You or Someone Like You: A Novel

IT IS 4:18 A.M. WHEN I realize Howard has come home.

I watch his outline in the still, dark bedroom stripping off the trousers of his navy suit, stained with sand and Pacific salt water. After a moment, I ask, Who has the life he wants?

He says nothing, standing in the shadows. I say, Wystan Auden did, one could argue.

Howard cuts in, We’re not fucking talking about Auden, Anne.

I am, I say with a calm I do not at all feel, talking about Auden.

We wait in the dark, in the silence, and I realize Howard is crying, his shoulders shaking beneath his stained, unbuttoned dress shirt, the tie gone, his chin down almost to his hairy chest, bobbing up and down with every sob, his eyes closed, his fists clenched. I am so stunned I cannot move for a moment, this big man in his underwear, crying, but then I jump out of the bed. I take him in my arms. He is large enough that his jerky, rough sobs push me back and forth, as if I was grasping an oak in a storm.

Howard, I say. Howard.

He is wiping his nose on his sleeve. He turns away from me.

It’s bad, he finally says, his back to me.

I retreat the tiniest bit. What do you mean, bad?

No, he says. I mean it’s really bad. I’ve thought a lot about it.

He fills his lungs, and he looks out and down over Los Angeles. The fury in his head and the pain that almost cripples him baffle me. He frowns, turns his eyes from L.A., and I watch him riding it out as they wash through him. They push him, shipwrecked, onto some distant mental shore. After a moment he manages to say, I can’t help feeling like I did something wrong.

I say after the briefest moment, You mean we.

He doesn’t reply. Then he says, No, actually I mean I.

Too small for a commercial flight, out the large dark windows the taillights of a tiny plane draw a dashed line across the sky.

I hear the I. I feel something very cold start to climb.

The suddenly strange man who is my husband says, There was something wrong before, and now I see it. He raises a hand like Caesar and adds in a loud voice, Don’t argue with me, Anne.

His anger is gasoline vapor filling the room.

I already know, of course, what the anger is: I am now, for him, a different kind of person. Howard discovered this only recently, when he picked Sam up at LAX after our son’s flight home from Israel. Simply by telling him what had happened in Jerusalem, the boy made Howard realize that Sam, too, is a different kind. It was inadvertent—Sam, who is asleep down the hall, never intended to lead Howard to the conclusions that have brought him to standing here in the dark, covered in sand and half-naked and sobbing—but inadvertent hardly matters now.

I watch Howard get the suitcase down from the walk-in closet, go to the dresser, and start taking out the soft white T-shirts Consuela folded yesterday. On my bedside table I look at my Modern Library W. H. Auden: The Collected Poems. I was reading it last night as the hours ticked by and Howard didn’t come home. I have selected it for my next book club—the studio executives—for one very specific reason: Unlike Howard, Auden, the adamant universalist, saw all people as the same kind. He called the human species New Yorkers, and to him they were, otherwise, nameless.

I hear Howard murmur. I have to focus on it to clarify the words. There’s something missing, Anne.

I cast about for the thing to say. I say, as quietly as if I’m afraid of shattering something, There was never anything missing before.

He merely breathes for a moment, wincing. Then, There is now.

He is walking to and from the suitcase in the shadows. The sun will be up in about fifty minutes. I hear his feet.

Howard, I say.

(I can’t bear the silence.)

Oh, Howard! I implore him, please talk to me.

It’s not necessarily rational, he says, his eyes on the things in his hands, and adds, his jaw tense, To you that means it’s suspect. I used to feel that way. Now I don’t.

As he packs, he begins to speak about having left an island long ago and wandering in the wilderness but the little island never forgot him, about a home that he betrayed, about a man in exile (in exile? I ask; in exile from what, Howard? but he doesn’t stop), and about longing without realizing he was longing—and my saying, How can you long without realizing it? and his digging in his heels at this, putting his head down, his voice rising by several decibels as if sheer willpower could win the argument.

He wraps some black shoes in felt. There is a suit bag. He is leaving our home.

Who will you be staying with? I ask.

