Ten Days in the Hills (64 page)

As Elena drew the sleeve of her kimono over his face, it was intoxicatingly sensuous and fleeting, compounded of the feel of the silk, some scent he did not recognize, the feeling of being seduced and subdued at the same time. He asked about that scent, and then it was very funny, he thought, that she should start talking about
Grace,
since he had been thinking of Lilli Palmer.

“Wasn’t it quite arduous for her at her age?”

“She was sixty or so if I remember correctly.”

“Even going to Canada in the winter and all?”

“She wore furs.”

Elena laughed, then said, “Well, sixty is the new fifty.”

He kissed her then, and had that sensation that he frequently had when he kissed her, that sensation of: Oh! This! How pleasant this is! You could do this all day and never get tired of it! They kissed for a long time, and he felt the immediacy of the kiss—the soft warmth of her lips, the presence of her face and her body, the small cave of her mouth—but the image of Lilli Palmer as a Polish girl never left his mind. Along with it came a lot of images from movies of the thirties, all black and white: Marlene Dietrich in
The Blue Angel,
Mae West in
Go West, Young Man,
Billie Burke in
Dinner at Eight,
Carole Lombard in
Nothing Sacred,
Myrna Loy in
The Thin Man.
Women in those days, of course, had a different body language from the body language of women today. Their self-display had been more subtle but more calculated, less trusting. Even as he had this thought, he realized that in Ukraine those women probably still existed, and there was some girl who could inhabit that part of Taras’ movie, and the movie could grow from there; in fact, it could grow outward toward the men by means of the women—the girl’s mother (maybe forty, almost dead of starvation), the maid (tough old lady who survives the siege), Taras’ wife (arranged marriage when she was thirteen to his thirty, now a crone at thirty-two), and then the men. The men would present themselves, too.

He pulled away from the kiss and rolled over on his back. He said, “I think I’m catching something.”

“Oh dear.” She felt his head with her small palm. “What?”

“A movie.”

“Which movie are you catching?”

“I’m sorry to say,
Taras Bulba,
and it’s going to be a major pain in the ass. But we can enjoy the best part right now.”

“What’s that?”

“Thinking about it.”

“What part are we going to think about?”

“Well, you are going to think about what it means, and I am going to think about what it looks like.”

“Do I get a credit?”

“Yes, right at the end of the credits it will say, ‘Meaning supplied by Elena Sigmund, author of the
Here’s How! Guide to Meanings
.’”

“Okay, then.”

“Okay, then. I begin with the women. What do you begin with?”

“I begin with the women, too.”

“Why is that?”

“Well, why do you begin with the women?”

“Because they’re the most difficult to visualize. Is there a woman in America who moves like those women? Whose face has those same habits, whatever they were, geared toward self-preservation? Is there a woman in Russia? In Ukraine? The Soviets set out to eradicate all former ways of thinking and to substitute new ways, more or less European ways, for the old ways, so, if we want to portray the old ways, where are we going to find them? It’s a forensic problem. We have this remnant and this remnant and what might be this other remnant over here. How do we put them together so that they look convincing?”

“You said that about the corsets. You told Stoney that the corsets were a deal-killer.”

“It goes deeper than the corset thing. But you could send your actresses to Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia and have them observe the body language of those women, and then subtract something, or add something. But you’d have to define what that something is—do you subtract subservience in the princess, or add nomadic toughness in the boys’ mother? Even then, you’d only get a rude approximation of the way those sixteenth-century women really were, but if it looked strange enough onscreen, it might work. The actresses could learn and study together, and so at least they could all be rather similar, not the same, but of the same breed.” He knew he sounded intrigued. This was the way it always happened—the point of the needle that got under the skin, and pretty soon, ways and means began to occur to you, and to engender more ways and means. First, there you were in a bookstore, and then there you were in the library, and pretty soon you found yourself on a plane scouting locations, the last place on earth that you had imagined yourself before you entered that bookstore. He said, “It’s so obviously a man’s book that it seems to me that the women are the main problem, and I don’t want to solve it in the old Hollywood way, by throwing a big star at it. Elizabeth Taylor as the princess, or even Nicole Kidman as the princess, or even J. Lo as the princess, or even whatsername, Hilary Duff as the princess. Maybe, when we looked at Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf last year, she looked okay to us, just the way Janet Leigh looked okay as an eighteenth-century French aristocrat in the 1950s, but now looks like a girl from California in a French-style dress.”

