You or Someone Like You (32 page)

“Lear and Lushington decorated their hats, coats, and horses with spring flowers as they went. But longing never bloomed; in Lear's mind, and in his awkward body, desires were something to be buried deep, stuffed down until they became a tangle of roots.”

Would you (I asked them) wish for one you loved that he flee, like the Jumblies, to a silent, lonely sea in a sieve? (But I was not referring to Sam.)

I told them how, the previous evening, I had called Anthony in London. He had sighed. How much they have always been hated, Anne, he said, these odd people. Edward Lear, inadvertently perhaps, opens up little wormholes to that hatred: into the macabre laughter, the violence pokes its gray claws.

(Brad Silberling is rereading this carefully. It of course speaks to him.)

Look at Auden. (Next photocopy.) Auden was relentlessly self-critical, partly, no doubt, as a result of the guilt programmed into homosexuals by British society. He felt, he said, embarrassed in the presence of anyone who was not in some respect his superior. “‘It may be a large cock,' he explained. ‘It may be sanctity.'” Isn't this
really
why Auden was so hated by the English? (I look toward Nick
Hytner; he of all of them should know.) Among the English, the given justification, the one you could speak in public, was that he had abandoned England in her time of great need. It was in 1939 that he and Christopher Isherwood left for New York.

In my head I hear the pain in Howard's voice. I see them sitting all around the garden, on chairs and the low stone walls with their texts, completely still.

For a moment, I'm not sure what to say next. I clear my throat. I ask them: Would anyone like more lemonade?

After a moment, someone says, “I think we're fine, Anne.” A. E. Houseman, I say. From
The Invention of Love
, you all have the text, so, right, Bryan, could you read for us, please? Bryan Singer lifts the photocopy I've made. “‘Your life is a terrible thing,'” he reads. “‘A chronological error. The choice for people like you was not always between renunciation and folly. You should have lived in Megara when Theognis was writing and made his lover a song sung unto all posterity…and not
now
!—when disavowal and endurance are in honour, and a nameless luckless love has made notoriety your monument.'”

Thank you, I say when Bryan finishes.

Houseman's sister Kate Symons observed after his death, “He very much lived in water-tight compartments that were not to communicate with each other.”

Listen, I say to them. E. M. Forster's only homosexual novel,
Maurice
, was not published till long after his death, his shame for the brilliant child of his hidden self ensuring that he would never see it born. Virginia Woolf's lesbianism was passionate and isolated and carefully unspoken of for years and years. Henry James wrote tortured love letters of increasing desperation and pain to Morton Fullerton, the dashing Paris correspondent for the London
Times
. “You do with me what you will,” James wrote in September of 1900. “You are dazzling, my dear Fullerton; you are beautiful…you are
tenderly magnetically
tactile
.” In December 1905, chokingly: “I can't keep my hands off you.” For decades James biographers took pains to explain that he was speaking metaphorically.

When we had finished, when they had gone, Howard alone would know what I was saying. I was saying that there are, in fact, all sorts of forbidden relationships.

Do you yourself want to set off, Howard, like the Jumblies, to a silent sea? Would you truly turn from love, Howard? When did disavowal become an honor to you, when did our love, yours and mine, Howard, become a notoriety? Why, Howard, do they forbid you from loving me because of who I am?

The given justification, the one you can speak in public, is abandoning the tribe in its time of great need. That's not good enough, Howard. Do you not see the guilt programmed into Jews, the poison by those hermetically self-sealed off? Do you not see all this buried deep inside you, stuffed down until it has become a tangle of roots? Do you not see this?

 

Later I will hear that someone debriefed Howard in his office. In detail, including what I had looked like, the quotes, how I'd spoken.

