“Soderbergh?” says Paul.
Oh, bollocks, I say, smiling at the sound of his fresh excitement. My timing is usually impeccable.
“Ahhhhhh!” he shouts, and I laugh willingly.
“So what next?”
We wait.
“That I can do,” he affirms energetically. “I’m the Olympic champ.”
Yes, I say, this is Los Angeles. The best in the world at waiting wait here.
THE PHONE RINGS, AND I look at the number. It is either Ellie or David. At the last moment I flip it open. “Anne,” she says. We exchange a pleasantry. Her tone is gentle but opaque. “Can you come over?”
I blink. I look down at my watch. I suppose so, I say. Yes.
As I leave the house I run the traffic in my head. I take Mulholland, then south on the 405, which oddly enough is flowing beautifully, the Sunset exit, left to San Vicente, right toward the beach. David’s car is gone. I park in their drive.
Ellie and I sit in the living room, the doors thrown open to the deck and the sea breeze. They own an enviable house on Ocean Way with a view of the Pacific. Rachel is out. “Practice,” Ellie explains, not specifying the sport. She has brought me a glass of water, and because she is a practical woman—which is one reason I’ve always liked her—she sits down directly opposite me and asks, “Do you know what a shidduch is?”
No.
Her finger taps her water glass. “It’s a setup. An introduction of a man and a woman with an eye toward marriage. I think technically it’s something done by a rabbi.”
It takes me a moment. Once I’ve understood, I have nothing to say.
“Being married is a religious obligation,” she says. “A mitzvah.” At the word, she looks at me questioningly.
That one I know, I say, Howard’s parents used it. I add after a second, They said Sam was a mitzvah when he was born.
She gets the point. She stands up, walks behind my chair toward another room. From somewhere behind I hear her saying, “A ba’al teshuva, a Jew recently returned to observance after years outside, would have many mitzvot to make up.” She’s looking for something. “He would be obligated to get married as soon as possible. It’s supposed to cement the thing in place.” I hear her pick up a piece of paper. She comes back into the room. “And have children with her. Jewish children are another mitzvah.” She is administering this inoculation under the theory that the more complete and rapid it is, the less painful it will be. She and I both know it’s just a theory, but it’s as good as any other, and I respect that. She’s going to push me through this fast, applying velocity as an anesthetic.
She hands me the paper.
Beit Yisroel Chabad on 21st Street in Santa Monica. An Orthodox synagogue, it says. Howard is to fill out the form. They’ve typed his name on the top at the left. I read “Shidduch Profile.” A list of items followed by blank spaces. Name. Hebrew Name. Date of Birth (Month/Day/Year). Telephone: Home, Work. Height, Weight. Gender (circle one): Male Female.
Part 2. Education and Occupation. Please circle your level of secular education.
Marital Information. 5a) If divorced, please give the name and phone number of the Rabbi who facilitated the Get.
Do you have children (circle one)? Yes No.
Are you (circle one) Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Other.
Are you (circle one) Observant from Birth, Ba’al Teshuva (returned to faithfulness), Convert.
If you’re a Ba’al Teshuva, how long have you been completely observant (Shabbos, Kashrus, etc.)? How long has it been since you began your Ba’al Teshuva process? (please supply details)
Do you: Go to Movies? Yes Never Sometimes
Do you participate in mixed swimming? Yes No Sometimes
Do you participate in mixed dancing? Yes No Sometimes
Do you: Eat in non-kosher restaurants? Yes Never Sometimes
Women Only: Do you wear pants? Yes Never Sometimes
Women Only: When you are married, will you cover your hair?
Men Only: Would you be comfortable with your wife wearing pants? Yes Never Sometimes
Men Only: When you are married, what are your plans for learning Torah?
Current Synagogue Affiliation. Name and Telephone Number of Rabbi.
Do you smoke? Yes No
Are you willing to date a smoker? Yes No
Men Only: Are you willing to date a woman taller than you?
