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

“What do you mean?”

There were scabs of skin on his bald head and his cheeks looked gray and heavy. I decided not to pick a fight and went to find Gloria.

Maybe I would have got drunk except we ended up having to leave soon after. Gloria was talking to Walter and Helen Greene.

Helen said, “Where’s Susie?”

“She’s still in New York. Her parents live there.”

“Is that where she wants to have the baby? It’s funny, isn’t it, how when you have a kid yourself you want to come home to Mommy.”

“Yes,” Walter said.

“So what’s the plan? Are you going to fly down?”

“I guess so.”

“I’ll tell you something nobody tells you about having kids. It’s like this closed shop. We all have to toe the thin blue line. Because the truth is, having kids is not only awful, but it exposes as basically pointless your relations with everybody else. So you learn to put up with the kids.”

“I’m going to get a drink,” Walter said, and then he pulled at me a little, and I went with him and he said, “You have to get that woman away from me.”

“It’s not her fault.”

“If she says one more word to me I’m gonna sock her.”

“You have to tell people, Walter. Because this is going to keep happening.”

“Back off, Marny,” he said. “I’m leaving. You can find your own ride home.”

But in the end, he waited a little and we left with him. Robert couldn’t drive us because he was taking Clay and Helen and the kids. Anyway, Gloria was ready to go and I felt strangely worn out. So Walter hung around, standing on the front porch by himself, while we said a few good-byes.

Tony asked me, “So are you guys going out?”

“I guess so.”

“What happened to the German girl? Does Gloria know about her?”

“There’s nothing to know. Stop it. Don’t look so amused.”

“You kids,” he said. “I got to get my kicks where I can.”

Everybody was pissing me off but Gloria. I found her talking to Cris in the kitchen and took her away.

It was a quiet car ride. Some of the snow had melted in the sunshine, but it was cold, too, and you had to watch out for black ice. Walter dropped us off at Gloria’s apartment, but before we got out he said to her, “Marny probably told you, didn’t he?”

“Told me what?” she said. “Yes. And I prayed for both of you.”

“Did you really?” Walter said, and that was that.

Gloria liked to go to the movies on Sunday afternoons, so that’s what we did. We saw Up in the Air at the Shores Theatre in St. Clair. She fell asleep for part of it, and afterwards, we got cheeseburgers and milkshakes at Achatz Burgers. Then she took me home, around nine o’clock. Walter’s light was still on so I knocked on his door instead of going up.

“You pissed off at me?” I said.

“Not really. Come in.”

So we stayed up late talking, till one in the morning. We did this a lot when we first moved in, before Susie arrived. Walter’s grandfather, on his mother’s side, came from Port Ellen in Scotland, and he always kept a bottle of Laphroaig around — this was one of his affectations in college. But he brought it out now and we drank that.

The cheeseburger and malted shake were still working their way through my system. Mel’s cigar didn’t help; I’d also had popcorn at the movies. My first drink of the day was at eleven a.m., at Tony’s house. It had been a long day. But the whisky woke me up again and I felt fine, okay, until the next morning.

“I got the sense that you didn’t like Gloria,” I said.

“Listen, don’t listen to me. What I think about people right now isn’t very rational.”

“If you want to talk about that, we can talk about that, too.”

“I don’t want to. It isn’t just that we lost the baby. There were other issues all the way through. Susie didn’t want to worry anybody, she didn’t want me to talk about it, but it’s been a long year. The lining of her womb is abnormally thin. The doctors said there’s a risk to her, too, if we try again, but this is something we haven’t discussed yet. So I don’t much feel like discussing it with you.”

I shook my head. “Are you worried she’ll stay in New York?”

“What does that mean? I told her to stay. She hates her parents. I told her, you have to make friends with these people, because they’ll die when you don’t want them to.”

“I didn’t tell you this, but my dad walked out on my mother.”

This is how we talked. I felt a kind of fever of intimacy, which wasn’t just the whisky. The heating shut down in his apartment at ten o’clock, and we stayed up for another three hours. By the end I was almost shaking with cold. But I didn’t want to say good night. There was something thrilling about speaking openly like this, and digging up several years’ worth of buried conversations. You can only fight like this with old friends, and even with them you can’t do it very often. But it makes you think, the rest of your life, you’re wearing thick gloves.

“That was a long time coming, wasn’t it?” Walter said.

“I don’t know why you say that. You hardly know him.”

“I met him once, I’ve heard you talk about them. You said yourself, she’s a very passive-aggressive woman.”

“I would never have used that phrase, I don’t even know what it means. That’s a bullshit phrase. Some people are aggressive and some people are less aggressive, so you call them passive-aggressive. Big deal.”

“That’s not what it means. It means some people say what they want and other people get what they want by not saying it.”

“My mother says what she wants all the time. She wants him to come back.”

“Is he coming back?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you care? You’re thirty-five years old.”

“They’re my parents. It feels like my whole childhood is at stake. I liked my childhood, I was happy, and it turns out the whole time that my father was miserable.”

“You’re not a kid anymore. And none of this means they didn’t love each other.”

“You should hear him talk. He’s been waiting to do this for forty years.”

“Remember, you don’t have to take anybody’s side.”

“What does that mean?”

“And by the way, you never struck me as such a happy kid. When you got to Yale you were repressing a lot of angry feelings.”

“Don’t give me this repression line. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“It means you were weird about sex. You were always weird about sex.”

“Are you kidding me, Walter?”

“Look, I got over it. I saw a girl I liked and repressed my feelings for her. And then I realized this is crazy. Susie was sexually active three years before she met me. In junior high the kind of thing her classmates did for fun was go down on boys. What she did instead was have two serious relationships with guys from the upper school, which didn’t work out.”

“It’s not just her. Everybody at Yale figured you were gay.”

“Well, I’m not gay.”

“You just took a long time to make up your mind.”

“I knew I wasn’t gay in college.”

“What, the girls you met were too old for you?”

“Mostly they were too young. I didn’t want to get slammed on Friday nights and hook up. I also didn’t want to have stupid conversations about Nietzsche at three in the morning.”

“Give me a break, Walter. That’s not why you didn’t go out with anybody.”

“So why didn’t I?”

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

Later we got on to Gloria. “What’s with the little-girl routine?” he asked. “Are you sleeping together or what?”

“What. She stays over but there are lines we don’t cross.”