Ten Days in the Hills

by Jane Smiley

  And Zoe had simply overcome him with her energy and her resilience and her everlasting readiness for whatever was next. She was tremendously impulsive, but she didn’t see herself that way at all, because acting on impulse never got her in trouble. A perfect example of how Zoe operated was the famous (in the family) story of the BMW. Right after Isabel was born, Max had bought Zoe a compact little white BMW, but she had found the driver’s seat uncomfortable, so she had set out one day to take it to the upholsterer and have it customized. As she was driving out to Van Nuys, she passed a Mercedes dealer, and decided to go sit in a Mercedes, to see if that seat was more comfortable. The result was that she traded a brand-new BMW with a thousand miles on it even up for a five-year-old Mercedes with twenty-six thousand miles on it. It was not yet noon when she arrived home in the Mercedes, and Max was still at the studio. As she was taking her groceries out of the back, she noticed that the dealer hadn’t cleaned under the passenger’s seat very thoroughly, and she pulled out some papers, including some sheets of music, which, of course, she went inside and played through. Songs she had never heard. No name or other identification. So she called the dealer. The previous owner was an elderly man who had died. She mentioned the music. The music! Well, the music turned out to belong to one of the car salesmen, who was moonlighting at the dealership, and by the following Saturday, Zoe had hired him to play backup on her next album, and now he was a sought-after session man and one of Zoe’s oldest friends. This sort of thing happpened so frequently with Zoe that she interpreted impulses as her good luck calling out to her. No one was like her. If he’d known himself then as he knew himself now, Max might not have attempted Zoe, but in that case, of course, there would be no Isabel, and he had known for a long time that it was Isabel who was the love of his life, not Zoe.

  Even so, or, perhaps, consequently, he didn’t often let himself think about what might happen to Isabel. He tried to think of her life as a brick wall she was building that had reached a certain height and was sturdy and aesthetically pleasing so far. She could be relied upon, he usually thought, to keep building in her careful way—to correct this bit here (Leo) and reinforce that bit there (New York)—in general, even as young as she was, showing herself to be an excellent builder. When he thought of her this way, he did not have to imagine, and then worry about, structural deformities that might topple the building in the future.

  So what if Isabel let herself get involved with either Stoney or Simon, one a has-been and one a never-will-be, in Max’s private, most brutal, opinion? Was it safer for her to pursue her own ambitions and not get involved with anyone at all? To aspire to a nice apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, clean and well furnished and in a secure neighborhoood, no know-it-all lawyer, no overworked doctor, no whining playwright or novelist, no shallow business executive, no abusive drug dealer, no alcoholic lyric poet, no tedious do-gooder from a nonprofit organization, no balding, cigar-smoking impresario, no sad-sack high-school teacher, no self-important book publisher? If he had to pick a man for Isabel, would he pick anyone? But did he really want her to wither away with a couple of cats, solitary and safe? Of course not. Even so, he was too old now to envision for her what he had envisioned for himself at the same age, all the prospective friends and mates as a gallery of unique and amazing possibilities—Ina! Ruth! Jane! Maureen! Nancy! Mary! If only! if only! a date! or a lunch! or a walk! or a drink! He had been enthusiastic in that teenaged-boy way until Zoe, so focused on the mystery of the girl. If you were lucky enough to get into her space, you would of course inspect all her things, trying to imbibe the wonder of them through your eyes and fingertips. Isabel should have that experience. It shouldn’t matter if at fifty-eight he saw all the boys as types whose fates were already decided, and not for the best, since all fates, he had discovered, were more or less disappointing or tragic. It was not that the young men were callow or puerile, it was that they were trapped and enclosed by nature, on the one hand, and nurture, on the other, and that what they thought of as surprise twists and happy endings Max knew were just the same old plot points all over again.

  He sighed and looked around the table. He was having that moment, even though the soup was good and the roasted vegetables were excellent and the salad was satisfying, that moment when the people around him, the people closest to him, whom he saw every day and cared for and loved, looked benighted and lost and confused and confusing, and of all things the thing he wanted least was to have that thought about Isabel.

