You or Someone Like You

by Chandler Burr

  He genuinely loved them, and they responded in kind. He disliked “Doctor” (“Only my mother calls me doctor,” he told them; this was in fact true) but got a kick out of “Professor.” Then a colleague saw him coming out of Rolfe Hall after class and shouted at him, “How are you, Howard?” and he shouted back, “I’m great box office,” and he was afterward known by all of UCLA and eventually everyone at the studio as GBO.

  In class, Howard was not overly prudent. It was just discovered, he told his second freshmen seminar, that Shakespeare actually wrote three plays about penises, one four-inch penis, another eight inches, the last one ten. They got the first one immediately—Much Ado About Nothing—and the second, Midsummer Night’s Dream. But the third?

  “Othello,” said Howard.

  The dean looked very grim as he listened to the single complaint by an intense young woman from Walnut Creek who lectured him on Professor Rosenbaum’s racism, patriarchalism, and sexism. He ushered her out with solemn tones, and then called his wife, an Elizabethan scholar, and repeated the joke to her, laughing hysterically.

  Howard paces the dais of the amphitheater enthusiastically. He is not bothered by doing the elementary stuff. Contrary to what all of you weaned on Warner cartoons think, he tells them, star-crossed lovers does not mean that Romeo and Juliet, a boy and girl three years younger than you are now, are so in love they have Chuck Jones animated stars circling their heads. No. What does it mean?

  An expectant glance at them over his reading glasses, his favorite prop. I bought them for him at the Rexall drugstore near the Beverly Center. Time’s up! Yes, possums, it refers to astrology, which used to be the state religion in Elizabethan hangouts. “What’s thy sign?” It means that this boy’s and girl’s respective astrological houses are at odds. Also, “Wherefore art thou, Romeo?” does not mean “Where the hell are you?” but “Oh, Christ, why do you have to be Romeo Montague, and I Juliet Capulet, two families at war, what a pain!”

  The first year, GBO rewarded their curiosity with a few juicy industry tidbits, was it true that such-and-such a star who Variety reported was working with him had signed for such-and-such a movie? He began rationing this sort of thing for moments when he found himself losing their attention. He stood at the lectern with his drugstore reading glasses and his notes and used sex to glue them to the text.

  “Every culture and society renews its religious injunctions against sex as perennially as sexual desire is renewed, which is to say every third of a nanosecond. The reflexive whitewashing of the past that we do with respect to sexual mores, which In My Humble Opinion derives basically from our desire to avoid imagining our parents doing it, leads to a really silly view of human nature. People use sex for many purposes. Certainly Shakespeare did. And his contemporaries. Take John Donne. Slightly younger than Bill. Donne 1572–1631. (Shakespeare’s dates? Hm? You in front, with the Lakers T-shirt. A guess, then. Dude, you can do it! What? Not bad, Shakespeare, 1564 to 1616.) During Vietnam, a war that we sort of fought before all of you were born, young men gained exclusion from military service if they got their wives or girlfriends pregnant, which gave the slogan ‘Make Love Not War’ a certain, shall we say, piquancy. ‘Better to make a person here than kill one over there.’ John Donne made the same argument in a poem called ‘Love’s War,’ on page 1068, where for example—ah, the sound of those pages riffling—where there are a few choice lines that never fail to bring a smile to my face. Just ask my wife. She’s sitting next to the big blond hunk in the sweat shirt, the one who looks so much like me. Wave, Anne. Thank you. Donne sees love as a constant, eternal war, only to him there are two kinds of war. You, yeah you, with what I’m sure is an absolutely lovely mezzo-soprano, or perhaps a basso profundo, please read and think of my marriage.”

  The boy unslouches a bit and begins to read aloud.

  Other men war that they their rest may gayne

  But wee will rest that wee may fight again.

  “Get it?” says Howard with a grin, and, after a rushed silent reread of the lines, frowning at the page, and finally equating “fight” with sexual activity, their faces say: “Oh…”

  There lyes are wrong; here safe uprightly lie;

  “Donne means that telling lies in love is par for the course.”

  There men kill men; we will make one by and by.

  Thousands wee see which travaille not to warrs;

  But stay swords, armes, and shott to make at home;

  And shall not I do then

  More glorious service, staying to make men?

  “Thank you. Nice voice. Where were you when we were casting Nemo? Now, Shakespeare, in his sonnets—quatrain, quatrain, quatrain, couplet—addresses the usual Elizabethan themes of immortality and beauty and constancy and all that crap, but we will skip Sonnet Number 18, the famous ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ where he modestly tells the girl that summer may fade and the sun grow dim in the commuter smog but she will remain eternally fair for the inarguable reason that he is presenting her that way in Sonnet Number 18, and we will skip Sonnet Number 29, which opens with the paradigmatic iambic pentameter When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes new line I all alone beweep my outcast state that makes such an icon of Sonnet Number 29, and we will skip Sonnet Number 87, the delicate Ode to Paranoid Insecurity that uses a cheesy flashback not even the schlockmeisters at Carolco would have touched, and stop at Sonnet Number 116, which treats sex a bit more seriously than does Mr. Donne and by which you should all prepare to live your lives or suffer failed marriages. I say this sincerely. Am I revealing too much? Remember that my wife is in the audience. You, in the black lycra cat-suit—page 809. People”—he looks up, projects to the very last rows of the amphitheater—“this one’s about expectations and reasonableness.”

  Let me not to the marriage of true minds

  Admit impediments. Love is not love

  Which alters when it alteration finds

  Or bends with the remover to remove:

  “In other words, Shakespeare is saying hey, stuff happens in relationships. Deal with it.”

  Oh, no! Love is an ever-fixéd mark,

  “Bill means love is an unmoving landmark.”

