I looked around the parking lot and thought: Everyone here understands what’s going on better than I do. But then I remembered that I had fired shots at a nuclear reactor. All the desperate remedies. And I remembered my mother’s first sentence to me when we arrived in New York harbor when I was ten years old. She pointed down from the ship at the pier, at the crowds, and she said, “Warren, look at all those Americans.” I felt then that if I looked at that crowd for too long, something inside my body would explode, not metaphorically but literally: it would blow a hole through my skin, through my chest cavity. And it came back to me in that shopping center parking lot, full of those LOVE NETWORK people, that feeling of pressure of American crowds and exuberance.
We collected our free cola certificates, and then I hustled my wife and kids back into the car. I’d had enough. We drove out of the Westland parking lot, then were directed by a detour sign into a service drive that circled the entire shopping center and reentered the lot on the north side, back at the clown races. I saw Jaynee again, still in the rain, hugging her American dad, and Jody holding on to his elbow, looking up at him, pressing her thigh against his. I took another exit out of the lot but somehow made the same mistake I had made before and, once again, found myself back in Westland. Every service drive seemed designed to bring us back to this same scene of father, daughter, and second wife. I gave them credit for who they were and what they were doing—I give them credit now—but I had to get out of there immediately. I don’t know how I managed to get out of that place, but on the fourth try I succeeded.
Shelter
COOPER HAD STOPPED at a red light on his way to work and was adjusting the dial on his radio when he looked up and saw a man in a filthy brown corduroy suit and a three-day growth of beard staring in through the front windshield and picking with his fingernails at Cooper’s windshield wiper. Whenever Cooper had seen this man before, on various Ann Arbor street corners, he had felt a wave of uneasiness and unpleasant compassion. Rolling down the window and leaning out, Cooper said, “Wait a minute there. Just wait a minute. If you get out of this intersection and over to that sidewalk, I’ll be with you in a minute”—the man stared at him—“I’ll have something for you.”
Cooper parked his car at a meter two blocks up, and when he returned, the man in the corduroy suit was standing under a silver maple tree, rubbing his back against the bark.
“Didn’t think you’d come back,” the man said, glancing at Cooper. His hair fell over the top of his head in every direction.
“How do you do?” Cooper held his hand out, but the man—who seemed rather old, close up—didn’t take it. “I’m Cooper.” The man smelled of everything, a bit like a municipal dump. Cooper tried not to notice it.
“It doesn’t matter who I am,” the man said, standing unsteadily. “I don’t care who I am. It’s not worth anybody thinking about it.” He looked up at the sky and began to pick at his coat sleeve.
“What’s your name?” Cooper asked softly. “Tell me your name, please.”
The old man’s expression changed. He stared at the blue sky, perfectly empty of clouds, and after a moment said, “My mother used to call me James.”
“Good. Well, then, how do you do, James?” The man looked dubiously at his own hand, then reached over and shook. “Would you like something to eat?”
“I like sandwiches,” the man said.
“Well, then,” Cooper said, “that’s what we’ll get you.”
As they went down the sidewalk, the man stumbled into the side of a bench at a bus stop and almost tripped over a fire hydrant. He had a splay-footed walk, as if one of his legs had once been broken. Cooper began to pilot him by touching him on his back.
“Would you like to hear a bit of the Gospels?” the man asked.
“All right. Sure.”
He stopped and held on to a light pole. “This is the fourth book of the Gospels. Jesus is speaking. He says, ‘I will not leave you desolate; I will come to you. Yet a little while, and the world will see me no more, but you will see me; because I live, you will live also.’ That’s from John,” the man said. They were outside the Ann Arbor Diner, a neon-and-chrome Art Deco hamburger joint three blocks down from the university campus. “There’s more,” the old man said, “but I don’t remember it.”
“Wait here,” Cooper said. “I’m going to get you a sandwich.”
The man was looking uncertainly at his lapel, fingering a funguslike spot.
“James!” Cooper said loudly. “Promise me you won’t go away!”
