You Don't Have to Live Like This (19 page)

And he signed himself with his name, “Your father, Charlie.”

I showed this letter to Gloria, but for once she gave me the wrong kind of sympathy. I’m sorry, she said, this is the craziest excuse I ever heard. A man walks out on his wife to make himself a better man. And for something to talk about. You’ve got to be kidding me. She got too angry on my behalf; she was also a little angry at me. But we didn’t have a fight about it—I kept the lid down.

W
alter knew my father a little, they met at graduation, but he wasn’t around to talk to. When I got back from Baton Rouge I found a note under my door. Walter and Susie had decided to fly home—they were going to spend New Year with his mother. I was surprised the doctors let her fly. And then one night Walter came back alone. I heard his taxi idling in the street and went down to say hello. Susie had stuck around in New York and was trying to mend fences with her parents. I carried one of his suitcases inside.

He offered me a cup of tea and I went upstairs to get some fresh milk. Then he told me what had happened. Just before Christmas they lost the baby. For two days Susie didn’t feel any kicking. She was getting more and more panicky, so Walter told her to go in, just so the doctors could calm her down. But the heart had stopped. There was a problem with the placenta, blood clots; the truth is, they were surprised the placenta had lasted as long as it did. Then they doped her up with Pitocin so she could push the baby out. Susie found the whole thing not only unbelievably awful but tremendously embarrassing—to go through all the special attention of labor for the sake of this dead thing. So afterwards they flew home. She needed a change of scene and couldn’t face anybody who knew
her pregnant. They weren’t telling people yet so I should keep quiet. And I didn’t feel like bringing up my father with him. He looked fat and sweaty and unhappy. There wasn’t much to eat in his apartment, but he found an old box of Entenmann’s powdered doughnut holes and kept popping them into his mouth while we talked.

I told him about Gloria, but the first time we appeared in public together was Jimmy’s baptism. Cris had had her baby, another son, and Tony asked me to be his godfather. This surprised me. I didn’t think we got along very well anymore. But Tony was one of those confident abusive types who act that way only in front of people they like. He could be pretty quiet with strangers. It’s also possible that his best friends got pissed off with him after a while, so he had to keep making new ones.

Walter came, too. We put on our jackets and ties, and Gloria met us at the house, wearing a cream-colored dress and a cream-colored hat with black spots, and a rose on top. Her overcoat was a hand-me-down from her mother, with a black fur trim. She looked great. Going to church was one of the things she really dressed up for.

I couldn’t tell what impression she made on Walter. He had a funny way with women he didn’t know. He simpered and half shut his eyes; he talked very gently. And Gloria made a real effort. “This is what happens when a man dresses himself,” she said, and tightened the knot of my tie. Then she offered to straighten out Walter’s. I could feel her hands on his shirt, my first little flare-up of sexual jealousy. It wasn’t till we pulled up outside the church, which had a parking lot big enough for a football field, that I realized how painful the whole business must be for him.

There was a sign fronting the road, like a football scoreboard, which read:

ST BARNABAS WELCOMES INTO CHRIST

JAMES CARNESECCA

WILLIAM HOFSTEDTER

LUCY TEMPLETON

Underneath that it said:

SPAGHETTI DINNER

JAN 20 7 P.M.

Gloria knew about Susie but wasn’t supposed to. She was the only black person in the church and I walked in holding her arm and feeling self-conscious. Everybody would assume we were sleeping together, but the truth is we weren’t.

On the second night I spent with her, Gloria explained to me what the deal was. She wasn’t a virgin, but the two or three times she’d had sex with her boyfriends she ended up regretting it afterwards, when the relationship ended. It seemed to make ending it more painful. So I was going to have to take it slow. It was early days so I didn’t argue with her. But even though we started spending many of our weekends together, nothing changed. I called what we did the hug-and-spoon race, which nobody won. She liked the phrase and I was stuck with that, too. On nights she stayed over I got very little sleep—I couldn’t sleep. We fooled around a little and did other stuff. Her thighs were like a strong boy’s, muscular and warm brown and totally smooth. She had these short little powerful legs. Her body was longer; her breasts sat up high on her chest; her nipples were rough and large. Once she took pity on me (the whole thing seemed to amuse her somehow) and gave me a hand job, but I didn’t like that much. It made a mess and left messy feelings, too. I felt kind of sticky all over, and she seemed to resent it afterwards.
So we had a fight later about something else. I didn’t ask her again, but whenever she stayed over I couldn’t sleep. Sleeplessness makes me obsessive; I lay there next to her body all night obsessing.

