You or Someone Like You

by Chandler Burr

  “Well,” objected Sam, who was sick of being exasperated, “but that’s just a way of getting around the—you know, the whole point.”

  “Exactly,” said Howard, that was exactly what Talmudic reasoning was, the selective assembling of tendentious arguments from a completely arbitrarily designated body of text in order to justify the conclusion you had already arrived at through your biases based on your difficult personality, past mistakes, tax bracket, lousy conscience, and so on. Sam should understand that Judaism was divided into two distinct phases, that when Temple Judaism, a primitive nomadic-tribal religion typical of its historic context with all the gewgaws of such religions (priestly castes, ritual purifications, fanatic xenophobia, nutty dietetic and sexual rules; Howard ticked them off on his fingers), was destroyed in—let’s see, was it around the second century CE?—rabbinical Judaism began, the study of text rather than the performance of temple ritual, since the temple was gone but the text could be stored and parsed in any Russian shtetl or Warsaw ghetto or Brooklyn tenement. Or (a significant look) the AMC Century City movie theaters in Los Angeles. OK? And this particular theological product has broken all the records. Outlived them all. Immune to internal incoherence. Here was this young idiot from the Buckley School, said Howard, engaged in exactly the brilliant adaptive strategy that has kept Jews Jews. And—this was the genius part—the simple act of arguing about it was Jewish worship itself. Not literally worship but something infinitely more important: the preservation of the tribe as a tribe. Marking the boundaries. What mattered was not that there was actually a right answer to whether or not you could get an eye job. What mattered was that Jews argued about these things. And non-Jews didn’t. Drawing that line was the point.

  And Howard cited to Sam several specific examples of reasoning from the Talmud. Sam rolled his eyes and left the room, spitting.

  But I was more interested in Howard. In bed later I remarked to him, You can really reel those off.

  He shrugged.

  I said, Really, I’m astounded at the extent to which you have these examples at your fingertips.

  He said, “They program you well.” He was reading the newspaper.

  Where do they program you well?

  He said, “At Hebrew school.” He turned a page, skimmed. “And a couple of weeks at a yeshiva.” Turned another page. “Jerusalem, I was a teenager.” He closed the paper, lay it down, turned out the reading light on his side, and closed his eyes. He chanted in a mumble, “Hamotzei, the blessing for bread, mezonos, the blessing for wheat, hagofen, the blessing for wine.”

  I thought about this for a moment. I said, I didn’t know you actually went to Hebrew school.

  “Are you going to read?”

  Yes, I’m going to read.

  “Kiss me and read.”

  I reopened the book and looked for my place. I couldn’t remember if I’d read this page or not. I said, So how many years did you go?

  AS WE ARE SETTING UP for that evening, Howard appears in his suit with a bag over his shoulder and kisses me gently on the forehead. That was sweet, I say. I take it this means LAX?

  He suddenly has a meeting in New York the next day with Natan Sharansky and David. “The Remnick project,” as HBO is referring to it, has led to Howard’s becoming friends with Natan and, surprisingly, his wife, Avital. She has become a correspondent of a sort, and Howard spent Shabbat with them during his last trip to Tel Aviv.

  “What did you give them?” he asks me, already moving toward the car. “It’s the directors tonight?”

  Yes, I say. Christina.

  I see more than hear him give a short laugh. It’s an obvious choice. “Knock ’em dead,” he calls, his key almost in the car door. “I’m back tomorrow night.”

  To the directors, I give Christina Rosetti. Who else? Less overtly visual than Keats, yet imagery so compelling one can’t turn away. She reads like film. We taught Sam about drugs with “Goblin Market,” which is about heroin addiction, whether Rosetti knew it or not. And she accomplished her splendid work without Sexton’s insanity or Plath’s crippled mind. “Do you know,” Virginia Woolf wrote to a friend, “she was about as good as poetesses are made, since Sappho jumped.” She masters the sensual act, slips it into our ears like a snake disappearing into a hole.

  You cannot think what figs

  My teeth have met in.

  Say it slowly, out loud. Pronounce each final consonant. Go ahead.

  “CHUPPA” SIGNIFIES “WEDDING” TO ME now, after all this time being married to Howard. (That’s the tent thing over the couple, I had asked years ago, yes? “Right.”) And at the same time, it doesn’t. It is another system, and I have adapted to it. The verb of culture. I didn’t have to create my own system, and I was not enslaved by this one, because I was able to exist parallel to it. But I did not own it, nor it, me.

