You or Someone Like You Read Free

asphalt street as it meets the stop sign on Mulholland Drive, across from Cahuenga Peak, just the other side from Universal Studios and above the 101.
    Â 
    THE VARIOUS BOOK CLUBS STARTED a year ago during one of Howard’s Shakespeare recitations at dinner at the Hamburger Hamlet on Sunset Boulevard. Howard told a reporter at some point that the credit was mine because I mentioned something that set him into motion that evening. But it wasn’t. It was Howard.
    On the other hand, we were eight at the table and had just ordered when Stacey Snider asked me about a reading list, so you could say that Stacey began it.
    I had stopped there in the afternoon to make the reservation; it’s an industry place, but in a low-key way. “Certainly,” the hostess had said. She wrote it down. She gave me a delicious smile. “So where are you from ?”
    New York, I said. She seemed to find that logical, somehow. Mine is such a strange accent, neither entirely one thing nor another, and naturally people become curious. I thanked her and went outside where the valet, a well-scrubbed boy, had watched over the convertible, and I tipped him.
    Howard had brought Casey Silver with him from the studio as well as Jennifer, Howard’s assistant. Sam had gotten his driver’s license a few months before and had driven down Coldwater Canyon from school with his friend Jonathan Schwartz. They’d been playing intramural basketball, and their teenage bodies, though they had showered at school, were still flushed from their exertions and the residual thrill of driving without adults. I had come from Griffith Park (via the flower shop, via the house), where I had spent the afternoon reading on one of the benches near the tennis courts. Staceycame on her own. Josh Krauss, an agent, dashed in as the waitress was handing us menus.
    Stacey and Howard had a mutual interest in a feature to be produced by a good friend of hers. Stacey would executive produce, if it went through. She was on my left, we were chatting about an actor she’d gotten to know during a recent shoot, and she leaned over to look at my book, which I’d placed next to my bread plate. John Ruskin, 1819–1900. One of the great Victorian art critics. I had just read his description of his first ever view of the Swiss Alps, at sunset, and Stacey picked up the book, opened to it, and read it to me: “‘The walls of lost Eden could not have been more beautiful.’” Ruskin was fourteen at the time, Sam’s age three years ago. “‘I went down that evening from the garden-terrace of Schaffhausen with my destiny fixed in all that was to be sacred and useful.’”
    She turned some pages slowly. Smiled, glanced at Sam. “College a year from now.”
    I was startled, and I hesitated. Though it was barely September, she had sensed the loss I already felt from Sam’s future departure.
    Am I so obvious, I said.
    â€œYou’re never obvious, Anne,” she said, smiling. Her gaze moved back to the Ruskin. They often comment on the fact that I always have a book. The tone is sometimes vaguely curious, as if reading were an eccentricity. Usually they glance at the cover, then turn to the menu.
    Casey looked at the book in Stacey’s hand, and it reminded him. “So, Howard,” he said slyly. “We’re here.”
    Howard, who knew exactly what he meant, just gave him an owlish look, so I explained to Josh, who was not following, that it was because of Sam. Hamburger Hamlet was where we had introduced Sam to Shakespeare. And I turned to Howard, because the subject had come up, and we were with friends, and it was a beautiful evening, and, moreover, it was time.
    â€œWhen young Hamlet came from college,” Howard explained, looking around the table at us, each in turn (“That’s mine,” he toldthe waitress who had just appeared, pointing out the iced tea), “full of new ideas and