Church was a funny place to have these thoughts. Two other kids were being baptized that day—all the parents sat together in the front row. Mostly it was just a normal service, but then Cris and Tony walked up with baby James, and I walked up, too, in front of everybody. The priest had black hair, combed up at the front like Elvis’s. His skin was very pink, though he probably had to shave a lot, because the black hairs came through darkly. He wasn’t very tall. Then he took the baby and dipped his head and Jimmy didn’t do anything but just lay there stupidly with a wet head. He cried when Cris took him. Cris and Tony said their bits, and I had to cast out the devil. Then we walked back and sat down. But the devil felt real to me then, I must say.

The priest, whose name was McAndrew, read out: “Just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.”

For some reason Brad wasn’t baptized but I was. My mother must have insisted, and for the second-born son my dad didn’t put up a fight. So I was once a baby with a wet head. Tony and Cris were sitting in front of me, and I could see Jimmy trying to push his nose into her breast. Cris had on a dress you can’t lift up, and he was crying and butting his nose against her. I remember thinking, Don’t be greedy.

Afterwards we all filed out. The Carneseccas had invited everyone back to their place. For once it wasn’t snowing. The sun shone bright enough the snow hurt your eyes, and most of the guests wore sunglasses as they walked to their cars. We were all dressed up and out of the house early on a Sunday morning, and people had a relaxed easy air, like it’s time to get drunk. Gloria said to me, “I been to church twice today already. Aren’t I a good little girl?”

“A very good girl.”

She said, “You know, you don’t have to hold my arm all the time. I’m okay.”

Then Walter caught up with us and drove us to Tony’s.

Everybody arrived at more or less the same time, but Tony had paid for caterers. Pretty soon the house was full of people and it wasn’t a big house. I ran into Mel Hauser.

“I didn’t see you in church,” I said.

“Oh, I don’t know. When are you and me going to hit the range again?”

I introduced him to Gloria, but he wandered off to get another drink. He seemed a little drunk already.

There were flowers all over the house. Cris had banged in nails and hung flowers over the front door and the kitchen door, and by the stairs. The television set was hung with ivy.

Robert James was there. So were Clay Greene and his wife. Their kids were there, too, and one of them said to Helen, “May we go outside?” He looked tall for his age and well brought up—he had short dark brown hair, parted in the middle. It looked recently cut. Afterwards I noticed him alone in the garden, rolling a snowball down the snowy slide. But it was only the angle of the window. Another kid, maybe his brother, rolled it back up again.

Cris sat in the kitchen, nursing Jimmy. “Wasn’t he a good boy?” she said to me.

“I’ve never been a godfather before,” I said. “What do I do?”

“Just pay a little extra attention, that’s all I ask. It doesn’t matter so much now but later on. You’re a good influence on Tony. The boys could use a man in their life who isn’t their father.”

“I find it hard to imagine my life more than a couple of months in advance.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” she said.

A waitress in a short black dress squeezed her way around, filling up wineglasses. I asked her name. Desiree, she said; she was a student at Wayne State. “What are you studying?” I asked, but she didn’t hear me. There was also a bar set up in Tony’s study, which is where I found him, talking to Mel Hauser. Mel said to me, “Do you want a cigar?” They were both smoking.

“I’ve never had one of these before. What do they do to you?”

“They make you feel sick,” Tony said. “Don’t tell Cris. She doesn’t like it in the house.”

But I lit one anyway. “What are you drinking?” I said.

“Scotch.”

Mel poured me a glass. “Hey,” he said. “I may have heard something about that girl you asked me to look into.”

“What girl?”

“The German kid, the one who got raped.”

“Well, what is it?”

“Come out to the range and I’ll tell you. I want to get my facts straight.”

Something about his tone got on my nerves. “What happened earlier?” I said. “You disappeared pretty quick.”

“What do you mean?”

There were scabs of skin on his bald head and his cheeks looked gray and heavy. I decided not to pick a fight and went to find Gloria.

