You or Someone Like You (38 page)

Barry edges backward into his chair. Howard is much larger than he is. Jennifer stares at Howard. Because she is very attractive, and given Barry's reaction, she intuits the backstory, the character relationships, and the plot, but not the theological subtext, not the moti
vation. Two associate producers arriving for the meeting are frozen in the doorway.

Howard says, “You
prick
.” Barry eyes the words. Howard's shoulders sag and his eyes unfocus. “You goddamn fool,” he adds to empty space.

He turns and the producers at the door press against each side of the doorway as Howard walks out between them, down the hallway, out the door, and gets into his car. They hear the engine roar and the sound vanishing.

The producers look at Barry, sitting there.

“What was
that
?” says Barry.

No one believes him.

 

When Jennifer will recount this to me later, both of us standing on an asphalt parking lot far enough from the studio that no one will see us (our two cars parked at odd angles, like FBI agents meeting covertly on this empty expanse), she will say, “I think I know why Howard called him that.”

A fool? I will ask.

She nods.

I will say very briskly, It's that Howard sees the risk of a man like him falling in love with a woman like you. Which is to say of making the same error Howard made.

She smiles simply because she is learning this. “And,” she will reply evenly, “the equal risk to the woman of falling in love back.”

For some reason I think of Ellie peering down at the trash cans. “Well,” I say, “at least there's that.” A non sequitur feels appropriate.

“He misses you,” she says. “I feel like he's suffocating from it.” We hear the cars driving past on Lankershim. “He's so torn up,” she says.

I steady myself on the parking lot's cement wall. How do you know he misses me? I ask her. How do you know?

She loves him, too, actually, and I suddenly see the sadness this
is causing in her. “It's in every gesture he makes.” She will frown. “He's had two”—(she's trying to remember the word
shidduch
, which I supply)—“two of them.” A pause. “You know that the rabbi has forbidden Howard to have any more contact with you.”

I assumed so.

“He took both women to the same kosher restaurant in Beverly Hills. He found the food mediocre and the conversations brutally uninteresting.” (I can hear Howard saying these words.)

“He looked at the women,” Jennifer says, “at their long skirts, at the wigs they wore, nodded while they talked, and thought about you.”

We will each be getting back into our cars when through my windshield I will see her say, “Oh!” and she will run back to me across the parking lot. I roll down the window. “Anne, what are you reading?”

I will think: Yes, I suppose he would want to know that. I will say to her, Tell him that I've stopped reading.

 

THE PHONE RINGS, AND WHEN
I pick it up, there's nothing but a man, breathing.

Howard, I say. I love you.

I listen to his breath, and he listens to mine. We are not allowed to talk, but we can listen, and so that is what we do. Outside the stars turn overhead.

When he puts the receiver down, it is very gentle. Like a kiss goodnight.

 

I BEGIN MY LONG-SCHEDULED TALK
on Why Do People Fear Art (meaning literature) this way: When it happened, I say to the audience, we were on a small cruise ship in the Mediterranean, an archaeological tour run by an Israeli outfit. The incident was reported later by AP.

(I am standing in an exquisite outdoor space. The evening is a yel
low and red liquid over the ocean, an opalescent blue inland. There are no stars yet. A private talk to a select group at a large private home in Bel Air. A wooden Japanese templelike structure is above us. A small cascade of water plunges into a black swimming pool. There is no podium. I stand before them in a simple charcoal dress. I am relaxed. There will be an elegant reception afterward. The caterers are setting up, the wine has been plunged in ice. It is just after 6:30 in the evening, and it is a Tuesday night.)

Our ship had left Tel Aviv on the tour, sailed to Luxor, I believe it was, and we were heading to the Sinai for two days. Then Turkey for three. The ancient world. We were sitting in the lower dining room on the tacky gold-colored chairs, listening to a lecture about Knossos. The visitors walked in as if they were bored houseboys. They put a shot in the ceiling. A single bullet hole. We peered up at it with confusion. One of the Americans, Zimmerman, a Miami carpeting mogul, demanded What did they want? and couldn't keep his voice from shaking. The leader—he was clearly the leader—did not bother to respond. They escorted us all to our compartments to get our passports. Once we had them in hand, without consulting them, they began dividing us up in a first pass.

They put the five Brits and the two Swedes and the Norwegian family with small children in the breakfast room above. The lower lecture room they filled with the Italian scholar and her husband, the sole Turk, the only other family onboard—Mexican—and a honeymooning Argentine-Peruvian couple. An eclectic bunch, but we were all in it for the archaeology and were thus self-selectedly rather serious minded. The two Germans were in the tiny disco with the five Japanese, the Spanish couple—he a violinist, she an alto—and the Canadian graduate students.

Americans were, at twelve, the largest single group. We sat in the game room and did not speak.

Then they did a second pass. This time they checked the passports.

They came and took out Zimmerman and his wife, both somewhat portly and fussily dressed. From the deck breakfast room they extracted Dr. and Dr. Wolfson (from Bath, England), with whom we had discussed Greek mythology the night before. From the lower dining room they took Sr. and Sra. Carlos Steinberg, the musicians. The Japanese remained untouched and utterly mystified. They alone, one of the Canadians told me after, while conscious that there was a system of assortment, could not divine it.

They came to the Levys from Miami. “Ah,” said Mr. Levy, enunciating each word since we had no idea how good their English was (they had barely spoken), and pulled on his damp collar, “you see, my wife is not…” The young man with the machine gun pointing at us watched him with detached, clinical interest; perhaps in Egypt or Saudi Arabia he did entomology when he wasn't doing this. “My name is Levy. But my wife's maiden name is Hanson.” He attempted to point at the U.S. passport held above him, the blue cover and stamp with the State Department eagle. “Under ‘maiden name,'” he explained helpfully. And when the young man with the gun remained opaque, he added, “She's from Wisconsin.” I was furious. I said to him, They even have them in Wisconsin. He vaguely turned to me and looked nauseous. His wife was trembling. They sent both the Levys outside.

