You Don't Have to Live Like This

by Benjamin Markovits

  On Friday evening, Susie Grabel came up from Oberlin. We all had dinner together. She wasn’t very pretty. Her hair was straight and brown, and she wore it very long, halfway down her back, like a girl who can’t let go of her childhood. Her skin was about the color of fresh yogurt, her eyes were pale blue and nearsighted, but she had one of those wonderful voices or accents that sticks to all the words. She had a deep voice. The dress she wore that first night was like the ones my mother is wearing in photographs of me as a kid. Down to her ankles with a sort of beaded pattern. She asked us if we thought it was dangerous, and Walter said, “It depends who you talk to.”

  Walter and I had gone out a few nights before with Kurt Stangel and a couple of other guys. There were five of us in the car—three first-timers, including Walter and me. We were supposed to be learning the ropes. Kurt had said to us, “If anybody has a gun, bring it,” so I sat in the back in the middle with the Remington between my legs. We drove around from midnight until four in the morning. Kurt has two kids, a boy four years old and a girl just six months, and one of the other guys had a ten-year-old daughter.

  “It turns out,” I said to Susie, “that your average middle-aged, middle-class American Caucasian has deep-seated fantasies about protecting his children by means of violence. I mean, he dreams of putting his life at risk for the sake of his kids, because that’s all Kurt and this other guy, a trade magazine writer named Todd McConnell, wanted to talk about. What they would do if somebody broke into their house.”

  “Did anything happen?” Susie said. “While you were out?”

  “Around two a.m. we stopped off at Kurt’s place for coffee and doughnuts. That was probably the most exciting bit. I asked Kurt if he’d seen any action. He said that we were just the scare-them-away gang. Mostly it’s kids looking for TVs. They don’t want to get shot and they don’t want to shoot anybody. They’re still young. But he’s chased a couple of cars around the block; nobody wants to get out of their cars. So far the organized crime has kept away—people aren’t sure why. He thinks there were deals cut with the police department, you know, with some of the gangs, and kept asking me questions about how well do I know Robert James. We had a good time. I haven’t been out like that,” I said, “with a bunch of guys since I was sixteen years old, coming back from debate in my teacher’s minivan.”

  Walter said, “Yeah, he held on to his gun like it was soft and furry.”

  “What does Kurt do?” Susie asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you said that Todd McConnell wrote for trade magazines.”

  “Kurt doesn’t do much. He used to work for Nike in PR and put away some money, but it’s like a cult around there. He was sick of selling stuff. Selling is lying, he said. That’s something else they talked about—Todd offered to get him some freelance work. Put him in touch with a couple of editors. Those two guys were sitting up front and the rest of us just listened to them like a bunch of kids. Kurt pretended to be insulted. That’s not why he got out of public relations, he said. That’s not why he moved here. They seemed to know each other well. His wife’s a lawyer, but she lost her job last year, which Kurt says she didn’t care much about because of the baby. For her first child she got two weeks’ maternity leave and didn’t want to go through that again.”

  “Where did they used to live?” Susie said.

  “Chicago, I think.”

  “But what’s he going to do?”

  “I’m not sure he knows. In college he wanted to be an actor, and there’s a movement afoot to get the film industry going in Detroit. A lot of tax breaks. He thinks that if he hangs around enough he might get called up as an extra.”

  “What about Todd’s wife?”

  “He’s divorced.”

  “Is that why he moved here?”

  “Partly, I guess. He was working for AutoTrader in Atlanta. But then he got divorced, and his wife moved back to Madison, where her parents live. Then AutoTrader let a bunch of people go and he was one of them. He figured Detroit was closer to Madison anyway, and he could live on the cheap and write freelance about the car industry.”

  “People’s lives,” Susie said.

  ON SUNDAY NIGHT, WALTER AND I sat up late in his apartment, talking. Susie was on her way back to Oberlin. It’s about two and a half hours in the car, around the western shoreline of Lake Erie. I told him I liked her a lot and asked him how he got up the nerve to make the first move. I mean, you must have been sweating bullets, I said. You always were a heavy-sweating guy.

  Walter was very matter-of-fact about the whole thing. She came by during his office hour once to ask him to decipher something he’d written on one of her papers. She was an excellent student; he used to write a lot of commentary. Without thinking much about it, he said to her, I’m very happy to communicate with you about your work, but I’d prefer to do it by email or in the presence of other people. I find you personally attractive and that makes me uncomfortable; I don’t want to make you uncomfortable, too. She blushed and didn’t say much, and left shortly after. But then she came by during his office hour again a few days later, looking determined, and it turned out to be easier than he expected. Does this mean you’re okay with what I admitted to you the other day? he said. And she said, yes, and he said, because I think you’re a knockout.

  She was by some distance the smartest kid in her class, he said. “Much smarter than me. I told her it’s a pity you’re set on music, because as a cellist you’re only eager and hardworking. But she knows all that. She wants to teach.”

  The more time I spent with Walter, the more I admired him. In college he was kind of a snob, and shy, and still hung up on stuff most people didn’t give a damn about—like cocktail recipes and hi-fi equipment. You needed to “get” Walter. But these days he was good at making friends. He used to go around the neighborhood helping people move house. If someone invited him for a drink, he said yes. He never seemed to be in any hurry; he never had anything more important to do. That counts for a lot. People liked him even if they didn’t understand him.

