Ten Days in the Hills (25 page)

He turned off the camera and took it down from his eye. He said, “So—do you want to be in pictures?”

“I would put that raccoon in a movie.” Then she sighed. “So, anyway, that was the Clinton administration. He wasn’t perfect, or even great, but he was undaunted, so you could get on with your life. I didn’t feel like we were headed toward the edge of the cliff, so I had more time to relax and enjoy myself, even with all of Simon’s misadventures, which of course I took too seriously, too.”

“Are you relenting?”

“Well, I did listen to what you said. It doesn’t make me relent, but it does make my concerns recede a bit. I’m not so rampantly offended as I was before you made your case, but I’m sure I will be when we get up and read the paper. I could argue, but I guess that I know that I will argue, and so I guess I think I could wait to argue. It’s possible to hold my feelings in abeyance for a moment. I mean, this is what I always wonder—do feelings build up like, say, the sewage in a septic tank, until they require some sort of drainage, or do they just come and go, like waves on the beach? If it’s the sewage way, then not expressing your feelings is more dangerous, and if it’s the wave way, then expressing them is more dangerous. You’d think I would know by now how feelings work, but none of the theories you read about seem to agree. Remember Primal Scream Therapy? That was the septic-tank model. But Parent Effectiveness Training is the waves-on-the-beach model.” Now she arranged her pillow again and slid down in the bed. Max lifted the coverlet and got in beside her, only not on his customary side. When he took her in his arms this time, it was his left hand that was free to push the hair out of her face and then press the back of her neck slightly and make a long stroke down her spine all the way to her buttocks, which he fondled, or, rather, he fondled her right buttock, which in the normal course of events was the lower buttock, but now was the upper buttock. In fact, even so minimal a change as this—embracing her mirror image with his unaccustomed left hand—was enlivening and even erotic. She turned her chin toward him, and he began to kiss her, pressing his chest and belly against hers and continuing to stroke her back, waist, and buttocks with long left-handed strokes. She snaked her hand under his arm and around his left buttock and began tickling his testicles from behind, lightly and rhythmically but not idly, rather as if she was systematically enjoying their shape and swell. He had a tiny scar on his scrotum, from his vasectomy, and her three fingertips touched and worried it, but oh so gently. It was exciting. Still they were kissing and kissing. To look at her, you wouldn’t think she would have a special talent at kissing. Her lips were not full, but she had a way of meeting his lips firmly, and then a moment later softening and in some way taking his lips into hers. This talent she had, specifically for kissing, did not manifest itself in her appearance at all. You could look at her, and probably many men had looked at her in the course of her adult life, and then you could overlook her, as, by her testimony, most men did. She was small, she was neat, her features were even and pleasing enough. Her clothes were self-effacing. Her hair was well cut, and she did move with grace across the room, but most men, he thought, would look at her and think that they should try for something better. If she were an actress, she would never get cast as the female lead, but always the schoolteacher or the prim older sister, the best friend if she was lucky. Nor would the audience ever know, of course, of the anatomy of her vagina, or her ability, unique in his experience, to squeeze the entire shaft of his cock while he was inside her. All the best parts of Elena were those that were not advertised, that were secret and safely preserved for the one she loved. And the one she loved was him, Max.

Thinking this, he turned her on her back and began kissing her forehead and eyebrows and hairline and earlobes, and he said, “I love you,” and she smiled with her eyes partly closed. Her eyelashes were good, too, long and thick, but you only noticed them if you were looking, since they were neutrally colored. This was what Max appreciated about Elena—now that, late in his life, he had enough sense to appreciate her. He had loved three women. Experience showed that most men, given the slightest opportunity, could appreciate Zoe Cunningham. As for Isabel, appreciating her and loving her, for him, and, he feared, for most men, was automatic. Delphine always maintained that the girl had faults, but primarily as a piece of logic—Isabel was human, all humans have faults, therefore Isabel has faults, though what they were in particular often escaped him and Delphine both. Elena, however—well, it seemed as though she was his to appreciate in full, and his alone, and that made her all the more precious to him. After years in Hollywood, he supposed that he was inured to the common, and even general, desire to possess someone because she was desired by everyone else.

