You Don't Have to Live Like This (7 page)

“Nolan Smith,” he said but didn’t shake our hands.

At this point the mailman came up the steps behind us. A big old guy with the kind of black skin that changes color around the eyes, like a sink around the drain. He handed Nolan a few bills and patted the dog.

“Mrs. Smith doing all right?” he said.

“Not too bad.”

“We got off on the wrong foot,” Hector said, when the mailman had gone.

“If you want to talk to a more mannerly person, you can talk to my mother.” There was a cardboard box on the front porch, with the label peeling, and Nolan reached inside it to pick up a handful of dry food, which he dropped in a bowl by the door. The dog went over to eat. “But she’s asleep.”

“We don’t want to wake her. We just wanted to let you know.”

“If you wake her, I’ll set my dog on you. Get you some water, Buster.”

He clattered through the screen door with the water bowl. Hector and I waited on the porch while the dog ate, moving his jaws like dogs do, partly chewing and partly just catching the pieces of food in his teeth.

“Buster,” I said to Hector.

Then Nolan came out again with fresh water and set the bowl down. “This is what’s going to happen,” he said. “If you need to
shut down the street, you may do so at my convenience. Now is not a convenient time for me.”

Hector said, “I got a permit here. I don’t need to ask you. I’m just letting you know.”

“If you shut it down,” Nolan told him, “I will personally come by your house with a baseball bat and break windows.”

We stared at each other for a minute on the front porch. It was a fresh sunny afternoon. There wasn’t much traffic around but up and down the street you could hear the sound of people working with their hands; in its own way, quite pleasant. A spring sound. Nolan said, “You think I’m angry. I am not angry. This is how I talk.”

“Look,” I said. “I’m the one who’s going to be your neighbor. Hector here’s just helping out. I don’t want any hard feelings.”

“You are not understanding what I am saying. I don’t have any feelings about you at all. Maybe you think I have some kind of Mexican thing against your friend. I don’t. Maybe you think it bothered me that your representatives came by three four five six times to try to persuade me to persuade my mother to sell her house so that more white people could move in to the neighborhood. It didn’t. If you want to move in here, that’s your business. But if you interfere with my life I will interfere with yours.”

“All right, okay. When would it be convenient for us to turn off the electricity?”

“I’ll let you know,” he said.

In the end, we waited all afternoon for the go-ahead. Angelo said he had other things to do, but in the morning, without asking me or telling anyone else, he shut down the street and reconnected the supply line running from my house to the mains. A few of his buddies stood in the yard with hammers, wrenches, shovels and tire irons, but nothing happened, and an hour later Angelo switched the lights back on.

T
hat weekend Beatrice had arranged a launch party at Bill Russo’s house on the shores of Lake St. Clair. A publicity stunt. There was a big barbecue on Saturday, with a band and a marquee, as the English call it. Basically a large tent. The idea was, so people moving in could meet a few representative members of “old” Detroit—community leader types, priests, schoolteachers, artists, businessmen. WDIV, the local NBC affiliate, had promised to send a van. The house was grand enough for some of Robert’s “closer” friends to stay over, which included me, and Sunday afternoon was supposed to be a chance for us to hang out quietly before things got crazy. Robert’s wife planned to fly in, with their son. Clay Greene was also bringing his family.

It’s about an hour in the car from Detroit, and I drove up with Bill Russo and Johnny Mkieze and Beatrice, in Bill’s old Cadillac, his father’s car, a 1963 DeVille. Johnny and Beatrice squeezed in the back. I was kind of jealous of them, sitting on top of each other like that, with their legs pushed to the sides and their knees knocking. Johnny was a small guy, but physically strong and very dark-skinned—attractive to women. His accent was almost perfectly American, but he had a way of talking to women that no straight
American man could pull off, like he was one of them, but in a flirty way, too. He made them laugh.

