You or Someone Like You (4 page)

His mother glanced at me, very briefly. “This one eats?”

I don't think he heard.

Still it seemed simple to me at the time. Upstairs in his room, Howard had put his arms around me, bearlike, carefully so as not to make noise. “I love you,” he had whispered simply. So I take it back; we did discuss it, or, to be precise, Howard gave me what seemed to me at that time the only response I could have asked from him. I thought it was the only thing either of us needed. And it was, then.

Stuart made it tolerable. He offered me chairs when they didn't. It was subtle and typically Stuart, the instinctive diplomat and negotiator, pouring oil on the waters. He talked with me. I asked about kosher. “Kashrut,” said Stuart with a smile. So what was eaten with what, how did they do it? He rolled his eyes, said with equanimity that his parents were self-delusioned, and, in whatever was not self-delusion, hypocrites and fakes. “Do you see two fuckin' sinks?” He dismissed it. I gleaned that he and Howard had given definitive, if not violent, notice on the Kashrut Question several years ago, and a delicate truce had been forcibly established in which the parties had agreed not to issue statements.

It was Stuart who explained—Howard had never mentioned it to me—that up until a matter of months before he met me Howard's mother had contrived to introduce him to a succession of Orthodox girls. I said, Really? with some astonishment, and before I could ask more, Stuart added, “They wear
wigs
. OK?” It was Stuart who, when they weren't looking, put his hands around his neck and pretended to strangle himself. “Why are you guys laughing?” Howard asked, annoyed. The odd thing, in retrospect, is that I never explained to him what we were laughing at. It belonged to Stuart and me. At some point in the presence of Howard and his parents I had understood that Howard had compartments, hermetically sealed off from each other, and if these were not to communicate with each other, on a
certain level I accepted this. My acceptance was automatic. I had been raised that way. It was how I had survived.

One word they used to his face was
inappropriate,
which I know because I overheard it, and which was a very mild word, but they'd already used all the others.

In the spring, his mother and father came to the wedding. Then we went out for dinner in Chinatown. Conversation was stilted. The food was mediocre. They paid. We said good-bye, walked up Mott Street, waited till we'd gotten to the corner and ran as fast as we could up Canal to the lip of the Manhattan Bridge and we kissed and kissed. We walked up Bowery, bathed in the greasy scent of hot oil, past the kitchen supplies stores, wandered through Union Square where the April buds were just starting to come out.

He told them he loved me, and they knew it was true. That their view didn't infuriate him infuriated me, at times, and baffled me at others. I didn't care so much that they disapproved. I cared that he didn't seem to care and that I had no idea why he didn't. We had a few minor fights over it, but then it simply became background radiation. I always knew that he loved me. That—and we agreed on this, Howard and I—was what counted.

 

When Sam was born, we lived inside him.

We soothed him with tiny promises.

We fed him orange flowers from blue islands and imported sunsets to his nursery.

He had the fingers of an artist, the lungs of a stevedore, and the ears of an artilleryman.

We cursed the clock, that it did not give us more hours in a single day to spend with him.

I taught him words:
flower
. And
tree
. And
clematis
, at which Howard said, “Oh, boy,” and rolled his eyes. I was not deterred. I would bring Sam with me to lectures at West Valley Nursery on Ventura, educated, interested women sitting on wooden benches with our
coffees in paper cups, the smell of mulch curling around our ankles, evaluating forsythia in arid Southern California. I never join in the decrying of eucalyptus. It is not indigenous, an import to this area, but then so am I, and it thrives here. Besides, it smells heavenly—astringent, fresh earth. When Sam was a baby, he slept. When he was older, he toddled around among the seedlings, and the nursery's salespeople watched him. In grasses, they knew him by name; I love grasses. At age two and a half, Sam pointed at a vine I was planting in the garden—which was coming together very nicely—and said, “Clematis!” Howard, reading a contract on a teak lounge chair, sat bolt upright, then burst out laughing.

His febrile intelligence, his curiosity, were obvious. As we watched him moving about the garden with his toys, placing a truck just so, investigating a bee, Howard murmured a line of Keats to me: “The creature hath a purpose, and its eyes are bright with it.”

