You or Someone Like You (15 page)

 

IT IS ALMOST TEN YEARS
ago. Kate and I are watching Sam and Sawyer playing on some sort of jungle gym. Mostly we just watch. By moments we talk about something, someone, an idea. Sam, hold on tighter, please. “Well,
this
year,” says Kate, “he looks a little more like Howard.” We compare the two boys, which one looks like his mother, which looks like his father. And what that will mean for them, how it will encumber them, the famous parent problem, and so on.

I am conscious of the fact that she converted and I didn't. We are physically similar, Kate and I, hair and eye color and skin tone and so on, and we resemble each other ethnobotanically, except that she's from Texas. The fact of her having converted when she married Steven and my not converting when I married Howard is not greatly relevant to us, personally (this is my perception; I don't know if it's relevant to her), but it is immensely relevant to the two children on the metal rungs above us. And to her husband, of course, who needed Sawyer to be Jewish. This we don't discuss.

She tells me about a trip they might take to Italy in September.

 

NOT EARLY ON A ROSEATE
orange evening when the first guests are just arriving and the staff and the sunset are still fresh, nor when walking over the marble threshold into the cool, exquisite restaurant, hungry, and the thick white linen tablecloth under the silver and crystal is clean and starched and pressed and inviting as a pool
of clear, blue water. Not then, but later, when the party has dragged on too long and the drunk ones are still there and a cigarette is floating in whomever's pool, or when the paying of the check becomes a Byzantine process and the conversation was not so stimulating and, hunger now sated, one realizes that it was, as it always is after all, just food—then I think of the line from the Roethke poem: “I run, I run to the whistle of money.” And when we did not run to it.

Or at the parties where everyone's clothing is perfect and mannered and where they announce—always with the glass raised, and the grin—the new three-picture deal, the latest opening numbers. And suddenly everyone is toasting and the eyes are moving in their slots and smiles are brittle and the food tastes of cardboard.

I shoo out the last guests, tell the caterers to send the cleaning staff the next day (it is just too late, no fault of theirs), and sit in the dark. He finds me there and joins me on the sofa. Puts his arm around my shoulders.

All that planning.

He sighs. “Yeah, but it was great.”

Hm. I know I shouldn't say it. But I hate, I say, and list several things and, maybe, even a person or two.

“Yeah, I hate them, too,” he says.

No, Howard, I
really
hate them.

“I hate them more!” he says. “I hate them more than life itself!”

Thank you.

“Don't mention it.”

Your breath smells like a wine cellar, I say to him, and he shrugs, acknowledging it.

I slip from his arm, take a volume from the bookshelf there, slip back under his arm, turn to Charles Lamb. The paper is textured beneath my fingers. When I assigned this to my producers, who jammed their Jaguars into my driveway, I had Justin photocopy for them a short biography of Lamb (1775–1834), a contemporary of Coleridge and Wordsworth and a good friend of both. What I like
about Lamb is what he is generally noted for, his immediacy and entirely human observations of life (so different from the Romantic craziness). His simple, ruthless account of landing as a young boy at Christ's Hospital, the London boarding school for sons of middle-class parents in straitened financial circumstances, is typical: “I was poor and friendless. My parents, and those who should care for me, were far away. Those few acquaintances of theirs, which they could reckon upon being kind to me in the great city, after a little forced notice, which they had the grace to take of me on my first arrival in town, soon grew tired of my holiday visits. They seemed to them to recur too often, though I thought them few enough; and, one after another, they all failed me, and I felt myself alone among six hundred boys.”

A woman I know was of sufficient ill-humor to dismiss Lamb as the Mitch Albom of Imperial Britain. This is truly cruel. And false. A stuttering, shambling, fragile man who was known for his smoking, drinking, and inveterate gentleness, he became a successful writer, actually a one-man publishing industry. Money began to flow to him. So it went. He and his beloved older sister Mary, to whom he devoted his life, gathered on Wednesday nights in their home the leading artists and writers of England. But after these artists and writers had cleared out, when they were alone again and it was late, Lamb thought about the difference in his now-rich life. Listen, I said to my producers, sitting in their expensive clothing in my large home atop this expensive hill. This is from Lamb's “Old China.”

WE WERE ACTUALLY STANDING IN
the spotless, luxurious hallway of the Four Seasons on East 57th—we'd arrived from Los Angeles the previous day—and Howard was in loafers and a
business shirt, ready to go down to the lobby (I think he'd already pressed the button) when I suggested that, well, it was a bit last minute, but perhaps I actually wouldn't go to his family's seder this year. I'm not wanted, I pointed out forthrightly.

Howard said that, yeah, he did have to admit, I wasn't wanted.

And so how about if I went to the spa? I proposed. Perhaps I'd get a nice massage. I'd be here when he and Sam got back.

“OK,” said Howard.

I mean, why should I go? I said to him. I'm not Jewish.

“OK,” said Howard, “no problem.” He'd take Sam. He turned his head toward the open door to our room. “Sammy!” (Sam was eight.) “We're leaving for Bubbe and Zaide's!”

(Well. I had to say that a casual “no problem” was not quite the reaction I was expecting. I was only his wife…! I paused, trying to work it out.)

