You or Someone Like You

by Chandler Burr

  But Auden’s view, I said to them, is a bit different from Frost’s. And I myself hear Auden’s voice more clearly because it involves choice and emptiness without faith. Which is to say, it would be emptiness but for faith—or (much better) “trust,” Auden’s word. Auden, Nick observed, had gone from one mental place to another and discovered in going there that he had arrived nowhere in particular. That he had shed everything and constructed something nameless.

  When I read this to Howard, I said that I didn’t know if there was any better synonym for “New Yorker” than Nameless. Free, if you prefer. Liberated from the old ologies. Howard disputed it, but he didn’t understand what Auden meant. He meant you shed the old names and assume new ones, and the new names mean what you want them to. In 1942, just three years after he arrived in his new home, Auden wrote that home is—the meter alone makes me weep—

  A sort of honour, not a building site,

  Wherever we are, when, if we chose, we might

  Be somewhere else, yet trust that we have chosen right.

  Auden remarked to Benjamin Britten that New York was one “grand hotel in a world so destabilized that everyone had become a traveler.” I am a traveler, and that my son does not share my accent bothers me in the end not at all. I was and am that thing Auden described, feared, and in the end loved more than anything. I was—I am—nameless.

  SOME JEWS, SPEAKING TO HOWARD under what they considered the right circumstances—they were friends of his family, they had his best interests at heart, they knew him from Brooklyn, they had gone through it with his mother when he married me—asked him gravely whether he considered Sam Jewish. They wanted to know how Howard was “going to deal with this.”

  Howard would change the subject. I didn’t really understand why. It seemed an odd reaction. Just answer them.

  “I don’t want to answer them,” he said. “It’s not their business.”

  I agree, but you can still answer them.

  “It doesn’t concern them,” he said, which was not exactly what he meant. Obviously it did concern them. In any case, I didn’t give it much thought.

  At the time I thought I knew what Howard’s answer to them was. I thought I knew because of what he’d said to his mother, often, including in front of company a few times. (She was less bothered by what was said in front of me. I got very, very good at not betraying the pounding heart, the reflex of my throat to swallow with anger.) When he told his parents about me, Howard’s father had enumerated the standard arguments: the perpetuation of the Jewish people after the Holocaust, the continuance of Jewish culture. He had even, if without much confidence in the stratagem, proposed that it was Howard’s being ashamed of being Jewish—“Give me a goddamn break, Dad” said Howard and burst out laughing. When that didn’t work, just once his father had tried the word God and the word faith, in the theological sense; Howard’s reaction to this, on the other hand, had been so blistering that his father went immediately back to cultural justifications. But it was his mother who had pressed him. It was she who asked. Why? Why? Why her? (I stood, my hands folded in front of me, outside in the hall, staring at nothing.)

  I knew what he replied. He replied that I was, simply enough, the woman he loved. He’d assured her that he himself was not changing, that he was still the son they both knew, that he could promise them that. The culture, the people, remained with him. (We were both twenty when he was saying this. His father would die when he was twenty-one.) Anne, he said to them, is the person I want to be with.

  He said at one point, We don’t live in a vacuum. (They didn’t reply. I interpellated Howard’s meaning.)

  So I thought I knew what Howard’s answer was when, once Sam hit fifteen, the Jewish mothers of Los Angeles’s Jewish teenage daughters began to notice and evaluate Sam and to ask Howard the question. They gather their information. They have Sam’s last name, they have Howard’s curly black hair, his vestigial Brooklyn accent, as they pursue their mating strategies. And they have their fears, bred into them: Look at the mother, they say, worried, suspicious. My looks throw them. And so they will, subtly or directly, ask, though never in these words.

  Is Sam Jewish?

  And Howard doesn’t reply, “Go fuck yourself.” No. Gravely, my husband will appear to consider the question.

  Faeder ure, thu the eart on heofenum, si thin nama gehalgod.

  We have lost so much. “Father our, thou that art in heaven, be thine name hallowed.” Look at this sentence and see what has gone. We got rid of English’s lovely familiar second person and its correlative possessive form (thou and thine, of the Old English thu and thin), and we replaced that regal genitive ending heofen-um with the modern, if a bit chrome-plated, preposition on, soon to become our mass-manufactured, ubiquitous in. Around 1400, we downsized the muscular past participial–ode /-od of Middle English, restructuring it into the more conciseed. Of all the richness from our highly inflected paternal Middle German verbs, only the poor little third-person singular conjugation still hangs on: “He reads a book.” And we surrendered to the Germans the elegant Teutonic prefix ge-of gehalgod along with capitalized nouns and the luxury car market. (Surely the delightfully antiquarian silent e after “name” is not long for this life.)

