You or Someone Like You

by Chandler Burr

  This goes equally, I say, for other versions of the Nazi idea. Such as the Jews are not superior, God simply holds the rest of us to a lower moral standard. My husband, Howard Rosenbaum, will get that reference when he hears it, I tell them. When, I say, Christian parents oppose their child’s intermarriage to a Jew, they are bigots. When Jewish parents oppose their child’s intermarriage to a Christian, they are something else. (My face is flushed. I am not so relaxed now. I do a quick mental inventory of my talk. Next is Mann, yes? Yes.)

  Thomas Mann, I say, had an answer to why people hate and fear art. (Three-by-five. Keep the hands still, Anne.) “Art,” he said, “has a basically undependable, treacherous tendency; its joy in scandalous unreason, its tendency to beauty-creating ‘barbarism,’ cannot be rooted out.” Actually my own answer would be just slightly different from Mann’s. Art, as something that is only interesting to the degree to which it shows human beings not as we would have them be but as they are, leads us to throw over the control structures others build for their benefit. Literature shocks not because what it shows about us is inherently surprising. It does the exact opposite. It is shocking because it breaks down what we would be and shows us what we know we are. Dividers of each other into races and groups. Ethnicists. People who hate others via these concepts. And then why this is problematic. Because (this is the way I would rephrase Mann) art’s treacherous tendency is to show that we all bleed, and in the long run you will not withstand art’s construction of life, which is Shakespeare’s construction of life, a construction that ultimately finds all human persons fundamentally human, regardless of religion or biology.

  (Quick breath in and out. I register for some reason a caterer, a boy in black tie carrying a neat tray of clean wineglasses.) Obviously this is not the point this evening’s organizers were counting on. Well—I should be more precise: This is exactly the point they were counting on, but they were not counting on its being applied to them and the immoral ways in which they organize themselves. But then that too nicely supports this evening’s point.

  Harold Bloom says that he would locate the key to Shakespeare’s centrality in the canon in one very specific aspect of one single character, Falstaff. “It is,” says Bloom, “Falstaff’s capacity to overhear himself. And, thereby, the man’s capacity to change. It is the most remarkable of all literary innovations.”

  I agree. The capacity to change is, indeed, one of the most remarkable aspects of literature, and one of the most remarkable, perennial capacities of human beings.

  And, I add, if a person can change, he can also change back.

  I am standing in an exquisite outdoor space. It is night. The ocean and the sky are now the same darkness. Stars above the wisteria. The little cascade of water into the black pool.

  I unfold the photocopied page I made of the script I got from Howard’s shelf. I clear my throat and read.

  GOETH in his Nazi uniform. His eyes track HELEN HIRSCH. She’s cornered. She glances right, left. He murmurs:

  AMON GOETH

  I would like so much to reach out and touch you in your loneliness. What would that be like. I wonder. I mean—what would be wrong with that?

  (a beat)

  I realize you’re not a person in the strictest sense of the word.

  (she doesn’t respond)

  But, well…Maybe you’re right about that too. What’s wrong isn’t us. It’s this. I mean when they compare you to vermin, rodents, lice…

  (she doesn’t respond)

  I…no, no, you make a good point. A very good point.

  (he caresses her)

  Is this the face of a rat? Are these the eyes of a rat? Hath not a Jew eyes?

  (his hand moves to her breast)

  I feel…for you, Helen.

  He leans in to kiss her. She is frozen with terror. And revulsion. And he sees it. Stops.

  AMON GOETH (CON’T)

  No, I don’t think so. You’re a Jewish bitch. You almost talked me into it.

  There are people who tell you that you are a kind of person, I say. Not a person. A kind of person. And that all other people are another kind. Who take your desire for good and your talents and your spirit and twist and twist till you instinctively say, “He is one of mine. He is not. She is one of mine. She is not.” And then convince you that there is a god sick enough to want this. Or, if you’ve no use for the god, that there is reason to perpetuate this culture. That evil is good. That lies are truth. That a heart should close.

