You or Someone Like You (34 page)

He's waiting. I'm not sure how to proceed. I clear my throat. My son, as I imagine you're aware, is just seventeen, he's in high school, and he—Again, this problem of words. He recently told my husband and me.

He absorbs this for a moment—the connection between it and my presence here—and then breaks out into such a huge grin I want to step back, as if from the sun. “You're so great!” he says. “Wow!” He says, “I don't believe it!” He nods his head. “So you want me to help you out.”

I'm sorry?

“Show you the ropes.”

Well, no, I say. No, no. I laugh. I want—(What do I want?) Not me. I want you to help Sam. Sam.

He looks at me. “Why?” he asks. “You don't think you need help?”

I was not expecting this. I'm fine, I say.

He considers that. Then switches to another tack. “Why me?” He's not at all thrown. He's actually amused. And interested in my response. He crosses his arms and cocks his head, waiting.

I know you, I say. I add, truthfully, You seem like a good and decent and open person.

He will counter this, calmly. “You don't know me,” he observes. “We spent three hours together under really weird circumstances.”

Best way to know a person.

“OK. But, like—my credentials as a homosexual.” His logical suspiciousness is making me crazy. “You know Scott Rudin, Rob Marshall, people like that.” He adds, “Bruce Cohen.”

These are not people I would go to in this case.

“Why?”

(Why must he perseverate?) Don't you know what their lives are like? (No. He doesn't. Never mind.) In any event, they're acquaintances of my husband's.

“Your husband, Howard.”

Yes. My husband, Howard. (What does
that
mean? Oh!) Oh, I'm terribly sorry he hasn't contacted you about the script, Paul, I say. He thinks it's quite good. But it—

“I'm thirty-six,” he says. Which means: Let's move on. He moves on. “What does Howard think of this?” My being here.

This is my decision, I say.

“I'm not old enough to be the kid's father,” says Paul.

The kid, I say, already has a father.

“And where is he, this father? Howard Rosenbaum, movie executive.”

He's at the office. Where he works.

He waits a moment, to let me know he knows perfectly well he's put his finger on it. I let out an impatient breath, which has always made people tremble, but this young man is of a sudden quite calm and not afraid of me at all. He reaches out a hand—I watch it approach, frowning at it—and takes mine. “Anne,” he says. “I'm sorry.” I have an instant of absolute fury and panic at having my life exposed to the world in this way, and then I am simply overcome with sadness. I am alone.

I turn my head far to the side. I am squeezing my eyes shut. I try to say, I'm very sorry, too, but only half of it comes out before I have to cut it off. Paul smiles. I wipe the tears away with my hand. Afterward, we sit awkwardly at the not overly sturdy dining table. I watch my coffee. After a moment I say, So. Sam.

“So, Sam,” he says.

He smiles. I take a very deep breath and feel a weight lifted. We watch the morning sunshine falling like snow on the asphalt.

 

Paul changes clothes twice before settling on T-shirt and jeans while I wait. “What the hell do they wear? Those stupid baggy jeans.” What they wear is irrelevant, the question is what are you going to wear. “I don't want him to think I'm some geek.” Well, you're not going naked.

It's a beautiful Saturday morning. As we drive up Laurel Canyon, I think about Howard, his performance at the screening and Sam's reaction. I ask Paul if he knows any gay jokes. Paul thinks about it. “What's the difference between a vagina and a bowling ball?” What? “If you absolutely have to, it is theoretically possible to eat a bowling ball.”

That's good, I say.

In my living room Paul stands awkwardly. Stop it, I say.

“What?”

Just relax.

“Every time I'm with you,” he observes, “I'm living some kind of crisis.”

Sam enters the room as if hauled in by invisible ropes, glaring at both of us. He shakes hands with Paul, his eyes slits. Paul affects nonchalance and goes into the handshake a bit too hard, which makes Sam roll his eyes, and Paul grins at this totemic display of teenage
Weltanschauung
. He relaxes.

Sam turns to me and says in Italian, “This guy is supposed to be my fucking babysitter?”