Would you like the person we introduce you to be (circle all that apply): Observant from Birth, Ba’al Teshuva, Convert
Photo. (Please include a recent photo of yourself.)
References.
Someone will contact you within two weeks after receipt of this application to arrange an interview. Please return to: Young Israel of Los Angeles–Shidduch Committee.
Knesset.
I look up at the wall. Ellie hesitates. She considers coming over to me, then decides to stick to the original plan. Fast and clean. “This is a copy for you,” she says. “We have it because Howard asked David for a reference. David, not me, since David is a man.” She says this a bit tightly. She adds, “Normally Howard would start divorce proceedings with you before getting too deeply into this. But as far as I can tell he’s not thinking with great clarity right now.”
My voice is hollow. I thought, I say, at first that I was imagining it.
“Well,” she says flatly. Her tone means that this doesn’t surprise her. “It’s the walking time bombs that make the screenplays work,” she says. A professional archetype.
I smile briefly. I’m imagining Ellie pitching Howard in an office on Lankershim.
She tucks a foot precisely underneath her. “After he left home,” she tells me, “Howard stayed with us for a few days.” I look up at her sharply. She holds my gaze, perfectly even. We are poised there. The question is whether I will consider this a betrayal. After a moment I nod. So that’s done. She is not too proud to give me a glimpse of it: She’s relieved.
She says, “I may not have been quick on the trigger here, but he finally opened his big mouth and told us.”
About Sam and the yeshiva.
“Except that’s not the way Howard tells it. He talks about a religious reawakening.”
Of course.
She has to add, for the record, “It was David who was sure the problem was Sam’s being gay.”
I nod. That’s the way Howard has presented it, I say. Although I don’t think it was conscious on his part. I think it was more just the timing. For a little while it gave him something to channel it through, but that’s finished.
“I felt like an idiot, of course,” says Ellie. “When you’d said, ‘This is not what it appears,’ I thought you were—” She hunts for a description.
Speaking metaphorically.
“Something like that.” She comes to it. “Why didn’t you tell me, Anne?”
I think about my answer. I say to her, You keep kosher.
It’s what she suspected. “Well.” And then she says, “Things change.” Her eyes are hazel in the late afternoon light. She begins to tell me about conversations she and David tentatively started having a few years ago. A discussion that seemed to present itself to both of them. Rachel was dating a Mexican American boy. She and David adored him. Ellie explains their decision to no longer keep kosher. “The rabbi was very unhappy,” she says, adds, with emphasis, “We also stopped going to temple.”
Ellie speaks, firmly and quietly, about their increasing consciousness of the meticulous separation of human beings into two classes. “And then,” she observes with irony, “we pretend to be surprised when they dislike us.” I realize as she talks that there are relatively few people to whom she can express what she has come, over time and at a cost, to understand. She has experienced isolation, even if self-imposed, perhaps for the first time. She and David have been understandably circumspect, among their friends and inside the industry. But, Oh!, there’d been this one truly great moment. She’d been in a script meeting with Nina Jacobson and h
ad tentatively, and a bit indirectly, brought it up, her evolving thoughts on the problematics of eternally dividing people. The instant Nina had gotten it, she’d simply waved a hand, cutting it off to dispose of it. “So, what?” Nina had demanded. “They’re wrong and we’re right?” She’d scoffed, her distaste brief and dry and definitive, and they’d returned to the script. Ellie laughs as she tells the story. She loves Nina for this.
She stretches and looks out over the ocean.
Where is he? I ask Ellie.
“I don’t know who he’s staying with now,” she says. “He’s not really speaking to us anymore.” She has an afterthought. “That’s why Howard left, by the way. The rabbi told him our house was unclean.” She smiles to herself.
What strikes me is that as Ellie talks, I cannot tell if this change she and David have experienced, which came from a shift in their views and their perceptions, originated from her or him or both of them equally. I think that my not being able to tell this is a mark of a good marriage. They have come to this new place together. For a moment I can taste my envy.
