You or Someone Like You

by Chandler Burr

  I leave them and, in Howard’s office, quickly find the ostensible reason. I carry the thin white envelope back to the kitchen, where we ignore it.

  Jennifer proposes the following day, 2:30 P.M. She has his agenda in her head. He suggested Canter’s Deli, she says. Fairfax between Rosewood and Beverly.

  Rosewood and Oakwood, I say.

  As she leaves, Jennifer passes her manila folder to me. She makes no comment at all on the contents. This is fine. She is guiding me, telling me things I need to know.

  There is a recent photograph from a newspaper—not the L.A. Times, I assume it’s a local paper—of Howard sitting across from Michael Steinhardt and next to Charles Bronfman, “of the Seagram’s fortune,” it specifies. “A main sponsor of the $210 million ‘Birthright Israel’ project,” reads the caption, “which attempts to deepen the commitment of American Jews.” The article starts by quoting a demographer: There has been “a vigorous effort by organized Jewry to reverse recent demographic changes…to get large numbers of Jews to change their family-related decisions—that is, to marry young, marry each other, stay married, and have many children.” Then it quotes Bronfman: “You can,” he says, “live a perfectly decent life not being Jewish, but I think you’re losing a lot—losing the kind of feeling you have when you know [that] throughout the world there are people who somehow or other have the same kind of DNA that you have.”

  I read through it. There is a statement by Mandell I. Ganchrow, president of the Orthodox Union, saying that intermarriage is sweeping young Jews “out to sea.” It goes on to describe the differences in approach: The (“rather successful”) Orthodox policy is segregation of Orthodox children from American society in day schools. “Play is discouraged,” writes the reporter. The Conservative movement, by contrast, uses suasion; their website, says the article, promotes an anti-intermarriage book called It All Begins with a Date. Various websites that will send your Daily Torah Portion by email (Parshas Metzora, Parshas Tazria, Parshas Shemini, Parshas Tzav), an exhortation to save your family from assimilation.

  I look at the photograph again. Howard’s face is turned toward Bronfman as he speaks. Abe Foxman and Mortimer Zuckerman sit on the other side of the platform. There are two or three other studio people I recognize under the banner.

  The following day I turn left off Crescent Heights onto Rosewood. Residential streets. I can’t remember whether Canter’s has parking. Ah. It does.

  We sit at the back. Although if he’s trying to hide our meeting, which his rabbi would of course disapprove, I can’t figure out why he would suggest this place. He has ordered a tea. And I’m very sorry if his hands begin trembling at the sight of me, and I’m sorry that he is in so much pain, but when he extends a hand across the table, I can’t take it. He has needed to see me. OK. I need to say something to him.

  I say to him: Take Jennifer. Your protégée. It would never occur to her that she is a different category of person. It never occurs to her, when the Jewish executive asks her out, takes her to the little restaurant he knows by the beach, gets her into bed, that he might see her as ineligible. No, that would be racist, and she’s a good, liberal person. So it doesn’t occur to her until she learns late some evening in her driveway, where they are fighting and she is trying with great frustration to get his reticence, this sudden out-of-nowhere desire of his to “cool things down.” She’s trying to understand through his stumbling words why he’s thinking it doesn’t work after all. And only when she really, really pushes him and he says that well, if she were Jewish…“What?” she says to him in the dark driveway. And that is how she learns about this. (She is indeed a bit naive.)

  She is shocked. She is stunned, and yet still (because she considers herself “open-minded,” because she recycles her glass and plastic and tries to conserve gas) she thinks, OK, wait, it’s his religion, right? It’s his culture, right?

  (So why does it feel like bigotry?)

  But no, no, she must be wrong about that.

  In her bed, alone, sleepless, she thinks: Then no more Jewish men. But that makes her the bigot. Right? But—wait. He’s not a bigot when he does it, but I am when I do?

  She is sweet, but she is not quite intelligent enough and not quite brave enough to add the parts together and reach the logical conclusion. She rationalizes it until she falls asleep, tearful and newly single, near dawn.

  Howard says nothing.

