Ten Days in the Hills (72 page)

“Is she going to have more sessions?” Zoe asked again.

“She might. She said she felt less preoccupied after. It could be productive for her. At lunch today, she didn’t seem so on edge.”

“I thought that, too.”

Here was Pacific View. At Outpost, Paul said, “Do you have any more to say about Max and Elena?” Only now did she realize that this was a session. She said, “I guess I’m surprised that he’s satisfied with someone who is so ordinary.”

“Maybe,” said Paul, “he’s learned his lesson.”

“What lesson would that be?”

“I don’t know. It’s his lesson.” And that was her lesson.

Left onto Senalda, and up the last hill. It wasn’t dusk, but it was late afternoon. She stopped the car, opened her window, and pressed the buttons. Her gate opened. By the time Paul switched his things and departed, it would be even later. She said, “You won’t be back to your apartment until dark. Would you like to come in?” She drove through the gate, leaving it open. She saw that the gardeners had been there. There was no evidence of wind damage. Her existential dread receded a little more.

He didn’t answer her question, but said, as they got out of the car, “Twenty minutes, is all. I go my own way.”

“Does it involve Mulholland?”

“No, but I could take Fountain.” He smiled.

He was standing there. At some point, there had been no tantrum. It was actually a relief. She went over and put her arms around him under his arms, and laid her head against his chest, just to feel again, for the last time, that rhythm their bodies had together. His arms went around her, and he kissed her on the forehead. She said, “This part is nice.” Now her existential dread went away, but she didn’t tell him that.

He said, “I think so, too.”

“You didn’t ask me about Marcelle.”

“That was between you and Marcelle. Anyway, she enjoyed you giving her hell. You’re famous. It gave her something to talk about for the next five years.”

She looked up at him. She saw that she was well and truly forgiven, no caveats or reservations. Him, too, she thought.

Now they kissed on the lips. After that, she pressed the trunk button on her key fob, and when the lid to her trunk popped up, he went over and took out his bag and his beat-up old yoga mat. He opened the passenger’s door of his Honda and jammed them in with all the other stuff. His last words were “I’ll call you.” She knew what that meant. Probably they were not going to do sessions, either. Probably she was going to find herself some other sort of coach—Jungian, Freudian, jazz, piano, Pilates, horseback riding, surfing, more acting. Not yoga. She was, after all, born to take lessons. She watched the beat-up little car turn right out of the driveway and disappear toward Oporto.

When she thought of Marcelle again, it was funny. Paul and Marcelle, at the Lascaux Caves, or at the Pyramids, or at Monte Albán, trudging around in the scorching sunshine or the moist darkness? So what, really? Zoe had been hauled around the world to so many location shoots that no location interested her at all, not the ones she had seen, not the ones she hadn’t seen, not Phuket, not Rodeo Drive, not the Champs-Elysées, not the monastery up north. What she really liked, in the end, was a little stage in a little club, with Tony at the piano and good acoustics. Glasses clinking in the background. A laugh from time to time, someone saying “Shh!,” plenty of songs to sing, a smattering of applause that she could graciously acknowledge for a moment before singing another song. A glass of white wine on the stool beside her, and a glass of water beside that. All the best locations were evoked in songs, after all—somewhere over the rainbow, the sunny side of the street, down in the valley, up on the roof, under the sun, moon, and stars, easy street, Brigadoon, Oklahoma, Abbey Road. And you didn’t have to stay anywhere long, either, just three or four minutes.

Ten days
of newspapers and magazines were neatly stacked on the hall table. The only headline she noted before turning away was “Bombing Is Tool of Choice to Clear a Path to Baghdad.” Max was right—they were used to it now, the war, the new world. They had been softened up and obliged to swallow, and it was shocking, except that it was not anymore.

She set down her bag and remembered that she had never put her makeup case actually inside the suitcase, so she went out to get that. The first thing she laid eyes on when she opened her front door was the end of the driveway, where the gate was closed and Paul was no longer poised to make his turn. It occurred to her to sing a song, but the song itself didn’t occur to her. Maybe “Just One of Those Things,” or “Begin the Beguine,” but neither of them was really appropriate. She loved the tune of “Begin the Beguine,” though. As she popped the trunk again, she started to hum. Her makeup case had rolled to one side, up against a small, flat, rectangular package wrapped in brown paper. She picked it up and turned it over. On the front, in curly script, was “For Zoe, from Joe Blow.” Had she seen it before?

