You or Someone Like You (8 page)

When he was fifteen: That evening he had (unbidden) put on a crisp new shirt and a navy blazer, which cut his broadening shoulders and framed the short, dark-blond hair. He buckled himself into the driver's seat, Howard next to him, and caught me in the rearview mirror. Sam had come to know a certain look in my eye. He knew I thought about the Thornton Wilder character, a mother whose daughter asks her anxiously, “Am I pretty?” and gives the starchy New England reply, “My children are good-looking enough for all
normal purposes.” He knew I found it unfortunate that he was more than good-looking enough for normal purposes.

He sometimes shrugged off Howard's directions and used the gas aggressively, but that evening, learner's permit in pocket, he eased the large automobile down our curving drive, across Macapa, and gently right on Mulholland.

I had commented on my fears to a friend. He had been in Los Angeles long enough to understand the potential toxicity. He knew what it could do. In the car, Sam, I said. Listen: Yeats. 1919, “Prayer for My Daughter.” (Driving, he kept his eyes on the road.)

“I hear you,” he said, very briefly, and to the windshield. But he did.

Howard adores Sam's looks. He loves the strong cut of jaw made satin with thickening peach fuzz, loses himself in the green eyes. Howard stares at them like a lover, but always obliquely. (Sometimes we watch our son from a distance. “I wonder what he's thinking,” Howard will say.) Howard watched as Sam negotiated the left turn down Laurel Canyon, assessed the traffic both ways, taking the care that fifteen-year-old males take when under their fathers' gaze.

Howard stood with me on La Cienega's cement curb (the starched maître d' at Mark's restaurant waiting to lead us to our seats) while on the asphalt Sam just a bit shyly handed over the keys to the valet, a Vietnamese teenager his own age. Seated at our lovely white-linened
table on the sidewalk, Howard watched as Sam got up, started to jog across the street to examine a sporting goods store. It is Howard's own flesh that moves like this. That's what got him, Howard murmured to me as we held our menus. That sleek young animal loping across the pavement came burbling up from his testicles and shot out his penis, it is his flesh and blood, and it looks like this. Look at it! Look at the way it moves.

Howard's eyes are black brown and somewhat close together, his nose Roman, the crinkly black hair tamed only to a degree with an expensive silicon gel (I don't know where he gets it) that lies on the tight curls and says, “I am doing what I can.”

The intensity of his personality, the slight thickness of his mannerisms, the Brooklyn that formed him and will never let him go. For Howard, that he, this particular Jew, should have produced the tawny creature gliding unaware among Mark's cool white tables on that blue evening where the tanned men tracked him from behind their menus and their golden hands—that was remarkable.

Not so long ago I happened to mention to someone that I am as surprised as Howard is that, given Howard's looks, he has produced this boy.

She paused. “Don't,” she said in a low voice, “ever say that to Howard.”

I thought about this for a moment now as we sat at our table. What would Howard say? I lay down my menu and talked about my surprise at Sam's looks given our genetics, given Howard's dark eyes, and what used to be called olive skin. Given the hair. I observed that genetically it was quite odd, wasn't it, Sam's having got virtually all his coloring and his skin from me. I wanted to know what he would say.

Howard put his hand on mine. He considered me for a moment. His eyes flickered over—Sam was heading toward our table. He smiled at me. He said softly, “Don't you see, Anne?”

I waited.

“The reason I love the way he looks,” said Howard, “is that he looks like you.”

I moved my hand across the white linen and caressed his warm skin. I loved him so deeply I wanted to cry, and laugh, to melt into this warm skin, to rip his clothes from his back and feel him inside me (after all these years still I want this).

“Dad!” said Sam very seriously, hauling back a chair, “all their ski stuff's on
sale
.”

“
Cool
,” said Howard, and smiled.

So Howard had offered a reason for the pleasure he took in Sam, and it was me. I felt my heart skip a beat. A clichéd expression, the heart, a beat, but it feels that way. A surge of love causes brief cardiac arrhythmia, and for some reason we aren't alarmed.

