More astonishing, said Howard, is that these men consider their emotions—these tendentious fillips in torrid afternoon moments in bungalows, the surge of tiny hormones they feel when their organ is in some moist, dark hole—real.
The movie industry operates on a mentor-protégé system, and Howard has his protégées. Generally women, though again, this is to be expected. Protégé derives from the French, “to protect,” and Howard does, as much as he can. He looks out for their interests.
Jennifer walks into the meeting room. “Hi, Howard!” She is lovely, her hair gleams, her body is thin. She is carrying a trashy legal novel, on which she’s just submitted her coverage to him, plus three different scripts based on it. (By that afternoon they will throw out all three.) “Where would you like these?”
Howard touches the table near him. She lays them on that spot, flashes a smile. “Anything else?”
“We’re OK,” says Howard, “thanks. I need you at three fifteen.”
“You bet.”
Even before the door closes, the short man meeting with Howard is leaning over the desk. “She single?”
After a moment, Howard says, “Yes, in fact.” He doesn’t look up.
“Set me up with her.” Now Howard looks up. The man bats away Howard’s look. Insistently: “So set me up with her!”
Howard returns to a script, searching for a problematic page. “She’s not Jewish, Barry.”
“How ard,” Barry says.
Jennifer has been with Howard since she graduated from USC. She is twenty-six now. She began as a production assistant on the lot, and six weeks later she came to the bungalow. She herself suggested babysitting Sam, and he adored her from the start. Howard knows little about her private life—she has an almost breathtaking maturity, which includes discretion toward her boss regarding herself; I know her a bit better: favors she’s done me, the logistical planning of Howard’s time that she and I manage together, her evenings looking after my son while we attended some function she had arranged for us. Howard knows she is sweet. He recently overheard that she is single. She is under his jurisdiction, so she is his protégée. Protected.
“Howard,” Barry says. He has not heard the edge in Howard’s voice (actually he has, but he ignores it because he is intoxicated by her teeth, her perfect shoulders, her breasts). He spreads his arms, the hands open palms up, raises his shoulders. “She’s got a box, right?” Confidentially: “Ya don’t marry a box, Howard.” The hands say: Am I right?
Howard sits there for a moment. Equanimity. He knows Barry. He says, “You’re the kind of guy I’d want dating my daughter.” He holds Barry’s gaze.
Barry doesn’t say anything. Howard goes back to thumbing a script, daffodil yellow. Barry thinks: “Fucking prick.”
The breakdown was over morality, Howard explained to me. There were, he said, just two different moralities at that table. He and I were in the living room, the sound of Sam’s music distantly from his bedroom. I was eating seedless grapes.
And what was your morality, I asked Howard.
He took a grape. His morality, Howard said, was that not in a million years would he let some guy use her as a sexual toy. Some little shmuck with a corner office on Wilshire who knows going in what he’s after and what he’s not, and why he’s not after it: because she doesn’t, as Howard put it, have the right stamp on her ass. A guy who would never drag her out of bed to meet his parents because his parents definitely wouldn’t wanna know. If Jennifer had the full info going in, she’d never go in. She’d say, Are you kidding me?
And what was Barry’s morality?
He seemed to be thinking about something else. He roused himself. “Well!” he said of Barry. “His morality.” Howard didn’t, actually, dislike the guy per se. He’d known him a while, they’d done a couple of projects. “His morality.” He shrugged.
JOSÉ APPEARED TWO WEEKS LATER, on crutches, wearing a carefully ironed cotton shirt. He somehow lent a dignity to the crutches. Denise answered the door, and although José cleared his throat and launched his best effort in English, she just turned and called Consuela.
Consuela’s eyes narrowed at the figure in the doorway.
When I came upon them, she was grilling him like a Mexican Himmler. He was enduring it but evinced relief at seeing me. I led him to the sofa. Would you like something to drink?