  Say there is a woman, Howard. Say she’s black. She has a degree from some ivy-covered East Coast college. She works in a steel-and-glass tower, manages twenty-three people, plays office politics (which she hates) with some dexterity, and earns a salary her parents still can’t believe. She would (if forced) call herself a centrist Democrat, though on taxes she’s more with the Republicans (the problem is that she worries about the environment and is adamant about choice and so she just “votes the person”). She gives to Emily’s List, she bicycles on the weekends, she tries to attend gallery openings. These she goes to alone, mostly. She wonders if she’ll ever meet the right man. She watches the various single men looking at the paintings and glancing at her. And from this aforementioned list of facts about her, any—any—of these choices she makes, any of the values she holds, any of the things she does, could in her opinion legitimately disqualify her in the eyes of these men.

  Except one. The one she has no control over. Her having or not having the same kind of DNA that they have. If they disqualify her for that? She knows what kind of people they are.

  Howard, I say, is it true you’re keeping kosher now?

  “Stop,” he says.

  He picks up his cup, noisily swallows some tea, puts the cup down a little too hard. He puts his hands in his lap in a ball.

  I think about our lovely kitchen in which he no longer stands, the stove, the glassware, the sink. The counters where Denise and I have made us years of meals. All of it, to you, polluted now. Our sink is polluted. Our kitchen is unclean, and you can no longer eat there.

  “Stop,” he says through his teeth. Howard’s need was to see me, said Jennifer. I am making sure he sees me.

  If they don’t accept my son, I say to him with freezing rage, they can all go to the goddamn ovens. If that means mass cultural suicide through the intermarriage that they, the racists, hate so much, then mass suicide it will be.

  As I watch his competing needs violently drowning each other in the storm in his head, I feel satisfaction that comes from my own anger and an utter, complete, black emptiness. I suppose I should not feel surprise when he closes his eyes and whispers, “Shut your hole.” He leans forward. “Shut your fucking hole.”

  I tell myself, This is expected. I walk toward the front door of Canter’s blinded, seeing nothing, the light refracting my vision.

  I SEND OUT AN EMAIL assigning my screenwriters’ group a novel called A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin because, I tell them, it contains the best description of religion I’ve read.

  When they arrive, I see that they are looking at me differently now. There is a wariness. I grip the book and begin.

  I tell them that years ago I took this passage and said to my young son: It is what all literature does, Sam, literature describes what we experience. Nothing more. You know, the first time I read it I felt delightfully light-headed, like the way you feel when you really, truly understand something Dad tells you about a poem, or when you sink the perfect shot. That’s the way we feel when literature makes us gasp and say, Yes. And look here. It involves a boy, like you.

  “The protesters filled the rain-slicked streets as if they were the cobblestones. Apart from what they were saying, the chanting itself brought Alessandro to a high peak of excitement, and he wanted to join them.

  “‘Go ahead,’ his father said, not looking up from the desk. ‘It can’t hurt. It might even help. Let me caution you, however. You imagine that you will make a speech.’

  “‘No I don’t.’

  “‘Yes you do. I can see it in you. At the Camp
idoglio you’ll step forward and, suddenly, Cicero. But Alessandro, they won’t let you, and even if they did, you would be speaking to a thousand different conceptions. Everyone has a self-made pass for travel through the terror and sadness of the world, and because, in the end, nothing is sufficient, everyone wants to share his own method, hoping for strength in numbers.’”

  He read it himself (he was nine, he could do it). “They take the self-made passes,” I explained to Sam, “and build their numbers, and they call them religions, Sam.”

  He nodded.

  “They’re just people clinging to each other for comfort and defense. In the end, this pass you’ve made disappears, and it’s just you alone. You with all the rest of us.”

  My writers look back at me. They know I’m speaking to Howard. They are starting to figure out what I’m saying.

  STUART AND I ARE SITTING at the kitchen table. His bag is on the floor, the LAX tag still on it. I haven’t even shown him to his room yet. “Nah,” he says politely, “no tea, nothin.” It’s so good to see him it hurts. I am dying to put my arms around him and hold him tightly, but I don’t.

  Howard’s little brother. I’ve promised myself that I won’t ask him where Howard is staying. He’s going to see Howard tonight. For dinner?

