You Don't Have to Live Like This

by Benjamin Markovits

  So Beatrice said, “I don’t have to sit here,” and stood up.

  Robert started going after her, but Clay put a hand on his shoulder. “Sit down, Robert, sit down. Have a glass of water.”

  When she was gone, Robert stopped talking for a few minutes and did what he was told. He had a glass of water. His face was pretty red; he always had a sandy complexion. But he was also a bit drunk and looked like a young Wall Street type after a bad day on the floor. Clay made a little general conversation. Have you enjoyed Yale? Do you think you’ve changed much since you were a freshman? What do you think you’ll remember about your time here?

  Walter answered, in his serious way, “I don’t think I’ll forget this dinner, sir.” Clay had the decency to smile.

  At the end, Robert tried to salvage something from the evening. He stood up and made a speech. “You all know Professor Greene,” he began, “but let me tell you a few things about him maybe you don’t know.” And so on. Finally he said (a line he had probably prepared): “I don’t need to tell you what opportunity looks like. It looks like this.”

  AS IT HAPPENS, CLAY AND Robert did go into business together. They opened their first office in New Haven, since it was convenient for the university. Robert was the only full-time employee; he was also a minority partner in the firm. They set up an office in Manhattan a year later.

  I kept hearing updates from Walter, who sometimes crashed at his place when he needed a weekend in the city. Robert had a small one-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village, with a fire escape balcony overlooking Chumley’s bar. By this stage he was paying himself something like a hundred thousand dollars in salary. Their monthly subscription rates went as high as thirty grand.

  Walter said he hadn’t changed at all, he looked just like he used to in college. Robert bragged that he never wore a tie to work. It was his job to bring in clients, something he turned out to be good at. Just before the dot-com crash, he sold his stake in the company for $17 million.

  7

  I stayed with Robert in Detroit for a little over two months. It took me that long to build up the nerve to move out, into a 1930s double-decker not ten blocks away, on a street in which about half the buildings had burned down. Also, I was waiting for Walter to come up from Indiana. We had a plan of living together for a while.

  For most of that time I had a pretty good time. In the morning, I went over to work on the house, which had broken windows and a leaky roof but looked presentable enough. Squatters had burned garbage and newspapers in the downstairs fireplace, and there were burn scars around the hearthstone. When I picked at the paint job a layer of wallpaper tore away with it. There was another layer underneath, leafy and yellow and rough to the touch, like the wallpaper in my grandmother’s house in Puyallup. As a kid, I used to rub my thumb against the grain; it made your elbows shiver.

  One summer in high school I volunteered for Habitat for Humanity, and a bunch of us middle-class teenagers stripped walls, sanded floors, and painted a run-down row of old Victorians outside of Denham Springs. Plumbing and roofing were beyond us, but we helped and watched. I kept thinking about that summer and what it meant that fifteen years later I was fixing up one of these down-and-out places for myself.

  There was no running water, and the toilets started out bone-dry. But the pipework seemed to be intact, which was lucky—people stole copper. Instead of grass, the garden grew mattresses, tires and broken bricks, but this kind of work I could do myself, with gloves on, and I spent most dry mornings wheelbarrowing junk from the backyard to the front. On wet days, the house felt pretty depressing since the upstairs living room ceiling dripped—not much, but enough to fill a bathtub someone had dragged under the drip. I spent maybe half an hour emptying this out, bucket by bucket, throwing the dirty water down the toilet. The damp smell wouldn’t go away, and every sunny day I forced open the crack-paned windows at the front and back to get a breeze going through.

  I didn’t like hanging around after dark. Also, I wasn’t in much hurry to move in. Mrs. Rodriguez, the cook, laid out hot lunch for us every day at Robert’s house, around the twenty-seater mahogany table in the dining room. So I came back for lunch. I looked forward to this walk all morning. You could see the neighborhood shifting from street to street. Burned-down houses were replaced by boarded-up houses were replaced by empty houses with for sale signs in the window. By the time I got to Robert’s house I had climbed about two-thirds of the way up the class ladder.

