You or Someone Like You

by Chandler Burr

  The glow blossoms onto her face again. She regains her composure. The two of them pass into the cinema with elegance and grace, and none of those watching dare to breathe, because they are in the presence of a star.

  The person truly unimpressed by celebrity, says Howard, is impossibly rare. He himself claims to be susceptible to it, but I’ve never believed him.

  I abhor the fear that is a plague here. I despise the vanity and the wanton waste and the vast and utterly boring emptiness, the breathtaking unoriginality of their meretricious visions. I am aware of the Terror that rules their moral situation, but Jane Austen has already told us about it. The emptiness is on view for us all to gaze at, their Plexiglas castles on their hilltops, the baubles in their garages, and their spectacular parties. The sad littleness of their rudeness and intimidation, the sinister, garish motifs of their grossly false friendships. As Anita Loos tartly observed, in the 1920s “the stars were moving out of the Hollywood Hotels and beginning to live in their own private houses with servants, most of whom were their peers in everything but sex appeal—which pinpoints the reason for the film capital’s mass misbehavior. To place in the limelight a great number of people who ordinarily would be chambermaids and chauffeurs, give them unlimited power and instant wealth is bound to produce a lively and diverting result.”

  Everyone is inside the cinema now, waiting for the movie to start, and Howard is watching over things. The director of photography is relaxed as a cat. An associate producer fairly shakes with agitation, wondering about the critics. That asshole from the L.A. Times? It’s a fucking vendetta, Howard, that guy! Howard just nods, his eyes locked on the director across the room. The director gets physically ill at premieres and is trying to appear stoical.

  I remembered something I’d always mean to tell Howard. That I’d read a description of all this in a book on God. “Yeah,” he said. “What was it?”

  “Millions fuse the real lives and the screen lives of movie actors, assign the combination an importance greater than any they concede to the real human beings whom they know, and then suffer the melancholy consequences. Their flesh is sad, alas, and they have seen all the movies.”

  “Nice,” Howard replied. “Mallarmé?”

  Yes. (An update of Mallarmé’s great lament: “The flesh is sad, alas, and I have read all the books.”)

  The distributor’s trembling fist grips the forearm of Howard’s dark-blue suit. “Howie, that bitch wants to fire our publicist.” Howard removes the fist but speaks reassuringly, leads him forward like a calf.

  In my quiet living room, the directors listened in silence. They know these evenings. One of them sighed and made a comment. I found it particularly perceptive. He had touched this heat, he told us. Of the blond, handsome movie star who years ago he’d intimately orbited, he said: “As if glancing at a menu, he was able to choose his life.” He had been spellbound. “The truth is, the temperament and impossible behavior of stars are part of the appeal. Their outrages please us. The gods themselves had passions and frailties. Modern deities should be no different.”

  But they’d drifted apart, he said. He came, on one of these white-hot evenings, to watch the star from the back of the theater at yet another premiere, the top of that famously casual, ever-boyish blond head visible as it moved down the aisle. (They all knew who he was talking about. It was his saying this that surprised them; these people have a rule: Never, ever bring up failure.) Watching in that white dark, a line of Falstaff had come to him. King Henry IV, Part 2, act 5, scene 5. He put on his reading glasses. Falstaff is watching the coronation of the new king, his former bright intimate, and murmuring to console himself for the stretch of this dark, unfamiliar space between them:

  Falstaff

  Do not you

  grieve at this; I shall be sent for in private to

  him: look you, he must seem thus to the world:

  fear not your advancements; I will be the man yet

  that shall make him great.

  When they have gone and my living room is empty but for Howard and me on the sofa, I will mention this to Howard. He will take a Miltonian view. He will appreciate the Falstaff reference but, at the same time, shrug and comment of the movie stars, “Even when you’re with them, you’re not with them.”

  I will decide that the following week I will give my producers—how could I not—“Ozymandias.” Shelley, 1818. I know. Too obvious. But they will love rereading the poem. Each perfect, cruel line will feed their narcissism. The plush suites off Lankershim and Alameda, the law offices on South Rodeo and Wilshire, the glass fortresses in Century City. The hearts that feed. The wrinkled lip and sneer I saw on Howard’s face in his office on that cool afternoon.

