Ten Days in the Hills (65 page)

“You have it on close-up.”

She took the camera away from her eye, looked at it, and said with genuine perplexity, “I do?” and then he took the camera out of her hand and put it on the nightstand, not without pushing the power button, and then he stretched her out, opened the kimono, and entered her, and her legs lifted and clasped him around the waist, and her head fell back over the edge of the bed, and it felt like he was entering her up to her throat, that’s how big he was, and how big she was, and just as he was thinking this, her entire inner being closed around him, and he also felt that other thing so distinctly, the pulse of her labia against his scrotum. “Mmm,” she uttered, and he pressed against her cervix, and it gave way, and he was so glad to be doing this again that he ejaculated almost into a state of unconsciousness.

Well, not really.

But she nearly fell off the bed, and then came a knock at the door, and someone said, “Everything okay in there?” and Elena whispered, “You were screaming,” and then she got up and wrapped the kimono around her and went to the door. Max could hear her saying, “Oh, yes, thank you for asking. Nothing at all to worry about. We’ll see you at breakfast. You’re very kind. Yes, I think the chicken-apple sausage will be delicious. Perfect. Good morning, then.”

She closed the door.

DAY TEN • Wednesday, April 2, 2003

Isabel had Zoe cornered
in what appeared to Zoe to be a commodious and well-stocked pantry. She was backed up against the double sink, which was next to a window that looked out on the cars. With the corner of her eye, she could see her own little Mercedes. The trunk was open, because she had been putting her suitcase in and realized that she had left her makeup case in the malachite bathroom. Paul’s suitcase, such as it was, was not in the trunk. While she was attempting to appear as though she was “actively” listening to Isabel, she was also watching for Paul. She hadn’t seen Paul since the night before. He had not said in so many words that he would come to her room in the night, but she’d thought he would. He hadn’t. She had left the trunk open, intending to run up and grab her makeup case and come back down. But that was forty-five minutes ago. Isabel had snapped at her as she was entering the dining room thinking of a cup of coffee, in front of Joe Blow and Marya. Zoe had done quite a good job, she thought, of backing out of the room and down the hallway into this more private space, drawing Isabel after her.

Isabel exclaimed, in a low voice that Zoe considered especially mean, “This whole thing is about you, isn’t it? Same as always!”

Zoe said, “What whole thing?,” but in fact she meant to say,
which
whole thing, the whole argument they were having, or the whole lunch they were about to eat (since Joe Blow had asked Zoe what she would like and Zoe had said that fish would be nice, and so they were going to have a seared salmon, wild rice, and dried-cranberry salad—no salmon for the vegetarians—with a light asparagus bisque and a crisp Riesling that Joe had been holding back, but how did Isabel know that Joe had designed the meal for Zoe?), or the whole experience at the Russian house, during which Joe Blow and the girls had seemed to be quite deferential, maybe more deferential than they were to the others (how was Zoe to know, how was Isabel to know, unless she had been watching like a hawk?), or some other whole thing that existed in Isabel’s mind, as yet to be defined. In fact, Isabel’s tone was making her very angry, but Zoe was well aware that (1) her feelings were her own responsibility and she didn’t have to express or even feel her anger if she didn’t want to, according to Paul, and (2) Isabel sounded much as she herself had sounded two nights ago, when Paul’s French client, Marcelle, had mistakenly rung through on Zoe’s extension, and Zoe had given her a piece of her mind. As of this morning, Zoe did not know whether Paul knew that that unauthorized interaction had taken place. Had Marcelle called him for her regular appointment the night before and been put through to the right extension?

Isabel whispered, “In fact, it didn’t matter whether you came to pick me up at that Starbucks or not! I never thought you would! So you don’t have to go up to Stoney and commiserate with him about his poor car when there was nothing you were ever going to do that would have helped in any way, so why bother!”

Zoe said, “I was trying to be polite, Isabel. I didn’t want to seem indifferent—”

“Even though you are!”

“Excuse me,” said Zoe, and she made just a tiny little effort to push—well, not push, but urge—Isabel to one side so that she could—

“Don’t push me!”

“Don’t be so predictable. If you don’t want me to push you, move out of the way and let me get by.”

“I don’t feel like it.”

“If you are going to have a relationship with Stoney, I would like to be nice to him—”

“My relationships have nothing to do with you!”

