by Jane Smiley
“If you say so.”
“Our analysis doesn’t go very deep.”
“I don’t think it does, no.”
“Well, you know what Delphine told me once?”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh, I was a senior in high school, I guess, and I was sitting on my bed ranting on about the Legendary Zoe Cunningham, and Delphine was picking up my dirty clothes, and, yes, I am fully aware of what a selfish baby I was being, and anyway she said, ‘Your mom is who she is because I bred her.’”
“What does that mean?”
“That’s what I said, and so Delphine sat down on the edge of the bed, and she told me about her life. I’ve never told anyone this story, not even those girls at college who were dying for a comeuppance.”
“Okay.”
“You know she was born in Jamaica, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, she’s never been back there. She said, ‘Honey, Jamaica was just one piece of bad luck after another for me, and I turned my back on that place, and I turned my back on that bad luck.’ I guess when she was three there was a tremendous flood in Kingston, and it destroyed their house, and her older brother, who was five or so, and her mother and the baby who was just born were all killed. Only Delphine and her father survived, and he lost everything, so that he had to go to work on a sugar plantation out in the country, repairing engines and cars and things like that. She never saw him again for more than a visit. She stayed in Kingston with her mother’s cousin, and I guess she was nice enough, but of course—”
“Of course Delphine had lost her entire family.”
“Well, yeah, isn’t that sad?” They were silent for a few moments, and Isabel suspected that Stoney was thinking of his own mother’s death, and, yes, here she was whining about Zoe to someone who had much more to whine about on that score than she did, but who never whined and, indeed, never even mentioned his mother. And so she was embarrassed, but she saw that it would be more awkward and therefore more embarrassing to stop telling her story, so she shifted it a little. “Anyway, she was sent to school. It was an English-type school, where they had to wear uniforms and speak only when spoken to, and basically it was right out of Jane Eyre, but for Jamaicans. She was being trained to do something useful, if only to be a high-class servant. ‘Here is what I remember about that school, honey, I remember that I was not pretty and that I would never be pretty. I was too tall and too skinny and I had big teeth and my uniform never fit about the waist. In an English school, they always tell you what’s wrong with you, and, between you and me, that’s not all bad, because then you can make a plan, and you know how the world works, and for Jamaican girls, the world works in one way for pretty girls and another way for plain girls, and that’s just the way it is. I don’t say they were mean to me. I say they had a job, to make me know myself, and that’s what they did.’ I mean, really, Stoney, this story is so sad that if I thought about it I wouldn’t know how to handle it, but I don’t think about it much. I look at her, and she seems healthy and self-reliant, and so I just try to think of it as the adventures of Delphine.
“Anyway, when she got out of school, right after the war, she went to work for a rich woman, as her assistant, and she did that for maybe two years, and then she fell in love with the chauffeur, and they did all the right things—they waited to get married until they had some money, and when they did get married, she was something like twenty-three or twenty-four, and her employer was very fond of her, and they got their own little house on the property, and right away they had a baby girl, and she said, ‘I looked at her, and I saw she looked just like me, honey, and my heart sank inside me.’ Then the employer got polio, and that whole family took all their money and went back to England, and the new owners of the place fired everyone for political agitation, because Delphine’s husband was a leftist. There wasn’t any work, so the husband went off to England looking for a job in the mid-fifties, and Delphine waited to hear from him, because either he was going to come back or she was going to join him, but they didn’t hear from him, and then the baby, who was about four by that time, died in a hurricane when the wall of the house they were sheltering in fell on her while she was sleeping. And then a man came from England and told her that her husband had been killed by hooligans on the street almost as soon as he arrived in London. So, she said to me, ‘That was enough Jamaica for me. No more floods, no more hurricanes, no more English people. I went around to everyone I knew and asked for some money, and because everyone felt sorry for me, they all gave me a little, and so I got to Miami Beach, where I worked as a maid in the fanciest hotel there,’ which I guess was called the Eden something—”
“Eden Roc,” said Stoney. “It was very famous.” His voice was subdued, and now Isabel was really sorry she had embarked on this story, because, as she told it, it seemed impossibly sad and also so huge that in a way it was happening all over again, perhaps because it was not just a story, but was her own grandmother’s experience that could never be expunged. It was so odd that when she had started telling Stoney this, not five minutes before, she had only felt what she had to call the entertainment value, or the shock value, of what she was about to say, but now that she was saying it, she felt the sadness of the child’s death, the horror of the husband’s death, and also fear for herself, as if these experiences were closing in on her, not because they were Delphine’s experiences, but because they were random human experiences that could strike at any time. She sighed and went on. “Anyway, here’s what she did in Miami—she seduced a good-looking musician who was playing there. I don’t think anyone famous, though she wouldn’t tell me who. She said she seduced him during the 1960 presidential campaign, and that he was Irish. She picked him because he was the best-looking man she ever saw, and also flirtatious and also a drinker, which gave her an advantage with him. I was so freaked out when she told me this. I mean, Mom said that her dad died in a plane crash when she was a baby, so I don’t know if Delphine’s ever told her about this guy. And then she looked at me and said, ‘And, honey, when your mom was born, I knew I’d done my job, because she was the prettiest baby I ever saw, from that time to this, including you, and from day one her life was not like mine. Every time she smiled, she made herself a little piece of luck, and since she was a happy baby, she smiled all the time.’”