  In the early dawn hours, while the world is still bluish and I am driving my powerful car very fast and alone on Sunset in the desert’s chill, I sometimes look up to see the billboard men in their blue jeans scaling the sheer concrete sides of the tall buildings above Sweetzer, and I see the forty-foot-high faces looking down on the cold, empty concrete. Their names are written in letters as high as people. The workmen peel down their faces and strip away their names in tattered rolls. The movie having closed, the stars disappear. Nothing lasts in this desert.

  FOR MY FIRST LINE PRODUCERS group, I give them Crime and Punishment.

  I give them this particular novel because a literary agent mentioned to me once that since it was published in serial form and on deadline, like Dickens and much nineteenth-century fiction, some of the facts got flubbed in the process. So I have Justin send out an email. “In Crime and Punishment,” asked my message, “where are Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s continuity errors?”

  Two of them find the first one almost immediately: Dostoyevsky puts the office of Porfiry, the police detective, on the fourth floor, and some eighty pages later it reappears on the sixth. Jennifer will call me to say that in a people-watching item, the Los Angeles Times has reported the producers’ names.

  THEY ASKED ABOUT THE ACCENT. One of them thought I was Australian, but then Americans are almost completely incapable of distinguishing non-American English accents. And—how many languages did I speak? Wait, Chinese, right?

  Right.

  I don’t know why I’ve kept the degree of British phonetically that I have. People think it’s on purpose; it isn’t. Things stick with me. My German, which is rudimentary, has a marked French accent. I suppose it’s the order in which I learned the languages. (I explained that we were in Paris for fourteen months, an eternity, before my father was again transferred, to Bonn, and I switched schools for, it seemed to me—I believe I was twelve—the three hundredth time.) The Spanish I learned because when Consuela came to us, she spoke no English at all. I bought a small Spanish grammar book and spoke with her and it came quickly.

  My Italian is good. My father was on special diplomatic assignment in Milan for a year (my mother put me in an Italian school that time), although all his assignments seemed oddly special. Howard thinks he was MI6, and that’s what he always told Sam in a melodramatic whisper. “Sam, your grandfather was a spy!” I think it’s a fun idea, father as James Bond. I never saw any direct evidence for it, even when, as a girl, I myself suspected it and snooped among his papers. I assume he was an ordinary diplomat, but I admit that is only a default assumption; he had a strange, secretive life in a multitude of strange, constantly shifting places, and I’ve often thought of contacting British intelligence and simply asking. My parents are dead; perhaps MI6 would give me an answer.

  In Cantonese, interestingly enough, I am utterly invisible. By accent, obviously. Not English at all, purely Cantonese, except for an inexplicable hint of Mandarin (which I don’t speak at all) in my slightly Beijing “r.” Seven-year-olds—my age when we arrived in Hong Kong—absorb grammar like sponges but will not necessarily become phonetically native, and China’s northern “r” is almost weirdly American. I listened to the servants and to my ya-ya, eavesdropped on the Star Ferry, and followed Cook around the
market as she haggled. All of this from the top of Victoria Peak, where we had an apartment with the most breathtaking Hong Kong view. The view was virtually free, since the apartments, which were quite modest and functional, were owned by the British government and given to its officials. Nineteen fifty-four to 1958 were lovely years to be in the colony, when the British ruled, the expatriates played polo, the Chinese had their unknowable lives in their fragrant mazes of alleys and noodle shops, and we understood everything.