  ROBERT FLEW HOME REGULARLY TO see his new baby and also traveled around to drum up sponsorship. In his opinion, Detroit could be useful as a model for urban regeneration only if it made money. Somebody had to get rich off it, and it was his job to persuade investors that they would. A certain amount of money he was willing to put up himself, and didn’t mind losing it either, for his own sake, but the only clear-cut way of judging this kind of scheme was by the profit it made. So it needed to be profitable.

  Beatrice served as his deputy whenever he went out of town. We saw a lot of each other those first few weeks since we both lived in the house. She had become an efficient and organized person who could deal with lawyers and manage a large staff. My second day there I saw her dismiss one of the real estate agents Robert had been using to buy up properties—an unhappy, smiley, middle-aged man.

  “I don’t want to talk to you,” she said. He kept trying to explain himself. “You may be right. You may even be honest, though I doubt it. But I’ve spent enough time listening to you already. Out, out,” she said, gesturing and laughing by this time, the laugh of a pretty woman who gets her way. And he walked out.

  She suspected him of turning the all-out landgrab into an excuse to raise prices, and so she set up a complicated system of rival agents to keep the prices down. Some of the land was being bought back from the city, which had started paying people to abandon their homes, and she got a good rate for the buyback, too. The city took it in the purse both ways.

  Another one of her jobs was to persuade the holdouts to sell, and I drove along with her on some of these missions. “As protection,” she said, though I was more frightened than she was. I told her about my gun and she looked at me, shocked.

  “Marny, what do you think this is?” she said. “Kabul? Get rid of it. I don’t want to hear about it again.”

  I thought she didn’t have a clue. Wearing her Barneys coat and bright stilettos, she clicked up broken porch steps in the melting snow and banged on warped doors when the bells failed to ring. “Darling,” she called people, and “honey,” but somehow nobody minded. They invited her in.

  Inside she would slowly unwrap herself, talking all the time, asking for coffee. Women, she once explained to me, respect a woman who can wear such shoes, and men have their own reasons for liking them. It didn’t matter in the end if most of the holdouts refused to sell—she wanted to spread good relations.

  I got to know my neighborhood this way, which had once been prosperous. There was still a kind of washed-up middle class. I remember an elderly retired elementary school teacher, Mrs. Troy, who had lived in her house for fifty years. Maybe two-thirds of her block had burned down—she was surrounded by fields. Shopping took all day. She refused to understand the Internet and couldn’t drive safely anymore, though her license was valid. There weren’t many buses. Her grandson, who used to come around with a few bags of groceries on a Sunday, was serving fifteen months at the Ryan Correctional Facility. She told us all this herself, with a certain pride: he was doing very well there.

  No, she wouldn’t think of selling. But she wanted us to stay and talk and brought out Archway oatmeal cookies on a china plate.

  Most of the buildings looked in much worse shape. The best way of telling if someone lived in them was by the satellite dishes. Cable companies refused to lay cable because locals spliced into the mainline themselves instead of paying their monthly fee. People also stole cable for its street value. So we looked for dishes.

  They weren’t hard to find. We s
aw one as big as a bathtub nailed into the side of a grand old Victorian corner house, with gables and turrets. It was so large it had to be attached by a six-by-six square of plywood. Somehow the dish and turrets went well together—the house a kid would design. There were cars parked on the grass in the front yard. The steps to the porch had caved in, so I climbed up first and gave Beatrice a hand.

  “Who lives like this?” I said. The windows were all boarded up.

  A young, muscular, well-dressed black man let us in. Two other young men sat behind him on a couch, watching TV. The room looked like a frat house after a party: potato chip bags, pizza boxes, bottles, cartons and napkins lay on the floor. The TV did double duty as a source of light.

  No, ma’am, they didn’t want to sell. Yes, they got the lawyers’ letters. There was nothing they didn’t understand or wanted to talk about. If white people want to move in, they can move in. See how they like it.

  I noticed that the guys on the couch weren’t watching TV but playing some video game. This explains why they hardly looked up. The images they controlled operated knives and guns.