At the same time, I'm fully aware that Howard thinks of Sam very much in terms of his own flesh, because in everything Sam is and in everything Sam does, Howard sees himself.

 

WE HAVE EATEN DINNER, AND
Howard is on the sofa watching a TV show a friend has produced. He holds the remote as if it were a shotgun, menacing the screen on the wall. I come, stand in front of him. He glances up and freezes the image. I sit, he puts his arm around me, and I briefly summarize my encounter with the producer at King's Road Café. Howard merely grunts a fillip of disgust and says, “Asshole.” Howard has seen it all. He aims the remote, and we watch a bit of the show together. “Hm,” says Howard. Yes, I say, agreeing with him. Dismal. It will be a huge hit.

I go to my office to get the list of books I've jotted down, and I come back and spend a half hour on the sofa showing him my list and talking to him about What Is Visual, or as he concretizes it, What Literature Is Translatable to the Screen. I mention the Thackeray, and he gives me the odd look it deserves, then waits patiently as I sketch out one of the subplots, and his look changes,
and he starts nodding. And, Howard, look at Boswell for that matter, not just the work, although the cinematic case could be made for that, but look at his papers, the diaries, believed destroyed, all miraculously discovered in the past fifty years. I said it struck me that Darren Aranofsky (Howard had just met with him) could have a postmodernist field day. I meant, well,
Boswell
: Now here was a genius both charming and repellent, someone both completely honest and, by good fortune, graphomanic, who by the age of twenty-three, when he met Johnson and began the biography, never wrote down a single thing at the time he heard it, as he had trained himself to remember, verbatim, every word, every gesture, every tone and remark of social discourse.

Here was the Scotsman who guided the very English, London-centric, devoutly anti-Presbyterian Johnson on his improbable, ultimately wildly successful tour of Scotland's primitive Highlanders. Now that was a buddy movie. Boswell knew absolutely everyone in literary England in the last half of the century, and he was a social genius, a literary artist, a brilliant conversationalist, and a deeply imaginative interviewer. I list a few actors I'd idly envisioned in the roles, two production designers Howard admires, an excellent costume woman from Cardiff, now living in Santa Monica. Howard mentally ticks them off with interest.

So the next day I redid the book list. I enjoyed it immensely. That evening we have dinner with our friends David and Ellie Trachtenberg. David does some kind of technical sound editing I don't understand. Ellie, script doctoring. Sam sits next to Rachel, their daughter, and instantly the two fall into a mysterious murmured teenage communion. As soon as we've ordered drinks I get out my notebook and run my ideas by them, with Howard annotating verbally. David does the conceptual criticism, Ellie hits the practical logistical points (practicality is her strong suit; one book she nixes for sheer length, which is smart and which I, stupidly, hadn't thought about). We're
excited. David and Ellie and Howard and I, grinning at one another. We feel like kids building a tree fort.

I call Jeremy Zimmer the next morning. I email him the list.

The day after that, Max Mutchnick calls. He is wondering could he join my reading group? Oh, and he's already ordered every book on the list from Amazon.

I pause. You have the list, I say.

Well, ah. (He feints, trying to decide if he should admit what he's just stated.) Yee-
eah
, he's got the list.

It's odd. I am on the phone with this boy, a very nice boy, Max, and here he has my list, which is to say a somewhat intimate part of me, and I didn't volunteer it. I didn't offer it. But he wants it, and that's lovely, actually. And I should be put out, and I am, a bit, who do they think they are, passing around my list.

Oh, who am I kidding. It's lovely.

That's fine, Max, I say. I add immediately: But you only have five days before the next meeting, and the book must be read. (I can't be a complete pushover.) “Of course!” he says, wounded, and I want to kiss his cheek. I tell him that's an absolute rule, could he please convey that to everyone. Just so we're all clear. He says he will. He hangs up before I can ask him if he knows everyone who is coming. I do my own recount and go down to see Consuela about seating.

