He was very agitated, but the words came out in the end quite logically; he’d clearly been walking himself through it. He scoffed at the idea that a God would care if you were circumcised, which he called “disfigurement as tribal ID,” a phrase that sounded like something he’d learned recently from a book. I washed lettuce and listened.
All the theological acrobatics, all the crap you’ve got to generate because all the rules you’ve laid down back you into it. And the thing is, said Sam, the rules were supposed to mean you were more moral. But actually, said Sam, they meant exactly the opposite: Doing this to other human beings was the most immoral thing you could do. Seriously, Mom!
It’s like, he said, they used to pull this shit at some fucking racist country clubs in Alabama. His hand was resting on the counter over the dishwasher. But this is religion. This is worse. This is, like, “We’re the only people with platinum-mileage status with God.” So what is everyone else worth, then. Nothing!
From the living room, we heard Howard get up from where he had been sitting and walk back to his home office and shut the door.
Sam was silent. He looked toward the office.
I GOT AN EMAIL. WILLIAM Morris literary agency in New York. The agent represented the authors of two novels coming out soon, and she wondered if I might be interested in getting an early look at the manuscripts. Oh, and maybe I could give her my comments, she’d be very interested to hear. I was intrigued. I told Justin to say I would.
The next day, just after FedEx had arrived with the two titles, Justin found me on the stairs, still filled with the thrill one has at the beginning of a novel. This is quite promising, I said to him. “Good,” he replied, “because they invited you to lunch.” There were several authors of theirs who, they’d suggested, I really should meet. A salad at the Beverly Hills Hotel, next Wednesday. Someone from New York was flying in, and some of their L.A. office would meet us. I told Justin it sounded interesting. It is, he said, already turning back to the office, and he’d already accepted. He had also specified to them the two writers they were to place on either side of me.
The day after the William Morris lunch, ICM called. Their New York office had just signed a new fiction writer, a real whiz kid, he was right up my literary alley, they said to Justin. “Well,” Justin replied smoothly, “I guess that will be Anne’s call, won’t it.” I found this harsh. He put a finger on the mute button, mouthed, “Let me manage it.” The finger turned the mute off. “So you’re looking for a blurb from Anne,” he began. It was the start of a negotiation. I have no idea what he thought he could extract from them. I left him to it.
When Howard got home and I started telling him about this, he was the slightest bit—I was surprised when I realized it—envious.
(The following day an editor called Justin to ask if I might slip a brand-new literary acquisition into Howard’s hands. I had Justin call Howard and repeat what she’d said. I took the phone. You see? I said to Howard. They’re using me to get to you.
Howard felt better but pretended he didn’t.)
I realized Justin was now regularly signing for five or so overnight deliveries each day. The stout dirty-blond DHL woman had a terrible crush on him. He moved around my house with his lists and papers, his mod glasses and moussed hair and his Princeton tones (I heard him casually mentioning his undergraduate institution to someone at Universal on the phone) never above a certain decibel, with a masculine friendliness that told people he kept the gate. He was a perfect animal for the telephone in Los Angeles. He treated Sam like a younger brother; in that role as well he had eerily perfect pitch.
I WAS NOT OVERTLY CONSCIOUS of why I chose the Trollope and Anna Karenina for my directors of photography. One of them actually elucidated my own choice to me afterward.
The phone rings at 3:00 A.M. It is two years ago, I explain to them, and it is Sam, age fifteen. Howard is instantly awake on adrenaline, sitting up, grunting his terror at whatever lies on the other end of the line. But Sam is fine. It is the other boy, the driver, who has been arrested on Santa Monica for an expired registration. The boy was not drunk, not high, not irresponsible. He’d just had the bad luck to meet this particular, overeager member of the LAPD.
There are two young women involved. And then it turns out the policeman was, perhaps, not so overeager. One of the girls had drugs, or she didn’t have drugs because she’d just swallowed them, wrapped in a plastic bag. We never get the full story. Sam was isolated in a separate room at the police station when they strip-searched her.
“This is his date!” Howard whispered to me, hand over the receiver.
No, mumbles Sam—too scared to be sullen at this particular instant; right now he needs us—she’s the other boy’s date. So the putative nondruggy is his then? Our first knowledge that Sam is dating, and we’re hearing it, in effect, from the LAPD. It struck me as hilarious. Honestly: This is how I learn about my son’s maturing social life?
Which drugs? I ask.
A pause. “GHB,” says Sam’s voice.
I give Howard a look: Do you know what that is? He has no idea.
“Is Mom crying?” asks Sam’s voice, stricken.
“Yes,” Howard barks. “You get home right now.”
Actually I am trying not to laugh. Howard, on the other hand, is cross. He will wait up till the police car arrives in the driveway and march out to meet it.
Howard has been this way from the start, since the moment we brought Sam home. He understood innately Bacon’s warning, “He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.”
How do you protect them?
Howard bought him a Volvo.