He is struggling with the suitcase. I’ll be in touch, he says through gritted teeth, working on the lock. He snaps shut the case, hefts the suit bag. Glances heavily at the dresser to check that he hasn’t forgotten anything.

Who will you be staying with?

It takes an instant for his feet to begin to move.

I hear his footsteps going down the hall. The kitchen door opening, a moment of auditory void, then the sound of it closing. An eternal period, and the car’s powerful German engine wakes again, calm mechanical equanimity. I listen to the recessional down our driveway. The faint sound of gravel crunching under tire comes through the open window, then the engine, the car leaps forward, and Howard vanishes into what is left of the night.

The movie cliché is the woman reaching out her hand, touching his pillow, and only then remembering. But I, when I wake again, find by contrast that my brief sleep has been entirely drenched in a blue distillate of his departure, such that even awake I confuse waking with sleeping and believe dreams to have become merely mundane. Unlike in the movies, there is never a single instant I don’t know that he’s gone.

IN THE SILENT LIVING ROOM (the sky is pale white-blue now) I search the vast, clean, neat shelves for a large dark-blue children’s book. The search is merely movement, an attempt to rein in the vibration of my emotional state. I am a very rational person, even though I am at the moment, not altogether rationally, searching up and down for this children’s book that is at the moment incidental.

I have a thought in my mind like my pulse, not under my control, and though I am shattered, the thought is crystalline, coherent: Everything that I have done has been connected. All these pieces of literature, the poetry, the novels, all of it. The lines that I spoke to express what I felt instead of using my own words because, to me, the authors were just better. And that connection, that thread, was, in every case, Howard. Now that Howard is gone I realize with a terrible clarity that the quotations were really always and only my way of talking to my husband. Throughout the book club I was speaking to them, yes, of course, and everything I said was meant for them, but it was also meant for Howard. This narrative, this conversation I have had with Howard from the very start, if it was imperfect and at times obtuse and, most recently, interrupted, it was entirely our own. And those authors’ words: When I used them, Howard always interpreted them the way I did. Or I thought he did.

When Sam was a very small boy, I would open the tall French doors of our house up in the hills from which we looked down over Los Angeles and sit him next to me and read to him from a big dark-blue children’s book of Bible stories, one my mother had found at Camden Market when I was a girl in London, called The Lord Is My Shepherd. I read all the stories to him, as my mother had to me, but his story, and Sam made clear the possessive, was Samuel’s.

‘Hannah was barren,’ the story began.

(It means she couldn’t have children, Sam. She wanted to, so very, very much; she wanted a little boy, like you. But she couldn’t.)

‘And she vowed a vow, and said, O Lord of hosts, if thou wilt give unto thine handmaid a man child, I will give him unto the Lord all the days of his life.’

The Lord answered Hannah’s prayers. ‘And she called the boy Samuel, saying, Because I have asked him of the Lord. And Hannah took him to the temple in Shiloh and gave the child to Eli, the priest. And the child Samuel grew on.’

The sleep part! Sam ordered, four years old, looking at the book. (I heard a laugh and looked up. Howard was leaning against the doorway, amused. He uncrossed his arms briefly to make a saluting gesture, Yes, sir!)

‘And it came to pass,’ I read, "‘ere the lamp of God went out and Samuel was laid to sleep, that the Lord called Samuel, Samuel. And he ran unto Eli, and said, Here am I; for thou calledst me. And Eli said, I called not; lie down again. And he went and lay down.

‘And the Lord called yet again, Samuel. And Samuel went to Eli, and said, Here am I. And he answered, I called not, my son.’

It was years before I explained to my son my reason for reading him this story. It would have been impossible to explain infertility to a child, and undesirable. The trying and the disappointments—we were still young, and then not so young—our growing fears, our visits to the doctor and sitting in that office with the large gray clock as they gave us the diagnosis. Never, they said. I felt Howard’s body stiffen at the word. Then the banally horrible fertility treatments, the injections, the needles, the plastic tubes, and all those decisions in those sterile white clinics. The drugs. And then, miraculously, there was Sam.

