You or Someone Like You (2 page)

Howard had brought Casey Silver with him from the studio as well as Jennifer, Howard's assistant. Sam had gotten his driver's license a few months before and had driven down Coldwater Canyon from school with his friend Jonathan Schwartz. They'd been playing intramural basketball, and their teenage bodies, though they had showered at school, were still flushed from their exertions and the residual thrill of driving without adults. I had come from Griffith Park (via the flower shop, via the house), where I had spent the afternoon reading on one of the benches near the tennis courts. Stacey
came on her own. Josh Krauss, an agent, dashed in as the waitress was handing us menus.

Stacey and Howard had a mutual interest in a feature to be produced by a good friend of hers. Stacey would executive produce, if it went through. She was on my left, we were chatting about an actor she'd gotten to know during a recent shoot, and she leaned over to look at my book, which I'd placed next to my bread plate. John Ruskin, 1819–1900. One of the great Victorian art critics. I had just read his description of his first ever view of the Swiss Alps, at sunset, and Stacey picked up the book, opened to it, and read it to me: “‘The walls of lost Eden could not have been more beautiful.'” Ruskin was fourteen at the time, Sam's age three years ago. “‘I went down that evening from the garden-terrace of Schaffhausen with my destiny fixed in all that was to be sacred and useful.'”

She turned some pages slowly. Smiled, glanced at Sam. “College a year from now.”

I was startled, and I hesitated. Though it was barely September, she had sensed the loss I already felt from Sam's future departure.

Am I so obvious, I said.

“You're never obvious, Anne,” she said, smiling. Her gaze moved back to the Ruskin. They often comment on the fact that I always have a book. The tone is sometimes vaguely curious, as if reading were an eccentricity. Usually they glance at the cover, then turn to the menu.

Casey looked at the book in Stacey's hand, and it reminded him. “So, Howard,” he said slyly. “We're here.”

Howard, who knew exactly what he meant, just gave him an owlish look, so I explained to Josh, who was not following, that it was because of Sam. Hamburger Hamlet was where we had introduced Sam to Shakespeare. And I turned to Howard, because the subject had come up, and we were with friends, and it was a beautiful evening, and, moreover, it was time.

“When young Hamlet came from college,” Howard explained, looking around the table at us, each in turn (“That's mine,” he told
the waitress who had just appeared, pointing out the iced tea), “full of new ideas and knowledge, he was shocked to learn his pa, the king, had lately passed away.”

“Perrier,” the waitress said. Casey raised a forefinger.

“But his discomfiture was greater,” recited Howard, “when he learned his dearest mater had been married to his uncle”—and here Howard raises his eyebrows menacingly and pushes out the word—“
Claude
without the least delay!”

“Another iced tea?” Mine. Cokes for the boys, pear juice for Jennifer, beer for Josh.

“For it seemed to him indecent,” explained Howard, “with his father's death so recent, that his mother should prepare herself another bridal bed. And there seemed to be a mystery in the family's royal history, but he failed to follow any clue, for fear of where it led.”

With a curious glance over her shoulder at Howard, the waitress retreats to the kitchen. Perhaps it is Howard's narrator accent, a crisp and remarkably authentic 1950s BBC British. “While he's in this sad condition he's informed an apparition is accustomed to perambulate the castle every night. That it looks just like his sire, both in manner and attire, but is silent, staid, and stoical—which doesn't seem quite right.” Howard puts on a quizzical look, like a demented peacock: “Having heard this testimony from Horatio, his crony, he decides to take a peep at this facsimile of his pop.” Two matching plosives.

Josh leans to Jennifer, whispers something, and she smiles and nods. Casey is loving Howard's
Hamlet
. He has already heard
King Lear
this way, lines that both send up and honor the play, at a party at our home, and
Romeo and Juliet
on, I believe, a tennis court in Santa Monica. Howard memorized these parodies in college.

