You or Someone Like You (28 page)

Consuela got the address from a friend, secretly—it was to be a surprise—and bought a present for Pepina, since it was her eighth birthday. She discovered a house that was filthy, the children were filthy, they were unfed, and all of this because her sister was sick. The man, it turned out, was disappearing for weeks at a time—no, he had not found work, no, he was paying no bills, there was back rent since May. Since
April
, said José from the backseat. Consuela corrected herself.

She is scanning the row of sagging houses, trying to locate Susannah's. She says apologetically, “I've never come from this direction.”

The man wasn't violent, exactly. (Consuela and José debate some
thing, but I am missing the vocabulary or else it is slang. Consuela puts her face in her hands.) “There was,” says José directly to me, “a question of sexual behavior with the children.”

I see.

Consuela's voice is ragged from crying. Direct me, I say gently. She points, wordless. We pull up outside a dilapidated, old Los Angeles wood bungalow.

Inside it is dark and it stinks. The children, from five to thirteen, stare at us. Consuela's sister lies on the ratty sofa. I ask if the electricity and water work. They do. Right. Here we go.

The car keys and three hundred dollars to Sam for cleaning products, trash bags, lightbulbs, toilet paper, rags from the
tienda
. José will go with him. Sam, keep the doors locked, park in front, you stay in the car and wait. The two littlest girls' dresses are not only grimy, they look bloodstained. I take each child into a bedroom, which is horrendous, and with Consuela's help get their clothes off and examine their skin and genitals carefully. One has scabies; two others, crabs.

I wash my hands (I finally find soap), then get my phone out of my purse and call Dr. Zimmer. “Doctor's office.” It's Anne Rosenbaum, I need to speak to David immediately, please. (David, who is almost seventy, was Sam's pediatrician.) While I'm holding, I start telling José and Sam what we need to get rid of: the sofa (lice infested), the giant, filthy unidentifiable wooden thing sitting in the main room, three of the four chairs (the fourth will do), and—David comes on sharply: “Anne, where are you?” I explain what I need. I can hear him uncapping a pen. “It's irregular.”

I say nothing. Which he expects.

“Where do you want me to call in the prescription?”

I ask Susannah for the nearest drugstore. She remains silent. Consuela blows up at her, most of which I again miss. We fix on a drugstore, and I give the address to David. Sam is watching me very closely. I catch his eye. He's wearing an expression I've never seen. I describe Susannah's symptoms on the phone. David stops
me, asks about her diet. I ask Susannah. When she prevaricates, I have Consuela leave the room and then question her rather sharply, translating her responses into the phone. “Oh hell,” he sighs, “it's probably 90 percent malnutrition.” He adds a dietary supplement for Susannah and we hang up. Consuela leaves with Sam. Sam, you have your credit card?

“Yeah,” he says. “
Tienes la lista?
” he asks Consuela. She nods, gripping it. “
Vamanos
,” he says.

By the time they come back, José, with the children's help, has moved the sofa and chairs out and is dismembering the wooden thing with a crowbar. Consuela and Sam have stopped at Kentucky Fried Chicken. The children fall upon the food like rats. We stand there, watching. This is the most disturbing sight so far. My lips are pursed. I tap my manicured fingernails on the tabletop.

I think about the next gubernatorial race. I mentally run through some things to talk to Howard about.

When they are sated—Susannah has been made to eat something and is feeling better—I put on latex gloves, hand pairs to Consuela, José, and Sam, and we strip the children, the sheets, the bedding, and the towels. We put what is in decent shape in plastic bags and the rest in the trash. We put all the kids into the shower at once. The oldest, a boy, will not cooperate. Sam gets down on one knee, talks to him face-to-face. I hear a man's quiet tone of voice. Eventually the boy obeys. While I use the Kwell on them—the gloves catch their skin, but they are brave about it, and I tell them so—José drives the bedding to a Laundromat. Very hot water, lots of detergent, and a strong shot of bleach. When I go into the living room, Susannah is up and has started scrubbing the floors. There is soap everywhere. She looks visibly better. The house smells of lemon and Clorox. Consuela opens plastic packages of new sheets, towels, underwear, T-shirts and cotton shorts and plastic flip-flops. Later she will take them to Payless for shoes. José is sweeping. I start ripping down the dark, dingy curtains. Home Depot has cheap, white paper shades that will look nice.

