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

Gloria asked me this, too. She said, “I have to ask you. I get it from all sides. It’s what everybody wants to know.”

“Trying not to make things worse.”

“How much worse could they have been?”

“I’ve been thinking about that, too. Worse.”

“Marny, I don’t want to talk about that. I don’t want to think about it. You find out things, and you think, who is this person, do I know you?”

“You know me. You know me better than these people who write these stories.”

“That’s what you keep telling me. But I’m not sure. How come they knew about the guns and I didn’t?”

“They weren’t important.”

“They seem important to me.”

All of this might have been easier if she weren’t living with me. Sometimes she came out the front door to find photographers in the street. You sort of get used to that but not really. She needed somewhere else to go, she needed to go home, but her home was a construction site. I guess she might have stayed with her mother, but she never got along with her mother, and these days they got along even worse because of me. Her mother was an unusually socially conscious person. She cared what strangers thought of her, and her daughter’s association with a guy who was in the news for the reasons I was in the news upset her sense of family class. But look, this is all from my point of view. Maybe Eunice just thought I’m an asshole, that’s possible, too. Either way, Gloria didn’t really want to stay with her, at least while we were still together.

The other problem, and this seems petty in the general context, but I think it mattered, too, was just that damn kitchen. Gloria was under a lot of stress, and she took some of it out on the contractor, who was a likable and basically hardworking guy, but not very well organized, and not very good at communicating with clients. So, for example, she ordered a stained beech worktop, but there was a problem with the distributor. It was going to put the job back weeks, so he cut a deal on a stained oak worktop instead, and started cutting it down to size. And told her about it afterwards. This is the kind of thing. Gloria made him go back to square one and refused to reimburse him either for costs or labor. Then there was an issue with the gas supply. Her apartment was in an unmodernized and badly maintained building from the 1930s, held together by spit and plaster. When he took out the old oven he started a leak that meant he had to shut down the supply in the whole building to fix it. Which pissed a lot of people off — at Gloria, not at him. After a while he started taking a tone with her, the tone of a reasonable man doing his gentlemanly best with an unreasonable woman, which drove her crazy. And as I say the whole thing dragged on and on.

I don’t want to take sides here, maybe I should have taken sides. Workingmen, contractors and plumbers and carpenters, carry a kind of male threat and appeal, which makes it difficult for some men to insist on terms and conditions. I guess I’m one of those men. Also, it wasn’t my kitchen, and maybe some part of me felt that Gloria was building her escape hatch or something, I don’t know. But you can’t stand around watching a guy working hard and competently, doing things you don’t know how to do, and then start complaining to him about the difference between stained beech and stained oak, and quibbling over prices. At least I can’t.

Gloria wanted from me a little more interest and cooperation, but that’s not really what the problem was. The problem ran deeper and didn’t have anything to do with the kitchen. People always liked Gloria, she got along with everybody, and suddenly here she was fighting battles on all sides, with people who clearly considered her a difficult personality. With her mother, herself a real professional piece of work. Sniping back and forth with Mrs. Sanchez at school, mostly for my sake. And now she heard herself nagging away at Kevin the Contractor, the kind of slightly shifty good-natured overweight man who usually flirts with her. Somehow she had backed herself into a corner where just to go anywhere in any direction she needed to get her claws out. And I can’t help thinking that at a certain point it occurred to her that the corner she was stuck in she was stuck in because of me.

But I don’t want to paint everything in bleak and dismal. And the truth is, when I look back on our relationship, these two months stand for what I miss — I mean the months we were living together, in the house I shared with Walter and Susie. At first, over the summer vacation, we all had time on our hands. But later, when Gloria started going back to school, I used to walk her part of the way just to make sure I got out of bed in the morning. When the weather was nice; otherwise she drove. We kissed on a street corner and I watched her go, my working woman, dressed in her own version of a school uniform, the simple skirts and high socks, clean shoes, a collared shirt or blouse. I say uniform because I knew her well enough by this point to realize that even her natural modesty, good humor and kindness were a form of protection, against strangers and kids, against the world, against anybody who didn’t love her, which makes up a high percentage of the total. So my heart went out to her as she kicked through the leaves.

On my short walk home I thought about what to make for dinner and sometimes picked up a few things on the way — from Annie’s Corner Store, some hippie-dippie hole-in-the-wall grocer that had just sprung up. Or I got in the car and drove out to Greenfield Market, which was more of a hassle but cheaper and took up more of my day. That was the main benefit. Money didn’t worry me much at that time. I had put a lot by from teaching the previous year. And I also had some vague sense that the way we were living couldn’t last. So I thought about money like it was food on a plate, something you enjoy and finish off.

Fall came late and mild. Detroit always has a summer mosquito problem, but Gloria and I kept getting bitten deep into October. At night the street lamps shone like sunshine in the yellow leaves. We left our bedroom window open, but the reading lamp attracted bugs, and Gloria had sweet blood — she got bitten more than I did. At least the mosquitoes still like me, she said. She got bitten once on her chest, just where a pendant might hang, on the visible skin between her breasts. Gloria didn’t want to scratch it because the scab would show, but sometimes when we were in bed together, making out, she got this unbearable wriggly kind of itch. She made me scratch it for her, and it was kind of a sensual delight, and also kind of not. It was more childish than that and a distraction from the other thing. So when I tried to kiss her she just said, no, don’t stop, scratch it there, there, there. I mention this just as an example. We didn’t always fight.

And even our fights felt like the real thing. We were living together, we were lovers, and we were working out some deep strife between us, which is what lovers should do. Gloria wanted me not to testify against Nolan. She wanted me to take sides — against the whole idea, against the rest of us. Let Tony and Nolan fight it out; it’s their fight. I said the only thing I can do is tell the truth, anything else will get me into trouble. “It’s not that simple,” she said, “and don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m not that worried about you.” It wasn’t just a question of what had happened. There was a context, there were consequences. “You have to work out what you want to happen,” she said. “Because what you say is going to have an effect on that. You have to work out what you think Nolan deserves.”

“This is too complicated for me, Gloria. They’re going to ask me some questions, I’m going to give them some answers. That’s all. It’s really not up to me.”