You Don't Have to Live Like This

by Benjamin Markovits

  “Is Tony allowed to come?”

  “That depends on my mood. You think I’m one of those mothers.”

  “I don’t think it’s just that. You’ve been retreating in this direction for years.”

  “Maybe that’s right.”

  When the show was over, I lay on my back and said, “Who wants to fly?”

  “Don’t whiz them up, Marny, it’s getting-ready-for-bed time. You can help them clear up while I run the bath.”

  So that’s what I did. We ended up on the carpet playing some stupid game with a toy telephone, all three of us. It wasn’t a toy exactly, but one of those old 1940s phones, an Olivetti rotary, which I bought with Walter at the 7 Day Swap out by Chalmers and Mack. This was in the days when I still cared about my apartment as a personality showcase. But it didn’t work and I gave it to Michael. If you hung up hard enough you could make it ping, which is what Jimmy kept doing. Since it got a reaction, he started hitting other things, and when I tried to take the phone away he hit me in the face. The earpiece caught my cheekbone under the eye. It was like somebody unplugged the nerves. I couldn’t feel anything, even my lip, or half of it, went numb.

  “Jesus,” I said, standing up, and spilled the bottle of wine.

  I went in the kitchen to get a kitchen towel.

  “What happened to you?” Beatrice said.

  “Is it bleeding?”

  “Is what bleeding? You look like a sheet of paper.”

  “I’m fine, I just need a drink.”

  But maybe a half hour later I was talking to Robert in the living room, and my hands started feeling sticky. I touched my forehead but couldn’t tell if it was burning or freezing.

  “Thanks,” Robert said.

  “For what?”

  He thought for a minute. When he couldn’t think of the right word or phrase he usually waited until it came to him. “For holding the line.”

  “I didn’t know there was a line.”

  “Okay.”

  We stood there awkwardly; my head felt floaty, not quite right. “I’ve been meaning to ask you,” I said. “What’s in this for you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The whole thing. All of this. Two years of your life.”

  “You know, in my circle right now, when we get together, a lot of us talk about real estate. The people I hang out with buy real estate. They complain about the prices, they brag about their deals, they act like it’s the only topic of conversation. And I sometimes think what they don’t realize is that it really is the only topic of conversation. I still rent our apartment in New York. None of this means to me what it means to other people. But I travel a lot, I see what it means. I was in Rio two weeks ago, and the people who invited me took me on one of these favela tours. You know, meet the natives. And I asked some guy, do you rent or own? And he kind of looked at me, and he said, when I needed a house, I built a house. When my father built his house, there was still land to build on, but now there isn’t any land, so I built on top of his. But you should see these houses. Two rooms. There are no gardens. The only private space for someone with a family is on the roof. So people take showers on the roof, they snack, they sit around. You can see it all from the funicular. It goes right overhead.”

  “I don’t understand why you’re telling me this.”

  “In some of these places I travel, there isn’t a woman over the age of twenty that you or I would consider sexually attractive. I’m serious about this, Marny. People talk a lot about Brazilian women, but in poor countries the only women we would consider attractive are young women. It costs money to stay attractive. I’m not even talking about cosmetic surgery. But diet, gym, free time, clothes, all of it costs money. In New York I see a lot of very attractive forty-five-year-old women. But not one in the favelas. And it occurred to me that what’s really going on here is an inside-outside thing. A woman needs privacy to look good. She has to say to herself, I’m going out to face the world, and that means having somewhere to prepare herself. It’s a question of real estate.”

  “The reason New York women look good is because they go to the gym, and the reason they go to the gym is they live in shit holes.”

  “That’s not why. You don’t know these women—they live alone. This is a very recent thing. We have this whole idea of presenting ourselves that comes from having a room of our own. In poor countries, everybody eats together, everybody sleeps together, everybody lives in the street. But we build houses to go inside, which is fine, but then we have to deal with going out again.”

  “Where do you get this shit, Robert? Nathan Zwecker? You think it’s only rich people who get neuroses? Everything you read about poverty tells you that it’s basically symbiotic with mental illness. They go hand in hand.”

