You or Someone Like You

by Chandler Burr

  I would sit with them as they talked. “Oblonsky said to the Tatar, ‘Well then, my good fellow, let us have two—no, that’s too little—three dozen oysters.’”

  We in the industry feast under our palm trees on reindeer, ostrich, assorted snake and reptilia, molluscae and delicate sub-species of avians. We have regressed: The menus of tonight’s Los Angeles read like nineteenth-century naturalist tracts, the seasonings like the treasures of plundered exotic cultures, powdered pearl, moondust. We are culinary Magellans. In our opium-free opium dens along Beverly and Robertson, our porcelain plates are test tubes into which they pour the reagents, sauces and spices hauled by elephant down from Thai mountains, rare plants cut by Peruvian Indians (and given a 400 percent markup by this evening’s chef ). We systematically sample every phylum, every genus, like evolutionary biologists, yet there are only so many species to eat. I quietly ask Howard, as that evening’s waiter hands us yet another list, printed in nonpolluting soy-base inks on chlorine-free paper, when will we get to rat?

  “What makes you think we haven’t?” he mutters, staring at the menu.

  “The Tatar darted off, his coattails flying; five minutes later he flew back with a dish of opened oysters in their pearly shells and a bottle between his fingers.” Tolstoy gives you nothing of the interim, notice; the important thing is the ebbing and flowing of the Tatar.

  Howard and I sit facing an immense metal tray of ice they have just placed on our table. The cool marine smell washes over me. Marvelous. The oysters are being paid for by an Englishman with a large amount of money meant to acquire “literary properties.” Oh, I say lightly, scripts. The Englishman doesn’t reply to me. He squeezes lemon over the bed of gleaming, silver-gray, gelatinous cells. He addresses himself to Howard: “Right then.”

  I would excuse myself sometimes and walk out into the blue evenings and sit slightly to the side and watch the movies walk in and out, the well-known faces from the screens, their expensive Italian sportscars being parked by the young valets who moved like short, athletic members of a Hispanic corps de ballet. Then I would go back in, careful to approach them from the direction of the ladies’ room, and sit, and Howard would take me by the hand and draw me into the conversation. They would compliment me, “That accent, that’s terrific,” as if it were a great tan. But they were energetic, and over time I started to revive and blossom, and I grew used to nights and nights of these lacquered restaurants, became casual about them, came to know them, slipping into their sateen seats with familiarity, until things shifted in our favor, and my presence became my own decision.

  Back then, I would think of this scene from Tolstoy not for the food or the opulence but for the connection. Things would be fine, and then abruptly the deal would hit a snag and the conversation would founder, their slick L.A. talk would fail, and you would feel the strange, sudden loss of bearings as they attempted to navigate the sea of laundered white cotton between them. Tolstoy foresaw it. “Levin sighed and was silent. And suddenly,” Tolstoy writes, “Levin and Oblonsky both felt that even though they were friends, even though they had been dining together and drinking wine, which should have brought them still closer together, each of them was thinking only of himself, and neither had anything to do with the other. Oblonsky had already had this experience more than once, of the extreme estrangement instead of intimacy that takes place after a dinner, and he knew what had to be done.”

  “‘The bill!’ Oblonsky shouted, and went out into the neighboring room where he immediately met an aide-de-camp he knew and started up a conversation about some actress and the man who was keeping her. And in the conversation with the aide-de-camp, Oblonsky instantly felt relief and relaxation.”

  As the electronic banking network in back sucks on the credit card, the players prepare to part, the deal undone, the studio and the producer unreconciled, the director still frustrated, the star (as stars always are) unfulfilled. Despite all the food, which is already forgotten anyway. It takes an eternity for the valet to bring the Porsche back from wherever they park them, huge hidden warehouses maybe behind Fairfax Avenue packed with ludicrously expensive steel and leather. No one ever knows. No one asks.

  I have known scorched partings, stumblings. Coldnesses that swam on and on with iced gills while you stood there. The sudden estrangement from them instead of intimacy, even though having dined together, even though (sometimes, sort of ) friends. Neither having anything to do with the other.

