You or Someone Like You

by Chandler Burr

  Actually I haven’t read it, I say when David emerges; they sent a copy to Howard’s office.

  So Howard describes David’s opening to me. The Lubavitchers have felt fedoras. The Moroccan Sephardim wear multicolored skullcaps. The Modern Orthodox Zionist has a small knitted kippa, a slightly larger one means a right-wing settler. A black velvet model is ultra-Orthodox. And then there was Sharansky, who wasn’t much of any of this except he wanted to be Israeli. When the Soviets freed him (Sharansky was the most famous political prisoner of his day), and he got on a plane to Israel, “people were betting whether or not I would put on the kippa,” Natan had told David, and added with an irritated grimace, “because it is impossible for Israelis to stay in one room together if they haven’t got their headgear coordinated.”

  “Taxi.” Howard’s pointing at the sky, glaring toward the street.

  “He put on an Israeli Army hat,” David says to me with a laugh. “It solved the identity problem. Thanks, Howard.” The taxi has slammed to a stop. David slides in. “299 Park,” he says to the driver, then to us out the window, “Allegiance to the national institution, the army. It was a secular statement, so it said, ‘I’m secular.’ But it covered the head, so it said, ‘I’m not completely religiously indifferent.’”

  “I’ll call you from L.A.,” says Howard. The taxi driver, who is wearing a Muslim tupi on his head, hesitates, sniffs the traffic, leaps into the flow.

  “I admire that,” Howard says, looking after the yellow car. “Great solution.” He glances with irritation at the sky. “Christ, it’s hot as hell, and it’s not June yet.”

  Why admire it?

  Howard says, “Sharansky’s smart.”

  That’s why?

  He focuses on me now. He asks, “What’s a better reason?”

  I say, I suppose it seems to me that the question is inherently silly. Playing political chess with these factions, each one madder than the next.

  “It is silly,” says Howard, logically, “but if you have to deal with it.”

  But why should one have to deal with it, I say. Why should one have to put up with this kind of ridiculous garbage.

  He is getting the slightest bit impatient with this. “That’s the way things are, Anne,” he states.

  That’s precisely my point, I say.

  FOR THE SCREENWRITERS, MY INITIAL choice was (retrospectively) so obvious it refused to jump out at me. One thinks “screenwriter” as one goes through lists and pages, brow creasing, one thinks (with a grimace) “writing…” and then “well, creativity” and then “oh damn it all,” and then it stands up on the page and waves at you. Light verse. Nonsense writing. Of course.

  The persecution complex is so deeply rooted in the Hollywood screenwriter and the parameters of their lives so tenuously lived between studios, directors, and stars, all positively barking and all viewing the writer as a sort of personal Rorschach blot, that Mark Singer once described Hollywood to me as “where the writer is that laughable schmendrik so low in the food chain he gets flossed after breakfast.” I assumed nonsense verse would catheterize them. Sure enough, they loved it.

  We began with Edward Lear (1812–1888). I rummaged around in the basement book boxes marked “Sam, childhood” in green Magic Marker and found the copy I’d picked up in London, a later edition of Lear’s 1846 Book of Nonsense. The original was printed for children, but my edition had already transitioned to adults. (Sam, at six, had been put off by the lack of pictures.) I’d had Justin photocopy it, carefully. Akiva Goldsman handed out the copies. I asked a writer with an action-comedy in preproduction to read “How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear.” Mind the meter, please.

  “How pleasant to know Mr. Lear!”

  Who has written such volumes of stuff!

  Some think him ill-tempered and queer,

  But a few think him pleasant enough.

  His mind is concrete and fastidious,

  His nose is remarkable big;

  His visage is more or less hideous,

  His beard it resembles a wig.

  He reads, but he cannot speak, Spanish,

  He cannot abide ginger beer:

  Ere the days of his pilgrimage vanish,

  How pleasant to know Mr. Lear!

