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

All night long I left the windows open, but in the morning the living room still smelled of bedclothes.

“What are you doing to yourself?” my mother asked, over breakfast.

My heart skipped a beat. “What do you mean?” I said.

“It’s freezing in here.”

On Christmas Day, Walter and Susie invited us downstairs. Everybody else got along, but I behaved badly. It was kind of a make-fun-of-Marny party. Susie did most of the cooking and she wasn’t a good cook. The turkey was dry in places and pink in others; the mash potatoes tasted salty and lumpy. There was too much food as well and it sat around on the dishes afterwards, and on people’s plates, showing the oil. I don’t think anybody cared. They just got drunk, even Susie, and there was an atmosphere of conviviality based on the idea that Walter and I were good friends, and Susie loved Walter and my mother loved me, so we all loved each other.

But I was in a bad way. I wanted to be elsewhere, and rejected all conversational approaches and offers of sympathy. Also, it didn’t help seeing Walter and Susie together, basically happy.

That night my mother said to me, “I don’t think you realize how much work it takes to put together a meal like that. It’s getting everything into the oven at different times, and getting them out at the same time. You could have showed a little appreciation.”

“I said several times how delicious everything was.”

“That’s not what I mean. It’s not what you say, people just want you to have a good time.”

“Some things are outside my control.”

“You can make an effort. And maybe after a while it won’t feel like such an effort anymore.”

“What you don’t realize is, that was an effort. That was me making an effort.”

“What I saw is you picking fights.”

And it’s true, at one point I lost my temper. Walter said something about Gloria; he had spoken to her on the phone. He remembered that I once met a friend of hers who worked for an adoption agency in Southfield. Susie and he wanted to adopt.

“What kind of kid? A black kid?”

“Is that possible?” my mother asked.

“With these guys, it is,” Walter said. “They’re Lutherans.”

“And what did Gloria say?”

“She was very obliging.”

“Don’t call her again,” I said.

“What did you do to her?”

“Nothing. I just don’t want to hear about her, I don’t want you to talk to her. I don’t want you people to have any relations with her when I don’t.”

“Well, why don’t you?”

“Oh, leave me alone,” I said.

Afterwards, my mother was always first to make up. She nagged at me, she niggled at me, but she couldn’t stay mad for long — she felt too anxious. That was probably bad for me, too. I started indulging myself in teenage sulks.

But it was too much, her sympathy. I couldn’t breathe. She looks like me, too, pale and earnest, like someone who doesn’t understand a joke but is trying her best. Explain it to me, her face said. Instead I watched TV or I watched her cook and after two weeks she couldn’t take it anymore.

“What I can’t bear is the idea that this was a failure.”

“Two weeks is a long time,” I said. “We’re not used to each other now.”

“That’s just what I mean.”

But she flew home on New Year’s Eve — the flights were cheaper. “I’ll come back for the trial,” she said. And after she left I felt surprisingly cheerful, cheerful in the old way, I mean. Like a college kid flying back after Christmas vacation, to his dorm room or apartment, to his old new life. But I had good days and bad days — good weeks and bad weeks.

One night, my brother gave me a call.

“You survived her,” he said.

“She was all right. She loves me.”

“Even I love you. Did you know all that about Nolan?”

“What,” I said.

“I talked to Korobkin. It’s not just the kid, Nolan has credit card debts. There are lovers, he’s been leading two or three lives. Irreconcilable lives. I see this stuff all the time in my pro bono work. Immigrant families, fucked-up dads, guys under a lot of pressure doing fucked-up things. What you have to realize is that for some people private life is a different kind of reality.”

“What’s that got to do with anything.”

“I thought I should warn you. This thing is going to get personal, they’re going to come after you.”

“Who is? I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

“His lawyers.”

“ Whose lawyers?”

“Listen, Greg. There’s only one way this goes to trial — if Nolan’s lawyers think they can make a reasonable case for his innocence. They have to turn this into a misunderstanding. Tony says one thing, he says another. The problem is you — you’re the only real witness. And if you don’t tell the story the way they want you to tell it, they’ll come after you. That’s all I’m saying. You should be prepared.”

“Okay, so you told me. I’m prepared.”

But he changed his tone. “What are you going to do now?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what do you do with yourself these days?”

“I’m going to clear up the kitchen and turn on the TV. Then I’m going to bed. That’s what I do.”

But the truth is I was watching a lot of porn. I had never done this before, at least not online, and didn’t know where to look. In high school one of my D&D buddies had access to the Playboy channel through his father’s account — his parents were divorced. But it didn’t interest me much; I felt embarrassed, especially in front of the other boys. But this time there was nobody around. I started out with Tyler Waites’s website and that led me to other things. It was amazing, the variety on offer, all these sophisticated tastes. I remembered something Nolan said. There is no human nature, just economics. Supply and demand.

The picture quality was usually pretty bad, but that seemed part of the appeal — you could never get a good enough look. You always wanted to be closer. And between you and what you wanted was this screen.

One of the things you learn growing up is that adult pleasures are more complicated than they look. Even beer is an acquired taste; it takes getting used to. And watching porn turns out to be hard work. Most sexual imagery is pain imagery; the sounds are also sounds of pain. For some reason I could concentrate on these images. Because concentration is what it was: the rest of the time I felt distracted, I tried to read and put down my book, I fell asleep in front of the TV. But at two a.m. I could stay awake, watching a woman lying naked on her back in bed, with her legs up in the air, while a man pressed himself between her legs, so that you could see his buttocks instead of her pubic hair. I was very unhappy, that was clear to me even at the time, but I also felt some kind of connection with people. Not just with the women, the actors. All across America, and not only America, there are men on their own occupying themselves in this way — looking for something and straining towards it, unsatisfied. And I was one of them.

If you go to bed at midnight and get out of bed, after a broken night, at ten or eleven in the morning, that still leaves thirteen or fourteen hours of waking time to account for. Eating doesn’t take long if you eat alone and I never felt hungry — I ate out of a kind of duty to something. But I didn’t feel many duties. The pressure to appear a certain way to other people had started to fade. I almost never saw anyone, apart from Walter. The things he went through for Susie, not just with her but on his own, the decisions he must have come to, his private battles — I began to get a sense of them. He had come out on the other side. But I was still in the middle. Something important had failed or was failing and I needed to deal with it, I needed to think it through.