“Three weeks. You just bought me a three-week holiday I don’t want.”
“Brad, I don’t understand this. You’re a smart guy, you have general interests. When’s the last time you read a book?”
“I don’t want to read books. I want to relax, I want to play golf.”
“So how much golf do you play?”
“Not enough. You know what I do on my weekends. I drive five hours to Baton Rouge and five hours back on Sunday night. And then on Monday morning I get up at six and go to work.”
“And this makes you happy?”
“I don’t expect to be happy. The happiness is for my kids. I expect to make money.”
“This is what I’m trying to tell you. What people want is basically pretty simple. That’s why kids are happy, they don’t worry about everything else. Shelter, food and community. None of these has to cost much. You read Walden in college, you know what I’m talking about.”
“That’s not what people want,” Brad said. “They want to make money, and they want to make more money than their neighbor does. That’s how you know you’re winning. And you’re kidding yourself, Greg, if you think that Americans want to help each other out. That’s not what I pay my taxes for. I pay my taxes so that other people are not my problem, and I pay as little tax as I can get away with. Have you met my neighbors? That’s why we invented the automobile, to get away from them. That’s why we move to the suburbs. That’s why we spend half our lives in cars and the other half watching TV. If we wanted to see our neighbors we’d move to Europe.”
“This guy makes you look good,” Nolan said. “He’s like a first-rate asshole. This guy makes you look second-rate or third-rate.”
“And by the way, Thoreau didn’t have any kids.”
“That’s not the point,” I said.
“And he didn’t give a damn about community.”
“Do I have to stand here listening to this shit?” Nolan said. “Do you guys need like an audience or something?”
“Well, I promised Robert I’d talk to you.”
“You talked. Now fuck off. I don’t mean that in an impolite or angry way.”
It was hotter than before when we got outside, and I noticed that the shadows of things, trees and cars, kept coming in and out of focus. There was a bit of wind, too.
“What happened there?” I said to my brother.
“You know he’s flaming, right?”
“What are you talking about?”
“He’s gay.”
“He’s got a six-year-old son.”
“Of course he does. He’s an African American male who played football in college. You don’t expect him to come out in the locker room?”
“Are you saying he’s out now?”
“What the hell do I know?”
“Then what are you talking about?”
“I’m just giving you a heads-up.”
I was too pissed off to say much at lunch. We made mustard-and-salami sandwiches and ate them with slightly stale potato chips in front of the TV. The second round of the US Open was on. Brad seemed in a good mood—he was looking forward to his reunion. There was a drinks party at the Art Institute on Saturday night and dinner afterwards at the Peninsula.
“I haven’t taken time off like this in five years,” he said. “I mean, when I wasn’t on some work thing or looking after the kids. It’s good to see you.”
“Obama was there, wasn’t he, when you were at law school?”
“We overlapped a couple of years.”
“Did you take any of his classes?”
“Con law. I liked him. He was a young guy, he knew when we were bored.”
Afterwards I drove him to the Hertz outlet on East Jefferson. I parked and waited with him at the counter, then carried his garment bag to the rental car. In certain public spaces, airports, for example, you can sometimes see people you love the way a stranger would. Brad looked like the kind of guy waitresses and flight attendants start a conversation with. Like somebody who makes good money but also knows how to have a good time. His deck shoes flopped a little on his feet; they looked comfortable. But his Dockers were clean and new and sat tight on his ass. He wore an Astros T-shirt and Ray-Ban sunglasses.
I gave him a hug and he said to me, “You got a nice setup here. I’m going to leave you alone. It wouldn’t kill you to call your mother once in a while. Dad, too.”
“One of these summer storms is coming in,” I said. “If you get tired just pull over. There’s no point in doing it all at once.”
When he left I felt sick, just sick. The mess I was making of my life. I couldn’t even pay for his dinner. But what really threw me was this business about SETI. My brother is a smart, educated guy. He went to Oxford on a Rhodes and made the law review at Chicago. But he also has practical instincts; he likes to be reasonable. And it seemed to him obvious that there were other worlds and forms of life. He paid his mortgage, he went to the country club, maybe he even slept with his secretary, I don’t know. But he could take it in stride, the idea that there might be something else out there. It didn’t bother him at all.
28
The weather broke around six o’clock, and by the time Gloria came by after work, it was raining so hard she had to run from the driveway to the porch, and still came in the house soaking wet and laughing. Her hair when it got wet showed all the beads of water. I gave her a towel and we watched the rain flatten itself across the bay window.
“It’s over,” she said. “It’s over. Another fucking year.” She almost never swore.
“What do you want to do, you want to go out to eat? There’s not much in the house but I can make pasta.”
“Let’s stay in and watch TV and go to bed.”
We made out on the couch after supper. With my eyes closed I could sense her by taste and touch, and my skin had a hot-cold feeling; a cold drop of sweat ran along my ribs. The rain kept coming down. At one point Gloria went to the bathroom and I got up to turn off the lights. The room went dark and the outside world reappeared. Even at nine o’clock it was still bright out. The windows streamed and shimmered and let in a lot of green. I turned off the TV, too.