  Once I complimented him along these lines, and he said, “I don’t have much vanity left.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a very happy condition.”

  He made a funny sort of throwaway noise, the sound my father would make if you told him that a kid you knew in high school was pitching for a minor-league affiliate. Like, you don’t say. Not caring much about it.

  12

  Robert started paying me three hundred bucks a week to run a newsletter, which was mostly online and ran advertisements for neighborhood businesses: a dating service, a goods exchange, that kind of thing. Every Friday I printed out a heap of copies and stacked them at Joe’s and a few other places around town. There was a Your Stories section, in which I interviewed people and asked them why they moved to Detroit, and what they hoped their new life would be like, and so on. Robert wanted me to write a history of the whole business eventually, and this gave me an excuse to keep records and start nosing around. Each week I sat down with somebody new and it’s wonderful what people will tell you if you ask them.

  There was a couple from Grand Rapids who planned to start a school, Bert and Ingrid Wendelman. Their relationship had an interesting backstory—it was Bert’s second marriage, and she was about fifteen years younger than him, one of these blond red-faced Dutch midwesterners, not particularly sexy, but healthy-looking, friendly and kind of ageless. I sometimes find it hard to tell how smart these northern European types are, since I usually measure intelligence by degrees of sarcasm, and Ingrid played everything straight. But I think she was a tough cookie, capable and not to be crossed.

  Bert taught English and drama at a Catholic school in Forest Hills. Ingrid was the third grade homeroom teacher of his son, Jeremy, by his first marriage. This was how they got to know each other, and when Bert and his first wife decided on a divorce, they sat down with Jeremy very reasonably and asked him who he wanted to live with. He picked Bert
and Ingrid—he really liked his homeroom teacher.

  Of course, that’s not the whole story, and Bert also said that Jeremy’s mother was a resident oncologist who worked unpredictable hours, so he often gave the boy his supper and put him to bed. The divorce settlement made it difficult for him to keep the house and give his ex-wife a fair shake, so they sold it. Both Ingrid and he needed a new start—their affair had soured a lot of their daily relationships. People took sides and most people sided against them. One of the things they both realized, Bert said, meaning him and Ingrid, is how little it cost them to give up the friendships, both at work and among their neighbors, that they had built up over the years. He was determined this time around to arrange his life differently.

  I liked Bert a lot. He was a good-looking guy, a little over six feet tall, with a mustache and a faintly thinning head of brown hair. Back at the school in Forest Hills he ran the kayaking club, and still tried to “get out on the water” at least once a weekend. He seemed in good shape. He was also about to turn forty-five, and you could just see a little stiffness in him when he walked, not stiffness exactly, but a kind of brittleness or carefulness, if he had to run a few steps, for example, or stand up from a low sofa.

  The school he planned to set up with Ingrid was going to be a homestead-type school in a single house, with only a couple of classrooms. One for kids up to the age of eleven, which Ingrid was in charge of, and the other to see them all the way through high school. I asked him if he needed a history teacher.

  “Have you done any teaching?” he said.

  “I spent about five years lecturing on colonial America at the University of Aberystwyth.”

  “Some of these kids will be twelve years old,” he said. “I tell you what. Why don’t you get a little experience, even if it’s only substitute experience, at some local school. If you can teach at a Detroit public high school you can teach anywhere.”

  So I called Gloria. I wanted to call her anyway, but I used Bert’s idea about substitute teaching as an excuse, which I half regretted, because the way she sounded on the phone received a slight adjustment when my interest turned out to be practical. She remembered who I was.

  “You ask a lot of questions,” she said. “And you get drunk like skinny people, kind of high energy. I thought you must have forgot my number.”

  “I wrote it down.”

  “Well,” she said, “you took your sweet time calling it.”

  I told her I was thinking of becoming a teacher and eventually she invited me to lunch at her school—after the holidays. It was still mid-July, which gave me no excuse to see her for a couple of months. But we kept talking. For some reason neither one of us wanted to hang up, though I can’t say I enjoyed the conversation much. I didn’t want to say the wrong thing. When I met her the first time I was too drunk to care, but over the telephone I noticed a couple of times that I changed what I was saying because she’s black. For example, she asked me what my neighbors were like, if everybody was excited by what we were doing, if we all got along. I told her about going out one night with a few of them in the car to patrol the streets. Somebody took a gun, I said.

  “You took a gun?”

  “Mostly we just drove around talking. About two a.m. we went to one guy’s house and made some coffee and carried it back into the car. It was an intense way to get to know each other.”

  “I bet,” she said.

  It was a relief to get off the phone. Apart from anything else I wanted to look forward to seeing her again without anything getting in the way, like having to think of things to say. Gloria is a well-organized person and put a date in the diary for me to come by the school, a few weeks into September, but by that point Astrid and I were already sleeping together.

