You or Someone Like You (11 page)

“Someone has to,” he says. “They've burned through the entire fucking budget, and they've only got
half
the thing in the can.”

I nod. But I have never been afraid of him before.

“He's stupid.” This he offers as a mitigating factor; he watches my face. He clarifies, “He's not just young. He's actually stupid. And arrogant.” His eyes drift over to the milky window, his mind still partly engaged in the conversation. He speaks poisonously to himself. I have never seen his face so ugly. He looks exactly like
all of them when they go into this mode. “An arrogant little shit who cost us three million dollars yesterday for two very, very bad reasons.”

He swallows to keep down the anger sloshing in his lungs. We stare at all his screenplays.

I say to him, They all do that. (I mean the applied cruelty.) I just didn't know you did it, too.

We sit on the steps, on the tasteful, putty-colored wool carpeting, looking at Howard's clean, spacious home office, the walls painted a muted straw. “Don't think you don't know me, Anne,” Howard says. “You know who I am.”

Not entirely, I say. After a moment I add, But I suppose that's OK, isn't it.

I add, It just surprised me a bit, that's all.

 

DENISE SHOPPED FOR FOOD TWO
days before the Woolf. She stated that she didn't want to prepare everything last minute, as she'd had to do with the Thackeray, when Double Features Films had suddenly asked if a small contingent could come. I'd begun cutting off the guest list one week before. It seemed a weekly event now, which given that they couldn't possibly be finishing the books in seven days I found bizarre until I realized I now had in essence two alternating biweekly groups. Consuela began her setup outside at around 3:00
P.M.,
wiping down the big teak garden dinner table, bringing out linens and glassware and fighting back a few of my vines, dying of curiosity, and a small regiment of grasses staging an invasion. She noted that we needed a gardener. I agreed. Consuela had a not-indecent eye for table placement, I found. She and I had gone to Crate & Barrel for extra plates and silver because I wasn't about to use paper. My job, which Denise and Consuela assigned me—it was the only one they felt me competent to perform—was
buying and arranging the flowers, although as Peter Chernin pointed out, “Anne, you're holding these things in a
garden
.”

Well, I said. I just thought it would be a nice touch.

He grinned at me. He considered something. “Who from Fox comes to your clubs?” And from then on Peter sent flowers with whoever came from the studio. Calla lilies and delphiniums and jonquils in fresh, crackling paper.

The unwritten rule was that they brought dessert. In typical industry fashion, like emerging nuclear powers, they rapidly escalated the desserts in intricacy and number and size and exoticism and, quite predictably, cost. The boxes they came in, covered in glinting gold filament wrapping or scented sheets of rare Indian cinnamon bark, irritated Denise. After several weeks of this I said to them, I am terminating this brinkmanship. The coordinator for each successive club will choose one of you to bring dessert, and it will be appropriate.

The Woolf dessert was appropriate in size (small), but it cost eight hundred dollars and came in four cream-colored bamboo boxes lined in silver paper and tied with raw Andalusian hemp. Some kind of chocolate-flecked foam. Denise grimly got out a sharp knife for the hemp. Consuela carried it out to us. We were just finishing a conversation about novelistic conventions and writers who broke them importantly. That was when Amy Slotnick asked me a question. What, in my opinion, was the single most important work of literature in the twentieth century?

They watched me carefully, sipping white wine. Two of them leaned on the large rocks with which I'd framed a lovely Latin American wisterialike vine I found two years ago.

I said that this hierarchization of literature—“the first most important work, the second”—is ludicrous, given art's complexity, and yet it rivets all of us.

I paused. I actually do, I said, happen to have an answer, because
something happened that decided it for me. It started when our friend Daniel Rose called.

Sam was eight at the time. Daniel had landed at LAX at 3:00
P.M.,
checked into the Ermitage, and called us. Hello, Daniel. “Hey, Anne, how are you. Howard there?” Howard: “Daniel! You in town?” Daniel had three tickets for the Bulls, floor seats. “Sammy,” Howard had hollered, “we're going to the Forum!” Into the receiver he said snidely, “So we're your latest philanthropic effort—I commend your choice.”