  This is how it goes. Say it is two years ago. Say we arrive in New York for the weekend. They decide that we will visit the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, because Stan and Rebecca want to see the Alex Katz exhibit.

  Afterward, for lunch, we descend to the Café Weissman, a paradigmatic museum café: the ivory walls, the still-life-under-glass feeling, like eating in a huge bathroom. The sign reads “Glatt kosher” and is guarded by a yarmulked, bearded, portly thirty-year-old. Because Howard called him last week, Donald Kuspit, of the museum, joins us, and Rebecca and Howard interrogate him about the art, the Katz. Regarding the Chaim Soutine exhibit last month Donald says things like, “Soutine’s shudder is a sublimation of the trauma of being born a lowly shtetl Jew and becoming an absurd Jew by becoming a painter.”

  They nod gravely at this, give it deep thought.

  I sip my tea.

  Lawrence Weschler joins us, apologizes for being late. “Anne!”

  How are you, Ren.

  Rebecca tells him about the Katz. They talk about the Jewish Museum. They discuss the place of Jews as outsiders in various societies. Someone says that the Jews are chosen, yes, “but it’s not that the Jews are better than other people, just that we answer to a higher moral standard.”

  They all nod gravely. This time I simply have to stare at Howard. Howard seems to notice nothing, and after a moment I look away. Ren, Howard, completely unaware.

  This is how it goes. Say it is just a few months ago. I am perhaps waiting for Howard in the canteen on the studio lot.

  I am drinking hot water with lemon and reading The Bacon Fancier, by Alan Isler. A friend of Howard’s has recommended it to me. Isler is an English Jew who won the 1994 National Jewish Book Award. In the novel, which is actually four novellas, there is a discovery of a mystery monster baby in the ghetto (it is the seventeenth century), and Isler has his Catholic Canon of the Cattedrale di Ferrara write a letter to the ghetto Jews. Isler’s character writes: “Think well what this portends, O Jews. Is not this monstrosity given as a sign that ye follow along twisted, wicked ways? From such as this may we not suppose that ye plot diabolical evil against us? Are ye not by this clearly possessed of Satan and his demons?”

  As I read this, at the table next to mine sits an anxious young man with dirty blond hair. His hands are moving around a paper cup, constricting, releasing. Constricting again. He looks toward the door every time someone comes in. I glance at my watch, get up to leave, but I ask him: Are you OK?

  “Oh!—” He laughs, clears his throat.

  He is working on a pilot, maybe he is working on a pilot (a nod toward some decisive meeting going on in offices upstairs). Creative differences. The network wants, you know, light, but serious, and original but familiar, and meaningful, but not too much. All the clichés. He wants: darker.

  I think for a moment. I refer him to a play by Wendy Wasserstein.

  His tension springs the response. “I’m so fucking sick of Jewish angst!” he says. And immediately the hands freeze in a choke hold on the coffee cup. “Oh, I don’t mean to offend you if you’re Jewish.”

  No, I begin slowly. The
Isler is in my mind. He takes the slowness for something else.

  “Oh my God, I am really—”

  I smile. I’m Anne Rosenbaum, I say by way of self-introduction, and, when he immediately starts again: It’s my husband’s name. Not that that matters, it doesn’t.

  He waits. I am smiling. You have no idea how refreshing it is to hear, I say to him quietly. I’m beaming with mirth.

  He stares at me.

  I tuck my purse under one arm, and offer him a hand. I want you to know what a pleasure it’s been to have spoken with you.

  He doesn’t know what to say, so I just smile at him. Howard says I always smile with my mouth closed, and I make sure to let my lips part because I like him and want very much for him to know that, and he does, I think.

  On the 101 going home, Howard driving, I reread for the eighth or ninth time the dust jacket copy of The Bacon Fancier, which some copywriter or perhaps an editor at Viking has written. This is, reads the copy, “a book in four tales set in successive centuries and linked by a common theme: The Jewish experience in the Gentile world.”

