You Don't Have to Live Like This (15 page)

For some reason Beatrice had dropped off the map. I saw her at Robert’s house but that was it. And maybe once or twice every couple of weeks, I substituted at Kettridge High and had lunch in the school cafeteria with Gloria Lambert.

T
he first day I got called in was early October, very cold and rainy, real Monday-morning-blues weather. Reception smelled of wet clothes and too many kids. Nobody cared what my background was in, they just gave me a textbook and the attendance card and sent me out to teach. By “they” I mean the assistant principal, Mrs. Sanchez.

“We’re starting you off nice and easy,” she said. “Ninth-grade math. Fractions.”

I said, “I haven’t thought about fractions in twenty years.”

Mrs. Sanchez had long, artificial, brightly painted nails. Her office was full of spider plants. One window looked into the reception area, the other had a view of a corridor. She had her degrees on the wall, from Wayne State and Marygrove College, alongside photographs of kids—Mrs. Sanchez sometimes had her arm around them. The tube lighting on the ceiling cast no shadows, it seemed designed to grow the plants. You couldn’t see any outside weather, and the office felt warm from all the lights.

She said, “I wouldn’t worry overmuch about fractions.”

When I got to the classroom, a few minutes before the bell, the
door was open and kids were not only coming in but going out, too, talking in the hall,
visiting
—for some reason, all kinds of spinsterish words like that came into my head. Then the bell went off, as loud as a fire alarm, and I stuck my neck out into the hall and said, “Everybody get in who’s coming in.”

It was a relief to say something out loud. I was talking so much in my own head, talking to myself and looking at everything and feeling blank and tired. A few kids came in and I shut the door. Then about ten seconds later another kid walked in, and I said, “Okay, that’s it, you’re the last one,” and stood by the door with my back against it. Then someone else tried to get in.

“Hey, what the fuck,” came a voice on the other side of the door. Some of the kids in the classroom heard him and laughed.

One of them called out, “Hey, Nugent, you late. It’s a lockout.”

“What do you mean, it’s a lockout?”

While this was going on, I stood there, pressing my back against the door and not saying anything.

“Sub’s here and he’s locking you out.”

Then Nugent said, “What’s he like?”

The kid talking to him had an Eagles jersey on, which was meant to be short-sleeved but came over his elbows on the arms and hung around his chair like a dress.

“Harry Potter,” the kid said.

“All right, keep it down.”

“You gonna let me in?”

“I saw you in the hall. I said, everybody get in who’s coming in. You didn’t come in.”

“I had something to do.”

“You were eating a candy bar,” I said.

“I was hungry.”

“So go get something to eat.”

“You don’t understand, I’m like on some watch list. I get one more absence, they give me detention and I got to come after school.”

“You should have thought of that before.”

“I didn’t know we had no sub today with a stick up his ass.”

“Well, now you know.”

“Man, fuck this. This is unreasonable. No way I’m going to detention for this. I’ll tell you what happen next. They put me on suspension for not going to detention. Then I’ll drop out of school and be like one of them corner kids because of you. And all because you wouldn’t open this damn door.”

I let him in.

By lunchtime I felt like I was coming down with flu—physically sore and stiff. My head ached, the institutional-strength classroom lights hurt my eyes. I looked out for Gloria in the cafeteria and sat down at her table but not near enough to talk. After lunch, when she got up to bus her tray, I bused mine, too, and said, “Can I talk to you?”

“What about?”

“I just need a friendly voice.”

“You can walk with me, I got class.”

She seemed short with me, officially polite, and I wondered if somehow I had annoyed her. But the truth is, she was probably being friendly enough. I didn’t know her well at all. Every time I taught at Kettridge I looked out for her in the lunchroom, and we found things to talk about or joined in the general conversation, and once I waited around after school by my car when I noticed it was parked close to hers. It was a Friday afternoon, the week before Thanksgiving, and a high-pressure front had cleared out the clouds. The big highway street lamps overlooking I-94 were already lit, and the sky had the almost white blue color of a late winter afternoon. It was cold, too; the metal of the car door felt chilly on my butt as I leaned against it.