No, thank you, I’m fine. Thank you, by the way, for the poem by Mr. Blake.
You’re welcome. Did you understand some of it?
He paused. I read some in the hospital, he said. Then he said, in English, “My mother taught me underneath a tree.”
I tried not to appear startled. That was excellent, I said. Then: How is your leg?
La herida está sanándose. He shrugged. Crutches for a few more days, perhaps.
This about the crutches was, I assumed, a lie.
Consuela swept in to inquire, in English, if Madame would like something to drink.
No, thank you, Consuela.
She turned imperiously to José. “Would you like drink something?”
“No,” said José. “Thank you.”
Well then. She swept out.
I asked him, How did you get here? To the house.
By…He merely motioned arriving, supplied no details. I didn’t pursue it.
I realized as we sat there and he asked me for a job that I did not exactly know, when I saw him the instant before Paul McMahon struck him with the car, how I had known he was a gardener. But he was. His price was reasonable. He wondered if perhaps there were not others nearby needing a gardener. I said the Fishbeins—he at TriStar, she at Paramount, four doors down—hated their garden service, I’d give him their address as well. (Miriam had ordered rocks. Marvin said that spending $20,000 on boulders—boulders!—was crazy. “It’s a rock garden, Marvin,” said Miriam. Marvin looked at me. “Who are we?” he said. “The Flintsteins? We live in Bedrock?”) As for us, I told José what his duties would be, stressed that I needed him to do exactly, precisely what I asked. No more. No less. I had all the equipment. We would work out a schedule.
He nodded calmly. Mr. Taciturn.
Howard accepted José with a friendly handshake and benign indifference. Howard was conscious that he was now employing three people in his home and with the usual American awkwardness regarding servants began referring to them sardonically as “our baptized property.” This was what the Russian gentry called serfs attached to landed estates. Not within earshot, though, since who knew who understood what at this point.
I LOST MY TEMPER, AND the press coverage started, and Howard said I deserved it. It was in public, too, so I was at fault.
Rather than have the next book club in my garden, my agents group suggested we meet at Orso. A few of them had a thing for Dos Passos. Dos Passos, who has strange punctuation that I dislike, which irrigated the affair, but what made me blow up was the New Yorker, specifically a profile they’d run just the previous week. It concerned a black woman who was a vocal coach, this serving the New Yorker writer as a platform for an examination of why blacks do not get jobs as easily as whites and Asians, and the vocal coach unconsciously provided the answer by stating, “African Americans don’t associate proper pronunciation and grammar with intelligence, and it is a shock to us when they are.”
First of all, I said. I don’t believe this for an instant because it is absurd. But leave that. The rule that a comma is placed before a conjunction joining two independent clauses is, I think, one of the few truly indisputable points of grammar. This was the way the sentence appeared in the New Yorker: “African Americans don’t associate proper pronunciation and grammar with intelligence and it is a shock to us when they are.”
I had Dos Passos’s U.S.A. on the table. I’d propped it open with my bread plate. The waiter kept moving the plate and losing my place. More water, yes, no, leave the plate, please. I glanced at the book, saw one of Dos Passos’s ellipses (he uses millions), and it triggered my irritation over the
New Yorker piece.
There are, still, a few things one should be able to count on, I said to them. If we are to reverse this country’s insane lack of support for public schools capable of educating our children—and what is more important than the public school system, nothing is, nothing—we need to begin with correct punctuation. I said, The New Yorker somehow managed to remember the period at the end of the sentence, but really, why bother with the period if you can’t remember the goddamn comma between the two independent clauses.
Their heads moved back just slightly. Well! Look at Anne. The waiter had stopped moving. But they were amused and interested, and it gave me permission to continue. (A thought came to me, from years of observing this industry: The freakish, the odd, the abrasive, the larger-than-life, when they are put before the camera, lit with halogen, presented on the screen, can become compelling. Context is everything. The act of going to see a person transforms that person. They had come to see me here, hitting my mark on this swank set, and I was suddenly conscious of being a different person.)
