She turned some pages slowly. Smiled, glanced at Sam. “College a year from now.”
I was startled, and I hesitated. Though it was barely September, she had sensed the loss I already felt from Sam’s future departure.
Am I so obvious, I said.
“You’re never obvious, Anne,” she said, smiling. Her gaze moved back to the Ruskin. They often comment on the fact that I always have a book. The tone is sometimes vaguely curious, as if reading were an eccentricity. Usually they glance at the cover, then turn to the menu.
Casey looked at the book in Stacey’s hand, and it reminded him. “So, Howard,” he said slyly. “We’re here.”
Howard, who knew exactly what he meant, just gave him an owlish look, so I explained to Josh, who was not following, that it was because of Sam. Hamburger Hamlet was where we had introduced Sam to Shakespeare. And I turned to Howard, because the subject had come up, and we were with friends, and it was a beautiful evening, and, moreover, it was time.
“When young Hamlet came from college,” Howard explained, looking around the table at us, each in turn (“That’s mine,” he told the waitress who had just appeared, pointing out the iced tea), “full of new ideas and knowledge, he was shocked to learn his pa, the king, had lately passed away.”
“Perrier,” the waitress said. Casey raised a forefinger.
“But his discomfiture was greater,” recited Howard, “when he learned his dearest mater had been married to his uncle”—and here Howard raises his eyebrows menacingly and pushes out the word—“Claude without the least delay!”
“Another iced tea?” Mine. Cokes for the boys, pear juice for Jennifer, beer for Josh.
“For it seemed to him indecent,” explained Howard, “with his father’s death so recent, that his mother should prepare herself another bridal bed. And there seemed to be a mystery in the family’s royal history, but he failed to follow any clue, for fear of where it led.”
With a curious glance over her shoulder at Howard, the waitress retreats to the kitchen. Perhaps it is Howard’s narrator accent, a crisp and remarkably authentic 1950s BBC British. “While he’s in this sad condition he’s informed an apparition is accustomed to perambulate the castle every night. That it looks just like his sire, both in manner and attire, but is silent, staid, and stoical—which doesn’t seem quite right.” Howard puts on a quizzical look, like a demented peacock: “Having heard this testimony from Horatio, his crony, he decides to take a peep at this facsimile of his pop.” Two matching plosives.
So at midnight’s dismal hour
Just outside the castle tower
He confronts the grisly phantom and he boldly bids it STOP.
Josh leans to Jennifer, whispers something, and she smiles and nods. Casey is loving Howard’s Hamlet. He has already heard King Lear this way, lines that both send up and honor the play, at a party at our home, and Romeo and Juliet on, I believe, a tennis court in Santa Monica. Howard memorized these parodies in college.
Those in the industry recognize us. They recognize Stacey and Casey and Josh and Howard. They watch Howard, the waiters who are actors, the dishwashers who are writing screenplays, the hostess who is waiting for a callback. They know his face from the trades. They know he can help green-light a movie, buy a script, make a career. It is Hamburger Hamlet on a Tuesday evening, and we are in Los Angeles, and anything is possible.
Howard tells us Shakespeare’s story, of anger and greed and violence and pain. Then the grisly phantom faded / Leaving Hamlet half persuaded. The tables around us, one by one, fall silent to watch and listen, those next to them notice the silence, then the focus, then the words, and they too still. Spends his time / in frequent talking to himself / of suicide and other subjects tinged with doom. And Howard, because he is an innate performer, increasingly projects to include them, so that in this room the circumference of his words enlarges to fit the expanding circle of attention paid to them. The waiters stop to watch, and so their busboys’ busy motions gently still, and they too turn to our table.
And so then one after other / King, Laertes, Hamlet, mother / With appropriate remarks / They shuffle off this mortal coil.
