by Jane Smiley
“Where’ve you been?”
Simon could tell that she was trying to make this question sound casual.
“Oh, I was looking at the car.”
“I thought you might be.”
“There was a pretty good moon out. Anyway, the driveway is filled with motion-sensor lights. Every time I moved, another light came on, it seemed like.” He glanced at Simon, then sat down on the bed and kicked off his shoes. Isabel said, “I caught Simon spying on Mom.”
Stoney looked at him, then said, “Got any dope?”
He said, “About half a j.”
“Do you mind if I smoke it? Maybe it will put me to sleep.”
Simon reached into his pocket and pulled out his wintergreen Altoids tin. He opened it. The joint was longer than he’d remembered. He handed it to Stoney, along with one of the kitchen matches, which Stoney took and struck on the underside of the table beside the bed. The match flared in the Amber Room, and was reflected in the mirror TV screen and, more dimly, in some of the amber panels at the head of the bed. Stoney put the joint to his lips and sucked in a long hit. Then, before he let it out, as dope-smokers were wont to do, he said the most important thing on his mind in a strangled voice that Simon could barely understand: “You know, it’s okay about that car. After the shop fixes it up, I’m going to sell it on eBay and buy something else. Another sports car. A little yellow sports car, maybe a Mercedes.”
“I would get—” Simon began, but Stoney interrupted him. He said, “I was looking at that car, and I thought and thought about Jerry, and I remembered something he always said that I was forgetting. He always said, ‘What are you keeping this for? Life’s too short! Didn’t you ever hear of John Maynard Keynes?’ Then he would explain why you had to keep all your possessions moving. Didn’t matter if you liked it or didn’t like it, sell it! Donate it! Give it to the homeless person on the corner! I can’t tell you the number of times we were walking down the street and he took off his tie and handed it to a homeless guy. Once, he gave a guy his belt; once, he gave a guy his watch; and once, he gave a guy the book he was carrying in his hand, which was a hardback copy of The Name of the Rose, and he said to the guy, ‘Here. You read it. Maybe you can make head or tail of it. I sure can’t.’ He would have loved eBay to pieces. He would have had me on eBay every day, selling everything in the house and the office and buying something else. You know how he furnished the Tahoe house? He found out where some cruise line he’d been on refurbished their boats. It was in a town in Alabama. He found a woman in Alabama to keep an eye out for him, and when one of those ships came in to be gutted and redone, he bought chairs and tables and beds and mirrors and a big gas grill and range and a walk-in refrigerator. Dorothy couldn’t stand it, she was so embarrassed.” He sighed. “But, anyway. So I’ll sell the car on eBay. Life’s too short, right?”
Isabel said, “Are you asking me for my opinion?”
Stoney nodded.
There was a long moment of silence, then Isabel said, “I have no idea, actually. I mean, about whether life’s too short. Or how short life is.”
Stoney said, “Well, for the time being, let’s say it is.”
Without actually planning to speak up, Simon found himself saying, not “How about I go to Iraq,” but “I saw my dad last year.”
Both heads swiveled in his direction.
He said, “I found him on the Internet. It wasn’t hard. He was teaching in Ohio.”
“Where?” said Isabel.
“Kenyon College. But he came out to San Francisco, and I met him there.”
“Wow,” said Isabel.
“I never told Mom, so don’t tell her.”
Isabel nodded.
Stoney said, “What was it like?”
Isabel said, “What was he like?”
“Well,” said Simon, “imagine that you’re walking down the street, and you’re looking at something in a store window, and you happen to bump into someone because you aren’t looking where you’re going, and when you look at that guy, there’s nothing about him that strikes you. He’s just a guy, kind of balding, wearing glasses and a blue shirt, and you both excuse yourselves, and then the voice-over narration says, ‘Simon, that is your father.’ It was like that. It seemed like I could pick some other guy and have that guy be my father just as easily. That’s what it seemed like, but of course he was completely convinced that I was his son, and he had all this verifying information about Mom, so I knew he was the one.” Simon shrugged.
Isabel said, “What was his excuse for abandoning you?”
“Mom always said he broke up with her before I was born.”
