Ten Days in the Hills (60 page)

“Well, he must have been—”

“What I think now is that I got involved with Leo because I don’t have a sense of humor.”

“No shit.”

“What else would it be? I was with Leo for five years. You know, we went to see
American Pie
and didn’t laugh one time. He didn’t laugh and I didn’t laugh. We went to see
Election
and he kept saying, ‘That’s funny,’ but he didn’t actually laugh.”

“I’ve seen you laugh.”

“You have?”

“You laughed when we were watching
Casablanca.
”

“No, I didn’t. I said something, and you laughed. People laugh at me, but I don’t have a sense of humor, and I don’t laugh.”

“Your mom has a sense of humor.”

“You’ve noticed that?”

“Well, sure. I think she says funny things that she knows are funny at the time. But she’s good at it. She never goes for the laugh, but a few minutes later, after the conversation has moved on or something, you remember what she said, and you smile.” He shrugged. “And you laughed just now.”

“Maybe there’s hope for me, then.” She paused for a long moment, then went on. “Anyway, the very reason I’m here is that Leo has to have time to do some sort of process on his marijuana garden before he can move out, or, rather, before
it
can move out, and I didn’t want to live with either him or
it
any longer, so I came out to L.A. But he has to do this whatever it is with a tweezers, and so it is taking quite a long time.”

“One thing I learned up at Davis is that agriculture is labor-intensive.”

“Do you like it there? I never thought of going there.”

“Mom thought I would be safer there. Anyway, when I applied, it was there or Riverside. I didn’t get into UCSD or Cal Poly. I was going to major in surfing, but when I didn’t get into the surf universities, I ended up majoring in highway driving. I’ve put a hundred and ten thousand miles on my car in three and a half years.”

“That’s a lot of emissions.” She looked completely serious, and Simon had to admit that, yes, looked at from a certain point of view, that fact only added to the pointlessness of those many pointless hours on the road. She went on, “You should plant some trees.”

“What kind of trees?”

“Depends on where you plant them. In some places, you would only want to plant native species, but in other places, you could plant species that had been introduced a long time ago and had adapted appropriately to that particular ecosystem. There are programs that replant the rain forest if you make a certain contribution. A hundred and ten thousand miles would be a thousand dollars or a thousand trees per year.”

“You know that right off the top of your head?”

“The math isn’t that hard when you start with a hundred thousand. And anyway, I can do that because I don’t take time out to make jokes.”

“That’s a joke.”

She stared at him again, then smiled, so he didn’t ask her why he should plant trees in Brazil when he was driving in California. Actually, she had a nice smile, wide and sudden. It was the Zoe part of her Max-ish face. But it didn’t have the variations and flourishes that Zoe’s smile had, and it reminded Simon that he had to continue to think of his adventure with Zoe as precisely that—a one-time adventure—or he would start to think more about it. He looked around, then said, “Don’t you think it’s kind of dark in here?”

“Well, I was trying to go to sleep. But, yes, this room is more of a daytime room. When the sun is shining in the windows, then everything lights up. It’s eye-popping, really, but I have no idea if all the panels are amber, and it seems sort of tasteless and philistine to ask Joe Blow. At night, though, it’s a little depressing. Stoney keeps calling this room ‘the Abyss.’ Maybe he went to sleep on a couch somewhere.”

“Do you think it was him your mom was yelling at?”

“That could have been Paul. I sensed at dinner that Paul was due.”

“Why was that?”

“Basically, she just doesn’t believe in Paul any longer.”

“He told me an interesting thing today. He said he knew Max in junior high. Max was in ninth grade and Paul was in sixth grade. In New Jersey. I gather that Max and his friends fucked with Paul in some way. He didn’t tell me exactly what they did. But he said that he recognized Max the second day we were at the other house, and he remembered his address, too, because he had to pass your dad’s house on the way to school and it always made him nervous.”

“Did he tell my dad about it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“See? That’s a perfect example of why Paul can’t last. He doesn’t have normal instincts. I don’t know if his instincts are better than normal or worse than normal, but when you expect him to say something, he doesn’t, and when you don’t expect him to say something, he does. I think he tries to be enigmatic.”

