You or Someone Like You (19 page)

He nodded calmly. Mr. Taciturn.

Howard accepted José with a friendly handshake and benign indifference. Howard was conscious that he was now employing three people in his home and with the usual American awkwardness regarding servants began referring to them sardonically as “our baptized property.” This was what the Russian gentry called serfs attached to landed estates. Not within earshot, though, since who knew who understood what at this point.

 

I LOST MY TEMPER, AND
the press coverage started, and Howard said I deserved it. It was in public, too, so I was at fault.

Rather than have the next book club in my garden, my agents group suggested we meet at Orso. A few of them had a thing for Dos Passos. Dos Passos, who has strange punctuation that I dislike, which irrigated the affair, but what made me blow up was the
New Yorker,
specifically a profile they'd run just the previous week. It concerned a black woman who was a vocal coach, this serving the
New Yorker
writer as a platform for an examination of why blacks do not get jobs as easily as whites and Asians, and the vocal coach unconsciously provided the answer by stating, “African Americans don't
associate proper pronunciation and grammar with intelligence, and it is a shock to us when they are.”

First of all, I said. I don't believe this for an instant because it is absurd. But leave that. The rule that a comma is placed before a conjunction joining two independent clauses is, I think, one of the few truly indisputable points of grammar. This was the way the sentence appeared in the
New Yorker
: “African Americans don't associate proper pronunciation and grammar with intelligence and it is a shock to us when they are.”

I had Dos Passos's
U.S.A.
on the table. I'd propped it open with my bread plate. The waiter kept moving the plate and losing my place. More water, yes, no, leave the plate, please. I glanced at the book, saw one of Dos Passos's ellipses (he uses millions), and it triggered my irritation over the
New Yorker
piece.

There are, still, a few things one should be able to count on, I said to them. If we are to reverse this country's insane lack of support for public schools capable of educating our children—and what is more important than the public school system, nothing is,
nothing
—we need to begin with correct punctuation. I said, The
New Yorker
somehow managed to remember the period at the end of the sentence, but really, why bother with the period
if you can't remember the goddamn comma between the two independent clauses
.

Their heads moved back just slightly. Well! Look at Anne. The waiter had stopped moving. But they were amused and interested, and it gave me permission to continue. (A thought came to me, from years of observing this industry: The freakish, the odd, the abrasive, the larger-than-life, when they are put before the camera, lit with halogen, presented on the screen, can become compelling. Context is everything. The act of going to see a person transforms that person. They had come to see me here, hitting my mark on this swank set, and I was suddenly conscious of being a different person.)

Spelling, punctuation, grammar, vocabulary, I continued. These things
matter
. They are not just the backbone of literature, they are
reflective of education and intelligence and capability. I thought about how Howard would express this. Oh, of course. I said to them, So there was a letter to the editor of the
Times
of London in which the writer, whose children went to one of London's most posh and expensive schools, had just gotten the tuition bill. This exclusive, august institution had printed the figure in “pounds per anum.” He wrote a reply to the school noting that while he didn't mind the amount so much, could he perhaps go back to paying through the other orifice, which was to say the nose.

Just look at this article, I said to them. I picked from my bag my copy of the
New Yorker
and flipped the pages. Here. For the moment, at least, I said, the
New Yorker
is still using the comma of direct address. (I read from the article.) “Hey comma baby!” (It was talking about street slang.) The meaning here of course being completely different from “Hey baby!” which means a baby named Hey. “You all curves an me wit no brakes.” No predicate,
and thus no comma necessary
.

I cleared my throat and smoothed my napkin. I flushed just a bit. I'm sorry, I said, for this pasquinade. But honestly, we all must understand this. It sounds silly, it sounds minor, these sorts of things, but they slip, bit by bit, and then suddenly you're the Congo, and nothing works, and the government is corrupt, and it's all shit, and you
hate
it.

A man at the next table kept glancing at me.

Howard met a lovely, rather breathless young actress recently, I said to them. She told him, “I'm about, like, self-expression!” Howard replied that that was nice, because she certainly was not about eloquence.

