You Don't Have to Live Like This (31 page)

“I don’t think you have a chance now.”

“I want to know what lawyers you’re talking to—where you get your information. Did Robert James talk you into this? Because he doesn’t want to see me in court, I can tell you that. A trial gives me a platform, it gives me a voice.”

“Nolan, you know what it’s like in there. Everything gets twisted. You never get to say what you want to say, and even if you do it won’t come out the way you want it to.”

“We’ll see about that. This is really just a game of chicken. Larry Oh says four years or life, but they can do better than that. Robert James won’t let this get to trial.”

“I don’t think Robert has anything to do with it.”

“Please, Marny. He sent you here, didn’t he?”

“No,” I said.

But afterwards Gloria told me, this is one of the things that made up her mind. Not because of what Nolan said. He was going crazy, she could see that, he didn’t make sense, he was fighting all kinds of battles he didn’t need to fight. It’s hard when you go through something like this to pay attention to what matters. But for her it was simple. We were all sitting around the kitchen table, and she realized (about me), he’s not helping, I wish he wasn’t here.

Everything had an effect. There was a lot of unpleasantness in the news. Somebody picked up on Walter’s story, too, on the situation with Susie, and the fact that we were living in the same house turned
into another couple of paragraphs on
Gawker
. What had happened to Meacher and Waites and Nolan and Tony was happening to me—when the news cycle spins you around, everything gets dirty. Then one Saturday morning a photographer papped Gloria coming out of my house and she just started running, crying and running until the end of the block. She knocked on Mrs. Smith’s door, and they talked and then she came back for her car. That was the last time she came to my apartment. When I saw her again that night, at her apartment, I carried over a shopping bag of her stuff.

Breaking up is one of those dramatic things you do, it brings out a lot of grandstanding. It’s like a license to say things. So I said some things I half regret.

My dad once told me, you’ve got this confessional streak, but no real desire to explain yourself. (A friend of mine broke the garage window by kicking a soccer ball against it, and I went straight in to take the blame.) Gloria was leaving me anyway, so I told her about my one-night stand with Astrid. I didn’t want to give her the impression I had nothing to be ashamed of. It was complicated. The video was stupid and pointless, and I told her it didn’t mean anything, but if she found out later what had happened, it could do real damage—I mean, after all that protested innocence. So I told her now. I said to her, look, this is over, you’ve made that clear, but I want a clean break, because I plan to win you back, that’s my plan. I figured she was already disgusted with me; a little more couldn’t hurt.

But I miscalculated. “Why are you telling me this?” she said. “I don’t want to know, I don’t want to know.” And later, “I made myself very vulnerable to you.” That seemed a weird way of putting it—it stuck in my mind for a long time.

C
hristmas was next, and this time my mother came to stay. To cheer me up, she said. A year ago everything looked better, everything was starting out. I had a girlfriend, I had a job, and my mother was married to my father. Of course, she had her own reasons for getting out of Dodge. She couldn’t face Brad’s family, Christmas with his wife in Houston, waking up in the spare bedroom, and watching her son go through what we all went through together, when she had a central role to play. So she came to me.

I gave her my bedroom and slept on the couch. But we got in each other’s hair. Mom was scared to go out in Detroit by herself, even sightseeing, even in the afternoon. Nothing will happen to you at the Institute of Arts, I said. But she answered, “I’ve heard the stories.” So she dragged me along with her, because the truth is, I didn’t have anything else to do. We saw the Rivera murals, the Moscow Ballet was in town, so we went to
The Nutcracker
at Caesars Windsor, I took her around Belle Isle. Being a tourist is tiring, but when you go with your mom you kind of reenact the old relationship, even if it isn’t true or real anymore. Anyway, none of this lightened my mood.

While she was staying I got another letter from my father. It was mostly about himself, this was turning into his big subject; he
wanted to explain himself again. In the past six months, ever since moving out, he had realized the burden my mother placed on him. She’s a very negative person, he said, and he hadn’t realized until it was pointed out to him, by a very smart younger person, what family life had done to his personality. Young people these days, he went on, don’t have the hang-ups I did, they don’t feel any false obligations. And so on.

“What’s he say?” my mother asked.

“Nothing much, just day-to-day stuff.”

“If he’s unhappy I want you to tell me, I want to know.”

“I think he’s all right,” I said.

One night I went to see Astrid—I had to get out of the house. I’d been trying to call her for several weeks, but she didn’t answer her phone. Finally, I sent her an email, and she wrote back. Her phone was dead; she had closed out the contract. She was leaving in the morning, flying to Germany for Christmas and not coming back. But I could watch her pack up if I wanted to. So my mom made me supper, and afterwards I drove over to Astrid’s apartment, in one of those survivor row houses by the old train station.

