Ten Days in the Hills (11 page)

“There’s this woman at my job whose husband was killed in the Trade Center eleven days after I met her. She’s convinced that he was one of the ones who jumped. For a long time after, she would stare at pictures of the ones who jumped, trying to figure out if she could recognize him, and then she said that she saw him, something about his face or his body or something, and so she knew that he jumped, and she began to wonder if when he jumped he was on fire, though that didn’t appear in the picture. She stopped talking about it, but if you asked her she would tell you her latest ideas, because she said she had decided that the best policy for her mental health was not to offer to talk about it, but not to resist talking about it, either. I thought that was good myself, in principle. Last year, we were working on a project together, just working up a proposal about funding research into temperate rain forests, and when we began reading up on the material, we came across these guys up north who climb the sequoias to look at what’s going on in the canopy. One time, she said, sort of to herself, ‘Well, that’s like the thirty-fifth floor,’ and these images came into my mind of her husband jumping from the sixty-fifth floor, because that’s where his office was. So we were reading along and working, or pretending to work, saying this and that, and all of a sudden I felt like I was in her mind and it was hell. It made me breathless to think that for over a year she’d had this constant, pounding image of her husband jumping out of the window of his office, maybe on fire. While I was reading a book or sleeping or riding the subway thinking how lucky I was to be in New York or, you know, arguing with Leo, she was seeing that repeat over and over again. The husband doesn’t have that. He’s dead. I feel sorrier for her than I do for him. So that’s what I mean by a larger fear.”

“You mean a fear of being alive.”

“Yes, I do. I am afraid of being alive. And I think my job has made it worse, because we’re always talking about endangered things. Do I sound suicidal?”

“Excuse me?” At this word, Stoney felt truly startled.

“Do you think being afraid of being alive is the same as being suicidal?” As she said this, she had her most typical Isabel look on—inquisitive and intent, vaguely threatening (which surely she inherited from Zoe, whose displeasure was a sight to see), not at all suicidal as Stoney had seen it—strung out on drugs or depressed. He said, “I have no idea.” And then, “I hope not.” Then he said, “You watched television today, didn’t you?”

She nodded.

“Me, too. But I didn’t get anything out of it.”

She nodded. She looked less intent, and younger, too. Since she was as tall as he was and broad-shouldered, like Max, and strong, he was not in the habit of worrying about her—more in the habit of trying not to offend her. This went back to when she was sixteen, too, and full of teenaged-girl bravado. Now, though, he saw it was time to do what his dad meant when he said, “Be a man.” He put his arms tightly around her and pulled her into him. He even put his chin on her head, as a way of enclosing her protectively. Then he said what Jerry might have said: “But, Isabel, you don’t have to think about the whole world. In fact, I think you should try
not
to think about the whole world. That’s what crazy people do. That’s why they end up thinking they are Jesus Christ or Genghis Khan or someone like that. Did you ever see that Albert Brooks movie
Defending Your Life
? There’s a place where he talks about how everyone thinks he is a reincarnation of Napoleon or Alexander the Great, when actually he’s just a reincarnation of someone who got chased by a bear, or hit by a car.”

“I don’t see what you’re getting at.”

“Well, of course you’re afraid to be alive, if you think being alive is rectifying or even sorting out all the causes and effects that produce the war, or the fish with no eyes, or the women whose husbands have been killed. You should be afraid if it’s that. But maybe it isn’t that.”

“What is it?”

“What is life?”

“Yeah.”

Sitting like this, with his arms around her and her warmth and fragrance engulfing him, he thought that it would be romantic to say, This, this is life, just like that, the way you would say it in a movie, but in fact he could not say that, because for such a long time he had been careful to define this as not life. Life was everything outside of this room-in-the-sky. So he said, “Okay, let’s say that life is a much smaller thing, the thing of doing what needs to be done when it needs to be done. Accomplishing the tasks or making the decisions that present themselves to you as they present themselves to you.”

“How would you come up with a plan, Stoney, if you just did that?”

“I don’t know.”

“It would just be chaos.”

“No, it wouldn’t. I mean, look at what happens when people die. It doesn’t matter what they planned, really. Their lives are consistent. In fact, they did the same things over and over. Even if they have the luxury of years of psychoanalysis, like my father had, in an effort to break old patterns and destroy the hold of the past on the present, blah blah blah, he talked about it for years, it was all of a piece when he died. Even though he died of a brain tumor, and everyone thought, ‘Well, where did that come from?,’ I remember thinking as soon as he told me the diagnosis, ‘Well, what do you expect, Dad? You think too much, and now you broke it.’”

“Oh, Stoney!”

“Well, I was sympathetic and really devastated, actually, and the whole year of his decline was the worst year of my life, but my dad aways had a theory, and his brain tumor was a perfect example of theory buildup. The neurons were crusted over or worn out or something like that. At one point, I read that book by Oliver Sacks,
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,
and I thought that I had located my father’s tumor right in the spot where all the psychoanalysis had taken place. Five times a week for decades. But I don’t know. It would be nice to blame Dr. Epstein. But anyway, whose life have you ever heard of that turned out random? No one. Everybody turned out to have made a life that looked like a package, no matter what they thought about it as it was going on. If you ask me what life is, well, that’s what I say. It’s what you were going to do anyway, before you started worrying about it.”

