“This is Gloria, she teaches at the high school where I sometimes substitute. Cris used to be a lawyer.”
“That’s a terrible introduction,” Cris said.
Outside the snow started coming down heavier, the salt had turned into corn puffs, and the second-floor factory window showed all of it, about a hundred feet wide. Beyond the parking lot I could see a raised highway, and beyond that and underneath it some temporary storage facilities and container units half buried in snow. There wasn’t much traffic on the highway but what there was kept coming just as steady as the snow. At one point I noticed a stream of black SUVs approaching and figured the president had arrived.
Tony stood watching the game, and I excused myself and went over to him.
“Who’s that black girl you came in with?”
“Someone I teach with. Cris is on a roll.”
“We had a fight,” he said.
Clay Greene was there, too, with a glass of champagne in his hand. “You’re a young man,” he said, “and I’m going to give you a little advice, which you’re not going to take. But it’s good advice. Apologize. Tell her what she thinks you did wrong, and apologize for that. Do it now and you can still enjoy yourselves this afternoon.” He seemed already a little drunk.
“Where did you get that?” I said, pointing at the champagne flute.
He looked at me vaguely. “Robert gave it to me.”
So I left my beer somewhere and went over to find Robert. I looked for Gloria, but by this point she was talking to Beatrice alone, and somehow I liked seeing the two of them together. Anyway, I wanted to bring her back a glass of champagne.
The room was large and full of people, the ceilings were low and we had to crowd ourselves around the office furniture. I pushed past men in suits and women in cocktail dresses, and guys in jeans and girls wearing heels and jeans or heels and miniskirts. There was a smattering of black faces. Robert had invited local businessmen, community-representative types, but he’d also given free passes to some of the new immigrants. There was a lottery system. People from the five neighborhoods could sign up, and later they found out if their name was on a list.
Robert wanted to play on the story of the Pilgrims’ feast; the Thanksgiving theme was his idea. Like it was native Detroiters who gave of their bounty to provide this meal, who welcomed us in. But the fact is most guests had to pay through the nose, and the money went to the Michigan Democratic Party.
Waitresses in white aprons and waiters in stiff white shirts served up little paper plates of food on silver trays. I ate a mini turkey burger with stuffing on top and ended up carrying around, then crumpling into my pocket, a salty paper cone that held sweet potato fries. In a side room, I saw Robert sitting on a rigged-up stage, with bright lights shining in his face that made him look powdered or rouged. He was talking to a guy with a mic.
“One thing we discussed,” Robert said, “one thing that worried me, is how big to make these neighborhoods.” His voice was gently amplified. There were people standing around, drinking and eating and watching. Robert sat in an office swivel chair; he looked very comfortable. “And in the end what I decided was, they should roughly add up to a midsize college campus. There’s a reason people have such nostalgic feelings in this country about their four years of college. And it isn’t just the football team. It’s because college is really the only time in our lives that most of us get to live in the kind of small-town community that we still associate with the founding of this country. And by the way, the Pilgrims on the whole were young, they were a young group of people, some of them were starting out in life for the first time, marrying and setting up a household and raising kids, and some of them had been out in Holland and were having a second or a third chance at it, starting over from scratch. And when you look around you, not just here and today, but in those neighborhoods, and you can imagine that I sometimes like to take a quiet walk around them, what you see is more or less . . .”
I spotted Kurt Stangel, wearing a fat tie, and he came over to me and said in a low voice, “Have you seen Sean Penn?”
“Is he here?”
“They’ve got a documentary room, where people can go up and talk into a camera. Anyway, Eddie saw Sean hanging out there with Micky Dolenz.”
“What do you mean, Micky Dolenz?”
“What do you mean what do you mean? The guy from the Monkees. All these LA types hang out together when they’re in town. You wanna go see?”
So we wandered out again, and on the way I picked up another beer. A guy in a pale gray pinstripe suit said, “Who’s running this show?” and somebody else said, “Robert James.”
“Who he?”
They were standing together by the drinks table, in everybody’s way, and when people pushed past they excused themselves very politely and didn’t move.
“One of these hedge fund types. He retired at like thirty and doesn’t know what to do with himself, so he does this.”
“Throw parties?”
Pinstripes had psoriasis on the back of his hands and kept scratching at it; the other guy was shorter and looked Jewish.
“No, this is just a publicity stunt. I mean, the whole neighborhood thing. Premature gentrification. He’s trying to get Obama’s attention.”
“So is he coming or not?”
“Don’t bet on it. He’s in Oslo for the Peace Prize.”
Then we got our beers and Kurt asked one of the waiters where the documentary room was. But it wasn’t a room. A kind of gallery overlooked the factory floor. There was a big open column of space in the middle of the building with a skylight on top made of small square panes. The afternoon light came in and fell like snow. You could hear the computers below giving off heat.