“You’re sure all this is true, right?”
“Well, of course it’s true. Why would she lie to me?”
“I’m not saying she lied.”
“So you’re saying she’s crazy?”
“No, of course not. I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m saying that I don’t know what to say or how to react. She’s a very mysterious woman.”
“I think so, too. I think the way she looks at it is that she had thirty or so years of bad luck, left Jamaica, changed her name, and then had forty-three years of pretty good luck.”
“I’ve always wondered what she does all day.”
“When I was living at home, she took care of me, and, believe me, my pear salad always looked like a face, and my macaroni and cheese was made with aged Cheddar and whole-wheat macaroni. But she reads. She reads lots of books and goes with Cassie every day to the gym. I guess they do aerobics and the stair-climber. She makes lace. That’s her needlework hobby. She never watches TV. But I will say that, whenever I would mention a book I was supposed to be reading in high school or college, she would have already read it.”
“So, basically, she’s a closet intellectual.”
“I guess. She read to me for years. But she would never help me with my homework.”
“So how did she and Zoe get to Hollywood?”
“How do you think? I mean, it was true. Everyone who saw my mom was struck by her. Some guy in Bruce Springsteen’s backup band saw her singing when she was seventeen in a club somewhere in Miami and asked her if she would join their gig, which she did for the few days they were in Miami, and then, three or four months later, when they were fin
ished with their tour and ready to go into the recording studio, someone called her and invited her up to New York to do a few sessions, so, she always says—haven’t you heard her?—‘I finished the paper I was writing about Ethan Frome and got on the plane to New York.’ Delphine went with her, of course, and then her first manager saw her and took her on and got her a party gig in L.A. By that time she was eighteen, and then, while she was doing that gig, my dad saw her and the rest was history. Delphine never let her out of her sight until my dad came along. But I don’t know. One time, before she told me this story, I asked her to tell me about some of the fun things they did when my mom was a kid, and she said they didn’t have time for fun.”
“I think that, as far as Delphine is concerned, you are the fun.”
Isabel sighed, suddenly remorseful. She said, “You know, I can’t believe I told you that. It was a secret, for one thing, and I was just trying to impress you in some way, for another. But now that I’ve told it, I can’t stand that it happened. Now it seems like it really did happen.”
“She said it happened.”
“When it was just her telling me, somehow it hadn’t happened as much as it has now that I’ve told you.”
“But think of all the things that happen and all the things that people think about and learn, and they get kept as secrets, and then they disappear. What if Delphine’s story just disappeared? What if she hadn’t told you, and you hadn’t told me? It doesn’t seem like she’s told your mom, and if she’s told Cassie, well, it’s just another item in Cassie’s catalogue of amazing stories. What if every event just disappeared without a trace? I mean, at the very least, there is something important that you wouldn’t know about yourself and about Zoe, and now you know it.”
Isabel actually rather liked this idea, but she said, “And now you know it. That’s the problem.”
“I’m not going to tell anyone.”
“We do have a history of keeping secrets, don’t we?”
“We do.” He coughed, then said, “Say, speaking of secrets, you know what Cassie said to me when we were watching the movie?”
“What?”
“Toward the end of the movie, when there’s panic in the streets, she turned to me apropos of nothing and everything, of course, the way she does, and said, ‘You know when they were looking for Cheney on the afternoon of 9/11?,’ and I said, ‘He was in a bunker outside of Washington, running the country.’ And she said, in that perky tone she has, ‘No, he wasn’t. He was at a racetrack somewhere, but my friend who saw him and called me on her cell phone was whispering, and so I didn’t get what racetrack it was.’ So I said, ‘What was he doing at a racetrack?,’ and she said, ‘He was meeting with the Sheikh of Dubai.’ Her friend was up in the stands, looking around, and that’s what she saw. Here came a big black limo, and before the officials moved her off, it stopped, and out stepped Dick Cheney. And then she went back to watching the movie, and I forgot about it until now.”
Isabel said, “Don’t tell Elena.” She saw Stoney smile in the darkness. Then she said, “These guys who want my dad to make this movie sound really iffy.”
“They are iffy. But Ben Avram has been pushing me. And anyway, I’m with Jerry on this. Your dad needs a push. He’s sinking into obscurity. And he knows it. He hadn’t made a movie in a year when he started doing the pre-production for that mountain-climbing movie, and it’s been almost three years since then, so that’s four years. Not even any TV. What’s he living on?”
Isabel, inside her wrappings, felt suddenly cold. She didn’t know the actual answer to this question, but she said, “Oh, something. Investments. He didn’t lose anything when the tech bubble burst. Don’t you remember that story?”
“No.”