When he reaches the end, everyone dead, we all applaud. The room fills with the sound. Howard bows to the stalls, accepting the declamation. Amid the applause people murmur. “Howard Rosenbaum,” they say, and his title at the studio, and the last movies he worked on, as if his name were a powerful enchantment and they were spinning a spell. I love Howard’s golden light when he is in his element, the vigor of my husband’s love of these words and stories, but I dislike the hunger this city focuses on him, their celluloid obsession. And I quietly prepare to withdraw into myself as usual and leave them to this world. But this evening, something is different.
It is, I realize, the play. Even in this permutation, I notice, the story holds its own. I look around in wonderment. Casey is looking, too. “I’d forgotten the power of the goddamn thing,” he says. “Look.” Stacey and I turn. Two Guatemalan busboys attack each other with invisible rapiers. The restaurant’s manager, coaching them, tilts the hand of one of the boys as it holds an invisible sword, pitching it, like Howard’s voice, into a perfect affectation of Elizabethan style. There, the manager says with satisfaction, good boy, that’s how we’d have done it on the set. We hear him say, “Shakespeare,” and hesitantly, in heavy accents, the busboys repeat the strange name.
Todd Black, a producer Howard knows, comes over to our table to say something to Howard. Stacey leans toward me. “Listen,” says Stacey. “Anne.” It’s a proposition. “Would you make me a reading list?”
I look at her. She is quite serious.
“What you think is important,” says Stacey. “No,” she corrects herself immediately, “what you think is good.”
Well, I say. Why me?
“You read,” she says, simply enough.
Howard overhears. He turns slightly, toward us. “Make her a list, Anne,” he says to me, smiling.
I don’t really know her that well. She’s Howard’s friend, not mine. They invariably are. Stacey is waiting, Howard and Casey and Sam are watching me. I think, Well, Howard has the same degree, after all. And he has the teaching position. She could ask him. She works with him, not me, on the movies; it would be more professionally strategic for her. Yet she is asking me. And it is impossible to overestimate the pleasure of being included. Even for one who has never much wanted to be.
Certainly, I say. If you like.
I assume it is merely because I have the doctorate in English literature, which impresses them more than it should. That I read a lot is one of the only things they know about me, even though Howard and I have been here for twenty-five years. I have always preferred it that way. In fact I assume that I myself am not actually material. I just happen to know the books.
But I smile, thinking about some titles. I say to her, I think we can come up with some very nice possibilities.
Todd registers this exchange. He returns to his table, where there are several people on Paramount’s production side, and I see him lean down and say something to Brian Lipson, who then makes a comment to a woman from the Universal lot.
AT 11:00 A.M. THE FOLLOWING morning I park next to our house, open the kitchen door, temporarily compromised by all my packages. Denise appears, and I hand her a large wrapped bouquet of flowers. The cone of crackling cellophane is like a lady’s inverted organza ball gown, the flowers many delicate feet. Denise accepts the cone from me and sets it on the kitchen counter. She will deal with the flowers when she’s ready.
They’re from Mark’s Garden on Ventura, I say.
“You was there?” She is not making conversation. She hadn’t thought I’d had time to go that far. I say, Yes, I was, there was an alarming lack of traffic. She goes back to her work.
I deposit the car keys next to the flowers, go to my office and lay down my books, the old ones and the three I just bought at Book Soup. I carry my new blouse upstairs, take
it out of the bag, and hang it in the closet. I wash my hands and face and brush my teeth, use a clean white towel, and then go to the library. I sit down and stare at the shelves. I take out a pad of paper. I am slightly irritated. I have been thinking about Stacey’s list, and it will not coalesce. I hesitate. There are her interests to consider, there is topicality. What would resonate with her. Then it comes to me. I write down the first title. My eyes move along the shelves. I write down another. I open up my Norton Anthology, which leads to other things. Soon I am fascinated, suffused with pleasure. When the phone rings, I am writing down the eighth. Melanie Cook says hello, we talk, in abbreviated manner, about a deal she is undoing. She is one of the industry’s top entertainment lawyers. Howard’s friend. She says, “I heard Howard gave another stellar performance. Does he do those Shakespeare things in class?”
One per semester. They won’t leave him alone till he does.
