You Don't Have to Live Like This

by Benjamin Markovits

  They both had flights to catch in the morning, and Robert excused himself to make another call. This left me alone with Mrs. James. She refilled my cup from the pot sitting under the coffeemaker.

  “Robert puts himself under too much pressure,” she told me. “He never says anything, he never complains. But if this thing works out it will be big news. So he tells me. It will open a lot of doors. Poor kid,” she said. “It’s a funny thing how ambition creeps up on you. When he was a boy all he ever wanted to do was help me in the kitchen. I used to stand him on a chair by the counter with a wooden spoon. I let him stir the mix when I was making cakes. And now the president sends him texts. It’s wonderful, I’m very proud, but I can’t always take everything as seriously as he wants me to. Peggy’s very patient with him, she’s very good, but it’s not easy having a small kid either. I don’t care how rich you are. Their place in New York is spacious for New York, but I don’t want to get in their hair. We’re called mothers-in-law for a reason. So I came out here. He feels his duty to me, too. And I get to see Beatrice.”

  I didn’t know whether to kiss her on my way out, so I didn’t do anything. She said, “Look after each other.”

  Robert walked me to the electric gate. I was wearing one of his college sweatshirts, because it was cool out and my sweat had dried. “Listen, what are you doing for dinner?” he said. “Because I’ve got an extra ticket for this thing. Some conference on educational reform. Beatrice doesn’t want to go.”

  So I saw him again that night, though we didn’t talk much. I met a lot of rich men, guys from the Big Three, and representatives from the mayor’s office, and other people who had flown in especially from DC. There’s a whole education reform mafia, businessmen who want to put their money into something. Detroit is like ground zero for education. Robert loaned me a jacket and tie, there was champagne served in the lobby of the Westin Hotel, and afterwards a three-course meal cooked up by the head chef of the Rattlesnake Club. While dessert was going around, Robert and I ended up at the bar together, with drink orders, and I said to him, “So she doesn’t mind, you staying here with Beatrice.”

  “She minds.”

  “Because most girls would find that weird, and with your mother as well.”

  “She’s jealous of that, too.”

  “So what do you do about it?”

  “Well,” he said, “I take it into account.”

  At that point his drinks arrived and I didn’t see him again for the rest of the night. It was a relief to get back to Johanna Street, where I could knock on Walter’s door and take off my tie, feeling drunk, and make fun of the whole scene.

  15

  A few days later Walter told me that Susie was pregnant. They hadn’t exactly planned it—they expected the whole conception business to take more than “a couple of shots.” And she was only eight weeks in. Susie didn’t want to tell anybody until twelve, so I shouldn’t say anything to her about it. But he wanted me to know—he was very happy.

  Maybe this is why Susie started to resent how often I stopped by. It was also a problem that she didn’t like Astrid, who she thought of as a phony person. I didn’t totally disagree with her, but there was something prim and old-maidish about Susie that riled me, given how she met Walter. She thought Astrid was an exhibitionist and a user of people and, I don’t know what else, a slut. Whereas Astrid had nothing but warm feelings for Walter and Susie and didn’t make any judgment about their relationship, not once, not in my presence, not even when we tried to talk each other to sleep, making the small talk of lovers in bed, which is often petty and hypercritical.

  It turns out that knowing secrets about people makes them dislikable. I couldn’t help noticing the slight extra gentleness in Susie’s voice, and the way she sat down next to Walter on the couch when we watched TV. She and Walter used to go jogging together several times a week, and they kept that up, but I heard her once saying, coming up the steps, “I don’t know what it is, but I get so tired these days.” Even though she was only talking to Walter. This is the kind of thing that got on my nerves.

  Not that I dislike kids. Tony and Cris sometimes came around with Michael, and Cris was starting to show. (Susie asked her a lot of questions about it.) And sometimes I even babysat for them, which probably means I did it twice. But I liked Michael. He called me Zio, and I used to hold him by his feet over my shoulders and pretend to look for him. “Where are you?” I said. “Behind you,” he said. So I’d turn around and get pretend-annoyed. I thought you said you were behind me, and so on. But I worried about Walter. I thought he was a very likable drifter, but when you drift you don’t want to accumulate too much stuff. And I felt jealous of his relationship with Susie.