The man nodded.
When Cooper came out again with a bag of french fries, a carton of milk, and a hamburger, the man had moved down the street and was leaning against the plate-glass window of a seafood restaurant with his hands covering his face. “James!” Cooper said. “Here’s your meal.” He held out the bag.
“Thank you.” When the man removed his hands from his face, Cooper saw in his eyes a moment of complete lucidity and sanity, a glance that took in the street and himself, made a judgment about them all, and quickly withdrew from any engagement with them. He took the hamburger out of its wrapping, studied it for a moment, and then bit into it. As he ate, he gazed toward the horizon.
“I have to go to work now,” Cooper said.
The man glanced at him, nodded again, and turned his face away.
“What are we going to do?” Cooper said to his wife. They were lying in bed at sunrise, when they liked to talk. His hand was on her thigh and was caressing it absently and familiarly. “What are we going to do about these characters? They’re on the street corners. Every month there are more of them. Kids, men, women, everybody. It’s a horde. They’re sleeping in the arcade, and they’re pushing those terrible grocery carts around with all their worldly belongings, and it makes me nuts to watch them. I don’t know what I’m going to do, Christine, but whatever it is, I have to do it.” With his other hand, he rubbed his eyes. “I dream about them.”
“You’re such a good person,” she said sleepily. Her hand brushed over him. “I’ve noticed that about you.”
“No, that’s wrong,” Cooper said. “This has nothing to do with good. Virtue doesn’t interest me. What this is about is not feeling crazy when I see those people.”
“So what’s your plan?”
He rose halfway out of bed and looked out the back window at the tree house he had started for Alexander, their seven-year-old. Dawn was breaking, and the light came in through the slats of the blinds and fell in strips over him.
When he didn’t say anything, she said, “I was just thinking. When I first met you, before you dropped out of law school, you always used to have your shirts laundered, with starch, and I remember the neat creases in your trouser legs, from somebody ironing them. You smelled of aftershave in those days. Sexually, you were ambitious. You took notes slowly. Fastidious penmanship. I like you better now.”
“I remember,” he said. “It was a lecture on proximate cause.”
“No,” she said. “It was contribution and indemnification.”
“Whatever.”
He took her hand and led her to the bathroom. Every morning Cooper and his wife showered together. He called it soul-showering. He had picked up the phrase from a previous girlfriend, though he had never told Christine that. Cooper had told his wife that by the time they were thirty they would probably not want to do this anymore, but they were both now thirty-one, and she still seemed to like it.
Under the sputter of the water, Christine brushed some soap out of her eyes and said, “Cooper, were you ever a street person?”
“No.”
“Smoke a lot of dope in high school?”
“No.”
“I bet you drank a lot once.” She was an assistant prosecutor in the district attorney’s office and sometimes brought her professional habits home. “You tapped kegs and lay out on the lawns and howled at the sorority girls.”
“Sometimes I did that,” he said. He was soaping her bac
k. She had wide, flaring shoulders from all the swimming she had done, and the soap and water flowed down toward her waist in a pattern of V’s. “I did all those things,” he said, “but I never became that kind of person. What’s your point?”
She turned around and faced him, the full display of her smile. “I think you’re a latent vagrant,” she said.
“But I’m not,” he said. “I’m here. I have a job. This is where I am. I’m a father. How can you say that?”
“Do I love you?” she asked, water pouring over her face. “Stay with me.”
“Well, sure,” he said. “That’s my plan.”
The second one he decided to do something about was standing out of the hot summer sun in the shade of a large catalpa tree near a corner newsstand. This one was holding what seemed to be a laundry sack with the words AMERICAN LINEN SUPPLY stenciled on it. She was wearing light summer clothes—a Hawaiian shirt showing a palm tree against a bloody splash of sunset, and a pair of light cotton trousers, and red Converse tennis shoes—and she stood reading a paperback, beads of sweat falling off her face onto the pages.