  Elena’s hand fell affectionately on his knee, though, and at her touch he realized that of course he was wrong. He could, for example, privately marvel in a condescending manner at Zoe’s choice of Paul here, systematically masticating and experiencing his food, though not, evidently, actually enjoying it. He could see Charlie’s life as one doltish, unreflective idiocy after another, many variations on the theme of blowing up an outhouse with a purloined stick of dynamite, or he could take seriously this little burst of pleasure he felt at Elena’s touch and presence and leave it at that and try not to worry about the fact that there was no life path he could choose for Isabel that would satisfy him.

  “I did an interesting thing today,” said Stoney.

  “What?” said Isabel.

  “Max, do you remember a guy named Howard Greco? Did you ever meet him? He was a friend of Jerry’s, but lots older. He’s eighty-five now. Anyway, Dorothy wanted me to take something over there that belonged to him, I don’t know, it was in a box, I guess Jerry had it for some reason. So I go out there. Howard lives in Pasadena.”

  “He worked for Disney for years,” said Max. “I met him once or twice.”

  “Remember Lady and the Tramp?” said Stoney. “Remember how beautiful certain scenes were? Once, I saw Lady and the Tramp as an adult when it came out for a short time on video, and there was that scene where the dogs are chasing the horse-drawn wagon through the rainy streets, under the streetlights, and as the wheels rolled through the mud, the light of the streetlights was reflected in the ruts and puddles. I thought that was the most beautiful scene!”

  “Or the opening sequence of The Lion King, with the animals galloping over the plain,” said Paul.

  “I did always think that Disney didn’t get enough credit for the detail and beauty of the animation,” said Max.

  “Well,” said Stoney, “Howard Greco was responsible for a lot of that, according to Jerry. Very painstaking and detailed in his work. Studied a lot of art over the years. I mean, he’s an expert on not only the Hudson River School, but also Constable and Turner. Very light-oriented. So I went out there today, and he was glad to see me, and he showed me his hobby.”

  “What’s his hobby?” said Zoe.

  “Animated porn,” said Stoney.

  “I knew you were going to say that,” said Cassie.

  “He showed me one of his shorts. It was eight minutes long and it took him two years to make, because he doesn’t use a computer and does it all in the old-fashioned way, hand-drawing every frame.”

  “Was it, like, Mickey Mouse does it with Goofy, or, say, a threesome with Minnie?” said Simon.

  “No, it was autobiographical,” said Stoney. “It was called Delilah, and it opened with a shot of Howard’s own front entry in his house in Pasadena. You see his hand go to the doorknob, and the door opens, and there’s a woman standing there in a pink dress. She looks vaguely like a Disney girl, like Sleeping Beauty or someone like that, but she’s clearly forty and has had a hard life, except that she has great skin, kind of luminous. As she turns and says, ‘You Howard? You called me?,’ it’s just like with those puddles in Lady and the Tramp—her skin reflects the way the sunlight is falling across the veranda. And then, behind her, he drew in all the flowers in the garden. Pink and white roses and some pampas grass and a lemon tree with lemons hanging on it, and just for a moment you look at these lemons and you see the shadows of the leaves across the fruit. So she comes into the entryway, and her shadow falls across the Saltil
lo tiles, and she says, ‘Put my bag here, that okay?,’ and she puts her bag on a table in front of a mirror, and in the mirror you see her back and her ass reflected behind the bag, and behind her, Howard, in his shorts and no shirt, and he really does look about eighty-five. His hair is standing on end, and he’s smiling. All around him is the inside of his house, the same house we were in, except drawn in this photo-realist style and suffused with bright colors. I mean, I don’t know how it would look on a TV or a small screen, but he’d built himself a screening room just for screening his homemade porn collection, so that he could get the right color values.