I used the story’s words to say this for me.

And the Lord called Samuel the third time. (Sam liked the third time.) "And Eli said unto Samuel, Go, lie down; and if he call thee, that thou shalt say, Speak, Lord; for thy servant heareth.

And the Lord came again, and stood, and called, Samuel, Samuel.

Now, I always found this odd. The Lord came and stood, it says. When Sam was fourteen, a high school freshman, this came up at the dinner table, and I said intently, Right, I always meant to ask you: The Lord came and stood. How did you understand that? Elbows off, please.

Sam thought about it and shrugged and said, I always pictured Dad. Standing at the top of the stairs. And then he laughed, his fork in his right hand.

I looked at Howard, and Howard wore the most indescribable expression on his face.

I have to assume Howard never fully recovered from this comment. What father would? And I thought I understood everything it meant to Howard. I was wrong. Father in Hebrew is Aba, and that, of course, is in turn God, and though I’m certain he was at the time unaware of it, Howard heard Sam’s fourteen-year-old remark as he had been prepared to by his parents long ago when Howard himself was a boy at a shul in Brooklyn. The word came back years later and claimed him, and he was defenseless. Words have such power. As a schoolgirl, I had read Jesus’ cry, Aba! Father! and was astonished, as a grown woman and my first time in Israel with Howard, when I heard a boy call out on a street "Aba!" and a man turned around.

Samuel answered the Lord, I read to my son. ‘ Speak; for thy servant heareth.’

And then, says the text, God revealed all sorts of visions to Samuel.

I glanced up from my child to my husband. He was watching me, simply listening. He made no comment. At the time, I assumed Howard understood these words the same way I understood them. I still think we do.

When Sam turned seventeen, we discovered that he had had visions, too, though I use that word simply to mean that he was suddenly, in several ways, not the boy we thought he was. To Howard it seemed that Sam was being torn from him, and Howard was in torment.

When I read from this book from lovely old Camden Market, I always tasted the Holy Land in my mouth and nose: the polyester of the 1970s jetways and the fuel vapor from the old El Al jetliners, the hulking X-ray machines, the grim baggage searches for bombs and the faint clink of the automatic guns, the tension, the dry Mediterranean breath of Tel Aviv. Howard when Howard was that younger person he no longer is. The ancient stones and the dust cooked by the sun, the aged date palms, and a sharp, hard something you got in the Israeli air coming through the hotel windows at night.

My only child and I sat on the sofa with the children’s book, the world thousands of feet below us outside the open French doors as the desert sun burned through a luminous particulate molecular mesh spun by millions and millions of automobiles on the Los Angeles freeways. When I began going to Israel with Howard, I was struck by the palms, and even after all these years I’m still conscious of them since, where I come from (or at least one place you might plausibly say I’m from), they are potent, exotic symbol and metaphor. (But then so is the place I live now, this dream factory that is Howard’s job.) Palm trees look, one discovers, quite the same poking up beside the ancient, dusty passages of Ramallah shading fly-infested donkeys hitched to knock-kneed Arab carts as the palm trees standing at the foot of our smoothly curving asphalt street as it meets the stop sign on Mulholland Drive, across from Cahuenga Peak, just the other side from Universal Studios and above the 101.

THE VARIOUS BOOK CLUBS STARTED a year ago during one of Howard’s Shakespeare recitations at dinner at the Hamburger Hamlet on Sunset Boulevard. Howard told a reporter at some point that the credit was mine because I mentioned something that set him into motion that evening. But it wasn’t. It was Howard.

On the other hand, we were eight at the table and had just ordered when Stacey Snider asked me about a reading list, so you could say that Stacey began it.

I had stopped there in the afternoon to make the reservation; it’s an industry place, but in a low-key way. Certainly, the hostess had said. She wrote it down. She gave me a delicious smile. "So where are you from?"

New York, I said. She seemed to find that logical, somehow. Mine is such a strange accent, neither entirely one thing nor another, and naturally people become curious. I thanked her and went outside where the valet, a well-scrubbed boy, had watched over the convertible, and I tipped him.

