You or Someone Like You (21 page)

Half of all black men between twenty-four and thirty-five have no full-time employment. One black man graduates from college for every hundred who go to jail. Almost half of all black children live in poverty.

I glance down at my notes. In a letter, dated August 30, 1791, Thomas Jefferson wrote to Benjamin Banneker, a black astronomer and mathematician whom he had had appointed official surveyor of the District of Columbia: “No body wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colors of men, and that the appearance of a want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence, both in Africa and America.”

They glance at one another. The book they hold is
Absalom, Absalom!

I get two glares. I say to them, I understand the desire not to wound, but it has been long observed that literature, if it is not ruthless, is nothing. They do not capitulate, but they turn the point over in their minds.

I can feel a breeze moving up from the Los Angeles side. For an instant it carries the sound of a radio, the music then blown toward the valley. No one says anything. I repeat to them, to clarify. Remember, I say, that in this context, this is a literary question.

 

THINGS HAPPEN. YOU ANTICIPATE THEM
without knowing it. This one had waited for us, quietly. Then it arrived.

Out of nowhere, Sam announces that he will go to Israel by himself for a few weeks.

“Out of nowhere,” says Howard to me, looking surprised and pleased. (It wasn't, of course, out of nowhere at all, but I do think that is the way Howard perceived it.)

Naturally we debate the timing. It is mid-January, but his college applications have been in “since forever,” everyone is (Sam points out) just waiting for the letters to come, and his grades essentially can't be higher. By the way, Josh Weinberg's parents are letting him go.

What's it hurt, Howard argues, missing one short week your senior spring? (He said two, I say. Howard promises that one of the two will be spring break, which makes it one. Yes, Howard will handle the school, don't worry about it.) Howard is very excited about it. He buys Sam the ticket. Economy class, a window seat, 14A, so he can sleep, on the El Al flight departing just before midnight.

 

JUSTIN IS GOING OVER A
list of things and mentions an email from a Paul McMann. “He says you know him?” It takes a few seconds and the word
screenplay
and then it clicks.

Mc
Ma
hon, I say to Justin, the man I met on Mulholland, yes. I'm trying to help him with a project.

I think to myself that I have truly been remiss, although, given the book clubs…I ask Justin to respond with my apologies, that I promise to get to it. Then, Never mind, Justin, I say, I'll do it myself. I send the email to Paul and mentally file a note. I've got to read his script. And I've got to get Howard to read it, too. I know I'm not going to trust my own reaction till I get his yes or no.

 

SAM WAS DRIVING WEST ON
Fountain when he asked Howard for some advice. He put the question: Stanford or Berkeley. Howard was struggling to position his visor against the morning sun flooding the windshield.

“What the hell's the matter with Columbia,” said Howard, squinting to cover his surprise.

“Dad,” said Sam very patiently, “I like California. My third choice is Occi. Jon and I went a couple months ago. We compared courses, the teams, all that stuff.”

“Well, if you've made up your mind,” grumbled Howard, surprised as well at the research, proud Sam was being serious about it. Personally, said Howard, he'd take Stanford, but nothing wrong with Berkeley if Sam chose his subjects carefully.

Sam held the wheel easily, accelerated from the light. But what did Howard and I want him to be? he asked. What did we intend for him?

Howard blinked.

“I'm just wondering,” said Sam, oblivious to the effect he was having. He sighed, very teenager. “God knows you guys have ideas about everything.”

I have always thought Howard did wonderfully when it came to Sam's future. We never dictated a word. We never told him what he must or mustn't be. We pointed out certain options and certain directions. Years ago, Howard had read Sam a passage from George Eliot's novel
Daniel Deronda
, and later that day, when they'd gotten home and Sam was out of earshot, he told me he'd found himself heading right for it as an anchor. He knew Sam would remember. In fact he suspected Sam's question had come from it.

Eliot's Daniel is freshly returned from his Young Gentleman's tour of the Rhineland with his Eton tutor, and he presents himself in Sir Hugo's library on a morning, and asks “What do you intend me to do, sir?” Naturally if Sam ever called Howard “sir,” Howard would choke.

