You or Someone Like You (36 page)

I lay the photocopy of the Shidduch Profile on the desk and step back. He stops moving. We stand there, next to each other, his back
to me, both his hands resting on the desk, his head down. I watch his back rise and fall. “Anne,” he says, and I can barely hear his voice. “I'm so sorry.”

When he has gone, I look again at the Profile. At the bottom of the page is a quotation, Lamentations 5:21: “Turn us to You, O God, and we shall return; Renew our days of old.”

I think of Denise's wall behind her battered screen door in Compton. The little frame holding Romans 9:25. “I will call them my people which were not my people.” And then I remember the second part. “And her beloved, which was not beloved.”

 

THE CURRENTS PICK UP EVERYTHING.
The words Howard speaks, the expression he wears, are borne to my ear on the tides, reliable as clockwork, and what I say these tides bear swiftly back out to sea to other ears on other shores.

So I say to him what I would have said were we face-to-face. What would we, all of us, be to a god? I asked them that evening at my book club as we sat, gathered in my garden. How would a god see us?

(They were a little startled at my opening approach to the text—I have given them James Joyce—but game enough.)

None was more acquainted than Joyce with the Troubles. In
Ulysses
, Leopold Bloom, a Hungarian Irish Jew, sits in a Dublin pub. The talk takes a political turn. Bloom complains that the history of the world is full of persecution, which perpetuates “hatred among nations.” Someone asks him, “But do you know what a nation means?” Bloom answers: “A nation is the same people living in the same place.” And then adds, “Or living in different places.”

OK, their faces said, waiting. The paperbacks sat, poised, on their knees.

Bloom, I said, escaped “nations” because he understood a better way of grouping ourselves.

An absolute adherence to culture, I said, is as stupid as an absolute adherence to nation. Cultures are merely what we decide they are, and thus they change constantly. As we mature, we leave things behind all the time.

In my garden, they lean forward with the copies of
Ulysses
on their knees. What are you saying? they ask me.

I am saying, I say, that the problem with a nation is that it demands that identity be taken seriously.

I am saying that a god—I use the term figuratively, I specify to them (Howard, when the tide carries this back to him, will understand me)—of goodness would never buy a Nazi ideology of racial purity and superiority of one group of people over all others. People would, yes, because these ideologies of us and of them are adaptive human nature. But human nature can be overcome, to a degree.

I am saying that as far as a god would be concerned, all of us are human. I am saying what James Joyce said: A nation is the same people living in the same place. Or else living in different places. And if we choose to be—
if we choose
—we are the same people.

They sat back. They said this was just beautiful. They nodded to each other, and they nodded to me. They did not understand, of course they never prescribe to themselves what they prescribe to everyone else. But they loved what they thought I was saying.

 

ONE OF THEM HAD UNDERSTOOD
me. It was, perhaps not surprisingly, someone who has over the years been a guest in our home, someone in whom we took real pleasure. The man (it doesn't matter who) saw me in the lobby of a building. Immaculate suit and tie. He approached, and we exchanged a greeting.

“It's how he feels, Anne,” he explained to me. “You can't condemn someone for how they feel.”

Actually, I said, you can't really condemn anyone for anything else.

He assessed me. He said, in essence, This is ultimately very dangerous, what you are doing, and I would counsel you against it. Why don't you just let him go.

I registered the strength of his reaction. I replied, I cannot.

“If you continue, you will lose me as a friend.” (It was putting me on notice.)

And I swallowed, although I tried not to show it, and steeled myself and replied, You are not my friend.

He was trying to work me out. He said carefully, “Anne, you and Howard and I have been friends for fourteen years.”

And I said: Let me restate. You like me, and I've always liked you, very much. You and I are quite happy to see each other once every four months at a party. But you confuse friendliness with friendship. And if you would advise me to live apart from him, you don't know me at all.

I look at the fine cloth of his suit, the shoulders precisely squared.

I say, This is why your threat is empty. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that none of you can hurt me.