 

THE MOONLIGHT IS LIKE MILK
when he wakes me. He says nothing (he never does), his hands moving strongly, automated with the urgency of sleep and his erection. My reaction is instant, this spike in me, though it comes from somewhere utterly different this time, I know that, but I turn toward him, naked already, I've put the jelly in myself, and he mounts me. He fills me and puts his whole weight on me, which is what I love, and we rock back and forth, the sheets slipping back and the milk from the moon spilling over us. He slips out, or pulls out, and then he comes in a bit lower, by accident, or by intention, and raising my hips with his large hands he enters me
further down, and a huge sound escapes from him, very low, as he takes from me what he has never before taken. And we move.

 

We lie in silence. I look out the window. The moon is directly south, heading toward the Pacific, large and alien white. That's what they do, I say. And you loved it.

I don't tell him it hurt. It was worth it for Sam.

I can feel his body instantly grow cold against mine. But I don't care.

 

THEY ARE ARGUING OVER THE
next book selection when Denise leans down. A phone message, but I don't understand. I'm distracted. Denise says more loudly, “Rabbi Stern.”

Rabbi Stern? I say, and several heads turn in my direction. Just then Consuela comes and whispers in Denise's ear. Denise grunts, irritated, marches back to the kitchen.

Consuela is embarrassed. “The message is for
Mister
Rosenbaum,” she clarifies. “Before I no unerstan.”

Ah, I say. I see.

 

Howard calls. “I'm not going to be home this evening.” He attempts to mitigate it. “Sam's never home Friday evenings anyway.”

But I am home Friday evenings, I say.

“I'll be back late,” he says and hangs up.

Consuela is gone, and the house is quiet. I ask Denise, Aren't you going home? She taps a foot on the floor. She has work, she says after a moment.

Go home, I say. You don't have any work.

“Nobody there. They gone to see,” and she names some team.

I look at my garden, but it says nothing to me. What if I waited till he came home, she proposes.

No, I say to the garden, very softly. Go.

I hear nothing for a moment. “Got some of that good soup in the freezer, lobster meat and all.” She disappears, comes back. She has her car keys and purse. Do you know where he is?

No.

I think we both suspect this is a lie, that we do know where he is.

I take out the lobster soup and look at it. It is a chunk of congealed salmon-colored ice in a zippered freezer bag. I open the bag, dump the heavy chunk of ice into a pan, set it on a very low fire, cover.

One thinks one wants an evening alone, no husband, no son, no maids, no gardener. And then one is lost in large, airy rooms on a long, curving street, up a trembling driveway, a magic, expensive treehouse that has lost its pirates and fairies. The flowers call plaintively from their prisons in the soil. Poor, pathetic things.

Some couples have scales on which they live their lives. The scales rise and fall in increments of emotion and sensation, and the couples live in seeking balance and equilibrium, adding or subtracting bits and pieces: one kiss, two airplane tickets (surprise), three children. Howard and I are not this. It is not a scale, though it encompasses balance. It does not rise and fall, though motion is involved. When I open my eyes, under a sky that the last stars have not quite yet relinquished, those stars lacing the pale ghostly early clouds, he is next to me, and I am, at that moment, very happy. Then he opens his eyes. We examine each other, and I realize that I am alone for the first time in however many years with this man. He touches my cheek. I hold my breath. His eyes flicker. But there are the invisible radio signals that only he can hear, and he focuses his antennae on them now, I vanish before him, and he withdraws his hand. As it recedes, I feel my heart spinning. Vertigo.

I sink into softness because the soft points of light in the twilight still above call softly and pull me under. I wait far below the surface until the stars, modest to a fault, flee higher into the azure and
onyx oxygen veil and disappear. When I again emerge from sleep, slit the membrane of early white-yellow light, the stars are gone, and so is he.

 

IT COMES, WHEN IT COMES,
from an unlikely source. A director. I don't remember him, though he insists we've met. We stand in the sunny parking lot where he has approached me. He wasn't “insinuating” anything, he said (I think he meant to use another word), but he had happened to notice Howard there, sort of hanging by himself, because, well, it was Howard! Also because Howard was acting
so intense
during the service.

