You Don't Have to Live Like This (11 page)

Later she asked me to look over the version of the story she had written down. She especially wanted my opinion about the dialogue, if she had gotten right the way black people talk, if it was offensive. I told her I didn’t know any better than she did. Also, I wasn’t there. “But you know what it’s like,” she said. “You remember only what you hear, and you hear only what you expect to hear, which is what prejudice is.”

I shook my head at her. “I don’t know.”

Ernst left her, she said, for no other reason than that everything about them had become too unhappy. I’m not unhappy, she told
him. Something terrible has happened to me but I’m dealing with it. (I liked it when she used American slang.) He said to her, Come with me, let’s go home, I’ve had enough of this country, but she felt that America was just becoming interesting. She was becoming interested in herself—she was discovering new things. Also, they argued about sex. Already a few weeks after the rape she wanted to prove to herself, and Ernst, that she could be normal and okay about sex, but in fact, she admits now, she was a little crazy in this respect, and Ernst understood very well that she didn’t want to be touched. But this is how she interpreted it, that he didn’t want to touch her, and she accused him of stupid things, she said he didn’t want to put himself where a black man had been, that she was stained and dirty and ruined, a ruined woman, that this was how he saw her. All of which upset Ernst very much, he was in tears, and somewhat pathetically tried to stroke her. But it wasn’t just pathetic, he couldn’t help himself, it was all too deliberate and unnatural, a little forced, and again she felt this childish feeling, that he was stronger than her, and when she pulled away in reaction, she had never seen him so angry before.

Why do you make that face, she asked me.

“I’m beginning to feel a little sorry for Ernst.”

“I feel sorry for him, too. When you saw me that night”—she meant at Bill Russo’s place in the country—“I was still a little crazy with everything that had happened. But you were smart. You ran away from me.”

“I didn’t run away. There were people I needed to talk to.”

“No, I know when a boy runs away from me.”

“Did they find the man who—raped you?”

“They found the car, and there were his fingerprints in the car, and they know who he is, but they haven’t found him.”

“But they found his sister?”

“Yes. I saw her again.”

“What did you say to her?”

“I can show you one day. I filmed it.”

For some reason, she hadn’t brought her video camera to the party. But often, when I saw her afterwards, she had it along: a small black Kodak, which she wore around her neck like sunglasses. It took some getting used to. I found myself talking and acting unnaturally and hated watching the results. My voice sounded funny to me, which is what everybody says, more southern than it sounds in my head, and kind of complaining or sarcastic or gay. In the beginning, I often stared into the camera, which Astrid told me not to do, but I couldn’t help myself.

Not that night but later I agreed to let myself be filmed having sex with her, which I came to regret. It started bouncing around the Internet at a bad moment, before the trial, when there was already a lot of media interest in my name. I learned firsthand the way private acts become distorted if they are shown in public. Because in fact it was a very tender scene. This was the first time Astrid had had sex since being raped, which is why she wanted to record it. We were extremely gentle with each other, and it wasn’t so much about pleasure as about getting through it, though of course there was pleasure, too, especially on my side. She cried much of the time but also held on to me and in her own way seemed pretty insistent. But it didn’t look good, and the sound quality was poor, which made it difficult to hear what she was saying. We filmed it at my bedroom in Johanna Street, and the way people took it was, this is the kind of thing they got up to there. But it didn’t really have any bearing on the case.

K
ettridge High is more or less on I-94, about thirty blocks north of Johanna Street. You can hear the traffic clearly as you walk up to the school entrance, and even inside there’s a hum that isn’t just kids. There was a security check inside the door, with one of those metal-detector portals. I passed through it minus keys and wallet, which I collected again on the other side. The guard wore a uniform that looked like a police uniform but cheaper, and he had a gun on a cord attached to his belt. He was sitting on a plastic cafeteria chair, and the table I pushed my wallet and keys across was a cafeteria table—a high school’s makeshift version of airport security.

The guard was black, the secretary in reception (who I could see through a window in the office door) was black, and the kids I saw making their way to lunch were black. I shouldn’t have been surprised, in fact, I wasn’t surprised, which didn’t stop me feeling like I’d entered another country, after an airplane flight.

Gloria had told me to come to her homeroom and the woman in the office gave me directions. The school itself looked like the school I went to in Baton Rouge, both inside and out—1960s architecture, one-story, with a couple of columns holding up the
entrance and yellow brick siding. The hallways had stippled partition walls and glossy floor tiles; everything echoed.