  I WASN’T QUITE SURE HOW to get in touch with Gloria, I mean, what excuse to make. We had left things on a purely practical footing. But I did what Mrs. Schramm said. I went down to the nearest precinct, at Beaubien Street, and got my fingerprints taken. This was a humiliating experience. While I waited, a cop brought in a group of high school girls who talked the whole time among themselves, very publicly, laughing and making fun of people. One of them looked at me and said, “What do you think he do?” and another one said, “He look like a rapist.” Then the first one said, “Yeah, he got that rapist look,” before their attention shifted to someone else.

  Afterwards, I got a kind of receipt or notification, for being fingerprinted, which I sent along with the application form to Detroit Public Schools. I called up the registrar’s office at Yale and had them mail a transcript over. I signed up for a first aid class. Then I waited. The city had to pass everything on to the Department of Education. None of this gave me a reason to see Gloria.

  Then one day I had the bright idea of writing a neighborhood profile about Nolan. So I knocked on his door, and he opened it with the dog at his feet and a fat kid standing behind him. They were just going out.

  “What do you want?” he said.

  “I want to interview you for this newsletter I write.”

  “What about.”

  “Gloria Lambert told me about your ninth-grade project. We could talk about that. We could also talk about your own work. We could talk about the neighborhood.”

  “We’re just taking the dog for a walk. If you come along, you can clean up his shit.”

  “What’s your name?” I said to the kid.

  “His name is Clarence. He’s my son. If you talk to him the conversation is over.”

  Nolan took the whole interview business more seriously than I expected. He made two conditions, that the piece should include a link to his website and that I should clear everything with him before it came out. I didn’t care much about these profiles so I agreed.

  The kid seemed like a nice kid. He kept saying, “Dad, how come I can’t talk to this guy? You’re talking to him.”

  “Because I don’t trust him,” Nolan said.

  “But you’re talking to him.”

  Clarence had to run a little to keep up, not all the time, but at some point on every block he had to run a few steps. Nolan was a rapid walker, he didn’t let the dog sniff around. When Buster shat against a tree he handed me a plastic bag.

  “I can’t believe you’re making me clean up this shit,” I said.

  “I didn’t make you anything. You just agreed to something.”

  I had to walk with the bag in my hand for about ten minutes, until we came to Mackowski Playground, where there was a garbage can. Then Clarence ran off to the slides and Nolan and I sat down. He took something out of his pocket and threw it on the ground, a biscuit for the dog, which was still on the leash.

  The park was busy, the weather was white and cold, and Halloween pumpkins sat out on the porches. There was a lot of construction being done on the houses overlooking the park, and you could hear hammers and drills even on a Saturday afternoon. Guys were blowing leaves into the streets and sweeping them up, but the playground was still wet with leaves, and the climbing frames looked slippery and ne
w. Kids had their gloves and hats on. There were kids kicking a soccer ball against a baseball backstop. Clarence had one of the few black faces. On the east side was the parking lot to a nursing home and a few old men and women came out and had a look at the weather and kids and went back in.

  I knew a few people there, and a woman named Rita Fuentes came over to say hello. I introduced her to Nolan. I said I wanted to write a profile about him, and she said, “He did me, too, a couple of weeks ago. My name in the papers. I sent it to everyone I know. I sent it to my son.”

  She grew up in Puerto Rico but worked most of her life in Manhattan, thirty years for one family, as a child carer and then housekeeper. During this time she married and got divorced. Her own son was now a sophomore at Michigan State, and when he left home she decided to move with him. “Close but not too close,” she told me. Somehow she had managed to save a little money. For the interview I took a photo of her new apartment, which she was very proud of. The garden was full of late flowers; she grew vegetables. But she still made money, on weekends and after school, looking after other people’s children.

