You Don't Have to Live Like This (16 page)

The credits rolled and then Micky got up and wandered off, but the piece was on a loop and I sat around to watch the beginning.

Kurt stuck around, too, and said, “The thing you have to realize about famous people is that they’re famous for a reason. Sean Penn is smarter than anybody you’ve ever met, he’s in better physical shape than anybody you’ve ever met, and he’s got more energy and intellectual curiosity about the world than anybody you’ve ever met. These people make things happen. He flies over to Haiti, and boom, a hospital gets built.

“There’s no wasted energy. If he’s hanging out with Micky Dolenz there’s probably a reason. Maybe he wants to make a Monkees movie. Not a remake, but a music-industry movie, about the whole publicity machine and the end of innocence. All of that crap. It’s not a bad idea. So he calls up Micky and says, I’m in Detroit, come, too.”

Astrid asked the black woman, “Do you remember when we first met?”

The woman shook her head and said, “I know who you are. I know what this is about. The only reason I agreed to this is because you paying me.”

“Would you like to talk about that? Would you like to mention how much you’re being paid?”

“I don’t like to talk about nothing. It’s your money, you axe the questions.”

“Do you remember when we first met?”

“I thought the Monkees was an LA thing,” I said to Kurt. “They were set up by the television studios.”

“Yes, but in 1967 they were supposed to play a concert in Detroit with Jimi Hendrix. But Jimi walked out and one of his publicists put it around that the Daughters of the American Revolution forced him off the tour.”

“I don’t think that’s why Micky Dolenz and Sean Penn are in Detroit.”

“You can’t make a movie about the American music business and not talk about Detroit.”

Astrid said, “What did you think when you saw me lying in your bed? For me, it was a very powerful moment. I was very scared, I didn’t know where I was, but to see a woman come in, after what had happened, made me think that what connects us as women is more important than nationality or race, it cuts through all that bullshit, when you came in, I knew it would be all right.”

“I didn’t do nothing but get rid of you.”

“You drove me to the bus station.”

“Well, if my brother came back I didn’t know what he’d do.”

There was a poster over the video screen that read
A Conversation About Rape, with Astrid Topolski.
Kurt said, “Listen, I’m gonna get another drink. This is downing me out.”

“Okay,” I said but after a few minutes stood up as well. Watching Astrid made me uncomfortable. As if I had done something wrong but didn’t know what—as if I had done something to her. Or maybe it was more like guilt by association. I went looking for Gloria.

Along the way I passed the queue for the documentary station. There were people in line shouting, and the woman whose turn it was made a calming motion with her hands and said, “Well, I don’t know if you’re coming to this party or not, Mr. President, but there are people here with a few things on their mind. What you’re doing to this country means that some of us got no choice but to set up on our own. If we have to do that in Detroit, we’ll move to Detroit.”

Her hair was straight and brown, she wore a suit jacket and jeans and looked maybe forty years old. She looked like she’d had kids, a little thick in the waist, and had to kind of perch on the edge of the chair. Her jeans seemed new, like she hadn’t broken them in. Her accent sounded southern, what I think of as a Christian accent. Some of the people shouting tried to shout her down, but she had supporters, too.

Don Adler said to me, “I’ve been waiting my turn forty minutes and need to go to the bathroom. But these dumbos don’t let anybody speak.”

“I’m sure they’ll keep your spot if you explain why.”

He gave me one of his looks.

“I prefer to take my chances holding it in,” he said.

The first person I saw as I came back to the party was Clay Greene, who stood in silk jacket and tie, leaning slightly, and put his hand on Astrid’s arm. I walked up and said to Clay, “I didn’t know you guys knew each other,” and he said, “This charming lady . . . this charming lady . . .”

“I want to talk to you, too,” Astrid said. She was wearing cowboy boots and jeans and a plain white T-shirt.

“I saw your documentary.”

“That’s what I want to talk to you about.”

“I’m here with somebody else tonight.”

“I want to meet her,” she said.

“No.”

“Well then, point her out.”

So we excused ourselves from Clay and started looking.

