You or Someone Like You

by Chandler Burr

  I know he hates speaking to me this way, he hates the anger in his voice, and he hates the panic he feels at finding it all out of his control. And I appreciate that, but I hate this, too.

  He waits, caught in between for a moment, but then he disappears.

  I think: Right, so that’s your tactic; then you and I shall discuss this another way.

  I put the pornography in the trash. I check my watch and see that I have more than enough time to find a particular Wharton passage I have in mind.

  When everyone is seated, I say to them, Before we get to tonight’s reading, I have something new. Edith Wharton. She wrote this in 1922. An example of heterosexual sexuality, I say. A father performs cunnilingus on his virgin daughter.

  She hardly heard him, for the old swooning sweetness was creeping over her. As his hand stole higher she felt the secret bud of her body swelling, yearning, quivering hotly to burst into bloom. Ah, here was his subtle fore-finger pressing it, forcing its tight petals softly apart, and laying on their sensitive edges a circular touch so soft and yet so fiery that already lightnings of heat shot from that palpitating centre all over her surrendered body, to the tips of her fingers, and the ends of her loosened hair.

  The sensation was so exquisite that she could have asked to have it indefinitely prolonged; but suddenly his head bent lower, and with a deeper thrill she felt his lips pressed upon that quivering invisible bud, and then the delicate firm thrust of his tongue, so full and yet so infinitely subtle, pressing apart the closed petals, and forcing itself in deeper and deeper through the passage that glowed and seemed to become illuminated at its approach…

  “My little girl,” he breathed…

  I lower the page. It’s heterosexual pornography, I say, to make sure they understand. Incest porn.

  They add up the elements with lightning speed. By the next morning Howard, via Jennifer, has received the exact details—the Wharton text, what I said, my tone of voice, and their interpretation of what I was saying to Howard. Honestly, Howie, they said, straight, gay, what the hell’s the difference. (This is what they think I’m saying.) They tell him, with complete confidence, Look, Anne’s totally right on this one, c’mon!

  They think Howard is upset about Sam’s homosexuality. I myself have reluctantly concluded that it is a sincere result of his new religious beliefs.

  And I am more apprehensive than I would like to admit about a question that has recently occurred to me. What will they do when they discover what this is really about? Whose side will they take? Because I have now invested my heart in them, and they are thus a second point at which I stand the chance of having it broken.

  I receive no response from Howard. My little victory is hollow.

  WE GO TO A PARTY at the Bel-Air Hotel.

  A group of seven of us are in a corner of one of the large rooms. I know all of them except the man who puts his drink on a coaster on the piano and sits at the keyboard, preparing to play. Which sends a frisson through the air.

  You’re a top,

  he sings jauntily,

  You’re a Roswell probing

  You’re a top, you’re a disco strobing

  Then I realize and say to Howard, It’s that Broadway composer. I’ve seen him on an awards show.

  Howard, who is usually in the thick of these things, says nothing. Doesn’t even glance over.

  You’re a Chippendale, an XL male, a stud

  You’re a ten-inch wonder, a genetic blunder, a can of Bud

  Alan Menken and his wife are grinning ear to ear, looking over at the piano. How many times have we, all of us, heard these songs at parties, the music. Two gay men are doing a doo-wop backup, in tune, precise.

  You’re as big as the big bonanza

  You’re as gay as a Garland stanza

  I’m a passive Greek, someone to shout, “Don’t stop!”

  But if, baby, I’m a bottom, you’re a top!

  A woman leans an arm on Howard’s shoulders for support as she laughs. Howard does not laugh. He is rooted to the spot. Someone next to me asks, Did Marc write this for Bette?

  You’re a horse, you’re my gonads tappin’

  No, says his neighbor, a benefit review they’re developing.

