You Don't Have to Live Like This (4 page)

“What do you mean?”

Tony was smiling and showing his teeth, but I think he wanted to offend me, too. He offered me a glass of wine.

“What I really need is to take a leak,” I said. He pointed the way, and when I came back in, Tony was still on his feet; he gave me a drink.

“If this is a reunion,” I said, “what are you doing here?”

“Because I grew up in the city and actually know what’s going on in this place. Even if I didn’t go to Yale.”

Tony had the forearms of a short man who lifts weights; he wore the kind of T-shirt that would show them off. Maybe he was my age or a few years older. His hair had gel in it and was carefully presented—a working-class white man’s haircut. In fact, he was a freelance writer who dropped out of grad school when he got a contract for his memoir about Detroit. His essays had also been published in
Vanity Fair
and
The New York Times
. He told me all this in the first few minutes, while we waited for Robert to come down.

“You’re a bunch of assholes, you know that?” Tony said. “And here comes the pick of the lot.”

I thought he meant Robert, but an older man walked in, wearing tasseled shoes and a gray silk jacket and tie. This was Clay Greene, one of Robert’s business partners. I kept thinking of him
as Professor Greene—he taught at Yale, and even after all this time I found it hard to imagine myself on a level with him. Clay poured himself a glass of wine and sat down in an armchair by the fire. Tony went back to his newspaper on the couch, but I had itchy feet after two days in the car and wanted to look around. There was a bookcase against one of the windows so I looked at Robert’s books. It touched me to see so many of our college editions:
Democracy in America
,
The Republic
,
Of Mice and Men
.

“Why do you think we’re all assholes?” I said to Tony.

“Because you’re trying to help and you haven’t got a clue. In a place like Detroit that makes you one of the bad guys.”

But I didn’t answer him because Beatrice had just come in. Her red hair was piled up high on her head, stretching her neck out long—she looked older and more elegant and somehow on display. From the expression on her face I couldn’t tell if she was happy to see me.

I
suppose I should say something about all these people—about how we met. College friendships can take a lot of explaining. The cement is still wet, deep impressions get made, but there are also a lot of casual footprints that leave permanent marks. When I graduated from Yale, I was determined not to be one of those guys who thinks, they were the best four years of my life. And I managed to move pretty far away from that whole scene, as far as Wales. But now I was right back in the middle of it again.

Robert had a room on the same floor as mine freshman year, but I noticed him for the first time in the dining hall lunch line. I was waiting for a plateful of baked ziti when he struck up a conversation with the guy behind the counter—this tall kind of rickety black guy, maybe fifty years old, who wore a dirty white hat and an apron with his name stitched onto it. Robert introduced himself, like a gentleman.

“Willy,” he said. “Is that your name? Do you mind if I call you Willy?”

“Go right ahead,” Willy told him, and Robert stuck out his hand.

“Robert James.”

He had to reach over the food counter, and Willy, who clearly felt uncomfortable, wiped his dirty, sweaty palm on his apron for about a minute before taking it. I remember thinking, it doesn’t matter if you call him Willy, he’ll still call you sir.

The reason we started hanging out is that Robert saw the squash racket sticking out of my backpack. Whenever he couldn’t sleep he’d tap on my door—I never turned the lights off till two in the morning.

“Hey, Marny, Marny,” he called. “You up, guy? Want a game?”

There were steam tunnels in the college basement that opened out onto squash courts. Nobody could hear us. The temperature, even in winter, topped ninety degrees, and we could play as late as we liked.

“How come you don’t sweat?” he asked me once.

“Because I’m not running.”

It felt sweet sending this strong, handsome kid all over the court. Robert rowed stroke in high school and sat on the bench for his varsity basketball team, but he wasn’t especially quick on his feet.

He didn’t mind losing, though, that’s another thing I liked about him. Somehow he always looked like the kind of guy who won. There were a few freckles to go with his almost curly hair; he had the complexion of someone who spent time on boats. It seemed like every weekend a different blonde showed up at his door, but he stayed friends with them, too. Sometimes they came in groups, they just wanted to hang out. All of this was new to me.

EACH YEAR THERE WAS A
party before Spring Break called Screw Your Roommate, where the girls ask out the guys, but not for themselves, for a roommate or a friend. It was a combination of blind date and practical joke. One day a girl came up to me outside
dining hall and said, “You’re Greg Marnier, right? Do you want to take Beatrice to the dance?”

“Which Beatrice?” I said, but I knew which one she meant. We had a philosophy seminar where we both talked too much. In class she dressed like a grown-up, in dresses and low heels, and sometimes took her shoes off under the table and sat with her feet on the chair and her chin on her knees.

