You Don't Have to Live Like This (20 page)

“I met him once, I’ve heard you talk about them. You said yourself, she’s a very passive-aggressive woman.”

“I would never have used that phrase, I don’t even know what it means. That’s a bullshit phrase. Some people are aggressive and some people are less aggressive, so you call them passive-aggressive. Big deal.”

“That’s not what it means. It means some people say what they want and other people get what they want by not saying it.”

“My mother says what she wants all the time. She wants him to come back.”

“Is he coming back?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you care? You’re thirty-five years old.”

“They’re my parents. It feels like my whole childhood is at stake. I liked my childhood, I was happy, and it turns out the whole time that my father was miserable.”

“You’re not a kid anymore. And none of this means they didn’t love each other.”

“You should hear him talk. He’s been waiting to do this for forty years.”

“Remember, you don’t have to take anybody’s side.”

“What does that mean?”

“And by the way, you never struck me as such a happy kid. When you got to Yale you were repressing a lot of angry feelings.”

“Don’t give me this repression line. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“It means you were weird about sex. You were always weird about sex.”

“Are you kidding me, Walter?”

“Look, I got over it. I saw a girl I liked and repressed my feelings for her. And then I realized this is crazy. Susie was sexually active three years before she met me. In junior high the kind of thing her classmates did for fun was go down on boys. What she did instead was have two serious relationships with guys from the upper school, which didn’t work out.”

“It’s not just her. Everybody at Yale figured you were gay.”

“Well, I’m not gay.”

“You just took a long time to make up your mind.”

“I knew I wasn’t gay in college.”

“What, the girls you met were too old for you?”

“Mostly they were too young. I didn’t want to get slammed on Friday nights and hook up. I also didn’t want to have stupid conversations about Nietzsche at three in the morning.”

“Give me a break, Walter. That’s not why you didn’t go out with anybody.”

“So why didn’t I?”

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

Later we got on to Gloria. “What’s with the little-girl routine?” he asked. “Are you sleeping together or what?”

“What. She stays over but there are lines we don’t cross.”

“Is it a Christian thing?”

“She’s not a virgin, if that’s what you mean.”

“That’s probably what I mean. I knew teachers like her at Dalton. The kids love them, they’re lively and sweet, and they haven’t quite grown up. Or if they have, they revert.”

“Walter, you should know how you come across right now. You seduced one of your students. So forgive me if I don’t take what you say about sex very seriously.”

“I’m just telling you so you know. There’s some damage there, that’s all I’m saying. You need to be careful.”

“I can’t believe I’m having this conversation with you.”

“How old is Gloria? Thirty, thirty-two? And she expects to spend the night at your place and not have sex? I’m sorry, I never did anything as kinky as that.”

“So how long did you wait before you had sex with Susie?”

“We waited until she was seventeen. Because that’s what the law is in New York.”

Maybe all this reads angrier than it was.

“I don’t really mind not sleeping with her,” I said. “Did I tell you I spent the night with Beatrice? Last summer, after Bill Russo’s party. We ended up in bed together but nothing happened. She fell asleep and I just lay there. A lot of things became clear to me. Sex is a distortion. It changes what you feel about people. It makes you like people you don’t really like and dislike people you don’t really dislike.”

Walter asked me if I had heard about Beatrice’s novel. “Apparently we’re all in it. Susie had dinner with Beatrice in New York.
She’s worried what people are going to say. You, me, the whole gang, everybody we knew in college.”

“What’s it about?”

“Beatrice wouldn’t tell her.”

“Have you met this English guy?”

“Robert has. Your classic gay Englishman, he says. But then her boyfriends always pissed him off.”

By one o’clock my eyes hurt. Maybe two inches above them, behind my forehead, some kind of vein was pulsing; it felt backed up with blood. I stood up to get a glass of tap water from the kitchen. Walter wanted one, too, so we stood by his sink, knocking back glasses of water. We were still in the thick of our conversation, in the heat of it, but I guess we both knew that whatever we had said might change color overnight. Like when you pull a muscle in the middle of a squash game, and keep playing, you feel fine, but the next day you can hardly walk.