There is a pop song Howard and I heard on the radio. I thought it was so lovely I used to sing it to Sam, when he was little and afraid of the Disney villains.

Howard would watch me hold Sam and sing to him. Years later, Sam said that he had been conscious that I was focusing on the line about being stronger than the monsters. But actually, he said, he himself as a child was relying on my being smarter than the tricks the animators sought to play on his heart. Those fake villains they drew into existence. Imagined sources of threat.

 

EVENING, THURSDAY, THE L.A. AIR
is darkening and lovely. It is almost 6:00
P.M.,
and I ask Consuela to set the table next to the crape myrtle. Jennifer calls from Howard's office just to check
in. No, I have everything. Oh—I tell her to keep Howard away for at least an hour, and she says she's already arranged that. She's very good.

J.J. arrives first. We introduce ourselves. He stands, self-consciously deferential, in the entryway in his suit, pressing the book over his testicles like a sporran. “Oh, I'm first?”

Quite all right.

He frowns at his watch. “She said…”

It's quite all right, J.J., honestly.

“Well. Terrific evening, huh.”

Yes. We'll be talking outside.

“Great!” he says enthusiastically. Then: “Oh! Should I…?” He makes a quizzical hand motion toward the back.

Please. After you.

“Great!” He moves out, like a one-man platoon taking the garden.

We hear two car engines die in immediate succession, and Consuela brings Melanie and Stacey. The candles are lit, we sort out the drinks. Are they hungry? Denise has made some things, so I hope we'll all eat. It's marvelous of you to do this, Anne, they say, to take the time, and so on. I say I'm happy to. Now, first of all, everyone finished, yes? Good, a well-thumbed copy there, nice to see.

I slip into the role as if into warm salt water in some pleasant ocean. They're watching me closely. I introduce myself very briefly, my literature degree, what this book means to me. It's an odd sensation, but I like it. Usually I only talk to Howard. This is pleasant. I stop speaking for a moment, clear my throat. Then I say, Right, now you. Who enjoyed the book and who did not?

But the conversation starts out painfully, haltingly. They are hesitant, their ideas cramped, and I don't understand why, and I find myself suddenly disappointed. Three days later this will be explained to me when I get a phone call from Jeremy Zimmer. It's the doctorate in literature, he will inform me decisively. How does he know
this? Oh, he will say—Jeremy, like all talent agents, speaks with dead certain authority—he'd been to a dinner party last night, seated next to a woman J.J. knows. She talked about it all night. They'd loved it, by the way, the whole evening,
really
loved it. Oh, and the English accent, too, that also intimidates them.

I will be struck by the fact that even in Southern California, every human being connects a knowledge of books with self-respect and self-worth. I will say to Jeremy, It certainly didn't occur to me that I was intimidating them.

They found you masterful, Jeremy will say.

So (he adds smoothly) the reason he called, he was wondering, could my book club take another person.

I will be slightly flustered but react by stipulating, It's not a book club, Jeremy. I will give him the next title, which it turns out he already knows, and the date, which it turns out he also already knows. I will say we haven't set the where yet but it might as well be at my house again. This, it turns out, he will have assumed. Right. In that case, I say, would he please take charge of logistics and coordination.

“Bronwyn”—his assistant—“pick up, please.”

Click. “Hi, Ms. Rosenbaum,” says Bronwyn.

Hello, Bronwyn.

“Oh, Bronwyn,” Jeremy will begin, “we'll need you to get us a dessert. A really good one.”

But in the garden on that first evening, it is not working, and I am feeling my way forward tentatively. I think, Why would they listen to me? but I am careful not to show this because in my experience showing doubt never serves any purpose.

I tell them: Please understand. You won't
offend
me if you do not like this book. I happen to love it, but a book is like a person, and one's reaction to a person invariably has more to do with one's own personality and life experience than with the actual person herself.

I add, Unfortunately.

