Ten Days in the Hills

by Jane Smiley

  Isabel said, “So, without starting a fight, can I make a few observations about Charlie’s case?”

  Delphine nodded.

  “Well, personally, I like the words ‘surgical strike,’ and I didn’t really care about the Bosnia thing or the Haiti thing, but maybe I was too young at the time to care anyway. And I was twelve during the Gulf War, and I did think that was a big deal. I remember we were in Princeville shopping when we heard about it, and I wondered if there would be Muslims in the grocery store, ready to blow us up right there in revenge. But there weren’t.”

  “I remember that night, too,” said Elena. “I was driving toward Mankato, Minnesota, and it was something like twenty below zero and deep snow, and I was looking for Muslim terrorists everywhere.”

  Isabel went on. “I do think it’s very nice the way Charlie makes it seem.” She stopped.

  “But—” prompted Delphine.

  “I don’t see any reason to believe that it is the way he makes it seem.”

  “Right,” said Elena.

  There was a silence.

  “The question is,” said Delphine, “why argue about it? He’s got his opinions. Other people have theirs. The events are already under way, and we have no way of controlling them or even, I would say, knowing what they truly are. Why talk about it?”

  “We don’t have to talk about it,” Elena acknowledged.

  “No,” said Delphine, “I’m not saying that we shouldn’t talk about it. I’m wondering why we do. What’s the source of this drive to talk about it, to think about it, to make up our minds?” She leaned back in her seat and patted the pillow in her lap.

  Isabel said, “Well, I—” but just then Charlie jumped out of his chair, the hot seat, the chair by the table that he had dropped into while making his case, and he exclaimed, “Shit! I have had it with this shit!” and he crossed the living room, went through the dark kitchen, and slammed out the door. A moment later, Paul heard the engine of the Mustang start up, and then the sound of the car disappearing down the hill. He saw Elena look at Max, who shrugged a small shrug. Cassie said, “Do you think he’s drunk? How much did he have to drink?”

  “He hasn’t been drinking,” said Delphine. “I don’t think he can drink really, because he takes all those pills.”

  “He drank half a beer,” offered Simon.

  “He said it was something like forty pills,” said Stoney.

  “I thought it was twenty-one,” said Isabel.

  “At any rate, he isn’t drunk,” said Zoe, whose weight next to Paul on the couch suddenly felt heavy and even painful. He tried to shift her without her noticing.

  “So what’s his problem?” said Simon. “He got to have his say, and Mom didn’t even interrupt once.”

  “Undoubtedly,” said Delphine, “he thought his argument was going to make everyone see things from his point of view, and—”

  “Well,” said Isabel, “it almost did.” She looked at Elena, who looked, Paul thought, sour and judgmental. Isabel was intimidated. “I mean, in a way.”

  Finally, Paul had to move away from Zoe’s weight completely, so he stood up. Zoe herself, seeing him looming over her, picked up her feet and pressed herself against the back of the couch. Just then, he had the briefest feeling that it was not he who had been avoiding her all day, but quite the other way.

  Isabel droned on: “We talked about this in my Ideology and American Culture class. My professor said that a lot of problems come from the fact that the U.S. has always been, basically, an honor-based culture, and that makes you feel that your opinions are entitled to respect. If you don’t get the respect that you need, then you seem to become aggressive, but actually you are becoming fearful because you are losing status in the—”

  A certain thing occurred to Paul. It was that he sympathized with Charlie. He thought, “I am wasting my time here.” It was as if he had somehow embarked on a cruise, something he had avoided all his life, and suddenly here he was, far out in a sea of languor with a group of people who on land could be avoided, and were therefore fine enough, but here, on this cruise, were insufferable. He sighed. They made him sigh. It was not precisely that they were boring, but more that they caused the expansion of time, so that every second, every moment, swelled to infinity, he himself, in his body and his consciousness, swelled to infinity, and he realized that his long path of exploration, that grand peregrination he had been making for fifty-five years had led to this room, that pointless movie, his old and oblivious antagonist, Max, the view of the eternal Getty Museum dimly white across the hills, the sight of Cassie once again opening her mouth to tell another tale. He groaned and closed his eyes. It was as if he could remember every thought he had ever thought, and every one of them was futile.