Elena said, “The women are the understandable ones. Let’s say that the men are just impossibly off-the-wall aggressive and warlike. Every time there are more than two men in any one spot, the first thing they do is fight, two against one, and then more show up, and it’s three against two, and on and on. I don’t think modern audiences really understand that, even, pardon me for saying so, in Ukraine or Russia or wherever. So the women, who are interested in survival, and family life, and love, even if those things as they know them are distorted and cut short by the endless violence, serve as the emotional guides to the action. Not by talking, since in some ways they can’t talk or aren’t allowed to talk, but just by reacting. As soon as the boys get home from their school, the mother has to let them go again, and she knows there’s a good chance that something bad will happen to at least one of them. That’s one thing. Or the princess. She knows how to be seductive, even when the walled city is falling apart around her. In the midst of death, she is seductive. That is so strange and yet right. And even though there aren’t many women in the novel, you can have more in the movie. I would have as many women as men, and have the women be a kind of chorus. The men are ignoring them, but the audience isn’t.”

He said, “I like that. But how do you know any of these women actually care about what we would consider regular, normal sorts of things? Maybe the brutality of their lives has driven that out of them? Maybe they are numb to all human feeling?”

“But the book hints that they aren’t. Taras dismisses the wife for being weak because she cries when the boys leave again to go to the encampment. And the author himself says that the girl’s concern for her mother is real. Those are our clues. Maybe, in your chorus of women, some of them make remarks that are more brutal. That’s how I see the chorus, a kind of ongoing gossip session about events as they transpire. Gossip seems to be perennial and universal. Everyone gossips, so you could use it for your own benefit. Voice-over gossip.”

Max could not help loving this idea. “Voice-over gossip”—just fragments of conversations, or groans, or screams, or horses whinnying, or whispers that couldn’t be made out precisely. That would be the score, he thought. Normally, the music in a movie didn’t leave much room for extra dialogue, but if there was very little music—folk music, mostly, and lots of ambient sound—that could be an interesting experiment. And it was something that you could try and then modify if it didn’t work, because you could always put in more music, weaving it into the other sounds. He had never made a movie like that, with that kind of sound, and he really, right at the moment, couldn’t think of a movie like that. He sat up higher in the bed. He said, “That gives me a great idea.” He described the idea to her, and she nodded. Her nod made it an even better idea (how many times had that happened, where, as soon as someone agreed with one of his ideas, it got so charged with energy that it became sheer genius?). “You know,” he said, “I’m getting a little excited. This room is beginning to seem a little small.”

She laughed.

“Mike is beginning to seem a little impoverished.”

She laughed again. “Are we launched?”

“Well, we are certainly launched from a supine position under the covers of the bed. I feel a slight urge to go down to the
My Fair Lady
library and look for picture books about the Russian steppe, or even to wander around in the living room. Aren’t there a bunch of Russian paintings and artifacts there? Let’s take the video camera. I can take some footage of what’s in there.”

“Will Joe Blow let you?”

“It isn’t a museum. Besides, it’s Mike’s project I’m working on. We could take pictures of every picture of a woman painted by a Russian in this house.”

“There was one I saw yesterday—”

“Of course he set this up. Of course this is why he invited us over here, so that the atmosphere would infect us.”

“You mean Mike.”

“I do.” He breathed in the fragrance that now seemed to inhabit the room.

She said, “It’s a pretty intoxicating atmosphere.”

He said, “This house is a treasury of ideas. Of course, that’s no guarantee that we will, or can, make a decent film.” He didn’t say, though he knew it was true, that the thoughts they were intrigued by now would diminish and be forgotten. This room that seemed somehow to engender them would collapse upon itself into barely an image. He would successively seek out, or endure, or even resist the stages that would take him from here to the movie on the screen—the all-involving research, the all-involving composition of the script, the all-involving beehive activity of actors and technicians, the all-involving logistics of filming in a new place, the all-involving details of finance and money and junk like costumes and houses and cameras and carts and piles of hay and lights and flowers in the grass and armor and weapons and clouds and mounds of turnips and fires and blood, then rehearsals and setup, and the acting out of scenes, the all-involving servicing of the small city that they would be. Cutting, editing, sound, music, and then, of course, promotion and publicity, premieres and festivals, interviews and reflections—one stage after another. Only to have it all fade away in the rearview mirror and become as old, eventually, as
Grace,
or
City Lights,
or
Birth of a Nation.
But this catalogue of unavailing efforts, this catalogue of woes to come, well, it perversely energized him, didn’t it? He said, “Simon should play Andrei.”

