Free Ten Days in the Hills by Jane Smiley

sure, but nonetheless a beam) at Zoe reaching for a strawberry, Elena suspected that he was surveying Paul for clues, using this new guy to ask, What does she want, what did she want? And Elena herself was staring at Zoe, as she always did, thinking, What does she have, is there something beyond the beauty and talent, or is it just that surface thing?
    Officially, of course, Max didn’t love Zoe—she had devolved into just another person who was around from time to time, important as Isabel’s mother but otherwise more tedious than attractive. Officially, Max’s adult life, at least with regard to women, had flowed like a river, through several sets of locks and dams, and no reach of the river was that much different from any other, except in regard to landscape. When he was first in the business, he told her (he told her all of this in an easy, good-natured voice), he was married to a girl named Ina that he had met at the Actors Studio in New York. They had come to Hollywood, but she had been artistically offended by the parts she landed, and so she’d gone back to New York. After Ina, who lasted only two years, he dated Dorothy, who was the daughter of Bo Levin, the famous agent. When the time came to break up, Dorothy and Bo had sat Max down in Bo’s office and told him he was too antisocial ever to make it in this town, and so Dorothy was leaving him, no hard feelings. Later, she married Jerry Whipple, who worked in Bo’s agency and was Max’s agent. Jerry had Stoney from his previous marriage to Diana Carstairs, a starlet who died in a car accident under mysterious circumstances when Stoney was not more than a year old. Jerry went on to make the sort of money that Dorothy and Bo were comfortable with, and to have three more children, while Max dated beautiful women. In 1979, Max met Zoe at a party, where she was singing with the band. In 1980, as a result of winning his Oscar for writing
Grace,
which had been about a classic British actress that Elena couldn’t now remember the name of and a child actor named Josh Lane escaping the Russian Revolution and ending up in Japan, but was really about Max’s great-grandmother and his grandfather, Max got Zoe a part in a comedy about college students in San Francisco, and she was so sexy and gorgeous, even before she sang, that for her next movie she had to hide the fact that she was pregnant with Isabel through almost the whole shooting. After Isabel was born, Zoe made one movie after another, with no one realizing that the woman on the set taking care of the baby was Zoe’s actual mother (because Delphine insisted on wearing what seemed to be a uniform, but was, according to Max, just the sort of cool, natural cotton trousers and shirts from India that Delphine liked to wear). Max didn’t make movie after movie, but he wrote two more and then directed his first, which was a success, and then directed his second, a blockbuster called
A Very Bad Day,
in which the Beverly Center was destroyed by a flotilla of tornadoes and the La Brea Tar Pits gaped open and swallowed up UCLA. After that movie, Max and Zoe bought this house. In 1990, Zoe suddenly bought a house in Malibu, and they broke up. In the late nineties Zoe had fallen in love with the costar on her most ambitious film, which was a remake of
Green Mansions,
set in the Amazon, written expressly for Zoe, though they actually filmed somewhere in British Honduras, and Zoe got malaria, which stopped filming for a while, and by the time the movie was in the can, Zoe didn’t want to see that director ever again.
    To Max (Elena was sure), Zoe felt like the main event of his life, but to Zoe (for some reason), Max felt like the opening act. Elena understood that this was a common pattern in Hollywood, where the calibrations of success, especially for “talent,” were highly refined, and every marriage was simultaneously an assertion of who and how important you thought you were at a particular moment in your career