You Don't Have to Live Like This

by Benjamin Markovits

  After Clarence left, Nolan basically shut down our relationship. I hardly saw him, except sometimes at his mother’s house. And even then he found a reason to leave the room, he took the dog out, he went upstairs.

  But Tony came in for a hard time, too. The Chicago Tribune ran a piece about his Detroit memoir, which gave a big boost to sales. Tony himself showed up at my house one morning, waving a printout of the Amazon page—he’d gotten to 133 in the charts. But the case put his memoir in a strong light, and people started looking at it for other kinds of information. There was a Slate blog that picked out three or four passages and considered them for racist content. Tony’s line on all this is that we’re all racist and it’s better to be open about it; that was the point of the book. He didn’t present himself as an authority, he presented himself as kind of a fuckup. There was a confessional element. But that’s not how the excerpts came across.

  Tony always said he liked being disliked, he was used to it. But some of what showed up on social media sites was pretty scary. There were threats, and a guy from the Eastpointe police department came by the house to talk to Cris and Tony about security. What kind of threats they took seriously, the kind they let go, what they should tell their kids. It was very upsetting for her; for Tony, too. At least, the male protective instinct allowed him to express some of his anxiety by directing it at his family. “I’m just glad Michael is four and not six,” he said to me. “At six he might start taking shit in the playground. But at four he doesn’t have a clue. He just knows that Mommy and Daddy keep fighting about something. I mean, go figure. The guy takes my kid and I’m the guy all the trolls want to take a potshot at. I guess the world is full of motherfuckers.”

  But it didn’t look good—Tony kicking Nolan in the head, knocking him out. There was a lot of national news interest. Robert, for example, was worried that pictures of me and Obama playing basketball might reach the Internet. Afterwards, under the garage lights, Bill Russo got one of the catering staff to take a group photo. That was easy enough to track down. But these days anybody with a mobile phone can turn into a problem. People take pictures they don’t even remember taking. Robert went through the guest list, making phone calls. He called Gloria, too.

  “What did he say?”

  “He wanted to know if I had any pictures of you and the president. He wanted me to delete them.”

  “Do you?”

  “Just one. He’s boxing you out.”

  “Did you delete it?”

  “What do you think?” she said.

  But they came out anyway. You can’t keep these things down anymore, and suddenly there was a picture of me on the cover of USA Today: in a half crouch, looking up at Obama, while he squared to shoot. Snow in the background, the lights reflecting off it, and Secret Service guys ranged along a fence. Robert’s driveway. The press didn’t know what to make of it. It’s an odd story. Witness in a racial confrontation played basketball with the president at a Thanksgiving fund-raiser. “In Detroit, the lines are being drawn, and crossed, and redrawn,” the article said. I spent a lot of my time online, reading the news.

  Gloria thought the case was taking over my life; this was another one of our fights. She went back to work and I stayed home, screwing around on the computer. And often when she came back she found me on the computer, too, sitting at the desk in the living room, which overlooked the front yard. She could see me on her way up the steps, around six o’clock at night, with my face in the digital glow. I tried to explain myself to her. That this thing had put me in a moral dilemma, the kind you read about, where you have to do something, you have to make a choice. I’ve got loyalties and duties on opposing sides. I’m trying to think all this through.

  “If you’ve got to do something,” she said, “how come all you do is stare at that screen?”

  And it’s true, there was something unhealthy about my curiosity. I kept finding out new things about my friends, about Nolan’s ex-girlfriend for example, in the public media. Clarence’s mother used to work at the Hooters in Troy—she was one of these women ballplayers date. And in fact her current husband started out pitching for the Lansing Lugnuts, a Class A affiliate of the Blue Jays, before moving into sales at Daikin. (Korobkin: See, it all comes down to baseball in the end.) But Nolan never mentioned her to me, or the fact that his kid was moving to Arizona. And here I had another source of information.