“Castelli-Frank. She’s about as tall as you, she’s got red hair. How many Beatrices do you know?”

“Just her.”

“Well?”

“Do you think she wants to go with me?”

“I don’t know, but she mentions you sometimes. I’m her roommate. You really get on her nerves. I mean that in a good way.”

“It doesn’t sound good.”

“Look, she likes you, okay. Do you want to go or not?”

“Yes,” I said. “Okay. I like her, too.”

This cost me a lot, saying yes. I was nineteen years old and had never been on a date—I’d never been in a sexual situation. But then a few days later Beatrice herself came up to me after class and said, “Are you doing anything Saturday night? Because there’s this stupid dance and I want to set you up with my roommate.”

“I think I met her,” I said.

“She’s prettier than me.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“She’s nicer than I am, too. I’m a big fan of this girl. I like you, too.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “No. I don’t know. Let me think about it.”

Eventually I called up the roommate and said no, I couldn’t go to the dance with Beatrice, and they must have worked it out together because Beatrice didn’t ask me again. But I started hanging
out with her after that, maybe because she felt like, okay, at least that’s clear. She used to read in our college library, and once when I saw her sleeping there I worked until she woke up, then asked her for coffee. When the waiter came around with our drinks, Beatrice said, “Give me your potted history.”

“What’s that mean?”

“You know, your life story.” And we went from there.

Her mother was from Rome, an actress. She came over to LA to make it in the movies and landed a few small parts in unmemorable pictures before marrying one of the industry lawyers and settling down to raise kids. Beatrice spoke decent Italian and identified strongly with the Italian side of her family. “A bunch of old socialists,” she called them, but her American childhood was very privileged. It made her generous with money, and I still have a first edition of E. B. White’s
Here Is New York
, which she found in the Strand and bought for me because we’d been having an argument about New York. At that time I was still southern enough to believe that New Orleans is the greatest city in America.

It was a shock to me when she started going out with Robert James. Personally, I liked Robert. For the kind of guy he was, he showed an unusual interest in intellectual ideas, even if he tended to boil them down into something he could digest. He had leftish sympathies. In his own controlling way, he tried to deal honestly with people. But Beatrice belonged in a different league. She was a real highbrow; she had appealingly uncomfortable standards. How she put up with some of Robert’s richer friends, and some of his poorer opinions, I couldn’t figure out.

Even by undergraduate standards, they had an up-and-down relationship. A few months after they got together, they split up. I don’t know why. Nothing that happened to Robert made him look or dress or sound any different, but you could tell Beatrice
had things on her mind. Always quick to argue, she started getting angry quicker. Once she saw him waiting in line at Claire’s, a cake-and-coffee shop on the corner of the New Haven Green. Only students hung out there. It was overpriced and dark and the cake wasn’t very good, but it had gotten a reputation as a date hangout for the short winter afternoons.

Maybe Robert had taken a girl there, maybe he really didn’t see her, but anyway, when he kept his shoulder turned, she called out loudly, “Don’t turn your back on me. You saw me. I didn’t blow you so two weeks later you could turn your back on me.”

I wasn’t there, but I heard about it from Walter Crenna, who was.

“Did she say that?” I said. “God, did she really say that? What did he say?”

“I don’t know. I was at the cashier. I had to pay for my cake.”

Walter was probably my best friend at Yale, outside of roommates—a heavy-footed, tall, awkward lit-magazine type. He had a sweet tooth and ate like he talked, slowly, with pleasure. His cheeks were pale and blotchy, but childlike, too; I think he hardly shaved.

By Christmas Beatrice and Robert were back together. In the spring she persuaded him to take an art class. There was something genuinely charming about the way he lugged the gear around (oversize paper pad, easel, paints) and set up openly in the middle of the quad. You could see him mixing his paints, taking his time. It struck me as a public declaration of love—he knew perfectly well he was no good. People stopped by to look at his work, which was not only bad but childishly bad. Still, he battled manfully with perspective, the way a father might, assembling a crib for his baby out of duty. A lot of girls stopped by, too. They could see he was being sweet.

Beatrice and Robert spent part of the summer together, sailing the waters around the James family place near York. She came back the next fall a little more in love than she was before—she liked his father.

But it didn’t last; they got along better at home than at school.

For some reason we couldn’t understand, Robert cared a lot about secret societies. He was determined to get into Skull and Bones and spent time and energy making the right friends. Beatrice had no patience for this kind of thing. I remember sitting with him on “tap” night. Robert just stayed in his room, and eventually Walter and I went out to bring back pizza and a six-pack of beers. Robert had missed dining hall, but he didn’t want to leave in case someone from Skull and Bones knocked on his door. But nobody did.

