You or Someone Like You

by Chandler Burr

  The young man jibes far away, then tacks toward me across the floor through the crowd. I’ve tracked his approach, and still he seems to materialize out of the air. “It’s Anne, isn’t it?”

  I sip my tonic water. Isn’t what?

  Not a scratch. “You’re here by yourself,” he says. Nonchalance.

  Are you sure?

  “Well,” he says easily, “your husband isn’t here.” He looks around, the jaw cutting a perfect arc in the air, and then the eyes sweep down and land in mine. “I mean, not right here.” The eyes are cobalt and magnesium.

  If, I say, you know who my husband is, then you know who I am and that my name is Anne. What do you want?

  “Help with Ezra Pound.” He smiles; it takes my breath away. It would take anyone’s breath away.

  I say, Pound, 1885 to, I believe, 1972. Not very fashionable—the difficulty of the poetry, the textual complexity, plus of course the Fascist politics.

  He clasps his fingers behind his head. The muscles in his shoulders pull back the fabric of the expensive blazer. He holds this position, grinning.

  I have tried to write Paradise, he says to me

  Do not move

  Let the wind speak that is paradise.

  Let those I love try to forgive what I have made.

  (I don’t know this. I turn over the last line in my mind.) You’re well versed, I say to him. Why do you need me?

  He laughs, a lovely, athletic laugh. “You know everyone,” he says. “All these people.” He indicates them with the chin, turns back again to face me, closer now. “I thought we might strike a deal.” His voice is very gentle. He is looking at me, his head slightly cocked to one side. He is the other half of the deal.

  Imagine all the unimaginable things. I say to him, You have the thickest, darkest sheet of hair and the most perfect teeth. They’re rather astounding, actually, your teeth. Even your breath is wonderful. You’re a beautiful man. It’s also entirely possible that you are an actor of some talent, although as hokey as it sounds, they actually never really know till the screen test. Good-bye.

  I set down the tonic water. I turn and walk out of the room, returning the waves of three people. At the corner, someone mouths “Call me” and I nod, descend the stairs carefully, my hand brushing the rail as a light control. I allow myself to swallow. I ask the boy at the valet stand for the keys. On second thought no, I’ll get it myself, where is it? There? The left side? Thank you.

  I find Howard’s Mercedes, unlock it, get in, shut the door, put my purse in the passenger seat, and lock the doors. I will wait here for Howard. I sit still, eyes closed, and grip the wheel. The cobalt and magnesium eyes are still in my head.

  THE NEXT EVENING. HOWARD COMES home late. I look up from a book.

  Oh, I’m so glad you’re here, I say, stretching luxuriously, I’d just started dying for bed.

  He says nothing. I see his face, and I stop smiling. I watch him for a moment. What time is it by the way? I ask.

  “Eleven twenty.”

  I look involuntarily toward the clock. So where were you?

  He jingles the keys. He says something.

  Howard, I can’t hear you.

  “I went to a temple,” he says. He throws the keys on the table, then peers down. “Is this all the mail?”

  Yes, I say. I actually think I’ve misheard. You went to a temple?

  He is sifting through envelopes. He picks out two, but looks dissatisfied with both. He walks toward the bedroom, eyes on the mail. “Talked about the problem with Sam,” he says, disappearing down the hallway.

  I ORGANIZE A DINNER FOR Howard’s colleagues. It’s our turn, essentially.

  We all sit in the night breeze on the restaurant’s stone terrace, the fountain’s water flows, and every so often the breeze picks up this water and washes us with fine, cold spray. Nothing connects tonight. I can see Sam, frozen in place, talking to no one, and he looks like he is waiting, but I don’t know what for. He is opaque. I feel that every voice is coming from far away.

  Howard pushes his chair back to talk to someone.

  And then I understand that in that moment I am seeing Howard again as he was before. Smiling, happy. Talking with everyone. Fielding comments and making them. He fills the place with his joy. But I notice he never once looks at me, and he never once looks at Sam. And that is what Sam is waiting for.

  But Sam is just beginning to figure it out. Howard has not spoken to him once about the yeshiva’s view of what he is, his classification, but Sam is figuring it out. You can see it progressing across his face like a shadow.