Howard had brought Casey Silver with him from the studio as well as Jennifer, Howard’s assistant. Sam had gotten his driver’s license a few months before and had driven down Coldwater Canyon from school with his friend Jonathan Schwartz. They’d been playing intramural basketball, and their teenage bodies, though they had showered at school, were still flushed from their exertions and the residual thrill of driving without adults. I had come from Griffith Park (via the flower shop, via the house), where I had spent the afternoon reading on one of the benches near the tennis courts. Stacey came on her own. Josh Krauss, an agent, dashed in as the waitress was handing us menus.

Stacey and Howard had a mutual interest in a feature to be produced by a good friend of hers. Stacey would executive produce, if it went through. She was on my left, we were chatting about an actor she’d gotten to know during a recent shoot, and she leaned over to look at my book, which I’d placed next to my bread plate. John Ruskin, 1819–1900. One of the great Victorian art critics. I had just read his description of his first ever view of the Swiss Alps, at sunset, and Stacey picked up the book, opened to it, and read it to me: ‘The walls of lost Eden could not have been more beautiful.’ Ruskin was fourteen at the time, Sam’s age three years ago. ‘I went down that evening from the garden-terrace of Schaffhausen with my destiny fixed in all that was to be sacred and useful.’

She turned some pages slowly. Smiled, glanced at Sam. College a year from now.

I was startled, and I hesitated. Though it was barely September, she had sensed the loss I already felt from Sam’s future departure.

Am I so obvious, I said.

You’re never obvious, Anne, she said, smiling. Her gaze moved back to the Ruskin. They often comment on the fact that I always have a book. The tone is sometimes vaguely curious, as if reading were an eccentricity. Usually they glance at the cover, then turn to the menu.

Casey looked at the book in Stacey’s hand, and it reminded him. So, Howard, he said slyly. We’re here.

Howard, who knew exactly what he meant, just gave him an owlish look, so I explained to Josh, who was not following, that it was because of Sam. Hamburger Hamlet was where we had introduced Sam to Shakespeare. And I turned to Howard, because the subject had come up, and we were with friends, and it was a beautiful evening, and, moreover, it was time.

When young Hamlet came from college, Howard explained, looking around the table at us, each in turn (That’s mine, he told the waitress who had just appeared, pointing out the iced tea), full of new ideas and knowledge, he was shocked to learn his pa, the king, had lately passed away.

Perrier, the waitress said. Casey raised a forefinger.

But his discomfiture was greater, recited Howard, when he learned his dearest mater had been married to his uncle—and here Howard raises his eyebrows menacingly and pushes out the word—"Claude without the least delay!"

Another iced tea? Mine. Cokes for the boys, pear juice for Jennifer, beer for Josh.

For it seemed to him indecent, explained Howard, with his father’s death so recent, that his mother should prepare herself another bridal bed. And there seemed to be a mystery in the family’s royal history, but he failed to follow any clue, for fear of where it led.

With a curious glance over her shoulder at Howard, the waitress retreats to the kitchen. Perhaps it is Howard’s narrator accent, a crisp and remarkably authentic 1950s BBC British. While he’s in this sad condition he’s informed an apparition is accustomed to perambulate the castle every night. That it looks just like his sire, both in manner and attire, but is silent, staid, and stoical—which doesn’t seem quite right. Howard puts on a quizzical look, like a demented peacock: Having heard this testimony from Horatio, his crony, he decides to take a peep at this facsimile of his pop. Two matching plosives.

So at midnight’s dismal hour

Just outside the castle tower

He confronts the grisly phantom and he boldly bids it STOP.

Josh leans to Jennifer, whispers something, and she smiles and nods. Casey is loving Howard’s Hamlet. He has already heard King Lear this way, lines that both send up and honor the play, at a party at our home, and Romeo and Juliet on, I believe, a tennis court in Santa Monica. Howard memorized these parodies in college.