  DAY SEVEN • Sunday, March 30, 2003

  Stoney was standing with Simon and Isabel in the corner of the kitchen. Simon had the newspaper in his hand, and was ostentatiously pointing to an article, but actually he was saying, in a smooth but low voice, “Didn’t you ever do that, Stoney? I thought everyone did.”

  Isabel said, “You were in the Gap at the Beverly Center?”

  “Well, it happened the first time at Macy’s six months ago. This was the third time.”

  He sounded so relaxed and innocent that Stoney couldn’t help smiling, but in fact it had never happened to him. He had never even thought of doing such a thing, which was that Simon, finding himself with a large erection in the jeans department (“peeking out of the waistband of my shorts”) and noticing a hot girl not far away, had simply reached up and flipped through some jeans on a high shelf, allowing the girl, if she was so inclined, to notice what was happening to him. Since she was not so inclined, he had simply taken down the stack of jeans, then put his hand in his pocket and rearranged himself.

  Isabel wiped the smile off her face and said, with some sternness, “How is that not exposing yourself? I consider exposing yourself an aggressive act.”

  “Well, I was only about a half-inch exposed. And I didn’t force her to notice. I just waited to see if she did notice. I wasn’t even offering an invitation, I was just seeing what might happen. My personal impression is that a lot more girls are a lot more interested in a lot more sex than you seem to think. She was pretty well exposed herself, I would have to say. I could see the back of her thong.”

  “Telling us about it is also a form of exposing yourself.”

  “Well, in lots of ways, yes—”

  Elena, who had been standing by the stove, pouring water into the coffeemaker, said, “I think I’ll be going back to my own house today. I think maybe Simon should go with me.” Simon fell silent, then glanced at Isabel and at Stoney, and made a nonplussed sort of face, eyes wide, eyebrows high, and mouth drawn down. He said, softly, “The mom sounds a little upset.”

  Stoney saw Paul glance at Zoe, who said, “We were talking just this morning about clearing out, too. I think Paul should go on up to the monastery, and maybe I’ll just go home. Nedra thinks I’m at the monastery, which is why she hasn’t called me here all week, but my cell phone is full of messages and text messages. I guess if I want to have a career after the war, I’d better quit hiding out.” Nedra, Stoney knew, was Zoe’s agent.

  It was that phrase “after the war” that made Stoney nervous. “After the war,” he would find himself down the hill in his odd and lonely house. After the war, Isabel would go back to New York. After the war, death and injury and horror would be more common than they had been before the war.

  Cassie said, “I’ve hardly been to the gallery in the last week. I even shut it completely for four days because there was so little street traffic, but maybe people are used to the war by now and ready to get out. I should at least open today, and I ought to go clean out my refrigerator. Have I eaten here every night? I think so. Did I miss Wednesday?” She turned to Delphine.

  “You didn’t miss Wednesday,” said Delphine.

  Max. Well, Max. Stoney couldn’t quite tell. Normally,
Max hated visitors, you could see that. But over the course of the last week, he seemed to have gotten used to it, the way you do in a bunker. He had started spending less time in his room and more time in the family room and by the pool. He didn’t always have much to say, but sometimes he would erupt with a comment when you hadn’t thought he was listening at all. That was a new degree of sociability from Max.

  “Are we breaking up, then?” said Simon. “Is Mom getting her way and sending me packing back to Davis even though I’ve integrated myself so delightfully into the L.A. family? If so, I need forty bucks for gas.”

  Stoney was tempted to point out to Elena that Davis was a dangerous place, that something could happen to Simon in Davis, just as something could happen to Isabel in New York. Stoney didn’t think that, in the midst of a war, they should break up too casually. Any character in a war movie who strolled away, whistling and happy, always got blown to pieces three scenes later.