Howard had always indicated to Sam that he would have to make his own money, and I had said the same thing, much more directly and much more often. At the same time, Howard argued to me, he didn't seem the sort of kid you had to worry would be corrupted by his parents' bank accounts, and I carefully agreed. He appeared solid. We never caught him showing off. He rarely coveted
the expensive toys that surrounded him and quickly shook off the episodes of jealousy when they arose. We had given him a decent allowance, increasing with his age and experience. ‘ “Perhaps,' said Sir Hugo, ‘I had better tell you that you may consider yourself secure of seven hundred a year.'” And so, said Howard, as they crossed Mansfield Avenue, we would pay for either Berkeley or Stanford. Graduate school, we would pay tuition; room and board would be his responsibility. Obviously we would ask that he live modestly. We would ask him to study, to be serious. No live-in girlfriends; that was nonnegotiable.

OK, said Sam.

As for what Howard “intended”? Well, said Howard, whatever Sam wanted to be. Howard comes by this sort of liberalism naturally. Yes, he had some ideas. He mentioned journalism and sports agenting. (“‘You might make yourself a barrister,' said Sir Hugo to Daniel, ‘be a writer.'”) Howard brought up, well, studio work. (“Or take up politics,” says Sir Hugo. “I confess that is what would please me best. I should like to have you at my elbow, pulling with me.”) But he said to Sam, You will do what you want, and you will be the one to find out what that is.

I am inclined to be more directive, but I found that Howard's point of view had, at some moment, become indigenous to me. Perhaps because I had read it in a book.

And still the boy Deronda says nervously to Sir Hugo, “‘I hope you will not be much disappointed if I don't come out with honours.'” And Sam said, basically, the same.

Howard made a face, waved this away with one hand and put the other to his eyes. Luckily they were at a stoplight, because he grabbed Sam and kissed him hard on the head. Sir Hugo says, “‘No, no. I should like you to do yourself credit, but for God's sake don't come out as a superior expensive kind of idiot, like young Brecon, who got a Double First, and has been learning to knit braces ever
since. What I wish you to get,'” quoted Howard gravely from Eliot's novel, “‘is a passport in life.'”

“They don't offer that,” said Sam, turning right toward the hills.

“Yes,” said Howard firmly, “they do.”

 

OUR FRIENDS HAVE ALWAYS TOLD
me that press attention functions microbially. The one-celled creature suddenly becomes two, which become four. Howard assumed it was the
Hollywood Reporter
piece that generated the article in
Entertainment Weekly
.

It was by critic Gary Susman. Gary had not attended the clubs—he hadn't, in fact, ever asked to—but he clearly knew many of those in them quite well. He said, in fact, that I had changed his view of filmmaking. He did not say how, which disappointed me. I was interested. The article reported a breathless account of a secretive book club for the Hollywood elite. It made me sound like a guru. The aura of exclusivity was carefully appointed, a paparazzi photo of me in sunglasses carrying dry cleaning into the house over my shoulder. I have to say, the photographers were very quiet. I had no idea they were there. If they had just asked, I would have certainly posed for a shot or two, outside, without the dry cleaning.

When
Us
magazine called, they said they wanted to take a “different approach,” which was to photograph me in my home. I said absolutely not. Well, would I talk with a reporter? I put them on hold and asked Justin what he thought. He said, “Are you kidding?” as if it was obvious. They sent a nice young woman, and Consuela brought lemonade to the garden, and I found it surreal. The piece wound up consisting of literary recommendations by actors, most of whom I had never met. What Will She Choose Next? Sandra Bernhard was quoted as saying she didn't fucking care, she hadn't fucking been invited. Bette Midler proposed D. H. Lawrence for some unusual reasons, and it started me thinking—I actually went
back to take another look at
Sons and Lovers
, though I am conscious of Max Beerbohm's evaluation of Lawrence: “He never suspected that to be stark staring mad is something of a handicap to a writer.” Perhaps. I sent Bette a note. Howard worships Beerbohm; Joseph Epstein once delighted Howard by telling him that Beerbohm “took out Freud with a single sentence: ‘They were a tense and peculiar family, the Oedipuses, weren't they?'” Bette enjoyed that.