This time Cooper went first to a fast-food restaurant, bought the hamburger, french fries, and milk, and then came back.
“I brought something for you,” Cooper said, walking to the reading woman. “I brought you some lunch.” He held out a bag. “I’ve seen you out here on the streets many times.”
“Thank you,” the woman said, taking the bag. She opened it, looked inside, and sniffed appreciatively.
“Are you homeless?” Cooper asked.
“They have a place where you can go,” the woman said. She put down the bag and looked at Cooper. “My name’s Estelle,” she said. “But we don’t have to talk.”
“Oh, that’s all right. If you want. Where’s this shelter?”
“Over there.” The woman gestured with a french fry she had picked out. She lifted the bag and began to eat. Cooper looked down at the book and saw that it was in a foreign language. The cover had fallen off. He asked her about it.
“Oh, that?” she said. She spoke with her mouth full of food, and Cooper felt a moment of superiority about her bad manners. “It’s about women—what happens to women in this world. It’s in French. I used to be Canadian. My mother taught me French.”
Cooper stood uncomfortably. He took a key ring out of his pocket and twirled it around his index finger. “So what happens to women in this world?”
“What doesn’t?” the woman said. “Everything happens. It’s terrible but sometimes it’s all right, and, besides, you get used to it.”
“You seem so normal,” Cooper said. “How come you’re out here?”
The woman straightened up and looked at him. “My mind’s not quite right,” she said, scratching an eyelid. “Mostly it is but sometimes it isn’t. They messed up my medication and one thing led to another and here I am. I’m not complaining. I don’t have a bad life.”
Cooper wanted to say that she did have a bad life, but stopped himself.
“If you want to help people,” the woman said, “you should go to the shelter. They need volunteers. People to clean up. You could get rid of your guilt over there, mopping the floors.”
“What guilt?” he asked.
“All men are guilty,” she said. She was chewing but had put her bag of food on the ground and was staring hard and directly into Cooper’s face. He turned toward the street. When he looked at the cars, everyone heading somewhere with a kind of fierce intentionality, braking hard at red lights and peeling rubber at the green, he felt as though he had been pushed out of his own life.
“You’re still here,” the woman said. “What do you want?”
“I was about to leave.” He was surprised by how rude she was.
“I don’t think you’ve ever seen the Rocky Mountains or even the Swiss Alps, for that matter,” the woman said, bending down to inspect something close to the sidewalk.
“No, you’re right. I haven’t traveled much.”
“We’re not going to kiss, if that’s what you think,” the woman said, still bent over. Now she straightened up again, glanced at him, and looked away.
“No,” Cooper said. “I just wanted to give you a meal.”
“Yes, thank you,” the woman said. “And now you have to go.”
“I was … I was going to go.”
“I don’t want to talk to you anymore,” the woman said. “It’s nothing against you personally, but talking to men just tires me out terribly and drains me of all my strength. Thank you very much, and good-bye.” She sat down again and opened up her paperback. She took some more french fries out of the sack and began to eat as she read.
“They’re polite,” Cooper said, lying next to his wife. “They’re polite, but they aren’t nice.”
“Nice? Nice? Jesus, Cooper, I prosecute rapists! Why should they be nice? They’d be crazy to be nice. Who cares about nice except you? This is the 1980s, Cooper. Get real.”
He rolled over in bed and put his hand on her hip. “All right,” he said.
They lay together for a while, listening to Alexander snoring in his bedroom across the hall.
“I can’t sleep, Cooper,” she said. “Tell me a story.”
“Which one tonight?” Cooper was a good improviser of stories to help his wife relax and doze off. “Hannah, the snoopy cleaning woman?”
“No,” Christine said. “I’m tired of Hannah.”
“The adventures of Roderick, insurance adjuster?”
“I’m sick of him, too.”
“How about another boring day in Paradise?”
“Yeah. Do that.”