“Well, it’s probably just as well, since I don’t get the sense that Paul believes in your mother, either.”

And now, at this confirmation of her own opinion, her face fell. The two M’s were way less trouble than this, he had to admit. At that moment, the door opened inward and, after about a second, revealed Stoney, who looked at him but not exactly in surprise. “Hey,” said Simon. Stoney didn’t say anything, but when Isabel jumped off the bed and said “Hey!” he kissed her on the cheek and said, “What’s up?”

“Where’ve you been?”

Simon could tell that she was trying to make this question sound casual.

“Oh, I was looking at the car.”

“I thought you might be.”

“There was a pretty good moon out. Anyway, the driveway is filled with motion-sensor lights. Every time I moved, another light came on, it seemed like.” He glanced at Simon, then sat down on the bed and kicked off his shoes. Isabel said, “I caught Simon spying on Mom.”

Stoney looked at him, then said, “Got any dope?”

He said, “About half a j.”

“Do you mind if I smoke it? Maybe it will put me to sleep.”

Simon reached into his pocket and pulled out his wintergreen Altoids tin. He opened it. The joint was longer than he’d remembered. He handed it to Stoney, along with one of the kitchen matches, which Stoney took and struck on the underside of the table beside the bed. The match flared in the Amber Room, and was reflected in the mirror TV screen and, more dimly, in some of the amber panels at the head of the bed. Stoney put the joint to his lips and sucked in a long hit. Then, before he let it out, as dope-smokers were wont to do, he said the most important thing on his mind in a strangled voice that Simon could barely understand: “You know, it’s okay about that car. After the shop fixes it up, I’m going to sell it on eBay and buy something else. Another sports car. A little yellow sports car, maybe a Mercedes.”

“I would get—” Simon began, but Stoney interrupted him. He said, “I was looking at that car, and I thought and thought about Jerry, and I remembered something he always said that I was forgetting. He always said, ‘What are you keeping this for? Life’s too short! Didn’t you ever hear of John Maynard Keynes?’ Then he would explain why you had to keep all your possessions moving. Didn’t matter if you liked it or didn’t like it, sell it! Donate it! Give it to the homeless person on the corner! I can’t tell you the number of times we were walking down the street and he took off his tie and handed it to a homeless guy. Once, he gave a guy his belt; once, he gave a guy his watch; and once, he gave a guy the book he was carrying in his hand, which was a hardback copy of
The Name of the Rose,
and he said to the guy, ‘Here. You read it. Maybe you can make head or tail of it. I sure can’t.’ He would have loved eBay to pieces. He would have had me on eBay every day, selling everything in the house and the office and buying something else. You know how he furnished the Tahoe house? He found out where some cruise line he’d been on refurbished their boats. It was in a town in Alabama. He found a woman in Alabama to keep an eye out for him, and when one of those ships came in to be gutted and redone, he bought chairs and tables and beds and mirrors and a big gas grill and range and a walk-in refrigerator. Dorothy couldn’t stand it, she was so embarrassed.” He sighed. “But, anyway. So I’ll sell the car on eBay. Life’s too short, right?”

Isabel said, “Are you asking me for my opinion?”

Stoney nodded.

There was a long moment of silence, then Isabel said, “I have no idea, actually. I mean, about whether life’s too short. Or how short life is.”

Stoney said, “Well, for the time being, let’s say it is.”

Without actually planning to speak up, Simon found himself saying, not “How about I go to Iraq,” but “I saw my dad last year.”

Both heads swiveled in his direction.

He said, “I found him on the Internet. It wasn’t hard. He was teaching in Ohio.”

“Where?” said Isabel.

“Kenyon College. But he came out to San Francisco, and I met him there.”

“Wow,” said Isabel.

“I never told Mom, so don’t tell her.”

Isabel nodded.

Stoney said, “What was it like?”

Isabel said, “What was he like?”

