Howard, irritably, asked me what was my obsession with Eliot, for Chrissake, and then he looked at his watch, grabbed the movie schedule, swore floridly, threw his paperbacks in some sort of deteriorating bag, and pushed me at high speed onto West 96th’s sidewalk.
After the movie, I will take him back to my small apartment. The sheets will at first be cold with this early, very chilly autumn, and then very warm. It is said by the Greeks that the breath of the Minotaur was so hot it ignited parchment.
But why should I need more than him? I asked her. We were in the Columbia cafeteria.
She frowned, took a quick (slightly exasperated) breath. “Jeez, Anne, you can’t just stay consumed by him.”
Oh, honestly. I’m hardly “consumed.”
“Well, what would you call it!”
God, I thought furiously, this is why I avoid people. I wouldn’t bloody call it anything, but I can’t exactly say that to her. She was my best friend. I couldn’t say, “I’ve found an entire world to live in, and he is enough.” We used to do homework together, this girl and I, go to the movies, paint our fingernails at midnight. She was looking at me. I hunted for a response.
I said, carefully, He is mine.
She gave a single, lithe shake of her head, but when she spoke, her voice almost broke. “I never see you anymore.” She pushed a glass on her plastic tray. “It’s class or him.”
You can see them disappear before you, vanishing away in sadness or incomprehension. Oh, I’ve never been good with people. You rely on them, and you love them, and they love you vaguely from some distance, they kiss you and fly away on a plane, and then suddenly they’re gone. Either you hurt them too easily or they hurt you. Am I wrong, I wanted to plead with her, to find one strong, anchored island and stay safe and contented upon it. But she had simply left her plastic tray behind.
It was shortly after we met that I told Howard a story about a teacher who had taught me Greek mythology. Howard loved the myths. At the time, it was simply something I mentioned to him, casually and entirely abstractly, one of the bits and pieces that had happened to me that he absorbed avidly.
I was in England, I think age thirteen and almost seven months at this particular school just outside London, for me a relative eternity in one place, and I listened with fascination as she spoke about the gods. She was an older, starched woman, but she would allow me to linger with her after class, when the other girls had recrystallized into their well-established structures that did not include places for me. I was one of the prettier ones, just beginning to fill out, but in that single-sex school there were no boys around to elevate my status. She was, for example, the only logical person I could tell of my father’s announcement at dinner that, once again, we’d be going overseas.
For seven months I had hovered by her desk. She would murmur to me bits and pieces about the myths as she frowned at her papers and jotted notes on things. The Greek god Proteus, she said, when he fought with you, had the power to change himself into any shape he wished—lion, serpent, monster, fish—trying to twist away and escape. But there was a trick, she explained sternly. If you could just hold on to him throughout his transformations, he would be compelled in the end to surrender, and resume his proper shape.
She had paused. “This is a new posting for your father.”
Yes. (I would be gone within the week.)
“And where are you going this time, Anne?”
My parents, I said, would be transferred to Jakarta, myself to a British boarding school in Kuala Lumpur.
“Remember Proteus,” she said, fixing me, looking into my eyes. “Just keep tight hold of him, and it will all be all right.”
Despite the hole I felt in my chest, despite the incipient loneliness of another distant country that would soon replace the present loneliness, I understood what she was doing. She was giving me strength via erudition, a particularly, and particularly lovely, British tradition. She was sharing her secular faith. A literate knowledge of the Greek myths to get one through. Very English. I nodded. When she was satisfied, she turned back to her desk. “Right. Off you go,” and she was back to work.
I told Howard this story.
ON THURSDAY MORNING, HAVING FINISHED a few other things, I called Stacey.
One of her assistants put her on. “Anne.” Her voice was hopeful.
I’ve made a list. If you’re serious.
“Of course!” She was thrilled, she said. I realized her voice had quickened my pulse. She had the unique, fresh hope that springs up in us when we are about to begin reading a good book.
Oh, said Stacey. A small cloud passed over the voice. She had been at a meeting the other day and in the parking garage had run into Melanie Cook. Melanie had heard I was starting a book club.
Yes, I said that Melanie had called me, we’d straightened that out.