  “I can’t believe it’s been a week,” said Zoe.

  Stoney said, “It hasn’t. It’s not a week until tomorrow.” Zoe smiled at him, as if to say that a week was a long time to hide out, but Stoney did not think that a week was at all a long time, if the other choice was leaving the fortress. The siege of Troy lasted ten years, did it not? He said to Isabel, “So where is Charlie? Did he ever come back?”

  Isabel shrugged one shoulder. To Stoney, Charlie was a perfect example of how, in wartime, a person could get displaced. He cleared his throat in a nervous way, and Isabel said, “Who cares?”

  “I do. You do, too.”

  She looked at him and said, “Well, yes. In my crabby way, I do care, but no one’s said a word about him.”

  Stoney stepped over to the kitchen window, the one that looked out on the cul-de-sac, and craned his neck to see the cars. He didn’t see the yellow Mustang, but, then, he couldn’t see his own Jag or Zoe’s Mercedes, either. What he could see, or, at least, too easily imagine, was all the cars rolling away, one by one, his own, no doubt, the last. The party over, but not the war. Indeed, not the war. Right there on the kitchen island, on the front page of the Sunday paper, the war was going strong. People were being taken captive. Rocket launchers were launching rockets. People were being caught in cross fire. Baghdad was being considered from a tactical point of view. Stoney took a deep breath and said, “What about this? You know those Russians who want Max to do that remake of Taras Bulba—”

  “Not them again,” said Max.

  “Well, they’re very persistent. I told them you weren’t interested and didn’t think your health could stand months on the Ukrainian steppe, winter, summer, all of that, but they want to make one last offer.”

  “I can’t imagine what will—”

  “Mike has a house at the top of Bel-Air. I thought it belonged to that friend of Jerry’s, Avram Cohen Ben Avram, but apparently it belongs to Mike now. Maybe Ben Avram got him to buy it, because Mike does seem to have all the money in the world. Anyway, they’ve been remodeling it for the last year, and it’s just about finished. I think they still have to bring in more art and do some more on the grounds, but it’s otherwise finished, and Mike would like to loan it to you for a few days.”

  “What for?” said Max. “I have a house.”

  “There is no one in all of L.A. who has a house like this. I’m not sure there is a house like this outside of Russia. I mean, you know, outside of the Summer Palace of Catherine the Great. Ben Avram told me you can’t believe the art. Things that have been gone for centuries are at this place, things by Picasso and van Gogh and even Vermeer. He said that there was a Vermeer. It’s big enough to pass as a small resort hotel. If we moved up there, we would definitely not be cramped. It just has a skeleton staff at the moment, but plenty for us. I don’t want to miss it myself, but the only way I can get in is if Max agrees to come and stay for a few days.” Actually, when Ben Avram told him about the place, he had pictured it as one of those L.A. monstrosities from the thirties, San Simeon on Sunset, but as he talked about it, he got desperately enthusiastic.

  “I wouldn’t go alone. It sounds lonesome to me,” said Max.

  “It would be very lonesome for sure if you were alone,” said Stoney. Here came his big pitch. “Ben Avram said we can all go with you. And there are no TVs and no newspapers, because they haven’t installed the media center yet, and it’s a hell of a schlep down to the market, so a certain disputed war could be left behind pretty completely. They have a fabulous screening room and a good collection of movies and videos. Lots of European stuff and Japanese stuff.”

  Cassie said, “My friend George Lomas went to Saint Petersburg. Or is it just Petersburg now? He went in 1995 with the State Department in some official capacity. He had to take an overnight train from Moscow to Petersburg to meet up with the group. When he and his friend got to the train station in Moscow at about eleven, they found his compartment, and then the friend said, ‘Okay, now we have to find the conductor.’ And when they found the conductor, George’s friend pulled a big pistol out of his pocket and held it to the guy’s chin and said, ‘If anything happens to my American associate here, I will come back and shoot you.’ Then the friend took George to his compartment and had him lock himself in.”