Sam and I measure each other for a moment. My son is now four inches taller than I am and perhaps twenty pounds heavier. Without moving my eyes from Sam's I say in English, He wants to know if you're supposed to be his fucking babysitter.

Paul appraises Sam coolly. “Tell him,” says Paul, in English, “that his mother did me a big favor, and now I want to do one for her.”

I translate this into Italian.

“Tell him,” says Paul, in English, “that he is an ungrateful little prick.”

Sam flushes. I translate this, a sentence actually easier to say in Italian than it is in English.

“Tell him,” says Paul, “that his mother is trying like hell, in her own way, to deal with the bomb he's exploded, but he's so self-centered and immature he's not giving any thought to its effect on her.” Paul's eyes are on Sam. “He only thought about getting himself to where he wanted to be, and getting back at his father, but now she's dodging fallout, shoring herself up, dealing with a husband who's freaking out, and yet
still
she has a plan, because this is a woman who always, always has a plan, and at the moment I'm the goddamn plan. She's decided that if her son's a homosexual then by God he's going to be a squared-away homosexual. Not standing around some dark bar with a shaved head and tattoos and an ear stud, a cynical smile leeching the freshness out of his face. She's decided he's going to get to know some decent people and be at least slightly protected as
he enters these strange waters, in particular now that the father has pulled out, so he doesn't drown his sorry ass leaving the dock.”

Paul sighs and stretches his right arm by pulling it with his left, which makes him look quite athletic. His elbow seems to hurt. “I played tennis,” he says, “too hard.”

Sam is looking at Paul.

“You guys are coming out,” Paul says, sincerely resentful, “and you're still babies.”

Sam grins sideways. I am dumbfounded. How did Paul do this? “I'm late,” mumbles Sam, “compared to some. There's this kid in, um, ninth grade.”

“Shit,” says Paul briskly. For a moment he views some interior film of his own life, and Sam and I imagine the years gone by and the regrets, and we wait for him. Of course, I think apprehensively. Sam, free and young and handsome, is for Paul a symbol of complex and powerful things. I suddenly wonder if I have chosen wisely.

“How old are you?” Sam asks Paul.

Paul gives Sam the summary of how he met Steve at Pink's liquor store on Sunset late at night after a disastrous date, a handsome guy who had left him on the sidewalk. He was crying in his rum and Coke, Steve sat down on the concrete, dumped the drink down the storm sewer—Paul had alcohol poisoning by this time—took him home, and put him to bed. Steve teaches seventh grade, public school, in Jefferson Park, all sorts of kids, Cambodians and Guatemalans and an Asiatic hill tribe, who the hell knew what. Little kids with straight black hair. Good kids. Paul takes out a photo and shows it to us. Sam examines the photo with interest. Steve looks surprisingly army sergeant–like for a teacher, handsomer and smaller than Paul. Dark, some Indian blood. A few gray chest hairs.

So what did Paul do?

Screenwriter. (Sam darkens.) Unproduced. (Sam brightens.)

Paul checks his watch, puts a fist on Sam's collar and starts dragging him out of the house backward like a potato sack. “We're late,
we gotta pick up Steve.” In my general direction he says, “We're taking him to the mountains today. He'll be back by midnight. You have my cell number.”

I nod, but Paul is not facing me. Sam is, and I watch his face as he recedes. They go out, and the door closes. I stand alone in the living room, looking at the front door.

The door opens again, and Sam rushes in and attacks me. Actually he brusquely puts his arms around me and buries his face in my shoulder. He has to lean down. Then he bolts out the door.

 

FOUR DAYS LATER ON A
Wednesday, the book club starts at 6:30
P.M.
There's a small change, I say. Given things, they are not at all surprised.

I have supplemented their reading. I hand out a series of pages, which they accept and look at intensely as if I'd put details of Howard's leaving in it. I have something to say, and I am not exactly sure what it will be. But when I start to speak, it comes out fluidly.

William Golding,
The Lord of the Flies
, I say to them. I want to add something.