“I hope my brother’s all right,” I said, when she came back. “He should be checked in to the hotel by now.”
“I got you something.” Gloria held up a condom packet. “I want to apologize. I just get so stressed out, I don’t even know what’s stressing me out. But it’s always the kids, it’s the school. And I never realize what’s going on until the year’s over.”
We went upstairs to bed, feeling kind of formal. She really seemed like an innocent kid, it was like a wedding night. We fooled around for a while and eventually Gloria said, “I can’t tell if you’re into this or not.”
“I’m into it. I’m just surprised.”
“I meant it to be like good surprise.”
“I feel like there’s something I need to tell you.”
“So tell me.” But already the mood had changed. I tried to kiss her again but she pushed me away.
“I love you,” I said, for the first time.
“No, you don’t. You just like me a lot.”
I had too much time to think about what to say. “What are you talking about?” I said eventually.
“Everybody likes me.”
“This is ridiculous. You’ve been sexually rejecting me for six months. And then you come on like this and I’m supposed to jump through hoops.”
“I just feel hurt. I thought this is what you wanted.”
“It is what I want.” After a minute, I said, “Can we try again?”
But the wedding-night feeling had gone. I began to stroke her hair and then her face and her shoulder and her side; at least she let me. “I don’t know what you see in me,” I said. “You’re a beautiful woman.”
“I know what I am and it’s not beautiful.”
“Then you don’t know.”
But she turned on her elbow to look at me. “I’m like a
type,” she said. “There’s a type of man who thinks I’m his type. Guys who like girls who look like boys. This is a bad-news kind of guy—I had a lot of bad experiences. So I take it slow. But Marny, baby, I liked you first time I met you. You were honest with me, you didn’t spin me a line. You want to talk everything out. I get that. But you need to learn to shut up, too.”
We kissed again and started up again. I kept thinking, you can tell her about Astrid later, when it won’t matter so much. For a while it was like a refrain in my thoughts, you can tell her later, but then I forgot about Astrid and forgot about Gloria, too, to be honest. Afterwards, she said, “I didn’t think it would make a difference, but it does.”
The rain had stopped; we could hear the roof dripping. It was only about ten o’clock at night. We hadn’t shut the curtains and the cloudy sky still held a little daylight.
“Are you tired? I’m not that tired. Do you want to read maybe?”
But she shook her head. “Let’s just lay here.”
“What difference does it make?” I said.
“I don’t know. Don’t make me say it.”
“Is it because I’m white? Is that why you weren’t sure?”
“Don’t make me angry, I don’t want to be angry again. Why do you say things like that?”
“Did you sleep with Nolan?”
“Marny, you don’t even know how ridiculous you’re being.”
“I don’t know, I think about you too much. I was really obsessed with you.”
“Shush shush shush shush shush,” she said.
BUT ON MONDAY MORNING SHE had to drive to Harsens Island. The Detroit Institute of Arts puts on a summer camp there for city kids. There used to be an old school on the island, which closed down. Then somebody turned it into a resort and restaurant, and when that failed, the DIA stepped in and converted the buildings into a campsite and retreat for artists in traditional media—painting and sculpture, that kind of thing. There’s a lot of wildlife on Lake St. Clair, turtles and snakes and birds, and you can sail from Harsens to a dozen other islands.
It’s about an hour’s drive from Detroit. You have to take the car ferry. I said to her, “You just got done teaching for the year, what are you doing to yourself.”
“I didn’t know about you when I signed up. This place is amazing. Most of these kids have never been in a boat. They think nature is trees and grass. They don’t know about all the colors.”
“But Monday morning.”
“You have to get them right after the school year ends, otherwise they don’t show up. They lose momentum, they start stacking shelves. The difference between rich kids and poor kids is what they learn on summer vacation. I get on my students all year long to sign up for this thing. I like saying to them, see you next week. It’s fun, I want to go.”
On Sunday night, after supper, she said, “I have to pack.”
“Let me at least stay over with you,” I said.
“I want to clear my head and work out what I need. Baby, it’s only a week. Not even that, five days.”
“I’m not thinking straight right now. I don’t know what’s going on.”
“Nothing’s going on,” she said. “I’ll see you next weekend.”
So she kissed me and drove off. That night I called Astrid, but she didn’t answer her phone. I wanted to explain to her what the deal was, that I couldn’t see her again.
I called my brother, just to catch up.
“Did you see that bit on NewsHour about Detroit?” he asked.
“About the Meacher case? When did it run?”
“Friday. I thought that’s what you were calling about. Apparently a few people have started to sell up, and one of them is challenging the terms of his contract. He says the house is worth a lot more than he bought it for. He put in the work, he wants to see the profit. If he wins his case the whole landscape’s going to change.”
“How can he win? He made a deal, we all did.”
“It depends how well the contract was drawn up.”
“My guess is Robert has good lawyers.”
“But that wasn’t really the point of the story. They wanted to find out why people are trying to move.”
“I don’t know anyone who’s leaving.”
“This Meacher business could drive down property prices, if the situation isn’t resolved in the right way. It’s a good time to sell.”