  “Yeah,” says Stuart. He names a restaurant.

  I don’t know it, I say.

  “Yeah,” he says, “I think it’s nondairy.”

  He is facing me as he says it, but I can’t really read him.

  Ah, I say.

  His eyes move away. We wait. “I understand it,” says Stuart quietly in response to the question I have not asked. “Even if I don’t get it. You see what I’m saying?”

  He understands it. How nice for him that he understands it. No, I do not see, not at all. Stuart’s calm density has, in a single instant, enraged me. I reel from the emotion, which feels like the first hit of morphine that merely makes you nauseous without removing the pain.

  I clench my jaw. Stuart, I have to know, I say to him. Are you for me or against me?

  Stuart moves his head sideways the way Howard does. “I’m for Howard,” he begins. He’s speaking carefully. “I’m always gonna be for Howard.”

  But I don’t let him finish. I start to cover, the way the English reflexively do with brisk movements of the hands and face meant to convey cool indifference, always pathetically transparent. And then, as if the bottom has fallen out, all the brisk movements fail me, and I jerk upward and stumble out of the kitchen through the hall, knocking over a framed photograph that cartwheels glassily and smashes in slivers on the narrow hall table, and Stuart, whom I love and who has betrayed me so that now I am truly, truly alone, has leaped up and is pursuing me, a hunter and a deer. As I flee, I am making some sound I don’t recognize, of panic perhaps. The pursuit traverses the living room, I knock over a lamp and the cord rips from the wall, I turn into the hallways beyond, where Stuart finally grabs me and holds my arms against my body in a steely embrace as I kick and scream, sobbing, my arms striking him wherever and as hard as I can.

  “Anne,” says Stuart. “Jesus Christ, Anne,” Stuart says, pressed against me, and I realize that he is laughing. He’s rocking with laughter. “A fuckin’ nondairy kosher restaurant,” says Stuart. “Are you kiddin’ me?” He’s roaring with laughter. “That fuckin’ nutcase!” His shoulders mound in waves with the absurdity. He staggers against the wall with hilarity, me in his arms.

  I start to laugh and choke. I hold him as tightly as I can. Stuart’s a bit smaller than Howard, but it’s a very similar feeling.

  I feel him sigh as his arms surround me, and I cling to him.

  Oh my God, I say. Oh my God, Stuart, oh my God oh my God.

  We sit on the sofa. Both of us in bare feet. Mine are tucked under me, Stuart’s on the floor, and he looks with interest at his toes. “I’ve never been married,” he remarks calmly. “Never get to climb into the bed with some woman I love. Every night I pull down the covers. I get into the bed. I pull the covers back up over me. I go to sleep. I wake up, and I lie there, and I think, ‘OK.’ I look at the walls, and I think, ‘So. Here we are again.’” He shrugs. “Howard sees that,” says Stuart. “He knows what love is, what he’s got. But he isn’t able to feel it right now. Not since he wigged out over Sam being the wrong half.”

  He knew it perfectly well, I say. Before Sam was conceived he knew it.

  “Yeah, he knew,” says Stuart patiently, “but he didn’t know know. That asshole rabbi in Jerusalem, he kicked Howard in the fuckin’ teeth. By kicking out his kid. His kid, ’k? Which is, they’re kickin’ out his love, his wife, everything Howard’s got, they’re throwin’ it in the toilet. And these are the people our parents taught him were” (he audibly stresses the distinction) “his. You kidding me?” He makes a face. “And he never saw it comin’! A lifetime of conditioning hits you. You feel like you’ve betrayed your mother, who just died, your father—” Stuart gets a wry look. “He was due for a midlife crisis,” he says with a grin. “But this! Wow, Howie.”

  I try to say something to him. Your mother, I begin. But I’m not sure how to finish. I see by his face I don’t need to. Yeah, yeah, he knows. His mother, his mother. He sticks out a lower lip, says, “Eh.” But, I burst out, but—then why don’t you believe all this, Stuart!

