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

“Why are you telling me all this?”

She hadn’t stopped by the house in months, I figured she had given up on me. So if she came by now there was probably a motive — she wanted something. “I’m just keeping you in the picture,” she said. “It’s your picture, too.”

“Look, I should tell you something. I knew about this beforehand. I may have mentioned it to Nolan.”

It was a cold prewinter day. I like this time of year, two weeks before Thanksgiving. The trees were leafless, the sun came in from every angle. Through my kitchen window, you could feel the light being translated into heat. Gloria had lent me her Gaggia, until the work was finished in her apartment, and I made some coffee. Beatrice looked important and attractive, a busy person, while I stood around in my jogging shorts.

“Nolan’s not the problem here,” Beatrice said. “But we need this money. If Goldman backs out, we have to make up the difference somewhere. And that will probably mean selling houses — speeding up the process. Which takes away control, it turns the whole thing into an open market. People will start selling, they’ll start buying, you’ll be living on a street with real estate signs in the yard.”

“Is that a problem?”

“It depends what you want. But I don’t think it’s what you want. This place isn’t ready yet. You need a culture — markets depend on cultures. But markets don’t make cultures, you have to engineer them. That’s what we’ve been trying to do. The health care, the ratio of shops and houses, the parks and schools, but you know all that. Handpicking tenants, different kinds of people, getting commitments from them. If they sell up now, in two years’ time we’ll be back where we started. At least, that’s my best guess. There’s also concern about what happens if this case goes to trial.”

“What do you mean, if?”

“The only thing that makes sense, and I mean that from Nolan’s point of view, is a plea bargain. Otherwise he’s looking at some very scary possibilities.”

“So he should make a deal.”

“His lawyers say he doesn’t want to — he wants his day in court. And we’ve got our own concerns about that. This case has already attracted a lot of bad publicity. The last thing anybody wants is a courtroom drama.”

“Except for Nolan.”

“In that case, Nolan has a very limited conception of his self-interest.”

“Is that what you want to talk to me about?”

“Marny, we’re talking because we’re talking. I’m worried about the trial, but I didn’t come here with motives. I’m proud of you. You’re one of the success stories, you’re one of the people holding this thing together. Teaching at a local high school, living with Gloria.”

I looked at her and she said, “You know what I mean.”

“Well, I haven’t been teaching this year.”

“I heard that, too.”

Afterwards I went for a run and tried to work out what she wanted from me — that I should talk to Nolan. Or maybe she didn’t want anything, I was just being paranoid. Running gives you a mild high, thoughts dislodge themselves, things occur to you, and it occurred to me that I had come a long way from the kid I was, that I was doing all right. Beatrice had spotted this and pointed it out. Either way that’s what she meant. I had become a point of contact between opposing views, somebody she could turn to for help. And maybe she was right about Nolan’s self-interest, too. You can’t dismiss an argument just because you don’t trust or share the motive of the person who makes it. Also, I basically did trust Beatrice. She always left a scent behind in a room, not just her perfume. She was somebody you naturally wanted to please, and that had a kind of aftereffect.

GLORIA TRIED TO BREAK UP with me as soon as her kitchen was ready. “You just used me for my appliances,” I joked. But that’s not really what was going on. There was a coincidence of events. Without telling me Astrid had uploaded the video of us having sex onto her website, along with a lot of other stuff: more of her videos, photographs of Detroit, etc. Maybe she told me, maybe I knew, I don’t know. Later she said, which was true, that the deal always was, whatever I video, I can use. Anyway, I stopped thinking about it. In some ways I’m not a very private person. There’s a lot of stuff you’re supposed to care about that I don’t. But somebody found the link and tweeted it, at which point the video went twittering around — a really inexplicable number of people watched it. I could write down a number but it keeps changing, even now. Gloria came home from school one day and showed it to me. Some of her kids had seen it.

“I don’t know if I’m more embarrassed or upset,” she said.

“I think you’re more upset.”

“That’s a very stupid thing to be a part of. Don’t tell me what I feel. You don’t want to know what I feel. I’ll tell you what I feel. You spend all day trying not to shout at the kids and then I come home and try not to shout at you. When I got in the car I just thought, that’s enough. Nobody’s happy anymore. What’s the point.”

“I’m happy,” I said. “This is my happy face.”

“Don’t play games, Marny, I’m not.”

We talked a lot more than that, we said stupid things. She started packing up to go home. Just give me a couple of weeks to get my head on straight, she said. But she kept thinking about that video — she wanted to know when it was shot.

“Listen, Gloria. Don’t think about it. It’s upsetting, but it’s got nothing to do with us. I know you’ve had sex with other people, you know I’ve had sex with other people, but we don’t want to think about it. This makes you think about it, I understand that. But it’s not important.”

“It’s not just this, it’s Nolan, it’s everything. I just need a break. I don’t want to fight you all the time.”

We held on a little longer after that. She stayed the night and left in the morning and moved back into her apartment. But we kept seeing each other — a little less often than before.

The last thing we did as a couple was try to talk Nolan out of standing trial. It’s strange that on this major source of conflict and disagreement, we ended up briefly on the same side. It was like an intervention; his mother was there, too, and we sat in their kitchen and one by one we said, please don’t do this thing. Everybody (except for Nolan) was extremely emotional. I felt very close to Gloria, to all of them. I was really at the heart of something, sitting in that family kitchen and debating with these people something so important and intimate, where the decisions you reach collectively have real consequences. But we didn’t reach any collective decisions because Nolan shut us out. He sat there, he took it, but he didn’t say much.

The best deal he could get was four years, which might mean closer to two in practice. That’s what Larry Oh was offering him. If the case went to trial, he could end up with a life sentence — maybe he gets out on parole after fifteen years. Nolan was pissed off, among other things, that Oh had decided not to press charges against Tony for assault. He planned to sue Tony, after the criminal case resolved itself, for medical damages and general psychological suffering. But he was having a hard time finding a litigator to take on the case — Nolan saw a conspiracy in this, too.

Gloria was often in tears; Mrs. Smith was in tears. She brought out cake and coffee, but I was the only one who ate anything. Nolan made his own coffee.

“I don’t need to tell you this,” I said, “but there’s a big difference between two years and fifteen years. Right now every option looks bad. I know it must be hard to choose between outcomes you don’t want and can’t even really imagine. But that’s what you have to do. Two years means Clarence is nine when you get out. Fifteen years means he’s twenty-two. The difference is basically his whole childhood.”