You or Someone Like You Read Online Free PDF

Melanie.
    â€œOf course. Josh?”
    â€œGot it,” he said.
    This is not a book club, OK?
    â€œNo,” she said, “I understand.” Oh, and she wondered if J. J. Abrams might join us, because she’d mentioned it to J.J., and he loved the idea.
    Who was J. J. Abrams?
    A director, she said. Great energy.
    Oh, yes. Of course. (I had met him somewhere.) If you’ll call him, that’s fine. So that’s three of you, then.
    A studio executive, an entertainment lawyer, and a director. I thought about it, potentially pleased.
    I went to warn Denise. There always has to be food.
    Â 
    HOWARD AND I WERE MARRIED by a justice of the peace just before 8:00 P.M. at City Hall. My parents were in Burma. They sent their blessings.
    Howard’s parents were more complicated. On a frigid February day about two months before the ceremony we took the 1 subway from Columbia in Harlem, changed to the 2 train at West 96th Street, and got out in Brooklyn at Borough Hall. Down Court Street, across Atlantic Avenue, left on Dean Street. This was when one scanned the sidewalks in that neighborhood for danger. They had gathered in the living room, his mother and father, several aunts, an uncle and so on. I was nineteen; Howard, twenty. Stuart, Howard’s brother, was three years his junior. They kept kosher. They handed me cookies and cups as if I was infectious. I tried to catch Howard’s eye, but he was engaged in a side argument with his father about LBJ.
    At one point he slipped me upstairs to show me his boyhood bedroom. Well, I whispered to him, the conversation is as iced as the weather.
    He was looking around. “They turned my room into storage .”
    Howard?
    After a moment he said, “Things are fine.”
    I said, Well, I’d hardly call this “fine.” You know perfectly well they’re against it.
    â€œIt’s none of their goddamn business,” he said gently.
    His reticence at discussing it was an emotional default, I knew.As we walked back down the stairs, he held my hand till our knees became visible to the living room and then he released it. He said, moving toward the large kitchen, “When do we eat!”
    His mother glanced at me, very briefly. “This one eats?”
    I don’t think he heard.
    Still it seemed simple to me at the time. Upstairs in his room, Howard had put his arms around me, bearlike, carefully so as not to make noise. “I love you,” he had whispered simply. So I take it back; we did discuss it, or, to be precise, Howard gave me what seemed to me at that time the only response I could have asked from him. I thought it was the only thing either of us needed. And it was, then.
    Stuart made it tolerable. He offered me chairs when they didn’t. It was subtle and typically Stuart, the instinctive diplomat and negotiator, pouring oil on the waters. He talked with me. I asked about kosher. “Kashrut,” said Stuart with a smile. So what was eaten with what, how did they do it? He rolled his eyes, said with equanimity that his parents were self-delusioned, and, in whatever was not self-delusion, hypocrites and fakes. “Do you see two fuckin’ sinks?” He dismissed it. I gleaned that he and Howard had given definitive, if not violent, notice on the Kashrut Question several years ago, and a delicate truce had been forcibly established in which the parties had agreed not to issue statements.
    It was Stuart who explained—Howard had never mentioned it to me—that up until a matter of months before he met me Howard’s mother had contrived to introduce him to a succession of Orthodox girls. I said, Really? with some astonishment, and before I could ask more, Stuart added, “They wear wigs . OK?” It was Stuart who, when they weren’t looking, put his hands around his neck and pretended to strangle himself. “Why are you guys laughing?” Howard asked, annoyed. The odd thing, in retrospect,