You or Someone Like You (25 page)

Not that I care about Sam's being Jewish or not. Or what it might mean to whomever. I care about Sam, but I can attend to him later; in the immediate it is Howard's tone of voice that concerns me, and
whatever is behind it, and I start by putting my hand gently on his shoulder and saying, “Howard,” but he moves away from my hand, gets up suddenly and, very fast, walks away from me toward the house.

 

When I come in—I have spent a few moments in vague nothing—I see Howard on the phone. He is talking to his brother. I can tell this instantly by his tone and his expression. He stops talking when he sees me, and we look at each other. Then he says, “Stu wants to say hi.”

He holds out the phone.

Hello, Stuart.

“Anne.” Stuart talks a bit.

You sound distracted, I say.

“Nah,” says Stuart. “Nah.”

So when are you coming out to see us?

Afterward I ask Howard what he and Stuart had been talking about.

“Just stuff,” says Howard, frowning at his hand.

 

SAM EXPLAINED HIS CONCLUSION TO
me (apropos of absolutely nothing; it's nothing, nothing, nothing from them, Signal Unavailable, and then all of a sudden one evening they're standing in the kitchen as you're chopping ingredients for the salad, vehemently expressing their thoughts as you try to hide your surprise). The thing was, he said, if you really, you know, want to
maintain
this crap (he meant “if you want to perpetuate a tribe of people separate and distinct from all other people”), then you have to
do this
to other human beings. You, like, have to! (His voice was straining upward.) To look at all the people who aren't in your
club
this way and stuff. This totally extreme in-group, out-group social organization, all the fucking ethnocentric differentiation and the primitive identity cueing, and the—the
theological-slash-morality
that, you know (he gesticulates, searching
among things he has heard in classrooms for a verb),
undergirds
it all philosophically. And you shore it up with this insane crap about what dishes you have to eat off or whatever and pretend that the Thing that created the universe seriously
cares about your dishes
. But it's all just about keeping your guys separate from everyone else's guys, because your guys are more—he gestured vaguely at the window—
valuable to God
or whatever.

He was very agitated, but the words came out in the end quite logically; he'd clearly been walking himself through it. He scoffed at the idea that a God would care if you were circumcised, which he called “disfigurement as tribal ID,” a phrase that sounded like something he'd learned recently from a book. I washed lettuce and listened.

All the theological acrobatics, all the crap you've got to generate because all the rules you've laid down back you into it. And the thing is, said Sam, the rules were supposed to mean you were more moral. But actually, said Sam, they meant exactly the opposite: Doing this to other human beings was the most
immoral
thing you could do. Seriously, Mom!

It's like, he said, they used to pull this shit at some fucking racist country clubs in Alabama. His hand was resting on the counter over the dishwasher. But this is
religion
. This is
worse
. This is, like, “We're the only people with platinum-mileage status with
God
.” So what is everyone else worth, then. Nothing!

From the living room, we heard Howard get up from where he had been sitting and walk back to his home office and shut the door.

Sam was silent. He looked toward the office.

 

I GOT AN EMAIL. WILLIAM
Morris literary agency in New York. The agent represented the authors of two novels coming out soon, and she wondered if I might be interested in getting an early
look at the manuscripts. Oh, and maybe I could give her my comments, she'd be very interested to hear. I was intrigued. I told Justin to say I would.

The next day, just after FedEx had arrived with the two titles, Justin found me on the stairs, still filled with the thrill one has at the beginning of a novel. This is quite promising, I said to him. “Good,” he replied, “because they invited you to lunch.” There were several authors of theirs who, they'd suggested, I really should meet. A salad at the Beverly Hills Hotel, next Wednesday. Someone from New York was flying in, and some of their L.A. office would meet us. I told Justin it sounded interesting. It is, he said, already turning back to the office, and he'd already accepted. He had also specified to them the two writers they were to place on either side of me.

The day after the William Morris lunch, ICM called. Their New York office had just signed a new fiction writer, a real whiz kid, he was right up my literary alley, they said to Justin. “Well,” Justin replied smoothly, “I guess that will be Anne's call, won't it.” I found this harsh. He put a finger on the mute button, mouthed, “Let me manage it.” The finger turned the mute off. “So you're looking for a blurb from Anne,” he began. It was the start of a negotiation. I have no idea what he thought he could extract from them. I left him to it.

When Howard got home and I started telling him about this, he was the slightest bit—I was surprised when I realized it—envious.

(The following day an editor called Justin to ask if I might slip a brand-new literary acquisition into Howard's hands. I had Justin call Howard and repeat what she'd said. I took the phone. You see? I said to Howard. They're using me to get to you.

Howard felt better but pretended he didn't.)

I realized Justin was now regularly signing for five or so overnight deliveries each day. The stout dirty-blond DHL woman had a terrible crush on him. He moved around my house with his lists and papers, his mod glasses and moussed hair and his Princeton tones (I heard
him casually mentioning his undergraduate institution to someone at Universal on the phone) never above a certain decibel, with a masculine friendliness that told people he kept the gate. He was a perfect animal for the telephone in Los Angeles. He treated Sam like a younger brother; in that role as well he had eerily perfect pitch.