Those in the industry recognize us. They recognize Stacey and Casey and Josh and Howard. They watch Howard, the waiters who are actors, the dishwashers who are writing screenplays, the hostess who is waiting for a callback. They know his face from the trades. They know he can help green-light a movie, buy a script, make a career. It is Hamburger Hamlet on a Tuesday evening, and we are in Los Angeles, and anything is possible.

Howard tells us Shakespeare’s story, of anger and greed and violence and pain. Then the grisly phantom faded / Leaving Hamlet half persuaded. The tables around us, one by one, fall silent to watch and listen, those next to them notice the silence, then the focus, then the words, and they too still. Spends his time / in frequent talking to himself / of suicide and other subjects tinged with doom. And Howard, because he is an innate performer, increasingly projects to include them, so that in this room the circumference of his words enlarges to fit the expanding circle of attention paid to them. The waiters stop to watch, and so their busboys’ busy motions gently still, and they too turn to our table.

And so then one after other / King, Laertes, Hamlet, mother / With appropriate remarks / They shuffle off this mortal coil.

When he reaches the end, everyone dead, we all applaud. The room fills with the sound. Howard bows to the stalls, accepting the declamation. Amid the applause people murmur. Howard Rosenbaum, they say, and his title at the studio, and the last movies he worked on, as if his name were a powerful enchantment and they were spinning a spell. I love Howard’s golden light when he is in his element, the vigor of my husband’s love of these words and stories, but I dislike the hunger this city focuses on him, their celluloid obsession. And I quietly prepare to withdraw into myself as usual and leave them to this world. But this evening, something is different.

It is, I realize, the play. Even in this permutation, I notice, the story holds its own. I look around in wonderment. Casey is looking, too. I’d forgotten the power of the goddamn thing, he says. Look. Stacey and I turn. Two Guatemalan busboys attack each other with invisible rapiers. The restaurant’s manager, coaching them, tilts the hand of one of the boys as it holds an invisible sword, pitching it, like Howard’s voice, into a perfect affectation of Elizabethan style. There, the manager says with satisfaction, good boy, that’s how we’d have done it on the set. We hear him say, Shakespeare, and hesitantly, in heavy accents, the busboys repeat the strange name.

Todd Black, a producer Howard knows, comes over to our table to say something to Howard. Stacey leans toward me. Listen, says Stacey. Anne. It’s a proposition. Would you make me a reading list?

I look at her. She is quite serious.

What you think is important, says Stacey. No, she corrects herself immediately, what you think is good.

Well, I say. Why me?

You read, she says, simply enough.

Howard overhears. He turns slightly, toward us. Make her a list, Anne, he says to me, smiling.

I don’t really know her that well. She’s Howard’s friend, not mine. They invariably are. Stacey is waiting, Howard and Casey and Sam are watching me. I think, Well, Howard has the same degree, after all. And he has the teaching position. She could ask him. She works with him, not me, on the movies; it would be more professionally strategic for her. Yet she is asking me. And it is impossible to overestimate the pleasure of being included. Even for one who has never much wanted to be.

Certainly, I say. If you like.

I assume it is merely because I have the doctorate in English literature, which impresses them more than it should. That I read a lot is one of the only things they know about me, even though Howard and I have been here for twenty-five years. I have always preferred it that way. In fact I assume that I myself am not actually material. I just happen to know the books.

But I smile, thinking about some titles. I say to her, I think we can come up with some very nice possibilities.

Todd registers this exchange. He returns to his table, where there are several people on Paramount’s production side, and I see him lean down and say something to Brian Lipson, who then makes a comment to a woman from the Universal lot.

AT 11:00 A.M. THE FOLLOWING morning I park next to our house, open the kitchen door, temporarily compromised by all my packages. Denise appears, and I hand her a large wrapped bouquet of flowers. The cone of crackling cellophane is like a lady’s inverted organza ball gown, the flowers many delicate feet. Denise accepts the cone from me and sets it on the kitchen counter. She will deal with the flowers when she’s ready.

They’re from Mark’s Garden on Ventura, I say.

You was there? She is not making conversation. She hadn’t thought I’d had time to go that far. I say, Yes, I was, there was an alarming lack of traffic. She goes back to her work.