  I stop. My vision has faded to black now. But in my sharp imagination, I’m in a large, dark vastness before a towering wall of dirty white. He sits on the other side of this tall, ice-colored wall between us where they’ve put him. I see the ugly thing crouched on its haunches above his head, hanging to the top of the chair, whispering into his ear. It is the only thing he can hear.

  I can see him. He leans toward me, and I love him so much, I love him so infinitely much, and I struggle in desperation to move myself to him, to touch him.

  But then he leans back. No. He doesn’t think so. I almost talked him into it.

  I realize, I say to them, that in my beloved husband’s new view of things I’m no longer a person in the strictest sense of the word.

  And then I begin to sob.

  No one moves as I turn and run. My heels sound rapidly on the beautiful slate stones. I run as fast as my sobbing will permit, but I am shuddering and sick with it. This is the path to the drive. I will somehow find the valet, he will give me the car keys.

  NO ONE calls throughout the evening.

  The next morning, I explain briefly to Sam. He nods, asks a few questions. “OK,” he says.

  Later that afternoon when he gets home he looks shaken, rather badly. But he also looks resolute. We talk for a bit, mostly me confirming or correcting what he’s heard from people or gotten via text. I find I have to explain nothing, merely fill in details and counter misinformation. I talk about Howard.

  There’s a silent moment as Sam considers his father. Sam has something to say about this. He says: “‘Here—we—are,’ said Rabbit very carefully, ‘all—of—us, and then we wake up and find a Strange Animal among us.’”

  I laugh. Yes, I say, indeed. I feel a thousand things lifting from me, spinning away. Such strange feelings we both have for Howard, Sam and I. An animal, I say, of whom we had never heard before.

  (Sam had forgotten this. He agrees it fits.)

  I say, I’m not letting go of him, Sam.

  He nods. He thinks this is good. Who knows what will happen. Sam, too, is a fan of perspective. He returns to last night. “Why didn’t you warn me?” He doesn’t look so shaken anymore.

  What makes you think I knew beforehand, I say. He knows I don’t mean it on the more literal levels, but I mean it in some real way, and he accepts this as I’ve not experienced him before. He is more present to me and at once more distant than ever. Wonderful and sad.

  So. He sits back. “Anyway, you went out with a hell of a bang.”

  I smile. All ruined, I sigh. Oh, dear.

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  I’m sorry, Sammy. I really am sorry.

  “S’all right,” says Sam, and smiles. “Don’t worry, Mom. Seriously.”

  I call Ellie. “Christ!” she says. And then: “Has he called?”

  No.

  I hear her inhale. She lets it out. Do I want to come over? David is making dinner. I say maybe tomorrow. She mentions, wryly, that their guestroom has availability. Yes, I say, I’d heard that.

  I call Stuart. He has heard via two colleagues. Accurate accounts, it turns out.

  He says, gently, “I haven’t spoken with him.”

  I nod. OK.

  “You couldn’t’ve just called the guy?” and immediately, “Annie, I’m joking.”

  Yes, well. (I smile, briefly.) There’s silence on the phone for a moment. You know that he doesn’t take my calls anymore, Stuart.

  I can hear a horn from the street in Queens. “Liste
n,” he says. “Anne. You need to believe me when I tell you this. He heard you. Every word.”

  But you haven’t spoken with him. How do you know?

  “Every word,” says Stuart. “Trust me.”

  I’M RETURNING TO MY UPSTAIRS table where I am eating by myself. An agent just leaving comes too close; a greeting is unavoidable. And then she must turn to the woman she’s lunched with, must introduce me. Anne Rosenbaum. The woman’s smile hardens, white paper burning in seconds to dark ash. Ah, yes, says the woman. The very diplomatic Anne Rosenbaum.

  Well, I say. I think about this matter of diplomacy. I suppose, I offer forthrightly, I’m not exactly Talleyrand. (Napoleon’s deft foreign minister.)

  No, she says immediately, maybe Ribbentrop, though.

  The faint clink of dishes. It takes me an instant to process it; Ribbentrop, yes, Hitler’s chief diplomat. Two busboys scurry around us. I smile. Nice, I reply, intellectual, even slightly arcane and yet extremely vicious at the same time. Though subtly so. Very nice. Two points.

