Ten Days in the Hills (10 page)

It was true that she was under the covers giving him head. Not only could he feel her lips and tongue on the end of his cock, making some kind of flower motion, but if and when he could keep his eyes open, he could see the hump of her hips and one foot, sticking out of the covers at the bottom of the bed. He groaned, which woke him up more thoroughly, and then his back arched a bit because she was doing something with her fingers on his balls that sent a charge directly into his spine. He placed both of his hands, which were on his chest, onto her head and he scratched her scalp a little bit through her hair and it was the least he could do until all of a sudden she rose out of the covers, lifting them high and throwing them off, exclaiming, “Oh, it’s so hot under there!” and she was brightly naked for a moment against the dark underside of the quilt, smiling, only the circles of her eye sockets and her areolae and the triangle of her pubic hair were dark, making a triumphant pattern against her skin, and then she swung her leg over him and sat down ever so slowly right on his cock, introducing it millimeter by millimeter into herself. She said, “I’m always amazed at how much bigger my cunt is than my mouth, when my mouth seems so big,” and he gave a loud sudden laugh and finally he was wide awake and fucking her, arching his back and looking at her face, which was, since her hands were on his shoulders, an arm’s length from his. As she gazed at him, she puckered her very fine curvaceous lips and then opened them and let her tongue float out between them, which he could not stop staring at, until he decided to stare at her breasts, which were small but round and good to look at the way they moved slightly as she leaned over him. “Oh, yes,” she said, and lifted herself and then she put her hand between them—her fingers were still cold, which was exciting—and somehow the coolness of her fingers and also sensing that at the end of his cock inside her he was touching something, what would that be, something deep inside her, that must be her cervix, made him come, so he arched up into her and it felt like all sorts of things were happening—his come was spraying out of him in a shower that was flowing back over him and warming him and her and running out of her onto his scrotum in a honeylike way, or not that, but something. “Ah,” she said. “Hmmm.” And she slumped forward over his chest, warm and comforting. After a moment, he said, “What happened to me?”

“Well, let’s see. I was drifting off and you were pushed up against my back, and I felt you getting an erection, so I thought I would kind of slide down there and give you a happy surprise.”

“It was a very happy surprise.”

“Were you having a dream?”

“Yes. My father was standing beside the bed, but I think he was you, because he was standing where you were when you came out of the bathroom and handed me the tissues. That sounds better, anyway.”

“Well, dreams don’t mean anything.”

“They don’t?”

“Just random images firing in your brain, and you make a story out of them. That’s what they said in my psych class.”

“That’s very boring.”

“I know. We were all a little disappointed.” She sat up and looked at him seriously, as if, after all this time, she was finally saying what she had been wanting to say. “Stoney?”

“Yes?” He arranged himself a little bit in order to answer this question, whatever it was.

“Does my father have a career left?”

He knew instantly what she meant, which was a bad sign, and then he didn’t say anything even though he had intended to, which communicated to her the fact that it was a bad sign. She added, “Does he think he has a career left?”

“Well, Max has been in Hollywood for a long time. And he doesn’t fool himself about anything, so my guess is he’s got a pretty good idea of, you know. Anyway, he has a career left, but it’s harder, and I don’t know that he’s made up his mind to do the hard stuff. I’ve only officially been his agent for a couple of years, and we’ve hardly worked together, because he hasn’t shown much interest.” He didn’t say that, once or twice when he was still lucid, even Jerry had expressed worry about Max.

“What’s the hard stuff?”

