by Jane Smiley
He said, “I like that. But how do you know any of these women actually care about what we would consider regular, normal sorts of things? Maybe the brutality of their lives has driven that out of them? Maybe they are numb to all human feeling?”
“But the book hints that they aren’t. Taras dismisses the wife for being weak because she cries when the boys leave again to go to the encampment. And the author himself says that the girl’s concern for her mother is real. Those are our clues. Maybe, in your chorus of women, some of them make remarks that are more brutal. That’s how I see the chorus, a kind of ongoing gossip session about events as they transpire. Gossip seems to be perennial and universal. Everyone gossips, so you could use it for your own benefit. Voice-over gossip.”
Max could not help loving this idea. “Voice-over gossip”—just fragments of conversations, or groans, or screams, or horses whinnying, or whispers that couldn’t be made out precisely. That would be the score, he thought. Normally, the music in a movie didn’t leave much room for extra dialogue, but if there was very little music—folk music, mostly, and lots of ambient sound—that could be an interesting experiment. And it was something that you could try and then modify if it didn’t work, because you could always put in more music, weaving it into the other sounds. He had never made a movie like that, with that kind of sound, and he really, right at the moment, couldn’t think of a movie like that. He sat up higher in the bed. He said, “That gives me a great idea.” He described the idea to her, and she nodded. Her nod made it an even better idea (how many times had that happened, where, as soon as someone agreed with one of his ideas, it got so charged with energy that it became sheer genius?). “You know,” he said, “I’m getting a little excited. This room is beginning to seem a little small.”
She laughed.
“Mike is beginning to seem a little impoverished.”
She laughed again. “Are we launched?”
“Well, we are certainly launched from a supine position under the covers of the bed. I feel a slight urge to go down to the My Fair Lady library and look for picture books about the Russian steppe, or even to wander around in the living room. Aren’t there a bunch of Russian paintings and artifacts there? Let’s take the video camera. I can take some footage of what’s in there.”
“Will Joe Blow let you?”
“It isn’t a museum. Besides, it’s Mike’s project I’m working on. We could take pictures of every picture of a woman painted by a Russian in this house.”
“There was one I saw yesterday—”
“Of course he set this up. Of course this is why he invited us over here, so that the atmosphere would infect us.”
“You mean Mike.”
“I do.” He breathed in the fragrance that now seemed to inhabit the room.
She said, “It’s a pretty intoxicating atmosphere.”
He said, “This house is a treasury of ideas. Of course, that’s no guarantee that we will, or can, make a decent film.” He didn’t say, though he knew it was true, that the thoughts they were intrigued by now would diminish and be forgotten. This room that seemed somehow to engender them would collapse upon itself into barely an image. He would successively seek out, or endure, or even resist the stages that would take him from here to the movie on the screen—the all-involving research, the all-involving composition of the script, the all-involving beehive activity of actors and technicians, the all-involving logistics of filming in a new place, the all-involving details of finance and money and junk like costumes and houses and cameras and carts and piles of hay and lights and flowers in the grass and armor and weapons and clouds and mounds of turnips and fires and blood, then rehearsals and setup, and the acting out of scenes, the all-involving servicing of the small city that they would be. Cutting, editing, sound, music, and then, of course, promotion and publicity, premieres and festivals, interviews and reflections—one stage after another. Only to have it all fade away in the rearview mirror and become as old, eventually, as Grace, or City Lights, or Birth of a Nation. But this catalogue of unavailing efforts, this catalogue of woes to come, well, it perversely energized him, didn’t it? He said, “Simon should play Andrei.”
“Oh, I don’t think so.”
“Sure. We’ll give him a beard up to his eyes and lots of flowing hair and a little swordplay coaching, a beautiful girl, and let him go. I bet he can do it. Teach him to ride a horse in the Cossack manner.”
“I don’t think he wants to be an actor.”
“But he doesn’t have to make a career as an actor. The fact is that a guy who shaves his head in order to play a penis in a student film is a guy who is up for anything. A little trip to Ukraine would be nothing for him. He can go on afterward, across the Silk Road to China, and become a trading representative between Santa Monica and Ulan Bator. Better than having him driving around California with nothing to do.”
“Oh well. I’m glad to know you’re joking.”
“Maybe I am, maybe I’m not.” But he was, or, if not joking, then at least giving vent to sudden high spirits. They could all go—Delphine, Cassie, Zoe, Paul, even Charlie. Just to extend this pleasure that he was suddenly aware of, the pleasure of having these particular people around day after day, a pleasure that he had been experiencing without realizing it, or, well, yes, he had realized the pleasure, but he had not admitted it. Now he did. He said, “Delphine and Cassie and Charlie and Zoe and everyone—I’ll tell Mike they’re my essential creative team, and I’ll make them all assistant directors.”
“So corrupt and nepotistic! I’m shocked.” But she was not shocked; she was amused.