  SUSIE WAS ONE OF THE reasons I went out more. By August she had started spending a lot of time at the house, and since Walter and I used to have dinner together every night, I tried to give them some space. This left a big hole in my life. Also, I was sexually lonely, and seeing Walter and Susie brought that home. For example, there were parts of my personality, like tenderness, that I didn’t get to use at all, and which I saw Walter and Susie using every day.

  I ran into Astrid at Slows—a barbecue restaurant by the old train station, where I sometimes went to eat by myself at the bar. She was there with a couple of girlfriends, German girls from home who were visiting her, and they were going on to a party at one of those half-abandoned warehouses in east Detroit and invited me along. Artists had turned the building, which had all kinds of problems with it, including faulty electrics and asbestos plastering, into studios. The party was partly a chance to show off their work, but they’d also rigged up an elaborate sound system and themed different studio spaces according to types of drink and music. But the walls weren’t thick enough to separate the sounds, and the clash of noise fronts was really pretty powerful and unpleasant and hard to escape.

  Astrid and I eventually took our drinks out into the parking lot. It was a hot August night, and I could hear the call of a Tigers doubleheader coming from one of the cars. There were several people, younger than me, sitting inside it, drinking and smoking pot. I could smell the sweet smoke drifting over towards us, towards the crumbly cinder block wall at the edge of the lot where Astrid and I sat down. She told me the story she hadn’t wanted to talk about before, which explained why Ernst had left her. I later saw another version of this story, which she had written down. It also appeared in a different form in a film she was working on, and after that night, after we started seeing each other, I heard her talk about it several times.

  A few weeks after I dropped them off, she was raped coming out of a nightclub on Woodward Avenue. She had gone to this club with Ernst to hear a new DJ, who mixed a lot of Motown in with other things, techno and more contemporary music. At one point she went outside by herself for a smoke. This was a couple of weeks before the Michigan ban, and the dance floor was full of smokers, but she wanted a breath of fresh air along with the cigarette. My guess is she had also had a fight with Ernst, though she didn’t mention it. It was very late and the street was deserted; the bouncer had gone inside. While she was standing there, a young man came out of the glare of a street lamp and asked her for a smoke. He was dressed in clean new jeans and unlaced work boots; he had recently had a haircut. He was black. She took out her packet and reached it towards him and he grabbed her hand and started pulling her along.

  “I was drunk, too,” she said. “Not sick-drunk but enough to be confused. Also, it was still very cold, there was still snow on the ground, not much, and I was wearing only a small dress. At first when I went outside I thought how nice and cool it was, after the hot club, but when he gave me a shock, I felt suddenly very cold and shaky.”

  Woodward runs through a small park and he dragged her towards it. Even though it was two or three in the morning there were still a few people coming out of the restaurants and clubs. But nobody helped her and for some reason she wasn’t screaming. She thought he might have a gun. She tried to explain to him that she didn’t have any money, her boyfriend had her wallet and he was back at the club. “He’ll give you whatever you want,” she said. When they got to the park, he pushed her down behind a tree next to some bushes; the ground was very hard and also a little wet. When he lay down on top of her (he felt very strong and heavy), he said, “Fuck, it’s too cold for this shit,” and pulled her back up.

  There’s not much around there except tall commercial buildings, with shop fronts on the ground floor and offices above, but a few blocks from the park he found a row of parked cars and broke into one of them. They had to cross several large streets, almost as wide as highways, to get there, and even though it was very early, there was still some traffic. By this point she had started screaming. He held her around the waist with his arm and had also grabbed her other hand as if she were drunk and needed support. He had large hands with long fingers and smelled strongly of cigarettes and aftershave or alcohol. But everybody
was in cars and no one heard her; at least, no one stopped.

  Inside the car, he spent about a minute getting it to start. When she tried to open the passenger-side door, he struck her very hard on the mouth, breaking a tooth so that her mouth filled with blood, which she spat onto the floor. This is one of the ways they eventually identified the stolen car. Then they drove for about ten minutes, she has no idea in what direction, until they came to a dark street with several vacant lots on it, a few run-down houses and a medium-size apartment block. They went into the apartment block and he pulled her up a flight of stairs—she had stopped using her legs, and the next day, apart from everything else, she found her shins and knees covered in dark bruises.

  He said, “Let’s just hope my sister ain’t here,” as he beat on one of the apartment doors and then kicked it in. She doesn’t remember much about the apartment. All the lights were off and he took her through a couple of dark rooms and then pushed her onto a bed, where he raped her, pinning her arms against the mattress with his elbows. She didn’t resist him. When she woke up or came to she heard a woman saying, “What you have to break down the door for.”

  “You wasn’t here.”

  “How’d you get here.”

  “Some car.”

  “What you doing now?”

  “I’m a drive it away.”

  “Don’t leave your ho with me.”

  “She ain’t no ho.”

  “I ain’t cleaning up after your white hos.”

  “She ain’t no ho.”

  “What you doing now?”

  “I told you. Taking the car.”

  And then he left. Eventually the woman came into the room Astrid was lying in.

  “Well,” she said. “What do you expect me to do with you?”

  “I want to go home.”

  “You should a thought of that before.”

  “Please,” Astrid said. “I don’t have anything.” She had left her purse in the stolen car.