“Keeping on writing and pitching and sucking up. I think it’s a toss-up between the three of those which is the hardest. I’ve suggested him for a few things and I’ve suggested a few things to him, but nothing’s connected in a little while. I thought he was going to make this mountain-climbing thing in British Columbia, but then he had that angioplasty when they were in pre-production, remember that? And they’d already rented the helicopters and everything, so they couldn’t wait. But after I saw the rough cut, I was glad he didn’t do it. Talk about slow. Step step step is nothing compared to handhold, grunt, foothold, heave, handhold, deep intake of icy breath, foothold, groan. And then it didn’t even look very good. It reminded me of that old Monty Python routine where you’re watching one of the Pythons hoist himself in agony up the sheer side of the icy cliff, and then the camera pulls back, and there’s Eric Idle standing there on the sidewalk with a microphone, and he says, ‘Will he make it? Yes, here we are, watching the famous mountaineer Marvin Parvin climb the Edgware Road! Marvin, can we have a word with you?’ And then he bends down and holds the microphone to the other guy’s lips.”

“That’s so funny.”

“Believe me, that was an angioplasty sent from God.”

“Maybe my dad could have made it better.”

“Well, he would have been more organized, I’m sure, but I don’t think he would have been able to screw more money out of what they laughingly called the production company. They were very cheap, which is not to say that the insurance people weren’t making them pay through the nose, too. But he has to write something. Something with two characters about your age that takes place in three small rooms and an old car.”

“Something really cheap, in other words.”

“Really cheap would be the key, and with the right angle, probably about stepparents and the eternal screwups of the baby-boom generation, something that would be independently financed and that we could take to Sundance.” He looked at her in the blue light. “Actually,” he said, “Max should do a documentary. I showed him a book a few months ago, about salt. It was a great book, and I thought it would make a great documentary. He said, ‘I would rather make a movie about asphalt.’ I didn’t know whether he was joking, or whether there was something really interesting about asphalt. And then it turned out that there’s a famous old movie named
Asphalt.
” He shrugged. “So I haven’t mentioned the documentary thing, but people love documentaries now.”

“Everyone in Cowell College at the University of California at Santa Cruz is intending to be a documentary filmmaker.”

“There you go.”

“I like documentaries. Didn’t I tell you that?”

“Yes, but you were stoned.”

“Should I worry about him?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because, as my father, Jerry Whipple, always said to me, ‘It’s not the job of the kids to worry about the parents, because the parents’ problems are way beyond anything the kids can fix. So go worry about yourself, and then I will stop worrying about you, and then I will have the time I need to worry about myself.’”

“That’s just a general principle.”

“Let Elena worry about him. That’s her job.”

“Maybe she doesn’t know enough about Hollywood to worry about him.”

“All the better.”

“They did screw up.”

“Who?”

“The baby-boom generation.”

“Well—”

“You should live in Santa Cruz, the town that time forgot. You can get to know two generations of hippies there. I had this roommate freshman year. Her name is Gloria. She’s from up near Redding somewhere. She was raised in a tepee. She was always setting off the smoke alarm in our room, smoking dope. She would smoke in the closet in the middle of the night, even though I pointed out to her that that was a definite fire hazard. One time, we were having a party, and somebody else set off the smoke alarm with a cigarette, so the dorm manager came down with a couple of security guys, and they opened the closet door and there she was, smoking a joint. So that was her last chance, and they told her to come out of the closet, but all she did was curl up in a fetal position and go limp. They had to drag her out and down the hall. She said it was ‘nonviolent resistance,’ but, really, she was just too baked to move.”

Stoney laughed.

“Another time, everyone was talking about what their parents liked to do, and Gloria said that her mom’s favorite thing was to go to one of these competitions where she would catch a sheep, shear it, card the wool, spin it, and make something before the end of the day.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“It does not prepare you for this world! And then we would have this constant discussion about a certain ethical question—should parents sell dope in front of their children? Whenever I said no, they all said, Well, she’s from
Hollywood.
Then they would talk about ‘white-skin privilege,’ and I always thought”—she turned her face toward him in the blue light and spread her hands under her chin—“‘Hello! Look at me, you blondes!’ but I didn’t say anything, because of course I knew what they were getting at, so I was just as bad as they were, and cowardly, too.”

Stoney laughed.

