You Don't Have to Live Like This

by Benjamin Markovits

  Nolan was there, too. I saw his shaved head. Even he seemed cowed. Sometimes he turned and whispered something in his lawyer’s ear. And afterwards, on our way out, I caught his eye, and he gave me a look like, here we go, buddy.

  A FEW DAYS LATER THE aluminum story broke in the business pages of The New York Times:

  Hundreds of millions of times a day, thirsty Americans open a can of soda, beer or juice. And every time they do it, they pay a fraction of a penny more because of a shrewd maneuver by Goldman Sachs and other financial players that ultimately costs consumers billions of dollars.

  The story of how this works begins in a complex of warehouses in Detroit where a Goldman subsidiary stores customers’ aluminum. Each day, a fleet of trucks shuffles 1,500-pound bars of the metal among the warehouses. Two or three times a day, sometimes more, the drivers make the same circuits. They load in one warehouse. They unload in another. And then they do it again.

  This industrial dance has been choreographed by Goldman to exploit pricing regulations set up by an overseas commodities exchange, an investigation by The New York Times has found. The back-and-forth lengthens the storage time. And that adds many millions a year to the coffers of Goldman, which charges rent to store the metal.

  The writer was a guy called Kocieniewski; I looked him up. A Buffalo kid, he used to work at The Detroit News. Most of his article was about the London Metal Exchange, its corporate structure (Goldman used to be on the board), and the protocols for storing precious metals. “Industry rules require that metal cannot simply sit in a warehouse forever,” Kocieniewski wrote. “At least 3,000 tons must be moved out each day. But most of the metal stored in Detroit is not being delivered to customers; instead, it is shuttled from one warehouse to another.”

  Two days later someone at the National desk picked up the story and connected it to Robert James. The headline was gently tongue-in-cheek: “Detroit Scheme Makes Profit, by Sitting on Its Assets.”

  Robert James describes it as the “Groupon model” for gentrification. “We take a virtual community and make it real,” he said last year at the shiny new Wayne Conner Server Farm, at a fund-raiser attended by President Obama. There were questions from the beginning about how the economics stacked up, but now it appears that Goldman Sachs, one of James’s “team of investors,” has been buying warehouses in the developed neighborhoods to store aluminum. . .

  So Steve Zipp was right. Maybe he was crazy but he was right. Then Time magazine ran an article on us, “Utopian Vision Faces Real-world Politics and Problems,” which covered not only the aluminum scandal but also the Meacher incident and Nolan’s trial. The journalist wanted to know whether the Goldman deal was funding the neighborhood project or whether the neighborhoods were just window dressing for a commodities scam. Beatrice didn’t worry much about the difference—the article quoted her. “This maybe matters to you people,” she said, “but I don’t have time for philosophical distinctions. We’re trying to do something good here. If Goldman broke the law, then the law should step in. Otherwise, I don’t see what the problem is.”

  The problem was, as she explained to me herself one afternoon, that regulators planned to change the law and close one of the loopholes—three thousand tons turns out to be a pretty low minimum for the amount of metal warehouses have to shift each day. “Goldman’s one of our biggest investors,” she told me. “If they lose their financial incentive, we’re screwed.”

  “Why are you telling me all this?”

  She hadn’t stopped by the house in months, I figured she had given up on me. So if she came by now there was probably a motive—she wanted something. “I’m just keeping you in the picture,” she said. “It’s your picture, too.”

  “Look, I should tell you something. I knew about this beforehand. I may have mentioned it to Nolan.”

  It was a cold prewinter day. I like this time of year, two weeks before Thanksgiving. The trees were leafless, the sun came in from every angle. Through my kitchen window, you could feel the light being translated into heat. Gloria had lent me her Gaggia, until the work was finished in her apartment, and I made some coffee. Beatrice looked important and attractive, a busy person, while I stood around in my jogging shorts.

  “Nolan’s not the problem here,” Beatrice said. “But we need this money. If Goldman backs out, we have to make up the difference somewhere. And that will probably mean selling houses—speeding up the process. Which takes away control, it turns the whole thing into an open market. People will start selling, they’ll start buying, you’ll be living on a street with real estate signs in the yard.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “It depends what you want. But I don’t think it’s what you want. This place isn’t ready yet. You need a culture—markets depend on cultures. But markets don’t make cultures, you have to engineer them. That’s what we’ve been trying to do. The health care, the ratio of shops and houses, the parks and schools, but you know all that. Handpicking tenants, different kinds of people, getting commitments from them. If they sell up now, in two years’ time we’ll be back where we started. At least, that’s my best guess. There’s also concern about what happens if this case goes to trial.”

  “What do you mean, if?”

  “The only thing that makes sense, and I mean that from Nolan’s point of view, is a plea bargain. Otherwise he’s looking at some very scary possibilities.”

  “So he should make a deal.”

  “His lawyers say he doesn’t want to—he wants his day in court. And we’ve got our own concerns about that. This case has already attracted a lot of bad publicity. The last thing anybody wants is a courtroom drama.”

  “Except for Nolan.”

  “In that case, Nolan has a very limited conception of his self-interest.”

