You Don't Have to Live Like This

by Benjamin Markovits

  So I followed her inside (she was using the house toilet, not one of the porta-potties lined up by the air-conditioning units) and stood by the door. I could hear the loud stream against the porcelain and water, then it stopped and I could hear the contact of the toilet paper. She came out with wet hands.

  “What do you want to talk about?”

  “I’m worried about you.”

  “I’m worried about me, too. I’m worried about you.”

  I tried to kiss her and she pushed me off. We stood looking at each other, combatively. Good-naturedly, too. It was kind of fun, like playing squash and wanting to win. I tried to kiss her again and this time she let me and we kissed for maybe a minute before she pulled away.

  “Marny,” she said, “please, don’t force it,” and walked out into the garden again. Eventually I followed her, feeling pretty tremendously sad and drunk.

  There were maybe fifty people still standing around, under the lights, though the second bus idled in the narrow roadway at the front of the house. I could hear it, and see it through the trees: “RedLine Motor Company, You’re Halfway There.” But the band sang “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me,” and the microphone magnification made it sound like it was coming from somewhere else. Maybe the shore. The wind had died down; the night was clear, not very hot. The stars looked about as far away as the lights of a house across a lake.

  I hadn’t talked to Robert James all night, but I’d seen him. His wristwatch strap had broken, so whenever he wanted to check the time he had to take the watch out of his pocket and hold it softly in his hands. For some reason this was very endearing. But I caught him now alone, looking at a broken champagne flute in the grass.

  “You wondering if you should pick it up?” I said.

  “I don’t want anyone to step on it. One of the kids, tomorrow morning.”

  “It’s starting to get messy, isn’t it?”

  “What?” he said, and I waved behind us at the party. There were people dancing on the plastic parquet laid down under the marquee, but not many. Maybe five or six couples. There were also a few tables scattered underneath and people sitting around those. A queue outside one of the porta-potties—the other one had overflowed.

  “You want to walk down to the water with me?” Robert said. “How are you doing anyway?” We reached the foot of the pier and stepped out onto it, and then Robert climbed down suddenly into the speedboat. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not going to turn it on. I just want to feel the water.”

  “I’m thirty-four years old. I have no job or wife or kids or girlfriend. For some reason I’ve moved here, on your dime.”

  “Don’t worry about that. I got a lot of dimes.”

  “I don’t know, Robert. I’m having anxiety-sadness.”

  “What’s that?”

  “There’s a hundred things I’m worried about, but what really worries me is that even if they all turned out okay I wouldn’t be any happier.”

  “I’m a little caught up in temporary concerns myself,” Robert said.

  “What kind of concerns?”

  He didn’t answer for a while. Even in the half-light coming from the garden and reflected in different ways off the water I could see he was a very good-looking guy. Without making any particular effort. He wore chinos and a shirt and no tie. But he looked comfortable in boats and like the kind of guy a woman could trust to pay for their kids’ private schooling. “You know,” he said eventually, “my father, before he died, started exposing himself. Mostly to his nurses, young women.”

  “I didn’t know he was dead. I’m sorry.”

  “Partly it was just one of these mental degenerative things. Alzheimer’s, whatever you want to call it. And nobody got hurt. He wasn’t threatening or anything. But it was like, all his life what he really wanted to do was take down his pants. And just show people, I don’t know. You never met him or maybe this would mean something to you. But when I was a kid, Jesus, this guy had all the answers.”

  “So he was old. He had a brain thing.”

  We sat there feeling the waves underneath us. “When was this?” I said.

  “Maybe it started three years ago. He died last fall.”

  “So what are these temporary concerns?”

  But he was done talking. “They’re not important. They’ll go away.”

  After a while he got out and I followed him (I kept following people) and we walked back up the faint slope into the garden.

  “Listen,” I said, taking his arm, “I just want to say good-bye to someone,” because I had seen Gloria in the line of people making their way onto the bus. She was standing and waiting her turn.

  “You going?” I said to her. “I want to talk to you. I’ve thought of a better answer to your question.”

