Ten Days in the Hills

by Jane Smiley

  Of course, his movie, by contrast to Howard’s, was about a relationship. Who am I? Who is Elena? How do we connect? Howard’s idea, of course, was about an exchange. And because it was animated, it was entirely subjective. The camera Max would use would offer the possibility of objectivity, because the camera always sees more than the director intends for it to see, so much more that even when the director and the film editor are staring at the footage, scrutinizing it for continuity problems, they can never catch them all. My Lovemaking with Elena would appeal, in part, for precisely the opposite reasons that Delilah appealed to Stoney—lack of control in contrast to control. Zoe was right—not much of a story to that Delilah thing, nowhere to go except, in eight minutes, to the handing out of greenbacks. But not even Max knew where My Lovemaking with Elena would go. Not even Max, the director, knew whether Max, the character, would be able to get it up! Max laughed.

  “What?” said Isabel.

  “I would like to see that little film, that’s all. Or the Pop Art one. Very funny. You should get him a Sundance gig, Stoney. He would be the toast of the festival. And they could seat him on a panel and interview him about the old days at Disney, too. That would be interesting.”

  “More soup, anyone?” said Elena.

  The tureen, Max saw, was almost empty, as was the dish of roast vegetables. A nice dinner, not what he had foreseen as he was standing outside the garage looking at the cars. He said, “We’ve got The Day the Earth Stood Still. Showing in, what, a half an hour? How about that?”

  “That’s old,” said Charlie.

  “Nineteen fifty-one,” said Max.

  “Global warming for the World War II generation,” mused Charlie, shaking his head and smiling as he looked around the table. “Someday, you know, they’re going to look back at us and say…” He was gazing confidentially, even conspiratorially, around the table.

  It was amazing to Max how slow on the uptake Charlie was. Surely he had seen the Subaru in the garage. Surely he remembered two nights ago, when Elena was talking about the Prius she had ordered. Surely he had some idea that Isabel had been working for an environmental nonprofit. Isabel, in fact, was now staring at her plate. Elena was staring at Charlie. Her hand went up, and with her index finger she pushed her hair behind her ear.

  Zoe said, “Someone sent me a global-warming script a couple of months ago. They’ve got financing for an all-star production already. A diversified band of patriotic Americans is supposed to outrun tidal waves inundating the Atlantic Seaboard and save their children of many races who are on a school trip to Washington, D.C. As I recall, I was up for the part of the black-studies professor at Columbia. I am a little snippy, and so I am killed when all the tidal waves suddenly turn to ice as the temperature plummets from ninety above zero to ninety below in the course of about an hour, but my child survives and is adopted by my cousin, who is a stay-at-home mom married to a displaced Bengali technician in Quebec City, which I guess is built on a high promontory of some sort, and so is turned into an island. I couldn’t make heads or tails of the script.”

  “It could happen,” said Simon.

  Everyone laughed, and, next to Max, Elena took a deep breath.

  “Good meal,” said Max.

  “Excellent,” said Paul.

  “Anyone want some Newman-O’s?” said Simon. “They’re Oreos by Paul Newman. They had them at Whole Foods when I was there today.”

  Elena pushed back her chair and stood up with the soup tureen. She said, “What was it you were going to say about global warming, Charlie?”

  “Oh, I can’t remember,” said Charlie.

  “Good idea,” said Simon.

  DAY FIVE • Friday, March 28, 2003

  Stoney and Isabel were lying on chaises longues at the farthest edge of the pool, under the shadow of the hillside, in the dark. Isabel suspected that it was way after midnight already. Even the pool light was out, and the water was black and invisible. If she had been making the movie of this conversation, Isabel thought, she would have stippled in some stars in the calm liquid surface of the pool and had them dimly reflect the stars in the sky. She said, “Stoney, do you think that when you are in a hole the way we are here you can see more stars, or is that just an illusion?”

  “I have no idea.”

  It was cool, and she was lying on a blanket, covered with towels. Their edges and corners fluttered just a little bit. It had been an odd day—hot and windy. Now she could feel the wind eddy about; the ridgeline to the west protected them from direct exposure. Even so, she had more of a sense than usual of something dangerous out and about—only the wind, but still—so she had a towel wrapped around her head. It was warm and comforting to be so cocooned.

  Stoney said, “I met with those Russians this morning. They told a story. I’ve been thinking about it all day.”

  “What was it?”

  “Well, they’re staying at the Beverly Wilshire, so we were sitting in the restaurant there. Did I tell you before that their names are Mike, Al, and Sergei? Mike is the boss. When he got up to go buy some cigars, Al leaned across the table to Sergei and said, ‘You know how Mike got married?’ Sergei shakes his head, and Al glances at me, and he says, ‘You know Mike is from Kazan, which is almost not Russia. He lives in Moscow now, but he went back to his home district when he was ready to get married, and fell for this girl Adana, but she was determined to finish at the university and have a career, so she turned him down and ran off and hid from him. He tried to set up a deal with her parents, but she still wouldn’t have it.