  But we have through some perversity or other kept a treasure trove of odd little adjectival suffixes; what we think of as “English” is a conglomerate of everyone. We have -ish (Old English -isc; cognate German -isch, Gothic -isks, and Gk. -iskos). Thus: “Irish,” “Scottish,” “Finnish,” “Spanish.” But “German,” “Eritrean,” “Alaskan,” of -an, and its variant -ian, “Latinate suffix denoting places (“Roman”; “urban”),” now productively forming English adjectives by extending the Latin pattern. This one denotes provenance or membership (“American”; “Tibetan”), social class (“Republican”), religion (“Episcopalian”), sense of time (“Elizabethan”); ME < L -ânum. (Not to be confused with the prefix an-< Gk. “not,” “without” ex: anelectric.) The Latinate -at (“Democrat”) and its variant -ate (“Italianate”) denote offices or functions (“triumvirate”), collective bodies (“senate”), or periods of rule (“protectorate”). Interestingly enough: Can also form nouns (“advocate”) and verbs (“calibrate”). And the decidedly Italianate -ese starting with “Milanese,” “computerese”—(this is also actual Italian, “scozzese”)—and on to “Japanese” and “Chinese” (rather than Chinish or Chinan or Chinate).

  Ah, but, Howard notes to the mother of the Jewish girl, or the grandmother, or to the curious rabbi, who is listening to Howard’s disquisition and wondering a bit uneasily what she or he has gotten him-or herself in for and where all the etymology fits into this, this meant there was a grammatical ambiguity, did it not? Yes indeed it did. Why, for example (Howard pointed out), consider the adjective “Jew-ish” (he motions to the mother who has asked “Is Sam Jewish?”)—which used the suffix denoting “sort of, but not exactly.” (“Not large,” one might say, “but large-ish.”)

  I love this. (I listen to Howard’s extremely serious exegesis during the Silverman bar mitzvah from behind a plaster pillar in a rented party room of the Beverly Hills Hotel. I listen to it a few feet from our table at the Shapiro bas mitzvah in Brentwood.) I love it first as mockery, which it is, and second as a point of grammar. We need here, Howard vigorously argues to them, a better adjective, don’t we? But what should it be? “Jewate”? “Jewese”? “Jewan”? No. Howard Rosenbaum proposes the grammatically sturdy “Jew” (still capitalized) as the English adjectival form of the nominative “Jew.” Consider the benefits, argues Howard, leaning toward his colocutor, the aunt of the bar mitzvah boy, her eyes taking on a gleam of panic. Now that is a straightforward adjective, truth-in-packaging. Not the hushed, chin slightly lowered and to-the-side whispered-in-your-neighbor’s-ear “So, the boy…is he Jewish?” but rather, asking it plain: “Is Sam Jew?”

  To your tablemate at the friendly family seder: “What great Jew food!”

  A knowing appraisal:
“He certainly looks Jew.”

  Remarking of the klesmer: “Boy, I love Jew music!”

  A: “Hey, are you Jew?”

  B: “Why, yes! In fact I am!”

  Certainly, says Howard, the other person could see the benefits. (The other person nods, very tentatively.)

  Because the thing about the -ish suffix is that it signifies “a mixture or alloy,” which Howard, a full Jew, is not, but which Sam, Howard explains, is. (“Oh,” says the woman. Her worst fears are confirmed.) “-ish,” points out Howard, as if he had picked up nothing at all in her face, happens to be precisely the adjectival suffix that takes adjectives and forms new adjectives (“reddish”; “sweetish”).

  See, that’s what’s great about the adjective “Jew”! It would mean “racially pure Jew.” (“Which describes me!” chirps Howard brightly.) And adding the suffix “-ish” would form a second adjectival (see above), one whose denotation would be “alloyed with pure Jew, or mixed with pure Jew,” as one might say of white paint into which some green has been added, “Not green, exactly, green-ish.”

