You or Someone Like You (31 page)

I reply, So blond, my lord, and true.

Suddenly his shoulders stiffen under my hands. “You think” (he pulls away from my hands, rises, turning toward me, holding the drink, and I see with a chill that his face is flushed with fury), “you think I would stop loving him.” He is ashen, staring at me, a poisonous suspicion passing behind.

He raises the tumbler and slurps the liquor from it. He specifies the line he's thinking about. “‘
Here I disclaim all my paternal care
,'” he says, Lear heartlessly banishing Cordelia, “‘
propinquity and property of blood, and as a stranger to my heart and me hold thee from this for ever, thou my
sometime
daughter
.'”

I had somehow forgotten that these are the king's subsequent words.
Stupid
, Anne. No wonder Howard has arrived at this reading of the text. The oversight makes me extremely irritated with myself. That's not what I meant, I say.

Howard blinks. “I'm not Lear,” he says. “Jesus, Anne.”

I think, but do not say, that to my mind at this particular moment Sam is, on the other hand, Cordelia. Cordelia, who refuses to feign love. Who is honest about who she is and pays a price. I say nothing.

We listen to the ambient noise. The helicopter is gone. Then a soft pinging in the garage. José? Then no sounds.

I wait for a moment. I lift my chin, glance around clear-eyed. I have a block on “propinquity,” I say. He walks over and with the hand that is not grasping the tumbler grasps my upper arm. At his touch, I feel the breath go out of him and out of me. He is staring down at Los Angeles, covered in the red.

‘ “Nearness of relationship or kinship,'” says Howard without any air. He does not come nearer, but he grips my arm tightly.

Ah, I say.

 

DURING OUR EARLY YEARS HERE,
when he was just establishing his foothold. Howard used to call and say, “We're invited to dinner, is that OK?”

OK, I'd say. I knew he needed me there. That was part of his job. My dislike of these rituals I set aside. That was my job. I would ask: What time? And: Shall I meet you there?

I had been prepared for dining in Los Angeles by Tolstoy. When I was seventeen, I first read the dining scene near the beginning of
Anna Karenina
. It takes place in 1870s Saint Petersburg, Oblonsky and Levin on their way to the Hotel Angleterre in a sleigh. “As they entered the restaurant, Oblonsky took off his overcoat, giving orders to the Tatars in swallowtails, who clustered around him.” We would wait for the two or three from the studio, or for the director, or for the producer arriving with the star. We walked among the diners toward our table, and as we passed I felt people's upward glances, like butterflies flying across your back. “Oblonsky bowed right and left to acquaintances, who as usual were delighted to see him. ‘This way,
please, Your excellency, this way!' said an old, specially eager white-headed Tatar, with broad hips and coattails separating over them.” (I loved that.)

All those evenings in the golden food boxes on Sunset and Melrose. One of the men from the studio would have reserved the table. It was his table. I never understood what made it different from most of the other tables, but to these people it was very different.

I found it hard to get the hang of it at first. It was much more than eating. It took me time to understand this. Salad, I would say. “
Just
salad? Listen,” he would explain, “it's my treat!” Yes, I would say, not showing that I was taken aback, I know. Thank you. “So, Howard. I wanna say two words to you: Negative Pickup. If the studios can do it, why not the independents?”

“I agree,” Howard would say, “but what do you do about the writer?”

They would discuss the writer. “He can be fired,” the woman from United Artists would say. And when they had discussed the writer, and how to fire him, we would order, and then we would discuss the director's back end.

I would sit with them as they talked. “Oblonsky said to the Tatar, ‘Well then, my good fellow, let us have two—no, that's too little—three dozen oysters.'”

