Ten Days in the Hills (70 page)

“You sound like Paul,” said Isabel.

“Well, you know, I was talking to Paul the other day, and he said, ‘I don’t mind
ça change,
because, in fact, there is also always
la même chose
.’”

Isabel laughed.

Just then, his cell phone rang. He took it out of his pocket, looked at it, put it back. She said, “Who is it?”

“Avram. But he can leave a message. I can hardly hear anything up here anyway, even voice mail. Pleasure before business, I always say.” She took his arm, and went with him under the pergola, into the rose garden. The roses themselves weren’t blooming, but it was the quickest way to the back lawn.

Most of the others had left right after lunch, though Isabel wasn’t sure about Zoe and Paul. Stoney put his arm around her waist, and she put her arm around his waist. He still looked a bit disheveled from lunch. If he had been a girl, he would have gone upstairs to wash his face and comb his hair, but he had only taken a few deep breaths and blown his nose in the table napkin. There was something about this that Isabel found endearing. She squeezed his arm and was about to ask him how he was feeling, but just then he said, “I guess Charlie is driving straight to LAX, even though his plane isn’t until six tomorrow morning.”

“I’m sure he thinks he had a very weird vacation. Maybe it was weird enough to send him back to his wife. He’d be much better off with her, you know, mowing the lawn and driving the grandchildren to their soccer games, than he is now. You heard what he said.”

Stoney nodded. He said, “Some of those old guys who think they’re flying at last are really just falling out of the nest. I got this weird feeling looking at him that if she doesn’t take him back he’s going to be dead pretty soon, like in a couple of years.” He uttered this sentiment just normally, as if it were a fact of life and no longer the founding principle of his Weltanschauung. Then he added, “But he didn’t sell us out.”

“No, I don’t think he did.” They continued down the path to the white stream. She began, “How are you—” but Stoney said, “You know what I call Cassie’s car?”

“What?”

“The ‘Enigma-mobile.’”

“What does that mean?”

“Do you understand those two?”

“What’s not to understand? They’re friends. They get along. I mean, they’re neighborly. I think it’s nice. And unusual.”

“Well—”

“They’re friends.” Isabel spoke definitively. And cleared her throat.

After a moment, Stoney said, “Well, yeah.”

“You just don’t understand female friendships.”

“No,” he conceded, “I’m sure I don’t.”

“The interesting thing for me was to watch Mom and my grandmother for ten days. I mean, I know they haven’t spent that kind of time together in years and years.”

“They seemed to get along.”

“Yes, I know, but it’s like it doesn’t occur to Mom not to get along. She’s
such
a narcissist that she’s immune to the swirl of family feelings, good or bad. I think she’s incredibly strange. I thought she was strange before, but now I think she’s even more strange.”

“And your grandmother isn’t strange?”

“She isn’t strange. She’s ideal.” Isabel said this without any self-consciousness, just saying at last what she always felt, but Stoney’s head swiveled around and he grinned at her, as if she were joking. She saw that he saw immediately that she was not.

They came to the white stream and walked along it. Just down from where they were walking, a small group of colorful agates, broken in pieces, had been set into the bottom of the stream. The stones were large enough so that the water split and flowed picturesquely around them. Isabel and Stoney sat down at this spot. She slipped her feet out of her loafers and slid them into the cold water, which glistened around her calves. After a moment, Stoney rolled up his jeans and did the same, saying, “They brought this sand all the way from Australia. Fraser Island. The sand there is perfectly white.” The weird little stream was so clear that the only way she could tell that it was running was when a fragment of a leaf or a bit of a stick slid telekinetically past. Stoney put his hand through the water and dug his fingers into the streambed. As he pulled his hand from the water, the sand flowed out of his palm and drifted in a silvery ripple around the agates. “And each grain is perfectly spherical. Joe Blow told me about it. That island is in the ocean, but it’s full of freshwater creeks that rise near the middle of the island and flow to the sea. Supposedly, they are branches of an underground river that comes to the island below the ocean, from Malaysia. When he was explaining it to me, I didn’t quite understand it.”

