You or Someone Like You (27 page)

I think, Oh damn Nancy Franklin and her observations.

 

One can arrive at a certain point, and turn around and look back, and see differently, and with a strange, discomforting clarity, all the things that have come before. Things clicking into place. Clarity, it seems to me, is supposed not to be discomforting. But.

Year after year, we exited Ben Gurion International into warm and ancient evenings under Israel's skies of blue silicate, the wind in the growing dark an aluminum scalpel slicing the tissue of heat away from the land. All those flights Howard and I used to take to Tel Aviv. (Our last trip several years ago now.) Howard “wanted to help.” He felt an obligation. All the evenings I remember of endless conversations, lawn chairs and fluttering flames of candles and the last bits of
pashteda
and
salat peirot
and
marak pitriot
littering the table, and they gave their opinions and picked at the food and argued and argued. I listened to them from the side. It was always the same: What of Israel? What of Israel? Besieged.

Surrounded by a violent enemy sea of fanatics who strap bombs to children, Israel's leaders necessarily fight back. They order assassinations in neighboring capitals—shootings, poisonings in Amman—as if ordering furniture. The country's founding history is a bomb's shudder, its borders are bullet paths. Its unending series of bloodlettings paint the biblical cities in corpuscles, catheterized with detonators: Galilee in coats of O-positive; Bethlehem, A-negative; and as for Jerusalem, any type you wish.

And they would sit, Howard's friends and acquaintances, the intel
lectuals and publishers and writers and three or four rich concerned Americans, at, for example, a long, outdoor dinner table in Jerusalem hosted by Ari Shavit, the liberal thinker of the left-leaning
Ha'aretz
, and moan and bewail the present, past, and future, like the bitterest of fortune tellers. View it this way, they would say. View it that way. They eat, they drink, and they talk and they argue. The hours tick by as always. I do not look at my watch. I try to find constellations in the sky. They do not talk to me. David Makovsky, whose
Ha'aretz
beat is diplomacy, sits next to Howard, who is listening to
Ma'ariv
's Shalom Rosenfeld, who interrupts himself, looks around.

“More wine, Anne?”

No, thank you.

He returns to the fray.

The tablecloth is stained with coagulated burgundy spots. I sit in the evening dark and wait, or go inside to read. Every so often someone enters to search for another volume of the
Encyclopedia Hebraica
or some other reference book and stumbles on me. “Oh!…” They need to verify some disputed, vituperative, ancient, anachronistic pseudo-datum. I remember once hearing, vaguely, David Bar-Illan roaring about Netanyahu, “One thing is to have an affair with a shiksa—but a married woman! With a shiksa, even the rebbes do it. But a married Jewish woman!” At this I close my book—I am suddenly unable to focus on the print—and wander outside again into the night and away from them, out of earshot. Howard is engaged in the conversation.

The Israeli press is pro-Labor, the immigrants are pro-Likud, the Ashkenazi are beset, the settlers have God and their Uzis on their side, and they and the Hasidim are as nutty, as someone describes it, as Snickers bars. I feel the hatred; it is palpable. I might look over at Amy Wilentz, whose loathing for the fanatics and the settlers seeps like acrid smoke from her
New Yorker
pieces. Someone would be loudly quoting Charles Krauthammer and saying in English, “At least
someone
understands!” I recall a comment that Abe Rosenthal
writes “like a man shouting from a fire escape,” but everyone talks that way here. It is exhausting.

When we were home, in Los Angeles, Howard and I never discussed it. It was important to him. I accepted that. I always went along: a few days' visit, perhaps a week here or there.

Once, sitting with Howard in David Remnick's office, I ask David: How was his trip. David has just returned from reporting a profile of Bibi Netanyahu. He looks haggard. David says, “Jerusalem is the City of Opinion. It rains opinions.” He laughs bleakly. “The desert blooms on the moisture of harangue. The rarest phrase in the fifty-year-long history of Israel is ‘No comment.'”

He looks as if he has imbibed all of these opinions and wants to vomit them back up.

