You or Someone Like You (18 page)

Ah, I say.

I wonder if that is why José's immigration status occurred to him.

When we arrive at the Saab, he stops, and I get out, and he follows. “Well,” he says with hearty sincerity, “listen, thank you. I mean, thank you. If it weren't for you—”

I smile. You did fine, I say. Do you have that screenplay with you?

“Oh!” He dives into his trunk, comes up with it, clean, nicely bound, three-hole punched, hands it to me. “A Screenplay by Paul McMahon.” His home address and home phone number, neatly typed.

I give him my card.

He accepts the card as if it were rare metal. He motions deprecatingly at the screenplay. “I really appreciate…” He looks hollowed out.

I take his chin between my thumb and forefinger, covered with dried blood, draw him toward me, and kiss his cheek. You did very well, I say.

As I drive off, he's still standing there next to his Toyota, looking after me.

At home, I stop at the kitchen door and call inside, Howard?

“Yeah!” says his voice. “Where were you? I can't find the—” I hear him coming toward the kitchen door. I say loudly that the blood isn't mine, Howard, I'm perfectly fine, don't be shocked. Then he rounds the corner and sees me.

I hand him Paul's screenplay and start to explain what happened. He tosses it on the kitchen table and talks agitatedly about tests and medical exams and what the hell was I thinking and picks up telephones and waves them about. I hold his hand and tell him I've talked to Dr. Blum. I'm to go in tomorrow morning. Howard and I are not to have sex for a while.

“We're going to the damn emergency room,” he says, digging for his car keys. “They can give you something tonight.”

I say, Don't forget the screenplay, please.

“Goddamnit, Anne!”

I give him a firm, warm kiss on the cheek. I head to my study to look up sloth. “
Perezoso
.”

Up in our bathroom, I strip off the earrings and the necklace and set them aside for Denise to clean when she gets a moment. I place my shoes on the bathroom tile and fold my clothes in a neat pile on top. I take a very hot shower and wash my hair and scrub under my fingernails. Halfway through my shower, I begin to hyperventilate, and my body shakes. I grip the walls until it passes.

I throw out everything except the shoes.

 

I HAVE BEEN ASKED WHETHER
the proximity of this number of women, this nubile, this interested in Howard or his job, bothers me. They glance pointedly at his assistant, Jennifer.

“I can hold my liquor,” Howard once said to me. I told him I both appreciated the metaphor and believed him. He happens never to have let me down, as far as I know.

Byron wrote, in 1821 in a letter to a friend, of his difficulties in finishing his epic poem “Don Juan.” He had “not,” he said, “quite fixed whether to make him end in Hell, or in an unhappy marriage, not knowing which would be the severest. The Spanish tradition says Hell: but it is probably only an Allegory of the other state.”

I am certainly aware of the blind genetic stupidity of men. Howard understands it as well. At our table at a charity dinner in Beverly Hills—I think it was Woodland Drive, we were in white tents in someone's backyard—Howard talks about it in the way he does. Why do men have a hole in their penis? he asks everyone. So oxygen can get to their brains.

What's the difference between men and pigs? Pigs don't turn into men when they drink.

Why does it take 100,000 sperm to fertilize a single egg? None of them will stop to ask directions.

Why do so many women have to fake orgasm? asks Howard. Why? our table replies in unison. Because so many men fake foreplay.

I am truly aware that many women get from men the things they don't really want and don't get what they really need. But then, so is Howard. He too has a Byronesque view of marriage. He knows what can turn it to hell. If the sensitive part at the head of the penis is called the “glans,” he asks the benefit table, what is the insensitive part at the base of the penis called? The man. The table roars. A thousand dollars a plate. Cancer, I think.

