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

“Is it a Christian thing?”

“She’s not a virgin, if that’s what you mean.”

“That’s probably what I mean. I knew teachers like her at Dalton. The kids love them, they’re lively and sweet, and they haven’t quite grown up. Or if they have, they revert.”

“Walter, you should know how you come across right now. You seduced one of your students. So forgive me if I don’t take what you say about sex very seriously.”

“I’m just telling you so you know. There’s some damage there, that’s all I’m saying. You need to be careful.”

“I can’t believe I’m having this conversation with you.”

“How old is Gloria? Thirty, thirty-two? And she expects to spend the night at your place and not have sex? I’m sorry, I never did anything as kinky as that.”

“So how long did you wait before you had sex with Susie?”

“We waited until she was seventeen. Because that’s what the law is in New York.”

Maybe all this reads angrier than it was.

“I don’t really mind not sleeping with her,” I said. “Did I tell you I spent the night with Beatrice? Last summer, after Bill Russo’s party. We ended up in bed together but nothing happened. She fell asleep and I just lay there. A lot of things became clear to me. Sex is a distortion. It changes what you feel about people. It makes you like people you don’t really like and dislike people you don’t really dislike.”

Walter asked me if I had heard about Beatrice’s novel. “Apparently we’re all in it. Susie had dinner with Beatrice in New York. She’s worried what people are going to say. You, me, the whole gang, everybody we knew in college.”

“What’s it about?”

“Beatrice wouldn’t tell her.”

“Have you met this English guy?”

“Robert has. Your classic gay Englishman, he says. But then her boyfriends always pissed him off.”

By one o’clock my eyes hurt. Maybe two inches above them, behind my forehead, some kind of vein was pulsing; it felt backed up with blood. I stood up to get a glass of tap water from the kitchen. Walter wanted one, too, so we stood by his sink, knocking back glasses of water. We were still in the thick of our conversation, in the heat of it, but I guess we both knew that whatever we had said might change color overnight. Like when you pull a muscle in the middle of a squash game, and keep playing, you feel fine, but the next day you can hardly walk.

“When’s Susie coming back?” I said again.

“Wednesday.”

I went up to bed.

Afew weeks later Mr. Pendleton, one of the history teachers at Kettridge High, slipped on the ice outside his house and broke his leg. Mrs. Sanchez asked me to take over some of his classes and I started going in three days a week.

This totally changed the complexion of my daily life. I got up early, I went to bed early, I worked hard. On the days I wasn’t teaching I prepared my lessons. On the days I was I had lunch with Gloria in the school cafeteria. Kids gossiped about us in the hallways. Sometimes they caught us holding hands. At first we were worried what they might think. Once a girl asked, “Dr. Marnier, are you doing it with Miss Lambert?” I blushed and two of her friends said, “Oh, he is, he is.” Later they said, “Do you like black girls then? Is that what you like?” But this was only teasing, they didn’t mind. Going out with Gloria was good for my reputation. I think it was harder on her.

The job also made a difference to our relationship. Instead of the guy from the social experiment across the freeway, I was now a part of Gloria’s working world. I knew the kids she liked and the ones who gave her a hard time, the kids she sometimes dreamed about at night, worry dreams, and wanted to talk about over dinner until I said, stop. We never spent the night together during the week, but sometimes she slept at my place on Fridays and Saturdays.

Once I even went to church with her and her mother. To the Glory of Zion Baptist Church on Carlton Street. I said I was interested. Outside it looked like a prison; there were high brick walls and small windows. But inside it felt like the hold of a ship, hot and crowded. There was a lot of singing and hand clapping; people stamped their feet. I couldn’t bring myself to do any of these things. Afterwards we went out for breakfast. “Was it interesting?” Mrs. Lambert asked me. Another time Nolan invited us to his mom’s house for Friday-night dinner.

Nothing particularly noteworthy happened, but I remember it for a couple of reasons. It was the middle of March, the first warmish day of the year. Roads were clearing, and the pileups of snow on the sidewalk shone with puddles.

Since I didn’t teach on Fridays I went over to Joe’s Café and sat there much of the afternoon. For a while it was even warm enough I could sit in the front yard. Spring birds sounded hesitant and strangely clear in the mild air. Joe had just got his license and after a cup of coffee I ordered a gin and tonic and then another. Partly just because I was in a good mood, the week was over, and I was going out with Gloria later, but partly because I was nervous about seeing her with Nolan. I don’t know, maybe it was that. Gloria had never said so but I suspected that they used to go out. Not all girls make me jealous but Gloria did. And sometimes, if I let my mind drift that way, I began to imagine stupid things. That she was only going out with me because I’m white or that that was why she wouldn’t have sex.

After a couple of G&Ts I felt sharp and nervous, kind of buzzing, when Gloria met me at Joe’s and we walked over together. You could hear snow dripping off the roofs onto the porches below. I had a girlfriend, a job, an apartment, spring was coming, I’d been living in Detroit for almost a year. I felt like you do in the middle of the beginning of something, which is just about when you realize it’s the beginning.

Clarence was going to bed when we arrived. He had his PJs on — Nolan carried him in his arms, so the boy was sitting on his forearms and looking frontwards. Clarence was a big kid; Nolan had strong arms. He kind of pointed him towards us and said, “Say good night, Clarence,” and Clarence said good night. Then they disappeared for a while and Gloria caught up with Mrs. Smith in the kitchen. I sat in the living room with another couple, Byron and Tamika. She worked for the Lutheran Adoption Service in Southfield. He was training to be a chef at the Art Institute of Michigan. But this was only his latest idea; he’d spent his twenties trying to get a band off the ground. They said, what do you do, and for once I had an answer.

“I’m a high school history teacher. Gloria and I work together.”

When Mrs. Smith came in she said to Byron, “I better watch what I’m cooking with you around.” She wore an apron and high-heeled shoes; her hair was pinned up on her head. Her coloring was paler than Nolan’s, and she’d put on some lipstick in a rush, making her look a little windblown. She was sweating from the kitchen; her cheeks were red.

“Well, what are you cooking?” Byron said.

I felt like I had been let into a room that is usually closed to the public. Baton Rouge is about 50 percent black. My high school was maybe 65 percent black — it was a magnet school, and people from my neighborhood got bused in. I didn’t have one black friend, not one. Even as a kid I had a sense of some world that was everywhere around me, which I couldn’t get into. My school bus drove past front yards with cars broken down in the grass, and other kinds of junk. People sat out on the porches, even in hot weather, talking.

“I guess you all have known each other for a while?” I said to Byron.