Howard asks about the piece. You can't understand the son, says David darkly, without understanding the father. “What Bibi has inherited from his father is a keen notion of Us versus Them.” And They will always, according to the father, act toward Us as They acted during the Inquisition in fourteenth-century Spain, when they devised a racial theory of the Jews as inherently different, inferior. (This particular racialist theory is, to David, self-evidently horrific.)

After David goes back to work, Howard and I will walk leisurely north hand in hand on Sixth Avenue. I will tilt my head at the images in a Neil Folberg exhibit in the International Center of Photography.

Howard reads David's articles and looks agonized. Howard says to David: Israel is a spectacular disaster. They mourn this together. We have met, Howard and I, a few of the founders who arrived to build a country of fraternity. We watch them survey the devastation of their dreams, poisoned by religion, riven by divisions among its people. And its failure is so pedestrian. Israel is now what it was never meant to be, a country like all the others, but it is worse because it is crippled by the weight of its failure, which hangs over it, invisible but deadly, something nations not crafted from dreams will never know.

That is what Howard thinks.

I think something very different. Even if I do not say it because, before, it never needed to be said.

What I think, what I have always thought, is this: The dream itself is poison. The country has a poisoned soul, an ideology of xenophobia that has traveled forward five thousand years like an unkillable ancient virus. A group of Middle Eastern nomadic tribes-men created a self-made pass through the terror and uncertainty of life by thinking up a god of segregation. Self and Non-Self. A cultural immunological system of breathtaking strength. A higher moral standard that axiomatically means for everyone outside the tribe a moral standard that is lower.

That is what I think.

The Ashkenazic elites abhor the Orthodox, loathe the Extreme Right, wince at the pervasiveness and politics of the military, denigrate the Sephardim, belittle the immigrants, and see themselves as a tiny bastion of civilization pressed on all sides by the fetid breath of medieval, irrational, superstitious hordes who reek of body odor, who know nothing of the Enlightened mind, who are clannish and inbred and practice a nepotistic theocratic totalitarianism. I agree. But. Howard once overheard Shimon Peres, the Ashkenaz, the educated, the secular, bitterly complaining that the Orthodox hate the Arabs, who surround them. And they hate
that
the Arabs surround them. But by God, said Peres, at least
they
—he meant the Orthodox—were surrounded by people exactly like themselves.

What, said Peres, what about us?

I remember Howard sympathizing with Peres. What about us, he and his friends lamented to each other, the nonfanatic Jews?

But I had been watching them for years, these friends of Howard's, and I had noticed that, like characters that Nancy Franklin observed in an Arthur Miller play, they had no ability to see themselves. It hardly took much effort, my noticing it. For example, it would go, year after year, basically like this.

It was afternoon. We had dovetailed with David, there reporting,
and together were walking along a path at Hebrew University. David and Howard were hunched over, listening intently to Danny Ruben-stein, the liberal, the intellectual, the writer on Arab-Israeli affairs. Danny inhabits the ever-thinning strip of coastal Israel that is the secular state, giving way gradually to the Middle Eastern, Oriental state, the theocracy. He shook his head. “For people like me and my friends, it's almost the end of the world. This new wave of immigrants—people holding values utterly not our own. We were brought up to work, and the new people, especially the ultra-Orthodox, don't give a shit about work. They're like the goddamn Moral Majority.”

He was fiercely angry. He was already mourning the future. Next to him, Avishai Margalit, who taught philosophy, murmured, “It turns out that we, the secular community, are the dinosaurs: It's the end of a species.”

Danny insisted to Howard, “The ultra-Orthodox don't respect us. They don't serve in the army, they don't care that we die.” He choked on the insult. “They treat us with such contempt, like—” He was looking for a sufficiently disturbing image. It was getting late. The sun was a burning sheet dying in the sky. Some students walked past. Danny, the secular, the enlightened, found his sufficiently disturbing image. “They treat us as if we were
goyim
,” he said. He was staring darkly at an invisible point in the distance, pondering this horror.

The students clanged a door behind us. Involuntarily I glanced right for an instant. David, apparently, had noticed nothing at all. I thought: OK, now I just have to move my eyes slightly left toward Howard. He will indicate to me that he has caught this, that he hears what it means. I moved my eyes. Howard was staring into the hot, dry air, contemplating the fact that Jews could treat other Jews as if they were
goyim
. (The word, spoken with the usual disgust.) After a moment I moved my eyes back to nothing.

