Say Nice Things About Detroit

by Scott Lasser

  She had met him at a bad time in her life, after she’d broken up with a man she’d thought “the one.” She and this man had spent three blissful months together, and then he informed her that his ex-girlfriend was pregnant. “I don’t want to lose you,” he told Carolyn, but in the end he went back to the other woman. Months later she met Marty. He pursued her relentlessly, and he was so clumsy at it that she assumed he’d never tried that hard before. It was flattering. He was a lawyer, and unlike almost every other man she’d met in Los Angeles, he had no secret dream to make movies. He lived in the real world. He felt solid and safe. She didn’t think he would ever hurt her. She thought she could make a life with him, and fill in the missing pieces later.

  • • •

  “CAROLYN?” SAID A voice. She looked over. It took her a moment, but then she recognized Suzy Maxwell. It had been twenty-five years, perhaps twenty-five pounds, but this was unmistakably Suzy Maxwell, same blue eyes, same dark hair; still, something was a little different.

  “Suzy?” Carolyn asked.

  “It’s the nose,” she whispered. They were sitting one seat apart in a long row of connected chairs. “I had it done.”

  “Oh,” Carolyn said, surprised by Suzy’s line. It was the way people talked in L.A. “It looks good,” Carolyn added.

  “Are you okay?” Suzy asked.

  “Yes, why?”

  “You look upset.”

  “I don’t like flying,” Carolyn said.

  They spent twenty-five seconds on the last twenty-five years. It was all they needed. At this spot, at this time, what had happened in those twenty-five years didn’t matter nearly as much as the shared experiences that had come before it. Suzy lived in Encino with her two kids. She “didn’t really” work; the ex-husband took care of the bills.

  “So,” Suzy said, “you going to the reunion?”

  “What reunion?”

  “Twenty-five years, our class. It’s Thanksgiving weekend, this year.”

  “I’m not in touch with anyone,” Carolyn said.

  “Well, now you’re in touch with me.”

  “I don’t know,” Carolyn said.

  “What’s wrong?” Suzy asked again. “There is obviously something wrong.”

  “I lost my sister,” she said. “And my brother.”

  “I didn’t know you had a brother.”

  Carolyn explained. She’d been working very hard to move on, but suddenly the loss of Natalie hit her. It wasn’t right. Natalie deserved to live. She wasn’t a twin, but Natalie’s life was the one life most like her own. Natalie was the one other person she might have been. And now she was dead. There was a basic injustice to it, this random violence. You lived your life and then all of a sudden—

  “I’m so sorry,” Suzy said.

  “And then there’s my marriage,” Carolyn said.

  “What about it? Is he cheating?”

  “Oh, no. No. At least, I don’t—no. He’s not cheating. I’m cheating.”

  “Oh.”

  “I cheated. I’m not cheating now. At least, I’m going to stop.” She thought for a moment. She hadn’t cheated for almost nine hours.

  “I don’t know what to say about your sister or your brother, but with your marriage? I’ve been there,” Suzy said. “Try to work it out. And don’t tell your husband about the other guy.”

  “Okay.” Carolyn felt calmer. It helped that it was Suzy, a stranger she trusted. Pam and Carrie, her best friends in L.A.—she wasn’t sure she could admit her infidelity to them.

  “Go to therapy. Get him to go. Work on it. For the boy, if nothing else.”

  “Of course,” Carolyn said.

  Over the loudspeaker the gate agent promised that the plane would be boarding shortly.

  “You think I can make it work?” Carolyn said.

  “Are you sure you really want to know what I think?”

  Carolyn did.

  “I don’t think you’ll work it out. You get to a point, it’s probably not going to get better. But you’ve got to try. You have to so you can move on without dying from guilt. It’s a killer, that guilt.”

  The announcement came to board the plane.

  “C’mon,” Suzy said. “Let’s get the hell out of Detroit.”

  • • •

  THEY TOOK OFF and banked west. Carolyn could see I-94, the plane ascending just north of it, then over the Romulus City Cemetery. The landscape, a dozen shades of green in summer, looked lush and inviting, so different from the arid parts of the West. Small droplets of water streamed across the window as the engines strained as they continued to rise.

