Ten Days in the Hills (61 page)

“Art. Photography. Geology. I took a couple of horticulture courses.”

“Well, we learned about Trickster Coyote in my Non-European Myths and Archetypes class. Just think about a coyote and think about tricks. I mean, not just tricks on other people. One time Trickster Coyote told his ass to keep the fire going all night, and fell asleep, and the fire went out, and so when Trickster Coyote woke up in the cold, he was angry at his ass, and he lit it on fire as a punishment, and burned all his own hair off.”

Simon burst out laughing. Isabel smiled. Stoney took another deep toke on the last bit of the joint. Simon said, “Well, that sounds right to me.”

Afterward, after Elena dozed off,
then woke up, then stretched against him, sighed, and opened her eyes, she said, “By the way, I looked for the Yul Brynner version all over the house and asked Joe Blow, but they don’t have it. I think we should watch it when we get home tomorrow night. Just you and me.”

Max tightened his arms around her and said, “That will be nice.” His cock, still not completely detumescent, lay with a certain kind of weight against his leg. He pressed it against her; then she ran her fingertips over it and looked up at him, saying, “You must be getting tired of the crowd.”

“I think we could spin off a few, just for a little while. I’ve held up better than I expected to, I’ll say that.” They disengaged a bit. He turned on his side and pushed the pillow more tightly against his shoulder. But she was right there. “Charlie is wearing out his welcome.”

“Mmm,” she said.

“And Paul, lovely man though he is.”

“Though not in a physical way.” Elena stretched against him again. “Which is not to say that I don’t agree with him on many things. It amazes me that I could respect someone’s quite unusual choices and yet not feel the slightest spark of interest in him.”

“And Zoe and I are divorced, after all. I don’t think we’ve spent this much time together in maybe fifteen years.”

“Cassie could spend one night at her own house.”

“Delphine could resume her customary distance.”

She lengthened against him and put her leg over his. “And Simon could get the hell out and go back to school!”

He kissed her. His own house would be really quiet by now. He said, “I’m sure those floors at Stoney’s place are refinished.” After his little talk with Isabel, Max thought it probable that mere proximity was the source of their relationship. Proximity was easy enough to fix; time itself would fix it, and if there was something else, well, right this very moment, maybe ten minutes into what you could call his “rebirth” if you wanted to (but might also call “resumption of service,” or “reprieve,” or “recovery,” depending on your model of the original dysfunction), he was gripped by a pleasant feeling of equanimity, especially with regard to love.

Elena said, “I would like to have some time with just Isabel, I think. We have things in common.”

“Well, of course.” He yawned, not out of fatigue, but out of pure relaxation. “Don’t you realize that men my age usually end up with someone like their daughters, not their mothers?”

“What do men do who only have sons?”

“They hang out with the guys. Did you ever see
Goodfellas
? The good fellas are happiest in prison, slicing the garlic with a razor blade, and having no access to firearms.”

“I saw that so long ago.” Now she yawned. Max laughed.

She snuggled closer. Still she made no reference to the war. Maybe it was over, too, and the Zeitgeist that was no longer pressing against him, apparently, was also no longer pressing against her. “Anyway,” she said, “I would like to see
Taras Bulba
by ourselves sometime this week, and then you can talk Mike into filming in Death Valley or over near Bakersfield or somewhere. And everyone can have what they want.”

“What do you want?” The question slipped out, a habit from that time, months before, when she might have said, “A cup of mint tea.” From the relaxation of her body, he sensed that Elena hadn’t thought of the war yet, either.

But she had. She said, “I want to come down from the mountain and discover that Al Gore is president, that 9/11 never happened, which it wouldn’t have, because he would have listened to his own administration’s warnings rather than dismissing them, that Saddam Hussein died of natural causes, that no elections were stolen and no elderly Jews had found themselves voting for Patrick Buchanan by mistake, that George Bush had been defeated as governor of Texas by Molly Ivins, and that no economic bubbles had burst and no massive tax cuts had been passed. Shall I go on? I want to discover that California has single-payer universal health care and all the labor laws are being enforced, giving every worker, whether a citizen or an illegal, enough bathrooms, enough ventilation, and enough fire exits. I want to find out that my Prius is at the dealer and ready for me to pick it up.” As she listed these desires, she was smiling at her game, but suddenly she frowned. After a moment, she said, “I want not to be sliding into a new dark age.”

He kissed her between the eyebrows. He said, “That’s not a foregone conclusion. We might arrest the slide.” But even as he said it, he acknowledged to himself that all the sunshine that seemed to be falling upon them here at the Russian palace was certainly, for him, the effect of their vacation from geopolitics.

She said, “Make a movie.” He suspected she meant, Revive your career.

He said, “I’m too lazy to make a movie, didn’t you realize that? How about
you
make a movie.”

She wriggled out of the coverlet cocoon and glanced at him, startled, but then she put her hands thoughtfully behind her head. After a moment, she said, “Do I have plenty of money?” Her voice was light again, so he said, “All the money in the world.”

“Can I go on location?”

“Not outside of southern California. You have to come sleep in my bedroom every night.”

She kissed the tip of his nose; the Flower Room became very quiet. It was early, Max could tell by the light, and possibly they were the only ones awake. This room caught the eastern light first thing in the morning, and from the window, a casement opening outward, what you saw when you looked out were the irises depicted in tile under the gleaming surface of the swimming pool. To the right of those, the flowering crab apples and plums alternating with Japanese maples and dogwoods marched down the green hill, frothy white with blossoms, and to the left, purple wisteria hung over the frame of the pergola. The garden had a kind of wildness that he usually didn’t care for in comparison with the austerity of his own, but he had enjoyed it after all. She said, “Is it okay to start with the music?”

“For now.”