He said, “And Isabel can do the research on authentic ecological details of the period. The steppe is supposed to have been an interesting and unique ecosystem, not just a flat place in the middle of Eurasia, so we can portray that, too. Fulfill our social obligation to record what is probably the end of an era. And as far as that goes, the only things we know about the geopolitical aspects of the sixteenth century are what we read in the novel, but maybe they were more interesting than even Gogol was aware of.”
“I’m sure Mike will go for that.”
“I’m sure he will. And then he can archive her research, and she can set up a special consulting firm—eco-research for various good causes.”
“Yes, but is this a movie or a miniseries?”
“Oh well, you can always get everything into the script until you can’t. That’s why I prefer to write my own screenplay, because I like to do my own thinking, even if the first draft is three hundred twenty-five pages long. The first draft of Grace was more than two hundred pages, and there were basically two characters. One of the problems with Southern Pacific, to name only one of the bombs I am responsible for—and I liked that movie, but I am the only one who did—was that, really, it was a seventy-page idea that we tried to pad out with close-ups of the dog.”
She laughed again and said, “Let’s get up and go downstairs and look around.”
He said, “Let’s get up and go downstairs and look around.” But when she leaned forward, he restrained her, and when she turned toward him, he slipped his hand inside her kimono. She said, “Don’t you want to?”
“Of course I do.” But he started kissing her again. She resisted for a moment, then yielded completely, and a moment later, they were rolling around in the bed again, less languidly, more like they had something to do but wanted to do this first. She kissed him and kissed him—not only on the lips, but next to the lips, on the nose, on the cheek, under his chin, between his eyebrows. She kissed him until he was laughing, and then she leaned over the edge of the bed and came up with the video camera. She sat up, quickly taking off the lens cap and pressing the power button. She said, “Speaking of archives.” And she threw back the covers with one hand, moved the hem of her kimono out of the way, and focused on his erection. He had one. She said, “Think some dirty thoughts,” but he didn’t have to do that. All he had to do was watch her face as she trained the vi
deo camera on his hard-on. She said, “Well, I am impressed,” but mostly to herself. He slipped his hand underneath his balls and felt them, then he ran it up the shaft of his cock, so smooth and youthful, that skin, did you ever hear the one about the mohel who ran a luggage shop, and a man comes in and asks to see a wallet? He laughed aloud at this ancient joke, and she laughed, too, just because he was laughing. When his hand closed over the cap, he smoothed it downward again, a little tighter this time, and as he let out an involuntary exclamation, she let out one, too. She leaned closer, and he didn’t have to look into the viewfinder to see what she was filming—the head of his cock, emerging from his closed fist, fat around its single dark exit, all the more full because he was squeezing it a bit. She leaned around to the right and got it from the underside, where it stood up out of his pubic hair, and she said, “Is it bigger? It seems bigger.”
“You have it on close-up.”
She took the camera away from her eye, looked at it, and said with genuine perplexity, “I do?” and then he took the camera out of her hand and put it on the nightstand, not without pushing the power button, and then he stretched her out, opened the kimono, and entered her, and her legs lifted and clasped him around the waist, and her head fell back over the edge of the bed, and it felt like he was entering her up to her throat, that’s how big he was, and how big she was, and just as he was thinking this, her entire inner being closed around him, and he also felt that other thing so distinctly, the pulse of her labia against his scrotum. “Mmm,” she uttered, and he pressed against her cervix, and it gave way, and he was so glad to be doing this again that he ejaculated almost into a state of unconsciousness.
Well, not really.
But she nearly fell off the bed, and then came a knock at the door, and someone said, “Everything okay in there?” and Elena whispered, “You were screaming,” and then she got up and wrapped the kimono around her and went to the door. Max could hear her saying, “Oh, yes, thank you for asking. Nothing at all to worry about. We’ll see you at breakfast. You’re very kind. Yes, I think the chicken-apple sausage will be delicious. Perfect. Good morning, then.”
She closed the door.
DAY TEN • Wednesday, April 2, 2003
Isabel had Zoe cornered in what appeared to Zoe to be a commodious and well-stocked pantry. She was backed up against the double sink, which was next to a window that looked out on the cars. With the corner of her eye, she could see her own little Mercedes. The trunk was open, because she had been putting her suitcase in and realized that she had left her makeup case in the malachite bathroom. Paul’s suitcase, such as it was, was not in the trunk. While she was attempting to appear as though she was “actively” listening to Isabel, she was also watching for Paul. She hadn’t seen Paul since the night before. He had not said in so many words that he would come to her room in the night, but she’d thought he would. He hadn’t. She had left the trunk open, intending to run up and grab her makeup case and come back down. But that was forty-five minutes ago. Isabel had snapped at her as she was entering the dining room thinking of a cup of coffee, in front of Joe Blow and Marya. Zoe had done quite a good job, she thought, of backing out of the room and down the hallway into this more private space, drawing Isabel after her.
Isabel exclaimed, in a low voice that Zoe considered especially mean, “This whole thing is about you, isn’t it? Same as always!”