  There are the boundaries that they clarify incessantly, neurotically. The drawing and redrawing of the line, which constitutes the sole purpose of the devotion. There is the constant clarification that I am not inside these lines. It is simply a fact. There is the shocking poverty of their perception, the vast depth of their narcissism. “Not better, just a higher moral standard.” The constant hypostatizing of evil, always locating it somewhere else. And this dust jacket copy. It is always, I notice, the Jewish experience in the Gentile world. It is never, I notice, the Gentile experience in the Jewish world.

  YEARS AGO. WE ARE IN New York visiting Howard’s family in Brooklyn Heights. Howard has disappeared into some conversation somewhere in another room. I don’t know where Stuart is. I linger in the dim front hallway that leads into the living room, where Sam, age six, his skin like the freshest peach flesh, is playing on the floor and where Howard’s aunts sit back on the sofa, viewing him, like queens on cushions. He is childhood itself, says one. Beauty itself. (“Beaudy” she pronounces it.) The other says, “Yes.” And then with dismay, whispers (but not all that quietly), “But the wrong half!”

  Sam, of course, takes no visible notice, but he has ears.

  In the dim hallway, the wrong half takes a sharp breath, freezing like a deer where she stands. The large, airy brownstone is dark and cool despite summer’s best efforts, the sun burning the Callery Pear trees (Pyrus calleryana) outside. A breeze zooms happily through the large open windows and up to the high ceilings, bearing with it Brooklyn’s streets and a bit of roast chicken with onions and a garrulous delivery boy and a passing car radio. In some other room, the correct half laughs briefly at a story an uncle is telling him.

  In the doorway, the wrong half peers into an old mirror. She examines herself. Hair. Nose. Trim breasts. Slim hips. Cotton sun-dress. A thin gold bracelet and small earrings. She feels that she looks normal. Not abnormal. Not wrong. She enters the room smoothly, sweeps up the two halves of her son without a word to the aunts, and cooing something in his small ear, bears him out the open door and into the streets, down the brownstone’s steps past the amorous delivery boy (chatting up the gum-snapping teenage Puerto Rican babysitter from the bottom unit), moves swiftly across the glowing concrete sidewalks and the fragrant asphalt, and deposits him on the other side. Together, they rush pell-mell down the street with crazy big steps to where they will stand, he with his thumb in his awed mouth, to watch the sweating young men wearing gold chains carrying plastic bags of ice from the truck into the Italian grocery on Dean Street near Hoyt.

  Stuart comes walking up Dean Street past the Italian grocery. He’s got a brown paper bag. He’d gone out to run an errand. “Hey, Annie!” Stuart says.

  Sam rushes to him, cheering. Stuart grabs Sam, holds him by his ankles so Sam can scream. Looks at me for a moment. “Whaddya doin’? You waitin’ for somebody?”

  No, I say.

  “Where’s Howard?”

  At home.

  Stuart flips Sam right side up, and he holds him in his arms as he considers me. He blinks. He puts Sam down and hands him the brown bag and whispers to him, “You take that back to Bubbe.” Sam tears off. Stuart looks at me, waiting patiently until I am ready to speak.

  I AM IN THE BLACK Saab, having pulled onto the dusty shoulder of Mulholland at Franklin Canyon Drive. The top is down, it is a spectacular day, almost no smog. I apply lipstick, matte it down with my lips. Burst out laughing at myself. Acting like an ex-actress driving into Bel Air. (Howard would have a field day, were he in the car. But he’ll be at home, and I’d like to look a bit less windblown when I arrive.) My head is tilted up with the laugh, which is why just beyond the mirror I catch sight of a slightly battered Toyota pulling up from the Sooky Goldman Nature Center, an occluded exit. I watch. My fingers run distractedly through my hair. The Toyota’s driver, a white man in his late thirties, leans forward over his steering wheel with a frown, trying to see one way, then the other. The Toyota pulls out into the far lane, then cuts across the shoulder of the road, where a gardener descends like a cat from behind a mass of dahlia, huge purple flowers and dark-green leaves (my mind will light on the variety: Pierre chaumier) and the old Toyota’s right front edge plows into the man’s flesh at the hip.

  Time stands still, one hears birds chirping, all the clichés. I semi-register the jerk of the car, how it stops like a confused animal, and the brief, awkward arc of the gardener’s body to the ground. Then he gives a choking cry, the Toyota’s driver begins to judder, and the event is no longer celluloid.