“Oh,” said Isabel, her face turning red. “I didn’t know that. I was making an assumption.”
“There is an ass in assumption,” said Stoney. He cleared his throat.
“Yes, there is,” said Isabel.
“We can say that he abandoned his zygote. Or maybe his embryo. I’m not sure how far along the pregnancy was. I mean, I haven’t quizzed my mom on all the aspects of the fatal interaction.” Now there was an uncomfortable silence, which Simon wasn’t sure how to break, since he had never had this conversation before, or even expected to have it. He tried to remember more about his encounter with “Bill.”
Isabel said, “Does he have other children?”
“Well, he doesn’t have a family. He said he was married, but they’d had fertility problems actually, don’t tell Mom, but they decided in the end not to adopt. He teaches Milton, non-Shakespearean dramatists of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, freshman comp, and American leftist writers of the twentieth century. He’s associate chairman of his department and does all the class scheduling and departmental paperwork. Ohio is a nice place, and he and his wife have a large perennial garden and two dogs, a golden retriever—”
“Not a golden retriever!” exclaimed Isabel skeptically.
“—and a mixed breed, part saluki.”
“Are you making this up?” challenged Isabel.
“No. I remember lots of the details. I wrote them down. He is writing a novel. He described it to me. Actually, when he was first talking about it, I had this thought that it would be about me, but it was about a guy who starts paddling a canoe on some lake in Wisconsin after going to an Indian pow-wow, and decides to try going out of the lake by means of a little creek he has never explored, and eventually, some six hundred pages later, he finds himself in New Orleans, and in the interim, he has relived all of American literature through a series of dreams. He said the pow-wow and the canoeing thing had happened to him, but he had just gone a little way out into the creek, but that the creek actually would lead eventually to the Mississippi, yada yada yada. Anyway, he keeps working on the novel, and has had some interest, but no actual publishing offers yet. He thinks it’s maybe a little too complex for today’s literary world, especially for the video-game generation.”
“Did you like him?” said Stoney.
“Well…” Simon had thought a lot about this question. He had not disliked Bill. But he had watched him over lunch. He was the sort of guy who picked up his fork and then his spoon and stared at them, then rubbed them with his thumb to make sure they were clean. He had positioned his water glass just so after every drink, and had kept the foods on his plate neatly separated. Simon said, “You know how Mom always says that when I was little, if there was a red button to push, I would push it?”
Isabel said, “I heard her say that after you socked Paul.”
“Well, I didn’t not like Bill. But I think I would have been that kid who always had to push the red button, and he would have been the dad who wanted everything to be just so.”
“That seems so rational,” said Isabel. “I don’t see how you can be rational about your dad.” Except, of course, she reminded herself, if you had to lie to him.
“I guess if he had been more interesting I would have been less rational. And anyway, our meeting was very short and superficial. A couple of hours, and then he
said I could always contact him, and he gave me his card. I think it would be different for Mom, so that’s why I never told her about it.”
“Just think,” said Stoney, “you’ve avoided the Oedipus complex entirely. You don’t even want to kill your father and fuck your mother.”
“What’s an Oedipus complex?” said Simon.
“My point exactly,” said Stoney.
“Nobody has those complexes anymore,” said Isabel. “You have to have been born into a nineteenth-century German Jewish family to get those. Let’s see. Obviously, Simon has a complex of some sort, though. Complexes are just a taxonomy of human idiosyncrasies, is what my psych professor said. And it doesn’t have to be Greek, either.” She scrutinized Simon for a moment, then smiled. “You know,” she finally said, “I think Simon has a Trickster Coyote complex.”
“Who’s that?” said Simon.
“What in the world have you been taking up there in Davis?” exclaimed Isabel.
“Art. Photography. Geology. I took a couple of horticulture courses.”
“Well, we learned about Trickster Coyote in my Non-European Myths and Archetypes class. Just think about a coyote and think about tricks. I mean, not just tricks on other people. One time Trickster Coyote told his ass to keep the fire going all night, and fell asleep, and the fire went out, and so when Trickster Coyote woke up in the cold, he was angry at his ass, and he lit it on fire as a punishment, and burned all his own hair off.”