  Their appreciation was purely neurological, reactive; discussion was limited almost entirely to an unspoken sense of complicity. I did get a clear-cut reaction to “Cold Are the Crabs,” which begins with the blissfully incoherent mess

  Cold are the crabs that crawl on yonder hills,

  Colder the cucumbers that grow beneath,

  And colder still the brazen chops that wreathe

  The tedious gloom of philosophic pills!

  and careens contentedly along through the lusciously meaningless “tardy film of nectar fills / The ample bowls of demons and of men” to end, with brilliant aplomb

  Yet much remains—to weave a solemn strain

  A pea-green gamut on a distant plain

  When wily walruses in congress meet—

  Such such is life—

  It was, one of them said, what he thought every day while driving on the Santa Monica Freeway, these shadowy scenes in the dark.

  I repeated their comments to Anthony Lane, and he got interested and wound up writing a piece on the subject. He noted of light verse that these very British constructions are “indeed funny but also curiously macabre in their imperturbable accounts of disasters, cannibalism, and murders.” My writers agreed. That, too, reflected their experience. To them Lewis Carroll (I found the dates: 1832–1898) “encapsulated” the movie pitch: the randomness, the weirdness, the pell-mell rush forward, the brutality. I’d made a mistake with Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter” (you know it: “The time has come,” the Walrus said, “To talk of many things, Of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax—Of cabbages and kings”), which ends with a calculatedly and breathtakingly cruel deception-cum-genocide of a group of oyster children. The mistake was reading it to Sam at age six, for of course he grasped all of the horror and none of the linguistic gamesmanship, and sobbed for an hour, Howard glaring at me the whole time.

  IT IS ALMOST TEN YEARS ago. Kate and I are watching Sam and Sawyer playing on some sort of jungle gym. Mostly we just watch. By moments we talk about something, someone, an idea. Sam, hold on tighter, please. “Well, this year,” says Kate, “he looks a little more like Howard.” We compare the two boys, which one looks like his mother, which looks like his father. And what that will mean for them, how it will encumber them, the famous parent problem, and so on.

  I am conscious of the fact that she converted and I didn’t. We are physically similar, Kate and I, hair and eye color and skin tone and so on, and we resemble each other ethnobotanically, except that she’s from Texas. The fact of her having converted when she married Steven and my not converting when I married Howard is not greatly relevant to us, personally (this is my perception; I don’t know if it’s relevant to her), but it is immensely relevant to the two children on the metal rungs above us. And to her husband, of course, who needed Sawyer to be Jewish. This we don’t discuss.

  She tells me about a trip they might take to Italy in September.

  NOT EARLY ON A ROSEATE orange evening when the first guests are just arriving and the staff and the sunset are still fresh, nor when walking over the marble threshold into the cool, exquisite restaurant, hungry, and the thick white linen tablecloth under the silver and crystal is clean and starched and pressed and inviting as a pool of clear, blue water. Not then, but later, when the party has dragged on too long and the drunk ones are still there and a cigarette is floating in whomever’s pool, or when the paying of the check becomes a Byzantine process and the conversation was not so stimulating and, hunger now sated, one realizes that it was, as it always is after all, just food—then I think of the line from the Roethke poem: “I run, I run to the whistle of money.” And when we did not run to it.

  Or at the parties where everyone’s clothing is perfect and man
nered and where they announce—always with the glass raised, and the grin—the new three-picture deal, the latest opening numbers. And suddenly everyone is toasting and the eyes are moving in their slots and smiles are brittle and the food tastes of cardboard.

  I shoo out the last guests, tell the caterers to send the cleaning staff the next day (it is just too late, no fault of theirs), and sit in the dark. He finds me there and joins me on the sofa. Puts his arm around my shoulders.

  All that planning.

  He sighs. “Yeah, but it was great.”

  Hm. I know I shouldn’t say it. But I hate, I say, and list several things and, maybe, even a person or two.

  “Yeah, I hate them, too,” he says.

  No, Howard, I really hate them.

  “I hate them more!” he says. “I hate them more than life itself!”

  Thank you.

  “Don’t mention it.”

  Your breath smells like a wine cellar, I say to him, and he shrugs, acknowledging it.