  You’re divorce just about to happen

  You’re the box that gives Fire Island Pines a rush

  When you wear your Raymond Dragon undies you make Jeff Stryker blush

  At this line, the backup singers (I think: They don’t look like Sam, not in the least, they are effeminate and wriggly) almost collapse onto each other. Only they understand it. No, wait, the Luffmans have gotten the references, and they laugh, making their comprehension clear. For this, they are envied. They have the keys to this tribe. One more tribe for us to be in or out of. I see David and Ellie Trachtenberg on the other side of the room, and they are looking directly at Howard.

  You’re a top, you are Geffen’s money

  You’re a top, you are clover honey

  I’m a tricked and treated overheated slop

  Oh, but, babe, if I’m a bottom, you’re a top!

  Why doesn’t Howard move away from this. Why don’t we just go. Should I push him? Should I lead him?

  You’re a jones, you’re a magic johnson

  Someone yells something in response to this line. Laughter.

  You’re the vaulter’s pole that shoots above the bar

  You are adipose, you’re Streisand’s nose, Speed Racer’s car

  David leans over, says something in Ellie’s ear.

  You are whipped like an ice cream dinner

  You’re equipped like the derby winner

  (spoken: “And I don’t mean the jockey!”)

  When your trou are down I’ve got no glottal stop

  Howard turns and walks away, including away from me. He doesn’t glance in my direction. People are arriving, attracted like moths, and he pushes past them. David and Ellie fall back from the crowd to pursue him.

  You are hung, you’re endowed like Harvard

  You’re as long as from port to starboard.

  I watch them as if they were other people. Three figures, all in motion, three trajectories.

  I think, Move, Anne! But I’m afraid to move.

  I turn and push gently past a couple. Excuse me.

  I’ll cry “deeper, deeper!” till you go and pop!

  I find them in the bar. Howard is taking a scotch from the bartender. He has apparently just said something to David because David replies, “So now you know him.” David glances at me.

  I think: More mistaken aim.

  We move, the four of us, in an odd group movement away from the bar. Howard’s face doesn’t change. He holds his glass. He doesn’t drink it. As if to the far wall, he says softly: “Easy for you.”

  “I’m only saying,” says David, “that you need to consider your position.”

  “So self-righteous,” says Howard vaguely.

  “Don’t be a prick,” says David.

  Ellie is aghast. “What are you doing?” she hisses.

  “It’s his kid,” David says to her, leaving it, turning away.

  She replies, “David, it’s his kid.” A rewrite of the line. A strong rewrite—with merely a change of stress she has retained the original dialogue yet fundamentally redirected its meaning and, neatly, the entire thrust. Ellie makes a lot of money doing this.

  Howard is a totemic presence. A waiter with a silver tray approaches, picks up the signals, instantly tacks toward a group pre tending not to be listening to us. They lift things off the tray. Ellie glares at them.

  Howard is breathing audibly through his nose.

  David takes a deep breath and speaks earnestly and low. “Don’t fuck this up with Sam, Howie. Or I’m telling you, buddy, you will regret it the rest of your miserable life.”

  Ellie says, “Anne.” She is pleading with Howard via me. Like a minor saint improvidently called upon to route a matter to the very top, I weigh my powers of intercession here
. But I don’t know this stone god before me. Not his face, not his voice, not his language. And it occurs to me that I have not known Howard for some time now. Since, say, around 11:00 A.M. almost six weeks ago when Howard left the house for LAX to meet Sam’s flight from Israel.

  It is Sam who returned, from Howard’s perspective, different. But to me it is Howard who is different now. You, Howard, but not you. Without moving a finger, I feel him arc away from me at speed, like some furious charred angel abandoning a burning earth. He is leaving me behind, and I am paralyzed and terrified and helpless to stop his going.

  Ellie realizes I have not said a single word during this entire exchange. She tries to interpret me and fails. We watch Howard turn abruptly on his polished heel beneath an impeccable navy blue suit, a ship cutting the tide.

  One can measure his force by the number in the room, disturbed by his wake, who turn toward him, then plot his trajectory back to the wake’s point of origin. Their lookouts spot the three of us, stranded there. Gleefully, these tiny boats bob in the ripples, beginning their analyses. Information is radioed out. I calculate dissemination and retrieval times. I try to estimate where Sam is. I look at my watch, a motion these eyes note. It is almost my first physical movement other than blinking.