  We fly to New York, a short trip of forty-eight hours, planned months ago, Howard “just checking in on a few projects.” He reads during the entire flight.

  That evening we have scheduled drinks with Alex Ross. The lights of Times Square are holograms on the wall of glass enclosing this slick new bar on 46th and Broadway. Howard’s choice. Too young for us, in my view, and too crowded.

  “So,” says Alex, “what are you drinking?”

  They talk business, of course. What is Alex writing these days? He’s writing on Strauss, he tells us. “Was Strauss anti-Semitic?” Alex’s article will ask.

  Howard does not look up, but the movement of his body suddenly stills over his tumbler. He is listening alertly.

  “It’s complex,” Alex says. (Alex does not notice Howard’s reaction. He doesn’t notice my glance, the straightness of my spine. Alex is just describing the question.) Strauss, who when Hitler came to power accepted the presidency of the Reich Music Chamber because it was his chance to implement some long-cherished ideas he had about musical reform, particularly legislation to benefit “serious” composers, legislation he thought necessary in an increasingly commercialized culture. (Hitler, a lifelong fan, agreed.) Strauss, who was only interested in the music. Strauss, who refused to sign documents firing Jewish musicians. Strauss, who continued to work with his Jewish librettist, Stefan Zweig. Strauss, who wrote to Zweig with an audible sneer, “Do you think that I am ever, in any of my actions, guided by the thought that I am ‘German’?” The letters were intercepted by the Gestapo. Strauss, who was asked to resign.

  “This,” Alex asked us, “was an anti-Semite?”

  “Strauss’s son,” says Alex, “became a dedicated and ardent Nazi. But, to muddy the waters a little, his father fought him on it, and, to muddy the waters a whole lot more, the dedicated Nazi married Alice von Grab, a Jewess. They had two children, and Strauss adored his grandsons. Both boys were Jews according to Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws that defined who, under Nazi Germany, was or wasn’t a Jew. They are also Jews according to Israel’s Law of Return, which defines who, under the Jewish state, is and is not a Jew.”

  Alex went to the town of Garmisch and met one of these grandsons of Richard Strauss. A tall, gaunt man, Alex reports to us. Not much came of the meeting, actually. He got, he tells us, only a single terse paragraph out of it. (He laughs, shrugs.) This Strauss is a Jew. His grandmother died in Theresienstadt. His given name is Christian.

  “These are hardly simple matters,” says Alex.

  I hesitate. I think they are, actually, I say. (Alex looks very slightly startled.) I think, I say, putting the words together, that dying in Theresienstadt because of what you are born is a simple matter. I add, I think a law—anyone’s law—that defines you because of what you are born is also a simple matter.

  It is at this point that Howard looks down. He watches the way the oily liquid rolls in his glass as he swirls it counterclockwise. Alex is not sure exactly how to respond. He has connected my statement to Howard, and he now connects Howard’s reaction back to me. He is uncertain of motive and causation.

  I say that it seems to me rather clear that Strauss’s sin was being loved by a maniac.

  Alex considers this. Alex is not sure. Conscious now that there is between Howard and myself a backstory whose terrain he does not know, Alex carefully reserves judgment. And Howard doesn’t say anything at a
ll.

  They return to Alex’s work. In this same obsessive vein, Howard and Alex discuss Wagner’s astounding genius, “which was fueled by his anti-Semitic hatred,” says Alex. “This is the theory. The scholar Anthony Julius located T. S. Eliot’s creative muse in anti-Semitism, too. ‘A gruesome guide to poetic truths,’” Alex quotes Julius.

  “It makes sense,” says Howard grimly.

  Alex sips, looks around the bar. People move around us inside this glass cage, talking loudly.

  I observe, my eyes narrowed, that it is also of course the Jewish muse. Anti-Semitism.

  Alex blinks.

  Anti-Semitism, I explain, is the muse of Jewish religious truth and Jewish survival because it is the gruesome muse of Separatism. It drives the central Jewish genius, separation, the unique genius that has through millennia kept the Jews alive as a distinct tribe. A genius much greater than Wagner’s, in a Darwinian sense.

  Alex’s eyes don’t meet mine and, carefully, don’t meet Howard’s.