  Nolan could be pleasant enough when he wanted to be, and after Rita left I said to him, “I guess you grew up around here. It must be changing a lot.”

  “I should tell you right now I consider this occupied territory.”

  “Most of this was empty land. The houses were in bad shape.”

  “How long have you lived in Detroit?”

  “About six months.”

  “So you don’t know a damn thing. Where did you meet Gloria?” he said.

  “At some party, one of these fund-raisers.”

  “Why did you call her again?”

  “I wanted to talk to her about teaching.”

  “That doesn’t sound to me like a reason.”

  “What kind of art do you do?”

  “Do your homework. Don’t ask what you don’t need to ask.”

  “What are you angry about? Why are you angry at me?”

  “I’m not angry. This is just how I talk. People get used to it.”

  In fact, I did get used to it, and over the next few weeks we saw each other several times. Clarence knocked at our door on Halloween, not with Nolan but with three other kids and an old, slow-moving woman behind them, who I took to be somebody’s grandmother. He was dressed as a football player. His helmet was mustard yellow and much too big for him—it said “Bulldogs” in cartoon letters. When I asked him about it, he told me his dad used to play football.

  The next time I saw Nolan I said, “So how did you like Ferris State?”

  “You’ve been doing your homework,” he said.

  He invited me in for coffee one day and I met his mother. “Properly,” I said to her. “I saw you on our doorstep a couple of nights ago, with the kids.”

  She had the same broad shoulders as her son; her hips looked as if they were painful to her. A bright shawl hung around her neck, and she held it against her bosom, even indoors, and only let go when I reached out to shake her hand. The room she invited me into smelled of Pine-Sol or air freshener. The curtains were half drawn, probably against the cold, it was a cold November day, and there were a lot of lights on, standing lamps and table lamps, that made circles of light on the carpet and the blanket on the sofa. The TV in the corner was one of those old TVs with a wood-grain effect and gray knobs. From the kitchen I could hear the radio on.

  “You’ve got a beautiful home, Mrs. Smith.”

  “Please, call me Eleanor.”

  “He can call you Mrs. Smith,” Nolan said.

  “Let the boy call me what he wants to.”

  “What do you want to call her, boy?”

  “I’m gonna give you a word of advice,” she said. “Don’t let my son bully you.”

  “I think I’d like to call you Mrs. Smith.”

  Nolan was an obsessive coffee maker. We could see him from the living room messing around in the kitchen, there were steam sounds, we could hear cups on counters.

  “I just want mine black,” Mrs. Smith called. “I don’t want any of that fancy milk.”

  “How long have you lived here?” I asked her.

  “Forty-seven years. I raised two boys in this house, and now I’m raising another one. When I get the chance.”

  “Do you mind people like me moving in?”

  “Oh, the things I mind . . .” She waved her hand away.

  “Does Clarence live here full-time?”

  “Clarence is not a topic of conversation,” Nolan shouted from the kitchen. “You need to stop that.”

  “I wish he did. His mother is somebody a little goes a long way,” Mrs. Smith said.

  After coffee, she left us to talk, and Nolan talked. It turned out he was perfectly happy talking about himself—he had a professional-confessional mode. His older brother got killed in a gang shooting when Nolan was still in high school. That was one of the things that straightened him out. The other was music. There used to be a record shop on Charlevoix, run by a white guy named Jez Lansky, who’d been at that corner since the neighborhood was about a quarter Polish. Probably he’d have got robbed out of business or beaten up if people didn’t like his records. But he played a lot of good music. Not just Diana Ross and Louis Armstrong, but Mable John and Billy Eckstine, Art Blakey and Horace Silver and Clifford Brown. Nolan’s dad used to say, “Jez is all right, you can hang out at Jez’s.” When he died, there was a line outside St. Albertus three blocks long following the coffin, and about half of those people were black. It didn’t matter that Jez was white and a homo and that he probably died of AIDS. Then they closed down that fucking church two years later, which had been there for about a hundred years, but this is Detroit.