After a moment I add, That always seems to be the case with others'
reactions to me, for example. They watch me when I say this. I flush very slightly at having made this statement. I'm the least self-revelatory person I know, but they were listening so intently. Well then. I return to my point. Half of any book, I say, is just a mirror in which you do or do not see yourself. But, and this is just my opinion, the best readers try to fit themselves into the writer's mind rather than the reverse. Take a step toward your authors, and they will repay you twofold.

They listen. And still the conversation stumbles along. They take no risks. They have, I think grimly, no courage.

I'm losing patience and about to look at my watch. And something occurs to me. If you were directing this, I ask them, how would you cast it.

Within two minutes J.J. is waving a cell phone like a switchblade and threatening to call Bonnie Timmermann, the casting director, because obviously such-and-such an actress, who Bonnie happens to love, possesses
ex-act-ly
the qualities the book's author ascribes to her main character. Considering the actress's latest performance, I personally find J.J.'s a rather unusual reading, and I tell him this, and so he immediately cites three different pages from the book at me, slams down a suddenly forceful, precise critique, and I see his point. Stacey dismisses the actress (as does Melanie, though for wildly different reasons), brutally details a
New York Times
review (eviscerating), suggests a different actress and two supporting actors, and quotes text from the book to support all of it (she has, to our surprise, underlined these sections), but J.J. will not be quashed and says oh, hell, if Stacey casts the supporting characters that way then she has totally missed the author's whole point, and Stacey is arming herself with her own cell phone and citing filmography right and left and saying fine, then why don't they just call Stephen Gaghan and ask
him
, and Melanie is championing her own choice, a young Golden Globe winner two years earlier (“Too young,” snaps Stacey; “Not if Tony Gilroy directs her,” retorts Melanie and with a certain menace goes for her own cell phone).

I make my first rule, which is No cell phones, and they back off, somewhat. I excise the extraneous comments, supply some textual pieces they missed (I am severe with them about a character they have all, to my mind, grossly misinterpreted), guide them back from a silly subplot they've gotten lost in. But essentially the textual work is theirs, and from that point onward it is decent work. Not brilliant, but, for a first outing, quite competent. We also arrive at what I must admit is a rather fascinating cast, which would, were the book filmed, add a radical and contemporary spin to Brontë's original intent. At 7:00, I stand up. Howard will be home soon.

J.J. peers at his watch again, this time with surprise.

 

I was seeing them to the drive when they asked me how I'd gotten here. In those words. The question confused me at first; I thought they meant our Realtor. I tend to be literal. They said no, no, Los Angeles. As in
living
here. “You were raised in London, yes?” they added.

Ah. Yes. Well, actually I was raised many places. My father, Matthew Hammersmith, was in the British diplomatic service. My mother was American. ( They waited.) Where: Hong Kong, I said, for several years when I was young. Rome. Oh, lots of places.

Where had I met Howard?

New York, I said. Howard and I met at Columbia.

And so? Stacey indicated our house, and J.J. pointed at the hills, the Pacific beyond, and I finally got it. Right.

How I got here. We came to L.A. because in 1970 we ran—quite literally—into Bennett Cerf, the head of Random House. The old train from Paris to Avignon swerved, and I lost my balance and flew outstretched-hands-first into a well-dressed man as Howard tried to catch me. Providence.

I'm
so
sorry!

In a carful of Frenchmen, “Ah, you're English!” said Bennett.

Well, sort of, I said.

Howard: “She's half American.”

“Well, you,” Bennett turned to Howard, “
you're
American.”

We wound up moving to the dining car. Bennett went and fetched his wife, Phyllis. “Phyllis, this young man is a newly minted Ph.D. in English literature.” “Anne will be one soon,” said Howard quickly. (It would take me an extra year; I'd been supporting Howard.) “Ah,” said Bennett. Howard was quite thin then, and Bennett had a fatherly hand on his shoulder and, clearly, an idea forming in his head. Almost immediately, unbidden, he brought it up: There was a job in—well, it didn't really have a name, not yet, Cerf was thinking about it (he looked at Phyllis as he said this), but he had this idea of having a Random House person work directly with the movie studios, selling books to them.