  Well, why, I ask Alex, why endlessly discuss anti-Semitism’s possible usefulness to T. S. Eliot and Wagner and other anti-Semites but not its clear usefulness to Jews? Why?

  Alex glances at Howard. But Howard seems to be musing on something that makes him absolutely furious.

  We walk back to the hotel and ride the vast escalators and the elevators that raise us into the curving colored glass tower over Eighth Avenue. In the room, we undress. How can I say it, I ask myself over and over, but no answer comes to me. He undresses faster than I, gets in bed. I’m sure Howard has understood what I was saying. Then I’m sure he has not. (I step out of my skirt, lay it on a chair. I take off my shirt.) I am, perhaps, still too shocked by what he said in our living room, or too uncertain, to state any more plainly what seems obvious to me. That there is no fucking problem with Sam. There is nothing wrong with Sam at all. Sam is perfectly fine as he is.

  Howard snaps the covers up to his collarbone and shuts off the lights. I can hear him breathing in the dark. I stand, in the dark hotel room, in my slip and bra with my shirt in my hand, staring toward his still, shadowed outline. I am sure he can hear my breathing as well. Neither of us moves a muscle.

  And the next day we go along, go to his appointments, and on the surface everything is normal.

  On the flight home to L.A. we are strapped into our first-class seats, bumping gently toward the concrete lip of the JFK runway that will funnel us up into that evening’s horizon. We are breathing the cool metallic gas. He has his half glasses on, a memo on a meeting before him. The engines are building. He stops reading the memo. As the plane lifts into the air, he takes my hand and holds it so tightly I am afraid he will break the bones, but I don’t dare remove my hand; he does all of this without looking at me.

  IN HOWARD’S STUDY AT HOME he has a framed photograph of himself with Judy Kaufthal and David Harris at a Salute to Israel benefit they coproduced. It is five years old. Howard had written a substantial check “to start things rolling.” Judy and he have their arms around each other and are grinning. I enter the office. He is staring at the photo. When he hears me, he’s startled. “Whadda you got,” he says brusquely, reactively, as if I’ve caught him and he’s going to bluff his way out of it.

  I hesitate. Nothing, I say, surprised.

  “What’s the matter?” Terse.

  Nothing’s the matter, Howard.

  He sniffs, vaguely now, wipes a finger briskly under his nose twice. Turns back to his desk. There are some papers at his elbow, a report from the National Population Jewish Survey on Jewish-Gentile intermarriage. Robert Abramson and the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism.

  The words ba’al teshuva are in bold. I notice that. I don’t know what it means.

  I move to the shelf over his desk that holds the regiment of screenplays and start to reach up toward the Paul McMahon script. I muster a light, dry tone: You haven’t forgotten young Paul? My genius driver who finds us gardeners?

  He claps both hands to his forehead—yes, he’d forgotten—and his tone is completely different. “I’m sorry, Anne.”

  I start to say that it’s OK, I just really need him to—and he says, “I’m so sorry,” and, seated, embraces me tightly around the waist. I freeze, my arm outstretched, hand on Paul’s screenplay.

  “I’m going to,” says Howard from below. He’s talking about the script. “I mean to,” he says.

  I go back to the kitchen. I remember an interesting point Nancy Franklin once made to me (she was working on a theater review) about fictional characters and the ways we view ourselves. Nancy had seen Barry Edelstein’s production of Arthur Miller’s 1947 play, All My Sons, at the Roundabout, and there was something she had found strange.

  About the play? I asked.

  No, she said, about the characters. “Any of us could make the mistakes of the businessman Joe Keller in All My Sons,” she said. “But the tired, desperate Willy Loman?” This salesman, this Jewish failure. She tapped a fingernail against her coffee cup and smiled, thinking about it. “Innumerable people have said that they know someone like Willy Loman. But it’s a good bet that no one—not even a traveling salesman—has ever recognized himself in the character.”

  Consider the nature of this problem, which is suddenly bothering me. Seeing oneself. As Nancy has so precisely outlined it. I do not know if Howard is able to see himself at the moment, and I have no ability to judge because at this moment I do not know what I myself am seeing when I see him. I’m recognizing less and less.

  I think, Oh damn Nancy Franklin and her observations.