Those in the industry recognize us. They recognize Stacey and Casey and Josh and Howard. They watch Howard, the waiters who are actors, the dishwashers who are writing screenplays, the hostess who is waiting for a callback. They know his face from the trades. They know he can help green-light a movie, buy a script, make a career. It is Hamburger Hamlet on a Tuesday evening, and we are in Los Angeles, and anything is possible.

Howard tells us Shakespeare's story, of anger and greed and violence and pain.
Then the grisly phantom faded / Leaving Hamlet half persuaded
. The tables around us, one by one, fall silent to watch and listen, those next to them notice the silence, then the focus, then the words, and they too still.
Spends his time / in frequent talking to himself / of suicide and other subjects tinged with doom
. And Howard, because he is an innate performer, increasingly projects to include them, so that in this room the circumference of his words enlarges to fit the expanding circle of attention paid to them. The waiters stop to watch, and so their busboys' busy motions gently still, and they too turn to our table.

And so then one after other / King, Laertes, Hamlet, mother / With appropriate remarks / They shuffle off this mortal coil
.

When he reaches the end, everyone dead, we all applaud. The room fills with the sound. Howard bows to the stalls, accepting the declamation. Amid the applause people murmur. “Howard Rosenbaum,” they say, and his title at the studio, and the last movies he worked on, as if his name were a powerful enchantment and they were spinning a spell. I love Howard's golden light when he is in his element, the vigor of my husband's love of these words and stories, but I dislike the hunger this city focuses on him, their celluloid obsession. And I quietly prepare to withdraw into myself as usual and leave them to this world. But this evening, something is different.

It is, I realize, the play. Even in this permutation, I notice, the story holds its own. I look around in wonderment. Casey is looking, too.
“I'd forgotten the power of the goddamn thing,” he says. “Look.” Stacey and I turn. Two Guatemalan busboys attack each other with invisible rapiers. The restaurant's manager, coaching them, tilts the hand of one of the boys as it holds an invisible sword, pitching it, like Howard's voice, into a perfect affectation of Elizabethan style.
There
, the manager says with satisfaction, good boy, that's how we'd have done it on the set. We hear him say, “Shakespeare,” and hesitantly, in heavy accents, the busboys repeat the strange name.

Todd Black, a producer Howard knows, comes over to our table to say something to Howard. Stacey leans toward me. “Listen,” says Stacey. “Anne.” It's a proposition. “Would you make me a reading list?”

I look at her. She is quite serious.

“What you think is important,” says Stacey. “No,” she corrects herself immediately, “what you think is good.”

Well, I say. Why me?

“You read,” she says, simply enough.

Howard overhears. He turns slightly, toward us. “Make her a list, Anne,” he says to me, smiling.

I don't really know her that well. She's Howard's friend, not mine. They invariably are. Stacey is waiting, Howard and Casey and Sam are watching me. I think, Well, Howard has the same degree, after all. And he has the teaching position. She could ask him. She works with him, not me, on the movies; it would be more professionally strategic for her. Yet she is asking me. And it is impossible to overestimate the pleasure of being included. Even for one who has never much wanted to be.

Certainly, I say. If you like.

I assume it is merely because I have the doctorate in English literature, which impresses them more than it should. That I read a lot is one of the only things they know about me, even though Howard and I have been here for twenty-five years. I have always preferred it that way. In fact I assume that I myself am not actually material. I just happen to know the books.

But I smile, thinking about some titles. I say to her, I think we can come up with some very nice possibilities.

Todd registers this exchange. He returns to his table, where there are several people on Paramount's production side, and I see him lean down and say something to Brian Lipson, who then makes a comment to a woman from the Universal lot.

 

AT
11:00
A.M
. THE FOLLOWING
morning I park next to our house, open the kitchen door, temporarily compromised by all my packages. Denise appears, and I hand her a large wrapped bouquet of flowers. The cone of crackling cellophane is like a lady's inverted organza ball gown, the flowers many delicate feet. Denise accepts the cone from me and sets it on the kitchen counter. She will deal with the flowers when she's ready.

They're from Mark's Garden on Ventura, I say.