  “She says, ‘You wanna go to the bedroom, right?,’ and he says, ‘Would you like a drink?,’ and she says, ‘Not this early in the day, but thanks,’ and as they walk toward the bedroom, she keeps looking around at the furniture and the paintings and the mirrors. He even draws her gaze pausing first on the mirror, where she sees herself and makes a little face, and then on a painting, where she makes another face. He draws the painting—it’s in a completely different style from the rest of the animation, it’s a picture of a waterfall and some mountains in South America, and he animates it so that as they pass it the camera seems to cross it. Can you imagine the work involved in that? I kept sort of marveling, and Howard would say, ‘So I’m an old man, what else is there for me to do?’

  “He follows her to the bedroom. She starts taking off her clothes, and the animation makes the clothes look filmy and vaporous as she unbuttons them and gets out of them. She is doing a little dance for him. But the best thing about this sequence is his room, which clearly hasn’t been redecorated since the 1960s, and has all these curved, shiny surfaces, but nicked and dusty, and it’s all in the animation, along with her.”

  “That junk is coming back into fashion,” said Cassie, “I can’t believe it myself.”

  “Well, judging by his film, his is vintage. Anyway, as she takes off her clothes, she moves around the room, and the shadows change. When she turns on a light, the light falls across her body. When he opens a window, the curtain lifts up, and you see the shadow of that. So pretty soon she’s naked, and he asks her to go out into the enclosed garden, which she does, and in the midst of her little dance, she begins to smell the flowers, and he shows you that, and also close-ups of the flowers. They’re as accurate as botanical drawings. They go back into the bedroom, and she lies down on the bed with her legs spread, offering her breasts in the classic Playboy manner, and doing several postures for him, all of which he has carefully drawn. From time to time you catch a glimpse of him in the mirror, and he has stripped down, too. I think the best parts, though, were the animation close-ups of her skin.”

  “I can’t believe this was erotic,” said Zoe.

  “It wasn’t,” said Stoney. “I mean, maybe it is to Howard, but the process was so labor-intensive, for one thing, that that would seem to me to diminish the erotic potential of the project even for him. And I thought I would watch him during the screening to see if he was watching it like you would porn, but I was so fascinated by what was happening on the screen that I forgot to look at him.”

  “So—did they do it?” said Simon.

  “Yeah, but it stays completely in Howard’s point of view. The sequence of them doing it is all what he sees—the side of her face, the pattern on the pillowcase, the window. At one point, he looks down at her stomach and breasts. They turn over, and he’s looking at the ceiling. There isn’t any kissing. After a minute, she says, ‘So—you done?,’ and you see him in the mirror, getting off her, and then he disappears from the mirror and you see part of her body, her leg bending and her buttock. Which looks, even in the mirror, not quite as firm as it once was. Then the bedsprings creak and she sits up, and you see her in the mirror, but she isn’t looking at herself. I mean, I have to say that I never saw anything like this. While I was watching it, I thought it was the greatest film I’ve ever seen. How many frames is eight minutes of animation? And he drew every single one as if it were a painting.”

  It was here that Max realized that Stoney was telling this story for his benefit, to warn him away from My Lovemaking with Elena. Max found this realization amusing, because, of course, there was no similarity between Howard Greco’s animated porn and his own live-action depiction of what was to be, essentially, an actual connection, on many levels, between two mature adults. “I’m sure,” said Max, “he had some sort of technique for reproducing at least parts of each frame.”

  “Well, he must have,” said Stoney.

  “Not much of a story,” said Delphine. “How did it end?”

  “Well, he shows his hands counting out some money, a hundred bucks, I think, with an extra ten for gas money, and then he offers her a Calistoga water, and she takes the lime flavor, and then he shows her to the door and watches her get into her car, which is a ’99 Civic, and then he shuts the door and rolls the credits.”

  “It doesn’t sound very funny,” said Simon.

  “It wasn’t funny at all,” said Stoney. “Or erotic. Or even sad. But it was beautiful and interesting. It was like entering the mind of another person, and seeing how he sees his own stuff and his own life. It was eerie. I didn’t know what to say afterward. Especially when he offered me a lime Calistoga water.”

  Everyone laughed.

  “Sounds lonely to me,” said Elena.