Spelling, punctuation, grammar, vocabulary, I continued. These things matter. They are not just the backbone of literature, they are reflective of education and intelligence and capability. I thought about how Howard would express this. Oh, of course. I said to them, So there was a letter to the editor of the Times of London in which the writer, whose children went to one of London’s most posh and expensive schools, had just gotten the tuition bill. This exclusive, august institution had printed the figure in “pounds per anum.” He wrote a reply to the school noting that while he didn’t mind the amount so much, could he perhaps go back to paying through the other orifice, which was to say the nose.
Just look at this article, I said to them. I picked from my bag my copy of the New Yorker and flipped the pages. Here. For the moment, at least, I said, the New Yorker is still using the comma of direct address. (I read from the article.) “Hey comma baby!” (It was talking about street slang.) The meaning here of course being completely different from “Hey baby!” which means a baby named Hey. “You all curves an me wit no brakes.” No predicate, and thus no comma necessary.
I cleared my throat and smoothed my napkin. I flushed just a bit. I’m sorry, I said, for this pasquinade. But honestly, we all must understand this. It sounds silly, it sounds minor, these sorts of things, but they slip, bit by bit, and then suddenly you’re the Congo, and nothing works, and the government is corrupt, and it’s all shit, and you hate it.
A man at the next table kept glancing at me.
Howard met a lovely, rather breathless young actress recently, I said to them. She told him, “I’m about, like, self-expression!” Howard replied that that was nice, because she certainly was not about eloquence.
Either you can parse a decent sentence or you can’t. The great French grammarian, Dominique Beauhur, wrote as his last words: “I am dying.” He then appended: “I am about to die. Either is correct.”
I looked up. Several of the agents were watching me with huge grins. The grins said that if I was a lunatic, I was their lunatic. Their warm complicity, their willingness to consider my linking punctuation to the rise and fall of civilizations, caught me off guard.
I loved them for it. And that caught me off guard as well.
For one moment I forgot about the punctuation and saw that they were enjoying me and liked me for who I was, and I let myself go into that, and I smiled back at them. I had to blink a few times and make a show of organizing my papers, and I said to myself, Honestly, Anne! but then I thought no, no, it’s perfectly fine.
So, I said, and I laughed. So we were talking about John Dos Passos.
Nick Paumgarten wrote the New Yorker Talk piece on the lunch. The man at the next table turned out to have been Philip Gourevitch, and he mentioned it to Nick on the phone. The waiters must have been listening closely, or perhaps it was Nick’s reporting skills, but the detail of it was startling. To my mind, the piece was about my agents group, and Nick, naturally, had spun something very nice out of that. But, “Uh, no,” said Sam, looking at me as if I was insane, “it’s about you, Mom.”
The New Yorker did at least wonder about having elided (as Nick put it, rather self-exculpatorily in my own view) the comma. Which was why David Remnick called. “Anne!”
You deserve it, I said to him. Every bit.
“I’m having all the copy editors shot,” he promised solemnly.
I got a call from Amy Kaufman. Focus Features has just bought a spec script from a UTA client, said Amy, and she was wondering, could I look at the (she hesitated, choosing the word) flow? The writer’s word use.
I paused. Are you asking me to look over the script’s syntax?
Yes! she said. The syntax. (She hadn’t wanted to say the word so bluntly.) Could I?
Well. Yes. I supposed I could. I was intrigued. I knew the writer. As we were talking, a messenger service dropped it off. I hung up and asked Justin to handle it. He immediately called Amy back and negotiated a five-figure agreement.