He considers this. “And Howard?” he asks.

He has taken me by surprise. I say, Yes?

“Losing him would hurt you.”

The words escape before my mouth can close over them. More than anything, I say.

“Ah,” he says, nastily, and with satisfaction.

 

Perversely I find that the farther I go, the more of the armor I shed. As I open myself bit by bit I feel more and more protected. How is it that as I am increasingly visible, a target making itself ever clearer, I am safer than I've ever been before. I never, ever would have imagined this.

I overhear someone saying that “shiksa” derives from the Yiddish word for blemish. I'm not certain whether they know I am within earshot.

 

JUSTIN IS HOLDING THE COPY
of
Variety
. He hands it over warily. “Literary guru of Hollywood,” they have written, “wife of Howard Rosenbaum,” “exclusive book salon,” “has parlayed renown into a coproducing deal with West 85th Films.” “Rosenbaum brings a project to the table,” “scribe Paul McMahon.” All the ridiculous, campy language they use. Mark has not (as Justin knows from Jennifer) spoken with Howard, nor did he get my OK to release this.

As if he has some sort of sensor, Mark's call comes during the only hour that I am not at home. Justin takes it: Listen, says Mark, someone leaked the deal, didn't know who but whatever, forget it, done now—and it had sparked considerable interest. Ride it, just ride it.

It has its predicted effect, like heroin in the bloodstream. Todd Black calls to say that he is devastated, he'd been prepping a proposal, could we meet immediately? And Jon Liebman and Gary Levinsohn both send notes, Dan Aloni and Bob Bookman leave messages to say that, look, now I really
did
need representation. And someone from the
Hollywood Reporter
, and someone else from
Variety
.

And Paul McMahon (now known as “my” screenwriter), breathlessly saying that he's been “personally called” by Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas and, twenty minutes later, by Arnold Rifkin, and they've both sent messengers, he's just sent them treatments, OK? not scripts! not scripts, Anne! for other ideas, which are being read even as he speaks. Paul assumes (hopes?) this was OK with Mark, and where the hell am I, he's been trying to reach me all day.

 

JENNIFER DOESN'T CALL. SHE JUST
arrives.

Sam sees her car from his window and runs out to meet her. They hug in the drive with an easy American intimacy that I will always find remarkable. She took him to Venice Beach, thus eternally
establishing her cool quotient, and on the new Universal ride when he was thirteen and she twenty-two. Standing beside her car, they confer intently. I can see that she is holding a manila folder. Sam gets very heated and angry. She puts a hand on his shoulder, and he calms down. She glances at her watch, then up at the house.

“Hi, Anne.” She hugs me, and we look at each other as if to check for damage.

So. Howard has made a request. Would I bring him something. A letter mailed by accident to our house.

Neither of us knows what to make of his inventing a reason to see me.

Jennifer thinks I should go, in part because she believes I need to, in part because Howard needs to see me. She takes care of him. Sam doesn't want me to see the son of a bitch, and Jennifer and I both know that he does. I already know that I'm going.

I leave them and, in Howard's office, quickly find the ostensible reason. I carry the thin white envelope back to the kitchen, where we ignore it.

Jennifer proposes the following day, 2:30
P.M.
She has his agenda in her head. He suggested Canter's Deli, she says. Fairfax between Rosewood and Beverly.

Rosewood and Oakwood, I say.

As she leaves, Jennifer passes her manila folder to me. She makes no comment at all on the contents. This is fine. She is guiding me, telling me things I need to know.

There is a recent photograph from a newspaper—not the
L.A. Times
, I assume it's a local paper—of Howard sitting across from Michael Steinhardt and next to Charles Bronfman, “of the Seagram's fortune,” it specifies. “A main sponsor of the $210 million ‘Birthright Israel' project,” reads the caption, “which attempts to deepen the commitment of American Jews.” The article starts by quoting a demographer: There has been “a vigorous effort by organized Jewry to reverse recent demographic changes…to get large numbers of Jews to
change their family-related decisions—that is, to marry young, marry each other, stay married, and have many children.” Then it quotes Bronfman: “You can,” he says, “live a perfectly decent life not being Jewish, but I think you're losing a lot—losing the kind of feeling you have when you know [that] throughout the world there are people who somehow or other have the same kind of DNA that you have.”

