You or Someone Like You (7 page)

I gathered their plates and left the dining room for the kitchen, experiencing the amusing sensation of being expelled from a nineteenth-century men's club.

This exclusive connection Howard has with Sam makes Sam openly love Howard, look up to him, be complicit with him. And I know, if I don't fully understand, how almost desperately my husband needs that link to his son.

Denise loaded me up with the pie she'd made, sent me back out so I wouldn't be under her feet.

“You know, Sam,” said Howard as they did a decidedly mediocre job of trimming a hedge—we needed a gardener—“when a house burns up, it burns down.” “Dad,” said Sam at fifteen when he was
finally
old enough to apply for his learner's permit and they stood in the fluorescent lighting of the L.A. Department of Motor Vehicles office, “you fill in this form by filling it out.” They were staying out together at night, practicing Sam's driving on the empty roads near the Hollywood Reservoir, and, “You know, Dad,” said Sam, “when the stars are out, they're visible, but when the lights are out, they're invisible.” Sam pointed at the stars overhead, and my husband tried to name the constellations as my son gently made fun of him. They
were lying on their backs on the hood of the Volvo looking up at the dark sky, side by side.

“It's like a snapshot of fireworks,” said Sam of the stars.

“The poet L. E. Sissman described fireworks,” said Howard.

An airplane blinked away behind the hills.

Sam was watching something far, far up.

 

I MYSELF TOOK A DIFFERENT
approach to Sam with words.

At Columbia I had bombed into Howard's dorm room one evening and said, Burgers! And, I'm starved! He'd gotten a funny look. He was fasting, he explained. It was Yom Kippur.

Oh. (We'd talked that morning between classes. He hadn't mentioned anything.) I considered this. Well, why do you fast? He began to say something. Then he stopped. Howard will work out things right in front of you. He looked at his watch. “Let's get a burger,” he said, a bit slowly, as if he was rather unsure of the syntax. He processed the psychology of this his way: public statements, humor. “It's just like your parents warn you!” he would say, loud and menacing, a few years later to a group of us. We were in our twenties then, taking menus from the waitress at Gennaro's on Amsterdam and 92nd. “The hot blond shiksa asks why, and you abandon all your morals!” He said, “So a Catholic boy marries a Jewish girl. And one
night, not long after the wedding, she starts reaching down under the bedcovers, but he freezes up. ‘It's Lent!' he whispers to her. ‘Oh,' she says, surprised, ‘can you get it back?'” We laughed.

That evening his parents were at Kol Nidrei services.

He always took me to the seders, though. He never wavered on that, and so I went. Howard's mother put us at the far end. Howard held my hand, though under the table. He had grown up going to seders. He had such strong memories, of his grandfather reading from the Hagaddah, said Howard, of looking for the
afikoman
(and the resulting minor skirmishes), of how they'd get silver dollars when they found it. Of how bad the food was. Of that time alone in the year seeing all his cousins, gathered in Brooklyn. Of everyone singing together.

No one bothered pretending. I wasn't welcome, but Howard had married me, and so they gritted their teeth. When Sam was born, I sat at the far end of the table, holding him for five hours. He fussed and squirmed, and my arms ached, and I was miserable. They shot me looks when he got noisy or cried.

When he turned three, to distract him, I began whispering to him a word to learn—Stuart would listen, never saying anything—or perhaps a line from a children's poem, bits and pieces of Milne or Potter. Sam, I would say very quietly, holding him at the table.

Listen.

(A small child, he knew these were our secrets. Another way of saying I loved him.)

At six, Sam, I murmured. You know Cinderella's glass slippers? They actually weren't glass at all. Cinderalla is French, Sam—her name is actually Cendrillon, just as Pinocchio is Italian and the Little Mermaid is Danish—and she wore shoes made of the fur of a squirrel-like animal the French called a
vair
. But as the story was re-told, French people confused
vair
with
verre
, which means glass. So the whole thing is a corruption. Pretty, though, isn't it, I said quietly to Stuart. “Glass slippers.” Stuart was smiling, his arms crossed.

What began as a simple distraction at the seders I've now been doing for years. As I drop him off at school. When he's checked in with me before practice. As he's turning out the light, ready for sleep. Sam, I say. Listen:

Assorted vocabulary: litotical, apposite, liminal. (He knows liminal.)

French words that do not exist in English:
nombre
(a number that is a quantity, ex: 1,004 people) as opposed to
numéro
(a number referring to a position in an order, ex: the fifteenth).

A line from an Elaine Feinstein poem: “The air is rising tonight and the leaf dust is / burning in cadmium bars, the skinny beeches / are alight in the town fire of their own humus. / There is oxblood in the sky.” Isn't that marvelous, Sam?

 

AT OUR SECOND MEETING, DENISE
and Consuela and I set up in the garden. Drinks and ice on a small table before the tall Argentine grass, sparkling glasses lined up, linen napkins for the food, which Consuela will pass. When we're done, the three of us step back and look it over. Yes, perfect.

They arrive, we find our places and open the books.

The next morning I run into a producer at King's Road Café. We're both getting coffee. Hello, how are you? He sees me moving on, gets to his point. It was great that they wanted to read literature, he said. Though of course there was the
other
aspect to it. (He makes a show of choosing a sweetener. This manipulation, making me wait, is completely conscious; like pathological physicists they measure everything here in iotas of power.) Stacey, he says, has an informal relationship with a star, a major one. He names the first name in the way they do, that false nonchalance, the implication (unverifiable) of intimacy. And Jeremy, another. Both stars have made known a desire to commit to a project with serious subject matter, not the usual explosions and romantic pablum off which each has made at least fifty million dollars. Something image-enhancing, he says. Challenging. And, well, he says, I did have a wonderful mind to exploit toward this end. (He uses an apologetic voice.) Thus their, uh, “interest”—he makes the quote marks with his eyebrows—in books.