Somebody had put together an exhibition on the gallery walkway. (Later I met the guy, a German named Kellerman about my age, whom Robert had recently hired as artistic adviser. He dressed like a banker and spoke English English.) There were paintings and photographs on the walls, a lot of disaster kitsch, Detroit landscapes, burned-out houses and teddy bears in the snow. I found it depressing, the way artists go for this stuff, like it’s any more real than daffodils. There were also found-object displays and video installations, not just by professional artists but by some of the locals, too—mostly kids, with their names and grades and high schools labeled underneath. I looked out for Kettridge High but didn’t see it.
A long queue around one of the corners turned out to be the line for the documentary station. Kellerman had had the bright idea of inviting people to talk about what brought them to Detroit in the first place. So he set up a chair against one wall and pointed a camera at it. A chunky, short-haired woman in Doc Martens and a yellow floral dress kept people moving along.
I noticed Don Adler in the queue, but the rest of the crowd looked younger. The guy talking when we walked past said he graduated from the University of Chicago in 2005, then moved in with some friends who were renting a house by Wicker Park. For a while he lived off money from his dad, who worked for Aerotek in Maple Grove, Minnesota. His dad was an engineer, which was one of the reasons he studied engineering. But then his dad got laid off and couldn’t afford to send him pocket money. By this point he was willing to take anything and signed up to a call center agency. They found him a job at a travel insurance company, which had some vacancies in the night shift. This meant leaving the house at ten o’clock in the evening and coming back at eight a.m. Then he slept till lunchtime, but often overslept, and found himself wandering out to buy milk at four in the afternoon and feeling weird.
Meanwhile, he and one of the girls he lived with got engaged. She worked as a teaching assistant at a public elementary school in Evanston, but they didn’t have enough money to rent a place of their own and didn’t know anyone in Evanston to share a house with. The commute was about forty minutes each way and she found it draining. Even before they got married, which was last year, she became pregnant, and they needed to think of some other arrangement,
not even to make their life tolerable, but just to make it feasible. After five minutes a light came on and it was somebody else’s turn to talk.
“Have you seen Sean Penn?” I said to Kurt, and he pointed.
It didn’t look like Sean Penn to me and then I realized it was probably Micky Dolenz. He was one of those fifty-year-old guys with a little boy’s face under the stubble and gray hair. Later I realized he was closer to sixty-five. Micky was sitting in front of a video installation, and Kurt and I took up a couple of empty seats in the row behind him. The video screen showed two women talking. One of the women was white and one was black, they were sitting on opposite ends of a brown couch, and suddenly I realized that the white woman was Astrid.
The credits rolled and then Micky got up and wandered off, but the piece was on a loop and I sat around to watch the beginning.
Kurt stuck around, too, and said, “The thing you have to realize about famous people is that they’re famous for a reason. Sean Penn is smarter than anybody you’ve ever met, he’s in better physical shape than anybody you’ve ever met, and he’s got more energy and intellectual curiosity about the world than anybody you’ve ever met. These people make things happen. He flies over to Haiti, and boom, a hospital gets built.
“There’s no wasted energy. If he’s hanging out with Micky Dolenz there’s probably a reason. Maybe he wants to make a Monkees movie. Not a remake, but a music-industry movie, about the whole publicity machine and the end of innocence. All of that crap. It’s not a bad idea. So he calls up Micky and says, I’m in Detroit, come, too.”
Astrid asked the black woman, “Do you remember when we first met?”
The woman shook her head and said, “I know who you are. I know what this is about. The only reason I agreed to this is because you paying me.”
“Would you like to talk about that? Would you like to mention how much you’re being paid?”
“I don’t like to talk about nothing. It’s your money, you axe the questions.”
“Do you remember when we first met?”
“I thought the Monkees was an LA thing,” I said to Kurt. “They were set up by the television studios.”
“Yes, but in 1967 they were supposed to play a concert in Detroit with Jimi Hendrix. But Jimi walked out and one of his publicists put it around that the Daughters of the American Revolution forced him off the tour.”
“I don’t think that’s why Micky Dolenz and Sean Penn are in Detroit.”
“You can’t make a movie about the American music business and not talk about Detroit.”
Astrid said, “What did you think when you saw me lying in your bed? For me, it was a very powerful moment. I was very scared, I didn’t know where I was, but to see a woman come in, after what had happened, made me think that what connects us as women is more important than nationality or race, it cuts through all that bullshit, when you came in, I knew it would be all right.”
“I didn’t do nothing but get rid of you.”
“You drove me to the bus station.”
“Well, if my brother came back I didn’t know what he’d do.”
There was a poster over the video screen that read A Conversation About Rape, with Astrid Topolski. Kurt said, “Listen, I’m gonna get another drink. This is downing me out.”
“Okay,” I said but after a few minutes stood up as well. Watching Astrid made me uncomfortable. As if I had done something wrong but didn’t know what—as if I had done something to her. Or maybe it was more like guilt by association. I went looking for Gloria.
