Ten Days in the Hills by Jane Smiley Read Free Book Online

said, “Just tell me one thing. Are you going to get a big tattoo on the back of your head?”
    “Isn’t that the best place?” But he slipped away from her without committing himself. He had only two tattoos so far, one on his calf, of a skull, that he had gotten in high school (“When I have to get a job, I’ll just wear pants”), and one on his upper arm, of a tree, that she rather liked. By the time he got that one, it seemed as though his future in corporate America was improbable, anyway.
    Across the room, the pancakes, cooked and served without her help, were now being eaten. Cassie, Max, Delphine, Charlie, and Stoney were sitting around the island, hunched over their plates and laughing. Behind them, framing them, the lemon and quince trees she had installed in tubs on the deck looked simultaneously bright and dark, yellow and green, promising and calm, just as she planned they would. The pancakes were small, maybe three inches across, and delicate, with crispy edges, cooked in butter. She slipped under Max’s arm, gave him a squeeze around his middle, and reached for one, then said, “Hi, Charlie.” Charlie opened his mouth to speak, but Cassie said, “So how did you enjoy the Oscars? We watched for a while, then we turned it off and missed all the good parts.”
    “They hid the red carpet around behind the building this year, for fear of snipers,” said Max, “so it wasn’t terribly festive.”
    “It was all new to me,” said Elena. “I liked it. And at one point, they got every actor who’d ever won up on stage for a group picture. I thought that was fascinating. I understood that they did that during a commercial break, so no one at home saw it.”
    “Frank still looks good,” said Max.
    “Who?” said Cassie.
    “Frank Pierson, the president of the Academy. You know him.”
    “I do,” said Cassie. “He’s older than I am.”
    “I don’t think so,” said Delphine. Elena didn’t know how to react to this. In fact, she didn’t know how to react to a lot of things Delphine Cunningham said.
    Stoney smiled. His plate was swimming with syrup. He lived by himself three streets down the hillside and hated to cook.
    Max said, “Frank told me a funny story at the Governors Ball.”
    “What was that?” said Stoney.
    “You know he worked on
Gunsmoke
for a while. And he said that, once, they were sitting around, waiting while the scene was being set up, and one of the old cowboys was sitting sideways on his horse, having a smoke. Well, the horse reached forward with his hind leg, I suppose intending to scratch some itch, and it got its foot in the stirrup of the saddle. Frank was standing right there, and he said the old cowboy just drawled, easy as you please, ‘Weelll, if yer gittin’ on, I guess I’m gittin’ off.’”
    Everyone laughed.
    “Frank has been around this town as long as I have and he’s still alive,” said Cassie. “Most of them aren’t.”
    Stoney said, “Cassie won’t tell me how she came to Hollywood, but she says it’s mythic. So, Elena, you tell me how you got to Hollywood.”
    “I never got to Hollywood. I only got as far as L.A.”
    “We want to know,” said Cassie. “Then I’ll tell how I got to Hollywood.”
    “You will?” said Stoney. Isabel leaned over his shoulder and took a strawberry off the plate in the middle of the counter. “You will?” she said.
    “You tell first,” said Cassie to Elena.
    She glanced over at Simon’s bald head. He was going down the stairs. “Well, my first literary work was a pamphlet called
You and Infertility.
What was this? Oh, twenty-five years ago now. I mean, I was married to my husband, and I could never get pregnant, so I did my usual thing, which was to find out all about it. Every time I made an appointment with an expert to find out more, he would ask me if I were writing a book, so eventually I started saying yes. Then that marriage broke up, which actually happens with infertility more than most people