I glance up, indicate a rapidly approaching street. Turn there. The driver does, and we almost go off the road. The driver is trying to look at us in the rearview mirror. Eyes front, please, I say. I say it very crisply to control the tremble I feel. I close my eyes for a moment. Steady on, Anne.
“Is it bad?”
I breathe deeply, open my eyes. What should I say. He’s going to be fine, it looks much worse than it is.
“Ask him if he’s legal,” the driver says.
It takes me an instant to process this. I find it interesting he has the presence of mind to pose such a question. Then: hospital, questions, papers, police, Immigration. I put my right hand on the side of the man’s head and ask him. He says that he is. I don’t bother to ask if he has health insurance. He moans, and the driver, already unnerved by the blood, becomes so agitated I’m certain all three of us are going to be hospitalized. He’s going to be fine, I say, and then gently, Please keep your eyes in front. I’m more frightened by his driving than by the blood; normally I would find this funny. But I can hear him hyperventilating, and I realize I must stabilize him. What do you do? I ask him.
He’s staring ahead. His mind spins a moment before it grips. “I’m a screenwriter,” he says, close to tears.
That’s interesting, I say. My husband works at a studio.
He blinks. Focused now. “Oh yeah?” He attempts a casual voice. “Who’s that?”
Howard Rosenbaum.
He gasps without making any noise, which is a feat. He is looking at me in the mirror even as he turns right at high speed. “You’re Anne Rosenbaum?” He is literally wide-eyed. Why do emergencies generate clichés? A car trying to merge into our trajectory honks at us.
Yes, I say. (He pretends not to be staring into the rearview mirror.) What are you writing?
“It’s a,” he says, clears his throat, “romantic comedy. Set in Vancouver.”
“Ah. Vancouver is lovely.”
He frowns, clears this throat again, says quickly, “Well, the movie’s not about Vancouver, and people don’t get that the characters don’t—”
You mean script readers don’t get it.
He makes a scoffing sound. He hasn’t even gotten as far as script readers. He’s gotten to the person who answers the phone.
You don’t have an agent.
“To get an agent you’d have to—”
Would you like me to give your script to Howard?
His eyes fill the rearview mirror. “Would you?”
I will if you keep your eyes on the road.
His eyes are instantly on the road. Eyeballs motionless.
The gardener moans and shifts. I raise and lower my left hand as he moves to hold the skin together. I ask the driver, Do you have a cloth? He starts flinging things from the glove compartment, though it’s clear this will produce nothing. He stops when he notices I’m shimmying out of my sateen slip, which is quite awkward in the backseat. I rip it into wide strips. It’s inappropriate bandage material, but my cotton shirt is too thick to rip, as is my linen skirt. I mop the blood that started seeping the instant I took my hand away. Then I try to tie the strips around his thigh to close at least part of the wound. The cloth seems to hold. I cradle the gardener’s head in my lap. He has become conscious of the blood now, and he is terrified. I tell him he will be OK, we are going to the hospital. I ask him his name, and he says José Pineda. He moans something about death and invokes Jesus and the names of several of the saints.
I remember a professor marvel once as he told me that in his view, strangely enough American poetry had become gentler and more reassuring to readers than it had in a century. I was dubious. He waved this away. Yes, yes, modernist technique had become the norm—difficult and complex allusion, fractionated reality. But forget the style; much of poetry today had reassumed its nineteenth-century role, Wordworth’s comfort and consolation, Blake’s even earlier haven from the cares of the world.
Including car accidents, I think now.
I look at this man lying in my lap, close up. I see the pores in his skin, the thick hairs of his eyebrows. I see all the busboys—come up by means I don’t ask about from all the unnamed impoverished countries—who have stood beside me to serve me glasses and glasses of cool lemon water, who have reached an intimate army of hairless cocoa-colored arms gently around my body to set a palace’s worth of gleaming white detergent-washed dinner plates before me. Smiled and nodded at me as I have smiled and nodded at them. But I think, now that I think, that I have never, ever, in all these years and all these plates actually touched this skin or this jet black hair that I am stroking. So I will give this man in my lap comfort and consolation. I murmur to him
My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but O! my soul is white;
White as an angel is the English child:
But I am black as if bereav’d of light.