I read through it. There is a statement by Mandell I. Ganchrow, president of the Orthodox Union, saying that intermarriage is sweeping young Jews “out to sea.” It goes on to describe the differences in approach: The (“rather successful”) Orthodox policy is segregation of Orthodox children from American society in day schools. “Play is discouraged,” writes the reporter. The Conservative movement, by contrast, uses suasion; their website, says the article, promotes an anti-intermarriage book called
It All Begins with a Date.
Various websites that will send your Daily Torah Portion by email (
Parshas Metzora, Parshas Tazria, Parshas Shemini, Parshas Tzav
), an exhortation to save your family from assimilation.

I look at the photograph again. Howard's face is turned toward Bronfman as he speaks. Abe Foxman and Mortimer Zuckerman sit on the other side of the platform. There are two or three other studio people I recognize under the banner.

The following day I turn left off Crescent Heights onto Rosewood. Residential streets. I can't remember whether Canter's has parking. Ah. It does.

We sit at the back. Although if he's trying to hide our meeting, which his rabbi would of course disapprove, I can't figure out why he would suggest this place. He has ordered a tea. And I'm very sorry if his hands begin trembling at the sight of me, and I'm sorry that he is in so much pain, but when he extends a hand across the table, I can't take it. He has needed to see me. OK. I need to say something to him.

I say to him: Take Jennifer. Your protégée. It would never occur
to her that she is a different category of person. It never occurs to her, when the Jewish executive asks her out, takes her to the little restaurant he knows by the beach, gets her into bed, that he might see her as ineligible. No, that would be racist, and she's a good, liberal person. So it doesn't occur to her until she learns late some evening in her driveway, where they are fighting and she is trying with great frustration to
get
his reticence, this sudden out-of-nowhere desire of his to “cool things down.” She's trying to understand through his stumbling words why he's thinking it doesn't work after all. And only when she really, really pushes him and he says that well, if she were Jewish…“What?” she says to him in the dark driveway. And that is how she learns about this. (She is indeed a bit naive.)

She is shocked. She is stunned, and yet still (because she considers herself “open-minded,” because she recycles her glass and plastic and tries to conserve gas) she thinks, OK, wait, it's his religion, right? It's his culture, right?

(So why does it feel like bigotry?)

But no, no, she must be wrong about that.

In her bed, alone, sleepless, she thinks: Then no more Jewish men. But that makes
her
the bigot. Right? But—wait. He's not a bigot when he does it, but I am when I do?

She is sweet, but she is not quite intelligent enough and not quite brave enough to add the parts together and reach the logical conclusion. She rationalizes it until she falls asleep, tearful and newly single, near dawn.

Howard says nothing.

Say there is a woman, Howard. Say she's black. She has a degree from some ivy-covered East Coast college. She works in a steel-and-glass tower, manages twenty-three people, plays office politics (which she hates) with some dexterity, and earns a salary her parents still can't believe. She would (if forced) call herself a centrist Democrat, though on taxes she's more with the Republicans (the problem is
that she worries about the environment and is adamant about choice and so she just “votes the person”). She gives to Emily's List, she bicycles on the weekends, she tries to attend gallery openings. These she goes to alone, mostly. She wonders if she'll ever meet the right man. She watches the various single men looking at the paintings and glancing at her. And from this aforementioned list of facts about her, any—any—of these choices she makes, any of the values she holds, any of the things she does, could in her opinion legitimately disqualify her in the eyes of these men.

Except one. The one she has no control over. Her having or not having the same kind of DNA that they have. If they disqualify her for that? She knows what kind of people they are.