Free You or Someone Like You by Chandler Burr Page B

our genetics, given Howard’s dark eyes, and what used to be called olive skin. Given the hair. I observed that genetically it was quite odd, wasn’t it, Sam’s having got virtually all his coloring and his skin from me. I wanted to know what he would say.
    Howard put his hand on mine. He considered me for a moment. His eyes flickered over—Sam was heading toward our table. He smiled at me. He said softly, “Don’t you see, Anne?”
    I waited.
    â€œThe reason I love the way he looks,” said Howard, “is that he looks like you.”
    I moved my hand across the white linen and caressed his warm skin. I loved him so deeply I wanted to cry, and laugh, to melt into this warm skin, to rip his clothes from his back and feel him inside me (after all these years still I want this).
    â€œDad!” said Sam very seriously, hauling back a chair, “all their ski stuff’s on sale .”
    â€œ Cool ,” said Howard, and smiled.
    So Howard had offered a reason for the pleasure he took in Sam, and it was me. I felt my heart skip a beat. A clichéd expression, the heart, a beat, but it feels that way. A surge of love causes brief cardiac arrhythmia, and for some reason we aren’t alarmed.
    At the same time, I’m fully aware that Howard thinks of Sam very much in terms of his own flesh, because in everything Sam is and in everything Sam does, Howard sees himself.
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    WE HAVE EATEN DINNER, AND Howard is on the sofa watching a TV show a friend has produced. He holds the remote as if it were a shotgun, menacing the screen on the wall. I come, stand in front of him. He glances up and freezes the image. I sit, he puts his arm around me, and I briefly summarize my encounter with the producer at King’s Road Café. Howard merely grunts a fillip of disgust and says, “Asshole.” Howard has seen it all. He aims the remote, and we watch a bit of the show together. “Hm,” says Howard. Yes, I say, agreeing with him. Dismal. It will be a huge hit.
    I go to my office to get the list of books I’ve jotted down, and I come back and spend a half hour on the sofa showing him my list and talking to him about What Is Visual, or as he concretizes it, What Literature Is Translatable to the Screen. I mention the Thackeray, and he gives me the odd look it deserves, then waits patiently as I sketch out one of the subplots, and his look changes,and he starts nodding. And, Howard, look at Boswell for that matter, not just the work, although the cinematic case could be made for that, but look at his papers, the diaries, believed destroyed, all miraculously discovered in the past fifty years. I said it struck me that Darren Aranofsky (Howard had just met with him) could have a postmodernist field day. I meant, well, Boswell : Now here was a genius both charming and repellent, someone both completely honest and, by good fortune, graphomanic, who by the age of twenty-three, when he met Johnson and began the biography, never wrote down a single thing at the time he heard it, as he had trained himself to remember, verbatim, every word, every gesture, every tone and remark of social discourse.
    Here was the Scotsman who guided the very English, London-centric, devoutly anti-Presbyterian Johnson on his improbable, ultimately wildly successful tour of Scotland’s primitive Highlanders. Now that was a buddy movie. Boswell knew absolutely everyone in literary England in the last half of the century, and he was a social genius, a literary artist, a brilliant conversationalist, and a deeply imaginative interviewer. I list a few actors I’d idly envisioned in the roles, two production designers Howard admires, an excellent costume woman from Cardiff, now living in Santa Monica. Howard mentally ticks them off with interest.
    So the next day I redid the book list. I enjoyed it immensely. That evening we have dinner with our friends David and Ellie Trachtenberg. David does some kind of