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

Afterwards, after he was finished with me, Larry Oh pushed himself up, with both hands on the table, and walked over. He looked at me for a minute and said, “Nolan is a friend of yours.”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell me what you feel about what happened?”

“Not really. There’s a whole side of my life that’s being closed off. I used to go out with a good friend of Nolan’s. We all had dinner together, that kind of thing. I like his mother a lot. Will she want to talk to me now? I don’t know.”

“Can you tell me what you did after leaving Mrs. Smith’s house?”

“Well, Tony took his kid away, they drove off, and I went back home to wait for the ambulance.”

“What did you do while you waited?”

“Nothing. I just sat there. I checked his breathing, I checked his pulse. It took me a while to find his pulse, but it seemed okay, and I just sat there with him. It’s like he was sleeping, I just sat there with my hand on his head.”

This is true, it’s what I did, but saying it felt like lying. Larry said, “No more questions,” and the judge dismissed me. So I got up out of my chair. People were looking at me, but I looked straight ahead. I had to walk past Nolan and Gloria and Robert and Beatrice and everybody else. Walter was there, too, I suddenly saw his face. Then I was out of the room, in the hallway; the light was dimmer, it was cooler, too. Sharia met me with a cup of coffee — we could talk out loud. “Put some sugar in it,” she said, handing me a couple of packets. “You can probably use a little sugar.” I wanted to sit in one of the public rows and watch, but she told me I couldn’t — in case I got called back in. “We don’t want you getting confused by what other people say.”

“I can’t wait in that waiting room anymore,” I said, but it turned out I didn’t have to, I could go home.

For a couple of minutes I sat in the hallway and drank the coffee. There was a bench pushed up against one of the walls, under a row of portrait photographs, judges and officers of the court. People walked past. There were other cases and trials, and a janitor took a mop to the marble floors.

Then Robert came looking for me. He was wearing what he usually wears, clean jeans, collared shirt, a North Face jersey — the rich man’s modest uniform. The only thing he spent money on was his wristwatch, a Patek Philippe. Sometimes you see ads for these watches in glossy magazines, a handsome middle-aged father and his son waiting at a train station in black and white. The caption says: “Make your own tradition.” Robert had a little boy now. His curly hair receded slightly, but it didn’t matter, his face hadn’t changed. Even in college, his skin looked weathered — from sailing, you couldn’t help thinking. The truth is, I always found his presence comforting, like one of those magazines. The world of the rich, everything’s going to be okay.

“What are you going to do now?” he said.

“Go home.”

“You need a ride? I need some fresh air anyway. God, people stink after a while. I probably smell, too.” In the car, he said, “They gave you a pretty hard time in there. I’m sorry about that. I thought they might.”

“Yeah, well.”

“Don’t worry about it, Marny. You did okay, you did good.”

“I don’t know what I did,” I said.

For the next two days, I mooched around at home, reading the news. There was a lot of media coverage. Nolan had become like a minor-league celebrity in Detroit. He was an artist and activist and publicly associated with protests against the new neighborhoods. I saw more pictures of Nolan, photographs taken in the hospital, showing open wounds, a real beat-up guy, a guy who had been kicked in the head and was now standing trial. While prosecutors refused to charge the man who kicked him.

There was speculation about what had actually happened. One theory went that Nolan drove over to Robert’s house, with a gun in his pants, to confront him or threaten him or shoot him, because of the Meacher case. But I also found a few things out about Nolan’s defense. Barrett was claiming that Nolan ran into Michael in the street and thought it was Robert’s kid. So he picked him up, he told him to get in the car, the kid looked lost. But Nolan was worried about showing up at the house with the boy, just like that, given the nature of his relationship to Robert James. So he took him to his mother’s house and waited for me to act as a kind of intermediary. What happened afterwards was the result of a misunderstanding — two angry guys refusing to listen to each other. But there was no kidnapping. That at least was the claim.

A few days later the phone rang, some time after lunch — there were still dirty dishes in the sink. I hadn’t cleaned up yet. It was Tony. Cris and he were throwing a little party, to celebrate, just the fact that it was all over; he wanted to pick me up on the way.

“So what happened?” I said.

“Guilty,” Tony said.

Cris gave me a glass of champagne when I walked in the door. She was crying, not particularly unhappily. Her breasts were full of Jimmy’s milk, she wore a soft cotton dress, which you could pull down for easy access, even her tears looked like maternal overflow.

“I don’t much feel like celebrating,” I said.

“He took my son, he attacked my husband. And he’s going to sue us now, you know that, don’t you? Don’t expect sympathy from me. I’m having a moment, all right? Just for today we can say, it’s over, until the civil stuff starts up again.”

It was wet outside, the garden had melted into mud. The house was overwarm and overcrowded. The kids kept getting between our legs. Jimmy could walk now, he was a late walker, and wanted to chase Michael around, which Michael kind of liked. But it also meant, whenever he stopped running there was Jimmy all over him, with chocolate icing on his hands and face. It was five o’clock and cake had taken the place of supper.

At one point Robert picked up Jimmy and said, “Hey, fella, what are you, the chocolate monster?”

Peggy was back in New York. “You must miss Ethan,” I said.

“You see other kids, and it doesn’t matter if they want you to or not, you pick them up.”

In fact, Jimmy started crying and Cris took him off Robert’s hands.

“Listen,” Robert said, “at some point, it doesn’t have to be now, I want to talk to you.”

“Well, here we are.”

“Not now.”

“What’s this about?”

“Let’s have a couple of drinks and celebrate. This is a conversation that can wait.”

Walter and Dan Korobkin were in the kitchen. Beatrice was there, too, so was David, the posh English guy, her new boyfriend and agent. So were Bill Russo and Clay Greene. I could hear my name through the open door.

“People are talking about me again,” I said and went over to the sink to fill my glass from the tap. “Are you guys out in the open now? Do people know?”

“What does he mean?” David said. He was tall and soft-looking; the skin on his face seemed very lightly stippled. He had big hands.

“That you guys are an item.”

“Oh, everybody knows,” Walter said. “We’re making fun of her book.”

“What’s wrong with her book?”

“Everybody’s in it, everybody we know.”

“That’s just not true.” Beatrice was acting the pretty girl, maybe because of David. She had her hand on his arm. It turns out that she’s one of these girls who touches her boyfriend a lot. But then, she always used to put her hands on everybody, she flirted with everybody.

“Has she finished it?”

“I sold it,” David said.

“That’s terrific. That’s terrific news. How come everyone knows except me? Did this just happen?”