  This is what Howard tells them, when they ask him. When Jews worry about purity, as Jews worry about purity, when they firmly circumvent me as one would something whose cleanliness was not up to par, when they frown and cough meaningfully, I simply fade back and let them take Howard aside by the elbow a centimeter or two to ask him gravely of our son, Sam: “Is he Jewish?”

  And Howard frowns with equal gravity and appears to ponder the question deeply. And then, solemnly, he replies, “Well, he’s Jewish.” And smiles at them.

  Which, given me, and given that Howard loves me, and that he loves his son, is really just a way of replying, Go fuck yourself.

  HOWARD CAME HOME TO FIND me quietly cursing twenty-four voice-mail messages. I was on the point of throwing the whole thing over.

  “Need help?” he said.

  Do I need help?

  He assessed the situation. “I’ll have my people call your people.” He turned.

  I don’t have people, Howard. And then as it dawned on me what that look meant: And I don’t want people. Howard! Do you hear me?

  “I’m going to make a phone call,” said his back. I could hear the whistling heading toward his home office. Some bit of Gershwin he likes that I can never place.

  A few days later I was informed by a friend at The Ant Farm that Howard had somehow gotten me onto the UTA Job List. Quite insider. The following morning at 8:00 A.M. there were, sitting politely in my kitchen under Denise’s stern eye, five candidates for the position of my full-time assistant, all intelligent, capable young men and women. I began interviewing them. By 8:12 A.M. three more had arrived. One was Justin Diaz from Juilliard. My former acting partner from HEAF, now having left New York and already a veteran of the Los Angeles movie audition. I’d forgotten how good-looking he was. “Howard gave me an 8:30,” said Justin, “but I figured I’d get here early.” I politely dismissed the others, handed him the code to my voice mail, and drove off to buy a small amount of fertilizer and, while I was at it, coffee beans.

  By the time I got home, Justin had organized my book club files, cleaned off my desk, sorted my voice-mail messages in categories of urgency, and written out the current book club membership lists, annotated. I took a moment to acclimatize, glanced at the lists, and said, Fine. I noticed that he had, in those two and a quarter hours, manifested a completely different demeanor. One knew he owned this space.

  “Of course,” said Stacey when I mentioned it. “He now manages a Rolodex people would kill for.” She meant Howard’s.

  I don’t see this, I said. He’s an actor.

  “Then he’s taken an excellent day job,” she said.

  I described my frustrations with the book club to Justin. I felt things were becoming diffuse, unfocused. We looked over names and affiliations. As we were doing so, Justin fielded calls from Harold Ramis and Joel Zwick and handed me the messages; it was heaven. Also, I explained to him, lots of them were calling Howard, not me, and Jennifer was trying gamely to do the gatekeeping, but she already had a full-time job, and her efficiency was suffering and so the numbers were becoming unwieldy.

  Justin had a suggestion. “Let’s divide them up.”

  I frowned.

  “Why not, Ms. Rosenbaum?”

  Um, Anne.

  “Anne.” Despite the Ms., I’d noticed that he’d become instantly familiar in the way he spoke to me.

  I was in fact resisting the idea of making the club official, just as I was trying to get used to the idea of a personal assistant. I suppose, I murmured to Justin, we might as well.

  So we split them into categories on different nights, producers with producers, studio people with studio people. It made them at once more competitive, which was to say sharper (particularly the agents), which I enjoyed, and more relaxed, since among their own. They mix very poorly, these people. Justin started playing basketball with Sam in the driveway, which Sam loved. I took Justin to the lot to meet Jennifer (she had already started forwarding all book club calls to him) and Howard. (“Mr. Rosenbaum,” said Justin, reaching out his hand with his eyes slightly wide. “Indeed,” said Howard very gravely. I kicked him.)

  Steve Tisch came out of Howard’s office. He wanted to know if I’d done Dumas. (Howard said “Oh, boy” and went back into his meeting.) Steve had been toying with a Dumas idea for a while. Someone I took to be an assistant came to get Steve, twice, with increasing urgency. “Take a message,” he said tersely. And also he had this idea about Henry James. What did I think of him? I said that James’s genius is detail, meticulously observed. Ah, said Steve, in that case I should definitely give James to my line producers. (Steve, I said, I don’t have any line producers.) Those guys live and breathe the details, he said, locations, shooting schedules, when did the writer fuck up the continuity.