I said to Beatrice, “You gotta have a woman up front,” but she insisted: “You get carsick in the back.” Which is true, I’ve got no stomach for tight spaces. So I said to Bill, “I guess you’re stuck with me.”

After five minutes, with the window down, I forgot about the two kids behind me, who couldn’t hear us anyway with the noise from the road, and talked to Bill. Everyone seemed in a good mood. It was the first really warm day of the year, what I would call southern warm, where you don’t have to worry about a little wind or shade. The air felt like an old towel fresh out of the dryer. I didn’t know Bill very well though I’d known him for almost fifteen years. We had one of those funny relationships, intimate-flavored, kidding, natural, but also formal, polite and distantly friendly at the same time. There were basic facts about his life I was ignorant of, and vice versa. Like the fact that his sister was married to one of the producers of
One Tree Hill
, and lived in Hollywood, in Beverly Hills, in a house with a small Picasso in it.

“A small Picasso,” Bill said again.

I was suddenly very happy to be there, with this young state rep, in a classy old car, driving out to some beachfront mansion, which he’d been going to since he wore diapers. It was great to hear him bitch about that Picasso.

In college I thought he was a spoilt little rich kid—one of those kids who compensates by digging latrines in Ecuador over summer vacation. But his friends were still private school friends and he wore his varsity wrestling jacket all over campus. Somehow, he hadn’t changed but I didn’t mind. It was also true that he spent his days doing good in the world, and rubbing shoulders with the kind of people I don’t even like to shake hands with when they ask
me for change outside the lobbies of heated buildings. He visited the Boys & Girls Clubs, talked to drug counselors (mostly reformed addicts), pushed their case in the House, sometimes gave out of his own pocket. Prison reform was his hobbyhorse. “People think I’m a crazy fucking liberal, but I’m basically a practical guy. Most of those bums deserve to rot in jail but it doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work.”

He had passionate political feelings but also liked to chase women and get drunk. Sometimes he used his political earnestness to chat up girls—this was the sort of thing I used to dislike him for. He missed doing “fun drugs,” stuff like mushrooms, marijuana, ecstasy and cocaine. We talked about all that in the car. In a couple of years if he wanted to get serious about politics, he was going to have to marry some nice girl. But not yet. You have no idea, he said to me, what a turn-on it is, political power. I can get girls these days who I couldn’t even kiss without standing on a step. (He’s about five foot seven, a pink-faced, clean-shaven guy who still looks like the boy next door.) The girls get turned on, aides, interns, secretaries (never his own), he gets turned on, everybody gets turned on together, by his access to committee meetings and the governor’s cell phone number.

“I don’t know why I’m telling you all this,” he said. “I’ll tell you something else. There’s a story that Matt Damon’s coming tonight.”

“What do you mean, a story?”

“Maybe Beatrice told me, I can’t remember. My sister knows his agent and Matt’s in Detroit filming. I got my eye on him.”

“For what?”

“To play me in a movie, what do you think. When I’m president.”

After all this, the house, when we finally pulled up the drive, turned out to be sweeter, smaller and quainter than I imagined. Mud-gray shingles and crooked chimneys, with a screen porch at
the back. A couple of loose steps pointed down the garden path to the beach. His great-grandfather built it in 1913 when his shares in Ford Motor took off. He was one of the first people to pick this particular spot along the shoreline of Lake St. Clair. But the garden was large and beautifully, wildly kept, with rose hips and blackberry bushes, plum trees and tulips leading down to sandy grass. There was also a short rotting dock and a speedboat in the water.

Inside it was bigger than it looked, with lots of small bedrooms sharing bathrooms and corridors. From the bed my room had a view of the water, and I lay down and took a nap while people tramped around downstairs. I could hear men in the garden hammering in the stakes for the marquee. When I woke up it was maybe four o’clock, a very clear lakeside windy afternoon. I put on a jacket and tie and went out the back into the garden, where somebody in black tails handed me a champagne cocktail. There were maybe thirty people standing around; the women had to hold on to their hats.