Justin interrupted me with a slip of paper, quickly jotted: “Jane Sarkin.
Vanity Fair
.” He mouthed “Line 2.”

Hello, Jane.

Hello, Anne.

It was to be a cover, she said. (Oh,
honestly
.) No, no—they had
just
come out of the editorial meeting—a cover, a cover, she repeated the word, incredulous, which I found rather amusing seeing that it was she who was trying to convince me, not the reverse. Ludicrous, I said to Howard. (He agreed but shrugged.)

Julie Weiss, the
Vanity Fair
art director, called four times. “Anne Rosenbaum at Home.”

“Why not?” said Howard. “It's your home, show it off.”

Oh, for God's sake, Howard, it's invasive, that's why not!

But I was so bewildered, and so intrigued, that I agreed.

“And,” Julie added, “Howard would be in some of the photos, naturally.”

I covered the receiver again, ran this by him. Yes?

“Sure,” he said.

Fine, I said.

“And,” (papers ruffling) “now, you two have a son?”

My tone of voice must have finally taken, because she moved immediately to the stylist.

David Margolick arrived from New York and was very pleasant, and quite handsome with his gray wavy hair, and direct. Did I agree I was very opinionated? I said I supposed I did. Good literature is strong opinion, intelligently expressed. ( Water, please, I said to the
waiter. Thank you.)
Complexity
of opinion does not dilute its strength, incidentally. And then there are various styles.

David ordered a salad. “And you?” He glanced at the attentive waiter, back at me. “Nothing? You're sure?”

Honestly. I'm not hungry.

How, I asked, can one not be in awe of Oscar Wilde's opinionated snottiness on every imaginable subject? Take art. Samuel Johnson humbly praised Shakespeare, writing, “Shakespeare is above all writers the poet of nature, the poet that, like Hamlet, holds up a faithful mirror of manners and life.” Wilde responded, “This unfortunate aphorism about art holding the mirror up to Nature is deliberately said by Hamlet in order to convince bystanders of his absolute insanity in all art-matters.”

David jotted rapidly and managed to eat lunch at the same time. I, with my elbows on the Lucques's table, playing absently with a bracelet, was slightly uncomfortable with the method of it; sometimes he wrote, his notebook laid next to his fish knife, sometimes he didn't. It seemed random. Please, I said, it's getting cold. He smiled. He said he'd eaten cold sea bass before.

Annie Leibovitz stopped by the restaurant to look at me. She sat with us for a few minutes. The only thing she said was, once, “Anne, could you look left a little.” I lifted my chin, and she said, “Mm hm.”

“Wasn't there,” David asked, “some controversy over your politics? George Eliot?”

Ah. Right. Well, I had—unintentionally—begun a conversation about feminism: I'd assigned
Middlemarch
. I'd said that in my view George Eliot had perfectly described in the character Dorothea Brooke virtually every woman “building a career,” in Eliot's prescient phrase. Of these women, she wrote, in 1871 (notice that, in updated language, this is
exactly
what you read last week on the same topic), “Their ardour alternated between a vague ideal”—the career—“and the common yearning of womanhood”—children,
staying at home—“so that the first was disapproved as extravagance and the other condemned as a lapse.” Remarkable.

When I read the quote, there had been a collective intake of breath from everyone in my garden, then a visceral, disgusted reaction from a woman from Roadside Attractions. There was no “
common yearning of womanhood
,” she said. “Jesus!” That (she said) was just “sexism.”

I said that “sexism” was possibly the most overused, and therefore useless, word in the damaged American lexicon after the now-meaningless “racism.”

How could I say such a thing? she demanded. Did I believe women were actually biologically different from men?

Obviously women are biologically different from men, I said, including neuropsychologically.

Well!…she said, nonplussed. Well, then—so I believed women were
inferior
?

Don't, I snapped, be ridiculous. I was now very seriously annoyed.