“When’s Susie coming back?” I said again.

“Wednesday.”

I went up to bed.

A
few weeks later Mr. Pendleton, one of the history teachers at Kettridge High, slipped on the ice outside his house and broke his leg. Mrs. Sanchez asked me to take over some of his classes and I started going in three days a week.

This totally changed the complexion of my daily life. I got up early, I went to bed early, I worked hard. On the days I wasn’t teaching I prepared my lessons. On the days I was I had lunch with Gloria in the school cafeteria. Kids gossiped about us in the hallways. Sometimes they caught us holding hands. At first we were worried what they might think. Once a girl asked, “Dr. Marnier, are you doing it with Miss Lambert?” I blushed and two of her friends said, “Oh, he is, he is.” Later they said, “Do you like black girls then? Is that what you like?” But this was only teasing, they didn’t mind. Going out with Gloria was good for my reputation. I think it was harder on her.

The job also made a difference to our relationship. Instead of the guy from the social experiment across the freeway, I was now a part of Gloria’s working world. I knew the kids she liked and the ones who gave her a hard time, the kids she sometimes dreamed about at night, worry dreams, and wanted to talk
about over dinner until I said, stop. We never spent the night together during the week, but sometimes she slept at my place on Fridays and Saturdays.

Once I even went to church with her and her mother. To the Glory of Zion Baptist Church on Carlton Street. I said I was interested. Outside it looked like a prison; there were high brick walls and small windows. But inside it felt like the hold of a ship, hot and crowded. There was a lot of singing and hand clapping; people stamped their feet. I couldn’t bring myself to do any of these things. Afterwards we went out for breakfast. “Was it interesting?” Mrs. Lambert asked me. Another time Nolan invited us to his mom’s house for Friday-night dinner.

Nothing particularly noteworthy happened, but I remember it for a couple of reasons. It was the middle of March, the first warmish day of the year. Roads were clearing, and the pileups of snow on the sidewalk shone with puddles.

Since I didn’t teach on Fridays I went over to Joe’s Café and sat there much of the afternoon. For a while it was even warm enough I could sit in the front yard. Spring birds sounded hesitant and strangely clear in the mild air. Joe had just got his license and after a cup of coffee I ordered a gin and tonic and then another. Partly just because I was in a good mood, the week was over, and I was going out with Gloria later, but partly because I was nervous about seeing her with Nolan. I don’t know, maybe it was that. Gloria had never said so but I suspected that they used to go out. Not all girls make me jealous but Gloria did. And sometimes, if I let my mind drift that way, I began to imagine stupid things. That she was only going out with me because I’m white or that that was why she wouldn’t have sex.

After a couple of G&Ts I felt sharp and nervous, kind of buzzing, when Gloria met me at Joe’s and we walked over together. You
could hear snow dripping off the roofs onto the porches below. I had a girlfriend, a job, an apartment, spring was coming, I’d been living in Detroit for almost a year. I felt like you do in the middle of the beginning of something, which is just about when you realize it’s the beginning.

Clarence was going to bed when we arrived. He had his PJs on—Nolan carried him in his arms, so the boy was sitting on his forearms and looking frontwards. Clarence was a big kid; Nolan had strong arms. He kind of pointed him towards us and said, “Say good night, Clarence,” and Clarence said good night. Then they disappeared for a while and Gloria caught up with Mrs. Smith in the kitchen. I sat in the living room with another couple, Byron and Tamika. She worked for the Lutheran Adoption Service in Southfield. He was training to be a chef at the Art Institute of Michigan. But this was only his latest idea; he’d spent his twenties trying to get a band off the ground. They said, what do you do, and for once I had an answer.

“I’m a high school history teacher. Gloria and I work together.”

When Mrs. Smith came in she said to Byron, “I better watch what I’m cooking with you around.” She wore an apron and high-heeled shoes; her hair was pinned up on her head. Her coloring was paler than Nolan’s, and she’d put on some lipstick in a rush, making her look a little windblown. She was sweating from the kitchen; her cheeks were red.

“Well, what are you cooking?” Byron said.