“Oh, it was so weird. A couple of months after the angioplasty, Delphine called me and said that I should know that someone at Max’s brokerage had hacked into his account and transferred all his assets to Singapore. I was so shocked! She thought he might have to sell the house, which was why she was telling me this. Anyway, everyone was terrified for about ten days, and then the perpetrator was caught and the assets were returned, but Max changed his brokerage house and his investment plan. He put everything in cash right before tech stocks started to fall, and that’s the last I’ve heard about his net worth.” A nice story and a piece of good luck, but, still, she felt cold at the thought that Max had no income, at the thought that Stoney was worried about him, and that even Jerry would have been worried about him. “Of course, he sold the house in Kauai a couple of years ago. I don’t know why he did that.”
“Well…” said Stoney, but he didn’t press the point.
Her neck was beginning to stiffen. It was hard to look anywhere but straight up. Her shoulders were getting numb from immobility. The lounge was narrower than a bed, even a twin bed, so it was awkward to turn onto her side, and anyway, her arms were bound by the covers she had wrapped herself in. But even in spite of whatever was happening to Max’s career, their privacy and the darkness were pleasurable. It was remotely possible, of course, that there could be an earthquake right now and the rock face could collapse right on her, but she vaguely remembered that she had overheard Max discussing the stability of this formation with someone when she was a kid, and there had been general agreement that it would have to be a very big one, etc. etc. During the Northridge quake, they hadn’t even gotten a single crack in any of the walls. Why was she thinking about this when her relatives were ranged around her like sentinels, Delphine high in the guesthouse, Cassie overlooking the road down the mountain, Max and Elena in the forward bedroom, surrounded by motion-sensor lights, Paul and her mom in the bowels of the earth, no doubt attuned to some vibrations somewhere (she did believe this, though of course Paul was a lunatic). Here she was, safe from bombing, safe from fire (right beside the pool, after all; if a fire raced up the mountain, she could roll right in), safe from biological warfare, at least for now, safe from everything except global warming, and that would take a while. Right now, the interval between herself and global warming seemed almost a treasure.
He said, “Are you cold? I’m getting a little cold.”
“Are you going to go home?”
“What time is it?”
“After midnight. It was eleven when we came out here. Can you see the house lights?”
“No.”
“Neither can I.”
“We could go to your room.”
“How would we do that? If we go through the house together, they’ll see us, and if I go through the house and you go out and around on the deck, you’ll pass my father’s windows and set off the motion sensors.”
“I would go with you through the house, say good night to everyone, if anyone is up, then go out and get in my car and drive away. When I get down to my house, I’d park the car and walk back.”
“You’re supposed to be staying here.”
“I could say I forgot something. But it seems awfully involved, doesn’t it?”
“I have a better idea.”
“What?”
Isabel couldn’t help lowering her voice. “Kind of make an opening in your towels and unzip your pants.”
Stoney laughed. He said, “You are a naughty girl, aren’t you?”
“What’s naughty? I just want to see your cock. Are you saying your cock is wrong or bad or dirty or, let’s see, shameful in some way? You should have been in my human-sexuality class if you think like that. It’s just a cock. The world is full of them.” She couldn’t help giggling.
“You make such a compelling argument.” He began wrestling with his wrappings. While he was heaving around on his lounge chair, Isabel thought of his cock, which was, in fact, just one of billions, but somehow compelling to her—almost pointed, not tremendously large, and a little bent, or at least curving. When they had discussed the mechanisms of desire in her human-sexuality class, the professor had introduced the idea of Pavlov’s dog. In a good relationship, it was thought, the sight (or s
mell or touch) of certain markers—the woman’s breasts or the man’s phallus—that were usually hidden except during explicitly sexual intervals would come to reliably trigger arousal in the partner, but only if such markers were not embedded in confusing experiences. You could ring the bell, then feed the dog, but you could also (and many did) ring the bell and then beat the dog before feeding it, or ridicule the dog while feeding it, or kick the dog just as it began to salivate, or converse with the dog instead of feeding it. Another thing the professor had said was that, contrary to the assertions of mass culture, those breasts didn’t have to be perfect melons, and that phallus didn’t have to be a log, in order to trigger desire, they just had to be unencumbered, and she had sat in her class thinking of male phalluses she had known (actually, only Stoney’s and Leo’s and one other, belonging to a best-forgotten freshman from Fresno), and she had thought it would be fun to know more, but the professor seemed to be saying that the phallic Pavlov effect took a while to develop, and if you carelessly encountered too many phalluses (or breasts, for that matter), your experiences could put you off the whole category. In the dark, Stoney’s lounge chair creaked and tipped, and he fell off. Isabel sat up. She said, “Are you okay?”
He said, “Believe me, it was a very short drop.” Now they were both laughing. He struggled out of the towels. She whispered, “Shh! What if someone comes out here just as you are pulling it out?”
“You still want to see it?”
“More than ever. My human-sexuality professor would say that it’s very important that I see it in order to reinforce the positive response that I have toward it.”
“Okay, missy.” He turned his back on her and set the lounge upright, then arranged the blankets a bit. He said, “Lie down the way you were. We need to get the mood back.”
“Okay.” She lay back, though a little more tilted toward him, and he stretched himself out on the nest he had made. She saw his hand go to his fly. That made her giggle, too. He said, “Ready?”