A line from an Elaine Feinstein poem: “The air is rising tonight and the leaf dust is / burning in cadmium bars, the skinny beeches / are alight in the town fire of their own humus. / There is oxblood in the sky.” Isn’t that marvelous, Sam?
AT OUR SECOND MEETING, DENISE and Consuela and I set up in the garden. Drinks and ice on a small table before the tall Argentine grass, sparkling glasses lined up, linen napkins for the food, which Consuela will pass. When we’re done, the three of us step back and look it over. Yes, perfect.
They arrive, we find our places and open the books.
The next morning I run into a producer at King’s Road Café. We’re both getting coffee. Hello, how are you? He sees me moving on, gets to his point. It was great that they wanted to read literature, he said. Though of course there was the other aspect to it. (He makes a show of choosing a sweetener. This manipulation, making me wait, is completely conscious; like pathological physicists they measure everything here in iotas of power.) Stacey, he says, has an informal relationship with a star, a major one. He names the first name in the way they do, that false nonchalance, the implication (unverifiable) of intimacy. And Jeremy, another. Both stars have made known a desire to commit to a project with serious subject matter, not the usual explosions and romantic pablum off which each has made at least fifty million dollars. Something image-enhancing, he says. Challenging. And, well, he says, I did have a wonderful mind to exploit toward this end. (He uses an apologetic voice.) Thus their, uh, “interest”—he makes the quote marks with his eyebrows—in books.
He just thought I should be aware of their motives.
I say, That’s very interesting, I wasn’t aware of this. I’m going to have to rethink the list now.
“Oh,” he says, and affects a glum look. “Well, that’s too bad.” He begins to move in now, to deploy whatever stratagem he has prepared into what he believes is the vacuum he has just created, but I slice off his leading edge.
No, I say, thoughtfully. I take off my sunglasses so he can see my eyes. I mean, I say, that there are several works I can think of that would be beautifully adapted to the screen, and I’ll have to include those.
An instant goes by. “Oh,” he says.
In fact, I say. (He stands there, warily.) In fact, I can think of several works perfect for both these actresses, and now that I think about it, I’m actually baffled that no one has snapped them up. They’ve taken some obvious ones, The Age of Innocence is so hugely cinematic despite the psychological backstory, and anyone could see the strong visual narrative in House of Mirth, and Portrait of a Lady has that marvelous transformation arc, you can just storyboard the whole thing in your head. But: I mention a Faulkner. A little-considered one. You could do it period or better yet, updated. I mention a Chekhov story that is a tiny, perfect movie pitch. I say that a certain actress has mentioned to Carla Shamberg and also to Lucy Fisher that she would like to stretch, to do serious now, and the Russian would suit her wonderfully, and come to think of it, Thackeray created a character perfect for that new boy they just put on the cover of Vanity Fair, the one with the woolly hair. What was his name? (With the Tourette’s reflex they have when given the least opportunity to provide a piece of industry data, the producer supplies the name.) That one! I say, Sam loves him.
He is trying to take mental notes on the titles I am naming, and failing.
I know that he is an enemy of Stacey’s. An associate producer credit that, long ago, purely out of spite, he made sure she didn’t get. I’ve always disliked him.
They should have said something! I say happily, meaning Stacey and Jeremy.
As I get back in the car, I feel simultaneously slightly repelled and thoroughly excited. I jot down the titles I’ve just come up with. I’m looking forward to telling Howard. I think, No, I’m not an executive, like my husband, or a producer, but I do have some instincts, and really, they would make marvelous movies.
L.A. IS COVERED WITH FLOWERS. Gasoline pink, mint crimson, moonlight white, deuterium violet.
We drive past them, tuxedo next to evening gown, two elegant Saturday evening pupae in this rushing metal-and-glass cocoon, migrating by infrared night vision toward some disease fund-raiser or cinematic party where we will metamorphose and spread our wings, seeking the heat lightning of the cameras. Diamonds filigree on my neck. Click click click. “Mr. Rosenbaum, over here, sir.” “Howie! Great to see you, how’ve you been?” “Howard, how are you? Hello, Anne.”