At four o'clock I check my watch. I write a check for the back rent and the coming month and hand it to Susannah. (
Usted tiene un conto banquario?
I ask, and she nods.) I give Consuela some more money and leave her there with instructions that she spend tomorrow here. She will look into the school situation. José is staying the night as well. Next Saturday he will bring the boy to our house, where Sam has told him there is a basketball net over the driveway. As we drive off, the children wave, including the boy. Sam waves back.

My son drives, putting us on the 10. I feel almost narcotized by the effects of the day. Sam is staring a bit glassily. Stunned.

Sam, I say. Listen: Italian words that do not exist in English:
scaramanzia, allappare
(
la bocca
),
freddoloso
. (I just love that one.) He thinks about them. I can see him focus. Almost imperceptibly, Sam smiles.

 

I am furious with Consuela. I never tell her, of course; it is simply part of catharsis: why she didn't tell me till now, why she felt she had to keep it secret, the overall tragic state of the human condition, et cetera. When she arrives on Tuesday morning, she comes and finds me in the bedroom and we sit on the bed and cry together.

 

Howard appears at my elbow. I startle, then scrunch over a bit on the lounge. I put my lemonade down in the pebbles beside the tall grass, and after an instant of some sort of thought, he sits down next to me. “He was very impressed,” he says. I find his tone ambiguous.

Did you talk to him?

He doesn't say anything for a moment. “I overheard him,” he says. “On the phone.”

Oh.

“He said you were, and I quote, ‘totally defiant.'”

Strange word.

It is warm in the afternoon sun.

He gives a brief laugh. “This was authentic teenage ‘Whoa, didn't know she had it in her.'”

Then he didn't know me, I say.

“He does now,” says Howard. He thinks of something. “When her kid comes over to play basketball with Sam, Justin and I could go two-on-two.”

Better not overwhelm him the first time, I say.

Howard hadn't thought about that.

He stands up to go. I say to him, You should have seen the way Sam dealt with things. He was wonderfully mature. Really fatherlike to those kids. You know, I didn't know him, either.

I say, maybe a bit too eagerly, Howard, why don't you talk about it with him?

For the past four weeks, Howard has been remarkably distant.

I've spoken loudly, so he can hear. He's walking toward the house. “Sure,” he says, vaguely, back over his shoulder.

Howard is gone that night. I don't know where. When he comes back the clock reads 11:27
P.M.

 

I GET UP JUST BEFORE
seven, brush my teeth and shower, then go to my office and sit down at the computer.

Justin has taught me how to sign in to annerosenbaum.com and how to navigate. (Never, I had said to him, our chairs scrunched together before the screen while he walked me through it as one would a child, Never in a million years. “Your password goes here,” he'd continued patiently.)

I had created a Thomas Hardy thread, and Albert Brooks has become quite competitive over—“
So
predictable,” Howard said to Jake Bloom—
Jude the Obscure
. Albert is adamant that Hardy is saying religion just comes from interpreting misfortune as divine intervention, but Grant Heslov is insisting that anyone with a brain could see the novel is
primarily
condemning social determinism and class structure.

I read over Albert's post. There are already eight replies on the
Hardy thread. Some nice work. I post some replies of my own. As I'm working on it, I forget the other things going on. I love this.

 

“ANNE FOUND A TERRIFIC SCREENPLAY,”
Howard announces to Stacey Sher and Joe Roth, “and I think she should produce it.” It is Tuesday evening.

“Hey!” says Stacey. Joe looks his congratulations at me. We're all sitting together in a row at the back of the studio screening room.

I stare at Mr. Out-of-the-Blue. You finally read it, I say to him.

Owlishly: “I
did
,” he says. “Whoever the hell this guy is.”

I ran into a screenwriter, I explain to Stacey and Joe, who was running over my gardener.

