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

“What do you mean?”

“He said you moved into one of these houses, these run-down houses, on those streets that everyone moves out of. Aren’t you afraid?”

“I’ve got a shotgun for the car, and a standard police-issue Smith & Wesson at home.”

“But you don’t take it with you?”

“If I need to. Where do you live?”

“Oh, where we’ve always lived, in a little house, which needs such a lot of work, but I never got round to it, and now the children are away, and my ex-husband, of course, and there isn’t any point. Just off Lake Shore Road. But what I’ve never understood is this business with needles. I used to sometimes smoke a cigarette, a very long time ago, when I was practically a girl, but I just don’t believe that people would willingly put something into a needle and then — stick it in their arm. They must be very desperate to do that.”

Beatrice came in, looking for somebody. She stood in the doorway in a black dress, which wasn’t what she wore at the factory party. In heels she stood tall enough she could look over people’s shoulders. I excused myself and went over to her. “What did you say to Gloria?”

“She’s too nice for you.”

“Is that what you said? You used to think I was too nice.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“If you’re looking for Robert, he just left.”

“Thank you, I wasn’t.”

“He says you’re writing a novel, he says you have an agent.”

“Marny,” she said, changing her tune, “can I tell you something even Clay doesn’t know? He’s not just my agent; we’re seeing each other.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“He flew in a couple of months ago to see Clay and stayed the night. That’s when it started. He’s supposed to be showing up here, but I haven’t seen him.”

“What’s he like? What’s this novel about?”

“One of these English guys who live in New York and end up being more English than the English, you know, charming and offhand and polite. But he’s our age. His father’s a lord but not a real one — he got made. He went to Eton.”

“What’s this novel about?”

“Oh, I don’t care about that. That’s just one of David’s ideas. He thinks he can sell it.” After a minute, she added, “I like Gloria, by the way, I like her a lot. What are you shaking your head about?”

“Nothing, I’m not. Is Walter here? Have you seen him? He was worried about Susie when I left. She’s starting to look pretty big; she wasn’t feeling too hot.”

Beatrice hadn’t seen him.

“I think I understand what it is about having kids,” I said. “They’ve got kids at their house all day, really small people. After a while, after you’ve been through your twenties and thirties, you want to have simple relations again.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s just something on my mind. This is the trouble with being a pioneer. You want a new life and you set up an outpost and soon it looks just like the life you left.”

“I don’t think what you’ll have with Gloria is simple relations.”

“Oh fuck off,” I said and went to find her.

But I ran into Susie and Walter first, talking to Helen, Clay Greene’s wife. They were standing in the dining room; the big mahogany table had been stripped of leaves and pushed into a corner. Helen said, “Why don’t you sit down?” There were dining room chairs lined up against the wall. “No point in playing the hero.”

“Everybody tells me to sit down. I don’t want to sit down. I’ve been lying down all afternoon, and poked and prodded.”

“Did they find anything wrong?”

“What they say is, it’s probably perfectly normal or maybe it’s not. I had a little spotting this morning. So I call up and they say, come in, we want to be safe. But then they can’t tell me if it’s safe or not.”

“How many months are you?” Helen asked. I was standing just outside the conversation. I wanted to talk to Walter, but he was listening in, and I didn’t feel I could interrupt.

“Seven months next week,” Susie said. Her belly was at the pillow stage, but she looked fatter also in the neck by the lines of her jaw. Her face had that animal placid cud-chewing pregnant look. She kept her hands on her hips and moved like she was carrying a full heavy pitcher of water.

“You’ll be fine, everybody has one kind of worry or another. Believe me, it’s worse when they come out. Everybody tells you, just get through the first three months. My boys now are eight and three and I’m still waiting to get my life back.”

It occurred to me that Helen didn’t like Susie very much, and this was her way of showing it. But maybe women her age can’t help themselves. They have to say something if they see somebody pregnant.

Susie said, “Well, all I care about now is this little guy right here. I want to get a good look at him, I want to find out what he’s like.”

Then Clay and Gloria came over.

Around five o’clock she wanted to go home. She had seen the president, she had stood in the room with him, it was enough. So I went to find Robert and say thank you, good-bye. He was picking at the food in the kitchen, standing around with the chef and the waitstaff and some of the president’s entourage. Obama was there, too, trying to get a game of three-on-three together. “Where there’s a backboard there’s a ball.” He meant the Roof King backboard over the garage door. The snow had stopped, the evening was clearing up, Obama offered to do a little shoveling himself. He hadn’t done a thing all day but eat small portions of food, the kind of food you can hold in one hand while you talk a lot of crap. “Come on,” he said.

The impression he made on me was very strong, his fame and his restlessness, which was partly physical and partly in the way he talked — he interrupted himself and made little appeals to people around him, not just people he knew but also one of the waiters, a six-foot white guy who used to play point guard for Aquinas College in Grand Rapids. “Sam wants a game,” Obama said. “Sam’s up for it, Sam wants to work off some of that gut you get in your twenties, when you work too hard and the rest of the time sit around on your butt.

“Come on,” he said again. “Who’s in? I need some names.”

Robert gave him a queer look. His shirt was unbuttoned at the top, his sleeves were rolled up. He kept himself in good shape. “The ball needs pumping up,” he said.

“So pump up the ball.”

Obama started pointing at each of us.

“You in?. . What’s your name? Introduce me.”

“Marny’s more of a squash player.”

“I’ll guard him then,” Obama said.

About twenty minutes later, I found myself scraping a snow shovel up and down the concrete drive. We took it in turns. Robert had loaned me a college sweatshirt, to pull over my undershirt, but I was still wearing slacks and leather-soled shoes. Then Obama took the shovel off my hands and pushed the last crumbs of snow into the pileups on either side of the drive.

“How far is East Lansing from here?” he asked. “About two hours?”

“A little less. An hour and a half,” Sam said.

“Robert, Robert James,” Obama called. “Did you invite Magic Johnson to this thing?”

“I’m not sure.”

“This is his kind of basketball weather. He told me once, he used to practice his jump shot with mittens on.”

Then there was a ball bouncing among the six of us, middle-aged men, in dark pants and dress shoes, breathing smoke, as we shuffled around, passing and shooting and chasing the ball under the garage lights. About ten security guys stood along the spear-topped iron fence, watching us, and the house itself was lit up like a Christmas tree. People crowded into the window frames to get a look. But the court felt private enough.