Ten Days in the Hills (59 page)

He smiled and said, “Okay.”

She stretched out on her back, floating in the water (but with her ears immersed so that she could honestly say that she couldn’t hear him). She kept a happy look on her face. Then she had a bright idea and said, “Personally, I think Elena and Simon fit in pretty well. I mean, I’m not asking if you’ve made any final commitments or anything. But I think it’s been pretty comfortable.”

“Do you?”

She stood up in the water and showed enthusiasm. “I really do.” She gave him a grin.

But he was not to be deflected. He asked it anyway: “So what’s going on between you and Stoney? I find this a little surprising.”

“What did Stoney say?” But she knew what Stoney had said; they had talked about it the night before. She only asked in order to gain time.

“He said he didn’t want to offend your autonomy or your personhood in any way.”

“You shouldn’t make fun of me, but if he said that, he was right.”

“He referred me to you.”

She kept quiet, just paddling her hands in the blue surface of the water. Finally, he said, “So. What do you say?”

It came easily, as if she had thought it up and rehearsed it. She said, “We’ve been friends. A couple of times he was in Santa Cruz and he called me up and took me to lunch, and then, once, he was there overnight, so he took me out to dinner and a movie. I mean, Stoney is such an old friend, I was always glad to see him. And then, since I came back for Jerry’s funeral last year, we’ve been talking on the phone pretty regularly—say, every week or so—and we’ve had good talks. He’s given me a lot of advice about Leo, and actually, I thought he would have mentioned some of those conversations to you, so I guess he didn’t?” She glanced at him. Every single word and implication of this was false.

Max shook his head.

“Huh. Well, anyway, I thought we got to be good friends over the last year, and then, suddenly, in the last week, we just got more interested. Don’t ask if we’re sleeping together!”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t want to talk about that with you.” After this, she let there be a moment of complete silence, so that she would seem to be resolute on this score, and, sure enough, he didn’t ask. She suspected he decided right then to assume that they weren’t having sex, that maybe they were just enjoying the Amber Room together. To reinforce this idea, she said, “It’s fun to stay in the Amber Room. It’s like going to camp or something.”

At this point, Max had ducked under the water, clearly checked, if not yet checkmated, and then he had taken the parental coward’s way out—he had said, “This thing with Leo isn’t as over as you think it is. Be cautious.”

“You know I am.” Even though, of course, she wasn’t. “Do I act on impulse? Don’t you know you can trust me?” She had said that all through high school.

“I worry about you.” Parents were supposed to sound apologetic on that one, and he did.

She had finished it off with “I love you, Dad. I love you, Mad Max,” her old nickname for him. And he said, fatally to any ongoing discussion, “I love you, too, Isabel. You know how much.”

“I do.” She hugged and kissed him in the water, and if her fingers hadn’t been crossed about her lies behind his back, well, they were crossed in her mind.

Now Stoney had been gone for half an hour, but, really, where would he go? She had the keys to the Volvo in her purse (she checked), and it was important that he feel that he was free to do what he wanted to, wasn’t it? She sat back down on the bed and slipped her feet between the sheets. She picked up the book she had been reading for the last two weeks,
The Botany of Desire,
and turned to where she had been reading about potatoes. It was interesting. Every time she picked it up, it was interesting.

Her justification for bold-faced lying was simple—over and above the fact that women had a perfect right to keep emotional secrets in the context of patriarchy, even benign patriarchy, it was also true that she hadn’t the foggiest idea of where the truth, should she begin to tell it, would actually take her. This was exactly the wrong moment for her to be talking herself into anything, and any story she might tell her father would amount to talking herself into something, something with Stoney or without him. As soon as she and Max might agree on even the most trivial point—let’s say, that Stoney was tentative and insecure, which he was—then that would be a fact that would have to be contended with.

This conversation had worked well enough—Max didn’t pursue the subject afterward. But it also had another effect, which was to alert her to a conversation at dinner that she might otherwise not have noticed.

