Free You or Someone Like You by Chandler Burr Page A

look, Howard? And Howard explained. “Sam looks,” he said, “the way we all look when, cocooned in sleep, we are the heroes of our dreams.”
    When he was fifteen: That evening he had (unbidden) put on a crisp new shirt and a navy blazer, which cut his broadening shoulders and framed the short, dark-blond hair. He buckled himself into the driver’s seat, Howard next to him, and caught me in the rearview mirror. Sam had come to know a certain look in my eye. He knew I thought about the Thornton Wilder character, a mother whose daughter asks her anxiously, “Am I pretty?” and gives the starchy New England reply, “My children are good-looking enough for allnormal purposes.” He knew I found it unfortunate that he was more than good-looking enough for normal purposes.
    He sometimes shrugged off Howard’s directions and used the gas aggressively, but that evening, learner’s permit in pocket, he eased the large automobile down our curving drive, across Macapa, and gently right on Mulholland.
    I had commented on my fears to a friend. He had been in Los Angeles long enough to understand the potential toxicity. He knew what it could do. In the car, Sam, I said. Listen: Yeats. 1919, “Prayer for My Daughter.” (Driving, he kept his eyes on the road.)
    May she be granted beauty and yet not
    Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught
    Nor her own eye before a looking glass, for they,
    Being made beautiful overmuch,
    Consider beauty a sufficient end,
    Lose natural kindness and maybe
    The heart-revealing intimacy
    That chooses right, and never find a friend.
    â€œI hear you,” he said, very briefly, and to the windshield. But he did.
    Howard adores Sam’s looks. He loves the strong cut of jaw made satin with thickening peach fuzz, loses himself in the green eyes. Howard stares at them like a lover, but always obliquely. (Sometimes we watch our son from a distance. “I wonder what he’s thinking,” Howard will say.) Howard watched as Sam negotiated the left turn down Laurel Canyon, assessed the traffic both ways, taking the care that fifteen-year-old males take when under their fathers’ gaze.
    Howard stood with me on La Cienega’s cement curb (the starched maître d’ at Mark’s restaurant waiting to lead us to our seats) while on the asphalt Sam just a bit shyly handed over the keys to the valet, a Vietnamese teenager his own age. Seated at our lovely white-linenedtable on the sidewalk, Howard watched as Sam got up, started to jog across the street to examine a sporting goods store. It is Howard’s own flesh that moves like this. That’s what got him, Howard murmured to me as we held our menus. That sleek young animal loping across the pavement came burbling up from his testicles and shot out his penis, it is his flesh and blood, and it looks like this. Look at it! Look at the way it moves.
    Howard’s eyes are black brown and somewhat close together, his nose Roman, the crinkly black hair tamed only to a degree with an expensive silicon gel (I don’t know where he gets it) that lies on the tight curls and says, “I am doing what I can.”
    The intensity of his personality, the slight thickness of his mannerisms, the Brooklyn that formed him and will never let him go. For Howard, that he, this particular Jew, should have produced the tawny creature gliding unaware among Mark’s cool white tables on that blue evening where the tanned men tracked him from behind their menus and their golden hands—that was remarkable.
    Not so long ago I happened to mention to someone that I am as surprised as Howard is that, given Howard’s looks, he has produced this boy.
    She paused. “Don’t,” she said in a low voice, “ever say that to Howard.”
    I thought about this for a moment now as we sat at our table. What would Howard say? I lay down my menu and talked about my surprise at Sam’s looks given