You or Someone Like You by Chandler Burr Page B

boat.”
    Whose worth’s unknown, although its height
    be taken.
    â€œThe star’s ‘height’ is its location, for use by navigators.”
    Love alters not with Time’s brief hours and weeks,
    But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
    If this be error and upon me proved
    I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
    â€œYou will decide for yourselves, of course, but when I first read this I took him to be warning me that if my girlfriend ever cheated on me, I’d better be able to work through it.” He eyes them pointedly. “Just my interpretation. Either that, or he’s being hopelessly idealistic, which you may come to believe. I don’t know. But in the final couplet Bill’s saying he’s betting everything he ever wrote on being right on this baby.”
    And Howard laughs.
    It was his theory that what they actually liked was hearing their own conversations, their own dark dorm-room thoughts and secret masturbatory interests and desperate erections and romantic young dreams, in late Middle English. As for Howard, he adored the words themselves. With his own son, he was somewhat stricter in his literary choices, attempting to find less NC–17 literature. He started with words. “Why is there no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger?” Howard asked when Sam was five years old, and Sam’s eyes got big as saucers, sitting up straight at the dinner table. “English muffins weren’t invented in England nor French fries in France.”
    â€œReally?” asked Sam, very seriously.
    Sam already knew from my father that sweetmeats were candy, and he knew that sweetbreads were calves’ glands because months before in Paris, at Le Train Bleu, after I placed his seat so he could see the trains arriving at the Gare de Lyon, and having gravely considered the long menu I translated for him, he had ordered them from the amused yet respectful waiter. But when Howard pointed out that sweetmeats aren’t meat while sweetbreads are, it surprised him.
    We went skiing in Aspen, and Howard’s outburst prompted Sam to ask how it can be cold as hell one day and hot as hell another. I’ve spawned a tape recorder, said Howard to me.
    What’s “spawned,” Dad? said Sam.
    Ask your mother, said Howard.
    Howard measured Sam’s developmental phases both by his increasing linguistic sophistication and by the way he reacted to Medieval poetry. Sam absorbed it without a hiccup. Sitting on his six-year-old’s bed, bedtime promptly at 8:30, covers up around Sam’s chin, Howard perched his reading glasses on his nose and read.
    â€œI Have a Yong Sister,” intoned Howard.
    I have a yong sister
    Fer
    â€œFar,” said Howard
    beyonde the see;
    Manye be the druries
    â€œDruries are gifts, Sam.”
    That she sente me.
    She sente me the cherye
    Withouten any stoon,
    â€œStone,” said Howard, “cherry pit.”
    And so she dide the dove
    Withouten any boon.
    â€œWithout any bones,” Howard said to Sam. “Cool, huh!”
    â€œ Dad ,” shouted Sam, twisting the sheets, and then set about repeating the lines back.
    As he grew, the sheets of Samuel’s bed became glowing, luminous membranes. Howard had bought him flashlights. I had to make him stop. Bedtime was bedtime. At least I didn’t fear fire. In Virginia Woolf’s comic novel Orlando I saw Sam exactly: “The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper worm and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away, and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder.” I took it as a warning, but I didn’t tell Howard. He would have been alarmed had I told him I was using Orlando , which is about an immortal boy who turns into a woman, as an operating manual for Sam.
    Why do you park in the driveway, Sam asked Howard on the 405 heading for a Lakers