Cassie had asked Charlie a question. She had said, “Were you talking to Monique? What’s she like? She’s very interesting-looking. I can’t figure out whether she’s twenty-five or thirty-five.”

“She’ll soon be thirty-four,” said Charlie.

“You were talking to her.”

Charlie lifted his eyebrows with what Isabel saw to be intentional significance, meant to indicate that talking was the least of it. Then he said, “She came to my room. She was interested in my rejuvenation techniques.”

The others mostly kept eating, but Isabel said, “Was she nice?”

“She was nice. She is nice,” said Charlie. “She’s lived in France, too. We had quite a long talk.” Then he cleared his throat. Lies, lies, lies, thought Isabel. At that very moment, Monique entered the room carrying two bottles of wine, a red and a white. She had on black jeans and a pink blouse; instead of seeming to wait on them, she seemed to be doing them a favor. Monique set the bottles of wine, which were open, on the table beside Max and walked out of the room again. For Isabel, who hadn’t looked very closely at her before, it was a perfect opportunity to give her the eyeball, which she did. Monique was beautiful. She looked like Charlize Theron, but short, maybe five six. After Monique had been gone maybe two minutes, long enough to have gotten back to the kitchen, Isabel said, “Which rejuvenation techniques was she most interested in?”

Now Charlie looked right at her, and she knew that he found her pursuit of this subject suspect. Since that night by the pool at the other house, they had hardly spoken to one another, and whatever friendliness she had exhibited toward him as a child had completely vanished. But, really, she wasn’t trying to be mean, she was just authentically curious about lying, and also, what would a girl who looked like Charlize Theron think there would be to talk about with a guy like Charlie?

He said, “We mostly talked about the Chinese herbs I use. She didn’t know much about Chinese herbs, more about French skin-care products.”

“Do you think she wants to break into the movies?” said Cassie.

“No,” said Charlie. “She didn’t say that she wants to break into the movies. We talked for quite a long time. She told me about her life in Russia, and her marriage there, and some things about her life here. She asked me about my life. In some ways, I sensed that she opened up to me. I’m sure it doesn’t mean anything. I think the staff is a little lonely here in a way.” He sniffed. He said, “Anyway.” He shrugged and poured himself another glass of wine. Isabel literally could not believe that anyone would care in the least about Charlie’s rejuvenation techniques. The very thought defied her entire understanding of human nature. Maybe Monique was paid a premium for conversing pleasantly with the guests? That was the only way Isabel could account for it. But he was a good liar, and she liked him a little better for it.

She decided to put her conversation with her father out of her mind.

If she were ever to come back to this house, she would ask to be put in the Comedy Room. She had spent maybe half an hour in there this afternoon, looking around, and she still hadn’t gotten all the jokes. One of them, though, that she had pointed out to Cassie that Cassie hadn’t noticed, was a small window, maybe twelve inches by twelve inches, in a closet, that opened onto a simple scene of the driveway. This scene was also painted on the window, except with one addition, a fly. It was funny in itself, but what was also funny about it, Isabel and Cassie agreed, was that you had to go looking for it.

She closed her eyes.

It was a very comfortable bed.

She drew long breaths in an encouraging way, demonstrating to herself how to stop worrying and go to sleep.

But of course she couldn’t. Within moments, she had thrown back the covers and stood up. Within moments after that, she had crossed to the door, turned the embossed handle, and opened it. The corridor outside was dim, but no dimmer, probably, than the Amber Room. She put her head out and looked right, toward the staircase, for Stoney, then left. She didn’t see him. It was only then that she noticed Simon, who was looking at her, or at least his head was turned toward her. He was standing across the hall, in front of her mother’s door. He was standing, not walking. She said, “Have you seen Stoney? What are you doing?”

He said, “No. I haven’t seen him at all. I just came up from downstairs. What are you doing?” And he came across the the corridor toward her and said, in a friendly way, “Hey,” and she stepped back and let him in.