I hold the cloth tightly, but not too tightly, to the leg of the man in my lap. He looks as if he is concentrating. “William Blake,” I say to him.
My mother taught me underneath a tree
I glance up to verify we are going the right way.
She took me on her lap and kisséd me,
And pointing to the east, began to—
There is a faint scream of rubber on asphalt somewhere, but it seems unrelated to us. Turn left here, I tell the driver. He turns. His eyes are in the rearview mirror, watching me recite, but somehow he seems to be able to drive like this.
—began to say:
“And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love,
And these black bodies and this sun-burnt face
Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.”
I’d take Civic Center Drive, I advise, to Beverly Boulevard.
He executes it, runs a red light. Both the face of the driver and the face of the gardener are focused now, kinetic, consoled.
Thus did my mother say, and kisséd me;
And thus I say to the little English boy:
José is listening. I don’t know if he understands any of this, since I haven’t heard him say a single English word. The driver’s mouth wears a strange smile.
When I from black and he from white cloud free,
And round the tent of God like lambs we joy,
I’ll shade him from the heat till he can bear
To lean in joy upon our Father’s knee;
And then I’ll stand and stroke his silver hair,
And be like him, and he will then love me.
They are both calmer now. Better.
“Más,” he asks from my lap. More.
I hold the gardener’s head as I used to hold Sam’s when I put him to bed, stroking the man’s hair down behind his ear with my right hand as my left holds his skin together. His hair is the color of Howard’s, black and very thick, but utterly different in texture, and boar-bristle straight. I think of one of Sam’s favorite poems, a Roethke called “The Sloth.” I remember only a random bit. Roethke, I say.
In moving slow he has no Peer.
You ask a question in his Ear,
He thinks about it for a Year.
The driver is grinning. I cannot remember the Spanish word for “sloth” but I describe the animal to the gardener, its habits, and he nods. He laughs, then winces. We proceed, three strangers, down West Beverly Boulevard.
When we get to Cedars Sinai, the ER team—young women in white coats, two Jewish and one Indian—extract him from the car. They act as if this were the most normal thing in the world. As they are taking him out, he says, apparently to me, “What you say.” English words. He gulps air. His accent is thick.
“Señor,” one of the doctors orders him, “por favor acuéstese. No se mueva.”
“Lo que usted dijo,” he says to me, cooperating with her but looking at me. “¿Me daría un duplicado por escrito?”
Yes, of course, I reply, surprised. I’ll write it
down for you tomorrow. He lets his head fall back on the gurney. He is examining the scarlet gumminess all over his right hand. I particularly enjoyed the last stanza, he says politely in Spanish. His Spanish is, phonetically, thoroughly lower-class Mexican, yet grammatically impeccable. He looks me in the eye, adds, just to make sure I understand, “En inglés.” He wants me to write it in English.
I smile broadly. Yes, sir, I say.
I turn to one of the doctors. Is Dr. Silverstein in today, I ask.
“Do you know him?”
He’s a friend, I say. There may be hairline fractures.
My diagnosis amuses her, but she is not entirely dismissive. “I’ll let him know.”
I’d like him to get good care, I say. Here’s my card.
Having stabilized him, she turns to me, looks at the card, accepts it. Very rapidly, she scans my skin for breaks—“You were hit?” No, I just held him—checks my fingers and cuticles. “You’ll need to come in for a hepatitis A test. You’ve had your B series?” I nod. “And syphilis, and in a few months HIV.” She purses her lips, satisfied, releases me, indicates a sign on the wall. “Call that number.” She turns away, passes through the swinging metal doors. In them I see a distorted image of myself covered in blood, streaks on my face, in my expensive hair. My shirt has dark-red patches. Half my pearls are tinted hemoglobin. The diamond earrings alone are untouched.