The next day Jeff Berg gave a quick call to say hi, he thought the script checking for Focus was an interesting idea, and he was wondering if I needed representation, but I said Justin was doing quite well. I wrote Justin a check for 15 percent. Justin started spending more time on the phone, which irritated Sam, an orphan under the basket over the driveway. José installed a separate in-box for Justin’s mail on his desk in my office. Justin’s attitude began changing, and Howard noticed immediately. Howard, walking past my office, would say loudly, “ICM’s hiring, Justin.”
Justin, I said, not glancing up, stop walking like that.
“Like what?”
With your chest out. Stop it. This needs to be mailed, please.
I would like to shoot, or have shot (either is correct), every fourth-grade teacher who is not regularly drilling their pupils in the diagramming of sentences. Sam, at twelve, came home one day and asked me what a predicate was. I explained it to him carefully, questioned him till I was satisfied, got my car keys, and drove straight to Harvard-Westlake, where I collared the school’s head. Borys Kit of the Hollywood Reporter called to ask me about why I’d done it; he had apparently heard about the four-year-old incident because Sam had mentioned it to a classmate after the Talk piece, and that classmate’s father was (of course) in the industry and passed it to Borys. So I explained to him that I’d said to this teacher that, my God, at age twelve my son didn’t know subject from predicate, and who, exactly, was going to hire him? McDonald’s? My son did not want to be limited to carting dirty dishes, and given, I’d said, that he was not African American, if he didn’t use proper grammar and pronunciation, people would think him ignorant. I told him my favorite knock-knock joke:
Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Fuck.
Fuck who?
Fuck whom.
At the same time, I said, hysteria over split infinitives is ridiculous. English isn’t Latin. So I’m hardly a purist.
Borys wrote it all down and reprinted the knock-knock joke in full in his Hollywood Reporter piece. It was generally taken as my throwing down the gauntlet.
WE’D JUST FINISHED A CHEEVER story on the subject of loss, and people were leaving when an actress stopped me. The Cheever had made her recall something. She laughed, almost embarrassed.
The tantrums she threw in the kitchen as a Trenton fourth grader before her tearful and uncomprehending mother. “An immigrant from Budapest,” she said. “She would knit me these absolutely exquisite Hungarian sweaters.” She did the accent perfectly: “‘Is good!’ she’d plead, ‘Is varm!’” She cleared her throat. “I used to drop them in the woods in the snow on the way to school. I told her I lost them. Now, of course…” She exhaled deeply, hooking a finger around a thin gold chain. “I’d kill to get my hands on them. I mean, you can’t buy that shit today. I could have given them to my daughter. But they’re gone. And I broke her heart.” She thought about it. Matter-of-factly: “And s
he’s dead.”
We stood and both looked up at the palm fronds making a gentle scything sound, like blades harvesting the night air. José had just trimmed them. “You miss your parents,” she said.
Some comment of mine about the Cheever had obviously elicited this from her. I considered it. I think about my parents, I said to her. Often, actually. Though not exactly like yours. Mine (I laughed briefly) never gave me anything I had to pretend to lose.
“A car accident, right?”
I was startled. Yes.
She frowned. “In Malaysia?”
For a moment I was confused, then understood. No, I said, it was the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, coming from JFK. Quite prosaic. I talked about the accident?
She paused. “You alluded to it. A few details.”
Malaysian Airlines.
“That’s it.”
I’d said to them that when we read fiction, we pour our own particular store of emotions—say, the sense of loss we feel for those disappeared from our lives—into the characters set before us. We take the few words with which the writer sketches these characters, the thing he said, the pain she felt, where they were, and our own emotional stockpile magically creates people. As the human eye fleshes out the pixilated image. Fictional characters are highly sophisticated Rorschach blots, and we, along with their author, are their authors. When you read a fictional character, you too are creating her.
I had commented to them that my mother and father made Cheever’s characters real for me.
It was a pileup of some sort, I said to her now, in a thunderstorm. Theirs was the last car into the mess. I paused. I think it’s called hydroplaning? When the tires do that. They had just landed. Their luggage was in the taxi’s trunk, but it burned.
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