We in the industry feast under our palm trees on reindeer, ostrich, assorted snake and reptilia, molluscae and delicate sub-species of avians. We have regressed: The menus of tonight's Los Angeles read like nineteenth-century naturalist tracts, the seasonings like the treasures of plundered exotic cultures, powdered pearl, moondust. We are culinary Magellans. In our opium-free opium dens along Beverly and Robertson, our porcelain plates are test tubes into which they pour the reagents, sauces and spices hauled by elephant down from Thai mountains, rare plants cut by Peruvian Indians (and given a 400 percent markup by this evening's chef ). We systematically sample every phylum, every genus, like
evolutionary biologists, yet there are only so many species to eat. I quietly ask Howard, as that evening's waiter hands us yet another list, printed in nonpolluting soy-base inks on chlorine-free paper, when will we get to rat?

“What makes you think we haven't?” he mutters, staring at the menu.

“The Tatar darted off, his coattails flying; five minutes later he flew back with a dish of opened oysters in their pearly shells and a bottle between his fingers.” Tolstoy gives you nothing of the interim, notice; the important thing is the ebbing and flowing of the Tatar.

Howard and I sit facing an immense metal tray of ice they have just placed on our table. The cool marine smell washes over me. Marvelous. The oysters are being paid for by an Englishman with a large amount of money meant to acquire “literary properties.” Oh, I say lightly, scripts. The Englishman doesn't reply to me. He squeezes lemon over the bed of gleaming, silver-gray, gelatinous cells. He addresses himself to Howard: “
Right
then.”

I would excuse myself sometimes and walk out into the blue evenings and sit slightly to the side and watch the movies walk in and out, the well-known faces from the screens, their expensive Italian sportscars being parked by the young valets who moved like short, athletic members of a Hispanic corps de ballet. Then I would go back in, careful to approach them from the direction of the ladies' room, and sit, and Howard would take me by the hand and draw me into the conversation. They would compliment me, “That accent, that's terrific,” as if it were a great tan. But they were energetic, and over time I started to revive and blossom, and I grew used to nights and nights of these lacquered restaurants, became casual about them, came to know them, slipping into their sateen seats with familiarity, until things shifted in our favor, and my presence became my own decision.

Back then, I would think of this scene from Tolstoy not for the food or the opulence but for the connection. Things would be
fine, and then abruptly the deal would hit a snag and the conversation would founder, their slick L.A. talk would fail, and you would feel the strange, sudden loss of bearings as they attempted to navigate the sea of laundered white cotton between them. Tolstoy foresaw it. “Levin sighed and was silent. And suddenly,” Tolstoy writes, “Levin and Oblonsky both felt that even though they were friends, even though they had been dining together and drinking wine, which should have brought them still closer together, each of them was thinking only of himself, and neither had anything to do with the other. Oblonsky had already had this experience more than once, of the extreme estrangement instead of intimacy that takes place after a dinner, and he knew what had to be done.”

“‘The bill!' Oblonsky shouted, and went out into the neighboring room where he immediately met an aide-de-camp he knew and started up a conversation about some actress and the man who was keeping her. And in the conversation with the aide-de-camp, Oblonsky instantly felt relief and relaxation.”

As the electronic banking network in back sucks on the credit card, the players prepare to part, the deal undone, the studio and the producer unreconciled, the director still frustrated, the star (as stars always are) unfulfilled. Despite all the food, which is already forgotten anyway. It takes an eternity for the valet to bring the Porsche back from wherever they park them, huge hidden warehouses maybe behind Fairfax Avenue packed with ludicrously expensive steel and leather. No one ever knows. No one asks.

I have known scorched partings, stumblings. Coldnesses that swam on and on with iced gills while you stood there. The sudden estrangement from them instead of intimacy, even though having dined together, even though (sometimes, sort of ) friends. Neither having anything to do with the other.

I never once imagined that those estranged people would ever be Howard and me.

 

ON THURSDAY, HOWARD GOES TO
New York. Saturday around noon he arrives back in L.A. Just after sundown the phone rings. I pick it up in my office. “Hello, is Howard Rosenbaum there?” asks a strong, pleasant male voice. I think, It must be an actor. I have just begun to say, Yes, he is, when somewhere else in the house Howard picks up fast and says, “Yeah,” a bit awkwardly, as if he were winded.

The man is slightly confused. “Uh, Howard?”