  Gripping the steering wheel, I check both ways with care, then send the Saab over the road and into the strip of dust on the far side, shaded by ficus, where I put it in park and turn the engine off. I extract the keys, put them in my purse, get out. The driver of the Toyota has the gardener, Hispanic, perhaps early forties, by the armpits and is frantically dragging him into the backseat. I glance at my cell phone. We are perched atop the world between city and valley, and there is no service. I think about the time to find a house with someone at home, the time for the ambulance to come. For it to return. I take a breath and think: OK, Anne. Steady on. You can do this.

  I say, You’re not supposed to move him.

  They both freeze and stare at me like truants caught wrestling. The gardener seems to be lucid, with neuromuscular control (he is clutching the driver, whose worn khakis already have a small blood stain), and is clearly in great pain. I look around: No one. I look at my watch, mentally run through traffic patterns. I look through the Toyota’s open door; the backseat is larger than mine, so that’s that. I toss my purse onto the floor of the front passenger seat. Right, I say in my best authoritative British, put him down and hold him like this. I motion to the driver to support the man, under the armpits. No, lock your hands together. Across his chest. (I observe that the driver is not stellar in a pinch.) “Like this?” he asks several times in anguish. “Like this?” Yes, I say, like that. Calm down. On my command we’re going to lift, you’re going in backward, and I want—no, calm down—

  “How can you see anyone!” he pleads, panicking. He means at the intersection.

  Listen to me, I say. He freezes. I fix him with my eyes. It’s a technique I’ve practiced on my son. I want his head in first, your end, OK? Slide him in slowly.

  I’ve got my hands around the gardener’s legs, and that’s when I notice the blood. To the driver, I say: Ready? We both breathe in and lift together, but the legs are heavier than I’d expected. The driver awkwardly pulls the gardener inside, more or less on top of his own body, but it works, until the hurt man screams, then closes his eyes and concentrates on the pain. When he opens his eyes, they are looking directly at me.

  I look at the driver, who almost seems in worse condition. Are you OK? I ask him.

  There’s a muffled sound, and he says, “I think so.” With a bit of shifting he edges out from under
, and the gardener lies back on the seat, head almost touching the car door, his hands in tight fists. I gently bend his legs and, stepping back, very carefully shut the door. I gather myself for a moment and realize I am not breathing. I let out my breath.

  I walk briskly around to the other side. We’ll take him to Cedars Sinai, I say.

  The driver is scampering around the other way. “Not Good Samaritan? It’s closer. Wait. Is it closer?”

  Cedars does better osteopathy. (I’m thinking of Marty Silverstein.)

  “Laurel Canyon!”

  I think, again, about traffic. Coldwater Canyon, I say.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t have moved him,” he says, almost literally wringing his hands.

  I give him a brief, sharp look, and he flies for the door, jams the key into the ignition so that it almost breaks off. I push the passenger seat as far up as it will go and then find the lever and flip the back forward. I squeeze into the back, near the man’s head, which I lift and then lower onto my lap, and look down at him. There is a surprising amount of blood on his hip and thigh. I start unbuckling his trousers. I’m sitting behind the driver on the passenger’s side. Drive, I say, fast.

  The Toyota jumps forward. I put a steadying hand on the backseat and continue with the pants. I’m going to look at the wound, I say to the man in Spanish, and he nods. I pull up his shirt, unfasten the belt, unzip the trousers. OK, I say, I need you to help me. You seem to be able to move.

  “I can move,” he says, and before I can stop him, he shifts his hips, gritting his teeth. Stop, I say very quickly. Don’t move. (That much I know from watching television shows.)

  I say to the driver, in English, He’s moving, so I don’t think there’s serious damage to his hip structure, amazingly.

  “Oh, thank God, thank God,” he says, and he gives his version of what happened, which of course he needs to do. At a very mild, brief wave of nausea, I realize that I myself am coming out of a bit of shock. I let it flow and ebb. I am gratified to see that the gardener is not modest. He slips the trousers down, uncovering gray, worn underwear, the agony showing in his neck. There is a huge gash along his upper hip, already purple and swollen, and I hold it closed with the fingers of my left hand. The blood stops flowing. The underwear is becoming soaked with blood. I look down and see that I, too, am covered with blood to my elbow.