  The Chinese hate not being able to categorize me. (Who is she? they mutter to each other in the greasy fluorescent-lit dumpling palaces of Los Angeles, the walls white ceramic tile. What does she want?) I order a soup, dispute a check, and they give me suspicious looks and twist the conversation, not very subtly either (they are Chinese, after all), to try to make me say things like “dental floss,” which they think is hard for foreigners to pronounce. It is, but not for me. Nga h’cxin. I say it and smile sweetly at their sullen reactions until one of them laughs, declaring victory in my favor. I give them no ground, ever, no foothold. I remain free from their expectations. It was very important to me as a girl. I am not in-nor out-group. I am always myself. A year of hanging around Cook, and I was able to entirely escape their categories, the expectations they could nail on one, and I did so loving it. They glared at me and said with distaste, “Lei-goh lui-je ye-gang mo je-gai geh gun-yuen.” This girl, her own origin-lacking. And talked snottily of seven thousand years of history.

  I said to them, “Lei-goh lui-je ye-gang ghai-fong-jeo je-gai geh gun-yueni.” This girl, origin-free. Or more literally, This girl is liberated from the idea of origins.

  THE QUESTION OF WHICH RELIGION in which to raise Samuel was not one we ever discussed. There was no need.

  Rarely—a bar or bas mitzvah, maybe—we go to synagogue together. There, Howard is the object of omnipresent feelers. “Howard! Great to see you here. You’re joining the temple!” It is a question. Sometimes, when they know about me, the interlocutor, jocular and earnest, avoids looking in my direction. “Nope,” says Howard pleasantly. After Yom Kippur, people drop hints. “Howard, we didn’t see you in shul.” Or “So Howard, listen, ever tried Temple Adat Shalom?”

  “No,” says Howard pleasantly, “I don’t think so. Anne”—(turning to me)—“have we ever tried Temple Adat Shalom?”

  No, I say, we never have.

  “Nope,” says Howard. “Never have.”

  Then my mother found The Lord Is My Shepherd in Camden Market just after Sam was born, and that solved my question about his cultural education. I simply read him the biblical stories, Old and New Testaments, as literature.

  Howard, on the other hand, read Kipling to Sam. He mentioned it once at a PolyGram meeting. Kipling? said a talent manager, with a severe frown. Very not-done. Racist. No, Howard had responded slowly. Kipling once said he worshipped “The God of Things As They Are,” which meant he was a brutal realist. But race? Kipling’s poetry is “not,” as an English friend once put it to me, “just chaps in pith helmets keeping the wogs at bay on the Northwest Frontier.” Here was a man who intimately knew Hinduism, a theologically justified racialist social order. One was born this caste or that one: Brahmin, Shatriya, Vaishya, Shudra, Thakur, Prabhu, Kayshth, Untouchable. The color of the skin went (surprise) downward from light to dark. And Kipling is quite pointed about opposing it. Howard used him to teach this to Sam. I gave my agents the poem we’d years ago given our son and asked Billy Lazarus to read it.

  All good people agree,

  And all good people say,

  That all nice people, like Us, are We

  And everyone else is They:

  But if you cross over the sea,

  Instead of just over the way,

  You may end by (think of it!) looking on We

  As only a sort of They!

  The agents were surprised to hear this from Kipling, but, without thinking about it too much, they all nodded vigorously in the usual self-congratulatory way and said how much they liked it. It’s the sort of thing Americans automatically take as self-evident truth.

  I take it as a self-evident truth as well.

  Kipling was as far textually as Howard went into religion. A few years ago we were approached by two of those smiling zombielike people who asked about “our faith.” Sam replied, “We worship the French fry,” and Howard enjoyed that. When Kabbalah arrived, to blossom and wither inside the industry like every other fad, Howard met it at first wordlessly. People in meetings at Paramount enthused about their Hebraic scholars, lunches at Imagine and Amblin where they plumbed the cryptic mysteries of the Kabbalist texts. He said nothing. “It’s great, Howie!” I’m sure it is, he replied. “Have you tried this?” (He was in some meeting with three Triad agents.) “It’ll unlock secrets for you, seriously.” Hm, said Howard genially. The agent to Howard’s left—his rabbi guru had, after months of study and thousands of dollars, pinpointed his Hebrew consonants daled and nun, which gave dan. “So, see?” he explained to Howard, according to Kabbalah, for him any word with “dan” in it held power. You had to find the words. That morning he’d been pondering “laudanum,” “a mysterious and powerful opiate.” And “danburite,” “a mysterious rare mineral contained in crystals.” And, of course, “danger,” a rich semiotic vein.