  That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

  It is the star to every wandering bark,

  “A ‘bark’ is a boat.”

  Whose worth’s unknown, although its height

  be taken.

  “The star’s ‘height’ is its location, for use by navigators.”

  Love alters not with Time’s brief hours and weeks,

  But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

  If this be error and upon me proved

  I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

  “You will decide for yourselves, of course, but when I first read this I took him to be warning me that if my girlfriend ever cheated on me, I’d better be able to work through it.” He eyes them pointedly. “Just my interpretation. Either that, or he’s being hopelessly idealistic, which you may come to believe. I don’t know. But in the final couplet Bill’s saying he’s betting everything he ever wrote on being right on this baby.”

  And Howard laughs.

  It was his theory that what they actually liked was hearing their own conversations, their own dark dorm-room thoughts and secret masturbatory interests and desperate erections and romantic young dreams, in late Middle English. As for Howard, he adored the words themselves. With his own son, he was somewhat stricter in his literary choices, attempting to find less NC–17 literature. He started with words. “Why is there no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger?” Howard asked when Sam was five years old, and Sam’s eyes got big as saucers, sitting up straight at the dinner table. “English muffins weren’t invented in England nor French fries in France.”

  “Really?” asked Sam, very seriously.

  Sam already knew from my father that sweetmeats were candy, and he knew that sweetbreads were calves’ glands because months before in Paris,
at Le Train Bleu, after I placed his seat so he could see the trains arriving at the Gare de Lyon, and having gravely considered the long menu I translated for him, he had ordered them from the amused yet respectful waiter. But when Howard pointed out that sweetmeats aren’t meat while sweetbreads are, it surprised him.

  We went skiing in Aspen, and Howard’s outburst prompted Sam to ask how it can be cold as hell one day and hot as hell another. I’ve spawned a tape recorder, said Howard to me.

  What’s “spawned,” Dad? said Sam.

  Ask your mother, said Howard.

  Howard measured Sam’s developmental phases both by his increasing linguistic sophistication and by the way he reacted to Medieval poetry. Sam absorbed it without a hiccup. Sitting on his six-year-old’s bed, bedtime promptly at 8:30, covers up around Sam’s chin, Howard perched his reading glasses on his nose and read.

  “I Have a Yong Sister,” intoned Howard.

  I have a yong sister

  Fer

  “Far,” said Howard

  beyonde the see;

  Manye be the druries

  “Druries are gifts, Sam.”

  That she sente me.

  She sente me the cherye

  Withouten any stoon,

  “Stone,” said Howard, “cherry pit.”

  And so she dide the dove

  Withouten any boon.

  “Without any bones,” Howard said to Sam. “Cool, huh!”

  “Dad,” shouted Sam, twisting the sheets, and then set about repeating the lines back.

  As he grew, the sheets of Samuel’s bed became glowing, luminous membranes. Howard had bought him flashlights. I had to make him stop. Bedtime was bedtime. At least I didn’t fear fire. In Virginia Woolf’s comic novel Orlando I saw Sam exactly: “The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper worm and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away, and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder.” I took it as a warning, but I didn’t tell Howard. He would have been alarmed had I told him I was using Orlando, which is about an immortal boy who turns into a woman, as an operating manual for Sam.

  Why do you park in the driveway, Sam asked Howard on the 405 heading for a Lakers game, and drive on the parkway? When the inevitable question came at fourteen—“Can I drive?”—and Howard gently replied, “Fat chance,” Sam sulkily pointed out that a slim chance and a fat chance are the same and was further irritated that his verbal dexterity didn’t get him behind his father’s wheel. When they were getting up at 4:30 in the morning to go fishing on Lake Castic, Howard noted that your alarm clock goes off by going on. Sam, why when I wind up my watch do I start it, but when a screenwriter winds up a screenplay, as screenwriters are only occasionally known to do without extensive prodding from long-suffering, overworked movie execs and the proffering of absurdly large sums of cash, does she end it?

  I tried to play once, early on. I put down my fork and said, Why is it alumnus, alumni, but hippopotamus, hippopotamuses? Howard froze. He looked at Sam and mumbled “Ha!” with his mouth full, and clear as a bell I heard “Look, pretend, OK?” But the ten-year-old was having none of it, nor did I want him to—I was fascinated by his sudden scornful agitation. “Mom, no.” It turned out that, yeah, yeah, he already knew that the plural “-i” ending is due to alumnus’s Latin provenance, but the animal’s English name derives from the Greek (hippos were known to the Greeks), thus “es.”

  Hm, I said. I had been under the impression that quirky information was the point. No?

  No.

  Ah. I see.

  The point, Howard explained to me, was…well, it wasn’t that. Sam rolled his eyes unempathetically and stuck potatoes in his mouth. The thing, done rightly, had to “make you go hm,” offered Sam, as if this was ridiculously obvious. Sam had given a concise working definition of irony.

  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.

  A small white integer appears,

  Bears a huge school of yellow pollywogs,

  And, with a white wink, vanishes. The boom

  Takes twenty-seven seconds to arrive.

  An airplane blinked away behind the hills.

  The dandelions of light now go to seed.

  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.

  Nobody seemed to know where they came from, but there they were in the For
est: Kanga and Baby Roo.

  “What I don’t like about it is this,” said Rabbit. “Here are we—you, Pooh, and you, Piglet, and Me—and suddenly—”

  “And Eeyore,” said Pooh.

  “And Eeyore—and then suddenly—”

  “And Owl,” said Pooh. “And Eeyore, I was forgetting him.”

  “Here—we—are,” said Rabbit very slowly and carefully, “all—of—us, and then, suddenly, we wake up one morning? And we find a Strange Animal among us. An animal of whom we had never even heard before!”

  (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).