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

“A couple of days ago. There was a lot of action at the London Book Fair.”

“That’s wonderful news.” Cris came round with another bottle of champagne, and I took it off her hands and filled everyone up. “I want to toast something that isn’t a guy getting locked up,” I said. “So let’s toast you.”

“Marny,” Beatrice said.

“So let me in on the joke. Who’s in it?”

“Calm down, it’s okay. Anyway, that’s not how it works,” Beatrice said. “It’s not one person or another, you make things up. You put different people together.”

“You’re in it,” Walter said.

“Have you read it?” I asked him.

“The parts I could recognize.”

“How come everyone’s read this book except me?”

“We figured you had other things on your mind.”

Tony came in, but the doorbell rang. He put his hand around my neck and gripped it on his way out. I couldn’t tell yet what I felt about him.

“So how do you know it’s me?” I said. “What do I look like?”

“Harry Potter,” Bill Russo said.

“But that’s my line, Beatrice. I told you that story, you can’t use that.”

“That’s not what you should get worked up about,” Walter said.

Then the sun came out, through a wet sky, and Tony tried to persuade people out onto his new deck.

“We just had it put in,” he said. “It’s a three-thousand-dollar deck.”

Cris didn’t like him smoking in the house and he wanted to hand out cigars. Some of the men went out, Beatrice, too, but I stayed inside to talk to Cris. But then Jimmy needed changing and Michael followed her out. For a minute I had the kitchen to myself. I ran the tap and wet my hands and ran them through my hair. Then Beatrice came back in.

“It’s too cold out there. This is Detroit spring, which is like LA winter. People are crazy.”

“Was it me,” I said.

“Was what you?”

“What happened. Do I have a history of miscommunicating?”

“You were the only one talking to both sides.”

“I didn’t reconcile these different parts of my life. Do you think it’s possible, if I said something different to Nolan, or something different to Tony, that Nolan takes me to his house, and we pick up the kid and drive home, and none of this happens?”

“I thought you told me it could have been much worse.”

“That’s what I thought. But I don’t know anymore. Maybe that kind of thinking was part of the problem.” She let that go and I said, “Gloria’s not answering my calls.”

“Marny, I want to have this conversation with you. But I came in because I needed the bathroom. Give her time.”

I went outside and Tony said, “Where’s your drink?”

“I don’t much feel like celebrating.”

“We’re not celebrating,” he said. “We’re getting drunk, we’re letting our hair down, there’s a difference.”

“Well, I feel pretty drunk already.”

Walter was sitting by himself on one of the benches, smoking a cigar. “My dad gave me one of these to take back to Yale, the summer before senior year,” he said. “I sat in my window and blew smoke out into the courtyard, and somebody called the fire brigade.”

“Well, here we are, twenty years down the line. It’s a reunion.” He didn’t say anything and I said, “How are you doing?”

“Susie and I got married last week.”

“That’s wonderful, Walter. Does everyone know about that, too?”

“Just you. It’s not a big deal, it’s something we did for the sake of the adoption.”

“Are you guys going through with that?”

“We’ve got a kid lined up, Shawntell. Guess how she spells it.”

“No.”

“Like the boy’s name plus tell.”

“Can you change it if you want? I don’t know the rules.”

“We can but we won’t. We’re picking her up tomorrow, as soon as they let her out of the hospital. She’s got a little jaundice, nothing serious.”

“How old is she?”

“Twelve hours. The whole time you were in court, Susie was texting me. These days they let you take her home even before the legal side goes through.”

“Have you met the mother?”

“The mother picked us. She had a one-night stand with a guy on leave from Afghanistan. She was seventeen then, she’s eighteen now. The guy got killed six months ago. His name was Shawn, he was a friend of her brother. She didn’t have any particular feelings for him, and none of the grandparents is financially or emotionally prepared to deal with this. But she’s a smart girl, she wants to go to college. I’m helping her out with that, too.”

After a minute, I said, “Are you ready for her?”

“That’s all we’ve been doing, for eighteen months, looking after kids.”

“I know what you mean. You get sick of grown-ups after a while.”

“Well, you’ve had a tough few months.”

“It’s not just that. I’m through. Everything people do, everything they say, is just some clumsy form of self-defense.”

“Children in my experience are monsters of selfishness.”

“But I’ve seen people with their kids, there’s no separation. They’re all on the inside of something.”

“That’s only true for the first few years. But listen, Marny, I don’t know if I should tell you or not. But Beatrice’s book. There’s a guy who shoots a black guy who breaks into his house.”

“You’re kidding me. And I’m the guy?”

He nodded.

“Did you say something to her about it?”

“She said it doesn’t mean anything. She said it’s just the kind of stupid thing you think of.”

After a while I went inside to get another drink. The kids were still up, in front of the TV in the TV room, and I wandered in with a bottle in one hand and a glass in the other, and sat down on the floor at the foot of the couch. Cris sat behind me, with a kid on each side. They were watching Sesame Street .

“Do you want a drink?” I said.

“My glass is just over there.”

So I scooched across and reached it and came back.

“This is a good show,” I said. “You look comfortable.”

“Sometimes I just want to take these two in the car and drive somewhere, some cabin in the woods, and live like that, like we don’t need anybody else.”

“Is Tony allowed to come?”

“That depends on my mood. You think I’m one of those mothers.”

“I don’t think it’s just that. You’ve been retreating in this direction for years.”

“Maybe that’s right.”

When the show was over, I lay on my back and said, “Who wants to fly?”

“Don’t whiz them up, Marny, it’s getting-ready-for-bed time. You can help them clear up while I run the bath.”

So that’s what I did. We ended up on the carpet playing some stupid game with a toy telephone, all three of us. It wasn’t a toy exactly, but one of those old 1940s phones, an Olivetti rotary, which I bought with Walter at the 7 Day Swap out by Chalmers and Mack. This was in the days when I still cared about my apartment as a personality showcase. But it didn’t work and I gave it to Michael. If you hung up hard enough you could make it ping, which is what Jimmy kept doing. Since it got a reaction, he started hitting other things, and when I tried to take the phone away he hit me in the face. The earpiece caught my cheekbone under the eye. It was like somebody unplugged the nerves. I couldn’t feel anything, even my lip, or half of it, went numb.

“Jesus,” I said, standing up, and spilled the bottle of wine.

I went in the kitchen to get a kitchen towel.

“What happened to you?” Beatrice said.

“Is it bleeding?”

“Is what bleeding? You look like a sheet of paper.”

“I’m fine, I just need a drink.”