Denise will glance at me and look away again and say to the dish she's wiping, “What you smiling about.” Which will startle Consuela: Is Ms. Rosenbaum smiling? She doesn't look like she's smiling. But Denise knows.

I will say to Denise, Well, we wanted a new teak dining table for the garden anyway.

“Mmm hm,” she will say skeptically to the dish.

It is a pleasure to suppress laughter. It bubbles into other parts, effervesces through you. This book club, I say to Denise, is doing unexpected things. It seems they want to know me.

She considers me for a moment. She nods matter-of-factly. She is happy for me. She turns back to her work.

And, I say to her, I want to know them.

 

I'M GETTING INTO BED, AND
Howard is getting in on the other side, his breath minty from the paste. I ask him very casually, So what I said to them about Elizabeth Sewell. Do you think I was off base, then?

The comment was one that, when I made it, I knew perfectly well would be over their heads. It was aimed directly at Howard; years ago he'd told me I was misunderstanding one of Sewell's poems. Howard looks startled. “How would I know?” he says, turning off his light. “I wasn't there.” He shuts his eyes.

I continue to look at him.

Howard waits, for good dramatic effect. Then, “I think,” he says, and with a grin, and with his eyes closed, makes a precise tweak to the point I'd made in my garden.

I
thought
so, I say triumphantly. I knew someone would pass my comments to him. I hadn't realized they would reproduce them with such fidelity. He's rolling around to get in a comfortable position. “It was an interesting discussion,” he says. He reaches for me.

I turn out my light. So you agree, I say, sliding toward him, with my view of Sewell.

“Yes,” says Howard. “Actually, I do.”

All these years later, I say, and you make some sense.

“Never too late,” he says in the dark and kisses my shoulder.

 

DOUGLAS WICK CALLS ME. AM
I reading spec scripts? he demands.

Doug, what are you talking about?

He names the producer from the café.

Him again, I say.

“Did you bring that jerk some fabulous literary adaptation?” (He names an eighteenth-century author. It's the wrong author.)
No
, I say very precisely.

“He's trying to rush Paramount into it.”

I reassure him: I'm reading no scripts. I never have. Ask Howard.

Doug is still not reassured.

I tell him it's the wrong author.

Doug is reassured.

Because I'm interested in his reaction—he by contrast is a supremely competent producer and has twice worked with Howard—I run the Boswell idea by him. “
Huh
,” he says. We discuss it for a few minutes. “I might take a look at this,” he says. He adds, “With your permission, of course.”

I'm surprised he's asked my permission, and then immediately, for a split second, I feel the possessive greedy neurosis toward my idea that they must feel all the time. I want nothing to do with that feeling. I am not a producer, I say to Doug, and it is not “mine.” By all means, I say firmly.

After we hang up I find myself wondering what he will think of it. It's such a
good
idea, I think. I make a mental note to call Doug in a week.

 

FRIDAY I HAD ASSIGNED THEM
William Golding's
Lord of the Flies
and noted a few thematic points they should look out for, and instantly I began to receive questions. These were innocuous enough but made it apparent that they were reading my analysis of the book's literary points as being hugely bound up with my own past—Golding and I both English, his dates roughly contiguous (they assumed, correctly) with those of my parents, and so on—and so they began to read between the lines and interpret me via the text. Rather annoying.

At my kitchen table Sunday morning I had been flipping the pages of John Peters's criticism of Golding, pen in hand. I'd already taken my notes on the author's dates and background, but there was a particular citation I was after. I had a real need to find it. As I searched the Peters, I muttered grimly to Howard: I've realized I'm inadvertently in analysis.

“
And you
,” he had murmured dramatically, not looking up from the newspaper, “
hate that
.”

I'm not going to do some (I searched for the image) literary striptease for them. I didn't sign up for this.