Either you can parse a decent sentence or you can't. The great French grammarian, Dominique Beauhur, wrote as his last words: “I am dying.” He then appended: “I am about to die. Either is correct.”

I looked up. Several of the agents were watching me with huge
grins. The grins said that if I was a lunatic, I was their lunatic. Their warm complicity, their willingness to consider my linking punctuation to the rise and fall of civilizations, caught me off guard.

I loved them for it. And that caught me off guard as well.

For one moment I forgot about the punctuation and saw that they were enjoying me and liked me for who I was, and I let myself go into that, and I smiled back at them. I had to blink a few times and make a show of organizing my papers, and I said to myself, Honestly, Anne! but then I thought no, no, it's perfectly fine.

So, I said, and I laughed. So we were talking about John Dos Passos.

 

Nick Paumgarten wrote the
New Yorker
Talk piece on the lunch. The man at the next table turned out to have been Philip Gourevitch, and he mentioned it to Nick on the phone. The waiters must have been listening closely, or perhaps it was Nick's reporting skills, but the detail of it was startling. To my mind, the piece was about my agents group, and Nick, naturally, had spun something very nice out of that. But, “Uh,
no
,” said Sam, looking at me as if I was insane, “it's about
you
, Mom.”

The
New Yorker
did at least wonder about having elided (as Nick put it, rather self-exculpatorily in my own view) the comma. Which was why David Remnick called. “Anne!”

You deserve it, I said to him. Every bit.

“I'm having all the copy editors shot,” he promised solemnly.

I got a call from Amy Kaufman. Focus Features has just bought a spec script from a UTA client, said Amy, and she was wondering, could I look at the (she hesitated, choosing the word) flow? The writer's word use.

I paused. Are you asking me to look over the script's syntax?

Yes! she said. The syntax. (She hadn't wanted to say the word so bluntly.) Could I?

Well. Yes. I supposed I could. I was intrigued. I knew the writer. As we were talking, a messenger service dropped it off. I hung up and asked Justin to handle it. He immediately called Amy back and negotiated a five-figure agreement.

The next day Jeff Berg gave a quick call to say hi, he thought the script checking for Focus was an interesting idea, and he was wondering if I needed representation, but I said Justin was doing quite well. I wrote Justin a check for 15 percent. Justin started spending more time on the phone, which irritated Sam, an orphan under the basket over the driveway. José installed a separate in-box for Justin's mail on his desk in my office. Justin's attitude began changing, and Howard noticed immediately. Howard, walking past my office, would say loudly, “ICM's hiring, Justin.”

Justin, I said, not glancing up, stop walking like that.

“Like what?”

With your chest out. Stop it. This needs to be mailed, please.

I would like to shoot, or have shot (either is correct), every fourth-grade teacher who is not regularly drilling their pupils in the diagramming of sentences. Sam, at twelve, came home one day and asked me what a predicate was. I explained it to him carefully, questioned him till I was satisfied, got my car keys, and drove straight to Harvard-Westlake, where I collared the school's head. Borys Kit of the
Hollywood Reporter
called to ask me about why I'd done it; he had apparently heard about the four-year-old incident because Sam had mentioned it to a classmate after the Talk piece, and that classmate's father was (of course) in the industry and passed it to Borys. So I explained to him that I'd said to this teacher that, my God, at age twelve my son didn't know subject from predicate, and who, exactly, was going to hire him? McDonald's? My son did not want to be limited to carting dirty dishes, and given, I'd said, that he was not African American, if he didn't use proper grammar and pronunciation, people would think him ignorant. I told him my favorite knock-knock joke:

At the same time, I said, hysteria over split infinitives is ridiculous. English isn't Latin. So I'm hardly a purist.

Borys wrote it all down and reprinted the knock-knock joke in full in his
Hollywood Reporter
piece. It was generally taken as my throwing down the gauntlet.

 

WE'D JUST FINISHED A CHEEVER
story on the subject of loss, and people were leaving when an actress stopped me. The Cheever had made her recall something. She laughed, almost embarrassed.