Howard lies now in the dark, eyes on the ceiling. I sleepily stroke his ears. “Stop smiling,” he says to the air above, “Jesus.”
Nonsense, he’s perfectly fine!
“He’s not gonna be fine when he gets home,” he says.
Bosh, I say to dismiss this, and I curl myself around Howard and fall semi-asleep as he auditions tones of voice in which to administer effective but not overly severe punishments. I feel like a casting director. Oh yes, that one, I mumble authoritatively as he rehearses. It just irritates him.
Howard obviously wanted Sam to have sex education, but in his view that came down in its entirety to this (Howard quoted it to the boy):
There was a young lady named Wylde
Who kept herself quite undefiled
By thinking of Jesus
And social diseases
And having an unwanted child
Howard, I said, this is ridiculous.
“Have you ever talked to him about birth control?” asked Howard.
Oh, of course I have, every boy is dying to have his mother explain how to put on a condom.
Howard gave me a Precisely! look. “So I have to do it.”
He’s fifteen, I said. Don’t you think it’s a bit early?
“All I know,” said Howard, “is what they tell me on television.”
Howard put the condoms in Sam’s hand, stating our strong preference that they not become necessary any time too damn soon, OK? No, really: Got it? Sam mumbled a response. “Well,” he sighed afterward, “you can’t make them climb into the lifeboat.”
And now our semisullen teenager was dating a girl who was snorting the alphabet.
Did he actually say he was dating her? I ask.
“Of course he’s dating her! He doesn’t have to tell his dad he’s dating her! The dad knows!”
Do we all look back at our own matings and find them inevitable, or perhaps simply uneventful, which is indistinguishable, retrospectively, from inevitable? I worried deeply about how Sam would go about it. Some club on Sunset frequented by bleach-blond girls with silicone implants. So many ways to go wrong. “The kid,” Howard says (it’s a warning to me), “will figure it out.”
I’m not so sure, I reply, Sam seems astonishingly dim sometimes. We’d noticed his dull, almost total reticence on this particular topic.
One thing that helps me, I say to my directors of photography, opening up a book now, is remembering that none of this—our worries about our children, their sexual risks, their potential mates—is new. It helps, remembering that, I say. Tolstoy’s world, for example, was absolutely ours.
Literature continually startles you with the fact that each book contains a time horizon beyond which absolutely nothing was known. The people reading these books and the characters inhabiting them crossed into the unknown future of 1741, of 1835, of 2048, and survived, and therefore so, perhaps, shall we. Take Tolstoy on marriage, I say.
“The old Princess’s own marriage had been arranged by an aunt. The young man, about whom everything was known beforehand, had come, looked at the girl, and was looked at by the family; the aunt passed on the impression on each side; on an appointed day the expected proposal was made to the parents and accepted. Everything had taken place easily and simply.
“But with her own daughters, she felt it was not at all simple. How many arguments with her husband there had been over the marrying off of the two older ones, Dolly and Natalie. The old Prince, like all fathers, was irrationally jealous of them, especially of the youngest, Kitty, his favorite, who had just come out into society, and at every step he made his wife a scene.
“The Princess felt that in Kitty’s case, the Prince’s punctiliousness had greater justification. Social customs had been changing a great deal lately. She saw that girls Kitty’s age went off to lecture courses, saw men freely, drove about the streets alone. A great many of them never curtsied and were completely convinced that choosing a husband was their business and not their parents’. ‘Nowadays girls are not given away in marriage as they used to be,’ all these young girls said, and so did even all the older people. But how marriages were then to be managed nowadays the Princess could not find out from anyone. The French custom—parents deciding their children’s fate—was condemned. The English custom—complete liberty for girls—was impossible in Russian society. The Russian custom of matchmaking was considered monstrous somehow and was laughed at by everyone. But the Princess knew her daughter might fall in love with someone she was seeing a lot of, and it might be someone who didn’t want to marry, or who would make an unsuitable husband. And no matter how often it was suggested to the Princess ‘it’s the young people who marry, and they must be left to make their own arrangements as best they can,’ she could not believe it, any more than she would have been able to believe that the best toys for five-year-old children could ever be loaded pistols.”
We want our children to have what we had, I say to my book club. At least we want them to have the best of what we had. And when marriage is good, nothing is better. The question is figuring out what a good marriage should be.
“You can’t really do a damn thing to get them a good marriage,” Stephen Schiff says to me, “other than, you know, raising them right.”
True, I reply. But you can provide them a target. Although, I added, Anthony Trollope disagrees with me. (We all put down Tolstoy, pick up Trollope.) From a position as a postal worker—Trollope invented the mailbox—he rose to become one of the bestselling authors of his era. For one of his novels he received the immense sum of £3,525. And if not a writer of the first rank, I defy anyone to point out a writer who achieved a greater connection to the parts of our lives that we don’t put in the movies. Compare Trollope’s view in Can You Forgive Her? to Tolstoy’s. Please read from the top of the page.
