You or Someone Like You Read Free Page B

in wonderment. Casey is looking, too.“I’d forgotten the power of the goddamn thing,” he says. “Look.” Stacey and I turn. Two Guatemalan busboys attack each other with invisible rapiers. The restaurant’s manager, coaching them, tilts the hand of one of the boys as it holds an invisible sword, pitching it, like Howard’s voice, into a perfect affectation of Elizabethan style. There , the manager says with satisfaction, good boy, that’s how we’d have done it on the set. We hear him say, “Shakespeare,” and hesitantly, in heavy accents, the busboys repeat the strange name.
    Todd Black, a producer Howard knows, comes over to our table to say something to Howard. Stacey leans toward me. “Listen,” says Stacey. “Anne.” It’s a proposition. “Would you make me a reading list?”
    I look at her. She is quite serious.
    â€œWhat you think is important,” says Stacey. “No,” she corrects herself immediately, “what you think is good.”
    Well, I say. Why me?
    â€œYou read,” she says, simply enough.
    Howard overhears. He turns slightly, toward us. “Make her a list, Anne,” he says to me, smiling.
    I don’t really know her that well. She’s Howard’s friend, not mine. They invariably are. Stacey is waiting, Howard and Casey and Sam are watching me. I think, Well, Howard has the same degree, after all. And he has the teaching position. She could ask him. She works with him, not me, on the movies; it would be more professionally strategic for her. Yet she is asking me. And it is impossible to overestimate the pleasure of being included. Even for one who has never much wanted to be.
    Certainly, I say. If you like.
    I assume it is merely because I have the doctorate in English literature, which impresses them more than it should. That I read a lot is one of the only things they know about me, even though Howard and I have been here for twenty-five years. I have always preferred it that way. In fact I assume that I myself am not actually material. I just happen to know the books.
    But I smile, thinking about some titles. I say to her, I think we can come up with some very nice possibilities.
    Todd registers this exchange. He returns to his table, where there are several people on Paramount’s production side, and I see him lean down and say something to Brian Lipson, who then makes a comment to a woman from the Universal lot.
    Â 
    AT 11:00 A.M . THE FOLLOWING morning I park next to our house, open the kitchen door, temporarily compromised by all my packages. Denise appears, and I hand her a large wrapped bouquet of flowers. The cone of crackling cellophane is like a lady’s inverted organza ball gown, the flowers many delicate feet. Denise accepts the cone from me and sets it on the kitchen counter. She will deal with the flowers when she’s ready.
    They’re from Mark’s Garden on Ventura, I say.
    â€œYou was there?” She is not making conversation. She hadn’t thought I’d had time to go that far. I say, Yes, I was, there was an alarming lack of traffic. She goes back to her work.
    I deposit the car keys next to the flowers, go to my office and lay down my books, the old ones and the three I just bought at Book Soup. I carry my new blouse upstairs, take it out of the bag, and hang it in the closet. I wash my hands and face and brush my teeth, use a clean white towel, and then go to the library. I sit down and stare at the shelves. I take out a pad of paper. I am slightly irritated. I have been thinking about Stacey’s list, and it will not coalesce. I hesitate. There are her interests to consider, there is topicality. What would resonate with her. Then it comes to me. I write down the first title. My eyes move along the shelves. I write down another. I open up my Norton Anthology, which leads to other things. Soon I am fascinated, suffused with pleasure. When the phone