The first person I recognized was Michael Carnesecca, Tony’s kid. He hugged me around the knees and made me spill my drink. I like this kid; Cris let me give him a sip of what was left in the glass. He made a face and said “More,” and then we played chase with the glass for a while—he jumped up and I held it out of his reach. He was a little violent; it got out of hand. At the same time I was looking around at the other guests, looking for Matt Damon, and Cris, misunderstanding me, said, “Go ahead, Marny, go find some pretty girl.” But she had to pull him off me in the end, by force, and took him aside into the bushes to bawl him out—in undertones. It was the first time I saw her lose her temper.

So I refilled my glass at one of the white-clothed tables and ended up standing next to a woman with flowers, real flowers in her hat. Roses and petunias, I don’t know. She was a ripe-colored black woman, almost eggplant-colored. Her lips were painted some
glossy shade that made them look freshly licked. In her summer dress she stood the way a man stands in jeans—I could see her plump strong legs under the material. She was short, too, and looked about fifteen years old.

It was difficult to hear so we walked down towards the water, towards the sandy grass. The band was starting to set up by the back porch. Her name was Gloria Lambert and she taught art and computers at Kettridge High School—about five minutes by car from Johanna Street. In fact, she knew Johanna Street well. A good friend of hers lived on Johanna Street, and I started to laugh.

“I guess you met Nolan,” she said.

“Yeah, I met him.”

“His bark is worse than his bite.”

“That doesn’t mean he don’t bite,” I said, though why I said
don’t
I don’t know. “Is he a boyfriend of yours?”

“You ask questions. How many you think I got?”

“So how come you know him?”

“There’s a program I run where local artists come in to talk to the kids.”

“Is that what he is? So why did you get invited to this thing?”

“I won the Eliza Curtis Hubbard Memorial Award.”

“Which is for what?”

“Teaching art. Let me ask you a question. This is what I don’t understand. Those are some nice houses on Johanna Street, but what are you going to
do
when you get there?”

“I don’t know. I’m drifting a bit right now.”

“Well, what are you
good
for?” she said.

In the windy sunshine, everything looked very beautiful and real. Maybe I fell a little in love. I said to her, “You’ve got the most amazing skin I’ve ever seen on a human being. Do people say that to you?”

“White men. Usually they put it a little different.”

I had just drunk two champagne cocktails on an empty stomach. There was a flagpole in the garden, about twenty feet high and made of painted wood. The paint was peeling but the Stars and Stripes hung out straight in the wind and sometimes dipped suddenly and folded over itself. That’s how I felt all afternoon, coming and going.

Then someone said, “George,” and pulled at my elbow. It was the German girl, Astrid, the hitchhiker, with a camera in her hand. She took my picture with Gloria, who afterwards moved away.

“How did you get here?”

“Your friend Robert likes blondes. Don’t you remember, you sent me his email address?”

“What happened to Ernst?”

“He wanted to go, I wanted to stay.”

This is how the afternoon went on. If I wanted to get out of a conversation, I said, “Have you seen Matt Damon? He’s supposed to be here,” and pretended to look for him. A video guy pushed his way through the crowd, with his face hidden by the machine. Whenever I saw him I carefully finished my sentences. There were speeches, too. Robert James said a few words; the wind made rough kissing noises and squeaks against the microphone. Bill Russo talked. “This is the house my great-grandfather built with money put in his pocket by the men who worked the line at the old Ford Motor factory in Highland Park.” For maybe an hour, around six o’clock, I played quietly inside with some of the kids. Clay Greene had showed up with his two boys, and I met his wife, Helen, a very tall, handsome, likable, not at all graceful woman, who was trying to make macaroni and cheese. “There isn’t any butter,” she said. “Can you run to the shops to get butter?”

“There aren’t any shops here. I’m too drunk to drive. I don’t have a car.”