  I DON’T CHECK EMAIL. THE faxes I glance at and throw away.

  Then I decide to check email. There are a few cancellations from assistants for the book club tomorrow night. Some bitter tirades and several freezing-cold single lines. When I reach an email that consists of one word—“Nazi”—I delete the rest without looking at them and shut down the computer.

  For my last book club, only two come. Both are Jewish, as it happens. One of them married an Italian Catholic and loves her deeply. The other was Orthodox and is now, as he puts it, “just a person.” The weather is overcast. We don’t read. It would be a farce. We drink lemonade and talk about how to transplant flowers. The key is water, I say.

  The one with the Italian wife tells us how to make plants thrive indoors.

  It bothers me that the clubs would end so abruptly. It bothers me because we had several good books coming up. Well—that is, of course, an absurd lie. What bothers me is how much I will miss them. I will miss the people, their words, the warmth of their presence, the way they crowded me. The arguments and the interaction. I can’t think about it, but then I know I must think about it, their going away, leaving me behind.

  I tell these two that I will miss them all terribly, and that I need them. I didn’t need you before, I say sternly, and we laugh. Now I do. It’s a bloody awful thing, I say, I had always managed to avoid it, my entire life, I’d always very carefully managed not to need people, but there you are.

  They smile. We sit together and just talk, about everything.

  I OPEN THE DOOR, AND it is Justin.

  “I came to pick up my things,” he says. He is steeling his voice. It’s a brave little effect.

  I smile. I say, Come in, and I walk with him to the office. He is a young man with the Hollywood disease, but it is explained by his youth and counterbalanced maybe (maybe) by his character. When he realizes what I’m offering, he is astonished, not by the content of the offer—we both know it is not a plum position anymore—but because he never expected it. He has braced himself for an impact and is spinning from the lack of one. He convulses once, the way boys sob, his face in the tight contortion of crying, then releases it in a gasp of air. “I’m sorry,” he whispers. Before he can go on, I say, It’s OK. Just please don’t do that again. (It has become obvious to me where it was not obvious before that some things are so ephemeral.)

  We let this sink in for a moment. He looks exhausted now, but calm. He takes a deep breath. He can’t possibly tell me he wants to be in my corner while I need him, so he clears his throat and just says, “Four more weeks?”

  Certainly. That should be just right. I deleted a lot of emails. I perhaps shouldn’t have.

  He nods, he’ll look at it. “Hey, Sam.”

  Sam is frozen midstep. “Hey!” says Sam, pleased, then, suspiciously, “You, uh—?”

  “Shut up,” says Justin, laughing, and wipes a wrist rapidly across an eye.

  Justin has a lot of work to do. I want things closed down correctly. Michael Schnayer and Carrie Fein, my young Internet entrepreneurs, have both moved to Warners, and my website has disappeared. Justin calls Michael about it, Michael doesn’t return the calls, and then he does and says that, well, you know.

  “Yeah,” says Justin.

  When Justin recapitulates this, he tells me, “You never owned the URL, Anne.” Then he explains what that means. I just nod.

  I compose an email. I can’t decide between “canceled” or “finished.” I choose “canceled,” then change it to “ended.” Justin sends it to everyone.

  He gives me my call list, and I make the few calls, but everyone happens to be out. This makes us both smile.

  AT CLOSE TO 2:00 A.M. on West 72nd and Amsterdam, Howard sits in the booth of a Greek diner. Alex sits opposite him. The large Formica-covered interior is empty except for the cook and a waitress. The buildings around them are filled with cleaning staff and sleeping people.

  Stuart sits next to Howard. “Comin’ on business,” Howard had announced to him the previous evening on the phone.

  “So, Howie,” Stuart says, “there’s something Alex thought you’d find interesting.”

  Howard has not asked why nor how his brother would have been talking to Alex Ross, nor what they discussed. He’s asked nothing at all.

  Alex glances over at Stuart. Almost imperceptibly, reassuringly, Stuart nods.

  “Howard, I was thinking,” Alex begins. “This odd thing. Did you know that Wagner isn’t played in Israel?”

