You or Someone Like You (3 page)

What?

With a look he apologizes for the laughter but explains very patiently, “Nobody
reads
in Hollywood.”

 

IN MY DESK THERE IS
an ancient letter I scribbled to my mother in gray, chilly London.

I was not, I'd written, happy at having left London, at having turned
down Cambridge, at Barnard's class offerings now that I was actually in New York. At the color of the New York sky, for that matter. I was not even happy (for reasons so juvenile I prefer not to recall them now) with my apartment, 808 Broadway, above the antiques dealers. (My mother kept the letter, gave it back to me a decade later; “It's not revenge,” she said, smiling, and I knew it wasn't; reading yourself in immature, overwrought version is instructive.) And the
Americans
.

One example: I wrote to her about a largish bespectacled left-handed boy with curly black hair who focused intently on whomever was speaking in the 2:00
P.M.
Columbia English literature seminar. On our first day of class I had shared the briefest of opinions. Anne Hammersmith, I said to them. I observed that Trollope made few claims for the durability of his own fiction. Which was, in my prim opinion, appropriate humility. But George Eliot? “Eliot's novel
Romola
will live forever.” I'd been emphatic and a little breathless about that.

The other students shot me sideways glances. Except for the black-haired boy. He did
not agree
. He felt (“Your name, please?” “Sorry: Howard”) that Trollope created fully real worlds where Eliot tended to write over her readers' heads. Howard was impatient with George Eliot and impatient with
Romola
and, clearly, with me. I turned away.

The next day, driven perversely by a fury, I drifted into the orbit of a Formica-topped table near the back of a Greek diner on West 96th, a table he always inhabited accompanied by several thick paperbacks. I walked slowly, unwrapping my scarf and pretending to look for someone, but he didn't care about the pretense. “Hi. C'mere. Siddown. You want some coffee?”

Crisply: No. Thank you.

“You sure?”

I'm sure.

“So, you English?”

Sort of, I said, you American?

“Hey, funny.”

Look, he explained, Eliot just couldn't make up her mind whether
she wanted to be the writer or the goddamn reader—she barely got a character invented before she started responding to him. Turgenev, on the other hand, stayed the hell out of his stories, let you do your own damn responding, and that, said Howard, was the way to write literature. Present the characters
as the world sees them
and get the fuck out of the way. Hey, did I wanna go see a movie? Oh, perhaps I disagreed about Turgenev, but he would convince me. I was astonished by all the various conversational pieces he pushed furiously at me. And then he came back to the accent.

Yes? I said of the accent. And?

He grinned, repeated the phrase about “inventing characters,” and it took me a second, but then I gasped. You think, I said, that my accent is
fake
! Well, I assure you—

“I think it's lovely whatever the hell it is.” Before I could explain it, he proposed we see a film by Some Important Director Or Other. He rushed through the director's filmography, explained why he was great, how he stacked up next to
other
directors, and
this
movie was a literary adaptation—

I was so thoroughly put out with him that I cut him off and agreed to go to the movies. Howard seemed to still. We sat in the sudden silence. His eyes were on me, and so I glared at the chalkboard menu on the wall. I dislike people trying to work me out, I always have. An old waitress trudged past with a Pyrex globe of coffee and a sigh. A customer entered at the other end of the diner, shivering. He began to talk to me, more quietly now. I can't remember taking off my coat, but at some point I did.

We talked about New York versus London, and then important variations on this theme, like winter versus summer, and which was better, hot chocolate in winter or ice cream in summer.

I think I asked if he believed in God as an attempt at being witty. Howard's gaze was so focused, I thought there was going to be a punch line. On the question of religion, he said, he was agnostic. I took him seriously, then realized. Oh, I said, you
are
joking.

He shrugged. He seemed completely uninterested in discussing it. “Joking and not joking,” he said.

I considered this. You're Jewish, though agnostic.

That he was Jewish was, Howard stipulated, clear. “I'm as Jewish as they come, culturally.” He quickly listed several words I didn't know (“They're holidays”), recited something in Hebrew quickly.