  “That’s what I mean. If you solve the real estate problem, you solve everything else.”

  “You’re not making sense, but that’s not what I asked you anyway.”

  I felt a fever coming on and wanted this conversation to stop. My head seemed to be the only thing staying still. There were bright spotlights in Tony’s living room, which made the ceiling swell and shift in its plane. The ground wasn’t too steady either. Robert thought I was waiting for him to say something.

  “When I was at Yale,” he said, “all I wanted to do is make money. And then when I was twenty-eight years old, I made a lot of money. I never wanted to spend it, though, that’s not how I was brought up. I wanted to win. That’s how I was brought up. But then you’re twenty-eight years old, and you think, what do I do now? It took me a long time to recover.”

  “So what happens next?”

  “That’s partly what I want to talk to you about. I think it’s a good idea you take a break for while. Maybe go back home.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean back to Baton Rouge.”

  “Are you kicking me out? Did people vote on this?”

  “Marny, I just think it’s a good idea. I’m worried. I don’t know what happens next. I don’t want you caught up in it.”

  “Something’s not right. I don’t feel right. I can’t feel anything.”

  “Maybe you should sit down. It’s been a long week.”

  “No, I can’t feel anything,” I said. “I can’t feel my face.”

  Cris came down from putting the kids to bed and took my temperature. It was raised, but not especially high—maybe 101. But she made Tony take me to the hospital.

  “I don’t want to go,” I said. “People will recognize me there.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m in the news.”

  “Just hold an ice pack to your face. No one will look at you.”

  And eventually I let them put me in the car. My health insurance was only valid for the DMC, so Tony had to drive me into Detroit—against the rush hour mostly, but it still took an hour. He was drunk; he didn’t want to get pulled over. There was a three-car pileup on I-94, and we didn’t make it to the exit in time. Vehicles with sirens kept pushing past us on the hard shoulder. But we got off at last and he dropped me outside the emergency unit and went to park. There was a big green space opposite, with people drinking outside, under the trees. The weather was changing. The cold air had a spring smell instead of a winter smell. You could see stars and clouds, the street lamps were lit.

  I wandered through the automatic doors. There was a reception desk, but it wasn’t the right one, and eventually I found the right one. The woman behind the desk had a tear tattooed on her cheek and chunky rings on her fingers. She could type very quickly, clicking the whole time, and told me to take a seat. About fifteen minutes later Tony found me, and then we sat there waiting maybe another hour. It was a busy night.

  The chairs were these plastic chairs, but you couldn’t move them, and they were spaced to make it difficult to lie down. So people kept fidgeting—all kinds of people. Big floor-to-ceiling windows at one end looked onto a hospital corridor with kids’ pictures on the wall�
�you could tell they were kids’ pictures from the bright colors. At one point I stood up to take a closer look. Art from the leukemia unit. The waiting room itself was a kind of public/private space. People talked on their cell phones. They bought snacks from the snack machine and spread out the food like a picnic. There was a kiddie corner with plastic toys, including several of those sit-down cars you have to push along, but the kids kept pushing them outside the gated area, which was a problem, because many people waiting had canes or crutches or some kind of motion aid, including wheelchairs.

  People went out to smoke and came back in. Some of the time you could tell what they were waiting for, but not always. I saw a lot of preexisting conditions: guys with splints or stitches or substantial bandaging. Pregnant women. Crying kids, black eyes, bloody noses. Burn victims. I had the usual thoughts you get in a hospital, like, would you have sex with this species? The answer is generally no. From time to time the receptionist read out a name, or a couple of names, and people shuffled up to the desk. Then a nurse came to take them away.

  I felt hot and shivery, and sometimes the ice pack helped and sometimes it didn’t. The room itself was probably too hot. There was a young man with his shirt off, a good-looking white guy, well built, maybe college age or a little older, pacing back and forth and talking. He was either high on something or coming down from it. “You need to hook us up,” he said, loudly but not at the top of his voice. He wasn’t shouting. “You have to medicate the people.” But he kept repeating himself.