“Oh, Stoney, you are such a slacker.” But she was smiling and light again. He looked at her and pinched her cheek, then stroked her arm. No suicide there, he thought. Her skin was resilient and hydrated, her eyes were clear, her whole body was well oxygenated and vibrant. When people used the word “suicidal,” Stoney thought, they didn’t know how hard it was to kill the animal. That’s what he’d discovered when his father was dying. For a year after the diagnosis, which was now just about exactly two years ago, all they had done really was try to enable his mind to last as long as his body, and they had failed. In the last two months, when Jerry really hadn’t known what he was doing at all, he had gotten out of bed and wandered around, fortunately setting off all sorts of alarms, night after night, shouting and disoriented, stumbling over furniture, evidently in terror and pain (which was worse?), until Stoney thought it would be easier to shoot him or let him fall in the pool, except that if he had fallen in the pool he would have surely kept swimming, in the same way that he kept eating and walking and yelling and pissing and shitting, a big man, a big animal, but not, of course, Jerry Whipple, husband, father, mentor, boss. The tumor did finally kill him, but only by shutting down the brainstem somehow. By that time, Stoney didn’t care about the details. Thinking about it now, he stroked Isabel’s arm again. Then he said, “Personally, I try to think the smallest thought I can at any given moment.”

“So what thought are you thinking now?”

“I’m thinking that your arm is very nice and that I enjoy stroking it.”

“I am so wide awake. We have to get to sleep before the sun comes up, or we won’t get to sleep at all. If you go to sleep, I will, too. So this is what I’m going to do. Lie back.” She arranged his pillow and he lay back. “Close your eyes.” He closed his eyes. “Now look right at your eyelids. You feel that sensation of being blocked inside your skull? That’s good. Leo taught me this. He can sleep anywhere. Keep looking at your eyelids. Now take a deep breath and imagine yourself humming. Just a low hum.” As he was doing this, she began stroking his forehead very lightly, up by his hairline. One more time, she said, “Look at your eyelids, and don’t forget to hum.” Here was his dream. He was driving up the 405, and the air was a little smoggy, and he saw a glacier inching down a mountain off to his left, right beside the highway, brilliantly white in the Southern California sunlight, and he thought he knew what that was, but he couldn’t remember.

As Stoney stepped out
onto the deck surrounding the swimming pool, carrying the scripts he had intended to read the day before and really had to read right now, before he went to the office, he heard Cassie say to Zoe, “Did you ever meet this guy Aaron Tolchin?”

“I met Michael Tolkin. He and his brother talked to me once about a movie they wrote that they thought had a part for me.”

“No, not him. This other guy, who was in the paper for the fund-raising scam. What was his name?”

“Tonken,” said Stoney. “Aaron Tonken.” He set the scripts down on a table. There were five of them. Five scripts had been nothing for Jerry—he read five scripts every night before going to bed. Stoney had been lugging these around for three days now.

“I don’t know,” said Zoe. “What does he look like?”

“Odd,” said Cassie. “Not pretty. His head and neck look like they have the same circumference. He came into the gallery once and asked if he could do a fund-raiser there, but then he never came back, so I didn’t follow it up, but then I saw that article in the paper yesterday.”

“Paul and I don’t read the paper. Maybe he did that fund-raiser for the West Hollywood Book Fair.”

“The West Hollywood Book Fair
is
a fund-raiser.”

“Remember I cooked something there? I cooked orange tarts with raspberry sauce and sang songs about desserts, like ‘The Good Ship Lollipop’ and ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain.’ I had to appear at ten a.m., and there were about twenty-five kids there, and the accompanist didn’t show up, but it was fun. All the kids came up and ate the tarts afterward.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t get sued,” said Cassie.

“Well, the parents had to sign a release,” said Zoe. “This is California, after all.”

Stoney moved one of the lounge chairs into the sunshine and sat down on it. Max’s pool, which was on a deck about fifteen feet below the kitchen, got sun for only about four hours on the best days, but it was quiet and you could look down the hillside and get a bird’s-eye view of the Japanese garden, which was in a cleft in the hillside another thirty or forty feet down. And there were potted flowers and bonsai on many of the steps. The garden was Max’s indulgence, and Stoney knew that it cost him a lot of money that other people would have put into refurbing the house, but Max was content that the house not be grand, and, in particular, not look grand from the street. Stoney thought he would wait for Max here, and then he would lure Max down the steps to the Japanese garden, and then he would make his proposal. He said, “I talked to Tonken about doing a fund-raiser once for Dorothy, for the L.A. Philharmonic. He said he could get Jack Nicholson.”

“For the L.A. Philharmonic?”

“Oh, Dorothy had some idea. I think the only movie Jack ever made that Dorothy saw was
Five Easy Pieces,
and that stuck in her mind, and of course Dorothy is she who must be obeyed, so I sent out a few feelers, and Tonken called me, but he was such a gossip, and nothing he said about anyone was nice, so I got a weird feeling about him and didn’t pursue it. In the paper it said he was paying a lot of celebrities to show up at the fund-raisers, and the paper was treating this as if it were a big deal.”

“Hunh,” said Cassie. Stoney eyed Zoe, to see if this last remark would get a rise out of her, but she didn’t react, and he couldn’t tell if it was because she hadn’t heard him or she didn’t care. Zoe interested him. She was a terrible actress, the sort of actress who moved twenty facial muscles in preference to two, and so he couldn’t watch any of her movies—she always seemed to him to be bursting off the screen, like the monsters in
Alien
—her mouth opened, and then another mouth seemed to open, and in some cases it was a song pouring forth, and in other cases it was some sort of emotion manufactured for the occasion. But Stoney kept his opinions about her acting ability to himself, and he liked Zoe. She had been nominated for a Best Supporting Oscar once but hadn’t won. She was very beautiful, though not as beautiful as she had been ten years ago, and Stoney felt he was entitled to this opinion because he and Zoe were only about five years apart in age. If this guy Paul was a healer, well, once again Zoe had done just the right thing, because now she was forty-three, and every actress in Hollywood who was forty-three needed a healer to help her accommodate herself to the decline of her looks, her career, and her prestige.