“Listen. Anne. I heard you’re starting a book club.”
I pause. After all this time, I’m still amazed at the velocity of information in this odd little world.
I realize, with a flush of annoyance at myself, that the idea of creating a book club interests me. Really, I say to Melanie.
“You’re not?”
No, I say, I’m afraid I’m not. I say that someone (I don’t mention Stacey’s name, that would be tasteless, and Melanie already knows anyway) evinced an interest in my making her a reading list. That’s all. Melanie is endearingly disappointed, but like a good lawyer she has prepared an alternative. She presents it in the form of a confession. “We were at a screening,” she says. “Spike Jonze, a rough cut.” After the screening, Bob Zemeckis had gotten into a debate with Jonathan Kaplan. Bob, she tells me, held that Spike was being derivative and cited The Ugly American to support his position. (“The book,” she stipulates, “not the movie.”) Zemeckis paraphrased a passage. Kaplan had responded that The Secret Agent was actually a better reference and that Spike was in fact starting where Conrad had left off. “Carla Shamberg agreed,” she said, “then Marc Lawrence brought up Saul Bellow.” She mentions a Bellow title. (I correct it slightly, which she accepts with grace.)
“It was visceral,” she says, “we could feel it, and I suddenly thought—” She pauses, remembering, a little awed. “I thought, my God, picking up the damn books with your hands. Not the Columbia Pictures version of Edith Wharton with an Elmer Bernstein score pushing you through. The Wharton itself.” She sighs. “How long since I’ve done that.” I know what she had felt, standing there as they spoke the book titles that appeared in the air, one by one; the titles conjured, they were spells. Literature is a power, like a foreign language you possess. The titles had clearly been played like cards. And her feeling was also of guilt, and I think: So she is, in fact, confessing. But no matter. Wanting to appear capable is not an illegitimate reason to read books.
She comes to her point. My name had come up. What if they read the books with me? She mentions a few people who are interested. “It’s your field,” she says.
I rub my fingertips on the desk. I love the particular spell she is under, it is one I know well, and because she is under it, at this moment I love her, but I simply am not in the position to pursue this. In order to put her off gently, I tell her I’ll consider it.
“Good.” Melanie has, she thinks, planted a seed. “Great.” She hangs up as if tiptoeing.
I retrieve the salad Consuela has made me and carry it and The Way We Live Now out to my chair by the Campylotropis macrocarpa, which I transplanted the week before. I check its small purple-white flowers, which are healthy. I start to read and forget about the list and the call.
Then I remember it again on the studio lot, and under a translucent California evening mention it to a man outside Howard’s bungalow. I am waiting for Howard so we can drive home together. I’ve known this man since we came here, he started in production design at Warners, and now he has his development deal and his sleek office. Three overweight union members in T-shirts are pushing a blue 1950s-era car across the lot. The car has no engine, it’s fake. When I mention the book list, he squints into the sun, then laughs. “Anne,” he says.
What?
With a look he apologizes for the laughter but explains very patiently, “Nobody reads in Hollywood.”
IN MY DESK THERE IS an ancient letter I scribbled to my mother in gray, chilly London.
I was not, I’d written, happy at having left London, at having turned down Cambridge, at Barnard’s class offerings now that I was actually in New York. At the color of the New York sky, for that matter. I was not even happy (for reasons so juvenile I prefer not to recall them now) with my apartment, 808 Broadway, above the antiques dealers. (My mother kept the letter, gave it back to me a decade later; “It’s not revenge,” she said, smiling, and I knew it wasn’t; reading yourself in immature, overwrought version is instructive.) And the Americans.
One example: I wrote to her about a largish bespectacled left-handed boy with curly black hair who focused intently on whomever was speaking in the 2:00 P.M. Columbia English literature seminar. On our first day of class I had shared the briefest of opinions. Anne Hammersmith, I said to them. I observed that Trollope made few claims for the durability of his own fiction. Which was, in my prim opinion, appropriate humility. But George Eliot? “Eliot’s novel Romola will live forever.” I’d been emphatic and a little breathless about that.
