Say Nice Things About Detroit (3 page)

“Are you free some night to get out for a drink?” he asked. “I know I could use a change of scenery.”

They agreed on the time—nine o'clock the next night—but not the place, as neither of them knew the area well enough to suggest one. David promised to scout out Birmingham, then call her back with a suitable location.

• • •

T
HE NEXT DAY
he sat in the passenger seat, his father driving thirty-five down Woodward. David wanted to say something, but his father was keeping the car in the lane and everyone else was passing them easily enough.

“I want you to call my lawyer,” his father said.

“Steve Bergen? Why?”

“His son, Peter. He's about your age, I'd guess.”

“What's it about?” David asked.

“A job,” Sol said.

“You're going back to work?”

“No, they need someone like you.”

“You know, Dad, I'm already a partner in a law firm. I mean, I appreciate the suggestion, but . . .” Just like the old man, he thought, always nudging, a true marine, never happy just to hold the ground he had.

“But what?”

“Move back to Detroit? For good? What about my job? My life in Denver?”

“You should move back.”

“Why would anyone move here?”

“It's your home, for one thing. Your family is here.”

“You and Mom.”

“What,” his father said, “we don't count? And the other thing, just as important? You need to get out of Denver.”

David sat in silence. Every once in a while his father said something that made sense, like a savant who could cut through to the simple truth: he needed to leave Denver. Till now he hadn't thought of Detroit.

• • •

T
HAT NIGHT DAVID
waited for Carolyn at the bar. The bartender, young, hair spiked, came over with a What'll-it-be look. Here David was, forty-five, and he still hadn't settled on a usual drink. He ordered a gin and tonic, the first thing that came into his mind.

He had chosen this bar by walking the streets of Birmingham. His mistake was not to look for a TV. This bar didn't have one, and so now he was sitting alone, with nothing to do and nowhere to look except at the mirror behind the infantry lines of liquor bottles.

His mother, he'd learned that afternoon, had moved up to first on the waiting list at the nursing home. His father had entrusted him (enlisted him, really) to take her out there next week, to show her around. It was hard to know how she'd take this. He expected the worst, but so far she seemed resigned to the idea, or perhaps unable to comprehend it.

“Another?” asked the bartender.

“Sure,” David replied, trying to approximate a drinker. He had a brief memory of Cory, a waking nightmare that flared up now and again. He shook his head to rid himself of the feeling; it always took some kind of physical effort.

He turned to survey the bar, expecting to find Carolyn, now fifteen minutes late. Natalie was always punctual, but he'd known her when she was young and perhaps didn't know better. And then Carolyn surprised him.

“Haven't been here in years,” she said as she slid onto the stool next to him.

“Carolyn.” He wouldn't have recognized her. She was still blond, but her hair was shorter and she'd filled out into a woman, more attractive than the spindly teenager she'd been. She wore designer jeans and a white blouse. After an awkward pause, they accomplished a lopsided hug, both of them teetering on the edge of their bar stools.

“Getcha something?” the bartender asked. “He's two up on you.”

She studied David's gin and tonic. “Bushmills, straight up,” she said.

David looked at his drink in a new, feminine light. Still, he didn't like whiskey enough. Perhaps vodka. Or just red wine. Red wine was acceptable.

He noticed her hands on the bar, the same long fingers he remembered Natalie having, except Carolyn wore a wedding ring, the yellow diamond almost bursting from the band.

“You're married,” he said.

“Aren't you?”

“I was once. Not now.”

“I'm sorry,” she said.

“Don't be,” he told her. “I'm beginning to see the advantage of being single.”

“Which is?”

“Only one person to make happy.”

Her drink arrived and she raised it for a toast. Their glasses clinked. “So, how's it going?” she asked.

“With what?”

“Keeping that one person happy.”

Well enough, he allowed, and then changed the subject. He was pretty sure women liked him because he listened. It came to him naturally, and he'd honed it from years of estate planning, when he would sit and listen to people say what they wanted till they got tired of listening to themselves lie. Then he'd draw up a plan that pleased the person paying the bill.

Her husband was a lawyer, intellectual property. Carolyn herself worked in advertising. At home they had daily help, a woman from El Salvador. Carolyn's son went to private school. These were the details from L.A. “You can play tennis outside in January,” she said.

“Do you?”

“I did, once.”

“Tell me about your son,” he said.

He studied her while she talked, the angular face, the golden hair, the perfect white line of her teeth. He felt something. He didn't want to, but he did. The implications of this were so uniformly unsettling that he ordered another drink, this time a glass of cabernet, which seemed manly enough, despite its French name.

Carolyn said, “It's a little weird, being here with you.”

“How so?”

“ 'Cause I think I had a crush on you when I was . . . well, a little girl. I was jealous of my sister because she had you.”

“I'm flattered,” he said.

“It was about Natalie. I was always jealous of her. She was older, more beautiful. But it wasn't a bad jealousy. I looked up to her.”

“She wasn't more beautiful.”

She looked down. “You're sweet,” she said. He thought perhaps that she blushed. Her modesty touched him. Maybe her beauty was something her husband no longer commented on. It was possible, he knew, to disappear in a marriage.

“You must miss Natalie,” he said.

She nodded, and looked down. “Terribly,” she said. “There was so much—” She stopped talking.

“What?”

“So much left for us to do,” she said. “And Dirk, too. Really, I barely knew him.”

“Didn't he ever live with you?”

Dirk, she said, had lived with his father. This was agreed upon by his parents, the obvious choice to them when they split up, because Dirk was black. Dirk's father, though, was indifferent at best, and Dirk was really raised by his father's oldest friend, adopted every way but legally. The FBI was Dirk's idea. “He wanted to set the world right, get everyone in line,” said Carolyn. “That's what Natalie always said.”