“Do you want to talk about lunch? About that black-dog story?”

“Not right now.”

“Do you want to say anything about your feelings?”

“No.”

She waited a moment, then said, “I liked this stream the other day, but now it seems odd. I prefer my sand golden. I like the sand on Kauai. This grass is nice, though.” She pulled her feet out of the water and shimmied a few feet up the hill, then leaned back and surveyed the hillside. “Look at this grass. Grass like this in California is so luxurious. I’d much rather lie down in a big field of grass than on the beach, I have to say.” But what she really wanted to say was, Are you okay? Are you happier? Are you less filled with contradictions and complications? But if she asked those questions and he answered them, then she would have to ask herself questions that she couldn’t answer, like “What now?”

He moved up the hill until he was just beside her. She looked at him. He said, “And do you want to say anything about your feelings?”

She knew she should be saying yes, but she said, “No.”

Stoney looked up at the sky. He said, “You know why we’re sitting here?”

“Are we going to talk about our feelings anyway?”

“You brought it up.”

“I brought up your feelings, not mine.”

Stoney laughed and lay back. After a moment, he put his arm across his face, to shade his eyes from the sun. She rolled over, and stretched out on top of him so that her head shaded his face. He put his arm around her.

She said, “Why are we lounging here?”

“Because we can’t bear to leave.”

“I can bear to leave. I think it’s strange here. I miss my room.”

“Well, that’s true. I can bear to leave, though not to get back to my specific chair in front of my specific TV.” She kissed him on the nose. “And I think the Amber Room is oppressive and this hillside is bizarre, too. It’s like when you go on a movie set at Paramount or somewhere, and the set is, say, a run-down old farmhouse.” He pushed her hair back, then ran his index finger across her cheek. “You step up on the screen porch, and not only does it look just like a screen porch somewhere in Illinois—I mean, with the right moldings and the authentic-looking steps—they’ve also done the boards. If you bend down and look at the floorboards that you’re standing on, they have layers of paint beneath the surface coat. They look like they would look if they were sixty years old and had been halfheartedly scraped and repainted two or three times over the years. You think it’s amazing!” This time, she kissed him on the lips. After a moment, he went on, “You marvel at the skill and thought of the set decorators and scene painters, but then you think, Who’s going to see this? Even the actors aren’t going to notice this, and certainly it won’t show up on film. But they did it anyway.”

“Usually that sort of excessive detail is the result of low labor costs.”

“Is it, Miss Smarty Pants?”

She nodded.

Stoney ruffled her hair. He said, “Well, it gives you the willies, and this place gives me the willies in the same way. So it’s not that I can’t bear to leave, it’s that I can’t bear to go anywhere.”

Isabel heard herself say, “Why is that?”

Now he looked right at her, and he kept looking right at her, only shading his eyes with his hand. He squirmed underneath her, and pulled her more tightly into him. She put her face down against his neck, and the grass brushed her face and gave off its fresh aroma. While they were not talking, Isabel could hear lots of birdsong—calls and trills from the aviary up at the house, but also humbler notes from the trees across the stream. And from the woods there was some sort of little cry, as of a squirrel, and scratching sounds. No traffic. Maybe this was the only place she had ever been in L.A. where no traffic hum intruded. It was true, she admitted, that she knew nothing. Or maybe it was that she knew so many things now, about herself and Stoney and their relationship, that no rational decisions could be made. He was too complex for her. She was too complex for him. And their history was certainly too complex for Max (though, she was willing to admit after today’s revelations, possibly not too complex for her mother). Yes, she could tell her father her story, and if she backed it up with a lot of feminist theory, she could talk him into accepting it, just as he always let her do whatever she wanted because she wanted to, but even now, even lying here like this, she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do. She suspected that that was what Stoney was saying, too.