But inside the house, the phone was ringing, so she set the makeup bag and the package beside the door as she closed it (and locked it). After talking to both her agent and her personal assistant, who did seem a little fed up with her, admittedly, long vacation, she went upstairs, then came down and went into her office, then found a bite to eat in the kitchen, then turned on the TV and saw that there was still nothing but the war and
American Idol,
and she considered again whether she wished she had Paula’s job on that show, and couldn’t decide again if she did or not. Lots of money, she was sure, but they were always giving the poor woman a hard time, too. TV might be fun, if she could play the eccentric best friend rather than the lead, or, better still, someone entirely different from herself, someone male or a nun. (What happened to all those nun movies, like
Two Mules for Sister Sara
—that was Shirley MacLaine with Clint—where they paired you with the toughest guy in Hollywood and you had lots of conversations about daily prayer? That would be a good project for her and Samuel L. Jackson, or, better still, her and Jim Carrey. The thought made her laugh out loud.) So she took a bath and read
Variety
and
The Hollywood Reporter
and
Rolling Stone,
but not the L.A.
Times.

In the end, it was the fact that it was only nine o’clock and she had nothing to do but unpack that drove her back to the front hall, where she picked up her bag and her makeup case, and saw the package again, and thought to open it.

There was a note in an envelope, handwritten on a half-sheet of paper. She unfolded the paper. It said: “Raphael and I thought you might like this. We want to thank you for your version of ‘So in Love.’ We not only have the recording, but we heard you singing in your room, once when you had the window open, while you were visiting. We decided this morning that you deserve this more than the tax authorities (or whoever) do.” Then there was an explanatory P.S. “We didn’t say anything to anyone while you were here, but we believe that Mike and the others have died. Adana believes this. The airplane has disappeared and state officials have already been to her house in Saint Petersburg. She says that they spent two hours going through papers in Mike’s office and they have also closed the headquarters of his business. We all agree that this is a very bad sign. We think there might be a story in the
New York Times
tomorrow.”

Zoe agreed that it was a bad sign, too. It was shocking, really, though she hadn’t actually met Mike and didn’t know the names of the other men. She realized she would be calling Max and Stoney very soon, and then there would be days of upset and mystery and revelation, and her memory of every moment of their stay in the Russian house would be utterly transformed, and in ten days, when Paul got back from the monastery, she would have to call him, too. She knew he would say that their discussion of death at lunch had not been a coincidence. But for now, all she planned to do was open the package.

She slipped her hand under the clear tape that held the brown paper closed, then ripped off the paper and set it on the hall table. The object was a painting, upside down. She turned it right-side up. It was the Vermeer.

A girl in a pale-green dress with a white collar, holding a recorder in her hand, had been sitting in her chair, playing music by the light of a partially open stained-glass window. Now she was leaning forward, as if to peruse the music—her finger was resting on the music stand—but she had been surprised at her practicing, and was just turning her head to look at the viewer. The light from the window brightened her cheek and the fold of her white headdress where it touched her on the neck. She wore a plain necklace of amethysts, and a dangling amethyst earring in the visible ear. The recorder was made of ebony with ivory fittings, and it lay in the pale green of her skirt, pressing into the folds. Her face was round and youthful—the face of a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old girl—pretty and pale, not yet smiling, but about to—as if she had only just recognized the intruder, and in a split second she would register her pleasure in seeing him. The intruder, Zoe suspected, was her beloved. It was a beautiful picture, and she stood under her hall chandelier, holding it in her two hands and gazing at it, for a long time, taking in the dress and the collar and the hairdo and the window and the glint of the music stand and the glint of the necklace and the sheen of the black recorder. And the song was in her mind. “Strange, dear, but true, dear…” E minor. Or lower, even. D minor. She thought of Joe Blow and Raphael. “So taunt me and hurt me, deceive me…” She was humming. She thought of Mike, and stopped humming. It was shocking. She shook her head to shake away the thought.