“Do you remember a song Judy Collins sang when I was in high school? It was called ‘Farewell to’ something. It was about sailing the coast of Greenland, and her accompaniment was the sound of whales singing and waves crashing. Every time I played the album, I cried. I could never get used to it. It seemed like she was saying goodbye to the entire animal kingdom, and they were saying goodbye to her. And it was prescient. We’ve spent my adult life saying goodbye to the animal kingdom. I would have that song play over my opening titles, because I would want the audience to be crying immediately, without even knowing why.”

“And then what? What’s your story?”

“Well, the whales aren’t in Greenland, they’re off the coast of California. The opening scene is a home movie of a girl on a boat with her family, whale-watching. She’s six and her brother is seven. They mug for the camera, and then the camera moves and films whales breaching, and then moves back to the children, who are standing still, looking at the whales. And then that dissolves to the same shot of our girl at thirty, on a similar whale-watching ship with her family. She’s about to deploy to Iraq with her unit, and this is her last visit home.”

“Who is it?”

“The star?”

“Sure.”

“Well, of course Nicole Kidman was the first one I thought of, but it should probably be an unknown.”

“Never get made.”

“Well, J. Lo, then. That’s appropriate for California.”

Max chuckled at the thought of Jennifer Lopez in this movie, but he went along with her. “Then what?”

“Then the movie just follows her as she goes about her business, leaving her family, and her boyfriend. Doing her job.”

“What’s her job?”

“Oh, let’s see. She went into the reserves years ago with the idea that, since she was bilingual, she would be deployed to natural disasters where the victims spoke either Spanish or English. Now she expects to be some kind of liaison with the Iraqis, though she doesn’t know much about the Iraqis. She gets some training in Kuwait. They’ve been waiting in Kuwait for the last six months. She watches the women there, wearing full chadors and keeping their eyes down. She thinks about that. But she doesn’t talk about it. There isn’t much dialogue in my movie. Most of what there is, is bullshit—you know, army-speak. Not necessarily anything bad or abusive, just the routine way that people speak by the book in large organizations. Joking. Cursing. Using jargon. Substituting conformist ways of talking for one’s own point of view. About thirty minutes into my movie, they start across the desert. That part is very realistic—sometimes boring, sometimes terrifying, sometimes horrible, sometimes exhausting. She sees things that she hadn’t imagined, like rockets hitting the convoy in front of her. They try to save the soldiers in the convoy. Civilians by the side of the road, half hidden in the sandstorms, sometimes firing weapons, sometimes being killed. Corpses. Machines. Fires. Darkness. Then they get near Baghdad. It’s day thirteen of the war. They are driving along in their Humvee. There are six soldiers in the vehicle. Two women and four men. It’s quiet. Everyone is tired, but not too tired to be joking a little bit. Nothing anyone says expresses what J. Lo is thinking, but she doesn’t know how to express what she is thinking anyway. She’s numb. She thinks of the whales, maybe. And then they drive over a land mine, and the Humvee explodes.”

“Is that the end?”

“If only it were. No, we’re only fifty minutes into the movie. We have an hour to go. Just as she and her buddies dealt with the rocket attack on the other vehicle earlier, someone else in the convoy shows up and deals with J. Lo and her buddies. Three are dead, blown to pieces. We see that. One is basically okay. Miracles happen. The one who was sitting next to J. Lo, a black guy, let’s say Will Smith, is alive, but most of his midsection is blown away.”

“An
hommage
to the scene in
Catch-22
where Snowden the gunner dies in Yossarian’s plane?”

“Yes, okay. J. Lo herself is a mess. Her face is okay, and her trunk. But the rest of her is a bloody mess. The rest of the movie is about her trip out of Iraq. About the hospital where she goes at first. With scenes of the surgeries. Of what they save and what they can’t save. Of the hospital where she goes after that, and the beginnings of rehab. Of the wheelchair. Of how shocked her parents and boyfriend are when they see her for the first time. You can tell by the look on the boyfriend’s face that he isn’t planning to take care of her for the rest of her life. He doesn’t quite know what his excuse is going to be, but he’ll come up with something. Her thirty-first birthday in the rehab center. Someone feeding her her birthday cake and holding a glass of 7-Up up to her lips. We see the others who are with her in rehab, some better off, some worse off. We see how she gets back to California. Then, of course, at the end, there would be a reprise of the Judy Collins song, with a lengthier section of the whales singing, and then that tapering off as the credits end. It would be a simple movie. No love interest. No cuts to George Bush or Dick Cheney or peace rallies or her family worrying about her back in Los Angeles. Nothing but J. Lo doing her job, living her life. Almost a documentary, but not quite. That’s my movie.”

Max didn’t know what to say, in part because he could actually see this movie, and it was a sobering movie. As far as he was concerned, it was a movie that could bring the war in Iraq to a dead halt, except that, of course, like all antiwar movies, it would come way too late. If he got up off the bed right now, drove down the hill, and began writing and casting this movie this very day, not to mention trying to find the money, it would still be out of date when it came out. For that matter, J. Lo would be way too old to play the lead. The lessons to be learned from it would be abstract and of mere historical interest, only generally applicable to the circumstances of the time when it would, certainly with some fanfare, have its premiere. Max lamented the utter futility of it.

Elena said, “You would have to star someone big like J. Lo, because you would want the audience to already have a relationship with her. You would want it to be just like seeing someone you know and care about go off and get blown up.”

“You show good instincts.”

She sat up and stared at him. “Then why am I in the minority about this war? Why, when it seems so obvious to me that there are no weapons of mass destruction and that our supply lines are too long, not to mention the odds of victory and of pacifying the populace? I mean, Saddam is a cruel dictator, but the country is not engaged in a civil war, so we have nothing to offer them
but
civil war—why don’t others see this?”