  The media puts people in interesting lights. It shows you angles you don’t usually get to see, but there’s a kind of glare, like flash photography. Everything looks a little lurid. And you try to square what you find out with what you already know, and it never adds up. So your friends become contradictions, and let’s face it, a part of you is always willing to suspect even your best friend of any kind of dubious past or practice. You’ve got all these grounds for resentment anyway, little doubts and uncertainties, and the news seems to justify them. Tony once glassed somebody in a bar fight and spent the night in jail. The charges were eventually withdrawn. In his journalism days, he got caught up in one of these plagiarism scandals, and lost his job at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Pittsburgh is where he went to grad school, his dissertation was on Emerson, he dropped out after two years. These are the kinds of things I learned.

  But I was also looking for something else, stories about the five neighborhoods, about Robert James. Because a number of commentators took Nolan’s trial as a larger trial of the whole idea. Nolan stood for the old black Detroit, Tony stood for the old white Detroit, I stood for the new guys. It didn’t go unnoticed that I was the only one in the clear. There were stories about my guns, too, the Remington and the Smith & Wesson, and my connection to Mel Hauser, and Mel’s connection to Tony. But Robert James was like the icing on the cake—since Nolan thought it was his kid, and the whole thing started at Robert’s big rented house in Indian Village. We saw photographs of this place dressed up in party mode, with the lights on and guests arriving, and pretty waitresses standing in the floor-to-ceiling windows. And I would stare at these photographs, trying to recognize people.

  This is a kind of self-obsession, and part of what pissed Gloria off. I wish I could write what happened from her point of view, because something was happening to her, too. For one thing, she got stuck defending me at work. The stories about my guns were particularly upsetting. She didn’t know about them. One of them lived under my bed, the handgun was in my sock drawer, but when she stayed over I had no reason to bring them out, and I never mentioned them. I guess I was ashamed. And then there’s the fact that I retreated to my bedroom while Nolan and Tony were fighting. People wanted to know what I was doing. Getting a gun? No, just sitting there, keeping out of it. But this didn’t look good either. And what about when Tony kicked Nolan in the head and knocked him out. What was I doing then? Nothing, watching, I was too slow. And why did I leave Nolan like that, lying unconscious? Because Tony didn’t know the way to his mother’s house. Who called the police, who called the ambulance? Tony. What was I doing?

  Gloria asked me this, too. She said, “I have to ask you. I get it from all sides. It’s what everybody wants to know.”

  “Trying not to make things worse.”

  “How much worse could they have been?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that, too. Worse.”

  “Marny, I don’t want to talk about that. I don’t want to think about it. You find out things, and you think, who is this person, do I know you?”

  “You know me. You know me better than these people who write these stories.”

  “That’s what you keep telling me. But I’m not sure. How come they knew about the guns and I didn’t?”

  “They weren’t important.”

  “They seem important to me.”

  All of this might have been easier if she weren’t living with me. Sometimes she came out the front door to find photographers in the street. You sort of get used to that but not really. She needed somewhere else to go, she needed to go home, but her home was
a construction site. I guess she might have stayed with her mother, but she never got along with her mother, and these days they got along even worse because of me. Her mother was an unusually socially conscious person. She cared what strangers thought of her, and her daughter’s association with a guy who was in the news for the reasons I was in the news upset her sense of family class. But look, this is all from my point of view. Maybe Eunice just thought I’m an asshole, that’s possible, too. Either way, Gloria didn’t really want to stay with her, at least while we were still together.

  The other problem, and this seems petty in the general context, but I think it mattered, too, was just that damn kitchen. Gloria was under a lot of stress, and she took some of it out on the contractor, who was a likable and basically hardworking guy, but not very well organized, and not very good at communicating with clients. So, for example, she ordered a stained beech worktop, but there was a problem with the distributor. It was going to put the job back weeks, so he cut a deal on a stained oak worktop instead, and started cutting it down to size. And told her about it afterwards. This is the kind of thing. Gloria made him go back to square one and refused to reimburse him either for costs or labor. Then there was an issue with the gas supply. Her apartment was in an unmodernized and badly maintained building from the 1930s, held together by spit and plaster. When he took out the old oven he started a leak that meant he had to shut down the supply in the whole building to fix it. Which pissed a lot of people off—at Gloria, not at him. After a while he started taking a tone with her, the tone of a reasonable man doing his gentlemanly best with an unreasonable woman, which drove her crazy. And as I say the whole thing dragged on and on.