People often say that marriage is an important thing, and should be much thought of in advance, and marrying people are cautioned that there are many who marry in haste and repent at leisure. I am not sure, however, that marriage may not be pondered over too much. Nor do I feel certain that the leisurely repentance does not as often follow the leisurely marriages as it does the rapid ones. That some repent no one can doubt; but I am inclined to believe that most men and women take their lots as they find them, marrying as the birds do by force of nature, and going on with their mates with a general, though not perhaps an undisturbed satisfaction, feeling inwardly assured that Providence, if it has not done the very best for them, has done for them as well as they could do for themselves with all the thought in the world. I do not know that a woman can assure to herself, by her own prudence and taste, a good husband any more than she can add two cubits to her stature; but husbands have been made to be decently good—and wives too, for the most part, in our country—so that the thing does not require quite so much thinking as some people say.
I clear my throat. I tell them, a bit hesitantly, that in its little confidences of an age gone by, its lovely sweet optimism, it gives me hope for my son and the woman he will eventually find. It makes me hope for the woman’s beauty and for her goodness, and for how he will love her, and she, him. Trollope is the poetry of things that just happen to us.
My eyes have become a bit wet, and I have to take a swipe at them with my hand. I hurriedly put the books away and clap my hands. Go on then, I say to them, off with you, no sitting around grinning like idiots.
As Howard said, “Sam will meet a girl, and that will be that.”
Afterward, one of them stays for a moment. She assays me with a smile and says, very gently, “It really won’t be so bad when he goes. I promise.”
Yes, I say, he’s prepared for the world, I think.
“I don’t mean for Sam,” she says, “I mean for you,” and gives me a kiss. “You’ll be fine.”
But I realize that actually I’d been thinking of Howard.
IT WAS THE TENTH DAY after Sam returned from Israel. Howard had already started to change. The thing had happened, and now it started gaining force behind us, advancing to engulf us, and we were just beginning to turn and look back at it, trying to make out its initial form as it gained ground. We had, at this point, no idea what it would become.
At five thirty in the morning, I am awake, and I leave him sleeping in the bed and make my way through the living room to his office, watching myself move through the large, elegant, clean, cool hallways, knowing something will be there.
It is a booklet, a single sheet of paper, hand folded, in small print. It looks vaguely strange, as if it had been printed on an antiquated press. At first I think it is a poem. I pick it up.
If you are a Jew, we have a message for you, it says.
CONSIDER that the Jew, the symbol of Eternity, who neither the fire nor the sword could destroy, is today succumbing to spiritual annihilation.
CONSIDER that the Jewish people, who have illuminated the world with the Divine Light, have raised a generation in darkness.
CONSIDER that we are the people of the Book, the nation that has given the Torah to the world, and yet today, its wisdom eludes our grasp.
CONSIDER that the Jew possesses expertise in every field, and yet his own heritage eludes him.
You are a Jew.
You have been given the unique mission of proclaiming the one-ness of G-d.
You have traveled the corners of the earth.
You have known oppression, all forms of persecution. Your memory fails. You have forgotten your past.
But nevertheless, a still, small voice calls out to you, to discover your inner self, to bend your will to your Maker’s, even if your intellect rebels, even if you do not understand why you should do this.
A still, small voice that gives you no peace, for within you courses the blood of prophets, martyrs, sages, and kings of Israel.
Who are your ancestors?
Where do you come from?
Why did G-d create you?
Your roots are sunk in eternity.
You are heir to a legacy over 4,000 years old.
Come home.
The paper is lying open and carefully smoothed out on the desk as if he has pressed it flat with an open hand to reread it many times.
Someone—I can’t remembe
r who—said that the only true paradises are those we have lost.
“READY?”
Wait. I’m sorry. These shoes are new.
He waits, hand on the car door, as I adjust them.
“Ready?” he asks.
Ready.
He nods, they open the door, and we step out onto the red carpet. The weird awed gasp of the crowd and the eerie bombardment of camera flashes, like a slaughter of soldiers in some strange war, explodes around us. We wear halogen halos.
“Anne! How are you!” “Anne, finally.” “Anne. You look terrific,” and then, as if hearing thunder lagging behind a lightning flash, “Hey, Howie.”
“Hi,” says Howard.
At the first opportunity, I catch his eye. He grins a self-mocking grin, which I have seen before, but then it slips, which I have never seen. I am still looking toward him, wondering if I should go to him as they take my arm, “Oh, Anne, come over here and meet the producer!” There are unfamiliar hands on the small of my back, guiding me. Not Howard’s hand. “He’s attached to the project,” they murmur to me, “great guy!” and add as if it’s the most hilarious, unbelievable thing, “He doesn’t even know you and I are friends.”
Howard seems to be paying less attention to me than usual. Or else he is busier than usual. He remains far away, and I, lonely among the hopeful who press, sequentially, to talk to the stars and the director, and now strangely enough to me, watch him in the swirl like a desirable, distant cloud, and wonder about this.
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