The lipstick is not entirely gone.
I look toward the driver. He’s watching me now, utterly exhausted. I smile at him, and he smiles back, the first time he’s smiled, and for a moment we grin at each other, out of panic and relief and whatever it is you feel when you experience something of this kind with another person.
We sit together, in companionable silence, waiting for the police to arrive.
The breeze coming in the window and the setting sun make me realize how energized I am. An adrenaline high.
“You’re English, right?” he asks. He makes a careful left, heading back up into the hills toward my car.
Not exactly, I say. I’m half. Well, yes, I mean, I suppose I’m English. I never know how to answer that question.
“Ah,” he says. “Well, everyone thinks you’re English.” He adds, “Your Spanish is really good. I’m jealous.”
Thank you.
There’s the slightest hesitation. “My partner is from Mexico.” Then, “Well, his parents are.”
Ah, I say.
I wonder if that is why José’s immigration status occurred to him.
When we arrive at the Saab, he stops, and I get out, and he follows. “Well,” he says with hearty sincerity, “listen, thank you. I mean, thank you. If it weren’t for you—”
I smile. You did fine, I say. Do you have that screenplay with you?
“Oh!” He dives into his trunk, comes up with it, clean, nicely bound, three-hole punched, hands it to me. “A Screenplay by Paul McMahon.” His home address and home phone number, neatly typed.
I give him my card.
He accepts the card as if it were rare metal. He motions deprecatingly at the screenplay. “I really appreciate…” He looks hollowed out.
I take his chin between my thumb and forefinger, covered with dried blood, draw him toward me, and kiss his cheek. You did very well, I say.
As I drive off, he’s still standing there next to his Toyota, looking after me.
At home, I stop at the kitchen door and call inside, Howard?
“Yeah!” says his voice. “Where were you? I can’t find the—” I hear him coming toward the kitchen door. I say loudly that the blood isn’t mine, Howard, I’m perfectly fine, don’t be shocked. Then he rounds the corner and sees me.
I hand him Paul’s screenplay and start to explain what happened. He tosses it on the kitchen table and talks agitatedly about tests and medical exams and what the hell was I thinking and picks up telephones and waves them about. I hold his hand and tell him I’ve talked to Dr. Blum. I’m to go in tomorrow morning. Howard and I are not to have sex for a while.
“We’re going to the damn emergency room,” he says, digging for his car keys. “They can give you something tonight.”
I say, Don’t forget the screenplay, please.
“Goddamnit, Anne!”
I give him a firm, warm kiss on the cheek. I head to my study to look up sloth. “Perezoso.”
Up in our bathroom, I strip off the earrings and the necklace and set them aside for Denise to clean when she gets a moment. I place my shoes on the bathroom tile and fold my clothes in a neat pile on top. I take a very hot shower and wash my hair and scrub under my fingernails. Halfway through my shower, I begin to hyperventilate, and my body shakes. I grip the walls until it passes.
I throw out everything except the shoes.
I HAVE BEEN ASKED WHETHER the proximity of this number of women, this nubile, this interested in Howard or his job, bothers me. They glance pointedly at his assistant, Jennifer.
“I can hold my liquor,” Howard once said to me. I told him I both appreciated the metaphor and believed him. He happens never to have let me down, as far as I know.
Byron wrote, in 1821 in a letter to a friend, of his difficulties in finishing his epic poem “Don Juan.” He had “not,” he said, “quite fixed whether to make him end in Hell, or in an unhappy marriage, not knowing which would be the severest. The Spanish tradition says Hell: but it is probably only an Allegory of the other state.”
I am certainly aware of the blind genetic stupidity of men. Howard understands it as well. At our table at a charity dinner in Beverly Hills—I think it was Woodland Drive, we were in white tents in someone’s backyard—Howard talks about it in the way he does. Why do men have a hole in their penis? he asks everyone. So oxygen can get to their brains.