  I never once imagined that those estranged people would ever be Howard and me.

  ON THURSDAY, HOWARD GOES TO New York. Saturday around noon he arrives back in L.A. Just after sundown the phone rings. I pick it up in my office. “Hello, is Howard Rosenbaum there?” asks a strong, pleasant male voice. I think, It must be an actor. I have just begun to say, Yes, he is, when somewhere else in the house Howard picks up fast and says, “Yeah,” a bit awkwardly, as if he were winded.

  The man is slightly confused. “Uh, Howard?”

  “I got it,” says Howard’s voice. The man starts to say something peremptorily, but I hang up. Somewhere in the house, Howard very quietly but firmly closes a door.

  IT WAS A SPECIAL CAREER project the school set up for the seniors. Private audiences with mothers and fathers in their suites and bungalows and clinics. Sam had chosen a law firm on Beverly Drive, a midmorning meeting. The partner (they stared at his plush office) was representing a client, an old man, a Hungarian Jew, who had been through the Holocaust, recovering his money in Switzerland. The client was, it turned out, a thoroughly nasty, petty, cruel human being, “but,” said the lawyer from his large leather chair, “we can’t judge him because we’ve never lived through having everyone we know die.”

  Sam sat up and said, “Some gay men—”

  Four teenagers stared at him, but the lawyer was furious. “That’s different,” he exploded, “they brought that on themselves.”

  “That’s what they said about the Jews,” replied Sam.

  It is 5:15 P.M. and already the story has been carefully repeated in precise detail by someone to Howard. Sam’s little performance has had its intended pyrotechnic effect. Howard stands before me, inflamed. “To a disease, God help me!…”

  I think: Well, Sam does know how to get to him.

  I stand up from the kitchen table and start to leave, but he leaps, spiderlike, and is in front of me before I can blink. Grasps my wrist. Don’t, I say. His face is inches from mine, and I add, Touch me. I pull away, just like in the movies. Yank the wrist sharply down and away with a snap. Lower the shoulder for extra force. His eyes are filthy green cataracts.

  He strides past me, his shoulder brushing mine, and disappears down the hall. Though he has not raised his hand an inch, I feel that he just missed putting a fist through the light fixture, or the wall had he aimed at my face.

  English words that do not exist in French:

  Bracing (as in a sharp slap).

  Don’t (the imperative form).

  Three hours later, and Howard stands outside in the dark, dangling his car keys. He has arrived from somewhere. Perhaps he has just been driving around. I stand opposite him in the dark driveway. We can barely see each other.

  “You used to be on my side,” he says to me.

  I take a breath. I’ve never had to fight for you. So I could afford to be uniquely on your side.

  He says nothing. I wait.

  You used to have great confidence in expressiveness, Howard. Now you seem to have renounced it.

  “Well!” he says, ignoring what I’ve just said, responding to the other comment, “This is a big change.”

  I don’t think so, I say.

  “Oh,” he says in a voice I don’t recognize, “I do. I think you’re a very different person from the woman I married.”

  In a few minutes I watch the taillights of his car disappearing back down our drive.

  I tracked down the person who had repeated the lawyer’s office conversation to Howard. It wasn’t difficult
. A Wilshire Boulevard colleague of the lawyer’s who, for reasons I could guess at, was trading in destruction. We’d met once. I called him.

  “Why shouldn’t Howard know what his son says,” he replied blithely. “He’s the boy’s father.”

  What the hell are you trying to do, I said, my voice iced.

  He hesitated. His job depended on industry contacts. Then he didn’t hesitate. “Anne,” he said, unimpressed. “You’re losing your touch.”

  “I’m afraid for him,” Howard yells. “What do you want for him? Aren’t you afraid?” He mutters why am I so goddamned obtuse, can I not see the dangers?

  And why my obsession with talking about it?

  And then he hangs up the phone.

  It isn’t Sam who is in danger, Howard. It is you and I. This danger you perceive is not your son with a man. It is you with me. That is what you fear, and you don’t realize it. (But the phone line is dead.)

  Because Howard will not allow me to speak to him, I give him my answer via the directors, and then I ask him a question.