  “What instrument did you play?”

  “I didn’t play any instrument. I liked the music, too, but what I really liked was the covers. My heroes were Reid Miles and Bob Cato and Mati Klarwein. Jez put me onto all those guys. I wanted to be a designer.”

  That’s why he went to Ferris State, apart from the fact that they gave him a football scholarship. Because of the Kendall College of Art and Design. Nolan had a lot to say about art degrees. What he took was a four-year course and you needed to write a thirty-thousand-word dissertation. It was a degree. These days you could get a master’s for pressing a button on a camera thirty times. To change the subject, I asked him about his brother.

  “He was like a low-level high school crack dealer. Not even a soldier, he was more like a small-business man, he was a kid with a lemonade stand. I don’t even think he was using. But then someone shot him in the neck.”

  “Did they find out who?”

  “Probably somebody owed him money. We don’t know.”

  “Were you close?”

  “White brothers are close to each other. He looked out for me, I looked up to him.”

  “I don’t know that white brothers are always so close.”

  We talked about his art, too. Coming out of college he wanted to make some really big art, he was obsessed with Diego Rivera, he wanted to apply the techniques of illustration on a large scale. I had noticed one of these pieces, a jungle scene painted on the side of an old factory—about fifty feet wide and a hundred feet tall. Later he got into photography, which is what his project with Gloria was about. The kids were just a means to an end for him, he was using them. The problem of art is always the problem of realism, he said, the relationship to reality. Big art for him was all about being bigger than reality, like, if it was bigger, it might be truer, too, or more real. Photography was the same deal. He talked a lot in this vein and I wrote some of it down, not because I was interested but I wanted to keep him happy. Right now he was working on a piece about his brother, about the crack scene in Detroit, called Looking for My Brother’s Killer. The point is the guy was probably dead, there was nobody to look for, but he was going to keep looking. He was hanging out with some pretty wrecked people and asking questions and taking photographs. Nobody remembered his
brother. When you got people dying and going to jail at the rate they do, nobody remembers anybody. But photography was just a transitional phase for him. He wanted to push realism further, he wanted to make art that changed reality, that had an effect on it, and one of the forms he was looking at was legal art.

  “What’s legal art?”

  Lawsuits, he said. He wanted to sue people, where the art was just the legal act, the court papers and documentation, the judge’s ruling. But it cost money. A lot of what he did was apply for grants.

  “Who are you going to sue?” I said.

  “I ain’t angry but I got a lot of grievances, a lot of things needing correcting.”

  I drove around Detroit with him, too—Detroiters were always driving me around. The first time it was just the two of us, and he took me around the old Black Bottom neighborhood, or what was left of it after urban renewal. “Negro removal,” Nolan called it, a line I had heard before, which slightly lowered my opinion of him. So he went around with borrowed ideas like the rest of us. He talked about Joe Louis and Bishop Franklin, Mies van der Rohe and other people. We walked under the highway intersections, the Chrysler Freeway and Gratiot Avenue, right by Ford Field, it was a dripping, cold November morning, through to the park on the other side, and I felt about as wet and cold as the roads we walked on. At one point I thought maybe this is where the guy dragged Astrid, but I don’t think it was. I asked Nolan if he knew her; he didn’t.

  Then he bought me coffee to warm up, at a place called Wigley’s Meats. It was about eleven in the morning. We also ordered corned-beef sandwiches. Nolan told me a story about a crack house where he took some pictures. A lot of these places were whore houses, too, it wasn’t just a question of drugs and customers, but clients and audiences, people hung out. People get pretty amusing when they’re high or when they want to get high. One of the worst things he saw was a woman going down on her son, who was about fourteen years old, the mother was maybe in her late twenties, both of them needed a fix and guys threw money at them while they did it. Wigley’s was an upmarket tourist destination, sort of blue-collar chic, though I guess locals went there, too, it wasn’t particularly expensive. Nolan never lowered his voice.