“You was there?” She is not making conversation. She hadn't thought I'd had time to go that far. I say, Yes, I was, there was an alarming lack of traffic. She goes back to her work.

I deposit the car keys next to the flowers, go to my office and lay down my books, the old ones and the three I just bought at Book Soup. I carry my new blouse upstairs, take it out of the bag, and hang it in the closet. I wash my hands and face and brush my teeth, use a clean white towel, and then go to the library. I sit down and stare at the shelves. I take out a pad of paper. I am slightly irritated. I have been thinking about Stacey's list, and it will not coalesce. I hesitate. There are her interests to consider, there is topicality. What would resonate with her. Then it comes to me. I write down the first title. My eyes move along the shelves. I write down another. I open up my
Norton Anthology,
which leads to other things. Soon I am fascinated, suffused with pleasure. When the phone rings, I am writing down the eighth. Melanie Cook says hello, we talk, in abbreviated manner, about a deal she is undoing. She is one of the industry's top entertainment lawyers.
Howard's friend. She says, “I heard Howard gave another stellar performance. Does he do those Shakespeare things in class?”

One per semester. They won't leave him alone till he does.

“Listen. Anne. I heard you're starting a book club.”

I pause. After all this time, I'm still amazed at the velocity of information in this odd little world.

I realize, with a flush of annoyance at myself, that the idea of creating a book club interests me. Really, I say to Melanie.

“You're not?”

No, I say, I'm afraid I'm not. I say that someone (I don't mention Stacey's name, that would be tasteless, and Melanie already knows anyway) evinced an interest in my making her a reading list. That's all. Melanie is endearingly disappointed, but like a good lawyer she has prepared an alternative. She presents it in the form of a confession. “We were at a screening,” she says. “Spike Jonze, a rough cut.” After the screening, Bob Zemeckis had gotten into a debate with Jonathan Kaplan. Bob, she tells me, held that Spike was being derivative and cited
The Ugly American
to support his position. (“The book,” she stipulates, “not the movie.”) Zemeckis paraphrased a passage. Kaplan had responded that
The Secret Agent
was actually a better reference and that Spike was in fact
starting
where Conrad had left off. “Carla Shamberg agreed,” she said, “then Marc Lawrence brought up Saul Bellow.” She mentions a Bellow title. (I correct it slightly, which she accepts with grace.)

“It was visceral,” she says, “we could
feel
it, and I suddenly thought—” She pauses, remembering, a little awed. “I thought, my
God
, picking up the damn books with your hands. Not the Columbia Pictures version of Edith Wharton with an Elmer Bernstein score pushing you through. The Wharton itself.” She sighs. “How long since I've done that.” I know what she had felt, standing there as they spoke the book titles that appeared in the air, one by one; the titles conjured, they were spells. Literature is a power, like a foreign language you possess. The titles had clearly been played like cards.
And her feeling was also of guilt, and I think: So she is, in fact, confessing. But no matter. Wanting to appear capable is not an illegitimate reason to read books.

She comes to her point. My name had come up. What if they read the books with me? She mentions a few people who are interested. “It's your field,” she says.

I rub my fingertips on the desk. I love the particular spell she is under, it is one I know well, and because she is under it, at this moment I love her, but I simply am not in the position to pursue this. In order to put her off gently, I tell her I'll consider it.

“Good.” Melanie has, she thinks, planted a seed. “Great.” She hangs up as if tiptoeing.

I retrieve the salad Consuela has made me and carry it and
The Way We Live Now
out to my chair by the
Campylotropis macrocarpa
, which I transplanted the week before. I check its small purple-white flowers, which are healthy. I start to read and forget about the list and the call.

 

Then I remember it again on the studio lot, and under a translucent California evening mention it to a man outside Howard's bungalow. I am waiting for Howard so we can drive home together. I've known this man since we came here, he started in production design at Warners, and now he has his development deal and his sleek office. Three overweight union members in T-shirts are pushing a blue 1950s-era car across the lot. The car has no engine, it's fake. When I mention the book list, he squints into the sun, then laughs. “Anne,” he says.