When I reached her room, Gloria was talking to a kid, so I waited by the open door. The kid had to bend his neck to look at her, though he also had a backpack over one shoulder, which seemed to pull him down. He was about twice her size, with a kid’s mustache and his hair cut back in rows. Gloria stood up straight, with her feet together; I wondered if she used to dance. She wore high socks and plain blue shoes, a skirt and a buttoned shirt—the prim schoolgirl look, which for some reason looks flirty on women.

“Come on in, Greg,” she said, when she saw me. “This is Alonzo. He’s one of the good ones. He’s one of the ones that makes it all worthwhile. Greg is thinking about becoming a teacher.”

“I didn’t want to interrupt you.”

“Nah, I was going,” Alonzo said. And then: “So you got somethin’ to teach me?”

“I don’t know. A little history.”

“Not too much, huh?” he said.

“Does he have a crush on you?” I asked, after he closed the door.

“I hope so,” she said, but shook her head. “It’s easier if they want me to like them.”

“I’m sure everybody wants that. So what makes Alonzo one of the good ones?”

“Oh, I say that to all the kids,” she said.

The classroom windows overlooked the school parking lot, which had all kinds of cars in it, including some expensive-looking SUVs, with tinted windows, and much cheaper cars, with smooth treads and rusty hoods.

“I haven’t been inside a high school in about fifteen years. I always tried to sit next to the window. There was a gas station just off campus, and I used to watch people filling up. They filled up
and they drove off, all these grown-ups. I was jealous, because they could go where they wanted, and nobody bothered them. We went there, too, during lunch break, for potato chips and soda.”

“Well, I’m a grown-up and I’m stuck here. Let me show you one of our projects,” she said.

The classroom walls were covered in bright pictures, colored in by felt-tip or Magic Marker and pinned up with thumbtacks. Then I noticed that some of the pictures were photographs, computer printouts of digital images, done on the same white paper.

“This is something Nolan worked with me on,” Gloria said. “It’s ongoing. They keep bringing in new stuff. We call it
I See What I See
. He got Nikon to donate some cheap digital cameras, the kind you give kids. We told them to take a lot of pictures of stuff in their lives. Then we ask them to draw whatever they took a picture of. Mostly they try to make the drawings as close to the photographs as they can, because it’s easier, which is fine, but that’s not really the point.”

She said “drawing” like “drawring.” There were pictures of women’s faces, and babies, and people watching TV, and dirty kitchen sinks. There was a picture of an old dead-looking man lying in a hospital bed. There were some cars and bicycles. I saw the odd gun, too, and a lot of posters of women or ballplayers or actors on bedroom walls. There were pictures of high school kids horsing around after school.

“What do you want them to do?”

“Well, they can do what they want, but I want them to use their imaginations. That’s why we decided to use the school printers, which you can probably tell are very low definition. So that the photographs don’t look too realistic. In class we talk about Impressionism and Pop Art and all that, but most of them don’t make the connection. Their drawings are just like the photos, only worse. But
it’s only been a month; we’re still working on it. Let’s eat. Teaching makes me hungry.”

“How old are the kids?”

“This is my freshman class, but some of them are a little older.”

“Where are Alonzo’s?”

She showed them to me. “This one’s maybe more interesting than the others.” It was a photograph of one those storefront churches, a brick facade painted white, with a barn door and a big purple cross above it going into the roof.
A.M.E
. was hand-painted on either side of the cross. The picture he drew to go with it showed something that looked a little more like a cathedral, with a spire and peaked roofs.

“He didn’t make that one up either,” she said. “That’s the Central United Methodist Church, the one by the ballpark, where the Tigers play. A Michigan Historical Site. They had the first gay priest there, at least in Michigan. The first gay Methodist. It’s kind of a hippie church.”

At lunch, which we ate in the cafeteria, I saw a few white faces, all teachers. Two of them sat down with us, a man and a woman—Gloria seemed to be good at making friends with white people. The woman was blond and maybe forty years old, Jenny Schramm. She sounded like she was from Michigan, an accent I had started to recognize and which probably made her working class. She talked a lot. She was one of those talkative types who live their whole lives under the impression that they’re helpful and well liked. Gloria set her off by saying I wanted to become a substitute teacher. Jenny told me what you need to do.

You need to get fingerprinted. You need to pass a few basic tests, including safety checks, most of which you can take online. Then you need at least to begin some kind of certification process. There are online courses for that as well. I wrote most of this down.

“How do you like teaching here?” I asked, and she talked some more.

“Sometimes I feel like salt in a pepper pot,” she said at one point. “But I don’t mind that.” Gloria had gone for a coffee refill or maybe she wouldn’t have said it.