She set the picture on the table, propped against the wall. She saw that there was another note, this one in an envelope that had been ripped open. She pulled it out and unfolded it. The paper was thick, on the letterhead of the Getty. It said, “Dear Mr. Blow (ha ha, very funny, Joe), Per your question, it is highly unlikely, in spite of the many legends around this painting, that it is a Vermeer. Practically an impossibility, in my opinion. But I looked around and asked my colleague here, Kirsten (did you ever meet her?), and we wonder if the artist might be a woman of the period named Judith Leyster. It would of course be of exceptional quality for Leyster, but less impossible than this being a Vermeer. Sorry. But hey, Leyster was the only woman artist of her day!! See you soon.” Then there was a signature she could not quite make out, and someone, maybe Joe Blow, had drawn an arrow toward the word “woman” and added another exclamation point. Zoe put down the letter and looked at the painting again. She had never thought it was a Vermeer to begin with.

But it was a beautiful picture. What it reminded her of was when you were watching some movie on the DVD and you pressed the pause button, and there were Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant seated at a table, or Lena Horne, smiling at Bill Robinson, or James Cagney, tap-dancing down the staircase in the White House, and the composition in the frame of the TV screen was striking, original, and evocative. You might leave the TV on, and the DVD player on, and have that picture, that ephemeral moment, on your screen forever, but in fact you always came back from the kitchen with the bottle of Perrier or the bowl of popcorn in your hand, and you always pressed the play button, even if you had seen the movie ten times before. And it never occurred to you that Cary and Audrey and Jimmy and Lena and Bill were dead. You went on with the movie; you could not help yourself. And now she had this still, this stop frame, of the girl in 1663, playing her music one morning in spite of loves lost, in spite of deaths, in spite of the plagues and the fires and the massacres and the genocides and the clashes of armies and civilizations.

She picked it up again. The girl was happy to see someone. It made Zoe smile.

I would like to thank several people who offered information, advice, and aid during the writing of this novel. They are: Miles Berkowitz, Abby Foss, Nick Goldberg, Arianna Huffington, Romi Lisally and her gardening friends, Lynn Pleshette, Mary Pendergast, and, of course, Loren Steck and his lecturers and students at UC Santa Cruz; also Anke Steinecke, who kept us all out of trouble, and David Vladeck. And to every director and commentator on every DVD who bothered to add “Special Features,” I couldn’t have done it without you.

Jane Smiley is the author of numerous novels, including
A Thousand Acres,
for which she won the Pulitzer Prize;
Horse Heaven,
which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize; and, most recently,
Good Faith.
She has also written four works of nonfiction, including a critically acclaimed biography of Charles Dickens, and
Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel,
a history and anatomy of the novel as a literary form. Smiley was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2001. She received the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature in 2006. Ms. Smiley lives in Northern California.

Also by Jane Smiley

NONFICTION

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel

A Year at the Races

Charles Dickens

Catskill Crafts

FICTION

Good Faith

Horse Heaven

The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton

Moo

A Thousand Acres

Ordinary Love and Good Will

The Greenlanders

The Age of Grief

Duplicate Keys

At Paradise Gate

Barn Blind

This Is a Borzoi Book Published by Alfred A. Knopf

Copyright © 2007 by Jane Smiley

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Jörg Friedrich: Excerpts from “Beyond Slaughter: Memories of ’45” by Jörg Friedrich (
Los Angeles Times,
March 28, 2003). Reprinted by permission of the author.
Los Angeles Times:
Excerpts from “Transgender Prostitute Guilty of Manslaughter,” by Tracy Wilson (
Los Angeles Times,
March 28, 2003). Copyright © 2003 by the
Los Angeles Times.
Reprinted by permission of the
Los Angeles Times.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Smiley, Jane.

Ten Days in the hills / Jane Smiley.—1st ed.

p. cm.

1. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 2. Hollywood

(Los Angeles, Calif.)—Fiction. I. Title.

PS
3569.
M
39
T
46 2007

813'.54—dc22                                                                        2006046579

This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical figures and public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

eISBN: 978-0-307-26735-1

v3.0