I deposit the car keys next to the flowers, go to my office and lay down my books, the old ones and the three I just bought at Book Soup. I carry my new blouse upstairs, take it out of the bag, and hang it in the closet. I wash my hands and face and brush my teeth, use a clean white towel, and then go to the library. I sit down and stare at the shelves. I take out a pad of paper. I am slightly irritated. I have been thinking about Stacey’s list, and it will not coalesce. I hesitate. There are her interests to consider, there is topicality. What would resonate with her. Then it comes to me. I write down the first title. My eyes move along the shelves. I write down another. I open up my Norton Anthology, which leads to other things. Soon I am fascinated, suffused with pleasure. When the phone rings, I am writing down the eighth. Melanie Cook says hello, we talk, in abbreviated manner, about a deal she is undoing. She is one of the industry’s top entertainment lawyers. Howard’s friend. She says, I heard Howard gave another stellar performance. Does he do those Shakespeare things in class?

One per semester. They won’t leave him alone till he does.

Listen. Anne. I heard you’re starting a book club.

I pause. After all this time, I’m still amazed at the velocity of information in this odd little world.

I realize, with a flush of annoyance at myself, that the idea of creating a book club interests me. Really, I say to Melanie.

You’re not?

No, I say, I’m afraid I’m not. I say that someone (I don’t mention Stacey’s name, that would be tasteless, and Melanie already knows anyway) evinced an interest in my making her a reading list. That’s all. Melanie is endearingly disappointed, but like a good lawyer she has prepared an alternative. She presents it in the form of a confession. We were at a screening, she says. Spike Jonze, a rough cut. After the screening, Bob Zemeckis had gotten into a debate with Jonathan Kaplan. Bob, she tells me, held that Spike was being derivative and cited The Ugly American to support his position. (The book, she stipulates, not the movie.) Zemeckis paraphrased a passage. Kaplan had responded that The Secret Agent was actually a better reference and that Spike was in fact starting where Conrad had left off. Carla Shamberg agreed, she said, then Marc Lawrence brought up Saul Bellow. She mentions a Bellow title. (I correct it slightly, which she accepts with grace.)

It was visceral, she says, "we could feel it, and I suddenly thought— She pauses, remembering, a little awed. I thought, my God, picking up the damn books with your hands. Not the Columbia Pictures version of Edith Wharton with an Elmer Bernstein score pushing you through. The Wharton itself. She sighs. How long since I’ve done that." I know what she had felt, standing there as they spoke the book titles that appeared in the air, one by one; the titles conjured, they were spells. Literature is a power, like a foreign language you possess. The titles had clearly been played like cards. And her feeling was also of guilt, and I think: So she is, in fact, confessing. But no matter. Wanting to appear capable is not an illegitimate reason to read books.

She comes to her point. My name had come up. What if they read the books with me? She mentions a few people who are interested. It’s your field, she says.

I rub my fingertips on the desk. I love the particular spell she is under, it is one I know well, and because she is under it, at this moment I love her, but I simply am not in the position to pursue this. In order to put her off gently, I tell her I’ll consider it.

Good. Melanie has, she thinks, planted a seed. Great. She hangs up as if tiptoeing.

I retrieve the salad Consuela has made me and carry it and The Way We Live Now out to my chair by the Campylotropis macrocarpa, which I transplanted the week before. I check its small purple-white flowers, which are healthy. I start to read and forget about the list and the call.

Then I remember it again on the studio lot, and under a translucent California evening mention it to a man outside Howard’s bungalow. I am waiting for Howard so we can drive home together. I’ve known this man since we came here, he started in production design at Warners, and now he has his development deal and his sleek office. Three overweight union members in T-shirts are pushing a blue 1950s-era car across the lot. The car has no engine, it’s fake. When I mention the book list, he squints into the sun, then laughs. Anne, he says.

What?

With a look he apologizes for the laughter but explains very patiently, "Nobody reads in Hollywood."

IN MY DESK THERE IS an ancient letter I scribbled to my mother in gray, chilly