  “Are we going to be held captive?” said Max.

  “No. No, we aren’t,” said Stoney. He heard the crunch of wheels outside and glanced out the window. Just the corner of the yellow Mustang entered, then backed out of, his line of sight.

  A moment later, the kitchen door opened, and Charlie came in. He was unshaven and still wearing his clothes from the night before. He smiled a little bit, then passed between Elena and Zoe and came toward Stoney at the sink. Stoney said, “I don’t think we should miss it.”

  Everyone looked at Max and not at Charlie. Only Max glanced at Charlie. Max groaned good-naturedly and said, “Tell me one more thing about the place.”

  “Well, Avram said there’s supposed to be a jewel-box replica of the Amber Room.”

  “George saw the Amber Room,” said Cassie.

  “What is it?” said Isabel.

  Charlie said, in an even tone of voice, “I read a book about it. The Amber Room was a whole room in the Summer Palace in Russia. It was paneled in sheets of amber backed with gold leaf. The Nazis stole them at the beginning of the war, and then they disappeared. What your friend saw in Saint Petersburg is a replica.” He took a cup out of the cabinet beside the sink and went to the coffeemaker, where he filled the cup. Now he crossed the kitchen and went into the living room and sat down. “But it could all be different by now, of course.”

  “Given what we know about Mike,” Stoney continued, “his Amber Room could be partly the real thing. Maybe it’s an amber bathroom or an amber closet. Who knows? Jerry always said that a lot more art from around the world ends up in Los Angeles than the museums have any notion of. Ben Avram has been telling me about it for a year. He was up there Friday and called me. He said it smashes all categories of good taste and bad taste simultaneously.” Max still looked skeptical, no doubt merely about crossing the 405.

  “I’m sure it’s not my type of place,” said Elena. “You can go without me and Simon.”

  “But it is my type of place, Mom. Totally. And yours, too, if you think about it. You can wander around deploring the plunder for three days. You can stand that.”

  Stoney could see Charlie’s feet on one of the ottomans in the living room. Zoe was shaking her head, and Paul, too. Cassie said, “I can’t take another day off.”

  “We’ve done plenty of cooking already,” began Delphine. “I’m…”

  Everyone had had enough. Only Stoney had not had enough, and Max, he thought, knew that. Stoney thought of Jerry, of something Jerry had done all his life: “Here, here’s a hundred-dollar bill, go get yourself some shoes. Here, here’s the keys to the Jaguar, go to Ruth’s Chris Steak House and have a steak, you look a little peaked. Here, here’s two tickets to Grosse Pointe Blank. Go get your girlfriend and
take her to see it. Tell me how you like it.” Stoney knew that Jerry never minded sitting you down in a chair and telling you just what a mess you were making of your life and your career, and using words like “schmuck” and “asshole” and “fucking disappointment to your mother and myself.” But the essential Jerry was always slipping you something good and giving you a wink, and maybe it was not the optimal child-rearing system, but he was grateful for it.

  Right then, Max put his hands on Elena’s shoulders, pulled her toward him, and kissed her on the forehead. “I’ll say yes, but only if Elena comes along. And Charlie, too.”

  “Oh,” said Elena. “I—” She was almost but not quite shaking her head. Max whispered in her ear.

  “We’ll fix him,” said Simon. “We’ll get him alone and away from all media and fix him good.”

  “I would like to see it,” said Charlie from the living room. “Whatever it is. I don’t quite understand what you’re talking about, but I’m game.” Stoney guessed from this that Charlie had had some sort of scary Century Boulevard adventure during the night—perhaps only as scary as spending the night in a hotel, but with some of those hotels near LAX, that could be scary enough.

  Max grinned, leading Stoney to believe that Max was fond of Charlie after all.

  Zoe looked at Paul. Paul said, “It does sound interesting.”

  “Art is always interesting,” said Cassie.