  Natalie and Dirk had died together, and it occurred to her now that she was alive because she’d been absent. She was always absent, had absented herself from the family as a reflex, and she couldn’t say why. She knew only that it was foolish. She loved her sister, and if Natalie felt so strongly about Dirk, then Carolyn knew she would have, too. They were her people and she felt guilty to be alive, for had she been a good sister, she would have been with them.

  VI

  HE DROVE EAST, across the endless plains. Carolyn wouldn’t take his calls. She was gone and David found himself sick with longing for her. He remembered odd physical details: the turquoise vein that jumped across the crook in her arm, the pink color she painted her toenails, the bony knobs at the edges of her wrists. He understood it was a silly youthful crush—he couldn’t ever rule out that it was related to Natalie, to what he’d lost, most specifically his youth—but he felt it deeply. He saw no reason why even at his age he shouldn’t be able to fall in love. And maybe this time enjoy it.

  He drove into town on the new 696 and exited at Telegraph. He’d been driving since Colorado, two days of interstates, and now finally he’d made it to surface streets. He was coming home. In the back of his car he had eight suits, the uniform of his work. Things were still slightly formal here. The rest of his clothes were back there, too, plus a few books, a pair of ski boots, two diplomas, five years of tax returns, a nine-by-twelve-inch envelope filled with pictures of Julie and—mostly—Cory. Back in Denver he hadn’t been able to throw these pictures away, though he found them too painful to look at. He doubted he would ever look at them again, or let them go.

  His entire life fit easily in the back of an Audi A6. He lacked a drive for acquisition but always had the feeling that he should have more and want more.

  • • •

  HE DROVE UP Telegraph and remembered a day in Denver when it was gray and windy like this. Cory had had a Little League game. He was ten or eleven. They drove all the way to a field in Arvada, the first to arrive. Soon it became clear they would be the only ones to arrive. It was April, cold, maybe forty degrees, the wind whipping along the foothills, picking up dust and throwing it across the infield the way breakers threw mist. David phoned the coach.

  “Didn’t you check the website? The game’s called,” the coach said.

  “For what?”

  “Too damn cold and windy.”

  In Michigan, in April, you played no matter the weather. You played if it wasn’t snowing or raining too hard, and you thanked God for the chance. David closed the phone, told his son the news. He got Cory to throw for ten minutes because he thought there were important lessons in it. Soon Cory’s cheeks turned red and raw in the wind, and often they had to stop throwing to turn away from the flying dust. Still, they played. David could see that Cory wasn’t having a good time, and that was perhaps the point. David believed in perseverance.

  “I’ve played in worse than this,” he told his son when they stopped. He handed Cory a cloth handkerchief, which he carried because the kid’s nose never stopped running.

  Cory blew his nose as a blanket of dust fell on them. “Maybe I won’t ever have to,” he said. “I could get lucky.”

  David made all the lights up Telegraph till he got to Maple. It was November, the day of the midterm election. He’d voted early in Colorado, a last vote in the West. The trees were b
are, the Detroit sky low and gray, the air above freezing but damp, cold and familiar, again the weather of home.

  • • •

  ON HIS THIRD day at work, a Thursday, Smalls stepped into his office with the folder. David had so far billed three and a half hours, all of it for existing clients. Smalls was, appropriately, a short man, plump, in his midfifties at least, but he walked with a bounce in his step that had caught David’s eye; he half expected the man to break into a foxtrot as he stepped down the halls of Bergen Smalls Rand and Bergen.

  “I’ve got one for you,” Smalls said. He set the file on an empty portion of David’s desk. The other partners had been bringing by their detritus for two days, small issues that they didn’t want to deal with or for which they had too little time, all of it related to estate planning. David was still making phone calls west, seeing what business he could hang on to.

  “What is it?” David asked.

  “A will, of course. Client died recently. I’m the executor, but I’m going to suggest we have you named. This is allowed for. I don’t see any problems.”

  “Okay,” David said. “Thanks.”

  Smalls sat at David’s desk. “It’s actually a bit of a famous case.”