The other students shot me sideways glances. Except for the black-haired boy. He did not agree. He felt (“Your name, please?” “Sorry: Howard”) that Trollope created fully real worlds where Eliot tended to write over her readers’ heads. Howard was impatient with George Eliot and impatient with Romola and, clearly, with me. I turned away.
The next day, driven perversely by a fury, I drifted into the orbit of a Formica-topped table near the back of a Greek diner on West 96th, a table he always inhabited accompanied by several thick paperbacks. I walked slowly, unwrapping my scarf and pretending to look for someone, but he didn’t care about the pretense. “Hi. C’mere. Siddown. You want some coffee?”
Crisply: No. Thank you.
“You sure?”
I’m sure.
“So, you English?”
Sort of, I said, you American?
“Hey, funny.”
Look, he explained, Eliot just couldn’t make up her mind whether she wanted to be the writer or the goddamn reader—she barely got a character invented before she started responding to him. Turgenev, on the other hand, stayed the hell out of his stories, let you do your own damn responding, and that, said Howard, was the way to write literature. Present the characters as the world sees them and get the fuck out of the way. Hey, did I wanna go see a movie? Oh, perhaps I disagreed about Turgenev, but he would convince me. I was astonished by all the various conversational pieces he pushed furiously at me. And then he came back to the accent.
Yes? I said of the accent. And?
He grinned, repeated the phrase about “inventing characters,” and it took me a second, but then I gasped. You think, I said, that my accent is fake! Well, I assure you—
“I think it’s lovely whatever the hell it is.” Before I could explain it, he proposed we see a film by Some Important Director Or Other. He rushed through the director’s filmography, explained why he was great, how he stacked up next to other directors, and this movie was a literary adaptation—
I was so thoroughly put out with him that I cut him off and agreed to go to the movies. Howard seemed to still. We sat in the sudden silence. His eyes were on me, and so I glared at the chalkboard menu on the wall. I dislike people trying to work me out, I always have. An old waitress trudged past with a Pyrex globe of coffee and a sigh. A customer entered at the other end of the diner, shivering. He began to talk to me, more quietly now. I can’t remember taking off my coat, but at some point I did.
We talked about New York versus London, and then important variations on this theme, like winter versus summer,
and which was better, hot chocolate in winter or ice cream in summer.
I think I asked if he believed in God as an attempt at being witty. Howard’s gaze was so focused, I thought there was going to be a punch line. On the question of religion, he said, he was agnostic. I took him seriously, then realized. Oh, I said, you are joking.
He shrugged. He seemed completely uninterested in discussing it. “Joking and not joking,” he said.
I considered this. You’re Jewish, though agnostic.
That he was Jewish was, Howard stipulated, clear. “I’m as Jewish as they come, culturally.” He quickly listed several words I didn’t know (“They’re holidays”), recited something in Hebrew quickly.
As for God? Yes, yes, he said impatiently, he had some sense of God. “Or, you know. Something.”
At the time, perhaps because I was young, what I spotted here was nothing more than a delicious chink in his armor. To divert his attention I trailed an ostentatiously casual finger in some spilled sugar. God or not, it wouldn’t matter, I said, licking crystals from my fingertip. Belief in God is irrelevant to Judaism. You can be completely Jewish and completely atheist. Exhibit A: Karl Marx. Exhibit B: Disraeli, a confirmed Anglican. Ergo, I said, Judaism was not most fundamentally a religion, it was most fundamentally a race.
Ah ha: Finally the boy truly objects to something! No, he said, it was most fundamentally a religion. We had an intense argument on this, and I won with Daniel Deronda by (I so loved saying it) George Eliot! (He glared at me.) You’ll recall, I said, that Eliot’s Daniel is raised Christian, is culturally Christian, knows nothing of Judaism whatsoever, but is considered Jewish by the writer, the reader, the other characters, and the Jews for the sole reason that he is racially Jewish; ergo the fundamental definition of Judaism is racial.
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