  Howard considered gravely and then brightly suggested “dandruff.” He looked around the antique cherrywood table. “A mysterious and powerful seborrheic condition.”

  As for Sam, he had from the very start had ideas of his own, thank you very much. When he was five, Howard had read the Adam and Eve and serpent story to him. Sam was at that point obsessed with defining, in all narratives, who was “the bad person,” and so Howard asked him whether in that story there was a bad person.

  Sam thought about it very gravely. “Yes,” he said, his face serious.

  “And who was that?” asked Howard.

  “God,” said Sam.

  WE ARE DESCENDING IN THE elevator with David Remnick. It is a year ago. The air-conditioning is freezing. Howard has come to New York for a meeting because there is sudden interest in L.A. in one of David’s pieces.

  Immediately on arriving, Howard had ducked off to Alex Ross’s office to negotiate this evening’s logistics. Howard loves Alex, loves that he is the music critic. I have never possessed whatever madness is necessary to be an opera fan, and so it suits me that he is happy trundling off with Alex to the Salzburg Festival. The two of them get their hotel rooms and spend the week hearing Kurt Weill and lieder and Mussorgsky and Ernest Chausson’s Poème de l’Amour et de la Mer. “The musical version of Cannes,” Alex once explained it to me, not altogether kindly, “a glamorous watering hole for classical super-stars and tycoon sophisticates and tourists sharing in their aura.”

  “Tonight?” Howard had asked, sticking his head in the door. “Quarter to eight,” replied Alex, “in front of Will Call,” and threw him out. From there he went to find David. I waited outside the office, reading about threats to the world’s food supply. Parasites, pollution. They emerged, twenty minutes later, talking about David’s article, which now may become a movie, and we go to the elevators.

  “The Afterlife” was about Natan Sharansky’s imprisonment by the Soviets and then, after he’d emigrated, about his political career in Israel. David wrote it several years ago—“but,” says Howard, “you never know when they’ll discover what”—and David is recalling the tiny, freezing cell in Perm-35. Sharansky’d take a cup of hot water, says David, put it on spots all over his body to warm up. David taps his fingertip on his shirtsleeve to indicate it.

  “I’m telling you,” says Howard emphatically, “it’s a long shot, OK? But there are people interested, and it matters. I’ve talked to him”—(Natan)—“and I’ve talked to Avital”—(Natan’s wife)—“a lot to her actually. He’s interested. She’s not crazy about the project.” Howard and David share a look. “Avital’s religious—”

  “Yeah—” says David.

>   “—so, you know….”

  “Uh-huh—” David, nodding, is holding the elevator door for me but concentrating on Howard.

  “—so Avital talked a lot about the religious issues, Jewish law, the way that would be presented.”

  David is ambivalent. “Natan did support a conversion law that effectively disenfranchised half of world Jewry,” he admits. “His per sonal political survival depended on his caving in to ultra-Orthodox ultimatums.”

  Howard says, “Yeah.” David wouldn’t, Howard indicates, necessarily need to bring this up with Natan. I notice Howard seems to be lost in David’s comment about the conversion law for a moment. He comes out of it. “Look, they’re open to discussing it,” he says, then, “By the way, I liked the way you opened the piece—”

  “The hats.”

  “Yeah, when he makes aliyah. Very nice,” says Howard. “Tribeca likes it.”

  “Did you like the hats?” David asks me, intently, just as I enter the revolving doors to 42nd Street ahead of him. The first interest had come from Jane Rosenthal, she loved it, and HBO and Participant were quite serious, so David is now having to rethink things in terms of the screen. Howard actually thinks it less of a long shot than he’s letting on, but with David he wants to err conservatively. David looks at me through the doors, impatiently, each of us in our moving slice of glass as the air-conditioning disappears into early summer in New York.