The tantrums she threw in the kitchen as a Trenton fourth grader before her tearful and uncomprehending mother. “An immigrant from Budapest,” she said. “She would knit me these absolutely exquisite Hungarian sweaters.” She did the accent perfectly: “‘Is good!' she'd plead, ‘Is varm!'” She cleared her throat. “I used to drop them in the woods in the snow on the way to school. I told her I lost them.
Now
, of course…” She exhaled deeply, hooking a finger around a thin gold chain. “I'd kill to get my hands on them. I mean, you can't
buy
that shit today. I could have given them to my daughter. But they're gone. And I broke her heart.” She thought about it. Matter-of-factly: “And she's dead.”

We stood and both looked up at the palm fronds making a gentle scything sound, like blades harvesting the night air. José had just trimmed them. “You miss your parents,” she said.

Some comment of mine about the Cheever had obviously elicited this from her. I considered it. I think about my parents, I said to
her. Often, actually. Though not exactly like yours. Mine (I laughed briefly) never gave me anything I had to pretend to lose.

“A car accident, right?”

I was startled. Yes.

She frowned. “In Malaysia?”

For a moment I was confused, then understood. No, I said, it was the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, coming from JFK. Quite prosaic. I talked about the accident?

She paused. “You alluded to it. A few details.”

Malaysian Airlines.

“That's it.”

I'd said to them that when we read fiction, we pour our own particular store of emotions—say, the sense of loss we feel for those disappeared from our lives—into the characters set before us. We take the few words with which the writer sketches these characters, the thing he said, the pain she felt, where they were, and our own emotional stockpile magically creates people. As the human eye fleshes out the pixilated image. Fictional characters are highly sophisticated Rorschach blots, and we, along with their author, are their authors. When you read a fictional character, you too are creating her.

I had commented to them that my mother and father made Cheever's characters real for me.

It was a pileup of some sort, I said to her now, in a thunderstorm. Theirs was the last car into the mess. I paused. I think it's called hydroplaning? When the tires do that. They had just landed. Their luggage was in the taxi's trunk, but it burned.

I felt my heart constrict again. Such a strange sensation. It never changes, yet always surprises.

I too have such regret, I said to her, these vast black oceans of regret. Their simply being alive was—(I hunted for it)—the possibility that they might change. Some day? Their dying took that away.

She pulled a strand of hair behind an ear. “Their dying didn't really change anything, Anne.”

The stars above the palms disappeared and reappeared as the fronds moved in the air, like the warning lights on the tops of skyscrapers. She was right, of course. I remember, I said to her, when we got the call. I remember stumbling to a chair and putting my face in my hands. Howard's voice, his hand on the back of my neck.

I took a breath, eyes opening. I looked around. I said, I've never really talked about this.

“Yes,” she said, smiling, “I know that.”

Howard's mother, cancer. And very fast. Not as fast as a pileup on the BQE, but fast. His father, a stroke, six years before that. They exit one by one, or sometimes two by two. You scatter pieces of them on the snow in the woods and run away as fast as you can, and then you turn and run back toward them, once they're beyond your reach.

I did not know Sam had felt this great loss from his bubbe dying, or rather I didn't know he was feeling it to such a degree. He was seventeen. The young sometimes show much less, and I simply didn't see it, or wasn't looking, or didn't know how to look. Degrees of culpability, I suppose, but little difference in the end.

Sam had gone with Howard to New York to sit shiva for his grandfather, but it was his grandmother's death—it was just last September—that had shaken him. He had watched Howard crumple as the beeping hospital machines finally silenced themselves, the heart rate line flattened, and her hand went lax in his father's. Howard lay himself along her cooling arm, eyes closed, facedown on the metal gurney, and the nurses skirted them for a few minutes as Sam watched this man hold his mother's body. He put a hand tentatively on his father's shoulder and in that gesture, seeking to comfort, experienced the moment that the child starts to become the parent. Sam sensed that in his grief something had also changed inside Howard.