“Oh, I don’t think so.”

“Sure. We’ll give him a beard up to his eyes and lots of flowing hair and a little swordplay coaching, a beautiful girl, and let him go. I bet he can do it. Teach him to ride a horse in the Cossack manner.”

“I don’t think he wants to be an actor.”

“But he doesn’t have to make a career as an actor. The fact is that a guy who shaves his head in order to play a penis in a student film is a guy who is up for anything. A little trip to Ukraine would be nothing for him. He can go on afterward, across the Silk Road to China, and become a trading representative between Santa Monica and Ulan Bator. Better than having him driving around California with nothing to do.”

“Oh well. I’m glad to know you’re joking.”

“Maybe I am, maybe I’m not.” But he was, or, if not joking, then at least giving vent to sudden high spirits. They could all go—Delphine, Cassie, Zoe, Paul, even Charlie. Just to extend this pleasure that he was suddenly aware of, the pleasure of having these particular people around day after day, a pleasure that he had been experiencing without realizing it, or, well, yes, he had realized the pleasure, but he had not admitted it. Now he did. He said, “Delphine and Cassie and Charlie and Zoe and everyone—I’ll tell Mike they’re my essential creative team, and I’ll make them all assistant directors.”

“So corrupt and nepotistic! I’m shocked.” But she was not shocked; she was amused.

He said, “And Isabel can do the research on authentic ecological details of the period. The steppe is supposed to have been an interesting and unique ecosystem, not just a flat place in the middle of Eurasia, so we can portray that, too. Fulfill our social obligation to record what is probably the end of an era. And as far as that goes, the only things we know about the geopolitical aspects of the sixteenth century are what we read in the novel, but maybe they were more interesting than even Gogol was aware of.”

“I’m sure Mike will go for that.”

“I’m sure he will. And then he can archive her research, and she can set up a special consulting firm—eco-research for various good causes.”

“Yes, but is this a movie or a miniseries?”

“Oh well, you can always get everything into the script until you can’t. That’s why I prefer to write my own screenplay, because I like to do my own thinking, even if the first draft is three hundred twenty-five pages long. The first draft of
Grace
was more than two hundred pages, and there were basically two characters. One of the problems with
Southern Pacific,
to name only one of the bombs I am responsible for—and I liked that movie, but I am the only one who did—was that, really, it was a seventy-page idea that we tried to pad out with close-ups of the dog.”

She laughed again and said, “Let’s get up and go downstairs and look around.”

He said, “Let’s get up and go downstairs and look around.” But when she leaned forward, he restrained her, and when she turned toward him, he slipped his hand inside her kimono. She said, “Don’t you want to?”

“Of course I do.” But he started kissing her again. She resisted for a moment, then yielded completely, and a moment later, they were rolling around in the bed again, less languidly, more like they had something to do but wanted to do this first. She kissed him and kissed him—not only on the lips, but next to the lips, on the nose, on the cheek, under his chin, between his eyebrows. She kissed him until he was laughing, and then she leaned over the edge of the bed and came up with the video camera. She sat up, quickly taking off the lens cap and pressing the power button. She said, “Speaking of archives.” And she threw back the covers with one hand, moved the hem of her kimono out of the way, and focused on his erection. He had one. She said, “Think some dirty thoughts,” but he didn’t have to do that. All he had to do was watch her face as she trained the video camera on his hard-on. She said, “Well, I am impressed,” but mostly to herself. He slipped his hand underneath his balls and felt them, then he ran it up the shaft of his cock, so smooth and youthful, that skin, did you ever hear the one about the mohel who ran a luggage shop, and a man comes in and asks to see a wallet? He laughed aloud at this ancient joke, and she laughed, too, just because he was laughing. When his hand closed over the cap, he smoothed it downward again, a little tighter this time, and as he let out an involuntary exclamation, she let out one, too. She leaned closer, and he didn’t have to look into the viewfinder to see what she was filming—the head of his cock, emerging from his closed fist, fat around its single dark exit, all the more full because he was squeezing it a bit. She leaned around to the right and got it from the underside, where it stood up out of his pubic hair, and she said, “Is it bigger? It seems bigger.”