You or Someone Like You (37 page)

Howard, I say, is it true you're keeping kosher now?

“Stop,” he says.

He picks up his cup, noisily swallows some tea, puts the cup down a little too hard. He puts his hands in his lap in a ball.

I think about our lovely kitchen in which he no longer stands, the stove, the glassware, the sink. The counters where Denise and I have made us years of meals. All of it, to you, polluted now. Our sink is polluted. Our kitchen is unclean, and you can no longer eat there.

“Stop,” he says through his teeth. Howard's need was to see me, said Jennifer. I am making sure he sees me.

If they don't accept my son, I say to him with freezing rage, they can all go to the goddamn ovens. If that means mass cultural suicide through the intermarriage that they, the racists, hate so much, then mass suicide it will be.

As I watch his competing needs violently drowning each other in the storm in his head, I feel satisfaction that comes from my own anger and an utter, complete, black emptiness. I suppose I should not feel surprise when he closes his eyes and whispers, “
Shut your hole
.” He leans forward. “
Shut your fucking hole.
”

I tell myself, This is expected. I walk toward the front door of Canter's blinded, seeing nothing, the light refracting my vision.

 

I SEND OUT AN EMAIL
assigning my screenwriters' group a novel called
A Soldier of the Great War
by Mark Helprin because, I tell them, it contains the best description of religion I've read.

When they arrive, I see that they are looking at me differently now. There is a wariness. I grip the book and begin.

I tell them that years ago I took this passage and said to my young son: It is what all literature does, Sam, literature describes what we experience. Nothing more. You know, the first time I read it I felt delightfully light-headed, like the way you feel when you really, truly understand something Dad tells you about a poem, or when you sink the perfect shot. That's the way we feel when literature makes us gasp and say, Yes. And look here. It involves a boy, like you.

He read it himself (he was nine, he could do it). “They take the self-made passes,” I explained to Sam, “and build their numbers, and they call them religions, Sam.”

He nodded.

“They're just people clinging to each other for comfort and defense. In the end, this pass you've made disappears, and it's just you alone. You with all the rest of us.”

My writers look back at me. They know I'm speaking to Howard. They are starting to figure out what I'm saying.

 

STUART AND I ARE SITTING
at the kitchen table. His bag is on the floor, the LAX tag still on it. I haven't even shown him to his room yet. “Nah,” he says politely, “no tea, nothin.” It's so good to see him it hurts. I am dying to put my arms around him and hold him tightly, but I don't.

Howard's little brother. I've promised myself that I won't ask him where Howard is staying. He's going to see Howard tonight. For dinner?

“Yeah,” says Stuart. He names a restaurant.

I don't know it, I say.

“Yeah,” he says, “I think it's nondairy.”

He is facing me as he says it, but I can't really read him.

Ah, I say.

His eyes move away. We wait. “I understand it,” says Stuart quietly in response to the question I have not asked. “Even if I don't
get
it. You see what I'm saying?”

He understands it. How nice for him that he understands it. No, I do not see, not at all. Stuart's calm density has, in a single instant, enraged me. I reel from the emotion, which feels like the first hit of morphine that merely makes you nauseous without removing the pain.

I clench my jaw. Stuart, I have to know, I say to him. Are you for me or against me?

Stuart moves his head sideways the way Howard does. “I'm for Howard,” he begins. He's speaking carefully. “I'm always gonna be for Howard.”

But I don't let him finish. I start to cover, the way the English reflexively do with brisk movements of the hands and face meant to convey cool indifference, always pathetically transparent. And then, as if the bottom has fallen out, all the brisk movements fail me, and I jerk upward and stumble out of the kitchen through the hall, knocking over a framed photograph that cartwheels glassily and smashes in slivers on the narrow hall table, and Stuart, whom I love and who has betrayed me so that now I am truly, truly alone, has leaped up and is pursuing me, a hunter and a deer. As I flee, I am making some sound I don't recognize, of panic perhaps. The pursuit traverses the living room, I knock over a lamp and the cord rips from the wall, I turn into the hallways beyond, where Stuart finally grabs me and holds my arms against my body in a steely embrace as I kick and scream, sobbing, my arms striking him wherever and as hard as I can.

“Anne,” says Stuart. “Jesus Christ, Anne,” Stuart says, pressed against me, and I realize that he is laughing. He's rocking with laughter. “A fuckin'
nondairy kosher restaurant
,” says Stuart. “Are you
kiddin'
me?” He's roaring with laughter. “That fuckin' nutcase!” His shoulders mound in waves with the absurdity. He staggers against the wall with hilarity, me in his arms.

I start to laugh and choke. I hold him as tightly as I can. Stuart's a bit smaller than Howard, but it's a very similar feeling.

I feel him sigh as his arms surround me, and I cling to him.

Oh my God, I say. Oh my God, Stuart, oh my God oh my God.

 

We sit on the sofa. Both of us in bare feet. Mine are tucked under me, Stuart's on the floor, and he looks with interest at his toes. “I've
never been married,” he remarks calmly. “Never get to climb into the bed with some woman I love. Every night I pull down the covers. I get into the bed. I pull the covers back up over me. I go to sleep. I wake up, and I lie there, and I think, ‘OK.' I look at the walls, and I think, ‘So. Here we are again.'” He shrugs. “Howard sees that,” says Stuart. “He knows what love is, what he's got. But he isn't able to feel it right now. Not since he wigged out over Sam being the wrong half.”

He knew it perfectly well, I say. Before Sam was conceived he knew it.