“Well,” said Simon, “imagine that you’re walking down the street, and you’re looking at something in a store window, and you happen to bump into someone because you aren’t looking where you’re going, and when you look at that guy, there’s nothing about him that strikes you. He’s just a guy, kind of balding, wearing glasses and a blue shirt, and you both excuse yourselves, and then the voice-over narration says, ‘Simon, that is your father.’ It was like that. It seemed like I could pick some other guy and have that guy be my father just as easily. That’s what it seemed like, but of course he was completely convinced that I was his son, and he had all this verifying information about Mom, so I knew he was the one.” Simon shrugged.

Isabel said, “What was his excuse for abandoning you?”

“Mom always said he broke up with her before I was born.”

“Oh,” said Isabel, her face turning red. “I didn’t know that. I was making an assumption.”

“There is an ass in assumption,” said Stoney. He cleared his throat.

“Yes, there is,” said Isabel.

“We can say that he abandoned his zygote. Or maybe his embryo. I’m not sure how far along the pregnancy was. I mean, I haven’t quizzed my mom on all the aspects of the fatal interaction.” Now there was an uncomfortable silence, which Simon wasn’t sure how to break, since he had never had this conversation before, or even expected to have it. He tried to remember more about his encounter with “Bill.”

Isabel said, “Does he have other children?”

“Well, he doesn’t have a family. He said he was married, but they’d had fertility problems actually, don’t tell Mom, but they decided in the end not to adopt. He teaches Milton, non-Shakespearean dramatists of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, freshman comp, and American leftist writers of the twentieth century. He’s associate chairman of his department and does all the class scheduling and departmental paperwork. Ohio is a nice place, and he and his wife have a large perennial garden and two dogs, a golden retriever—”

“Not a golden retriever!” exclaimed Isabel skeptically.

“—and a mixed breed, part saluki.”

“Are you making this up?” challenged Isabel.

“No. I remember lots of the details. I wrote them down. He is writing a novel. He described it to me. Actually, when he was first talking about it, I had this thought that it would be about me, but it was about a guy who starts paddling a canoe on some lake in Wisconsin after going to an Indian pow-wow, and decides to try going out of the lake by means of a little creek he has never explored, and eventually, some six hundred pages later, he finds himself in New Orleans, and in the interim, he has relived all of American literature through a series of dreams. He said the pow-wow and the canoeing thing had happened to him, but he had just gone a little way out into the creek, but that the creek actually would lead eventually to the Mississippi, yada yada yada. Anyway, he keeps working on the novel, and has had some interest, but no actual publishing offers yet. He thinks it’s maybe a little too complex for today’s literary world, especially for the video-game generation.”

“Did you like him?” said Stoney.

“Well…” Simon had thought a lot about this question. He had not disliked Bill. But he had watched him over lunch. He was the sort of guy who picked up his fork and then his spoon and stared at them, then rubbed them with his thumb to make sure they were clean. He had positioned his water glass just so after every drink, and had kept the foods on his plate neatly separated. Simon said, “You know how Mom always says that when I was little, if there was a red button to push, I would push it?”

Isabel said, “I heard her say that after you socked Paul.”

“Well, I didn’t not like Bill. But I think I would have been that kid who always had to push the red button, and he would have been the dad who wanted everything to be just so.”

“That seems so rational,” said Isabel. “I don’t see how you can be rational about your dad.” Except, of course, she reminded herself, if you had to lie to him.

“I guess if he had been more interesting I would have been less rational. And anyway, our meeting was very short and superficial. A couple of hours, and then he said I could always contact him, and he gave me his card. I think it would be different for Mom, so that’s why I never told her about it.”

“Just think,” said Stoney, “you’ve avoided the Oedipus complex entirely. You don’t even
want
to kill your father and fuck your mother.”

“What’s an Oedipus complex?” said Simon.

“My point exactly,” said Stoney.

“Nobody has those complexes anymore,” said Isabel. “You have to have been born into a nineteenth-century German Jewish family to get those. Let’s see. Obviously, Simon has a complex of some sort, though. Complexes are just a taxonomy of human idiosyncrasies, is what my psych professor said. And it doesn’t have to be Greek, either.” She scrutinized Simon for a moment, then smiled. “You know,” she finally said, “I think Simon has a Trickster Coyote complex.”

“Who’s that?” said Simon.

“What in the world have you been taking up there in Davis?” exclaimed Isabel.