“I got it,” says Howard's voice. The man starts to say something peremptorily, but I hang up. Somewhere in the house, Howard very quietly but firmly closes a door.

 

IT WAS A SPECIAL CAREER
project the school set up for the seniors. Private audiences with mothers and fathers in their suites and bungalows and clinics. Sam had chosen a law firm on Beverly Drive, a midmorning meeting. The partner (they stared at his plush office) was representing a client, an old man, a Hungarian Jew, who had been through the Holocaust, recovering his money in Switzerland. The client was, it turned out, a thoroughly nasty, petty, cruel human being, “but,” said the lawyer from his large leather chair, “we can't judge him because we've never lived through having everyone we know die.”

Sam sat up and said, “Some gay men—”

Four teenagers stared at him, but the lawyer was furious. “That's different,” he exploded, “they brought that on themselves.”

“That's what they said about the Jews,” replied Sam.

 

It is 5:15
P.M.
and already the story has been carefully repeated in precise detail by someone to Howard. Sam's little performance has had
its intended pyrotechnic effect. Howard stands before me, inflamed. “To a
disease
, God help me!…”

I think: Well, Sam does know how to get to him.

I stand up from the kitchen table and start to leave, but he leaps, spiderlike, and is in front of me before I can blink. Grasps my wrist. Don't, I say. His face is inches from mine, and I add, Touch me. I pull away, just like in the movies. Yank the wrist sharply down and away with a snap. Lower the shoulder for extra force. His eyes are filthy green cataracts.

He strides past me, his shoulder brushing mine, and disappears down the hall. Though he has not raised his hand an inch, I feel that he just missed putting a fist through the light fixture, or the wall had he aimed at my face.

English words that do not exist in French:

 

Bracing (as in a sharp slap).

Don't (the imperative form).

 

Three hours later, and Howard stands outside in the dark, dangling his car keys. He has arrived from somewhere. Perhaps he has just been driving around. I stand opposite him in the dark driveway. We can barely see each other.

“You used to be on my side,” he says to me.

I take a breath. I've never had to fight for you. So I could afford to be uniquely on your side.

He says nothing. I wait.

You used to have great confidence in expressiveness, Howard. Now you seem to have renounced it.

“Well!” he says, ignoring what I've just said, responding to the other comment, “This is a big change.”

I don't think so, I say.

“Oh,” he says in a voice I don't recognize, “I do. I think you're a very different person from the woman I married.”

In a few minutes I watch the taillights of his car disappearing back down our drive.

 

I tracked down the person who had repeated the lawyer's office conversation to Howard. It wasn't difficult. A Wilshire Boulevard colleague of the lawyer's who, for reasons I could guess at, was trading in destruction. We'd met once. I called him.

“Why shouldn't Howard know what his son says,” he replied blithely. “He's the boy's father.”

What the hell are you trying to do, I said, my voice iced.

He hesitated. His job depended on industry contacts. Then he didn't hesitate. “Anne,” he said, unimpressed. “You're losing your touch.”

 

“I'm afraid for him,” Howard yells. “What do you want for him? Aren't you afraid?” He mutters why am I so goddamned obtuse, can I not see the dangers?

And why my obsession with
talking about it
?

And then he hangs up the phone.

It isn't
Sam
who is in danger, Howard. It is you and I. This danger you perceive is not your son with a man. It is you with me. That is what you fear, and you don't realize it. (But the phone line is dead.)

Because Howard will not allow me to speak to him, I give him my answer via the directors, and then I ask him a question.

Now, we'll start this evening with Edward Lear, the nonsense poet. The first photocopied pages? On top? Yes, the screenwriters read him a few months ago. Anthony Lane described it this way, I say to them. (I find my place in Anthony's article.) “Lear was odd, eccentric. A man who seemed to love no one. His verse impenetrable as Yorkshire taffy, and why?” (I am conscious of speaking a bit fast.) “Because he felt, one of his female biographers has politely suggested, a sexual longing for a man named Franklin Lushington, with whom he toured Greece in 1849.” (The directors' eyes move quickly to me, then back down to the page.)