“You waiting for somebody?” Gloria said, shifting the bag on her hip to look for her keys.

“I thought maybe we could go for a drink. It’s Friday night.”

“Most Friday nights I have a bath and go to bed. Saturday night’s going-out night.”

“How about tomorrow then?” But I remembered I couldn’t. Astrid and I had a date. “Actually I can’t tomorrow, let’s just have a beer tonight.”

It was rush hour, and the noise of the freeway gave a funny urgency to the conversation and made everything seem somehow temporary and important. The world outside was the world of traffic and commutes and stretched from here to Ann Arbor and Brighton and Auburn Hills, on 96 and 94 and 75 and 696.

“I told you I’m tired. I get cranky when I’m tired. If you want to ask me out just ask me out.”

“I thought that’s what I was doing.”

“I don’t know what you’re doing. If you want to go out with a girl you don’t have to start teaching at her school.”

“But I wanted to do that, too. I’m not exactly overemployed at the moment.”

“That’s all this is. You don’t know what to do with yourself. I can’t even tell if you like me very much. All you ever do at lunch is try to argue with me.”

“I argue with everybody.”

“That’s just what I mean. Listen, I told you I’m cranky. You got my number, if you want to give me a call give me a call.”

“Well, how am I supposed to know if you like me?”

“That’s one of those things you figure out for yourself.”

There was something immature about all this, her tiredness and the way she got annoyed. Her face was very smooth and boyish, she was as short as a kid and acted like a kid in school sometimes,
for the sake of her students. She had a lot of energy, but when it ran out, there was nothing left and this is what she was like. On Sunday evening I gave her a call and asked her to join me for the big political fund-raiser Robert James was putting on. Tickets were $300, but I could get in as a friend and bring a date. The Wrenfields were booked to play, along with Anita Baker and Chairmen of the Board. Obama was supposed to be coming with Michelle and the girls.

“Well, in that case,” she said.

I TOLD NOLAN ABOUT THIS,
and he said, “What you want to go out with her for?”

We were jogging around Butzel Park, mostly on the street because the sidewalks were covered in snow. Just after Thanksgiving a low-pressure front blew in and dumped a foot of snow all over the city. I opened the window one morning and looked out on countryside—white fields. But it didn’t last, not like that. The only good thing to come out of all this, Nolan once said, is that the fucking streets get plowed. Even so, we took it pretty slow, since the asphalt was full of cracks and holes and some of the plowed snow had melted again and frozen overnight. Slow suited me fine; it was cold enough my lungs hurt breathing.

“What kind of question is that? The usual reasons.”

“That’s what I’m saying. You just want to go out with a black woman.”

“I thought she was a friend of yours.”

“She is a friend of mine.”

“Did you used to go out with her or something? Is that what this is?”

“Naw, I’m not the kind of asshole she goes for.”

“What kind is that?”

“White ones,” he said. “Anyway, aren’t you going out with somebody?”

“Not really.”

We were kidding around, which suited me fine, since I wanted to let him know one way or another. Nolan reduced many things to black and white; it didn’t mean he was more pissed off than usual. And we kept jogging along on flat feet, blowing steam and pulling our sleeves down over our hands. But somehow this put me in a bad mood and after the run I got into an argument with Nolan about Obama. He said he was just like every other president, a front man for big business. We were standing outside Nolan’s house, in wet snow, sweating and cooling down. I don’t care what else you want to say about him, I said, but to have a black man in the Oval Office makes you a witness to history. Am I supposed to be grateful, Nolan asked. Oh give me a break, I said, and started walking away.

G
loria lived about a ten-minute drive east of me, just at the border with Grosse Pointe, on the Detroit side. One block farther, and the mansions began—well, not mansions exactly, but big old suburban houses, with privately maintained lawns out front and publicly maintained trees shading the road. But on Gloria’s street there were still boarded-up garages and empty lots. There weren’t any trees, except growing wild in the lots, and the houses had cheap sidings and no driveways. They looked like kid-size milk cartons, one after the other, all lined up.