“I mentioned it to Rob Greenberg,” says Howard.

Howard, I'm supposed to call Mark Siegal before you do anything!

“You want
Mom
to produce it?” says Sam, slightly incredulous. He is sitting in the row just below us, his legs sprawled over the red velvet seats before him.

Oh, thanks, I say to Sam.

“Put your feet
down
, Samuel,” says Howard. Then to me, “Seriously. Think about it.” The screening room is filling up now, so Howard lowers his voice. “The guy's good.”

“Do I know him?” asks Stacey. The writer. “Anything produced?”

No, I say, nothing.

Is he married to anyone in the industry? she asks. Maybe she knows his wife.

I say, He's gay, actually.

Sam looks up at me instantly. Howard's eyes, by contrast, seem suddenly locked on the screen.

His name is Paul McMahon. I think the boyfriend is an elementary school teacher.

“Oh, a teacher, good for him,” Stacey says, “thank Christ some people are still going into teaching. How long have they been together?”

Howard says, “A teacher. To children.”

His tone has changed. Joe looks over. Stacey is a bit surprised. Howard's eyes are still fixed on the screen. I'm a bit surprised myself. Down in front, the studio exec in charge of the movie is preparing to introduce the screening. Howard says to the screen, “Why do gay couples never last. It's a joke.”

Stacey and Joe glance at each other.

I say, Howard. I wonder what he is processing here.

“Because,” Howard says, “
il y a toujours un qui fait le con et l'autre qui s'emmerde
.”

I say: Howard…

Howard doesn't look at me. He repeats to them the explanation we heard from the boorish France Telecom consultant on a flight from Paris. The joke involves duplicate meanings of two different French words, both of them slang, the result a single sentence with two readings. One being “Because one of the guys is always a jerk and the other gets bored,” the second, “Because one of the faggots always plays the cunt while the other gets shit all over himself.”

Joe blinks. Stacey diplomatically pretends she's looking for a friend. They have heard about the incident with the DP's marketing photo. They add that to this.

I'm looking at Howard, who is still staring at the screen. Who is this man, what drives him to say such a thing? (This transformation, which I still don't understand, that seems simply to gather speed.) We hear the studio exec say, “Good evening!” He smiles a big smile at us. He's young, and this is his first major project. As everyone finds a place, Samuel, who is angry—almost as angry, we see to our surprise, as Howard—jumps up and walks four rows forward, slams himself down again, and puts his feet over an empty red velvet seat.

 

THEY CALL ME WITH THE
proposal. Three of them, two on speakerphone at Spyglass Entertainment, Wendy Finerman conferenced in from her office. Quite enthusiastic. A private talk, they propose. It will be lovely, catered of course, perhaps six in the evening? at a beautiful home in Bel Air. (I've heard the man's name, an industrialist and his wife. They tell me he is funding a new shop headed by two former Castle Rock people.) So what did I think? they ask. They'd invite a nice, small selection of people, says Wendy—they mention a few names, some production companies, some titles.

And how about this for a topic, Anne. They'd love for me to speak about Why People Fear Art. Meaning literature, they clarify. Why do people fear books? (They are industry people, and they consider the question and its answer to cut uniquely in their favor. They assume they know what my answer will be.)

I honestly think it was the sheer solidity of the thing that made me agree and write down the date in my book. It sat there in neat black letters and looked like an anchor, something to steady me. On this date, at least I know I will be
here
.

Well, I say to them after I jot it down. I'm looking forward to it.

I felt I needed some anchors.

 

SAM IS SILENT THROUGH THE
entire drive to the Farmer's Market. He feels vaguely angry, but I keep thinking I'm misinterpreting this. It is early on a beautiful Los Angeles Sunday spring morning, heading for 81 degrees announces 89.3 FM. For a week, since the trip to Consuela's, he has been remarkably quiet. Howard and I have both noticed it. Howard pulls into the lot off Fairfax Avenue and asks him what he wants for breakfast, and Sam says, “Huh?” and looks around: Oh. We're here.

Howard wants apples.

They're an autumn fruit, I say, it's April.

“No, everything's everything now.”