Simon burst out laughing. Isabel smiled. Stoney took another deep toke on the last bit of the joint. Simon said, “Well, that sounds right to me.”
Afterward, after Elena dozed off, then woke up, then stretched against him, sighed, and opened her eyes, she said, “By the way, I looked for the Yul Brynner version all over the house and asked Joe Blow, but they don’t have it. I think we should watch it when we get home tomorrow night. Just you and me.”
Max tightened his arms around her and said, “That will be nice.” His cock, still not completely detumescent, lay with a certain kind of weight against his leg. He pressed it against her; then she ran her fingertips over it and looked up at him, saying, “You must be getting tired of the crowd.”
“I think we could spin off a few, just for a little while. I’ve held up better than I expected to, I’ll say that.” They disengaged a bit. He turned on his side and pushed the pillow more tightly against his shoulder. But she was right there. “Charlie is wearing out his welcome.”
“Mmm,” she said.
“And Paul, lovely man though he is.”
“Though not in a physical way.” Elena stretched against him again. “Which is not to say that I don’t agree with him on many things. It amazes me that I could respect someone’s quite unusual choices and yet not feel the slightest spark of interest in him.”
“And Zoe and I are divorced, after all. I don’t think we’ve spent this much time together in maybe fifteen years.”
“Cassie could spend one night at her own house.”
“Delphine could resume her customary distance.”
She lengthened against him and put her leg over his. “And Simon could get the hell out and go back to school!”
He kissed her. His own house would be really quiet by now. He said, “I’m sure those floors at Stoney’s place are refinished.” After his little talk with Isabel, Max thought it probable that mere proximity was the source of their relationship. Proximity was easy enough to fix; time itself would fix it, and if there was something else, well, right this very moment, maybe ten minutes into what you could call his “rebirth” if you wanted to (but might also call “resumption of service,” or “reprieve,” or “recovery,” depending on your model of the original dysfunction), he was gripped by a pleasant feeling of equanimity, especially with regard to love.
Elena said, “I would like to have some time with just Isabel, I think. We have things in common.”
“Well, of course.” He yawned, not out of fatigue, but out of pure relaxation. “Don’t you realize that men my age usually end up with someone like their daughters, not their mothers?”
“What do men do who only have sons?”
“They hang out with the guys. Did you ever see Goodfellas? The good fellas are happiest in prison, slicing the garlic with a razor blade, and having no access to firearms.”
“I saw that so long ago.” Now she yawned. Max laughed.
She snuggled closer. Still she made no reference to the war. Maybe it was over, too, and the Zeitgeist that was no longer pressing against him, apparently, was also no longer pressing against her. “Anyway,” she said, “I would like to see Taras Bulba by ourselves sometime this week, and then you can talk Mike into filming in Death Valley or over near Bakersfield or somewhere. And everyone can have what they want.”
“What do you want?” The question slipped out, a habit from that time, months before, when she might have said, “A cup of mint tea.” From the relaxation of her body, he sensed that Elena hadn’t thought of the war yet, either.
But she had. She said, “I want to come down from the mountain and discover that Al Gore is president, that 9/11 never happened, which it wouldn’t have, because he would have listened to his own administration’s warnings rather than dismissing them, that Saddam Hussein died of natural causes, that no elections were stolen and no elderly Jews had found themselves voting for Patrick Buchanan by mistake, that George Bush had been defeated as governor of Texas by Molly Ivins, and that no economic bubbles had burst and no massive tax cuts had been passed. Shall I go on? I want to discover that California has single-payer universal health care and all the labor laws are being enforced, giving every worker, whether a citizen or an illegal, enough bathrooms, enough ventilation, and enough fire exits. I want to find out that my Prius is at the dealer and ready for me to pick it up.” As she listed these desires, she was smiling at her game, but suddenly she frowned. After a moment, she said, “I want not to be sliding into a new dark age.”
He kissed her between the eyebrows. He said, “That’s not a foregone conclusion. We might arrest the slide.” But even as he said it, he acknowledged to himself that all the sunshine that seemed to be falling upon them here at the Russian palace was certainly, for him, the effect of their vacation from geopolitics.