  Now, we’ll start this evening with Edward Lear, the nonsense poet. The first photocopied pages? On top? Yes, the screenwriters read him a few months ago. Anthony Lane described it this way, I say to them. (I find my place in Anthony’s article.) “Lear was odd, eccentric. A man who seemed to love no one. His verse impenetrable as Yorkshire taffy, and why?” (I am conscious of speaking a bit fast.) “Because he felt, one of his female biographers has politely suggested, a sexual longing for a man named Franklin Lushington, with whom he toured Greece in 1849.” (The directors’ eyes move quickly to me, then back down to the page.)

  “Lear and Lushington decorated their hats, coats, and horses with spring flowers as they went. But longing never bloomed; in Lear’s mind, and in his awkward body, desires were something to be buried deep, stuffed down until they became a tangle of roots.”

  Down the slippery slopes of Myrtle,

  Where the early pumpkins blow,

  To the calm and silent sea

  Fled the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò

  Would you (I asked them) wish for one you loved that he flee, like the Jumblies, to a silent, lonely sea in a sieve? (But I was not referring to Sam.)

  I told them how, the previous evening, I had called Anthony in London. He had sighed. How much they have always been hated, Anne, he said, these odd people. Edward Lear, inadvertently perhaps, opens up little wormholes to that hatred: into the macabre laughter, the violence pokes its gray claws.

  There was an Old Man of Whitehaven,

  Who danced a quadrille with a Raven;

  But they said—“It’s absurd, to encourage this bird!”

  So they smashed that Old Man from Whitehaven.

  (Brad Silberling is rereading this carefully. It of course speaks to him.)

  Look at Auden. (Next photocopy.) Auden was relentlessly self-critical, partly, no doubt, as a result of the guilt programmed into homosexuals by British society. He felt, he said, embarrassed in the presence of anyone who was not in some respect his superior. “‘It may be a large cock,’ he explained. ‘It may be sanctity.’” Isn’t this really why Auden was so hated by the English? (I look toward Nick Hytner; he of all of them should know.) Among the English, the given justification, the one you could speak in public, was that he had abandoned England in her time of great need. It was in 1939 that he and Christopher Isherwood left for New York.

  In my head I hear the pain in Howard’s voice. I see them sitting all around the garden, on chairs and the low stone walls with their texts, completely still.

  For a moment, I’m not sure what to say next. I clear my throat. I ask them: Would anyone like more lemonade?

  After a moment, someone says, “I think we’re fine, Anne.” A. E. Houseman, I say. From The Invention of Love, you all have the text, so, right, Bryan, could you read for us, please? Bryan Singer lifts the photocopy I’ve made. “‘Your life is a terrible thing,’” he reads. “‘A chronological error. The choice for people like you was not always between renunciation and folly. You should have lived in Megara when Theognis was writing and made his lover a song sung unto all posterity…and not now!—when disavowal and endurance are in honour, and a nameless luckless love has made notoriety your monument.’”

  Thank you, I say when Bryan finishes.

  Houseman’s sister Kate Symons observed after his death, “He very much lived in water-tight compartments that were not to communicate with each other.”

  Listen, I say to them. E. M. Forster’s only homosexual novel, Maurice, was not published till long after his death, his shame for the brilliant child of his hidden self ensuring that he would never see it born. Virginia Woolf’s lesbianism was passionate and isolated and carefully unspoken of for years and years. Henry James wrote tortured love letters of increasing desperation and pain to Morton Fullerton, the dashing Paris correspondent for the London Times. “You do with me what you will,” James wrote in September of 1900. “You are dazzling, my dear Fullerton; you are beautiful…you are tenderly magnetically tactile.” In December 1905, chokingly: “I can’t keep my hands off you.” For decades James biographers took pains to explain that he was speaking metaphorically.

  When we had finished, when they had gone, Howard alone would know what I was saying. I was saying that there are, in fact, all sorts of forbidden relationships.

  Do you yourself want to set off, Howard, like the Jumblies, to a silent sea? Would you truly turn from love, Howard? When did disavowal become an honor to you, when did our love, yours and mine, Howard, become a notoriety? Why, Howard, do they forbid you from loving me because of who I am?