As for God? Yes, yes, he said impatiently, he had some sense of God. “Or, you know. Something.”

At the time, perhaps because I was young, what I spotted here was nothing more than a delicious chink in his armor. To divert his attention I trailed an ostentatiously casual finger in some spilled sugar. God or not, it wouldn't matter, I said, licking crystals from my fingertip. Belief in God is irrelevant to Judaism. You can be completely Jewish and completely atheist. Exhibit A: Karl Marx. Exhibit B: Disraeli, a confirmed Anglican. Ergo, I said, Judaism was not most fundamentally a religion, it was most fundamentally a race.

Ah
ha
: Finally the boy truly objects to something! No, he said, it was most fundamentally a religion. We had an intense argument on this, and I won with
Daniel Deronda
by (I
so
loved saying it) George Eliot! (He glared at me.) You'll recall, I said, that Eliot's Daniel is raised Christian, is culturally Christian, knows nothing of Judaism whatsoever, but is considered Jewish by the writer, the reader, the other characters, and the Jews for the sole reason that he is racially Jewish; ergo the fundamental definition of Judaism is racial.

Howard, irritably, asked me what was my obsession with Eliot, for Chrissake, and then he looked at his watch, grabbed the movie schedule, swore floridly, threw his paperbacks in some sort of deteriorating bag, and pushed me at high speed onto West 96th's sidewalk.

 

After the movie, I will take him back to my small apartment. The sheets will at first be cold with this early, very chilly autumn, and then very warm. It is said by the Greeks that the breath of the Minotaur was so hot it ignited parchment.

 

But why should I need more than him? I asked her. We were in the Columbia cafeteria.

She frowned, took a quick (slightly exasperated) breath. “Jeez, Anne, you can't just stay
consumed
by him.”

Oh, honestly. I'm hardly “
consumed
.”

“Well, what would you call it!”

God
, I thought furiously, this is why I avoid people. I wouldn't bloody call it anything, but I can't exactly say that to her. She was my best friend. I couldn't say, “I've found an entire world to live in, and he is enough.” We used to do homework together, this girl and I, go to the movies, paint our fingernails at midnight. She was looking at me. I hunted for a response.

I said, carefully, He is mine.

She gave a single, lithe shake of her head, but when she spoke, her voice almost broke. “I never see you anymore.” She pushed a glass on her plastic tray. “It's class or him.”

You can see them disappear before you, vanishing away in sadness or incomprehension. Oh, I've never been good with people. You rely on them, and you love them, and they love you vaguely from some distance, they kiss you and fly away on a plane, and then suddenly they're gone. Either you hurt them too easily or they hurt you. Am I wrong, I wanted to plead with her, to find one strong, anchored island and stay safe and contented upon it. But she had simply left her plastic tray behind.

 

It was shortly after we met that I told Howard a story about a teacher who had taught me Greek mythology. Howard loved the myths. At the time, it was simply something I mentioned to him, casually and entirely abstractly, one of the bits and pieces that had happened to me that he absorbed avidly.

I was in England, I think age thirteen and almost seven months at
this particular school just outside London, for me a relative eternity in one place, and I listened with fascination as she spoke about the gods. She was an older, starched woman, but she would allow me to linger with her after class, when the other girls had recrystallized into their well-established structures that did not include places for me. I was one of the prettier ones, just beginning to fill out, but in that single-sex school there were no boys around to elevate my status. She was, for example, the only logical person I could tell of my father's announcement at dinner that, once again, we'd be going overseas.

For seven months I had hovered by her desk. She would murmur to me bits and pieces about the myths as she frowned at her papers and jotted notes on things. The Greek god Proteus, she said, when he fought with you, had the power to change himself into any shape he wished—lion, serpent, monster, fish—trying to twist away and escape. But there was a trick, she explained sternly. If you could just hold on to him throughout his transformations, he would be compelled in the end to surrender, and resume his proper shape.

