You Don't Have to Live Like This (17 page)

“I’m not really into that sister act she tried to pull. Did you go out with her?”

“No. In college she went out with Robert James.”

“Did you ever sleep with her?”

“There’s a lot of things I could tell you about her but not like this.”

“Like what?”

The drive was too short to talk any of this out. Robert’s street was blocked off at both ends by security vehicles, so we had to park around the corner. It was a little after three o’clock in the afternoon and the street lamps came on while we sat in the car. They flickered and then burned, and the snow, which was still falling, made patterns against the rays of light.

“I shouldn’t drink at lunch,” I said. “It makes me depressed.”

But she was looking out the window at the sidewalk. “I’m really annoyed with myself I didn’t bring other shoes.”

“I could carry you in. I said I could carry you in.”

“I’m deciding if I want to be in a grouch. Okay, carry me.”

So I stepped into the cold and opened the passenger door and she jumped into my arms. She put her legs around me. I could feel the strength in her thighs and managed to kick the door shut and get the key in while she hung on. Then I shuffled along through the snow—she weighed about as much as a ten-year-old kid. It just felt like an incredibly friendly thing to do, on both sides. She held her cheek against my hair, which had snow in it that melted against her skin and made her shiver.

“Be nice to me,” she said, “when we get in. Don’t leave me.”

I
n fact, we soon got pulled in different directions, but it didn’t matter much. Obama was there—I mean, he was in the house, in one room or another, and from time to time you could see him, smiling sometimes and sometimes holding back smiles. Gloria kept looking out for him and then we ran into Clay Greene, who had sobered up a little.

“This is Gloria Lambert,” I said. “She teaches art and computers at Kettridge High. She’s one of those teachers who wins prizes.”

“Now I’d very much like to hear your views on something,” he said to her. “I’m working on an article about class and race and education. Maybe you can help me. Let me get you a glass of champagne.” And he picked one off a passing tray.

I left them to it and edged into a group of people talking to Robert James. They were standing in front of the living room fireplace, with their backs against the heat.

“May I use you as a fire screen?” I said to no one in particular. The conversation was about the mayoral election, which was a month old. The guy who lost used to work at Arthur Andersen. Some lady’s ex-husband had a weekly lunch date with him at the
Yacht Club, oh, about twenty years ago, when people still lived like that. She couldn’t remember what his impressions were.

“Have you seen Beatrice?” Robert said to me, when the circle broke up. “Apparently she’s working on a novel. She’s got an agent, Clay Greene’s agent. He’s here, too.”

“Which one is he?”

“Some English guy. Not that old.”

“Do you mind?”

“Why should I mind?” he said.

“Excuse me.”

I felt a hand on my arm and it was the woman with the ex-husband. She was the underweight kind of elderly lady. Her skin bruised easily—I could see the marks on her wrists made by some of her bracelets. Also, she was drunk. Her head lay slightly lopsided on her neck.

“Excuse me,” she said again. “Robert tells me you’re one of these terribly brave young men.”

“What do you mean?”

“He said you moved into one of these houses, these run-down houses, on those streets that everyone moves out of. Aren’t you afraid?”

“I’ve got a shotgun for the car, and a standard police-issue Smith & Wesson at home.”

“But you don’t take it with you?”

“If I need to. Where do you live?”

“Oh, where we’ve always lived, in a little house, which needs such a lot of work, but I never got round to it, and now the children are away, and my ex-husband, of course, and there isn’t any point. Just off Lake Shore Road. But what I’ve never understood is this business with needles. I used to sometimes smoke a cigarette, a very long time ago, when I was practically a girl, but I just don’t
believe that people would willingly put something into a needle and then—stick it in their arm. They must be very desperate to do that.”

Beatrice came in, looking for somebody. She stood in the doorway in a black dress, which wasn’t what she wore at the factory party. In heels she stood tall enough she could look over people’s shoulders. I excused myself and went over to her. “What did you say to Gloria?”

“She’s too nice for you.”

“Is that what you said? You used to think I was too nice.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“If you’re looking for Robert, he just left.”

“Thank you, I wasn’t.”

“He says you’re writing a novel, he says you have an agent.”

“Marny,” she said, changing her tune, “can I tell you something even Clay doesn’t know? He’s not just my agent; we’re seeing each other.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“He flew in a couple of months ago to see Clay and stayed the night. That’s when it started. He’s supposed to be showing up here, but I haven’t seen him.”

“What’s he like? What’s this novel about?”