  I don’t want to take sides here, maybe I should have taken sides. Workingmen, contractors and plumbers and carpenters, carry a kind of male threat and appeal, which makes it difficult for some men to insist on terms and conditions. I guess I’m one of those men. Also, it wasn’t my kitchen, and maybe some part of me felt that Gloria was building her escape hatch or something, I don’t know. But you can’t stand around watching a guy working hard and competently, doing things you don’t know how to do, and then start complaining to him about the difference between stained beech and stained oak, and quibbling over prices. At least I can’t.

  Gloria wanted from me a little more interest and cooperation, but that’s not really what the problem was. The problem ran deeper and didn’t have anything to do with the kitchen. People always liked Gloria, she got along with everybody, and suddenly here she was fighting battles on all sides, with people who clearly considered her a difficult personality. With her mother, herself a real professional piece of work. Sniping back and forth with Mrs. Sanchez at school, mostly for my sake. And now she heard herself nagging away at Kevin the Contractor, the kind of slightly shifty good-natured overweight man who usually flirts with her. Somehow she had backed herself into a corner where just to go anywhere in any direction she needed to get her claws out. And I can’t help thinking that at a certain point it occurred to her that the corner she was stuck in she was stuck in because of me.

  But I don’t want to paint everything in bleak and dismal. And the truth is, when I look back on our relationship, these two months stand for what I miss—I mean the months we were living together, in the house I shared with Walter and Susie. At first, over the summer vacation, we all had time on our hands. But later, when Gloria started going back to school, I used to walk her part of the way just to make sure I got out of bed in the morning. When the weather was nice; otherwise she drove. We kissed on a street corner and I watched her go, my working woman, dressed in her own version of a school uniform, the simple skirts and high socks, clean shoes, a collared shirt or blouse. I say uniform because I knew her well enough by this point to realize that even her natural modesty, good humor and kindness were a form of protection, against strangers and kids, against the world, against anybody who didn’t love her, which makes up a high percentage of the total. So my heart went out to her as she kicked through the leaves.

  On my short walk home I thought about what to make for dinner and sometimes picked up a few things on the way—from Annie’s Corner Store, some hippie-dippie hole-in-the-wall grocer that had just sprung up. Or I got in the car and drove out to Greenfield Market, which was more of a hassle but cheaper and took up more of my day. That was the main benefit. Money didn’t worry me much at that time. I had put a lot by from teaching the previous year. And I also had some vague sense that the way we were living couldn’t last. So I thought about money like it was food on a plate, something you enjoy and finish off.

  Fall came late and mild. Detroit always has a summer mosquito problem, but Gloria and I kept getting bitten deep into October. At night the street lamps shone like sunshine in the yellow leaves. We left our bedroom window open, but the reading lamp attracted bugs, and Gloria had sweet blood—she got bitten more than I did. At least the mosquitoes still like me, she said. She got bitten once on her chest, just where a pendant might hang, on the visible skin between her breasts. Gloria didn’t want to scratch it because the scab would show, but sometimes when we were in bed together, making out, she got this unbearable wriggly kind of itch. She made me scratch it for her, and it was kind of a sensual delight, and also kind of not. It was more childish than that and a distraction from the other thing. So when I tried to kiss her she just said, no, don’t stop, scratch it there, there, there. I mention this just as an example. We didn’t always fight.