Hello.
Before we leave the house, I put my flowers to bed. The bougainvillea simply waits in the dark in its gaudy purple glory. Stupid plant. Infragrant. Ambitious and showy and thorned, but if pruned that sort has its uses. As Howard pulls the car out, I check my new Stewartia koreana. I have just transplanted it, and it is wet and upset, bewildered and off-key, but it will be fine in a day or two. The lilies are overwrought from the heat. The butterfly bush is sullen but will perk up later. The kumquat is simply delighted with everything. My horticultural nursery is innocent, sleepy, except the delirious moon vine, which is waking up late, delicately, waving and stretching and looking around, asking, “Where is everyone?”
Everyone has set with the sun.
Out here on the streets, the tough flowers grip the walls, cling to the gates, and skirt the concrete sidewalks, self-saturated with their delicate scented particles and infused with the even more delicate, invisible fizz of television and radio waves, their opalescent petals shot through with the quantum mechanic buckshot of millions of cell phone signals from millions of cars. The street flowers bathe in catalyzed exhaust fumes. The metallic night is cool as tinted glass, hung with the thick odor of indolent Los Angeles blossoms, groaning silently with their own weight, glamorous and petulant. On thin vines, the honeysuckle climbs the concrete barriers behind which they hide the big houses, the long driveways. Everything in L.A. aspires. Even the flowers. Aspiration ladens the bloom-opiated air. They stand, waiting for someone to notice them. As we swoosh up to the brilliantly lit entrance in our car, they languorously shift their svelte, gorgeous bodies, forests of thin-waisted women, covered in the most expensive silken sheaths and suits, slit their eyelids as we emerge, desperate to know “Who are they?” and “Can I use them?” even as they seek to broadcast “I don’t care.” They always greet each other with only one eye; the other is on the future, the rest of the room. As we carve our way through their bright colors and pass by into the hall or home or screening room or backlot, their hot interest blossoms into flame and burns in the next instant to a cinder. They turn back to gaze once again at themselves, straining to determine whether or not they are impressed.
HOWARD HAS TOLD ME HE loves me in so many ways. Some have taken me by surprise.
When Sam arrived, he looked, Howard said factually, like poor-quality dough. His eyes changed colors. He had boils, rashes, his teeth came in, fell out. He screamed, he vomited. He was fat as an infant, and short, then he shot upward and was thin and awkward. We waited, apprehensive, for puberty. And then we had to relearn him physically. The newly tight skin, the slender muscle mass. We could almost identify the day people began to look back when he passed by (he was oblivious), the mascaraed glances of teenage girls in malls, the way they began to track his movements.
I asked Howard: Is he? Really? But what did the word handsome mean, exactly? How does this boy look, Howard? And Howard explained. “Sam looks,” he said, “the way we all look when, cocooned in sleep, we are the heroes of our dreams.”
When he was fifteen: That evening he had (unbidden) put on a crisp new shirt and a navy blazer, which cut his broadening shoulders and framed the short, dark-blond hair. He buckled himself into the driver’s seat, Howard next to him, and caught me in the rearview mirror. Sam had come to know a certain look in my eye. He knew I thought about the Thornton Wilder character, a mother whose daughter asks her anxiously, “Am I pretty?” and gives the starchy New England reply, “My children are good-looking enough for all normal purposes.�
�� He knew I found it unfortunate that he was more than good-looking enough for normal purposes.
He sometimes shrugged off Howard’s directions and used the gas aggressively, but that evening, learner’s permit in pocket, he eased the large automobile down our curving drive, across Macapa, and gently right on Mulholland.
I had commented on my fears to a friend. He had been in Los Angeles long enough to understand the potential toxicity. He knew what it could do. In the car, Sam, I said. Listen: Yeats. 1919, “Prayer for My Daughter.” (Driving, he kept his eyes on the road.)
May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught
Nor her own eye before a looking glass, for they,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend.
“I hear you,” he said, very briefly, and to the windshield. But he did.
