by Jane Smiley
She opened the bathroom door and looked at Max, who appeared to have drifted back to sleep. That was good. It seemed to her that he could, as he said, love her for who she was only if who she was was not so potent and concentrated as to irradiate him with the full intensity of her fears.
She opened the closet door and took out a robe. It was an antique silk kimono with a motif of plum blossoms on a black background. The other one in the closet had a chrysanthemum design on a peach-colored background. In her two days in the room, she had paraded around in both of them, and both were flattering. The room was filled with mirrors that reflected all the flowers in the pictures and on the wallpaper back upon themselves, so parading around in the kimonos had been a bit of a forbidden pleasure, if you considered vanity a forbidden pleasure, which normally she did. She went to the window that faced away from the pool. The garden fanned out below as if it had been there for years. A row of palms, each at least twenty feet tall, separated it from the aviary, and the grass grew right up to the base of the palms. What was really beautiful about the garden, though, was that the beds were semicircular, and the blossoms, in their multicolored variety, seemed to twine about one another. From the perspective of her window, the garden made a picture that reminded her of some sort of Arabic or Turkish design, intricate and meditative. She had meant, but kept forgetting, to get Joe Blow to take her up onto the roof so that she could see the garden from an even higher promontory. In the last couple of days, she had stood exactly at this spot any number of times and found it soothing, just as she found it soothing right now. She had conditioned herself to use just this spot to replace other images, as she now used it to replace those images of Simon and Isabel. She took a deep breath, reminding herself that it was profoundly bad (immoral? bad luck?) to think in such a way.
The early-morning light was just brightening, and the sun, still low above the horizon, was picking out some of the yellow and orange flower beds (she recognized the clivia miniata), leaving the purple (Dutch iris) and white (spirea and hawthorn) ones in shadow. Jasmine grew everywhere. The roses had been pruned and were starting to leaf out—Elena expected them to be blossoming in less than a month. She was reminded not so much of Max’s garden, more that her own garden required some work. Once, it had been her special small project, an extension of the kitchen and just about as neat, with all of her necessities stashed conveniently in corners—rosemary, thyme, basil, bay, oregano, the grape arbor, the clementine tree, the lemon tree, the freesia, the daisies for the table, the few orchids, etc., but since taking up with Max, she had cut most of it back and hired a gardener to take care of what was still producing. Max’s garden was quite intimidating to her, and so the herbs she grew at his house she grew in pots. She had put those citrus trees on the deck and would have liked more—Mike had beautiful flowering trees here, many of which Elena did not recognize. Isabel had said she didn’t like this garden very much, because it was not a native-plant garden, but Elena didn’t mind that. Her ideal was the tomato, not a plant native to Italy, and yet reaching its zenith right there, where it met up with olive oil, garlic, and basil.
She would say to Tony Blair—
She opened the window in a conscious effort to forestall what she would say to Tony Blair, and as she opened the window, a morning fragrance of dampness, sweetness, and grass entered the room. Max moved and opened his eyes, perhaps at the fragrance. He said, “I dozed off. I was dreaming you were naked.” He sounded okay, as if not repelled by her movie.
Instead of telling Max what she would say to Tony Blair, she chose to say, “I am naked inside this silk kimono.” She turned, and the silk billowed, outlining her figure, she thought. She lifted her arms and pushed her hair back; the kimono spread wider, and the draft from the window pressed the cool silk against her buttocks and the backs of her thighs and then, “Do you smell the alyssum? I bet that’s what it is, though there must be other things, too. Why does Mike get to have a mature garden after only six months, and the rest of us have to wait years?”
“Ah! Mike!” exclaimed Max. “He’s very ambitious. Maybe he’s the lost great-grandson of Tsar Nicholas. I keep wondering if some ancestor of Mike’s and some ancestor of mine met on the streets of Kraków somewhere, or did business, or had a falling-out, or were related in some way. I’ve always thought that one nice thing about exile, or at least emigration, for Eastern European Jews, is that they don’t have to run into the people who beat them and cheated them and sneered at them for all those generations. The people they run into might have beaten and cheated and sneered at other Jews, but not them themselves. So now we have the advent of Mike—”
“You never seem to think of yourself as Jewish,” said Elena.