“One of these English guys who live in New York and end up being more English than the English, you know, charming and offhand and polite. But he’s our age. His father’s a lord but not a real one—he got made. He went to Eton.”

“What’s this novel about?”

“Oh, I don’t care about that. That’s just one of David’s ideas. He thinks he can sell it.” After a minute, she added, “I like Gloria, by the way, I like her a lot. What are you shaking your head about?”

“Nothing, I’m not. Is Walter here? Have you seen him? He was
worried about Susie when I left. She’s starting to look pretty big; she wasn’t feeling too hot.”

Beatrice hadn’t seen him.

“I think I understand what it is about having kids,” I said. “They’ve got kids at their house all day, really small people. After a while, after you’ve been through your twenties and thirties, you want to have simple relations again.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s just something on my mind. This is the trouble with being a pioneer. You want a new life and you set up an outpost and soon it looks just like the life you left.”

“I don’t think what you’ll have with Gloria is simple relations.”

“Oh fuck off,” I said and went to find her.

But I ran into Susie and Walter first, talking to Helen, Clay Greene’s wife. They were standing in the dining room; the big mahogany table had been stripped of leaves and pushed into a corner. Helen said, “Why don’t you sit down?” There were dining room chairs lined up against the wall. “No point in playing the hero.”

“Everybody tells me to sit down. I don’t want to sit down. I’ve been lying down all afternoon, and poked and prodded.”

“Did they find anything wrong?”

“What they say is, it’s probably perfectly normal or maybe it’s not. I had a little spotting this morning. So I call up and they say, come in, we want to be safe. But then they can’t tell me if it’s safe or not.”

“How many months are you?” Helen asked. I was standing just outside the conversation. I wanted to talk to Walter, but he was listening in, and I didn’t feel I could interrupt.

“Seven months next week,” Susie said. Her belly was at the pillow stage, but she looked fatter also in the neck by the lines of her jaw. Her face had that animal placid cud-chewing pregnant look.
She kept her hands on her hips and moved like she was carrying a full heavy pitcher of water.

“You’ll be fine, everybody has one kind of worry or another. Believe me, it’s worse when they come out. Everybody tells you, just get through the first three months. My boys now are eight and three and I’m still waiting to get my life back.”

It occurred to me that Helen didn’t like Susie very much, and this was her way of showing it. But maybe women her age can’t help themselves. They have to say something if they see somebody pregnant.

Susie said, “Well, all I care about now is this little guy right here. I want to get a good look at him, I want to find out what he’s like.”

Then Clay and Gloria came over.

Around five o’clock she wanted to go home. She had seen the president, she had stood in the room with him, it was enough. So I went to find Robert and say thank you, good-bye. He was picking at the food in the kitchen, standing around with the chef and the waitstaff and some of the president’s entourage. Obama was there, too, trying to get a game of three-on-three together. “Where there’s a backboard there’s a ball.” He meant the Roof King backboard over the garage door. The snow had stopped, the evening was clearing up, Obama offered to do a little shoveling himself. He hadn’t done a thing all day but eat small portions of food, the kind of food you can hold in one hand while you talk a lot of crap. “Come on,” he said.

The impression he made on me was very strong, his fame and his restlessness, which was partly physical and partly in the way he talked—he interrupted himself and made little appeals to people around him, not just people he knew but also one of the waiters, a six-foot white guy who used to play point guard for Aquinas College in Grand Rapids. “Sam wants a game,” Obama said. “Sam’s up
for it, Sam wants to work off some of that gut you get in your twenties, when you work too hard and the rest of the time sit around on your butt.

“Come on,” he said again. “Who’s in? I need some names.”

Robert gave him a queer look. His shirt was unbuttoned at the top, his sleeves were rolled up. He kept himself in good shape. “The ball needs pumping up,” he said.

“So pump up the ball.”

Obama started pointing at each of us.

“You in? . . . What’s your name? Introduce me.”

“Marny’s more of a squash player.”

“I’ll guard him then,” Obama said.

About twenty minutes later, I found myself scraping a snow shovel up and down the concrete drive. We took it in turns. Robert had loaned me a college sweatshirt, to pull over my undershirt, but I was still wearing slacks and leather-soled shoes. Then Obama took the shovel off my hands and pushed the last crumbs of snow into the pileups on either side of the drive.

“How far is East Lansing from here?” he asked. “About two hours?”

“A little less. An hour and a half,” Sam said.

“Robert, Robert James,” Obama called. “Did you invite Magic Johnson to this thing?”

“I’m not sure.”