“Is it the black schoolteacher?” Astrid said.

“There,” I said.

Gloria stood holding her beer bottle in two hands across her lap and watching the football game. Tony was with her and said something to her. He had to bend his neck; she kept her eyes on the wall.

“I’m glad it’s her,” Astrid said. “It’s good for you. It’s what you need.”

“What does that mean?”

“The first time I met you I could tell, you are scared of this country, you are scared of people, you were scared for me . . .”

“Look what happened to you.”

“And here I am. Anyway, you are a man. Are you sleeping together?”

“Does it make a difference? No.”

“Why don’t you sleep with her? Is it for me?”

“This is our first date.”

“And will you sleep with her tonight? Excuse me, I want to know. For myself, I don’t mind. But I think maybe she is the kind of woman who does, and I don’t want to make trouble.”

“Astrid, this conversation makes me uncomfortable and unhappy.”

“Some things you don’t mind doing, but you don’t want to talk about them.”

“I mind doing them, too,” I said and went over to Gloria.

“What happened to you?” she asked.

The football game had gone to commercial and people wandered away to get drinks and food. It was an odd party—it felt like an office party, we were surrounded by office plants and there were brightly colored ergonomic chairs pushed up against the walls—except without the sense of release or shifting intimacy. Too many people stood around watching the game. That’s what happens when you put a TV on: people stare at it.

“I got waylaid. Were you bored?”

“I love football. I went to Michigan. Go Blue,” she said.

“We were having an interesting conversation about Nolan Smith,” Tony broke in.

“What were you saying about Nolan?”

“Excuse me, do you know where the restrooms are?” Gloria asked and went off in search of them. I didn’t know her very well but it occurred to me that when she got angry she became little-girl polite.

“What did you say to her about Nolan?”

“Nothing,” Tony said. “I just told her what happened.”

“What happened about what? Nothing happened.”

“Well then, that’s what I said.”

I left him to find Gloria and when she came out of the women’s bathroom she said, “If you didn’t want me to come, why did you bring me?”

“I wanted you to come but I got caught up with stupid people.”

She took this in for a minute. From where we stood, I could see the corner window wrapping around the building, so that the streets and the parking lot below spread out in two directions. Snow fell heavily now; the cars on the freeway went at half speed with their headlights on.

“We’ll have a bad time getting out of here,” I said.

“I’m not like your friends. You move in . . . high circles.”

“What are you talking about? You’re practically the only person I know who has a decent job.”

“That’s what I mean.”

“And Tony’s just an asshole. That’s got nothing to do with circles.”

“Tony was like the only one I could relate to. I know lots of Tonys.”

“You mean Beatrice,” I said.

“I don’t think she’s a good friend to you. She says things.”

“What did she say?”

But this changed her mood a little.

“She said that at Yale you were voted most likely to become the next Unabomber.”

“That’s not even true. That’s not even
her
joke.”

“It wasn’t about you, it was about me. It’s like she wanted to keep me out.”

“I’ll talk to her.”

“Don’t talk to her.”

“I’ll talk to her. She’s an important person to me but it’s not always plain sailing. Our friendship has always needed a lot of adjustments.”

“You know he did his PhD at Michigan,” she said. “I took some classes in the math department and there were still people there who remembered him.”

“Who?”

“Ted Kaczynski. He said it was the worst five years of his life. I guess I don’t have such high standards. I like Ann Arbor.”

A voice came into the room through a kind of speaker system. “I figured I’d wait till halftime,” it said. “I know when I can’t compete.
But now that everybody’s in a good mood.” And a few people cheered.

At first I thought somebody must have turned up the sound on the football game, but then I realized there was a guy with a microphone at the other end of the room. The office space ran the length of the factory floor, but the ceilings weren’t especially high, they had those panels you stare at from the dentist’s chair, and Gloria and I stood in exactly the wrong place, by the restroom doors. But then I felt her hand on my arm—Obama had come.

