Benjamin Markovits - You Don't Have to Live Like This

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.”

A voice came into the room through a kind of speaker system. “I figured I’d wait till halftime,” it said. “I know when I can’t compete. But now that everybody’s in a good mood.” And a few people cheered.

At first I thought somebody must have turned up the sound on the football game, but then I realized there was a guy with a microphone at the other end of the room. The office space ran the length of the factory floor, but the ceilings weren’t especially high, they had those panels you stare at from the dentist’s chair, and Gloria and I stood in exactly the wrong place, by the restroom doors. But then I felt her hand on my arm — Obama had come.

We tried to push our way a little closer, but the party, which had been loud and spread out, was now quiet and packed in. A few people at the back stood on tables to get a view, but Gloria didn’t want to do that and in the end I managed to find her a chair. I climbed up next to her for a moment, holding her waist, and then stepped down again. This is what Obama looked like from fifty paces, a young Arab businessman. His head looked small and he seemed light on his feet.

Walking with the microphone in hand, he said, “We got in, I don’t know, about eight a.m. this morning, and the first thing I said was, take me to these neighborhoods, take me to these streets, so we drove off, with about eighteen cars, one after the other, and by this point it was about nine thirty, and I knew we had got to the right place, because there were guys working, building, wearing those hard hats and dirty day-glo jackets, climbing on roofs and digging foundations, on Saturday morning, and the other half of the folks I saw were sitting in Joe Silver’s café drinking lattes.”