“And then along comes Mike! Is it just the sight of his face that triggers some race memory for me? I don’t know.”
But he was smiling, so Elena smiled, too. She said, “I have race memories all the time. They are of all those Karstensens and Sigmunds churning butter and making cheese. You know, my grandmother’s cholesterol count was almost three hundred, and she lived until she was over eighty. That always made me think that Scandinavians evolved to tolerate high cholesterol. I think it was a body-warming device. If you got lost in the snow, your body would burn the cholesterol until they rescued you.” She waited until he smiled, and then smiled herself. Not thinking bad things.
He pulled her down on the bed and kissed her. The kimono floated down over them and she felt it again, smooth across her legs. She lifted her arm and wafted the silk across his face. He closed his eyes. He said, “That smells good.” Once again, then, he had induced her to leave that Elena, the shrill, preoccupied, and uncomfortable Elena, behind in the bathroom. She was grateful for that. But she said as if idly, “There are sachets in the closet. But, seriously, you never talk about being Jewish, you never talk about Israel—”
“Jerry used to call me one of the ‘half-baked Jews.’ He was only partly joking, but we got along, anyway.”
“What do you think about Israel, though?” She tried to make this sound casual, as if it were not related to her preoccupation with the Evangelical right wing and other thoughts.
“I don’t know what to think about Israel, frankly. You know what my father said about Israel? He only said one thing during my whole childhood that I can remember, and that was ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea to have all the Jews gathered in one place.’ And I knew what he meant. In dispersal, safety lies.”
This sounded plausible to Elena, but it also brought her argument with the Evangelical Christians to her very lips. She pressed them closed.
He lifted the sleeve of the kimono to his nose again, inhaled, and then said, openly changing the subject, “Do you think Mike thinks of all these details himself?”
When she opened her lips, something normal came out. “I asked Joe Blow about that, and he said some yes and some no. He said to me, ‘Madame Elena, Raphael and I together equal one Martha Stewart, and so we are able to put together this one house.’ I guess he’s a faithful fan of Martha’s, and has been since he got to America.”
Max laughed, then said, “I hear the Russian troika went back to Russia yesterday to make another billion dollars. I told Ben Avram that Mike needs a sport to occupy his time.”
She pressed him just a little bit more. She said, “Didn’t you ever have a Jewish girlfriend?”
“As it turned out, no. Though at the time I would have said it wasn’t a conscious intention.”
Instead of saying, “I hope you never do have a Jewish girlfriend, now,” she said, “Tell me about when they made Grace. You didn’t make it in Russia, did you?”
“Oh, heavens, no. We, but really they, made it partly in Canada, partly in the studio, and partly in Prague, with a second unit shooting a few scenes in Japan. Mostly in the studio, though. The exterior scenes were fewer than you think. There were a lot of scenes in hiding, and if you look at the film very closely, you can see that we used the same set for almost all of t
hem, we just kept redecorating it. The great thing about Lilli Palmer, especially at that point in her career, was that when she was in the scene she was all you looked at. She gave nothing to the kid. Lots of actors hate acting with kids, but she didn’t seem to mind, or said she didn’t, but when they were in a scene together, it was the kid who just could not stop looking at her. Apted thought that was going to be a problem, but actually, it worked out perfectly, because the kid was the one being saved and Lilli was the one doing the saving, and she made the whole plot very suspenseful.”
“I thought it was an English actress in that movie.”
“Well, she was married to Rex Harrison for a while, and acted with him in plays. And she took an English name as a young woman, but she was a Jew from Poland, so she was actually perfect for the part. She wrote a book or two. They weren’t bad, either.”