  “Is that what you want to talk to me about?”

  “Marny, we’re talking because we’re talking. I’m worried about the trial, but I didn’t come here with motives. I’m proud of you. You’re one of the success stories, you’re one of the people holding this thing together. Teaching at a local high school, living with Gloria.”

  I looked at her and she said, “You know what I mean.”

  “Well, I haven’t been teaching this year.”

  “I heard that, too.”

  Afterwards I went for a run and tried to work out what she wanted from me—that I should talk to Nolan. Or maybe she didn’t want anything, I was just being paranoid. Running gives you a mild high, thoughts dislodge themselves, things occur to you, and it occurred to me that I had come a long way from the kid I was, that I was doing all right. Beatrice had spotted this and pointed it out. Either way that’s what she meant. I had become a point of contact between opposing views, somebody she could turn to for help. And maybe she was right about Nolan’s self-interest, too. You can’t dismiss an argument just because you don’t trust or share the motive of the person who makes it. Also, I basically did trust Beatrice. She always left a scent behind in a room, not just her perfume. She was somebody you naturally wanted to please, and that had a kind of aftereffect.

  GLORIA TRIED TO BREAK UP with me as soon as her kitchen was ready. “You just used me for my appliances,” I joked. But that’s not really what was going on. There was a coincidence of events. Without telling me Astrid had uploaded the video of us having sex onto her website, along with a lot of other stuff: more of her videos, photographs of Detroit, etc. Maybe she told me, maybe I knew, I don’t know. Later she said, which was true, that the deal always was, whatever I video, I can use. Anyway, I stopped thinking about it. In some ways I’m not a very private person. There’s a lot of stuff you’re supposed to care about that I don’t. But somebody found the link and tweeted it, at which point the video went twittering around—a really inexplicable number of people watched it. I could write down a number but it keeps changing, even now. Gloria came home from school one day and showed it to me. Some of her kids had seen it.

  “I don’t know if I’m more e
mbarrassed or upset,” she said.

  “I think you’re more upset.”

  “That’s a very stupid thing to be a part of. Don’t tell me what I feel. You don’t want to know what I feel. I’ll tell you what I feel. You spend all day trying not to shout at the kids and then I come home and try not to shout at you. When I got in the car I just thought, that’s enough. Nobody’s happy anymore. What’s the point.”

  “I’m happy,” I said. “This is my happy face.”

  “Don’t play games, Marny, I’m not.”

  We talked a lot more than that, we said stupid things. She started packing up to go home. Just give me a couple of weeks to get my head on straight, she said. But she kept thinking about that video—she wanted to know when it was shot.

  “Listen, Gloria. Don’t think about it. It’s upsetting, but it’s got nothing to do with us. I know you’ve had sex with other people, you know I’ve had sex with other people, but we don’t want to think about it. This makes you think about it, I understand that. But it’s not important.”

  “It’s not just this, it’s Nolan, it’s everything. I just need a break. I don’t want to fight you all the time.”

  We held on a little longer after that. She stayed the night and left in the morning and moved back into her apartment. But we kept seeing each other—a little less often than before.

  The last thing we did as a couple was try to talk Nolan out of standing trial. It’s strange that on this major source of conflict and disagreement, we ended up briefly on the same side. It was like an intervention; his mother was there, too, and we sat in their kitchen and one by one we said, please don’t do this thing. Everybody (except for Nolan) was extremely emotional. I felt very close to Gloria, to all of them. I was really at the heart of something, sitting in that family kitchen and debating with these people something so important and intimate, where the decisions you reach collectively have real consequences. But we didn’t reach any collective decisions because Nolan shut us out. He sat there, he took it, but he didn’t say much.

  The best deal he could get was four years, which might mean closer to two in practice. That’s what Larry Oh was offering him. If the case went to trial, he could end up with a life sentence—maybe he gets out on parole after fifteen years. Nolan was pissed off, among other things, that Oh had decided not to press charges against Tony for assault. He planned to sue Tony, after the criminal case resolved itself, for medical damages and general psychological suffering. But he was having a hard time finding a litigator to take on the case—Nolan saw a conspiracy in this, too.

  Gloria was often in tears; Mrs. Smith was in tears. She brought out cake and coffee, but I was the only one who ate anything. Nolan made his own coffee.

  “I don’t need to tell you this,” I said, “but there’s a big difference between two years and fifteen years. Right now every option looks bad. I know it must be hard to choose between outcomes you don’t want and can’t even really imagine. But that’s what you have to do. Two years means Clarence is nine when you get out. Fifteen years means he’s twenty-two. The difference is basically his whole childhood.”

  “You haven’t been reading the papers,” Nolan said. “Clarence is in Arizona. And seriously, what chance do you think I have to get him back if I go to jail?”

  “I don’t think you have a chance now.”

  “I want to know what lawyers you’re talking to—where you get your information. Did Robert James talk you into this? Because he doesn’t want to see me in court, I can tell you that. A trial gives me a platform, it gives me a voice.”

  “Nolan, you know what it’s like in there. Everything gets twisted. You never get to say what you want to say, and even if you do it won’t come out the way you want it to.”