  Afterwards, on the way out, I said to Beatrice, “You didn’t do the striptease act for them.”

  This is one of my father’s phrases, and I thought she might take offense. Which she did, but I was surprised by what offended her.

  “What do you mean, them?” she said.

  It was a wet April afternoon a few days after a snow. Nobody else was out walking, and I had a strong feeling there was a reason for that. Empty streets make you think that everyone else is in the know. But we made it to the car all right.

  Later, on the drive home, we had the other argument, too.

  “I don’t understand what’s going on here,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I thought you broke up with him and now you run around taking his orders.”

  “That was ten years ago, Marny.”

  “I thought you said he wasn’t smart enough.”

  “I was wrong, and anyway, it doesn’t matter. You realize after a while that there are certain people who make things possible; he’s one of them, that’s all. There are more important things going on here than my self-esteem.”

  “Or maybe you think you’re really calling the shots, with those short skirts and high heels.”

  “Why are we fighting, Marny? Are you trying to pick a fight?”

  “I don’t know what it is,” I said. “When I’m scared for some reason I try to piss people off. Maybe I don’t like being told that I’m a racist.”

  BUT THIS WASN’T THE WHOLE story. I found living in the house with her very painful. Seeing her come down for breakfast, with wet hair, and watching her at night go up to bed carrying the day-old New York Times and a mug of Celestial Seasonings tea. (When I went into her bedroom I saw many of these mugs, cold and half full, with the tea bag left in, coloring the water.) We spent afternoons as I have described, driving around Detroit together, sharing car space, and sometimes parking and getting out in what seemed to me medium-risk situations. She had become a tough, competent and admirable woman but part of what pained me is the fact that she also seemed diminished somehow—not quite the girl I knew in college. I didn’t like the way she took his money, though I was living off Robert’s money, too.

  ROBERT HIMSELF PUZZLED ME. I figured I knew him well enough at Yale, yet every time I saw him he struck me as more difficult to get at.

  The morning after my arrival, after breakfast, he said to me, “Come for a walk with me, Marny.”

  I realized for the first time what our new relations were when it occurred to me that I shouldn’t refuse him. So I put on my coat and second-best leather shoes, which I had sprayed the night before with waterproof sealant. (I didn’t own any northern-winter boots.) Together we edged our way along the icy sidewalks. He wanted to point out houses in the neighborhood, the real beauties.

  The place we were staying in was only rented, from a retired midlevel General Motors executive. A good guy, Robert said, who believed in the city and had lived in it his whole working career. But even he had had enough and took early retirement to justify a move to the country. Besides, his girls were already out of college; one was married.

  Robert wanted to buy the house from him. He thought if the Detroit plan worked out this kind of high-end real estate would shoot up in price.

  “You can’t help making money,” I said. “Can you?”

  “I hope not.” This was an example of his humor—not so much funny as hard to read.

  Later he delivered one of his prepared speeches. The reason I brought you in on this, he said, is not just because it was your idea in the first place. “I wanted a historian on hand, in case this thing takes off. I want you to write about it.”

  There were plenty of journalists around, interviewing him and Clay and covering the story for newspapers and magazines. Smart guys, some of them, but they weren’t his guys; also, it wasn’t their job to take the long view. Then he spoke about my academic specialty, American colonial history—he’d been reading up on that, too. It’s an obvious point, he said, but what people forget about the early settlers is that they were shipped over by private companies; it was a business venture. A typical Robert James pronouncement, vaguely general and matter-of-fact. He believed that what we were doing in Detroit belonged to the same tradition.

  I said, “It means a lot for me to be here. I was going out of my mind in Baton Rouge.”

  “You’re one of those crazy guys who isn’t meant to be alone,” Robert told me, tapping the code into the front gate.

  That afternoon he flew to Boston, and from there he went on to Geneva and then Hong Kong. A few weeks later I got a peek at his Detroit diary, which Beatrice was in charge of. Flipping through the pages I caught sight of my name. “Take a walk with Marny after breakfast,” it said, under the date.