  David reached for the file. Opened it. And that’s when he saw Dirk’s name.

  “It was all over the papers—”

  “I knew him,” David said.

  “How?”

  David explained.

  “Well, then,” Smalls said. “I’m sure the family will be happy to deal with you.”

  David looked quickly through the will’s beneficiaries: Shelly and Michelle Burton and someone named Marlon Booker. Natalie was nowhere in the will. Carolyn, either.

  Shelly, the widow, got almost everything, which was a government pension, the house in Detroit, so probably not worth much, its contents, the cars (an Impala and the Mercedes, which was still at the crime lab), $250 K from a life insurance policy, and everything in a UBS brokerage account, less $200,000 for Michelle and $100,000 for Marlon Booker, identified as a family friend. All in all, it was pretty straightforward, a few hours’ work to separate assets and file the necessary documents with the court. David admired Dirk. Here was someone who had planned for the unthinkable.

  He decided to call Shelly Burton. He’d need to meet with her to introduce himself and get her okay to do the work. He would tell her he’d known Dirk, or at least had met him once. It was an odd thing, and he wanted it to be aboveboard, this, his first work in Michigan.

  • • •

  “YOUR MOTHER IS having an affair,” his father told him. David sat on the ancient family couch. His father had removed the plastic covers, thank God.

  “Dad,” David said, “Mom’s incontinent. She’s in the Alzheimer’s ward of a nursing home.” An affair? The idea was preposterous.

  “I know that. I’m not saying they’re sleeping together. You don’t have to have sex to cheat.”

  David wondered if this was true. “Who is he?” he asked.

  “Some big galumph. Chester Jovanovich. A Jew-hater, I bet, even before he lost his mind.”

  The intensity on his father’s face suggested to David that the old man wanted something from him, Lord knew what. “Dad, are you jealous?”

  “Hell yes, I’m jealous. You should see the way she takes care of him. Walks him around, combs his hair. She feeds him, for Chrissake.”

  “I see,” David said. It was a small miracle, really. Lately David feared that if he lost his mind, he might turn into the kind of selfish jerk he had always hated. He found it terrifying, not being able to control who you were.

  “What do you want me to do?” David asked.

  “Who said I want you to do anything?”

  “I guess I don’t get it, Dad. It sounds like a decent situation. Mom has something to do and Chester Whatevera­vich has someone besides the nurses to look after him. Does he have family?”

  “He’s a Medicaid case, the lucky SOB”

  Apparently luck, like beauty, was in the eye of the beholder.

  “Don’t send me to that home,” his father said. “If the time comes, just grow a pair and shoot me instead.”

  • • •

  MIDDLE NOVEMBER, the time of somber light. It would stay like this for months, till mid-March or so, unbroken only for the odd clear winter’s day, when the temperature might drop to forty below zero even if the sky was so blue it could break your heart. There was a reason why the Swedes settled here, the Finns. Sure, the French had founded the place, leaving place-names mispronounced all over the state, but it was the others who’d cut down the forest primeval and filled the factories: Scandinavians, Eastern Europeans drifting east from Chicago, and, later, blacks coming up from the South. Now all were scattering.

  It was late in the afternoon when he drove to Shelly’s. She was a black woman of indeterminate middle age, tall and mildly plump with straightened hair and a gaudy wedding ring he suspected wasn’t worth much. He sat in her living room, lined with bookcases, the books without their dust jackets. It was an odd touch, and it seemed to mute the room’s light, just as the light outside was muted. It was a cozy room, and he felt comfortable in it.

  She poured him tea and thanked him for coming. He explained that he had once met her husband. He felt a smile twisted on his face. He was nervous, though he wasn’t sure why. She had that effect on him. It had something to do with her eyes, big and round and black, as if they could see through him. It was part of an idea he knew he had, namely that black people somehow had a better idea what was really going on in the world than he did. It was a silly prejudice, but he could never shake it. Odd, he thought, how hard it was to get beyond skin color.

  He told himself he had nothing to worry about here. Burton’s was an easy case—any new lawyer could have handled it.

