You Don't Have to Live Like This (34 page)

“I can’t wait in that waiting room anymore,” I said, but it turned out I didn’t have to, I could go home.

For a couple of minutes I sat in the hallway and drank the coffee. There was a bench pushed up against one of the walls, under a row of portrait photographs, judges and officers of the court. People walked past. There were other cases and trials, and a janitor took a mop to the marble floors.

Then Robert came looking for me. He was wearing what he usually wears, clean jeans, collared shirt, a North Face jersey—the rich man’s modest uniform. The only thing he spent money on was his wristwatch, a Patek Philippe. Sometimes you see ads for these watches in glossy magazines, a handsome middle-aged father and his son waiting at a train station in black and white. The caption says: “Make your own tradition.” Robert had a little boy now. His curly hair receded slightly, but it didn’t matter, his face hadn’t changed. Even in college, his skin looked weathered—from sailing, you couldn’t help thinking. The truth is, I always found his presence comforting, like one of those magazines. The world of the rich, everything’s going to be okay.

“What are you going to do now?” he said.

“Go home.”

“You need a ride? I need some fresh air anyway. God, people stink after a while. I probably smell, too.” In the car, he said, “They gave you a pretty hard time in there. I’m sorry about that. I thought they might.”

“Yeah, well.”

“Don’t worry about it, Marny. You did okay, you did good.”

“I don’t know what I did,” I said.

For the next two days, I mooched around at home, reading the news. There was a lot of media coverage. Nolan had become like a
minor-league celebrity in Detroit. He was an artist and activist and publicly associated with protests against the new neighborhoods. I saw more pictures of Nolan, photographs taken in the hospital, showing open wounds, a real beat-up guy, a guy who had been kicked in the head and was now standing trial. While prosecutors refused to charge the man who kicked him.

There was speculation about what had actually happened. One theory went that Nolan drove over to Robert’s house, with a gun in his pants, to confront him or threaten him or shoot him, because of the Meacher case. But I also found a few things out about Nolan’s defense. Barrett was claiming that Nolan ran into Michael in the street and thought it was Robert’s kid. So he picked him up, he told him to get in the car, the kid looked lost. But Nolan was worried about showing up at the house with the boy, just like that, given the nature of his relationship to Robert James. So he took him to his mother’s house and waited for me to act as a kind of intermediary. What happened afterwards was the result of a misunderstanding—two angry guys refusing to listen to each other. But there was no kidnapping. That at least was the claim.

A few days later the phone rang, some time after lunch—there were still dirty dishes in the sink. I hadn’t cleaned up yet. It was Tony. Cris and he were throwing a little party, to celebrate, just the fact that it was all over; he wanted to pick me up on the way.

“So what happened?” I said.

“Guilty,” Tony said.

C
ris gave me a glass of champagne when I walked in the door. She was crying, not particularly unhappily. Her breasts were full of Jimmy’s milk, she wore a soft cotton dress, which you could pull down for easy access, even her tears looked like maternal overflow.

“I don’t much feel like celebrating,” I said.

“He took my son, he attacked my husband. And he’s going to sue us now, you know that, don’t you? Don’t expect sympathy from me. I’m having a moment, all right? Just for today we can say, it’s over, until the civil stuff starts up again.”

It was wet outside, the garden had melted into mud. The house was overwarm and overcrowded. The kids kept getting between our legs. Jimmy could walk now, he was a late walker, and wanted to chase Michael around, which Michael kind of liked. But it also meant, whenever he stopped running there was Jimmy all over him, with chocolate icing on his hands and face. It was five o’clock and cake had taken the place of supper.

At one point Robert picked up Jimmy and said, “Hey, fella, what are you, the chocolate monster?”

Peggy was back in New York. “You must miss Ethan,” I said.

“You see other kids, and it doesn’t matter if they want you to or not, you pick them up.”

In fact, Jimmy started crying and Cris took him off Robert’s hands.

“Listen,” Robert said, “at some point, it doesn’t have to be now, I want to talk to you.”

“Well, here we are.”

“Not now.”

“What’s this about?”

“Let’s have a couple of drinks and celebrate. This is a conversation that can wait.”

Walter and Dan Korobkin were in the kitchen. Beatrice was there, too, so was David, the posh English guy, her new boyfriend and agent. So were Bill Russo and Clay Greene. I could hear my name through the open door.

“People are talking about me again,” I said and went over to the sink to fill my glass from the tap. “Are you guys out in the open now? Do people know?”

“What does he mean?” David said. He was tall and soft-looking; the skin on his face seemed very lightly stippled. He had big hands.

“That you guys are an item.”

“Oh, everybody knows,” Walter said. “We’re making fun of her book.”

“What’s wrong with her book?”

“Everybody’s in it, everybody we know.”

“That’s just not true.” Beatrice was acting the pretty girl, maybe because of David. She had her hand on his arm. It turns out that she’s one of these girls who touches her boyfriend a lot. But then, she always used to put her hands on everybody, she flirted with everybody.

“Has she finished it?”