“Well, anyway, so what? I already have my own relationship with Stoney.” The interesting thing about her conversation with Marcelle was that the Frenchwoman had stayed on the line to listen, rather than hanging up at once, which is what Zoe would have done. She had stayed on the line for seven or eight minutes, and of course you could attribute a few of those—say, two or three—to the pure shock of expecting that you were going to be hearing the soothing but matter-of-fact tones of your therapist, and here you had found a woman’s voice saying, “Really, Marcelle, I am only thinking of you. You need to ask yourself what you are getting out of this therapy and why it isn’t working for you. It’s been, what, seven years? Ten years? You aren’t progressing!” Her tone had been fairly light to begin with, and her thinking had been quite Paul-like—the wrong extension was actually a heaven-sent opportunity for Marcelle to hear something that she needed to hear, delivered by someone whom she didn’t know, but who had a more objective sense of what was really happening than either Paul or Marcelle. But unfortunately, after a good beginning, she had gotten irritated, because there was something in the Frenchwoman’s manner of talking about Paul that struck her. It was too intimate and too possessive. It told Zoe, not in so many words but in so many tones, not only that the two of them had had an affair, but that it was still going on, and it then leapt into her mind that it was Marcelle who kept meeting him on his exotic pilgrimages and climbing those seven holy mountains and going to those Neolithic caves (well, he hadn’t done that yet, but this year, and those caves were in France!) and going to the beehive tombs, wherever they were, and why was she calling on the wrong night, anyway? She was his longest-lasting relationship! And here he always presented himself as a solitary seeker after enlightenment, traveling the rock-strewn path ever upward, dallying less and less over the pleasures of the flesh as his being gradually evaporated out of this world. Not bloody likely, Zoe now thought.

Isabel said, “I think you should hear me out for once, Mom!” and she went on.

Zoe had her eyes on Isabel, and she watched her face, which was red. Her forehead was wrinkled and her brows were strangely lifted, as if she wanted to look supercilious but was only faking it. She kept tossing her chin and pushing her hair back, but she was absolutely right, Zoe wasn’t actually listening to Isabel having her say. What Paul was really doing was battening on—no, entertaining himself with—one wealthy woman after another, not exactly living off them (though he did charge them all for sessions) but going along for the ride. Why, for example, did his 1982 Honda Civic have fewer than a hundred thousand miles on it? Because he was being driven around in this Mercedes or that BMW or the other Ferrari. And he was driven around. She did all the driving.

And she was not listening because she was cornered. Being cornered, as everyone knew, aroused a primal reaction that felt very much like anger. This competed with her fugitive maternal instinct not to reward bad behavior by paying attention to it. That had been Delphine’s main child-rearing principle, expressed as “You will catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. When you can come to me and speak to me in a proper tone of voice, then we can discuss this.” And Delphine had been implacable. She never responded to Zoe’s anger, ever ever ever. Which meant, obviously, not that Zoe learned how not to be angry, only that she learned that her mother was a strange and mysterious person who could not be understood, at least by her. And Zoe had accepted that—partly, Paul told her, because she had lots of other things to occupy her attention.

Isabel cleared her throat and began again, controlling her tone of voice this time so that it sounded cooler and more rational, all the better to prosecute. Zoe began again, too, making herself think that if she just kept quiet and still and pretended to listen, this could take, at most, ten minutes, and then she could get away from Isabel, from Paul, from Delphine, from Max, from Simon, from Charlie, and the others, who didn’t matter except that they chattered away, tossing up interference and keeping the noise level high and irritating. Isabel said, “The thing is, Mom, you don’t think I heard what you said, but I did. You said, ‘We need to talk about Max’s project. Call me.’”

Isabel was right. Zoe had not thought that she had heard that little remark; she had been, in fact, not even sure that Stoney had heard her, and, yes, she had been using her condolences about the car as a way to insert that remark, and, to complicate things further, she didn’t even care whether Max made an independent film in his bedroom or not. What she really wanted to do was to get Stoney to talk to her about what was going on between him and Isabel, and she couldn’t think of another way, especially in front of Isabel, who had been stuck to Stoney like a second head all morning. Until that moment in the dining room. Now Stoney was nowhere to be seen, and she was trapped by Isabel in the pantry. She glanced up; she couldn’t help herself. Stacks of dishes arranged in neat rows by color were arrayed all around them. One of the two girls—maybe Marya?—stopped in the doorway, glanced in, and walked away. Zoe said, “They must want to get in here—”

“I don’t care! And if your phone rings, I don’t care. Why should Stoney call you about my father’s project? What business is it of yours! You are not attached to it!”

“No, I’m not. Fine. Tell Stoney to forget what I said, I don’t care.”

“But that’s not the point. The point is that you said it—”

“I was just taking an interest, Isabel—”

But Isabel said, “That’s a lie! You don’t just take an interest, in fact you don’t take an interest at all, so why pretend that you do? You’re pretending that you do because you have some reason to, and I am just telling you to back off, because it’s his project, and just because we all happened to spend ten days together for some reason after thirteen years doesn’t mean you are part of the family and you can show an interest. If you wanted to show an interest, you should have shown it before this. Now it’s too late!” She said the words “show an interest” as if she were spitting out garbage.