I felt like I had been let into a room that is usually closed to the public. Baton Rouge is about 50 percent black. My high school was maybe 65 percent black—it was a magnet school, and people from my neighborhood got bused in. I didn’t have one black friend, not one. Even as a kid I had a sense of some world that was everywhere around me, which I couldn’t get into. My school bus drove past
front yards with cars broken down in the grass, and other kinds of junk. People sat out on the porches, even in hot weather, talking.

“I guess you all have known each other for a while?” I said to Byron.

“I was Terrell’s friend first, back in high school. Nolan was just his dumb brother.” Mrs. Smith had already gone back to the kitchen.

Nolan liked his wine and brought out wine at dinner, which was a sweet potato stew, made with chicken thighs and pinto beans. The health care bill was just about to come up to the House for the last time, and Gloria said, after tasting her food, “But Nolan, I haven’t told you yet. I met him, I met him.”

“Who?”

“Obama,” she said. “I can’t believe I haven’t told you. He almost broke Marny’s nose.”

“I don’t know it was him,” I said.

“Oh, come on. They were playing basketball, and he got him right in the face.”

“I don’t understand anything about this story,” Mrs. Smith said, so Gloria told her.

“What did you do?” Byron asked me.

“He got beat’s what he did,” Gloria said. “I watched the whole thing. And afterwards I get this towel from the kitchen, to clean him up, and Obama says to me”—she tried to do his voice, but it came out wrong
—“This man’s not a whiner, this man’s not a whiner.”

“That’s more Jesse Jackson,” I said. “Obama sounds more like me.”

“Oh please.”

“What do you mean,
please
. I’ve got more in common with him than you do.”

“Like what?”

“An Adam’s apple,” I said. “You want me to go on?” This is something I’d been thinking about a lot. “I mean, his father’s from one place, his mom’s from another, and he grew up somewhere else altogether. My dad’s Canadian. He spoke French as a kid. My mother comes from the Pacific Northwest. They brought us up in the Deep South, except that the suburb we lived in wouldn’t look out of place in Indiana. Obama and I are the kind of Americans who have to choose what to sound like.”

“You’re crazy,” Gloria said.

But we talked about the health care bill as well. I told them that I had campaigned for Obama in New Hampshire. This was in my tender serious boyfriend’s voice, the one you use for intimate strangers. The people I came across were mostly working-class whites, I said, not quite rural or suburban, but the kind of people who live on the outskirts of poor small towns. The only thing Obama’s election would do is give them an excuse to dislike a black man publicly. Because everybody’s allowed to dislike the president—he’s fair game. They could say whatever they wanted about his health care policy.

“Those people say what they want to anyway,” Nolan said. “You think they give a shit, Marny? You think someone like you’s any better? For people like you he isn’t black, he’s just
a Harvard guy
.”

After dinner we sat in the living room, and I asked Mrs. Smith who played piano. There was an upright piano pushed between the windows. “My husband bought that for the boys. But they never really played. It’s a shame, Nolan got those musical fingers, nice and long, but all he ever cared about was drawing and throwing that football up and down the block.”

Eventually the wine kicked in and I said, “There’s something I’ve always wanted to ask about the inauguration. You know, when Obama’s kids were standing there, and the Reverend Rick Warren said their names? Sasha and Malia. Like they were some kind of
tropical fruit he wanted to take a bite out of. I mean, was that commented on?”

“You mean by black people?”

“I guess so.”

“Yeah, it was weird,” Nolan said. “It was kind of weird.”

Gloria and I walked home together afterwards, about a hundred yards. It was cold enough by that point that she let me put my arm around her; a nice clear end-of-winter night, pretty starry.

“Did I do okay?” I said. “Did I embarrass you?”

“I’m not always testing you,” she said.

“Did you ever go out with Nolan?”

“Oh, please,” she said. “For about a minute. He’s not really my type.”

But I didn’t ask her if she’d slept with him. We spent the night together and the next day together and the next night together. It was all very innocent and low-key. I felt like I was falling in love but maybe not just with her, with something else, another world, but maybe that’s always what falling in love is like.