Ten Days in the Hills (3 page)

Elena folded up the silver shawl and set it on the table by the door—that was borrowed, too, from her friend Leslie, who had an antique-clothing collection. “Frances McDormand is not my type at all.” She knew she sounded a little waspish.

“Who is your type?”

She turned and looked at him. He looked jolly and irreverent. She said, “That’s a dangerous question to answer. Lots of potential for vanity on the one hand and false modesty on the other. What if I said ‘Audrey Hepburn’? What if I said ‘Marjorie Main’?”

“What if you said ‘Liv Ullmann’? She’s Scandinavian, like you. Or ‘Constance Bennett’?”

“Constance Bennett was a lifelong blonde and at least four inches shorter than I am. Not to mention that she’s the same age as my grandmother.”

“But she’s your type. Every move she makes is organized and precise. Every moment she’s onscreen, she’s taking measure, observing. She would never get herself into that situation that, say, Joan Fontaine got into in
The Women,
where she leaves the husband in a fit of petulance and talks in a baby voice. It’s not in her. The thing you just did, walking across the room naked, hanging up the dress, turning to face me down though I lie at your mercy in my bed, Constance Bennett would have done that effortlessly. Joan Fontaine would have made a fuss about it. It’s one take versus twenty takes.”

“Thank you, you’re forgiven, she’s dead, so who else?”

“Frances McDormand.” But he was teasing her.

“Say who for you.”

“I don’t know.”

“We’re not actually casting the movie. Just say someone who’s dead. Say someone who’s too attractive, too unattractive.”

“Let’s see. Gregory Peck in
To Kill a Mockingbird.
Too thoughtful and wise and forbearing. So full of virtues that the good looks slip into the background. That’s not me. Walter Huston in
Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
Too garrulous and hairy. I can’t jump up and down like he does. I’m too nervous for that.”

“What if I say Dana Andrews is your type?”

“I like that.”

“Whatever he’s doing, you want to watch him. You don’t have to watch him, the way you do Humphrey Bogart. The whole time you’re watching Humphrey Bogart, you’re thinking of reasons to stop watching him, but you keep watching him anyway, even when he makes that little move with his upper lip and you go, Ughh, don’t do that! With Dana Andrews, you just sit there and when he’s onscreen you’re happy and when he’s not onscreen you’re less happy.”

“That’s a very female perspective.”

“I’ll tell you what. It’s going to be harder to cast you, because it’s harder to cast a man as a regular man, a man with a brain and a point of view. As soon as you have a man on the screen, everything about him is exaggerated. When he’s lying around in bed, he’s got a manliness problem. When he’s sitting at the kitchen table, he’s got a manliness problem. He’s got to get out of bed and stand up and prove he’s a man and then do that all day and all night, and every time he does something or fails to do something, either he’s more of a man or less of a man. I don’t think that’s going to work in a simple tale of
My Lovemaking with Elena.
”

“I didn’t realize you were such a theorist of the cinema.”

“Adrien Brody could do
My Lovemaking with Elena,
but not with Frances McDormand.”

“I think he solved his manliness problem last night, for sure. He took her in his arms, he pulled her to him, he bent her back, he gave her the kiss of a lifetime and took her completely by surprise. His rhythm was perfect.”

“He did, but men in European movies don’t have a manliness problem. They can do whatever they want.”

“Brits, too?”

“They’re transitional. For example, Hugh Grant never has a manliness problem. He has abdicated all considerations of his manliness, and if a question of manliness comes up, he ignores it, so he’s fallen back to the default option—he’s a man. That makes all movies with him much more simple and relaxed. Colin Firth, on the other hand, always has a manliness problem, because his willingness to keep working on the issue is evident in his face every time he’s onscreen. He has to win something or get something or understand something. Hugh Grant only has to allow things to be thrust upon him. So English actors have a choice. American actors have no choice, and European actors are outside the manliness problem altogether.”

Max laughed.

By now she had put away everything, closed the closet doors, raised the shades, looked across the canyon at the Getty shining through the smog, straightened the pillows on the settee, and flipped a corner of the area rug, a rose-colored Oriental, so that it lay flat again. The room looked neat and quiet. For her, disorder was what noise was for most people, distracting and irritating, but, oddly, she didn’t mind noise. If the room she was in was straight and the windows were clean, no amount of noise disturbed her.

He threw the quilt to one side and said, “Here’s a manliness problem right here.”