  “Do the Evanses have any claim on the money?” Shelly asked.

  “No, Dirk left everything to you, except for portions for your daughter and someone named Marlon Booker.”

  “A hundred grand for Marlon,” she said. He asked about Marlon. “Marlon was Dirk’s nephew—not by blood. Marlon is the son of the man Dirk thought of as his brother. That was Everett, but Everett died. So now Marlon is Dirk’s cross to bear.”

  “Any idea how I find Marlon?”

  “Keep checking here. He’ll come around, sooner or later.”

  “You sure?”

  “It’s part of Dirk’s deal. Marlon always has a place to go. The downstairs guest room is his.”

  “How ’bout Marlon’s mother?” David asked. Mothers tended to know how to contact their children.

  “Patrice. You can ask her. I’m not sure she knows where her son is, but you can ask. If you can find her.”

  Shelly went to the kitchen, then returned shortly with an address book and read David the number, a 313, like everyone, whites and blacks, used to have. They spent the next ten minutes signing paperwork.

  “Please, Mr. Halpert, let’s get this closed up as soon as possible,” she said.

  “I understand.”

  “I want to move down to Texas, to be close to my daughter. I’m ready to list the house.”

  “It’s a lovely home,” he said, and he meant it.

  “Wanna buy it?” she asked.

  VII

  SHE REALIZED THAT Marty was bulkier than David, slightly taller, with more hair. A happier, more satisfied version of a man. Her husband had grown up in Pasadena. He took his success in stride, something to be expected, like the pleasant weather.

  The first week back Carolyn allowed herself simply to fall into routine, to spend time with Kevin and catch up at work (287 unanswered e-mails waited upon her return), and to act deliberately, without desperation. She wanted happiness, not to settle. It wouldn’t be easy.

  She made love with Marty the third night back. It was his idea, and she was glad for it, a way to deal with her guilt. It started after she’d put Kevin to bed and was standing at the stove, boiling wat
er for ginger tea. Marty came up behind her and put his hand on the small of her back. “I’ll be right up,” she said before he could speak. She didn’t want to hear him ask, “Are you coming to bed?” or “Come to bed,” in that way he had. He was hopeless at flirtation, always had been. She couldn’t even blame him. She’d known, and she’d looked past it, thought it wasn’t important. One day she would list all the things she used to think weren’t important, and in a different column those she once thought were; then she would hold the two lists together just to see all the entries on the wrong side.

  Sleeping with Marty wasn’t horrible, but it wasn’t great. It was just one of the many things they did together because even in the absence of passion there was some force that compelled them to do this silly thing together. Once, afterward, lying next to him, she’d felt as though the next thing to do was to sign her name to something, by Marty’s, as they did on their tax returns. As if to say, There, done.

  And so it was tonight. It was the first time in a month. If she went back to David after a month, it wouldn’t be like this. She was forty-two. She calculated that she made love with Marty thirty times a year—that seemed to be the pace of it—and so that at this rate, and allowing for some slowing with age, she’d sleep with him a thousand more times in the next forty-two years. The thought of forty-two more tax returns seemed far more palatable.

  He was asleep. She knew this from his breathing. There was enough light in the room—from the glow of the case that housed the TV and audiovisual components, from the outdoor security lights that made it past their blackout blinds—that she could get out of bed and put on the nightgown she always left at the end of her bed, in case Kevin needed her. She decided to go to his room.

  He slept in a ball, breathing deeply. She stood at his bedside, bent over at the waist, and listened to the languorous draws of breath. It was part of her routine, the way she dealt with nighttime terrors and general sleeplessness. She defied a mother to listen to her child sleep and not feel at least a small bit calmer.

  At some point her back began to hurt, and so she sat by the bed, listening still. She then laid herself out next to him. Kevin’s nightlight threw odd shadows on the ceiling. It was a good room. A peaceful room. It was, really, what you needed. The German car was nice, the four thousand square feet for three people, the pool, the magnolia tree trucked up from the South by the previous owner—all this was lovely, more even than her father the doctor had taught her to expect. But it wasn’t necessary. What was necessary was a peaceful room for your child.