It’s a different place these days. Nobody has anything to show off. Guys help each other out, but there’s also a lot of petty theft—there are very thin boundaries.
My brother came and tried to take me away. He gave me two days of his time; I let him buy me dinner. When he couldn’t talk me into leaving, he flew home. As soon as he left (I watched his rented car drive off), the old confused feelings returned. I don’t know how anyone reconciles childhood and adulthood, it can’t be done. He said, “I’m going to leave you alone, but you have to call your mother once in a while.” I can’t call, our house doesn’t have a phone, and anyway, I don’t want to hear her voice. But sometimes I go to the public library and send her an email.
The fact is, I keep expecting my mother to turn up. I walk around like a runaway, looking over my shoulder. But either she can’t face me or Brad has talked her out of it.
I haven’t got a job, though I do some day labor, fruit picking, furniture removal, leafleting, yard work. As little as I can get away with. I still see people, Tony and Cris, for example. Walter and I joke that our fifteen-year reunion is coming up. Maybe we’ll go. I sold my car, I don’t know how I’d get there unless he drives me. Basically I’m treading water, but what you don’t expect from this kind of life is how many shifts of feeling it involves. My point of view is undergoing an alteration, and when your point of view changes you see things you couldn’t see before, different aspects of reality become available.
When Beatrice knocked on the door I didn’t recognize her. This was sometime in August, a hot gray day, in the nineties, sweaty and overcast. Robert’s house has a big front yard; in the summer it gets completely overgrown. The grass was seeding, mallow had run wild and flowered, bamboo was invading the lawn. My synapses had to adjust themselves to make sense of her face. I felt this almost physically. Her cheeks and her eyes, her forehead, realigned themselves until they fit again somewhere in my brain.
“I found you,” she said.
She was wearing a summer dress and sandals. I could see the beginning of her thighs, and her bony knees, and her ankles. She had the calves of a woman who jogs and a redhead’s pale tough skin. She looked successful and attractive and almost forty.
“I haven’t been hiding. Do you want to come in?”
“I want to get you out,” she said. “What are you doing to yourself? Is this some kind of penance?”
“Where are you staying?”
“Not with you.” This was a joke—she smiled a little too hard to prove it. “At Bill’s place, on the lake. He’s there, too. You’re welcome to join us, he says. I’ve rented a car.”
“For how long?”
“We’ll think of something. Is this some kind of penance?” she said again. “Has it worked?”
“I don’t know. How are you doing?”
“All right. There’s been a lot going on in my life, some of it good. I keep talking to you, Marny, in my head. I’m really very happy to see you. Come for the weekend. You can see Bill. And if you want afterwards you can come back here. I’ll drive you myself.”
“So I eat his food and sleep in his clean sheets. This isn’t what I need, I need my own private life.”
“Nobody will ask you anything you don’t want to talk about.”
“That’s not what I mean.” We stood like that for a minute, staring at each other. “I feel like I’m starting to get a grip on some important questions, but this may be just another stage of delusion.”
“Look,” she said, “I’m not going to leave you like this.”
“Like what?” I said and saw myself suddenly through her eyes. But I wouldn’t go with her; she eventually left in tears.
But that was months ago and it’s getting cold again. Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it. That always struck me as a very funny line. Maybe my brother is right, you need to build fences. You need a wife, you need kids, you need private school. Okay, so you worry about money. Worrying about money is what you pay for. It stops you from worrying about everything else.
I keep thinking about Beatrice. If she can make six figures by writing some novel about me, what should I get for writing this? I could start over. I could move to New York. Robert James is still there. Beatrice told me she was buying an apartment, a studio on the Upper West Side. So she’s living alone, I thought. With time on your hands you get all these ideas; you imagine things. But if I stay in Detroit I might run into Gloria, too. This is something else I think about—what to say. If I say the right thing, who knows.
A few of the guys kick a ball around at Butzel Park on Wednesday afternoons. Soccer is one of those recession games, it’s cheap, you only need a ball. Even in the cold, so long as it isn’t raining, they head out. A couple of hours before dusk, but sometimes they play into the dark, too. Most of us don’t have anything else to do. I haven’t played soccer since my mom was a soccer mom and used to drive Brad and me every Saturday morning to the Southside YMCA. But maybe once a month I go over to see if there’s a game. All kinds of memories come back to me, nothing is lost. Orange wedges and Capri Suns in the ice chest. Grass in your cleats. God knows what the parents are talking about. Their kids. You keep starting over. Somebody kicks the ball away from your feet. And for a few seconds you watch them passing it up the field. While your breath comes back, you just stand there, hands on hips. Fuck this, you think, but then you put your head down anyway, and when it’s probably too late to catch them, start running.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BENJAMIN MARKOVITS grew up in Texas, London, Oxford and Berlin. He left an unpromising career as a professional basketball player to study the Romantics—an experience he wrote about in Playing Days, a fictional memoir forthcoming from Harper Perennial. He has written essays, stories, and reviews for, among other publications, The New York Times, Granta, The Guardian, London Review of Books and The Paris Review. The author of six novels, including a trilogy on the life of Lord Byron, he was a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and won a Pushcart Prize in 2009. Granta selected him as one of the Best of Young British Novelists in 2013. Markovits lives in London and is married, with a daughter and a son.
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ALSO BY BENJAMIN MARKOVITS
Childish Loves
A Quiet Adjustment
Imposture
Playing Days
Fathers and Daughters
The Syme Papers
CREDITS
COVER DESIGN BY JARROD TAYLOR
COVER PHOTOGRAPH © FRED R . CONRAD / THE NEW YORK TIMES / REDUX
COPYRIGHT
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
YOU DON’T HAVE TO LIVE LIKE THIS. Copyright © 2015 by Benjamin Markovits. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
A portion of this novel appeared, in slightly different form, in the Spring 2013 issue of Granta.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Markovits, Benjamin.
You don’t have to live like this : a novel / Benjamin Markovits. —First edition.
pages ; cm
“A portion of this novel appeared, in slightly different form, in the Spring 2013 issue of Granta.”
ISBN 978-0-06-237660-2 (hardback) 1. Psychological fiction. I. Title. II. Title: You do not have to live like this.
PS3613.A7543Y68 2015
813’.6—dc23
2014042021
EPub Edition July 2015 ISBN 9780062376626
15 16 17 18 19 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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