He just thought I should be aware of their motives.

I say, That's very interesting, I wasn't aware of this. I'm going to have to rethink the list now.

“Oh,” he says, and affects a glum look. “Well, that's too bad.” He begins to move in now, to deploy whatever stratagem he has prepared into what he believes is the vacuum he has just created, but I slice off his leading edge.

No, I say, thoughtfully. I take off my sunglasses so he can see my eyes. I mean, I say, that there are several works I can think of that would be beautifully adapted to the screen, and I'll have to include those.

An instant goes by. “Oh,” he says.

In fact, I say. (He stands there, warily.) In fact, I can think of several works perfect for both these actresses, and now that I think about it, I'm actually baffled that no one has snapped them up. They've taken some obvious ones,
The Age of Innocence
is so hugely cinematic despite the psychological backstory, and anyone could see the strong
visual narrative in
House of Mirth
, and
Portrait of a Lady
has that marvelous transformation arc, you can just storyboard the whole thing in your head. But: I mention a Faulkner. A little-considered one. You could do it period or better yet, updated. I mention a Chekhov story that is a tiny, perfect movie pitch. I say that a certain actress has mentioned to Carla Shamberg and also to Lucy Fisher that she would like to stretch, to do serious now, and the Russian would suit her wonderfully, and come to think of it, Thackeray created a character perfect for that new boy they just put on the cover of
Vanity Fair
, the one with the woolly hair. What was his name? (With the Tourette's reflex they have when given the least opportunity to provide a piece of industry data, the producer supplies the name.) That one! I say, Sam loves him.

He is trying to take mental notes on the titles I am naming, and failing.

I know that he is an enemy of Stacey's. An associate producer credit that, long ago, purely out of spite, he made sure she didn't get. I've always disliked him.

They should have said something! I say happily, meaning Stacey and Jeremy.

As I get back in the car, I feel simultaneously slightly repelled and thoroughly excited. I jot down the titles I've just come up with. I'm looking forward to telling Howard. I think, No, I'm not an executive, like my husband, or a producer, but I do have
some
instincts, and really, they would make marvelous movies.

 

L.A. IS COVERED WITH FLOWERS.
Gasoline pink, mint crimson, moonlight white, deuterium violet.

We drive past them, tuxedo next to evening gown, two elegant Saturday evening pupae in this rushing metal-and-glass cocoon, migrating by infrared night vision toward some disease fund-raiser or cinematic party where we will metamorphose and spread our
wings, seeking the heat lightning of the cameras. Diamonds filigree on my neck.
Click click click.
“Mr. Rosenbaum, over here, sir.” “Howie! Great to see you, how've you been?” “Howard, how
are
you? Hello, Anne.”

Hello.

Before we leave the house, I put my flowers to bed. The bougainvillea simply waits in the dark in its gaudy purple glory. Stupid plant. Infragrant. Ambitious and showy and thorned, but if pruned that sort has its uses. As Howard pulls the car out, I check my new
Stewartia koreana
. I have just transplanted it, and it is wet and upset, bewildered and off-key, but it will be fine in a day or two. The lilies are overwrought from the heat. The butterfly bush is sullen but will perk up later. The kumquat is simply delighted with everything. My horticultural nursery is innocent, sleepy, except the delirious moon vine, which is waking up late, delicately, waving and stretching and looking around, asking, “Where is everyone?”

Everyone has set with the sun.

Out here on the streets, the tough flowers grip the walls, cling to the gates, and skirt the concrete sidewalks, self-saturated with their delicate scented particles and infused with the even more delicate, invisible fizz of television and radio waves, their opalescent petals shot through with the quantum mechanic buckshot of millions of cell phone signals from millions of cars. The street flowers bathe in catalyzed exhaust fumes. The metallic night is cool as tinted glass, hung with the thick odor of indolent Los Angeles blossoms, groaning silently with their own weight, glamorous and petulant. On thin vines, the honeysuckle climbs the concrete barriers behind which they hide the big houses, the long driveways. Everything in L.A. aspires. Even the flowers. Aspiration ladens the bloom-opiated air. They stand, waiting for someone to notice them. As we swoosh up to the brilliantly lit entrance in our car, they languorously shift their svelte, gorgeous bodies, forests of thin-waisted women, covered in the most expensive silken sheaths and suits, slit their eyelids as we
emerge, desperate to know “Who are they?” and “Can I use them?” even as they seek to broadcast “I don't care.” They always greet each other with only one eye; the other is on the future, the rest of the room. As we carve our way through their bright colors and pass by into the hall or home or screening room or backlot, their hot interest blossoms into flame and burns in the next instant to a cinder. They turn back to gaze once again at themselves, straining to determine whether or not they are impressed.

 

HOWARD HAS TOLD ME HE
loves me in so many ways. Some have taken me by surprise.

When Sam arrived, he looked, Howard said factually, like poor-quality dough. His eyes changed colors. He had boils, rashes, his teeth came in, fell out. He screamed, he vomited. He was fat as an infant, and short, then he shot upward and was thin and awkward. We waited, apprehensive, for puberty. And then we had to relearn him physically. The newly tight skin, the slender muscle mass. We could almost identify the day people began to look back when he passed by (he was oblivious), the mascaraed glances of teenage girls in malls, the way they began to track his movements.

I asked Howard: Is he? Really? But what did the word
handsome
mean, exactly? How does this boy look, Howard? And Howard explained. “Sam looks,” he said, “the way we all look when, cocooned in sleep, we are the heroes of our dreams.”