Ellie turns her gaze from the ocean. “When I wondered, later, why you hadn’t told me at the party, why you hadn’t simply picked up the phone, I explained to myself that you couldn’t have known how I would react. We haven’t really talked in a long while.” She laughs at the classic Los Angeles excuse. No time, traffic’s terrible, we never see each other. It is a substitute for her real accusation, which is that I had not trusted her.
I haven’t trusted anyone, I say.
We both sit back and let the golden light take over. I get up and walk through the doors to stand on the deck, and the breeze goes through my hair. She comes to stand next to me and takes my hand and squeezes. Then she moves to the edge of the deck to glare down at the neighbor’s trash cans. “Son of a bitch,” says Ellie.
The ocean is so pretty, I say.
She shrugs. “At least there’s that.”
He has come back to the house for a moment to get some clothing. He is going through some papers at his desk. It’s dark.
Do you wish you’d married a Jewish woman?
He twists away from the question, like an animal looking for an exit from a trap. He has no desire to hurt me. When he replies, his voice is strangled. “Yes,” he says. But he sounds unconvinced.
I lay the photocopy of the Shidduch Profile on the desk and step back. He stops moving. We stand there, next to each other, his back to me, both his hands resting on the desk, his head down. I watch his back rise and fall. “Anne,” he says, and I can barely hear his voice. “I’m so sorry.”
When he has gone, I look again at the Profile. At the bottom of the page is a quotation, Lamentations 5:21: “Turn us to You, O God, and we shall return; Renew our days of old.”
I think of Denise’s wall behind her battered screen door in Compton. The little frame holding Romans 9:25. “I will call them my people which were not my people.” And then I remember the second part. “And her beloved, which was not beloved.”
THE CURRENTS PICK UP EVERYTHING. The words Howard speaks, the expression he wears, are borne to my ear on the tides, reliable as clockwork, and what I say these tides bear swiftly back out to sea to other ears on other shores.
So I say to him what I would have said were we face-to-face. What would we, all of us, be to a god? I asked them that evening at my book club as we sat, gathered in my garden. How would a god see us?
(They were a little startled at my opening approach to the text—I have given them James Joyce—but game enough.)
None was more acquainted than Joyce with the Troubles. In Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, a Hungarian Irish Jew, sits in a Dublin pub. The talk takes a political turn. Bloom complains that the history of the world is full of persecution, which perpetuates “hatred among nations.” Someone asks him, “But do you know what a nation means?” Bloom answers: “A nation is the same people living in the same place.” And then adds, “Or living in different places.”
OK, their faces said, waiting. The paperbacks sat, poised, on their knees.
Bloom, I said, escaped “nations” because he understood a better way of grouping ourselves.
An absolute adherence to culture, I said, is as stupid as an absolute adherence to nation. Cultures are merely what we decide they are, and thus they change constantly. As we mature, we leave things behind all the time.
In my garden, they lean forward with the copies of Ulysses on their knees. What are you saying? they ask me.
I am saying, I say, that the problem with a nation is that it demands that identity be taken seriously.
I am saying that a god—I use the term figuratively, I specify to them (Howard, when the tide carries this back to him, will understand me)—of goodness would never buy a Nazi ideology of racial purity and superiority of one group of people over all others. People would, yes, because these ideologies of us and of them are adaptive human nature. But human nature can be overcome, to a degree.
I am saying that as far as a god would be concerned, all of us are human. I am saying what James Joyce said: A nation is the same people living in the same place. Or else living in different places. And if we choose to be—if we choose—we are the same people.
They sat back. They said this was just beautiful. They nodded to each other, and they nodded to me. They did not understand, of course they never prescribe to themselves what they prescribe to everyone else. But they loved what they thought I was saying.
ONE OF THEM HAD UNDERSTOOD me. It was, perhaps not surprisingly, someone who has over the years been a guest in our home, someone in whom we took real pleasure. The man (it doesn’t matter who) saw me in the lobby of a building. Immaculate suit and tie. He approached, and we exchanged a greeting.