  And even our fights felt like the real thing. We were living together, we were lovers, and we were working out some deep strife between us, which is what lovers should do. Gloria wanted me not to testify against Nolan. She wanted me to take sides—against the whole idea, against the rest of us. Let Tony and Nolan fight it out; it’s their fight. I said the only thing I can do is tell the truth, anything else will get me into trouble. “It’s not that simple,” she said, “and don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m not that worried about you.” It wasn’t just a question of what had happened. There was a context, there were consequences. “You have to work out what you want to happen,” she said. “Because what you say is going to have an effect on that. You have to work out what you think Nolan deserves.”

  “This is too complicated for me, Gloria. They’re going to ask me some questions, I’m going to give them some answers. That’s all. It’s really not up to me.”

  “Excuse me, no. That’s like a Yalie’s point of view, because you basically trust the system. You think, all I have to do is tell the truth, so help me God. But the system doesn’t work, so it’s a question of getting from it something you can live with. I mean, what’s Nolan looking at? Life with parole. Ten years. Four years. Think about Clarence. Because whatever it is, he’ll have to live with it, too.”

  “You want me to lie for him.”

  “I want you to make the right thing happen.”

  “That’s not my job. They’ve got judges and lawyers working this thing out.”

  “You mean, the people who let Tyler Waites hit a young black man with his car. For stealing his phone.”

  “I can’t talk to you when you’re like this,” I said. “You’re identifying me with people I’ve got nothing to do with.”

  “These are the people asking you questions. I just want you to think very carefully about your answers.”

  “I’m thinking, I’m thinking.”

  “Think harder,” she said.

  I told myself, this is just the friction that produces the heat. We were working out whether to align ourselves. It’s supposed to be painful, like a slipped disk—you have to learn how to move again. I said this to Gloria, too, but she wasn’t convinced.

  34

  Nolan’s trial moved from the district court to the circuit court. There was a motion hearing, to determine admissible evidence, and I went along to see what everyone had to say. The Frank Murphy Hall of Justice looks a little like a parking garage built in the 1970s, concrete with horizontal windows an
d those broad courthouse steps you need in the movies, to show the defendant tumbling down them into freedom or trapped halfway up by reporters.

  Inside the place was done up in brown and beige. Everything was carefully coordinated, brown tables and chairs, beige walls, brown carpeting, nothing that shows stains. I guess the idea is to depress people into submission. The judge was an overweight black woman; her accent ranged from sonorous to nitpicky. A placard on the table in front of her had her name on it: Judge Liz Westinghouse. It seemed funny to me that she used her nickname—I tried to work out what that meant. Maybe her full name didn’t fit. But she had also clearly acquired what the self-improvement gurus try to sell you, strength of personality. When she came in people rose, when she sat down people sat.

  Mostly what happened was procedural stuff, and not very interesting. There wasn’t much evidence in dispute. Nolan’s lawyers wanted to argue that the kid was in the street, wandering around—not in the house or the garden or the driveway. Apparently one of the cops overheard Nolan in hospital saying something about the guys working on the front gate, which seemed at least an indication of his general vicinity. But his lawyers wanted to rule these comments inadmissible—the guy had been kicked in the head, he was just waking up. There was also some dispute about whether or not the cop had read him his Miranda rights before or after Nolan said what he said or what he was alleged to have said.

  I found the whole business both depressing and impressive. All this attention to detail. You realize pretty quickly that you are in the hands of massive but at the same time small-scale forces. It’s like being overrun by ants. Afterwards what you get is not facts exactly or truth or anything like that—there’s no reason to think that the real facts or the real truth is best adapted to surviving this process. I mean, I was there, I saw a lot of what happened, but I don’t know how much of what I saw or thought would have counted with these people, the lawyers. But there are certain kinds of information that do survive. It’s like those urban myths about nuclear holocaust, the only thing left is cockroaches. But that’s not quite what I mean either. There’s a kind of reproach you feel, in seeing firsthand these competent, expensively trained people do their work. Like, on what basis do I live my life? Can it withstand this kind of scrutiny? No, not really. But I also heard in the back of my mind what my brother might have said if he were watching—that some of these guys were second-rate.