“Ya ain't much,” retorted Daniel, “as charitable causes go.” Daniel funds his philanthropy through his real estate.

But when they returned much later that evening, their mood was somewhat dark, and Daniel was watching Sam intently. Some of the players, Howard explained, had gotten up to speak after the game—an antidrug message mated, naturally, to a product endorsement—and Howard and Daniel had both realized that Samuel was registering Black English. The boy had listened to them, and, after a long moment, had turned to Howard. “Why are they talking like that, Dad?” It had bothered him.

I was pouring Howard some coffee. The way they spoke, Sam?

He wriggled in his chair, eyes on the wall. “Yeah.”

What did you think about it?

Daniel, his head cocked slightly to one side, observed Sam vaguely kicking the air.

“I don't know.”

Articulate it, Sam. Say what you're thinking.

My son thought about it, and we ate cookies. “Well, it was, like—”

Don't tell me what it was “like,” tell me what it was.

“Mom!”

Sam.

And then more cookies and then, gradually, with no “likes”: They were famous, he understood that. He knew their names. And they
were rich, and they slid gorgeously through space with the sleek agility of cats, gleaming and graceful, but when they opened their mouths to articulate their ideas, the words squeezed with visible effort through the neural tubes. In their bodies they were athletes, but in their minds they limped. Sam was reacting, we understood, to the sudden realization that intellectually they were cripples. Then Howard picked him up to put him to bed. I made some fresh coffee for Daniel.

Howard came back and sat down. “It was the contrast,” said Howard, adding that he, too, via the kid, he said, had seen something for the first time. That all of us who reflexively cringe (and just as reflexively hide it) at the stumbling ineloquence of these black men are not alone. That our children can sense, too, this vast difference. The great divide had opened for Sam for the first time, and they—Daniel and Howard—had witnessed the boy's learning at the Los Angeles Forum that we are not all equal. Howard sighed.

Tell me about it, said Daniel. They didn't know how to speak, how to
walk
, for God's sake, look at them, either strutting like peacocks or shuffling like convicts—and you were supposed to hire them? One of the philanthropic projects he'd recently funded was the Harlem Educational Activities Fund. It tutored bright Harlem junior high students and then supported them in high school with mentoring and special trips, and in college with a special HEAF 800 number they could use, and money to come home on holidays—and, he said, it was a great program, if he did say so himself. But. He'd just been at a HEAF awards ceremony, and, Jesus, you just watch these kids, he meant the way they moved with tentative, awkward embarrassment, how the hell are they going to look at their Harvard interview, at their Goldman Sachs interview? They didn't know how to act, said Daniel.

I said that, in that case, he should be providing them with acting lessons.

Daniel gave me a look.

Socialization is acting, I said. You needn't change the person, you simply need to change the façade they present others. We spend our entire lives acting, Daniel.

Daniel gave me a different look. He looked at Howard. Howard said, “Sounds right to me.”

(My eyes rest on Amy Slotnick, seated in my garden. She's carefully following my answer to her question.)

Daniel went back to New York and called Juilliard, and Juilliard talked to one of their voice coaches, Denise Woods, a black woman, and Daniel wrote a check, and the teacher created a class called “Express Yourself!” and they started enrolling kids. Daniel called me and said, “Come,” and so I wrote a check to HEAF, which Howard and I copied to our accountant as a charitable deduction, and HEAF bought me a ticket out of that amount, and I flew to New York and met the teacher. Denise was a delight. She had been raised at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge on the Lower East Side. “I used ta tawk like dis,” she told me, “I kid you not.”

We argued out every aspect of the program. I sat in on a class. I watched her illustrate different accents to the students, acting out texts with her assistant, Justin Diaz, a Juilliard drama major she'd borrowed. Justin was smooth and very serious and good-looking (he was rather conscious of this). I assumed a dash of Quechua blood had added exotic to his handsome. She used me as an exhibit. She said, “Everyone, this is upper-class English, listen to the vowels,” and pushed me into the middle of the room and said “Speak.” Twenty-five underclass black and Hispanic kids all turned their eyes to me and waited, expressionless.

