You Don't Have to Live Like This

by Benjamin Markovits

  “I have had my experience here. It’s like when you work on a picture, and then you say it’s done, you have to do something else.”

  This is the kind of thing.

  I wanted to have some real conversation with her, about the video, about Gloria, about something. I wanted to tell her, we can’t see each other anymore, we can’t hang out. But this was obviously pointless, and at least I figured that out. When I left she gave me a Sesame Street kid’s book, the tiny hard kind you can loop to a baby stroller. Bert and Ernie’s Sleepytime Book. “I bought it for my niece months ago; she’s really too old for it. That’s what happens when you go away. They grow up. My sister says, she walks everywhere now. You can have it,” she said and scribbled something inside the cover with a felt-tip pen.

  In the bleak overhead car light, feeling drunk, I read her inscription: From Astrid, for the long nights . . .

  My mother was asleep when I got home, so I turned on my computer and started messing around online. After a few minutes, I looked up the video link. I sat on my sofa, with the computer on my lap, and watched us make love. Astrid was crying and I kept going and afterwards we held on to each other. I don’t know what I felt looking at her, you could see her breasts hanging down a little shapelessly, she had small breasts and sat on top. But one thing I did feel was turned on. It was a stupid physical reaction, but I was also very lonely at the time, and I needed some outlet or expression for my intensity of feelings. And this was it.

  All night long I left the windows open, but in the morning the living room still smelled of bedclothes.

  “What are you doing to yourself?” my mother asked, over breakfast.

  My heart skipped a beat. “What do you mean?” I said.

  “It’s freezing in here.”

  On Christmas Day, Walter and Susie invited us downstairs. Everybody else got along, but I behaved badly. It was kind of a make-fun-of-Marny party. Susie did most of the cooking and she wasn’t a good cook. The turkey was dry in places and pink in others; the mash potatoes tasted salty and lumpy. There was too much food as well and it sat around on the dishes afterwards, and on people’s plates, showing the oil. I don’t think anybody cared. They just got drunk, even Susie, and there was an atmosphere of conviviality based on the idea that Walter and I were good friends, and Susie loved Walter and my mother loved me, so we all loved each other.

  But I was in a bad way. I wanted to be elsewhere, and rejected all conversational approaches and offers of sympathy. Also, it didn’t help seeing Walter and Susie together, basically happy.

  That night my mother said to me, “I don’t think you realize how much work it takes to put together a meal like that. It’s getting everything into the oven at different times, and getting them out at the same time. You could have showed a little appreciation.”

  “I said several times how delicious everything was.”

  “That’s not what I mean. It’s not what you say, people just want you to have a good time.”

  “Some things are outside my control.”

  “You can make an effort. And maybe after a while it won’t feel like such an effort anymore.”

  “What you don’t realize is, that was an effort. That was me making an effort.”

  “What I saw is you picking fights.”

  And it’s true, at one point I lost my temper. Walter said something about Gloria; he had spoken to her on the phone. He remembered that I once met a friend of hers who worked for an adoption agency in Southfield. Susie and he wanted to adopt.

  “What kind of kid? A black kid?”

  “Is that possible?” my mother asked.

  “With these guys, it is,” Walter said. “They’re Lutherans.”

  “And what did Gloria say?”

  “She was very obliging.”

  “Don’t call her again,” I said.

  “What did you do to her?”

  “Nothing. I just don’t want to hear about her, I don’t want you to talk to her. I don’t want you people to have any relations with her when I don’t.”

  “Well, why don’t you?”

  “Oh, leave me alone,” I said.

  Afterwards, my mother was always first to make up. She nagged at me, she niggled at me, but she couldn’t stay mad for long—she felt too anxious. That was probably bad for me, too. I started indulging myself in teenage sulks.

  But it was too much, her sympathy. I couldn’t breathe. She looks like me, too, pale and earnest, like someone who doesn’t understand a joke but is trying her best. Explain it to me, her face said. Instead I watched TV or I watched her cook and after two weeks she couldn’t take it anymore.

  “What I can’t bear is the idea that this was a failure.”

  “Two weeks is a long time,” I said. “We’re not used to each other now.”

  “That’s just what I mean.”

  But she flew home on New Year’s Eve—the flights were cheaper. “I’ll come back for the trial,” she said. And after she left I felt surprisingly cheerful, cheerful in the old way, I mean. Like a college kid flying back after Christmas vacation, to his dorm room or apartment, to his old new life. But I had good days and bad days—good weeks and bad weeks.

  One night, my brother gave me a call.

  “You survived her,” he said.

  “She was all right. She loves me.”

  “Even I love you. Did you know all that about Nolan?”

  “What,” I said.

  “I talked to Korobkin. It’s not just the kid, Nolan has credit card debts. There are lovers, he’s been leading two or three lives. Irreconcilable lives. I see this stuff all the time in my pro bono work. Immigrant families, fucked-up dads, guys under a lot of pressure doing fucked-up things. What you have to realize is that for some people private life is a different kind of reality.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything.”

  “I thought I should warn you. This thing is going to get personal, they’re going to come after you.”

  “Who is? I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

  “His lawyers.”