Elena kissed him on the nose. She liked it when he talked about his work. Her wish that he would direct this strange movie about war-mad Ukrainians came from sheer ignorance, but every day Stoney said something to her about how Max had to get out of the house, or how Max was letting his talents go to waste, or how Max had turned into an old man since Jerry’s death, or how Max was the only person who could plausibly make this movie without having the movie making a fool of everyone involved. She tried asking another question, just a subtle, suggestive question. “Wasn’t it quite arduous for her at her age?”
“She was sixty or so if I remember correctly.”
“Even going to Canada in the winter and all?”
“She wore furs.”
Elena laughed, then said, “Well, sixty is the new fifty.” She almost said, “Fifty-eight is the new forty-five,” but she stopped herself.
Now he gave her a real kiss, gentle, self-confident, and exploratory, his lips meeting hers in that strange, unreproducible, and almost unrememberable way of kisses that made you wonder about how humans came to be, yes, big brains, yes, opposable thumbs, yes, buttocks as a counterbalancing weight, yes, hairless, but also soft, warm, full, sensitive lips, pressing, retreating, shape-shifting, pressing again, opening, closing. Such lips didn’t evolve to kiss babies or suck pomegranates or drink water from a cupped palm, they evolved to precipitate the brain into a hormonal tizzy. She opened her mouth slightly, and touched the tip of his tongue with hers.
Although he was still not quite awake, or maybe because he was still not quite awake, when she turned away from the window and the kimono spread out around her, Max saw the climax to his movie. His movie, not her movie. He had dozed off thinking of her movie, but awakened thinking of his, about her. And now the slanting morning light through the window gilded her hair, the side of her face, and the side of her leg, and the black, red, orange, white, and yellow of the kimono lit up, too. Within its boundaries, there she was, moving, turning, her head tossed back, her neck arched, her breasts lifted, her hip cocked, and her bare leg stepping toward him. It was a perfect last image.
Just a moment later, though, as she was slightly turning her head and repositioning her lips and snaking her arms farther around his shoulders, and he was beginning to forget the movie business entirely (and he could feel a renewed rumble in his crotch that felt reliable and routine rather than miraculous), he closed his eyes and saw the image in a different way. Elena in the kimono was transmuted, for some reason, into Lilli Palmer in a brocade dressing gown—not the Lilli Palmer he had known, an exacting and worldly older lady with an unpredictable sense of humor, but the Lilli Palmer of, say, Berlin in 1935, sleek and mysterious, and the movie she was in was Taras Bulba, and the part she was playing was the part of the girl in the besieged Polish city, desperate to save her family, especially her mother, from starvation, and yet also attracted to that dashing Cossack Andrei, a girl whose every preconception has been dissipated and vaporized by the war, and now she is only a bundle of survival instincts, but a beautiful bundle, a bundle that Andrei cannot resist.
As Elena drew the sleeve of her kimono over his face, it was intoxicatingly sensuous and fleeting, compounded of the feel of the silk, some scent he did not recognize, the feeling of being seduced and subdued at the same time. He asked about that scent, and then it was very funny, he thought, that she should start talking about Grace, since he had been thinking of Lilli Palmer.
“Wasn’t it quite arduous for her at her age?”
“She was sixty or so if I remember correctly.”
“Even going to Canada in the winter and all?”
“She wore furs.”
Elena laughed, then said, “Well, sixty is the new fifty.”
He kissed her then, and had that sensation that he frequently had when he kissed her, that sensation of: Oh! This! How pleasant this is! You could do this all day and never get tired of it! They kissed for a long time, and he felt the immediacy of the kiss—the soft warmth of her lips, the presence of her face and her body, the small cave of her mouth—but the image of Lilli Palmer as a Polish girl never left his mind. Along with it came a lot of images from movies of the thirties, all black and white: Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel, Mae West in Go West, Young Man, Billie Burke in Dinner at Eight, Carole Lombard in Nothing Sacred, Myrna Loy in The Thin Man. Women in those days, of course, had a different body language from the body language of women today. Their self-display had been more subtle but more calculated, less trusting. Even as he had this thought, he realized that in Ukraine those women probably still existed, and there was some girl who could inhabit that part of Taras’ movie, and the movie could grow from there; in fact, it could grow outward toward the men by means of the women—the girl’s mother (maybe forty, almost dead of starvation), the maid (tough old lady who survives the siege), Taras’ wife (arranged marriage when she was thirteen to his thirty, now a crone at thirty-two), and then the men. The men would present themselves, too.