They took Howard's passport and my passport. Howard looked at me. I would never, not for an instant, have allowed him to separate me from him due to my last name, and after a brief moment, he nodded at me, and we turned to face them together. A tall one with a thick beard fingered through our passports, bending the pages into blue, ink-covered arcs, and then, with a little moue of the lips, motioned after the Levys. We stood. We walked out. We, all of us who had been sorted according to the system, American and Spanish and English and one Canadian (Margulies, a postdoctoral in Upper Paleolithic art), we all sat on the top deck, as instructed, in deck chairs in the sun. We watched a small plane fly up close, circle
the boat once languidly, go away again. We held light-green cotton deck towels over our heads to try to block the sun. After about two hours, we began to think the visitors had gone. We didn't move. We heard nothing. Then the crew came up from below, blinking at the light, and restarted the diesel motors. I don't even know how AP got the story.

I always marveled that Levy would not enunciate that word
Jew
. I assume it was because other people could hear him. Death was staring him in the face. But he was a highly socialized creature.

We never found out what they were. I suggested IRA. Everyone looked at me blankly. Black Irish, I added. One of the Dr. Wolfsons coughed. If that's your idea of a joke…

Of course it was my idea of a joke.

We continued to Sinai, then Turkey. We flew home. No one noticed. Not even CNN. I saw one report, in Turkey, which said (I asked someone to translate) that the guns were fake. But there was the single bullet hole in the ceiling. Maybe it was fake.

Here, I said to them in Bel Air, is the one and only exchange my husband and I had about the event.

My husband: The fucking Arabs divided the Jews from all the other groups, from everyone else.

Yes. Precisely.

My husband: A very long pause—What does that mean?

It means precisely.

Howard: Anne—

That is precisely, exactly the division that Judaism makes.

How could you say that, he said.

Howard, I replied. Don't be ridiculous. You're an adult.

I paused at that point in my lecture. I stared up at the Japanese trellis overhead because I was formulating words, and it was tricky.

We may, I said, standing no more than a single centimeter from another person, glimpse vast sights they do not see, whole worlds
hidden to them a mere movement away. What you do, I see. I see many of you spend your entire lives avidly, constantly making exactly this division, imbuing it with the deepest meaning, positing it your central tenet of what you call worship. And then I see you shocked when people you've divided from yourselves notice. Shocked when other people draw this same line. Yet you are adults.

I don't even mean, I add, the more obvious aspects of Jewish theology, the dietary laws and so on. The practice of the rites ostensibly for the benefit of some deity but actually meant simply to perpetuate an ancient idea of an us. And, just as importantly, a them. What is called “Judaism,” both the religion and the culture, consist in their practice of this division of all human beings into these two groups. The disgust for
trefe
being of course not a disgust for shrimp but a disgust for non-Jews. What compounds this is the ludicrous idea that this division must always and only work in one direction. How convenient and good racialism is when you're doing it, when it's you keeping you a separate, integral, coherent group. How inconvenient and terrible it is when others are doing it to you. This is the live by the sword, die by the sword problem. Hypocrisy and so forth. This is what I want to discuss. This is the reason people hate literature.

 

The evening is now twilight, the horizon over the expanse of ocean a nuclear rim above dark water. It faces an approaching sheet of violet. Now there are a few stars. One glows through the wooden lattice above us, laced with shadowed wisteria.

I was asked, I say to them, to talk about why some people hate literature. Why some groups, regimes, systems, religions fear it.

(I pause to drink from the water glass at hand.)

The reason is obvious, of course. Literature shows us who and what we really are, whether we like it or not. This isn't an original observation. But there it is. I think the most important thing to note
this evening will be something Auden wrote from New York to his father in England. Auden was conscious of his position, and he began by saying that (I've taken out my three-by-five cards, neatly arranged, and I read) “if he wants to be the mouthpiece of his age, as every writer does, it must be the last thing he thinks about. Tennyson for example
was
the Victorian mouthpiece in ‘In Memoriam' when he was thinking about Hallam and his grief. When he decided to be the Victorian Bard and wrote ‘Idylls of the King,' he ceased to be a poet. What an age is like,” (I look up at them) Auden added pointedly, “is never what it thinks it is, which is why the best art of any period, the art which the future realizes to be the product of its time, is usually rather disliked when it appears.”

Auden's identity is Namelessness. (I stress the word.) And it was hated, and it
is
hated and feared still. (I pause.) For instance, you hate it, I say to them. (A few eyes either widen or narrow, and someone shifts in a seat.) Auden rejected the traditional classifications of country, race, religion, and so on. I had always known I instinctively embraced this. Until something happened to me recently, I say to them, taking a breath, I never quite realized how deeply I am nameless, too.

Now, art—let's use a specific example. You hear or read or see something, some piece of art, and you think, “Ah, this means that.” Look again, and you frequently realize it means something completely different. This may well be the artist's intention. For example:

In my own book club it did not occur to many otherwise good, decent, educated people that this is literature adamantly opposing the idea that we should order our lives by (I glance down at a three-by-five card) “the feeling that throughout the world there are people who somehow or other have the same kind of DNA that you have.”

In my opinion, I add, neither cultural pride nor theological kinship offers guidance that is morally satisfactory. And yes, I fully realize that secular spirituality's dark and dubious places are more numerous and obscure than those of religious spirituality. But I expect us to be big boys and girls and to get to work and deal with them. Not to retreat, pathetically and incoherently, like frightened children to religion's atavistic fairy tales.