All night long there was this stream of people coming through. It was a very unsatisfying visit. I guess I was hoping to pick a fight but she wasn’t in the mood. So I just sat on her two-seater couch, drinking red wine and offering the bottle to newcomers when they walked in. Astrid was stressed out but also clearly on a kind of high, kissing everybody, crying lightly, giving things away—paintings, DVDs and CDs, bottles of alcohol and clothes. “I want to go home with what I can carry in a duffel bag,” she said, again and again and again. I’m sure that some of the people coming through recognized me from the video link. It was embarrassing and depressing and every time I saw this woman she annoyed me and attracted me at the same time.

“I don’t understand how you can just leave,” I said to her at one point.

“I have had my experience here. It’s like when you work on a picture, and then you say it’s done, you have to do something else.”

This is the kind of thing.

I wanted to have some real conversation with her, about the video, about Gloria, about something. I wanted to tell her, we can’t see each other anymore, we can’t hang out. But this was obviously pointless, and at least I figured that out. When I left she gave me a
Sesame Street
kid’s book, the tiny hard kind you can loop to a baby stroller.
Bert and Ernie’s Sleepytime Book
. “I bought it for my niece months ago; she’s really too old for it. That’s what happens when you go away. They grow up. My sister says, she walks everywhere now. You can have it,” she said and scribbled something inside the cover with a felt-tip pen.

In the bleak overhead car light, feeling drunk, I read her inscription:
From Astrid, for the long nights . . .

My mother was asleep when I got home, so I turned on my computer and started messing around online. After a few minutes, I looked up the video link. I sat on my sofa, with the computer on my lap, and watched us make love. Astrid was crying and I kept going and afterwards we held on to each other. I don’t know what I felt looking at her, you could see her breasts hanging down a little shapelessly, she had small breasts and sat on top. But one thing I did feel was turned on. It was a stupid physical reaction, but I was also very lonely at the time, and I needed some outlet or expression for my intensity of feelings. And this was it.

All night long I left the windows open, but in the morning the living room still smelled of bedclothes.

“What are you doing to yourself?” my mother asked, over breakfast.

My heart skipped a beat. “What do you mean?” I said.

“It’s freezing in here.”

On Christmas Day, Walter and Susie invited us downstairs. Everybody else got along, but I behaved badly. It was kind of a make-fun-of-Marny party. Susie did most of the cooking and she wasn’t a good cook. The turkey was dry in places and pink in others; the mash potatoes tasted salty and lumpy. There was too much food as well and it sat around on the dishes afterwards, and on people’s plates, showing the oil. I don’t think anybody cared. They just got drunk, even Susie, and there was an atmosphere of conviviality based on the idea that Walter and I were good friends, and Susie loved Walter and my mother loved me, so we all loved each other.

But I was in a bad way. I wanted to be elsewhere, and rejected all conversational approaches and offers of sympathy. Also, it didn’t help seeing Walter and Susie together, basically happy.

That night my mother said to me, “I don’t think you realize how much work it takes to put together a meal like that. It’s getting everything into the oven at different times, and getting them out at the same time. You could have showed a little appreciation.”

“I said several times how delicious everything was.”

“That’s not what I mean. It’s not what you say, people just want you to have a good time.”

“Some things are outside my control.”

“You can make an effort. And maybe after a while it won’t feel like such an effort anymore.”

“What you don’t realize is, that was an effort. That was me making an effort.”

“What I saw is you picking fights.”

And it’s true, at one point I lost my temper. Walter said something about Gloria; he had spoken to her on the phone. He remem
bered that I once met a friend of hers who worked for an adoption agency in Southfield. Susie and he wanted to adopt.

“What kind of kid? A black kid?”

“Is that possible?” my mother asked.

“With these guys, it is,” Walter said. “They’re Lutherans.”

“And what did Gloria say?”

“She was very obliging.”

“Don’t call her again,” I said.

“What did you do to her?”

“Nothing. I just don’t want to hear about her, I don’t want you to talk to her. I don’t want you people to have any relations with her when I don’t.”

“Well, why don’t you?”

“Oh, leave me alone,” I said.

Afterwards, my mother was always first to make up. She nagged at me, she niggled at me, but she couldn’t stay mad for long—she felt too anxious. That was probably bad for me, too. I started indulging myself in teenage sulks.

But it was too much, her sympathy. I couldn’t breathe. She looks like me, too, pale and earnest, like someone who doesn’t understand a joke but is trying her best. Explain it to me, her face said. Instead I watched TV or I watched her cook and after two weeks she couldn’t take it anymore.

“What I can’t bear is the idea that this was a failure.”

“Two weeks is a long time,” I said. “We’re not used to each other now.”

“That’s just what I mean.”

But she flew home on New Year’s Eve—the flights were cheaper. “I’ll come back for the trial,” she said. And after she left I felt surprisingly cheerful, cheerful in the old way, I mean. Like a college kid flying back after Christmas vacation, to his dorm room or
apartment, to his old new life. But I had good days and bad days—good weeks and bad weeks.