He pulled away from the kiss and rolled over on his back. He said, “I think I’m catching something.”
“Oh dear.” She felt his head with her small palm. “What?”
“A movie.”
“Which movie are you catching?”
“I’m sorry to say, Taras Bulba, and it’s going to be a major pain in the ass. But we can enjoy the best part right now.”
“What’s that?”
“Thinking about it.”
“What part are we going to think about?”
“Well, you are going to think about what it means, and I am going to think about what it looks like.”
“Do I get a credit?”
“Yes, right at the end of the credits it will say, ‘Meaning supplied by Elena Sigmund, author of the Here’s How! Guide to Meanings.’”
“Okay, then.”
“Okay, then. I begin with the women. What do you begin with?”
“I begin with the women, too.”
“Why is that?”
“Well, why do you begin with the women?”
“Because they’re the most difficult to visualize. Is there a woman in America who moves like those women? Whose face has those same habits, whatever they were, geared toward self-preservation? Is there a woman in Russia? In Ukraine? The Soviets set out to eradicate all former ways of thinking and to substitute new ways, more or less European ways, for the old ways, so, if we want to portray the old ways, where are we going to find them? It’s a forensic problem. We have this remnant and this remnant and what might be this other remnant over here. How do we put them together so that they look convincing?”
“You said that about the corsets. You told Stoney that the corsets were a deal-killer.”
“It goes deeper than the corset thing. But you could send your actresses to Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia and have them observe the body language of those women, and then subtract something, or add something. But you’d have to define what that something is—do you subtract subservience in the princess, or add nomadic toughness in the boys’ mother? Even then, you’d only get a rude approximation of the way those sixteenth-century women really were,
but if it looked strange enough onscreen, it might work. The actresses could learn and study together, and so at least they could all be rather similar, not the same, but of the same breed.” He knew he sounded intrigued. This was the way it always happened—the point of the needle that got under the skin, and pretty soon, ways and means began to occur to you, and to engender more ways and means. First, there you were in a bookstore, and then there you were in the library, and pretty soon you found yourself on a plane scouting locations, the last place on earth that you had imagined yourself before you entered that bookstore. He said, “It’s so obviously a man’s book that it seems to me that the women are the main problem, and I don’t want to solve it in the old Hollywood way, by throwing a big star at it. Elizabeth Taylor as the princess, or even Nicole Kidman as the princess, or even J. Lo as the princess, or even whatsername, Hilary Duff as the princess. Maybe, when we looked at Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf last year, she looked okay to us, just the way Janet Leigh looked okay as an eighteenth-century French aristocrat in the 1950s, but now looks like a girl from California in a French-style dress.”
Elena said, “The women are the understandable ones. Let’s say that the men are just impossibly off-the-wall aggressive and warlike. Every time there are more than two men in any one spot, the first thing they do is fight, two against one, and then more show up, and it’s three against two, and on and on. I don’t think modern audiences really understand that, even, pardon me for saying so, in Ukraine or Russia or wherever. So the women, who are interested in survival, and family life, and love, even if those things as they know them are distorted and cut short by the endless violence, serve as the emotional guides to the action. Not by talking, since in some ways they can’t talk or aren’t allowed to talk, but just by reacting. As soon as the boys get home from their school, the mother has to let them go again, and she knows there’s a good chance that something bad will happen to at least one of them. That’s one thing. Or the princess. She knows how to be seductive, even when the walled city is falling apart around her. In the midst of death, she is seductive. That is so strange and yet right. And even though there aren’t many women in the novel, you can have more in the movie. I would have as many women as men, and have the women be a kind of chorus. The men are ignoring them, but the audience isn’t.”