  “I can’t even remember it anymore. I don’t remember your name.”

  “Marny,” I said. “Can I give you a call?”

  “You’re drunk. If you can remember it you can call me.”

  And she told me her number and got on the bus. For several minutes I wandered around in a daze, repeating it, until I found a pencil in the kitchen and wrote the numbers down on the back of a Sports Illustrated subscription card, which was lying by the telephone. When I came out again Tony Carnesecca was standing in the porch light.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” he said. “You were mumbling like a crazy man. Anyway, there’s something I want to tell you. Cris is pregnant.”

  “That’s terrific.”

  “She wanted me to explain why Michael’s been acting up. She’s weaning him. They’ve all gone to bed.”

  “That’s terrific,” I said again. “I think I’m gonna go to bed, too.”

  I felt a little sick, walking up the stairs, but then I saw a light under Beatrice’s door and knocked. She had the room next to mine—we shared a bathroom. When there wasn’t any answer I got undressed and went for a piss, but after brushing my teeth I couldn’t help myself, and knocked again on the bathroom door.

  “What is it, Marny?” she said. “What do you want.”

  “I want to come in.”

  “I’m trying to go to sleep.”

  “Why can’t you sleep? I don’t want to be alone.”

  “Just come in for Christ’s sake and stop shouting. It isn’t locked.”

  So I went in. She was lying in bed with her hair spread out against the pillow. The bedside lamp put half her face in shadow. Her skin in the light looked tired. I thought, she’s thirty-four years old.

  “What do you want?” she said.

  “What were you doing?”

  “Nothing, staring. I forgot my book.”

  “I want to sleep here.”

  “What are you, twelve.”

  I felt weird standing there in my pajamas while she lay flat on her back, covered in bedclothes. I said, “I don’t think you’re very happy either.”

  “I don’t want to have one of your talks. I’m not in the mood. I don’t want to explain anything about myself and I don’t want to hear your explanations either.”

  “Beatrice, this is what I’m like. You used to like me. You used to like me for being like this. So I like to talk. Sometimes I don’t even know if other people have intimate conversations with themselves in their own heads or if what they talk about to themselves is the same shit they talk about to me. What time their babies wake up and how much their fucking kitchen is going to cost. For example, I have no idea what you talk about to yourself. No idea. If that’s just adult life, count me out. There are things that became very clear to me tonight.”

  She didn’t say anything so I went on. “I used to be in love with you. You probably know that but I thought I should tell you anyway.”

  “God, Marny. Is this how you talk a woman into bed?”

  Suddenly she seemed in a good mood, she looked cheered up. “Come here,” she said and I sat down next to her. “You can lie down if you want to. I’m not going to sleep with you, but you can lie down here if you want.�
��

  So, feeling dutiful, I climbed under the sheets beside her and lay on my back. Beatrice rolled over and switched off the bedside lamp.

  “Come here,” she said, rolling back, and held me. Her eyes looked right into mine, too close for me to see her properly. She kissed me on the face a little and then kissed my mouth. I kissed her back, trying not to kiss too hard.

  “You’re going to be okay. We’re all going to be okay. Anyway, I’m not unhappy, just in the dumps. There’s a difference.”

  “What’s the difference.”

  “The dumps doesn’t matter.”

  “Was it seeing his wife?”

  “I’ve seen his wife before.”

  “But is that what it was?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, and turned over again on her back. Then she said, “I don’t mind if you stay all night, but I want to sleep.”