  “Whose lawyers?”

  “Listen, Greg. There’s only one way this goes to trial—if Nolan’s lawyers think they can make a reasonable case for his innocence. They have to turn this into a misunderstanding. Tony says one thing, he says another. The problem is you—you’re the only real witness. And if you don’t tell the story the way they want you to tell it, they’ll come after you. That’s all I’m saying. You should be prepared.”

  “Okay, so you told me. I’m prepared.”

  But he changed his tone. “What are you going to do now?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, what do you do with yourself these days?”

  “I’m going to clear up the kitchen and turn on the TV. Then I’m going to bed. That’s what I do.”

  But the truth is I was watching a lot of porn. I had never done this before, at least not online, and didn’t know where to look. In high school one of my D&D buddies had access to the Playboy channel through his father’s account—his parents were divorced. But it didn’t interest me much; I felt embarrassed, especially in front of the other boys. But this time there was nobody around. I started out with Tyler Waites’s website and that led me to other things. It was amazing, the variety on offer, all these sophisticated tastes. I remembered something Nolan said. There is no human nature, just economics. Supply and demand.

  The picture quality was usually pretty bad, but that seemed part of the appeal—you could never get a good enough look. You always wanted to be closer. And between you and what you wanted was this screen.

  One of the things you learn growing up is that adult pleasures are more complicated than they look. Even beer is an acquired taste; it takes getting used to. And watching porn turns out to be hard work. Most sexual imagery is pain imagery; the sounds are also sounds of pain. For some reason I could concentrate on these images. Because concentration is what it was: the rest of t
he time I felt distracted, I tried to read and put down my book, I fell asleep in front of the TV. But at two a.m. I could stay awake, watching a woman lying naked on her back in bed, with her legs up in the air, while a man pressed himself between her legs, so that you could see his buttocks instead of her pubic hair. I was very unhappy, that was clear to me even at the time, but I also felt some kind of connection with people. Not just with the women, the actors. All across America, and not only America, there are men on their own occupying themselves in this way—looking for something and straining towards it, unsatisfied. And I was one of them.

  If you go to bed at midnight and get out of bed, after a broken night, at ten or eleven in the morning, that still leaves thirteen or fourteen hours of waking time to account for. Eating doesn’t take long if you eat alone and I never felt hungry—I ate out of a kind of duty to something. But I didn’t feel many duties. The pressure to appear a certain way to other people had started to fade. I almost never saw anyone, apart from Walter. The things he went through for Susie, not just with her but on his own, the decisions he must have come to, his private battles—I began to get a sense of them. He had come out on the other side. But I was still in the middle. Something important had failed or was failing and I needed to deal with it, I needed to think it through.

  I lived like this for three months, hardly leaving my apartment. Going quietly crazy, Walter called it, but making progress. I started reading again, with more attention. I read Walden again, I read Invisible Man. Native Son, Go Tell It on the Mountain, Stover at Yale. High school staples like The Awakening and Huck Finn. Walter gave me a 1942 edition of Say, Is This the U.S.A. and I spent a week looking through the photographs and reading the captions, frequently in tears. The men and women in those pictures are probably dead now, even some of the kids. There were passages in each of these books that seemed tremendously important. I thought, other people need to know about this. But they’d obviously been given the chance and it hadn’t made much difference.

  When you don’t do much, when you don’t go anywhere, you notice small changes. In yourself and other people, in the world outside your window. The snow that started in late November kept accumulating—one inch, and then another, and then a few more. Mild fall, harsh winter. None of it had anywhere to go, it just piled up. I used to watch the kids play in the street. After particularly heavy nights, school would be canceled, the cold and ice made everything resound, the whole world seemed like their temporary playground. But then on other days, everyone stayed indoors. Cars sat parked on islands of frozen slush; the snow on their roofs was the last thing to stay white.

  The Adlers moved out in February. Don knocked on my door, while Tina finished packing. There was a U-Haul van in his driveway.

  “We’re getting out now,” he said. “We’re not going to wait around for bad news.”

  “What bad news?”

  “Whatever form it takes. I’ve got that prestorm feeling. This time I’m going to listen to it. Also, it’s too cold here. It’s just too cold.”

  “So where are you going, back to Phoenix?”

  “I never liked it there. Somewhere else. Maybe Austin, but it’s expensive now. These hipster types have a lot to answer for. Everywhere you used to find a decent quality of life, they come and drive up the price. The first place we’re going is South Bend, where the in-laws are. Then we put some things into storage. I’ve got too much stuff, I don’t use any of it. Then we make up our mind. Okay, well. So long,” he said, and I watched him cross the road flat-footed, taking care on the ice.

  36

  Nolan’s trial came at the right time for me. It snapped me out of myself, it forced me to make contact with people.

  A form letter arrived from the prosecutor’s office: “Being called to testify in court may make you nervous. This is a natural reaction . . .” One of their suggestions was to ask for a copy of my police statement and read it over beforehand. Which I did—it gave me a buzz to see my words officially documented. They had an air of authority, and I found it hard to remember what had actually happened, as opposed to what I had sworn to. There are all these processes that remove us from the past, step by step, and writing is part of the process. “Dress neatly,” the letter said. I shaved, I wore my leather shoes, I tucked my shirt in. And for three days, the days of my court appearances, I woke up each morning as if I had a job to do and left the house looking presentable.