Ah, she said. Well. The thing was, what Stacey and Melanie were wondering was whether, if I had time of course, if it wasn’t an imposition, would I like to read with them? Obviously I’d already read the books, it was my list after all, but they were thinking an evening every month or so—they would come to me, of course! I wouldn’t ever have to get in a car.
I thought about it. Well, maybe I could do that. Once every month. Or so. Why not. Perhaps we could start three weeks from today? I was looking at my calendar. Thursday evening. At my house.
Stacey said, “Josh, pick up, please.”
A click on the line. “Hi, Mrs. Rosenbaum.”
Hello, Josh.
Josh would make the entry on her calendar. I told Stacey I would leave it to her to coordinate all this with Melanie.
“Of course. Josh?”
“Got it,” he said.
This is not a book club, OK?
“No,” she said, “I understand.” Oh, and she wondered if J. J. Abrams might join us, because she’d mentioned it to J.J., and he loved the idea.
Who was J. J. Abrams?
A director, she said. Great energy.
Oh, yes. Of course. (I had met him somewhere.) If you’ll call him, that’s fine. So that’s three of you, then.
A studio executive, an entertainment lawyer, and a director. I thought about it, potentially pleased.
I went to warn Denise. There always has to be food.
HOWARD AND I WERE MARRIED by a justice of the peace just before 8:00 P.M. at City Hall. My parents were in Burma. They sent their blessings.
Howard’s parents were more complicated. On a frigid February day about two months before the ceremony we took the 1 subway from Columbia in Harlem, changed to the 2 train at West 96th Street, and got out in Brooklyn at Borough Hall. Down Court Street, across Atlantic Avenue, left on Dean Street. This was when one scanned the sidewalks in that neighborhood for danger. They had gathered in the living room, his mother and father, several aunts, an uncle and so on. I was nineteen; Howard, twenty. Stuart, Howard’s brother, was three years his junior. They kept kosher. They handed me cookies and cups as if I was infectious. I tried to catch Howard’s eye, but he was engaged in a side argument with his father about LBJ.
At one point he slipped me upstairs to show me his boyhood bedroom. Well, I whispered to him, the conversation is as iced as the weather.
He was looking around. “They turned my room into storage.”
Howard?
After a moment he said, “Things are fine.”
I said, Well, I’d hardly call this “fine.” You know perfectly well they’re against it.
“It’s none of their goddamn business,” he said gently.
His reticence at discussing it was an emotional default, I knew. As we walked back down the stairs, he held my hand till our knees became visible to the living room and then he released it. He said, moving toward the large kitchen, “When do we eat!”
His mother glanced at me, very briefly. “This one eats?”
I don’t think he heard.
Still it seemed simple to me at the time. Upstairs in his room, Howard had put
his arms around me, bearlike, carefully so as not to make noise. “I love you,” he had whispered simply. So I take it back; we did discuss it, or, to be precise, Howard gave me what seemed to me at that time the only response I could have asked from him. I thought it was the only thing either of us needed. And it was, then.
Stuart made it tolerable. He offered me chairs when they didn’t. It was subtle and typically Stuart, the instinctive diplomat and negotiator, pouring oil on the waters. He talked with me. I asked about kosher. “Kashrut,” said Stuart with a smile. So what was eaten with what, how did they do it? He rolled his eyes, said with equanimity that his parents were self-delusioned, and, in whatever was not self-delusion, hypocrites and fakes. “Do you see two fuckin’ sinks?” He dismissed it. I gleaned that he and Howard had given definitive, if not violent, notice on the Kashrut Question several years ago, and a delicate truce had been forcibly established in which the parties had agreed not to issue statements.
It was Stuart who explained—Howard had never mentioned it to me—that up until a matter of months before he met me Howard’s mother had contrived to introduce him to a succession of Orthodox girls. I said, Really? with some astonishment, and before I could ask more, Stuart added, “They wear wigs. OK?” It was Stuart who, when they weren’t looking, put his hands around his neck and pretended to strangle himself. “Why are you guys laughing?” Howard asked, annoyed. The odd thing, in retrospect, is that I never explained to him what we were laughing at. It belonged to Stuart and me. At some point in the presence of Howard and his parents I had understood that Howard had compartments, hermetically sealed off from each other, and if these were not to communicate with each other, on a certain level I accepted this. My acceptance was automatic. I had been raised that way. It was how I had survived.