(I ask not a single question. People give you this sort of information in the hope of receiving information from you. They tell you a long, involved question, essentially.)

And he was simply awed. The fervent devotion. The way Howard had bowed his head over the books. The way he'd stumbled over the Hebrew, using his finger like a little kid, trying to keep up.

Ah, I say, only because he has paused to hear what I will say.

The way Howard looked around at the candles and blinked. (It is simplistic, somewhat juvenile imagery, but he is infamous for being a manic storyboarder.) Envied the guy! Seriously. Searching. Frowning at the stuff he didn't know, visibly self-conscious about it, he was bar mitzvahed, yeah?

Yes.

He chuckles. And now he didn't know a
Baruch-hu
from an amidah. Amazing, huh. Here's this guy on a Friday evening, pretty far from his house, the Beit Yisroel synagogue over in Santa Monica, they do a lot of outreach to
ba'al teshuvas
like Howard—Jews going back to observance, it's a real movement these days!—and we lived up by Mulholland, right? The one with all the French doors and the big garden, right?

Yes.

So anyway when the service is over Howard makes a beeline for the rabbi, young guy, young-
ish
for a rabbi, great speaking voice, sounds like an actor, which is very important, you know, he throws Howard this huge grin, Well done! see how easy that was, that kind of thing. Howard grabs at him like he's drowning, and Rabbi Stern pulls him up, hauls him around, they confer a bit privately, he pats his back, then sets Howard safely in a corner and starts greeting people. Except of course everyone is noticing, Hey, wait a minute, isn't that Howard Rosenbaum? Has he been here before? Someone asked, Where's Anne?

(I don't rise to it. I'm wearing my sunglasses, which gives me a tactical advantage.)

So there was that pushy woman from HBO and of course that jerk at Millennium Films and some big shot from DreamWorks, they all go over and start talking to him, welcome blah blah even though it was
clear
he wanted to be alone and just sort of take it all in. Which is why he himself hadn't gone over, although Howard was unfailingly gracious and even seemed to be a little glad for the human contact, so then he was sort of kicking himself for not going over. But whatever.

(I wait. He is talking and watching me in equal parts.)

And then Rabbi Stern says
Shabat Shalom!
to everyone and puts his arm across Howard's shoulder really warmly and they duck back to the rabbi's office and close the door. And that was that. It was a pretty beautiful thing, seeing a guy getting back to his faith, like that, you know, the—He searches for it. That return story? It's the, you know,
essence
of the thing, after the years of being lost, you can't—

He's reaching for words.

“
For this, my son, was dead
,” I say, “
and is alive again; he was lost, and now is found
.”

He looks at me, startled.
Exactly
, he says, really, really pleased.

An ancient story, I say.

And a powerful one, you gotta admit, that's really—wow, your
Talmud is
good
, you (he laughs) you've always got those references, Anne. You always know exactly—

It's New Testament, I say crisply, the parable of the prodigal son. Spoken by Jesus.

His body moves not a millimeter, and yet he recedes from me at the speed of light.

 

AT
9:40
A.M., THE PHONE
rings. When I answer, Jennifer is very concerned. He has missed his 9:00 and his 9:30. No, I say, I don't know where he is. The 101 is more or less clear, she says, Lankershim as well, and he has not called. His mobile is off. She hesitates. “Has something happened?” She knows the answer, at this point. She is asking for more.

Well, yes, I say. Actually, something has happened. And now, apparently, something else is happening. Call me in an hour, I say and hang up. I pick the receiver up again and call Howard's brother in New York. “Oh, hi, Anne,” says Stuart's secretary. He's just left for lunch. She apologizes. No, he didn't take his cell phone, but she'll have him call me.

Jennifer calls an hour later. Still nothing.

Stuart calls back. I give him an update. He seems concerned but just asks me to keep him up to date.