For the next twenty minutes, Cooper described the beauty and tedium of Paradise—the perfect rainfalls, the parks with roped-off grassy areas, the sideshows and hot-air-balloon rides, the soufflés that never fell—and in twenty minutes, Christine was asleep, her fingers touching him. He was aroused. “Christine?” he whispered. But she was sleeping.
The next morning, as Cooper worked at his baker’s bench, rolling chocolate-almond croissants, he decided that he would check out the shelter in the afternoon to see if they needed any help. He looked up from his hands, with a trace of dough and sugar under the fingernails, over toward his boss, Gilbert, who was brewing coffee and humming along to some Coltrane coming out of his old radio perched on top of the mixer. Cooper loved the bakery where he worked. He loved the smell and everything they made there. He had noticed that bread made people unusually happy. Customers closed their eyes when they ate Cooper’s doughnuts and croissants and Danishes. He looked up toward the skylight and saw that the sky had turned from pale blue to dark blue, what the Crayola 64 box called blue-indigo. He could tell from the tint of the sky that it was seven o’clock, time to unlock the front doors to let in the first of the customers. After Gilbert turned the key and the mechanics from down the street shuffled in to get their morning doughnuts and coffee in Styrofoam cups, Cooper stood behind the counter in his whites and watched their faces, the slow private smiles that always registered when they first caught the scent of the baked dough and the sugared fruit.
The shelter was in a downtown furniture store that had gone out of business during the recession of ’79. To provide some privacy, the first volunteers had covered over the front plate-glass window with long strips of paper from giant rolls, with the result that during the daytime the light inside was colored an unusual tint, somewhere between orange and off-white. As soon as he volunteered, he was asked to do odd jobs. He first went to work in the evening ladling out food—stew, usually, with ice-cream-scoop mounds of mashed potatoes.
The director of the shelter was a brisk and slightly overweight woman named Marilyn Adams, who, though tough and efficient, seemed vaguely annoyed about everything. Cooper liked her officious irritability. He didn’t want any baths of feeling in this place.
Around five o’clock on a Thursday afternoon—the bakery closed at four—Cooper was making beds near the front window when
he heard a voice from behind him. “Hey,” the voice said. “I want to get in here.”
Cooper turned around. He saw the reddest person he had ever laid eyes on: the young man’s hair was red, his face flamed with sunburn and freckles, and, as if to accentuate his skin and hair tone, he was wearing a bright pink Roxy Music T-shirt. He was standing near the window, with the light behind him, and all Cooper could see of him was a still, flat expression and deeply watchful eyes. When he turned, he had the concentrated otherworldliness of figures in religious paintings.
Cooper told the young man about the shelter’s regulations and told him which bed he could have. The young man—he seemed almost a boy—stood listening, his right foot thumping against the floor and his right hand shaking in the air as if he were trying to get water off it. When the young man nodded, his head went up and down too fast, and Cooper thought he was being ironic. “Who are you?” he finally asked. “My name’s Cooper.”
“Billy Bell,” the young man said. “That’s a real weird name, isn’t it?” He shook his head but didn’t look at Cooper or wait for him to agree or disagree. “My mother threw me out last week. Why shouldn’t she? She thought I was doing drugs. I wasn’t doing drugs. Drugs are so boring. Look at those awful capitalist lizards using them and you’ll know what I mean. But I was a problem. She was right. She had to get on my case. She decided to throw me away for a while. Trash trash. So I’ve been sleeping in alleys and benches and I slept for a couple of nights in the Arboretum, but there are too many mosquitoes this time of year for that and I’ve got bites. I was living with a girl but all my desires left me. You live here, Cooper? You homeless yourself, or what?”
“I’m a volunteer,” he said. “I just work here. I’ve got a home.”
“I don’t,” Billy Bell said. “People should have homes. I don’t work now. I lost my job. I’m full of energy but I’m apathetic. Very little appeals to me. I guess I’m going to start some of those greasy minimum-wage things if I can stand them. I’m smart. I’m not a loser. I’m definitely not one of these messed-up ghouls who call this place home.”
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