One word they used to his face was inappropriate, which I know because I overheard it, and which was a very mild word, but they’d already used all the others.
In the spring, his mother and father came to the wedding. Then we went out for dinner in Chinatown. Conversation was stilted. The food was mediocre. They paid. We said good-bye, walked up Mott Street, waited till we’d gotten to the corner and ran as fast as we could up Canal to the lip of the Manhattan Bridge and we kissed and kissed. We walked up Bowery, bathed in the greasy scent of hot oil, past the kitchen supplies stores, wandered through Union Square where the April buds were just starting to come out.
He told them he loved me, and they knew it was true. That their view didn’t infuriate him infuriated me, at times, and baffled me at others. I didn’t care so much that they disapproved. I cared that he didn’t seem to care and that I had no idea why he didn’t. We had a few minor fights over it, but then it simply became background radiation. I always knew that he loved me. That—and we agreed on this, Howard and I—was what counted.
When Sam was born, we lived inside him.
We soothed him with tiny promises.
We fed him orange flowers from blue islands and imported sunsets to his nursery.
He had the fingers of an artist, the lungs of a stevedore, and the ears of an artilleryman.
We cursed the clock, that it did not give us more hours in a single day to spend with him.
I taught him words: flower. And tree. And clematis, at which Howard said, “Oh, boy,” and rolled his eyes. I was not deterred. I would bring Sam with me to lectures at West Valley Nursery on Ventura, educated, interested women sitting on wooden benches with our coffees in paper cups, the smell of mulch curling around our ankles, evaluating forsythia in arid Southern California. I never join in the decrying of eucalyptus. It is not indigenous, an import to this area, but then so am I, and it thrives here. Besides, it smells heavenly—astringent, fresh earth. When Sam was a baby, he slept. When he was older, he toddled around among the seedlings, and the nursery’s salespeople watched him. In grasses, they knew him by name; I love grasses. At age two and a half, Sam pointed at a vine I was planting in the garden—which was coming together very nicely—and said, “Clematis!” Howard, reading a contract on a teak lounge chair, sat bolt upright, then burst out laughing.
His febrile intelligence, his curiosity, were obvious. As we watched him moving about the garden with his toys, placing a truck just so, investigating a bee, Howard murmured a line of Keats to me: “The creature hath a purpose, and its eyes are bright with it.”
There is a pop song Howard and I heard on the radio. I thought it was so lovely I used to sing it to Sam, when he was little and afraid of the Disney villains.
I’m stronger than the monster beneath your bed
Smarter than the tricks played on your heart
Howard would watch me hold Sam and sing to him. Years later, Sam said that he had been conscious that I was focusing on the line about being stronger than the monsters. But actually, he said, he himself as a child was relying on my being smarter than the tricks the animators sought to play on his heart. Those fake villains they drew into existence. Imagined sources of threat.
EVENING, THURSDAY, THE L.A. AIR is darkening and lovely. It is almost 6:00 P.M., and I ask Consuela to set the table next to the crape myrtle. Jennifer calls from Howard’s office just to check in. No, I have everything. Oh—I tell her to keep Howard away for at least an hour, and she says she’s already arranged that. She’s very good.
J.J. arrives first. We introduce ourselves. He stands, self-consciously deferential, in the entryway in his suit, pressing the book over his testicles like a sporran. “Oh, I’m first?”
Quite all right.
He frowns at his watch. “She said…”
It’s quite all right, J.J., honestly.
“Well. Terrific evening, huh.”
Yes. We’ll be talking outside.
“Great!” he says enthusiastically. Then: “Oh! Should I…?” He makes a quizzical hand motion toward the back.
Please. After you.
“Great!” He moves out, like a one-man platoon taking the garden.
We hear two car engines die in immediate succession, and Consuela brings Melanie and Stacey. The candles are lit, we sort out the drinks. Are they hungry? Denise has made some things, so I hope we’ll all eat. It’s marvelous of you to do this, Anne, they say, to take the time, and so on. I say I’m happy to. Now, first of all, everyone finished, yes? Good, a well-thumbed copy there, nice to see.