  In one corner of the room, opposite reception, there was a TV fixed to the ceiling, not much bigger than the kind of TV you get in a motel. I couldn’t hear it but I could see it. They were showing the local news. A reporter stood in front of a camera van in front of a burning house. The house looked more or less like the houses on Johanna Street, and I picked my way through people’s legs and bags and kids to get a closer look. At the bottom of the screen a news ticker ran through the day’s stories, but there were also captions for the hearing impaired. You could see the reporter moving his mouth, and you could see the words appear on the screen below, not always perfectly spelled but clear enough. This is how I found out about the riots.

  39

  They lasted three days. Most of the damage was confined to New Jamestown, but there were shops on the periphery, on East Jefferson, on Gratiot, where a few big chains had moved in, that also took a hit. They started a little after six o’clock, when WDIV reported the verdict in Nolan’s case. But the truth is, preparations must have been made beforehand; there was an organized element.

  Houses and cars were burned, and in some cases the fire spread across entire blocks. That first night was clear, cool and windy, the second day was overcast and slightly warmer, and it finally rained around four in the morning and continued raining for the rest of the third day. But on that first night the fires just jumped around.

  Mrs. Smith’s house was one of the ones that burned. I don’t think she was hurt, though I haven’t seen her since the trial; I’m not sure. The fire took out the inside and the second floor fell in, though the walls and the roof survived. From the outside it almost looks livable, except the window frames are charred holes. There’s no glass. But the roof on my house went up in smoke. My bed was soaked with rain, and my clothes and books and shoes lay over the open stairs—that’s how I found them later. For some reason the living room in Walter’s apartment came out okay, but the flames reached such a high temperature in his kitchen that some of the plastic toys in the garden melted on one side.

  There were more than a hundred arrests. Seven people died, one of them shot by the police, which came in for a lot of criticism afterwards. Some of my neighbors said it was basically a looting situation, nobody wanted to hurt anyone. It was kids, teenagers, young men; girls and women, too. They just wanted to burn stuff and steal stuff. But it depends who you talked to, I also heard arguments on the other side.

  Steve Zipp got hit by a stolen car. The driver was a kid named Kwame Richardson, who tried to help him. He drove him to the emergency room at Henry Ford, and police outside the hospital arrested the boy. Later the charges were dropped. Steve turned out to be okay—two broken ribs and a deep tissue bruise, just above the knee, that made him limp for a month.

  While this went on I waited in another hospital to see a doctor. Tony had a hangover already. We talked about his book. He was halfway through the fatherhood memoir, but this Beatrice deal had thrown him. Maybe he was on the wrong track. For years he’d been trying to write a novel about Detroit.

  When the doctor, one of these good-looking, rich-looking old white guys, a very competent person, saw me, he said, “You picked a bad night to have an accident.”

  “My one-year-old hit him with a telephone,” Tony said.

  Then the doctor sent me off for an X-ray, which meant another half-hour wait. Tony stayed with me the whole time and even stuck around for the X-ray itself. A technician guy sat me down in a kind of dentist’s chair, covered my chest with a heavy gray vest and turned on the invisible forces, which made a quick buzzing sound.

  After that we waited some more for the results—Tony kept stocking up on chocolate and potato chips from one of the vending machines. It was ten o’clock by this point, but I didn’t eat anything. I still had a fever, I kept drinking cans of Sprite.

  Then the doctor came back.

  “You’ve got a fracture, there,” he said, pointing at a spot on the transparency. The bones and shape of my face were clearly visible; there was a white glowing scar under one of my eyes. And beneath the skull, with that grin you can’t help, my brains, my thoughts, like jam in a jar.

  “So what do we do?”

  “You’ve got two options. You can do something, or you can do nothing.”

  “What happens if I do nothing?”

