Ten Days in the Hills (14 page)

“Yes! Good idea! Did you ever see
The Magnificent Seven
?”

“Yes.”

“That was a Japanese movie made in the Old West. Did you ever see
Ran
? That was an English play made in Japan. Did you ever see
The Birdcage
? That was a French movie made in Hollywood. We can do this. We just have to find some property, some old French movie, to show them. Like
A Man and a Woman,
something like that. Then we rewrite it and do what we want.”

“I think you’re serious. I think you want me to actually take this project around.”

Max leaned back and looked at him. “I see exactly how it could be. Exactly. It’s running in my head. I can hear the music and the conversation. I can see them making love. It’s like when I was writing
Grace.
The images in my mind were so thick and alive I never had to think once. Writing the screenplay was like dealing cards off a deck. Each scene, each bit of dialogue was just there. All I had to do was place it on the page. And then, when they did the filming, every time I was on the set it was like looking at something I remembered, even though of course all I ever knew about what really happened with my grandfather and his mother was how the stories were told. Why do you think that movie was so good? Why do you think the screenplay got the Oscar? I’ll tell you. It was because it pre-existed me. It pre-existed Apted. It was a room we walked into. Even when it felt like work, it was the work of reconstruction, not construction.”

“My dad said that did go pretty smoothly.”

Max smiled. He said, “That was very grudging. But I take it as a yes. Here’s our deal. I’ll write something up. You get me that book. You read what I write and I’ll read the book, and then we’ll talk again.”

Stoney said okay, and felt some tension that he hadn’t recognized before flow out of his chest. The thought in his mind as the tension dissipated was of Isabel, not Max. They stood up at the same time. Max was taller than Stoney. He led the way around the cypresses and back through the garden. Stoney thought he should probably go to his office now, or at least down to his house. It was nearly eleven.

Around the pool, every seat was taken, and on the big table sat a plate of fruit and another plate of toast. Zoe was saying, “That’s what he told me.” She shrugged. Isabel gave a snort. It was such a loud, indignant snort that Stoney and Max both glanced at her just as she said, “Oh, I can’t believe you would repeat something like that, Mom! Don’t you have any sense at all?”

“I think it’s interesting,” said Cassie, “and I’m not surprised.” She looked at Delphine, and Delphine nodded.

“What’s interesting?” said Max. Now all the eyes turned toward him and Stoney. Stoney noticed that Simon was smiling and that he had pulled his chair closer to the group. Elena was still sitting where Max had left her. Zoe said, “Remember when I did that movie about the French Revolution, when was that, ’88 or ’89? I played Sophie, who had lost her parents and was on her own. I was supposed to be about seventeen, I think. Anyway, in the course of three hours—God it was a very long movie, truly endless, which is probably why it died, it even had an intermission—Sophie goes all around the countryside and meets everyone and sees everything, and eventually she gets thrown into the revolutionary prison—”

“The Conciergerie,” said Isabel, schoolmarmishly, but Zoe ignored her.

“—and she gets tried and she meets all the aristocrats and then all the first wave of revolutionaries that are killed, and Danton and Marat and de Sade. She rides in the tumbrel to the guillotine but is saved at the last moment, and she and her lover escape and they go to America, where she meets Thomas Jefferson and writes a book.”

“I remember that one,” said Max. “I wonder if it’s out on DVD? I wouldn’t mind seeing it again.”

