meaning and stuff.”
She made a face. “It sounds excruciating.”
“It is. I think the great philosophers were all wankers, except for Voltaire, who was funny. Nietzsche was probably the wankiest of the lot.”
“Why’re you reading it if you think it’s so awful?”
“Let’s just say I’m in full-tilt autodidact mode these days. Nowadays I carry the same three books with me everywhere I go. This one, a book about quantum mechanics, and the latest edition of thePeople’s Almanac. The almanac’s the only one I really enjoy.”
“What’s that, quantum mechanics?”
“Didn’t they teach you anything in school? Advanced physics. Probably just a lot of philosophical wanking set to math. But it interests me. Somewhere between physics and philosophy is the intersection of the real world. Out of our subjective perception of an objective reality of energy and matter comes our interpretation of being and meaning.”
“Whatever you say, Uncle Ivan.”
“Are you going to this party tomorrow night?”
She shook her head emphatically. “I’m going to a concert with my boyfriend. Anyway, I don’t much care for movie people. Oh, some of them are nice, but-I’ve never been comfortable around actors. I can never tell when they aren’t acting. No, that’s not it, it just makes me tired trying to figure out when they’re acting and when they’re not. The directors are mostly pretentious bores, and the producers just make Daddy crazy.” She gazed down the canyon. “The fact is, I don’t much like movies. But my boyfriend”-she gave him a quick, self-conscious glance-“my boyfriend loves ’em. And heloves dinosaurs. He says he judges a movie by whether he thinks it’d be better or worse with dinosaurs in it.”
“Did he have anything to do with that recent version ofLittle Women? ”
“No. He’s not in the industry, thank God. I wouldn’t go out with anybody who is. I wonder what genius thought of settingLittle Women in prehistoric times. Anyway, you’d be surprised how many movies flunk his dinosaur test.”
“Probably I wouldn’t.”
“He and Daddy like sitting around coming up with lunatic premises for movies. What they call high-concept. He cracks Daddy up. Daddy says he could be making movies every bit as bad as anybody else’s if he just applied himself.”
“Give me an example of high-concept.”
“‘Hitler! Stalin! And the woman who loved them both!’” They laughed together. Then she suddenly regarded him seriously. “I hope you’re not going to let yourself be overawed by these people.”
“People don’t awe me.” She looked doubtful, so he added, “They can’t begin to compete with what awes me.”
“What’s that? What awes you?”
He leaned sideways in his chair, scooped some dirt out of a flowerbed. “This,” he said, and as he went on talking he spread the dirt on his palm and sorted through it with his index finger. “When we were kids, teenagers, while your daddy sat up in his room figuring out how to write screenplays, I was outdoors collecting bugs and fossils. We neatly divided the world between us. He got the arts, I got the sciences.
Even our tastes in reading-while he was reading, oh, Fitzgerald and Nabokov, I’d be reading John McPhee and Darwin’s journal of the voyage of theBeagle. There was a little overlap. We both went through phases when we read mysteries and science fiction like mad. I’d readThe Big Sleep orThe Time Machine and pass ’em onto Don, and then we’d discuss ’em. But we were usually interested in different parts of the same books. Don was interested in the characters, the story. Who killed so and so. I loved Raymond Chandler’s, Ross Macdonald’s descriptions of the southern California landscape. I was like a tourist. My feeling was that setting is as vital as plot and characterization. A good detective-story writer had to be a good travelogue writer, or else his characters and action were just hanging in space. Don argued that a good story could be set anywhere, scenery was just there to be glanced at. If the plot was good, it would work anywhere.”
“Daddy says there are only three or four plots. At least he says that out here there are only three or four.”
“Well, anyway, your dad and I have art and science all sewed up between us. Science to help us find out what the world is. Art to-I don’t know, art’s not my thing, but I think-”
“Daddy says you’re trying to write a book.”
“Trying is about as far as I’ve got so far. I have all the raw material, but…” But. “I’m not creative.
Anyway, I think we have to have both science and art. Everything in the universe partakes in some way of every other thing.”
“What about philosophy?”
“Maybe it’s what links science and art.”
“Even if it’s a lot of wanking?”
“Even wanking has its place in the scheme of things. What about this boyfriend?”
“Interesting segue.”
“Is this a serious thing? Serious like marriage?”
She shrugged, then shook her head. “I want to do something with my life before I get into that.”
“What?”
“I wish I knew. I feel I have so much to live up to. Your side of the family’s all overachievers. My father’s a hot Hollywood screenwriter. My uncle, the scientist, has done just the most amazing things. My grandparents were big wheels in Texas politics. It’s almost as bad as having movie-star parents. The pressure on me to achieve is awful.”
“It was probably worse for the Huxleys.”
“Mom’s always felt outclassed. Her family’d always just muddled along. She felt utterly inadequate the whole time she and Dad were married.”
“With a little help from him, she made a beautiful daughter.”
She looked pleased by the compliment but also a little uncomfortable. “Thank you for saying that.”
“It’s true.”
“You used to call me Squirrel Monkey.”
Don came outside looking exasperated. “Ever reach a point in a conversation,” he said, “where, you know, you can’t go on pretending to take people seriously who don’t know what they’re talking about?”
“Are we talking rhetorically?”
Don laughed a soft, unhappy sort of laugh. He indicated the unopened bottle of beer. “Is that for me?”
“Just that one, Daddy.”
“I need it.” He said to Ivan, “Tell me the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard. I’m trying to put something into perspective here.”
Ivan thought for a moment. “Well, there was the low point, or maybe it was the high point, of my blessedly short stint as a purveyor of scientific knowledge to college freshman. I had a student tell me in all earnestness that an organism that lives off dead organisms is a sacrilege.”
Don laughed again, less unhappily than before. “Been on the phone with someone who makes deals and gives off movies as waste. He’s got the hottest idea of his life. He’s doing a full-blown remake ofThe Three Musketeers in Taiwan.”
Ivan felt his eyebrows go up. He made them come back down.
Don nodded. “That was my reaction. I said to him, I gather you’ve taken a few liberties with the novel.
And he said, Novel? By Alexandre Dumas, I said. You mean it? he said. Excuse me for a moment, and he gets on his AnswerMan and says, To legal, do we have exclusive rights to alleged novel by Doo-dah-duh. Dumas, I scream,Dumas, you dumbass!” He shook his head as though to clear it of an irritating buzz. “Well. I go on and tell him the novel’s in the public domain, Dumas has been dead for a little while now. He drums his fingers on his desktop. He screws his face into a mask of thoughtfulness.
He says, Well, it’s always best to be sure, because if what you say is true, we’ll have to see about getting it pulled out of circulation. I beg his pardon. He says, We don’t want people confusing it with our book based on the movie.”
Ivan said, “He’s going to novelize a movie based on a novel?”