Howard adores Sam’s looks. He loves the strong cut of jaw made satin with thickening peach fuzz, loses himself in the green eyes. Howard stares at them like a lover, but always obliquely. (Sometimes we watch our son from a distance. “I wonder what he’s thinking,” Howard will say.) Howard watched as Sam negotiated the left turn down Laurel Canyon, assessed the traffic both ways, taking the care that fifteen-year-old males take when under their fathers’ gaze.
Howard stood with me on La Cienega’s cement curb (the starched maître d’ at Mark’s restaurant waiting to lead us to our seats) while on the asphalt Sam just a bit shyly handed over the keys to the valet, a Vietnamese teenager his own age. Seated at our lovely white-linened table on the sidewalk, Howard watched as Sam got up, started to jog across the street to examine a sporting goods store. It is Howard’s own flesh that moves like this. That’s what got him, Howard murmured to me as we held our menus. That sleek young animal loping across the pavement came burbling up from his testicles and shot out his penis, it is his flesh and blood, and it looks like this. Look at it! Look at the way it moves.
Howard’s eyes are black brown and somewhat close together, his nose Roman, the crinkly black hair tamed only to a degree with an expensive silicon gel (I don’t know where he gets it) that lies on the tight curls and says, “I am doing what I can.”
The intensity of his personality, the slight thickness of his mannerisms, the Brooklyn that formed him and will never let him go. For Howard, that he, this particular Jew, should have produced the tawny creature gliding unaware among Mark’s cool white tables on that blue evening where the tanned men tracked him from behind their menus and their golden hands—that was remarkable.
Not so long ago I happened to mention to someone that I am as surprised as Howard is that, given Howard’s looks, he has produced this boy.
She paused. “Don’t,” she said in a low voice, “ever say that to Howard.”
I thought about this for a moment now as we sat at our table. What would Howard say? I lay down my menu and talked about my surprise at Sam’s looks given our genetics, given Howard’s dark eyes, and what used to be called olive skin. Given the hair. I observed that genetically it was quite odd, wasn’t it, Sam’s having got virtually all his coloring and his skin from me. I wanted to know what he would say.
Howard put his hand on mine. He considered me for a moment. His eyes flickered over—Sam was heading toward our table. He smiled at me. He said softly, “Don’t you see, Anne?”
I waited.
“The reason I love the way he looks,” said Howard, “is that he looks like you.”
I moved my hand across the white linen and caressed his warm skin. I loved him so deeply I wanted to cry, and laugh, to melt into this warm skin, to rip his clothes from his back and feel him inside me (after all these years still I want this).
“Dad!” said Sam very seriously, hauling back a chair, “all their ski stuff’s on sale.”
“Cool,” said Howard, and smiled.
So Howard had offered a reason for the pleasure he took in Sam, and it was me. I felt my heart skip a beat. A clichéd expression, the heart, a beat, but it feels that way. A surge of love causes brief cardiac arrhythmia, and for some reason we aren’t alarmed.
At the same time, I’m fully aware that Howard thinks of Sam very much in terms of his own flesh, because in everything Sam is and in everything Sam does, Howard sees himself.
WE HAVE EATEN DINNER, AND Howard is on the sofa watching a TV show a friend has produced. He holds the remote as if it were a shotgun, menacing the screen on the wall. I come, stand in front of him. He glances up and freezes the image. I sit, he puts his arm around me, and I briefly summarize my encounter with the producer at King’s Road Café. Howard merely grunts a fillip of disgust and says, “Asshole.” Howard has seen it all. He aims the remote, and we watch a bit of the show together. “Hm,” says Howard. Yes, I say, agreeing with him. Dismal. It will be a huge hit.
I go to my office to get the list of books I’ve jotted down, and I come back and spend a half hour on the sofa showing him my list and talking to him about What Is Visual, or as he concretizes it, What Literature Is Translatable to the Screen. I mention the Thackeray, and he gives me the odd look it deserves, then waits patiently as I sketch out one of the subplots, and his look changes, and he starts nodding. And, Howard, look at Boswell for that matter, not just the work, although the cinematic case could be made for that, but look at his papers, the diaries, believed destroyed, all miraculously discovered in the past fifty years. I said it struck me that Darren Aranofsky (Howard had just met with him) could have a postmodernist field day. I meant, well, Boswell: Now here was a genius both charming and repellent, someone both completely honest and, by good fortune, graphomanic, who by the age of twenty-three, when he met Johnson and began the biography, never wrote down a single thing at the time he heard it, as he had trained himself to remember, verbatim, every word, every gesture, every tone and remark of social discourse.