Now she was stretched out completely, half smiling, the top of her head pushing into one of the pillows, and the covers on the floor. Sunlight angled across her chest, lighting up her pubic hair with a few morning sparkles. He smoothed his hands around her waist, then lifted her breasts together and kissed each nipple. After that, he took his left hand, his thumb and middle finger, and gently stroked the line of her jaw and the tendons in her neck, which somehow caused her nipples to harden even more, until she giggled suddenly and said, “Oh, I love that.” Now he gently parted her knees and spread her legs, then knelt between them, his cock hanging between his legs and her body open before him. While he looked at her, he held her feet in his two hands, feeling the soles with his fingers for a moment, then the toes. As he did this, her back arched and her stomach tightened, as if he were almost tickling her, then he moved his hands and encompassed her heels, giving them little rhythmic simultaneous squeezes. After a few of those, he moved his fingers to her Achilles tendons, and first gently stroked them, and then squeezed the skin between them and her ankle bones until she sighed. Then he ran his hands lightly back up her feet and squeezed her insteps once, before changing his grip and running his hands up the outside of her calves, which were, of course, smooth. He liked that, that she worked in a little oil or cream every day. What was the scent? Lavender or something like that? A fresh, gardeny scent. Thinking of it made it almost there, in the air around him. He stroked her knees, then her inner thighs, which were smooth and silky. He spread her knees wider and wider, just stroking the tender flesh up and out, and there was her cunt, the labia folded together like petals, its shape and color as unique as any face. What a movie that would make, a thousand cunts and a thousand faces, no words, only some music! Her eyes were closed. Her hands were on his thighs, but not doing anything. Some birds were calling outside the window, and then they flew away, and he continued to regard her portal. It was having no effect on his member, but it was having an effect on him, a soothing, pleasing effect. Since he could not do the usual thing with it, looking at it made him feel lighter and more relaxed, as if he had more time than he had ever had, as if he had never been a teenager or a young man, had never wanted anything so much that he overshot the mark and screwed it up. That expression was apt, wasn’t it? This thing, these labia, this entry was the goal, but, then, you rarely bothered to look at it, did you?

And, having looked at it, he leaned forward and kissed it. The labia were still dry, but as he kissed them, they swelled slightly—he could feel it with his lips—and she moved against the bed, though she didn’t say anything. Anyway, the sound of her hips against the fibers of the bedsheet was arousing enough, the audible signal that his kissing was sending charges through her that were like those he was feeling. He kissed her all over—her thighs, her pubis, the labia again, which he separated gently with his finger, kissing the inner sides and then the outer sides, then the hood over her clitoris, which was beginning to swell. Her hand rested on the top of his head and she cried out. She moved away from him, and he hooked his hands underneath her and anchored her. She cried out again. Now the labia were warm and swollen, not bladelike and nestled, but beginning to open. He felt his cock, but really he didn’t have to. His cock didn’t care, for whatever reason, except that now when he thought of his cock he did think of Baghdad—how long would it take him to get over that?—and the tanks rolling over the desert even as he was kissing her labia, not the real Iraqi desert but a desert like Death Valley. He kissed her again, and then pulled her labia into his mouth and ran his tongue over them. He could feel her clitoris begin to touch his upper lip. He gripped her tighter, but tried not to press his face too firmly into her. There was a right touch—interested but reserved. You had to keep your wits about you in a way that was not so important when you were fucking. Suddenly she shivered and cried out, and the aroma of her sex mushroomed around him, tangy and rich and erotic. “Ah ah ah ah ooh!” she said, and a moment later pushed his head away. “Oh, it’s too much,” she said, “I can’t stand it,” and she laid her fingers over her vagina opening and took a deep breath. He sat up. She often couldn’t stand to be touched for the moment or two after she had orgasmed. “Mmmm,” she exhaled, then she sighed again. He sighed, too. Then she smiled and opened her eyes. He smiled back at her. Baghdad receded a bit, as if, for example, it were no longer in Death Valley, but somewhere in Nevada or even West Texas. Oh, the camera. What a compact, useful, and attractive object it was. He picked it up again and turned it on. She stretched and eased over, then closed her eyes again.