  David and Ellie need absolution and then explanation. I am not sure I will give them these. I am not sure exactly what I will do the next moment. Do I have the keys or does he? Where did we leave the car? What does one do?

  “Did he leave?” asks David. I see Bob Broder making for us fast, rescue in his eyes, but on seeing David’s lips move Bob cuts his engines and floats at a distance, uncertain.

  I have no idea, I say. He’s never done this before.

  Ellie gets an inquisitive look. “Really,” she says.

  Really, I say, returning the word with a bit too much force.

  She follows me into the hallway, catches my shoulder, says, Howard must understand, he must this, he must that.

  I say to Ellie: This is not what it appears. And she stops and looks at me very closely, waiting. But I falter. They are religious, she and David. Kosher, observant. They go to temple, and if she knew what Howard was becoming, I wonder whether Ellie Trachtenberg would be saying that Howard must understand, must this, must that. She might in fact be saying something very different.

  He finds me standing in the northern corner of the Bel-Air’s parking lot. He approaches, crosses his arms on the car’s roof, and buries his face in the arms. I can’t see his face, hidden against the metal sheet, though of course I can feel the agony that radiates from him. The back of his neck is slightly hairy, he needs to go to the barber. I reach out and stroke his neck.

  He turns instantly and enfolds me in his arms and I feel his beard scratching my cheek and catching strands of my hair. I still can’t see his face. Held in this position, I look up at the clouds lit just so by the moon. I hold on to him as tightly as I possibly can. It is my desperate hope to make him stop changing. (I call him softly, Proteus, Proteus. The name of the god. This god in the midst of his transformations, trying to escape. I was promised that, if I can keep tight hold of him, these transformations will stop. He will resume his proper form.)

  The car’s metal skin is cool, Howard’s skin is warm in the chill.

  “I need time,” he says.

  They had asked me a question in my garden one evening. Did I feel at home here, having left Britain? I’ve thought about it constantly over the years in the way all of us immigrants do. But it had never occurred to me to ask myself whether Howard felt at home. With me, I mean. Not to be defensive, but Howard never gave me reason before to think the answer might be anything but yes.

  Now I see it differently. Unlike myself, Howard never changed passports. On the other hand, he had married me. I’m the one who saw home Auden’s way, the place we have chosen, wherever we might be somewhere else, yet trust that we have chosen right.

  But Howard always said he saw it Frost’s way. Home as the place where when you go there, they have to take you in. First of all, that’s slightly different.

  The flower girl sloughs off her native dialect and acquires a new tongue and leaves her old world, and she may well have done it scientifically, she may indeed have believed entirely in that process, it may be thoroughly real. But what if her previous world, vengeful, comes back to reclaim her? What if one ducked briefly into the old territory for a visit, as one had for years, without thinking about it, but on the way out was stopped unexpectedly at customs, the guards with lowered guns. What if one is surprised by an inability to leave? Like Auden, who left Britain for a chaotic New York, shedding his old identity, Howard had chosen to leave Brooklyn and instead join Auden’s tribe, the determinedly origin free. Marrying me had made Howard nameless. I made him nameless.

  But his son had crossed a checkpoint, and they’d seen that his papers were wrong, and they were coming after the father, laying claim to him. They had his previous name on file.

  And I suddenly think to myself that it is strange I’ve never thought of it before. Howard had changed passports after all.

  THE NEXT DAY, HE LEAVES at dawn.

  That evening, he sits in a lawn chair, watching the sun sinking over Catalina. I come up behind him. I say, “‘I cannot heave my heart into my mouth.’” It is Cordelia’s response to Lear’s demand for a protestation of love. (Tell me you love me, Lear commands his daughter. Why, she replies, is this a test?)