  Howard lifts his coffee cup. He seems to be focusing on the coffee.

  “The music is considered tainted. You can’t put your finger on the taint, but it’s in there, in the notes, infesting the chords.”

  Howard is motionless. Relaxed as a cat, Stuart’s head is slightly tilted, he focuses on Alex.

  “And Wagner was an anti-Semite,” says Alex, “no question. In 1850 he wrote of Jews: ‘a swarming colony of worms in the dead body of art.’ The man is clear.” He adds, “But there is, of course, an irony.”

  Howard is listening. Not looking, but listening.

  “The irony,” says Alex softly, “is that the Israeli ban seems to follow the same logic as Wagner’s own edicts on Jewish music.” He quotes a musical scholar: “‘If we dismiss Wagner’s diagnosis of “Jewishness” in music as the bigoted drivel it seems to be, how do we go about ascertaining “anti-Semitism” in music?’”

  Howard picks at something on his sleeve. Far away in Los Angeles, I have no idea this conversation is going on. Stuart has always been extremely discreet. With a translucent clarity Howard has, inexorably, come to a stop before the only possible conclusion: Perhaps you don’t get to do both.

  In the white fluorescent light, Alex seems to be contemplating something, searching for a small bit far away. Stuart wears the trace of a smile. The meaty palms of Howard’s hands are pressed to his temples, his elbows on the Formica.

  Alex returns, offers the small point. “When Pfitzner, the raving anti-Semitic German composer, tried to persuade Mahler the Jew that the most essential feature of Wagner’s music was its ‘Germanness,’ Mahler responded that the greatest artists leave nationality behind,” says Alex. “This, the secret of artists dropping outmoded identities, was elucidated by a Jew.” After a brief moment Alex adds, rather boldly, considering the context, “A nonobservant one.”

  Howard takes a deep breath in. He grunts a laugh. Exhales. He gets Alex’s point.

  They wait for Howard’s response. Two taxis flow past outside. Howard says to the black diner window, “I miss the earth so much. I miss my wife.” He sits in the booth, the song’s lyrics a murmur. “It’s lonely out in space.”

  Alex puts a finger on a spoon. Turns it slightly, examining the angle. He hums the next few notes of the melody.

  Stuart says nothing. He is sitting next to his brother. It is after 2:00 A.M. and Howard’s eyes are bloodshot watching the taxis, flashes of yellow in the dark over the pavement
.

  THERE’S A MESSAGE FROM WEST 85th Street Films. Mark’s first call in a week.

  There are some problems with the screenplay, says the answering machine. He lists them, cursorily.

  I replay the message, twice, just to experience my own uncontrolled descent. I close my eyes and listen to the violent rush of the wind against my wings of feathers and wax.

  I dial Paul’s number. Paul, it’s Anne.

  “You heard from West 85th,” he says.

  I’m so sorry.

  He laughs, briefly. Sighs.

  I say, It’s not dead yet, you know.

  “Anne,” he says flatly.

  I’m so sorry….

  (He’s smiling, I can tell.)

  But you were collateral damage, I say.

  “Yeah,” he says. It’s a shrug.

  I think about what I want to say to him. I want to take him in my arms. Or I want him to take me in his. I say: I don’t deserve you, Paul.

  “Yes,” he says firmly, “you do.”

  I FIND A LETTER IN the mailbox. A single sheet of paper is inside. Written out by hand is a careful description of a man slowly drowning. It is (I look it up) from Byron’s “Don Juan, Canto the Second.”

  And first one universal shriek

  Louder than the loud Ocean, like a crash

  Of echoing thunder; and then all was hushed,

  Save the wild wind and the remorseless dash

  Of waves; but at intervals there gushed,

  Accompanied by a convulsive splash,

  A solitary shriek, the bubbling cry

  Of some strong swimmer in his agony.

  It is Howard’s handwriting.

  “ANNE,” HE SAYS QUICKLY, “IT’S Paul.”

  I think: Is this panic in his voice or laughter?

  “Listen,” he says. “Howard just came by.” He pauses as if out of breath.