Now Zoe had the sense to say, “What are you worried about, Isabel?” And even though Isabel shook her head and said, “I’m not worried about anything,” emphasizing the word “worried,” a look crossed her face that indicated that she was worried about something, though whether it had to do with Max or with Stoney, or even with Delphine, Zoe had no idea. Isabel went on, “And if I were worried, you would be the last person I would tell about it, but I’m not. It just drives me crazy that for ten days you’ve been sitting around, making yourself at home, offering your opinion, parading your new guy around here, just like it’s the most natural thing in the world, when it isn’t at all! It’s not right that we should all act like we’re just a happy, normal family when—”

“When in fact we just happened to be thrown into the bunker together, or into the lifeboat, for that matter, or the
Titanic,
or—”

“Go ahead and make fun of me, but there’s not going to be this Hollywood ending where we all finally come to respect one another after our harrowing trip together!”

“Fine, Isabel. Please, have it your way. But do step aside, because I want to get out of here.”

“That’s the very reason I will not step aside.”

“Isabel, do you know how crazy you sound?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Do you want to sound this crazy?”

“I don’t care how I sound to you, as a matter of fact.”

Zoe could hear footsteps in the kitchen, maybe the footsteps of two people, and also out the window, in the driveway, tramp, tramp. All at once, she felt all her wishes to be out of here, to be getting into her car, to be somewhere like Paris or Morocco, fall away. Here she was. Here was Isabel. Here was the sink, and here were the dishes and the silverware and the serving platters and the hardwood floor beneath her feet. Yes, excess in here, but plain old excess, not excess with added-on flourishes of excess. No one’s imagination had been put to work overtime in here. In here, she did not feel the press of six hundred years of history and culture as she did in the rest of the house. It was actually restful in here, in a way. She took a deep breath and said, “Okay, don’t go away. Don’t let me out. As long as you’ve got me here, I’ll tell you something about my life.” She almost smiled at the brilliance of this trick.

“Oh, God, Mom! All about you again.” And Isabel fell for it.

“Well, it’s your choice. You can leave, or you can stand there and listen. If you leave, I’ll be happy, because I can leave, so if you don’t want me to be happy, you can bar my way.”

“I’m not listening.”

“Fine, don’t listen. But I am talking.”

Isabel began to hum. It occurred to Zoe to tell her that she was acting like a baby, but instead she began telling her story. She said, “Remember that friend you had for a while, what was her name, Lee Anne, and her mother had been Miss Minnesota back in the 1970s? And she and her sister had a piano in their room, and every child in the family played two instruments and also took ballet? And she wasn’t allowed to spend the night because she had to practice the piano first thing in the morning, and to go to bed by eight? You thought they were all so funny.”

Isabel stopped humming long enough to toss her head. “Of course I do.”

“Well, that was my life with your grandmother, except it was all done in the context of the hotel where she worked in Miami. We got up at five and got dressed. We got to the hotel by six, and she went to work in housekeeping. We didn’t have a piano at home, but for an hour before the schoolbus came, I practiced on the piano in the lounge bar. Then I went to school on the bus, and after school, the bus dropped me off at the hotel, and I had lessons. The guy who played the piano at night gave me piano lessons, and his wife, who managed the cabaret dancers, gave me tap and jazz lessons, and after I was eleven, she gave me singing lessons, too. His name was Eddie Farrell and her name was Violet Hartman, and they had done a couple of musicals in Hollywood in the thirties. They had had a school in New York before they gave that up and moved down to Miami. Mom worked overtime to pay for all the lessons. When I wasn’t going to school or doing homework, I was having lessons. And I did a lot of shows and recitals. The three of them said that they were grooming me for a stage career at the time, but I think now that, for Mom, it was more about keeping me out of trouble.”

“You don’t have to tell me—”

“The tale of my tragic childhood? I know that, though I never have really just laid it out for you, Isabel. It was work. It wasn’t cooking and cleaning and making beds, but we went about it in the same way. Mom loved all those movies,
Little Miss Marker
and
The Seven Little Foys, Yankee Doodle Dandy,
that sort of thing, where the children are productively employed. She figured if I was making rhythmic noise, either tapping or playing the piano, then I wasn’t getting into trouble, and since she was who she was, I went along with it—” She held up her hand to forestall the inevitable protest. “Anyway, it was fine with me, because when I made some money, doing whatever, she would take me shopping, and we always bought clothes for me, and she always said she couldn’t find anything for herself that she liked. My reward was that I was the best-dressed kid in school.”