“What were Natalie and Dirk doing the night they were killed?”

“No one knows. They spent a lot of time together after her marriage ended. Dirk's daughter was out of college. Shelly, his wife, likes her space. Nat and Dirk kept each other company. My mother liked it that they had a friendship. She felt things with her family were finally coming together. Except I wasn't there.”

David nodded. He felt a longing, a terrible ache for his son, so he smiled.

“Do you have kids?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “But I can imagine.”

IV

C
AROLYN LIKED HIM,
had always liked him. She'd realized this as a girl and saw it again now: there was no artifice with David Halpert, no tics or anger or phobias or recklessness hidden in some shadow of his personality. Not that he didn't have some of these things, but the lights were on. Also, he was not a bad-looking guy. He was losing his hair and he'd put on some weight since high school—who hadn't?—but he still could look at her directly and get her attention. A man who could look you in the eye was not to be taken lightly.

She remembered her sister's devotion to David. Carolyn wanted to feel so strongly about a man that nothing else mattered, but it hadn't gone that way. Marty had come along at the right time. In the end, she'd pursued him and he'd surrendered. She saw in him a steady man, a good provider, someone who didn't mind being left alone. A man, in short, not unlike her father. She felt secure with Marty. She never really had to worry about anything.

She asked why David had become a lawyer.

“Lack of imagination,” he said.

“What else would you have been?”

“I'm still trying to figure it out.”

He didn't elaborate, and soon she found herself talking about her mother. The subject was too depressing, so she excused herself to go to the ladies' room, where she could check her face. David stood when she got up from the table, as her father would have; as Marty once did, but no longer.

• • •

D
AVID STOOD AGAIN
when she returned to the table.

“Tell me what went wrong with your marriage. And then what went right.”

“Well, we fell in love. It wasn't all bad, at the beginning. Then we fell out of love. What about you? Why did you get married?”

“I thought Marty would make a good husband, and it seemed like the right time.”

“I see,” he said.

She had in effect told him that she wasn't in love with her husband, and he had understood immediately.

“I was young,” she said.

“Then there's the boy. That makes it complicated, right? No kids and you're like me, you both walk away and it's no harm, no foul.”

“I'm sure,” she said, meaning the opposite.

He shrugged. “Well, you should be happy.”

“How can you say that? You don't know me.”

“It's just how I want to think of you,” he said.

It was like therapy, talking to David; actually, he was better than her therapist in Beverly Hills. David was a much quicker study, and refreshingly direct. There was a sadness to him, but he didn't try to hide it—or couldn't—and that made him that much more attractive. She could think of a dozen women back in L.A. who would crawl over each other to have dinner with this man.

“So tell me, David,” she said, “why isn't there a woman in your life?”

“How do you know there's not?”

“I don't think there is.”

“You're right,” he admitted.

• • •

H
E POURED WINE
into a tumbler. They were in his living room, walls the color of pudding, an Ansel Adams photo (nice enough, but out of place), carpet the color of dirt, a greenish couch she was sitting on. Before she got married, if a man had brought her to a dump like this she wouldn't have considered him a serious contender. Tonight they'd gone to a liquor store for wine, then walked back here like a couple of teenagers. She realized that once she stopped asking him questions he became talkative, funny. She was conscious of what she was doing, that she was a married woman in the apartment of an unmarried man, the ex-­boyfriend of her dead sister.

“Here's to you,” he said. He clinked his glass to hers. “I must tell you, I think I'm drunk. I don't drink often, but . . .”

“And yet you keep drinking,” she said. She was feeling a bit tipsy herself.

She had cheated on Marty twice before; she had considered doing it far more than that. Offers were surprisingly abundant. Just last week she had gone to lunch with the guy from her firm who was to head up the marketing campaign for a new movie. They'd been seated about five seconds when he looked at her ring and said, “So, are you
happily
married?”

She was appalled by his rudeness, by his lack of respect for her as a professional, and most of all by the world and its excessive store of desperation.

She wasn't feeling any of that now. She just wanted to be reckless.

“Set down your glass,” she said. He did as he was told. She moved to him and kissed him. He was surprised at first, but he quickly adjusted. It was thrilling, almost like being young again. She hadn't felt anything like it in years.

V

D
AVID PACED IN
his kitchen, wanting to call Carolyn. In the last six days they'd had dinner three times. She wouldn't sleep with him. He'd asked—it seemed almost insulting not to—but only once, at the second dinner. She was married, after all. The last time he called she told him not to call again, but he had a hard time believing her. Yes, she was married, but she was available. He could feel it. He decided to call anyway. Maybe she would pick up. In fact, she did.

“Come over,” he said.

She hung up without a word. Half an hour later, she surprised him at his door. He greeted her, but she entered without speaking, set her purse on the dining table, threw her coat over a chair, slipped out of her shoes. She walked to the bedroom. David gave himself a moment to watch the elaborate design on the back pockets of her jeans swing back and forth.

He took a deep breath, conscious of it, and then walked into the bedroom. He found her studying the bed, arms crossed, head bowed, a picture of agony.

“I can't,” she said.

“Then don't.”

“But I want to.”

“Then do.”

• • •

L
ATER, HE HELD
her in his arms, drifting in and out of sleep.

“What are we doing?” she said.

It was a good question. It was new and exciting. He liked her, and he liked himself when he was with her. He hadn't thought about it beyond that. He stayed quiet till she gave him a nudge, a pointy elbow to his ribcage.

“I just like you,” he said.

“That's your answer?”

“I don't have an answer. What do you think we're doing?”

“I'm a sucker for attention,” she said.