Ten Days in the Hills (35 page)

“Do you think she’s kidding?” said Delphine to Simon.

“I don’t know,” said Simon.

“She’s not kidding,” said Delphine.

Cassie shrugged. “Everyone is impressed by hundreds of thousands of deaths, or millions of deaths, or, actually, one death, but what does it do? It doesn’t do anything that I can see, except give the survivors a sense that they now uniquely deserve something better than what they had before—”

Elena said, “Yes, well, but now you’re playing into the conservatives’ hands, because you’re discussing all sorts of huge and unrealistic ideas while they go ahead and do something that is illegal and inhumane, which is invade a country and bomb their population and take their assets. It’s perfectly fine with Rumsfeld that you debate issues of global life and death, because that occupies you while he deploys his army.” She did sound shrill, thought Isabel, although Isabel knew perfectly well that the very word “shrill” was always applied only to women, and only when they were stating strong and usually correct opinions. And so Isabel said, “I agree with that,” in a voice that she tried to mold to sound grave, sober, and not shrill.

Isabel saw Zoe look at Elena, then at Max, and then at Paul. Paul had finished his kiwifruit and was now eating grapes. She said, “Dear one, what do you think?”

Paul glanced at her, ate another grape, and then picked up his napkin. He methodically wiped his mustache downward, then smoothed his beard. He set his napkin beside the plate of fruit, which still contained an apple. He said, “Of course, I think it’s all an illusion,” and in the next second, without any warning, Simon, who was sitting next to him, made a fist, hit him in the jaw, and knocked him off his stool. Everyone gasped—Isabel herself gasped—and then Zoe began to laugh in great merry peals of laughter, her eyes wide in surprise and her mouth open and her golden, legendary laugh filling the room like bubbles. She leaned forward and helped Paul off the floor, then picked up his stool. As he sat himself down and turned his head from right to left and back again, putting his hand to the side of his jaw, Isabel said, “Mom!” and Elena said, “Simon!”

Max said, “Did you rehearse that?”

“No,” said Paul, but in an even tone of voice. “We did not rehearse that.”

“What in the world were you thinking of, Simon?” said Elena, and Isabel saw that even Cassie and Delphine were shocked. She felt her own shock, which had taken a moment to kick in, begin to swell.

“I was thinking of Bishop Berkeley,” said Simon. “He was this guy in the eighteenth century who said that everything was an illusion. So, one day, a couple of other guys were walking down the street. I think one of them was Immanuel Kant. And they started talking about Berkeley and his ideas about the illusory nature of reality, and Kant kicked a stone by the side of the road and said, ‘This is what I think of Berkeley.’ So that occurred to me when Paul said that word ‘illusion,’ and I guess I thought I would try a similar sort of thing. It was a sort of philosophical punch. I’m sorry if it was a little hard. I meant it to be more of a slap.”

“That is the dopiest excuse I ever heard,” said Elena. She went over to Paul and put her hand on his shoulder. She said, “I am so sorry. Would you like some ice? Does it hurt? Oh dear.” Isabel thought she really seemed undone by the whole thing.

Max said, “I’m sorry, Paul. I am. But that was the best slapstick routine I ever saw.”

“It was. It was!” exclaimed Zoe. “You could not reproduce that timing on film. You couldn’t rehearse the look on Simon’s face, which was completely relaxed, or how quick it was and how unexpected. I’m so sorry I laughed, dear one! Please forgive me. Would you like to lie down on the couch or anything?” She leaned forward and put her hands on his shoulders and winced sympathetically and then kissed him gently on the uninjured side of his face. When Elena brought the ice, Zoe held it gently to his jaw and said, “Honey, have you ever been cold-cocked before?”

Paul nodded.

Isabel looked at Charlie, who said, “You have? I never have.”

“Mmm,” said Paul, “that’s quite a left hook. Yeah. No, I used to get into fights all the time, and then I became a vegetarian, actually mostly to stop fighting. I was glad to note that I didn’t jump up and try to throttle Simon. That’s what I would have done thirty years ago, but this time it didn’t even occur to me, so that’s good.” He took a deep breath, then leaned down and picked up the apple that had fallen off the fruit plate and rolled under his stool. Isabel thought he looked a little white around the eye sockets, but, of course, his cheeks were hidden by all that curly hair. Then he said, “What was I saying? Oh.” He glanced quickly at Simon. “That all of this is illusory.”