Maybe I would have got drunk except we ended up having to leave soon after. Gloria was talking to Walter and Helen Greene.

Helen said, “Where’s Susie?”

“She’s still in New York. Her parents live there.”

“Is that where she wants to have the baby? It’s funny, isn’t it, how when you have a kid yourself you want to come home to Mommy.”

“Yes,” Walter said.

“So what’s the plan? Are you going to fly down?”

“I guess so.”

“I’ll tell you something nobody tells you about having kids. It’s like this closed shop. We all have to toe the thin blue line. Because the truth is, having kids is not only awful, but it exposes as basically pointless your relations with everybody else. So you learn to put up with the kids.”

“I’m going to get a drink,” Walter said, and then he pulled at me a little, and I went with him and he said, “You have to get that woman away from me.”

“It’s not her fault.”

“If she says one more word to me I’m gonna sock her.”

“You have to tell people, Walter. Because this is going to keep happening.”

“Back off, Marny,” he said. “I’m leaving. You can find your own ride home.”

But in the end, he waited a little and we left with him. Robert couldn’t drive us because he was taking Clay and Helen and the kids. Anyway, Gloria was ready to go and I felt strangely worn out. So Walter hung around, standing on the front porch by himself, while we said a few good-byes.

Tony asked me, “So are you guys going out?”

“I guess so.”

“What happened to the German girl? Does Gloria know about her?”

“There’s nothing to know. Stop it. Don’t look so amused.”

“You kids,” he said. “I got to get my kicks where I can.”

Everybody was pissing me off but Gloria. I found her talking to Cris in the kitchen and took her away.

It was a quiet car ride. Some of the snow had melted in the sunshine, but it was cold, too, and you had to watch out for black ice.
Walter dropped us off at Gloria’s apartment, but before we got out he said to her, “Marny probably told you, didn’t he?”

“Told me what?” she said. “Yes. And I prayed for both of you.”

“Did you really?” Walter said, and that was that.

Gloria liked to go to the movies on Sunday afternoons, so that’s what we did. We saw
Up in the Air
at the Shores Theatre in St. Clair. She fell asleep for part of it, and afterwards, we got cheeseburgers and milkshakes at Achatz Burgers. Then she took me home, around nine o’clock. Walter’s light was still on so I knocked on his door instead of going up.

“You pissed off at me?” I said.

“Not really. Come in.”

So we stayed up late talking, till one in the morning. We did this a lot when we first moved in, before Susie arrived. Walter’s grandfather, on his mother’s side, came from Port Ellen in Scotland, and he always kept a bottle of Laphroaig around—this was one of his affectations in college. But he brought it out now and we drank that.

The cheeseburger and malted shake were still working their way through my system. Mel’s cigar didn’t help; I’d also had popcorn at the movies. My first drink of the day was at eleven a.m., at Tony’s house. It had been a long day. But the whisky woke me up again and I felt fine, okay, until the next morning.

“I got the sense that you didn’t like Gloria,” I said.

“Listen, don’t listen to me. What I think about people right now isn’t very rational.”

“If you want to talk about that, we can talk about that, too.”

“I don’t want to. It isn’t just that we lost the baby. There were other issues all the way through. Susie didn’t want to worry anybody, she didn’t want me to talk about it, but it’s been a long year. The lining of her womb is abnormally thin. The doctors said there’s
a risk to her, too, if we try again, but this is something we haven’t discussed yet. So I don’t much feel like discussing it with you.”

I shook my head. “Are you worried she’ll stay in New York?”

“What does that mean? I told her to stay. She hates her parents. I told her, you have to make friends with these people, because they’ll die when you don’t want them to.”

“I didn’t tell you this, but my dad walked out on my mother.”

This is how we talked. I felt a kind of fever of intimacy, which wasn’t just the whisky. The heating shut down in his apartment at ten o’clock, and we stayed up for another three hours. By the end I was almost shaking with cold. But I didn’t want to say good night. There was something thrilling about speaking openly like this, and digging up several years’ worth of buried conversations. You can only fight like this with old friends, and even with them you can’t do it very often. But it makes you think, the rest of your life, you’re wearing thick gloves.

“That was a long time coming, wasn’t it?” Walter said.

“I don’t know why you say that. You hardly know him.”