I crawled along the curb reading numbers and pulled up outside the only apartment block, a yellow-and-brown brick building, probably built in the 1930s, with dozens of small windows and a fancy entrance. There were pillars on either side and a kind of ziggurat pattern cut out of the brickwork overhead.

Gloria lived on the fourth floor. I rang the bell and she let me in and I walked up the concrete stairwell—three out of the four landing lights were broken. But her apartment was warm and bright, she had simple tastes, there was a rug on the floor and a couple of chairs, a coffee table, there were plants on the window ledges and a drop leaf table pushed up against one of them, where it looked
like she ate her meals. It was the living room of a single person who thinks, now I will sit here, now I will sit here. I knew what that was like myself.

“How long have you been in this place?” I said.

“Two years come Christmas. But I grew up in the building. My mom still lives in it.”

“That’s pretty close.”

“Close enough. But there’s another entrance. You got to go out and come back in.” And then, “My daddy died. I’m the only child. I figured this was better than having her move in with me when she got too old.”

Gloria wore a green wool dress, with long sleeves, and dark tights—it was like she had only two things on. She had pulled something up and pulled something down. Her lips were painted the same bright wet color she wore the day I met her, at Bill Russo’s place in the country, and she had on a bright cheerful mood, too.

As we walked down to the car, she said, “What do you get to eat for three hundred dollars?”

“I think it’s a Thanksgiving theme.”

“That’s all right,” she said. “I’m one of those people that loves turkey. Leftovers, too. Turkey and gravy and mash potatoes, all of that.”

It was just after noon on the first Saturday in December. There was overnight snow on the ground and tiny, almost invisible specks of snow or rain falling through the air like salt. But the roads felt powdery under my tires and not icy or slick. We made good time.

A black SUV blocked the entrance to the parking lot and then pulled out of the way after I waved the clearance badge, which came with my invitation.

The old Wayne Conner plant used to be run by General Motors, to make diesel engines, but they shut down their diesel division in
1979. For the next twenty years it got leased to different companies, mostly light-truck manufacturers. Then it went empty. Robert James bought the plant in 2008 and rented it to a California web company, which hired the Kraemer Group, a Detroit architecture firm, to turn the factory space into office space.

It was a nice building. There were three lines of tall continuous windows running the length of each floor, and around the corners, too, and the brickwork was faded to a chalky shade of fall yellow. The main entrance wasn’t much to look at, just a couple of flat high gates, with a smaller door cut into one of them, which is the one we used. Two Secret Service guys in black suits and overcoats stood by the gates, doing the eye-roll patrol, and another woman in a temporary booth sat with a space heater blowing at her feet and checked our names against the guest list.

But inside was warm. We walked through a metal-detector arch and somebody took our coats and gave us a ticket. Behind the coat-check table you could see, through internal windows, row after row of graphite-gray cabinets sprouting red and blue wires. The hum was about as loud as the noise of the sea when you’re sitting on the beach. But the party was upstairs, in the open-plan office area, and much louder.

Somebody had rigged a projector to one of the computers, to show a football game against part of the white wall. Because that’s what you do on Thanksgiving, I guess, watch football . . . Michigan was playing Ohio State and the band was still on the field when we arrived, a few minutes before kickoff. Then the players ran out of the tunnel, looking about ten feet tall and stippled like golf balls against the office paneling. Even over the noise of the party you could hear the trumpets of the marching band. I got a little buzz off it and took a beer from one of the drinks tables, and gave one to Gloria.

“See anybody you know?” she said, and I said, “I want you to meet an old friend of mine,” because Beatrice was talking to Cris by the floor-length window.

“Listen,” Gloria said. “If someone tries to introduce us to the president, I’m just saying if it happens, don’t expect me to say a word. You’ll have to do the talking. I don’t think I could.”

“I haven’t seen him yet.”