“I’m not going to hit you again. I really didn’t mean to hit you that hard. I really was just thinking of Kant kicking the rock by the side of the road.”

“I don’t think it was Kant,” said Isabel. “It was someone else.” She didn’t feel that it was becoming of Simon to try to sound like an intellectual.

“What if,” said Paul, “all those people who died in the Blitz and the fire-bombings and the rape of Nanking and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and are now dying in Iraq were just playing parts? What if, after the play was over, they got up, took off their costumes, and went on to do something else? What if they had been incarnated to do that, and they were subsequently reincarnated to do something else, and the thing that happened to them in that life, that particular form of suffering, was so momentary that they forgot it immediately?”

Isabel could see that no one had anything to say to this idea, one that she felt was simultaneously tired and irrelevant, but certainly comforting to someone like her mother, who would of course be ever seeking some form of irresponsible belief. She said, “I think that’s too easy. It lets everyone off the hook. ‘Oh, it’s all illusion, everything is fleeting.’” She heard her own mocking voice. “We can just take what we want and do whatever we want, and whatever happens will be fine because it’s all illusory anyway. I for one don’t think the endangered species are illusory. I don’t think plastic bags in the oceans being eaten by seals and birds are illusory. I don’t think watching your child die in a bombing is illusory. I mean, look what your generation has come up with. Global warming, environmental degradation, corporate takeover of government, third-world debt impoverishment, failure of the health-care system, the blockbuster movie, and video games. Mercury poisoning.”

“They didn’t come up with video games,” said Simon, seriously. “Or, really, the Internet, either, though—”

“Excuse you,” said Isabel.

“Oh, sorry,” said Simon.

“If you ask me, I think baby boomers have wrecked the world. But here we are, talking about everything being an illusion! How convenient!”

“Maybe I haven’t explained myself very well,” said Paul.

“You have! Of course you have. It’s not that hard to grasp, you know. I took the History of Religious Thought. When I graduated, the graduation speaker spoke quite eloquently about universal love and Nelson Mandela and seeking a higher form of forgiveness, and why wouldn’t he? He lived in Capitola! He bought his house for forty-six thousand dollars and now it’s worth about a million! Of course he’s conversant with universal love! I would be, too, if I lived in Santa Cruz and had a sailboat.”

“You always sound so resentful, Isabel.”

“Well, you always sound so shallow, Mom! Maybe you aren’t, but blah blah blah! It’s embarrassing!”

“You know who really sounded shallow,” said Cassie, “was Marilyn Monroe. I met her. But actually she wasn’t shallow at all, she—”

“Shh,” said Delphine.

“Of course,” said Cassie.

Isabel was staring at Zoe, who was staring right back at her. Zoe said, “I don’t think the way I am is your real problem with me. I don’t think you know how I am or what I’m like—”

“What daughter does?” said Cassie. “I was always glad—”

“Shhh,” said Delphine.

“Well, my mother drove me crazy. She was used to good service, because she was quite a beauty and her family was rich, and eventually I was the only one left to serve her. She’d have me drive over there, saying she’d lost her heart medicine, and then her heart medicine would be right there but what she really wanted was for me to find her cigarettes for her in the bedcovers, even though she was forbidden to smoke in bed. I put two smoke alarms above her bed. If I tried to hide her Winstons or keep them from her, she would grab them out of my hand and light up.”

“Are you finished?” said Delphine.

“I was just pointing out that it could be a lot worse for Isabel. Did you ever see that movie
Hanging Up
? About Nora Ephron’s dad—what was his name?—oh, Henry. He was a charming man from the outside, but he drove those girls crazy, according to the movie. They had Walter Matthau play him. Very dependent, couldn’t find a woman of his own age to take care of him, drove the wife away, at least in the movie—”