Zoe said, “What whole thing?,” but in fact she meant to say, which whole thing, the whole argument they were having, or the whole lunch they were about to eat (since Joe Blow had asked Zoe what she would like and Zoe had said that fish would be nice, and so they were going to have a seared salmon, wild rice, and dried-cranberry salad—no salmon for the vegetarians—with a light asparagus bisque and a crisp Riesling that Joe had been holding back, but how did Isabel know that Joe had designed the meal for Zoe?), or the whole experience at the Russian house, during which Joe Blow and the girls had seemed to be quite deferential, maybe more deferential than they were to the others (how was Zoe to know, how was Isabel to know, unless she had been watching like a hawk?), or some other whole thing that existed in Isabel’s mind, as yet to be defined. In fact, Isabel’s tone was making her very angry, but Zoe was well aware that (1) her feelings were her own responsibility and she didn’t have to express or even feel her anger if she didn’t want to, according to Paul, and (2) Isabel sounded much as she herself had sounded two nights ago, when Paul’s French client, Marcelle, had mistakenly rung through on Zoe’s extension, and Zoe had given her a piece of her mind. As of this morning, Zoe did not know whether Paul knew that that unauthorized interaction had taken place. Had Marcelle called him for her regular appointment the night before and been put through to the right extension?
Isabel whispered, “In fact, it didn’t matter whether you came to pick me up at that Starbucks or not! I never thought you would! So you don’t have to go up to Stoney and commiserate with him about his poor car when there was nothing you were ever going to do that would have helped in any way, so why bother!”
Zoe said, “I was trying to be polite, Isabel. I didn’t want to seem indifferent—”
“Even though you are!”
“Excuse me,” said Zoe, and she made just a tiny little effort to push—well, not push, but urge—Isabel to one side so that she could—
“Don’t push me!”
“Don’t be so predictable. If you don’t want me to push you, move out of the way and let me get by.”
“I don’t feel like it.”
“If you are going to have a relationship with Stoney, I would like to be nice to him—”
“My relationships have nothing to do with you!”
“Well, anyway, so what? I already have my own relationship with Stoney.” The interesting thing about her conversation with Marcelle was that the Frenchwoman had stayed on the line to listen, rather than hanging up at once, which is what Zoe would have done. She had stayed on the line for seven or eight minutes, and of course you could attribute a few of those—say, two or three—to the pure shock of expecting that you were going to be hearing the soothing but matter-of-fact tones of your therapist, and here you had found a woman’s voice saying, “Really, Marcelle, I am only thinking of you. You need to ask yourself what you are getting out of this therapy and why it isn’t working for you. It’s been, what, seven years? Ten years? You aren’t progressing!” Her tone had been fairly light to begin with, and her thinking had been quite Paul-like—the wrong extension was actually a heaven-sent opportunity for Marcelle to hear something that she needed to hear, delivered by someone whom she didn’t know, but who had a more objective sense of what was really happening than either Paul or Marcelle. But unfortunately, after a good beginning, she had gotten irritated, because there was something in the Frenchwoman’s manner of talking about Paul that struck her. It was too intimate and too possessive. It told Zoe, not in so many words but in so many tones, not only that the two of them had had an affair, but that it was still going on, and it then leapt into her mind that it was Marcelle who kept meeting him on his exotic pilgrimages and climbing those seven holy mountains and going to those Neolithic caves (well, he hadn’t done that yet, but this year, and those caves were in France!) and going to the beehive tombs, wherever they were, and why was she calling on the wrong night, anyway? She was his longest-lasting relationship! And here he always presented himself as a solitary seeker after enlightenment, traveling the rock-strewn path ever upward, dallying less and less over the pleasures of the flesh as his being gradually evaporated out of this world. Not bloody likely, Zoe now thought.
Isabel said, “I think you should hear me out for once, Mom!” and she went on.
Zoe had her eyes on Isabel, and she watched her face, which was red. Her forehead was wrinkled and her brows were strangely lifted, as if she wanted to look supercilious but was only faking it. She kept tossing her chin and pushing her hair back, but she was absolutely right, Zoe wasn’t actually listening to Isabel ha
ving her say. What Paul was really doing was battening on—no, entertaining himself with—one wealthy woman after another, not exactly living off them (though he did charge them all for sessions) but going along for the ride. Why, for example, did his 1982 Honda Civic have fewer than a hundred thousand miles on it? Because he was being driven around in this Mercedes or that BMW or the other Ferrari. And he was driven around. She did all the driving.
And she was not listening because she was cornered. Being cornered, as everyone knew, aroused a primal reaction that felt very much like anger. This competed with her fugitive maternal instinct not to reward bad behavior by paying attention to it. That had been Delphine’s main child-rearing principle, expressed as “You will catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. When you can come to me and speak to me in a proper tone of voice, then we can discuss this.” And Delphine had been implacable. She never responded to Zoe’s anger, ever ever ever. Which meant, obviously, not that Zoe learned how not to be angry, only that she learned that her mother was a strange and mysterious person who could not be understood, at least by her. And Zoe had accepted that—partly, Paul told her, because she had lots of other things to occupy her attention.