  The given justification, the one you can speak in public, is abandoning the tribe in its time of great need. That’s not good enough, Howard. Do you not see the guilt programmed into Jews, the poison by those hermetically self-sealed off? Do you not see all this buried deep inside you, stuffed down until it has become a tangle of roots? Do you not see this?

  Later I will hear that someone debriefed Howard in his office. In detail, including what I had looked like, the quotes, how I’d spoken.

  THE MOONLIGHT IS LIKE MILK when he wakes me. He says nothing (he never does), his hands moving strongly, automated with the urgency of sleep and his erection. My reaction is instant, this spike in me, though it comes from somewhere utterly different this time, I know that, but I turn toward him, naked already, I’ve put the jelly in myself, and he mounts me. He fills me and puts his whole weight on me, which is what I love, and we rock back and forth, the sheets slipping back and the milk from the moon spilling over us. He slips out, or pulls out, and then he comes in a bit lower, by accident, or by intention, and raising my hips with his large hands he enters me further down, and a huge sound escapes from him, very low, as he takes from me what he has never before taken. And we move.

  We lie in silence. I look out the window. The moon is directly south, heading toward the Pacific, large and alien white. That’s what they do, I say. And you loved it.

  I don’t tell him it hurt. It was worth it for Sam.

  I can feel his body instantly grow cold against mine. But I don’t care.

  THEY ARE ARGUING OVER THE next book selection when Denise leans down. A phone message, but I don’t understand. I’m distracted. Denise says more loudly, “Rabbi Stern.”

  Rabbi Stern? I say, and several heads turn in my direction. Just then Consuela comes and whispers in Denise’s ear. Denise grunts, irritated, marches back to the kitchen.

  Consuela is embarrassed. “The message is for Mister Rosenbaum,” she clarifies. “Before I no unerstan.”

  Ah, I say. I see.

  Howard calls. “I’m not going to be home this evening.” He attempts to mitigate it. “Sam’s never home Friday evenings anyway.”

  But I am home Friday evenings, I say.

  “I’ll be back late,” he says and hangs up.

  Consuela is gone, and the house is quiet. I ask Denise, Aren’t you going home? She taps a foot on t
he floor. She has work, she says after a moment.

  Go home, I say. You don’t have any work.

  “Nobody there. They gone to see,” and she names some team.

  I look at my garden, but it says nothing to me. What if I waited till he came home, she proposes.

  No, I say to the garden, very softly. Go.

  I hear nothing for a moment. “Got some of that good soup in the freezer, lobster meat and all.” She disappears, comes back. She has her car keys and purse. Do you know where he is?

  No.

  I think we both suspect this is a lie, that we do know where he is.

  I take out the lobster soup and look at it. It is a chunk of congealed salmon-colored ice in a zippered freezer bag. I open the bag, dump the heavy chunk of ice into a pan, set it on a very low fire, cover.

  One thinks one wants an evening alone, no husband, no son, no maids, no gardener. And then one is lost in large, airy rooms on a long, curving street, up a trembling driveway, a magic, expensive treehouse that has lost its pirates and fairies. The flowers call plaintively from their prisons in the soil. Poor, pathetic things.

  Some couples have scales on which they live their lives. The scales rise and fall in increments of emotion and sensation, and the couples live in seeking balance and equilibrium, adding or subtracting bits and pieces: one kiss, two airplane tickets (surprise), three children. Howard and I are not this. It is not a scale, though it encompasses balance. It does not rise and fall, though motion is involved. When I open my eyes, under a sky that the last stars have not quite yet relinquished, those stars lacing the pale ghostly early clouds, he is next to me, and I am, at that moment, very happy. Then he opens his eyes. We examine each other, and I realize that I am alone for the first time in however many years with this man. He touches my cheek. I hold my breath. His eyes flicker. But there are the invisible radio signals that only he can hear, and he focuses his antennae on them now, I vanish before him, and he withdraws his hand. As it recedes, I feel my heart spinning. Vertigo.