  My mother offered to fly into town. I told her, “Mom, you don’t have to do this, you don’t have to hold my hand.”

  “What else do I do with myself?” she said.

  “You were just here a few months ago. Come some other time. Come when I have time to see you. I’ll be at the courthouse all day, waiting around.”

  “I can wait with you.”

  So we went back and forth like that, and after a while I said, “Let me do this alone,” and she said, “Okay.”

  Robert picked me up on my first day, which was day three of the trial. Somehow he had gotten a pass for the courthouse parking lot. He honked outside the house in his Saab 9-5, on one of those pissy cold transitional mornings, not freezing but thawing, where it sort of rains off and on but it doesn’t make much difference either way. Robert had the heating going pretty well; he sat there with his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow. You could see his forearms—instead of rowing these days, he worked out on an erg machine. There was a car seat in the back and food wrappings and bits of food all over the floor. I sat down on an empty bag of baby wipes.

  “How’s it going?” I said.

  “Oh, this is just what it’s always like. This is just the usual chaos.”

  “No, I mean the trial.” He thought I meant the state of his car and life.

  “Mostly what I’ve seen is procedural stuff. It’s not like I hang around all day. Jury selection, that kind of thing. The truth is, I don’t know what his lawyers are thinking. It’s their job to make sure this doesn’t come to court. If you’ve got a client who wants to have his say, you let him say it to you. You don’t let him say it to a judge and jury, especially given the way Nolan is likely to come across.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Look, Marny. I’m sympathetic to him. But if he were my client, he’s not a guy I’d like to put on the stand.”

  “He always struck me as pretty persuasive.”

  “All right,” Robert said. “Let it go.”

  The downtown traffic is never very heavy in Detroit, but there was some buildup along Gratiot, and even more when he turned onto St. Antoine: a queue of cars outside the parking lot, which was separated by a chain-link fence from the road, and already half full. We got stuck for a minute behind some media van, whose driver had pulled over to unload equipment. Eventually Robert drove around him and down a side street and parked in one of the spaces slanted against a bay in the building.

  “There’s something else I wanted to talk to you about,” he said. “You’re going to notice some extra security around. I don’t want you to worry about it. There are people I pay to give me advice, and this is the advice they give me, so I listen. But I’m not really worried.”

  “What kind of security?”

  “A few extra patrol cars, private security cars. As long as the trial lasts, there’ll be two guys in chairs on either end of your street. Just to see who comes and goes. That’s all. Well, here we go.”

  Robert took me inside by a back entrance, through the metal detectors, up some steps and around some corners, down through administrative-looking hallways and then into a slightly grander hallway, where one of the news crews was setting up. I left him by the entrance to the courtroom—he wanted to get a good seat. But there were officers of the court I had to show my papers to, and I ended up, about a half hour later, in some waiting room for witnesses.

  I spent a lot of time in that room. It wasn’t very big and had carpeting and stippled paneling on the ceilings and one of those water kegs that glugs from time to time. There were tw
o posters on the wall: River in a Mountain Landscape, by John Mix Stanley, which showed not so much a river as a kind of swampy dead end or pond in front of a couple of hills. The other poster was a team photo of the ’88–’89 Detroit Pistons, who won the NBA Championship when I was fourteen or fifteen. It made me feel one of those weird overlaps or crossovers or connections between selves, and I started going through the roster to see who I could remember. There were three names I didn’t know, Jim Rowinski, Pace Mannion and Fennis Dembo. When I got up to stretch my legs I often walked over to this poster and tried to work out who was who.

  People in the room came and went—they got called up, they walked out, they came back. The prosecutor’s office had assigned me a witness coordinator, who checked in from time to time. She was an attractive, disorganized woman named Sharia. Mostly when I saw her she had coffee in one hand, papers in another, two tote bags on the same shoulder, that kind of thing.

  I said, “Sharia, like the law.”

  “Nobody ever said that to me before.”

  But I liked her; we talked. She had dropped out of law school after getting pregnant. Now the kid was two and she wanted to go back to school but couldn’t afford it. I heard a lot of her life story—she spilled that out, too. I had time on my hands and didn’t much like my book. That’s another thing the prosecutor’s letter told me. Bring reading material, but I should have brought a pack of cards. I felt too distracted to read. Sharia had other things to do. “I can’t stand around all day shooting the breeze,” she said. It’s amazing how time continues to pass even if you don’t have the mental attention to occupy yourself. It passes anyway.

  Then Tony showed up, in a suit and tie—black shirt, maroon tie. I hadn’t seen much of Tony since the arraignment. It’s not like we felt guilty or complicit or anything. It’s more like we’d had a kind of gay impulse, which we both experienced but were embarrassed by afterwards. I don’t mean that that’s what happened but that’s what it was like. But I was glad to see him. He looked well, skinny and strong. His suit looked tight on him, and I said, “You look good.”