The man had a leather jacket on, which he didn’t take off, even at lunch, and gray stubble. His name was Eric Kaymer and he went out halfway through to smoke a cigarette. But before he went he flirted with Gloria, which I could only partly listen in on because of the woman. His accent wasn’t as rough as his appearance. From what I overheard he went to a lot of theater.

Gloria seemed a very popular person in the cafeteria. Girls called out “Miss Lambert” from across the room, and stopped by our table on their way to class. The lunch ladies liked her, too. She had a quick natural smile and I wondered if it was sometimes a burden to her, if it was just something she could do.

“Were you a sorority girl?” I asked her at one point.

“Delta Sigma Theta,” she said. “Why?”

“Do you keep in touch?”

“I keep in touch with everybody. Nobody gets away from
me
.”

When Eric came back, Gloria said to him, “Greg’s one of these guys living over in the new neighborhoods.”

“Oh, I thought about getting in on that.”

“But you decided not to?”

“They turned me down,” he said.

“I only got through because I know the guy who started it.”

“How’s it working out?”

“I don’t know yet. I’ve met a lot of strangers; people talk to each other. After college I went out of the country for about ten years. I only just came back. But the sense I get from the people I talk to is that they weren’t very happy with their old lives. Not just because
of money worries, though that, too. I read once that when people don’t know what to do with themselves, when they reach a dead end, they dream about going back to school or becoming an actor. Those are the kind of people we get.”

“Is that what you’re doing?” Gloria asked.

“Maybe that’s why they turned you down,” I said to Eric. “We were looking for people who wanted to change their lives. You have a life here already.”

“Is that what I have? So what’s your excuse?”

“I’m one of these academic drifters. I spent my twenties trying to get a job I’m not gonna get, and now I’m not fit for anything else. But it’s been good for me so far. You know how there are some basic facts about yourself that you don’t know, because you don’t want to face them or can’t get the angle to look. I’m trying to look.”

“That sounds like a full-time job,” Eric said. “Does it pay much?” So I shut up.

After lunch Gloria walked me to the parking lot. “Did you find out what you wanted to know?” she said to me.

“Mrs. Schramm was very helpful.”

“Yeah, Jenny talks a lot. Was there anything else?” She sounded a little combative.

“What’s the graduation rate?”

“Depends how you do the accounting. If a kid doesn’t show up for class but twenty days a year, does it mean he didn’t graduate or he didn’t attend? But it’s about a quarter.”

“And can they read and write?”

“Not as well as I’d like. Anything else? Well, I got things to do,” she said, and I felt really pretty unhappy and ashamed when she left.

This is what I thought about on the way home.

One night at Yale, I walked into my college dining hall while
some sorority party was going on. It was a Friday night, a little after ten o’clock, and I heard the noise of the party after coming back from the library. A dull thudding bass line and other sounds, crowd sounds and sometimes clapping. You could hear it from the courtyard, and since there was nobody at the door, checking tickets, I went in. Everybody inside was black, and they were almost all women, which I could see even though most of the lights were off—except for a disco ball or a spotlight, I can’t remember which, maybe both, which shone or glittered in the center of the room. Underneath the ball or in the light two black men were dancing and taking their clothes off. When I got there they were shirtless and down to their jeans. After a few minutes they raised their arms and pointed at the women in the crowd, and a couple of volunteers eventually walked into the spotlight, or had to be pushed. The men picked them up and kept dancing—picked them up over their heads, I mean, and gently lowered them again, in time to the music, closer and closer to their faces, while everyone cheered them on. Even though there were maybe two hundred people in the room, which was hot with crowded bodies, I had the sense that something private was going on, and it was only after I walked out again, into the cooler evening, that I realized how that could be. What I had seen was somehow racially private, and even though nobody stopped me or asked me what I was doing there, I felt like I had passed through closed doors into a kind of family room where things could be said and done without embarrassment, which wouldn’t be shown or discussed outside.

When I mentioned this to Beatrice at the time, she said, “Bullshit, it’s got nothing to do with race, it’s a gender thing, it’s because they were all women. You don’t think women want to have sex.”

But I wasn’t sure. “I don’t know,” I said.

I suddenly remembered this conversation, which I hadn’t thought about for years, while walking home from Kettridge High.
This is strange, because at the time it made a big impression. I was still a virgin, sex wasn’t something I liked to talk about, and the way those women cheered the two guys on was something new to me. The fact that they were black, the fact that everybody seemed to be having a good time, that no one looked ashamed, all that was part of the impression, and I wondered if it had anything to do with my attraction to Gloria.