He put the camera to his eye, took it down again, turned it in his hand. It had a nice weight, enough to seem serious but not inconvenient. He was a little impressed and suddenly curious about what more he could do with it. He said, “Do you think Cassie and Delphine would let me video them having a conversation? I always wonder what they talk about. They’ve been talking constantly for twenty years. It was Cassie who found this house. She lived next door, and the day she heard it was coming up for sale, she told Delphine, Delphine told Zoe, and Zoe called an agent.”

“Ask them,” said Elena.

But he didn’t think he would. He lifted the camera to his eye again, and focused it just on the curve of her back as it shaped her waist, then swelled into her buttock. When he looked at it with his eyes, it was pleasant but unremarkable. When he looked through the viewfinder, the same curve was bright and erotic, flat in a way, but alluring.

When Max bought his house,
it had a two-car garage, fairly standard for the time (at least outside of Bel-Air). There had been a little garden and a boxwood hedge to the right side of the garage. In 1990, he had taken out the hedge, repaved the driveway, and added another bay to the garage, so that it could now hold three cars. These cars were his own Lexus, dark gray, which he had just driven up the hill and parked on the street; the six-year-old Volvo sedan he had gotten new for Isabel when she turned sixteen, white; and Elena’s moss-green Subaru wagon, though recently she had ordered a Toyota Prius, dark blue. Personally, he thought the Prius was awfully small, but it was the perfect car for Elena—she could drive it in good conscience almost all the time and know exactly how many miles she was getting every moment of every hour of every day. In fact, the only problem with the Prius was that it didn’t seem to offer the Global Positioning option, which would be great for Elena, since knowing just where she was (and what the temperature was, what the time was, and what her average speed was) always relaxed her. “I like to feel well oriented,” was what she said. “It’s reassuring.” He thought the GPS was intriguing himself, except that a friend of his, a lawyer married to another lawyer, had rented a car with that system for a trip to look at autumn color in New England, and his wife and the system had gotten into repeated arguments about the proper route to take. The voice on the GPS would imperturbably announce something like “At Route 128 East, turn south-southwest onto Mars Lane,” and the wife would insist that, according to her map, he had to continue to the next right and turn there. There had been no way to turn off either the GPS or the wife. The friend had lamented to Max, “She couldn’t help arguing with that voice. She would say, ‘Larry, I know it’s not a person, but I hate the way she’s such a know-it-all!’”

Outside the garage, blocking his ingress, were five cars: Zoe’s new Mercedes SL500 convertible, silver with red leather interior, quite a machine, really; Simon’s ten-year-old black Jeep that he had bought with money he earned working for a caterer before heading off to college; Cassie’s blue Saab; Stoney’s vintage dark-red Jaguar, new in 1980, when Jerry and Max had driven it to Las Vegas for a night just to feel it go; and, of course, Charlie’s rented lemon-yellow Mustang convertible. Cassie normally didn’t park in his driveway, since her own unremodeled two-car garage was right next door, but the trunk was open, meaning they would have been unloading groceries. He looked in the trunk, took out a case of Pellegrino, and then closed it. He set the case of Pellegrino inside the garage door, then resumed his original inspection of the plantings along the driveway. Every year he thought he might redo this area, and in fact, now that the big garden was about as done as it could possibly be without tearing the whole thing up and doing it all over again, it was the perfect time to begin. But the idea of beginning just made him want to go into his bedroom and sit down with a book—it would be a gardening book, maybe a big picture book or maybe something more technical—but it would not be a book that inspired him. It would be a book that soothed him into waiting another day. In the end, this spot was nice enough, and the bougainvillea was thriving, even though it had an outdated air about it. Though the two eucalyptus trees were getting overmature, and they dropped a lot of junk vegetation around the place.