Here was the Scotsman who guided the very English, London-centric, devoutly anti-Presbyterian Johnson on his improbable, ultimately wildly successful tour of Scotland’s primitive Highlanders. Now that was a buddy movie. Boswell knew absolutely everyone in literary England in the last half of the century, and he was a social genius, a literary artist, a brilliant conversationalist, and a deeply imaginative interviewer. I list a few actors I’d idly envisioned in the roles, two production designers Howard admires, an excellent costume woman from Cardiff, now living in Santa Monica. Howard mentally ticks them off with interest.
So the next day I redid the book list. I enjoyed it immensely. That evening we have dinner with our friends David and Ellie Trachtenberg. David does some kind of technical sound editing I don’t understand. Ellie, script doctoring. Sam sits next to Rachel, their daughter, and instantly the two fall into a mysterious murmured teenage communion. As soon as we’ve ordered drinks I get out my notebook and run my ideas by them, with Howard annotating verbally. David does the conceptual criticism, Ellie hits the practical logistical points (practicality is her strong suit; one book she nixes for sheer length, which is smart and which I, stupidly, hadn’t thought about). We’re excited. David and Ellie and Howard and I, grinning at one another. We feel like kids building a tree fort.
I call Jeremy Zimmer the next morning. I email him the list.
The day after that, Max Mutchnick calls. He is wondering could he join my reading group? Oh, and he’s already ordered every book on the list from Amazon.
I pause. You have the list, I say.
Well, ah. (He feints, trying to decide if he should admit what he’s just stated.) Yee-eah, he’s got the list.
It’s odd. I am on the phone with this boy, a very nice boy, Max, and here he has my list, which is to say a somewhat intimate part of me, and I didn’t volunteer it. I didn’t offer it. But he wants it, and that’s lovely, actually. And I should be put out, and I am,
a bit, who do they think they are, passing around my list.
Oh, who am I kidding. It’s lovely.
That’s fine, Max, I say. I add immediately: But you only have five days before the next meeting, and the book must be read. (I can’t be a complete pushover.) “Of course!” he says, wounded, and I want to kiss his cheek. I tell him that’s an absolute rule, could he please convey that to everyone. Just so we’re all clear. He says he will. He hangs up before I can ask him if he knows everyone who is coming. I do my own recount and go down to see Consuela about seating.
Denise will glance at me and look away again and say to the dish she’s wiping, “What you smiling about.” Which will startle Consuela: Is Ms. Rosenbaum smiling? She doesn’t look like she’s smiling. But Denise knows.
I will say to Denise, Well, we wanted a new teak dining table for the garden anyway.
“Mmm hm,” she will say skeptically to the dish.
It is a pleasure to suppress laughter. It bubbles into other parts, effervesces through you. This book club, I say to Denise, is doing unexpected things. It seems they want to know me.
She considers me for a moment. She nods matter-of-factly. She is happy for me. She turns back to her work.
And, I say to her, I want to know them.
I’M GETTING INTO BED, AND Howard is getting in on the other side, his breath minty from the paste. I ask him very casually, So what I said to them about Elizabeth Sewell. Do you think I was off base, then?
The comment was one that, when I made it, I knew perfectly well would be over their heads. It was aimed directly at Howard; years ago he’d told me I was misunderstanding one of Sewell’s poems. Howard looks startled. “How would I know?” he says, turning off his light. “I wasn’t there.” He shuts his eyes.
I continue to look at him.
Howard waits, for good dramatic effect. Then, “I think,” he says, and with a grin, and with his eyes closed, makes a precise tweak to the point I’d made in my garden.
You or Someone Like You Page 6