I slip into the role as if into warm salt water in some pleasant ocean. They’re watching me closely. I introduce myself very briefly, my literature degree, what this book means to me. It’s an odd sensation, but I like it. Usually I only talk to Howard. This is pleasant. I stop speaking for a moment, clear my throat. Then I say, Right, now you. Who enjoyed the book and who did not?
But the conversation starts out painfully, haltingly. They are hesitant, their ideas cramped, and I don’t understand why, and I find myself suddenly disappointed. Three days later this will be explained to me when I get a phone call from Jeremy Zimmer. It’s the doctorate in literature, he will inform me decisively. How does he know this? Oh, he will say—Jeremy, like all talent agents, speaks with dead certain authority—he’d been to a dinner party last night, seated next to a woman J.J. knows. She talked about it all night. They’d loved it, by the way, the whole evening, really loved it. Oh, and the English accent, too, that also intimidates them.
I will be struck by the fact that even in Southern California, every human being connects a knowledge of books with self-respect and self-worth. I will say to Jeremy, It certainly didn’t occur to me that I was intimidating them.
They found you masterful, Jeremy will say.
So (he adds smoothly) the reason he called, he was wondering, could my book club take another person.
I will be slightly flustered but react by stipulating, It’s not a book club, Jeremy. I will give him the next title, which it turns out he already knows, and the date, which it turns out he also already knows. I will say we haven’t set the where yet but it might as well be at my house again. This, it turns ou
t, he will have assumed. Right. In that case, I say, would he please take charge of logistics and coordination.
“Bronwyn”—his assistant—“pick up, please.”
Click. “Hi, Ms. Rosenbaum,” says Bronwyn.
Hello, Bronwyn.
“Oh, Bronwyn,” Jeremy will begin, “we’ll need you to get us a dessert. A really good one.”
But in the garden on that first evening, it is not working, and I am feeling my way forward tentatively. I think, Why would they listen to me? but I am careful not to show this because in my experience showing doubt never serves any purpose.
I tell them: Please understand. You won’t offend me if you do not like this book. I happen to love it, but a book is like a person, and one’s reaction to a person invariably has more to do with one’s own personality and life experience than with the actual person herself.
I add, Unfortunately.
After a moment I add, That always seems to be the case with others’ reactions to me, for example. They watch me when I say this. I flush very slightly at having made this statement. I’m the least self-revelatory person I know, but they were listening so intently. Well then. I return to my point. Half of any book, I say, is just a mirror in which you do or do not see yourself. But, and this is just my opinion, the best readers try to fit themselves into the writer’s mind rather than the reverse. Take a step toward your authors, and they will repay you twofold.
They listen. And still the conversation stumbles along. They take no risks. They have, I think grimly, no courage.
I’m losing patience and about to look at my watch. And something occurs to me. If you were directing this, I ask them, how would you cast it.
Within two minutes J.J. is waving a cell phone like a switchblade and threatening to call Bonnie Timmermann, the casting director, because obviously such-and-such an actress, who Bonnie happens to love, possesses ex-act-ly the qualities the book’s author ascribes to her main character. Considering the actress’s latest performance, I personally find J.J.’s a rather unusual reading, and I tell him this, and so he immediately cites three different pages from the book at me, slams down a suddenly forceful, precise critique, and I see his point. Stacey dismisses the actress (as does Melanie, though for wildly different reasons), brutally details a New York Times review (eviscerating), suggests a different actress and two supporting actors, and quotes text from the book to support all of it (she has, to our surprise, underlined these sections), but J.J. will not be quashed and says oh, hell, if Stacey casts the supporting characters that way then she has totally missed the author’s whole point, and Stacey is arming herself with her own cell phone and citing filmography right and left and saying fine, then why don’t they just call Stephen Gaghan and ask him, and Melanie is championing her own choice, a young Golden Globe winner two years earlier (“Too young,” snaps Stacey; “Not if Tony Gilroy directs her,” retorts Melanie and with a certain menace goes for her own cell phone).
You or Someone Like You Page 3