Ten Days in the Hills (39 page)

Now he began to feel better. That’s what words were for, he had found. Their only virtue, but it was an essential one, was to enter the flow of adrenaline and fragment it by means of interference. The quanta of words tumbled through the energy of feelings and blocked their flow like rocks in a stream, and pretty soon the feelings lost their dynamic and their power. You, whoever you were, were not within the feelings anymore, but beside them or above them, observing them. That was the perennial efficacy of mere words. It was a lovely thing. He said, “No, I like you to tickle me when I’m sleeping. If it arouses a nightmare, so what? I don’t mind a nightmare.”

“You seem more enlightened than that.”

“Oh dear,” said Paul. “I don’t think enlightenment is about being happy.”

“What is it about, then?”

“Well, you know…” He could feel himself go into parable mode. “I think about all the archeological sites I’ve visited. When I go, try as I might to make it otherwise, I just see ruins. But there are others who know more than I do who see what was once there. Right now, that’s what I think enlightenment is. It’s a sense of all the things that exist having meaning. People’s brains are organized to build and perceive patterns, and so the greatest enlightenment is the largest possible construction of meaning, a construction in which every nail and joint and angle and
accident
would have the same amount of meaning as every supporting beam and facing board and brace and
intention.
All the masters say that my construction will eventually be blown up by real enlightenment, and, sure, it will. It has to be. It’s like the Tower of Babel. They worked hard on it and built it higher and higher and with greater and greater complexity, and then—boom—God blew it up. Whoops, said the folks on the ground, God is angry. He didn’t like our tower. But that’s just their perception. It’s just as likely that what really happened is that it poufed out or vanished into another dimension, that God saw it was good and it ceased to have material existence. Its disappearance wasn’t actually a judgment, but, rather, the explosion was a measure of the difference between God and man. I am operating on the premise that I’m as ignorant at any given moment as I can’t help being, but that when I am less ignorant things will have more meaning, until they, and I, cease to be human at all.”

She said, “Hmm,” as if she had not quite followed this explanation and was now thinking about something else, but Paul rather liked that Tower of Babel idea. He wondered whether he would remember it. “You know,” she said, “I should tell you that Simon and I had a little thing today.”

He pictured them arguing about something, but what? The punch? (His jawed throbbed.) But Simon seemed genuinely remorseful about that, so, unless there was some irritable, grudge-holding side of Zoe that he didn’t know about, he didn’t think that was likely. Simon was impulsive but not argumentative or defensive, as far as he could tell. The constant joking seemed truly good-natured. He said, “What about?”

“Well, about the usual.”

“You and Simon have a usual source of disagreement already? You’ve only known each other a few days. Did you get on him about punching me? My feelings about that are—”

“Honey, it wasn’t an argument. We fucked. While you were doing yoga and then having that phone session with the girl from Atlanta.”

Paul had to admit he was startled, or maybe more than startled, but then it struck him all over again that that was what technique was for. If you are technically adept, then you always know the right thing to say even when you are startled, and so he said, “Does that seem to you to have been appropriate?”

“I don’t know. It was fun. He’s nice. I realize he punched you, but I’d sort of forgotten about that by the late afternoon.”

Nevertheless, his jaw gave another throb.

“He’s had lots of experience, as you can imagine, given the way he looks.”

Paul cleared his throat in an effort to attain a state of disinterestedness. “Older women?”

“Among others.”

“Older men?”

“I gathered that, yes, a few of those.”

“Did you use a condom?”

“We didn’t have one. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. It seemed harmless.” Her voice was still light, but not quite as light as it had been when she first told him. He said, “I guess, as your counselor, I have to point out that I believe your instincts have led you astray on this one.”

“Well, as my counselor, you shouldn’t be sleeping with me in the first place, isn’t that true?”

He sat up and turned toward her. She looked a tad defiant, which he had to admit was a tad intimidating. He reached around her and turned on the light, reviewing as best he could the agreed-upon unspoken ground rules of their relationship. They seemed to be that she had the right to tell him about things and he had the right to suggest productive and non-self-destructive modes of behavior, and at the same time, he had the right to pursue a sexual relationship with her while she had the right to become attached to him, and additionally that she had the right to spend her money freely on the two of them and he had the right to pursue his various disciplines in the course of the day. He had the right to be honest with her about his opinions, sometimes brutally so, and she had the right to express her feelings, even when they were contradictory and, let’s say, unattractive. He took a deep breath. He said, “Yes, some people would say that, but having a relationship seemed to be something we both wanted, and so I didn’t feel that there was a mismatch of power that would make either of us unduly vulnerable to the other if I became your counselor.”

“Well, I don’t think power comes into what I did with Simon at all. We felt like doing it, it seemed like it was going to be fun, and it was. Better than getting it on with Charlie, who’s been hitting on me in his way, too.”

“But he’s slept with men.”

“Well, I didn’t find out about that until afterward, but he said that he’s always been the pitcher, not the catcher.”

“Did you douche?”

“Well, I cleaned myself up, of course, but why are you focusing on this part? There are so many parts to focus on, and you’ve decided that HIV is the important one.”

“What do you think is the important one?”

“That he’s twenty. That he’s my former husband’s girlfriend’s son. That he’s younger than my own daughter, who is in the house. Then, of course, there’s the part about him punching you. If this were a movie and you were the villain, then it would be good that I fell for him after that, but if you were the hero, then it would show the true evil of my promiscuous nature.”

“How about your continuing discomfort with the sessions I have with women like Marcelle and Anita and Jolene and Diana? That seems to have been part of your motivation today.”

She ignored this and said, “But I guess I feel like the punch doesn’t really have meaning, apart from what he said about it.”

“So you’re focusing on the incestuous part.”

“Do you really think it’s incestuous? I never met him before. We’re not related.”