She felt his arms release her, then she felt his hands on her shoulders. A moment later, he was looking at her. Soberly. Seriously. He said, “Are you still afraid of being alive?”

She knew perfectly well what he was referring to, but she pretended not to. “What?”

“Remember in the middle of the night that first night, when you asked me whether being suicidal was the same as being afraid of being alive?”

“I was so stoned.” She kissed him again, but he made her look at him. She said, “That night was fun. I loved that night.”

“Well, are you? You said the baby boomers had wrecked everything and the only thing people your age had to look forward to was everything getting worse and worse.”

“Don’t you think that’s true?”

“I don’t know. I leave it to you to distinguish between the personal and political.”

“There is no—” But she knew that he knew that she knew that, right at this moment, that was too easy. He was looking at her very earnestly. She said, “Things are likely to get worse and worse.” She rolled off him, and then he rolled onto her, pressing her deliciously into the turf. She said, “The probability is that they will get worse and worse, or at least get a lot worse before they get better.”

He said, “I think so, too. It makes you think of the Thirty Years’ War or the Hundred Years’ War, even if you don’t know anything about them.”

They agreed on this, then. But, really, what was important was that she could not stop staring at him. She had always thought he was handsome, even though no one ever said that about him—quite the contrary. Blair Underwood was handsome. Heath Ledger was handsome. Brad Pitt was handsome. Owen Wilson was handsome. Stoney Whipple was not, by any standard, handsome. And yet. She said, “I know. But I guess, between Mom and Cassie and Simon and everything that they’ve done to drive me absolutely crazy, I’m not especially focused on that idea right this very minute.”

“What idea are you focused on this very minute?”

“I want to ask you a question. Are you handsome?”

“What?”

“Are you a handsome man?”

Stoney’s head dropped back, his eyes closed, and he laughed out loud in true merriment. His arms went around her again. He said, “No, Isabel, no, honey, I am not handsome. Jerry was not handsome, and I look just like him. His genetic endowment was too overwhelming for the lovely Diana, at least in my case.”

“Then it must be that I love you.”

“What?” He lifted his head and looked at her again. She decided again that what she was saying was true, so she repeated herself.

“Then it must be that I love you.”

“Oh, Isabel.” But his face had softened.

She ran the tip of her forefinger up the bridge of his nose, then brushed her hand across his forehead. His high-and-getting-higher forehead. She whispered, “Because it must be that the love comes first, and then what you love looks beautiful to you. You look beautiful to me, and you always have.”

Now he stared at her, so intently that, if she had not known him, she would have thought he was angry, but he wasn’t angry. She saw that he was feeling what she said go all through him, and he had to feel every moment of it, she knew that, he had to let it register in every cell, let it become knowledge that his body understood. She saw that she had said something very serious, even though she had never thought of saying such a thing before now. She felt what she had said go through her, too, and install itself. There was a long silent moment, and then, just before he kissed her, he said, “I am yours, Isabel.”

They, whoever they were,
might as well have been dead, Zoe thought when she sat up and looked at her watch. She, at least, had disappeared into nowhere for some period of time, and as she looked around, she could hardly understand where she was. Above a stream? Near some flowering trees? Sitting in the grass beside a mysterious man? Was he the Woodsman? Was he the Wolf? He could not be the Prince, she thought, because he had a wild, long beard. How did she know if she had slept for ten minutes, and not ten days or ten years? How did she know she was not Sleeping Beauty after all? She wiggled her toes. Her shoes had fallen off her feet. She put them on again. She adjusted her shirt and her bra. The Woodsman was still sleeping. Without knowing who she was or who he was, instinctively, as it were, she leaned over him and kissed him full on the lips. He kissed her back. His lips were elastic and responsive, as if she were not in a dream. His eyes opened. Paul, his name was. She knew instantly and without a doubt that they were not going to see one another again after this unless he did something to claim her, something that was entirely outside of “Paul’s” personality as she had come to know it. And if he was not going to claim her, what then?