Certainly it is best when the man you are with is aware of the illusions men have, the confusions these cause. A fly is buzzing through the jungle, says Howard as we sit in our seats in the Kodak Theater (the giant gold statue is on the screen; we've just started the fifth commercial break and only two Academy Awards have been handed out). The fly hears an elephant trumpeting with annoyance. He asks, “What's the matter?” She says, “It's this damn bug in my ear!” The fly marches into her ear and shoos out the bug. She says to the fly, “Oh, how can I thank you!” “Well,” he says, “I've always wanted to have sex with an elephant.” The elephant tries not to laugh at the obvious, but she agrees. The fly swaggers around to the rear and begins thrusting while she waits for him to finish. Suddenly a gigantic coconut falls on her head. “Ow!” says the elephant. And from the rear, the fly roars, “Take it all, bitch!”

“OK, back in five!” they warn, “four, three,” the cameras swing into position, and on the stage Billy clears his throat and looks into the prompter. Our row is still choking with laughter, and a minion wearing a headset glares at Howard.

We have had our moments of solitude. Disappointments, a few disagreements that lasted days. A silent late-night flight eighteen years ago to Prague. We had experienced our second terror in the middle of the night, both of them boringly identical in the way they uncoiled themselves, my waking in the darkness of New York to some vapor
ous pain, the textbook-style cramping where my own flesh raged inside me. And yet each nightmare managed to distinguish itself, the blood, Howard's voice, my screaming. They were paradigmatic miscarriages of myth and legend, both fetuses lying on their backs on the porcelain bottom of the toilet bowl gazing up at you, doomed swimmers in their agony, the water, blood filled as if from a shark attack, sloshed gently over their tiny heads. The first was male, the second female. We couldn't afford it at the time, but we'd stabbed a random finger at the globe, and Eastern Europe had seemed so far from all the doctors telling us we would never have a child, that I would never survive it, in the extremely unlikely event that I ever did manage to become pregnant again. Never. Sam, for whom I would have sacrificed anything, had not been conceived yet.

Years later, we rented an apartment in Rome, and one of the first things the elderly signora who lived below us taught Sam in Italian was a dictum: “Love makes women strong and men weak.” (After summers and vacations there, Sam spoke Italian fluently, with a blunt-instrument Roman accent. The kid sounded, Howard once told David Simon, like a miniature Fellini character.) I liked the dictum, and remember repeating it to someone, and he thought it over and replied, “Maybe Howard is actually a woman.” Love seemed to make him strong.

All the young agents and hopeful writers and ingratiating producers, who came to Howard and minutely detailed for him in some Hollywood canteen the examined, transporting joys of oral sex. Invariably their joy derived less from the act itself and more from the man's not being married to the woman involved. Howard recounts these tales to me, sitting at the kitchen counter still holding his car keys, his shirt hanging exhaustedly on his shoulders. They lay every minute goddamn detail of this lubricious facsimile of intimacy at his feet, he sighs, their aim to create yet another facsimile of intimacy, this time between them and him. “Bonding,” said Howard sourly, hooking two fatigued fingers around the word; thus was cunnilin
gus recycled, gaining infinitely more meaning by its recounting (they were hoping it would seal a production deal) than by its actual performance.

More astonishing, said Howard, is that these men consider their emotions—these tendentious fillips in torrid afternoon moments in bungalows, the surge of tiny hormones they feel when their organ is in some moist, dark hole—real.

The movie industry operates on a mentor-protégé system, and Howard has his protégées. Generally women, though again, this is to be expected. Protégé derives from the French, “to protect,” and Howard does, as much as he can. He looks out for their interests.

Jennifer walks into the meeting room. “Hi, Howard!” She is lovely, her hair gleams, her body is thin. She is carrying a trashy legal novel, on which she's just submitted her coverage to him, plus three different scripts based on it. (By that afternoon they will throw out all three.) “Where would you like these?”

Howard touches the table near him. She lays them on that spot, flashes a smile. “Anything else?”

“We're OK,” says Howard, “thanks. I need you at three fifteen.”

“You bet.”

Even before the door closes, the short man meeting with Howard is leaning over the desk. “She single?”

After a moment, Howard says, “Yes, in fact.” He doesn't look up.

“Set me up with her.” Now Howard looks up. The man bats away Howard's look. Insistently: “So set me up with her!”

Howard returns to a script, searching for a problematic page. “She's not Jewish, Barry.”

“How
ard,” Barry says.