“This is his kind of basketball weather. He told me once, he used to practice his jump shot with mittens on.”

Then there was a ball bouncing among the six of us, middle-aged men, in dark pants and dress shoes, breathing smoke, as we shuffled around, passing and shooting and chasing the ball under the garage lights. About ten security guys stood along the spear-topped iron fence, watching us, and the house itself was lit up like
a Christmas tree. People crowded into the window frames to get a look. But the court felt private enough.

“I’m about as warm as I’m gonna get,” Obama said. “Come on, Reggie. Let’s get it on.”

Reggie was his assistant, one of those friendly-faced black guys, about six and a half feet tall, and bald as a cantaloupe. About a foot taller than Bill Russo, who played, too. Bill still kept a set of workout clothes at Robert’s house and was the only one of us in rubber soles—he had on his wrestling shoes and started grabbing people by the waist and pushing.

“Get off me, Bill,” Robert said.

But Bill was having a good time; he didn’t give a shit about basketball. He guarded Robert, and Reggie guarded Sam, and the president guarded me. Mostly I tried to get out of his way. I didn’t want to injure anybody, and the ground was cold concrete and slippery with snow dust. Obama put up a jump shot and missed, and Reggie grabbed the rebound and kicked it back to him, and this time he knocked it down.

“It’s raining on a snowy day,” Obama said. He had a quick, jerky left-handed stroke, which took a little getting used to. After each shot he held his hand out like a claw.

“You got to get on him,” Robert told me.

We played to fifteen and then we played to fifteen again. Sam was still in good shape. His shot was rusty but he was strong and fast and could dribble all over the place; somehow nobody ever got in his way. And Robert had a nice little soft fifteen-footer—a white-boy jump shot, Obama said. I don’t think Reggie tried particularly hard. He picked up a lot of rebounds. We won the first game and then Obama got hot—shooting from the fences, he called it—and they pulled out the second. Obama and Reggie liked to talk. Sam didn’t say a word, and Robert didn’t talk much either; it took me a
while to realize he was pissed off. Partly at Bill, who kept horsing around and taking out his legs. But partly at me, too.

“Rubber match?” Obama said, and when the third game started, Robert switched me onto Bill and guarded the president himself.

Afterwards I tried to work out what happened—I wanted to understand the buildup. Maybe it was a racial thing. Robert played varsity basketball for Claremont High. They had one of those teams where the uniforms don’t show your name. The way Robert was brought up, you played hard and you made the extra pass and you didn’t care how many points you scored, you cared about winning. And you didn’t talk. But Obama liked to run his mouth. It didn’t bother me much. But maybe it had nothing to do with basketball, maybe Robert was pissed off about something else.

Anyway, it was cold and people were tired, and still half drunk. I got the feeling on both sides that some guys really wanted to win. Then Reggie set a pick for Obama, and Robert pushed through it. I tried to help out and caught an elbow in the nose from somebody and sat down on the frozen concrete, trying to hold the blood in with my fingers.

Obama put his hand on my head. “You all right, kid?” he said. “Let’s call this thing off.”

But Bill ran in to get toilet paper, which I stuffed in my nose to stop the bleeding.

“Marny’s fine,” Robert said. “You all right, Marny? He’s fine. If you start something you finish it.”

“I don’t mind,” I said. So we finished the game.

Afterwards, I said to the president, “There’s somebody who wants to meet you.”

Gloria was waiting for me in the kitchen, with a wet, warm cloth. I took out the bloody tissue paper and held the cloth to my
face. When she saw Obama, she kind of stood at attention, but he put out his hand and she shook it.

“I think you knew my father,” she said. “I think you knew my father before I knew him.”

Obama’s high forehead was sweating under the kitchen lights; he started drying himself off with cocktail napkins. After a while, he had a handful of these napkins and nowhere to put them.

“Who’s your father?”

“Tom Lambert. He used to work for the DCP in Chicago.”

He put the napkins in his pocket. “I was very sorry to hear it when he died.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“Too long,” Obama said. “He died too young.”

“Thank you, Mr. President.”

The kitchen was crowded, there were maybe thirty people in the room, including the caterers, waitstaff, security, and the rest of the guys who played. Obama put his arm around me and said, “I want you to know something about this guy, he’s not a whiner,” and then the other conversations took over. Somebody brought the president a glass of mineral water. He turned to Robert, who was drinking tap water by the sink, and called out, “You ever seen the shower they got on Air Force One?”

“You can use the showers here.”

“If I leave now I can kiss the kids good night.”