  I don’t think she fell asleep right away, she couldn’t have, but I didn’t get another word out of her. I just lay there, not moving. I didn’t want her to kick me out. This funny phrase came into my head: you must be so happy. I meant me. But the truth is, I couldn’t sleep at all like that and the night stretched ahead. I got that feeling I sometimes got as a kid of looking at myself through the wrong end of a telescope. Eventually she started breathing softly, one breath after another, and the fact that this big warm female animal, almost six feet big, was lying next to me and not wearing much started to take effect. An erection climbed up my pajama pants and wouldn’t go away. I don’t know how long I lay there, not sleeping—several hours. Sometimes my erection went down a little, but this made it touch my thigh so it came back up. Jesus, I wanted to rub it against her like a dog. But I also wanted to show her, Look what I got, what am I supposed to do with it. All kinds of crazy thoughts came and went. I thought about Robert’s dad. I thought about Gandhi. I read once that he liked to sleep naked with naked girls, to test his chastity. And it occurred to me that all this sexual pressure, which had been building up all day, and not just all day but for months and years it seemed, wasn’t building towards anything. It was just there and maybe what you did was learn to ignore it. I don’t know how to put this without seeming crazy, but I started to have kind of saintly fantasies, I mean fantasies about a life of chastity and repression and so on, and this was the first test of it. I was doing okay. If you can get through tonight you’re going to be okay, you might make it through to the other side of all that stuff.

  Eventually I tried to sneak out of bed and she half woke up.

  “Are you going, Marny?” she said and pulled at me a little so that she could kiss me. Her breath was warm, almost hot. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m sorry,” and let me go.

  10

  The next morning was Sunday. After church, Bill Russo planned to put on a caucus brunch for some of the big donors. (Russ is what Bill Russo’s MDP friends called him, and since they knew him better than I did, I started calling him Russ, too. And then stopped.) Apparently these donor types like to meet each other, and the Michigan set wanted to rub shoulders with Robert James. After that some quiet time was scheduled. Maybe a ride in the speedboat and a little swim. Drinks on the sunporch, etc. But I’d had enough. Tony Carnesecca was driving back early, with his wife and kid, so I asked him to give me a ride.

  They’d had a bad night, sleeping three to a room, in two beds. Michael was just getting used to being out of the crib. He woke up scared around two in the morning and came in with them. So Tony got out. Then Cris tried to sneak out, too, and sleep with Tony, but Michael heard her and cried, so Tony tried to get him down but couldn’t, and eventually they all ended up together again. Only Michael slept.

  “I know what you mean,” I said. “I’m tired, too.”

  Cris told me to sit in front. And then, after buckling Michael in and buckling herself, she said, “You were kind of quiet-drunk last night. Are you hung over?”

  “I don’t know. I think I talked too much.”

  I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep. When we hit the highway, I fell asleep properly and only woke up when Tony pulled into his drive. Michael was also asleep and Cris very slowly and carefully lifted him out. I felt for the kid. She laid him out gently in his stroller and started walking him around. “I’ll just drive Marny home and come straight back,” Tony said and pulled out again.

  “I’m supposed to stay in Johanna Street tonight.”

  “What do you mean, supposed?”

  “Well, Walter’s coming up tomorrow and that’s what I told myself I was going to do.”

  But he dropped me at Robert’s place because I had to pack up. Which is how I spent the afternoon: going through the house and collecting my things, sometimes from other people’s bedrooms. There wasn’t much, a couple of boxes of household goods, a duffel of clothes, a few books and CDs, some of which I had loaned to other people. Even though no one was home I knocked on their doors.

  In Beatrice’s room I sat down on her bed, which was fully made up, and then took off my shoes and lay down on it. I was still very tired. I could smell her on my skin from the night before then realized it was only her sheets. The novel on the bedside table had a bookmark sticking out of it—a postcard from her mother, with a picture of Frank Sinatra on the front, smiling into a microphone.

  The note itself was prettily legible, effusive in a faintly foreign way. “Darling, how wonderful it was to see you . . .” etc. and then I noticed the date: the twenty-ninth of November 1993—a few days after Thanksgiving break freshman year. This was several months before I met Beatrice coming out of seminar on the way to lunch. We stood in the melting snow, talking and getting colder; I tried not to show it. But it was like a window had opened up and let in some of that cold air.