  Three days later I got my first request from two line producers, but I apologized; Steve Tisch notwithstanding, I just couldn’t see creating a line producers group yet.

  I gave Mansfield Park to my directors. We were in my living room that evening; it was raining. It clearly surprised them when I said that Austen, to me, was writing about movie stars. Odd looks all around, so I tried to clarify: I meant, actually, our perception of ourselves visà-vis the stars. Not their own lives. (Widespread skepticism.) She’s writing, I explained, about moral systems. (Still unconvinced.) Hang it, I said. You. Read aloud, please, this is Lionel Trilling’s 1954 essay on Austen, “The Opposing Self.”

  He raised the photocopy. “It was Jane Austen who first represented the specifically modern personality and its culture. Never before had a novelist shown the moral life as she shows it to be, never before had it been conceived to be so complex and difficult and exhausting. Hegel speaks of the ‘secularization of spirituality’ as a prime characteristic of the modern epoch, and Jane Austen is the first to tell us what this involves.”

  “Well!” said a director. He looked at each of them. “That’s definitely us,” he said.

  I said, Carry on. You, please.

  “Secular spirituality’s dark and dubious places are more numerous and obscure than those of religious spirituality.”

  I absolutely would choose to grapple with the secular variety, I told them, but I understand why the disoriented and afraid prefer the reassurance of the religious kind. (Still unconvinced.)

  It clicked when Trilling said that Austen wrote of the need to ensure that our lives and styles “exhibit the signs of our belonging to the secular-spiritual elect.” You see now? I said. (Oh, they certainly did. They understood the star’s need for the newer Lamborghini. They understood the need to be seen lunching with the star.)

  To me, I said, almost the only surefire secular-spiritual elect are the movie stars.

  They now acted as if it had all been obvious from the start.

  I tell them a story to illustrate: It is a relatively recent evening, just south of where we are sitting, when everything is bath
ed in white-hot light. The studio has paid for the searchlights scorching the night sky above. The two of us, Howard in a tuxedo and I in a gown, are alone among a thousand people pressed fervidly together in a plush, electrified place. Howard watches them progress up the red carpet and murmurs to me: “Everyone here”—(he means Hollywood)—“lives as Lucifer, the definition of hell always being one’s distance from the stars.”

  Howard is good with the stars. We are standing somewhere behind the actress who has gotten her name above the title, who has just stepped out from the long black car. I watch Howard’s face flicker with the flashes aimed at her. She is escorted by her new agent. She has just dropped her previous, longtime agent for him, for his youth, and for his aggressiveness, which she believes she needs now, and for his looks and his clothes, and he has made hot professional love to her. Then, back at the curb, another car door opens. A younger actress emerges, the one they’ve run on the covers instead of her, the one she didn’t get along with on the set. (This is what they’ve written in the tabloids.) The cameras swing away from her, back toward that car, the voices move in a vast wave from her, creating a void where she is standing, she is in free fall, and she needs an anchor.

  But the young agent is not an anchor. His talent is pyrotechnics, not strength. A sea of whispers rises around her, she falters, one or two cameras, smelling blood, swing back now. They would love to record her as she drowns before them on that linear pool of red. But Howard is moving. The studio security know him, he passes through them like smoke. From nowhere, it seems, Howard slips his arm through hers, sets her ringed hand onto his tuxedoed wrist. To the young agent’s shoulder Howard briefly applies what looks like a fatherly hand; it serves to separate the agent from the star. His arm in hers, he begins to walk her down the long carpet to the theater’s doors. Had she heard the story, Howard murmurs to her, his mouth close to her diamond-tipped earlobe, of Jean Harlow’s meeting Margot Fonteyn? The two divas hated each other on sight, but it was a movie premiere, and the cameras were watching. (The star remembers to relax her face. She grips Howard’s arm.) In front of the reporters, murmurs Howard, Harlow was pure sweetness, and it was “Oh, Margot this!” and “Oh, Margot that!” (He maneuvers her perfectly into place, stand, stand, turn slightly, stand, so they can get their shots.) Except that Harlow pronounced it “Margotte,” with a hard consonant. (He looks ahead, catches security’s eye, and they prepare to open the front doors.) “Margotte, darling!” Finally Fonteyn leaned over to Harlow, not quite out of reach of the microphones, and murmured “Oh, darling. Actually it’s Margot. With a silent T. Like Harlow.”