  I slip from his arm, take a volume from the bookshelf there, slip back under his arm, turn to Charles Lamb. The paper is textured beneath my fingers. When I assigned this to my producers, who jammed their Jaguars into my driveway, I had Justin photocopy for them a short biography of Lamb (1775–1834), a contemporary of Coleridge and Wordsworth and a good friend of both. What I like about Lamb is what he is generally noted for, his immediacy and entirely human observations of life (so different from the Romantic craziness). His simple, ruthless account of landing as a young boy at Christ’s Hospital, the London boarding school for sons of middle-class parents in straitened financial circumstances, is typical: “I was poor and friendless. My parents, and those who should care for me, were far away. Those few acquaintances of theirs, which they could reckon upon being kind to me in the great city, after a little forced notice, which they had the grace to take of me on my first arrival in town, soon grew tired of my holiday visits. They seemed to them to recur too often, though I thought them few enough; and, one after another, they all failed me, and I felt myself alone among six hundred boys.”

  A woman I know was of sufficient ill-humor to dismiss Lamb as the Mitch Albom of Imperial Britain. This is truly cruel. And false. A stuttering, shambling, fragile man who was known for his smoking, drinking, and inveterate gentleness, he became a successful writer, actually a one-man publishing industry. Money began to flow to him. So it went. He and his beloved older sister Mary, to whom he devoted his life, gathered on Wednesday nights in their home the leading artists and writers of England. But after these artists and writers had cleared out, when they were alone again and it was late, Lamb thought about the difference in his now-rich life. Listen, I said to my producers, sitting in their expensive clothing in my large home atop this expensive hill. This is from Lamb’s “Old China.”

  “I wish the good old times would come again,” Mary said to me, “when we were not quite so rich. I do not mean that I want to be poor; but there was a middle state in which I am sure we were a great deal happier. A purchase is but a purchase, now that you have money enough and to spare. Formerly it used to be a triumph. When we coveted a cheap luxury (and, O! how much ado I had to get you to consent in those times!)—we used to have a debate two or three days before, and to weigh the for and the against, and think what we might spare it out of, and what saving we could hit upon. A thing was worth buying then, when we felt the money that we paid for it.

  “Do you remember the brown suit, which you made to grow so threadbare, till all your friends cried shame—and all because of that folio ‘Beaumont and Fletcher,’ which you dragged home late at night from Barker’s at Covent Garden? Do you remember how we eyed it for weeks before we could make up our minds to purchase it, and had not come to a determination till it was near ten o’clock of the Saturday night, when you set off from Islington where we lived, fearing you should be too late. And when the old bookseller with some grumbling opened his shop, and by the twinkling taper (for he was setting bedwards) lighted out the relic from his dusty treasures. And when you lugged it home, wishing it were twice as cumbersome—and when you presented it to me—and when we were exploring the perfectness of it (collating, you called it)—and while I was repairing some of the loose leaves with paste, which your impatience would not suffer to be left till daybreak. Was there no pleasure in being a poor man? Can those neat black clothes which you wear now, and are so careful to keep brushed, since we have become rich and finical, give you half the honest vanity with which you flaunted it about in that overworn suit for four or five weeks longer than you should have done, to pacify your conscience for the mighty sum of fifteen—or sixteen shillings was it?—which you lavished on the old folio.

  “Now you can afford to buy any book that pleases you, but I do not see that you ever bring me home any nice old purchases.”

  WE WERE ACTUALLY STANDING IN the spotless, luxurious hallway of the Four Seasons on East 57th—we’d arrived from Los Angeles the previous day—and Howard was in loafers and a business shirt, ready to go down to the lobby (I think he’d already pressed the button) when I suggested that, well, it was a bit last minute, but perhaps I actually wouldn’t go to his family’s seder this year. I’m not wanted, I pointed out forthrightly.

  Howard said that, yeah, he did have to admit, I wasn’t wanted.

  And so how about if I went to the spa? I proposed. Perhaps I’d get a nice massage. I’d be here when he and Sam got back.