“I sold it,” David said.

“That’s terrific. That’s terrific news. How come everyone knows except me? Did this just happen?”

“A couple of days ago. There was a lot of action at the London Book Fair.”

“That’s wonderful news.” Cris came round with another bottle of champagne, and I took it off her hands and filled everyone up. “I want to toast something that isn’t a guy getting locked up,” I said. “So let’s toast you.”

“Marny,” Beatrice said.

“So let me in on the joke. Who’s in it?”

“Calm down, it’s okay. Anyway, that’s not how it works,” Beatrice said. “It’s not one person or another, you make things up. You put different people together.”

“You’re in it,” Walter said.

“Have you read it?” I asked him.

“The parts I could recognize.”

“How come everyone’s read this book except me?”

“We figured you had other things on your mind.”

Tony came in, but the doorbell rang. He put his hand around my neck and gripped it on his way out. I couldn’t tell yet what I felt about him.

“So how do you know it’s me?” I said. “What do I look like?”

“Harry Potter,” Bill Russo said.

“But that’s my line, Beatrice. I told you that story, you can’t use that.”

“That’s not what you should get worked up about,” Walter said.

Then the sun came out, through a wet sky, and Tony tried to persuade people out onto his new deck.

“We just had it put in,” he said. “It’s a three-thousand-dollar deck.”

Cris didn’t like him smoking in the house and he wanted to hand out cigars. Some of the men went out, Beatrice, too, but I stayed inside to talk to Cris. But then Jimmy needed changing and Michael followed her out. For a minute I had the kitchen to myself. I ran the tap and wet my hands and ran them through my hair. Then Beatrice came back in.

“It’s too cold out there. This is Detroit spring, which is like LA winter. People are crazy.”

“Was it me,” I said.

“Was what you?”

“What happened. Do I have a history of miscommunicating?”

“You were the only one talking to both sides.”

“I didn’t reconcile these different parts of my life. Do you think it’s possible, if I said something different to Nolan, or something different to Tony, that Nolan takes me to his house, and we pick up the kid and drive home, and none of this happens?”

“I thought you told me it could have been much worse.”

“That’s what I thought. But I don’t know anymore. Maybe that kind of thinking was part of the problem.” She let that go and I said, “Gloria’s not answering my calls.”

“Marny, I want to have this conversation with you. But I came in because I needed the bathroom. Give her time.”

I went outside and Tony said, “Where’s your drink?”

“I don’t much feel like celebrating.”

“We’re not celebrating,” he said. “We’re getting drunk, we’re letting our hair down, there’s a difference.”

“Well, I feel pretty drunk already.”

Walter was sitting by himself on one of the benches, smoking a cigar. “My dad gave me one of these to take back to Yale, the summer before senior year,” he said. “I sat in my window and blew smoke out into the courtyard, and somebody called the fire brigade.”

“Well, here we are, twenty years down the line. It’s a reunion.” He didn’t say anything and I said, “How are you doing?”

“Susie and I got married last week.”

“That’s wonderful, Walter. Does everyone know about that, too?”

“Just you. It’s not a big deal, it’s something we did for the sake of the adoption.”

“Are you guys going through with that?”

“We’ve got a kid lined up, Shawntell. Guess how she spells it.”

“No.”

“Like the boy’s name plus tell.”

“Can you change it if you want? I don’t know the rules.”

“We can but we won’t. We’re picking her up tomorrow, as soon as they let her out of the hospital. She’s got a little jaundice, nothing serious.”

“How old is she?”

“Twelve hours. The whole time you were in court, Susie was texting me. These days they let you take her home even before the legal side goes through.”

“Have you met the mother?”

“The mother picked us. She had a one-night stand with a guy on leave from Afghanistan. She was seventeen then, she’s eighteen now. The guy got killed six months ago. His name was Shawn, he was a friend of her brother. She didn’t have any particular feelings for him, and none of the grandparents is financially or emotionally prepared to deal with this. But she’s a smart girl, she wants to go to college. I’m helping her out with that, too.”

After a minute, I said, “Are you ready for her?”

“That’s all we’ve been doing, for eighteen months, looking after kids.”

“I know what you mean. You get sick of grown-ups after a while.”

“Well, you’ve had a tough few months.”

“It’s not just that. I’m through. Everything people do, everything they say, is just some clumsy form of self-defense.”

“Children in my experience are monsters of selfishness.”

“But I’ve seen people with their kids, there’s no separation. They’re all on the inside of something.”

“That’s only true for the first few years. But listen, Marny, I don’t know if I should tell you or not. But Beatrice’s book. There’s a guy who shoots a black guy who breaks into his house.”

“You’re kidding me. And I’m the guy?”

He nodded.

“Did you say something to her about it?”

“She said it doesn’t mean anything. She said it’s just the kind of stupid thing you think of.”

After a while I went inside to get another drink. The kids were still up, in front of the TV in the TV room, and I wandered in with a bottle in one hand and a glass in the other, and sat down on the floor at the foot of the couch. Cris sat behind me, with a kid on each side. They were watching
Sesame Street
.