  “I don’t know yet. The fracture hit the nerve—he got you right on the money. But what we can’t tell from this is if it’s still exerting pressure. I also can’t tell how badly the nerve is damaged. Sometimes you just get a pinch. We could operate and try to relieve the pressure, but it’s a very delicate little bone, we might make things worse. There’ll be a scar, we do what we can to minimize it, we come up from under the line of your jaw like this. But even if everything goes beautifully it might do no good. How bad is the loss of feeling?”

  “About the size of my hand. Half my lip. Even drinking this soda feels like pouring something into a container.”

  “Well, it’s your choice. If you want, I can book you in.”

  “If everything’s fine when will the feeling come back?”

  “That’s hard to say, too.”

  But I let it go—I let Tony take me home, back to his place. Another two hours in the car. I-94 was closed, Gratiot was closed, we had to go north on 75. There was a slow river of cars. I fell asleep on the way. Tony did all the driving, perfectly sober by now. When I opened my eyes I saw his forearm on the wheel. I felt like a kid, my temperature must have been close to 103. The Tylenol they gave me at the hospital was wearing off. But I slept anyway. Then around one in the morning he woke me up. We were in his driveway, it was a cool night, I walked inside. Cris had made up the sofa bed.

  ABOUT A WEEK AFTER THE riots, Walter and I walked around the neighborhood and looked at the house, to see if there was anything we could salvage. He and Susie were staying at Bill Russo’s place on Lake St. Clair. They had a little baby—all of that went through. We drove over in Walter’s car and managed to fill up the trunk with clothes and toys and books, but I didn’t care about any of this stuff, I was just going along. We saw a few people trawling through the rubble, not all of them familiar faces.

  About half the houses on Johanna had burned down, the rest had broken windows, some of them were boarded up. I said to Walter, “Well, this is more or less what it looked like when I got here.”

  Robert’s neighborhood didn’t look much better—we walked around there, too. On the night of the riots, he drove home from To
ny’s and saw what was going on and didn’t get out of his car. He drove straight through the night, heading south and east, through Michigan and Ohio and Pennsylvania and New Jersey and the Lincoln Tunnel. He ended up in Manhattan around breakfast time, parked in the street and bought croissants and cups of coffee from one of the delis around there to surprise Peggy with. We talked on the phone the next day, I heard the whole story.

  For the first two months I couldn’t feel my face, and for the next two months I couldn’t tell if I could feel anything, and after that there was a kind of tingling that eventually turned into feeling. Most of the time I don’t think about it now. When I pull at my beard, there’s a very slight sensitivity on one side, like a mild sunburn.

  Walter and Susie couldn’t stay at Bill’s place forever. Anyway, they felt isolated out there with the kid. So they moved into Robert’s old house, which was more or less intact, and eventually I moved in with them. It’s pretty intense, having a baby around. She’s present everywhere. You can hear her crying, her toys are on the floor, there are mush stains on the kitchen table. Sometimes I take the night shift, to give them a break. Shawntell sleeps on top of me in bed, and I lie there and try not to move. In the dark like that, my thoughts seem to expand—into the room, into the night. It’s strange to think she won’t remember any of this.

  There are a lot of hands on deck; it’s a full house. “You’re going to have a happy childhood,” Susie says to her. “Everybody loves you.” But I don’t know how sustainable it is. Steve Zipp lived with us for a while, then went back to Ohio. The Wendelmans are here now. Bert’s son, though, has gone to live with his ex-wife in Grand Rapids. It’s not really a place for school-age kids. If a room is free, people hear about it, they knock on the door, and we usually let them in.

  Franklin’s farm survived the riots, though Franklin himself moved to Boston, which is where he studied law. A lot of us pick over his land for things to eat, asparagus, corn, zucchini, beets, tomatoes, not to mention apples, pears, plums and blackberries, and pumpkins later in the year. I used to make a little cash by going through some of the burned-out houses and looking for things other people overlook. The electronic equipment was all gone, whatever could be melted down was gone, door handles, pipe work, etc. But sometimes I found old books in decent condition. Pictures or picture frames, toys can be worth money, flowerpots, even plants.