“Well, when we were just starting that one, maybe on the fourth or fifth day of shooting, I had to do a scene where Sophie realizes that the little band of people she had fallen in with are thieves. They take something they find on her—maybe it was her jewels that were strapped to her leg under her gown, or something like that. So they rob her and beat her up and leave her for dead in a bush, and when she revives she is watching two men hidden in a grove behind the bush, and they are obviously having sex, though of course the director did something so that you only had to know they were having sex if you already knew about that sort of thing. You could barely see them, for one thing. So, when Sophie comes to and sits up, they hear her and they stop buggering one another and run over and grab her and pull her out of the bush, and they are going to kill her—the younger one pulls out a pistol and puts it to her head—but the older one sees she is beautiful and saves her, not because he’s attracted to her, but because he thinks he can sell her. So they give her a shot of cognac and sit her on a rock, and she asks them who they are and all, and it turns out the old guy is the local bigwig aristocrat and the young guy is his servant, and as they are talking, the old guy says that all girls are for sale, the more beautiful the better, but no one really actually wants to fuck them. What all men really want is to be buggered by their servants—girls are just bargaining chips. I mean, this movie was really supposed to be a hard-hitting analysis of the French Revolution, and this scene was meant to be a shocking revelation of political reality. I think we did about four takes, and after the fourth one, the old guy—was that Peter O’Toole or someone else? That movie was full of great English actors. Anyway—he laughed and said, ‘Well,
plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
!’ and I said, ‘What does that mean?’ and he said, ‘What was good enough for the Ancien Régime is good enough for Hollywood, isn’t it?’ I guess I must have looked shocked, and he just laughed and said, ‘Oh, darling! Where have you been keeping yourself?’ So, anyway, we were talking about that, and I was saying that once I came to realize that Hollywood does work like that, everything got a lot easier, and all of a sudden Isabel got upset. You know, I think if I were to recite ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ Isabel would get upset, and I am getting tired of it.”

“Well,” said Max, “apart from the fact that O’Toole, like all Brits, would say anything just to get a laugh out of someone, or, preferably, just to get up the nose of some Yank, why is this shocking, Isabel?”

Isabel exclaimed, “It’s tremendously homophobic and sexist at the same time. It, like, encapsulates everything about how women and gays are destroyed by conventional social arrangements. And she just started talking about it as if that’s the way things are and it doesn’t really matter and there’s no reason to do anything about it.
And
she went along with it, and made use of it for her own purposes. And she was trying to get a laugh, too.” Isabel was pressing her lips together angrily, and Stoney thought that he was the only one who knew the roots of her overreaction. He went over to get a piece of toast, and while he was putting some pineapple on a plate with one hand he touched her on the shoulder with the other. She stepped away from him. Of course, this was the downside of their secret intimacy—he couldn’t actually comfort her, or rein her in. The best he could hope for was some later conversation about it, but that rarely happened. He took some toast and watched her stalk round the pool and sit down on the corner farthest from her mother, where she said, “If things work like that, then you should make an effort to change them.” Stoney was looking down at his toast, but he felt his eyebrows lift at this sentiment.

“But what if it’s true?” said Cassie. “I think it is.”

“Oh, you do not,” said Delphine. “I’m the one who thinks it’s true.”

“I do, too.”

“We were talking about a year ago,” said Delphine, “and if you’ll remember, it was my idea.”

“You are teasing me,” exclaimed Isabel.

“How did this come up, anyway?” said Max.

In the ensuing silence, Elena sniffed. Simon, who Stoney saw was much livelier now than he had been, said, “I started it.”

“Simon has a part in an alternative movie,” said Cassie. “That’s what he called it.”

“I heard about that,” said Max.

“It’s just for fun,” said Simon. “And it’s good money for, like, two days’ work. Everyone is my age. They’re all at USC film school. It’s funny.”

“What’s an alternative movie?” said Paul, who was relaxing in lotus position, with his head tilted back and his eyes closed.

“Porn,” said Elena.

Paul opened his eyes, but his facial expression didn’t change.

Simon said, “They’re in film school, Mom. It’s a project.”

“It’s a project they’re going to turn in to their teachers?”

“Well, I think so. That’s what they said. I mean, why not? It’s got some very funny bits. There’s a naked male chorus line tap-dancing. It’ll be funny. It
makes fun
of porn in a way. I mean, most porn movies are all about dicks, if you excuse me saying so, and here are sixteen dicks flopping around. It should be interesting. We’re all going to have umbrellas that we twirl. I laughed for days after they told me that.”

“What’s your part?” said Zoe.

“Well, in addition to the tap dance, I’m in the fantasy sequence where there are two dicks and two pussies out on a date. I mean, there’s a whole bar-full of dicks and pussies, so they needed lots of bald guys to play pool and sit around and do the things you do in a bar.”

“How are the girls dressed?” said Cassie.