  But even at the time I felt stage-managed. I had opened up to him, in confidence, and he had taken advantage of my confession to give me his opinion. So now I was stuck with it. You don’t often get a sense of what people think of you. And the worst thing about sexual loneliness is that you have no practical and tedious duties and arguments to occupy the hamster wheels in your brain. So this kind of thing goes around and around.

  TONY LIKED TO SNARK ABOUT Clay and Robert James and the rest, the whole setup. He showed me around Detroit, starting with the big art deco towers downtown—arched halls, mosaics on the walls and floors, gold leaf. It was like walking around the pyramids, they were monuments, not offices, half dead, except for the tourists, and even the ugly new buildings surrounding them had space for rent signs hanging from the thirtieth-floor windows. You could park downtown, there was plenty of room, and every time a People Mover, one of those funny sky trains, passed overhead, Tony pointed and shouted and tried to see if there was anyone in it.

  “This was a fucking great city,” he said, “when LA was just a small town. And the only thing left is four lousy ball clubs.”

  We broke into Michigan Central Station together, which reminded me of Sterling Library at Yale. Gravestone architecture, a tall narrow gray slab. Except instead of books it was full of broken glass, wires, loose stones, graffiti, cigarette butts and beer bottles. Like most abandoned places it showed funny intimate signs of habitation: underpants, a can of shaving foam. I cut my hand on the chain-link fence surrounding it and for weeks afterwards had to resist scratching the scab. We went round the ballparks and the fine arts museum and wandered through the asbestos-lined hallways of an old factory, where the radiators seethed and dripped. Artists had taken over the place and filled it with bad watercolors and large lumpy ceramics. We ate Polish food in Hamtramck.

  The house itself was full of journalists, politicians, lawyers, academics and other hangers-on. A documentary crew filmed many of our meetings and sometimes followed us around the city in several cars, recording. Clay Greene was going to present. You couldn’t tell how old he was, that was part of his a
ppeal. Clay was one of these smooth-skinned good-looking guys who might be prematurely gray or well preserved. This was his first venture into TV, which accounted for some of his personal vanity. The mirrors around him were multiplying, and when he opened his mouth the tape recorder clicked on.

  Sometimes, after dinner, we watched the outtakes in Robert’s home cinema. There was Clay on the wall, spread out on a flat white roll of screen, and Clay sitting beside me, and both of them were talking, explaining.

  Detroit seemed to him a textbook case of the need for private-public partnerships. Most people assumed that the failure of state and market forces meant that Detroit itself was doomed. Urban studies theorists like Richard Florida suggested abandoning the Rust Belt altogether. But Clay believed that a highly directed combination of the two could solve many of its problems. He was very interested in China. The Chinese had been trying to combine free market capitalism with democratic centralism for several years, and had managed to regenerate a number of cities in much worse shape than Detroit. Of course, the government took on a lot of short-term debt. You needed someone willing to play God, or king.

  This, as Clay liked to say, was Robert’s job.

  He had a dry, cordial host-at-a-cocktail-party TV manner, which wasn’t entirely humorless. Let me introduce you to a few ideas, very dear friends of mine.

  “This city,” he said, posing for the cameras in front of Michigan Central Station, in his tasseled loafers and holding lightly onto his linen tie, to keep the wind from blowing it in his face, “lies at the center of so much of what America is talking about and worrying about today: the death of the middle class and the rise of social inequality, the collapse of the real estate market and the decline of manufacturing, the failure of the American labor movement and the entrenchment, almost fifty years after Martin Luther King led the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, of a black underclass. Detroit at its peak had a population of almost two million people—it is now roughly a third of that, which means, let me put it this way, that for every family still living here, their neighbors on either side of them have moved away. And their houses—you can see this for yourself because we’re going to show them to you—sit either empty or boarded up, or half burned down, or they’ve been destroyed altogether, and grass and trees are growing in their place. What we are about to witness is a small experiment in regeneration—an attempt to repopulate these neighborhoods, to rebuild these houses, to revive these communities. It is, by its nature, a very local solution to some of the deeper and broader problems America faces today. But if you can fix it here, you can fix it anywhere.”