Cris and Beatrice seemed to be in midflow, but we wandered over anyway. Beatrice was listening and Cris was saying, “You know what I keep thinking about, I keep thinking about the fact that there are all these stories men have, you know, when they’re confessing things to you, which is what they do to show they can talk to women, and it kind of works when you’re just starting to go out and sitting in some nice restaurant, and it’s exactly these stories which you can’t bear to hear once you’re married to them. Hello, Marny,” she said. “I’m being disloyal for once in my life. It’s wine at lunch. Don’t grass on me. Introduce me.”

“This is Gloria, she teaches at the high school where I sometimes substitute. Cris used to be a lawyer.”

“That’s a terrible introduction,” Cris said.

Outside the snow started coming down heavier, the salt had turned into corn puffs, and the second-floor factory window showed all of it, about a hundred feet wide. Beyond the parking lot I could see a raised highway, and beyond that and underneath it some temporary storage facilities and container units half buried in snow. There wasn’t much traffic on the highway but what there was kept coming just as steady as the snow. At one point I noticed a stream of black SUVs approaching and figured the president had arrived.

Tony stood watching the game, and I excused myself and went over to him.

“Who’s that black girl you came in with?”

“Someone I teach with. Cris is on a roll.”

“We had a fight,” he said.

Clay Greene was there, too, with a glass of champagne in his hand. “You’re a young man,” he said, “and I’m going to give you a little advice, which you’re not going to take. But it’s good advice. Apologize. Tell her what she thinks you did wrong, and apologize for that. Do it now and you can still enjoy yourselves this afternoon.” He seemed already a little drunk.

“Where did you get that?” I said, pointing at the champagne flute.

He looked at me vaguely. “Robert gave it to me.”

So I left my beer somewhere and went over to find Robert. I looked for Gloria, but by this point she was talking to Beatrice alone, and somehow I liked seeing the two of them together. Anyway, I wanted to bring her back a glass of champagne.

The room was large and full of people, the ceilings were low and we had to crowd ourselves around the office furniture. I pushed past men in suits and women in cocktail dresses, and guys in jeans and girls wearing heels and jeans or heels and miniskirts. There was a smattering of black faces. Robert had invited local businessmen, community-representative types, but he’d also given free passes to some of the new immigrants. There was a lottery system. People from the five neighborhoods could sign up, and later they found out if their name was on a list.

Robert wanted to play on the story of the Pilgrims’ feast; the Thanksgiving theme was his idea. Like it was native Detroiters who gave of their bounty to provide this meal, who welcomed us in. But the fact is most guests had to pay through the nose, and the money went to the Michigan Democratic Party.

Waitresses in white aprons and waiters in stiff white shirts served up little paper plates of food on silver trays. I ate a mini tur
key burger with stuffing on top and ended up carrying around, then crumpling into my pocket, a salty paper cone that held sweet potato fries. In a side room, I saw Robert sitting on a rigged-up stage, with bright lights shining in his face that made him look powdered or rouged. He was talking to a guy with a mic.

“One thing we discussed,” Robert said, “one thing that worried me, is how
big
to make these neighborhoods.” His voice was gently amplified. There were people standing around, drinking and eating and watching. Robert sat in an office swivel chair; he looked very comfortable. “And in the end what I decided was, they should roughly add up to a midsize college campus. There’s a reason people have such nostalgic feelings in this country about their four years of college. And it isn’t just the football team. It’s because college is really the only time in our lives that most of us get to live in the kind of small-town community that we still associate with the founding of this country. And by the way, the Pilgrims on the whole were young, they were a young group of people, some of them were starting out in life for the first time, marrying and setting up a household and raising kids, and some of them had been out in Holland and were having a second or a third chance at it, starting over from scratch. And when you look around you, not just here and today, but in those neighborhoods, and you can imagine that I sometimes like to take a quiet walk around them, what you see is more or less . . .”

I spotted Kurt Stangel, wearing a fat tie, and he came over to me and said in a low voice, “Have you seen Sean Penn?”