Avishai had understood. But what could he do?

 

DRESSED FOR WORK, HOWARD WALKS
down the hall. He passes Sam's door without stopping. He makes no sound, no whistling today. I hear the kitchen door open and his car keys fading outside.

Evening, he is still gone. He doesn't call. He arrives home at 11:28
P.M.
and drops the keys quietly on the table in the hallway where he also leaves books and files for the office.

In the morning, when he has left and the keys are gone again, there is a flier that wasn't there the previous evening. He hasn't hidden it. He hasn't not hidden it. The address is a temple in Los Angeles. I see “Ba'al Teshuva” and after that the translation, “Returned to Faithfulness.” Next to the flier there is an envelope with an Israeli stamp addressed to Howard. The letter that was inside it is laid neatly open and squared with the papers. I don't know the handwriting.

I pick it up. It is a letter from Avital Sharansky. “Dear Howard,” she writes, and then there is a sentence or two about his health, and her health, and how was his son, Sam? And a reference to David and the movie project. And then, “I hope that you—and all the American Jews—will save yourselves and come to Israel. There is no life there. This is just who I am, but I just feel that way, in the sense of all the assimilation. You are not living fully. I have had the experience of not being in Israel, Howard, and I know that by your not being here you lose something of yourself. It's not real life, it's just spending time. It might be luxurious, it might even be interesting, but you must understand that real life is when you have your own place and you are with your own people and you have your own way of life and are not worried that your children will become something else.”

Then a final paragraph that reads, in entirety: “Please, Howard, I don't want to offend you. It's just one Israeli housewife's opinion.”

Howard, of course, is worried about exactly this. About the son
who has already become something else. Who, without Howard's having perhaps given it quite the thought he should have two decades ago (although they warned him), was born something else. He hadn't listened to them then. He is listening now.

 

THIS I HEAR ABOUT AFTER
the fact.

They are in one of the studio's marketing offices. The immensely proud DP is unveiling the movie's poster; with a small handheld camera he'd surprised the star in her underwear between takes, and the studio has, contrary to expectations, built the entire marketing campaign on that shot.

“Ta da!” says the associate producer.

“Whoa,” says a development executive as someone whistles. “What's your MPA?”

“NC–17,” says the marketer loudly.

The associate producer doesn't appreciate the joke. “It's an
R
movie,” she assures the exec. “We got an
R
.”

Howard mutters something.

“What, Howie?” asks the exec, turning.

“Kids see this thing,” says Howard of the poster. “Children and women.
Respectable women
see this thing,” he says.

Everyone waits for the punch line. They lean forward infinitesimally.

“How about some fucking modesty,” Howard says, glaring at the photo. “She's completely uncovered.” He averts his eyes.

The development exec is still waiting for the punch line. The DP and the associate producer glance at each other.

 

I WALK INTO THE KITCHEN
and retrieve an orange for breakfast. Saturday morning. I am going to play tennis with a friend. I am holding yet another phone message from Mark Siegal. Jus
tin has written a single word: “When?!” When indeed. I still don't feel comfortable jumping into this until I get Howard's take on the screenplay. I am wondering for the nth time if this is just silly when, from my position in the kitchen, I see Denise and José standing outside. They are having some sort of hushed discussion. When they spot me, they instantly suspend it. José squints at the garden as if surveying something. Denise folds her arms and scowls distractedly. It's then that I hear Consuela crying in the driveway.

 

I call to cancel the tennis and change my clothes.

In the car, I get the full story. José and Sam sit in back. We take the Hollywood Freeway to the Santa Ana Freeway, going to Pico Rivera. Consuela is sitting next to me, directing and explaining. José interrupts her every so often to clarify or stress a point she might be softening. Her younger sister came up from Guadalajara five months ago (this I knew) with her five children (this I didn't). She came with a man who is not her husband but who lives with her and who may or may not have fathered the fifth child. They found a bungalow in Pico Rivera, which is near Downey, which is where Consuela lives. The man found work and was paying the bills. But Consuela rarely saw Susannah in Pico. Susannah always came to her house (there was a relatively convenient bus). Everything was fine.