  “OK,” said Howard.

  I mean, why should I go? I said to him. I’m not Jewish.

  “OK,” said Howard, “no problem.” He’d take Sam. He turned his head toward the open door to our room. “Sammy!” (Sam was eight.) “We’re leaving for Bubbe and Zaide’s!”

  (Well. I had to say that a casual “no problem” was not quite the reaction I was expecting. I was only his wife…! I paused, trying to work it out.)

  But why do you go, Howard? You don’t believe of word of it, the religious stuff and all that.

  “Tribal identity,” said Howard. Calling into the room, a bit more irritated: “Sam! I’m waiting.”

  But you’re completely opposed to that benighted sort of thing.

  Howard shrugged, breezily. He scratched his nose. A moment later I heard the elevator ding, and they descended to get a taxi. I stood in the plush hallway watching the space they’d disappeared from. I went into the room, kicked off my navy pumps, picked up the phone, and called down to the spa.

  Was the shrug a nonchalant acknowledgment of the irreconcilable nature of life? Or was it, as the expression goes, shrugging it off. If I play the scene again, it could be either.

  On the Lexington Avenue train that evening back to 59th Street and from there the Four Seasons, Sam swung his legs over the plastic subway bench and asked Howard about the end of the seder. They had concluded with, “Next year in Jerusalem!” “We always end the seder with that,” explained Howard. “It’s a promise.”

  “To who?”

  “To whom,” said Howard. “To ourselves. We promise ourselves to be in our own land.”

  Sam thought about it for a moment and asked, “Will Mom be there?”

  The reason I know this is that many years later Sam told me. At the time I knew nothing. And Howard, reported Sam, gave no response.

  (“Now Anne no longer goes and I go,” I heard Howard explain once to someone. It struck me that Howard was being simplistic.)

  SAM HAD HIS FIRST FORMAL lesson in Talmud at thirteen while hanging out at the AMC Century City movie theaters. A boy Sam remotely knew from the Buckley School was asserting that his mother’s recent transconjunctival blepharoplasty was for her health.

  The transparent idiocy of the argument threw Sam—“She had an eyelift for her health?” said Sam—but it was the aggressive vehemence of the boy’s response that drew him into what rapidly became a well-attended shouting match in front of the ticket booths. The vehemence was generated, it turned out, by theology; Sam learned that categorizing plastic
surgery as Health was crucial because Hebrew scripture categorically forbid “mutilation of the body” for any other reason. A tattoo, pierced ears, a medial pedicle mastopexy (breast tuck), and a Jew could not be buried in a Jewish cemetery. But for the observant—the Buckley boy’s family kept kosher—the cutting-and-pasting of his mother’s features, this elective surgery—“Elective!” shouted Sam, “like, did her health insurance cover it?” and eight teenage heads swiveled to the other side for the retort—could indeed be categorized as “health,” turning the word into such a large theological umbrella that arguably anything you wanted could be made to fit under it, including pop sex books.

  A girl in the group threw Sam a scornful, slightly disgusted look, which he interpreted instantly. He had grown to thirteen, half the kids he knew lived in Beverly Hills, and he was only now discovering that this intellectual contortion of wealthy Jews regarding their plastic surgeons, this gross hypocrisy, was as universal as it was perfunctory? Please, her look said.

  When he arrived home grim and furious, Howard, with a bit of work, extracted the episode from him. Howard thought about it, then went and dug up the New Yorker of a few weeks earlier and found a letter to the editor by a certain Arthur Daniels of Brooklyn—Howard showed it to Sam—which read “In discussing whether Ophelia can be given a Christian burial, one of Shakespeare’s gravediggers asks another how this would be possible ‘when she wilfully seeks her own salvation?’” (“He means ‘Since she committed suicide,’ Sam. That’s a sin to Christians.”) “His companion responds that Christian burial is possible for anyone who drowns, since ‘if the water come to him and drown him, he drowns not himself.’”

  “A perfect example of Talmudic reasoning,” said Howard with a smile.