Simon had not seen
the Amber Room in the daylight, but now, at night, his first thought was that it was a dope-smoker’s paradise. Because he was still a little baked from the joint he had shared with the two M’s a while ago, he stopped dead in the middle of the floor and stared around. Everything in here glinted or vanished. It was like standing in a forest in the moonlight. He put his hand out and stepped to his right, and his hand met the wall before he had thought it would, or maybe he had thought his hand would enter the wall as if the wall were the surface of water. He said, “Wow.” The wall was cool to the touch, not like a painted or a papered wall. Isabel went over to the bed, which was huge and many-pillowed. She flopped down, looking at him, and her feet bounced. She said, “Did you see Stoney anywhere?”

“Was that Stoney in with your mom? She was yelling at someone.”

Isabel shrugged and then rolled her eyes. “Were you listening outside her door?”

“Well, I heard her. I was a little surprised. I stopped—”

“Isn’t your room at the other end of the corridor?”

Simon considered this question for a moment, then said, “Well, it could have been Stoney in there. But I didn’t hear a guy’s voice, and I didn’t, uh, have a chance to make out what she was saying. I was actually thinking that it might be a DVD playing or something. That’s what I was thinking right when you opened the door.”

“Maybe he is in there. I hope so, actually, because then I don’t have to worry about him wandering around the grounds in a state.”

“A state of what?”

“A state of—oh, I don’t even know. That’s what I was trying to decide when I opened the door. I mean, I was all set to go to sleep, and then I thought about him toppling into the pool with his hands in the pockets of his jeans and sinking to the bottom without even taking his hands out of his pockets. It’s like in a movie. His eyes are open and his hands are in his pockets and he just goes down.”

“
Harold and Maude,
” said Simon. “Or that John Cusack movie—what’s it called?—where he tries to commit suicide over and over.”

“I didn’t see that one.”

By this time, Simon had run the palm of his hand along the cool wall, feeling the odd glassy smoothness of its mysterious interface with the air of the room, and he was about to sit down in one of the chairs across from the bed when Isabel said, “Go into the bathroom.”

He went into the bathroom and turned on the light. A brilliant gloss of black and ocher stripes seemed to blaze up all around him. It was startling. He recognized it as tigereye immediately, even though he had maybe seen one tigereye necklace in his whole life, when he went to Cabo with two guys his senior year in high school and they looked at some jewelry for some reason. He put out the bathroom light.

“Mom’s are malachite. That’s green, you know?”

“Huh. You should go down the hall and look at mine. They’re inch-thick glass with designs of fish and coral etched on the underside and lit from below.”

She gazed at him, and then, after a long moment, she said, almost as if surprised, “Well, maybe I will. I’ll do that tomorrow.”

“So—why are you always so pissed at your mom?”

Isabel stared at him, and Simon suddenly realized that this question, which he had uttered with mere curiosity, had more than idle importance to Isabel, and he wished he hadn’t said anything. He smiled. Usually with girls, his smile was pretty reliable, he had found, but she did not respond to it by smiling, or even softening up. It came to him that if he had had a sister Isabel would have been just the sort of sister he would have wanted, because she was the sort of girl you could prank all day long and she would fall for it every time. This whole thought made him get fond of her right there. Suddenly, instead of waiting for her answer to his question, he said, “Say, why in the world did you get involved with Leo Decker? He’s such a stiff. It’s like he’s never been a kid. One time, I was hanging out with Roman. I mean, we were about eleven, so Leo was maybe thirteen. And we watched him trim a pair of Dr. Scholl’s insoles for his loafers with a nail scissors. The whole time, he was explaining to us that he couldn’t get them exactly right with a regular scissors.” He cleared his throat, and right then she started laughing, ha-ha-ha. Really merry and happy laughter. Simon found himself laughing, too. Then she said, “Oh, God, I’ve seen Leo do that so many times! Every time he bought a new pair of shoes, at least. Insoles! Nail scissors! That’s so funny! He was thirteen?”