But why do
you
go, Howard? You don't believe of word of it, the religious stuff and all that.

“Tribal identity,” said Howard. Calling into the room, a bit more irritated: “
Sam!
I'm waiting.”

But you're completely opposed to that benighted sort of thing.

Howard shrugged, breezily. He scratched his nose. A moment later I heard the elevator ding, and they descended to get a taxi. I stood in the plush hallway watching the space they'd disappeared from. I went into the room, kicked off my navy pumps, picked up the phone, and called down to the spa.

Was the shrug a nonchalant acknowledgment of the irreconcilable nature of life? Or was it, as the expression goes, shrugging it off. If I play the scene again, it could be either.

 

On the Lexington Avenue train that evening back to 59th Street and from there the Four Seasons, Sam swung his legs over the plastic subway bench and asked Howard about the end of the seder. They
had concluded with, “Next year in Jerusalem!” “We always end the seder with that,” explained Howard. “It's a promise.”

“To who?”

“To whom,” said Howard. “To ourselves. We promise ourselves to be in our own land.”

Sam thought about it for a moment and asked, “Will Mom be there?”

The reason I know this is that many years later Sam told me. At the time I knew nothing. And Howard, reported Sam, gave no response.

(“Now Anne no longer goes and I go,” I heard Howard explain once to someone. It struck me that Howard was being simplistic.)

 

SAM HAD HIS FIRST FORMAL
lesson in Talmud at thirteen while hanging out at the AMC Century City movie theaters. A boy Sam remotely knew from the Buckley School was asserting that his mother's recent transconjunctival blepharoplasty was for her health.

The transparent idiocy of the argument threw Sam—“She had an eyelift for her
health
?” said Sam—but it was the aggressive vehemence of the boy's response that drew him into what rapidly became a well-attended shouting match in front of the ticket booths. The vehemence was generated, it turned out, by theology; Sam learned that categorizing plastic surgery as Health was crucial because Hebrew scripture categorically forbid “mutilation of the body” for any other reason. A tattoo, pierced ears, a medial pedicle mastopexy (breast tuck), and a Jew could not be buried in a Jewish cemetery. But for the observant—the Buckley boy's family kept kosher—the cutting-and-pasting of his mother's features, this elective surgery—“
Elective
!” shouted Sam, “like, did her
health insurance
cover it?” and eight teenage heads swiveled to the other side for the retort—could indeed be categorized as “health,” turning the word into such a large theological umbrella that arguably anything you wanted could be made to fit under it, including pop sex books.

A girl in the group threw Sam a scornful, slightly disgusted look, which he interpreted instantly. He had grown to thirteen, half the kids he knew lived in Beverly Hills, and he was only
now
discovering that this intellectual contortion of wealthy Jews regarding their plastic surgeons, this gross hypocrisy, was as universal as it was perfunctory? Please, her look said.

When he arrived home grim and furious, Howard, with a bit of work, extracted the episode from him. Howard thought about it, then went and dug up the
New Yorker
of a few weeks earlier and found a letter to the editor by a certain Arthur Daniels of Brooklyn—Howard showed it to Sam—which read “In discussing whether Ophelia can be given a Christian burial, one of Shakespeare's gravediggers asks another how this would be possible ‘when she wilfully seeks her own salvation?'” (“He means ‘Since she committed suicide,' Sam. That's a sin to Christians.”) “His companion responds that Christian burial is possible for anyone who drowns, since ‘if the water come to him and drown him, he drowns not himself.'”

“A perfect example of Talmudic reasoning,” said Howard with a smile.

“Well,” objected Sam, who was sick of being exasperated, “but that's just a way of getting around the—you know, the whole
point
.”

“Exactly,” said Howard, that was exactly what Talmudic reasoning was, the selective assembling of tendentious arguments from a completely arbitrarily designated body of text in order to justify the conclusion you had already arrived at through your biases based on your difficult personality, past mistakes, tax bracket, lousy conscience, and so on. Sam should understand that Judaism was divided into two distinct phases, that when Temple Judaism, a primitive nomadic-tribal religion typical of its historic context with all the gewgaws of such religions (priestly castes, ritual purifications, fanatic xenophobia, nutty dietetic and sexual rules; Howard ticked them off on his fingers), was destroyed in—let's see, was it around the second century CE?—rabbinical Judaism began, the
study of text rather than the performance of temple ritual, since the temple was gone but the text could be stored and parsed in any Russian shtetl or Warsaw ghetto or Brooklyn tenement. Or (a significant look) the AMC Century City movie theaters in Los Angeles. OK? And this particular theological product has broken all the records. Outlived them all. Immune to internal incoherence. Here was this young idiot from the Buckley School, said Howard, engaged in exactly the brilliant adaptive strategy that has kept Jews Jews. And—this was the genius part—the simple act of arguing about it
was Jewish worship itself
. Not
literally
worship but something infinitely more important: the preservation of the tribe as a tribe. Marking the boundaries. What mattered was not that there was actually a right answer to whether or not you could get an eye job. What mattered was that Jews argued about these things. And non-Jews didn't. Drawing that line was the point.