“Is he here?”

“They’ve got a documentary room, where people can go up and talk into a camera. Anyway, Eddie saw Sean hanging out there with Micky Dolenz.”

“What do you mean, Micky Dolenz?”

“What do you mean
what do you mean
? The guy from the Monkees. All these LA types hang out together when they’re in town. You wanna go see?”

So we wandered out again, and on the way I picked up another beer. A guy in a pale gray pinstripe suit said, “Who’s running this show?” and somebody else said, “Robert James.”

“Who he?”

They were standing together by the drinks table, in everybody’s way, and when people pushed past they excused themselves very politely and didn’t move.

“One of these hedge fund types. He retired at like thirty and doesn’t know what to do with himself, so he does this.”

“Throw parties?”

Pinstripes had psoriasis on the back of his hands and kept scratching at it; the other guy was shorter and looked Jewish.

“No, this is just a publicity stunt. I mean, the whole neighborhood thing. Premature gentrification. He’s trying to get Obama’s attention.”

“So is he coming or not?”

“Don’t bet on it. He’s in Oslo for the Peace Prize.”

Then we got our beers and Kurt asked one of the waiters where the documentary room was. But it wasn’t a room. A kind of gallery overlooked the factory floor. There was a big open column of space in the middle of the building with a skylight on top made of small square panes. The afternoon light came in and fell like snow. You could hear the computers below giving off heat.

Somebody had put together an exhibition on the gallery walkway. (Later I met the guy, a German named Kellerman about my age, whom Robert had recently hired as artistic adviser. He dressed like a banker and spoke English English.) There were paintings and photographs on the walls, a lot of disaster kitsch, Detroit land
scapes, burned-out houses and teddy bears in the snow. I found it depressing, the way artists go for this stuff, like it’s any more real than daffodils. There were also found-object displays and video installations, not just by professional artists but by some of the locals, too—mostly kids, with their names and grades and high schools labeled underneath. I looked out for Kettridge High but didn’t see it.

A long queue around one of the corners turned out to be the line for the documentary station. Kellerman had had the bright idea of inviting people to talk about what brought them to Detroit in the first place. So he set up a chair against one wall and pointed a camera at it. A chunky, short-haired woman in Doc Martens and a yellow floral dress kept people moving along.

I noticed Don Adler in the queue, but the rest of the crowd looked younger. The guy talking when we walked past said he graduated from the University of Chicago in 2005, then moved in with some friends who were renting a house by Wicker Park. For a while he lived off money from his dad, who worked for Aerotek in Maple Grove, Minnesota. His dad was an engineer, which was one of the reasons he studied engineering. But then his dad got laid off and couldn’t afford to send him pocket money. By this point he was willing to take anything and signed up to a call center agency. They found him a job at a travel insurance company, which had some vacancies in the night shift. This meant leaving the house at ten o’clock in the evening and coming back at eight a.m. Then he slept till lunchtime, but often overslept, and found himself wandering out to buy milk at four in the afternoon and feeling weird.

Meanwhile, he and one of the girls he lived with got engaged. She worked as a teaching assistant at a public elementary school in Evanston, but they didn’t have enough money to rent a place of their own and didn’t know anyone in Evanston to share a house with. The commute was about forty minutes each way and she found it
draining. Even before they got married, which was last year, she became pregnant, and they needed to think of some other arrangement, not even to make their life tolerable, but just to make it feasible. After five minutes a light came on and it was somebody else’s turn to talk.

“Have you seen Sean Penn?” I said to Kurt, and he pointed.

It didn’t look like Sean Penn to me and then I realized it was probably Micky Dolenz. He was one of those fifty-year-old guys with a little boy’s face under the stubble and gray hair. Later I realized he was closer to sixty-five. Micky was sitting in front of a video installation, and Kurt and I took up a couple of empty seats in the row behind him. The video screen showed two women talking. One of the women was white and one was black, they were sitting on opposite ends of a brown couch, and suddenly I realized that the white woman was Astrid.