“But you can’t sell, that’s the deal. I don’t know what the right way is supposed to mean.”
“That’s one of the questions.”
I hung up in a worse mood than before. This was just my big brother throwing his weight around, showing me that he knows what’s what. But the truth is, some of my neighbors were worried. Bert Wendelman’s school had just been broken into. Ordinarily, there wasn’t much to steal, but Bert had persuaded Texas Instruments to donate twenty new tablets as part of a low-budget promotional campaign. Things to do with New Jamestown often made it into the news. Anyway, the tablets got stolen. Their street value was about $3,000, which isn’t much, but people are sensitive to break-ins at schools.
On Monday, I ran into Don Adler outside the Spartan grocery store on McIntyre. I asked him if he had seen the report on NewsHour.
“I stopped watching when MacNeil retired. It’s not the Wendelman burglary that worries me,” he said. “This is a big city, that kind of thing will happen. It’s the not-for-profit crime. The senseless destruction, this is what worries me.”
“What are we talking about here.”
“They’re burning cars.”
“Who is?”
“Who do you think? They just break windows and spray the insides with gasoline and light up.”
“I haven’t seen it,” I said. But this wasn’t quite true. In fact, I had noticed more broken glass on the street, and other remains, burned strips of rubber and melted CDs.
“That’s because they clean this stuff up. This isn’t what they want people to see.”
“Who’s they?”
“Oh, come on. Detroit has always had a certain amount of pointless crime. That’s what they should have called one of the ball clubs. Not Pistons or zoo animals. The Detroit Arsonists. But it’s getting worse and it’s getting closer to home. At least to my home.”
I spent too much time on my couch reading the papers, and not just the Detroit papers, but whatever I could find online. Larry Oh called a press conference for Thursday afternoon, and then on Wednesday night the story went around on Twitter that Meacher had died. The Detroit Free Press reported this fact on their website—I sometimes checked the home page while cooking supper.
Around ten o’clock, my doorbell rang. I was in the middle of unloading the dishwasher and went downstairs drying my hands on my shirt. Don Adler stood on the porch.
“Don’t say I didn’t tell you so,” he said.
“What’s going on? Do you want to come in?”
“I think you should come out.”
It was a warm, humid night; the summer storm hadn’t quite cleared the air. I had a T-shirt on, and running shorts, which I sometimes wore around the house at night for comfort.
“I was just about to go to bed.”
“Go put your shoes on. There’s a fight—your friend Kurt Stangel is mixed up in it. Him and the black guy.”
“What am I supposed to do? Call the police.”
“If the police did their job, we wouldn’t have to.”
“What does that mean?”
But I followed him out in bare feet. The sidewalk was still partly wet, and I walked a little gingerly. There was a car parked sideways in the middle of the road, outside Nolan’s house. I could hear people shouting. Mrs. Smith stood on her porch steps, in her bathrobe.
“What’s going on?” I said to her.
She was in tears. “Marny, Marny,” she said, grabbing my shoulder, “maybe you can talk some sense into somebody.”
Six or seven people stood around the car, whose front window was broken. One of t
hem said, “Come on, guys,” and Mrs. Smith called out, “Nolan, Nolan!” I took hold of her hand and then let go of it. There was a strip of dirty lawn between the sidewalk and the road, and I walked over the grass but stopped at the curb. You could see glass on the asphalt under the street lamp light.
“Nolan!” I said and Eddie Blyleven walked over to me. He’s one of these likable good-looking guys, big and responsible, who doesn’t take anything too seriously.
“They’ve kind of punched themselves out already. It’s basically over.”
“What happened?”
What happened was this. When the story about Meacher started going around, guys from the Neighborhood Watch decided to set up a few roadblocks in case something kicked off—including one at the end of Johanna Street. People in other neighborhoods were doing the same thing. Eddie wasn’t there but apparently this big black dude came out of his house with a baseball bat and told Kurt to fuck off. Kurt started explaining himself and the guy took out his windshield with the bat. So Kurt tried to take his bat away and they got in a fight. Kurt’s a pretty big dude himself, Eddie said.
“They called me over but I said, leave ’em alone. The last thing we want is a bunch of white guys standing around beating the crap out of somebody. But I took the bat away, you can do some damage with a bat. We’re too old for this bullshit. You have to be in pretty good shape to throw punches for more than two minutes, and these guys aren’t in great shape. They’re just wrestling now. What worries me is just the broken glass.”
“Can’t you step in?”
“It’s like with kids,” he said. “If you step in it just takes longer.”
“Marny,” Mrs. Smith said, and I went back to her. “What’s he saying? Can’t you get him away from those men? I want to get him inside.”
“I don’t have any shoes on. Did you call the police?”
“What am I call the police for? To arrest my son? I got more sense than that.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I don’t know what to do. He gets so angry about everything. I say, what do you want me to do? That’s how it is. He says I go along with everything, I’d go along with my own funeral. And that’s right, I will, when the time comes, but now is not the time. Even when he was a boy he got angry. He wasn’t one of these kids you can make it better.”
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