“Yeah, he knew,” says Stuart patiently, “but he didn't
know
know. That asshole rabbi in Jerusalem, he kicked Howard in the fuckin' teeth. By kicking out his kid.
His kid
, 'k? Which is, they're kickin' out his love, his wife, everything Howard's got, they're throwin' it in the toilet. And these are the people our parents taught him were” (he audibly stresses the distinction) “
his
. You kidding me?” He makes a face. “And he never saw it comin'! A lifetime of conditioning hits you. You feel like you've betrayed your mother, who just died, your father—” Stuart gets a wry look. “He was due for a midlife crisis,” he says with a grin. “But
this
! Wow,
How
ie.”

I try to say something to him. Your mother, I begin. But I'm not sure how to finish. I see by his face I don't need to. Yeah, yeah, he knows. His mother, his mother. He sticks out a lower lip, says, “Eh.” But, I burst out, but—then why don't
you
believe all this, Stuart!

Stuart's face doesn't darken. He thinks about all the things he could say and then says simply, “She's dead.” He shrugs. “And even if she wasn't. She's just not that, for me. She's just not the fucking Body Israel or whatever these crazies believe. She had these absurd ideas. ‘
God hates bacon
.'” He puts it in audible quotation marks. “Oh, fuck, please.” Dismisses it. Back to Howard. “Look. She was from that culture, they were completely programmed, she passed it on to him, and it stuck in places he didn't know about, and a couple decades later there were four good triggers, and it blew up.”

Hamotzei
, I say tentatively, the blessing for bread. (It's the only one I remember.)

Utterly uninterested, Stuart waves it away with a bored hand. “For our parents, that was the way of ordering the world. Now Howie says that he thinks it's that for him, too. And maybe it is, I dunno. Whatever. For me?” Stuart grins pointedly. “There's another way of ordering the world. It's simple. Listen.” He's mimicking me; he's seen me murmuring my words to Sam's ears. “Assorted vocabulary.” He mimes opening a book. He skims his finger down the invisible columns, stops at a word. “There it is.” he says. “See under: love.”

 

JUSTIN IS TALKING ON THE
phone in my office. His back is to me as I enter. It is raining, a gray day.

Well, he asks the gatekeeper on the other end, can I meet him on Thursday? (He listens.) His flight gets in at three? (He listens.) How about Friday? (She is questioning him closely now, but he keeps his cool. I hear the tension in his voice, but she probably can't.) Yeah, he says, Anne spoke to him about me.

I am not supposed to be here. I am supposed to be out till evening. Justin has laid open my personal address book on the desk.

I move forward. He jumps, and his face drains. I glance down at the name in the book. I am impressed with his audacity. He has gone directly to the top. I hold out my hand, and he passes me the headset, which I put on. Christy, this is Anne, is Ron free Monday morning?

Christy comes alive now, I hear pages turn. Tell him, I add, that I meant to speak to him about this.

She sets up a meeting for Justin with Ron Meyer on Monday morning.

I hang up, write the number on a piece of paper, snap shut my address book, hand Justin the paper, his jacket (which is on a chair), and his cell phone (which is sitting on my desk).

Now get out, I say.

 

I assume Justin calculated that his window of opportunity was closing. His instincts are probably correct, as usual. That is why it unnerves me so deeply. After I hear the front door click shut, I sit down in my chair at my desk and watch the rain.

 

WE ARE ON AN EMPTY
cement sidewalk at a bus stop on Normandie Avenue. Apparently he is living in one of the houses near here.

“‘And when she had weaned him,'” Howard recites, his voice like smoke, “‘she took him, with three bullocks and one ephah of flour and a bottle of wine, up to the temple in Shiloh. And she gave the child to Eli, the priest, to be raised in the temple. “As long as he liveth he shall be lent to the Lord.” '”

I say nothing.

“Why were you always reading him that story from the Book of Samuel?” he asks me. It is a grim plea. He needs an explanation. He holds our divorce papers in his hand, which he has signed. He has asked me to come here because I am supposed to sign them. I have not touched them yet.

I think: I could never have imagined this, not in my wildest dreams.

Hannah was barren, Howard. And I had all those terrible fertility problems, and they had given me those horrendous drugs. And we wished so desperately for a child. That was all it meant to me.

He is sitting on the bus stop bench. I am standing. I say to him, If that insane woman wanted to surrender her child to a religious cult, that was her business. People do all sorts of things. I would never—never, Howard, never—
never
—wish for my son to find favor with anyone's fucking
god
.

I clench, unclench my jaw. I am nauseous with disgust.

“But when you were infertile,” yells Howard, jumping up, coming at me, “why did we pray for him?”

I never prayed for him, I say.

Howard turns his back. “I did,” he says after a moment.

I don't believe you, I reply, after I've thought about it.

His back is to me, his face buried in his hands. “Don't hold on to me, Anne,” he says into his hands, his voice suffocated. “Let me change. Let me go.”

I gasp. I am not sobbing, but it feels like it. “I am stronger than the monster beneath your bed,” I say with all my might, “I'm smarter than this trick they are playing on your heart.”

 

AT THE STUDIO BUNGALOW, HOWARD
is walking down the hall past the door to the conference room where they are prepping a meeting. ( Jennifer will mentally record all the details.) It must be his peripheral vision that spots Barry. He stops, turns into the room. Barry looks up from the page he's annotating. “Hey, Howie,” he says. Jennifer is standing to Barry's left, bending over the page. She is tracking the lines of dialogue the studio wants cut, and she straightens and gives Howard a smile.

Howard looks down at Barry.

Barry, uncertain, is trying to gauge this. “What's up?” he says.

Howard's jaw is clamped shut. He looks out the window, he looks back at Barry. He walks abruptly to the broad, polished cherry table, takes a sheet of paper and writes something down, folds the paper once, twice, three times, and throws it in Barry's face. He leans in after the paper, right up close, says, “Here's her fucking number. Give her a call.”