  “‘One day, Mike is out wandering in the countryside, trying to figure out what to do about Adana—should he forget her, should he try something else, why is she such a cold bitch—and he hears the sound of dogs barking and howling, and he turns around and here comes a naked girl. The dogs are big wolfhound types, and they’re chasing her. Behind them is a man on a horse with a gun. The dogs run her down and grab her, and the guy jumps off his horse and goes after her with his gun. Mike has a gun, too, like he always does, so he steps in among the dogs and shoots one and grabs the girl. She’s got blood pouring from her belly and her breasts. So Mike holds him off, but thinking that the guy looks familiar, and then the guy says, “Mike! It’s not your business!,” but Mike won’t let him near her. She’s crying, one of the dogs is dead, Mike figures it’s going to be a shoot-out, which isn’t so uncommon in Kazan, but the guy says that he is Mike’s uncle Nikolai and that this is Masha, that he is in love with. Now, Mike’s uncle is dead, and he figures the guy is lying, so he threatens to shoot the other dog. The uncle says that, yes, he did die, but, unbeknownst to the family, he died by his own hand, out of love for the girl. And after he died, the girl Masha laughed and gloated at his funeral, but then Masha died of a mysterious illness.’”

  Stoney sat up, leaned toward her, and whispered, “After her death, the two of them were sent to hell and were cursed, and their curse is this—once a week, just at sunset on Friday, he chases her with the dogs right to this spot, the dogs catch her, and he shoots her.”

  Isabel said, “Stoney, do you believe everything you hear?”

  “And suddenly, as the uncle finishes telling the story, the dead dog leaps up and sinks his teeth into the girl’s ass, and she screams. Mike steps back in surprise, the uncle shoots the girl in the head, pulls out a knife, slits her open, pulls out her heart, which is small and hard, and throws it to the dogs, who gobble it down. Then all of them—dogs, horse, uncle, and girl—vanish.”

  He sat back, out of her gaze, and Isabel looked up at the stars again. She said, “This is a ghost story, right?”

  “They said it really happened.”

  “Ugh,” said Isabel. It was true, she thought, that honoring the integrity of other people’s cultures was always harder than you thought it was going to be.

  “The next week, according to Al, Mike talks Adana and her family into going with him and his family out to this spot. Pretty soon, they’re ensconced under some t
rees, and here comes the horse, the uncle, the girl, and the dogs. She is naked and running and screaming, and as alive and palpable as you or me, and the horse is churning up dust, and the dogs are barking and baying. Right in front of the spectators, they leap on her and bring her down and begin tearing her apart. Nikolai jumps off his horse and wades into the melee, and does the same thing as the week before, shoots her in the head so that her brains spatter all over a nearby tree, and then he rips her open, tears out her little heart, throws it to the dogs, and they all disappear into thin air. Adana’s father runs over to the tree and sees that the bark is clean. No blood. No hoofprints. No sign of a bullet. Well, the onlookers are really shook by this—it’s 1992, after all, and all the old folks went to Soviet-era schools, and nothing about this sort of thing was ever covered in the curriculum. They do believe in curses, though, so the mother and the father take the daughter aside, and they have a long family conference right there, and Mike starts looking a little better to her. Everyone decides, in the end, that the marriage could be good or bad, but a curse is worse, and so they have a wedding, and Mike brings Adana back to Moscow, and now she works for ITAR-TASS, and they have a couple of kids.”

  “They told you this with a straight face?”

  Stoney nodded.

  “This girl is my age?”

  “Thirty, actually.”

  Isabel shivered, looked up at the stars, and listened for the low whoosh of cars on the unseen 405. “They told you this sitting in the restaurant at the Beverly Wilshire?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did Masha feel the pain?”

  “I gather that’s what a curse is. You have to feel the pain.”

  “I guess.” Now Isabel could feel the darkness form a second layer of her cocoon. It gathered around her, pressing quietly against her. It was L.A. darkness, reassuring after all, darkness that wafted around places like the Beverly Wilshire and Rodeo Drive and Sunset. Up Beverly Glen to Mulholland, along the PCH, feathered by the whiteness of the breaking surf. Darkness in L.A. wasn’t all that dark, in Isabel’s experience, and was anyway always broken up and scattered by light. It sounded like darkness in Russia was deeper and more dangerous. Adana and Masha. She shivered. He said, “The way the family interpreted the curse was that the girl returned evil for good—when the guy gave her his love, she not only spurned him, she mocked him.”

  “So she had no right to her own thoughts and feelings, basically. For her to have her own thoughts and feelings is a danger to the entire town, is that what they were saying?”

  “Basically, yeah.”

  “So what does this have to do with my father?”

  Stoney said, “Nothing, except that Mike’s the boss and the one with the money. He came back without any cigars and said he didn’t like what they had, but I kept wondering if they had set me up with this story to communicate something.”