  Stuart’s face doesn’t darken. He thinks about all the things he could say and then says simply, “She’s dead.” He shrugs. “And even if she wasn’t. She’s just not that, for me. She’s just not the fucking Body Israel or whatever these crazies believe. She had these absurd ideas. ‘God hates bacon.’” He puts it in audible quotation marks. “Oh, fuck, please.” Dismisses it. Back to Howard. “Look. She was from that culture, they were completely programmed, she passed it on to him, and it stuck in places he didn’t know about, and a couple decades later there were four good triggers, and it blew up.”

  Hamotzei, I say tentatively, the blessing for bread. (It’s the only one I remember.)

  Utterly uninterested, Stuart waves it away with a bored hand. “For our parents, that was the way of ordering the world. Now Howie says that he thinks it’s that for him, too. And maybe it is, I dunno. Whatever. For me?” Stuart grins pointedly. “There’s another way of ordering the world. It’s simple. Listen.” He’s mimicking me; he’s seen me murmuring my words to Sam’s ears. “Assorted vocabulary.” He mimes opening a book. He skims his finger down the invisible columns, stops at a word. “There it is.” he says. “See under: love.”

  JUSTIN IS TALKING ON THE phone in my office. His back is to me as I enter. It is raining, a gray day.

  Well, he asks the gatekeeper on the other end, can I meet him on Thursday? (He listens.) His flight gets in at three? (He listens.) How about Friday? (She is questioning him closely now, but he keeps his cool. I hear the tension in his voice, but she probably can’t.) Yeah, he says, Anne spoke to him about me.

  I am not supposed to be here. I am supposed to be out till evening. Justin has laid open my personal address book on the desk.

  I move forward. He jumps, and his face drains. I glance down at the name in the book. I am impressed with his audacity. He has gone directly to the top. I hold out my hand, and he passes me the headset, which I put on. Christy, this is Anne, is Ron free Monday morning?

  Christy comes alive now, I hear pages turn. Tell him, I add, that I meant to speak to him about this.

  She sets up a meeting for Justin with Ron Meyer on Monday morning.

  I hang up, write the number on a piece of paper, snap shut my address book, hand Justin the paper, his jacket (which is on a chair), and his cell phone (which is sitting on my desk).

  Now get out, I say.

  I assume Justin calculated that his window of opportunity was closing. His instincts are probably correct, as usual. That is why it unnerves me so deeply. After I hear the front door click shut, I sit down in my chair at my desk and watch the rain.

  WE ARE ON AN EMPTY cement sidewalk at a bus stop
on Normandie Avenue. Apparently he is living in one of the houses near here.

  “‘And when she had weaned him,’” Howard recites, his voice like smoke, “‘she took him, with three bullocks and one ephah of flour and a bottle of wine, up to the temple in Shiloh. And she gave the child to Eli, the priest, to be raised in the temple. “As long as he liveth he shall be lent to the Lord.” ’”

  I say nothing.

  “Why were you always reading him that story from the Book of Samuel?” he asks me. It is a grim plea. He needs an explanation. He holds our divorce papers in his hand, which he has signed. He has asked me to come here because I am supposed to sign them. I have not touched them yet.

  I think: I could never have imagined this, not in my wildest dreams.

  Hannah was barren, Howard. And I had all those terrible fertility problems, and they had given me those horrendous drugs. And we wished so desperately for a child. That was all it meant to me.

  He is sitting on the bus stop bench. I am standing. I say to him, If that insane woman wanted to surrender her child to a religious cult, that was her business. People do all sorts of things. I would never—never, Howard, never—never—wish for my son to find favor with anyone’s fucking god.

  I clench, unclench my jaw. I am nauseous with disgust.

  “But when you were infertile,” yells Howard, jumping up, coming at me, “why did we pray for him?”

  I never prayed for him, I say.

  Howard turns his back. “I did,” he says after a moment.

  I don’t believe you, I reply, after I’ve thought about it.

  His back is to me, his face buried in his hands. “Don’t hold on to me, Anne,” he says into his hands, his voice suffocated. “Let me change. Let me go.”

  I gasp. I am not sobbing, but it feels like it. “I am stronger than the monster beneath your bed,” I say with all my might, “I’m smarter than this trick they are playing on your heart.”