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

“Not really. You know, I published my memoir at the wrong time, about five years too soon. The Times piece had a link to it, and I checked my Amazon ranking this morning. It’s still somewhere in the hundreds of thousands, but yesterday it was in the millions. You can reach people these days, if you want to, if you make the effort. It’s a simple numbers game. How many email addresses do you have? About a thousand? So when a book comes out you write to everybody, asking them to buy it and spread the word. Even if the take-up’s only five percent, that’s still fifty people. And then they send it to another thousand, and so on.”

“I don’t know anything like a thousand people.”

“To email? Come on. Even if my numbers are way off, it still adds up. You just need a critical mass.”

“So what are you working on?”

“Another memoir, about being a father this time. There’s this thing that happens when you become a dad. They should cut off your dick but they don’t. Because that’s basically what happens to the woman. All the sex organs get turned into something else. You know, their vagina turns into the birth canal. Their breasts turn into milk bottles. Cris just lies there in bed leaking and then Jimmy wakes up and comes in with us and sucks at her. And it’s natural and beautiful. But all this time I’m lying there trying to sleep. And you know what happens to a guy. Your dick goes up and down all night long. You get these erections. And kids don’t have a clue, they jump all over you. So you’re stuck with this thing that is totally inappropriate but you can’t do anything about. And you feel sick about it. Even in the morning, you’re so sleep-deprived, you get these erections coming and going whenever you sit down — that’s how tired you are. What happens in the night keeps happening in the day. It’s like being a teenager. And you feel really weird about it. Dads don’t talk about this kind of thing. Mothers spill their guts to perfect strangers, people they hardly know. But we don’t talk to anybody. And the fact is, while all this is going on, you’re probably not having much sex. Anything that walks by on two legs gets your attention. And you feel sick about that, too, because you just saw what she went through for you, and it’s no picnic. And the whole point of babies, the point of kids, is that they’re sexually innocent. That’s what you love about them. I mean, Jimmy goes right for his pee-pee when you take off his diaper, but it doesn’t mean anything, it doesn’t hurt anybody. Kids reduce everything to the same kind of pleasure. But for grown men all that’s left is one kind of dirty pleasure, and everything else is responsibility. So right from the beginning fathers have these feelings of guilt, which nobody has time to address. And six months later, or five years later, or twenty years later, the marriage starts paying the price.”

“How’s Cris?” I said.

“She’s fine, we’re doing fine. And Jimmy’s great, he’s starting to sit up, he’s starting to eat solid food. That’s just my first chapter, that’s the premise. I want to talk about the new economy, too. Dads stuck at home with the kids, because they got laid off. Moms working.”

At two o’clock I asked the bartender to switch one of the TV stations over to the local news. Eventually he found what I was looking for — Larry Oh’s press conference.

He sat behind a table in some windowless room, with microphones bunched up against his face. You could see the effect of his white genes. His mother was a Catholic-school girl, when there were still Catholic girls’ schools in Detroit. I remembered this much from the newspaper article. Oh had one of those ageless Asian faces, but a little tired-looking, a little crumpled around the eyes and mouth. I had to stand up and walk over to the TV set to hear him.

Dwayne Meacher came out of his coma yesterday morning, around three a.m. He’s weak, but he’s talking, Oh said. The EEG shows no sign of brain damage. In the light of which, they had decided not to press charges against Tyler Waites.

“What about charges against Meacher?” a reporter asked.

“We have no plans of pressing charges against Mr. Meacher.”

“Okay,” I told the bartender. “You can switch it back.”

“Cris is basically fine,” Tony said, when I sat down again. “She identifies totally with the kids, she’s a great mother, I love to watch her with the boys. We used to fight about Michael. How long are you going to nurse him for? If he can spell breast, he’s too old. But Jimmy’s made a lot of that easier.”

“I’m glad you said that. I didn’t always know where to look.”

“I could have told you where to look.”

Tony paid for lunch. Both of us needed to take a leak. On the way out I asked him if he was okay to drive.

“Do you want to drive?”

“I had as much as you.”

“I’m fine,” he said.

There’s nobody on the streets in Detroit anyway. About fifteen minutes later, we pulled up outside the gates of Robert’s house; the workmen had gone. By this point it was maybe three o’clock in the afternoon. The sun had burned the clouds away, but the sky looked hazy, not quite blue. Tony had misjudged the angle, so I got out to tap in the entry code. With the bushes blooming and the grass recently cut, the air smelled almost tropical.

They must have changed the code. We couldn’t get in and Tony backed up to park in the road.

I kept ringing and ringing the bell by the intercom. “Maybe it’s broken,” Tony said, but eventually Robert himself buzzed us in. Then he opened the door for us and stood in the doorway.

“I don’t know where anyone is,” he said. “Probably the garden.”

So we went through the air-conditioned house, and into the kitchen, and out into the garden again. I was sweating already, just from the contrasts. Peggy lay on a blanket in the grass, trying to read on one elbow, under a hat.

“Where are the kids?” Tony said.

“Fran’s just getting Ethan to sleep. He refuses to nap unless you put him in the stroller.”

“Did Michael go with them?” he asked, and Peggy sat up.

“I think so.”

“Which way do they usually go?”

Peggy had taken off her shirt. She was wearing a swimsuit top, but she put her shirt on again and stood up. “I’ll go with you,” she said, buttoning it.

“You sure he’s not in the house?”

“I don’t know.”

But he wasn’t in the house, and it took us half an hour in the car to track down Fran. Her phone was dead, and she had stopped on Charlevoix at an ice cream parlor that had just opened up. We saw her pushing the stroller out again; Ethan was still asleep. Peggy and I got out. Tony was driving. Peggy said, “Where’s Michael?”

“I thought he was with you.”

“Why would he be with me?”

Fran thought for a minute and said, “The last time I saw him he was watching TV in the kitchen. You were talking on the phone.”

“You’re right, that was me,” she said.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Just take him home.”

We got in the car and Peggy told Tony, “It was probably my fault. She doesn’t know where he is. The last time anybody saw him was in the kitchen.”

“He can’t have gone far,” I said.

So we drove back to the house, and Peggy ran in and started calling for Robert. Tony said to me, “I don’t feel well, I shouldn’t have drunk. I need to clear my head. I need some water.” Peggy got the number of the repair guys, but it was a company number, and she had to wait on the phone to get through to a human being. So we looked around the house again; it was a big house. I went into the garden and ran around it once, from back to front, then walked back the other way, already out of breath. My eyes itched, I couldn’t stop rubbing them, but I didn’t find anything except his soccer ball, under a bush.