Beatrice came in, looking for something, and saw Helen. The two big, good-looking women embraced, leaning over each other.

“I need to get a few things from the shops,” Helen said. “Do you mind staying here with the boys? They’re perfectly happy. I’ll be back in a minute.”

Beatrice said, “No, that’s fine. Of course. Go.”

“Are you sure? I can’t face wrestling them into the car.”

“Go.”

So she went. One of the boys, the smaller one, started crying and going after his mother, so Beatrice with a certain rough familiarity picked him up in her arms. She was wearing a linen pants suit—working dress. The boy kicked and she dropped him and stood kind of flat-footed and unhappy while he cried.

“I’m no good with kids. These kids don’t like me.”

“They can hear you,” I said.

“Fuck you, Marny,” she said and walked out.

So I got some pots and wooden spoons from the kitchen and sat down on the floor, banging them together. The older one was reading books. After a while, they both got bored and tried to go into the garden, but I reached the door in time and shut it. The small one started to cry again and Clay Greene came in with Peggy James, Robert’s wife. She had a baby wrapped around her middle in a kind of cloth.

Clay said, “Quiet, son, you’ll wake the baby.”

“He won’t,” Peggy said, “and anyway, it doesn’t matter.” She was pretty, too, less handsome than Clay’s wife but more attractive and noticeably younger than us. She had a button nose and very expressive mouth—big clean healthy gums that kept her mouth open and smiling. Also, she was skinny as a boy, even after childbirth, and wore shorts, because of the hot weather, and her legs were tanned and smooth and strong and thin. She wore pull-up stripy sports
socks and sneakers. She was like a sexy kid sister. Everything was okay with her, and when Helen Greene came back Peggy woke up her baby to give Helen a cuddle.

“You look fantastic,” Helen said. “God, how do you do it. I bet you even get some sleep.” And I went outside to find another drink.

The band was a sort of Supremes look-alike act, but shorter, older and fatter, and with bigger hair. They played an afternoon set and an evening set. Around seven o’clock the first bus arrived, to take the guests with kids back to Detroit. Then the lights came on, in strings, hung across branches and bushes and the undercarriage rope work of the marquee. Another round of champagne made its way among us, in bright groups, on the waiters’ trays. Astrid and I went walking into the trees, glasses in hand.

“I’ve had a very bad time,” she said. “It’s only beginning to get better.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t want to talk. I talk about it too much.”

We started making out a little. There was another wooden jetty farther along the shore, mostly hidden by reeds, which kids probably used for diving off. We sat on the wet wooden boards at the end, letting our legs hang and kissing, which isn’t easy. I had a crick in my neck. Eventually she said, “I should tell you, I’m in a project at the moment where I’m filming everything, about me and my life here. So even if we end up going to bed together I want to film it. I don’t know if you are comfortable with that.”

“But you’re not filming this now.”

“I’m not stupid. Everything isn’t possible.”

“Where are you staying tonight?”

“I don’t need to stay with you, if that’s what you mean.” Then: “Do you want to go swimming?”

“It’s too cold for me.”

A few minutes later we stood up (the seat of my pants had gotten wet) and walked back to the party. I kept looking out for Gloria but couldn’t find her. I had never kissed a black girl and wondered if they tasted different. But maybe she had caught the seven o’clock bus. I had another drink. There were things to eat, too, but I wasn’t hungry and had a kind of surging important feeling that it was possible to be more simple and honest with people than I usually was. I could say to Gloria, I want to kiss you and I could also admit that I had never kissed a black girl. Astrid was very honest, and even though she was also pretentious and I didn’t like her much, I admired her for it. She was very pretty anyway. I hadn’t had sex since coming back to America, over a year ago. The way all this frustration built up inside me is to make me think, nobody is very kind to me, and nobody knows me well, either. But I couldn’t find Gloria, she had probably caught that bus. Beatrice walked past me, almost pushed past me, with a red face. I said, “Hey!”