  “I guess old age is lonely, you know,” said Charlie.

  “But it wasn’t really lonely,” said Stoney, “because it was so painstaking. You realized as you were watching it that if he didn’t have all that solitude he wouldn’t have been able to make this thing, and the time with Delilah would have just vanished into the past as meaningless.”

  “It sounds pretty meaningless to me,” said Cassie. “I’m not saying that’s bad. Every landscape in my gallery is meaningless, when you come to think of it, but where’s the proportion? Two years on a sordid little story of the time a certain prostitute came to your house in Pasadena?”

  Max laughed.

  Stoney said, “But it was so good! I mean, I was so enthusiastic after I watched it that I was ready to get him some kind of film-festival showing, like at Sundance or something. I still might. He has four of them. He said, ‘Ah, ya know, Stoney, this one’s the photo-realist one. But there’s a Pop Art one, too. That’s called Sophie. I think that’s the funniest one. Then I had this girl come, and her name was LaDonna, and she was a black girl, and I thought I should do her like she was out of a da Vinci painting. She had that look.’” Stoney shook his head. “Wouldn’t you love to have them?”

  “What would you do with them?” said Simon.

  Max said, “Run them on a continuous loop, the way they do video installations in museums.”

  “But then you’d get used to them,” said Zoe. “I hate that, when you hear some song you recorded ten years ago over and over again. I think all recordings should self-destruct after five hundred playings.”

  “What I would do,” said Paul, “is watch each one one time, but in a concentrated way, you know, and then give them to someone else.”

  “What if he dies,” said Cassie, “and some relative comes in and throws them out? Without even looking at them? I think you should do something, Stoney.” She rolled her eyes, then went on, “I know what I said before, but, actually, the meaning of art is in the technique, after all. Why would these be any more meaningless in the larger scheme of things than Lady and the Tramp?”

  “Or what if some relative looks at them,” said Isabel, “and decides they’re nasty and throws them out because of that?”

  While this discussion bubbled around the table, Max was thinking of himself that morning, of how Elena’s body looked through the digital viewfinder of the video camera. He did feel a surge of reflexive annoyance and, yes, proprietary jealousy at Howard Greco’s animated “sex cam” focusing on the pattern of the pillowcase, and then turning over and looking at the ceiling. But, still, only eight minutes! Two years’ work and only eight mi
nutes! Whereas his own idea had few commmercial possibilities, Howard Greco’s had none at all. Though the film-festival idea was a good one. These days, you could go around to film festivals for most of the year and find yourself quite a big audience. The thought gave him a jolt, and then he remembered what that jolt was. It was anticipation, something he had avoided feeling for a fairly long time now, at least since the bad year 2000, and maybe for longer than that. Under the table, he took Elena’s hand between the two of his. The bad year 2000 had opened with his dog, Marco the Barker, half Doberman and half German shepherd, and very lazy (Marco always slept late, and only wandered out of Max’s bedroom when he heard people opening the refrigerator door; he then sat down and seemed to survey the shelves at his leisure until the person tossed him something, which he caught and carried to his bed to eat in peace), picking up poison somewhere in the hills and expiring after two weeks of intensive care. His throat swelled up and clenched shut, and he could not be saved. He was seven. Within a few weeks after that, Max himself had gone to have a checkup and ended up in the cardiac unit, having an angioplasty, which was supposed to be an easy-on, easy-off procedure. At one point during the, for lack of a better word, “operation,” he had felt a transient pain in his chest, and remarked on it. The surgeon had said, “That’s your heart attack. If you ever feel that again, head straight for the emergency room.” But six weeks later, he still felt punk, and not as happy as Stoney had thought he should feel at being relieved of that mountain-climbing production. And then, of course, Jerry was diagnosed with his brain tumor (“I don’t know what it is, Max, but every time I get on the 405 going north, I feel like I’m spinning”). The bad year 2000 had literally changed his life, hadn’t it? But only now, as he felt that single jolt of anticipation with regard to work rather than sex, did he realize how much it had changed his life.