She had moved away from him, and now there was about a foot between them, probably a good idea. He said, “I guess I think that there are two ways of looking at that piece of it. Does it feel incestuous?”

“Well, only in the age-difference thing. But I have to admit that, when we were eating dinner and he was sitting across from me, surrounded by the others, I felt a little odd and naughty.”

“Zoe—” He was going to exclaim at the irresponsibility of her choice, but he stopped himself, thinking again of the ground rules, and said, “What do you think will happen when the others find out?”

“I don’t think they will. Simon says his mother still thinks he’s a virgin.”

“I truly doubt that.”

“Believe me, she can’t imagine all the experience he’s had. It’s like his vocation.”

“That,” said Paul, “I do understand.”

“He said he made up his mind to fuck me the moment I walked into the house. I am the prize.”

“He said that? That seems very calculating.”

“Well, yes, it does as I repeat it, but it was flattering when he said it. I laughed. I mean, he’s got the look of a prize himself, he’s so cute.”

“So,” said Paul, “how was it?”

“Oh, it was fun. Just a fuck. Nothing deep. It’s nice to be around a young body.”

“I’m sure. But don’t you think he’s going to brag about this? It would be inhuman not to.”

“Yes, but not to his mother. I don’t think he’s going to brag to his mother.”

“But to others?”

“People brag about having slept with me all the time, whether they have or not or whether they’ve even met me or not, and I don’t pay any attention to it. I can’t say yes and I can’t say no. I just keep smiling and I don’t say anything.”

“But haven’t we had several sessions about whether you should act on impulse in this way?”

“Paul.” She sat back on her haunches and looked right at him. “Do you care whether I had a thing—”

“Had sexual intercourse with—”

“—had sexual intercourse with Simon?”

“Do you mean, does it threaten or hurt me in any way?”

“Yes.”

“You mean, how do I feel about it as opposed to how do I think about it?”

“Yes.”

“You mean, what meaning do I give it?”

“Yes.”

“Especially in light of the fact that he socked me first thing in the morning and my jaw still throbs?”

“Does it? I’m sorry about that, honey.” She feathered her fingers along his jaw, and he let her. Was this, he thought, the attack he had been dreading, the shadow he had intuited, something as simple, after all, as sexual infidelity? And this bit of information did have an effect—it made his throat ache and his mouth go dry. But he said, “Well, I’ll give you my first reaction, my very first thought.”

“That should be telling.”

“I think it is.” He cleared his throat yet again. He said, “The fact is, I’m a little relieved.”

“You are?” She looked surprised.

“A little.”

“Why is that?”

“Because you are a big responsibility.”

“Oh,” she said. She looked hurt. He held her gaze. Her expression fixed itself, then shifted and grew a little more remote for a moment. Finally, she looked away, toward the door, then she looked back. She said, “Yes, of course you’re right. All you have to do is watch
Sunset Boulevard,
d-a-a-h-hh-h-ling, to realize that.”

He gave her a moment. Then he said, “But you are fun.”

She moved across the bed toward him again, almost as if she didn’t even realize what she was doing. She snuggled against him. Yes, he thought, it was dishonest. But it was a relief, too. He put his arm around her.

“Look at that,”
said Cassie. “He dropped the burning cigarette on the wooden floor of the hallway, and stubbed it out with his toe. We used to do that all the time.”

“That’s true,” said Max. “There used to be cigarette butts everywhere. I’ve been to parties where people actually snuffed their cigarettes out on the wall-to-wall carpet. When they first had nylon carpeting, you put a butt out on that and it would just melt the nylon right down to the matting. Wool, you could get a pair of scissors and cut the carpet out from around the burn, but not, what was it, olefin. And it wasn’t just stubbing them out. The burning tips would drop off during parties, and no one would even notice—”

“That’s because they would have had so much to drink,” said Cassie. “I mean, look at this fellow. Every time he enters a scene, he asks for whisky. That’s what acting used to be, smoking and drinking.”

Charlie said, “You know, when I first started working, when was that, the early sixties, I worked in this office where we all just threw our cigarette butts into the wastepaper basket, and the secretaries would throw used carbon paper in there, too. No one thought a thing about it until, one day, some of the carbon paper caught fire, and since there wasn’t a fire extinguisher, one of the secretaries ran for a glass of water, but the other one stood up and went over and pulled down her panties and pissed the fire out.”

“How could she do that?” exclaimed Isabel, skeptically.

“It wasn’t actually flaming,” said Charlie.

They were watching a movie Paul had never seen before, from England. It was called
The Day the Earth Caught Fire.
Paul recognized only one actor, Leo McKern. It seemed to be a newsroom/romance/apocalypse movie. Paul felt that it was taking a long time to get going. He was sitting on the couch beside Zoe. Simon was sitting on the floor in front of the two of them, in what Paul considered to be a very sonlike position. Isabel was sitting on the other side of Zoe. The others were ranged around the room. The only thing notable about the arrangement was that Elena was as far from Charlie as she could be. The two of them had had a huge argument in the middle of the afternoon, down by the pool, in which he had called her a know-nothing traitor and she had called him a Republican Party robot-apparatchik. The tumult had since died down, but there had been no apologies. Dinner had been strained. It didn’t help that the nightly movie seemed to be about climate change.

The movie was heavy on the dialogue, so Paul was with Delphine in this. If they were going to watch it, then everyone should be quiet, but of course everyone was not quiet. The screen was the biggest Paul had ever seen in a private home. Max had told him that the equipment was outdated, but Paul had to admit that he enjoyed the luxury, just as he enjoyed the luxury of the cool and quiet wine-cellar room, and the luxury of the pool, and the luxury of the garden, and the luxury of the location, though all of them, in their way, were outdated.