I spoke, about Samuel. What my son liked to do after school, who his friends were. I clipped my Ts with positive cruelty. I selected words of no more than three syllables, simplified my structures, was chary with relative pronouns (but did insist on the subjunctive), intentionally used a predicate nominative, referenced Tennyson, which I pronounced
tenisin
, as one used to at Oxbridge. I made it a point to sound
in all ways like the unreconstructed, pre-Regionalist BBC. I modeled for them an impressive façade. I elocuted and circumlocuted and shan't'ed and cahn't'ed. I even—twenty-five years in America, and you feel that it's overkill, but—pronounced “opening” as two syllables. I loved it. I was absolutely passionate. They were my children, and I treated them as I treated Sam. One is not, I suppose, supposed to touch students nowadays, but I did, put my hand on their warm skin, patted their backs. It is like putting one's hand on something electrical, or a wild bird. One feels so much startled life inside those small bodies.

A light-skinned girl asked, What use is all this? Her tone was calculating, slightly hostile.

I said: Wealth. Power. Social standing. Success. Access. Money talks, I said. Speak its language.

Denise shot me a look; she agreed completely with me—her point was simply that to them, I was sounding glib. Hm. I looked back at the girl, estimated her at around fourteen. I said to her: The phone rings at my house. (This is two weeks ago.) I answer, cover the receiver. “They're inviting us to go sailing,” I say to Howard.

“Sailing!” cries Howard, then adds suspiciously, “On a boat?”

I confirm that the sailing will take place on a boat.

He says, “‘
To mew me in a Ship is to inthrall Mee in a prison / Long voyages are long consumptions / And ships are carts for executions
.'” John Donne. Howard hates boats.

I uncover the receiver and say I am terribly sorry, but it turns out we have lunch plans that weekend.

I hang up. Howard says approvingly, “You sound so English when you lie.” I say yes, an English accent is marvelously effective for lying. People buy it much more readily even when they don't believe a word. I said to the light-skinned girl: This is a matter of culture. British culture assumes duplicity for the conveying of manners to a much greater degree than American, and it also more highly values privacy, which is guarded by manners, and sees this kind of duplicity not
in moralistic terms (the American reaction) but in terms of simply making things flow better. Hypocrisy saves you trouble; your interlocutor accepts this because he shares your culture. The accent—the expression of words and thoughts in this particular manner—is a finely tuned tool, and you use it to
get what you want
in life.

“I can see that,” the girl said approvingly, and I saw her eyeing the cut of my clothing, taking my measure, and plotting a new persona. I thought I detected her planning to steal wholesale this exterior I have developed. I hoped she would. It is, for all its defects, one I've always found useful. You children, I said to them, you need weapons, yes, but you also need protection; the personae you've developed for survival on the sidewalks of Malcolm X Boulevard don't work in fortieth-floor conference rooms in offices on East 57th or the sleek lofts of SoHo where their dinner parties are held.

“You will breathe deeply from the ribs and not the chest,” the teacher told them. “Now, what are the sounds?” She turned to me.

The rain, I said, in Spain stays mainly in the plain. In Hartford, Herriford, and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen. (I look at Amy Slotnick. It takes her only an instant to put the connection together and see, before anyone else, that I have just given her the answer to her question. “Ah…” she says, smiling.)

A jet-black girl repeats this. In Hartford, Herriford, and Hampshire. I appraise her.

“Where are you from?” she asked. She carefully included the predicate. You could see her doing what the teacher had taught them, you could see her turning her three-word sentence into four.

I was raised in London.

“They all talk like that?”

Yes, they all talk like this. Excuse me,
some
of them talk like this. It depends on which part of the city and which social class. (This they understood implicitly.)

The teacher directed me. “Hah!” I said. “Hah-tfuhd. Herriford. Hampshire.”

The teacher looked at them a trifle narrowly. She spoke with a street accent. “Y'all gone get up an leave here. They gone be stan'in' aroun', drink malt liquor from a can, ‘Yo, mami! 'nuthin' gone change, see?” And continuing in Standard English, “So do
not
think you're going to use this sound on 131st Street. You will use it when you need to adapt to different circumstances.”