She sat down cross-legged on the bed and regarded his member. Once, in the Hustler Store on Sunset, they had gone through all the dildos on the shelf to find the one that most resembled him. In the end, they had settled on the “Big Classic.” Now, though, the Big Classic had subsided into cushy somnolence, though as far as Elena was concerned it was still appealing. It lay over to the side, not a straight, evenly shaped sausage, but more of a baguette, bulging comfortably in the middle and then narrowing just below the cap. Blood vessels of various shapes and sizes ran all over its length. The major artery ran up the left side and branched at about the middle. The cap itself was large. It swept back in a fire-helmet sort of shape and bore a faint triangular discoloration, a birthmark, that was only visible in bright daylight. The most interesting thing about the Big Classic was that, even though it was fifty-eight years old, the fineness of the skin, its smoothness and softness and resiliency, seemed not to have diminished over the years. Was this from lack of exposure to the sun, or simply a feature of this special sort of skin? It differed in this from all the other skin on his body, even the skin in the creases of his hips and the tops of his thighs. And his scrotum showed considerable wear and tear, even though one couldn’t actually say what the wear and tear on a scrotum would be. She said, “I told you I consider this a geopolitical problem.”

It was true that the war felt like it was just outside the room, not visible through the windows looking out upon the Getty, but still there, like two gunmen hiding in the bushes, waiting to mow them down. You could film it that way—cutting from herself and Max, idly considering his dick, to the brutal-looking hit men, glancing at one another as they took up their positions, then back to her running her index finger up the artery on the Big Classic, then encircling the shaft with her hand, and the two of them smiling at each other, then back to hit man number 1, taking off his jacket as the sun struck the house and laying it neatly under a bush, then back to her rolling the shaft gently against his belly, then back to hit man number 2, setting down his weapon and surreptitiously wiping his nose with a used tissue, then tossing aside the tissue and picking up his weapon again.

Or you could film the Iraq war as a fog, a thick toxic pall, approaching the house from the other side. While they unknowingly laugh and chat, the suffocating miasma engulfs the house board by board, roof tile by roof tile.

He said, “Don’t you think it would be able to transcend the geopolitical problem?”

“I don’t know, because I think this particular geopolitical problem is unprecedented. I think your cock is saying what now, why bother, he’s distracted, she’s distracted. At this point, I think it’s just reacting. I think it will naturally either reject or assimilate the geopolitical situation.”

He flipped his cock back and forth in a way that she always found a bit disrespectful, or at least overly familiar, but of course perfectly understandable since it was his cock. He said, “Why don’t you turn over, and I’ll just massage your ass?”

She stretched out on the bed and then turned over, facing away from him. The sheet against her skin was cool and clean. She said, “Don’t you always wonder what you would do in your last hour or so, as the bombs were falling all over Los Angeles? Would you really have the fortitude to sample one last pleasure? Would you really have the strength and fatalism to maintain your privacy, to not show off your end in any way? And say we were together. What would be the most comfortable connection? Just lying in one another’s arms? I guess it would take a lot of savoir faire to do anything else.” Of course she had images in her mind of
Mrs. Miniver
and of Margaret O’Brien, but she had no images of real deaths, real escapes, real panic, or real fortitude, because the closest she had ever come to such a thing was crouching in a corner of the basement with her babysitter during a tornado as a child. Elena would have been nine and Eric maybe four. They were sitting at the kitchen table after school when the sirens went off, and they stared at one another for a moment, then the girl herded the two of them to the top of the cellar steps. As she opened the cellar door, they looked out. The spot they were standing in was quiet, but ten feet away, the curtains to the windows of the screened porch stood out horizontal in the wind. The two of them went down the steps while the sitter went for Andrew, who must have been about a year old. A minute or two later, here she came down the steps, lightning flashing behind her, with Andrew clinging to her shirt. Yes, trees fell like bombs as the winds broke them over the house, and, yes, the noise was too loud for any kind of communication. Andrew clung to the babysitter, and the babysitter held Elena and Eric in place beside her, their backs pressed against the bricks, until the door opened at the top of the steps and Elena’s mother’s face appeared and they realized everything had been quiet for some period of time. Now she turned toward him and said, “I was in a tornado once. A house two streets over was knocked off its foundation, and all the windows on the west side of the school were blown out. But you were in Vietnam.”

“I guess the scariest thing that happened directly to me over there was when this crazy guy in our company turned the rocket launcher toward the officers’ tent, which was up the hill. I was actually stepping into the latrine. I’d just closed the door when the force of the explosion knocked it over onto the door and it slid down the hill maybe ten feet. It took them at least a half an hour to roll it over and let me out of there. I wouldn’t say I panicked, but my attitude was far from resigned and accepting. I was the company clerk, so I wasn’t out in the firebases, taking incoming rounds all night. I knew some of those guys, though. Lots of the time they were drunk, of course. Or stoned to the eyeballs, though the real marijuana period was more after my time. I think if you’d asked those guys what they wanted to be doing all night, they would have said fucking, of course, but who knows? They didn’t have that option.” He leaned forward and kissed her breasts, first the left one, then the right one. She put her fingers in his hair and felt the shape of his head. Her nipples lifted. The left one seemed to spark, as if the nerves within were switched on by the unexpectedness of the kiss. Both breasts seemed suddenly lighter and less dense. His skull was hard under her fingertips, and he breathed out a little groan. But the Big Classic was non-responsive. She pulled him on top of her. The Big Classic fell between her thighs.