  “We’ll see about that. This is really just a game of chicken. Larry Oh says four years or life, but they can do better than that. Robert James won’t let this get to trial.”

  “I don’t think Robert has anything to do with it.”

  “Please, Marny. He sent you here, didn’t he?”

  “No,” I said.

  But afterwards Gloria told me, this is one of the things that made up her mind. Not because of what Nolan said. He was going crazy, she could see that, he didn’t make sense, he was fighting all kinds of battles he didn’t need to fight. It’s hard when you go through something like this to pay attention to what matters. But for her it was simple. We were all sitting around the kitchen table, and she realized (about me), he’s not helping, I wish he wasn’t here.

  Everything had an effect. There was a lot of unpleasantness in the news. Somebody picked up on Walter’s story, too, on the situation with Susie, and the fact that we were living in the same house turned into another couple of paragraphs on Gawker. What had happened to Meacher and Waites and Nolan and Tony was happening to me—when the news cycle spins you around, everything gets dirty. Then one Saturday morning a photographer papped Gloria coming out of my house and she just started running, crying and running until the end of the block. She knocked on Mrs. Smith’s door, and they talked and then she came back for her car. That was the last time she came to my apartment. When I saw her again that night, at her apartment, I carried over a shopping bag of her stuff.

  Breaking up is one of those dramatic things you do, it brings out a lot of grandstanding. It’s like a license to say things. So I said some things I half regret.

  My dad once told me, you’ve got this confessional streak, but no real desire to explain yourself. (A friend of mine broke the garage window by kicking a soccer ball against it, and I went straight in to take the blame.) Gloria was leaving me anyway, so I told her about my one-night stand with Astrid. I didn’t want to give her the impression I had nothing to be ashamed of. It was complicated. The video was stupid and pointless, and I told her it didn’t mean anything, but if she found out later what had happened, it could do real damage—I mean, after all that protested innocence. So I told her now. I said to her, look, this is over, you’ve made that clear, but I want a clean break, because I plan to win you back, that’s my plan. I figured she was already disgusted with me; a little more couldn’t hurt.

  But I miscalculated. “Why are you telling me this?” she said. “I don’t want to know, I don’t want to know.” And later, “I made myself very vulnerable to you.” That seemed a weird way of putting it—it stuck in my mind for a long time.

  35

  Christmas was next, and this time my mother came to stay. To cheer me up, she said. A year ago everything looked better, everything was starting out. I had a girlfriend, I had a job, and my mother was married to my father. Of course, she had her own reasons for getting out of Dodge. She couldn’t face Brad’s family, Christmas with his wife in Houston, waking up in the spare bedroom, and watching her son go through what we all went through together, when she had a central role to play. So she came to me.

  I gave her my bedroom and slept on the couch. But we got in each other’s hair. Mom was scared to go out in Detroit by herself, even sightseeing, even in the afternoon. Nothing will happen to you at the Institute of Arts, I said. But she answered, “I’ve heard the stories.” So she dragged me along with her, because the truth is, I didn’t have anything else to do. We saw the Rivera murals, the Moscow Ballet was in town, so we went to The Nutcracker at Caesars Windsor, I took her around Belle Isle. Being a tourist is tiring, but when you go with your mom you kind of reenact the old relationship, even if it isn’t true or real anymore. Anyway, none of this lightened my mood.

  While she was staying I got another letter from my father. It was mostly about himself, this was turning into his big subject; he wanted to explain himself again. In the past six months, ever since moving out, he had realized the burden my mother placed on him. She’s a very negative person, he said, and he hadn’t realized until it was pointed out to him, by a very smart younger person, what family life had done to his personality. Young people these days, he went on, don’t have the hang-ups I did, they don’t
feel any false obligations. And so on.

  “What’s he say?” my mother asked.

  “Nothing much, just day-to-day stuff.”

  “If he’s unhappy I want you to tell me, I want to know.”

  “I think he’s all right,” I said.

  One night I went to see Astrid—I had to get out of the house. I’d been trying to call her for several weeks, but she didn’t answer her phone. Finally, I sent her an email, and she wrote back. Her phone was dead; she had closed out the contract. She was leaving in the morning, flying to Germany for Christmas and not coming back. But I could watch her pack up if I wanted to. So my mom made me supper, and afterwards I drove over to Astrid’s apartment, in one of those survivor row houses by the old train station.

  All night long there was this stream of people coming through. It was a very unsatisfying visit. I guess I was hoping to pick a fight but she wasn’t in the mood. So I just sat on her two-seater couch, drinking red wine and offering the bottle to newcomers when they walked in. Astrid was stressed out but also clearly on a kind of high, kissing everybody, crying lightly, giving things away—paintings, DVDs and CDs, bottles of alcohol and clothes. “I want to go home with what I can carry in a duffel bag,” she said, again and again and again. I’m sure that some of the people coming through recognized me from the video link. It was embarrassing and depressing and every time I saw this woman she annoyed me and attracted me at the same time.

  “I don’t understand how you can just leave,” I said to her at one point.