One night, my brother gave me a call.

“You survived her,” he said.

“She was all right. She loves me.”

“Even I love you. Did you know all that about Nolan?”

“What,” I said.

“I talked to Korobkin. It’s not just the kid, Nolan has credit card debts. There are lovers, he’s been leading two or three lives. Irreconcilable lives. I see this stuff all the time in my pro bono work. Immigrant families, fucked-up dads, guys under a lot of pressure doing fucked-up things. What you have to realize is that for some people private life is a different kind of reality.”

“What’s that got to do with anything.”

“I thought I should warn you. This thing is going to get personal, they’re going to come after you.”

“Who is? I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

“His lawyers.”

“
Whose
lawyers?”

“Listen, Greg. There’s only one way this goes to trial—if Nolan’s lawyers think they can make a reasonable case for his innocence. They have to turn this into a misunderstanding. Tony says one thing, he says another. The problem is you—you’re the only real witness. And if you don’t tell the story the way they want you to tell it, they’ll come after you. That’s all I’m saying. You should be prepared.”

“Okay, so you told me. I’m prepared.”

But he changed his tone. “What are you going to do now?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what do you do with yourself these days?”

“I’m going to clear up the kitchen and turn on the TV. Then I’m going to bed. That’s what I do.”

But the truth is I was watching a lot of porn. I had never done this before, at least not online, and didn’t know where to look. In high school one of my D&D buddies had access to the Playboy channel through his father’s account—his parents were divorced. But it didn’t interest me much; I felt embarrassed, especially in front of the other boys. But this time there was nobody around. I started out with Tyler Waites’s website and that led me to other things. It was amazing, the variety on offer, all these sophisticated tastes. I remembered something Nolan said. There is no human nature, just economics. Supply and demand.

The picture quality was usually pretty bad, but that seemed part of the appeal—you could never get a good enough look. You always wanted to be closer. And between you and what you wanted was this screen.

One of the things you learn growing up is that adult pleasures are more complicated than they look. Even beer is an acquired taste; it takes getting used to. And watching porn turns out to be hard work. Most sexual imagery is pain imagery; the sounds are also sounds of pain. For some reason I could concentrate on these images. Because concentration is what it was: the rest of the time I felt distracted, I tried to read and put down my book, I fell asleep in front of the TV. But at two a.m. I could stay awake, watching a woman lying naked on her back in bed, with her legs up in the air, while a man pressed himself between her legs, so that you could see his buttocks instead of her pubic hair. I was very unhappy, that was clear to me even at the time, but I also felt some kind of connection with people. Not just with the women, the actors. All across America, and not only America, there are men on their own occupying themselves in this way—looking for something and straining towards it, unsatisfied. And I was one of them.

If you go to bed at midnight and get out of bed, after a broken
night, at ten or eleven in the morning, that still leaves thirteen or fourteen hours of waking time to account for. Eating doesn’t take long if you eat alone and I never felt hungry—I ate out of a kind of duty to something. But I didn’t feel many duties. The pressure to appear a certain way to other people had started to fade. I almost never saw anyone, apart from Walter. The things he went through for Susie, not just with her but on his own, the decisions he must have come to, his private battles—I began to get a sense of them. He had come out on the other side. But I was still in the middle. Something important had failed or was failing and I needed to deal with it, I needed to think it through.

I lived like this for three months, hardly leaving my apartment. Going quietly crazy, Walter called it, but making progress. I started reading again, with more attention. I read
Walden
again, I read
Invisible Man
.
Native Son
,
Go Tell It on the Mountain
,
Stover at Yale
. High school staples like
The Awakening
and
Huck Finn
. Walter gave me a 1942 edition of
Say, Is This the U.S.A.
and I spent a week looking through the photographs and reading the captions, frequently in tears. The men and women in those pictures are probably dead now, even some of the kids. There were passages in each of these books that seemed tremendously important. I thought, other people need to know about this. But they’d obviously been given the chance and it hadn’t made much difference.

When you don’t do much, when you don’t go anywhere, you notice small changes. In yourself and other people, in the world outside your window. The snow that started in late November kept accumulating—one inch, and then another, and then a few more. Mild fall, harsh winter. None of it had anywhere to go, it just piled up. I used to watch the kids play in the street. After particularly heavy nights, school would be canceled, the cold and ice made everything resound, the whole world seemed like their temporary
playground. But then on other days, everyone stayed indoors. Cars sat parked on islands of frozen slush; the snow on their roofs was the last thing to stay white.

The Adlers moved out in February. Don knocked on my door, while Tina finished packing. There was a U-Haul van in his driveway.

“We’re getting out now,” he said. “We’re not going to wait around for bad news.”

“What bad news?”