“We were in that tornado with a babysitter. She was fourteen or something, maybe only thirteen. She sent Eric and me down the cellar and went for Andrew. When she appeared in the doorway, her hair was puffed out from her head because of static electricity, like a helmet. Andrew’s hair was standing straight out, too. He didn’t cry until he saw my mother when she got home and found us. The babysitter charged fifty cents an hour, and my mom gave her a ten-dollar tip for saving our lives. She said, ‘Oh, you don’t have to do that, Mrs. Sigmund.’ Then my dad came home and we ate dinner and he told us how the tornado went right down our street just when he would have been coming home, except that he had to stop at my uncle George’s house to give his car a jump.” Now she could feel the muscles in his back and buttocks as she stroked him up and down. He pressed her comfortably into the mattress, and she felt completely safe. She said, “I would do this if the bombs were falling. I would pull you on top of me and be crushed by falling debris.”

He lifted his head and put his hand behind her. “My friend Charlie who’s coming today and I were in a thunderstorm in high school. We were watching TV with our girlfriends in his living room. Marnie Cushman and Patty Danacre. Lightning came down the cord and blew the thing up right in front of us.”

“Oh my God!” exclaimed Elena.

“Charlie threw himself over Marnie so he would get some credit for saving her. They made out for the first time right then and there, with the TV smoking against the far wall. I tried to get that scene into a movie once, but I had to leave it out.” His weight along her body was reassuring. She gently pulled his cheeks apart and pushed them back together; pulled them apart, pushed them back together; then she made deep circular strokes, her right hand clockwise and her left hand counterclockwise. She said, “What would you have to leave out of
My Lovemaking with Elena
?”

“I wouldn’t have to leave anything out. That’s the challenge. Say, for example, there is no lovemaking with Elena, or at least no penetration, because part of the team isn’t cooperating. You might be tempted to leave that out, or to film another day, or to use a body double or some sort of special effect. Even as I say it, I can imagine how I would do it. But the noncooperating member does have a contribution to make. What is it? This here seems to be intimately related to the manliness problem.” He was smiling.

“I’m not sure that it is, actually. The manliness problem is more of a social problem. The noncontributing-member problem could have a more idiosyncratic context, and anyway would be a problem that lots of people could relate to. Really, how many guys are going to boo or jeer? People might get up and walk out, but not just because the protagonist can’t get an erection. What is it that lawyers say? His manliness problem is mooted. It’s personal. Members of the audience don’t judge. It’s bad luck to judge something like that, and they know it.” She was smiling, but again the war was imminent. It was fun to lie here beneath him in the bed in the tidy room in the well-cared-for wing of the charming house nestled at the top of the canyon on the west side of L.A., overlooking the shining Getty in southern California, far from Washington and even farther from Iraq. It was a relief not to know personally any of the government officials who were setting up the deaths and dismemberments and talking about them reasonably. But now that she had remembered that old tornado and had in her mind simultaneously the dim memory of the babysitter’s hand on her arm, holding her against the wall, the earthen smell of the basement of that house, and the soundless roar of the wind, but also an image of them as if from her mother’s point of view as she would have opened the cellar door and looked down, four children pressed into a dirty dark corner, only the pale colors of their clothes and skin visible at first, that was the image she now had of the waiting-to-be-bombed ones in Iraq. What if the mother never came home, what if the bombs, unlike most tornadoes, came right through the house into the basement, what if the babysitter was killed, leaving three, two, or one child to linger in shock and pain, what if the bombing went on for days instead of an hour or so, what if the basement was flooded, what if rats came around and ate the children, what if the mother showed up but way too late? It might be that these what-ifs didn’t cross the minds of those prosecuting the war, and it might be that if they did cross those minds, those people said to themselves, So what? Elena could imagine that, too. She could imagine how it was when you wanted to do a certain thing—you thought, that’s the way life is sometimes, or they’ll get over it, or that’s not my problem. There was a little frisson to that, a frisson of selfishness combined with willfulness. Who had not felt it? Of course the architects of the war felt that. And then there would be the afterthought, after the war was done and countless agonies had gone unwitnessed or unexpressed. The afterthought would be, we did our best. Mistakes were made; some things are always unforeseeable. But actually, from beginning to end, indifference would be permanently on display, the indifference of those who made the war to the war’s resulting deaths and dismemberments. The war-makers knew they should care—everyone agreed they should care—but in fact they didn’t, and you couldn’t get around it. They themselves would say that they cared about something else more than the deaths and dismemberments, that one had to have priorities, but that was a rationalization of the fact that, no, they didn’t care.