  “That sounds very Godfather-ish.”

  “I admit that, but you know what they say about movie critics.”

  “What?”

  “After they’ve seen three movies a day for a year, they hardly dare to go down the basement steps anymore.”

  Isabel snuggled down into her cocoon and pulled her turban over her eyes so that she couldn’t see anything, but she knew Stoney was looking at her, so she smiled. She heard him go on.

  “I mean, it’s not like threats and intimidation are unheard of in Hollywood. Bugsy Siegel, Frank Sinatra, William Randolph Hearst, George Raft, and all that. You know who Anthony Pellicano is, right? I mean, it’s still happening. If Jerry were alive, he would know how to talk to them.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said I’d schedule a meeting. Then I came out onto Rodeo Drive, and it was so windy that the trees were cracking. It was kind of apocalyptic.”

  “Your dad was a tough guy, wasn’t he?” Jerry had been a fixture in Isabel’s life, but she had never experienced him at all the way Stoney had, no doubt because she was a girl—Jerry treated all females the same way: he complimented their clothes and hair, brought presents, asked them jovially if they had any boyfriends, and then more or less ignored them.

  “Well, compared to whom? Compared to De Niro, in The Godfather, Part II? Did he do what he had to do when he was a kid? Compared to Pacino in The Godfather, Part III? Did he allow the deaths of longtime friends and associates because they had betrayed the code or gotten in the way? I sincerely doubt it. But he was fearless in some ways. He was so intent on the goal that his mind didn’t take in threats the way mine does. A threat, for Jerry, was just another factor to be considered while he was deciding his strategy. In the end, people always did what Jerry wanted them to do. Even when he had that brain tumor, he was still like the Terminator. You just couldn’t stop him, he was tough like that.”

  Isabel pushed up her towel and then turned her head and looked at Stoney. Her eyes were so adjusted to the dark now that she could see him perfectly. To all appearances, she thought, he was just talking. With Stoney, just talking inevitably seemed to circle around to Jerry. All the same, she didn’t like the idea of her father being vulnerable to these Russian guys, whoever they were, with only Stoney as protection. She said, hopefully, “I guess my dad is a pretty tough negotiator.”

  “Max isn’t a negotiator at all, that’s his problem.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, if he really wants to do something, then he will give up anything in order to do it. I mean, when he made Southern Pacific—remember that one?”

  “With Dennis Quaid. I loved that one.”

  “Yeah, you and one movie reviewer, I think. Well, Max loved that script, and he wanted to work with that cinematographer, and he had Dennis all fired up, and Jerry had to practically lock him in the closet to keep him from giving everything away. He would have done it for PBS, he would have spent his own money to do it. He thought that his enthusiasm meant something good, but all it meant to the studio was that they could roll right over him. But if they get it cheap, then the project doesn’t mean anything to them, that’s the way their minds work, and Max should have known that. If you don’t play hard to get in this town, then nothing about your project has any value. But if Max is not interested in a project, he just says no, and then he gets pissed when they keep after him.”

  “‘No means no,’” said Isabel. “I can’t tell you how many times I heard that over the years.”

  “Well, in this business, ‘No’ means ‘Call me later and come up with more money.’ He should know that by now. Your mom is a great negotiator. She’s legendary.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. You know that way she has of reacting to what you say with something that’s just a little out of left field? And then you laugh, but you aren’t sure she was really making a joke?”

  “Yes. It’s because she isn’t really listening.”

  “Well, I don’t know why it is, but it’s always disarming, because all the guys in the room are thinking about one thing, and she isn’t thinking about that thing. And then she seems truly not to care about any project more than any other. They think they have to make her care, and of course they think the way to do that is money and perks and points and stuff. But she doesn’t really seem to care about that, either, so they offer more. Maybe she’s a great actress in those negotiations, but in fact I think she really doesn’t care.”

  “I don’t know what she does care about,” said Isabel, and saying it felt like a confession. “I don’t know who she cares about.” There were several things she could add, Isabel thought, but she resisted doing so.

  “Are we going to talk about her failures as a mother?”

  “We could, but I know what you think.”

  “And I know what you think. How about you tell me what I think and I’ll tell you what you think, and we’ll see if we still agree with ourselves.”

  Isabel sniffed, knowing he was making fun of her, but, yes, she did deserve to be made fun of, at least a little. So she
said, “You think she’s afraid of me, and just because whenever she calls me or talks to me I act snotty, she gets more afraid of me, and less interested—”

  “Less likely.”

  “Less likely to make an effort.”

  Stoney said, “You think that she’s a selfish narcissist who should take more of an interest in others who are not unsuitable men. That there has actually only been one suitable man, that would be Max, and in the end pleasing him meant fulfilling her obligations to you and Delphine, and that was the deal-killer for her.”

  Isabel looked at the stars again for a moment, then wiggled around in her cocoon, which suddenly felt too tight. She said, “I guess we understand each other.”