“Well, they’re naked, but they have secondhand fur coats on, and whiskers and cat ears. Every bald guy is wearing just a stick-on name tag, stuck to his chest, with ‘My Name Is Dick’ written on it.”

“I think it’s cute,” said Zoe.

“It’s about the college dating scene,” said Simon. “It’s a satire! I don’t understand why my mom is so upset.”

Everyone looked at Elena. She said, “Well, you make it sound very innocent, but there’s explicit fellatio and masturbation, you said. I just don’t think—”

“Yes, but in my scene the masturbation is mental. When the pussies walk by, we’re supposed to take both of our hands and rub our heads and close our eyes and moan.”

Everyone laughed. Even Isabel smiled, though she was studiously pretending not to be part of the conversation. It occurred to Stoney that he should take Simon aside and find out who these kids were and see if they had representation. Elena sat up. She was smiling, too, in spite of herself. She said, “Well, it seems like fun now, but these sorts of things come back and haunt you in your later life. What if it gets popular? That defines you! For the rest of your life, people say, ‘Oh, were you in some movie I saw?’ Especially now, when everything is in some Internet database.”

“So I’ll grow hair. I don’t think I’ll be that recognizable. Anyway, we have to shave our eyebrows the night before the filming of our scene.”

Elena frowned. Stoney could see that she felt a little defeated, but he could also see her point of view, and he didn’t think it was about the kid’s being haunted in the future by this particular youthful indiscretion, more about what were probably a train of youthful indiscretions one by one taking their toll. Simon had that look—the bald head, the tattoos, the piercing—but more than that a certain look, the look of a smoker, right out of that book he had been talking to Isabel about. According to that book, smokers had a natural nervous daring that they realized very early on, primarily through the process of learning to smoke cigarettes. Stoney was willing to bet that Simon was one of those who had been in and out of trouble since high school, and that Elena was mostly reacting to this episode as yet another item on a long list.

“What about classes you’re missing in order to come down here?”

“We’re just working on our final projects this quarter.”

“I’m not even going to ask what that is,” said Elena.

“Well, I’m not quite sure yet, but I have some ideas and some photographs, if that’s what I choose to do.”

“That’s why I’m not asking.”

“Oh, Mom,” said Simon, but he knew he’d won.

The sunlight had now spread everywhere around the pool and spilled down the hill into the Japanese garden. Conversation subsided, and everyone stretched out and did something in the sunshine. Sure enough, Simon reached into the pocket of his shirt and came out with a cigarette, which he quietly lit. Here’s why I need a wife, Stoney thought: with a wife you could say, “This is what I think,” and then, after a while, after something had happened, she would say, “It was just the way you said it was going to be.” And then all of your passing good ideas didn’t simply vanish into thin air. For a while his former wife, Nina, had been good at reinforcing this feeling of having a life and building toward something—not a fortune, exactly, or a family, or a legacy, or the things that Jerry and Dorothy cared about, but something more like the idea that one thought was adding to another and eventually there would be a state of understanding. He looked at the scripts on the table. There would also be a reason to not just let his career slide into the maw of his natural temperament.

After a few minutes of quiet, Cassie said, “Well, I need to get to the gallery, and I wondered what about dinner, because Delphine and I can go get something. Let’s see.” She reached for her handbag and took out a small pad. “Okay, how many regular vegetarians?”

Zoe’s hand went up, then Paul shrugged and put his hand up.

“Vegans?”

Only Isabel.

“Anyone lactose-intolerant?”

Delphine nodded.

“Low-fat?”

Max’s hand went up. Cassie said, “What about Charlie?” and Stoney realized he wasn’t present. Max said, “If he isn’t, he should be.”

“Okay. Let’s see. How about hot-pepper-intolerant?”

No hands went up.

She said, “Do you care, Elena?”

“No okra.”

Cassie wrote that down, then said, “I don’t like lamb. Hmm.” She showed the list to Delphine. “Simon likes everything?”

Simon nodded.

“I know Stoney likes everything.”

Stoney nodded.

Cassie and Delphine stared at the list for a moment. Then Delphine said, “I think baked tofu in a spicy orange sauce with pea pods and pea tendrils, Szechuan green beans, some with shrimp and some without, and some baby greens with champagne vinaigrette—”