“Do you want a drink?” I said.

“My glass is just over there.”

So I scooched across and reached it and came back.

“This is a good show,” I said. “You look comfortable.”

“Sometimes I just want to take these two in the car and drive somewhere, some cabin in the woods, and live like that, like we don’t need anybody else.”

“Is Tony allowed to come?”

“That depends on my mood. You think I’m one of those mothers.”

“I don’t think it’s just that. You’ve been retreating in this direction for years.”

“Maybe that’s right.”

When the show was over, I lay on my back and said, “Who wants to fly?”

“Don’t whiz them up, Marny, it’s getting-ready-for-bed time. You can help them clear up while I run the bath.”

So that’s what I did. We ended up on the carpet playing some stupid game with a toy telephone, all three of us. It wasn’t a toy exactly, but one of those old 1940s phones, an Olivetti rotary, which I bought with Walter at the 7 Day Swap out by Chalmers and Mack. This was in the days when I still cared about my apartment as a personality showcase. But it didn’t work and I gave it to Michael. If you hung up hard enough you could make it ping, which is what Jimmy kept doing. Since it got a reaction, he started hitting other things, and when I tried to take the phone away he hit me in the face. The earpiece caught my cheekbone under the eye. It was like somebody unplugged the nerves. I couldn’t feel anything, even my lip, or half of it, went numb.

“Jesus,” I said, standing up, and spilled the bottle of wine.

I went in the kitchen to get a kitchen towel.

“What happened to you?” Beatrice said.

“Is it bleeding?”

“Is what bleeding? You look like a sheet of paper.”

“I’m fine, I just need a drink.”

But maybe a half hour later I was talking to Robert in the living room, and my hands started feeling sticky. I touched my forehead but couldn’t tell if it was burning or freezing.

“Thanks,” Robert said.

“For what?”

He thought for a minute. When he couldn’t think of the right word or phrase he usually waited until it came to him. “For holding the line.”

“I didn’t know there was a line.”

“Okay.”

We stood there awkwardly; my head felt floaty, not quite right. “I’ve been meaning to ask you,” I said. “What’s in this for you?”

“What do you mean?”

“The whole thing. All of this. Two years of your life.”

“You know, in my circle right now, when we get together, a lot of us talk about real estate. The people I hang out with buy real estate. They complain about the prices, they brag about their deals, they act like it’s the only topic of conversation. And I sometimes think what they don’t realize is that it really is the only topic of conversation. I still rent our apartment in New York. None of this means to me what it means to other people. But I travel a lot, I see what it means. I was in Rio two weeks ago, and the people who invited me took me on one of these favela tours. You know, meet the natives. And I asked some guy, do you rent or own? And he kind of looked at me, and he said, when I needed a house, I built a house. When my father built his house, there was still land to build on, but now there isn’t any land, so I built on top of his. But you should see these houses. Two rooms. There are no gardens. The only private space for someone with a family is on the roof. So people take showers on the roof, they snack, they sit around. You can see it all from the funicular. It goes right overhead.”

“I don’t understand why you’re telling me this.”

“In some of these places I travel, there isn’t a woman over the age of twenty that you or I would consider sexually attractive. I’m serious about this, Marny. People talk a lot about Brazilian women, but in poor countries the only women we would consider attractive are young women. It costs money to stay attractive. I’m not even talking about cosmetic surgery. But diet, gym, free time, clothes, all of it costs money. In New York I see a lot of very attractive forty-
five-year-old women. But not one in the favelas. And it occurred to me that what’s really going on here is an inside-outside thing. A woman needs privacy to look good. She has to say to herself, I’m going out to face the world, and that means having somewhere to prepare herself. It’s a question of real estate.”

“The reason New York women look good is because they go to the gym, and the reason they go to the gym is they live in shit holes.”

“That’s not why. You don’t know these women—they live alone. This is a very recent thing. We have this whole idea of presenting ourselves that comes from having a room of our own. In poor countries, everybody eats together, everybody sleeps together, everybody lives in the street. But we build houses to go inside, which is fine, but then we have to deal with going out again.”

“Where do you get this shit, Robert? Nathan Zwecker? You think it’s only rich people who get neuroses? Everything you read about poverty tells you that it’s basically symbiotic with mental illness. They go hand in hand.”

“That’s what I mean. If you solve the real estate problem, you solve everything else.”

“You’re not making sense, but that’s not what I asked you anyway.”

I felt a fever coming on and wanted this conversation to stop. My head seemed to be the only thing staying still. There were bright spotlights in Tony’s living room, which made the ceiling swell and shift in its plane. The ground wasn’t too steady either. Robert thought I was waiting for him to say something.

“When I was at Yale,” he said, “all I wanted to do is make money. And then when I was twenty-eight years old, I made a lot of money. I never wanted to spend it, though, that’s not how I was brought up. I wanted to win.
That’s
how I was brought up. But then you’re
twenty-eight years old, and you think, what do I do now? It took me a long time to recover.”