When my father went into the army, it was, I think, a severe shock. We recall World War II as “the good war,” but this is stupid hindsight. If you are expecting the upstanding adventures of
Chatterbox
, modern warfare disappoints. People argue that the Great War destroyed the upper classes, but for my father, Matthew Hammersmith, who joined up in 1939 at age twenty-five—and for Britain, I personally believe—it was the Second that truly did it, because it underlined the whole goddamn, bitter thing. It killed (finally) the concept of the gentleman, it finished off the fields of Eton, which had only just begun bleeding to death in 1914, the brave school lads marooned on islands, and so on. It was the death of a moral belief, and the death of a moral belief, by gun or science or literature, is
the cruelest death of all. From time immemorial people have had detailed belief systems, carefully organized in their heads, and they have all died, and it has, always, been agony. It made Kipling cry out, “What comes of all our ‘ologies.'”

I do not refer to Howard.

Instead I say to them: Golding makes it clear that it is more painful for our beliefs to die than it is to die ourselves, because (I will lay this on the air, which will carry it to them, and they will carry it to Howard's ear) our lives are simply our lives, but when we retreat to a set of beliefs, no matter how stupid or crazy they may be, we turn these beliefs into the very purpose of those lives. And that is a perversion.

You could think of Auden, I said to them. I picked up the piece of paper on which I'd printed the poem from the Internet and read it out loud. From “September 1, 1939.” The title itself—the date Germany invaded Poland and began the war—was more than half the poem, but then context is arguably everything.

We would all soon plunge again, of course, into the agonies of dying belief systems—Auden writing just before this plunge, Golding just after—of certainties drowning, all under the glassy gaze of the psychopathic god, the French in the lead over that distant, tropical, suicidal Indochinese cliff, in 1954, when I was seven, and then the Americans after them, and so down into the darkness. But as
I have said the unimaginable sits, just beside us, at an infinite distance.

I put down the paper and stare at it. I take a deep breath.

 

MY CELL RINGS JUST AFTER
eight on a Saturday morning. When I put the trowel down and answer, he says, “It's Mark Siegal, from West 85th Street Films,” as if I'd never met him. Yes, Mark, of course, how are you. “Listen,” he says, “Anne, the screenplay you sent me by this McMahon guy. I really
like this
.”

Wonderful, I say.

“No,” says Mark, “I
really
like this.”

Yes, I say. I see.

West 85th wants to make this picture. (I imagine Paul's reaction, the cry of joy. I am already preparing to hold the receiver away from my ear.)

I do a rapid calculation—it's been weeks since I sent the script over (I think, You, Anne, who are supposed to be so hot)—and despite myself I start to make a slightly acid comment about this.

Smoothly, he cuts me off; he has anticipated me. Look, he's well aware that the standard practice is to call up and effuse immediately, but he'd wanted to lay the groundwork first. Ah, I say. With coolly calculated effect, he lists all the executives and producers and directors who have, during these weeks, read the script. I had no idea. None. (Casually, he communicates that this was part of his plan. He's a real impresario.) The list is impressive. I realize I have the cell pressed to my ear. Most of them, he tells me, are extremely enthusiastic about making this picture. Making it with me. We (emphatic) are going to make this picture. I will have to join the production company, he says, how's coproducer as a title (we can discuss that), pitch dates, we're thinking in two weeks, they're pitching it already to Sandy at Fortis, and to Nancy, perfect for Flower Films, and Bonnie Bruckheimer's gonna go crazy. He's sent it to a big director as
well—he mentions the name casually—who is reading it, he says, “avidly.” (This I take with a grain of salt.)

I shift the phone to the other hand and sink my trowel under a delphinium, squinting at the sun. I'm sorry, Mark, I missed that.

He repeats: “There is money, obviously.” Oh yes. And there is art. There is
literature
, there is creativity.

I wipe my forehead with my trowel hand, sprinkling a bit of enriched dirt in my hair. The receiver asks, “Who is this guy, by the way?”

I explain Paul. “Hm,” says the receiver, thinking. “Well, do you trust him?”