Isabel could perceive that Cassie was giving her time to back down, as well as giving her a kindly lesson, but she could feel her coming outburst swelling within her anyway, or maybe even because of what Cassie was saying. She could also see everyone else looking at her. Her father looked neutral, as if he had decided not to interfere, which he always did. Elena looked somewhat similar, but with the added knowledge that this was not her business. Simon, of course, looked all too interested, and Paul looked like he had just been punched and didn’t really care what happened. She thought that if Stoney were here, the one person that she could rely on, she might have some alternative, but he wasn’t, and she didn’t, and so she said, in a voice both loud and firm, “No, I am not saying my mom is dependent or hard on me or difficult or even a prima donna, because everyone knows that she isn’t. But, Mom! Show me something that you care about! It doesn’t have to be the dolphin population or the coral reefs! It doesn’t have to be children with AIDS in either Africa or Southeast Asia. You could care about abortion rights or the plight of, of, of anything. You could recognize that there are plights and that you could do something about those plights!”

Zoe continued to stare at her. Isabel was more and more annoyed with herself that she couldn’t come up with just the right example that would demonstrate what she meant, but at the same time, she was a little surprised that, of all her grievances against her mother, this was the one she had ended up enunciating. It was as if, after this long time, she had put her quarter in the gumball machine, and now the gumball that rolled down the chute was yellow rather than red, was about her mother’s nature rather than about Isabel’s nurture. “When Bush was elected, you didn’t really care about the Florida vote! You said that you didn’t see a dime’s worth of difference between them anyway, so you hadn’t even voted—”

“Well, I changed my mind later—”

“But then it was too late! But that’s just it.”

“I’m busy, I—”

“Well, you aren’t too busy for Paul, are you?” she said nastily. “Paul comes around and tells you that everything is an illusion, and there we have it. You spend time doing sessions and going to the monastery and refining your practice, but that’s shallow, too. If Paul were to go away, all that stuff would be over, just like that, but leaving a residual sense that everything is just okay!” There she was—instead of pointing out that Paul was just another in a long line of her mother’s romantic mistakes, she was taking issue with Paul’s belief system. But even though she was somehow losing her chance, or so it seemed, her rhetoric had its own momentum.

“People have the right to live their own lives, Isabel,” said Charlie, and he did—yes, he did—give her a significant look. So she defied him. She said, “No, they don’t. Actually, they do not have that right. They live their own lives because no one stops them.”

Paul interrupted her. She had paused to take a breath, so there was a little space for him to intrude, but Isabel knew that they both knew she wasn’t finished. That was the first actual beef she had against him. There was nothing overtly wrong with him; guys like him were a dime a dozen in Santa Cruz. Even so, his voice sounded authentically even and steady. He said, “It’s not only the bad things that are illusory. It’s the good things, too.”

She snapped, “What difference does that make?” But of course it did make a difference, and distracted her from what she had been saying, because as soon as he said that she thought again of that moment with Stoney the night before. “Everything is fleeting! I understand that!” Obviously, that’s what would make a moment like that moment with Stoney precious.

Paul said, “I didn’t say ‘fleeting.’ I said ‘illusory.’ What we see around us doesn’t have actual being, so the sensations we have about it always betray us, the way they do in a dream. That’s all I was saying.”

Zoe ignored him. She exclaimed, “What am I supposed to say to you, Isabel? That I’m not shallow, that I have feelings and all of that? I’m not going to do that.”

“You can’t prove a negative,” said Simon. “According to Mom. That’s why the justice system is ‘guilty or not guilty.’ In England it’s ‘guilty’ or ‘not proven,’ I think. I mean, it’s the job of the accuser to make the accusation stick, not of the accused to prove the negative. That’s why the Saddam Hussein thing is—”

“Would you shut up, Simon?” said Isabel.

Simon cleared his throat, but he did shut up. Then he began to clean up his place at the counter. He looked at his watch. Isabel turned her gaze back to Zoe, who said, “I don’t mind talking to you about this, but I would like to do it in private rather than in front of everyone.”

“I don’t want to talk about it. It’s not like you’re going to change my mind. You can’t demonstrate to me that you are not who you are. You are who you are. That’s fine.” But of course it wasn’t fine, Isabel saw that everyone could see that. She picked up her own dishes and walked them over to the sink. She put her toast crusts down the disposal and set her plate in the sink. Behind her, Charlie said, “I thought sure we were going to have a big argument about Iraq.”

“We still can,” said Elena.