Along the way I passed the queue for the documentary station. There were people in line shouting, and the woman whose turn it was made a calming motion with her hands and said, “Well, I don’t know if you’re coming to this party or not, Mr. President, but there are people here with a few things on their mind. What you’re doing to this country means that some of us got no choice but to set up on our own. If we have to do that in Detroit, we’ll move to Detroit.”
Her hair was straight and brown, she wore a suit jacket and jeans and looked maybe forty years old. She looked like she’d had kids, a little thick in the waist, and had to kind of perch on the edge of the chair. Her jeans seemed new, like she hadn’t broken them in. Her accent sounded southern, what I think of as a Christian accent. Some of the people shouting tried to shout her down, but she had supporters, too.
Don Adler said to me, “I’ve been waiting my turn forty minutes and need to go to the bathroom. But these dumbos don’t let anybody speak.”
“I’m sure they’ll keep your spot if you explain why.”
He gave me one of his looks.
“I prefer to take my chances holding it in,” he said.
The first person I saw as I came back to the party was Clay Greene, who stood in silk jacket and tie, leaning slightly, and put his hand on Astrid’s arm. I walked up and said to Clay, “I didn’t know you guys knew each other,” and he said, “This charming lady . . . this charming lady . . .”
“I want to talk to you, too,” Astrid said. She was wearing cowboy boots and jeans and a plain white T-shirt.
“I saw your documentary.”
“That’s what I want to talk to you about.”
“I’m here with somebody else tonight.”
“I want to meet her,” she said.
“No.”
“Well then, point her out.”
So we excused ourselves from Clay and started looking.
“Is it the black schoolteacher?” Astrid said.
“There,” I said.
Gloria stood holding her beer bottle in two hands across her lap and watching the football game. Tony was with her and said something to her. He had to bend his neck; she kept her eyes on the wall.
“I’m glad it’s her,” Astrid said. “It’s good for you. It’s what you need.”
“What does that mean?”
“The first time I met you I could tell, you are scared of this country, you are scared of people, you were scared for me . . .”
“Look what happened to you.”
“And here I am. Anyway, you are a man. Are you sleeping together?”
“Does it make a difference? No.”
“Why don’t you sleep with her? Is it for me?”
“This is our first date.”
“And will you sleep with her tonight? Excuse me, I want to know. For myself, I don’t mind. But I think maybe she is the kind of woman who does, and I don’t want to make trouble.”
“Astrid, this conversation makes me uncomfortable and unhappy.”
“Some things you don’t mind doing, but you don’t want to talk about them.”
“I mind doing them, too,” I said and went over to Gloria.
“What happened to you?” she asked.
The football game had gone to commercial and people wandered away to get drinks and food. It was an odd party—it felt like an office party, we were surrounded by office plants and there were brightly colored ergonomic chairs pushed up against the walls—except without the sense of release or shifting intimacy. Too many people stood around watching the game. That’s what happens when you put a TV on: people stare at it.
“I got waylaid. Were you bored?”
“I love football. I went to Michigan. Go Blue,” she said.
“We were having an interesting conversation about Nolan Smith,” Tony broke in.
“What were you saying about Nolan?”
“Excuse me, do you know where the restrooms are?” Gloria asked and went off in search of them. I didn’t know her very well but it occurred to me that when she got angry she became little-girl polite.
“What did you say to her about Nolan?”
“Nothing,” Tony said. “I just told her what happened.”
“What happened about what? Nothing happened.”
“Well then, that’s what I said.”
I left him to find Gloria and when she came out of the women’s bathroom she said, “If you didn’t want me to come,
why did you bring me?”
“I wanted you to come but I got caught up with stupid people.”
She took this in for a minute. From where we stood, I could see the corner window wrapping around the building, so that the streets and the parking lot below spread out in two directions. Snow fell heavily now; the cars on the freeway went at half speed with their headlights on.
“We’ll have a bad time getting out of here,” I said.
“I’m not like your friends. You move in . . . high circles.”
“What are you talking about? You’re practically the only person I know who has a decent job.”
“That’s what I mean.”
“And Tony’s just an asshole. That’s got nothing to do with circles.”
“Tony was like the only one I could relate to. I know lots of Tonys.”
“You mean Beatrice,” I said.
“I don’t think she’s a good friend to you. She says things.”
“What did she say?”
But this changed her mood a little.
“She said that at Yale you were voted most likely to become the next Unabomber.”
“That’s not even true. That’s not even her joke.”
“It wasn’t about you, it was about me. It’s like she wanted to keep me out.”
“I’ll talk to her.”
“Don’t talk to her.”
“I’ll talk to her. She’s an important person to me but it’s not always plain sailing. Our friendship has always needed a lot of adjustments.”
“You know he did his PhD at Michigan,” she said. “I took some classes in the math department and there were still people there who remembered him.”
“Who?”
“Ted Kaczynski. He said it was the worst five years of his life. I guess I don’t have such high standards. I like Ann Arbor.”
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