  Eventually I got bored of lying there and went round the rest of the house. Robert’s bedroom was surprisingly messy. There were clothes all over the bed, shirts, pants, socks, etc., probably from when he was packing his overnight bag. There were papers all over his desk, too, bills, printouts, and a letter from Clay Greene. Clay once explained to me why he still wrote letters. Every time I send an email, he said, I imagine cc’ing the editor of The Washington Post, because it isn’t going to disappear and sooner or later somebody will find it.

  His letter to Robert was mostly about a guy called Stanley Krause, who worked at Goldman Sachs. Goldman had invested a good deal of money in Robert’s consortium, and they were interested in some of the warehouses and factory buildings Robert had been buying up, for their own use. Stanley wanted to make sure they “had their name down”—this was Clay’s way of putting it. “It’s worthwhile humoring these people,” he went on. I wondered if this is what Robert meant by temporary concerns. But there was also a picture on his desk of Peggy and little Ethan, swinging together on a swing in Central Park, with the tall blurry fence of the reservoir behind them. They seemed likely candidates, too.

  AROUND FOUR O’CLOCK I THREW my duffel in the passenger seat, put my boxes in the trunk, and drove the ten blocks south to Johanna Street.

  Every time I came back to the house I looked for signs of a break-in, but it seemed in good shape. The paint job looked almost sticky. Shrubs poked out of the beds in the front yard and the grass had the blue-green underwater appearance of a first growth. I brought my stuff inside, up the porch steps then up the hallway staircase to the second floor. The first thing I did coming in was check the wall phone in the kitchen for a dial tone. It flatlined, so I dialed up Robert on his cell.

  “Listen,” I said, “are you still at Bill’s? Because I forgot something by the phone, a number. It’s on a subscription card.”

  There was a wait and footsteps while he carried his phone downstairs.

  “When did you take off?” he said. “I thought you were sticking around.”

  “Tony gave me a ride home.”

  He started reading out the 800 listing.

  “Not that,” I said. “There should be something else, maybe on the other side. In ballpo
int— Wait a minute, I gotta find something to write with.”

  This turned out to be not so easy. The place was totally unlived in, but there was still the usual mess of junk mail and utility bills on the kitchen counter. Nothing to write with, though. No dried-out felt-tip or uncapped Bic, no golf pencils. “Hold on, hold on,” I called out, “listen, I’m going to have to call you back,” before I realized I could type it into my computer, which is what I did. Afterwards I said, “This isn’t really why I called. I wanted to say thank you. I’m in Johanna Street right now. I’m moving in. It looks great. My first grown-up apartment.”

  “Take care of yourself, Marny. I don’t want to see you on the news.”

  “You guys having a good time? Have you been swimming?”

  “It’s very relaxed,” he said. “We’re all very relaxed.”

  After hanging up, I poured myself a glass of water from the kitchen tap. All the appliances were brand-new. Hector and one of his cousins, a kid named Ziggy, had driven me out in his truck to the Ikea in Canton. We came back with a bed, a sofa, a coffee table, plates, pots, glasses, knives, forks, plants, etc. Ziggy helped put it all together, he was a real helpful kid. One of these guys who takes over this kind of job if you let him. So I let him. But he liked talking, too. When they hear you’re a teacher or used to teach, people sometimes open up to you, a lot of our important decisions and failures involve school. So he worked and I asked him questions.

  Ziggy spent a couple of years at North Texas, where he majored in merchandising. Then one summer he got his high school girlfriend pregnant, ex-girlfriend really, and instead of going back to Denton he stayed in Galveston. By this point anyway he was thirty grand in debt and three semesters short of graduating. Three fucking semesters. She had a job at Payless ShoeSource, which she quit, and the manager was a friend of theirs so he took her place. That was two years ago. They were living at home with her mother, in a two-bedroom apartment, the baby was walking, there was plastic everywhere, Ziggy spent his whole life kicking things over and picking them up again. He started getting acid reflux, which sounds like no big deal, but after every meal he wanted to lie down in a dark room. It’s this funny thing about pain, he said. You want to be alone with it, you don’t want to move, you don’t want to do anything except hang out with this pain.