Two days later I got a note from him, an invitation to join a new club, which was going to be everything the secret societies weren’t. “Open, inclusive, intellectually serious.”

We went to Mory’s, which I had never been to before; Robert had just become a member. There was an entrance on York Street that was hard to find, and inside there were lots of little rooms with beat-up wooden tables and paneled walls.

Robert had some idea of getting us to talk seriously about our futures, but in fact all we talked about is where we wanted to live after graduation—LA, New York, Boston, Chicago, New Orleans. Most of us defended our home states, except for Johnny Mkieze and Bill Russo, who both came from Detroit. Johnny was born in Lagos, though, and went to school at Country Day, which (as Bill pointed out) is as much like Detroit as Yale is like New Haven. Bill’s father was a real Detroiter. He grew up in Indian Village and bought his first house on Ellery Street; they only moved out when Bill’s mom got pregnant. Now half the block was boarded up, burned down or sitting empty. This may have been the first time I heard about what was happening to Detroit.

At the end of the meal, Robert ordered a Cup—a large urn filled with homebrewed punch. Another embarrassing tradition. Nobody was really drunk enough, but we sang anyway,
Put a nickel
on the drum
, all that bullshit, passing the Cup around and drinking and singing. One song led to another.
Bright college years, with pleasure rife, the shortest, gladdest years of life. Bulldog Bulldog bow wow wow. For God, for country and for Yale.
Walter had a beautiful voice, a little thin maybe but light for a big man and clear as a bell. For a while he was singing by himself:
We’re poor little lambs who have lost our way! Baa baa baa!
I don’t think anyone considered the evening a success.

BEATRICE BROKE UP WITH ROBERT
“for good” a few weeks before Christmas, senior year. “Because he had never heard of Pinter,” she said to me one night, but I’m sure there were other reasons.

She was standing in the courtyard drinking beer when I bumped into her. “Let’s get out of here,” she said. “Have you ever been to the top of the clock tower? I know someone with a key.”

So I followed her into the library and then up the cold stone stairs. There’s a seminar room at the top, and next to the stairwell another door I’d never tried to go in.

“I know the guy who cleans up around here,” she said. “A student. He always leaves his key behind one of the books. For smokers.”

She couldn’t find the key, but it turned out when we tried it a few minutes later that the door was unlocked. There was another staircase behind it, colder and narrower than the first and made of wood, with maybe a hundred cigarette butts underfoot. Beatrice went first. She had on boots with heels and moved awkwardly in the dark. The door at the top was also open, and we stepped out onto a narrow balcony, into the outside air.

There was snow on the ground, a long way below, and Beatrice put an arm around me. She wasn’t wearing a coat, just a wool scarf
bundled up around her neck, and I found it disconcerting how close her face was. In spite of her good looks, or maybe because of them, she had quite a forceful, almost male presence—strong bones and broad shoulders. She used to swim in high school.

“What are you going to do next year?” she said.

“I’m not sure. I’ve applied for a couple of fellowships to Oxford. My brother got one and had a good time over there.”

“Do you always do what your brother did?”

“Look,” I said, “if you want to give me a hard time, you can go to someone else for human warmth.”

She let go of me then and stood a little apart. There was not much wind, even up in the tower, but zero cloud cover, and the temperature was somewhere in the twenties. All the time we were talking, students carrying various kinds of bags—backpacks and shopping—came and went through the college gates.

“Oh, it’s too cold to argue,” Beatrice said and lit a cigarette. When she had finished, with cold jittery fingers, she breathed in and out and leaned against me again.

“Why did you really break up with him?” I asked.

“I told you, because he had never heard of Pinter. Do you know what his GPA is? Three point two, three point three, something like that. God, I sound like such a snob—I am a snob. But after two years of dating I finally realized he isn’t very bright. Does this make me a bad human being? But you don’t believe me.”

“No, not really.”

“You think he is very bright?”

“I think he has a kind of efficient intelligence. But that’s not what I don’t believe.”

“Yes, he has a kind of intelligence. The trouble is, he thinks it is better than
real
intelligence.”

“I’m not sure what that is.”

“Yes, you are. It’s what you have, it’s what I have.”

“The way you put it doesn’t make it sound very nice.”

“It’s very important to you to be nice, isn’t it? I think this is why you don’t have many girlfriends.”

“Do girls not like nice boys?”

She let go of me again and eventually she said, “This is a very stupid conversation. This is the kind of stupid conversation I had freshman year.” And I could see (I should have seen it before) that she was really quite unhappy, and that her bright sarcastic mood was just the surface of it.

To change the subject, I asked, “And what are you going to do next year?”