundred-thousand-seat stadium. Well, not quite, but the sound system was pleasant to think about, though his hearing was going and he couldn’t really tell the difference between the acoustics of the concert hall and the acoustics of the church. Many people in L.A. liked their cars better than they liked their houses. He liked his house better than he liked his car, which showed him to be a certain type of person, not very cool, and probably from the East. So now he opened his front door and walked into the house. It was almost six-thirty.

  “Dad!” said Isabel, who was standing in the entryway with a boot in her hand. “What movie did you get?”

  “I got the one from the paper this morning, The Day the Earth Stood Still.”

  “I never saw that. I saw Deep Impact, though. That was a waste of time. I thought you were going to get the whales one, the Star Trek whales one.”

  He laid his jacket over the back of the bench. “It was out.”

  She dropped the boot she was holding and put her hand on his shoulder, then kissed him on the cheek. She said, “I’m glad you’re home. You should hear the story Cassie’s telling. She really does know everyone.”

  “She does. Who this time?”

  “Henry Miller.”

  “Henry Miller the author?”

  “The very one.”

  He laughed. “I’m impressed. I didn’t realize her acquaintanceship extended to literary types.”

  She put her arm through his, then leaned toward him and whispered, “I don’t think they talked about books or art.”

  Elena and Delphine were cooking dinner. Elena was stuffing vegetable parings down the garbage disposal, flipping the switch off and on as she poked at the onion skins and what looked like celery stalks. When she saw him, she turned off the disposal and came over to give him a kiss. In her book, Here’s How: To Do EVERYTHING Correctly!, there was a subsection entitled “Meeting and Greeting” in which she pointed out that all mammals have greeting rituals that distinguish between family, friends, and strangers, and therefore an emotionally stable life involves orderly habits of kissing, hugging, patting on the back, making eye contact, and smiling every time your loved ones come and go. He folded her against his chest and it was true, he was reassured.

  Cassie was saying, “Well, at that point I was, what, forty? He must have been at least seventy or older. He painted. Our paths crossed. What can I say?”

  “Well,” said Simon, “what was he like?”

  Delphine handed Stoney a knife, a cutting board, and a cucumber. He sat down at the island, and then Isabel sat beside him. He cut a slice off the cucumber, but Isabel stopped him, then took the knife and the cucumber and began to shave off the dark-green skin. Stoney smiled at her.

  “He was a talker. I’m not saying he was a big talker, because that would imply that he couldn’t back it up, but he did like to talk and talk. And talk dirty, of course. He was quite famous for talking dirty and making dirty talk popular, but mostly he just liked to talk.”

  “How did you meet him?” said Isabel.

  “Oh, I was into art then, too, though I secretly thought all the best work was being done in macramé.” She grinned. “He told me a funny story about his life in Paris that I never saw printed in any of his books.”

  “Oh, do tell,” said Zoe.

  “Pour me a glass of wine,” said Cassie.

  She had been idly slicing tomatoes, but now she put down the knife. Stoney reached across the island and took the rest of the tomatoes.

  Zoe picked up the bottle, took a glass out of the cabinet, and poured a healthy serving. She gestured to Max, who nodded. It was a Burgundy that he didn’t recognize, not from his own cellar, but richly colored and fragrant. Cassie took an appreciative sip and said, “Well, as you can imagine, when Henry Miller first went to Paris, he did not hang out with the best people, but he was good-looking and sexy-looking. He caught the eye of a woman walking down the street—he told me it was ‘the exact street that the tumbrels used to go down on their way to the guillotine!’ I got the feeling he wouldn’t have paid any attention to her if he’d met her in the Louvre. Anyway, this woman invited him to her place one day when her husband was out. Henry thought she might give him something to eat, so he went. It turned out the husband was something like thirty-five years older than the wife. He was a doctor and had all these ideas about sexual energies and sexual hygiene, and so he only slept with his wife every month or so.”

  Charlie said, “Well, lots of people think—”

  “Shhh,” said Delphine.