“I’ll tell you something. You’re fifteen years older than I am. People normally think that’s good, to be the younger one, but I think the fifteen years that I have more than you, say, I think it’s going to be a nightmare. I mean, I’m
scared
of global warming. I’m
scared
of estrogen imitators in the water. I’m
scared
of the death of the rain forests. I’m
scared
of fish with no eyes. At my job, we talked about that stuff all the time, and you know what, there are people at my job who’ve been there for a whole generation, as long as I’ve been alive, just about, and they’re still going at it, and it’s gotten worse, not better. I mean, there’s this group of gorillas saved here, and that group of hunters and gatherers who don’t drink Coca-Cola there, but in general, it seems like they’ve done more harm than good, because they’ve just been feeding the other side and making it bigger and bigger. Here you are, you sixty-year-old woman, in your Birkenstocks and your homemade wool sweater and your gray hair, and you think globally and act locally, and they just sneer at you! And everything you say or do increases their contempt.”

“The two halves of your analysis don’t really seem to mesh—”

“Well, aren’t you scared? Aren’t you angry?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Angry? Of course I’m angry, I guess, but I’m angry that here
I
am, doing the same thing as my father and my grandfather, but I’m not doing it very well, not as well as they did, and I’m angry at Dorothy for being angry at me that the power in the agency is shifting to people that Dorothy doesn’t like and never had any respect for, and I can’t stop it, even though that’s my job. We all know that I am the interregnum while Monty and Clark get it together, and believe me, they have a perfect right to be named Monty and Clark, because Monty and Clark were tremendous friends of Dorothy and her father, Dorothy is Hollywood
royalty,
and her father’s father came over with the original Hungarians, and before they came, they were very important in Hungary, which means that Dorothy was born to be important, or maybe not, depending on what day it is, maybe they were extra unimportant and that’s why it is so amazing that Dorothy is who she is today. So—someday Monty and Clark are going to take over the agency, except that Monty plays the guitar and the piano and the saxophone and wants to write music for video games—that’s his consuming ambition—and Clark wants to ride reining horses out in the Valley and live with that girl who trains dolphins at SeaWorld, and Dorothy is of course happy that they have talents, but in Hollywood, if you’ve got talent but not genius, then you are nobody, really. So…” He shrugged.

“You don’t sound angry. You sound like you think it’s funny.”

“Well, I do think it’s funny. But I am angry.”

“But you’re not scared?”

“Honey, I’m scared your father is going to find out I’ve been putting it to you since you were underage, since my father was alive, since I was married. If this were a Hollywood movie, it would be
Badlands
or something like that, and probably I would have to die in a major shoot-out in the end, or at least a car wreck.”

“What’s
Badlands
?”

“
Badlands
is that Terrence Malick movie where Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek go on a killing spree in South Dakota, and she is about fifteen, though I think she was about your age when she made the movie. Anyway, they have fun, but he has to die in the end.”

“I can’t believe you’re not scared about bigger things.”

They stared at each other. Stoney knew that now it was time to mention the war, which had come up for discussion at the dinner table after an entire day without television. In the afternoon, Stoney had walked down the hill to his own house and watched CNN for an hour, but he didn’t say anything about it when he got back, implying that he’d gone to the gym, where, of course, CNN or Fox News would have been blasting away anyway. Whatever show he’d been watching on CNN at his house amounted to a parade of experts interspersed with footage of the soldiers crossing the desert, and Stoney found himself agreeing with all of them, even when the moderator advertised them as being in violent disagreement with one another. What swayed him, he thought, was the conviction with which each one spoke, even those speaking for the administration, of whom Stoney was inclined to be suspicious. Part of the reason he didn’t say anything at the dinner table was that he hadn’t learned anything from the television except maybe that if all premises were true then no conclusions could be drawn, a remark that would confirm Isabel’s impression that he had arrived prematurely at some plateau of uselessness, though his own idea was that he had risen artificially and reluctantly to a higher stage of development (marriage, moderate career success, pretty good money, though not children) than he had actually been capable of, and was now falling back to his natural level, which was more or less adolescent (eating whatever was in the refrigerator, getting to work most of the time, driving around even when he didn’t need to, and watching car chases on TV). He said, “I am not for the war.”