 

I WAS NOT OVERTLY CONSCIOUS
of why I chose the Trollope and
Anna Karenina
for my directors of photography. One of them actually elucidated my own choice to me afterward.

The phone rings at 3:00
A.M.
It is two years ago, I explain to them, and it is Sam, age fifteen. Howard is instantly awake on adrenaline, sitting up, grunting his terror at whatever lies on the other end of the line. But Sam is fine. It is the other boy, the driver, who has been arrested on Santa Monica for an expired registration. The boy was not drunk, not high, not irresponsible. He'd just had the bad luck to meet this particular, overeager member of the LAPD.

There are two young women involved. And then it turns out the policeman was, perhaps, not so overeager. One of the girls had drugs, or she didn't have drugs because she'd just swallowed them, wrapped in a plastic bag. We never get the full story. Sam was isolated in a separate room at the police station when they strip-searched her.

“This is his date!” Howard whispered to me, hand over the receiver.

No, mumbles Sam—too scared to be sullen at this particular instant; right now he needs us—she's the other boy's date. So the putative nondruggy is his then? Our first knowledge that Sam is dating, and we're hearing it, in effect, from the LAPD. It struck me as hilarious. Honestly:
This
is how I learn about my son's maturing social life?

Which drugs? I ask.

A pause. “GHB,” says Sam's voice.

I give Howard a look: Do
you
know what that is? He has no idea.

“Is Mom crying?” asks Sam's voice, stricken.

“Yes,” Howard barks. “You get home right now.”

Actually I am trying not to laugh. Howard, on the other hand, is cross. He will wait up till the police car arrives in the driveway and march out to meet it.

Howard has been this way from the start, since the moment we brought Sam home. He understood innately Bacon's warning, “He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.”

How do you protect them?

Howard bought him a Volvo.

Howard lies now in the dark, eyes on the ceiling. I sleepily stroke his ears. “Stop smiling,” he says to the air above, “Jesus.”

Nonsense, he's perfectly fine!

“He's not gonna be fine when he gets home,” he says.

Bosh, I say to dismiss this, and I curl myself around Howard and fall semi-asleep as he auditions tones of voice in which to administer effective but not overly severe punishments. I feel like a casting director. Oh yes,
that
one, I mumble authoritatively as he rehearses. It just irritates him.

Howard obviously wanted Sam to have sex education, but in his view that came down in its entirety to this (Howard quoted it to the boy):

Howard, I said, this is ridiculous.

“Have
you
ever talked to him about birth control?” asked Howard.

Oh, of course I have, every boy is dying to have his mother explain how to put on a condom.

Howard gave me a Precisely! look. “So I have to do it.”

He's fifteen, I said. Don't you think it's a bit early?

“All I know,” said Howard, “is what they tell me on television.”

Howard put the condoms in Sam's hand, stating our strong preference that they not become necessary any time too damn soon, OK? No,
really
: Got it? Sam mumbled a response. “Well,” he sighed afterward, “you can't make them climb into the lifeboat.”

And now our semisullen teenager was dating a girl who was snorting the alphabet.

Did he actually say he was dating her? I ask.

“Of course he's dating her! He doesn't have to tell his dad he's dating her! The dad knows!”

Do we all look back at our own matings and find them inevitable, or perhaps simply uneventful, which is indistinguishable, retrospectively, from inevitable? I worried deeply about how Sam would go about it. Some club on Sunset frequented by bleach-blond girls with silicone implants. So many ways to go wrong. “The kid,” Howard says (it's a warning to me), “will figure it out.”

I'm not so sure, I reply, Sam seems astonishingly dim sometimes. We'd noticed his dull, almost total reticence on this particular topic.

“What do you want to do, Anne?” Howard sighs. “He'll meet a girl, that'll be that.”

One thing that helps me, I say to my directors of photography, opening up a book now, is remembering that none of this—our worries about our children, their sexual risks, their potential mates—is new. It helps, remembering that, I say. Tolstoy's world, for example, was absolutely ours.

Literature continually startles you with the fact that each book contains a time horizon beyond which absolutely nothing was known. The people reading these books and the characters inhabiting them crossed into the unknown future of 1741, of 1835, of
2048, and survived, and therefore so, perhaps, shall we. Take Tolstoy on marriage, I say.

We want our children to have what we had, I say to my book club. At least we want them to have the best of what we had. And when marriage is good, nothing is better. The question is figuring out what a good marriage should be.

“You can't really do a damn thing to get them a good marriage,” Stephen Schiff says to me, “other than, you know, raising them right.”

True, I reply. But you can provide them a target. Although, I added, Anthony Trollope disagrees with me. (We all put down Tolstoy, pick up Trollope.) From a position as a postal worker—Trollope invented the mailbox—he rose to become one of the bestselling authors of his era. For one of his novels he received the immense sum of £3,525. And if not a writer of the first rank, I defy anyone to point out a writer who achieved a greater connection to the parts of our lives that we don't put in the movies. Compare Trollope's view in
Can You Forgive Her?
to Tolstoy's. Please read from the top of the page.