Jennifer has been with Howard since she graduated from USC. She is twenty-six now. She began as a production assistant on the lot, and six weeks later she came to the bungalow. She herself suggested babysitting Sam, and he adored her from the start. Howard knows little about her private life—she has an almost breathtaking maturity,
which includes discretion toward her boss regarding herself; I know her a bit better: favors she's done me, the logistical planning of Howard's time that she and I manage together, her evenings looking after my son while we attended some function she had arranged for us. Howard knows she is sweet. He recently overheard that she is single. She is under his jurisdiction, so she is his protégée. Protected.

“Howard,” Barry says. He has not heard the edge in Howard's voice (actually he has, but he ignores it because he is intoxicated by her teeth, her perfect shoulders, her breasts). He spreads his arms, the hands open palms up, raises his shoulders. “She's got a box, right?” Confidentially: “
Ya don't marry a box, Howard
.” The hands say: Am I right?

Howard sits there for a moment. Equanimity. He knows Barry. He says, “You're the kind of guy I'd want dating my daughter.” He holds Barry's gaze.

Barry doesn't say anything. Howard goes back to thumbing a script, daffodil yellow. Barry thinks: “Fucking prick.”

The breakdown was over morality, Howard explained to me. There were, he said, just two different moralities at that table. He and I were in the living room, the sound of Sam's music distantly from his bedroom. I was eating seedless grapes.

And what was your morality, I asked Howard.

He took a grape. His morality, Howard said, was that not in a million years would he let some guy use her as a sexual toy. Some little shmuck with a corner office on Wilshire who knows going in what he's after and what he's not, and why he's not after it: because she doesn't, as Howard put it, have the right stamp on her ass. A guy who would never drag her out of bed to meet his parents because his parents definitely wouldn't wanna know. If Jennifer had the full info going in, she'd never go in. She'd say, Are you
kidding
me?

And what was Barry's morality?

He seemed to be thinking about something else. He roused himself. “Well!” he said of Barry. “
His
morality.” Howard didn't, actually,
dislike the guy per se. He'd known him a while, they'd done a couple of projects. “
His
morality.” He shrugged.

 

JOSÉ APPEARED TWO WEEKS LATER,
on crutches, wearing a carefully ironed cotton shirt. He somehow lent a dignity to the crutches. Denise answered the door, and although José cleared his throat and launched his best effort in English, she just turned and called Consuela.

Consuela's eyes narrowed at the figure in the doorway.

When I came upon them, she was grilling him like a Mexican Himmler. He was enduring it but evinced relief at seeing me. I led him to the sofa. Would you like something to drink?

No, thank you, I'm fine. Thank you, by the way, for the poem by Mr. Blake.

You're welcome. Did you understand some of it?

He paused. I read some in the hospital, he said. Then he said, in English, “My mother taught me underneath a tree.”

I tried not to appear startled. That was excellent, I said. Then: How is your leg?

La herida está sanándose
. He shrugged. Crutches for a few more days, perhaps.

This about the crutches was, I assumed, a lie.

Consuela swept in to inquire, in English, if Madame would like something to drink.

No, thank you, Consuela.

She turned imperiously to José. “Would you like drink something?”

“No,” said José. “Thank you.”

Well then. She swept out.

I asked him, How did you get here? To the house.

By…He merely motioned arriving, supplied no details. I didn't pursue it.

I realized as we sat there and he asked me for a job that I did
not exactly know, when I saw him the instant before Paul McMahon struck him with the car, how I had known he was a gardener. But he was. His price was reasonable. He wondered if perhaps there were not others nearby needing a gardener. I said the Fishbeins—he at TriStar, she at Paramount, four doors down—hated their garden service, I'd give him their address as well. (Miriam had ordered rocks. Marvin said that spending $20,000 on
boulders
—boulders!—was crazy. “It's a
rock
garden, Marvin,” said Miriam. Marvin looked at me. “Who are we?” he said. “The Flintsteins? We live in Bedrock?”) As for us, I told José what his duties would be, stressed that I needed him to do exactly, precisely what I asked. No more. No less. I had all the equipment. We would work out a schedule.