What’s the difference between men and pigs? Pigs don’t turn into men when they drink.
Why does it take 100,000 sperm to fertilize a single egg? None of them will stop to ask directions.
Why do so many women have to fake orgasm? asks Howard. Why? our table replies in unison. Because so many men fake foreplay.
I am truly aware that many women get from men the things they don’t really want and don’t get what they really need. But then, so is Howard. He too has a Byronesque view of marriage. He knows what can turn it to hell. If the sensitive part at the head of the penis is called the “glans,” he asks the benefit table, what is the insensitive part at the base of the penis called? The man. The table roars. A thousand dollars a plate. Cancer, I think.
Certainly it is best when the man you are with is aware of the illusions men have, the confusions these cause. A fly is buzzing through the jungle, says Howard as we sit in our seats in the Kodak Theater (the giant gold statue is on the screen; we’ve just started the fifth commercial break and only two Academy Awards have been handed out). The fly hears an elephant trumpeting with annoyance. He asks, “What’s the matter?” She says, “It’s this damn bug in my ear!” The fly marches into her ear and shoos out the bug. She says to the fly, “Oh, how can I thank you!” “Well,” he says, “I’ve always wanted to have sex with an elephant.” The elephant tries not to laugh at the obvious, but she agrees. The fly swaggers around to the rear and begins thrusting while she waits for him to finish. Suddenly a gigantic coconut falls on her head. “Ow!” says the elephant. And from the rear, the fly roars, “Take it all, bitch!”
“OK, back in five!” they warn, “four, three,” the cameras swing into position, and on the stage Billy clears his throat and looks into the prompter. Our row is still choking with laughter, and a minion wearing a headset glares at Howard.
We have had our moments of solitude. Disappointments, a few disagreements that lasted days. A silent late-night flight eighteen years ago to Prague. We had experienced our second terror in the middle of the night, both of them boringly identical in the way they uncoiled themselves, my waking in the darkness of New York to some vapor ous pain, the textbook-style cramping where my own flesh raged inside me. An
d yet each nightmare managed to distinguish itself, the blood, Howard’s voice, my screaming. They were paradigmatic miscarriages of myth and legend, both fetuses lying on their backs on the porcelain bottom of the toilet bowl gazing up at you, doomed swimmers in their agony, the water, blood filled as if from a shark attack, sloshed gently over their tiny heads. The first was male, the second female. We couldn’t afford it at the time, but we’d stabbed a random finger at the globe, and Eastern Europe had seemed so far from all the doctors telling us we would never have a child, that I would never survive it, in the extremely unlikely event that I ever did manage to become pregnant again. Never. Sam, for whom I would have sacrificed anything, had not been conceived yet.
Years later, we rented an apartment in Rome, and one of the first things the elderly signora who lived below us taught Sam in Italian was a dictum: “Love makes women strong and men weak.” (After summers and vacations there, Sam spoke Italian fluently, with a blunt-instrument Roman accent. The kid sounded, Howard once told David Simon, like a miniature Fellini character.) I liked the dictum, and remember repeating it to someone, and he thought it over and replied, “Maybe Howard is actually a woman.” Love seemed to make him strong.
All the young agents and hopeful writers and ingratiating producers, who came to Howard and minutely detailed for him in some Hollywood canteen the examined, transporting joys of oral sex. Invariably their joy derived less from the act itself and more from the man’s not being married to the woman involved. Howard recounts these tales to me, sitting at the kitchen counter still holding his car keys, his shirt hanging exhaustedly on his shoulders. They lay every minute goddamn detail of this lubricious facsimile of intimacy at his feet, he sighs, their aim to create yet another facsimile of intimacy, this time between them and him. “Bonding,” said Howard sourly, hooking two fatigued fingers around the word; thus was cunnilin gus recycled, gaining infinitely more meaning by its recounting (they were hoping it would seal a production deal) than by its actual performance.
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