  He will know the line. He teaches it. He doesn’t turn around, doesn’t move. I can hear a distant helicopter. He shifts his buttocks slightly on the teak chair. “You’re saying that or I am?”

  For an instant I have to think about it. I assumed you were, I eventually say to the back of his head. To Sam.

  He says nothing. I’m surprised at having to spell it out for him. I mean it sympathetically, Howard. (Perhaps he has misunderstood me.)

  “So blond,” he murmurs, “and so untender.” At least he can joke. (Shakespeare’s line is, “So young and so untender.”) Lear with a whiskey on ice.

  I reply, So blond, my lord, and true.

  Suddenly his shoulders stiffen under my hands. “You think” (he pulls away from my hands, rises, turning toward me, holding the drink, and I see with a chill that his face is flushed with fury), “you think I would stop loving him.” He is ashen, staring at me, a poisonous suspicion passing behind.

  He raises the tumbler and slurps the liquor from it. He specifies the line he’s thinking about. “‘Here I disclaim all my paternal care,’” he says, Lear heartlessly banishing Cordelia, “‘propinquity and property of blood, and as a stranger to my heart and me hold thee from this for ever, thou my sometime daughter.’”

  I had somehow forgotten that these are the king’s subsequent words. Stupid, Anne. No wonder Howard has arrived at this reading of the text. The oversight makes me extremely irritated with myself. That’s not what I meant, I say.

  Howard blinks. “I’m not Lear,” he says. “Jesus, Anne.”

  I think, but do not say, that to my mind at this particular moment Sam is, on the other hand, Cordelia. Cordelia, who refuses to feign love. Who is honest about who she is and pays a price. I say nothing.

  We listen to the ambient noise. The helicopter is gone. Then a soft pinging in the garage. José? Then no sounds.

  I wait for a moment. I lift my chin, glance around clear-eyed. I have a block on “propinquity,” I say. He walks over and with the hand that is not grasping the tumbler grasps my upper arm. At his touch, I feel the breath go out of him and out of me. He is staring down at Los Angeles, covered in the red.

  ‘ “Nearness of relationship or kinship,’” says Howard without any air. He does not come nearer, but he grips my arm tightly.

  Ah, I say.

  DURING OUR EARLY YEARS HERE, when he was just establishing his foothold. Howard used to call and say, “We’re invited to dinner, is that OK?”

  OK, I’d say. I knew he needed me there. That was part of his
job. My dislike of these rituals I set aside. That was my job. I would ask: What time? And: Shall I meet you there?

  I had been prepared for dining in Los Angeles by Tolstoy. When I was seventeen, I first read the dining scene near the beginning of Anna Karenina. It takes place in 1870s Saint Petersburg, Oblonsky and Levin on their way to the Hotel Angleterre in a sleigh. “As they entered the restaurant, Oblonsky took off his overcoat, giving orders to the Tatars in swallowtails, who clustered around him.” We would wait for the two or three from the studio, or for the director, or for the producer arriving with the star. We walked among the diners toward our table, and as we passed I felt people’s upward glances, like butterflies flying across your back. “Oblonsky bowed right and left to acquaintances, who as usual were delighted to see him. ‘This way, please, Your excellency, this way!’ said an old, specially eager white-headed Tatar, with broad hips and coattails separating over them.” (I loved that.)

  All those evenings in the golden food boxes on Sunset and Melrose. One of the men from the studio would have reserved the table. It was his table. I never understood what made it different from most of the other tables, but to these people it was very different.

  I found it hard to get the hang of it at first. It was much more than eating. It took me time to understand this. Salad, I would say. “Just salad? Listen,” he would explain, “it’s my treat!” Yes, I would say, not showing that I was taken aback, I know. Thank you. “So, Howard. I wanna say two words to you: Negative Pickup. If the studios can do it, why not the independents?”

  “I agree,” Howard would say, “but what do you do about the writer?”

  They would discuss the writer. “He can be fired,” the woman from United Artists would say. And when they had discussed the writer, and how to fire him, we would order, and then we would discuss the director’s back end.