“It’s how he feels, Anne,” he explained to me. “You can’t condemn someone for how they feel.”
Actually, I said, you can’t really condemn anyone for anything else.
He assessed me. He said, in essence, This is ultimately very dangerous, what you are doing, and I would counsel you against it. Why don’t you just let him go.
I registered the strength of his reaction. I replied, I cannot.
“If you continue, you will lose me as a friend.” (It was putting me on notice.)
And I swallowed, although I tried not to show it, and steeled myself and replied, You are not my friend.
He was trying to work me out. He said carefully, “Anne, you and Howard and I have been friends for fourteen years.”
And I said: Let me restate. You like me, and I’ve always liked you, very much. You and I are quite happy to see each other once every four months at a party. But you confuse friendliness with friendship. And if you would advise me to live apart from him, you don’t know me at all.
I look at the fine cloth of his suit, the shoulders precisely squared.
I say, This is why your threat is empty. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that none of you can hurt me.
He considers this. “And Howard?” he asks.
He has taken me by surprise. I say, Yes?
“Losing him would hurt you.”
The words escape before my mouth can close over them. More than anything, I say.
“Ah,” he says, nastily, and with satisfaction.
Perversely I find that the farther I go, the more of the armor I shed. As I open myself bit by bit I feel more and more protected. How is it that as I am increasingly visible, a target making itself ever clearer, I am safer than I’ve ever been before. I never, ever would have imagined this.
I overhear someone saying that “shiksa” derives from the Yiddish word for blemish. I’m not certain whether they know I am within earshot.
JUSTIN IS HOLDING THE COPY of Variety. He hands it over warily. “Literary guru of Hollywood,” they have written, “wife of Howard Rosenbaum,” “exclusive book salon,” “has parlayed renown into a coproducing deal with West 85th Films.” “Rosenbaum brings a project to the table,” “scribe Paul McMahon.�
� All the ridiculous, campy language they use. Mark has not (as Justin knows from Jennifer) spoken with Howard, nor did he get my OK to release this.
As if he has some sort of sensor, Mark’s call comes during the only hour that I am not at home. Justin takes it: Listen, says Mark, someone leaked the deal, didn’t know who but whatever, forget it, done now—and it had sparked considerable interest. Ride it, just ride it.
It has its predicted effect, like heroin in the bloodstream. Todd Black calls to say that he is devastated, he’d been prepping a proposal, could we meet immediately? And Jon Liebman and Gary Levinsohn both send notes, Dan Aloni and Bob Bookman leave messages to say that, look, now I really did need representation. And someone from the Hollywood Reporter, and someone else from Variety.
And Paul McMahon (now known as “my” screenwriter), breathlessly saying that he’s been “personally called” by Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas and, twenty minutes later, by Arnold Rifkin, and they’ve both sent messengers, he’s just sent them treatments, OK? not scripts! not scripts, Anne! for other ideas, which are being read even as he speaks. Paul assumes (hopes?) this was OK with Mark, and where the hell am I, he’s been trying to reach me all day.
JENNIFER DOESN’T CALL. SHE JUST arrives.
Sam sees her car from his window and runs out to meet her. They hug in the drive with an easy American intimacy that I will always find remarkable. She took him to Venice Beach, thus eternally establishing her cool quotient, and on the new Universal ride when he was thirteen and she twenty-two. Standing beside her car, they confer intently. I can see that she is holding a manila folder. Sam gets very heated and angry. She puts a hand on his shoulder, and he calms down. She glances at her watch, then up at the house.
“Hi, Anne.” She hugs me, and we look at each other as if to check for damage.
So. Howard has made a request. Would I bring him something. A letter mailed by accident to our house.
Neither of us knows what to make of his inventing a reason to see me.
Jennifer thinks I should go, in part because she believes I need to, in part because Howard needs to see me. She takes care of him. Sam doesn’t want me to see the son of a bitch, and Jennifer and I both know that he does. I already know that I’m going.
You or Someone Like You Page 28