We tried to push our way a little closer, but the party, which had been loud and spread out, was now quiet and packed in. A few people at the back stood on tables to get a view, but Gloria didn’t want to do that and in the end I managed to find her a chair. I climbed up next to her for a moment, holding her waist, and then stepped down again. This is what Obama looked like from fifty paces, a young Arab businessman. His head looked small and he seemed light on his feet.

Walking with the microphone in hand, he said, “We got in, I don’t know, about eight a.m. this morning, and the first thing I said was, take me to these neighborhoods, take me to these streets, so we drove off, with about eighteen cars, one after the other, and by this point it was about nine thirty, and I knew we had got to the right place, because there were guys working, building, wearing those hard hats and dirty day-glo jackets, climbing on roofs and digging foundations, on Saturday morning, and the other half of the folks I saw were sitting in Joe Silver’s café drinking lattes.”

People laughed, but at the time I didn’t hear all that, and only worked out from the
Free Press
website in the morning exactly what he said. Partly it was a problem with the acoustics. The office had been designed to cut out the flow of noise from one space to the next. There were also hecklers. Someone called out, “The United
States of Detroit,” which didn’t mean much to me then and doesn’t now. But Obama stopped and started again.

“Now I know there are folks here today who don’t agree with everything I do, and I don’t expect you to. But there are things we can agree on. That the American Experiment ain’t over yet. And that’s not because we’re sitting around on our butts, waiting for the results to come in. The people rebuilding Detroit, and some of you are in this room right now, are still tinkering with it, still adapting it, still moving forward. You have come here from Albuquerque and Chicago, from Queens and from Cleveland and from San Diego. You have come from Mexico and Poland and Sudan and from right here in Detroit. You have come because you lost your job or you couldn’t get a job or you had to work three jobs just to put food on the table. Because your health insurance ran out or your mortgage was worth more than your home. Because the school you sent your kids to couldn’t afford to buy books or because the part-time job you got in college turned out to be the best thing you could find after earning your degree. You have come because there was a voice in your head saying,
You don’t have to live like this. There’s a better way to live
. This voice has called people to America for over four hundred years. It calls to us now . . .” and so on. Eventually he said, “But stick around, I’m just the warm-up act. Am I right in thinking we got the Wrenfields coming next?”

Afterwards, though, the men in dark suits closed down on him pretty quickly, and a few minutes later I saw the herd of SUVs in the parking lot filing out. Maybe they were worried about the snow—it sat lightly on the parked cars about six inches thick.

I said to Gloria, “Did you get anything to eat? There were turkey burgers going around. I want to introduce you to Robert James.”

We caught up with him shaking hands. There were maybe fifteen, twenty people who wanted his attention, and he stood there
in his open-necked shirt, looking the part but not saying much. He looked tired, too, like he’d been wound up and was winding down. “I’ve got to get this stuff off my face,” he said at last and rubbed his palms against his cheeks and held them up. “I hate TV, please excuse me.” He headed for the exit, but I chased him into the concrete stairwell.

“I want to introduce you to someone,” I said. But Gloria had got stuck somewhere. The stairwell was empty, and for a moment we just stood there, the two of us, almost embarrassed. Robert had his foot on the stair—he was giving me time.

“We’re going over to my house for a party,” he said. “Obama’s already there.”

“Let me just get her.”

“Come, too, I can put you on the list. I’d drive you over but I need fifteen minutes alone.”

“It’s been a good day for you,” I said.

“It’s been a terrific day.”

So I found Gloria and we went downstairs and collected our coats, then stepped outside. The afternoon felt warmer. Snow reflected the cloud-filtered sunlight, and there was a kind of cold glow in the air. Cars driving out had packed the snow down in two ruts and we walked in those.

“It’s stupid, I should have brought my other shoes,” Gloria said.

I turned on the ignition and let her sit in the car while I scraped the windows clear. When the snow came off I could see her again, looking ahead but not looking at me.

There wasn’t much traffic but I concentrated on the road instead of talking. After a few minutes Gloria said, “I still don’t know what took you so long in there.”

“I ran into Kurt Stangel. They had a camera set up, where people could tell their stories, and I listened to them for a while.” Then I
said, “The truth is, I liked seeing you with Beatrice. I thought you would get along.”