  One can arrive at a certain point, and turn around and look back, and see differently, and with a strange, discomforting clarity, all the things that have come before. Things clicking into place. Clarity, it seems to me, is supposed not to be discomforting. But.

  Year after year, we exited Ben Gurion International into warm and ancient evenings under Israel’s skies of blue silicate, the wind in the growing dark an aluminum scalpel slicing the tissue of heat away from the land. All those flights Howard and I used to take to Tel Aviv. (Our last trip several years ago now.) Howard “wanted to help.” He felt an obligation. All the evenings I remember of endless conversations, lawn chairs and fluttering flames of candles and the last bits of pashteda and salat peirot and marak pitriot littering the table, and they gave their opinions and picked at the food and argued and argued. I listened to them from the side. It was always the same: What of Israel? What of Israel? Besieged.

  Surrounded by a violent enemy sea of fanatics who strap bombs to children, Israel’s leaders necessarily fight back. They order assassinations in neighboring capitals—shootings, poisonings in Amman—as if ordering furniture. The country’s founding history is a bomb’s shudder, its borders are bullet paths. Its unending series of bloodlettings paint the biblical cities in corpuscles, catheterized with detonators: Galilee in coats of O-positive; Bethlehem, A-negative; and as for Jerusalem, any type you wish.

  And they would sit, Howard’s friends and acquaintances, the intel lectuals and publishers and writers and three or four rich concerned Americans, at, for example, a long, outdoor dinner table in Jerusalem hosted by Ari Shavit, the liberal thinker of the left-leaning Ha’aretz, and moan and bewail the present, past, and future, like the bitterest of fortune tellers. View it this way, they would say. View it that way. They eat, they drink, and they talk and they argue. The hours tick by as always. I do not look at my watch. I try to find constellations in the sky. They do not talk to me. David Makovsky, whose Ha’aretz beat is diplomacy, sits next to Howard, who is listening to Ma’ariv’s Shalom Rosenfeld, who interrupts himself, looks around.

  “More wine, Anne?”

  No, thank you.

  He returns to the fray.

  The tablecloth is stained with coagulated burgundy spots. I sit in the evening dark and wait, or go inside to read. Every so often someone enters to search for another volume of the Encyclopedia Hebraica or some other reference book an
d stumbles on me. “Oh!…” They need to verify some disputed, vituperative, ancient, anachronistic pseudo-datum. I remember once hearing, vaguely, David Bar-Illan roaring about Netanyahu, “One thing is to have an affair with a shiksa—but a married woman! With a shiksa, even the rebbes do it. But a married Jewish woman!” At this I close my book—I am suddenly unable to focus on the print—and wander outside again into the night and away from them, out of earshot. Howard is engaged in the conversation.

  The Israeli press is pro-Labor, the immigrants are pro-Likud, the Ashkenazi are beset, the settlers have God and their Uzis on their side, and they and the Hasidim are as nutty, as someone describes it, as Snickers bars. I feel the hatred; it is palpable. I might look over at Amy Wilentz, whose loathing for the fanatics and the settlers seeps like acrid smoke from her New Yorker pieces. Someone would be loudly quoting Charles Krauthammer and saying in English, “At least someone understands!” I recall a comment that Abe Rosenthal writes “like a man shouting from a fire escape,” but everyone talks that way here. It is exhausting.

  When we were home, in Los Angeles, Howard and I never discussed it. It was important to him. I accepted that. I always went along: a few days’ visit, perhaps a week here or there.

  Once, sitting with Howard in David Remnick’s office, I ask David: How was his trip. David has just returned from reporting a profile of Bibi Netanyahu. He looks haggard. David says, “Jerusalem is the City of Opinion. It rains opinions.” He laughs bleakly. “The desert blooms on the moisture of harangue. The rarest phrase in the fifty-year-long history of Israel is ‘No comment.’”

  He looks as if he has imbibed all of these opinions and wants to vomit them back up.

  Howard asks about the piece. You can’t understand the son, says David darkly, without understanding the father. “What Bibi has inherited from his father is a keen notion of Us versus Them.” And They will always, according to the father, act toward Us as They acted during the Inquisition in fourteenth-century Spain, when they devised a racial theory of the Jews as inherently different, inferior. (This particular racialist theory is, to David, self-evidently horrific.)