She said, “Make a movie.” He suspected she meant, Revive your career.
He said, “I’m too lazy to make a movie, didn’t you realize that? How about you make a movie.”
She wriggled out of the coverlet cocoon and glanced at him, startled, but then she put her hands thoughtfully behind her head. After a moment, she said, “Do I have plenty of money?” Her voice was light again, so he said, “All the money in the world.”
“Can I go on location?”
“Not outside of southern California. You have to come sleep in my bedroom every night.”
She kissed the tip of his nose; the Flower Room became very quiet. It was early, Max could tell by the light, and possibly they were the only ones awake. This room caught the eastern light first thing in the morning, and from the window, a casement opening outward, what you saw when you looked out were the irises depicted in tile under the gleaming surface of the swimming pool. To the right of those, the flowering crab apples and plums alternating with Japanese maples and dogwoods marched down the green hill, frothy white with blossoms, and to the left, purple wisteria hung over the frame of the pergola. The garden had a kind of wildness that he usually didn’t care for in comparison with the austerity of his own, but he had enjoyed it after all. She said, “Is it okay to start with the music?”
“For now.”
“Do you remember a song Judy Collins sang when I was in high school? It was called ‘Farewell to’ something. It was about sailing the coast of Greenland, and her accompaniment was the sound of whales singing and waves crashing. Every time I played the album, I cried. I could never get used to it. It seemed like she was saying goodbye to the entire animal kingdom, and they were saying goodbye to her. And
it was prescient. We’ve spent my adult life saying goodbye to the animal kingdom. I would have that song play over my opening titles, because I would want the audience to be crying immediately, without even knowing why.”
“And then what? What’s your story?”
“Well, the whales aren’t in Greenland, they’re off the coast of California. The opening scene is a home movie of a girl on a boat with her family, whale-watching. She’s six and her brother is seven. They mug for the camera, and then the camera moves and films whales breaching, and then moves back to the children, who are standing still, looking at the whales. And then that dissolves to the same shot of our girl at thirty, on a similar whale-watching ship with her family. She’s about to deploy to Iraq with her unit, and this is her last visit home.”
“Who is it?”
“The star?”
“Sure.”
“Well, of course Nicole Kidman was the first one I thought of, but it should probably be an unknown.”
“Never get made.”
“Well, J. Lo, then. That’s appropriate for California.”
Max chuckled at the thought of Jennifer Lopez in this movie, but he went along with her. “Then what?”
“Then the movie just follows her as she goes about her business, leaving her family, and her boyfriend. Doing her job.”
“What’s her job?”
“Oh, let’s see. She went into the reserves years ago with the idea that, since she was bilingual, she would be deployed to natural disasters where the victims spoke either Spanish or English. Now she expects to be some kind of liaison with the Iraqis, though she doesn’t know much about the Iraqis. She gets some training in Kuwait. They’ve been waiting in Kuwait for the last six months. She watches the women there, wearing full chadors and keeping their eyes down. She thinks about that. But she doesn’t talk about it. There isn’t much dialogue in my movie. Most of what there is, is bullshit—you know, army-speak. Not necessarily anything bad or abusive, just the routine way that people speak by the book in large organizations. Joking. Cursing. Using jargon. Substituting conformist ways of talking for one’s own point of view. About thirty minutes into my movie, they start across the desert. That part is very realistic—sometimes boring, sometimes terrifying, sometimes horrible, sometimes exhausting. She sees things that she hadn’t imagined, like rockets hitting the convoy in front of her. They try to save the soldiers in the convoy. Civilians by the side of the road, half hidden in the sandstorms, sometimes firing weapons, sometimes being killed. Corpses. Machines. Fires. Darkness. Then they get near Baghdad. It’s day thirteen of the war. They are driving along in their Humvee. There are six soldiers in the vehicle. Two women and four men. It’s quiet. Everyone is tired, but not too tired to be joking a little bit. Nothing anyone says expresses what J. Lo is thinking, but she doesn’t know how to express what she is thinking anyway. She’s numb. She thinks of the whales, maybe. And then they drive over a land mine, and the Humvee explodes.”