She had paused. “This is a new posting for your father.”

Yes. (I would be gone within the week.)

“And where are you going this time, Anne?”

My parents, I said, would be transferred to Jakarta, myself to a British boarding school in Kuala Lumpur.

“Remember Proteus,” she said, fixing me, looking into my eyes. “Just keep tight hold of him, and it will all be all right.”

Despite the hole I felt in my chest, despite the incipient loneliness of another distant country that would soon replace the present loneliness, I understood what she was doing. She was giving me strength via erudition, a particularly, and particularly lovely, British tradition. She was sharing her secular faith. A literate knowledge of the Greek myths to get one through. Very English. I nodded. When she was satisfied, she turned back to her desk. “Right. Off you go,” and she was back to work.

I told Howard this story.

 

ON THURSDAY MORNING, HAVING FINISHED
a few other things, I called Stacey.

One of her assistants put her on. “Anne.” Her voice was hopeful.

I've made a list. If you're serious.

“Of course!” She was thrilled, she said. I realized her voice had quickened my pulse. She had the unique, fresh hope that springs up in us when we are about to begin reading a good book.

Oh, said Stacey. A small cloud passed over the voice. She had been at a meeting the other day and in the parking garage had run into Melanie Cook. Melanie had heard I was starting a book club.

Yes, I said that Melanie had called me, we'd straightened that out.

Ah, she said. Well. The thing was, what Stacey and Melanie were wondering was whether, if I had time of course, if it wasn't an imposition, would I like to read
with
them? Obviously I'd already read the books, it was my list after all, but they were thinking an evening every month or so—they would come to me, of course! I wouldn't ever have to get in a car.

I thought about it. Well, maybe I could do that. Once every month. Or so. Why not. Perhaps we could start three weeks from today? I was looking at my calendar. Thursday evening. At my house.

Stacey said, “Josh, pick up, please.”

A click on the line. “Hi, Mrs. Rosenbaum.”

Hello, Josh.

Josh would make the entry on her calendar. I told Stacey I would leave it to her to coordinate all this with Melanie.

“Of course. Josh?”

“Got it,” he said.

This is not a book club, OK?

“No,” she said, “I understand.” Oh, and she wondered if J. J. Abrams might join us, because she'd mentioned it to J.J., and he loved the idea.

Who was J. J. Abrams?

A director, she said. Great energy.

Oh, yes. Of course. (I had met him somewhere.) If you'll call him, that's fine. So that's three of you, then.

A studio executive, an entertainment lawyer, and a director. I thought about it, potentially pleased.

I went to warn Denise. There always has to be food.

 

HOWARD AND I WERE MARRIED
by a justice of the peace just before 8:00
P.M.
at City Hall. My parents were in Burma. They sent their blessings.

Howard's parents were more complicated. On a frigid February day about two months before the ceremony we took the 1 subway from Columbia in Harlem, changed to the 2 train at West 96th Street, and got out in Brooklyn at Borough Hall. Down Court Street, across Atlantic Avenue, left on Dean Street. This was when one scanned the sidewalks in that neighborhood for danger. They had gathered in the living room, his mother and father, several aunts, an uncle and so on. I was nineteen; Howard, twenty. Stuart, Howard's brother, was three years his junior. They kept kosher. They handed me cookies and cups as if I was infectious. I tried to catch Howard's eye, but he was engaged in a side argument with his father about LBJ.

At one point he slipped me upstairs to show me his boyhood bedroom. Well, I whispered to him, the conversation is as iced as the weather.

He was looking around. “They turned my room into
storage
.”

Howard?

After a moment he said, “Things are fine.”

I said, Well, I'd hardly call this “fine.” You know perfectly well they're against it.

“It's none of their goddamn business,” he said gently.

His reticence at discussing it was an emotional default, I knew.
As we walked back down the stairs, he held my hand till our knees became visible to the living room and then he released it. He said, moving toward the large kitchen, “When do we eat!”